Ayn Rand 2.0 | Talking Readers

by Stan Sorscher I went to France in June and couldn't help comparing the French revolution to our own. So let's commence with aristocracy, then we'll get to Ayn Rand. Stick with me. In a nutshell, shortly following our revolution, peasants in France <a href="http://www.couponcatch.net/ "><strong>best buy coupons </strong></a> concluded that aristocrats have been giving them a genuinely crappy deal. Inside a quick time, peasants and employees rounded up aristocrats, and took them to Location de la Concorde in downtown Paris, and chopped off their heads. Extremely critical stuff. In a museum, I saw "The Gleaners," a popular work by Jean-François Millet, depicting three peasant ladies stooping above to choose up wheat left behind in the harvest. I knew this painting from Sunday school, exactly where I discovered as a kid that folks of wealth have a moral obligation to acknowledge the dignity of poor people. Gleaning in the fields was a situation in point, going back to the Old Testament. Envision my shock to hear from the museum audio manual that the painting was controversial when displayed in 1857. Aristocrats (evidently some had survived with their heads intact, if not their human compassion) regarded the 3 peasant ladies as brutes. Aristocrats objected to painting peasants in a sympathetic light. On the opposite wall in the museum was an additional instance of French realism, painted a <a href="http://www.couponcatch.net/ "><strong>free online coupons </strong></a> few years later by Jules Breton. Its title is translated as "Recalling the Gleaners from the Field." This a single was wonderful – more compelling than The Gleaners. In the second painting, the peasant females are just as poor, with bare feet and torn clothes, but this is a work group, with confident presence – all business, capable, focused even at the finish of the functioning day. The ladies seem to communicate among themselves instinctively, like players on a strong sports team. Their recent ancestors had chopped off the heads of aristocrats, and they appear prepared to do it once again, if required. Which brings me to Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand's books, Atlas Shrugged in specific, serve as an intellectual foundation for free of charge industry ideology. Atlas Shrugged came out as a movie not too long ago. At the time, Rand's outlook regarding the wealthy was characterized in these terms: "… wealthy individuals "produce" and are rich simply because they "produce." The rest of us are "parasites" who suck blood and energy from the productive rich, by taxing them." Jon Stewart captures this in one particular of his videos. I entirely disagree with Ayn Rand's reasoning about how rich men and women turn into rich. My good results depends on powerful communities, shared prosperity, opportunity and fairness, and investment in the future. Alex de Tocqueville named this "self interest, effectively understood." As Paul Wellstone stated, "We all do much better when we all do far better." Eric Reinert asks why a barber in Honduras earns much less than 1 per hour while the normal of living for a barber in Ohio may possibly be 30 occasions greater, even though both are comparably productive and skillful, and the two are equally deserving of prosperity. Basically put, the Ohio barber's consumers are more prosperous. This stands in contrast to the Ayn Rand view that rich individuals do well largely as a consequence of their inner nobility. I call that the Ayn Rand 1. viewpoint. Ideally, in an Ayn Rand 1. world, some people obtain excellent wealth, but the political and economic technique will keep an equitable social balance and wholesome dynamic amongst various earnings groups, with upward and downward mobility, and chance for all – the American Dream, as it were. Wealthy individuals can picture for themselves whatever inner qualities they want. Anyone would have the possibility to do well. Nonetheless, think about an Ayn Rand 2. world, exactly where the wealthiest accumulate unchecked power and dominate policy-producing. For three decades, <a href="http://www.couponcatch.net/ "><strong>coupon codes </strong></a> we've observed a constant shift in political power away from workers and communities and toward corporate interests and investors. Wages have stagnated, jobs have moved to low wage countries and government policies now align mainly with enterprise, leaving employees and civil society behind. If those all around us do worse, we will also do worse. America's founding fathers rejected aristocracy. Our Constitution prohibits titles of nobility. But nothing at all in the Constitution prevents us from sliding backwards into a functional aristocracy. We are turning out to be a society of the 1 %, by the 1 percent, for the 1 percent. If we enable the best 1% to rewrite policies to <a href="http://gellarfan.org/##############/displayimage.php?album=lastup&cat=0&pos=3"><strong >Laptop AC Adapter for Acer Aspire One A110, A150, AOA110, AOA150 ...</strong></a> solidify their positions of privilege, we will have a functional aristocracy, a shrunken middle class and millions of workers in wage peonage. Let's go back to the two paintings. We can see other folks as brutes, and extract wealth from these beneath us, or we can see other folks as neighbors, co-employees, teammates, or even merely as customers, whose prosperity is tied to ours. Stan Sorscher is Labor Representative at Society for Specialist Engineering Staff in Aerospace (SPEEA), a union representing over 20,000 scientists, engineers, technical and specialist employees in the aerospace sector. He has been with SPEEA because 2000 TALKINGREADER.COM