Cheeze_Pavilion said:
JMeganSnow said:
Cheeze_Pavilion said:
No, they are trying to balance the claim of "I invented it" and "I paid for the schools that you went to for free so you could get smart enough to invent it." Or "I inherited it" and "I didn't" and why you get it even though you didn't make it, if "I made it" is so important.
Public schooling paid for by taxation is wrong, so there's that dispensed with.
No, it just means that if society was built from the ground up on/from this point forward on Objectivist principles, that dilemma would not exist.
Yes, exactly my point.
I'm simply pointing out the dissonance between Objectivists saying 'people should only have the right to things they earn with the sweat of their own brow' and 'people have absolute rights over their property'.
How is this dissonance? Someone created the property and *they* have the right to dispose of it, which can include conferring it, and the associated rights, onto someone else. If you couldn't do this, trade would be impossible.
Work is how property comes into existence and creates the *initial* right that makes the derivative rights possible. The thing that Objectivists are against is the demand for a "right" to property *without the consent of the owner*. It doesn't matter *why* the original owner decides to sign over his property, once conferred the right is just as absolute as the right of the initial creator was.
This only creates "dissonance" if you have a weird utopian view where "he who does not toil, shall not eat" or some similar garbage, which is not the Objectivist view. Our view is simply that rights come into existence in a specific way and thereafter operate in a specific way.
Totally untrue. Government favors are not the only way to prevent another from creating their own fortune. If I have inherited wealth, I can run my business at a loss until I drive out my competitors. I can substitute the power of my wealth for the power of my reason.
Yes, and you will eventually run out of money and either go out of business or be forced to raise prices high enough to make up for the original loss--at which time a competitor will happily jump in and take the market away from you wholesale. Things like this have been tried and they don't work. You might successfully run a couple of competitors out of business in this manner, but all you will succeed in accomplishing long-term is feeding your wealth into the hands of your customers and impoverishing yourself. You figure people would be in *favor* of that, since they think inheriting wealth is so wrong.
In other words, she addresses it, but, really has no explanation for it that you're willing to offer up for scrutiny ;-D
In other words, I'm tired of repeating myself endlessly for the benefit of people who can't be arsed to think for themselves for five minutes. And, yes, I'm not surprised the essay isn't available for free online, since the copyright is still extant and in the possession of Leonard Peikoff. I am not going to get derailed into a detailed discussion of minute issues, but the fundamental principle is that intellectual property operates differently than physical property. A copyright or patent held in perpetuity would entitle heirs to profit *without any investment* from the work of *other men*--indefinitely.
A man who inherits *money* or *things* cannot continue to benefit from these things in perpetuity without continual work--they run out or become worthless if utterly neglected. But a publisher may still wish to publish a two hundred year old novel and we're *ALL* making use of thousand-year-old inventions. The only continued investment going on there is on the part of the publisher and the *new* inventors building on earlier principles, so they should be the recipient of the rewards, not random people who have not had any sort of explicit right conferred upon them.
Basically, the term limits exist to avoid some random yahoo claiming to be the 200th great-grand-nephew of Jesus and demanding royalties for every Bible ever sold. For the most part this isn't necessary: a lot of the work published and patented never makes money even for the originator. Still, it's good to have it spelled out as a safeguard against a waste of time and money.
Like most narrowly concrete issues there's a lot of gray area that needs to be carefully spelled out, but that's what lawyers are for.
Well then it's not accurate to say "Objectivism recognizes this and demands perfect *political* equality of the type originally espoused by the Founding Fathers--the type of equality where if you produce something, *you own it unconditionally*, not with contingencies based on the unknown and unknowable desires of any random passerby."
Yes it is. If you read the writings of, say, Jefferson, you will discover that the man was nearly an anarchist in his desire to keep government from having the power to tell anyone to do anything. However, in *practice* this ideal became corrupted by their utilitarian foundation. Their goal of securing freedom is identical to the one espoused by Objectivists--that's the *type* of equality (equality before the law) the founding fathers originally espoused. However their *reasons* for espousing the ideal of freedom and their eventual application of it are thoroughly repudiated by Objectivism.
If you want an example, it's similar to the case of a woman in a primitive South American village who was believed to be "possessed", so the villagers decided to drill a hole in her skull to let the devil out. Fortunately she was rescued and sent to a modern hospital where it was determined that her brain was under fluid pressure that needed to be released--by drilling a hole in her skull to let the fluid out.
The prescription is the same, but depending on your reasons for adopting it the long-term outcome will be vastly different.
Don't know--America has worked out pretty good so far. Even through the New Deal and all, seems whatever the principles we've been using, we haven't run into this "terrible trouble" you are warning us about.
That's like saying that lighting the fuse on some dynamite works perfectly well up until the boom. We remain semi-prosperous because we retain quite a bit of freedom, but our lovely politicians are working hard to take every bit they can away from us, every day. When you've blown yourself up, it's too late to start wondering how long the fuse has been fizzing--you have to learn how to see the causes and effects BEFORE the explosion.
Because I've found that laziness is not the unitary characteristic that Objectivists make it out to be. I've found that some people, once you get them in a different environment, become productive.
I've simply found that laziness can have many more motivations than a desire not to work--sometimes it can be fear-based paralysis, for instance. But it doesn't change the fact that you aren't entitled to *demand*. And if you have problems, the world is full of benevolent people who are more than happy to help you get over them.
Not to mention, the whole theory falls apart when you consider infants--they DO starve unless someone takes care of them. And of course it makes no sense to call infants 'lazy'.
I know some lazy babies. Anyway, it's improper to start philosophizing by considering the exceptional cases, you must first establish a principle for the base case (adults), then work to cover the remaining exceptions.
Taking care of children involves a give-and-take relationship, it's just not an obvious one. Providing for the infant's support, health, and well-being means that you are entitled to exercise their rights on their behalf. It works like anything else in a free society: rights are coupled with responsibilities.
It's not really necessary to make much more provision than the fact that if you neglect your responsibility toward a child, you lose your parental rights (and thus, custody of the child). People *fight* over the right to take care of children, which I can fully understand even though I personally don't want kids.
It *is* the only one that adopts the extreme prophylactic measure of making sure that no unjust claims are given any weight by not acknowledging any claim that is not the result of mutual, explicit, free market contract-like agreement between the parties involved OR was procured by physical coercion.
And, hence, the only one that puts into practice the ideas that others mutter about as theory. Most of Objectivism (barring Ayn Rand's solution to the Problem of Universals--or rather her dismissal of it as a problem at all, see
Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology) is not really new. The Objectivist metaphysics, for instance, is almost pure Aristotle, minus a few bits derived from Platonism. The difference lies in taking the ideas seriously, integrating them, and following them to their logical conclusion and then applying them to your life. There are no half-measures because you don't need them.
