Atlas Shrugged 2: one hour later

Orwell said:
Thinking of right-wing libertarians always reminds me of this cartoon

Atlas Shrugged 2: one hour later
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I don't get it. Are you trying to say that the owners of capital depend upon the workers?

Of course that is true just as it is true that the workers are dependant upon the owners of capital.

In the US it would seem the workers struggle against the owners of capital gets much more attention than the owners struggle does.

Having said that i don't get the point you are trying to make.
 
don't get it except it is angry and probably written by a beret wearing chick.
 
Ed said:
don't get it except it is angry and probably written by a beret wearing chick.
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I get it inasmuch as Galt's Gulch was a very poorly constructed epilog to Atlas, but I'm guessing that's not what the author of the cartoon was trying to establish. Galt's Gulch was probably meant to represent the brain-drain that [sometimes] occurs in nations moving in a capitalist to socialist direction. In reality, they don't take their ball and go home, they just find a different field on which to play.
 
Marxists claim to be looking out for "the workers", but are there any Marxists in the US who actually have a job (you know, work) outside of academia? I've long suspected the only job American Marxists have is when their mamas makes them clean their rooms. :p
 
Ed said:
don't get it except it is angry and probably written by a beret wearing chick.
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A beret wearing guy trying to impress a chick.
 
WildCat said:
Marxists claim to be looking out for "the workers", but are there any Marxists in the US who actually have a job (you know, work) outside of academia? I've long suspected the only job American Marxists have is when their mamas makes them clean their rooms. :p
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Wasn't Malachi151 a comunist of some form?
 
I think the point being made is that no one is an island and there is a lot of inter-dependence in society that Rand overlooks.

Think of all the people involved just to allow you to have food available for your breakfast.

Just my two cents.
 
Re: Re: Atlas Shrugged 2: one hour later

username said:
I don't get it. Are you trying to say that the owners of capital depend upon the workers?

Of course that is true.
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Yes, it's obvious to you and to me as well. But it evidently wasn't obvious to Rand. In her little universe, there was little or no dependency of the factory owners upon their workers; any of her
various ubermensch could and would, in a pinch, perform any job, however menial, that was necessary to operate their factory. In fact, they were also demonstrably masters of other fields as well (Francisco could make enough money on the stock market to buy and run his own copper foundry while still in college -- and later demonstrates his mastery of safety procedures in a steel mill.) Stockton, the ironworker, has no problem manufacturing smelting his own ore for use in his own forge, like a medieval blacksmith.

In real life, it doesn't work that way. Francisco would have failed out of school while running the foundry into the ground. I don't think I've ever met a professional metalworker who could mine and smelt ore -- and I've met very few foundry executives who even know how to weld. Running large industries such as railroads, steel mills, oil companies, banks, and so forth, is a skill -- which is why the MBA degree exists in the first place -- that is not typically shared with the workers on the factory floor. But by the same token, the workers on the floor usually have skills that are not shared with the brass.

Galt's Gulch wouldn't work. Too many MBA's, not enough people who know how to work the floor.
 
IllegalArgument said:

Think of all the people involved just to allow you to have food available for your breakfast.
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The standard example is making a pencil.

From a Libertarian website:

I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe, a claim I shall attempt to prove. In fact, if you can understand me -- no, that's too much to ask of anyone -- if you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing. I have a profound lesson to teach. And I can teach this lesson better than can an automobile or an airplane or a mechanical dishwasher because -- well, because I am seemingly so simple.

Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me. This sounds fantastic, doesn't it? Especially when it is realized that there are about one and one-half billion of my kind produced in the U.S.A. each year.
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...
 
I think you managed to miss the whole point Atlas Shrugged, drkitten. It wasn't that the owners could fire all the workers and still be able to make a buck (though that was done, to simplify the plot I expect); her point was that collectivism is a bad thing (think of the struggle between Reardon and [I forget the name] rather than a struggle between Reardon and his workers).
 
I guess I missed the point too. I never saw Atlas shrugged as capital vs labor -- I read it as the competent vs the incompetent.
Whoever wrote the comic must never have read the book. How much is in the Cliff's notes?
 
DaveW said:
I think you managed to miss the whole point Atlas Shrugged, drkitten. It wasn't that the owners could fire all the workers and still be able to make a buck (though that was done, to simplify the plot I expect); her point was that collectivism is a bad thing (think of the struggle between Reardon and [I forget the name] rather than a struggle between Reardon and his workers).
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Unfortunately (and this is part of the problem with Rand as a philosopher), Rand can't write.

I did not miss the point. Rand missed the opportunity to express her point clearly and convincingly -- as you pointed out, her primary method of demonstrating the evils of collectivism was to postulate a world where the owners could fire all the workers and still be able to make a buck.

If this is "simplifying the plot," then give me a complex one. Her method of demonstrating her point essentially involves assuming a completely unrealistic (and economically ill-informed) world, ringing a set of entirely implausible events upon it, and I'm supposed to be convinced of the validity of her economic application of philosophy?

Really, Galt's Gulch comes straight out of the pages of any of the other unrealistic economic Utopias; it starts with an entirely unrealistic assumption, and then proceeds to outline the consequences. G. K. Chesterton was no fan of collectivism himself, but he really nailed the Utopia problem:

The weakness of all Utopias is this, that they take the greatest difficulty of man and assume it to be overcome, and then give an elaborate account of the overcoming of the smaller ones.
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I don't really get the cartoon... The point of withdrawing was to break down the economy to the point that the collectivist government would shatter, not to kill their future labor force. At the end of the book and having destroyed civilization, the owners could let workers into gulch as they pleased. Non-issue.
 
TjW said:
I guess I missed the point too. I never saw Atlas shrugged as capital vs labor -- I read it as the competent vs the incompetent.
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Exactly. It wasn't just the owners that were invited to Galt's Gulch. Plenty of factory workers went there too. Remember in the end that Dagny kept losing all of her best workers and she couldn't pay them enough to stay?
 
I read Bob the Angry Flower kinda regularly, and I greatly imagine his reasoning was: "Gah! Deadline's tommorow. Uh, what do I make a comic about? Something silly. Ayn.... Rand. She sure does suck, right? Yeah, totally. Okay, I'll just fling this off and then get drunk."
 
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