Passion and entrepreneurship are innate in the human mind. They are products, not of outside motivation, but of internal ratiocination — the drive to maximize utility. This is the driving wheel of economic and societal development. FULL ARTICLE by Jonathan M. Finegold Catalan
Source link: http://archive.mises.org/11635/passion-comes-from-liberty/
Passion Comes from Liberty
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>neighbors subscribed to competing police departments, what is certain (if they were in fact police departments operating on the basis of objective law
Subjectivism, libertarian or other, contradicts objectivity. Whim-worship is not politics.
Subjectivism means out of conceptual contact with reality. It does not mean consciousness or purpose.
And what or who, w/o govt, would enforce disagreements about law? This is a mere restatement of the claim that Rand shows to be w/o basis. See Palestine, Somalia, the Afghan-Pakistan border.
>the drive to maximize utility.
Ideas (and their effects, motives, emotions, etc) are volitional, not automatic.
You all make things sooooo complicated. The underlying factor in the essay is greed, wanting a bigger share of the pie for one’s self. The question the essay raises is the unit for which the greed should be implemented – the individual, the family, the tribe, the nation . . . .
“Entrepreneurship is a building block for economic development. Individuals who invest and invent are instilled with a passion to create wealth”.
If each of these statements is stand alone, i.e. if the first does not lead into the second, then I accept them. If not, then here’s what I have to say:
Inventors are instilled with a passion to create. Period. Seldom do inventors burn with a passion to create wealth. They are driven by the vision to see their inventions work and succeed. They are seldom turned on by money. Entrepreneurs on the other hand invest their money in successful inventions with a view to profit. They paly on their so called hunches which are really calculated risks and when they succeed they invariably add to and become the building blocks for economic wealth.
EnEm,
Wealth does not have to be measured as a monetary value. Wealth should be measured in utility. Like the article says:
A man could be very poor by one’s standards, but be incredibly wealthy by his own. A man could feel himself more wealthy by having a healthy, loving family than by sacrificing said family for one million dollars.
In short, we are agreeing with each other.
________
Stephan,
I take it you are quoting a different article? This article doesn’t talk about police departments. There is plenty of material on private defense available elsewhere (in any case, none of your examples are anarchic)
In regards to your comment about the drive to innovate, nobody claimed that it was not volitional, or willful.
The rebuttal of Rand in this article is quite weak.
Rand says,
“One illustration will be sufficient: suppose Mr. Smith, a customer of Government A, suspects that his next-door neighbor, Mr. Jones, a customer of Government B, has robbed him; a squad of Police A proceeds to Mr. Jones’ house and is met at the door by a squad of Police B, who declare that they do not accept the validity of Mr. Smith’s complaint and do not recognize the authority of Government A. What happens then? You take it from there.”
Rand’s mistake here is she discards objective reality. The illustration talks about an instance of robbery. The fact that the robbery took place or it didn’t is an objective fact. If robbery took place it took place as an objective fact regardless of ones perception.
The question then is this. Is a monopoly of force and final decision making over a given geographical area best suited for discovering the objective truth?
The answer is no.
If you base your ethics on the decisions of certain men, this implies the truth is not in fact objective and discovered by the use of reason, but it is based on subjective valuations of those certain men that compromise the state.
Senior Finegold Catalan,
I thought your article was beautiful and was honestly surprised that anyone said a negative word. I hope that they will continue to read and reflect on the ideas at mises.org.
Also, I must say something about “greed.” Greed is a pejorative. It is not greedy to brush your teeth. It is in your interest to avoid cavities. It is self interest. It is not greedy to work long hours in an office as a young person and learn accounting skills. It is not greedy to provide lots of high quality steel to people at less cost than the competition like Andrew Carnegie. He may have been greedy, but his philanthropy was much more effective than the government handouts of the 20th century have been. He did not create any public housing where even the police are afraid to enter.
The “capitalism” you have in mind is mercantilism. It cannot exist on the free market. It is the “American System” of Henry Clay. It is the Federal Reserve with its privileged banks. That is greed. And it is not possible without government support.
Jonathan,
The web site sent me from “Anarchy” to the “Liberty” blog. w/o my noticing.
Dear Kerem,
> Is a monopoly of force and final decision making
> over a given geographical area best suited for
> discovering the objective truth?
While I consider this approach correct, I also consider it incomplete. There is much more to dealing with the crimes than detective work. There is also deterrance, restitution, accreditation (i.e. formalised reputation), etc. I’m not disagreeing with you, I merely broaden the argument.
No my friend, liberty is the result of passion.
When you want freedom strong enough and you are passionate enough to work hard and fight hard for it, you win it.
It is oftenly frustrations and resentment that create the passionate drive towards freedom.
If life was perfect, there would be no passion and no freedom.
Passionate persons that work hard to achieve their goals are free, those who wait for freedom before they do what they like get neither.
If mankind had never been sick, we would never have researched medical science passionately and we would never have discovered DNA, cells, metabolism etc.
Mankind takes it’s pride and dignity by refusing the constraint imposed upon by nature and by expanding the boundaries.
There could be no passion without hardship ! Freedom is to fight the hardship with passion !
Ayn Rand does have a point. If the ‘customers’ buying ‘security’ don’t believe in individual rights then the result of ‘private government’ can easily be civil war.
And this is certainly a perfect non-sequitur
“The basic reason why a social order could, and would, arise in the absence of governments (as they are known today) is the fact that man has an objective need for social order and protection from initiatory force.”
The fact that people need protection does not imply that people will actually get it. We are not dealing with an economic problem but with a moral problem.
Government is more than “men acting in concert.†It is men acting in concert according to law. Men acting in concert according to law, rather than men acting in concert according to something other than the law, is a difference between government and anarchy. And again, epistemologically, government is indeed men, but it is not “nothing but men.†It is men and law. Men without law do not constitute government.
Jarrett Wollstein was one of the first people to be systematically targeted and purged from the Objectivist movement. He was even banned from attending NBI lectures or otherwise attending any Objectivist events. I always wanted to meet him, but we lived on opposite coasts.
Although he was a far more sophisticated and independent thinker than most of the Rand fans, he was one of the few to hang in there and not be intimidated by their “thought police” tactics (so wonderfully described in Murray Rothbard’s play). I’ll check out his website.
As for the issues discussed in this article, it seems almost surreal to try to distinguish between the idealized “good” or “valid” or “just” government and its functionaries, and what we have, today. Can we really call the U.S. anything but a “rogue state” or some sort of corporate prison-police state or “slave pen”?
Yes, we’re still functional and “the greatest nation in the world”, but there is nothing on the horizon to give us hope that more freedom, more prosperity, more peace and a higher quality of life for everyone is approaching. And if you live in the lower half or lower 10th of the population in terms of income, as I do, you will probably find this discussion academic, to say the least.
Somehow, I got sent to the wrong article for the comment, above. It was, of course, directed at the Jarrett Wollstein article “Arguments against Anarchy.”
“Rather, they would be criminal gangs, plain and simple.” Criminal gangs plain and simple is of course what we currently have in the world. All the “coulda, shoulda, oughta” arguments in these government articles are based on what I believe is a fundamental false assumption. The assumption is that it is possible for a group of persons, the security company, to operate within the bounds of the intentions of its customer/creators. It is not possible. Once a formal group is given permission to use deadly force, it must inevitably take on the character of a criminal gang. This is a fundamental law and there is no escape from it. That is the nature of groups exercising deadly force. Inventing ingenious ways to prevent the eventual criminality of the enterprise (e.g. separation of powers, well written legal code, etc.) will only delay the inevitable.
Disagree – I am going with Ms. Rand on this one…
The Government or the State is a natural projection of a higher social order…
If you believe in Mathematical Induction than do this mental experiment:
Assume there is no Government, no State at some initial point of time – only free collaborating individuals.
And now assume that some become more successful due to being stronger, better equipped or adapted (or maybe just lucky) to survive in their environment. We all can agree that some will do much better than the others, gradually acquiring or merging the adjacent territories – not necessarily by exercising direct coercion. One also would agree that the successful ones will have to protect their growing property and wealth from the invaders, such as squatters and common criminals (since we all agree that “owning†private property necessarily means protecting it or retaliating with coercive force against the initiation of the same (natural law)). Thus it is easy to see the wealthy will start forming alliances and consolidating coercive power, initially having only the intention to protect them…
Naturally there will arrive a watershed moment where a certain group of individuals or a clan will prevail in a certain locale and monopolize the coercive power in a certain region. Iterate the mental steps above sufficiently many times on the same and larger scale, and you will automatically arrive at a higher authority consisting of the elite group of individuals setting and overseeing the enforcement of the internally pre agreed rules.
As shown above, in any sufficiently advanced society consisted of individuals dependent on each other for survival and constrained by natural resources, there will eventually emerge an authority that will hold the monopoly on the coercive power, setting the laws of the land.
Unfortunately, my analysis shows that there is no way to escape this reality – just to mitigate it by trying to make the laws more just to the individual….
In other words, think of the State as the most “successful†land-owner or entrepreneur (or, for that matter, the Government being its CEO) that is leasing his/her physical resources to the individuals that happen to reside (be born) on its land (I know, it is very sad)…
Ayn Rand does have a point. If the ‘customers’ buying ‘security’ don’t believe in individual rights then the result of ‘private government’ can easily be civil war.
But if the ‘customers’ don’t believe in individual rights, then the result of ‘public government’ would also be civil war (or something equivalent; police state, etc.)
“The Government or the State is a natural projection of a higher social order…”
As rape is a natural projection of the higher powered sex.
“think of the State as the most “successful†land-owner or entrepreneur…”
Like Al Capone, Saddam Hussein & Adolph Hitler.
Just thought of some more of the greatest entrepenuers in history, like George W. Bush. There was Ghengis Khan, Attila the Hun and all the Czars of Russia. Some great entrepenuers have conflicts of course, the Viet Cong Corporation looked like they would succumb to a hostile takeover by Pentagon Inc. before they ultimately prevailed. On the other hand, back here in the Vaterland, the Southern plantation slave masters were completely crushed by the Northern bank slave masters.
It’s important for serfs to not rationalize in this matter, “pbergn”.
* Genghis Khan
“The question then is this. Is a monopoly of force and final decision making over a given geographical area best suited for discovering the objective truth?” – K. Tibuk.
The answer is yes. Anarcho-Libertarians would aspire that all geographic localities be held only in private hands
To: mpolzkill
Yep. You are finally catching on with the reality…
You are right…
You are in a jungle baby! Wake up, time to go!
Was that “in a jungle baby”, or “in the jungle, baby”?
I would like to agree with the writer of Argument Against Anarchy but am not quite convinced because of gaps in reasoning towards second half of the article. Rand’s arguments would seem more emotionally compelling.
Going off tangent, it has always intrigued me that the Japanese society has been relatively susceptible to conformity, nationalism, (during and before WWII) even fascism, and up to today still showing minimal appetite for libertarianism.
I speculate the mainstream Japanese culture is still burdened by a mythical fear of the anarchic chaos of the samurai era. It is as though the culture has taken the wrong, non-libertarian, lessons from The Seven Samurai cultural archetype (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Samurai)
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