The Ethical Basis of Politics

[syrakusos]

In many ways I've come to think of AS as an antique. There are parts, though, that hold up marvelously well, like Francisco's money speech. The Fountainhead holds up much better overall and literarily imo even though AS is the greater novel. --Brant

That speech is easy to quote from. It offers many "sound bites." On some message boards, my taglines come from that speech.

Nonethelss, I have been tempted to recast it into a positive statement. The speech is largely negative. Money is not... Money is not... Money is not...

The problem is not limited to Rand as a fictionalist. The Objectivist (Libertarian; Conservative) concept of freedom and liberty is largely negative. "Congress shall make no law..." We define our ideal social relationships by what other people are not allowed to do.

In Roark's Courtroom Speech is the kernel of a different argument: The freedom to create. The liberty to discover. The right to invent. The privilege of artistry -- and in that I mean "privilege" in its root sense of "private law."

However, we see too little of that, certainly in Atlas Shrugged, which is about inventors and creators. We learn a little about Rearden Metal, and Dr. Hendricks' portable x-ray machine, and Galt's Motor, of course. But what did Roger Marsh ever do?

And again, the fault, such as it may be, is not entirely Ayn Rand's own limitations, but, I believe a general assumption among liberarians that society rests on the prohibitions of actions by others, a double error: prohibition; and concern for others.

Working on a master's degree now, I have a criminology class in Global Crime. My term paper will be about the Future of Capitalism. My research took me to books from the previous hundred years that also predicted futures for capitalism -- including its demise, of course, Marx holding sway among intellectuals.

1. Herbert Feis, Europe: the World's Banker 1870-1914
   
2. Charles R. Spruill, Conglomerates and the Evolution of Capitalism
   
3. George W. Edwards, The Evolution of Finance Capitalism
   
4. Sebastian Mallaby, The World's Banker (Glowing bio of Wolfensohn by the CFR)
   
5. Henry Cendrowski, et al., Private Equity: History, Governance, and Operations
   
6. In addition, another dozen books on corporate crime by leftwing criminologists.
   

Like the passing of Mark Twain, the demise of capitalism has been announced too often and too early. Remember that when Marx wrote in 1848, few (if any) had any idea how old the world and humanity are. Marx knew of about 5,000 years of humanity.

I read of a Silicon Valley bumper sticker: "Capitalism: what people do when you leave them alone." Thus, it is not surprising that the "engine of creation" is always evolving in an environment that is often hostile. That hostility is the motive to define freedom as the proscription of actions of others. But it misses the point of the creative, expansive, exploratory nature of the discovering, testing, proving and applying.

About a thousand years ago or so, Durk Pearson told me that when he was at MIT attending RadCap meetings ("Radicals for Capitalism" -- square root with dollar sign), he got the idea that what the socialists and libertarians were arguing was how to have a stable society, when, in his view, freedom offers a meta-stable society, a society of dynamic equilibrium that responds to constant changes by continuous rebalancing. I never heard more about the idea, though you can see that it stayed with me.

Among the postmodernists in criminology -- as in other similar writings -- the phrase "game theory" is always written with a sneer. Following Bourdieu and Habermas, they decry a world based on risk. Indeed, as Peter Bernstein asserts in Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk, every society has merchants, but capitalism was only possible when Fermat and Pascal developed the algebra of probability. That led, ultimately, to our quantum-relativistic world. Again, this is a global society in which the postmodernists find the lack of strict rules to be a source of evil, whereas the engines of dynamic creation run on the fuel of statistical inferences. Indeed, the very basic "Prisoner's Dilemma" tells businesses how to act vis-a-vis govenment: co-operate, then reply tit for tat; if that fails, try a double reward despite a betrayal. (What happens after that, I have no idea, perhaps The Strike, or perhaps only the Flight of Capital.)

In lieu of wringing one's hands over "money masters" is the personally profitable course of minding your own business, focusing on that which you can control and thereby widening your latitude of action. In the broader sense, rather than complaining about evils, advocate virtues.

Edited November 7, 2009 by Michael E. Marotta

[Brant Gaede]

Interesting you mention Dirk Pearson. I once did a job for him and Sandy Shaw. They write a technical on-line life extension column for a vitamin/supplement firm that sells their stuff and he posts regularly in the comments of ToThePointNews.com run by his extremely close friend Jack Wheeler under "....". (Name privgately available to you on request.) One of his latest remarks is about a "meta-joke" or a joke about a joke. Anyone can buy into ToThePointNews for nine bucks for one month and use the search function to roam the site.

--Brant