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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (7959)	12/23/2005 8:49:11 PM
From: neolib	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 541702

So she mitigates that by advocating an enlightened, mature, sophisticated kind of self-interest, the selfish recognition that it is not really in our self-interest to overdo it. That is no different then advocating enlightened, mature, sophisticated altruism. You can make altruism and self-interest be identical in the philosophical limits. Hence socialism and libertarianism as well. I was incorrect it agreeing with Tim that Ayn's works were Fiction. They are Fantasy instead. The physicist Steven Wienberg once made the observation that surprisingly in physics, most things which are not ruled out by mathematics, turn out to be true. IIRC correctly he called this the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. This was in contrast to philosophy which he called unreasonable ineffective. He went on to say that about the only real use of philosophy seems to be to protect us from prior worse philosophy. IMO, he was spot on with that observation, and Ayn Rand and Libertarianism is a very classic example of this. She was a useful antidote to the foolishness of Communism. But thats about it. I see the same issues at play in biology. What is not proscribed eventually comes to be. It holds just as true in social settings. Enron was inevitable without laws to proscribe such behavior. From physics to biology, there is evidence which says Ayn's laws are insufficient for the desired outcome. Utopia is not achievable Its not a matter of utopia. The question is whether it has a ghost of a chance of being even functional. I say no for very obvious reasons. If someone claims they have good guidelines for a functional system, and further that the system should be better than others, i.e. optimal I find that interesting and worth consideration. If on examination I find a major flaw in the premises, I look for suggestions that those promoting it recognise this. I don't see that with Libertarians in general. They seem to think it actual would work. It remains me of perpetual motion machines. There is always just this minor little issue to the ideal which in the minds of the inventor should not distract form the overall soundness of his reasoning. BS. Libertarianism has one minor issue, it is not compatible with real human populations. Other than that it is admirable.