Gary Fisher

@Brant Gaede I think fascism is the wrong word for it. Me and many of my good friends have all worked in the private sector, the military sector, and the public sector. Anybody who has extensive experience or contacts in all of these areas agrees with me 99%. There's a reason that laissez-faire policies are not taken seriously by any top businessmen. In my opinion, it's the people who actually have business experience that should be deciding this country's policies, not academics who have no idea what it takes to be successful.

@Brant Gaede Today's world is exceptionally nazi-free, so I can't complain. I don't think your criticism was very constructive, as you didn't back up your charge that my rendition of history is "terrible" with anything.

Based on my argument, I don't see how you can justify a 100% tax rate. Taxes should be the minimum necessary to complete our objectives as a country. I think current tax rates are just fine, and we can incentivize further economic investment through temporary tax breaks.

@Francisco Ferrer If America didn't have an interventionist foreign policy, today we would be playing second fiddle to the British Empire. Or worse, the Nazis, as allied victory was only possible due to the US taking over much of the infrastructure and trade networks of Britain in the Middle East, as well as Roosevelt's Total War policies and the extreme amount of economic control they required.

@Selene Yes. Essentially. However, I have no problem whatsoever with private funding of research. In fact, I encourage it. As for taxation, I think the citizens are repaid many times over in the form of a) not being subject to the whims of a foreign power, b) increased profits through commercialization of these technologies, and c) new, affordable consumer goods.

@Ba'al Chatzaf That is all true. But the thing that incentivized so much private innovation in the 19th century were patent laws and private property, not laissez-faire policies, which actually never existed in the first world. Eventually, it became apparent that innovation couldn't be left up to the private sector alone, first of all because it has extremely important effects on the military (any technology can potentially revolutionize the way wars are fought), second of all because there are some technologies that need absolutely staggering amounts of investment before they can become profitable, so they are unlikely to develop at all in a timely manner without state funding. For example, although I think it is entirely possible that some company could eventually make so much money that they could afford to research computers intensively for many decades with no prospects for profit, any country that uses the state to research computers before this happens would be at a huge military advantage with respect to others. @Selene I agree 100% that people are capable of acting corruptly. That's why I consider myself a realist in politics. @Brant Gaede Mostly it's stuff I pulled together from what I know of economics and independent study of European history.

Damn. You guys don't waste time do you? Gettin' right down to the bottom of things from the get go. @Brant 1. It means that I'm not a conservative. I support gay marriage, abortion, pro-immigration, etc. 2. I am pro-capitalism but against completely de-regulated capitalism. I believe that private property should be respected as much as possible, and that is my understanding of the word "freedom". 3. America needs to protect her interests abroad, and foreign policy should reflect domestic concerns. @Michael I've read Atlas Shrugged as well as some other Objectivist materials I found on the internet including some youtube videos. I also ordered some books from Amazon recently.

@Wolf DeVoon Lol, k. I meant just before and after WWI.

Sorry about the formatting. I don't know why it isn't displaying paragraphs correctly.

@Wolf DeVoon These commercial projects are only possible over such long time-spans because commercial ventures can tolerate losses. Not enough resources to produce as much as you like? No big deal, you just make less profit. This is not possible in military endeavors.Historically, innovation has been driven nearly 100% by state subsidization and funding. Computers, radar, microwaves, nukes, you name it. Most modern military technology has been developed primarily by the public sector at first, and then sold off to the private sector when it became possible to make it profitable.Actually, I think the free market does a lot to destroy wealth, as I'll explain below. Economic and military imperialism on the part of the US and its allies explain this last part. There is a general trend throughout history whereby Great Powers have imposed free market policies on weaker countries in order to destroy that country's domestic industry and make it dependent on the Great Power. This happens because Great Powers subsidize their industries, and those industries are then able to produce the same goods at lower prices and then sell them to weaker countries. This is called capital divestment, and it rips economies apart. This is generally why Third World countries are so poor.Many dictators have risen to power through the active support of the US and the British Empire (especially in the Middle East), and the US continues to give economic and military aid to those dictators even today. Often, when a country recognizes the threat that free trade poses and refuses to sign free trade agreements, its government is deposed by US military intervention and replaced with a dictator who will do what the US tells him to do. There are many examples of this in recent history. (This sometimes backfires, though, like with Saddam).After the local economy has been destroyed and a dictator has been installed, if the country has a valuable resources such as oil, then that country's economy will be specialized for the production of that resource by the Great Power through the dictator as proxy. The dictator will also be able to suppress wages and any popular uprisings that take issue with the Great Power's meddling in their country's affairs. Of course not. Mercantilist policies have a lot of problems and are unsustainable in the long-run. That's why I support a system of imperialism like I described above.

@Brant A lot of people are genetically predisposed to depression. My father was one such person and he committed suicide after suffering from depression for virtually his whole life.I have inherited his tendencies, and so has my daughter, apparently. Though, luckily, we both seem to have much milder forms of it.

Here is my issue with Laissez-Faire in general (this includes Objectivist type minarchism as well as anarcho-capitalism). One of the fundamental roles of nation-states has been to provide for military defense of the country. In order to defend the country, the state must ensure that it has all of the necessary supplies to wage war, that is, food, ammunition, weapons, soldiers, etc. If all of these things are controlled by markets, problems immediately ensue. Generals must be able to make plans for national security that look as much as 20 years ahead. If prices for goods fluctuate in the meantime, as they often do, it would be next to impossible to ensure that the military has the supplies it needs to carry out its objectives. Secondly, markets encourage economic specialization in order to take advantage of the law of comparative advantage. But from the viewpoint of national defense, this is a death sentence. For example, if one country specializes in the production of textiles, let's say, and another country specializes in the production of food, and the first country depends on trade with the second country for food, then the first country will be at a serious disadvantage if the two countries go to war (the second country will cease to trade its food to the first country, starving it). This is why, as the modern nation state emerged during the period 800 - 1400 AD, European kings started developing permanent taxation (before, taxes were only levied during times of war), tariffs on imported goods, and other kinds of control over trade. They needed taxation in order to pay off debts during peace time that were incurred in war time. Tax laws became extremely complicated because they were intentionally structured in such a way as to ensure that there is no outflow of important goods during wartime. They later also imposed tariffs on foreign goods in order to protect domestic industry, thereby maintaining their productive independence from threatening neighboring countries. All of these practices continue to the present day, and are just as necessary now as they were back then, if not more so.

Hello Objectivist Living. My name is Gary Fisher, and I'm from Texas. To start off, I'm not an Objectivist or a libertarian but I find a lot of commonalities between my own personal views and that of Ayn Rand. I wouldn't describe myself as either a liberal or a conservative. I'm on the left when it comes to social issues, to the right on economic issues, but against laissez-faire capitalism. I believe a certain amount of state regulation and intervention in the economy is necessary for, at the very least, national security, and sustainable economic growth and stability. I am also in favor of an active foreign policy, and believe that America should play a leading role in the world today. Philosophically, I consider myself an individualist (especially in ethics), a pragmatist (metaphysics and epistemology), and an atheist.