A libertarian social safety net

For reasons the merits of which are not altogether clear to me, a great many people have been habituated into the thought that a social-welfare safety net has to be administered, coercively (at the point of a gun), by the state.  We're not even talking here about emergency measures that perhaps only a state-scale entity could take during a deep recession or depression, or during a deadly virus outbreak (there's one I have readily in mind at this very moment), but rather an ongoing, cradle-to-grave, offensive-to-liberty, welfare state.

Consider: the United States had, by today's standards, a very small federal government, outside of wartime, for the first century-plus of its existence.  Somehow the people managed to get by without all of today's largesse; somehow it managed to develop into a world power with a per-capita GDP growth rate not unlike what came after.  As for what has come since, non-military spending at all levels of government (federal, state, local) has steadily increased to over 30 percent of GDP today, even as GDP has expanded many-fold during that time.

On its face, this indicates that it's not some pressing, life-or-death need that feeds the welfare-state mentality, but rather a mentality reflecting a contempt for principles of liberty (to adopt a phrase used in the title of a Walter Williams book).

(As for pressing, life-or-death needs, there will be, for the foreseeable future given foreseeable technological and production frontiers, such pressing needs at the margins.  Even the "successful" (using a specifically statism-inflected moral standard) Nordic-style welfare states still have nonzero poverty rates, e.g., around 5% in "Denmawk!"  And the economically-advanced nations continue to hoard wealth out of the reach of the desperately needy peoples of Africa and elsewhere; part of the prevailing welfare-state mentality is that "universal healthcare as a matter of human rights" doesn't extend to such geographically less lucky peoples.  That is, the pressing-needs-at-the-margins argument that is the wedge in the door welfare-statists use to get us to the 30-percent-of-GDP level we have today, is selectively not expanded to cover the entire world.  The expenses would then supposedly be too unreasonably demanding of the wealth-producers' talents, energies, time, and lives, see - that is, the global top x% selfishly lives high while letting others die.  As for a sustainable, i.e., capital-intensive route to economic development for the geographically unlucky people, transfers of already-produced wealth from altruistic first-worlders, to thereby be consumed by the unlucky ones, won't cut it, however warm and fuzzy it makes the altruistic ones feel.  Only in the era of globalized capitalism has the global poverty rate been declining (dramatically).)

Human beings flourish as members of communities.  That's a point well-recognized by sages like Aristotle.  But it's a category error to lump "community" in with "state" or government.  A sine qua non of state institutions is physical force, i.e., compulsion or threat at the point of a gun.  Under the classic libertarian analysis, physical force must not be initiated or introduced into human affairs; its only proper use is to repel or redress initiated force.  ("But what about x, y, z, this that and the other thing, be it public goods, public health emergencies, depressions, etc.?"  Is it really that such pressing needs and concerns can't be addressed by non-state means, or is there a failure of imagination involved?  And is even a hardcore libertarian analysis not amenable in any way to libertarian interpretations of the invasiveness to human autonomy that is a public health threat?  Are we even really sure that economic depressions come from the operations of a fully free market under fair legal constraints?  Are the likes of David Friedman just out to lunch?)

Now, my vision for an ideal social order is something like this: Aristotelian-eudaimonist-perfectionist ethical norms, under some wide or universal recognition of the idea of better living through philosophy (including philosophy for children), combined with libertarian social-political norms.  (Are there such things as incorporated cities even in an 'anarcho-capitalist' framework envisioned by Friedman et al?  There are incorporated other things, so I don't see why not.  So there may be cities, but perhaps not city-states - presumably the form of polity of primary focus for an ancient Greek philosopher - cities being localized and more under direct control of the territorial participants.  So, would such cities have the (delegated) rights to regulate the size of soft drink you can purchase within the city limits?  More on that in just a moment.)  Under such a social framework, based on eudaimonist or flourishing norms alone, there would be a large private-sector-based social safety net, probably operating under the virtue-based norm of aid that Rand/Galt promulgated in Atlas Shrugged (and which Rand-bashers refuse to acknowledge, having lazily/recklessly caricatured her egoism in base, non-virtue-based terms).

So let's say I am posed the question, "If you could eliminate the ongoing cradle-to-grave welfare state right now, given all its offenses to human liberty, would you advocate for that?"  But under scrutiny, the terms of the question are a moot point.  Hypotheticals or counterfactuals should be treated with all the seriousness they deserve, which is to say, they need to consider not merely the consequent but the preconditions for the antecedent.  (That is to say, hypotheticals or counterfactuals are open to abuse in the absence of proper context-keeping.)  That is to say, there is no conceivable scenario, under proper constraints for conceiving things, in which the welfare state is going to be eliminated right now.  (Properly constrained conceiving - as distinct from, say, imagining - doesn't permit conceiving of pigs who can fly unaided, hence the saying.  No proper concept of "pig" allows for it; it would drop the context of how we came to form and maintain the concept.)  The prevailing norms of American society won't allow for it.  The people would have to be converted to the Aristotelian-etc. principles I note and link to above, or be moved considerably in such a direction, or some such widespread values-alteration.

Would cities or other territorial communities make laws or regulations about soft drink sizes, or sexual practices, or other matters of virtue?  Or is there something about the libertarian norm that reflects and informs how people ought to treat one another generally speaking?  Or more exactly, is it something about what explains, grounds, or informs the libertarian norm (linking again) that involves a perhaps-judgmental yet laissez-faire attitude toward how people conduct their lives?  I mean, let's say that rather than paternistically regulating soft drink purchases, people apply Rand/Galt's virtue-based approach and condition social aid on either past virtuous behavior or on education for future virtuous behavior?  I think that this eudaimonist-libertarian way of thinking, actually present but largely implicit or inchoate in a great number of American people, helps explain what they find so offensive about Mayor Bloomberg's paternalism (which flows over into the mentality behind his highly intrusive "stop-and-frisk" policies, a mentality I don't see being extricated from his worldview all that soon, the same as with the elitist hubris behind his comments about farming skills).  Anyway, eudaimonist-libertarian social norms would emphasize education toward people exercising their best judgment, and then leaving it up to them to exercise their judgment given their own context of knowledge and hierarchy of values.  Like, duh?

To sum up: Like perhaps quite a lot of libertarians, I'm all for a robust social-welfare safety net and other virtues of sociality and community, just not at the point of a gun.  And with enough imagination (fueled by an intellectual perfectionism and/or the kind or quality of thinking behind Nozick's appallingly neglected framework for utopia) as well as ample benevolence, wouldn't it be a better safety net than the one currently existing?

[Addendum: Under a broadly prevailing culture of Aristotelian intellectual perfectionism, would there be even nearly as much need for social safety net institutions, or would people be a lot more self-sufficient in that regard?  I urge much properly-constrained imaginative conceiving in this regard.  Much like Rand, and contrary to the usual lazy caricatures of her, I have a very high view of human potentialities even as regards the less talented; while I don't envision a repeal of the bell curve, I envision a marked 'rightward' shifting of it under culturally Aristotelian conditions.]

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?

The core libertarian principle explained

I'm using the term 'libertarian' in its specifically political sense, not the (indeterminist) free-will sense, as per the following image:

The basic libertarian principle is often phrased in terms of 'self-ownership' - the principle that one is the rightful owner and therefore has exclusive rights of disposal or control over one's own physical person (body-mind; faculties; abilities; energies; time; life-activities) - and, by further reasoning, exclusive rights of disposal or control over the productive fruits of applying one's personal resources in action (property rights, including the right to start and own/control a business of one's own, or pool capital with others, whatever one freely chooses).

Now, in the header I put the word "explained", and in so doing I'm both giving an essential description of the core libertarian principle as well as a why-account, as in why do people possess an exclusive right of 'self-ownership' and classic, essentially Lockean property rights.

The core libertarian 'self-ownership' principle reformulated is provided in the image above: one person's life is not another's (or others', as in a majority/mob) to dispose of.

I take the libertarian principle to be some kind of undeniable moral truism although its precise specification is a matter of controversy.  Is it consistent with any form of welfare or subsistence rights that Rand explicitly denies?  (And for reasons I will get into shortly I regard Rand as preeminent exponent of the libertarian idea.)  If it is undeniable, then it means that whatever other ethical/moral principles we can all reasonably agree upon after due deliberation, they all must occur within the constraints of libertarian 'self-ownership'.

Now, as to the reformulated wording.  The most directly comparable formulation of "one person's life is not another's to dispose of" or "my life is not yours to dispose of" in the literature is Prof. Hospers' "other men's lives are not yours to dispose of," in his early-1970s article, "What Libertarianism Is."  But it's a safe bet that his primary influence in this regard was his series of conversations and correspondence with Ayn Rand in the early '60s.  And the evidence that it originated with Rand is a passage in Atlas Shrugged (1957) where the hero, John Galt, asks the Head of State (heh heh) Mr. Thompson (heh heh), what he has to offer him, and the panicked (heh heh) and account-overdawn (heh heh) Mr. Thompson says, "I'm offering you your life" or words to that effect, and Galt replies, "It's not yours to offer, Mr. Thompson."  (Of course, anyone who has followed these things knows, Hospers, a widely respected figure in his profession, is recognized in particular for his expertise in aesthetic theory, and he's a big fan of Atlas Shrugged.)

Now, the core libertarian self-plus-property ownership principle is often taken by many scholars and interpreters to imply a rejection of any extensive measures of taxation and governance (a really big, powerful armed forces might be required for a period of time to defeat a mortal foreign enemy?), and especially measures that take property/income/wealth from one citizen and give it to another, or, what's usually called redistributive taxation/spending.  (Self-styled anarchist libertarians or 'anarcho-capitalists' say that you don't need any form of government/taxation to have a stable rule of (libertarian) law, national defense, or other 'public goods' functions usually attributed to a 'minimal state' framework.)

Now, the basic libertarian 'self-ownership' is, I believe, best formulated by Rand and (subsequently) Hospers, but Rand gives an explanatory why-account that Hospers doesn't in his article, although the intuitive appeal of the principle is there aplenty even in his telling.  But it's Rand who really gets to the meat of the why-account, which is the whole theoretical & thematic core of Atlas Shrugged and her entire philosophy: the role of the mind in man's (human) existence and all this entails.

Rand boils down the basic principle in dramatic fashion in the Galt-Thompson scene as much as she does throughout pretty much the whole novel.  The basic opposition comes down to this: Is John Galt's mind properly at Mr. Thompson's disposal rather than (exclusively) his own?  By "mind" Rand means a specifically human, conceptual or intellectual faculty which depends on the volitional  (thereby requiring free or uninhibited thought/action) act of focus, and the ultimate measure of the service to one's life, i.e., ethical or moral perfection, is the degree of one's focusing one's mind as opposed to evading or being otherwise frustrated or negated from within or without (by other actors).  
Put another way: A human is, by nature, a volitional/free conceptual-intellectual being who must make judgments about how to act, and this requires a focused process of thinking and this requires an effort (the basic phenomenon that involves active, free, volitional movement as opposed to a relatively or fully passive or restive state), and it means that one must be able to duly consider the reasons for taking a course of action.  So is it Galt's life to determine by how own free judgment how it is disposed of, or does it belong in part or full to Mr. Thompson/the State?  It's an irreconcilable opposition of basic principles.  Miss Rand is often bashed for putting things like this in such starkly "unrealistically black-and-white" terms, but I don't see any way around it.  It's the basic crux of Nozick's rejection of Rawls' theory (and arguably on grounds Rawls concedes as true when he defends the seperateness of persons against utilitarian appropriation-of-persons-for-collective-benefits).

But the fundamentality or primacy or basic-principle-ness of Rand's role-of-the-mind theme is the why of the libertarian principle.  To state again: the human mind (intellect) must operate freely to act/be what it is, and to be appropriated from outside against the action-directives issued by the exercise of its own free judgments weighing the for/against reasons (etc etc?) is to be treated as a mere instrument or means which falls afoul not just of the libertarian principle as presented here but also a 'Kantian' principle widely considered eminently plausible (the Randian version being stated as: "man is an end in himself and not a means to the ends of others" - which I take to be another alterative formulation of the libertarian principle).

So if Mr. Thompson is to get Galt to willingly cooperate, bother to put forth the effort to act (causally enact an effect, which in human terms is means-ends reasoning), he needs to be shown a reason to do so, and not the muzzle of a gun.  (Oh no, that unbearably black-and-white illustration of the principle, stated for the umpteenth time already in the novel (heh heh - if only the Rand-bashers would just fucking listen for a change, man, they might learn something; Rand's got information, man; not-exactly new shit has come to light (these past 63 years and counting ffs etc. for the umpteenth time)).)

What exactly is a reason for engaging in the effort of an action?  Well, there's a vast literature on that but a lot of it has to do with reconciling the "rational" and the "reasonable," or put another way, between appeals to one's personal preference- or value-set, a so-called egoistic reason-giving or justification for action on the one hand, and what, in arriving at the best principles for governing interpersonal behaviors meet the highest standards of fairness?  (Much of the influence of John Rawls in recent moral-political theory has to do with his understanding of political justice in terms of fairness or what I'm here calling reasonabless.  The idea I'm advancing/advocating here is that the libertarian principle must be able to - and does - satisfy standards of fairness, principles all communicating-in-moral-terms actors can freely and cooperatively agree upon.  Rawls brings in the concept of overlapping consensus to help describe/explain this ideal deliberative-communicative framework.)  The reasonableness-standpoint also suggests something or other about taking a stance of impartiality so that the perspective of all moral deliberators-actors are respected (taken into account).  (Political jab: this is why I loathe today's leftists who constantly caricature their opponents.)  Some sort of principle of human-equality is operative throughout all this ideal, something about equal consideration of all perspectives which means techniques of free, rational, logical persuasion and dialectic.  (Rawls' famous Original Position is a thought-experimenty device for taking the impartial standpoint so that particular circumstances don't affect one's judgments of fairness.)

So, Galt and Rand are saying - or might or ought to say - perhaps not to a slimeball like Mr. Thompson but rather to even an honest interlocutor whom I take Rawls and Nagel (whose 'altruism' or other-person-directed motivation comes from taking an impartial stance) to be, something like the following: "Look, give it your best shot at convincing me to take your so-called impartial stance but it's going to me my own free judgment and not yours that decides, okay?  This constrains you from applying your difference principle and all that stuff in anything other than a voluntary sense, i.e., even then it's not the role of the political to employ physical force in any capacity other than protection from the initiation of force (the introduction of force into human relationships)."

Rand has a lot of very negative things to say about the initiation of physical force.  "Force and mind are opposites" as she would say aplenty.  Then there's the translation of "armed might (of, e.g., the electoral majority)" into "guns and physical force."  Rand ain't fucking around here when she brings up the gun thing, because that's what it comes down to, a tool to threaten you to do things contrary to your own judgment and substitute for that the judgment of others (over how to lead your own life, etc.).  If Rand gets nothing else about her political principles across, it's that all human relationships should be premised on rational persuasion.

Now, there's the introduction of force, and there's the use of force in self-defense in the event that its use is initiated.  So that gives us some idea of when the use of force is ever appropriate.  If one is ever to use force, one should be able to give a damn good reason for doing so.  In the case of self-defense, a life is at stake (we're taking the case of defense against attempted murder here).  Or, we can speak of a portion of one's life (which is one's own to exclusively dispose of, etc.) being defended against less deadly forms of violent assault.  Now, there's also the matter of what are usually termed 'emergency exceptions,' e.g., the shipwreck scenario and breaking into an absent owner's house to obtain food rather than starve - provided compensation is paid to the owner, say.

Some philosophers - James P. Sterba comes to mind - have argued that a combination of reasonableness and libertarianism (or the moral principles that give libertarianism its appeal) leads to subsistence or welfare rights on roughly the 'emergency exception' grounds, although that can probably (surely?) be reformulated in the terms of reasonableness and fairness outlined above.  But there is reasonable disagreement over really (I mean, really, c'mon) how much leeway this gives the government/state to use forcible mechanisms to move resources around on a greater-needs basis.  (Keep in mind that the primary/basic/fundamental/essential productive resource is the human mind/intellect.)  For one thing there is a really large body of economic and political-philosophical literature that speaks of the wisdom of free markets in minimizing human want or suffering across a vast range of goods and services, in raising living standards wherever they're instituted, in making for the development of capital which leads to fewer out-of-resources scenarios, etc.  (Rand famously yet widely-misunderstoodly explains all this in terms of the darn-near-explosive power of the human mind unleashed especially as that has happened in the modern period from the scientific and political Enlightenment and onward, with (in her polemical mode) statist parasites trying to divert all the fruits of that progress to their big-government programs for little or no reason (sic) other than that "the resources are there for the taking [and Rawls tells us that we should go by maximin principles as a justice-as-fairness criterion, so the proper, non-libertarian role for government/force here is to maximally improve the lives of the least advantaged, and that requires about 50% of GDP be government/force-based.]")

(Note, BTW, the implausibility of the Warren/Obama argument that billionaires are created through massive state-created infrastructure - the famously caricatured but still relevant-point-making "You didn't build that" stuff.  So, how do they explain the existence of a billionaire like John D. Rockefeller or an industrialist on the level of a Henry Ford, prior to the rise of post-New Deal big government infrastructure?  Is it the idea that more government-provided infrastructure adds to the per-capta GDP growth rate?  I rather doubt that the data available at ourworldindata.org support such a thesis.  It actually shows a fairly consistent cross-era (pre- and post-New Deal) average growth rate - so doesn't that suggest that all that extra government is just a deadweight-loss superfluity in GDP growth rate terms, thereby recommending a return to a libertarian-ish default government size?

I guess one basic question here, though, is whether the libertarian is conceding as a matter of principle that in the event that misfortune should ever exhaust a person's resources, they have a government/taxpayer-provided safety net, which is in effect conceding that there are welfare or subsistence rights.  Do we get at least this concession on behalf of a "right to well-being" when Gewirth formulates his semi-famous principle of generic consistency (PCG) in terms of rights to freedom and well-being (inasmuch as he's formulating his 'dialectical' moral framework in rights-terms...).  Put differently: is this a principle that even a John Galt could rationally-and-reasonably concede in terms of the value-hierarchy he could rationally endorse, which necesarily includes taking an appropriate stance of impartiality?  What if he's in the shoes of the unfortunate who has exhausted all resource-avenues (somehow)?

I think I'll leave that as an open question for now.  While it is an interesting question whether the kind of subsistence-rights-claim I'm talking about can still be called libertarian in some sense, the more interesting question is whether it's the right position to take.  I happen to think it is, as long as it's properly qualified and constrained.  There is an emergency-exception kind of rationale on the one hand, and then there's the reality of government taxing and spending upwards of 40% of GDP in many advanced economies today on the other hand.  Is there some kind of slippery slope from an emergency-style safety net (what else is "safety net" supposed to connote? it's not supposed to mean a hammock, as many conservatives like to point out) to government taking up half a country's (it's citizens' lives) in GDP?

Okay, to wrap this up: There's a lot of reason to believe that the libertarian principle, widely adopted in all its implications and grounding principles, would be a route to optimal human problem-solving across a vast range of cases (particularly in regard to what I take to be its Randian grounding principles about the free exercise of the human intellect - which adopted/applied universally would meet by definition for an end of history, i.e., a universally or perhaps only near-universally adopted principles of a perfectionistic or 'Aristotelian' approach to human rationality or problem-solving.  I've found the tendency for the most accomplished libertarian theorists (the Aristotelians and Randians) to be barking up that tree quite a bit more than I've been seeing the other libertarians or the non-libertarians doing so.  Communicative rationality, justice-as-fairness, or even the basic libertarian principle itself describe roughly the "form" that human reasoning ought to take on ethical (more specifically, moral or universalistic) grounds - ideas that fall more or less into the Kantian tradition of theorizing.  But the Randian-Aristotelian ground of the libertarian principle is a principle of intellectual perfectionism that applies not only to thinking in terms of mutual deliberative rationality and that cluster of Kantian-ish theories (with reasonabless front and center), but at least as importantly to the issues about how to live one's life and fulfill one's wisely-formed goals, expressed in terms of rationality (preference-satisfaction) and well-being (objective flourishing/actualizing of potentials).  (This is often associated with 'Aristotelian,' teleological, eudaemonist or happiness-oriented, self-actualization (like in David L. Norton's magisterial if not monumental Personal Destinies), perfectionism (the Dougs Den Uyl & Rasmussen; Thomas Hurka), virtue-ethics (a huge field of authors such as Anscombe, Foot, Rand, Veatch, MacIntyre, John M. Cooper, Nussbaum, Annas, and basically a lot of the moral philosophy faculty at places like Arizona and UNC-Chapel Hill.) That is to say, the intellectual perfectionism applies to the content of one's ends over and above applying the proper form of reasoning.  The very interesting question from this point on, explored in places like Gewirth's Self-Fulfillment, is how mutually reinforcing these reasoning-stances are or might be.  We can have Kantian-ish constraints informing us about the reasonableness of ends to adopt as examined from the flourishing-angle - to both reasonably and rationally incorporate such contraints into one's (wisely-formed) preference-set, as it were.  And it seems to me that whatever else intellectual perfectionists ought to be, they ought to be libertarians who also recognize the problem-solving power of human intellect with all this entails.  (And it's hard to see how Rand doesn't earn high philosophical marks on this count, although I would like also to single out Gewirth - a good man, and thorough.)

How does the left have any perceived credibility among reasonable people?

The American left today is dialectically estranged from the American mainstream and America's founding principles, although it still has the run of the education (sic) system (while missing the best tree to bark up, the philosophy one).  Almost surely the very best minds among the public-intellectuals have gravitated over time to the Right (while the very best minds among the academic, non-public-intellectual population contains a mixture of increasingly-libertarian Rawls-ish liberals and the libertarians, with Tomasi representating a state-of-the-art attempt at synthesis of the two). [*]

So what sustains any impression among reasonable, decent people that the left has quality ideas and intellectual and moral credibility any longer?  Some ideas:

(1) See above about the left's control of the bulk of the education (sic) institutions, a great many of them funded in whole or part by taxpayers.  (Before one rationalizes like a leftist that this points to the intellectual superiority of leftism/leftists, see Nozick for a alternative explanation.)  Lots of narrative-shaping going on there for many a captive audience, many of whom go out into the real world afterward rather than pursue (e.g.) state-of-the-art debates between Rawlsians and libertarians, so they don't have all that good an idea of how Rawlsians might not have any clear upper-hand despite left-wing dominance of the academy.

(2) The left is riding past successes in the areas of civil rights and LGBT+ equality.  Even until very recently the American cultural Right has been hostile to progress in the latter idea, much to its motherfucking shame.  The Blue States (not synonymous with the left, but a close approximation) have been making progress in the area of cannabis legalization, while outlets such as the otherwise-respectable Wall Street Journal continue to this very day to peddle bullshitted-up numbers and narratives supposedly showing how destructive cannabis and its legalization are.  (The fucking least they could do is acknowledge the testimony of cannabis-users like Carl Sagan, which they don't.)  What's not at all clear to me is that the Blue States are legalizing weed on the grounds of individual freedom as distinct from equitable treatment of minorities (who suffer disproportionately from the failed big-government War on Drugs) or the Blue States' greed for always-more tax revenues.  And even there, the state of CA has been shitting the bed in its efforts to reconcile its big-government ethos with a free-market one.

But weed legalization is a present-day trend with the merits still to be assessed over time by the American mainstream.  I don't fault the WSJ and other conservatives for having suspicions about its wisdom/merits when it's the Blue States (by and large - see Alaska for an exception) spearheading the effort.

Back to LGBT+ equality: The Civil Rights movement was over half a century ago now; the LGBT+ equality movement has been a recent thing where we can get a better sense of where the left has gone in more recent times.  The usually faulty and often downright awful arguments by the cultural Right (such as illogically linking acceptance of homosexuality to the questionable aspects of the Sexual Revolution generally and their implications for (namely) widespread abandonment of the nuclear family) would lend credence to the impression that the left has the upper hand intellectually.  (Note that on this and other issues the libertarians, who by default tend to end up on the "Right" side of the spectrum - especially nowadays - haven't usually been in the business of offering shitty arguments on this, cannabis, or other issues.)

(Note also that leading proponents of marriage equality include conservatives like Andrew Sullivan and Ted Olson.  What would really be nice is a well-publicized debate between Olson and Princeton's Robert George, but national intellectual bankruptcy seems to preclude interest in and calls for such.  No reasonable person respects the nincompoopery of the slippery-slope arguments from politicians like Santorum, after all.)

So far I've been pointing to what are broadly termed "cultural" and "personal freedoms" issues, not economic issues.  This ties into the next point:

(3) The placement of figures like Rawls and Keynes somewhere near the center-left of American opinion lends credence to the notion that there are still quality ideas on "the left" generally speaking, in the smeary ways many people often think of these things (my differentiation here is one of a continuum starting with the likes of Rawls on one end and the total commies on the other, with egalitarian commitments of varying strengths uniting them under the "left" umbrella).  But as with the lively Rawlsians vs. libertarians debates, there is a lively dialectic between Keynesians and more staunchly free-market positions (e.g., Hayek and Friedman, with Mises still regarded as more out on the "fringes" of free-market thought despite all his vastly learned/sage insights - a situation similar to that of Rand).  With the likes of Keynes and Rawls pushing sophisticated arguments for government interventions or a large public sector generally, further-left folks like Elizabeth Warren and Obama (who's definitely well to the left ideologically despite his more pragmatic-realpolitik presidency) feel more of a license to take this further with notions about the overwhelming role of state-provided infrastructure in individual success (for which see Krauthammer's rebuttal).

Points (1-3) may not individually explain how the left maintains such a degree of (real or perceived) cultural and political respectability today, but together they may explain quite a lot.  There may be other factors I can't think of right off.  The values-priorities that Haidt's research points to may also explain quite a lot.  Values are fundamental and prior to debates about whether this or that economic/fiscal policy is desirable; people's policy preferences are basically shaped by the values over and above whether they achieve some outcome (about which there are plenty of social-science disagreements, besides - measurement issues, replicability issues, causal understandings, etc.).  This would help explain why conservatives tend to oppose efforts at drug legalization irrespective of the awful outcomes: "do we want to send the wrong message (to young people)?"  (What if they applied this reasoning consistently across all policy issues?  Don't lefties say that tax cuts for the wealthy "send the message" that a fifth mansion for the wealthy is preferable to ringworm medication for the destitute, whatever the actual marginal propensity to consume at the high end?)  Much of political discourse comes down to signaling of virtues considered high-priority by one's favored group/party.

(There also, perceptions of value-priorities also come into play.  Lots of folks - left and right - seem to get a bunch of mileage out of caricaturing libertarians as being focused on only one moral value - individual liberty - and Haidt's categorizing of libertarians in these terms plays right into this perception.  Of course, libertarians are very minimalistic about the role of the state which severely constrains what they think political institutions ought to be doing to putatively achieve moral aims.  I don't think you'd have much difficulty getting a shit-ton of libertarians - if there even are that many - to sign on explicitly to the principle of subsidiarity which nearly everyone ought to know more about.  Anyway, caricaturing libertarians as being only freedom-focused just because their political priorities are so narrowly freedom-focused looks like a way for many non-libertarians to lazily avoid confronting the core libertarian 'self-ownership' thesis or discovering more about virtue-based libertarian thought, e.g., the Dougs or LeBar.)

Guess I might go smoke a bowl and see what else comes to mind?

[*] - Further differentiation: those I'll call the 'self-ownership' or hardcore rights-based libertarians on the one hand - Rand, Hospers and Nozick being leading examples - and the more consequences-oriented ones (Mises, Hayek, Friedman) on the other.  Tomasi seeks a synthesis between these two strains of libertarian thought as well as the broader synthesis.  Broadly speaking I like the idea of synthesis or dialectic, although my context (ahem) here is much more Sciabarra than Tomasi and hence probably more 'radical' in its libertarian sensibilities (within an 'Aristotelian/Randian-intellectualist' epistemological-ethical totality).

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?]

Big Govt Refucklicans vs. cannabis common sense

[Details to come; I just wanted to get that post title and images in as soon as I could.  Republicans qua Refucklicans selectively entrust (all of a sudden) and empower an insultingly paternalistic and always-increasingly bloated government bureaucracy to generate supposedly desirable outcomes; all of a sudden they rush toward Wickard-style federal overreach; how's that been working out for them? Should be fun lol ^_^ ]

"The Blue States are legalizing it and they're always wrong about everything. Also it's a gateway drug to opioid overdose, or something." -Scumbag GOP

A pretty smart and common sense guy, probably while saganized

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.)