Who needs cranky Ayn Rand when we have Thomas Jefferson?

Doodle, you're really not being terribly reasonable, here; you clearly have extremely limited knowledge of Ayn Rand and her views, but are going out guns-blazing, declaring her the equivalent of Rudy Giuliani, suggesting she would vote for Obama over Ron Paul, and generally making extremely bold negative assertions on the basis of minimal evidence.

Ayn Rand wanted to see all taxation ultimately abolished, opposed State economic intervention, opposed the welfare state (the fact that she took Social Security money does not make this position hypocritical- our own Ron Paul has explained countless times that it is not hypocrisy for someone who opposes the existence of a welfare system to accept welfare payments if said individual has him/herself been first required to pay into said system- moreover, note that both Ron and Rand Paul accept government money in their Congressional positions, and Rand took Medicare money in his optometry practice), and actually expressed anti-militaristic/anti-war sentiments at times, though I admit that she was not consistent in this regard. I do not count her among my personal idols, but will unhesitatingly state that she was one of the most accomplished and influential of all libertarian authors and philosophers in history.
 
Agorism said:
Ayn Rand thought the Arabs were savages.

Wikipedia anti-arab page

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Arabism

http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=media_america_at_war_israeli_arab_conflict
Click to expand...

I could see how comments like this in support of Israel could be an extension of Rand's anti-communism, which had to be taken into account in every conflict at that time.

Everything was looked at through the filter of USSR v. USA.

It's hard to recall that was the case, I'm guilty of it myself from time to time.

That said, Jefferson > Rand IMO.
 
People who bash Rand are people who have never read Rand or have any legitimate basic understanding off her. Agorism and doodle (assuming they aren't the same person) clearly both fall into this category. The idea of calling Rand a COLLECTIVIST of all things is so intellectually pathetic it's hardly worth responding to. I doubt they even realize the tragic irony of such a statement.

Low preference guy is probably right about the Einstein comparison, because Ayn Rand completely dismantled all the older forms of philosophy and completely rebuilt it. Her intellectual ability was nearly unreal.
 
Ayn Rand movie bombs out as movie audience go GALT on this POS.


Twelve days after opening “Atlas Shrugged: Part 1,” the producer of the Ayn Rand adaptation said Tuesday that he is reconsidering his plans to make Parts 2 and 3 because of scathing reviews and flagging box office returns for the film.

“Critics, you won,” said John Aglialoro, the businessman who spent 18 years and more than $20 million of his own money to make, distribute and market “Atlas Shrugged: Part 1,” which covers the first third of Rand’s dystopian novel. “I’m having deep second thoughts on why I should do Part 2.”

“Atlas Shrugged” was the top-grossing limited release in its opening weekend, generating $1.7 million on 299 screens and earning a respectable $5,640 per screen. But the the box office dropped off 47% in the film’s second week in release even as “Atlas Shrugged” expanded to 425 screens, and the movie seemed to hold little appeal for audiences beyond the core group of Rand fans to whom it was marketed.
…..
The novel, a sacred text among many conservatives for Rand’s passionate defense of capitalism, takes place at an unspecified future time in which the U.S. is mired in a deep depression and a mysterious phenomenon is causing the nation’s leading industrialists to disappear or “strike.”
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train-crash.png
 
This thread is head scratching to say the least. Ayn Rand may have been many things, but a collectivist she was most certainly not. She was in favor of abolishing all taxation and making the funding of the government 100% voluntary. She opposed all government forced welfare, was generally a non-interventionist, and valued achievement and progress.

The Libertarians she attacked was largely the Libertarian Party because she (rightly) said they would fail. As far as anarcho-capitalism, she abhorred it because she (rightly) points out that it's a contradiction in terms. The government serves one purpose: to protect property rights and individual rights.

Anarchy, as a political concept, is a naive floating abstraction: . . . a society without an organized government would be at the mercy of the first criminal who came along and who would precipitate it into the chaos of gang warfare. But the possibility of human immorality is not the only objection to anarchy: even a society whose every member were fully rational and faultlessly moral, could not function in a state of anarchy; it is the need of objective laws and of an arbiter for honest disagreements among men that necessitates the establishment of a government.
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-Ayn Rand

If a society provided no organized protection against force, it would compel every citizen to go about armed, to turn his home into a fortress, to shoot any strangers approaching his door—or to join a protective gang of citizens who would fight other gangs, formed for the same purpose, and thus bring about the degeneration of that society into the chaos of gang-rule, i.e., rule by brute force, into perpetual tribal warfare of prehistorical savages.
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-Ayn Rand

I'm not an objectivist, I do respect a lot of their ideas however. I also love Atlas Shrugged, hence my username. I'm just not sure I understand all of the hatred of Ayn Rand. Was she a bitch? Yeah probably, who knows. Thomas Jefferson owned slaves but that doesn't discount all of his ideas.
 
Ayn Rand novels are for middle schoolers (as that was when I read it and thought it was great at the time.) Then you grow up and realize that post-modernism is legitimate, that a stateless society is ideal not a military society as Rand wants, and that 1984 was 10X as good in terms of an anti-government novel plus Orwell was actually a good writer.

nsa_1984.gif
 
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Agorism said:
Ayn Rand novels are for middle schoolers (as that was when I read it and thought it was great at the time.) Then you grow up and realize that post-modernism is legitimate, that a stateless society is ideal not a military society as Rand wants, and that 1984 was 10X as good in terms of an anti-government novel plus Orwell was actually a good writer.

nsa_1984.gif
Click to expand...
A stateless society is a pipedream. Rand didn't want a "military society," she believed that a military is one of the few legitimate functions of a government. With no objective laws and no police force our individual rights fall to the mercy of roving gangs. Society will simply break down to competing gangs fighting over turf and territory and we'll have to pay protection money to a racket in order run a business.

Anarchy? Really? You're serious? And you say Ayn Rand is for middle schoolers, anarchy is for elementary school.
 
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