Posted on 03/24/2015 8:25:29 AM PDT by Nelson Hultberg
Speech given to Freedom Fest, Las Vegas, NV
Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. What I will be discussing in my talk today is the crucial role that the ideas of Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard have played in the defense of liberty and Western civilization.
All Americans, well read in political affairs, know of these famous thinkers. They were two of the most powerful and revolutionary intellectuals in the 20th century, contributing many valuable insights to our knowledge of philosophy, politics, and economics. As with most intellectual rebels, their major ideas about freedom and government were highly controversial. What I will do in this talk is explain what these controversies are, demonstrating the wisdom and folly of their ideas. As to which is the more prevalent, wisdom or folly, stay tuned.
I will also explain a new way for libertarians and conservatives to look at the political spectrum and the egoism-altruism clash that Ayn Rand promoted so dramatically. This will be done by using the Greek philosopher Aristotle's famous Doctrine of the Mean and applying it on the macro-level instead of just the micro-level.
In doing so, I hope I can alert you to the immense importance of Aristotle to the cause of freedom and how his philosophical approach compares to that of Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard.
Why is this so important? Because freedom has always been a fragile orchid in a jungle of rapacious ideologies bent on snuffing its presence out. Freedom requires rational, irrefutable thought to be won and maintained. If we have built our defense of freedom upon a false philosophy with faulty premises, then we are fighting in vain. Read more: http://afr.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Rand-Rothbard-Speech.pdf
(Excerpt) Read more at afr.org ...
Why yes. Yes you did.
Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard: The Verdict after Fifty Years
Americans for a Free Republic ^ | 3-2-15 | Nelson Hultberg
Posted on Tuesday, March 03, 2015 11:32:01 AM by Nelson Hultberg
Ayn did as well as she could with atheism. However she rode on the coattails of some very theistic ideals. This is called sawing off the branch upon which you sit.
lolol.
Be that as it may; are YOU gonna hit Report abuse on that comment, or shall I?
The message is important; the messenger not so much. Like MLK, who was an imperfect messenger, but the messages of non-violence and content of character were valid. Ayn Rand’s message on the ill effects of socialism is valid.
ridiculous blog pimp ...must be because you are a stupid Paulinista
Tell us how you really feel. lol
Socialism ends up failing to keep its own promises because it has no genuine motive to do so. However in the process of pointing this out, Ayn manages to pan all “altruism” and this is a mistake. Charity should not be subsumed by Caesar, but it is not an evil thing of itself, quite the opposite, it helps society go.
Can’t we all just get along...
Imagine if you were smart enough to detect the truly heinous forces at work in the world and what would happen, but still blind to the truth and hope offered by God. Well, you might search for worldly solutions to fight back with, but you cannot fight the world with the tools of the world and win.
It would either drive you to hopelessness and desperation, or to some pretty far out precipices in search of a “novel” solution to the problem. That’s where she ended up.
Your critique of Rand’s altruism/egoism is on target and well-stated.
THIS school board director needed that ... thank you
What price liberty ?
someone read something twice ?
Poor baby.
No, she pretty much painted anyone who did anything to help others as suckers.
I prefer Rose Wilder Lane. Rand is over-rated and Lane treated as a character from Little House on the Prairie, which is to our loss. Read The Discovery of Freedom.
Rand definitely used the shock factor and got more TV time thanks to her bizarre penchant for denigrating people of faith and members of the military, something the media liked to play up. Sure, she did it with a sort of “bless your heart” kind of language, but she did it. I think this may stem from the fact that Rand was a Russian immigrant who did not fully enjoy the experience of America.
Lane, however, was a product of the “wild west” and had grown up in the practice of freedom, as can be read in the Little House series. Her views are much more mature and less boring Old World/Russian Radical atheism.
Rand ping.
I’m o.k. with juxtaposing (post-Englightenment) Judeo-Christian values against totalitarianism and anarchism, but the essay loses balances with its obsession with Ayn Rand.
Rand was a critic of the dominant culture of her time, which was statism, whether of the soviet communism variety or the western progressive socialist variety. At the time she wrote, the social teaching of the Catholic Church, expressed in Quadragesimo anno, endorsed fascism as was found in the Catholic countries of Argentina, Italy and Spain. The social teachings of the Protestant churches were even worse. To be fair to her, you should acknowledge her role as a kind of voice crying out in the desert. As to whether those who followed her chronologically - Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II - could be said to be her followers in the intellectual sense, is an academic question of no particular importance.
Getting back to the essay, it should even-handedly contrast the Golden Mean of limited government under a Constitution, to totalitarianism and anarchism; and, furthermore, distinguish the false hopes of both a utopian totalitarian state and a utopian anarchistic state to the brutal oppression that characterizes both totalitarian states and anarchistic states in the real world.
I hate it when I don’t get to read something before the zot!
Me too
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