LaissezFaire

I wanted to give and get a few thoughts on Objectivism and post-Objectivist/Neo-Objectivist etc. philosophical work. To give a background, my first exposure to Objectivism was through an audio book version of Atlas Shrugged I had torrented (take that, Objectivist IP nerds!) I was already familiar with radical liberalism and market anarchism through various lectures and articles on Mises.org, Anti-state.com and similar websites. I think I first heard about libertarianism via a Yahoo political party search (I liked the LP platform), and had started reading economics articles on Lew Rockwell. Pretty soon I was emailing socialist parties asking them why they had such crazy ideas about international trade, but it wasn't for a while after that that I seriously investigated Ayn Rand. I think I might have heard a few of her views on metaphysics and God when researching atheism in my teens, but I didn't distinguish her in particular until I decided to give Atlas Shrugged a listen. I have a taste for pulp literature and hard boiled detective novels, both of which influenced Ayn Rand, so I generally enjoyed the story. I found it a bit weird and slow at times, but some of the dialogue was really great, and funny (Rand wouldn't appreciate that - she believed laughter was for destructive purposes!) I especially liked Hank Rearden, who's more charming as an uptight but straightforward sexy Rockefeller than the New Capitalist Man John Galt. I agreed or sympathized with many views Rand expressed in the book, but I was not especially taken in by her philosophy - probably because I had already felt many of the same influenced she had, and had already radicalized into libertarianism and egoism a bit further than she did. I am not an intensive student of Objectivism in general or Rand, but I have put some effort into reading works by Objectivists or those strongly influenced by its ideas; and as I said, I have read some of the source material that influenced Ayn Rand's own development such as Aristotle, Nietzsche and Mises. The best place to start would probably be standing on one leg. The first seems entirely reasonable to me. Although certain metaphysical theories and religious belief systems would deny or qualify this, I suspect that most Objectivists had the same experience of George H. Smith of loudly proclaiming the existence of the external world and futiley waiting for someone to argue with you. That is not to say there isn't merit in pointing this out: after all, academic philosophy and pop mysticism are rife with bizarre and contradictory standards that contrive to allow them a pretended solipsism, and following through the implications of a realist metaphysic will help us understand the relationship between ontological coherence and logical consistency: Rand, like Aristotle, wants to make metaphysics prove logic. Her arguments in favor of this are not particularly detailed. Peikoff has made more elaborate discussions, but probably the best Objectivist-Aristotilian metaphysic and ontology I have seen is in the work of George H. Smith such as Atheism: The Case Against God. I am not sure if I agree with Ayn Rand's epistemology, though it does not strike me as a crazy epistemology what I have read by her and Peikoff hasn't convinced me. In fact, it hasn't entirely stuck with me, which is why I'd like comments from others. My own epistemic views are similar to those of Roderick Long, himself an Aristotilian, and it would perhaps to be worthwhile to see what he has to say about Rand's epistemology. I know that David Gordon has a lecture on this available online, too, which I'll try to listen and pay attention to. In some literal sense every man is his own end in that only particular persons have ends or ideas about means. Rand's moral views, as I understand it ala David Kelley, is that when persons understand their nature they use their reason to assess facts and assign a value and disvalue according to some standard of life or flourishing. If that is what Rand means by 'morality' I suppose I would agree, but I have always had trouble with how she goes from this very general proposition to presuming an broad swathe of classical liberal legal virtues. I wouldn't even say that law and morality are the same thing. It reminds me of the very abstract arguments of theologians for the existence of a Benevolent Prime Mover which conclude with, "therefore Jesus." While I do believe there are plausible supports to be made for libertarian law, eudaemonian reasoning, virtue ethics, egoism, and the general advantages of an individualist, rationalist and capitalistic society I don't know that you could make any straightforward deduction of them from the fact that men must use reason in their pursuit of ends. I mean, certainly thugs do use reason.They are not 'faking reality', because the 'long run' contribution to the damage of society they make is miniscule and the benefits are rapid and direct. Arguments that being a thug leads to a poor disposition and shallow life, that you risk retaliation, etc. are all perfectly reasonable, but MAN'S NATURE just isn't going to cut it. I am a Mises U. disciple of the Austrian Priesthood, generally favoring Rothbard, Mises and Menger. I am also fond of certain elements of Joseph T. Salerno's formulations, particularly on causal realism and economic calculation. Given that, and my overall views on civil society and law, I am a firm endorser of laissez-faire capitalism and I believe that Rand had a reasonably good grasp on economics from her writings in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. It's not clear if she understood the Austrian theory of the trade cycle, but capital theory is obscurantist by its nature.

A points of fact: We should not make the mistake of saying that Mises 'predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union'. The collapse of true socialism as described in Mises' works would happen almost instantaneously, not 70 years later.The Soviet Socialist Republics were not socialist in the economic sense. They had an extensive black market and some legal property and transfer rights. The Soviet Union was a hampered market economy. The closest it came to socialism, in the economic sense, was during War Communism, which was quickly abandoned to prevent a collapse of the Soviet Union at its birth. The Soviet Union 'collapsed' for a large number of reasons (history tends to be overdetermined). The negative impact on its economic, technical and human infrastructure was leaving a smaller-and-smaller clique able to be beneficiary of the extortion policies. The system was based, even in its later years, on the threat of police or at least economic sanctions by the State. I think Yuri Maltsev's explanation may be one of the major causes: when the pressure of police power was relieved, the Soviet Union had to disintegrate. That's had become the sole basis of its continued public legitimacy.

Zeitgeist and LaRouche should team up and make me laugh.

For a good survey of libertarian intellectual history and its various traditions in America, which will give her an idea of which authors she might want to read and what they were about, can be found in Brian Doherty's excellent Radicals for Capitalism. Robert P. Murphy's Chaos Theory is a clear outline of Rothbardian anarcho-capitalist legal and practical theory in a small package.

Rothbard's private protection agency, not to mention an private cities, resemble in many ways governments. Or, to put it another way, was Ayn Rand's ideal voluntarily financed government really a state? Even if it's not anarchy, lacking the power to tax would deny it the status of a government among almost all classical liberal theorists (who themselves had occasional sympathies with anarchism). The question of whether anarchism is socialism is best answered on two levels: one, overall values. These are often incommensurable, Nietzschean libertarians and English egoists will have more in common, regardless of their economic theories, than Syndicalists and Anarcho-Capitalists. Anarchism is a diverse tradition, nonetheless many classical liberal and radical works were anarchistic (or nearly so), such as Burke's Vindication of Natural Society. Proudhon was the first member of an identifiable anarchist tradition, but he was not the first to deal with concepts of propertarian societies, markets organization (by the way, Proudhon was a follower of Bastiat in most matters, he was a very special kind of socialist) or the elimination of all coercive features of the State. Anarchism, more than its own movement, represents a certain inner logical tendency of radical movements at the fringes. There is an anarchist version of virtually every imaginable political philosophy, from communism to feudalism.

I've been interested in philosophy since before I knew what it was. Probably my earliest exposure to its fringes was Spock's quasi-Stoic views on logic and character in the old Star Trek shows. Existentialism, nihilism, comparative religion and intellectual history are all majorly fascinating to me. Some political and anarchisty authors I've found interesting would be: Murray Rothbard, Max Stirner, Ayn Rand, Anthony de Jasay, Ludwig von Mises. I was already pretty well into a material-realist and individualist outlook before I specifically considered politics, and after some sifting around I found that libertarians tended to have the legal and economic arguments that made the most sense to me; I also liked the somewhat awkward connexion to individualist and egoist philosophy. I don't think I ever was at a 'limited government' phase, I was more or less politically neutral before my exposure to libertarianism. Once I had a conception of systemic problems with state action (largely thanks to economics) it seemed obvious to me that, if you were consistent, you'd just cut the state out as an uncontrollable psycho-parasite.