this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
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taking Ayn Rand's work seriously. five seconds of critical thought and her entire philosophy comes crashing down
One thing that few people seem to accept when saying that they believe in Ayn Rand's philosophy is that you are supposed to pay people what they are worth, not what you can negotiate with them.
For instance, in Atlas Shrugged, it is made explicit that Rearden pays his mill workers far above typical salaries because it is worth it to him to have the best staff working in his mills. Rearden is also the kind of person who isn't going to make racist or sexist jokes because he wants the best person regardless of sex or color.
What Objectivist is that moral?
That's actually the root of all social philosophies: they require decent people.
No matter which system you take, capitalism, communism, anarchism, monarchy, democracy, etc. they all would work perfectly fine, if people wouldn't be stupid, selfish and about 1% downright psychopaths. And I'm not even talking about real crimes. In your example it would be perfectly legal, to pay the workers the absolute minimum possible, but it would be a dick move.
At the end of the day, a system always has to answer the question: How do you reign in assholes? That's it. Designing a system based on Jesuses is trivial.
It's not enough to reign in assholes, the system has to be designed in such a way that carriers of "dark triad" traits (i.e. the usual bad faith actors in a system) are still incentivized to contribute to or improve society without gradually dismantling it to increase their wealth/power/status. That's a hard problem to solve.
Capitalism incentivizes dark triad folks and rewards the behaviors lavishly. To the tune of billions. Probably the largest concentration of narcissists and sociopaths you can find would be in politics and board rooms.
That's pretty much what I meant, or at least an aspect of it.
"Asshole" is an umbrella term for me that means every anti-social behavior or more general, behavior against the spirit (not the text!) of whatever ideology you're implementing.
Whether your system fails because one "dark" person can manipulate 100s to do bad things for him or 100s of persons do small bad things every day doesn't really matter at the end - the system failed.
So you have to find a way to reign this behavior in. Psychopaths react similar to every other person, just way more extreme.
I think capitalism is the outlier there. Some atleast expect knobheads but the free hand of the market or something is supposed to take them out of business.
But it doesn't seem to expect "knobheads" manipulating the hand.
How does that differ from the current way things are done? (especially in the US)
Largely it doesn't. There are some boundaries, like minimum wages and maximum working hours, etc. But according to the hypercapitalists, even those minimums are already undue influence by the government.
Im assuming this is part of the mythology. That out betters are benevolent and inherently moral. They are the smart ones who should be running the show and if we just give them the tools they need then itll all trickle down to the workers. Of course this will only happen when theyre immune from the last law, last regulation, are fully tax exempt, and are adequately subsidized by the tax paying rabble. Surely then the proles will live in the land of milk & honey........right?