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The soliloquy of Francisco d’Anconia upon the nature of money, by Ayn Rand
The following is many people’s favorite passage from Atlas Shrugged. From theburningplatform.com:
Submitted by Known Associate
“So you think that money is the root of all evil?” said Francisco d’Anconia. “Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the “looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?
When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears nor all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor—your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money. Is this what you consider evil?
Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions—and you’ll learn that man’s mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.
Moral Capitalism, by John Stossel
The only thing wrong with capitalism is the lousy job its so-called defenders do of defending it. Readers are referred to Atlas Shrugged for a comprehensive and cogent defense and explication of its many virtues. From John Stossel at theburningplatform.com:
Presidential candidates and the media keep telling people “it’s immoral” that a few rich people have so much more money than everyone else.
They talk as if it doesn’t matter what the rich did to get the money. Instead, the fact that they are rich is itself immoral.
Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute says this is lunacy. “They want to condemn the people that actually have moved civilization forward,” Brook complains. “People who improved the standard of living for everybody on the planet.”
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Lethal Moral Code–and Why Conservatives are Defenseless, by Anders Ingemarson
AOC, as she’s now known, realizes it’s all about morality. No amount of economic efficiency and look how much the rich pay in taxes is going to dent her “righteous” screeching. For that, you need a better morality, which conservatives don’t have. From Anders Ingemarson at separatestateandtheeconomy.com:
According to most accounts, from YouTube college-to-Congress dancing performances to tweets to media appearances, Ms. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a fun-loving, intelligent, passionate young woman with strong beliefs.
What contributes to her appeal is that she gets what most of her more seasoned opponents don’t understand or choose to evade: that morality trumps both politics and economics. When asked by Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes about her misrepresentation of certain facts she stated:
“If people want to really blow up one figure here or one word there, I would argue that they’re missing the forest for the trees. I think that there’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right.” (emphasis added)
This insight puts her ahead of most politicians and pundits with decades of experience.
What’s more, her moral and political compasses are aligned; unlike most of those who oppose her, her political and economic goals are logical extensions of her moral code. Combined with her charisma she could be a tremendous force for good. It is therefore regrettable that she subscribes to the same old, reactionary, lethal moral code that repeatedly has brought, and continues to bring, misery on mankind: altruism.
Posted in Civil Liberties, Government, Morality, Philosophy, Politics
Tagged Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayn Rand, rational selfishness, Self-interest
Language: The Indispensable Fundamental Actuator of False Orthodoxy, by Doug “Uncola” Lynn
Mess with language and you can mess with people’s heads. From Doug Uncola Lynn at theburningplatform.com:
In Ayn Rand’s penultimate magnum opus, “The Fountainhead”, there was a minor antagonist by the name of Ellsworth Toohey whose raison d’etre was to undermine Rand’s ideal man and protagonist, Howard Roark.
Although Toohey considered his parasitical power as having a major stifling effect on capitalistic society, in reality, all his cumulative efforts ended up as a mere minor footnote in the long march of Man; as evidenced in the story’s denouement and ensuing towering city skylines.
Of course, much of Rand’s life consisted of excoriating the parasitical aspect of the Collectivists and their government, as both defined by dependency; in stark contrast to the rugged self-reliance of the men who moved the world.
In The Fountainhead, a discussion took place whereby Toohey said he wanted to make the “ideological soil” infertile to the point where young heads would explode prior to expressing any individuality (or similar to that). Then, later, near the end, Toohey asked Roark what Roark thought of him, and the egoistic, self-reliant architect replied: “But I don’t think of you.”
In reality, is it possible today to ignore the Collective? Or, has it propagated sufficiently to where it can be ignored no longer?
Acceptance of reality requires honesty. And the author Ayn Rand identified reason as the means for Man’s thriving existence on this blue marble. Therefore, if we are to examine reality with honesty, then we must by all means factor logic and time as follows:
If (this), then (that)
Stated another way, either the decisions we make now will improve our reality in the days ahead – or, we will be worse off than we are at present.
Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Crime, Government, History, Law, Media, Politics
Tagged Ayn Rand, collectivism, Hive Mind, Language, Rules for Radicals, Saul Alinsky
Atlas Shrugged, er, Mugged, by Jeffrey Harding
Elizabeth Warren could be one of the villains in Atlas Shrugged. From Jeffrey Harding at anindependentmind.com:
Current events have revealed that Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged is not just fiction, but almost a prophesy. Elizabeth Warren’s Accountable Capitalism Act and the cronyism of Trump’s tariff policies are straight out of Rand’s novel. It won’t end well.
Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged depicts a world where freedom and free markets are crushed by not-so-well-meaning politicians and bureaucrats. The story is a blueprint for the creation of a command economy where prices, wages, and production are dictated by bureaucratic apparatchiks. Like all regimes seeking autocratic power, the outcome, as she chillingly reveals, is cronyism, corruption, economic depression, and the rise of dictatorship.
Posted in Capitalism, Civil Liberties, Collapse, Government, Literature
Tagged Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand, Elizabeth Warren, Regulation
She Said That? 11/9/17
From Ayn Rand (1905–1982), Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter The Fountainhead (1943):
It’s easier to donate a few thousands to charity and think oneself noble than to base self-respect on personal standards of personal achievement. It’s simple to seek substitutes for competence—such easy substitutes: love, charm, kindness, charity. But there is no substitute for competence
The Wright Women: “Loving Frank”, an Architect of Modernity, by Doug “Uncola” Lynn
This is a long but very interesting article about Frank Lloyd Wright, Ayn Rand, Nancy Horan, and Martha “Mamah” Borthwick-Cheney, who had an affair with Wright. From Doug “Uncola” Lynn at theburningplatform.com:
Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore it if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
For sometimes glimpses on my sight
Through present wrong the eternal right
And step by step since time began
We see the steady gain of man
– Welsh hymn, from the poetry of John Greenleaf Whittier
In a search for the quintessential American pioneer and archetype of twentieth-century capitalism, it would be hard to find a better representation than Frank Lloyd Wright (1867 – 1959). An architect and builder par excellence, Wright designed more than 1,100 buildings during his lifetime, of which 532 were completed. He was acclaimed as “the world’s greatest living architect” by the American historian and architectural critic, Lewis Mumford; and after Wright’s death; Mumford declared him as “the Fujiyama of American architecture, at once a lofty mountain and a national shrine.”
At an early age, Wright entered into a seven year apprenticeship with the innovative American architect Louis Henry Sullivan, who is known today as the “father of modernism” and the “father of skyscrapers”. Sullivan entirely rejected the muddled embellishment of European architectural design including the opulent ornamentation of Gothic Revival, French Empire, and Italianate designs which permeated the streets of America’s nineteenth-century cities. Instead, Sullivan favored cleaner engineering more in line with the maxim he personally coined: “form follows function”.
Although Frank Lloyd Wright later founded his own firm in the Chicago area in 1893, his tallest building was a mere nineteen-story construction in Oklahoma. Instead of soaring urban towers, Wright consummated his own uniquely American classification of architecture known as the Prairie School, a type of organic design marked by horizontal lines reconciled in harmonic integration with the landscape surrounding his structures. Wright’s buildings were the result of a philosophy he designated as “Organic Architecture” and it is said the name “Usonian” was developed by Wright while on a trip to Europe, whereby he envisioned a new landscape for the United States to include urban planning combined with avant-garde architectural configurations.
To continue reading: The Wright Women: “Loving Frank”, an Architect of Modernity
Posted in Business, Capitalism, Culture, History, Morality, Philosophy, Uncategorized
Tagged Ayn Rand, Frank Lloyd Wright
Would Ayn Rand Have Cast President Trump As A Villain? by Steve Simpson
Donald Trump may have read and liked Ayn Rand, but his scattershot philosophy is light years from Rand’s carefully thought out and elucidated philosophy, reasoned from basic first premises to its revolutionary conclusions. From Steve Simpson at the Foundation for Economic Education, fee.com:
After Donald Trump announced a number of cabinet picks who happen to be fans of Ayn Rand, a flurry of articles appeared claiming that Trump intended to create an Objectivist cabal within his administration.
“Ayn Rand-acolyte Donald Trump stacks his cabinet with fellow Objectivists,” proclaimed one article. Would that it were so. The novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand was a passionate champion of individual freedom and laissez-faire capitalism and a fierce opponent of authoritarianism. For her, government exists solely to protect our rights, not to meddle in the economy or to direct our private lives.
A president who truly understood Rand’s philosophy would not be cozying up to Putin, bullying companies to keep manufacturing plants in the United States, or promising “insurance for everybody” among many other things Trump has said and done.
And while it’s certainly welcome news that several of Trump’s cabinet picks admire Rand, it’s not surprising. Her novel Atlas Shrugged depicts a world in decline as it slowly strangles its most productive members. The novel celebrates the intelligent and creative individuals who produce wealth, many of whom are businessmen. So it makes sense that businessmen like Rex Tillerson and Andy Puzder would be among the novel’s millions of fans.
But a handful of fans in the administration hardly signals that Trump’s would be an “Ayn Rand” administration. The claims about Rand’s influence in the administration are vastly overblown.
To continue reading: Would Ayn Rand Have Cast President Trump As A Villain?
STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC 