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http://vimeo.com/24286634

Brilliant analysis of the author Ayn Rand.

Brilliant.. how? The typical "Ayn Rand type" was a "heavy metal headbanger who worshipped Charles Manson"?! ???

I've only been to one Objectivist Conference in my time, but I didn't see a single one in the lot that fit that description. It reminded me more of a meeting of businessmen than death worshippers. Clearly his assertion is not based in reality.

I don't think the point is that Rand's followers are those types, but that they base all their "morality" off her books and her books were inspired by exactly that type of thinking. I never looked at it that way: that she was quite probably a sociopath, and that that's why she's such a poster-girl for cut-throat greed. But everything she ever writes... it's just more blatantly hypocritical bullshit peddled by a nasty old hypocrite of a woman. FFS, she's often used as the inspiration for killing medicare, and yet IIRC she utilized medicare at the end of her life to pay for her cancer (or whatever it was) treatment.

All you really need to know to understand Ayn Rand's books is that she was a rich girl who's family lost everything when the revolution came through her town, and that that traumatic event framed her thinking for the rest of her life.

She was forced to pay more into it than you likely ever will.

I have heard great, albeit negative, discussions over Ayn Rand and never were they this shallow and immature.

Then I like her. "Medicare" is just a euphemism for stealing from Group A to give money to Group B. It's immoral, not to mention economically destructive.

The woman constructs a whole philosophical system, giving you ample opportunity to inspect and discover flaws in her logic, and the best you're capable of mustering is an ad hominem?

As she should be. Other things that should rightly be gotten rid of: medicaid, social security, minimum wage, etc.

She would only be a hypocrite if she pulled an Alan Greenspan, and advocated one thing earlier in her life, but advocated another thing later in life. She was always opposed to the medicare program, but her moral system demonstrates that there is no problem with taking advantage of medicare (which is forcibly funded with taxpayer dollars), so long as you continue advocating for its abolishment.

This is exactly why she has a better insight than most. She has first-hand experience with the logical conclusion of the altruistic system under which her family was destroyed: communism.

You pretend that a person's arguments can be refuted by discovering that they're motivated by their experiences with reality. By that logic, everyone's arguments can be refuted. In truth though, your rebuttal is a simple ad hominem fallacy, and will be disregarded.

Everyone who hates Medicare must really love their parents and grandparents.  After all without Medicare and Social Security 90%+ of you can expect to be bunking up with said elders once they have trip and fall or otherwise have a health problem that they can't afford or their insurance won't cover.  I wonder once you have to take care of (without any help cause that would be socialism)  your dying parents and as they bankrupt you (and themselves) and drain your life-force (since you won't have the money for any professional help) if it'll give you a different take on what the role of government can be.  It doesn't matter if "Group A" is a bunch of multi-billionaire trust fund babies who actively buy politicians and despise the middle and lower classes and play them off against each other brilliantly and do everything they can to stifle social mobility and "Group B" is the working people who didn't inherit billions and would only like an opportunity to rise in society if given a fair chance.  Apparently that is irrelevant.

With my savings from not paying into Medicare/Social Security, my parents/grandparents will be living better off than they would be under Medicare. For those people who chose not to save for their parents' elderly care, that is their responsibility, not mine.

Americas medicare system is pretty poor I've heard, it's the flicking of a dime to the vagrant that is the healthcare of the US majority. Mostly its there to pay big pharma and big insurance anyway isn't it?

All that notwithstanding, Group A is Group B. Unless you come from planet Krypton, the chances are you will find yourself in both groups during the course of the changing circumstances of your life.

So what you're saying is: If you don't want to take responsibility for your own grandparents, it's perfectly okay to take money from your neighbors by force in order to help yourself pay for medical costs? Basically, because you and your family haven't saved money to take care of each other, and you don't want the trouble of asking for voluntary charity, you have the right to steal that money from other people? And then you dismiss any moral objections to your theft by saying you're only stealing it from "multi-billionaire trust fund babies?" And then you want to claim that you're the benevolent one?

Do you even know what percentage of taxpayers are "multi-billionaire trust fund babies?". Billionaires alone would be less than 0.000001%, and then maybe 5% of those could be considered "multi-billionaire trust fund babies".

So what the hell do you think you're doing by advocating the theft of property from the other 99.999999% of people?

You're a disgusting human being, because you steal from others to satisfy your own wants. Shame on you.

In the US you have to be a millionaire to afford to take care of your own and your families health too without assistance (due to the massive power of the insurance industry etc).

If 99% of people saved all the time to be ready to care for parents, grandparents, spouses and children... then there'd be a lot less people out there willing to spend money buying the fruits of peoples work. Which means there'd be a lot more people not earning enough to be able to save.

So I say again, 99% of the population is in both Group A and Group B. I take it you do not agree?

How old are you anyway? Atlas is off the hook, he's allowed to think Ayn Rand is witty and clever for another few years at least before the embarrassment sets in. But what's your excuse?

HAHAHAHHAHAHAH!!  I guess ignorace really is bliss.  When people control the vasty majority of the wealth, that means they reap the vast majority of benefits from the system, therefore its their obligation to pay the vast majority of the taxes.

Time for a reality check using FACTS and NUMBERS, not opinion pulled out of your ass...


http://thesocietypages.org/graphicsociology/files/2009/05/conley_champagne_distribution.png

http://markpalermo.tripod.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/.pond/cocktail.jpg.w300h300.jpg

http://static7.businessinsider.com/image/4cdacea9cadcbbd007010000/chart-wealth-distribution.png


This would be a good read for you, an actual acedemic paper, not a youtube clip or someone's blog: http://www.clms.neu.edu/publication/documents/Wealth_in_America.pdf

Couple of quick quotes from the research paper:




Yes, that's right, the FED EXCLUDES the wealthest of the wealthy from the data, otherwise what is already a horrendous disparity would be absolutely unbearable.

http://images.quickblogcast.com/85389-74649/Percent_Distribution_of_Wealth.jpg



http://www.truthout.org/robin-hood-reverse-us-seven-examples

Your first sentence is false. One need not be a "millionaire" to care for their family. None of my extended family, nor any of my friends' families, are millionaires... yet somehow they're all able to care for their grandparents - usually because the grandparents were thrifty and prudent and made good life decisions. They didn't rely on others to pick up the slack.

Individuals should be responsible for themselves, and when they cannot be, they should rely on the voluntary efforts of friends, family, and charity. In no case is it moral, or justified, to forcefully take the property of other people - who have goals, family situations, and desires of their own - in order to satisfy your own needs. It is theft.

And no, people in general are not in both groups in equal portions. Many individuals TAKE much more than they give to the public trough. Most people actually, are net takers, and it is a minority of successful, very productive individuals who are forced by government violence and the threat of imprisonment to support the rest. I think it is immoral to steal wealth from any person, whether from poor to rich or rich to poor. It is wrong for the Goldman Sachs executive to steal from the poor through his lobbying of the Federal Reserve to inflate the money supply. It is similarly wrong of the poor person to lobby Congress to steal the money from the wealthy man and give it to him in the form of various "public services."

Regarding my age, I'm not sure why that matters, but I'm 27. When I was a teenager, as you assume I am, I thought much more like you do. Naive and with a very confused moral compass. I'm not here defending Ayn Rand, I'm here defending myself.

Sir, you may some day realize that such a graph, along with all your fun statistics, are actually showing you a distribution of production and when you learn what production is, then you may re-evaluate your snide stance. Nobody is arguing that the rich don't own most of the wealth. Of course they do. They produced it - by creating things of value and trading them with those who were happy to part with the money. I will add the caveat that any "ruler" who made his money by theft of the population (like kings, etc) have no legitimate claim to their fortune. The Saudi princes, and the Queen of England, should all be on the street.

What you're actually showing me is a graph of how much rich people have already contributed to society. For every dollar in their vast bank account represents more than a dollar's worth of value they provided to someone else. If this were not true, the trade would not have occurred (of course there are exceptions, but the general observation is valid). The very small number of individuals who just "inherited" their money, still didn't take it from anyone - it was produced by the person who left it to them, and you have no right to seize such wealth by force to make yourself feel better.

Indeed, given that you've shown me a graph of who has produced what, it would not be unreasonable to make the argument that the poor should pay all the taxes, since the rich already produced billions of dollars of value for the world, and the poor have done little. Does that idea make you uncomfortable?

Note that I make less than $30k per year, so please don't write me off as a "greedy fat cat" or sling any other insults at me to cover up the fact that you think it's okay to steal from people who have more than you. I'm merely someone who knows the difference between production and consumption, and I respect the former, while you do not. I know where wealth comes from, while you seem to know where it should go - you simply see wealth out there, in a distribution you deem unfair, and you want to seize it from those who have it and give it to those who you think should have it.

You also perhaps have missed the real lesson of Robin Hood. He wasn't stealing from "the rich." He was stealing from the government, who took by force of taxation the production of the people. Some day I hope you'll realize you are on the side of that government - you advocate theft through taxation, while Robin Hood was on the side of the producers, taking back what was rightfully their property.

Ah, the great fallacy of the free marketeers... that everyone who is rich MUST be highly productive.

Please don't misstate my opinion. I never said everyone who is rich must be highly productive. I merely said that most wealthy people, probably the great majority, were highly productive.

Further, as one approaches a free market (which we are nowhere near having), without government favoritism, it becomes increasingly difficult to grow or maintain wealth without being highly productive. Many of those who, today, are both wealthy and "non-productive" are in fact able to subsist in that way because of government distortions in an otherwise free market. Bankers, who obtain vast wealth through the inflation of the fiat monetary system, are a great example. In a free market, a banker would actually have to provide a valuable service to become wealthy.

The first sentence in your Adam Smith quote is very important, and it has something to do with the last sentence. It is not the free businessman who should be your enemy - it is the violent government, which starts wars, protects its friends, and provides all manner of distortion and corruption upon the public. Remember too that without those "opulent merchants" mentioned in the quote, every one of the 100,000 families would be toiling in the mud. The wealthy did not put the peasants in the field They did, however, enable some to rise above it. The natural state of man is poor, hungry, and cold. It is foolish to see modern society, with all the wealth that we have, and then assume that such wealth caused those who don't have it to remain in that natural state. We would all be there, but for the business man.

Then obviously I didn't mistate your opinion because that's exactly what you said before and it is equally untrue.

My thesis: most wealthy people earned their money.
My statistical source: "Only 16% of high-net-worth individuals inherited their stash, according to Capgemini." - Economist article, http://www.economist.com/node/17929057

Your thesis: most wealthy people did not earn their money.
Your statistical source: ???

And even if 100% of wealthy people inherited their money, you don't have the right to steal it from them. Unless a rich man stole his wealth (such as a congressman who taxed it away from its rightful owner), you have no claim to it.

Quote me where myself or Smith said anything about inhereting money, then I'll conceed the point.

Perhaps I misunderstood. What is your thesis?

Productivity and/or hard work is generally inversely related to wealth.

Hmmmm. So then does it hold that the harder I work, and more productive I am, the less wealth I will accumulate? Or does the inverse of that hold, so that the less I work, and the less productive I am, the greater my fortune will become?

Certainly you can't believe those things?

Read the quote by Smith again until you understand what he's saying.  This isn't theoretical, this is how things actually arrange themselves without active intervention.


In a free market or anything close to a free market, the hardest working people are those on the lowest rung of the ladder.  The guy that works the hardest is the guy in the sweatshop that gets paid pennies per week.  The entire system depends on this guy, because it is his cheap labor and hard work that allows everyone else to reap the massive profits of his labor.  This man does more work than anyone, but paid less than 1/400 of even a minimum wage US worker.

On the flip side of the working world we have the corporate executives that are paid, on average, 300-500x more than the US workers (not international, sweatshop workers, which they are paid many hundreds of thousands of times more than).  Do they do 300-500x more work than the guy standing behind the cash register?  Absolutely not.

Then we move into the non-working world - the owners of the means of production, land, buildings, etc.  These people do literally next to nothing, but reap the most rewards of anyone... for doing absolutely nothing.  They don't need to lift a finger to do labor, but they still collect ungodly amounts of money simply because of what they own, many hundreds of millions of times more money than the guy busting his ass for 15+ hours per day, 7 days per week in the sweatshop.  These people are not at all vital to the system, only their assets are.




The bottom line here is that financial reward in a free market system is NOT tied to how hard one works.  That myth is just that, a myth.  Financial reward is based on power, and power is based on the control of the means of production.  Want it get rich?  Hard work is not how you do it.  You need to strive for control of the means of production and/or the power to control people.

The bottom line here is that financial reward in a free market system is NOT tied to how hard one works.

Beautiful isn't it? It's actually tied to how much value you produce for people.

BINGO

You obviously didn't listen to a word I said, nor the quote from Smith.  The people that actually create value are the lowest level of workers.  The people that get paid the most don't create a damn thing, they merely control the means of production.

By what measure do they produce value? Anybody can be a low-class rock pusher. Hardly a valuable commodity by any measure.

Also, the people at the top are responsible for a lot. Sound delegation and strategy is very scarce. Restaurants fail due to poor ownership or management. Not bad labor.

The system doesn't function without the people at the lowest rung.  The same cannot be said for those at the top rung.

The people at the top are responsible for nothing other than having their name on a deed.  The system functions the same whether the deed reads John Smith or Bill Roberts.  The only difference is who gets to pocket the huge sums of money.

I wish you luck running a company or property profitably by doing absolutely nothing. You know nothing about business.

Ironic statement of the year.

We're about to break even with BitTalk.tv and exit into profit. What have you created?

I trust that's including the tax withholdings for your legitimate business.

We are not based in the United States.

That doesn't even make sense.  I'm just asking whether you file a tax return with the IRS.

We don't need to. Again, we're not based within the United States.

Atlas gets +1 for being correct, +1 for reaching profitability, and +1 for figuring out how not to pay US government extortion money. Nice!