The flaw in Ayn Rand

I have been taught that systems are either inconsistent or incomplete – which could imply that objectivism, as a closed system, has either a flaw or a missing component.

(Objectivism as an open system holds more promise, but we'll leave that alone for now.)

More specifically, I have been thinking very carefully about what might be considered "the flaw in Ayn Rand," since the general consensus is that her iteration of reality – and I am counting objectivism as an iteration since Larry and I came up with "what-it-is-ism" on our own, which implies that both philosophies are working towards accuracy without necessarily having reached it, problem-solving being the process of going from guessing to knowing and so on – is not precisely how they wish to understand the world.

The trouble is that there is so much Ayn Rand criticism that is imprecise. A Seattle University professor of philosophy, for example, wrote the following, which was published on a PBS news site:

The fallacy that is at the heart of Rand’s political-economic philosophy is the fallacy of mistaking a necessary condition for a sufficient condition.  [...] But in truth the entrepreneur, though very much a necessary condition for the production of economic value, is not a sufficient condition.  An entrepreneur will get nowhere without a capitalist or a government agency in charge of a budget to finance his or her ideas; the production will require a labor force; it will need to make use of public infrastructure and a framework of the rule of law; and the fruits of the production will be of no value if no one wants them.  Thus the creators, entrepreneurs, investors, taxpayers, legislators, jurists, workers, and consumers are all necessary conditions for the production of the value that we find in the marketplace; but none of them, including the entrepreneur, is a sufficient condition: none can make it happen alone.

It seems as if this philosopher did not read either Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead very carefully, as both texts specifically explain that production and labor are mutually beneficial to each other, that rule of law is essential to the system, that venture capital should be encouraged, and that the fruits of the production should rightfully have no value if nobody wants them. You may recall the ridiculous argument from Atlas Shrugged that the publishing industry should be required to reprint and resell books nobody wanted to read because "those books didn't have a fair chance."

The public infrastructure thing, on the other hand – that's fair, and I don't know what to do about the whole "well, what would we do without roads" deal. Obviously there could be private roads instead of public ones, with tolls to cover the costs of their maintenance, and maybe the money that we don't pay in road-maintenance taxes would allow us to afford the tolls and still have cash left over.

(We are, in fact, going to get to the tax thing. But not yet.)

There's also this extremely common criticism, expressed pretty much everywhere but exemplified in this article from Popula:

In Atlas Shrugged Rand creates a world where there are people who deserve to live, because they are “intelligent” and “creative,” and those who do not. The former set out to rid themselves of the latter. These “men of the mind,” whom the author totally worships, go “on strike” and refuse to be creative any more, which means that everybody else must perish; you may judge for yourself how intelligent or creative that plan sounds.

The story of Atlas Shrugged is not about men who go on strike so that everyone else may perish. It is about a man and a woman – Hank Rearden and Dagny Taggart – who remain at their posts so that people might survive. You may recall Dagny's extraordinary effort to work with the Minnesota wheat farmers to prevent nationwide starvation, or her insistence that the railroads remain both functional and safe at any cost. (Rearden, who is somewhat more complicated, begins by working to profit from the confusion and ends by giving up everything he owns.)

The fact that both protagonists fail – that they cannot, in this existing system, distribute the fruits they have created (as John Steinbeck would say) – may in fact be the point of the book.

This, by the way, directly contradicts the Seattle professor's argument that Rand has mistaken a necessary condition for a sufficient condition.

At this point I should devote just a few paragraphs to The Fountainhead, which I just finished last night.

I should tell you that when I got to the part where Gail Wynand wished to remove himself from the world of the book, I had a similar impulse; I kept telling myself that I had to finish reading this thing because there had to be some kind of payoff, that everyone in this story was horrible and nothing in this text seemed like a decent model of how to live, and then –

well, there's a point at which everything you've read previously rearranges itself in your mind, and you suddenly understand what Rand is trying to tell you, and that in itself may make The Fountainhead worth reading.

That said, I'm not sure you need to read The Fountainhead to understand reality (which exists, after all, independent of the works of Ayn Rand). There's another story about another architect that could serve just as well, and it's much more appropriate for the season.

I am referring, of course, to It's a Wonderful Life.

And I don't have to write my own essay about how George Bailey is a more compelling iteration of Howard Roark because my points have already been made by none other than the Atlas Society.

Thus far, I have only found two flaws in objectivism-as-a-closed-system (this is not to say that these are the only two flaws, since I've only been thinking about this for a few weeks).

One of them is demonstrated in Sondheim and Lapine's Into the Woods, and I will write about that later.

The other is, as I referenced earlier, the tax thing.

Look, I read The Virtues of Selfishness and absolutely adored the chapter in which Rand says that we can solve all our problems [edit: she doesn't precisely say this, she writes "as an illustration, and only as an illustration" of how the problem could be solved] by eliminating all taxes except sales tax, I've heard that argument before (I've also heard the VAT argument and at one point actively campaigned for Andrew Yang), and then Rand takes all of this a step further and says that we only need to charge sales tax in the case of credit-based transactions, anyone who pays in cash gets a tax-free purchase, and I am sitting here thinking where is the math, someone please do the math on this.

I mean, obviously you need to figure out how much revenue the government might need to take in (and, while you're on the subject, which government-provided services you might want to expand and/or reduce), and how much that might work out in terms of credit-based-transaction tax, and if that tax were doubling as contract insurance you'd also need to include the cost of adjudicating broken contracts, and I would imagine that the credit-based-transaction tax would be progressive based on the amount of the transaction, and while the assumption is that people will see their total tax burden reduced under this plan, there is no guarantee that the math on that works out at all (and in fact if you think about it for more than two seconds you could equally believe that the math will work out to be about the same, or that certain people will pay extraordinary amounts in tax as everyone else switches over to cash-based transactions or uninsured credit-based contracts).

At this point I really have to end this because we're going over to my parents' for Boxing Day, so I will simply refer you to this delightful article titled Rand, Anarchy, and Taxes that says everything I might want to say but smarter and better. (My expertise is only in personal finance, after all.)

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