« Home | Obama is Missing a Golden Opportunity on Iran » | Very Interesting Article on Objectivism » | Post Racial America » | Why isn't Nancy Pelosi in Jail? » | Stock Update » | South Carolina Passes the Fair Tax! » | More on the Swine Flu » | A Few Thoughts » | Should I stay or should I go? » | Youtube Censors Tea Party Reality »


6.23.2009

Read all the Ayn Rand you can get your hands on

I've been doing that myself, and man oh man it's like my brain has been opened up to reality for the first time. So far I've read "Atlas Shrugged", "The Voice of Reason", "The Objectivism Lexicon" and I'm halfway through "The New Left."

Rand, more than being just an Author, was a brilliant philosopher, and she invented her philosophy called Objectivism, describing it as such:

My philosophy, Objectivism, holds that:

  1. Reality exists as an objective absolute—facts are facts, independent of man’s feelings, wishes, hopes or fears.
  2. Reason (the faculty which identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses) is man’s only means of perceiving reality, his only source of knowledge, his only guide to action, and his basic means of survival.
  3. Man—every man—is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his ownhappiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.
  4. The ideal political-economic system is laissez-faire capitalism. It is a system where men deal with one another, not as victims and executioners, nor as masters and slaves, but as traders, by free, voluntary exchange to mutual benefit. It is a system where no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force, and no man may initiate the use of physical force against others. The governmentacts only as a policeman that protects man’s rights; it uses physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use, such as criminals or foreign invaders. In a system of full capitalism, there should be (but, historically, has not yet been) a complete separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.
That's exactly right. I'm going to keep reading all of her books that I can get my hands on, this is great stuff.

Labels: ,

Post a Comment

Links to this post

Create a Link