From what I've seen, when I deal with people who have a lot more knowledge and wealth than I do, I come out WAY ahead. I get all the benefits of their wealth and knowledge in exchange for surprisingly little effort on my part. All they get in exchange for their extreme effort to become a lot more knowledgeable and wealthy than I am is a little extra money they don't need all that much--yet their desire for that money means I have all sorts of things I couldn't even *begin* to provide for myself. I don't think I could figure out how to build an iPod in a thousand years, but I can get one for the price of spending a few *hours* pushing buttons on a keyboard.
Obviously not. Herein, you're fundamentally misunderstanding the economic relationship between the privileged and working-classes that defines the consumptive habits of western civilization: chiefly, that the levels of industrial efficiency achieved in the west have been largely the byproduct of a relatively overworked populace (history will attest to this, though it's common anthropological knowledge that the average American still spends four-five hours more per day working than the primitive man). So in effect, the cost of an iPod isn't just typing for a few hours, but the structure of labour you're inevitably part of that has allowed for its complex creation, whereby your free time - which is essential to the development of any skill (sociology has proven this; there's a reason England's greatest poets hailed almost entirely from the aristocracy) - is sapped by your profession, regardless of whether you're interested in what you're doing (and this
is often not the case due to the nature of supply and demand, wherein there will always be more people needed to scrub toilets than to play in the NHL).
Perhaps I should be more lucid: a recent study by Malcolm Gladwell, a sociologist, all but proved what was a long-standing suspicion of the academic discipline - that "talent" is an overused term, and that what really catapults people to success in any given field is hard work, to the tune of, he derived from his studies, about 10,000 hours. Unfortunately, achieving that figure - which was consistent with thousands of examples of high performers - is essentially impossible unless "special circumstances" exist: which often, not always, pertain to someone coming from a bracket of wealth whereby they have the opportunity to pursue their interests without facing hurdles en route (exceptions Gladwell cited included The Beatles and Bill Gates, who were working-class by origin but managed to attain eight-hour gigs in Hamburg playing strip-clubs and get randomly netted in as a tester, respectively). This flies in the face of your idea that objectivism would separate the "talented" from the "lazy masses": in actuality, all objectivism would achieve is the continued perpetration of unarbited capitalism, wherein the need for the lower-class to work extensively systemically prevents them from developing the same abilities as their upper-class counterparts, and thusly fosters a continual cycle of expoitation (if the opportunity to develop a skill still exists pervasively within the American middle-class, please note that this is only the case because of "global capitalism", which has caused the transmission of wealth from one part of the world to the other, but ultimately doesn't alter the economic equilibrium).
I brought up in my last argument that the system of "economic freedom" espoused by Rand is only palatable as a result of violent, "collective takeovers" that are inherently disregarding of "property rights": the American Revolution, for example. An
even larger problem with the ideology is that it is simply un-scientific: the economic ideas promoted by Rand, to be blunt, rebuff the entire body of social sciences that have sought to dissect intelligently the implications of political institutions, beyond Rand's simplistic idea, not held solely by her, that "equal opportunity" just means hiring the most able person regardless of background, or not restributing wealth because it's wholly the fault of the poor that they are not wealthy. And aside from being devoid of an elementary school child's understanding of the effects of social conditioning, her ideas are bad mainly for one simple reason: they don't work.
In this way, you'd be no less sensical if you just told the forum that you thought dinosaurs walked the Earth 6000 years ago, or that the world was flat.
When people give you funny looks or refuse to give you their stuff, you retain the ability to go elsewhere and deal with other people or just make your own arrangements. Your rights are not infringed and your decision-making ability is not shorted out. Particular objects or people can be replaced. Your *life* cannot. Sure, you can try to resist, but that's not such a good bet if you care whether you live or die.
Property rights have never been absolute. When Guy Fawkes rented an apartment below the English parliament in 1605 and filled it with explosives, would it have been a wise decision for the government to not infringe on his property rights by intruding? That's an extreme example, of course, but the principle still stands when you consider that the death of the English parliament is dwarfed by the overall significance of creating a society that functions on the basis of reason - i.e., sciences of the social type; rather than the sort of irrationality proposed by Rand.
And her philosophy is just idiotic. Here's a quote from "Apollo and Dionysus" (I skimmed over a couple of her books I'd read for good measure):
Symbolic figures are a valuable adjunct to philosophy: they help men to integrate and bear in mind the essential meaning of complex issues. Apollo and Dionysus represent the fundamental conflict of our age. And for those who may regard them as floating abstractions, reality has offered two perfect, fiction-like dramatizations of those abstract symbols: at Cape Kennedy and at Woodstock. They were perfect in every respect demanded of serious fiction: they concretized the essentials of the two principles involved, in action, in a pure, extreme, isolated form.
...By which she means to assert that Dionysus' joyous irrationality reflects, holistically, the ideology of collectivism and Apollo's 'light' reflects individualism. How can anyone, as an intelligent human being, believe this crap? The allusion she provides is as enlightened as me stating that the Boston Tea Party is emblematic of the values of individualism, whereas a Swedish marathon for charity perfectly embodies collectivism. Moreover, she merely ignores the fact that the country she demonizes as being a trop of collectivism and irrationality - the Soviet Union - had led the United States in terms of space exploration in achieving every prior benchmark, and on a much smaller scientific budget! Of course, none of these things matter, and neither does Rand's metaphoric premise, but the latter is typical of her philosophic approach: fanciful, but devoid of any substance insofar as the reader is a serious thinker. Perhaps the only concision to this would be the need, I believe, to define individual rights (along with, ideally, collective ones), but that goes back to the beginning of philosophy, and when Rand isn't paraphrasing, her ideas are completely devoid of weight.
P.S. If you can't retort to what I'm arguing - or can't retort without simply claiming I don't understand objectivism well enough to know how inscrutable it is - I'll consider it merely an affirmation of what everybody already knows: that it's a hack ideology that shouldn't even have the title of "philosophy" conferred upon it.
I'm sorry, anyone who takes threats like that seriously deserves what they get.
