Does Bezos exploit Bezos?

(A sequel to the original.)

The enemies of capitalism have a perverse (mis)understanding both of its basic moral principles and of the workings of the free market, which - in light of Rand's integration of the two points in Atlas Shrugged (and in "What is Capitalism?") under the theme of "the role of the mind in man's existence" - come to the same thing.  The way they typically employ the phrase "means of production" indicates their failure and/or refusal to grasp Rand's point that the mind/intellect/reason is the prime mover of the production process, i.e., the source of value-added over and above both technologically primitive means (natural resources excluding the most economically pivotal natural resource, the human mind) and the prevailing economic and technological infrastructure at any given point in time.  (Considerably more than anyone else, there's one man's vision behind Amazon.com.)

The anticapitalist ignorance/fallacies involved are well represented by Bernie Sanders' statement to Bloomberg at the Feb. 19 debate: "You know what Mr. Bloomberg? It wasn’t you who made all that money. Maybe your workers played some role in that as well. And it is important that those workers are able to share the benefits also."  No one said that Bloomberg created the entire value of his company; what economics experts would say, however, is that the people involved in the running of his business were each paid roughly proportional to their marginal value-added contribution.  Bernie's language would indicate that he thinks there's some kind of (exploitative) zero-sum rather than win-win thing going on here; this kind of language/tendency is pretty widespread among socialists, notwithstanding the dramatic rise in both population and living standards in the era of modern capitalism.

(Sanders followed the above statement with the following, also a familiar one from enemies of capitalism; we'll call it the "alienation argument": "When we have so many people go to work every day and they feel not good about their jobs, they feel like cogs in a machine. I want workers to be able to sit on corporate boards as well, so they can have some say of what happens to their lives."  The arguments involved here can't be covered in a brief paragraph of post.  But the gist of this problem, as best as I understand it, is that Bernie and socialists are talking here about a human problem, not a capitalism one, and it's not a problem I see being solved by the traditional socialist solutions about "seizing the means of production (sic)" or other forcible measures of putting "the workers" more in charge of decisions about the running of firms.  That being said, I'm all for voluntary 'worker'-empowerment arrangements that even a Randian 'left-libertarian' like Roderick Long gets behind.  And in any event, how do the rare, entrepreneurial skills of a Bezos get put to their optimal use under socialistic proposals?)

Sanders' statement about the "workers" creating much of the money is standard for socialist-talk and an ingrained tendency toward thinking in terms of a labor theory of value (LTV) under some guise or other.  The most (in)famous proponent of LTV, Karl Marx, had to qualify the LTV in such ways as to make it a truism.  To make a long story short, a CEO of a company qua such (i.e., not qua shareholder in the firm, which I address in a moment) is in the category of highly skilled labor, which represents a multiple of simple or unskilled labor.  And CEOs are known to often make many multiples of the lesser-skilled laborers under his or her command.  But the real villain in the Marxian/socialist framework, the source of alienation and exploitation, is the category of capital (in its privately-owned version, that is).  It's not the CEO that exploits, it's the shareholders (the capitalists) who are in the position to exploit the labor of the CEO and everyone else working in the firm.

Now, Bezos' salary as CEO is a mere $81K.  The vast bulk of his compensation comes from the value of the shares in the company he founded and runs.  IOW, in the Marxist/socialist "understanding," the shareholder-value part of the equation represents exploitation.  And Bezos is only a roughly 1/6 shareholder in Amazon, meaning to the tune of 5/6 of the company's value, Bezos the skilled-laborer-CEO is beholden to shareholder-capitalists.  It's so unfair and alienating.  (Ludwig von Mises among others went through considerable pains to make the point that entrepreneurs and capitalists are beholden to customers.  Is that what's unfair and alienating, in the final analysis?  Is the Marxist/socialist objection really about the inequalities in wealth and income arising from differences in ability to satisfy market demand?)

But the whole Marxian/socialist analysis runs into a problem that Rand solves, when we think through how Bezos qua capitalist/shareholder supposedly exploits the workers (including Bezos qua CEO)?  The question that Marx/socialists fail to answer but Rand does answer, is whether and how Bezos' shareholder-based net worth is a more or less accurate reflection of the value-added he generated as prime mover behind Amazon's success.  Never mind whether or how the net worth of other shareholders in Amazon and other companies reflect how they generated value-added through their skills, savings-and-investing, and savings-and-investing skills or vision.  (Warren Buffett - net worth of roughly $90B or 5th largest in the world - made his fortune through pure investing/finance skills an vision.  What role for a Buffett's finance skills in a socialist-style economy?  And if a highly-and rarely-skilled person holds out not merely for the minimal level of compensation that would bring forth performance, but rather holds out for what the market will bear, is that especially objectionable?)

Anyway, in 2019, Jeff Bezos divorced from his wife, Mackenzie, and as a consequence of the divorce settlement she became currently the 23rd wealthiest person in the world, with a net worth of roughly $44B.  She's not the CEO; she's not usually credited with being the prime mover behind Amazon's success.  From 2019 onward, she draws returns from Amazon's productive capacity qua pure capitalist.

So, using Marx/Sanders/socialist logic, does Mackenzie exploit Jeff?

Loathsome leftist loser Leiter & Co.'s "black book of capitalism"

Note that the so-called black book of capitalism the leftists imagine there to be is a reaction to the damning evidence (namely, 100 million dead and millions brutalized/demoralized) presented in the Black Book of Communism.

I've taken the loathsome Leiter to task before on his anticapitalist/leftist intellectual sloth, his one-sided cherry-picking of the evidence,  etc.  But this just about takes the cake.  As against all the data available at ourworldindata.org, Leiter cherry-picks this one article about suicide rates in the USA as evidence of capitalism (i.e., the system of private property, if you can suspend disbelief for long enough to imagine some causal connection) - or the global neoliberal juggernaut, if you will - making life simply unbearable for ever more people.

I mean, why now, all of a sudden, did capitalism get around to upping the despair/suicide rates?  Globalization and/or automation outsourced their jobs and so it's capitalism's fault that the mostly-public, mostly-Demo-rat-run education (sic) system was too piss-poor to prepare people for the transition?  You basically are in mindless doubling-down territory if you try to keep up a leftist narrative.  You'll notice that the 3.5% unemployment rate gets no mention, capitalism gets no credit for that.  The number just isn't all that important; by definition . . . let me try to mimic leftist thought processes here for a moment, and tell me if you haven't seen it a thousand times . . . the unemployment rate only includes eligible labor force, those seeking work vs, those who have work, which excludes those who've given up perhaps in hopelessness and despair which is due to the private ownership of the means of production because . . . this is where it gets really tricky and I don't claim to know where it might go from here.  One thing's for sure, if they didn't choose to learn from Mises and Rand and the 100 million killed by Reds when they had ample opportunity to do so, then they're probably never going to learn.

Shouldn't these nitwits just stick to the climate-change-discredits-capitalism narrative?  It's a lot less difficult to keep a plausible story straight there - that is, until you dialectically/contextually/hierarchically, if you will (considering both presuppositions and implications, etc.) bring in the role of future tech (AI, etc.), in which case it looks like the leftists are losers there, too.  Yes, indeed, the age of the neoliberal global juggernaut has brought with it one of the greatest things the world has yet seen - the Internet - and it is true, despite the benefits of all that, despite all the raw data/info it makes available to your average inquirer, it hasn't resulted in  particularly improved integrators of data on average across the population.

If anything, given the tendencies of the left-run education (sic) institutions - the case of Leiter being representative of the intellectual rot smugly trying to pass as sophisticated and superior - it has produced inferior information-integrators.  What else is the notoriously toxic twitter sewer but a bunch of inferior info-integrators sucking each others dicks (or using mouth on whatever of each others' genitalia) and imagining Trump/America to be racist and everything is getting worse because of capitalism stuff.  No, it couldn't be because the education (sic) system is failing to meet expectations, it gets a C-minus or so in the cognitive-skills-value-added dept. despite all the extra dough poured in there, and the taxpayers' patience is wearing thin (advantage: Trump/GOP).  No, the thing for the (loathsome) leftist and twitter spittler to do is to double down and blame capitalism (private property), somehow.

But getting back to the real world here: the primary causal factor in human affairs, if you examine it thoroughly and carefully, is the mental and intellectual, with material production value-added a subordinate causal consequence (i.e., historical materialism is conceptually untrue).  And something something the fundamental role of philosophy in human intellectual life (and implications for educating children [a proven success wherever tried] as well as everyone else who's eligible in the ways of philosophic inquiry), a point I've been making a lot over the course of this blog (see, e.g., the 'Intro' link, "Better Living Through Philosophy, in broad outline," at the top of this blog posting).

And it'd sure be damn nice if the leftist losers would stop smearing Ayn Rand at every opportunity and actually make an effort to grasp her point (about, e.g., "the role of the mind in man's existence").  The "best" that the academic left has come up with these days is a hit-and-run smear piece by the intellectual thug Scumbag Lisa Duggan, saying that Rand's point is something about being a "mean girl" - that this "mean girl" thing is more centrally and fundamentally connected to Rand's worldview than (say) the role of the mind in human existence or the Benevolent Universe Premise or heroic sense of life.  Nope, it's not about any of that; it's about Rand having this chip on her shoulder about those folks who proclaim that man's life is the state's to dispose of; this makes her the mean one here, you see.

The loser-left argues against capitalism pretty much as, well, as dishonestly as it argues against its various lame caricatures of Rand.  There pretty much had to be a convergence of both methods and subject matter here (and to a lesser extent this applies to the left's non-response to Mises), since Rand made the fundamental-level identification about the role of the mind/reason/intellect in the capitalistic production process and how that had to lead to the huge advances in the wake of the Industrial Revolution (and the founding of America the nation, as Rand is quick to point out is pivotal to human progress pace the ignorant anti-America leftists smears).  As long as the left refuses to engage reality and/or Rand on this point - about the effectiveness of capitalism at bringing out elite intellectual contributions of economic producers (and this may have something to do with yet another interesting cognitive principle Rand identified: unit-economy) - they will continue to fail in their smear campaigns.  If they engage Rand/reality on this fundamental point (no thanks to the likes of Scumbag Duggan or Comrade Leiter, who actively destructively interfere with doing so), it will be a win-win.

AOC: an excellent fucking idiot, or a perfect one?

AOC's latest is that there being billionaires is not a morally good outcome.  Last I checked, the increase in the instances of billionaires in the world has come along with vast net benefits for masses of people - including drastic reductions in global poverty.

The data are all there at ourworldindata.org.

Take the iPhone and iPad, for instance.  Someone named Steve Jobs made billions (in net worth, not in mansions and cars and golf courses and hookers and blow and gold coins sitting around in an Olympic-pool-sized vault - but rather, something more like current-value-of-expected-future-revenue-stream, i.e., value-created-over-replacement-level, etc. etc. from the iPhone, iTunes, iPad, etc.) through his serving a vast electronics-hungry market of people worldwide.  All the while, global poverty has plummeted, even in the non-iPad-consuming (but perhaps partly iPad-producing...) parts of the world, and someone probably had to end up having some billions of dollars next to their name in the net worth calculations for that to occur.  Mises explains all this quite well in his work on the role of the business tycoon in satisfying mass customer demands, i.e., cultivating a specialized skill in spotting and realizing value-added.  Rand, of course, perfects the analysis in such a way that Atlas Shrugged provides that much more value-added over and above Human Action -- we're at the very tail end of the distribution here in terms of 20th century political-philosophical acumen . . .

I don't know how much more stupid AOC can get than this.  The other day she was saying that the USA was "evolving into fascisuuuuuuum" all the while we have a better example over in China of a more fascism-like environment that serves as a marked contrast to the world's leading light (the good ol' USA, warts and all) which has the moral capital that China lacks to lay claim to being the world's lone superpower for some time to come.

AOC says that she looks about her and does not find "an advanced society."  Her idea of an advanced society involves something called demo-ratic socialisuuuuum where billionaires don't exist while poverty is eliminated (if you can believe that shit), but I've yet to year about AOC's proposal for philosophical education for children (and ipso facto the rest of the mentally-competent citizenry?) ASAFP which would be the fastest way to ensuring whatever the most advanced society we can reasonably expect to realize, which along the way means dialectical engagement between competing ideas about the good and the right at the highest levels of give-and-take (Dennett/Rapoport Rules, etc.) (that's one problem with the Academic Loser-Left, it's all take and no give with them, "the selfish cunts"?).  Ideally it means all informed citizens do their homework as thoroughly as (e.g.) Rawls and Nozick did, at least on the essentials, so as to engage most effectively with their influential-on-academia treatises?  Ideally it means all informed citizens who keep hearing about this Ayn Rand woman know where to look to find good scholarship on Rand.

(Hint: Gregory Salmieri, editor of the Wiley/Blackwell Companion to Rand, and not Scumbag Lisa Duggan, author of 'Mean Girl,' is a reputable Rand scholar.  Scumbag Duggan responds to pointed inquiries about the level of thoroughness and care in her work with evasions and insults.  Also, the only decent critics of Rand these past few decades have been libertarians, e.g., Nozick and Huemer, and even there you find some effective pushback from more Rand-friendly figures like Dougs Den Uyl and Rasmussen - also reputable Rand scholars who were editors of the first academic publication on Rand's philosophic thought in the 1980s.  Also, Sciabarra is a reputable Rand scholar, and the most reputable of all Rand scholars is, of course, Peikoff, by Rand's own attestation.  In the ideal, Dennett/Rapoport society, anyone wanting to comment on Rand and be taken seriously will be thoroughly familiar with the themes covered in Peikoff's output and not just the already-devastating material in Rand's output, e.g., "What is Capitalism?", "Man's Rights," "The Comprachicos," "Art and Cognition," "This is John Galt Speaking," "Apollo 11," "Don't Let It Go," "Philosophy: Who Needs It," etc.  The Peikoff courses are more like material trying to explain in all necessary painstaking detail the cognitive processes that lead to the skill level involved in penning these and other gripping essays/monologues.)

(Then, induce the principle involved with Rand/Objectivism/Peikoff across all the history of philosophy such that (e.g.) an Aristotle-basher like Bertrand Russell doesn't hold the public's attention in the light of the contributions of a most respected Aristotle scholar like W.D. Ross (Aristotle, 1923; editing the Oxford Translation of Aristotle's work in the early 20th century).  In the ideal advanced society AOC has not provided any helpful cues toward, there will be widespread familiarity with the admittedly difficult ideas of Kant and Hegel and their relevance; this includes widespread familiarity with such 'metadata' as where to look for (e.g.) the most thorough or the most cited of Kant or Hegel scholarship.  One should be able to distinguish most thorough and most cited; e.g., I found Sciabarra's Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (1995) to be the most thoroughly researched academically published work on Rand at least for a good decade or two - prima facie evidence of this is the thorough use of Peikoff's lecture materials as well as books, something that Scumbag Duggan didn't bother with in the slightest - whereas the Peikoff-friendly academics affiliated with the Ayn Rand Society (a reputable source about Objectivism...) have been loath to reference or discuss Sciabarra's work much.  The people and organizations near in orbit to "Objectivist apostate" Dr. David Kelley, or Jimmy Wales' Moderated Discussion of Objectivist Philosophy email list in the 1990s and thereabouts were, on the other hand, much interested in discussing Sciabarra's ideas/themes.  I'd like to hear from scholars of Rand, and Aristotle, and Hegel and others about Sciabarra's claims about the Aristotelian provenance of dialectics as he understands it ("the art of context-keeping") and his claims - endorsed in all essentials by avid avowed Aristotelians like the Dougs - of Rand's Objectivism being an expert application of Aristotelian-dialectical essentials in the landscape of 20th century thought (with the necessary scale and scope of integration required to compose Atlas Shrugged being Exhibit A).  (I would also use as examples of dialectical sensibilities in action Aristotle's sprawling research program and Sciabarra's sprawling bibliographic references.)  Why should people in an advanced society expect anything less than care and thoroughness in such research and opinion-forming processes?  I find dialectical sensibilities in action to be a rewarding enterprise.)

An advanced society is also a society comprised of people who are aware of the basics of all the major theories and schools of economics (including the Austrians/Mises), and taught to think about those economics ideas in conjunction with possessing a knowledge of the data at ourworldindata.org.  The juggernaut that is industrial capitalism has almost wiped out extreme poverty, for a population of people approaching 10 billion, and has implemented at profitable scale the technologies that made (e.g.) the iPhone possible.  To borrow a phrase from a Gentle Giant song, is any of this that I'm saying here stuff that Aristotle would discontend?  Not the fool AOC, but the sage Aristotle.  Would his homework-doing lead him to the conclusion that capitalism is exactly as win-win beneficial as Rand and Mises say, that it's particularly difficult to envision a system that can supersede it (he would at least have metadata-level awareness of what's going on in David Ramsey Steele's From Marx to Mises (1992), an exhaustively-researched 20+ page bibliography study, itself one of the 1300 or so works referenced in Sciabarra's Total Freedom, so it's like condensations of condensations of exhaustive research going into the present-day pro-capitalism case...), and that Rand's "What is Capitalism?" captures the essential here (which is a condensation, into one essay, of the theme of Atlas Shrugged) at least as well as anything out there?

Would Aristotle provide a much more thorough commentary upon the work of Sciabarra and the Dougs than what they've received so far from their academic 'peers'?  I mean, are they basically right about Rand's being a rightful heir to the venerable Aristotelian tradition or not?  Or do her polemics leave enough to be desired (e.g. not showing the slightest familiarity with Kant's quandary in the Antinomy of Pure Reason before pronouncing him an evil evader? that sort of thing?) that she falls short of the standards of perfection in dialectic and other conduct that Aristotle tried to exemplify?  I mean, he did say of Plato's theory of Forms/Ideas, 'farewell to such tarradiddle; they are mere sounds without sense,' but at least his rebuttal to the Ideas was explained in detail; Rand never went into detailed polemics against her philosophical 'enemies.'  I guess she comes closest to any such thing in her essay "Causality vs. 'Duty'" inasmuch as it comes into direct conflict with Kant's ideas about specifically moral motivation (that it must be done for duty's sake - that there is something irreducibly autonomous about why we are motivated by moral considerations; it doesn't come down to a calculation of interests or the 'virtue of prudence' but rather assigns an inherent dignity to humanity as such as an end in itself . . . the other aspect of Kant that Rand really never touches upon but which actually best explains his profound influence on mainstream moral philosophizing).  Without coming to grips with Kant's Antinomy and with Kant's project being in great part a response to what he regarded as the Rationalists' (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz) pretense to knowledge of supersensible realities - which contextualizes his talk of "denying knowledge to make room for faith" - Rand's attack on Kant's foundational appearance/thing-in-itself dichotomy isn't particularly helpful.  (Wouldn't we find a suitably 'Aristotelianized' Hegel more insightful in regard to this and other pesky dualisms?)  Her brief polemical attack on Nietzsche in 1961 ("For the New Intellectual" - an essay that is less than utterly fabulous in its entirety, due to the brief polemical attacks) belies her own early Nietzsche influence and even her own positive words about Nietzsche in 1968 which would contextually account for the sources of Nietzsche's appeal.

But Rand's deficient polemics aside, when she's talking about her own ideas and theories, and applying her thinking and writing habits to contemporary cultural commentary, how is she not a first-rate figure?  I mean, has no one noticed that in the 1960s she had no public-intellectual competition to speak of - that no one was producing anything remotely like the body of theory and observation contained in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1967)?  I mean, whatever the value-added-over-replacement-level of works like Rawls' A Theory of Justice (1971) and Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), do they exceed overall and in deepest fundamentals what's going on in C:TUI much less Atlas or The Fountainhead?

Would AOC's advanced society involve people often trying to envision what Aristotle might or might not discontend given all the readily available data about political economy, moral theory, and related areas of study?  Or is AOC's idea of an advanced society predominantly involve people who are as ignorant, intellectually lazy, one-sided, hubris-filled and annoying (if only because she wields real power, a legalized kind involving a gun, in a nominally free country) as AOC?  Do we one-sidedly Chicken Little about the global climate crisis while proposing solutions no consensus of economists could take seriously, while providing no accounting of the pace of technological advancement (in this "not-so-advanced society," see) or - most important of all, as Rand as well as anyone could recognize - the record of humankinds' capacity for problem-solving?

(For example, I am currently in the process of solving or trying to solve how to deliver an incontrovertible, thoroughly researched, one-stop clearing house of a book or series about the eudaimonia/happiness-benefits of a life lived philosophically (and, in the process, discovering the best philosophical paradigm for the organization of life - e.g., is it Aristotelian-style dialectic; or at the least is Aristotelian-style dialectic a better philosophical paradigm or set of organizing principles than, e.g. Marxian dialectical materialism)?  Are there dangers in applying a totalizing 'dialectical' paradigm to the formation of society?  Dangers only with some strands of totalizing dialectics but only benefits with others, like if a society of full-fledged Aristotelians set itself to the task of optimal problem-solving?)

From what I can tell, the Academic Left qua such doesn't produce thinkers like Aristotle or aspiring Aristotelian(-style dialectician)s ; it produces loyal mouthpieces like AOC (and left to run amok it would produce only such loyal "minds") who like routinely to shit all over the things that made America and distinctively Western civilization great, and then to pretend that the USA is a nascent fascist entity when we have a real and very contrasty example of such an entity right in front of our noses in China, as I like to think Aristotle would affirm.  As much as erecting more border barriers might trigger the word "fascism" in AOC's noggin, the wider question being begged is why so many non-white people from around the world would want to gain entry into even a nascently fascist and hateful country.  And, a commonsense question in this context given current Beltway events: Can Xi Jinpeng be impeached for anything?  Given current and past Beltway examples, wouldn't you probably need an opposition party for that thing, much less a minimally effective one?  Seems like only disloyalty to the one, ruling party in China could get one into deep trouble in that context.

So how on earth would this U.S. Representative (NY-14) be so out of it, as to think there are nascent cultural-political forces in the USA that would make us more like the regime in China?  How does someone with a degree in International Relations and Economics from Boston University end up being so out of it as to imagine such things?  How does someone so out of it get an endorsement from Obama?  How does someone so out of it get such a free pass even from the more reasonable and responsible of center-to-left big-govt "liberals" much less the fawning adoration of the far & academic left which unleashed her kind on the polity?  I mean, basically, the academic left has as a core idea for an advanced society something euphemistically and kinda dishonestly called "demo-ratic socialism" but once everyone gets their better-living-through-big-government, punish-the-most-able benefits, where do these advanced citizens go from there presumably with all their new free time?

When do they get around to implementing Philosophy for Children for all schools from grade 3 or so onward?  Why haven't they already, given that it's a no-brainer and the literature makes it perfectly obvious that kids can consider and reflect on bona fide philosophical material (e.g., the nature of justice, happiness, the soul, God)?  What about the whole meaning of life issue?  Is that solved by demo-ratic socialism, or should the citizenry be informed of the state of the art research on the topic, which doesn't seem to make reference to capitalism vs. socialism?  How about applied aesthetics such as getting kids and the citizenry exposed to the essential canon of classical music (in addition to other essential genre-canons, but this one arguably has priority).  Wouldn't there be a closer tie to better living with research into these areas, than with whatever "benefits" supposedly accrue to ordinary folks from a punitively redistributionist fiscal scheme?  (Once the billionaires are outlawed, how do they suppose that the next generation of high-tech goods and services would be realized and delivered at the most feasible combination of quality, price and time saved?  Do these leftists have any viable and sustainable alternative to point to, besides an economic system that has worked better to alleviate human problems than any other economic system on record?)

AOC is faithfully parroting the Academic Left line.  She hasn't really put any careful and thorough thought into any of this stuff, so that leaves us the question: What about the Academic Left itself?  What's its excuse?  How did it fail to put 2 and 2 together by comparing the history of the world before and after modern industrial capitalism and conclude anything other than that it alleviates misery and solves problems (although it tends to do this in unequal measure across the population, which seems to be the real "problem" for the left)?  How does one manage, as does the typical academic leftist, to attribute no credit to capitalism for the problems it solves, while making light only of capitalism's supposed evils - e.g., not crediting capitalism for the dramatic fall in global poverty, but blaming it for climate change (as though there were no connection between these two things, as though it's not the markets-adopting, widespread-absolute-poverty-reducing China with its 1B+ population that is now the world's highest-volume carbon emitter)?

The likes of AOC are where the Academic Left's theoretical rubber hits the political-praxis road.  Is it a remotely impressive result?  Or should we instead rate these phenomena on a scale of (dis)value describing the exact opposite of impressive - e.g., willfully destructive?  Would there be a more perfect example of the willfully destructive run amok than a critical mass of AOC mentalities?  Through the usual pressures for ideological purity on the left, wouldn't a critical mass of AOC types end up being indistinguishable from 20th century Red movements?  If we replace "AOC types" with "Academic Left types" do we get any more encouraging an answer?  Is the Academic Left a perfect fucking idiot?  Any more/less so than the genuine 'fascist Right'?  As for combating climate change, can we leave this to the reasonable and responsible experts in the sciences of the doable?  Past performance tells me that such types are not to be found on the far left; even so much as a loser as Nancy "Keeping out Illegal Border Crossers is Immoral" Peloser recognizes what an obvious epic loser the Green Dream or whatever it is, is.  Cutting poverty increases carbon emissions, ceteris paribus.  What isn't held equal is population size, technological capital, and human problem-solving capacities.

And so the loser-left's last-gasp effort to destroy capitalism is to destabilize the poverty-reduction effort to "save the planet" while giving no accounting on the other side of the ledger of these other not-held-equal things?  The same bunch of leftists who delivered and/or apologized for 20th century socialism - those unaccountable intellectual thugs?  They're sure we shouldn't try out nuclear energy or something before diving headlong off the abolish-capitalism cliff?  They're sure that they're so on the ball that if(/when?) AI gets sophisticated enough - as superior and sophisticated and advanced as your typical leftist, see - to diagnose (or not) on the basis of systemic features of capitalism, that it'll endorse the far-left abolish-capitalism prescription?  Is the Academic Left 100% sure that it's done its homework here, enough to warrant systematically excluding, ignoring, belittling and punishing as many (presumably) intellectually and morally inferior non-academic-leftists as they can?  If the Academic Left can't be blamed for spawning an obvious loser like AOC - if she is come kind of anomaly among undergrads unleashed on the public - then what about the Academic Left itself?  What successes won't it try to discredit, and what failures won't it excuse?  To disambiguate and translate the wording of the post title into a more familiar metaphor: just how sick is this puppy, exactly?

Just how big of a loser is the Left/leftism, exactly?

Since the example of Ayn Rand is way to triggering for these intellectual lowlifes, how about we present a more, uh, conservative (as in very likely understated) case of unexceeded libertarian intellectual excellence in making the scholarly and technically-refined case for right-libertarian (i.e., capitalist) political theory/philosophy: Chris Matthew Sciabarra's Total Freedom: Towards a Dialectical Libertarianism (2000).  Sciabarra has since gone on to be lead editor for the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies (1999-present) while his academic background is such that he was a student of a leading Marx scholar of his day, Bertell Ollman, author of such works as Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in Capitalist Society (1971).  It is also of such an astonishing research orientation that his Total Freedom ends up with 48 pages (or some 1300-ish) references, including all the major philosophers and works of philosophy throughout history along with pretty much anything dialectics-oriented (a tradition stemming from Aristotle, by reputation probably the greatest philosopher of all time, and continuing most especially through Hegel and Marx (in transumated form, i.e., dialectical materialism), and then on through to - Sciabarra argues quite convincingly - the 'dialectical libertarian ascendancy' of Mises, Hayek, and Rand.  And judging by his Rand-related work (not the least of which would be his also-thoroughly-researched [which by necessity includes all the Peikoff courses up through its preparation/publication period] Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (1995)).

Sciabarra refers to dialectics as "the art of context-keeping," a notion (context-keeping, that is) quite familiar to the Serious Students of Objectivism, i.e., those with longtime exposure to the Peikoff courses.  In briefest essence, context-keeping is orienting one's mind toward being able habitually to clearly establish interconnections among all of one's cognitive contents, being sure not to leave out parts or aspects of the truth that usually come crucially to bear on the treatment of any one aspect or part.  And how does a perfectionistic research orientation reflected by 48 pages of references not demonstrate in practice a dialectical sensibility precisely as Sciabarra defines it?  Wanna do dialectics excellently?  Take a hint from the size and scope of the bibliography ffs.  (Do leftists keep context nearly so well, or are they typically partial, fragmentary and one-sided on how they approach ideas, particularly political ones?  Do they demonstrate a curiosity and interest in getting or telling the full story?  If Rand demonstrates quite convincingly that that owners of mind/intellect are compensated accordingly and therefore justly in a free, capitalist economy, do leftists care about understanding her point to the satisfaction of all concerned and responding accordingly?  Even better yet, how about being willing to bend over backwards to understand their opponents' views to everyone's satisfaction before uttering so much as a word of critique?  Could we ever reasonably expect such interpretive charity coming from leftists, given what we can know and prove about them?)

(Having heard pretty much all of Peikoff's courses save for all but the first hour of his Grammar course, and having heard a number of them at least twice - and this includes Understanding Objectivism, the OPAR seminars, The Art of Thinking, and (duh) Objectivism Through Induction, I consider myself among these Serious Students although I don't necessarily identify as an Objectivist; I prefer the term 'Perfectivist' for some odd reason.)

Anyway, Sciabarra's Total Freedom is his exhaustively-researched answer to any variant of leftism that claims the mantle of dialectics.  Private property is a sine qua non of libertarian individualism, there are just really no ways around that given the tie between intellectual production (an irreducibly individual activity - see, e.g., the inability of leftists/leftism to produce any other intellectual with the same powers of leftist agitation as Marx himself, in all these 150+ years ffs) and the exclusive control over material resources (including fundamentally one's body and mind/brain, BTW) traditionally characteristic of private property norms.  Anyway, Sciabarra's covered all his bases, consulted all the essential scholarly sources, drove the point home with a critique of a less-than-satisfactorily-dialectical version of libertarianism advocated by one Murray Rothbard.

So, has there been a leftist rebuttal to Sciabarra's work in all this time, these past two decades and counting?  Well, being also a perfectionist-research-orientation type, I know where to look first for promising leads in that direction, because of what I know about his pattern of past responses to criticisms and where he would post them.  So here you go:
https://www.nyu.edu/projects/sciabarra/totalfrdm/tfrevues.htm

First off, I don't see anything that would suggest a leftist critique of Sciabarra's dialectics-based argument.

And why would there be, really?  Leftism is wrong, false to the facts.  The human world is simply not suited to the left's egalitarian or quasi-egalitarian agenda; they have no remotely credible program for repealing the bell curve.  They have no remotely credible argument for how capitalism is a fundamentally unfair system that impoverishes most those who create the most value-added.  The argumentative techniques they have in favor of this latter view come off almost invariably as ignorant, dishonest, or downright stupid.  Socialism in its original sense that all the leftists were agitating and apologizing for - collective ownership and/or control of "the means of production" (including in practice, as Rand points out, the most important means of production ignored by uniformly shitheaded socialists: the irreducibly individual self-moving human intellect) has proved time and time again to be a monumental failure if not humanitarian catastrophe.  Rather than provide a remotely credible explanation for all this failure and catastrophe, or a remotely credible answer to Mises, Hayek, Rand, Nozick, Sciabarra, Hospers, Mack, Den Uyl and Rasmussen, and on and on go the names of the not-remotely-credibly-answered political philosophers, they continue to agitate, AOC-like if not Chomsky-like, for collective appropriation of individual intelligence.  (Chomsky says in a video titled 'Manufacturing Consent' that things won't improve for ordinary folks unless there is an end put to "private control of the resources."  "The resources" presumably including the human intellect?  Chomsky is quite the intellect in many ways - even in ways praised explicitly by Rand in how he handled Skinner behaviorism - but on the matter of capitalism vs. socialism he seems like an absolute shithead.)

So, to boil it down: Sciabarra presented, two decades ago, a monumental work of scholarship fundamentally challenging the leftist claim to either dialectics or to libertarianism.  If there had been even one rebuttal by the left to Sciabarra's thesis, I probably would have heard about it way back when.  (I'm included among perhaps well over a hundred others in its Acknowledgments section, for one thing....)  Roderick Long does have a Journal of Ayn Rand Studies review of Total Freedom, and he identifies as a left-libertarian of sorts, but he's also into Mises and praxeology and the Austrian School . . . and Rand . . . and Aristotelian philosophy most importantly, and since when were leftist losers big on whatever the Aristotelian tradition might have to offer to current understanding?  Zizek does Marx and Hegel but what about Aristotle?  Zizek has an article in the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies but it's not of much distinction and it sounds a lot like he's doing what he's reputed widely for: being provocative, i.e., a sort of philosophical troll.  And does he have any good answer to Sciabarra/Total Freedom?

I can't think of any good answer; I don't have any high expectations that a near-future delving into of the Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx is going to give me satisfactory or impressive answers in this regard.  (Maybe it really is just some strange accident of history that Marxism attracted psychopathic cults time and time again, pretty much all rooted on the premise that "the capital-owning class" exploited "the working class."  Take that, Hank Rearden/Galt/Rand?)  Sciabarra's already aware of Ollmann's work and he's not a convert to Marxism/leftism, etc.

Now, just how is it that in all these two decades, apparently no prominent leftist critique of Sciabarra's work has emerged?  Just how big of a loser does this make the Left/leftism, exactly?  Because it seems to me that this lack of rebuttal is a devastating indictment of what I strongly suspect if not know if not know for a 100% certainty to be a fundamentally dishonest intellectual culture of leftism?

If that isn't a devastating indictment, then what is?  There's simply no valid excuse for it, whatsoever.

And anyone who has the curiosity to seek out the evidence knows that this is just the apex of a mountain of it, when it comes to leftism.  Leftism is fundamentally a corruption of the human soul/psyche and intellect; its persistence has to be more a psychological and sociological phenomenon than an intellectual one.  The persistent absence of references to Aristotle or Aristotelian ideas speaks volumes in itself given the left's pretentions to intellectual and moral superiority.  Nor do I find it surprising, given the history of human belief and ideological movements, that something so perfectly discreditable and cult-like as leftist/egalitarian/anti-capitalist thought could continue on so long after the argument had been settled on its merits.

(If you're still a leftist after roughly 1974, how serious an intellectual can you possibly be?  From what I've been able to glean metadata-wise, Nozick's most prominent leftist critic, the Marxist G.A. Cohen, postulates that society could be run essentially along the lines of a camping trip.  (Or why not a family?)  Also, I did read through, way back when, his full-book-length critique of Nozick, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality.  If I could boil down what I think was the essential argument there, it's that from self-ownership alone you couldn't derive any specific regime of property rights.

[Edit: here, I'm checking it now, but you also can check out some 'metadata' on the book here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/394221.Self_Ownership_Freedom_and_Equality [Adjacent tabs now include: https://sites.google.com/site/professorericmack/home/selected-papers which contains a paper with 'marxism' in the title responding to Cohen; and http://politybooks.com/mack-online-chapter/ as well as a paper copy of Mack's Libertarianism book at hand; don't worry, I'm well ahead of y'all in metadata level things like where to look first and what related materials, etc.  Also looking very forward to Mack's latest commentary on the Dougs' rights theory in that online chapter, sounds very tasty!  Haven't had that much excitement since their 1993 Reason Papers exchange on, well, basically, teleology and deontology in rights theory if I can boil it down that way.  I think I resolve the basic differences there in my 2006 JARS essay on egoism-and-rights, and just to be clear, Aristotelianism is foundational to the normative project, and it's the 'Kantian' elements found in the concept of rights that are built on the Aristotelian foundation given the prime-mover role of the intellect/reason in a eudaimonic/flourishing human life; Kantian normative theory is built on the formal requirements of a reasoning being's practical(/praxis/action) imperatives, but what's the ultimate point, the ultimate telos of practical imperatives?  And what about the constitutive role of virtue/rationality in the best/happiest kind of human life?  Anyway, Kant's categorical imperative(s) are monumental insights into the formal character of a reasoning being's practical imperatives, which in terms of the moral imperatives we call categorical, overriding and all-things-considered imperatives include things like: make your maxims applicable to all reasoning beings in all similar circumstances; respect yourself and your fellow human as an end-in-itself, not to be treated merely as a means or instrument to the ends of another (consequent to which the libertarian self-ownership principle: other men's lives are not yours to dispose of).  And something or other about a Kingdom of Ends based on a universal implementation of Kantian-style moral reasoning, which sounds like one of those preconditions for an 'end of history' type of dealio there.  Also, to make a long story very short, I believe this, and it's a big lesson that a lot of non-Aristotelian libertarians can really learn from as well: the reasons that we have for promoting a certain kind of reason-based or intellectualist or Aristotelian vision of the good life, are the same reasons we have for affirming a concept of rights based on the universalization of the free exercise of human reason and all that is consequent to that (including the capitalistic right to private property, a connection which Rand nailed as well as anyone).] ]

So as for Cohen's 'self'- vs. 'world'-ownership dichotomy: So much for Rand's point about the human mind/intellect and the bell-curve realities involved there?  (And so much for the essential history of capitalism which is a marked material betterment of all folks on the bell curve, in an historically very short period of time, which Rand correctly attributes to individuals' reason being set as free as never before in the realm of material production?)  Anyway, Hayek was a young socialist as of roughly 1922, until Mises' Socialism came out and changed his mind.  What's the excuse for why so few non-Hayek folks did the honest thing?  Socialism settled the argument on its merits in 1922, and Mises/Hayek were proved fundamentally right about socialism's inability to solve key problems of economic production, while Rand discredited socialist ethics right to its rotten little envious core as early as 1936 with her debut, We The Living.  All the left ever managed against Mises were some 1930s articles by Lange and a couple others limited to the "calculation" issue (whereas Mises took on all aspects of socialist thought up to and including its tendencies toward cultural destructions), whereas Hayek rebutted Lange in subsequent articles anthologized in Individualism and Economic Order (1948).  The collapse of socialist-proper economies vindicated Mises and Hayek.  Hayek went on to supplement his economic work with work in politics, philosophy, and psychology.  I'm unaware of much in the way of serious and honest leftist rebuttals to Hayek; the closest thing I know of to a Rawlsian response to Hayek is Tomasi's Free Market Fairness (2013), which is essentially positive and duly credits Hayek's insights.  I mean, shouldn't Tomasi's book basically settle whether leftism has any shred of credibility remaining?  Meanwhile, all the left has ever managed against Rand is a bunch of outrageous, context-eliding, dishonest-on-their-face smears.  If this doesn't speak very poorly about the quality of leftist minds, then what does?  [Rand not being around herself to ask this question, I guess it's on me to ask it on her behalf, and it's a great fucking question, is it not.])

So the left is really fucking pathetic, but just how really fucking pathetic, exactly?

[In the queue: Something positive and not altogether polemical, I swear!  Wherein, I deal with the question, What would a society of people adopting Rand's philosophy for living (hint: the basic/fundamental virtue is rationality) look like?  Spelled out in furthest nonfiction detail, we get her best student Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (based on the Rand-authorized course, etc.), and in particular the chapters on "Objectivity" (the basic habits/practices of mind of a well-ordered intellectual life) and "Virtue" (the section on Honesty being particularly memorable and effective).  Peikoff's OPAR seminar lectures (as well as the parallel lectures in the authorized '76 course) on these topics are at the ARI Campus site for free, etc. etc., links needing to be supplied yet again?]

[Addendum: It's not just these intellectual figures the left has behaved dishonorably towards; just look at how the left recklessly smears Trump as a racist on the flimsiest of pretexts - pretty much every fucking time; maybe there was an exception or two where Trump really shouldn't have been so politically incorrect whatever valid point he was trying to make and the left ignored - and how the entirety of the American left seems just fine with how Brett Kavanaugh was recklessely smeared as a sex pervert based on stories that never got close to passing an honest sniff test, and how it's all fair game because of his "privileged white male" existence, or whatever the dishonest, scraping-bottom rationalization for the typically leftist affront to common sense (to be sneered at as 'bourgeois ethics') epitomized by the Kavanaugh episode.  Nancy Peloser says Trump's border wall is about "making America white again" and not a leftist says a peep in protest or objection. (Not even a strategically wise remark to the effect of, "Keep it up, Nancy, and it'll cost us another presidential election"?  Are leftists this fucking pathetic and depleted of the best minds, even at the lightweight level of activism strategy/tactics?)  If that isn't disreputably scummy on her and their parts, then what is?]

[Addendum #2: Ollman - again, Sciabarra's mentor and author of the book on Marx's conception of alienation - had this blurb about Russian Radical: "Ayn Rand, a radical? A comrade of Marx, methodologically speaking? Libertarians and Marxists BEWARE, because Sciabarra makes a solid case for his astounding claim. An eye-opening work, and a pleasure to read!"  This about a work nearly a quarter century old now, and did the leftists ever take Ollman up on his provocative claims?  I'm talking the Academic Left, here.  Did it lift a finger in the direction of intellectual curiosity when a leading scholar of Marx raised the equivalent of a red flag (ahem?) requiring some pretty urgent attention?  I mean, like, how is it possible that one could apply methodological tools that have deep parallels to Marx's, and end up with a libertarian-capitalist politics?  As a(n aspiring) metaphilosopher with something of an obsessive interest in methodology myself, this strikes me as pretty rock-bottom fundamental stuff with huge implications over time and place for a whole lotta people.  I mean, look at the 20th century implications of Marxian theory, in action, and think carefully and thoroughly about what important lessons this tells us about applying methodology correctly?  It's clear - or is it? - that despite their own professed commitments to full context-keeping, Marx and Rand ended up going about it differently.  Rand has no commitments to historical materialism (materialist conception of history, histomat, diamat, etc.).  She claims methodological precedents in (and her only acknowledged philosophical debt to) Aristotle, and as anyone who's looked carefully and honestly into her system of ideas (which necessarily includes anything closely related to that Rand-authorized/endorsed 1976 course and its presenter) can see how Rand presents a plausible vision for how neo-Aristotelian sensibilities might be applied today to some pretty fundamental-level issues (such as the nature of virtue, or philosophic method itself, or why ever have any institutions that employ physical force), and one thing I don't see coming out of such a program or anything like it is what came from Marxism, e.g., the Gulag Archipelago, the Great Chinese Famine, ongoing Chinese illiberalism/repression (the actual fascism-like concrete we can look to today, pace that goddamned knuckleheaded nitwit AOC and her vocal fry...), the ever-cult-like Academic Left, and other very anti-human-telos failures of the past century.  I'll get all the data and metadata I need for full diagnostics on this pitiful excuse for an effort at creating what that Comprachico--ized numbskull AOC & ilk refer to as an advanced society, once I go through the Oxford Handbook of Marx.  On the fail scale, Stalinism is as good a candidate for a 10/10 rating as any, but it's like these 'demo-rat socialist' leftist losers are trying their best to push a 7 or 8, something more Atlas Shrugged-like if their latest ideologically inbred lurching is any indication.  As the too-brainwashed-to-know-she's-a-walking-caricature AOC declared, someone's right to housing supersedes your privilege of earning a profit.  The Blue State model currently being played out in NY, CA, CT, MA, IL, and other more advanced societies appears not to be yet far left enough for AOC and the Academic Left.  There's still too much capitalism, too much gentrification, too much of economic laws dictating what bourgeois neoliberals consider practical and feasible.  Sounds like they need some reeducation/immunization from neoliberal ideology?  Double down on the leftist Cold War line of the 20th century, in other words?  But I do wish those bourgeois neoliberals in San Francisco, NYC, and LA the best of luck in their effort to keep things fiscally sustainable (the primary key is to avoid an Atlas-style brain drain...), not be overtaken by an ever-insistent far left, and maintaining their own smug satisfaction that they've so much as adequately rebutted Rand, Mises, Hayek, Friedman, Nozick, Krauthammer, Limbaugh, Buckley, et al.  I mean, I don't expect any adequate rebuttal to any of these thinkers from an AOC or Peloser, but someone, anyone among the center-left neoliberal bourgeoise?  I was hoping Rawls might do a 50-page rebuttal to Nozick like Nozick did with Rawls, but no such luck there, so where do I look next, pray tell?  Someone rebutting Mack (rebutting Cohen rebutting Nozick)?  I guess not.  Anyone rebutting Hospers' libertarianism formulation ("other men's lives not yours to dispose of")?  I already know about no rebuttals to Sciabarra (and it's not like he doesn't debate his points exhaustively with his critics and seems to get in the last word, much like the neo-Aristotelian Dougs Den Uyl and Rasmussen, who also aren't being rebutted, although as I've pointed out before in this blog under the "dialectic" tag, the Sciabarra and Dougs arguments seem to come to the basic essential idea, a perfectionist/dialectical social ethos combined with a nonperfectionist/libertarian politics, so it wouldn't be any surprise if neither of these arguments met with serious rebuttals, right?...).  Krauthammer, widely reputed in D.C. for having been the leading intellectual figure among its regular commentators, was a Democrat until the mid-1980s, by which point it had become clear to the finest observant minds that a Reagan-like agenda was superior to a typical Demo-rat-like one.  What did the Demo-rats do since the 1980s that would have led Krauthammer to reverse his judgment on this?  Jack shit, that's what.  And on and on it goes.  As I've indicated, I don't think Cohen's rebuttal to Nozick amounts to anything, although I do have to grant credit to one James P. Sterba for his taking on libertarians for their full-on rejection of welfare-rights claims.  So there's Sterba, noteworthy for standing out for taking on libertarians more effectively than just about anyone (although my metadata about Beyleveld's Gewirthian treatise The Dialectical Necessity of Morality (1992) tells me that he does an admirable job there as well...).  So Sterba and Beyleveld/Gewirth among the center-left bourgeois neoliberals, and no far-left criticisms of right-libertarian politics worth serious consideration IMHO.  And this is even without taking into consideration the neglect (by center-left liberals, leftists, and many libertarians) of conservative thought.  (I know, there are just so few of them in academia, it can be hard for the leftists, center-left, and libertarians while going after one another to remember about the conservatives.  That's kinda fucking sad, actually.  I mean, surely there's a really good treatise-length refutation of conservatism out there, somewhere?  Monograph-length?  Also, is there any good refutation of Rand by conservatives anywhere?  John W. Robbins just doesn't cut it, now, does he.  Sciabarra's grasp of Rand is way better, also the Dougs'.  And since leftists are so shitty at refuting Rand, and the center-left so-called liberals don't seem to know really what to do except fall back on Rawls, or something, and non-Randian libertarians spend so much of their time barking up less than optimal trees, one is left to ask where any good refutation of Rand might ever come from.  I mean, Nozick, Huemer, Mack (his 'Problematic Arguments'/'Shuffle' critiques), Charles King, Scott Ryan . . . they raise points worth going through, but do they really refute any of insights from the likes of the Dougs and Sciabarra into the most fundamental Rand stuff, i.e., the method, the life-based teleological eudaimonism, objectivity in cognition as requiring social and political freedom (man as an end in himself, etc.), the role of sense of life in aesthetics, . . . . BTW, Rand's essay "What is Capitalism?" is, as far as I can tell, irrefutable; as Rand points out, it can serve as an essentialization of Atlas Shrugged's theme about the role of the mind in human existence, and it also brings into the discussion a philosophical essential for Rand - her distinction between the objective, the intrinsic, and the subjective.  Now, I've not yet obtained a physical copy of the Ayn Rand Society's Philosophical Studies series Volume 3, 'Reflections on a Free Society,' but the metadata I've gleaned about it is that there is no debate about "What is Capitalism?" in this volume.  (The focus is a lot more on Rand's theory of rights and government, with one Darryl Wright doing quite a bit of heavy lifting with the first three chapters.)  It's like there's simply nothing in there to debate! - that Rand nailed a difficult philosophical topic and in the process established a foundational grounding for capitalism-related common sense going forward.  Of course capitalism is a system uniquely suited to actualizing the potentialities of human intelligence in the realm of material production, and the concretes and contrasting systems are all around us today and throughout history.  So how did the universities churn out so many fools like AOC?)  One last thing: when that Volume 4 in the works, about Rand's relation to Aristotle and Aristotelian themes, is published, what are the enemies/bashers/smearers/belittlers of Rand going to do to then?  Flush their credibility yet further down the toilet by pretending that it or any such book doesn't exist?  By failing to recognize its significance?  Just how more fucking pathetic, exactly, are they willing to get?  Do these fuckheads not know that Salmieri studied under Gotthelf who was both a leading scholar of Aristotle's biology and and longtime associate of Rand's?  The Aristotelian tradition is as high-profile a tradition or school of thought as it gets.  Its scholars are perfectionists.  So what is one to make of the fact of there being a highly-reputed scholar of Aristotle who takes Rand most seriously as a neo-Aristotelian figure?  Metadata-wise, what does it tell you?  Does it tell you that it's safe to go on ignoring, belittling, etc. Rand if intellectual credibility is your concern?  That it would be safe to ignore the work in progress by Salmieri, Sciabarra, Tara Smith (someone big on perfectionism, BTW), Den Uyl and Rasmussen, Miller, Lennox, Mayhew and other neo-Aristotelian Rand-positive scholars?  I mean, because the Academic Left is placing its bets and staking its long-term credibility on ignoring these very figures (on the assumption that Rand being evil/lightweight, Rand-positive people are themselves intellectually/morally deficient).  The decision to ignore these figures still wouldn't give a shred of a valid excuse for why there doesn't seem to be a peep coming from the Academic Left about the virtues of Aristotle or Aristotelian themes.  Not even about his being the father of dialectical method, before Hegel and Marx.  How bright can they possibly be compared to their smug pretentions?]

Philosophy profession discredits itself?

(a teensy bit of context)  (a not-so-teensy bit)

This situation is unacceptable: 8 in 10 Philosophy Majors Favor Socialism

In addition to being unacceptable (on the merits of socialism vs. capitalism), it makes a bad impression about philosophy on the wider American public which contains a great many folks skeptical of philosophy's value for society, and some of whom have influence on state university budgets.  This should be cause for alarm for the philosophers whose profession will inevitably be targeted because of this.

If ever there is an idea discredited theoretically, morally and historically, it is socialism.  Mises' 1922 book, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (linked above) is an epic, monumental takedown of socialist "thought," and is widely acknowledged among defenders of the free market -- i.e., capitalism -- for being such.  (Keep in mind that a great many of capitalism's defenders are not often in agreement about what thinkers and arguments are its strongest.  Misesians may overlap plenty with Rothbardians, say, but there isn't so much overlap between Rothbardians and Randians.  Just for instance.)  Mises' book and case against socialism was most widely discussed in reference to his "calculation argument," in which he established with great thoroughness and care that a truly socialist production framework couldn't properly calculate prices (particularly for production factors, i.e., capital goods).  What role for entrepreneurs in a socialist framework, particularly if such putative entrepreneurs had to answer to some collective production bureau?  (There also is a sizable body of literature on entrepreneurship by 'Austrian school' economists influenced principally by Menger, Bohm-Bawerk, Mises and Hayek.)

Socialism's defenders took Mises on regarding the "calculation problem" (which appears in the end to have vindicated Mises, if Heilbroner's testimony is any indication).  But they neglected the rest of Mises' book, which exposes patterns and habits of thought among socialists that are inimical to Western civilization.  The final chapters of Socialism concern the tendency of socialism toward cultural destructionism, for example.

The history of socialism was not only one of failure, but monumental and monumentally deadly failure.  Some 20 to 40 million or more people perished in the Great Chinese Famine alone.  Time and time again mediocrities and sociopaths with access to power were (unsurprisingly?) drawn to this ideology, or more specifically the Marxian strain of it.

If anything might have discredited socialism, it is this deadly (and often outright bloody) history.  There is no honest denial of it, no way to spin the evidence.

If anything discredits socialism it is the ethical premises it relies upon, and while ethical theory isn't subject to the same testing the way that socialism was tested historically, one uncontroversial ethical principle (if any exist at all) is that stated by John Hospers, philosophy professor and first Libertarian Party presidential candidate, more or less directly channeling his former sparring partner, Ayn Rand: "other men's lives are not yours to dispose of."  Socialism, by definition, contravenes this principle.

Here's the definition of socialism appearing at the top of the above-linked google search:

a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.

As Rand states in "This is John Galt Speaking" (Atlas Shrugged), "When you clamor for public ownership of the means of production, you are clamoring for public ownership of the mind."  The theme (of course?) of Rand's novel is: the role of the mind in man's existence.  (This applies in both the material and the spiritual realms, in politics and religion.)  It is only by application of the distinctively human conceptual faculty that the human race has moved from a primitive, caveman existence to modern, technologically-sophisticated society - and in any era of this progression, it's exceptional individual minds/intellects rising above the herd level, the conventional, the given, who drive further progress.  Non-human-intellect natural resources (means of production) have to be transformed by the human intellect to generate value-added or technological advance, and these minds/intellects come attached to specific individuals who are in a unique position to develop and direct this resource.  But even more importantly, ethically speaking (and not just a matter of historical explanation) the minds/intellects are their owners' to dispose of.  The whole point of her novel's heroes going "on strike" is to devote their energies/talents/minds to ends and projects of their own choosing, rather than to be forcibly subjected to the dictates of their public-sector inferiors.

Now, I'm aware that Rand-bashers typically refuse to understand Rand's point, hence their resort to any number of intellectually lazy or reckless caricatures or outright smears.  In any case, she remains socialism's most potent critic of socialism (and defender of capitalism) on ethical grounds.

Now, socialism proper - the state or collective owning "the means of production" is discredited roundly enough that defenders of it are hard to find these days.  But there's a little loophole in the above definition of socialism: "or regulated".  The same moral principle applies: under this definition the state or collective can still control and direct (under force of law) how individuals are to dispose of their intellects, talents, time and energy and the subsequent property holdings.  And significant wide-ranging regulation of people's economic lives is not only typical of most nations' economies of today, but those of the more socialist bent seek more such control.

Anyone who finds socialism attractive and yet fails to engage with Rand and Hospers (and Nozick and Mack) with due dialectical diligence is either ignorant or dishonest.  So which of these two is this 80 percent of philosophy (sic) majors, and - more importantly - how did this 80 percent manage to end up supporting the unsupportable?  How poor a job did their philosophy (sic) instructors have to do in order to generate such an unacceptable result?  I understand that the philosophy majors who go on to grad school would have to do a minimally decent job of dialectic with the libertarian position espoused above (which holds that either (a) market arrangements are in fact the best-known way of improving people's economic situation as well as preserving other freedoms and republican political institutions, or (b) that non-market arrangements are the best way of improving lives where markets didn't meet the task, or both).  But what excuse is there for so many undergrads/majors for embracing such a monumentally stupid, immoral and un-American idea as socialism (whether defined in terms of ownership or of control of "the means of production")?  (The best non-market arrangement I can propose for improving people's lives is (of course?) widespread philosophical education.)

If philosophers concerned with the public image of their professors have a clue, they'll be driven to some amount of action to counteract what's going on here.  (How does socialism compare to / contrast with biblical fundamentalism, say?  With the Rapture-ready variants?  With more extreme variants than that?)  Let's put this in terms that might stimulate their competitive juices more:

Economics majors aren't nearly so favorable to socialism; "only" 1 in 4 find socialism appealing.  Now, in the undergraduate academy there are three main sectors: the physical sciences, the "soft" or social sciences, and the humanities.  Various measures of (academic) intelligence show consistently that the smartest (on average) physical sciences majors are in Physics, the smartest social scientists are in Econ, and the smartest humanists are in Philosophy.

So . . . which majors are really the smartest and least ignorant when it comes to socialism?

You can't really blame "the campus environment" for the deplorable level of Philosophy majors' support for socialism, since that toxic environment hasn't destroyed (yet) the Econ departments enough to result in their majors supporting socialism in similar numbers.  Anyway, the overwhelming majority of the Econ and the Philosophy majors can't both be right about the socialism thing; one of these groups is probably screwing up big-time.  So which group is it?  Are the Philosophy professors curious enough to find out, and perhaps clean up their acts?  This is assuming that institutional incentives related to possible departmental budget cuts by representatives of pissed-off taxpayers aren't motivation enough.

As it is, 80 percent of philosophy (sic) majors supporting socialism only supports the widely-held thesis that "philosophers don't know how the real world works."  Two last points to bring up here:

(1) There is indeed a widespread problem about the relation of philosophy to the real world, and that is a tendency among highly intellectual people - academic types perhaps most especially - toward cognitive rationalism, or a fundamental breach between ideas and the world that's supposed to moor down the ideas.  (If you're a philosopher who wasn't confronted the problem of rationalism head-on, explicitly, fully and systematically, then how do you know you're not beset by it?  Note that Peikoff delves in pretty deep on this stuff in Understanding Objectivism - head on by name in Lectures/chapters 8 and 9 and implicitly throughout the first 7 lectures/chapters as preparatory work.  

(2) How would the likes of Plato, Aristotle and Kant address the socialism subject?  One thing they (well, Aristotle for sure) wouldn't do is to fail to have a rigorous dialogue with the Econ profession.  (I say Aristotle for sure, not just because of his sprawling research program, but if you open a history of economic thought you might just well find Aristotle discussed as a leading founder of the discipline - basically not surpassed for some 2,000 years until the Physiocrats et al.)  Aristotle's sensibility is such that he'd be engaged heavily with Mises' book as well as Rand/Hospers' "your life is your own to dispose of" thesis.  Nozick's 1974 Anarchy, State, and Utopia was praised on a back-cover blurb for its "unsurpassed dialectical sensibility" or words to that effect.  It's unmistakable that this former leftist Nozick did his homework and concluded about socialism pretty much the same thing that Rand, Mises, Hayek, and Hospers did: it's indefensible as moral theory and as social science.  Would Aristotle with his unsurpassed dialectical sensibility conclude any differently?  Does Rawls' advocacy of a quasi-socialistic regime of economic and/or property rights fall afoul of the "individuals' lives are their own to dispose of" moral principle, and if it does, does this rule out as unacceptable (this aspect of) Rawls' theory?  Among leading Harvard political philosophers of the early 1970s, the ratio of Rawlsians to Nozickians was 1:1.  Wouldn't that be a more healthy representation of the philosophy profession than the (more or less) 4:1 ratio among philosophy majors?  If so, whence the disconnect between points A and B?

Also, perhaps philosophers might explain how Hospers - a non-Harvard man tainted by his enthusiasm for and association with Rand - has gotten little recognition for his "other men's lives are not yours to dispose of" formulation while Nozick's essentially similar point but stated less strikingly is what gets the academic attention?  What's wrong with Hospers' formulation?  How is it not a powerful moral principle?

(I once stated this principle to a Rand-basher who replied that "that's actually a Kantian principle," and whereas Kant was a philosopher this Rand-basher respected most highly, this basher wouldn't extend any credit to Rand for espousing that very idea.  Par for the Rand-bashing course, as my exhaustive experience in this area tells me.)

How on earth do philosophy (sic) majors appear utterly ignorant of such a hard-hitting formulation of libertarian principles?  Surely Aristotle wouldn't fail to engage fully and fairly with Rand, Hospers, Nozick and Mises?  Aristotle is one of the people I can confidently say didn't contribute to negative aspects of philosophy's reputation (notwithstanding hubristic STEM-lords who blame Aristotle for subsequent thinkers turning his physical theories into dogma).  He systematically eschewed cognitive rationalism.  If the only excuse today's philosophy profession has to offer for not operating at Aristotle's level is that they can't keep up with someone who had as a teacher someone who had Socrates as a teacher, then perhaps that's a legitimate excuse, but they might not like the can of worms this explanation might open up, either.  If the notion of (my hypothetical, resurrected, preferably drill-sergeant-role) Aristotle embracing socialism strikes one as ridiculous as it strike me, then one should operate accordingly.  Me, I wrote this blog post and have it duly contextualized with hard-hitting links.  (Here's even another one, right from the SEP.)  Perhaps others in the profession can take measures of their own to help salvage its reputation?

Socialism is a litmus test for sound moral and/or scientific reasoning.  In my experience, arguing with socialists is like arguing with flat-earthers; they will stop at nothing to spin the evidence in their preconceived direction, and when confronted with the Rand/Hospers/Nozick principle (especially when illustrated by an example such as a decision to start one's own business to compete with the collectively-run/regulated enterprise, or with the reality of the skills bell-curve that results in differences in income and wealth), they don't even bother spinning: they fall silent.  The socialists did a piss-poor job of responding to Mises' treatise in its full context (including his thesis about cultural destructionism), they've done a piss-poor job of even understanding Rand's main political-economic themes, they have a track record of apologetics for the most murderous and authoritarian political regimes; they have long since squandered the benefit of the doubt.  You don't even need a hypothetical example of a resurrected Aristotle to figure this out; the aforementioned figures already presented compelling arguments and the historical record of socialism's failure can't be honestly avoided.

Is the only sorry excuse for this sorry state of affairs that the meaning of "socialism" has changed between the time of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Castro, et al and today, such that the Scandinavian welfare-state model (where the lives of the men of mind and ability, as Rand/Galt terms them, are merely extensively regulated but not owned outright) and not the USSR is the most representative case?  (As for the use of the term "socialism" to apply to Scandinavia but not to the USSR: how is the linguistic confusion run rampant here in any way acceptable in its own right?  How on earth can it look good, no matter how you spin it, that 4/5 of Philosophy majors favor socialism?)

I already linked above Alan Charles Kors' discussion of the malpractice of intellectuals (sic) during the USSR era and afterward.  Can there be an "after socialism," Kors asks, if the intellectuals don't come to grips with this malpractice?  (Unlike medical doctors they can't be sued for malpractice; it's not evident that they face any serious negative repercussions for the failures of their ideas, a point that Thomas Sowell has repeated endlessly.)  The fact that 80 fucking percent of philosophy majors find this evil idea attractive would indicate that the intellectuals (sic) are still engaged in the same malpractice, in essence.  Bad-faith rationalizations about how pro-capitalism, libertarian and/or conservative intellectuals aren't competitive in an academic environment won't cut it, and certainly won't help to rehabilitate the low to mixed public reputation of the philosophy profession.

How much could it hurt these academics for them to actually behave like the letters "PhD" behind their names would suggest?  How much does it really hurt them to seriously and fully consider that Bezos, Buffett, et al are entitled to their wealth for implementing visions that evidently no one else had the skills to do (at their level, anyway), that they're using their own skills/talents/energies/time/minds attached to their physical and moral personhood, that their activities tend to raise living standards generally, and other such truths about the capitalist system?  Short of my hypothetical resurrected Aristotle, there is the example of Nozick who went through all the alternatives on offer and found socialism - basically anything to the left of Rawls - to be woefully inadequate as serious political philosophy.  So, what did Nozick miss?  (And it wouldn't be very philosophical to peddle the easily-refuted myth that Nozick "abandoned libertarianism," now, would it.  What's the 2011 Slate article author's excuse for not acknowledging Nozick's 2001 interview?  This is just the sort of intellectually lazy, bad-faith shit I'm talking about, which seems to pass without comment way too damn much.  Heck, why don't leftist intellectuals respond to Kors and either atone as he recommends, or explain how they don't have to?  Had I somehow missed their addressing Kors' argument?  Do I need to make some exhaustive google search to confirm what I already suspect with ample justification?  Shouldn't the Kors search link provided above suffice?  If anything, the only arguments, facts and justifications here keep coming from the other direction, providing only more evidence of the academic left's shameful, credibility-squandering intellectual history.  And the mainstream of taxpaying America certainly doesn't have the patience for this far-left shit.)

Answer to Prof. Wolff on inequality

The loathsome leftist loser Leiter links to (Marxist/museum piece) Robert Paul Wolff critiquing what he takes to be standard lines of justification for income/wealth inequality used by defenders of capitalism.  I've addressed the essential point in this blog fairly recently using the example of Amazon/Bezos, but I elaborate on my argument further below.  First, Wolff:

In order to focus our attention and make the argument concrete, let me take as an example the Columbia University Sociology Department in which I shall again be teaching this fall.  There are upwards of forty members of the department, including many distinguished scholars, and a support staff of four.  Since Columbia, unlike UMass, is a private university, it is of course impossible to find out easily how much each of these folks makes [whereas at UMass this is public knowledge], but I think we can assume that there is a considerable pay gap between the senior professors and the departmental secretaries – maybe three hundred percent or more.  How can this be explained and justified?

The standard answer is that it takes both long preparation and really rare talent to be a Columbia Sociology Professor, and the big bucks are needed to get the right people into those jobs.  I freely grant that being a Columbia Sociology Professor requires long preparation and really rare talent.  But do you need to pay big salaries to get the best people into those jobs.  [Alert:  I am going to ignore the effect of competition among universities in all of this.  I trust it is obvious that that consideration can be bracketed for the purposes of this analysis.  If it isn’t obvious, sit and think about it for a bit before you rush to comment.]

Well, think about it.  Setting to one side the cost of job preparation and the foregone income [see above], suppose we ask Shamus Kahn [currently Department Chair] whether he would prefer to remain as a Professor of Sociology or take over the job of Winston Gordon III [one of the support staff.]  Leave aside being Department Chair, which Shamus, like any sensible academic, could do without [or so he told me.]  As a Professor, he would be expected to be on campus 32 weeks out of the year, two or three days a week.  He would be in class 4 or 5 hours a week, would hold office hours 2 hours a week, would prepare lectures, and [ugh] would grade papers once or twice a semester.  He would also be encouraged [but not required] to do any independent research he wished and every so often to publish the results.  Contrariwise, as a departmental staff member, he would be expected to be on campus 48 weeks a year, five days a week, seven hours a day.  He would answer the phone, file papers, respond to student inquiries, assist professors with secretarial tasks, run errands, and perhaps manage the finances of the department.

In order to explain why it is necessary to pay Shamus three or four time as much as Winston, we must assume that if Shamus were to be offered the same salary as Winston, he would respond, “If it is all the same, I would just as soon do Winston’s job.”  Since the excellence of the Columbia University enterprise really requires that Shamus agree to be a Professor, we may suppose that a negotiation would ensue, with Shamus offered more and more money until finally, he replies, “Weeell, all right, but only if every seventh year you give me six months off from the grind; call it a sabbatical.”

Seriously?  You can do the same thought experiment for a corporate manager and the man who cleans the toilets in the home office.  To get the right people into the right jobs, you need to test them and sort them and sift them.  But do you also have to pay the suits so much more than the shirts?

Now, if you're a leftist/anticapitalist with limited understanding of how (pro-)capitalists think - especially the most intellectually challenging/formidable capitalists - you might find this an impressive counter to the supposed defender of capitalism.  (The loathsome Leiter says it's "sensible commentary.")  Heck, one of the Marxists in Wolff's comments section links to this imbecilic strawman of Rand and capitalist thought at Existential Comics, "making Wolff's very serious, and not silly, point."  (In what cannot be but an irony, the main Achilles Heel of EC is its ignorant anticapitalism.  The same Marxist linking to EC's imbecilic strawman later complains about how Marx is widely, ignorantly caricatured.  Gee, it's like dialectic has broken down, or something.  On a completely unrelated note, why isn't Ferrarin's Hegel and Aristotle all the rage?  And when you do hear from leftists about philosophy you might hear quite a bit about Marx, and then some Hegel, maybe some Nietzsche, Foucault, Deleuze (& Guattari), Frankfurt School . . . but what about the greatest philosopher of all, Aristotle?  I mean, Marx is reacting to Hegel, who is reacting to Aristotle and developing Aristotelian-teleological themes which aren't exactly superseded by anything after Aristotle.  Here I was told the left is really woke and advanced?  And what about philosophy for children/everybody?  How did they manage to miss that one, pray tell?  Misplaced priorities, perhaps?)

Here's my reply to Wolff, reproduced from the comments section and with some links added:

Ultimate Philosopher said... 

I'm not following. I assume you're all familiar with Nozick's example of Wilt Chamberlain, and the $100K salary. Well, today, the top sports stars (think Mike Trout, Tom Brady, LeBron James) make upwards of $40M a year, an even greater cause of disparity compared to what, oh, say, the concessions workers make. 

Concessions workers are readily replaceable. Mike Trout could do concessions work, but there's comparative advantage. The concessions workers can't do what Trout does. 

True, if Trout were offered the same wage or salary as the concessions worker makes for playing baseball, his love of playing baseball would still lead him to prefer the baseball playing. 

Heck, we're talking about people who play a game for a living, and have fun much of the time doing it. Many of the concessions workers are stuck doing whatever their skill set qualifies them for, and they're likely not having much fun much of the time. They have to deal with lots of stupid and crappy customers, for example. They're perhaps acutely aware that they don't have the talents that the customers are coming to pay the most money to see. Etc. 

But Trout is commanding what the market will bear, enjoying a big surplus over what he *would* be willing to play baseball for. (And on top of that, there are performance metrics these days tied to the concept of "Value Above Replacement Player," and Trout is shooting up the career leaders list there at almost astonishing speed. And even a replacement-level player, ready to be knocked down to AAA, has talents that are in-demand enough to make several hundred thousand a year. [We can bracket for now baseball's antitrust exemption, particularly given that the customers prefer to watch as undiluted a talent pool on the field as is consistent with a few dozen big cities, but not many more, having teams.]) 

And so, I ask along with Nozick, where is the injustice exactly? Is commanding what the market will bear unjust, or lacking in justification? (Of course, you should all know Nozick's justification by now: it's what people choose to do with their holdings.) (There's also Robin Hanson's rather mangled attempt to apply leftist reasoning about justice to the market for sexual and/or romantic partners. Guess what: a lot of people are SOL there no matter what they do, while a select few can get "10" partners even if they *would* settle for 7s. [Hanson's "creepy" in-jest proposal to force the more fortunate to have sex/romance with the less fortunate can be toned down to something more like a system of tax incentives/disincentives, something much more to the liking of statists who insist on separating human rights from property rights.] The point being, life isn't fair, but you sure get a lot of selective outrage about that from anticapitalists who, to a lot of procapitalists, appear to be rationalizing envy. A retort along Rawlsian lines is that what is fair is not nature but how we as a society respond to such natural unfairness, e.g., to maximize as much as possible the opportunity set of the least advantaged. Nozick's rebuttal is something to the effect that what's fair is when I dispose of my life as I choose, i.e., that it isn't others' to dispose of [and that otherwise nice-sounding ideas about maximin should be left to people to implement voluntarily {for which a good place to start might be philosophy for children, for which see the SEP entry there}]. Oh wait, that's originally Hospers/Rand....) 

UP/CRC