The poor need to pay more taxes

And don't take on Mothra with a pop-gun.

(By the way, not only am I ugly... I think I'm a chick.)

 

I agree. That was the whole point of my post. Still, maybe in 225 years, the ideas of Trader/Rand will be as accepted as Smith... Nah! Trader, you should supplement your Rand readings with some Rand criticisms. Here's the conclusion from a piece by Barry Stoller:

The popularity of Objectivism was---and remains---largely confined to
universities and high schools in affluent areas. The reasons for this
are to found in Rand's tireless assertions that '[a] country without
intellectuals is like a body without a head'(ibid., p. 12). Not only are
such pronouncements flattering for students to hear but they are also
plausible because (middle- and upper-class) students, living in the
prosthetic environment of a campus, are not directly exposed to either
the production process or even the circulation sphere of
capitalism---and, therefore, have no way of knowing where, or how,
surplus value originates.

This is not to infer that Objectivism is characterized by rigorous
thinking. Quite the opposite. Ayn Rand had a conspicuous habit of
criticizing concepts she didn't understand. Notable examples are her
critiques of John Rawls' Theory of Justice and B.F. Skinner's Beyond
Freedom and Dignity. In the case of the former, she actually admitted
that she didn't even bother to read one word of the book (Rand, 'An
Untitled Letter,' Philosophy: Who Needs it, Signet 1984, p. 109). Both
were critiques of book reviews of the books she critiqued (Rand, 'An
Untitled Letter,' ibid., pp. 102-19; also, 'The Stimulus and the
Response,' ibid., pp. 137-61)---not exactly a study habit encouraged on
ANY American campus.

The strength of Rand's arguments come from the probability that her
(young, conservative) audience is even less acquainted with the ideas
that she first explains and then attacks.

In short, Objectivism is a sort of cliff note intellectualism for people
too busy, lazy, or stupid to actually be intellectuals. The
contradiction of a supremacy theory predicated upon the 'superiority of
smart people' that itself is characterized by and logical
inconsistencies, emotional reductionism, poor scholarship and, as a last
resort, suppression of dissent has, of course, delighted liberals and
other left-wingers for decades. For 'management' class (or wannabe
management-class) kids who subscribe to Objectivism (the 'challenge to
2,000-and-a-half years of cultural tradition'), it provides a
simplistic, narcissistic justification to expropriate as much surplus
value from workers as biologically possible and politically feasible.

Doesn't sound like an argument... more like a religion. If it is unchallenged, it is so only in your mind.

 

Yeah, OK. Except he didn't win for the stuff you're peddling. In most cases, Rand and Friedman are closer than you are with yourself. Throw in a little Hayek and we've got 3 peas in a pod. (Friedman's son, David, is even closer to Rand than his father, suggesting the apple stays on the tree.)

Some of Rand's followers occasionally take issue with Milton on doctrinaire stands, but right hand or left, it's still mental masturbation.

(From various web pages.)
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Those inspired by her ideas have published books in many academic fields and founded several institutes. Noteworthy among these are the Cato Institute, based in Washington, D.C., the leading libertarian think tank in the world. Rand, along with Nobel Prize-winners Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, was highly instrumental in attracting generations of individuals to the libertarian movement. Also noteworthy are the Ayn Rand Institute, founded in 1985 by philosopher Leonard Peikoff and based in California, and The Objectivist Center, founded in 1990 by philosopher David Kelley and based in New York.
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INTERVIEWER: Do you remember reading Hayek's Road to Serfdom? Did that have an impact on you?

MILTON FRIEDMAN: Yes, it certainly did have an impact. It was a very clear, definite statement of certain fundamental ideas. It was a passionate plea by a passionate man, and so it was very well written, and for those of us who were concerned about these kinds of issues, I think it had a tremendous impact.

In fact, I've often gone around and asked people what determined their views. I've asked people who were in favor of free markets and free enterprise, who formerly had been of a different view, what caused them to change their mind.

I'm talking particularly not about economists, not about professionals, but generally ordinary people, most of whom had been socialist or in favor of government control at one time and had come over to free markets. And two names have come up over and over again: Hayek on the one hand, The Road to Serfdom from Hayek, and Ayn Rand on the other, Atlas Shrugged and her other books.
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The ideas that F.A. Hayek, Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman and others had been propounding for a generation were taking root with more people...
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In addition to the "protective" reason for limiting and decentralizing governmental power to preserve freedom, Friedman points out a "constructive" reason as well. Like philosopher and internationally acclaimed author Ayn Rand, Friedman observed that the great advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting; in science or literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized power. A society that robs an individual of the product of his effort, or enslaves him, or attempts to limit the freedom of his mind, or compels him to act against his own rational judgment—a society that sets up a conflict between its edicts and the requirements of man’s nature…destroys all the values of human coexistence, has no possible justification and represents, not a source of benefits but the deadliest threat to man’s survival (Rand, p.330).
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But, apart from Milton Friedman and the Austrian school of economics, there are very few voices in the world who consistently championed capitalism as an ideal system. Ayn Rand was the first to declare that "greed is good" and make it stick.
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The usual understanding of anarchism as a left wing ideology does not take into account the neo-liberal "anarchism" championed by the likes of Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman and America's Libertarian Party, which couples law of the jungle right-wing economics with liberal positions on most social issues.
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Still, capitalism has always had some defenders who weren't reticent about calling it by its given name, particularly the disciples of Ayn Rand and of libertarian economists like Ludwig von Mises, Frederick Hayek, and Milton Friedman. They tend to be people who come to the defense of capitalism with something more like religious zeal. You could hear some of that in the profession of faith that Kenneth Lay made to an interviewer a while ago: "I believe in God and I believe in free markets," he said, and went on to suggest that Jesus would have agreed with him. Needless to say, that level of enthusiasm changes the tone of the discussion. When people extol the virtues of free enterprise, they usually invoke the rising standard of living and the inventions it spawns. When they talk about the virtues of capitalism they're more likely to go on about the moral values of individualism and the freedom to fail that capitalism provides -- the lesson that both O'Neill and Lindsay were quick to read in the Enron disaster. It's a little scrap of bombast you can trace directly back to Ayn Rand's turgid philosophizing -- the notion that capitalism is never so glorious as when it's strewing the ground with bodies.
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Yet Rothbard distinguishes himself from most fellow Libertarians when he takes the final step toward what he considers to be the true logical conclusion of these premises: advocating the abolishment of the State entirely. While Rothbard calls this position Libertarianism (which he distinguishes from Ayn Rand's or Milton Friedman's "right-wing" Libertarianism), the name most contemporary political thinkers give Rothbard's position is "anarcho-capitalism."
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Neo-liberalism is a very hard term and set of beliefs to elucidate because there are so many misconceptions tied up with it. The basics are: 1) it was developed by heartless ivory tower number crunchers (Milton Friedman et al.) who were followers of Ayn Rand and B.F. Skinner (whose work "Beyond Freedom and Dignity" should be a clue as to what motivated these people), 2) it was disseminated, promulgated and popularized with the help of misreadings and incomplete readings of Adam Smith, 3) It had its first stirrings of triumph under Nixon and took over with the Reagan revolution and the Bush/Clinton years, replacing the Keynesian economic theory and its emphasis on an active public sector and oversight as the dominant model of Capitalism, and 4) it somehow managed to make itself synonymous with Capitalism, even freedom itself, and later, after the fall of state Communism, proclaimed its own triumph.