I wonder if it will do the book justice.

[Ursa Majoris]

Heller's book has been widely criticized by the Ayn Rand Society as being a skewed bunch of crap. I haven't read it, so I don't know. But several objectivist scholars I've talked to have read it and I believe them.

Nevertheless, I stand by what I said about her earlier.

 

I find Rand to be a primitive throwback, very cold-blooded, almost vicious and certainly intolerant. She writes well but her attitude is that of one who can be fairly certain she will never be in need of the assistance of others, so screw everyone else. A Rand world isn't on my list of places to visit.

 

She comes across as vile.

[bushwacked]

Heller's book has been widely criticized by the Ayn Rand Society as being a skewed bunch of crap. I haven't read it, so I don't know. But several objectivist scholars I've talked to have read it and I believe them.

 

 

Was the quote attributed to her boyfriend taken out of context?

[Jimmy Neutron]

I asked for and got the book for Christmas after my friend at work kept bugging me to read it. Haven't cracked it open yet but I pretty much already know the main point. There's a group at work that are all into it.

 

I don't agree with all of Rand's philosophy, but the book is still an excellent read. The "far-fetched" behavior of the government is not so far-fetched in the light of recent happenings.

[bpwallace49]

Heller's book has been widely criticized by the Ayn Rand Society as being a skewed bunch of crap. I haven't read it, so I don't know. But several objectivist scholars I've talked to have read it and I believe them.

 

Isnt that like a Scientologist ripping on L. Ron Hubbard?

 

OMG . . people that belong to a society named after the woman dont like a book that may not paint her in a very flattering light? Color me shocked

[Lady.hawke]

Amazing that so many are commenting that have never read "Atlas Shrugged." I have many friends reading it right now that are not sleeping well at night because so much of the book seems to describe what is happening right now.

[SheikYerbuti]

Isnt that like a Scientologist ripping on L. Ron Hubbard?

 

No, it isn't. But thanks for playing.

[Czarina]

Funny that L Ron's name should come up. I was thinking that people's devotion to Ayn Rand borders on a Scientology-like worship.

[Perchoutofwater]

Funny that L Ron's name should come up. I was thinking that people's devotion to Ayn Rand borders on a Scientology-like worship.

 

I haven't finished the book yet, but feel no devotion to Rand, at least not in that sense. I do think that she makes some fine arguments for capitalism and free markets. She is very logical in her explanation of them, and the consequences of government infringement upon them. Like I said, I'm not even half way through Atlas Shrugged, and my opinion of her may change a great deal by the time I finish it, but everything stated so far makes sense. Those that I personally know that recommended I read Rand do not worship her, but rather see the logic in what she puts forth.

[westvirginia]

You guys might want to read some of the stuff before your little "rush to judgment". I've read most of what she's written. I don't like all of it, but the bottom line of the philosophy is this - one would never live their life for the sake of another nor expect another to live life for their sake. Now, I choose to apply that as far as coercion goes - it's not right to coerce someone to pick up the tab for someone else. But I can certainly choose of my own free will to give of my time and my largess (minuscule though it might be), but forcing someone, at the point of a gun, to pay for someone else's bad decisions was, is and ever shall be wrong. Period. You can make all the straw-man arguments you want about widows and orphans starving, or attack me as bp has done before that I just don't care about anyone but myself (when he doesn't know the first thing about me), but the bottom line is FORCE (and that's all government is) is untenable when it takes from one who has earned and gives to one who does not. You can maintain some kind of balance as long as the producers feel the blight isn't worth fighting over, but at some point, they quit.

 

Remember - even Robin Hood took from the GOVERNMENT to give back to those they taxed into poverty.

[westvirginia]

And BTW, I have no great devotion to Rand. I defy anyone here to ever find me calling myself an objectivist. Libertarian/anarchist, absolutely.

 

And I first started reading Rand damn near 20 years ago.

[Perchoutofwater]

So far this is my favorite part of the book, and is very relevant to today:

 

"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."

[Ursa Majoris]

You guys might want to read some of the stuff before your little "rush to judgment". I've read most of what she's written. I don't like all of it, but the bottom line of the philosophy is this - one would never live their life for the sake of another nor expect another to live life for their sake. Now, I choose to apply that as far as coercion goes - it's not right to coerce someone to pick up the tab for someone else. But I can certainly choose of my own free will to give of my time and my largess (minuscule though it might be), but forcing someone, at the point of a gun, to pay for someone else's bad decisions was, is and ever shall be wrong. Period. You can make all the straw-man arguments you want about widows and orphans starving, or attack me as bp has done before that I just don't care about anyone but myself (when he doesn't know the first thing about me), but the bottom line is FORCE (and that's all government is) is untenable when it takes from one who has earned and gives to one who does not. You can maintain some kind of balance as long as the producers feel the blight isn't worth fighting over, but at some point, they quit.

 

Remember - even Robin Hood took from the GOVERNMENT to give back to those they taxed into poverty.

The problem is that Rand's philosophy, if not leavened with a dose of reality, produces serfdom at the very least and ultimately revolution a la Russia. I completely agree that people should keep as much of the fruits of their labors as possible but it's undeniable that the more benefit you get from e.g. the infrastructure we put in place, the more you should fork over for it. I also completely agree that subsidizing the shiftless and lazy needs to be done away with - workfare needs to completely replace welfare and the reforms under Clinton went some way to doing that.

 

But balance is king - in Rand's dream, all the intellectuals and other "worthy people" went on strike - in a different Pol Pot reality, all the worthy people got executed. Bear in mind that all workers have value or they wouldn't work. I'll also point out that if all the CEOs die tomorrow, we'll probably not miss a beat. If all the cops / nurses / garbage collectors / teachers/whatever die tomorrow, we're f****d.

[i_am_the_swammi]

I have many friends reading it right now that are not sleeping well at night because so much of the book seems to describe what is happening right now.

 

The you have some pretty f**ked-up friends

[bpwallace49]

one would never live their life for the sake of another .

 

 

Jesus did . . . .

 

And i have been attacking the message you bring forth . . I got personal once, and apologized.

[Pope Flick]

Unless Peter Jackson's the director, they're not going to be faithful to the book in any way, shape or form. You guys ARE talking about Hollywood after all.

[westvirginia]

Jesus did . . . .

 

And i have been attacking the message you bring forth . . I got personal once, and apologized.

 

Jesus was not a man, other than inhabiting a fleshly body. And I'm just poking you.

 

And ursa, I'm not saying all taxation is an issue, that for firemen, cops, military, etc. is something we get value for. Even subsidizing farming to some extent. Foreign aid, welfare (corp and ind), as well as many other things, not so much.

[bpwallace49]

Hmm . . some foreign aid I agree with, but many other aspects of foreign aid can also be defined as "investment" which can benefit the US by opening up markets for our exports.

 

Just look at how much halliburton is benefiting from rebuilding Iraq . . . exporting freedom is AWESOME.

 

Welfare (individual) has benefits if the goal and structure is to get people OFF welfare and working. Then they consume goods, which benefits sales taxes, employs people , etc. If the goal isnt to get off welfare (and in a lot of ways it isnt in some states) then it never has a ROI.

 

Subsidizing schools have a ROI when they become consumers, get good jobs, then pay taxes themselves. That helps keep the US at the top of the heap when it comes to world wealth and individual consumerism.

[SheikYerbuti]

So far this is my favorite part of the book, and is very relevant to today:

 

That may be your favorite part so far, but you're going to LOVE it when

Dagny draws down

.

[Czarina]

Unless Peter Jackson's the director, they're not going to be faithful to the book in any way, shape or form. You guys ARE talking about Hollywood after all.

Peter Jackson just screwed up The Lovely Bones from all accounts, so don't imagine that because he hit the jackpot with the LOTR trilogy he's a lock to deliver this book faithfully.

[WaterMan]

This has all the makings of a Cult Classic.

 

The cults all ready love it.

[Pope Flick]

Peter Jackson just screwed up The Lovely Bones from all accounts, so don't imagine that because he hit the jackpot with the LOTR trilogy he's a lock to deliver this book faithfully.

 

 

Well, if you haven't seen it I'd say it's hard to tell. People with 'inside accounts" are often times fired form the project and thus have an axe to grind.

 

My point being making a novel work is an exception rather than the rule.

[westvirginia]

Well, if you haven't seen it I'd say it's hard to tell. People with 'inside accounts" are often times fired form the project and thus have an axe to grind.

 

My point being making a novel work is an exception rather than the rule.

 

+1. The only movies I've ever seen that live up to the books are the Bourne movies, and I think Ludlum is a blowhard anyway.

[Chief Dick]

Personally, I liked The Fountainhead better than Atlas Shrugged.

[Ursa Majoris]

+1. The only movies I've ever seen that live up to the books are the Bourne movies, and I think Ludlum is a blowhard anyway.

Ludlum's books were hughly enjoyable back in the day but it always creased me up when he'd use a proper noun as a single word sentence c/w exclamation point.

 

Rangoon! Oh no, Chancellor thought as he flashed back to the Rangoon affair! Ludlum writes for hysterics.

[westvirginia]

Ludlum's books were hughly enjoyable back in the day but it always creased me up when he'd use a proper noun as a single word sentence c/w exclamation point.

 

Rangoon! Oh no, Chancellor thought as he flashed back to the Rangoon affair! Ludlum writes for hysterics.

 

Bingo - it's like he contrives his drama. The plots are great, but his style just rubs me wrong.