1049: "Bookshelf"

[scrdest]

I've never read Atlas Shrugged, but I'm told there is a passage where the train full of new copper collides with a passenger train. I'm also told there is long diatribes (probably not 60 pages long, but there) about how horrible it is that the new magic copper is destroyed. The dead passengers, they are just there to be a reason for another train to be on the track, not say, a huge tragedy of lost life, at least not compared to all that special copper (was the magic copper what allowed an engine to violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics, as I said, I haven't racked up resolve to force myself through a book with a 60 page long radio address). A philosophy that makes someone write this way immediately makes me suspect on that alone. I think others pointed out Fountainhead involved blowing up a building without anyone worried about how that could destroy the water, power, and sewer line for everyone else, but hey, that's still OK because the building used a design that had been compromised against the original designer's will.

Ugh, that's what happens when you get informations from fourteenth hand. That's an... impressive mixup you got here. Now, I understand you didn't read the book, but being proud of your ignorance is not a good sign. You are on the Internet, and you are WRONG. You know what that means.

Now, I'm typing this from memory, so everything falls under IIRC. What happened was a huge pileup, involving an army transport and a politician's train, incompetent higher-ups and employees threatened with being fired without possibility to find another job. Long story short, the employees were coerced into using a coal-powered train in a badly ventilated tunnel. Cue carbon monoxide death. Then it got worse, as another train, filled with ammo, crashed into it. As you see, no mention of any magic copper.

The thing is, in what I think may have been an accident involving too much meth (hey, it was legal back then, and Rand did take it to write faster), instead of dwelling upon the pointless deaths, Rand decided to be optimistic and basically say: "Hey, don't worry people, they were as good as dead either way" and a million walls have head-shaped holes ever since. Same with the Fountainhead's building-blowing.

I did a quick lit search and found a reference to Reardon rescuing a load of copper from an Atlantic Southern train crash on page 205. This is probably a different train crash from the one you're talking about. Exadyne might have been talking about that crash, or a mixup between the two crashes.

In the process I looked at a sort of synopsis of some of the story, and it looks like Dagny decided to do a normal freight run on a brand new railroad bridge before any testing because she was sure it would work. She rides the train herself on the first test run; she feels safe because she understands how it works, not because she has faith it will work. If my reading of the synopsis is right, I'm really really glad Dagny was not a software engineer.

I believe you have the right crash, J. As someone said about it,

In two of the most unwittingly hilarious sections of the book, trains crash, giving intriguing insights into Ms Rand's psyche as they do so. In the first TERRIBLE TRAGEDY of the book, a train carrying copper collides head-on with a passenger train on a hillside, spilling PRECIOUS COPPER everywhere. Hank Reardon surveys the terrible tragic waste of PRECIOUS COPPER spilled over the tracks, before gritting his teeth at the hellish awfulness of it all, and heroically organising alternate transport so his PRECIOUS COPPER can get there on time, without so much letting an emotion slip out because of all the tragedy of the PRECIOUS COPPER. Because that's the kind of heroic guy he is.

**IT HIT A FREAKING PASSENGER TRAIN HEAD-ON. THE HILLSIDE WOULD BE LITTERED WITH DEAD PEOPLE. RAND DOESN'T EVEN MENTION THIS ONCE.**

The time people DO get killed in the train, of course, in the collapse of the tunnel, they have pretty much asked for it, by dint of being teachers, social workers, journalists, humanitarians, mothers etc. They knew the risks of living in a society that wasn't based on fascistic capitalism, so screw them, right? They're only useful to make a point. Screw them.

So yes, there is ambiguity about which crash. The first one, the copper crash, is confusing because apparently, everyone glosses over the train it hit, but it was a passenger train. Rand waxes poetic over that loss, and ignores the human life involved in a copper shipment hitting a person's train.
The second crash scrdesteluded to. Looking it up, I've seen quoted text saying the people on the train "deserved" it and a defender of Rand using the fallacy of ambiguity to say the word deserved could mean a lot of things. He then kind of glosses over blowing up the building in the Fountainhead with people were as good as dead anyway. I said there would be water, sewer, and electric lines in progress to the building. Now, maybe I'm pessimistic, but I think setting off explosives on something that might be attached to a sewer, a sewer that carries away things like gases that can sometimes explode, hence modern toilet design, is probably a bad thing.

As for saying I am proud of my ignorance, scrdest, you read to much negative into your opponent. I admitted not reading the books because I'm honest, and if I'm wrong and the train carrying copper didn't hit a passenger train and it didn't involve having a liturgy for copper but glossing over the passenger train, I'll be glad to be informed. I find it interesting though, someone saying I'm proud of ignorance, but if I don't feel like reading a book that in chunks I've seen I won't like, isn't that a form of rational self interest? Isn't my time better served doing something I'd like to do more? Well perhaps you'd argue that it would open my mind and make me an objectivist (beyond doubtful) and therefore better me. On the other hand, I've heard every Objectivist decree anyone who's read Atlas Shrugged as not understanding Objectivism.

Damn, I accidentally the tab.

Who's reading too much negative here? I admitted that the way the crash was written was awful. I also admitted that if you blew up a whole goddamn building, you realistically would have been dangerous to innocents, which was overlooked. Jokingly, I attributed these to Rand's usage of meth during writing, which is a fact. I was trying to speak without being too confrontational. What I didn't do was cheering for deaths of the train's passengers or the destruction of the building, or handwaving them.

Secondly, I didn't quite remember AS that well, so after J posted his crash, I did some research myself. Unfortunately, you are wrong. There was only one crash that involved multiple deaths, the Taggart Tunnel one, causes of which I explained in my previous post and, again, admitted that the way it was written is facepalm magnet. So, feel informed.

That leads straight to another point, it seems that you either did not actually read any 'chunks' of the book, only second-hand relations of it, or you should work on your reading comprehension skillz (or, well, both). I won't ask you to read the book, because:
a) it is not my job to preach
b) you will do whatever you want either way

I accused you of being proud of your ignorance, as you attempt to criticize the book without reading it at all, and that would be pretty pointless at best. You can discuss the ideas as much as you want, it's fair game. But if you want to talk about the book, do some research. Pretty please? And if you are discussing the ideas, stay away from mentioning enormous monologue, trains crashing, laws of thermodynamics, etc.

Info dump:

Spoiler:

FYI, the magical metal was some kind of steel or other alloy, and the magical engine didn't have anything in common with it.

Grammar Nazi here: I think the word 'liturgy' (for copper, in your post) doesn't fit here

[HugoSchmidt]

jokingly, I attributed these to Rand's usage of meth during writing, which is a fact

Last post for me for the day, because this is wearing me out. Rand was prescribed benzedrine, which is an amphetamine, not a methamphetamine, and certainly not "meth", which is a name for Crystal meth.

[scrdest]

Last post for me for the day, because this is wearing me out. Rand was prescribed benzedrine, which is an amphetamine, not a methamphetamine, and certainly not "meth", which is a name for Crystal meth.

Oops, re-checked, Wikipedia says you are right. Sorry. Still, what's the big difference? It has no relation to the validity of the ideas anyway.

[IcedT]

Okay, you can accept the schizophrenic and the chronic drug user as your model of happiness if you'd like. Nothing I can do to stop you.

See, this here is my problem with you and with Objectivism in general. Tautology. "You're only happy if you have these virtues, and if you have these virtues you're happy. And if you think you're happy and you don't have all these virtues, you're delusional, which means you're SUPER unhappy." Do you not see how this is circular reasoning that won't persuade anyone with half a brain?

[eran_rathan]

Okay, you can accept the schizophrenic and the chronic drug user as your model of happiness if you'd like. Nothing I can do to stop you.

See, this here is my problem with you and with Objectivism in general. Tautology. "You're only happy if you have these virtues, and if you have these virtues you're happy. And if you think you're happy and you don't have all these virtues, you're delusional, which means you're SUPER unhappy." Do you not see how this is circular reasoning that won't persuade anyone with half a brain?

This is why I prefer Heinlien's version to Rand's.

"This is what makes ME happy. You can do whatever makes YOU happy, so long as it doesn't infringe on my (or anyone else's) rights."


(Edited for caveat)

[Pfhorrest]

This is why I prefer Heinlien's version to Rand's.

"This is what makes ME happy. You can do whatever makes YOU happy, so long as it doesn't infringe on my (or anyone else's) rights."

And then comes the hard part: what is a right, and what constitutes infringing on it?

And there you get into a discussion of actual ethics.

[eran_rathan]

This is why I prefer Heinlien's version to Rand's.

"This is what makes ME happy. You can do whatever makes YOU happy, so long as it doesn't infringe on my (or anyone else's) rights."

And then comes the hard part: what is a right, and what constitutes infringing on it?

And there you get into a discussion of actual ethics.

Absolutely! That's the interesting part, isn't it?

Me personally, I think there are two levels to rights - Natural Rights, which exist for all sentient/sapient entities; and Political Rights, which are part of the governance process.

I like Locke, Jefferson, & Madison for discussion on Natural Rights; I think that the Political Rights portion of it is far more tricky.

[iamspen]

Would your view of economic rights fit neatly into your definition of political rights, or would that deserve a third category?

[eran_rathan]

Would your view of economic rights fit neatly into your definition of political rights, or would that deserve a third category?

That depends. What are you calling economic rights?

[iamspen]

A discussion about economic rights might entail the right to keep one's hard-earned money to the detriment of others versus the right of others to reap the benefit of their collective labor to the detriment of their employers. In essence, socialism versus capitalism, or whatever balance of the two any individual may believe to be correct.

[eran_rathan]

A discussion about economic rights might entail the right to keep one's hard-earned money to the detriment of others versus the right of others to reap the benefit of their collective labor to the detriment of their employers. In essence, socialism versus capitalism, or whatever balance of the two any individual may believe to be correct.

I tend to see it as, "Taxes are user-fees for civilization." Granted, you could get into a discussion of "How much tax is just?" and "What kind of taxes are ethical?" but I think that would get away from where you are thinking.

(as an aside, I think that the most ethical tax system is one of voluntary taxation, i.e. luxury taxes - with the caveat that investments, dividends, and stock options are luxuries and should be subsequently be taxed).

[Beatrice The Golden]

Let me jump in with few things I would like to point out.
(I won't join the discussion about natural or political rights though)

As hippo said about could you make this any easier, I'll ask, have you ever heard of schizophrenia and schizophrenic high? Many people who have schizophrenia (and I'm assuming you'll agree schizophrenics have rejected reality and rationality) are in fact very happy.

Okay, you can accept the schizophrenic and the chronic drug user as your model of happiness if you'd like.

You missed the point. Not the first time in this discussion, as I can see. The point was to find a contr-argument to your statement and that is your contr-argument. Are you saing that If you exclude "schizophrenic and the chronic drug user", then your point is valid? Or that these people have no right to be happy? Or cannot be called happy?

I completely agree with The Great Hippo - you cannot mesure happingess with an objective scale. You cannot say someone is unhappy if he's saying he is truly happy, nor you can know if he's saying the truth or just lying to himself. That is something that science won't help you with. It can point to few distinct ways of thinking, but won't tell you if someone is or is not happy.

Also:

It's a good sign that I am not dealing with a professional scientist, but rather someone who fancies themselves one. Tell me, do you spend a lot of time adjusting some variables and all that?

Well, that sums up the attitude you presented so far quite nicely.
You do know that insults never help to get your point accross? Quite the opposite.

(...) and I'm assuming you'll agree schizophrenics have rejected reality and rationality (...)

I agree with the whole point you're making, but would like to poke only at this particular sentence. You're talking only about the hardest of cases of shizophrenia. Large amount of shizophrenics do accept reality, subconsciously straying from it if it makes their life easier (or easier to understand. For them, that is). I point it out because it strengthens your argument. Escape from reality actualy makes such people happier. We can argue whether they are sick or not (depends on the definition of sicknes, but that's just semantics and there was enough of it already in this topic) but large amount of them can live and function quite well on their own. With some inconviniences, but still. They can be happy or unhappy regardless.

I think the J Thomas's story about him and his cat makes the simplest and the best point so far. Even people (or cats) without specific vritues or moral codes they abide to, can be happy. Being rational, or irrational.

Now, can someone who daydreams at a given time be happy at another? Only to the extent that they are no longer being irrational.

I know the first sentence is true, at least for me it is, but I cannot prove it. Then again, the second sentence seems impossible to prove too.
Which makes discussing this point moot.

[Pfhorrest]

I tend to see it as, "Taxes are user-fees for civilization."

The problem with this perspective is that we generally frown on being forced to buy someone's product. Imagine if your ISP wouldn't let you cancel their service and kept billing you for it whether you wanted it or not. AOL actually did this or something very close to it for a long time and got a lot of flack for it. Big evil corporation doing evil things right? But how is that any different than the state billing you for their services whether you like them or not, e.g. the "service" of bombing scary brown people half a world away? Sure, you can move if you want to be out of their service area and not subject to their billing; but how would that be any different than, say, Comcast insisting that you have to be their customer just because of where you live? We would never tolerate that; even when there are no other options to Comcast, it's still possible (if perhaps undesirable) to go without internet service. That possibility is not there with the state.

And yes, I'm aware of the practical problems involving externalities, etc, but that doesn't change the principle of it: you're being forced to pay for services you may or may not want, when perhaps you could get better service for a better price from someone else. In some cases you can (you can buy private equivalents of many things the state offers), but even then you can't cancel your old (state) service. And in other cases you can't even get an alternative because nobody's allowed to provide one: the state claims a monopoly and enforces it with military might. Imagine if any other service provider kept competitors out of the market at the barrel of a gun. Atrocious failure of the free market, right? Capitalism gone horribly wrong? But the state is doing the same thing.

I'm actually a fan of the government-as-a-valuable-service model, but if we're looking at it in that light, it's clear that we let the state get away with heinous things that would have us jumping up and down if the provider of any other service did them.

[J Thomas]

A discussion about economic rights might entail the right to keep one's hard-earned money to the detriment of others versus the right of others to reap the benefit of their collective labor to the detriment of their employers. In essence, socialism versus capitalism, or whatever balance of the two any individual may believe to be correct.

Discussion about economic rights should start with the long-term effect on ecosystems. If we were living among the asteroids and every ecosystem was built behind glass or steel and had a single owner, then this would not be an issue. But when we live on planet where migratory birds and butterflies carry microorganisms and other commensals between continents, where we are probably a couple hundred years from figuring out how to use the information locked up in ancient biomes, but today we have no idea how to undo the damage we're doing -- then it makes good sense to go slow on ecosystem destruction.

We can have lots of freedom about things that don't have much significance. If your company acquires the right to have a monopoly on a new technology for 20 years, it can only slow us down by 20 years or so. Not such a big deal. But if you accidentally release a foreign species into an ecosystem that can't handle it, you're destroying wealth that we have no idea how to restore.

Similarly if you pollute groundwater. We might figure out how to unpollute it. We might find a better way to make groundwater unimportant. Or you might cause damage for a very long time.

You should have the right to do anything you want as long as it doesn't hurt anybody and it doesn't infringe on other people's rights. We probably need to spend a couple hundred years examining all the possible damage you can do by following various common practices, before we decide whether to allow those common practices.

[BlueSoxSWJ]

I tend to see it as, "Taxes are user-fees for civilization."

The problem with this perspective is that we generally frown on being forced to buy someone's product. Imagine if your ISP wouldn't let you cancel their service and kept billing you for it whether you wanted it or not. AOL actually did this or something very close to it for a long time and got a lot of flack for it. Big evil corporation doing evil things right? But how is that any different than the state billing you for their services whether you like them or not, e.g. the "service" of bombing scary brown people half a world away? Sure, you can move if you want to be out of their service area and not subject to their billing; but how would that be any different than, say, Comcast insisting that you have to be their customer just because of where you live? We would never tolerate that; even when there are no other options to Comcast, it's still possible (if perhaps undesirable) to go without internet service. That possibility is not there with the state.

And yes, I'm aware of the practical problems involving externalities, etc, but that doesn't change the principle of it: you're being forced to pay for services you may or may not want, when perhaps you could get better service for a better price from someone else. In some cases you can (you can buy private equivalents of many things the state offers), but even then you can't cancel your old (state) service. And in other cases you can't even get an alternative because nobody's allowed to provide one: the state claims a monopoly and enforces it with military might. Imagine if any other service provider kept competitors out of the market at the barrel of a gun. Atrocious failure of the free market, right? Capitalism gone horribly wrong? But the state is doing the same thing.

I'm actually a fan of the government-as-a-valuable-service model, but if we're looking at it in that light, it's clear that we let the state get away with heinous things that would have us jumping up and down if the provider of any other service did them.

The problem with this perspective is that your analogy doesn't actually work very well. How about if, in your example, you declining Comcast service then means that no one in your city can have it? Does everyone in the city get veto power, so Comcast is only available if purchased by unanimous consent?

The second flaw is that your principle sees government as a foreign, uncontrolled entity. In your analogy, it's more accurate to say that we took a vote, the majority voted that the city would be a Comcast-serviced city, so now everyone gets Comcast. If the Comcast service and price get too bad, a majority will change their minds, and no one will get Comcast. The problem with an integrated society is that it's simply physically impossible not to have conflicting "rights" everywhere. So, in a Democracy, we vote on which right takes precedence, and the majority decides whose "freedom" has to be sacrificed when two freedoms are mutually exclusive. We tolerate things from government that we wouldn't from private companies not because we're blind to the principles being violated, but because someone has to make that decision, and so we make it by majority vote. (Of course, in most countries, we don't have time for everyone to vote on everything, so we use republican systems, but that's all mechanics.)

[Pfhorrest]

The problem with this perspective is that your analogy doesn't actually work very well. How about if, in your example, you declining Comcast service then means that no one in your city can have it?

The question is, why would that be the case? And if that could be the case, must it be? Or could it be avoided? If it can be avoided, shouldn't we let people avoid it if they like?

Or, to translate from the analogy to the substantial topic:

The problem with an integrated society is that it's simply physically impossible not to have conflicting "rights" everywhere.

What exactly do you mean by "an integrated society", and if that is not a necessary state of affairs (i.e. if it's possible not to be), why should it be obligatory? If there is enough value in having one that it's worth waiving one's rights to get it, then surely people world form them purely voluntarily, and people who want no part of that one can form another, or none at all if they so choose?

The second flaw is that your principle sees government as a foreign, uncontrolled entity.

To those who didn't win the popularity contest, it is. Governments are made of people, and nothing more. Everything the government does is something that some people do. Assuming we have some kind of standards about what it is OK for people to do or not, why do some people get a pass on those standards just because there are more of them? Is that any better than some people getting a pass on them because of, say, the family they were born into?

An appeal to popularity is no more valid than an appeal to any other authority. "Because The People say so" is as empty a justification as "because The King says so". That's not to say that there are no justifications and that anything goes; only that whether or not something goes does not depend on whether anybody, or any number of people, say so. If there are morally intractable situations where someone's genuine rights have to be sacrificed one way or another, arbitrary decree is no more just a way or settling whose those are than letting the interested parties fight it out.

And since those decrees only carry the weight of the force behind them, they are tantamount to just calling that fight before it happens: one party is obviously going to win if it comes down to a fight because they have the power block (be it The King or The People) backing them, so no point actually fighting the fight. That's not justice. That's just intimidation. Justice demands reason.

On which note, I have my doubts about whether there really are such morally intractable situations, since those kinds of contradictions disprove any assertion of rights which gives rise to them just as surely as any contradiction disproves any assertion that gives rise to it. Someone asserts that for all x, F(x). But F(a) is contrary to F(b). That disproves the assertion, as the assertion would imply F(a) and F(b), a contradiction. This is just as true if F(x) is the claim that x has a right to something.

In other words, if you think it's possible for there to be two rights contrary to each other, and a need for someone to decide which one gets violated and which one gets respected, then your concept of what rights people have needs to be reexamined.

[HugoSchmidt]

You missed the point. Not the first time in this discussion, as I can see. The point was to find a contr-argument to your statement and that is your contr-argument. Are you saing that If you exclude "schizophrenic and the chronic drug user", then your point is valid? Or that these people have no right to be happy? Or cannot be called happy

By all means, go right ahead and pursue happiness by turning yourself into a drug-addled schizophrenic. Please be my guest. I'll continue pursuing happiness by a life as an honest, just, productive individual. We'll see who is successful by any rational definition of the term.

I'm reminded of an issue that Orwell pointed out during the Second World War to some of the clever-clever fashionable intellectuals. He pointed out the issue wasn't whether or not you could make some sophist case that British Imperialism was really just as bad, or even a bit worse, than that Hitler chappie. The issue was whether or not you yourself would want to live underneath the Nazi rule.

Objectivism emphatically isn't some special code of morality that you might or might not decide to follow. It's an explicit identification of the only code that humans follow, whenever they are not engaged in destroying themselves.

I know the first sentence is true, at least for me it is, but I cannot prove it

Well, you don't have to, because that first sentence is a question, not a comment.

Then again, the second sentence seems impossible to prove too.

You see, actual scientists proved it, and published it in Science. Which brings me to this:

Well, that sums up the attitude you presented so far quite nicely.
You do know that insults never help to get your point accross? Quite the opposite.

Someone has the nerve to insult my loyalty to the scientific method and does so with a claim that Science magazine is a "pop-sci magazine", and I'm supposed to respond with politeness? Get real. And if you bother to read the paper, you will see that it supports exactly what Ayn Rand wrote about the connection between reason and happiness and self-confidence.

My patience runs out when I pull together a stack of data and this is carefully breezed over. I'm not interested in dealing with people doing their damndest to misunderstand. I'm only interested in addressing minds trying to understand things directly.

[eran_rathan]

I tend to see it as, "Taxes are user-fees for civilization."

The problem with this perspective is that we generally frown on being forced to buy someone's product. Imagine if your ISP wouldn't let you cancel their service and kept billing you for it whether you wanted it or not. AOL actually did this or something very close to it for a long time and got a lot of flack for it. Big evil corporation doing evil things right? But how is that any different than the state billing you for their services whether you like them or not, e.g. the "service" of bombing scary brown people half a world away?

Precisely nothing. Which is why citizens, as shareholders in their government, have the moral responsibility to hold accountable the people in the government who authorize such actions. The three recourses available to a citizenry against a tyrannical government is the Ballot, the Bench, and the Bullet (in that order).

Sure, you can move if you want to be out of their service area and not subject to their billing; but how would that be any different than, say, Comcast insisting that you have to be their customer just because of where you live? We would never tolerate that; even when there are no other options to Comcast, it's still possible (if perhaps undesirable) to go without internet service. That possibility is not there with the state.

There are several things that one can do about it. Move to another polity. Vote out the incumbents. etc.

The thing is, there are so many facets of civilization that we as Americans take for granted, and I find Objectivists in particular guilty of this, being willfully blind to the money that the previous generations and previous governments have put into making our culture what it is. Roads, utilities, all of the infrastructure that we daily utilize that many have absolutely no concept how much these things cost.

Do you know how much it costs to build a road? Here in Maine, for a two-lane asphalt paved road with 8 ft shoulders, you are taking about a MINIMUM of $200 PER FOOT to build that road. $200 per foot. Think about how far you traveled yesterday - for me, it was 24 miles (12 miles each way to and from work). That means I traveled over 24x5280x200 = $25 344 000 dollars worth of infrastructure, and that is without talking about maintenance, bridges, etc. At approximately 4 million miles of roads in the US, that is $4.22x10¹² dollars, just in roads, assuming that it costs the same in Maine as the rest of the country (even though this is fallacious, most of the country is much more expensive than Maine). This says nothing of dams, bridges, aqueducts, sewer treatment systems, etc.

Additionally, there are a number of departments whose actions, though indirect to most people's daily lives, still work to their benefit, such as the EPA, the FDA, the Highway Safety Commission, NOAA, etc.

And yes, I'm aware of the practical problems involving externalities, etc, but that doesn't change the principle of it: you're being forced to pay for services you may or may not want, when perhaps you could get better service for a better price from someone else. In some cases you can (you can buy private equivalents of many things the state offers), but even then you can't cancel your old (state) service. And in other cases you can't even get an alternative because nobody's allowed to provide one: the state claims a monopoly and enforces it with military might. Imagine if any other service provider kept competitors out of the market at the barrel of a gun. Atrocious failure of the free market, right? Capitalism gone horribly wrong? But the state is doing the same thing.

I'm actually a fan of the government-as-a-valuable-service model, but if we're looking at it in that light, it's clear that we let the state get away with heinous things that would have us jumping up and down if the provider of any other service did them.

And you can find a large number of people who will agree with you, about nearly everything. The only thing is, as a representative republic, we have to compromise, and make decisions with the minimum of suck for everyone. Doesn't always work, but the system is iterative, it'll eventually get better.

[eran_rathan]

Objectivism emphatically isn't some special code of morality that you might or might not decide to follow. It's an explicit identification of the only code that humans follow, whenever they are not engaged in destroying themselves.

[citation needed].

Taoists, Buddhists, Sikhs, Christians, Muslims, and basically every other religious group in the world would disagree with you.

Religion is practically defined as being non-rational. Yet, there are hundreds of studies about how religion makes people happier.

[J Thomas]

The problem with this perspective is that your analogy doesn't actually work very well. How about if, in your example, you declining Comcast service then means that no one in your city can have it?

The question is, why would that be the case? And if that could be the case, must it be? Or could it be avoided? If it can be avoided, shouldn't we let people avoid it if they like?

It depends. Take an example that has no particular moral implication -- toll roads. Lots of roads get funded by taxes that you have to pay. Toll roads in theory get paid only by the users, and that's fairer. If you don't want to use the road you don't have to pay for it. But it turns out that even if you don't use the toll road, it's likely to get in your way. You have to cross over or under it sometimes, and it's more of an inconvenience than if it wasn't a toll road. And also it turns out that collecting the tolls is a big inconvenience to the people who do use the road. And a big part of the expense of maintaining the road comes from the cost of collecting the tolls. Now we have the beginning of an electronic solution. If you use the toll road a lot you can buy a gizmo that lets them count you without a lot of delay.They can sell you a pass that lets you use the road as many times as you want for some time, or they can count how many times you use the road and bill you.

This is not just a problem for governments. Like, traditionally the phone company allowed unlimited local calling because the cost of recording and billing each call was more than half the total cost of a phone system that billed for each call. It just wasn't worth doing. Now the technology is available to cheaply bill by the call so cell phones tend to do that.

Imagine that all roads were toll roads. That would be too inconvenient to bother with. Imagine that tax roads are too unfair to have. The obvious alternative is don't have roads. If everybody lives on his own farm and makes everything he needs, and walks on dirt paths to visit his neighbors, then nobody is being oppressed. But the trouble with that approach is that it results in a population that's too small and too disorganized to fight off invading armies.

So, say you object to taxes that pay for a road you don't use. If you buy a car, did the car-carrier that brought your car to the dealer use that road? Did the truck that brought the gasoline to your gas station use that road? The reefer that brings ice cream to your grocery store? Your customers? Things that you don't use directly still might be good for you. And yet, why should you be forced to pay for things that are good for you when you don't notice what's good for you?

Or, to translate from the analogy to the substantial topic:

The problem with an integrated society is that it's simply physically impossible not to have conflicting "rights" everywhere.

What exactly do you mean by "an integrated society", and if that is not a necessary state of affairs (i.e. if it's possible not to be), why should it be obligatory? If there is enough value in having one that it's worth waiving one's rights to get it, then surely people world form them purely voluntarily, and people who want no part of that one can form another, or none at all if they so choose?

Not to put words in somebody else's mouth, what he says works if we replace "integrated" with "urban". We don't have the technology for a whole lot of people to live crammed closely together without getting in each other's way. They naturally tend to feel like their rights are being violated. It's a lot easier to get your rights when you live on your own farm and nobody can get onto your property unless they walk there through somebody else's property.

The second flaw is that your principle sees government as a foreign, uncontrolled entity.

To those who didn't win the popularity contest, it is. Governments are made of people, and nothing more. Everything the government does is something that some people do. Assuming we have some kind of standards about what it is OK for people to do or not, why do some people get a pass on those standards just because there are more of them? Is that any better than some people getting a pass on them because of, say, the family they were born into?

I think it's usually better. But if I wanted to argue that it's better in principle then I'd have trouble. I think I could make a good case for it, but nothing like an airtight case. It would wind up depending on secondary stuff that usually goes along with aristocracy but that doesn't have to happen.

An appeal to popularity is no more valid than an appeal to any other authority. "Because The People say so" is as empty a justification as "because The King says so". That's not to say that there are no justifications and that anything goes; only that whether or not something goes does not depend on whether anybody, or any number of people, say so. If there are morally intractable situations where someone's genuine rights have to be sacrificed one way or another, arbitrary decree is no more just a way or settling whose those are than letting the interested parties fight it out.

Agreed. If some answer is truly right, and we have a right way to find that answer, then there's no harm in making a decree about it. But majority rule is not guaranteed to give any good result at all.

And since those decrees only carry the weight of the force behind them, they are tantamount to just calling that fight before it happens: one party is obviously going to win if it comes down to a fight because they have the power block (be it The King or The People) backing them, so no point actually fighting the fight. That's not justice. That's just intimidation. Justice demands reason.

Agreed. And yet, it is a tremendous convenience for everybody to call the fight before it happens instead of having to fight it out. That's why I think Afghanistan should have a rifle democracy. Every voter brings some kind of gun to the polls, and shoot a target for part of the registration. One gun, one vote. When there's a clear mandate they don't have to actually fight it out.

On which note, I have my doubts about whether there really are such morally intractable situations, since those kinds of contradictions disprove any assertion of rights which gives rise to them just as surely as any contradiction disproves any assertion that gives rise to it. Someone asserts that for all x, F(x). But F(a) is contrary to F(b). That disproves the assertion, as the assertion would imply F(a) and F(b), a contradiction. This is just as true if F(x) is the claim that x has a right to something.

You argue that rights cannot conflict. I think it's more likely that this will lead to a proof that there are no rights, or at most one, than a proof that there are actually two rights which can never conflict. But we'll see how it goes.

In other words, if you think it's possible for there to be two rights contrary to each other, and a need for someone to decide which one gets violated and which one gets respected, then your concept of what rights people have needs to be reexamined.

Yes. OK, do people have a right to life? No. Everybody dies.

Do people have a right to food? No, there's no guarantee that the world economy can produce enough food for everybody. We can get into situations where somebody has to starve.

When we are in a situation where some people can live while others have to die, what is the fair way to decide who lives and who dies? How do we satisfy everybody's rights while we decide who dies? I think in general there is no fair way to make that decision.

If I'm correct, if there is no right to survive and no fair way to decide who dies, what rights do you have that are more important than that?

[exadyne]

As hippo said about could you make this any easier, I'll ask, have you ever heard of schizophrenia and schizophrenic high? Many people who have schizophrenia (and I'm assuming you'll agree schizophrenics have rejected reality and rationality) are in fact very happy.

Okay, you can accept the schizophrenic and the chronic drug user as your model of happiness if you'd like. Nothing I can do to stop you.

Well if we use that, then you'd have to agree, rationality doesn't bring happiness. The more productive thing is, does Objectivism have a definition for happiness? I'm not sure how the philosophy can maximize it, if it doesn't define it. Barring that, I go with happiness based on seeing someone making happy expresses or expressing their happiness. Many schizophrenics do that. You'd have been better off to say that rejecting reality means you either won't be happy or you won't be safe. Now, as Objectivism is about maximizing personal happiness, it sounds like for schizophrenics, denying reality is maximizing it, which would contradict the Objectivist principle that being rational maximizes it.

Hugo, I don't think we've seen you show how Rand was a truly happy person. . I've said she clearly showed times of being dishonest and unjust, you've claimed I lied by saying she was self-hating. From what I've heard of her end of life, it involved her being rather unhappy, shuffling the neighborhood in a bathrobe, devoid of major purpose.

I imagine that thought makes you feel really, really... something, anyway.

Yes, Rand escapes from one of the world's worst tyrannies, get's to America with ten dollars in her wallet, becomes a best-selling author, and launches a philosophical revolution that is still ongoing - yeah, total failure. Complete refutation of her philosophy. Sure.

Those are all things she did. At no point do I see where you said, "and this made her happy." I didn't call her a failure. Oddly enough, Marx is still being discussed and enjoyed by people in this thread, over a hundred years after his death, even though he advocated things that Objectivist call irrational. Would you argue that Marx was a failure? I think you'd be irrational to do it, but I'd bet you'd be willing to argue he was unhappy because he didn't fulfill some Objectivist measure. You also ignore how her life ended - so broke from her "so successful" franchise, that she cashed in on social security and medicare to treat her cancer.

[exadyne]

Damn, I accidentally the tab.

Who's reading too much negative here? I admitted that the way the crash was written was awful. I also admitted that if you blew up a whole goddamn building, you realistically would have been dangerous to innocents, which was overlooked. Jokingly, I attributed these to Rand's usage of meth during writing, which is a fact. I was trying to speak without being too confrontational. What I didn't do was cheering for deaths of the train's passengers or the destruction of the building, or handwaving them.

Secondly, I didn't quite remember AS that well, so after J posted his crash, I did some research myself. Unfortunately, you are wrong. There was only one crash that involved multiple deaths, the Taggart Tunnel one, causes of which I explained in my previous post and, again, admitted that the way it was written is facepalm magnet. So, feel informed.

That leads straight to another point, it seems that you either did not actually read any 'chunks' of the book, only second-hand relations of it, or you should work on your reading comprehension skillz (or, well, both). I won't ask you to read the book, because:
a) it is not my job to preach
b) you will do whatever you want either way

I accused you of being proud of your ignorance, as you attempt to criticize the book without reading it at all, and that would be pretty pointless at best. You can discuss the ideas as much as you want, it's fair game. But if you want to talk about the book, do some research. Pretty please? And if you are discussing the ideas, stay away from mentioning enormous monologue, trains crashing, laws of thermodynamics, etc.

Info dump:

Spoiler:

FYI, the magical metal was some kind of steel or other alloy, and the magical engine didn't have anything in common with it.

Grammar Nazi here: I think the word 'liturgy' (for copper, in your post) doesn't fit here

Ok, here, I've found the passage via Amazon search inside, page 194 of mass market paperback (emphasis mine):

The day began with the news of a disaster: a freight train of the Atlantic Southern had crashed head-on into a passenger train, in New Mexico, on a sharp curve in the mounts, scattering freight cars all over the slops. The cars carried five thousand tons of copper, bound from a mine in Arizona to the Rearden mills.

Notice something, the first tally they give, how much copper is lost. Not how many people died on the passenger train that the freight train hit. Skimming the next few pages Amazon gave, I see a lot of worry about a missing shipment, not a lot of thought given to the shipment hitting a passenger train.
I've honestly missed where you said the building blowing up in fountainhead was bad. The only thing I see in the post I responded to referred to people being dead already, but I assumed that was in reference to the train that passed through a carbon monoxide.
I've admitted I didn't read the book. My critique is on her philosophy, and as she used books as her philosophical platform a lot, I'd say showing parts that show a person that's philosophy glosses over a load of dead people to talk about lost copper that someone would use to make an alloy.
Yes, the calling it magic copper, and referring to the second law of thermodynamics are things that aren't really that important, my questioning if they are connected was facetious. The engine breaking the second law does make me wonder about someone who insists on reality. Given the hard reality of most of it, I find it an odd plot device, more jarring than say Terry Goodkind having a whole magical world set of novels that encourages Objectivism - at least the pretense of being our reality was given up in it to allow magic and what not.

[exadyne]

I tend to see it as, "Taxes are user-fees for civilization."

The problem with this perspective is that we generally frown on being forced to buy someone's product. Imagine if your ISP wouldn't let you cancel their service and kept billing you for it whether you wanted it or not. AOL actually did this or something very close to it for a long time and got a lot of flack for it. Big evil corporation doing evil things right? But how is that any different than the state billing you for their services whether you like them or not, e.g. the "service" of bombing scary brown people half a world away? Sure, you can move if you want to be out of their service area and not subject to their billing; but how would that be any different than, say, Comcast insisting that you have to be their customer just because of where you live? We would never tolerate that; even when there are no other options to Comcast, it's still possible (if perhaps undesirable) to go without internet service. That possibility is not there with the state.

And yes, I'm aware of the practical problems involving externalities, etc, but that doesn't change the principle of it: you're being forced to pay for services you may or may not want, when perhaps you could get better service for a better price from someone else. In some cases you can (you can buy private equivalents of many things the state offers), but even then you can't cancel your old (state) service. And in other cases you can't even get an alternative because nobody's allowed to provide one: the state claims a monopoly and enforces it with military might. Imagine if any other service provider kept competitors out of the market at the barrel of a gun. Atrocious failure of the free market, right? Capitalism gone horribly wrong? But the state is doing the same thing.

I'm actually a fan of the government-as-a-valuable-service model, but if we're looking at it in that light, it's clear that we let the state get away with heinous things that would have us jumping up and down if the provider of any other service did them.

I would say part of this analogy isn't correct, in that you can choose how much or how little AOL or Comcast you consume, including none. None one in a society can stop using the value that being in a society creates. Consider, if I sell a plot of land in one country, it probably sells for a different price than in another, based in at least part based on the prosperity of the government/country/society the land is in. An acre in the middle of nowhere USA probably sells for more than an acre almost anywhere in Somalia (give or take homesteader acts that give land away for free in some regions of the US). An iPhone is valuable in the US because there is an existing infrastructure to use it, but it wouldn't be as useful in the middle of the ocean with no government and no infrastructure. You are absolutely correct though that everyone will invariably pay for something they don't agree to in any Government system, even a perfectly libertarian / Objectivist one - "how dare you make me pay court fees for this trial. I didn't agree to a trial just because my coal fire plant poured soot on people's homes!"
I also think that as the health of society has an impact on what your wealth actually accomplishes, it justifies the people who make more pay progressively instead of a flat fee - doing better means you're harvesting more value from society, whether you want to admit to it or not. To say the least, in a pure anarchy (little a, not Anarchy the movements with a capital A), there's a much steeper limit to what you can own, usually the amount you can fend off from others.

[jpers36]

By all means, go right ahead and pursue happiness by turning yourself into a drug-addled schizophrenic. Please be my guest. I'll continue pursuing happiness by a life as an honest, just, productive individual. We'll see who is successful by any rational definition of the term.

How about you guys agree on a "rational definition" of happiness and see what implications flow from that?

The non-Objectivists are saying:
1. Objectivism claims rationalism to be the only path to happiness
2. There exist non-rational people who are happy
3. Therefore, Objectivism is false

I believe HugoSchmidt rejects 2, but from his post is seems that he realizes it's a rhetorical misstep to explicitly state the rejection. Instead, he's muddying the waters by begging the question. But maybe I'm wrong. Hugo, can you directly address the above argument?

[Beatrice The Golden]

You missed the point. Not the first time in this discussion, as I can see. The point was to find a contr-argument to your statement and that is your contr-argument. Are you saing that If you exclude "schizophrenic and the chronic drug user", then your point is valid? Or that these people have no right to be happy? Or cannot be called happy

By all means, go right ahead and pursue happiness by turning yourself into a drug-addled schizophrenic. Please be my guest. I'll continue pursuing happiness by a life as an honest, just, productive individual. We'll see who is successful by any rational definition of the term.

I'd gladly compete but I do not know which definition of happiness can be called rational (and why).
By all means, do quote one for me.

I'm reminded of an issue that Orwell pointed out during the Second World War to some of the clever-clever fashionable intellectuals. He pointed out the issue wasn't whether or not you could make some sophist case that British Imperialism was really just as bad, or even a bit worse, than that Hitler chappie. The issue was whether or not you yourself would want to live underneath the Nazi rule.

Yes, I get it. Godwin's law. Enough already...

Objectivism emphatically isn't some special code of morality that you might or might not decide to follow. It's an explicit identification of the only code that humans follow, whenever they are not engaged in destroying themselves.

See, this is exactly the problem with understending your train of thoughts. You assume everyone are using your definitions of every vague concept that exists in philosophy or whatnot. Can you prove this "explicit identification of the ONLY code that humans follow" in any way?

Then again, the second sentence seems impossible to prove too.

You see, actual scientists proved it, and published it in Science.

This makes me laugh every time I read it (no, not for the reason you think it does).
Fine. For the sake of the argument, I've created an account and read the article. The whole 1 page of it.

I know, English is my second language, but correct me if I'm wrong in understanding this:
1) They took 5000 iPhone users with quite admirable spread in age and occupation. Country-wise not so, but it doesn't matter too much.
2) They let them report their happiness level every now and then with activity they were performing and so on
3) They found out that during normal dayily routine, if they mind wanders, they become some % less happier later that day.

And that is your definite proof that irrationality leads to unhappiness.
Scientists proved it through one vaguely related research.

Well done, science.

If being randomly lost in thoughts means someone is irrational...
And if it consists the ONLY way someone can be called irrational...
If such terms are made then you are, in fact, backed up by science.

[J Thomas]

I also think that as the health of society has an impact on what your wealth actually accomplishes, it justifies the people who make more pay progressively instead of a flat fee - doing better means you're harvesting more value from society, whether you want to admit to it or not. To say the least, in a pure anarchy (little a, not Anarchy the movements with a capital A), there's a much steeper limit to what you can own, usually the amount you can fend off from others.

I want to state an alternative point of view as clearly as I can. Not that I particularly believe in it, but it is widely believed and it's worth careful examination.

------------
You say that people who are richer are taking more from society, so they deserve to pay more.

However, in a free market somebody who makes more money deserves to make more money because he provided more value than he was paid. People wouldn't pay him so much unless they got even more out of it.

Therefore he deserves to keep every penny he owns until he's ready to pay for something he personally has decided he wants. Something that's worth more to him than the money.

You say that being in a rich society has made me rich. But really, I got rich by making society rich. Society owes me, and not the other way around. If I hadn't done the work I did for society, nobody would have done it. Society would have had to do without, and would be that much poorer. My money comes from my creative genius, not from society, and it's mine and nobody else's. I have the leisure to sit around arguing about ethics on the internet because my contribution to society was worth far more than society's investment in me.

My children deserve to inherit my wealth, because it's mine and that's what I want to do with it. Nobody has a right to take anything of mine unless I agree.
-----------

To my way of thinking, one giant hole in this argument comes at "if I didn't do it, nobody would". If I can outcompete my closest competitor and drive him completely out of business, maybe -- just maybe -- I'm better for society than he is and I deserve to get the business. But my value to society is something like the difference between what I do and what the other guy would have done if I wasn't there. Maybe I'm 1% better or 5% better. Maybe my wonderful service to society is that I did better advertising to persuade people they needed my product. Maybe it was a whispering campaign to convince customers that his product was unsafe and had hidden flaws. It isn't true that if I didn't do it nobody would.

In biological systems there are always more individuals born than there is room for, and the ones that can best take what they need survive, while the surplus dies. Under free economic competition it works the same way. For every physics genius who discovers something important, there are three or four others who would have done the same thing within a few weeks, years, or decades. In general, you get all the glory by getting there second.

If I win out because the creative genius who came up with the new industry was undercapitalized and I wasn't, how does that mean I deserve all the rewards and nobody else deserves any of them? Not that I'm presenting an argument about how the rewards ought to be split up, but I'm arguing that the argument that the guy who's best at grabbing the rewards doesn't necessarily have a strong case why he should get to keep them all.

[iamspen]

Plus, you didn't pick yourself up by your own bootstraps to get rich. Nobody does. Nobody ever has. The most successful businessman in the world still pays thousands of employees to do the dirty work. The richest employers in the world got that way because they drastically undervalue the work of those under their employ as it relates specifically to them. That's what they're supposed to do, otherwise nobody would start a business ever because it would be stupid. But that also doesn't make me feel guilty about asking them to pump a little bit more of their income back into the system to provide the revenue that their employees couldn't ever hope to afford.

[J Thomas]

For the sake of the argument, I've created an account and read the article. The whole 1 page of it.

I know, English is my second language, but correct me if I'm wrong in understanding this:
1) They took 5000 iPhone users with quite admirable spread in age and occupation. Country-wise not so, but it doesn't matter too much.
2) They let them report their happiness level every now and then with activity they were performing and so on
3) They found out that during normal dayily routine, if they mind wanders, they become some % less happier later that day.

And that is your definite proof that irrationality leads to unhappiness.
The scientists proved it through one vaguely related research.

Well done, science.

If being randomly lost in thoughts means someone is irrational...
And if it consists the ONLY way someone can be called irrational...
If such terms are made then you are, in fact, backed up by science.

I read the sciency pop report and didn't read the actual article. Can you tell me --

Did the people who did less mind-wandering over all, say they were happier over all?

If we assume that everybody was just as likely to call in while they were daydreaming as everybody else, then if Hugo is right the people who do less daydreaming will be happier generally and not just a few hours after they don't daydream.

But it's possible that the study did not have enough controls. Perhaps people who don't report their daydreaming are happier than people who do report their daydreaming. It would be better to call people at random times and ask them what they are doing and how happy they are.

The people who let their minds wander and later were less happy -- were they happier while their minds wandered and less happy later when their minds were not wandering?

If that's true, it might be that people are in general happier when they daydream and less happy when they don't daydream, and to be happier they should daydream more -- as long as they spend enough time paying attention to the things they need to.

And I want to point out in Ayn Rand's defense that if it turns out that HugoSchmidt does not yet understand how science works, that does not mean that Ayn Rand didn't understand science. He could have misunderstood Rand, too.

[Beatrice The Golden]

Did the people who did less mind-wandering over all, say they were happier over all?

I don't remember them pointing out such correlation. Than again, I quickly forgot the article altogether.

The people who let their minds wander and later were less happy -- were they happier while their minds wandered and less happy later when their minds were not wandering?

That's actually a very good question. They do discern between "wandering off to happy thoughts, unhappy thoughts and neutral ones" and the highest percentage wandered off to happy ones. So I assume that during these moments they were in fact happier, which sounds about right, since that's the main reason we conciously stray from reality to begin with.

This reserch needs follow-up with measurments of happiness change during daydreaming and comparison of this change with the overall unhappiness created by the daydrimming. It would be interesting to see which one is higher.

[J Thomas]

Did the people who did less mind-wandering over all, say they were happier over all?

I don't remember them pointing out such correlation. Than again, I quickly forgot the article altogether.

The people who let their minds wander and later were less happy -- were they happier while their minds wandered and less happy later when their minds were not wandering?

That's actually a very good question. They do discern between "wandering off to happy thoughts, unhappy thoughts and neutral ones" and the highest percentage wandered off to happy ones. So I assume that during these moments they were in fact happier, which sounds about right, since that's the main reason we conciously stray from reality to begin with.

This reserch needs follow-up with measurments of happiness change during daydreaming and comparison of this change with the overall unhappiness created by the daydrimming. It would be interesting to see which one is higher.

The article itself was one page? Unless they checked for it, they could have had the following situation: People do a lot of daydreaming about happy things and while they do it they are happier. Within a few hours they revert to baseline and so later they are less happy. But their happy times are the daydreaming, and their other times are neutral, so on the whole they wind up happier on average because of their time daydreaming.

That sort of thing happens all the time in science. People find out something, and then they think they have found out something completely different. This is why Jaynes's operationism is so important. Look at what the experiment actually did, and make your theories refer to that.

[IcedT]

You missed the point. Not the first time in this discussion, as I can see. The point was to find a contr-argument to your statement and that is your contr-argument. Are you saing that If you exclude "schizophrenic and the chronic drug user", then your point is valid? Or that these people have no right to be happy? Or cannot be called happy

By all means, go right ahead and pursue happiness by turning yourself into a drug-addled schizophrenic. Please be my guest. I'll continue pursuing happiness by a life as an honest, just, productive individual. We'll see who is successful by any rational definition of the term.

Um... you're aware that schizophrenia is a psychological disorder that people are born with or develop involuntarily, and that its symptoms can be impossible to manage without medication (drug use)? Seriously, stop talking out of your ass.

[J Thomas]

Plus, you didn't pick yourself up by your own bootstraps to get rich. Nobody does. Nobody ever has. The most successful businessman in the world still pays thousands of employees to do the dirty work. The richest employers in the world got that way because they drastically undervalue the work of those under their employ as it relates specifically to them.

To say that employers undervalue their employees' work we need a way to decide how valuable that work is. How would we do that? The easiest way is to say that people are worth what they can get paid according to supply and demand in a free market. If you get a job from the richest employer in the world, and he drasticly underpays you, then you should go get a better job that pays more instead. What, nobody will pay you more? Maybe he isn't underpaying you after all.

I don't think that's a good way to decide value, but what should we use instead? If you go to school for four years to learn to do a skilled job that there's a shortage of trained people for, that seems good. But four years from now the shortage is likely to be less because there will be 3 years of graduates in the job market. After you've been doing it for ten years there will be another ten years of graduates. And maybe somebody will have a way to automate your job by then. Time to go back to school....

Since there are many fewer employers than there are employees, the employers have the negotiating advantage. Is there anything a free market can do about that? My own thought is to limit the size of corporations. Gradually reduce the maximum size -- first Walmart has to split up into smaller corporations, or spin off entities that can work for Walmart or for competitors. Then as the maximum size gets smaller, other big corporations must split up. Say you eventually reach a maximum size around 100 employees. GM would have to do a whole lot of subcontracting. Each individual employee would be employed by a small corporation that wouldn't have nearly as much bargaining clout as GM used to. They'd have a much better handle on waste, too, but there would be the overhead of specifying the work that needed to be done between corporations.

That's what they're supposed to do, otherwise nobody would start a business ever because it would be stupid. But that also doesn't make me feel guilty about asking them to pump a little bit more of their income back into the system to provide the revenue that their employees couldn't ever hope to afford.

Every employer needs to get more value from an employee than he pays, otherwise he'd be stupid to hire. Similarly each of the employer's customers needs to get more value from the product than he pays, or it would be stupid to buy the employer's product. It's hard to estimate how much value each employee actually produces, but imagine that we could do that. Say that you are paid $100,000/year and your value to your employer is $200,000/year. How should it be decided how much of the value you should get versus how much the employer should get? There might be some sort of fair way to decide that. But suppose that after we decided on the fair way, one of you could get a better deal with somebody else. Kind of a waste to decide what's fair when supply-and-demand says something else. On the third hand, it's a whole lot of trouble to figure all this stuff out. If you spend three work days a year negotiating pay, that's 3 days that could have been spent creating value instead.... I think a lot of people spend most of their time carefully not thinking about how much they are paid versus how much they could get paid. What good does it do? If you drive the hardest bargain and get the best deal on salary, then when the downsizing comes it will make you the obvious first target.

[Pfhorrest]

You say that being in a rich society has made me rich. But really, I got rich by making society rich. Society owes me, and not the other way around.

The way a truly free market works, it's both. Two parties only trade when they both benefit from it. If two people with very high quality products or services to offer trade with each other, there's much more benefit all around (both are very happy with what they got for their trade) than if two incompetent people traded with each other (both are kinda miffed at not getting much value from it).

If you're looking at the exchange between someone and society as a whole, then if everything is working as it should be (which often isn't the case, granted), a talented person in a supportive society will result in a person contributing something truly great to society and a society making that person truly successful. In the end, neither owes either; it's a fair trade. If one or the other parties isn't so great, then society could tell a person "you're not rich because you don't contribute anything of enough value to society", or a person could tell society "I'm incapable of doing great works because my society doesn't support me well enough".

So there's a feedback loop, which can be positive or negative. Society can hold people back, or help them shine. People can do great works or barely carry their own weight. One can lead to another: a society that helps people shine can lead to people capable of doing great works, and people doing great works can lead to a society that helps people shine. People who barely carry their own weight can result in a society that holds everybody back, and a society that holds people back can leave people barely capable of carrying their own weight.

All of this is because societies are made of people, and so reflect nothing more than the quality of people they're made of.

[IcedT]

You say that being in a rich society has made me rich. But really, I got rich by making society rich. Society owes me, and not the other way around.

The way a truly free market works, it's both. Two parties only trade when they both benefit from it. If two people with very high quality products or services to offer trade with each other, there's much more benefit all around (both are very happy with what they got for their trade) than if two incompetent people traded with each other (both are kinda miffed at not getting much value from it).

If you're looking at the exchange between someone and society as a whole, then if everything is working as it should be (which often isn't the case, granted), a talented person in a supportive society will result in a person contributing something truly great to society and a society making that person truly successful. In the end, neither owes either; it's a fair trade. If one or the other parties isn't so great, then society could tell a person "you're not rich because you don't contribute anything of enough value to society", or a person could tell society "I'm incapable of doing great works because my society doesn't support me well enough".

So there's a feedback loop, which can be positive or negative. Society can hold people back, or help them shine. People can do great works or barely carry their own weight. One can lead to another: a society that helps people shine can lead to people capable of doing great works, and people doing great works can lead to a society that helps people shine. People who barely carry their own weight can result in a society that holds everybody back, and a society that holds people back can leave people barely capable of carrying their own weight.

All of this is because societies are made of people, and so reflect nothing more than the quality of people they're made of.

To add on to this, it's important to remember how drastically value can change as society and technology changes. The skills that make a person wealthy in America today are very different from the skills that would've been valued in another time or place. Warren Buffet would've been shit out of luck if he'd been born before the development of stock exchanges. Henry Ford today would probably be just a competent engineer today instead of the revolutionary industrialist he was in his own time. Don't even get me started on what all these cunning businessmen would be doing if they'd been born into Edo Japan, where merchants were at the absolute bottom of the social structure and opportunities were so few.

I think I recall a story by Mark Twain, where the main character learns from an angel that the greatest military genius ever produced by mankind lived out his days as a cobbler, because there were no wars for him to fight. His genius went by completely unnoticed, even by himself. This is why wealth, power, and status are about half ability and half opportunity.

[J Thomas]

You say that being in a rich society has made me rich. But really, I got rich by making society rich. Society owes me, and not the other way around.

The way a truly free market works, it's both. Two parties only trade when they both benefit from it. If two people with very high quality products or services to offer trade with each other, there's much more benefit all around (both are very happy with what they got for their trade) than if two incompetent people traded with each other (both are kinda miffed at not getting much value from it).

If you're looking at the exchange between someone and society as a whole, then if everything is working as it should be (which often isn't the case, granted), a talented person in a supportive society will result in a person contributing something truly great to society and a society making that person truly successful. In the end, neither owes either; it's a fair trade. If one or the other parties isn't so great, then society could tell a person "you're not rich because you don't contribute anything of enough value to society", or a person could tell society "I'm incapable of doing great works because my society doesn't support me well enough".

So there's a feedback loop, which can be positive or negative. Society can hold people back, or help them shine. People can do great works or barely carry their own weight. One can lead to another: a society that helps people shine can lead to people capable of doing great works, and people doing great works can lead to a society that helps people shine. People who barely carry their own weight can result in a society that holds everybody back, and a society that holds people back can leave people barely capable of carrying their own weight.

All of this is because societies are made of people, and so reflect nothing more than the quality of people they're made of.

Continuing along that line, the same society can support one person very well and another not at all. A springboard for one and a millstone for the other.

That isn't fair. But can't I use my fortune to help my children? Naturally I want to give them every possible edge against people who would compete with them. "All I'm asking for is an unfair advantage."

[BlueSoxSWJ]

Since there are many fewer employers than there are employees, the employers have the negotiating advantage. Is there anything a free market can do about that? My own thought is to limit the size of corporations. Gradually reduce the maximum size -- first Walmart has to split up into smaller corporations, or spin off entities that can work for Walmart or for competitors. Then as the maximum size gets smaller, other big corporations must split up. Say you eventually reach a maximum size around 100 employees. GM would have to do a whole lot of subcontracting. Each individual employee would be employed by a small corporation that wouldn't have nearly as much bargaining clout as GM used to. They'd have a much better handle on waste, too, but there would be the overhead of specifying the work that needed to be done between corporations.

One of the obvious problems with this strategy is that you're sacrificing the social benefits of economies of scale. If you can show evidence that firm size (in employees) gives employers rent-extracting power over their employees, you're better off attacking the labor-capital balance directly and trying to minimize externalities that flow into the producer-consumer balance. Better strategies might include making minimum wage a function of # of employees, or requiring unionization of firms with a minimum number of employees. If there isn't rent-capturing going on by employers, then you're creating it for labor, so you'd probably want to be really careful in figuring out the macroeconomic implications. It could well be the case that, combined with a regulatory and tax environment that greatly favors capital, regulatory rent on behalf of labor would be beneficial, but it would take some pretty careful study before making any major changes.

[Pfhorrest]

Precisely nothing. Which is why citizens, as shareholders in their government, have the moral responsibility to hold accountable the people in the government who authorize such actions. The three recourses available to a citizenry against a tyrannical government is the Ballot, the Bench, and the Bullet (in that order).

That misses the point. Pointless wars were given as an example of an unwanted product we're being forced to buy. You're talking about our responsibility to make sure that an organization we ostensibly control doesn't do wrongs on our behalf, like pointless wars. I agree with that, but it's orthogonal to what I was driving at.

We are not only the shareholders of the state, we are its customers. As shareholders, we get a say in what it does on our behalf, and need to exercise that say well, yes. But as customers... normally we have a choice of whether or not to be customers. With the state, we don't.

Say Widget Co. decides to sell the "service" of literally throwing money down a hole. You pay them money, they will gladly throw it down a hole for you, never to be seen again. As a shareholder in Widget Co., you would be absolutely right to be upset about that and say that's a waste of company resources and a stupid valueless product to sell. But as a customer of Widget Co., you would be absolutely right to say "no thanks, I don't need my money thrown down a hole" and not buy it.

But Widget Co. is a special company: you have to buy whatever they sell. You don't have the option to not buy Throw My Money Down A Hole. If you're also a shareholder and the majority of other shareholders agree with you, you can take that product off the market, but that's besides the point: I don't want my choice of whether to buy Throw My Money Down A Hole to rest with Widget Co.'s shareholders, even if I'm one of them!

And the situation is no different with buying Widget Co.'s widgets, which are actually a substantial product that some, maybe even many or most people like and would actually buy. Even if I would buy those widgets anyway, and even if I am a shareholder, I don't want my choice of whether to buy widgets to rest with myself and the rest of Widget Co's shareholders; I want it to rest with just myself.

When we're talking about a business corporation that reasoning is patently obvious. Now say that corporation sells security services, and grocery coupons, and health insurance, and things like that. No difference, right? Being a shareholder of them doesn't give them the right to decide whether you buy their product. Some other random person being a shareholder doesn't make a difference either, does it? Them being a gigantic Walmart-esque megacorporation with millions of shareholders doesn't make it any better either, right? So what if everyone ends up a shareholder... does that somehow make it right?

Sure, you can move if you want to be out of their service area and not subject to their billing; but how would that be any different than, say, Comcast insisting that you have to be their customer just because of where you live? We would never tolerate that; even when there are no other options to Comcast, it's still possible (if perhaps undesirable) to go without internet service. That possibility is not there with the state.

There are several things that one can do about it. Move to another polity.

Move out of Comcast's service area if you don't want their cable. Of course, Time-Warner will force you to buy their cable if you move into their service area. Or Cox if you move into their area.

Vote out the incumbents.

So if everyone in Comcast's service area was given a share of their stock, that would make forcing service on them OK? Credit unions are member-owned; is it OK if your local credit union forces you to join them just for living in their service area, so long as they give you a share? See my long rant above.

The only thing is, as a representative republic, we have to compromise, and make decisions with the minimum of suck for everyone.

Why do we have to work like that? Granted we are working like that and if we are doing so obviously making decisions which suck the least for the most is best. But why can't everybody choose for themselves what sucks the least for them?

A great metaphor I heard once is this: a group of people go out to a restaurant. The waiter comes to take their order. The group begins deliberating the best method of deciding what dishes to order for whom. Bob is a doctor and so probably knows people's dietary needs best, so perhaps they should all defer to him. Susan thinks they should all vote on what dish each person is going to get, since it wouldn't be fair to defer the decision to one supposed expert like Bob. But Joann has special dietary needs and doesn't want to get stuck with what everyone else thinks would be best for her. Etc... various more complex intermediary methods are proposed.

Eventually, Joe suggests that maybe they should each just order whatever they want for themselves. But everybody dismisses him as a crackpot; what kind of crazy way to order is that? It would be anarchy! Someone might order something unhealthy, or something others think is gross, or something that's not halal or kosher, or something more or less expensive than the others...

[BlueSoxSWJ]

Spoiler:

Precisely nothing. Which is why citizens, as shareholders in their government, have the moral responsibility to hold accountable the people in the government who authorize such actions. The three recourses available to a citizenry against a tyrannical government is the Ballot, the Bench, and the Bullet (in that order).

That misses the point. Pointless wars were given as an example of an unwanted product we're being forced to buy. You're talking about our responsibility to make sure that an organization we ostensibly control doesn't do wrongs on our behalf, like pointless wars. I agree with that, but it's orthogonal to what I was driving at.

We are not only the shareholders of the state, we are its customers. As shareholders, we get a say in what it does on our behalf, and need to exercise that say well, yes. But as customers... normally we have a choice of whether or not to be customers. With the state, we don't.

Say Widget Co. decides to sell the "service" of literally throwing money down a hole. You pay them money, they will gladly throw it down a hole for you, never to be seen again. As a shareholder in Widget Co., you would be absolutely right to be upset about that and say that's a waste of company resources and a stupid valueless product to sell. But as a customer of Widget Co., you would be absolutely right to say "no thanks, I don't need my money thrown down a hole" and not buy it.

But Widget Co. is a special company: you have to buy whatever they sell. You don't have the option to not buy Throw My Money Down A Hole. If you're also a shareholder and the majority of other shareholders agree with you, you can take that product off the market, but that's besides the point: I don't want my choice of whether to buy Throw My Money Down A Hole to rest with Widget Co.'s shareholders, even if I'm one of them!

And the situation is no different with buying Widget Co.'s widgets, which are actually a substantial product that some, maybe even many or most people like and would actually buy. Even if I would buy those widgets anyway, and even if I am a shareholder, I don't want my choice of whether to buy widgets to rest with myself and the rest of Widget Co's shareholders; I want it to rest with just myself.

When we're talking about a business corporation that reasoning is patently obvious. Now say that corporation sells security services, and grocery coupons, and health insurance, and things like that. No difference, right? Being a shareholder of them doesn't give them the right to decide whether you buy their product. Some other random person being a shareholder doesn't make a difference either, does it? Them being a gigantic Walmart-esque megacorporation with millions of shareholders doesn't make it any better either, right? So what if everyone ends up a shareholder... does that somehow make it right?

Sure, you can move if you want to be out of their service area and not subject to their billing; but how would that be any different than, say, Comcast insisting that you have to be their customer just because of where you live? We would never tolerate that; even when there are no other options to Comcast, it's still possible (if perhaps undesirable) to go without internet service. That possibility is not there with the state.

There are several things that one can do about it. Move to another polity.

Move out of Comcast's service area if you don't want their cable. Of course, Time-Warner will force you to buy their cable if you move into their service area. Or Cox if you move into their area.

Vote out the incumbents.

So if everyone in Comcast's service area was given a share of their stock, that would make forcing service on them OK? Credit unions are member-owned; is it OK if your local credit union forces you to join them just for living in their service area, so long as they give you a share? See my long rant above.

The only thing is, as a representative republic, we have to compromise, and make decisions with the minimum of suck for everyone.

Why do we have to work like that? Granted we are working like that and if we are doing so obviously making decisions which suck the least for the most is best. But why can't everybody choose for themselves what sucks the least for them?

A great metaphor I heard once is this: a group of people go out to a restaurant. The waiter comes to take their order. The group begins deliberating the best method of deciding what dishes to order for whom. Bob is a doctor and so probably knows people's dietary needs best, so perhaps they should all defer to him. Susan thinks they should all vote on what dish each person is going to get, since it wouldn't be fair to defer the decision to one supposed expert like Bob. But Joann has special dietary needs and doesn't want to get stuck with what everyone else thinks would be best for her. Etc... various more complex intermediary methods are proposed.

Eventually, Joe suggests that maybe they should each just order whatever they want for themselves. But everybody dismisses him as a crackpot; what kind of crazy way to order is that? It would be anarchy! Someone might order something unhealthy, or something others think is gross, or something that's not halal or kosher, or something more or less expensive than the others...

Spoilered your post for length while not taking anything out of context.

When you come up with a way for the U.S. Army to be funded only by those who approve of all its activities, and have its activities benefit those (and only those) who fund it; when you can come up with a way to fund a road at 75% cost, and then restrict its benefits to the 75% who wanted it (including indirect - if you chose not to fund it, your solution has to come up with a way of ensuring that you don't, for example, buy a product in a store that was transported by the road you declined to "purchase."), we can talk about differing levels of government services based on which "products" you'd like to buy.

You again create a poor analogy, by ensuring that the personal decisions in your analogy have no effect on anyone else, thus assuming away the entire point of the conversation. You still give no consideration to the fact that government services, for the most part, are either there for everyone or for no one. (Or, even if it would be possible to differentiate services, it would cost more to do so then the cost of unwanted benefits.) An improvement on your analogy is to say that the restaurant's (admittedly bizarre) policy is that everyone at the table has to make an identical purchase. Now how do you decide what to order? If preferences aren't uniform, someone is going to be less then perfectly satisfied by the decision. Wishing for a better method than Democracy to make that decision is all well and good ("Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."), but unless you provide some realistic alternative, you're not making a substantive point.

[Pfhorrest]

benefit those (and only those) who fund it

If I own a home and beautify it and the surrounding property, are my neighbors obliged to help fund that? After all, my beautifying my home improves the view from their home and the overall quality of the neighborhood and thus their property value. I challenge you to show me a way in which I can beautify it without them getting those positive externalities and being thus indebted to me for providing them; otherwise, I should be able to charge my neighbors for any such home improvements I want to make.

Of course, I don't really ask any such thing, as that would be ridiculous, but that's tantamount to what you are asking me to do.

My point being, while there is certainly something to be said for stopping negative externalities, the same logic does not apply to positive ones. I can say "your actions incidentally harm me, therefore you owe me", because I didn't get a choice in whether to have the actions which harmed me done to me, you forced them on me against my will and if I don't like the results I deserve compensation. But I cannot say "my actions incidentally benefit you, therefore you owe me", because I have a choice whether or not to do those actions, and if I'm really petty enough to want so badly not to benefit you that I'm willing to forgo the benefit to myself, well then I can suffer with that decision.

A rational person would do things which benefit himself even if it (gasp) incidentally helps others. After all, he would do those thing if there were no other people around. He doesn't benefit any less by there being other people around. Some other people just incidentally benefit from his doing something for himself. And that's somehow a bad thing? A bad thing those other people did, just by existing in the presence of this person who did something for himself and incidentally benefitted them, something so bad they owe him compensation for depriving him of his, uh... his what exactly?

I know a retired fireman who almost single-handedly saved his entire block from a wildfire because of the awesome fire defense system that he had built at great cost into his house because he knew it was a high fire risk area. The actual fire department were busy fighting that fire on another front, and his defense held the fire back from that block long enough for the fire department to get the rest of it under control. Do his neighbors owe him for that? Not in the debt-of-gratitude sense, but like, should he be able to bill them for that service? Should he refuse to save his own house next time if they don't pay up this time?

when you can come up with a way to fund a road at 75% cost, and then restrict its benefits to the 75% who wanted it (including indirect - if you chose not to fund it, your solution has to come up with a way of ensuring that you don't, for example, buy a product in a store that was transported by the road you declined to "purchase.")

Why is that indirect usage criterion necessary? If the direct usage criterion is met, and a store finds the roads useful for its business, and its customers find the store that much better for their use, the store can pay for its direct usage and pass that cost on, indirectly, to its customers who indirectly benefit from the store's usage thereof in the improvements to the store. You could make the same argument about, say, high-speed internet -- if having broadband makes a business more productive and draws in customers it will pay for it and make up for the cost in increased profits from its customers, no need to bill everyone directly for the business's broadband just because many people benefit indirectly from the boost to that business's productivity.

You again create a poor analogy, by ensuring that the personal decisions in your analogy have no effect on anyone else, thus assuming away the entire point of the conversation. You still give no consideration to the fact that government services, for the most part, are either there for everyone or for no one. (Or, even if it would be possible to differentiate services, it would cost more to do so then the cost of unwanted benefits.) An improvement on your analogy is to say that the restaurant's (admittedly bizarre) policy is that everyone at the table has to make an identical purchase. Now how do you decide what to order?

So we're ordering a pizza then, and have to decide on what toppings to go on the whole pizza? My question then is why do we have to order a whole pizza -- if I just want a salad, why can't I get that, and you guys go in on your pizza together?

[J Thomas]

Since there are many fewer employers than there are employees, the employers have the negotiating advantage. Is there anything a free market can do about that? My own thought is to limit the size of corporations. Gradually reduce the maximum size -- first Walmart has to split up into smaller corporations, or spin off entities that can work for Walmart or for competitors. Then as the maximum size gets smaller, other big corporations must split up. Say you eventually reach a maximum size around 100 employees. GM would have to do a whole lot of subcontracting. Each individual employee would be employed by a small corporation that wouldn't have nearly as much bargaining clout as GM used to. They'd have a much better handle on waste, too, but there would be the overhead of specifying the work that needed to be done between corporations.

One of the obvious problems with this strategy is that you're sacrificing the social benefits of economies of scale.

This is worth a whole lot of careful thought. You don't sacrifice the economic benefits of economy of scale. Like, today GM has a bunch of inhouse attorneys, a bunch of inhouse accountants, a bunch of inhouse janitors, a bunch of inhouse building engineers, etc. If GM could only have 100 employees, they would get attorneys on contract, and their attorneys would subcontract out a lot of the work to other attorneys. They would get accountants on contract who would subcontract a lot of the work to other teams of accountants with no more than 100 per team. Etc. All of the actual work could be done about the same way it is now -- if that looked like the best way to do it. The difference would be that things which are currently department performance reviews would become contractor performance reviews etc.

If you have faith in free market economics, you will be sure that it would be better. At every level, each contractor could be replaced by a competitor. They would compete on price and quality. Efficiency at all levels would go up. If your job is to mop a factory floor, you could be replaced by somebody who does the work cheaper or better. Or your company which provides this service to multiple factories, which has up to 100 people like you, could be replaced at any factory by another company which provides the services cheaper or better. The company which contracted for your services, which provides sweeping, washing, cleaning of all kinds, building maintenance, HVAC repair, etc could be replaced at any factory. Etc. All this competition has to provide the best possible performance.

If you doubt this, perhaps you should figure out which of your misconceptions make you a commie-lover, and root them out. Or perhaps you might notice the specific things that limit the benefits of free enterprise, and get an idea where the free market ideas work best and where they should be replaced by something else.

So for example, WalMart has 2 million employees and about half a trillion dollars income. This is bigger 40% of the nations in the UN. Obviously those nations would fail if their governments employed their whole populations and gave them jobs and told them what to do. But it works for WalMart. How much of WalMart's success comes from their ability to get the most efficient work out of their employees in the utter absence of free competition inside the corporation? How much of it comes from their ability to wring low prices out of their suppliers, due to their marketing strength which comes partly from their sheer size?

If you can show evidence that firm size (in employees) gives employers rent-extracting power over their employees, you're better off attacking the labor-capital balance directly and trying to minimize externalities that flow into the producer-consumer balance. Better strategies might include making minimum wage a function of # of employees, or requiring unionization of firms with a minimum number of employees. If there isn't rent-capturing going on by employers, then you're creating it for labor, so you'd probably want to be really careful in figuring out the macroeconomic implications. It could well be the case that, combined with a regulatory and tax environment that greatly favors capital, regulatory rent on behalf of labor would be beneficial, but it would take some pretty careful study before making any major changes.

I argue on theoretical grounds that firm size (in employees and in revenue) results in inefficiency for a variety of causes. Not least among them that a company that is making enough money to grow has at least temporarily found an ecological niche it does well in, but when it grows it moves into a new niche that it must adapt to. In the general case (there can be important exceptions) the national and world economies will do better if this company splits into two competing companies before it doubles in size. Or it might perhaps prefer to spin off suppliers that provide some of the things it needs. Those suppliers can then provide those goods and/or services to the original company and also supply similar needs to its competitors or to whoever needs them.

When a corporation gets too big it becomes basicly impossible to manage. Top management starts to spend its time doing things that look good to stock analysts, their jobs become dominated by manipulating the stock price. And occasionally manipulating the government. This is absurd.

There may be some legitimate use for a giant corporation. We can discover that by trial and error. If we first require that no single corporation can have more than 1 million employees or more than a quarter trillion dollars in revenue, that will affect hardly anybody but WalMart. In a few years we can make the limits lower, and that will affect a handful of giant corporations. A few years later we would affect a large handful more. And so on. If large size is actually good for something we will find out before very many corporations have been affected.