Ayn Rand: "Francisco's Money Speech"

[Filthy Keynes]

"Francisco's Money Speech"

CAPITALISM MAGAZINE


The following is an excerpt from Atlas Shrugged, © Copyright, 1957, by Ayn Rand. It is reprinted with permission from the Estate of Ayn Rand.

"So you think that money is the root of all evil?" said Francisco d'Anconia. "Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?

"When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears not all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor--your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money, Is this what you consider evil?

"Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions--and you'll learn that man's mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.

"But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made--before it can be looted or mooched--made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.'

"To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss--the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery--that you must offer them values, not wounds--that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best that your money can find. And when men live by trade--with reason, not force, as their final arbiter--it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability--and the degree of a man's productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?

"But money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires. Money is the scourge of the men who attempt to reverse the law of causality--the men who seek to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind.

"Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants: money will not give him a code of values, if he's evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he's evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgment, ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered: that no man may be smaller than his money. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

"Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth--the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one, would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune. Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve the mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

"Money is your means of survival. The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence. Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men's vices or men's stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment's or a penny's worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame. Then you'll scream that money is evil. Evil, because it would not pinch-hit for your self-respect? Evil, because it would not let you enjoy your depravity? Is this the root of your hatred of money?

"Money will always remain an effect and refuse to replace you as the cause. Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices. Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit. Is this the root of your hatred of money?

"Or did you say it's the love of money that's the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It's the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money--and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it.

"Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.

"Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another--their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.

"But money demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or to keep it. Men who have no courage, pride or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life, men who apologize for being rich--will not remain rich for long. They are the natural bait for the swarms of looters that stay under rocks for centuries, but come crawling out at the first smell of a man who begs to be forgiven for the guilt of owning wealth. They will hasten to relieve him of the guilt--and of his life, as he deserves.

"Then you will see the rise of the men of the double standard--the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money--the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law--men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims--then money becomes its creators' avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.

"Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion--when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing--when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors--when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you--when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice--you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that is does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.

"Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked, 'Account overdrawn.'

"When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, 'Who is destroying the world? You are.

"You stand in the midst of the greatest achievements of the greatest productive civilization and you wonder why it's crumbling around you, while you're damning its life-blood--money. You look upon money as the savages did before you, and you wonder why the jungle is creeping back to the edge of your cities. Throughout men's history, money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, whose names changed, but whose method remained the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the producers bound, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor. That phrase about the evil of money, which you mouth with such righteous recklessness, comes from a time when wealth was produced by the labor of slaves--slaves who repeated the motions once discovered by somebody's mind and left unimproved for centuries. So long as production was ruled by force, and wealth was obtained by conquest, there was little to conquer, Yet through all the centuries of stagnation and starvation, men exalted the looters, as aristocrats of the sword, as aristocrats of birth, as aristocrats of the bureau, and despised the producers, as slaves, as traders, as shopkeepers--as industrialists.

"To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money--and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man's mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being--the self-made man--the American industrialist.

"If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose--because it contains all the others--the fact that they were the people who created the phrase 'to make money.' No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity--to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words 'to make money' hold the essence of human morality.

"Yet these were the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of the looters' continents. Now the looters' credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide-- as, I think, he will.

"Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns--or dollars. Take your choice--there is no other--and your time is running out."

The above is an excerpt from Atlas Shrugged, © Copyright, 1957, by Ayn Rand. It is reprinted with permission from the Estate of Ayn Rand.

[Book]

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3454/3983964772_3e656cdbd1.jpg

Ayn Rand cheated on her husband and was an adulteress. So much for her writing about "virtue" and "ethics"...lol.

:oo-->

READ ALL ABOUT IT HERE (http://www.noblesoul.com/orc/bio/brandens.html)

[Gaillo]

Book,
Attacking the messenger is not the same as attacking the message. While I pretty much despise who Ayn Rand was as a human being, I find her writings on the subjects of money, freedom, and rational thought to be unequaled by any writer in the last 100 years. If you are going to make an attack on what Filthy Keynes just posted, why not attack the material itself? I'm thinking probably because you cannot find fault with it... so there's nothing left to do but attack the author herself.

[Glass]

The following is an excerpt from Atlas Shrugged, © Copyright, 1957, by Ayn Rand. It is reprinted with permission from the Estate of Ayn Rand.

"So you think that money is the root of all evil?" said Francisco d'Anconia. "Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?

"When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears not all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor--your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money, Is this what you consider evil?

"Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions--and you'll learn that man's mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.

"But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made--before it can be looted or mooched--made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.'

"To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss--the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery--that you must offer them values, not wounds--that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best that your money can find. And when men live by trade--with reason, not force, as their final arbiter--it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability--and the degree of a man's productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?

"But money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires. Money is the scourge of the men who attempt to reverse the law of causality--the men who seek to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind.

"Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants: money will not give him a code of values, if he's evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he's evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgment, ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered: that no man may be smaller than his money. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

"Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth--the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one, would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune. Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve the mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

"Money is your means of survival. The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence. Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men's vices or men's stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment's or a penny's worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame. Then you'll scream that money is evil. Evil, because it would not pinch-hit for your self-respect? Evil, because it would not let you enjoy your depravity? Is this the root of your hatred of money?

"Money will always remain an effect and refuse to replace you as the cause. Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices. Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit. Is this the root of your hatred of money?

"Or did you say it's the love of money that's the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It's the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money--and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it.

"Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.

"Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another--their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.

"But money demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or to keep it. Men who have no courage, pride or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life, men who apologize for being rich--will not remain rich for long. They are the natural bait for the swarms of looters that stay under rocks for centuries, but come crawling out at the first smell of a man who begs to be forgiven for the guilt of owning wealth. They will hasten to relieve him of the guilt--and of his life, as he deserves.

"Then you will see the rise of the men of the double standard--the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money--the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law--men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims--then money becomes its creators' avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.

"Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion--when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing--when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors--when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you--when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice--you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that is does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.

"Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked, 'Account overdrawn.'

"When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, 'Who is destroying the world? You are.

"You stand in the midst of the greatest achievements of the greatest productive civilization and you wonder why it's crumbling around you, while you're damning its life-blood--money. You look upon money as the savages did before you, and you wonder why the jungle is creeping back to the edge of your cities. Throughout men's history, money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, whose names changed, but whose method remained the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the producers bound, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor. That phrase about the evil of money, which you mouth with such righteous recklessness, comes from a time when wealth was produced by the labor of slaves--slaves who repeated the motions once discovered by somebody's mind and left unimproved for centuries. So long as production was ruled by force, and wealth was obtained by conquest, there was little to conquer, Yet through all the centuries of stagnation and starvation, men exalted the looters, as aristocrats of the sword, as aristocrats of birth, as aristocrats of the bureau, and despised the producers, as slaves, as traders, as shopkeepers--as industrialists.

"To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money--and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man's mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being--the self-made man--the American industrialist.

"If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose--because it contains all the others--the fact that they were the people who created the phrase 'to make money.' No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity--to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words 'to make money' hold the essence of human morality.

"Yet these were the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of the looters' continents. Now the looters' credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide-- as, I think, he will.

"Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns--or dollars. Take your choice--there is no other--and your time is running out.


For readability

[k-os]

I am not afraid to say it. I am a huge fan of Ayn Rand. Yes, she was probably not a good wife to her husband, and that's a shame. That is certainly not a quality to admire. I am not saying it's right, but if we discounted all works done by those with a scarlet letter, I think we might not be left with much.

Ayn Rand lit the flame inside me that eventually changed me from a public-school-indoctrinated-gun-hating-liberal-drone into what I am today, which, although I am an unfinished product, I am light years from where I was before I read Atlas Shrugged.

I heart Francisco d'Anconia. What a bad ass.

What's kind of funny is that while reading the book the first time, I was mad at Francisco for his acts of destruction. That seems so silly now.

[Buddha]

A single sentence from that lengthy passage says it all. "Money is the barometer of a society's virtue."

[Gaillo]

The ultimate fate of TPTB, so succinctly put that I couldn't do better even if I tried for the next 1,000 years! Read this, and be awestruck:


Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.

Absolutely AMAZING! :)

[Still Barbaro]

Filthy Keynes,

Great excerpt, for a book I haven't read, but should read.

Thank you.

And Book, that is her personal business, and their surely was a reason for it.

[Twisted Titan]

The ultimate fate of TPTB, so succinctly put that I couldn't do better even if I tried for the next 1,000 years! Read this, and be awestruck:


Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.

Absolutely AMAZING! :)



Thank God I own Firearms to Protect My Myself and Loved Ones from the coming Murderers and pickpockets.


T

[Book]

why not attack the material itself?



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uHSv1asFvU

http://images.encyclopediadramatica.com/images/1/1a/Aynrandcartoon.jpg

Where to begin? Ha Ha.

I read Atlas Shrugged and some of her other stuff many years ago. This old ugly windbag was nothing more than a Talmudist jew looking down her hooked nose at us unworthy goyim. Her entire cult was and still is comprised of jews. Her underlying message was personal greed and selfishness cloaked in indignant CHOSENITE self-righteousness.

Don't feel too embarrassed Gaillo. We all went through our RANDROID (http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Randroid) phase as young naive college students...lol.

:D

[madfranks]

You can buy a D'anconia Copper Round (http://www.fmmex.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=1000033&zenid=v28dhat31u29t1fa1leqhtfl72) for under $2.00; kind of cool as a novelty.

[Book]

:oo-->

[Silver Rocket Bitches!]

Objectivism: My happiness is all that matters. If you get stepped on because I'm achieving my happiness goals, it's your fault for being weak.



TPTB must really buy into the Ayn Rand school of philosophy.

[cedarchopper]

If Rand despises force and violence to achieve one's ends...and then condemns Arabs, but not Israel, she obviously is dishonest in principle. Israel has used terror and violence on the Arabs from the beginning...but I guess they are supposed to react with subservience to their (American provided) modern technological superiors?

[mightymanx]

why not attack the material itself?



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uHSv1asFvU

http://images.encyclopediadramatica.com/images/1/1a/Aynrandcartoon.jpg

Where to begin? Ha Ha.

I read Atlas Shrugged and some of her other stuff many years ago. This old ugly windbag was nothing more than a Talmudist jew looking down her hooked nose at us unworthy goyim. Her entire cult was and still is comprised of jews. Her underlying message was personal greed and selfishness cloaked in indignant CHOSENITE self-righteousness.

Don't feel too embarrassed Gaillo. We all went through our RANDROID (http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Randroid) phase as young naive college students...lol.

:D


Yet again you do not address the quote. just smappy pictures for strawman arguments.

[Filthy Keynes]

This thread was started with the intention of edumacating (sic) people about "money". Rand had an excellent grasp of what money is, how it functions and how the "looters" have abused the "producers".

This is not meant to be an "attack Rand" thread.

PS. I personally don't agree with all that she espouses in Objectivism, however she had a brilliant mind in that she saw (predicted) what would happen to USA in the end - and she saw it from half a century ago. Reading that quote at the top of the page is just amazing.

[learn2swim]

She's a hypocrite, the "chosen ones" tend to do this.

[Filthy Keynes]

She's a hypocrite, the "chosen ones" tend to do this.


Have you ever owned a US Treasury Bond?

Keep in mind that a Bond is a promise to tax the citizens. I would guess that many people on this forum are hypocrites. Aren't we all?

[sirgonzo420]

She's a hypocrite, the "chosen ones" tend to do this.


everyone's a hypocrite... the "chosen" are just a bit more practiced at it

[learn2swim]

This thread was started with the intention of edumacating (sic) people about "money". Rand had an excellent grasp of what money is, how it functions and how the "looters" have abused the "producers".

This is not meant to be an "attack Rand" thread.

PS. I personally don't agree with all that she espouses in Objectivism, however she had a brilliant mind in that she saw (predicted) what would happen to USA in the end - and she saw it from half a century ago. Reading that quote at the top of the page is just amazing.


True, she makes some good points, but she has her faults. Like most people, her ethnocentrism makes her biased.

[learn2swim]

She's a hypocrite, the "chosen ones" tend to do this.


everyone's a hypocrite... the "chosen" are just a bit more practiced at it


When someone points out that one is being a hypocrite, they will usually admit it. Not the chosen ones, they call you a anti-semite.

[sirgonzo420]

She's a hypocrite, the "chosen ones" tend to do this.


everyone's a hypocrite... the "chosen" are just a bit more practiced at it


When someone points out that one is being a hypocrite, they will usually admit it. Not the chosen ones, they call you a anti-semite.


well, I guess if you're gonna be a hypocrite, you might as well go all out!

Chutzpah for the win!

[Book]

This is not meant to be an "attack Rand" thread.



It was meant to be a pro-Rand-only propaganda thread...lol.

:D

[sirgonzo420]

This is not meant to be an "attack Rand" thread.



It was meant to be a pro-Rand-only propaganda thread...lol.

:D


LOL

Do you have anything to say about the actual quote that was posted?

[Book]

Do you have anything to say about the actual quote that was posted?



http://ceoworld.biz/ceo/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/ruth-madoff-bernard-ponzi-scheme.jpg

Madoff adored Rand and quoted her Virtue stuff to naive goyim fools all the time...lol.

:D

[sirgonzo420]

Do you have anything to say about the actual quote that was posted?



http://ceoworld.biz/ceo/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/ruth-madoff-bernard-ponzi-scheme.jpg

Madoff adored Rand and quoted her Virtue stuff to naive goyim fools all the time...lol.

:D


Nice try, but that really doesn't have much to do with the original quote, does it?


I see what you are trying to do by painting Rand as an unsavory character that couldn't possibly ever write anything decent or true, but methinks you are missing the point.

I'm not a fan of the Rothschild family, but if a Rothschild were to say "the sun is hot", I wouldn't disagree simply because they come from the richest, most diabolical family on earth.

Truth = truth, no matter who the messenger is.

[Hatha Sunahara]

A long time ago I was enthralled by Ayn Rand. I bought all her books and read
them. I was gaga just like some of the posters on this thread about Ayn Rand.
Then it occurred to me that Ayn Rand was the Gordon Gecko of her day. Greed is
good. The Virtue of Selfishness. She mercilessly attacked altruism. Read
Capitalism the Unknown Ideal. Altruism, she said was the foundation of
totalitarian regimes. The desire to live for others, transformed into the
desire to live for the State. Rand twisted altruism into a knot that made it
look like the root of all evil. And it isn't. The love of money is the root
of all evil. The love of money is greed or selfishness. Rand misperceived
altruism. And she glorified selfishness. Money is not the barometer of virtue
in a society. It is the barometer of corruption.

Altruism is really a desire to help others that is misdirected by people with
political motives. There is nothing bad about altruism. It is what used to be
called innocence, or kindness, and it is what makes sheeple what they are.
Rand wanted us all to be corrupted with greed, or what she called selfishness.
I'd rather live in a world where people are kind and generous. But that won't
happen in a world where people worship the ideas of Rand and Gecko. Rand
mortally wounded kindness and generosity in America--made it look like it's
stupid to be kind and generous to others. Gecko killed it completely.

I don't worship Rand, and I'm suspicious of people who do.


Hatha

[Ash_Williams]

I never read Rand.

One thing I know... if you convince your opponent to feel bad about winning, it really makes victory easy.

Don't have money, don't have power. Greed and selfishness and bad traits. Sharing is good. Remember that and be a good little slave. Don't worry, all those rich people who are playing you like a chess piece aren't as happy as they look, and karma is going to get them, and they're going to hell. Just be a nobody and be happy about it. Only victims are "good". Be a victim.

[k-os]

Do you have anything to say about the actual quote that was posted?



http://ceoworld.biz/ceo/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/ruth-madoff-bernard-ponzi-scheme.jpg

Madoff adored Rand and quoted her Virtue stuff to naive goyim fools all the time...lol.

:D


Nice try, but that really doesn't have much to do with the original quote, does it?


I see what you are trying to do by painting Rand as an unsavory character that couldn't possibly ever write anything decent or true, but methinks you are missing the point.

I'm not a fan of the Rothschild family, but if a Rothschild were to say "the sun is hot", I wouldn't disagree simply because they come from the richest, most diabolical family on earth.

Truth = truth, no matter who the messenger is.


Great point, sirgonzo420. And let me tell you how relieved I am to see other people calling Book on his strawman stuff.

[nunaem]

Ayn Rand's philosophy is just a shallow and perverted reiteration of Nietzsche's. And her writing pales in comparison to earlier libertarians.

Why is she famous again? Maybe we should look at the messenger rather than the message.

[Filthy Keynes]

Maybe we should look at the messenger rather than the message.


This thread is about the message.

If you don't like the messenger, then that's fine - start your own thread about the messenger.

[Book]

...Rand wanted us all to be corrupted with greed, or what she called selfishness.
I'd rather live in a world where people are kind and generous. But that won't
happen in a world where people worship the ideas of Rand...


Hatha


http://www.cbs.nl/NR/rdonlyres/1B514D7D-7EF7-4402-8FAF-73E0B3EFE6F9/0/E2503g1.gif
CHILDLESS WOMEN



Rand remained childless. Motherhood was not even mentioned once within her 1088 PAGES of Atlas Shrugged. Not one character was a parent.

Female Randroids today consider children to be "looters" who require maternal sacrifice and illogical love.

:D

[ximmy]

;)

[nunaem]

Maybe we should look at the messenger rather than the message.


This thread is about the message.

If you don't like the messenger, then that's fine - start your own thread about the messenger.



My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (--its will to power:) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement ("union") with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power.

Ayn Rand was supposedly influenced by Nietzsche. Why did she leave the second sentence out of her philosophy? Is it because it's only for the you-know-who's?

[Gaillo]

Rand remained childless. Motherhood was not even mentioned once within her 1088 PAGES of Atlas Shrugged. Not one character was a parent.

Female Randroids today consider children to be "looters" who require maternal sacrifice and illogical love.


Bullsh*t.

Here's Rand's stance on motherhood:


PLAYBOY: In your opinion, is a woman immoral who chooses to devote herself to home and family instead of a career?

RAND: Not immoral—I would say she is impractical, because a home cannot be a full-time occupation, except when her children are young. However, if she wants a family and wants to make that her career, at least for a while, it would be proper—if she approaches it as a career, that is, if she studies the subject, if she defines the rules and principles by which she wants to bring up her children, if she approaches her task in an intellectual manner. It is a very responsible task and a very important one, but only when treated as a science, not as a mere emotional indulgence.


I will ask you to project the look on a child’s face when he grasps the answer to some problem he has been striving to understand. It is a radiant look of joy, of liberation, almost of triumph, which is unself-conscious, yet self-assertive, and its radiance seems to spread in two directions: outward, as an illumination of the world—inward, as the first spark of what is to become the fire of an earned pride. If you have seen this look, or experienced it, you know that if there is such a concept as “sacred”—meaning: the best, the highest possible to man—this look is the sacred, the not-to-be-betrayed, the not-to-be-sacrificed for anything or anyone.


The reason children are not featured in Atlas Shrugged or in any of her other novels is quite simply because those books were not about children. They were about grownups doing grownup things. The character Dagny Taggart was a woman who chose not to have children (a very minor detail among the great many important things she did choose to do in that book). Many women in real life choose not to have children. I don't consider that to be such an unusual thing. Many women authors chose not to have children. Yet I don't hear too many people accusing Jane Austen or Margaret Mitchell of believing that families are soul-killing prisons.

As for the charges made in this thread that Objectivists do not exhibit kindness, giving, etc. and are "selfish brutes" who do what they want without regard for others, obviously the posters do not understand what the Objectivist philosophy actually teaches. Selfishness from an OBJECTIVE standpoint means that the person acts with RATIONAL SELF INTEREST - a concept that includes respecting other people's boundaries and property rights. Sometimes the "selfish" thing for a person to do, because it makes them feel good about themselves as well as reaffirming their connection to humanity, is to be generous, to give, to share, and in cases where a person is truly needy and not just mooching... to be compassionate and charitable.

Again, I do not think much of Ayn Rand as a person - she undoubtably did hypocritical things in her life and definitely did NOT live up to her philosophy... but attacking her as a person does NOT invalidate the truth of her monumental contributions to the philosophical, economic, political, and artistic disciplines.

[RJB]

Has it occured to the randroids that her philosophy applies the the banksters, NOT YOU.


Her whole philosophy is a perversion of what made this country great. The beauty of the freemarket is freedom of association, in other words Liberty. She has perverted you into thinking that the beauty of our country is based greed and profit at any cost. This is the difference between liberty and corporatism. In other words, think about BP using our coast guard to suppress freedom of the press for profit.

[Gaillo]

Has it occured to the randroids that her philosophy applies the the banksters, NOT YOU.


Her whole philosophy is a perversion of what made this country great. The beauty of the freemarket is freedom of association, in other words Liberty. She has perverted you into thinking that the beauty of our country is based greed and profit at any cost. This is the difference between liberty and corporatism. In other words, think about BP using our coast guard to suppress freedom of the press for profit.


Are we talking about the same person/philosophy? Objectivism teaches that rational PRODUCTION of VALUE (commodities, goods, services, scientific breakthroughs, etc.) and FREE MARKETS for that value are the lofty ideals to be sought, not "profit at any cost".

[learn2swim]

Maybe we should look at the messenger rather than the message.


This thread is about the message.

If you don't like the messenger, then that's fine - start your own thread about the messenger.



My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (--its will to power:) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement ("union") with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power.

Ayn Rand was supposedly influenced by Nietzsche. Why did she leave the second sentence out of her philosophy? Is it because it's only for the you-know-who's?


And you have to question Nietzsche. Was he a homo? was he an occultist? Seems like most of these types are.

[RJB]

Are we talking about the same person/philosophy? Objectivism teaches that rational PRODUCTION of VALUE (commodities, goods, services, scientific breakthroughs, etc.) and FREE MARKETS for that value are the lofty ideals to be sought, not "profit at any cost".
I'm basing this on reading "Atlas Shrugged" (I also read Anthem and We the Living) almost 2 decades ago in my early 20s. Somethings she wrote didn't sit well with me, but I dismissed it as I was an on fire conservative/libertarian. That book, Rush Limbaugh, and the like were my guiding light at the time.

Maybe it's my dislike of me trusting neocons. Limbaugh, Hannity and the like seem to preach her message. I see War in Iraq and Afganistan sold as a necessary "good" to American

I could be wrong. Maybe 2 decades of stewing in my mind it no longer resembles the actual book. But from Atlas Shrugged I took it as her justifying greed. If I'm wrong I apologize for misdirecting the thread. I'll have to give the book another read.

[Gaillo]

Maybe we should look at the messenger rather than the message.


This thread is about the message.

If you don't like the messenger, then that's fine - start your own thread about the messenger.



My idea is that every specific body strives to become master over all space and to extend its force (--its will to power:) and to thrust back all that resists its extension. But it continually encounters similar efforts on the part of other bodies and ends by coming to an arrangement ("union") with those of them that are sufficiently related to it: thus they then conspire together for power.

Ayn Rand was supposedly influenced by Nietzsche. Why did she leave the second sentence out of her philosophy? Is it because it's only for the you-know-who's?


And you have to question Nietzsche. Was he a homo? was he an occultist? Seems like most of these types are.


Ayn Rand was influenced by MANY, MANY philosophers during the formulation of Objectivism, but that does not mean she necessarily AGREES with all their teachings. In many cases, she adopted portions of other's philosophy while disagreeing with the overall "gist" of it. A great example is Aristotle... Objectivism states exactly as Aristotle did that there is ONE REALITY that IS what it IS, regardless of how you feel about it or wish it to be. However, Objectivism strongly disagrees with many of the "mystical" aspects of Aristotle's philosophy, and outright rejects it as a complete philosophical system. Nietzsche has been outright lambasted and harshly criticized by Rand and other Objectivist proponents, not only for its glorification of force (an example of which can be seen in the quoted text) but also for it's root philosophical structure - that of Plato and those who built philosophies based on his "shadow cave" allegory of unknowable reality.

So far in this thread, we've seen attacks on Ayn Rand as a person, attacks on Ayn Rand by association with other philosophers, attacks using a few somewhat amusing images, and attacks through outright lies about what Objectivism teaches. However, we have YET TO SEE an attack on the economic concepts that the original poster (Filthy Keynes) brought to our attention... we've seen NO rational argument against the actual concepts of Francisco's money speech. Let's put away the straw men, and get to the meat of this... does anyone here disagree with what was originally posted?

[RJB]

we've seen NO rational argument against the actual concepts of Francisco's money speech. Let's put away the straw men, and get to the meat of this... does anyone here disagree with what was originally posted?
Fair enough. I reread the above piece indetail.

When I read this book, I didn't understand the Federal Reserve and Gold money. Reading the above passage about Gold and the destroyers of money with different eyes I realize I missed a lot...

When I read it years ago, I thought she was talking about liberals, not banksters. I find I'm in agreement with a lot of what is said in the speech (outside of the context of the book.)

If that's the pure spirit of Objectivism, I think most of my dislike for her has come from people like Limbaugh and Hannity who give a Hegelian out look of It's Obama against the good corporations when in reality it's Obama working for the corporation-- different than what is talked about in the above speech.

To sum it up, based on the above writing and nothing else, I have more of a disagreement with her "students" in the MSM than Rand.

I will definitely give the book another read.

[Gaillo]

RJB,
You are a good man, willing to re-examine your beliefs like that! Truly a rarity in this day and age!
If you like what you read, also check this out... it was a totally mind-blowing life changing book for me:

Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (by Leonard Peikoff)

http://www.amazon.com/Objectivism-Philosophy-Ayn-Rand-Library/dp/0452011019/

[Glass]

^^^I don't have any problems for the most part. The gist of it is that there are those that produce and those that pillage. The pillagers might fashion themselves as shepherds or farmers of those that produce. So long as the process is without resistance. Once resistance to the "shepherding" appears then pillaging follows.

Give it to me freely or I will take it by force. Sounds like a protection racket to me.

The last couple of paragraphs worry me a bit because the industrialist of the late 1800's into the 1900's became those pillagers, the owners of a flock called workers whom they abused and killed when faced with resistance. I think those paragaphs smack of communist manifesto influences.

[Gaillo]

Glass,
You are correct... industrialists of the late 19th century figured out that they could use government influence to turn the government INTO an instrument of plunder, instead of it's rightful place as PROTECTOR against such plunder. There actually were some industrialists who attempted to fight this, including one who attempted to build a privately funded railroad, but they all found that they COULD NOT COMPETE with those who held the big gun of government to everyone else's heads, pillaging and destroying their competition at will with the "blessing" of the law.

Essentially, there are two ways for human beings to obtain what they need... produce it themselves and trade peacefully, or take it by force from others who are doing the first. Objectivist philosophy is based on the idea that the ONLY legitimate use of government is to protect the first group (the producers) from the second group (the coercive thieves). The extent to which government deviates from this purpose is the extent to which the government becomes corrupt and destructive to the governed.

[RJB]

I haven't converted :) As Glass states above there were some points open to interpretation in that speech. But I will give it another look and will duck out of this thread until I'm better armed knowledgewise either way.




RJB,
You are a good man, willing to re-examine your beliefs like that! Truly a rarity in this day and age!
If you like what you read, also check this out... it was a totally mind-blowing life changing book for me:

Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (by Leonard Peikoff)

http://www.amazon.com/Objectivism-Philosophy-Ayn-Rand-Library/dp/0452011019/

[Gaillo]

I haven't converted :)...

I know! ;)

However, you are willing to at least re-examine your beliefs about something as important as philosophy... which is what I was applauding you for. Most people do not have that much courage and integrity.

[Filthy Keynes]

By the way, if it wasn't for Limbaugh I would have never read that book. We all have our own personal story of how we came to know THE TRUTH and I found Limbaugh good at first, but then lacking in meat. He mentioned the book. I bought it. Read it. Liked it. Then I found Peter Schiff, bought his books, liked them, and then I found Ron Paul, met him in person in Washington DC at Campaign For Liberty, then joined forums for Gold/Silver then found Zero Hedge, then found JoeSixPack and this forum.

So here I am. Ayn Rand is one piece of my puzzle. She has a "creed" that I wish I could believe in but I can't: "I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."

Jesus said: "1 John 3:16 (King James Version) Hereby perceive we the love of God, because he laid down his life for us: and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren."

Again here: "John 15:13 (King James Version) Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends."

I almost agree with Rand, but not quite.

Today we are told by the government: "Greater love hath no man than this, that a Government take a mans life and lay it down for his friends."

HUGE DIFFERENCE!


Again HUGE DIFFERENCE.

By the way, Ayn Rand, who was an Athiest, ALMOST had it. But her creed came up short. Here is the Biblical view of her creed:

2 Thessalonians 3:8 (King James Version) Neither did we eat any man's bread for nought; but wrought with labour and travail night and day, that we might not be chargeable to any of you: (basically if you don't PRODUCE you don't EAT).

[ximmy]

But did she make a good pie?

[Gaillo]

Indeed, Filthy! We all come to know the truth through different means, and nobody EVER gets it all from one source. I also have some problems with aspects of Rand's philosophy, and can't agree with many of her viewpoints... I find her stance on many things to be over-blown, or (in at least one case I can recall) outright WRONG.

This does not disturb me, I was never looking for someone to follow or a "cult" or group to join, I'm like most people on this forum in that I'm just plain SICK OF THE LIES and all the BS we are fed to keep us enslaved. While I would go as far as say that I'm probably an Objectivist by loose definition of whatever that is, I do not DEFINE myself within those parameters. Everyone is different, we all have different life experiences and values, and there is NOT (at least that I've seen so far) a one-size-fits-all world view that is right for everyone.

BTW, thanks for posting the money speech... some great stuff there!

[Filthy Keynes]

Indeed, Filthy! We all come to know the truth through different means, and nobody EVER gets it all from one source. I also have some problems with aspects of Rand's philosophy, and can't agree with many of her viewpoints... I find her stance on many things to be over-blown, or (in at least one case I can recall) outright WRONG.

This does not disturb me, I was never looking for someone to follow or a "cult" or group to join, I'm like most people on this forum in that I'm just plain SICK OF THE LIES and all the BS we are fed to keep us enslaved. While I would go as far as say that I'm probably an Objectivist by loose definition of whatever that is, I do not DEFINE myself within those parameters. Everyone is different, we all have different life experiences and values, and there is NOT (at least that I've seen so far) a one-size-fits-all world view that is right for everyone.

BTW, thanks for posting the money speech... some great stuff there!


Thanks man. Exactly the same here.

[Book]

...obviously the posters do not understand what the Objectivist philosophy actually teaches.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uHSv1asFvU

Listen to the actual WORDS that come out of her own mouth in this teevee interview:

1) Talmudist Jewess expressing her utter Chosenite contempt for all us inferior goyim.

2) Supports the malignant jewish tumor growing upon Palestine.

3) Insanely describes "Israel" as peace-loving jewish victims of the attacking violent Arabs.

Even Phil Donahue was shocked at her insane rant which you now here in this thread call her brilliant Objectivist philosophy.

:ROFL:

WATCH THIS SHORT VIDEO !!!

[Gaillo]

...obviously the posters do not understand what the Objectivist philosophy actually teaches.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uHSv1asFvU

Listen to the actual WORDS that come out of her own mouth in this teevee interview:

1) Talmudist Jewess expressing her utter Chosenite contempt for all us inferior goyim.

2) Supports the malignant jewish tumor growing upon Palestine.

3) Insanely describes "Israel" as peace-loving jewish victims of the attacking violent Arabs.

Even Phil Donahue was shocked at her insane rant which you now here in this thread call her brilliant Objectivist philosophy.

:ROFL:

WATCH THIS SHORT VIDEO !!!



Again, I do NOT support Rand on many points, her support for Israel is one of the things that I COMPLETELY, 100% take issue with and think she was WRONG in. However, I cannot recall reading pro-Israel writings in any of her written works (of which I have not read all, just 6 or 7 of her more available books...). I know she was a New York Jew, who surrounded herself with a mostly New York Jew "inner circle" of friends (one of which was Alan Greenspan, before anyone else brings it up). Speaking with a pro-Israel viewpoint would naturally follow. However, once again, Book, I need to ask you - DO YOU disagree with the economic/monetary speech from Atlas Shrugged that was originally posted in this thread? Where in that speech does she say anything about Jews, Madoff, being annoying (cute cartoon, BTW... I'm keeping it! ;D) or any of the other straw-man "arguments" you've posted? Yes. She was a Jewish, adulterous, self-destructive (smoking alcoholic) hypocrite. We know that... It's widely published and adapted to the big screen... There is no argument to that effect from me or anyone on this forum that I'm aware of. My question to YOU is: what is YOUR argument against her writings and philosophy - and not her as a "person"?

[Book]

Yes. She was a Jewish, adulterous, self-destructive (smoking alcoholic) hypocrite. We know that... It's widely published and adapted to the big screen... There is no argument to that effect from me or anyone on this forum that I'm aware of.



http://tomhawes.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/shrug.png

Excellent. Now please explain why we should embrace WHAT she wrote when she herself obviously did not. Simple question.

:)

[Gaillo]

Yes. She was a Jewish, adulterous, self-destructive (smoking alcoholic) hypocrite. We know that... It's widely published and adapted to the big screen... There is no argument to that effect from me or anyone on this forum that I'm aware of.



http://tomhawes.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/shrug.png

Excellent. Now please explain why we should embrace WHAT she wrote when she herself obviously did not. Simple question.

:)






Many people throughout history have penned truths and ideals that they themselves were unable or unwilling to live up to. It's part of being a human being... there is always the possibility that you will KNOW what is right, yet fail to actually do it. Imperfection and weakness plague the human species, and probably will continue to do so for thousands more years. Do we dismiss calculus and classical physics because Isaac Newton was a power-mad homo? Do we discount the importance of Alan Turing's contributions to computer science because he was an effeminate coward? How about throwing away most of what we know about Radioactivity and Isotopes because Madam Curie was suicidally STUPID in her lab practice? Throwing out Ayn Rand's philosophy and writings because of the above mentioned (and well-documented!) character flaws and ethnic biases is equally disingenuous.

[Book]

http://www.evolvefish.com/fish/media/MA-NoGodTruth.jpg

Atlas Shrugged is 1088 PAGES long. Nobody ever once said that this novel was well written, fun to read, or a literary example of excellence. I myself slogged through it many years ago while in college. I also read The Fountainhead. I got it. She gave us all permission to be our most self-serving selves without apology. For a time that was exhilarating until our family and friends eventually observed that we had become selfish condescending assholes like Ayn Rand. At some point most of us outgrew Ayn Rand.

:)

[Gaillo]

http://www.evolvefish.com/fish/media/MA-NoGodTruth.jpg

Atlas Shrugged is 1088 PAGES long. Nobody ever once said that this novel was well written, fun to read, or a literary example of excellence. I myself slogged through it many years ago while in college. I also read The Fountainhead. I got it. She gave us all permission to be our most self-serving selves without apology. For a time that was exhilarating until our family and friends eventually observed that we had become selfish condescending assholes like Ayn Rand. At some point most of us outgrew Ayn Rand.

:)





C'mon, Book... THAT's your argument? The book was long? You found it boring? That you turned into a condescending asshole that your family didn't like any more so you "outgrew" what you obviously didn't understand to begin with anyway?

Buddy... "Thought Criminal" over on the other site (Who we all know of here as PDT, among other user names) has a better (yet still flawed) argument than that - and he at least quotes parts of the original poster's text to make his point! ;)

BTW, thanks for posting Gandhi and his quote... TRULY words to live by!

[MAGNES]

2 heavyweights battling it out here. ;D

I am afraid to step in.

Don't want to look stupid for one.

I rarely read every word carefully in a thread.

So thanks to all the posters.

@ the OP Keynes, many of us go way back,
Book is old school and he has JewDar, nobody
gets a free pass, 90 % of what Rand says may
be good, even for intellectuals and well
read people there are psyops, targeted, I don't
know enough about Rand, I actually read a lot
about this/her online, Atlas Shrugged has been
promoted on gim since day one, looking at her
other book, looks like she is promoting hedonism
and what goes with it, nihilism, this is a deliberate program,
Book sees this, why else would he post it.

@ Gaillo, corruption has always been with society,
Justice and government structure to achieve it
have always been the key issues, just did some
review, that is almost all Plato concerns himself with,
Justice and the Moral State, Plato is bigger than
anyone for many reasons. You mentioned Plato.
I fail to see how Rand owns those issues and labels
it "Objectivism", maybe I should read the book, lol .
Since Gaillo put it up I will, how's that. 8)

Philosophy has never been an area of mine,
but there was two old school gim students
I would love to here from on this.

As far as economics, maximizing utility is basically
the basis for the free economy, government interferes
in that, free choices decide where all the money goes,
it is one of the most perfect systems.

Okay now be gentle.

@ Gaillo , I will look at that book.

@ Book , I still got catching up to do.

[ximmy]

Although, I have little faith, I believe the wicked pose as angels of light...

And no wonder, for Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light. It is not surprising, then, if his servants also masquerade as servants of righteousness. Their end will be what their actions deserve. (2 Corinthians. 11:14-15)

[Gaillo]

MAGNES,
Either book brought up in this thread contains the same essentials, but for someone who is new to Rand, I would recommend "capitalism: the unknown ideal" before any other. It is a hard-hitting economic non-fiction work, one that most GS-US'ers will relate to. If you are looking for an overview of Rand's philosophical, economic, and political thought, look at the book I recommended as the 2nd post on this page (Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand).

[Book]

BTW, thanks for posting Gandhi and his quote... TRULY words to live by!



http://www.neurosciencemarketing.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/handshake.jpg

:)

[jetgraphics]

Money madness is a strange malady. Those who have it, do not know it. Those who do not have it, can easily recognize it.
Oddly enough, Ayn Rand had it.
Prosperity is not based on the volume of money tokens one acquires.
Prosperity is the creation / production of usable surplus goods and services, their trade / transportation, and the enjoyment thereof.

Money mad people rush about seeking the best way to "make money" - by scams like usury and gambling. They are concerned with "storing value" and investment.
Those who are not so afflicted seek to increase prosperity by making more, with less, so more can enjoy. They have a surplus to share, generously.

A good barometer is to ask someone which goal agrees with their ideals:
[1] I want to {win the lottery / hit the jackpot / beat the stock market} and be set for life;
or
[2] I want to be more productive, creative, inventive and make the world a better place.

[Gaillo]

BTW, thanks for posting Gandhi and his quote... TRULY words to live by!



http://www.neurosciencemarketing.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/handshake.jpg

:)





Book,
Thank you. Despite the fact that I have found you annoying on more than one occasion (as you have undoubtably likewise found me! ;)), I'm glad you are on this forum - and I would be HONORED to make your acquaintence if that ever becomes possible. You are an asset to GS-US, and I enjoy your posts more often than not!

[Gaillo]

Money madness is a strange malady. Those who have it, do not know it. Those who do not have it, can easily recognize it.
Oddly enough, Ayn Rand had it.
Prosperity is not based on the volume of money tokens one acquires.
Prosperity is the creation / production of usable surplus goods and services, their trade / transportation, and the enjoyment thereof.

Money mad people rush about seeking the best way to "make money" - by scams like usury and gambling. They are concerned with "storing value" and investment.
Those who are not so afflicted seek to increase prosperity by making more, with less, so more can enjoy. They have a surplus to share, generously.

A good barometer is to ask someone which goal agrees with their ideals:
[1] I want to {win the lottery / hit the jackpot / beat the stock market} and be set for life;
or
[2] I want to be more productive, creative, inventive and make the world a better place.


Other than where you state that "Ayn Rand had it" (money madness), your post is almost 100% objectivist and very "rand-ish"! ;D

I think Rand did have some degree of greed, like most of us, but her overwhelming life's endeavor seemed to be more of an educational than monetary one. Too bad she got sidetracked by affairs, substance abuse, and ego-tripping assholeness before she reached the level of public exposure necessary to fully awaken the masses! >:(

[ximmy]

http://www.neurosciencemarketing.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/handshake.jpg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rNXP2ndT9M

[MAGNES]

I recommended as the 2nd post on this page (Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand).


That is what I am interested in cause of your statements. My ears are up.

Gaillo, this is a question I ask myself,
Why is Rand such a target for people that are studying the infiltrators ,
there is quite a lot of exposure online, they don't trust her. This is largely
academic arguments, why bother ? I am just asking questions.

Books like Atlas Shrugged, Brave New World are gim intros for me.

[jetgraphics]

Money madness is a strange malady. Those who have it, do not know it. Those who do not have it, can easily recognize it.
Oddly enough, Ayn Rand had it.
Prosperity is not based on the volume of money tokens one acquires.
Prosperity is the creation / production of usable surplus goods and services, their trade / transportation, and the enjoyment thereof.

Money mad people rush about seeking the best way to "make money" - by scams like usury and gambling. They are concerned with "storing value" and investment.
Those who are not so afflicted seek to increase prosperity by making more, with less, so more can enjoy. They have a surplus to share, generously.

A good barometer is to ask someone which goal agrees with their ideals:
[1] I want to {win the lottery / hit the jackpot / beat the stock market} and be set for life;
or
[2] I want to be more productive, creative, inventive and make the world a better place.


Other than where you state that "Ayn Rand had it" (money madness), your post is almost 100% objectivist and very "rand-ish"! ;D

I think Rand did have some degree of greed, like most of us, but her overwhelming life's endeavor seemed to be more of an educational than monetary one. Too bad she got sidetracked by affairs, substance abuse, and ego-tripping assholeness before she reached the level of public exposure necessary to fully awaken the masses! >:(

Greed isn't money madness.
Money madness is the belief that the abstraction (money) is reality.
Example: believing that a "dollar bill" is a dollar.
Or that a dollar is a measure of value, another relative quantity.

The reality is the output of production - whether foodstuffs, finished goods, or services rendered. Since that varies, it is irrational to peg its value to a fixed and finite sum of precious metal coin. It is beyond reason to use debt-credit notes, borrowed at usury, as the medium of exchange.

That we're entrapped in money madness, is why we have unemployment and economic problems. And even if there was a "gold standard", there is insufficient bullion to facilitate trade. And there is certainly not enough to pay off the public debt (thanks to usury and fraud).
(Fort Knox depository has 147.4 million ounces versus 304 million Americans. Approximately $9 per capita, pursuant to the Coinage Act of 1792.)

[Gaillo]

I recommended as the 2nd post on this page (Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand).


That is what I am interested in cause of your statements. My ears are up.

Gaillo, this is a question I ask myself,
Why is Rand such a target for people that are studying the infiltrators ,
there is quite a lot of exposure online, they don't trust her. This is largely
academic arguments, why bother ? I am just asking questions.

Books like Atlas Shrugged, Brave New World are gim intros for me.



MAGNES,
My best guess, after watching the whole thing and debating with many of the Rand detractors is the obvious: Rand was a New York Jew, connected (although tenuously) to some members of the power-center (most notably Alan Greenspan). Add to that the fact that she was an adulterer, somewhat of a magnet for sycophant kissasses (she LOVED attention and fame)... and you end up with an "open-and-shut" case for her being a member of the opposition. However, having read as many of her writings as I have, I find it impossible to adopt that view of her... I find more in common with her writings and those of the founding fathers/politicians of the U.S.A. than any other group throughout history that I am aware of. Read the book, and tell me what you think! 8)

[Olmstein]

So good to see another Ayn Rand thread. All that's missing is PDT/Phoenix piping in calling her by her birth name, Alicia Rosenbaum.

Let's start a Windows vs. Mac thread next.

[Gaillo]

So good to see another Ayn Rand thread. All that's missing is PDT/Phoenix piping in calling her by her birth name, Alicia Rosenbaum.

Let's start a Windows vs. Mac thread next.

;D ;D ;D

[Gaillo]

http://www.neurosciencemarketing.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/handshake.jpg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rNXP2ndT9M



Niiiice... ;D
Let's see how "Phase 2" develops before making any solid conclusions. ;)

[Book]

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/12/18/business/18madoff.600.jpg
"The goyim looters stopped me from fleeing to Galt's Gulch but the "still-missing" $65 Billion made it to Tel Aviv."

:D

A = A

ISRAEL = GALT'S GULCH

POGROM = GOYIM WAKE UP

[RJB]

Why is Rand such a target for people that are studying the infiltrators I've been thinking about this a lot last night, because I do agree with most of what she says, but her obsession with self interest goes against the grain of western ideals. In most western literature the main motivator for our greatest protagonists is love (Romeo and Juliet and Jesus crucifixion for our sins) to the point of death. Bringing justice is another motivator as Hamlet avenges his father's murderer and his mother's dishonor. In real life, the sinking of the Titanic where men sent their wives and children on the lifeboats as they went to a frigid watery grave. Most heroes in our literature over come their flaws and win or sucumb to their flaws and die. The part of Rand's philosophy that doesn't sit right with me is that her protagonists not only justify what we've learned to be character flaws but succeed because of them.

In the speech there is a section where Francisco defends loving money as loving the labors of others. (If Rand really did that, fine, I don't know her heart) In reality, I doubt very many people do that. Here he is challenging the bible's "The love of money is the root of all evil." (1 Timothy 6:10) I find it odd that Christians who would never reads the writings of the Dali Lama, who practices a lot of what Jesus taught, would whole heartedly embrace Ayn Rand who in some ways is the antithesis. Money is a tool. I could no more love money than a wrench. God, family, and friends are what I love.

I'll still go back and re-read that book and others.

[RJB]

we had become selfish condescending assholes like Ayn Rand. At some point most of us outgrew Ayn Rand.That's great that you quit being a condescending asshole. So did you outgrow her last night. ;D

[k-os]

we had become selfish condescending assholes like Ayn Rand. At some point most of us outgrew Ayn Rand.That's great that you quit being a condescending asshole. So did you outgrow her last night. ;D





Ha!

[RJB]

Ha! Book is one of my favorite people here, but I could not resist...

[k-os]

Ha! Book is one of my favorite people here, but I could not resist...


Oh, I've learned to love him as well, but that was funny, so I could not resist.

[Book]

I've been thinking about this a lot last night, because I do agree with most of what she says, but her obsession with self interest goes against the grain of western ideals...The part of Rand's philosophy that doesn't sit right with me is that her protagonists not only justify what we've learned to be character flaws but succeed because of them...God, family, and friends are what I love.



Rand was a Russian jew, all known to be nation-wreckers, and here she is fleeing to America, changing her jew name, and destroying our western ideals and social bonds. Her job here was divide and conquer by giving the naive permission to be selfish and anti-social. A nation of self-serving assholes cannot survive very long. The last thing she wanted was social Unity and a SHARED sense of "us". She divided us into a mythical jew-is-producer goyim-is-looter mindset.


Ayn Rand (pronounced /ˈaɪn ˈrænd/;[1] born Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum; February 2 [O.S. January 20] 1905 – March 6, 1982)

:oo-->