Ayn Rand stinker.

Ayn Rand stinker. Hendes tanker er primitive, halvbagte og ligegyldige. Hendes sprog og intriger er som L:Ron:Hubbards: sølle.

Men jeg har vist aldrig kastet en bunke links herind, der til evig tid kan minde alle interesserede om hvorfor Rand er spildtid. Men det kommer nu, gør det så.

"The fallacy that is at the heart of Rand’s political-economic philosophy is the fallacy of mistaking a necessary condition for a sufficient condition. This is elementary logic. A necessary condition is something that is needed in order to make something else happen. A plant must have water, for example, in order to thrive. But a necessary condition is not the same as a sufficient condition — that is, something that provides everything needed for something else to happen. Water is not sufficient to make a plant thrive. Other ingredients are needed, like soil and sunlight.

Ayn Rand’s philosophy is above all a defense of the entrepreneur. The economic value of goods and services that we find on the market is created by entrepreneurs — people who had the idea, pursued the vision, marshaled the resources, managed production, and shepherded products to market.

One can agree with this point by saying that the entrepreneur is a necessary condition for the creation of economic value. But Rand treats the entrepreneur as a sufficient condition. The entrepreneur creates the value of goods and everyone else gets in his way (in Rand the pronoun is always “he,” even when he is a woman). Governments are leeches on the value he creates; organized labor siphons off more of it. Who could blame the hero of Atlas Shrugged, John Galt, and his like if they should take their marbles and head off to form their own society, leaving the parasites behind?

But in truth the entrepreneur, though very much a necessary condition for the production of economic value, is not a sufficient condition. An entrepreneur will get nowhere without a capitalist or a government agency in charge of a budget to finance his or her ideas; the production will require a labor force; it will need to make use of public infrastructure and a framework of the rule of law; and the fruits of the production will be of no value if no one wants them. Thus the creators, entrepreneurs, investors, taxpayers, legislators, jurists, workers, and consumers are all necessary conditions for the production of the value that we find in the marketplace; but none of them, including the entrepreneur, is a sufficient condition: none can make it happen alone.

It is this very fundamental and seemingly obvious fact that Rand’s thinking seeks to distort."

http://crosscut.com/2012/08/ayn-rand-seattle-u-philosophy-professor/

The simplistic flaw in Ayn Rand's philosophy

Ayn Rand looms large in American "philosophy."