I got this response on a forum with a bunch of fools on it, and thought some here may get a kick out of it. Unfortunately I can’t respond as the “forum/thread” (or whatever it is) activity will come to an end soon, but it would be interesting to watch some readers here tear this rubbish up. Once I read “natural laws” I knew this would be interesting…
It appears to me that you are a Libertarian (or a Ferengi, a la Star Trek), and chances are you believe that all goods should be privately held and all services privately provided; you believe that it destroys the ‘moral fiber’ and ‘industriousness’ of humans to have anything held, owned, protected, or provided by the state.
It doesn’t matter to most Libertarians that this kind of hyper individualized economics is objectively at odds with the natural laws that underlie the biosphere and sponsor human life on earth. It only matters that the Randian Doctrine remain ‘pure,’ internally consistent, and be followed in all cases without exception.
Like its hyper collectivist, zero private property counterpoint on the extreme Left, such absolutist thinking is a form of clinical hysteria – a mental illness.
yeah, the “natural law” bit was hilarious… also the knee jerk reaction about Randian Doctrine somehow being the only voice in a libertarian perspective is unknown to me. They correlate libertarian with “pure” Randian Doctrine yet I’ve never read any Rand. So either I would be assumed by this person to be not a libertarian or I am a pure Randian and I personally don’t realize that yet. But they are all assumptions, of course, by that person, but he or she did say something that adheres to property rights might be a Ferengi so blessed be he/she provided options as to who adheres to property rights - so maybe I’m a Ferengi and don’t realize that yet either…[:P]
I like this in the description “a massive transference neurosis acted out in the world’s political arenas, with devastating effects on the institutions of liberty”.
But most “liberals” (if we want to call them that) will just turn their content filters on at the sight of a book that sounds partisan…
And why does Rand seem to get virtually all the credit and attention for Libertarian ideas from non Libertarians? It’s not like she invented the concept or anything…
Something I found particularly funny is that the quote basically called every Libertarian alive now and who ever existed “mentally ill”. So if you’re part of any mainstream political ideology that’s not seen as “extreme”, you’re mentally healthy. But once you start questioning whether the government is doing more harm than good…whoa there, I think you’re coming down with something…[:|]
It’s like the loons thinking the sane person in the sanitarium is the one who is a kook.
As for Rand, non-libertarians love to hate her and think we’re all her evil spawn. It makes their simplistic world-view easier to wrap their little heads around.
I’d say Rand probably honestly believed what she said, so it’s more likely she took her crazy inventor-as-ubermensch ideology and attacked a group of folks she saw as stealing her ideas and rebranding them.
Mmmh… please note the scary part about “clinical hysteria”. if I remember correctly many of the XX century favorite tyrants had a penchant for sending political/economic dissenters to mental institutions. Dissenting with them was obviously a sign of “mental illness”.
You know, that is a good point that is rather sobering. If a major libertarian movement was to start picking up steam and it was causing the government serious problems, I wouldn’t put it past them to start arresting the “extremist” leaders of the movement for the sake of national security and peace…
Question about a comment above-- why do you think Rand dispised Libertarians? (Not saying that’s wrong, just asking what the reasoning is as I’m not very familiar with Rand..)
Rand was a fairly rabid advocate of “intellectual” property and effectively raised inventors to the level of ubermenschen. As such, she viewed the fact some in the emerging American libertarian movement used some of her ideas in a different context as a grave insult.
Absolutely, Rand practically ostracized herself from libertarianism accussing it of “stealing” her ideas (hows that for intellectual property rights). Granted, she did advance individualism in the general populace, but, quite frankly I dont think she was particularly that important or original as a thinker. So much for “purity” of Randian doctrine, whatever that means. In my case in particular, I got started with Rothbard, as I know many others have. As for the use of “absolutist” and “extremist” , Id much prefer to be called "radical" which obviously poses a problem for these people since it deals with perspectives that are not their own. "Mentally ill"? Id much rather be “mentally ill”, than “brain dead”.
I try to avoid wiki itself, but that’s from the original source. I was particularly struck by the arrogance and especially the vitriol here. Maybe it was just a matter of the state of the party at the time since the comments were made long ago, but based on the text here it doesn’t sound like it at all.
This is why she is considered a Libertarian. Most things she says here are great. I think if you interpert her correctly and ignore the girly “omg strong ambitious energetic men tee hee” you get a lot of nice ideas coming from her
It doesn’t matter to most Libertarians that this kind of hyper individualized economics is objectively at odds with the natural laws that underlie the biosphere and sponsor human life on earth.
like most of the criticisms ive heard of libertarianism this suffers from two fundamental flaws, a strawman version of libertarianism and a total unawareness of the methodological arguments of the austrian school.
