In her landmark essay, "What is Capitalism?", Rand presents a shortened, nonfiction version of much of the "Galt speech" in Atlas Shrugged. The theme of Atlas Shrugged? "The role of the mind in man's existence." The strength of Rand's case for capitalism stands or falls with her arguments concerning the role of the mind in human existence -- in the case of capitalism, the role of the mind in the process of economic production. It is this role that socialists of whatever stripe seem to have a very poor grasp on. Evidence of this poor grasp is how socialists/leftists tend to react to Rand's writings themselves (i.e., quite cluelessly, resting content with caricatures or downright smears), but a wider body of evidence is available: how do socialists treat the subject of entrepreneurial creativity and vision?
Many of the richest people in capitalism-lite societies of today are visionary entrepreneurs, who create value-added using rare and hard-to-replace skills. At the margins, these value-added skills are rewarded handsomely, which is how (in this age of advanced wealth accumulation) the top-net-worth individual[*] can surpass the next individual on the list to the tune of billions of dollars. It is this combination of skills and the usual monetary incentives that explains how we now have four "tech" companies well within striking distance of $1 trillion market capitalization each. (In the true spirit of Making America Great Again, we should be following the lessons from the successes of the MAGA giants, i.e., Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Amazon.)
In the literature of the Austrian economists, entrepreneurship is front and center in explanation of market processes in constant 'disequilibrium' moving toward 'equilibrium' as, e.g., arbitrage opportunities are discovered and exploited. (Israel Kirzner is one such economist who treated this subject in much detail, applying basic Misesian observations.) Rand adds the dimension of creativity to the entrepreneurial process. Creativity is a unique function of human consciousness: in essence it involves taking existing elements and generating some new or original combination of them. (The following is a tentative characterization of creative action.) Creativity happens in almost any human endeavor where abstract thought is involved; from there it is a matter of magnitude, and some humans have demonstrated greater aptitude in this process than others.
In other words, what Rand was getting at with Atlas and "What is Capitalism?" is: the primary means of human economic production is the human mind or intellect or reason. All the other means of production in form of (the productive value of) land, labor, and capital are consequences of this primary. (We're assuming, of course, a value-added situation beyond that of the primitive humans.) It is this basic feature of human economic life that socialism of every variety fails to recognize or appreciate. In consequence, what socialism involves is some measure or degree of control over the human mind. As Rand put it, via Galt, "When you clamor for public ownership of the means of production, you are clamoring for public ownership of the mind."
As she put it elsewhere, "a free mind and a free market are corollaries."
(I like to play games in my head along the lines of "What's your all-time starting five" and not just when it comes to NBA basketball. So, like, in the NBA a good lineup of candidates for the starting five would be Russell or Abdul-Jabbar at Center, Lebron James and Larry Bird at the Forward positions, and Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson at the Guard positions. Now, what are good candidates for an all-time starting five in the realm of "intellectual defenders of the capitalist system." They would include: Rand, Mises, Hayek, Nozick, Friedman. Now, if we liken it to another sport, hockey or soccer, we would have a goalie, and I'd have Rand at goalie. Every argument against capitalism you might come up with would have to get past Rand-the-goalie. When you get to Rand -- assuming you somehow managed to get past the Mises-Hayek-Nozick lines of defense -- she'll have a response invariably along the lines of "Man is an end in himself." Or: "Man has a right to exist for his own sake." Or: "My life isn't yours to dispose of." The rest is the anti-capitalist going through various rationalizations to either deny these statements or mutate them somehow into a defense of socialism(-lite) along these very same morally-undeniable lines. "Doesn't the capitalist dispose of the lives of a company's employees?" etc.)
What is to happen with entrepreneurial talent/vision in a socialist framework. More pointedly: how does one go about providing incentives for entrepreneurial talent to be forthcoming? Even under a "market socialist" framework (basically, a mutation of socialism from its original meaning - central ownership, planning, control - to something involved "social ownership" but subject to market processes, as a supposed response to the Mises-Hayek criticism of central planning), if what is sought is long-term economic prosperity, certain rare and marginally-very-valuable talents will have to be involved, and the judgment involved has to be exercised freely in accordance with the requirements of the creative intellect. If what is sought is efficient financing of production projects, you need financial talent and incentives sufficient to bring that talent to market and directed toward its most optimal uses. How does all this happen without essentially "devolving" into the very tried-and-true capitalist process?
The socialists may not still profess to adhere to a labor theory of value (although getting them to drop that theory may have been like pulling teeth), but their chief focus is on a category they call "the workers" (subordinate employees). Do entrepreneurs do a lot of value-added intellectual work? From what I've been able to discern, this seems to be an issue discussed very little in the socialist literature. If we applied Marxoid phraseology (without reference to at-the-margin value or rarity), entrepreneurial labor could be categorized as multiplied or intensified unskilled or simple labor. The less-clueless socialists will still want to distinguish between entrepreneurial or organizational talent on the one hand, and the finance-capital end of things on the other. But what about financial-capital talent? Is it discussed at length in socialist literature? (If it is, it must be hidden well from view, with other themes and concerns pushed to the fore. The main concern/theme driving all of it seems to be: inequality in the process of production. Talents are, after all, "distributed" unequally.)
The capitalist ethos (espoused by Rand first and foremost) holds that private property rights are essential to human freedom, in terms of the products or consequences of individual value-added creativity. In the case of the "tech titans" we might have the CEO owning a lot of the company's shares, in effect playing the roles of both entrepreneur/organizer as well as financial capitalist. Along the lines of Locke and Hegel and Rand and others, property is an extension of self or personhood. In some sense, the personality of a "tech titan" is heavily invested in the enterprise. But does anyone really need a billion dollars (discovered via the loathsome leftist Leiter's blog) to properly express their personality?
It'd sure be nice to resurrect Rand in her prime to see how she would handle this kind of question. She'd pick apart certain assumptions of the question, perhaps use the phrase "context dropping" or "blanking out the cause of the effect." But I'm not her, I am merely me, and here's what I've got so far:
Say a tech titan reaches a billion dollars net worth. (This is not like a billion dollars cash in the bank, it might be nearly tied up in stocks that couldn't all be liquidated at present market prices. It's almost surely not a billion dollars that's going to be blown on hookers and coke, as good as that might be for the bottom line of hookers and coke merchants.) So if Ocasio-Cortez and the other enlightened progressives have their way, this tech titan won't be able to amass a net worth more than $1 billion, at least not as long as there are human beings somewhere going without health insurance. (What are we actually supposed to infer about the latter from the former, anyway? Is one the cause of the other? That means that our modern economy is accurately characterized as more like a zero-sum situation than a win-win one [tech titans offer comparative advantage, using talents not directly at the disposal of "the workers", . . . ].)
(Without delving into the preposterous, just how would a committee of average-100-IQ "workers" manage to develop a company like Apple? Again, one only need read Rand for the essentialization of the principle involved here. It's on the same order of preposterous as imagining a committee of average-100-IQ intellects coming up with the grand-scale integrations of a Karl Marx. Ohhhhhhhh, so now the role of the mind in man's existence becomes more clear, all of a sudden, to the myopic leftist. Keep in mind, though, that Marxism proper doesn't place primacy on the human intellect but on "the material productive forces" of which intellectual products - including Marx's theoretical edifice itself - are consequence or superstructure. In the last resort, of course. And this is the leading contender for best socialist theorist to date, no less.)
Anyway, let's say I have a billion dollar net worth and any extra amount of wealth over that is confiscated (to pay for children's health insurance or whatever most noble cause). I could just sit on my ass after that and create no more value-added. But what good would that do anyone? No matter, my marginal tax rate is 100% because in the last resort that meets enlightened progressive understandings of fairness, and so I can either sit on my ass or continue to create value for free. So why should the tax code create preference for leisure time over production? In one case (sitting on my ass) my life is still exclusively at my disposal, but in the other, doing win-wing comparative-advantage consensual capitalistic acts, the state can dispose of 100% of my marginal proceeds, i.e., my time, energies, effort, talents, mind, person. (Nozick makes a similar point about a tax-code incentive for leisure over production in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, p. 170. It's basically a common-sense refutation of the moral premise of punitively high redistributive taxation, just right there.)
What part of "Man is an end in himself, has a right to exist for his own sake, and he has a right to dispose of his own life as he chooses" do the leftists/socialists not fucking understand?
So, in a nutshell: Private property is an expression of man's mind. Socialism foolishly flouts this moral principle; pure socialism flouts it purely (see: Mao, Great Leap Forward.). Socialist moral theorizing implies the preposterous.
(If it can be established that "capitalism causes global warming," i.e., desire for economic prosperity causes global warming, and if it can be established that warming-mitigation technology could not outpace the warming itself, then and only then would you have capitalism characterized by a monumental negative externality or non-win-win scenario. But the socialists were basically making preposterous assertions about capitalism before global-warming became a big issue, putting their credibility in tatters.)
[*] - I'd sexistly say "guy" . . . well, why not just say "guy," since we appear to be at the tail end of a bell curve of a certain kind of intelligence, dominated almost all by men . . . a fact that cannot be sexist. (Speaking of which, if we're going to rank-order the greatest women philosophers in history on the basis of a full accounting of their strengths and shortcomings, we'd better be sure we've got the right criteria for measurement. What did Prof. Hospers find so fascinating about Miss Rand in particular, again? All-time starting five, at least? And what about . . . All-Time Starting Five Philosophers, period? What shall the criteria be? I need to become more of a student of the history of philosophy to know for sure, but I already do know that there can be both a lot of great stuff in Rand and in the rest of the philosophy canon; need they stand over and against one another? ^_^ )
