Productivity is relevant. An objectivist does not have to be an entrepreneur or any of the heroes in Atlas Shrugged. The most important virtue of Rand’s philosophy is doing what makes you happy and that is often not in the realms of running a railroad, inventing a motor that run’s off of static in the air, or creating the world’s strongest metal. If you remember, there were those in Galt’s Gulch who played in movies, orchestrated, and became a pirate, which, in your mind, is not very productive.

Objectivism is certainly one of the hardest philosophies to wrap your mind completely around, especially for strong intellectuals with impeccable logic and rationality.

That is a similar truth structure that i find among the “neocon” religion.
there are no limits or controls set on insurance firms that won’t pay premiums for illness, out of work people who lose their insurance and then lose everything when a loved one becomes ill. The “neocon” system is also fair as long as it is played out by wealthy or credit card infused lives and healthy people who dont have to deal with the mess of life. I have actually seen the transformation this very year of people who did not believe in big government cry foul of what they are losing and have lost. The pain of watching 2 parents who worked all their life only to see their savings and a second mortgage cost them everything because their paid for premium health insurance would not cover medical costs until it was too late. Are now wondering about their former neocon world views.

And i at one point in 2000 worked for a mortgage broker, it was brief – 8 months- but something was not right. the junior brokers hired were shady characters and it seems that i had too many principals for them to train me, well i know now what was happening but then it did not make much sense.
The middle and lower middle class, everyone, dream of having a home and have been told all thier lives, in media and by the economists and bankers, that a home is the best investment that you can buy. Most of these people felt that these experts would tell them that they can not get a house. They trusted the experts, who pushed 401k’s and pension funds and as well as houses. It was snake oil and wrong – i left the mortgage company in 2001, something was amiss. but more was amiss then i could know at the time.

The truth is the john galts would love to sell well made products to people who want to buy them. If this country were really a republic, with basic laws and ruled by the law of decency, then why would lenders want to convince someone to buy when they can not afford to? if people were paid fairly for the work they were able to do, then the peopel who are productive would generate a great life and build a great life.

I have 2 startups on my second, the first was ruined by some wall street types so i know first hand what they are like.

when we are all strong and able to pick up the pieces-it is easy. but try to be strong and walk out on your boss when you have found out that your wife has cancer and you cant leave because yu have to keep your insurance-now they have you.

Or a poor person in a community where the schools have no books

These are the basic things that human beings need to thrive, not just survive. roads, railways, schools, medical care
when these are provided for people thrive and can excel.

That is unfathomable to the government we have had the last eight years. neocon rule is the lucky ruling the talented. It is in the lucky’s best and only interest to hold onto that interest. and that means using government and LACK of proper restraints to make sure that they STAY ontop, because they lack the talent to create and produce. They claim to remove government, but they did not, iwth slight of hand THEY moved government over-site out of the way. It was the greatest government intervention of all.

and the problem with the credit situation was that people were no longer applying for credit, but going back to basics and that was a threat to the neocon bottom line.

that was starving the rule of the lucky and now we are seeing behind the curtain. the farce of the bailout. the reward for shoddy work, and the backup for the useless and corporate welfare.

They are truly different.

Rand did not go far enough in her analogy. She stopped at the point of what is the glue that keeps all the gadgets humming and the mind growing. somewhere in the middle is the truth, republic like our founders envisioned, the right of a person as individual, and the community of society that supports the best and the brightest,

where anyone and everyone is John Galt

Sorry, but you must have blinders on. The US code is over 16 thousand pages long, and 13 thousand of those pages are the tax code (read: economic regulation). And that’s just at the Federal level. The SEC, whose job is to make sure securities trading is “transparent and fair” employs over 4000 people working full time, yet enabled the largest securities fraud in history. FNMA and FMAC are quasi-governmental entities and they are the largest buyers of mortgages and mortgage-backed debt in the US, all according to rules dreamed up in some committee in Washington. And of course, it’s all denominated (like all transactions) in government-issued legal-tender fiat paper, the price of which is controlled by a few fat guys at the Federal Reserve.

As for George W. Bush being a free market guy, I can’t help “LOLing”, as you say. Here’s what Dubya himself has to say about that: “I’ve abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system.” Good riddance, Mr. Bush. Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.

Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand institute comments on Bush’s “free-market” record:

“Did Bush abolish the countless regulations and controls strangling businessmen? No. But he did sign into law Sarbanes-Oxley–the largest expansion of business regulation in decades. Did Bush consistently push for free trade? No. But he did give us a new steel tariff. Did Bush attempt to roll back America’s massive welfare state? No. But he did pass the prescription drug benefit, the largest new entitlement program since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Did Bush curtail government spending? Far from it. Bush presided over an unprecedented increase in the federal budget: from $1 trillion at the time he took office to more than $3 trillion today. This is to say nothing of Bush’s response to the financial crisis. He has completely evaded his administration’s responsibility for the Fed and housing policies that created the housing bubble. Instead, he has led the chorus blaming the market and calling for unprecedented handouts, bailouts, and nationalizations as the cure.

“If Bush is a friend of the free market, who needs enemies? By praising the free market while systematically undermining it, Bush has done more to discredit capitalism than any open critic could. Like a con artist who undercuts the reputation of Mercedes by selling lemon look-alikes, Bush has now led people to associate his failed policies with capitalism. That association needs to be erased. We must make it clear: Bush is no friend of free markets.”

Taking from Atlas Shrugged, the philosophy is not about anti-regulation I think. It’s not against regulating the railroads because of security measures. Or regulating steel concerning the security of the material.

Concerning other topics: And compulsory social security? Is it regulations or an insurance? I think Ayn is not against insurance.

It’s more against regulations which manipulate the market towards people who have government friends.

This is not true – SOME of them belong on Galt’s Gulch, but a lot steal and lot suck govt. money.

No one in AS got rich flipping real estate or any kind of magic money options/derivatives crap. They all made things people wanted and sold it to them. (Except Midas Mulligan who FUNDED the other guys. He was damned important.)

Rand wanted PRODUCTION and there’s no production by the Wall Street quants. It’s masturbation with mathematics.

When Rand was right she was right, but she was wrong about no regulation.

Capitalists need watching.

Well, no they don’t. They tell you. But with the military, energy budgets and farming subsidies, the US is one of the countries where the government distributes a lot of money. No free market – they subsidy a lot of things. They just want to look free-market.

Bush and his cronies look like the looters in Atlas Shrugged. Being in government and distributing jobs and money between friends. Haliburton anyone? They have strangled science for years, just like the government in Atlas Shrugged.

“And it’s that precise philosophy that fuckered up everything in the first place. And if you can’t see that, you are a dumbass.”

No, what f* up everything in the first place, was giving money (mortgages) to people who couldn’t afford them. Making money on clever financial instruments – taking it out of some hat out of nowhere. Going into massive trillions of debt to distribute the money to friends in the industry and make them rich. That’s what f* up everything.

You cannot magically creating wealth – you only can create money by printing it. Then the bubble burst because the wealth people thought they had wasn’t there. Paper money.

But as I’ve said, I’m no objectivist.

Well said.

It’s a bit eerie to be reading Atlas right now and simultaneously watch pretty much the same story unfold on TV.

I like how the story debunks the claim that there’s a dichotomy between material and spiritual values and presents an alternative view, that material wealth is created as both a product and a tool of the pursuit of happiness in this world.