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this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
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There's at least a grain of truth in that book. Try starting a business or producing something.
Look at domestic attempts to mine lithium or building semiconductor plants. Try building anything here.
“When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing; when you see that money is flowing to those who deal not in goods, but in favors; when you see that men get rich more easily by graft than by work, and your laws no longer protect you against them, but protect them against you. . . you may know that your society is doomed.”
Yes the world would be a better place if people looking to profit in the world didn't have to ensure that their products were safe, regulated, and taxed appropriately. Business owners should just be able to make their own rules.
Nah man I'd say that shit it stupid too. It's difficult to build a lithium mine in the United States for pretty good reasons, especially surrounding regulation and safety.
Australia has some of the tightest safety regulations and strongest unions on the planet. We are opening lithium mines left right and centre.
It's cheaper to mine lithium in other countries because the labor is cheaper, the labor is cheaper because we live in a country with a more advanced economy, that same economy became more advanced under more stringent regulations. Who gives a shit if they don't mine lithium here when we designed the machines that mine lithium all over the world. There's a reason people are beating down the doors to come here.
Like most things it's balance .. No one wants the ecological damage of the 60s again. I'd say the vast majority of the things people are buying are imported from less regulated markets.. Lead in the kids toys am I right? If things are produced here at least you can take those companies to court when they do harm.
Good reasons being ? I've seen projects cancelled due to a few arrow heads and tool parts being found .. Massive overruns due to turtle eggs. Private companies just don't build here if they can avoid it. Building and producing things is never perfectly safe and will always cause some ecological damage. The things we consume are actually built overseas in the most destructive and unregulated way possible mostly .. Are they not?
That's how you trick the gullible, start with a bit of truth they can understand and then jump off the deep end into lunacy.
You can agree with some principles of a work and reject others. What parts of her philosophy do you find to be lunacy?
The premise that some people are just better than everyone else is not intelligent. Valuing a person's worth as a human by measuring their productivity is genocidal.
Some people are just better in terms of being productive. I don't see how that's debatable. The question is just if you let those people keep they're outsized earnings or you forcibly redistribute them.
I'm going to respond so hopefully you grow.
Productivity is difficult to measure or define. Intelligence is similar. Regardless, neither of these things define value in a human life. Some people love to cook, some are great at reading comic books. One might be really good at watching TV. In the end, your preference for what is seen as valuable comes to your preference. There's nothing objective about it. More concretely, in many engineering jobs great engineers are promoted into management positions for which they are ill suited. They make more money, are they not definitionally more productive? Yet the company and team is worse off.
As for your question, Rand is not subtle about her thoughts.
Odd to me that you equate productivity with the value of a person.
I do not. Rand explicitly does.
I mean, why SHOULDN'T I be able to expose people and the environment to harmful conditions in order to maximize profit?
I'm allowed to do that in other countries, and I can also pay those slaves in beans so that I can make even more money.
Some environmental impact is unavoidable. I think people are maybe a bit more aware and if I knew a company was being unnecessarily wreckless I'd personally not give them a dime. Also this is what lawsuits are for. These companies should be sued into nonexistence.
Why are domestic companies forced to compete on an uneven playing field like that? Why are companies able to just go abroad and import at very favourable rates. That's profoundly unfair .. But have you thought about what would happen to the cost of goods if there was an equal playing field? All the worst things are still done they just happen elsewhere.
lemmy doesn't semd updates reliably. or at least my client.
Anyway, what you're saying is that capitalism and open markets is the enemy. I agree.
It seems to me this passage speaks against the bankers, intellectual property owners, monopolists, land owners and the like. All gate keepers of resources.
Perhaps Atlas is actually someone else than Rand thought.
It speaks against a system where political favour dictates your success as a producer over your ability to compete. If you feel land owners and intellectual property owners are gate keepers in a society where your can have your own ideas and buy your own property I don't know what to say.
I know.
The permits, policies, regulation and political apparatuses which Rand so despises are legal fictions which allow a small group of people control, who gets to use what resources and how.
Currencies, fractional reserve banking, patents and land ownership are similar legal fiction, which allow a small group to control who gets to use what resources and how.
If I want to sell razor blades to a Gillette razor, I will get sued for patent infringement. Is their gatekeepping somehow more morally valid than the politician's who gives a tax break to Gillette's competitor since their production line is in his city?
I was trying to humorously point out, that the quoted part of Rand's text could be read almost as a socialist opinion, where the value created arises from the worker and not the owners.
I guess the difference being the people in control of permits and policies produce nothing of value. If a capitalist fails to produce he no longer holds the property or patents. Someone else gets them to try to compete.
The reason capitalism is moral is that the people who get the scarce resources need to be effective in providing for everyone else by creating or they lose them. Under a central planning system this is not the case. Scarce resources are held by connected people .. The state bails them out if they really fuck up.
Nothing is stopping you from creating an improved Gillette razor and competing without blatenly copying their patent.. Property is expensive but available (problem created by government with interest rate manipulation and making land one of the only viable hard assets) you can hire people for your factory. They'll cost 10x what they do overseas though.. So you'd probably just go there.
Man you won't find me defending fractional reserve banking or fiat currency. Those are also things created by politicians and bankers. They're just means of stealing value. You also can't have socialism without fiat currency. The myth that you can rob the 1% to pay for the needs of everyone.. Well do the math .. Liquidate the 10 richest people and it funds the state for maybe a month or something.
Ah I didn't get the joke I guess lol. I'm not really much of a fan of socialism. If companies can't build without permits and tax breaks then you dont really have a level playing field anymore and you no longer have functional creative destruction. Old inefficient well connected incombants strangle the new razor corp in the crib and you're stuck paying 35 dollars for blades :)
I've read all of Rand and I thoroughly enjoyed it. But not for the right reasons.
Coming from a background myself of community art > touring performance artist > clown/circus school > comedy and improv... I found things like "I'ma write a book where a character delivers a speech on capitalism longer than the communist manifesto" to be quite funny.
The way people spoke to each other, the ridiculous melodrama from the perspective of a soy bean stuck on a train, a community made from pure gold inside a hologram inside a volcano, how people can only have sex if they bite each other, the amazing lazzi (sketch) of the rich man accidentally giving a homeless man $100 bill instead of $1 and the homeless man not caring because it was an accident, the guy putting out a steel furnace in meltdown while naked with his bare hands...
I thought it was very funny. I chortled all the way through. a perfect 7/10.