Live Blogs Pannic Reads Stuff He Hates

Pannic2012-06-30 18:18:12

I tried to read the book. The keyword is "tried". After 170 pages or so, I gave up - surrendered, really. I'm both religious and a big believer in social democracy and other leftist policies, so you can imagine how convincing the book's arguments were. It was annoying to read "liberals" who could think of no practical reason to use taxation, while I could think of several, despite never taking an economics course.

Even ignoring my personal philosophies, the book was horrible. ALL the characters were both bland and completely unsympathetic (especially John Galt, who thinks that sending a country of 250 million+ people down the toilet is an acceptable side-effect of helping the rich). Rand kept presenting behavior that, while certainly not inhuman, are certainly far less likely than she seemed to believe. Like a theatre critic saying that society has evolved beyond the need to admire great people. I can imagine a few people saying this, but the author wants you to think it could be a majority viewpoint.

By the way, I love your review. Keep it up. This story sucks.

Yeah, sounds like putting the date on it was a really bad call unless they also did stuff to make it clearly an alternate reality.

Yet another issue with the real world is that right now the largest shareholder, CEO, and Chairman of the holding company of one of the two largest railroad companies in America is a Democrat who agitates for higher taxes on the rich and has committed to donate most of his wealth to charity. The company has been doing fine and has been regularly making domestic capital expenditures well in excess of depreciation.

I think the best way to sum up the thing about how companies care about their image and reputation is the old saying "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."

People don’t like bankers! That’s where we get pervasive antisemitic stereotypes! Or is it the other way around?

The other way around, but once it got started I'm sure it reinforced things too; it's not hard to resent the people you owe money to.

"If you wanted him to be some kind of stodgy liberal, wouldn’t it make more sense that he’d object to growing the company so he can stay a “small business”?"

"Small Businees" is the Right's thing, now.

Actually, in a way, James has the right idea when it comes to wanting to work in places that aren’t ‘Murica (granted, Mexico is pretty past the “developing” stage, but I’m just talking about his rhetoric).

"Emerging" is where it fits now, I think.

There are limited growth options available. But if you go to developing nations or places like India, where you have a rising middle class full of educated young people, you can get a lot of growth and a lot of money. Wasn’t this film was written by a businessman? Is my college edumacation just steering me wrong here?

I think this is another example of where giving a date was harmful to the movie: Mexico used to be more of a nationalization risk, but now it's pretty much a subscriber to the Washington Consensus in good standing.

So then we got stuff about a “Fair Share” bill and an “Anti-Dog-Eat-Dog Act,” which is good for James Taggart ‘cause he hurts his business rivals and I almost get the feeling that if the movie were actually trying for some sort of, like, political intrigue thing, this might be a step in the right direction.

Okay, I can give it this: there were New Deal programs that tried to get companies to compete less on price in order to stabilize and raise the price level and profits as a whole.

Can't say I've ever given the story a shot, but when one of the few things I know about it involves a long speech that includes some goldbugism, that's not a selling point.

Objectivism in a nutshell.