Posted on 09/01/2013 5:46:15 AM PDT by Popman
Amen Brother /S
The Randian understanding of liberty leaves you free to take up as many constraints on as you want. It doesn’t force anything on you. It’s up to you according to your conscience or your religious beliefs or whatever. That’s why it’s so annoying to see her compared with the left. Unlike the left, Rand doesn’t want to dictate what you can say or what you can do or what you do with your life. She leaves it up to you. Is that really so threatening?
Question for you: If we lived in a purely free market without any external, government, religious, social constraints, and somebody, acting in their own self interest, screwed you over on a contract, what would be your recourse?
I’d take it up in court, obviously.
I would say that mostly you are correct.
Still my father did not do so directly with my family but he had such strong unwavering belief that when he did tell us something we believed it. Still when becoming an adult it was up to me to go to church groups and study and pray etc.
Mel
Unfortunately, I don’t really have any idea how to do it.
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We could start by persuading Christians and conservatives to remove their children from the government’s socialist-entitlement K-12 schools. In many counties and even some states this one move would utterly collapse one evil part of Marxist control.
No, not big government, but the the exclusion of morality, based on Judeo-Christian principles, would be the triumph.
Do you mean a free market or do mean anarchy?
You realize they’re not the same, right?
What if those laws were inconsistent with the personal morality of the person who screwed you? Let's suppose he was a muslim 9or became one after the contract) and it was not only proper, but his duty to lie to you, the infidel. Is he not simply exercising his liberty to choose his moral pursuits as he sees fit?
The point is that both movements exclude God and attempt to replace Him with man-made rules with no moral compass to guide them.
Both godless philosophers. I like Rand for everything else she says about the individual. But her one blind spot was that she was an atheist.
what would be your recourse
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Courts and rule of law.
Ayn Rand isn’t for NO government. She espoused limited government.
Government is needed for the following:
—protect borders and culture from invading armies and by being overwhelmed by refugees.
—provide honest courts and police to enforce contracts.
— punish criminals
Of course! A free market requires enforcement of contracts, which implies a judicial system.
I think you’ve mistaken Rand for an anarchist.
Only on economics. On culture, God, morality, Christianity, social conservatism, immigration, Americanism, in other words everything needed to make and maintain conservative America AND CONSERVATIVE ECONOMICS, libertarians are against conservatism AND ARE WARRIORS FOR THE LEFT.
As a Christian, I agree. This is also my stand regarding Rand.
Yes, her atheism is her big blind spot. But it doesn’t matter since a government run according to Randian principles wouldn’t have the power to force atheism (or any other religious belief) onto you.
By definition, enforcement of laws or contracts requires force when someone refuses to comply. A free market system cannot exist without rule of law to enforce contracts.
Without it, enforcement reverts to violence, in the way illegal businesses such as drug dealers and pimps enforce their illegal contracts. Or the way inner-city gangs protect their territories.
Free market anarchists such as Rand never seem to realize how utterly dependent their preferred system of human interaction is on the controlled violence of the State. If (all) people voluntarily complied with their commitments, we would indeed not need government. But they don’t, and they never will.
Please show me that Rand was an anarchist who didn’t believe in enforcement of contracts.
Conservatives built a conservative Christian America of free markets and limited government, libertarianism and leftism has created a broken America of anti-Christianity and big government.
A Sodom and Gomorrah that is a democracy will always result in bigger government and more government, not less.
Libertarianism is a contradiction, they think that ghetto morality and broken homes and drugs and porn, and abortion and homosexual equality and unlimited immigration, somehow creates voters that vote like Evangelicals, rather than liberal voters, it is insanity.
Ok then - so there's a need for a system of laws. Laws are based in some vague notion of morality - but whose? Those who don't subscribe to those notions are then not free to pursue their interests as they see fit...and are compelled to comply with them. In other words, if they choose to be law abiding citizens, they do so by government coercion, rather than free exercise of liberty.
The smooth and civil operation of a society agrees on behavioral constraints agreed to, not necessarily by everybody, and which impose on other's beliefs. I'm avidly pro-life (unlike Rand, btw). My freedom to choose to live as I wish, in an abortion free society, is compromised by laws I oppose. I can work to oppose them and overturn them, but as long as abortion is legal, I have to accept it as such.
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