Ayn Rand's Ideal being published by ARI


galtgulch

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Does ARI have a Twitter account?

 

The Ayn Rand Institute has one: https://twitter.com/aynrandinst . So too does the Ayn Rand Org: https://twitter.com/aynrandorg . Their tweets essentially mirror each other.

 

Do you have a Twitter account, Adam?

 

The review of Ideal in the NYT certainly attracted a lot of comment, from folks with zero knowledge of her life and works all the way to fans who have read much and loved much of her work.

 

This comment struck me as puckish and funny, while also quite unfair. I wonder where the writer borrowed it from:

 

Jeff G Oakland, CA 7 hours ago
I always loved the way all the hyper-capitalistic superheroes at the end of "Atlas Shrugged" end up on a commune.
Edited by william.scherk
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This comment struck me as puckish and funny, while also quite unfair. I wonder where the writer borrowed it from:

Jeff G Oakland, CA 7 hours ago
I always loved the way all the hyper-capitalistic superheroes at the end of "Atlas Shrugged" end up on a commune.

Yep...a privately owned commune...with rules like every commune I have met...

Good pickup.

We used to run into this argument at the anarchist conferences. My response was they could have their commune in my utopia whereas I could not have ours in theirs.

Kinda shut that one down quickly.

Simple Venn diagrams took care of that.

Are Venn diagrams still used to teach logic in schools, or, have they ceased teaching logic.

A...

No Twitter account. However, if I launch a certain campaign, I will.

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Interesting comment here:

Once again: publishing work that a writer did not choose to publish in his or her lifetime (or when he or she is able to choose) is a rights violation. Unless there is certain provision left by the estate, It is theft. It is theft whether the writer is Harper Lee, or Elizabeth Bishop, or Ayn Rand. It is one thing for papers to be given (or sold) to a library, where they can be made available to interested parties. But publication is another matter entirely.

A...

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Interesting comment here:

Once again: publishing work that a writer did not choose to publish in his or her lifetime (or when he or she is able to choose) is a rights violation. Unless there is certain provision left by the estate, It is theft. It is theft whether the writer is Harper Lee, or Elizabeth Bishop, or Ayn Rand. It is one thing for papers to be given (or sold) to a library, where they can be made available to interested parties. But publication is another matter entirely.

A...

Not if they are inherited property. Rights' violation of a dead lady? Maybe the rights' violation of an estate but who would be the complaining party? Someone who would have rights specified by and in the estate against another estate party or parties.

--Brant

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Interesting comment here:

Once again: publishing work that a writer did not choose to publish in his or her lifetime (or when he or she is able to choose) is a rights violation. Unless there is certain provision left by the estate, It is theft. It is theft whether the writer is Harper Lee, or Elizabeth Bishop, or Ayn Rand. It is one thing for papers to be given (or sold) to a library, where they can be made available to interested parties. But publication is another matter entirely.

A...

Not if they are inherited property. Rights' violation of a dead lady? Maybe the rights' violation of an estate but who would be the complaining party? Someone who would have rights specified by and in the estate against another estate party or parties.

--Brant

Brant:

We would have to see the will because it may be possible to block publication if that was the express desire of the deceased.

If there was a trust established it would impact a number of "assets."

A...

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Yes--but the problem isn't necessarily anything in the will but how to reconcile something in the will with "rights violation." Whose and what? There is nothing in any Randian rights philosophy that gives the estate estate rights that are primary. Estate rights would have to come from a human right--right action--a living, breathing human being. They have to pass on, one to the next as in property inherited.

Now what da law say is what da law say and da law has its own logic. There are all kinds of legal rights that are not human rights. The biggest example is in and from legal corporate structure. A corporation has this and that right through law. It's a two-way buffer between the owners and everybody else, including the government. (Buffer does not mean absolute barrier.) It generally relieves personal liability for corporation actions and products by redirecting the force of tort. Tort (and corporate) law should not exist. That should all be privately done unless there's a spill over into criminality as with fraud or releasing toxic waste into a river system. In that last sense, the government is even more corporate than a corporation in that it's simply getting away with what just happened in Colorado, unlike BP in the Gulf of Mexico.

--Brant

CO2 into the atmosphere is bad because the government so sayeth while toxic waste into a major western river system isn't really so bad because that's what the government so sayeth also

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There are all kinds of legal rights that are not human rights. The biggest example is in and from legal corporate structure. A corporation has this and that right through law. It's a two-way buffer between the owners and everybody else, including the government. (Buffer does not mean absolute barrier.) It generally relieves personal liability for corporation actions and products by redirecting the force of tort.

The more important part of limited liability is on behalf of owners (stockholders) who are not employees and have no operational responsibility for the corporation. Should somebody who held BP stock, with that his or her sole connection to BP, be held personally and financially liable for BP's oil spill?

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There are all kinds of legal rights that are not human rights. The biggest example is in and from legal corporate structure. A corporation has this and that right through law. It's a two-way buffer between the owners and everybody else, including the government. (Buffer does not mean absolute barrier.) It generally relieves personal liability for corporation actions and products by redirecting the force of tort.

The more important part of limited liability is on behalf of owners (stockholders) who are not employees and have no operational responsibility for the corporation. Should somebody who held BP stock, with that his or her sole connection to BP, be held personally and financially liable for BP's oil spill?

No. For that's not the legal construct.

That the legal construct should be or might be changed is only a theorectical-can't-be-a-practical concern for anyone alive today. There are much bigger and more important things on the table, to say the least. Frankly, I see no interest in getting rid of corporations and limited liability even in a perfect world. I simply have not bothered to reconcile corporations with libertarian political theory, assuming I could. Even so there is nothing that legally excuses criminal behavior--rights' violations--by employees of a corporation per se except the government's failure to define and enforce criminality against those people. For instance, high level banking officers in major US banks. One reason for that is FDIC banks are effective adjuncts--fascist or socialist (explain your choice--I'm not making one)--of the Federal government. Fractional reserve banking is the primary way via loans new money is created and pumped into the economy and, absent those loans (compared to what they were), the mere monetization of Federal debt can scarcely compete, so we have ironic deflationary consequences of private people not seeking debt enough to keep pumping air into the economy while capital itself--real capital (savings)--is being consumed for sundry reasons, the most important of which is the curtailment of real productive human activity (action) leaving capital stocks vulnerable for the feasting on of entropy if not of taxes or consumed by the whirlwind of mal-investments out of extremely low interest rates distorting by cheapening the true cost of money and just staying in and doing business by taking on inappropriate and ultimately unsustainable levels of debt.

All living is is the direction of energy against the otherwise tendency of life to extinguish itself.

The big crunch is coming.

--Brant

rant alert!

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