Ayn Rand Was NOT a Libertarian

[Odin]

I agree, though the point I was trying to make isn't that corporations are inherrently good and government is bad, it was to ask how are they different? They both are run/governed by ordinary men. Why would you trust one versus the other? If corporations are not founded on principles of freedom, what is to stop some powerful and corrupt corporations from simply capturing a government? And what is keeping men who run a government virtuous? Do they not have the same motives, failings, desires for profit, power, etc? The Founders understood this problem and thought we could perhaps get around it by keeping power divided and decentralized as much as possible. I believe anarcho-capitalists view their philosophy as doing just that...just on an even more micro scale.

I think maybe I didn't explain myself well enough in the first place, let me ask you this though, would you advocate those with the most money getting the most votes? Because that is kind of what you are advocating in suggesting that corporations provide the service government usually provides. They would be accountable to those who pay them the most money (insert joke about that already being the case due to campaign contributors here lol).

In the ideal society, corporations would be bound by the principles of freedom. In an anarcho-capitalist society, they are bound by the interests of the wealthy imho. And I would not put my freedom in the hands of a corporation that is beholden to more wealthy people tbh. I really believe that we can have a good government though if the people change. The people usually lose their freedom before their liberty is revoked. By that I mean if you look at nations which have turned tyrannical or authoritarian, that movement was precipitated by the people losing the the spark of longing for freedom inside themselves. If you look at this country we seem to be going the same way unfortunately. Like George Carlin says we've become a nation of shopping malls and strip malls, just go out on the weekend to see fat, oblivious morons with their dumbass kids packing shit into their shopping cars and putting it on the credit card. Until that kind of attitude and lifestyle dies, I can't really see a good future for us.

Changing the conscience of the people is the number 1 task imo, everything else is secondary after that. I personally believe in a Republican form of government based on firm and solid principles of freedom which form the basis for all law and justified use of force. I also think that instituting that kind of government will play a role in reversing the conscience of the people. I do not think that eliminating the state completely would do that though.

Hopefully that makes more sense. I have a habit of going off on tangents in many of my posts.

 

[acptulsa]

just imagine a huge corporation which has it'S headquarters in a little town.
in such towns the real major sits in the head office of that corporation and not in the town hall.
quite usually those towns are totally dependent on such a corporation and they will do nearly anything they want.
or those corporation can literally buy the puplic opinion of such a region by financing or buying up the most important media outlets of the area. or one guy is in the government, his brother in business, a cousin in the media ...
those things happen every day. if you take a look at the situation in southern italy for example you'll see that the local government is a key to the mafia problem.
all those small units of government can easily be infiltrated and be corrupted.

I don't have to. I live plenty close enough to a little town in northwest Arkansas. Perhaps you've heard of Bentonville.

My experience is the corporation officers don't $#!+ where they live. Bentonville is a nice town. But even if that weren't true, I could avoid Bentonville with ease. It's avoiding the United States of America that's proving difficult. So, Bentonville can be as corrupt as Wal Mart wants it to be, as far as I'm concerned--so long as Wal Mart stops buying influence in D.C.

 

[vienna]

I don't have to. I live plenty close enough to a little town in northwest Arkansas. Perhaps you've heard of Bentonville.

My experience is the corporation officers don't $#!+ where they live. Bentonville is a nice town. But even if that weren't true, I could avoid Bentonville with ease. It's avoiding the United States of America that's proving difficult. So, Bentonville can be as corrupt as Wal Mart wants it to be, as far as I'm concerned--so long as Wal Mart stops buying influence in D.C.

well they do. there are numerous cases documented where they did so. i can tell you of places like that. like i said. southern italy is a glamorous example for such a swamp.
of course you could leave the town (if your situation allows it ... maybe you need to be close to your parents or something similar and you can't leave). and go somewhere else. and there you might find a similar situation. who knows.
the game is the same everywhere.

with money you can buy influence. in washington as well as in bentonville or vienna.

 

[LibertyPA]

I'd rather either option over what we have.

 

[July]

I think maybe I didn't explain myself well enough in the first place, let me ask you this though, would you advocate those with the most money getting the most votes? Because that is kind of what you are advocating in suggesting that corporations provide the service government usually provides. They would be accountable to those who pay them the most money (insert joke about that already being the case due to campaign contributors here lol).

In the ideal society, corporations would be bound by the principles of freedom. In an anarcho-capitalist society, they are bound by the interests of the wealthy imho. And I would not put my freedom in the hands of a corporation that is beholden to more wealthy people tbh. I really believe that we can have a good government though if the people change. The people usually lose their freedom before their liberty is revoked. By that I mean if you look at nations which have turned tyrannical or authoritarian, that movement was precipitated by the people losing the the spark of longing for freedom inside themselves. If you look at this country we seem to be going the same way unfortunately. Like George Carlin says we've become a nation of shopping malls and strip malls, just go out on the weekend to see fat, oblivious morons with their dumbass kids packing shit into their shopping cars and putting it on the credit card. Until that kind of attitude and lifestyle dies, I can't really see a good future for us.

Changing the conscience of the people is the number 1 task imo, everything else is secondary after that. I personally believe in a Republican form of government based on firm and solid principles of freedom which form the basis for all law and justified use of force. I also think that instituting that kind of government will play a role in reversing the conscience of the people. I do not think that eliminating the state completely would do that though.

Hopefully that makes more sense. I have a habit of going off on tangents in many of my posts.

Well, first of all, I should say I'm not an an-cap myself, so I can only go so far in explaining my view of it, so take what I say with a grain of salt. But I'm not sure I understand your first question. If there is no central government, in a society like that, what would people be voting on exactly? In the current system, rich people (whether they run big global corporations or not) have an edge in granting themselves privilege from the state, since they can afford to buy more representatives, lobbyists, lawyers, media, etc. In an an-cap society, 'voting' would come in the form of direct consumer transactions. It would change the makeup of corporations.... Would corporations be able to grow so massive and oppressive without access to powerful central governments, corporate welfare, standing armies, printing press, etc? To vote in a voluntary society, you wouldn't need to be rich per se, you'd just need the ability to refuse to purchase a product or sign a contract that you don't want, and have the ability to make a choice to find an alternative. You can do that to a corporation, because we don't regard them as being infallible or deserving of our income no matter what. Government is different because we do...and therein lies the problem, IMO.

 

[TheGrinch]

Except when it comes to IP, apparently. Then it's okay to start threads to argue (and divide) over how limited (or absent) government should be.

That was theoretical debate in response to previous threads, with me actually making the argument of a self-professed anarchist Rothbard.

I did not go calling people collectivist hippies, aimed at being divisive.... I don't believe I need to go on to explain the difference between theoretical debate and divisive ad-hominem misrepresentation.

Feel free not to join a debate if you don't feel it's worth debating, but don't come lumping me in with this divisive drivel trying to paint who does and doesn't belong in this movement. My point is that we all do, or else our differences will be nothing but theoretical, and never implementable if we continue to eat our own.

 

[MarkoH]

The quotes collected in “Rand Was NOT a Libertarian” pretty much apply to Libertarians with a capital L – the party or theoreticians associated with the party – not lowercase libertarians, which are not very well defined.

Another thing: the quotes are frozen in time. Were Ayn Rand alive today, she would have tolerated the libertarian Ron Paul even more than the conservative Barry Goldwater, whom she supported in 1964. But Ron Paul didn’t appear on the national scene until about ten years after her death.

It may come as a surprise that Ayn Rand herself used “libertarian” – small L – to apply to her political philosophy. See Ayn Rand’s Political Label.

 

[Victor Grey]

The two statements by posters July and Buddy Ray on the first page were the most insightful to the topic.

Eh, she also thought libertarians were plagerizing her ideas. And libertarians at the time criticized her for running a cult and for being too rigid and intolerant of any deviation to her philosophy, so there was obviously a lot of personal resentment and baggage on both sides of the respective movements... I take a lot of the he said/she said with a grain of salt.

She was just bitter that the movement became something bigger than herself and her own little insular cadre. She laughably claimed libertarians "stole her ideas" even though American libertarianism had been around as a conscious and self-realized movement for at least a hundred years. Also, Rand herself stole from Isabell Paterson and Garet Garrett, even borrowing huge elements of the plot and the name of the protagonist from the latter's novel "The Driver."

These describe my own feelings toward Ayn Rand as a person and her mentality. Which was the real topic at hand.

The rest of the thread's pages while interesting, were of great majority a long off topic debate.