this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
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taking Ayn Rand's work seriously. five seconds of critical thought and her entire philosophy comes crashing down
One thing that few people seem to accept when saying that they believe in Ayn Rand's philosophy is that you are supposed to pay people what they are worth, not what you can negotiate with them.
For instance, in Atlas Shrugged, it is made explicit that Rearden pays his mill workers far above typical salaries because it is worth it to him to have the best staff working in his mills. Rearden is also the kind of person who isn't going to make racist or sexist jokes because he wants the best person regardless of sex or color.
What Objectivist is that moral?
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That's actually the root of all social philosophies: they require decent people.
No matter which system you take, capitalism, communism, anarchism, monarchy, democracy, etc. they all would work perfectly fine, if people wouldn't be stupid, selfish and about 1% downright psychopaths. And I'm not even talking about real crimes. In your example it would be perfectly legal, to pay the workers the absolute minimum possible, but it would be a dick move.
At the end of the day, a system always has to answer the question: How do you reign in assholes? That's it. Designing a system based on Jesuses is trivial.
It's not enough to reign in assholes, the system has to be designed in such a way that carriers of "dark triad" traits (i.e. the usual bad faith actors in a system) are still incentivized to contribute to or improve society without gradually dismantling it to increase their wealth/power/status. That's a hard problem to solve.
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