The money those millionaires have is theirs. The money I have from working as a janitors is mine.

Says who? Hasn't it occurred to you at any point in these conversations that maybe some of the money people make isn't acquired through justified means? That by using leverage, more money can be acquired than a person has a right to? You paint a black and white picture that would completely hide such injustices. There is a war going on in the corporate world where those at the top try to increase their incomes above their productivity, while driving down workers compensation below their productivity. That problem is not solved in Objectivism, by any party. It would grow to a Plutocratic dystopia. Or there would be riots long before. It's a disgusting ideology MrA.

EDIT - I missed the consequences of your answer. You believe it is okay to let good people die on the street, meanwhile letting millionaires keep money that in many cases, was unjustly acquired. Really?

Mr A wrote:Because those people hold no claim on anothers property. .

This is technically incorrect as it is the government, which is an extension of the people that form it (at least in democratic societies like our own) that establish and secure property rights. Property rights do not exist in nature and are devised by social and legal contracts (more on the latter). Without the force of the will of everyone behind the government to establish and secure property rights via those legal contracts, there would be no property rights, and your entire argument falls apart. Thus, we all have a claim, though not the simplistic kind is the only one you might thing exists, on everyone's property via the social contract that creates and maintains those property rights.

To wit, one could imagine the following scenario in the rampantly individualist Objectivist dystopia:
A: "This is my property; you have no right to it or claim upon it. Please leave."
B: "Says who?"
A: "Says me, that's who."
B: "Why should I care what you say? Who are you?"
A: "I'm the property owner; that's who!"
B: "But I don't care what you say about that and have no reason to care."
A: "Would you like it if I just came and took your property?"
B: "Who said I have any property? Who says I'm taking anything? How would you try to take it, anyway?"
...
You can see that forceful coercion would be likely to follow soon, unless A were to entirely concede his claim upon the ownership of any property--in the absence of government contracts (here in the forms of deeds) that are enforced by the power of the state and the legal architecture. So immediately, the Objectivist is faced with the quandary of having to create a government (a form of collectivism) to define and enforce property rights, some minimal function, you might say, of statism.

Then the fly gets in the pudding because at that point, you have to start defining exactly what it is that the government has power to do, how secure it can make those rights, how it will enforce infringements of the legal architecture that defines those rights, and how it will resolve disputes between individuals over those rights, as any written legal code will be insufficient to cover all possible permutations of the situations.

What do you end up with? Objectivists coming to define laws that they then end up complaining about as if they are monstrous failures that infringe upon individualism. Outside of adolescent-grade quasi-philosophy, we call this a paradox and abandon the framework that gives rise to it.

I've been following this discussion with interest and offer a couple comments:

johnson1010 wrote: I know someone who is mired in this objectivist mentality, and it leads to some strange real world dealings.

He asked his facebook friends what he should have done:

A woman, apparently a single mother, had gotten stuck in the parking lot of a big box store. He helped her push her van loose but then after the fact he wondered if maybe the more appropriate thing for him to do would have been to let her stay stuck. She would have lingered longer in the snow, had a much worse day, but in the end she would have helped herself and gained self-actualizing abilities in un-sticking herself… or so I imagine the idea goes.

If your acquaintance is truely 'mired' in objectivist mentality I suggest, if this happens again, that rather than just letting the woman stay stuck and drive away quietly he should drive up and shout out "Hey lady, get yourself un-stuck!!" and then roar off in a cloud of smoke and snow. Now that would make the point and I'm sure she would start pulling up those boot-straps right away!

JamesALindsay wrote: At the bottom of it, Objectivism is an over-the-top knee-jerk reaction to the totalitarian communism that Ayn Rand experienced as a child, and it is an entirely unworkable philosophy (if one is interested in a society) that essentially would have every individual act as a surly teenager (which includes pretending that Mom doesn't have his/her back and isn't the actually enabler of his/her surly, rebellious, "independent" lifestyle). That's why is polar-opposite to totalitarian communism.

Exactly, 'surly teenagers'. I think you've nailed it. I can picture Ayn Rand's 'objectivist' characters as surly teenagers.

I suggested that he should have "pants'd" her, then turned on his brights so that everyone could laugh at her.

Millionaires.

But have millionaire’s actually earned their money?

There are a lot of references to rights in this discussion. Lets not forget that rights are not natural or god given. They are agreed upon by people. If rights WERE natural, like a natural law, there would be no way to have rights violated.

What right do you actually have? You have the right to die in the worst way possible. Starving to death, lying on your back in the dirt, a sharp rock between your shoulder blades under the blaring sun, while scorpions lay eggs in your ear canals.

Nothing in nature demands that can’t happen. The only thing which might save you from that fate is the empathy of your fellow humans for it is we who ensure the safety and “rights” of our brothers and sisters.

Millionaires and worse, billionaires are not natural, and they do not “deserve” their money. Accumulation of such billowing storms of money is only possible through the action of society. For the vast majority of human history it wasn’t really feasible to have possessions. We were nomadic hunter / gatherers and possessions would have been something of a liability after a point. Farming introduces the ability to stay put and to accumulate material goods. And it also introduces true excess. This is a new development and not one we are naturally equipped to deal with.

Take a look at the obesity problem in rich countries, the US in particular. We are not well equipped to deal with excess.

So capitalism and making money are fine ideas and for the most part everyone can get behind them. But there is a systematic flaw in the idea which doesn’t really manifest until there is enough leverage in one group to begin dominating the competition, at which point it isn’t business skill, or marketing savvy which allows you to conquer new competitors, but the sheer momentum of so much filthy lucre.

We all agree when somebody makes the best bread and sells it that they should keep their profit. We agree when somebody starts a bakery and sells lots and lots of bread that they should keep their profit. What happens when you don’t need to be a baker to make bread? What happens when you don’t need to pay people to knead the dough? What happens when you own a thousand automated bakeries and have access to stream-lined distribution networks so that your bread can be anywhere on the planet before it goes stale?

Somewhere here there is a disconnect. Somewhere here we go from making sure people get to keep the money they earn to ensuring the ability of rich people to amass ludicrous amounts of money.

How do millionaires deserve their millions? How much of that money have they earned, and how much of it comes from a short circuit in our system where we continue to protect their claim on money which might more properly be funneled to all the people who are actually doing the work?
Lets put this in a different light.

A man see’s a gigantic animal, say a wooly mammoth. He goes to the rest of his 99 starving neighbors and organizes a hunt. He stands on a rock, points at the mammoth and all the people run out there with their spears, which they made themselves, get up close and start trying to take the beast down. Some of them are killed or maimed in the process. Finally the beast dies.

The first man walks up to the carcass, having watched the whole thing go down from his perch on the rock, puts his foot on it and claims it as his own. He then has somebody else cut off small chunks of the mammoth to give to all the little people who work for him and they walk away with a total of 5% of the mammoth meat. The rest is left to the man who first saw the beast because he “deserved” it .

At some point it really just stops making sense that a person should keep all the heaps of money that they are able to pull in just because they are able to do so. You can see form the mammoth example how absurd it is.

johnson1010 wrote:I suggested that he should have "pants'd" her, then turned on his brights so that everyone could laugh at her.

HA! I see we are thinking along the same lines. Your suggestion is even ruder than mine but similarly would make the point loud and clear! I'll bet this lady would start carrying a shovel about in her van .. Or maybe she'd switch to public transit! Reduce green house gases! Wow, I'm convinced. Think I'll paste a picture of Ayn Rand on my wall right now.

Well, ok, maybe not just yet. But this does bring a question to mind - are 'objectivists' actually nasty, uncivilized, uncaring people so swallowed up in their individualist thinking that even such rude behavior is possible in the name of their ideology? Or is this behavior just a 'put-on' that covers up a kind, tender heart that is fearful of being taken advantage of and so creates a lot of bluster about individualism and so forth to cloak that vulnerability?

Interbane wrote:
EDIT - I missed the consequences of your answer. You believe it is okay to let good people die on the street, meanwhile letting millionaires keep money that in many cases, was unjustly acquired. Really?

They certainly are entitled to their money, unless they stole the money, fraud, etc. Otherwise, its theirs, by right. The money I earn working, or aquire through my investments, all mine, by right. As long as those millions were not stolen, or they used fraud or some other use of force against others, it is theirs by right. Those starving people, as there are plenty of them around the world today, hold absolutely no claim to a single solitary penny of mine or a millionaires.

Mr. A, a primary point that you seem to be missing is that the reason the money you earn is all yours, by right, is because of the social contract that makes that construction possible. Since this whole diversion seems to have arisen around "what claim does anyone else have on your property?" this is imminently relevant. That is not the same thing as saying that they have absolutely any claim to be able to walk up to you and say, "Mr A, you have too much money, and the value of that money--and the property that it represents--is secured by a social contract in which I'm a part, so give me some." You seem to think that the opposition to your point is that people just get to come in and demand that you give them "your" money. That's embarrassingly juvenile.

The reality is that the money and property you possess is secured by a social contract made up of everyone in the society (and, as I noted before, a legal architecture that arises from the government that exists as an extension of the people in the society--now that we've invented democracies). Therefore, that society collectively through the actions of the government has a claim on putting restrictions on what you can and cannot do with that money, and they also possess the ability (even the right, since it's a socially agreed-upon aspect of the social structure you make your living in and thus are beholden to) to request that their corporation, if you will allow the slight abuse of language, the government, can establish laws, taxes, and regulations that regulate how you can use your money and how much of it you pay back into society to build the collective enterprise.

It seems that if you cannot get your head around this point that you're probably not worth continued discussion, though, because it is the central key to understanding the phenomenon of a society upon which your Objectivist dreams rest. The main problem with Objectivism is that it simultaneously wants to benefit from the social contract while asserting that it is independent from it--rather like a surly teenager that loves to pretend that Mom and Dad aren't enabling their entire surly adventure.

I am thinking I should add that however much you don't like the social contract of your society, you are a part of it and beholden to it. You're welcome to complain about it (now that we've invented free speech as a part of the social contract) and welcome to try to change it (now that we've invented democracy and the right to a vote and active part of the political process), and, if you happen to possess the opportunistic freedom, if you don't like it, you're welcome to leave and choose a different social contract to live under, specifically by choosing to live under a different governmental system. Liberia and Somalia are particularly close to the Objectivist ideal, if you're looking for any that subscribe to that sort of philosophy. The Western democracies, however, do not subscribe to that philosophy. As I said, complain or try to change it, but do not expect that the social contract doesn't apply to you. You live in this society, and you benefit hugely from living in this society, and thus you are beholden to the prices (taxes, regulations, etc.) that have actually succeeded in making this society worth living in. In that way, though, all of us possess some claim upon you and your property because it's only by our mutual agreement that you can call your property yours and that you have any in the first place.

EDIT: That we have this social contract that enables property rights creates a strong motivation for all of us to ensure that those rights are used responsibly, in a way that does not impact our negative liberties (as they are actually defined, not the warped Objectivist redefinition of that term) more than we can stand. Since essentially no individual has the power to stand up to a highly wealthy person or, more notably, a corporation of people, we use government as the collective enterprise of "the people" (remember those "We the people, in order to form a more perfect Union..." words?) to protect our individual liberties. For example, we might want to protect our liberty to clean air and water and thus regulate the way industrial capitalists (and individuals) can behave with their property.

The key point here, though, is that because we live under a social contract that defines the very society that we live in, each of us is compelled to act through the legal architecture of that society (legislative, executive, and judicial, in this case) to push for our representation in your property rights, i.e. that you essentially cannot misuse your property to our detriment beyond the agreed-upon boundaries laid out by our society (we call them laws).

James wrote: Mr. A, a primary point that you seem to be missing is that the reason the money you earn is all yours, by right

I am not missing the reason, as I am not missing the reason man has rights in the first place:

http://www.theobjectivestandard.com/iss ... rights.asp
http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer? ... d_writings