(Please note that Michael Anderson is a respected MD practicing as a pediatrician and constitutional attorney who clerked for a Federal Appeals Court Judge. He, as all our writers, is a Madison Forum Member.)
By
Michael Anderson
Reconsidering the Sirens’ song from Ayn Rand’s (aka “Ian Ruined”), that oddly influential book that may have been originally titled as “I at Least SHAGGED”. Perhaps publishers believed US readers would miss the nuance of British slang, and re-named “I at Least Shagged” to “Atlas Shrugged.” The “Shagged” version of the title reads with more candor. Here I express my disappointment and anger at the smug indifference to our Nation’s amazing history purchased at great sacrifice from its citizens’ precious blood. I’m calling-out the Avarice recently embraced by our elected leaders. This nuevo-politic argues that the strongest should exploit the least of these among us. Throughout history this politic correlates with the ruin of great nations. We trifle with our democratic liberty as we ignore the warnings from the ancient sages including our Founding Patriots, even mocking contemporary economic scholars.
This matter strikes me personally. In my early years I learned that Congress, our Presidents, and the Supreme Court draw citizens of exceptional character who deserve our respect. I am proud to have been an Air Force Officer, a youth member of the Boy Scouts, and an Eagle Scout. I love our Nation and believe our Founding Patriots are uniquely worthy of respect.
Many among us took the same oath: “…. to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same….” By my memory I have no excuse that relieves me of this duty. Thus, since 1993, I remain faithful and bound by my word to support and defend.
“To give aid and comfort to the enemy are the acts of either the treasonous or idiots.”
From US Air Force Officer Training, quoting General Douglas MacArthur.
“Our Nation’s Liberty was purchased by precious blood let on our behalf by our Nation’s sons, daughters, fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, split on fields from Calvary, to Arlington, Pearl Harbor through Normandy, Berlin, Madrid, Tokyo, Seoul to Saigon, Baghdad, Fallujah, to Fort Hood. Both individually and as a Nation, we always confront in battle the same enemy. She wears various uniforms and stands under different flags, but she is one. In Colonial Philadelphia our Founding Patriots penned her name in words of warning. They hoped our people and Nation would never be deceived and embrace this enemy. Notably, history’s genius Aristotle, Moses, Solomon, Jesus, St. Paul, Adam Smith, to our Founding Patriots Madison, Washington, Adams and that this enemy of humanity has an insatiable blood-thirst and cruelty. Wars against this fiend have claimed too much good blood from this Nation (and others). She is an enemy to morals and reason, as Nobel Prize Economist Ronald Coase explained how Avarice increases social costs and marginally sucks value from commerce. Adam Smith, the acknowledged father of economic theory, with his two part treaties: (1) First “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” with the later thoughts penned as (2) “The Wealth of Nations”.
Adam Smith: “The disposition to admire and almost to worship the rich and the powerful, and to despise or at least neglect persons of poor and mean condition, is the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.” Moses of Ancient Egypt: “there should be no poor among you;” King Solomon: “He that follows avarice, troubles his own house;” Aristotle of Greece: “Avarice is insatiable;” Jesus of Nazareth: Love your neighbor as yourself … you cannot serve both God and Avarice; Paul of Tarsus: Avarice is one of the seven lethal to the soul. President Thomas Jefferson wrote prolifically to warn against avarice, selfishness and self-love. Any honest enough to look will find that the warnings against Avarice were mighty in force in the minds that moved the pens of our Founding Patriots.
The genius of history agree, as if in committee, all warned that Avarice is a powerful and infectious enemy of our Nation’s Liberty, wealth, and well-being. Any fool should know better, Avarice is Never Good! Yet, by the end of the 20th Century, Americans rush in where the mighty fear to tread. Avarice breaches the moral ramparts that protected our Nation for the first 200 years. Now Avarice tramples upon two centuries of our honored and enlightened virtues, as penned by the founding patriots: Thomas Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Washington, et al. From its founding our economy and liberty grew for its first 200 years through the enlightened minds of Locke, Rousseau, and “.
In an astounding about face at the end of the 20th Century, Americans abruptly discarded these icons of the American Economy like old shoes. “Away with you Mr. Smith and your Moral Sentiments and Invisible hand. Now come the pulp fiction writer Ian Ruined (aka Ayn Rand) with her iconoclast ” I At Least Shagged”.
From the perspective of classical enlightenment writers and Biblical mores, Rand boldly writes that she seeks to turn upside down, wrong to right, good to bad, Avarice to virtue. Amazingly, she even takes on the icons of morality writing that the historical Jesus’ teachings to love neighbor as self “monstrous.” In an obvious perversion Rand glorifies and boldly embraces a pedophile porn killer named Walter Hickman, as her moral superman. She writes Hickman is super because he does not care about the feelings of others, one convicted to chopping -off the limbs of the little girl Marion Parker.
The Randian Acolytes remind me of middle-school the nonsense. Then some entertained themselves with a puerile scam known as “Dine and Dash.” The scam ran as follows: adolescent miscreants found an open table at a busy restaurant. The perps flagged wait-staff and ordered off the menu anything to run-up a tab. At the point of gastronomic bursting, then the scam ends by merely leaving without paying. The wait staff is searching for the little miscreants who stiffed the whole check. After eating their fill they may amuse themselves with the chant a mantra – “we don’t need you anymore.” The miscreants have moved on with the justification, “it’s their fault for being so stupid, serves them right;, dumb arses, they will catch on eventually, in the meantime we are pursuing our own happiness. Don’t be afraid, just learn. As long as we not stupid enough to get caught. … Its not who will permit us, who is going to stop us.”
After middle school some of these were in college and found the author, Ian Ruined’s warped ethics in her pulp-fiction,” I at Least I Shagged.” The fiction therein was a perfect retelling of the old dine and dash scam. On a national scale, the miscreants plaster over any cognitive dissonance that that may cause the adult-adolescents to wince as Avarice tore through American Culture.
A new parable for morality appealing to the young acolytes popular under the original title, “I at Least Shagged” as the theme runs as follows:
An entrepreneur needs fertile soil to start his seedling enterprise. Find a well-educated, politically stable nation state with the 19th and 20th Century USA, the perfect planting beds for the seeds of innovation. To maximize the yield for the sower, once a tender seedling has matured, move it to cheaper soil. Take advantage of the offered No-Cost, Freebie, Global Security of US Military Might. The best part is that by using accounting, US accounting rules none of the foreign earnings are subject to US taxes. Using other accounting rules, some of your domestic earnings may be allocated or shifted to tax-free zones on foreign soil. A CFO at a domestic defense contractor calculated that these tax disincentives to US manufacturing result in a 20% tax-free subsidy to encourage US multinationals to avoid U.S. based manufacturing.
The best part of all, new moral shifting declares that this type of Dine & Dash is right and good, because if they are ignorant enough to accept it, let them be “shagged”. If any fault or blame is applied, the new morality places blame on the “gullibility” of the vulnerable as the just deserts of ignorance. This weeds out the weak, and ensures survival of the fittest. Such were the morals from a high priestess teaching young entrepreneurs and leaders in the US in the late 20th Century. In this new economic cult, the only wrong is to get caught – all is acceptable you can manage without denting your reputation.
The scam, today, gets better. Now if somebody calls the scam out, if anyone complains, just tell them “I don’t need you …. [anymore]”. Further one may add with a shrug “I’m going Galt, and it’s your fault”.
”AT Least I SHAGGED” by Ian Ruined, the founder of the philosophy “objectivist – opportunism. ”
Who can shrug-off such insanity? This lune is shagging our Nation with Avarice as channeled through a sociopathic medium (Ayn Rand). Who are today’s brain-dead zombies, idiots fawning over this pulp-fiction wing-nut? Who are the acolytes who prostrate themselves before this sociopath as their economic high-priestess? Shamefully the list is too long. Here are called-out a large gaggle drawn from the T.E.A. Party including some who claim to be our Christian brothers and sisters. Really? If you claim any humanity and your holding a” John Galt” sign, or your name is listed as supporting this Luciferian Lune, here are a few questions to consider:
(1) Do you believe the Holocaust is fiction?
(2) Do you own brown shirts with red armbands?
(3) Do you have a tin-foil hat?
(4) Are you hell-bent on destroying this Nation?
If you answered yes to any of these, your condition is understandable, regardless please seek some professional help for your schizophrenic hallucinations.
The price paid by the blood was too high to waste. Let us steel ourselves against a pulp-fiction and shake off the nonsense. We must bind ourselves to the masthead to resist the sirens songs and navigate our Nation with the moral compass that guided true for our first 200 years. Tune our ears to the tried sages and genius with proven metal and see the bright path they illuminate to peace and prosperity. We who are not either treasonous nor idiots stand up and be numbered. Liberty weeps when the people embrace Avarice. As the Patriots understood, unless peace and justice flow steadily from the wellspring of virtue the tares of tyranny grown from the fountainhead of Avarice, as tares sown in our children’s wheat fields, the virtues of our churches, parishes, synagogues, traditions, and families will have been swept aside to clear a path for a progressive government – because too few of us acted today with enough of those gentile virtues necessary to keep Liberty safe.
Listen to Liberty calling. Take action to resist Avarice. She is not good. The time has come to remember where we, as a Nation, came from and where we want to arrive for our children and grandchildren. We must show them the way to peace and prosperity as illuminated by the genius of history and as embraced by the values expressed from our Founding Patriots. Then Liberty will stay for our children and give them freedom as a legacy.
I loved this article and will be using its insights in my teaching and forwarding it to those who need to read it.
Thanks to Dr. Anderson for writing and Michael for publishing.
Christina Jeffrey
Christina, thank you.
Dr. Anderson’s article pulls from a few good sources of economic thought, but I find that his argument is not very clear. He fails to clarify to the problem and its solution which seems to be extreme greed and virtue.
Dr. Anderson points to Ayn Rand and her philosophy as the emerging problem facing the politico-economic landscape in our current time. Her philosophy of individualism is a central theme throughout her works. She believes in personal choice and personal consequences. Her writings, in my opinion, contain important insight into economic freedom and, she like any person, has her own opinions and moral formation. Her moral sentiment is not formed by Christian teachings, enlightened through the knowledge that God is our creator, and we were created to love God and love other people. Perhaps her moral formation would have been different if she had grown up in a country that did not outlaw God, making Atheism the national religion. In light of all that being said, Ayn’s view of economics in the right direction, but are also incomplete. Even though she fails to impute a more noble pursuit, the truths of economic freedom and liberty can be found in her words.
Liberty is what humanity desires. It is an essential piece of the human condition. Ayn holds strong views the human person and liberty in that a person possesses liberty through self-ownership and private property. The individual owns himself and is a sovereign entity. Her view does not go any farther than the individual, because she does not believe in anything higher than the individual. What’s an atheist to do when talking about liberty? Her motivation for human action will always come back to individual’s behavior guided by self-interest. In contrast, Adam Smith followed more of a natural rights path to liberty. He believed in individual liberty informed by the physical evidence. As a Christian, he was aware of God’s presence in the world and the duty an individual had to love his neighbor through the use of free will. Where Ayn and Adam will agree is in the middle, the ownership private property. Private property is the lynchpin of Liberty. Both would contend that it is necessary for an individual to have the right to private property and to dispose with such private property as he sees fit, whether it be for self-interested, selfless, or a combination of both reasons. In regards to Ayn’s view on private property, I find the argument comparing Ayn Rand’s philosophy to a “dine and dash scam” unfitting.
Liberty requires a combination of a few things: self-governance in the political sphere, free-markets, quality education with moral formation. This is what the founding fathers believed and fought to achieve. Each subject affects the other. If the individual loses his voice in government, liberty becomes compromised. If the market is not free, or if a government or a larger entity directs the market like in: a centrally-controlled economy, crony-capitalism or through protectionist trade policies, liberty is compromised. If education becomes a tool for control of the population instead of inspiring the person to discover truth, beauty and goodness, liberty becomes compromised. And on a deeper level, if people neglect the reality of God, or even view God as good but are not truly transformed by him and enter into genuine worship of him, liberty is compromised. All virtues grow out of Divine Law. I think this is what Dr. Anderson is trying to illustrate.
TO CLARIFY IF NECESSARY: If an objectivist may concede that Adam Smith and Ronald Coase are “at least a few good sources of economic thought when held up to a standard of “Any Rand” then here is mentionable moment. My regrets if a failure to clarify after spilling so many words to illustrate a rather simple problem known and better expressed by so many though human history … Greed is not good … Also the self-restraint of Greed helps every offered solution to human misery. “Checking premises” with an Objectivist may reveal that an essay on the perils of Avarice will always be difficult. Regardless, The plain point of the above essay remains … Avarice is an old problem, expressly considered by our Nation’s Founders, in their written consensus of opinion … Greed is not good. The most noted moral philosophers of human history have repeatedly recommended the solution to Greed is self-restraint … True self-restraint, patience, and many others are among the virtues. These are not merely found in the Creeds of Faith, but also among the serious economic scholars, and the most notable moral philosophers of all history, as already discussed in the above essay. The others before expressed in agreement on the nature of the problem with Avarice (or Greed) and their predictions for nations that cannot bind this miserable mistress. In the recent events of United States, even as recent as the Sub-Prime Mortgage fiasco, these moral philosophers sound as if all prophets. The not-so-subtle metaphor of the Adolescent Scheme Dine and Dash was an intended plain reference to the problems of recommending the use of “Domestically Controlled Foreign Corporations” as a tax dodge, while enjoying the prior free-ride and continuing the free ride in a nation with a sable social structure, that exists so long as Avarice is kept in check by others. A few Greedy people may become very wealthy, only so long as the number is kept to a few, otherwise the wheels fall off and the system crashes, as recent history demonstrates.
I continue to believe that the essay is plain and clear in the matter of Ayn Rand and her true character and limited value. She rightfully suffers with a well-deserved lacking of credibility as a serious economic scholar. Such is reasonably foreseeable, as a consequence of Rand’s “personal choice” of Rand’s public perversion as she glorifies and boldly embraces a pedophile porn killer named Walter Hickman, as her moral superman. As a narcissist par-excellence, Rand wrote that Hickman is super because he does not care about the feelings of others, one convicted to chopping -off the limbs of the little girl Marion Parker. If she is not a Luciferian Lunatic Wing-nut, the Randite cultists created in her a goddess she never intended. If believably sane, then, if in an honest moment, Rand may embrace her apparent skills as a grandstanding entertainer who wrote pop-culture fictional novels. Oddly, her acolytes may have elevated Rand above even her own imagination. In comments on theme of greed, Braden reveals himself by using the adjective of “extreme” before the word Greed. Really? Such usage is not redundant only if one were to accept greed may be anything other than extreme. Bradly reads as an Apologist for Rand. Why imagine Rand is more than an entertainer? She never claimed to be a grand philosopher, and certainly not one to redefine mental health science. Really? “Liberty is what humanity desires. It is an essential piece of the human condition … adding more of Rand’s drivel “Ayn holds strong views the human person and liberty in that a person possesses liberty through self-ownership and private property.” Not from Atlas Shagged but from Rand’s opus “ Man’s Rights, in “THE VIRTUE OF SELFISHNESS “124, 126 (1964). Virtue? Perhaps on a skit for “Saturday Night Live.” We may agree with Braden that Rand …. does not go any farther than the individual, because she does not [know any better]. Apart from the polemics of Ayn Rand, musing what motivates the human soul, consider perhaps another, Abraham Maslow (not totally obscure) who wrote that human actions are motivated in an ordered hierarchy of specific needs. Some of these begin with food, water, shelter, warmth, then safety, security, stability and freedom from fear, then love, family and friends, then recognition and respect. At least if Maslow, then Liberty is a human motivation if only these others are first secured. Many enlightened may add that liberty may be helpful all along the way. However, Rand’s distortion “The Virtue of Selfishness” destroys liberty, as those who thrust, hunger, and long for more concrete human needs will trade liberty their own liberty, and that of their brothers, sisters and neighbor early on until the most basic needs are secured.
The problem for many Acolytes of Rand is the same problem when children go to the movie theatre. Sometimes the immature confuse entertainment and reality. Rand may be entertaining, but she is a perilous source for economic and political guidance. May I be more clear? Rand’s writings, in my opinion, have importance for their entertainment value, and also serve as a bad example of what happens when an entertainer is mistaken as a sage or prophet when creating policy guided by the writings of a jester or court clown.
While I appreciate Bradley’s sentiment, I don’t believe I need the help explain what I believe is plan in the words of the essay … For example Dr. Anderson … “was trying to illustrate” … no more simple than that, … merely that Selfishness is not a Virtue, and Greed (Avarice) is not good. My conclusion remains that the time has come to remember the history of our Nation where we want to guide it in the future for our children and grandchildren. As others more well known and prolific have before expressed, to keep our liberty safe, then we must learn how to resist Avarice. Justice Clarence Thomas, Gov. Scott Walker, and others ought to know better … that Ayn Rand’s rantings are neither informative nor useful for public policy. Instead read and study the genius of history and embrace by the values expressed from our Founding Patriots. Plain among these is the virtue of self-restraint … expressed in my prior essay on the subject of Virtue and Liberty, also found here in the Madison Forum. My wish is to pass on a legacy of liberty to our children and even our grandchildren.
Most sincerely, “Dr. Mike”
PS: Remember that “The disposition to admire and almost to worship the rich and the powerful, and to despise or at least neglect persons of poor and mean condition, is the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.” — Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
Sent: Tuesday, July 21, 2015 4:23 PM,
Dr. Anderson, Thank you. We are so grateful for your work defending the original principles of the Founding Fathers so that we can preserve this nation for future generations. Your perspective on Ayn Rand’s book and how our society is being corrupted by greed and power is insightful. That is exactly the mentality we are trying to combat here in Washington. At the Heritage foundation we believe that there should be opportunity for all and favoritism to none. A lot of the work that we do is to promote policies that benefit the American people, not just pander to powerful men in Washington.
Thank you again for sharing your work with us.
Best regards,
Abby