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xssve -> RE: Ayn Rand and altruism (4/15/2012 8:25:46 AM)
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Well, it is true that a small percentage of people do most of the real work, and they're usually not the people at the top, or the people at the bottom, they're the people in the middle - in the military, it's often observed that non-coms are the "backbone of the military", and this is very true: if there is something that has to be done, you call a Sergent, and they'll get it done.
Rand however has built a cult around a particular class, and most of the propaganda supporting her construct is class oriented - Dinesh D'Souza for example has written numerous essays establishing correlations between financial success and industriousness, and even to moral purity, i.e., wealth is the marker for all that is "good" and as a binary mytheme this must mean that the absence of wealth is indicative of both laziness and moral turpitude, rather than an asymmetrical distribution of surplus labor, which is cogent in terms of the gravitational effects of capital: i.e., capital is attracted to capital: one is much less inclined to make a sizable loan to a poor person than to a rich one, thus the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
The second effect is a condition of human nature that the more money one has the less grateful one is to the schleps that made if for you: in most economies, this eventually leads to slave labor, i.e., the "fairest price" for labor performed in your benefit is nothing, or sustenance wages - technically, one cannot reasonably go below sustenance wages and expect a labor force to keep working while they slowly starve to death or die of exposure, but it has been attempted.
Rand appeals to 19th century moralist by making it sound modern, and of course, the right is currently pretty much defined by it's attachment to 19th moralism: it's what wealthy people, or wannabe wealthy people want to hear, and it appears to appeal to the self loathing of the have not's especially if they feel lucky to be getting at least sustenance level wages for their labor, and resent being forced to go on the dole (poor but proud).
The altruism comes in here where these Two paradigms of wealth creation cross, in generating commerce and innovation, and is precisely the problem Adam Smith addressed in Wealth of Nations: in order to create a dynamic economic system with social mobility, there has to be competition and it has to come from the bottom - the feudal economy resists innovation, the poor labor at sustenance level wages, in a system in which they are often reduced to mere property - that's not socialism, that's unregulated "capitalism", defined merely as concentration of capital - the aristocracy taxes or seizes all surplus labor production, and uses it to purchase mercenaries to collect taxes, the system becomes hereditary, any social mobility is strictly the result of patronage, "hard work" per se, gets you nothing, you merely produce more surplus labor for seizure - it seems to work because the coercive element is downplayed or omitted - there are still a lot of apologists and defenders of Southern Slavery, "they were better off", etc. i.e, redefining forced labor as altruism. But even if that is arguable on a case by case basis, what is not arguable is that it was very good for the Southern aristocracy.
In fact, the South is full of such miserable land, hilly, heavily wooded with Black Oak (which is considered a "trash tree", with little commercial value, but difficult to remove), and where there is not Black Oak there are brambles, that agriculture is considerably less viable without slave labor, it even resists mechanized clear cutting, and tree crop technique is to clear cut the first year, burn off the second, spray herbicide the third, and plant loblollies the Fourth, and hope they grow faster than the brambles.
Anyway as a economy slides into feudalism it becomes less efficient, and there is little incentive to innovate, because there is no pressure from innovators at the bottom threatening the position of those at the top, there is instead an incentive on the part of those at the top to quell any innovation from the bottom, and keep them under-capitalized lest they become competitive which would destabilize their whole cozy position.
And once people get cozy, it's very hard to dislodge them, and mutual patronage develops where other wealthy people will collude to suppress any innovation or competition from the bottom, but are instead motivated to maintain and solidify class divisions even to the extent of caste formation - African Americans, for example, are not seen not so much as class as they are a caste, and a wealthy, successful Black man like Obama is seen as violating some unspoken (or spoken) caste division, rather than as a repudiation of the justification for caste systems in general.
This is where laissez faire invariably ends up, it's in the self interest of those who got in early to keep subsequent waves of competition down, and increasingly so as the easy pickings disappear and margins contract, and with all due respect to Von Mises OCD, there are huge gaps in his analysis, whereas Smith argues each and every aspect of commercial activity to exhaustion, I'm not sure he would even recognize altruism as an economic concept, given that all acts, even acts of altruism can be evaluated as a cost/benefit ratio, and might even agree with Rand that giving away "something for nothing", if that's how you define "altruism", probably makes poor business sense.
But in terms of current right-wing/financial philosophy the real tough part here is that making capitalism work, real capitalism, not neo-capitalist corporate feudalism, means keeing enough slack in the system that competition can continue to apply pressure form below, and that means refraining form doing things, even if they are profitable in the short term - this is self evidently fucking madness from a right wing view, and the only remotely valid defense "if I don't do it, somebody else will", is undercut by the stiff resistance to the imposition of any regulation from without that would insure a healthy economic turnover that would keep the system dynamic increasing both production efficiency and innovation, opening new markets, instead of a static, sclerotic, class/caste system, which is where it invariably ends up otherwise.
Statistically, you could say the cost benefit ratio becomes distorted, with a small proportion of the population getting all the benefits while the remainder bear all the costs.
i.e., real capitalism requires a little pain, shared equitably - no pain, no gain.
Currently, and predictably, the rights legislative efforts are focused on privatizing and locking in profits while socializing the risks, which is not significant different from communism where the surplus labor is distributed by the party, which not surprisingly, tends towards patronage, and in the end, it's not much different than crony capitalism, and just as socially static and inefficient.
Arguing the converse, Congress is a socialist subsystem, which if it allows itself to slide from a regulatory body into a patronage system, is indistinguishable from party communism, which is just another form of feudalism.
The rule here, is that all commercial interest tends towards monopoly, and as a result, all economic systems tend toward feudalism. Left to the forces of laissez faire economics, all economic systems eventually become feudal systems, it requires regulation to prevent that from happening.
A regulated capitalist meta-system in synergy with supporting socialist subsystems is what appears to work, the socialist subsystems channel some of that surplus labor into reinvestment in the labor market itself, which private markets are often disinclined or disincentivized to do, for various reasons. There is no incentive for a private employer to provide basic educational services to their employees for example, they bear the expense of increasing the labor value of an employee, which he or she can then turn around and sell at a higher price to a firm that does not bear the cost of education - i.e. the first business is simply subsidizing the other (thus the guild system in feudalism), but both businesses need educated labor, thus the supporting socialized subsystem synergystically benefits both labor and employer, and thus, is only seemingly altruistic: in reality, there is a distinct payoff in cost vs. benefit, it's an investment.
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