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RE: Missing: the Ayn Rand heroic Capitalists in the Voluntaryist Movement?
I think the Ayn Rand era is long over. We need to embrace new stuff. Steemit and crypto are ways we can make ideas into reality. We don't need fiction, and we have better philosophers.
Maybe we focus on real economists and developers of free market principle. Rand was good for getting me angry enough to consider libertarianism. Now I'm hungry for more, and I'm finding that in Austrian economics.
I love the idea of “Primacy of existence.” A lot of Ayn Rand’s ideas were not hers, but thinkers such as Francis Bacon (“Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.”). I think the book “The Objectivist Philosophy of Ayn Rand,” in the first four chapters is most valuable and those are ideas from great thinkers preceding Ayn Rand. So to be anti Ayn Rand in everything is ridiculous. IMO. I’ve gone into exploring Austrian economics myself. It’s not easy. There is a whole lot of material and I will need to study it full time to become an expert. So instead I read small essays on certain aspects. I just finished reading Saifedean Ammous’ book on The Bitcoin Standard. He is an Austrian economist and seems to still think gold is valuable, but he is a bitcoin proponent. Another one is just an essay I read by Jorg Guido Hulsman, “Deflation and Liberty.”
Both sound wonderful :) I'm just listening to podcasts at work mostly. Eventually I'll get into actually reading books. A lot of them are available for free from the Mises Institute.
Actually you are equating Ayn Rand, the cult figure with objectivism, a philosophy that is either valid or not. If Objectivism is not valid, you are fine. But if it is a valid philosophy and you reject it you could be suffering in life. It’s like natural law: if you reject the fact there is a cliff in front of you the law won’t care if you walk off the cliff. It exists. Ayn Rand did not invent Objectivism. It’s been around for centuries and its metaphysics is Aristotelian.
Objectivism is indeed either valid or not. Its proponents are open to criticism, and abstract ideas not put into practice have no value on their own. What can we do now to transcend the status quo? That is the question.