I don't think I am at all, so that's that then. I still have yet to see any "perils" of Objectivism in this thread.

I'm sure that you're more convinced than ever of your position MrA, that's how human psychology works.

The first and largest peril is inequality. However, inequality is a marker, a causal nexus, rather than a perilous end. The negatives that inequality leads to cannot be listed here in a single post. But let's pick one of the many at random. Education.

I'm not sure what education would look like under Objectivism, so the effects of inequality on education may actually be worse than I propose. If education is privatized, then only the wealthy could afford an education that would lead to a job that provides enough to feed a family. Generation upon generation would be stuck in the ruts of poverty, with no way out except perhaps winning the lottery, or an unexpected inheritance from distance relatives. Due to how wealth is distributed in a Capitalist economy, this means that less than 1% of children would have an adequate education for a higher-skilled job.

If education is public, then we'd see what we're witnessing today, only worse. Cuts to funding, leading to an ever greater disparity in learning between those children educated by the public system, and those educated privately. The results are the same as if it were privatized.

There's a treasure trove of information on the subject of inequality, with many books written on the subject. It's the marker that can be found in the collapse of most societies in Earth's history that fell from the heights of power.

https://www.google.com/search?q=income+ ... e&ie=UTF-8


The second peril of Objectivism that could trump inequality is environmental degradation. With the throttle removed on our consumption of resources and pollution, we'd shift even further than we already are in the wrong direction. Species would go extinct at a faster pace, smog would return, the mountains of garbage in our ocean would grow even faster, climate change would worsen, and nowhere could you find a park or any wildlife that would be preserved and enjoyable.

The third peril, which isn't as bad as the first two, is the disparity between productivity and compensation. It's already terrible. Under Objectivism it would be much worse. But we've been beating that dead horse in this thread too much for it to get through to you by mentioning it again.


Objectivism wouldn't last long as a dominant ideology. Our society would collapse very quickly, or mother Earth would take her revenge before that happened. If you can't see the perils of Objectivism, you have only your own stubborn conviction to blame.

JamesALindsay wrote: Another peril of Objectivism: the monumental amount of wasted time spent arguing with Objectivists who cannot see the perils of Objectivism because they view the situation from the inside rather than from a relatively unbiased perspective.

I view it active mindedly, and I have been trying to find something wrong with any of it, for many many years. I have found not one compelling argument against any of it. I had trouble not long ago understanding something in it, I thought I had finally found something wrong with it, but I was wrong, it was not.

JamesALindsay wrote: Objectivists are faith-heads every bit as nutty as the Westboro Baptists.

We are reason-heads, we use our heads, our minds, we do not abandon reason for faith. We use logic, not ad hominems, like you. Nothing in Objectivsm's structure is accepted on faith, only reason. So your claim is totally unsubstantiated.

I have yet to see any 'perils' of Objectivsm presented in this thread.

See.

Interbane wrote: I'm not sure what education would look like under Objectivism, so the effects of inequality on education may actually be worse than I propose.

Here is a good idea of what it would look like, beside not being funded by taxation, totally privatized.

Lisa VanDamme, VanDamme Academy, who applies such an approach:
http://www.vandammeacademy.com/

See the writings of Lisa VanDamme:
http://www.theobjectivestandard.com/con ... ndamme.asp
http://capitalismmagazine.com/author/LisaVanDamme/

Lisa VanDamme’s blog, Pedagogically Correct:
http://www.pedagogicallycorrect.com/

See Leonard Peikoff’s lecture, The Philosophy of Education:
https://estore.aynrand.org/p/64/philoso ... 3-download

Here is a good idea of what it would look like, beside not being funded by taxation, totally privatized.

Correct, over 1k a month for a child. You prove my point. Where do the millions of people who work for minimum wage send their kids? A family of five with 3 kids would cost over $30,000 a year... double what many service employees make at a job. I'm middle class, and I certainly couldn't afford that. As soon as "walmart schools" open up, kids would get "walmart educations". Now that's equal opportunity!

What of the other perils I mention? You don't respond to them, yet claim they don't exist. Is it only in your head that they don't exist?

All entitlement programs in laissez-faire capitalism would be phased out. It wouldn't happen overnight.
Cost would be determined by the market and upon what type of education, etc.

All entitlement programs in laissez-faire capitalism would be phased out. It wouldn't happen overnight.
Cost would be determined by the market and upon what type of education, etc.

So the eventual stratification of education ensures that lineages will carry on much as they did in medieval times. Only rich kids can afford educations that would land them jobs that compensate well. Middle class and poor will be forced to buy bargain education for their children, ensuring that they only get service level jobs. Children in modern America would no longer be "entitled" to equal education, as if the use of the word "entitle" is a bad thing.

On top of this, public subsidized childcare such as ASES would become nonexistant. Parents who currently work two jobs just to make ends meet would no longer be able to, since their children would need to be taken care of instead.

Faced with the option of paying most of their money to put their kids through school, and putting food on the table, the percentage of uneducated children would rise sharply. Without child protection laws, these children would be put to work in entry-level menial jobs such as agriculture or low-wage manufacturing. What other choice would families have?

Again, this is the tip of the iceberg for inequality. There is enough to write about on that subject alone that it can't all be mentioned here.


A fourth peril of Objectivism would be the failure of infrastucture. First, we'd see a transition that MrA mentions. Roads would all be fee-based, utilities would all increase drastically in price, including gasoline for cars. Unable to pay to use roads or vehicles, the poor class would resort to animals and bicycles for transportation, such as what we see in the cities of India. The cities with a decent sized population with enough money to afford vehicles would only be able to afford those without standards, bringing smog back to our cities in only a few short years after the transition starts.

Zoning and property development would run amok, leaving neighborhoods in a shambled hodgepodge that resembles the nastiness we see on TV in places such as Somalia and Brazil. Tin sheeting for roofs and car doors for windows. Waterways would all be devastated by pollution and other uncontrolled externalities. Our food supply would degrade and the headlines of food poisoning and starvation would be so common that it would soon be ignored.

We are reason-heads, we use our heads, our minds, we do not abandon reason for faith. We use logic, not ad hominems, like you. Nothing in Objectivsm's structure is accepted on faith, only reason. So your claim is totally unsubstantiated.

The same "reason" that elevated Communism to such a trusted ideal before it was actually put into practice. The same "reason" that supports 'theories' such as the flat-Earth theory, hollow-earth theory, phlogiston theory, etc.

Reasoning is not enough. How often across history have reasonable ideas turned out to be false? Reality has a way of making even the greatest ideas seem quite stupid in hindsight, after implementation.

Interbane wrote:Reasoning is not enough. How often across history have reasonable ideas turned out to be false? Reality has a way of making even the greatest ideas seem quite stupid in hindsight, after implementation.

More accurately, reasoning upon bad assumptions (bad axioms underlying the logico-axiomatic system, specifically) returns bad results. Objectivism operates on very bad assumptions, and thus its conclusions appear logical from the inside and disastrous from the outside. Since it is an ideology, outside happens to be where reality lives, and so in practice, it would be an utter trainwreck.

Mr A wrote:All entitlement programs in laissez-faire capitalism would be phased out. It wouldn't happen overnight.
Cost would be determined by the market and upon what type of education, etc.

Do be very careful with that loaded word "entitlement." What Objectivists seem to miss, while calling these things "entitlements" is that they aren't entitlements, they are the benefits of a social insurance program that benefits the entire society that has them in place, which is what justifies people paying for them via taxes. One could say that the value of a rich person paying way more for some poor kid's education is that the rich person doesn't have to live in a society full of uneducated people that make piss-poor decisions and aren't able to do high-end work.

In another vein, one could say that the value of a rich person paying way more for some elderly person's retirement is that the rich person doesn't have to live in a society full of starving old people who have to do things like choose between medicine and food (which is a moral outrage in any rich society). Since Objectivists are too disgustingly self-absorbed to possibly see the benefit in this from a moral standpoint, as their ideology completely warps their moral framework away from anything salient, one could say that it will provide the opportunity to live in a society not burdened by old beggars nastying up the place and constantly begging for stuff with desperate younger relatives committing crimes to obtain basic needs.

In yet another vein, one could say that the value of a rich person paying way more for the poor in general to be able to live is essentially the same: reduced poverty is a moral force unto itself, but pragmatically speaking, criminals and most of the other ills of society that rich people would have to insulate themselves from (at greater cost if there are more of them, particularly when they hit the breaking point and riot en masse) are far less problematic in a society in which desperate need isn't driving so much of the crime.

In yet another vein, one could say that the value of a rich person paying way more for environmental regulations on business, in addition to the implicit costs associated with running a regulated business, vastly, vastly outweigh the costs of a ruined environment, which will ruin not only the poor but eventually the rich as well. If climate change isn't attended to relatively soon, MIT scientists are predicting a minimum of $180 trillion ($180,000,000,000,000) (more than 10xGDP) in damages arising from environmental problems within the next three decades. For another comparison, there is roughly $27T worth of oil still in the ground, including how scarcity will drive its value up as it becomes more and more scarce. This will literally destroy the global economy. This global economic catastrophe will be big enough to impact the rich in their luxurious, pretend-the-world-isn't-there-or-hurting islands, if not enough to ruin them outright.

We could go on and on and on with these things. The problem for the Objectivist is that the "laissez-faire" free market has absolutely no mechanisms to deal with these problems, pretend as it may. Self-regulating businesses will pay the price of being undercompetitive and therefore will not act until it becomes cost-effective to do so, which is predicted to actually be many times over too late (e.g. the oil thing: the estimate is that if even a quarter of that $27T in oil is recovered and burned, we will have probably broken the environment to the tune of many, many times over that in damages to the environment). Since the free market does not put a premium on the value of commons like the air or water quality or composition, it is the primary driver of the tragedy of the commons, a fact they try to put off on collectivist systems like governments which are the only entity that can actually protect the real commons that cannot be easily monetized.

In this, it is insanely important to understand that governments are not some "other" out there that imposes will or whatever nonsense the Objectivist will use to label government action and programs. The government, in a democratic society, is the extension of the will of the people, essentially all of us when the democracy is healthy and functioning (ours in the US is currently not--we suffer from a severe deficit of democracy here due to the exact kinds of moneyed special interests that laissez-faire capitalism and Objectivist principles allow the affluent to buy). The people want clean air and a reasonable degree of assurance about the future for themselves and their children, and they want a fair shake at opportunities, all of which are secured by collecting the will of the people into the instrument called government.