"Anti-Capitalism and Anti-Semitism"


Mark

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From the review, I gather Mr. Brook does not reach the fundamental dubiousness people have about making money on money, which surfaced in Aristotle and perhaps too in some violent behavior of Jesus as told in the Bible. It’s not a shadiness cast over only money lending, but over stock brokers, commodity traders, etc. It’s related to why my temperature rises a bit each time I hear tell that saved money is “earning interest.” My bonds and CD’s are not “earning” a gull durn thing when I get interest from them and neither am I. I am entitled, as Nozick would say, to any interest, but it is shady to pass that off as “earning.”

Notice how Yaron moves to exchanges at a shopping center for the imputation of merit in money-making going on there to the banking going on behind that scene. Notice how Rand makes Rearden her centerpiece for the capitalist process, not Mulligan. In a way, this is a natural emphasis because working, producing, and exchanging is the more elementary level of economic activity upon which money, money lending, joint stock companies, and so forth are important supporting elaborations. (Brook knows all about this, and I imagine Mark does also.) What should be argued by a defender of capitalism is, as Nozick argued, the justice of those many entitlements that are not earned, which is to say not obtained by exchange of one’s own labored-upon product (say, a crafted chair or a cleaned house) for money similarly labored for. There is a line near the end of the film Pretty Woman where Gere, who had been a corporate raider, takes a turn of enterprise and says something like “We’re going to make boats.” The making of things is the prized activity for the writer and the receptive audience, and as I recall, this very point in the film was applauded in a publication affiliated with ARI way back then. Nature and rightness of corporate raiding, I’ll have to leave off for others, as I must get back to my own areas.

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Making stuff has a better reputation then renting stuff.

Interest is rent

Ba'al Chatzaf

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