Comment by bena | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bena | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

No, she doesn't. She ignores the entire situation which makes her reasoning suspect. So now you have a bunch of trust fund babies running around blathering about Ayn Rand and how they are the backbone of society because they have money, and if they have money then they must be worthy of having money because money is earned through being a productive member of society.

By ignoring "lucky money", she creates a logical loop in which money becomes a marker for productivity. The more money you have, obviously the more productive you are, because there are no productive poor.

It is also the problem of equating money with wealth. Money is just a good faith token between parties to expand the barter system to people who would otherwise have no basis to barter. For example, I am a software developer. I need a plumber. The plumber does not need software developed. Now, I can initiate a whole chain of exchanges that winds up with me having something the plumber wants, but that is inconvenient for day to day living. To short circuit all of that I give him a number of markers equal to the value we place on his time.

The markers aren't the point. That's the problem we have. We are emphasizing these markers and ignoring actual production. In a true idealized society based upon actual utility and such as Rand would have it, it would not be the scientists, artists, and executives at the top of the heap, but the electricians, plumbers, carpenters, and other doers and makers as they possess the skills of making.

Atlas shrugged is just CEO porn.

Zimbabwe, above, is actually correct in that she does not ignore the situation. Rand looks down upon such monied-without-effort people, but offers no useful solution.

Also, I don't understand how people so readily apply vast utilities to carpenters and plumbers, but not business process managers and leaders who make a business vastly more efficient and productive. Is it because value creation that can't immediately be felt (it's not a fixed leak in a faucet) is beyond the capacity of most to imagine? It completely ignores the amount of operational leverage that such improvements have in large enterprises.

Not to say there aren't plenty of people who make plenty of money while providing questionable value creation.

Looking down upon is not the same as addressing the issue. If that were the case, there wouldn't be any homeless, ever. It's almost an aside. "Oh yeah, those people are a total refutation of all my points. Let me continue ego stroking now and hope everyone ignores them too, because the answer is to do the very things I'm claiming to be against."

I attribute vast utility to carpenters and plumbers, because without them you don't have a house. Whereas without business leaders, we still have houses. At the end of the day, you need people to do more than you need people to manage.

That's why my belief is it's useful to see Atlas as a personal guide rather than a social one. Rand's treatises on doing what's right for yourself and never doing things that you don't respect, which actually appear better in The Fountainhead, are terrific guides for living honestly with yourself and with others, once you get over the intial I'm-a-dick-because-I-read-Ayn-Rand phase. Socially her argument falls apart, because she ignores a lot of evidence that proves her points wrong. (For instance, she denies global warming because she refuses to say that mankind should be limited by nature, which is a little insane.) But man-to-man, her work is a great guide about how to function in society without giving in.

That's what I was trying to say. Rand's books are very limited in scope, but if you treat them as such then they're not harmful books to read and enjoy. However, she does very specifically mention looters and inheritants as being the evil sort of rich, that which doesn't create but merely uses. So my initial point still stands: She admits that there's a problem there, even if she never really explains what she'd plan to do about it.

But what if you can organize a carpenter company such that it can do twice as much construction work as before? Does that not give you two houses whereas before you had one? Why should you ascribe value to the first house, but not the second, when they are identical goods?

What you do here is assign zero value to productivity changes. If a change in productivity has zero value, then the value of the original productivity has zero value as well.

The only way to claim that a person who makes carpenters more efficient is worthless is to claim that carpenters are also worthless.

There is a natural limit to the amount of work any one body can do. Sure a "carpenter company" can make more houses than a single carpenter in a given time span, but that is because they employ more than one carpenter not through some magic business efficiency.

But I'm also not arguing what you want me to argue either. I'm not saying that "leveraging synergies" is worthless, just that it is worth less. If we are to ascribe value to production and utility, those who can do are the top of the heap.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com