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re: John Galt
Alisa — (archived)

These fools and knaves you speak of: are these poor souls predestined or can they do something about it? Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that you are going with predestination. To me this is a load of crap. Unless you're mentally unsound, there is something you can do about your situation, if you want to. There's nothing worse in the world than to make yourself a victim. Of course, just because you take the initiative to change your life, doesn't mean the white-collar criminal down the street will choose to do the same. One glitch in Rand's system is that there is no room for very bad people. She assumes that at some point they will fail, but that might only happen after they've destroyed the lives of countless people. I can't say that I'm completely against government restrictions. There's a lot of stupid people out there, and a lot of inherently evil people, too. It would take many, many years to create Rand's utopia. Something not too short from a dictatorship would probably have to be established in order to weed out "undesirables." In this case, the objectivist utopia comes dangerously close to communism, and how it ended up working when tried in the real world. A point I did want to make is that not all capitalists/objectivists are rich white men looking to prey on the lower classes. People from all different backgrounds have embraced this discipline. Rand herself was financially unstable for many years preceding the sales of her novels. Her and her husband barely made enough to scrape by. Even so, she still held the same philosophy which definitely favored the rich. When considering this, you must remember that her rich achieved their status by hard, satisfying, honest work. The riches were secondary to the satifaction of the career. When you make money unethically, the monetary gain becomes more important than anything else. This isn't what Ayn Rand preached. Now, you've stated what you don't believe. I'm interested to know what system you feel would work and what your philosophic views are.

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