I'm not arguing that all objectivists are selfish, Im saying that in her system being selfish is okay. If I didn't care about anyone around you that would be perfectly acceptable in an objectivist system because any forced sense of obligation is wrong.
If charity is such a natural way of solving problems how is it that these systems ever arose in our government? If persuasive family members are enough then why do these plights still exist. Just think of all the people who do nothing in response to dawn and sarah maclachlan commercials. Feel bad, do nothing. Objectivism says that that is perfectly fine because you should not be sacrificing yourself for others. You can but you don't need too.
IN her interview with donahue , talking about "Subnormal" children and how schools and buses for them brings the rest of society down. She even said something akin to what you end up with is a half idiot that can maybe read and right. Her idea was that society should support the gifted and that "subnormals" should be dealt with by their parents and if necessary by charities but that the first duty is to the "most gifted". She says that it is "Alright" to help that child but not at expense of your own child (by which she means utilizing resources that could have gone to them for other children). It's not a charitable worldview it's a selfish one. Good will is acceptable, but it isn't encouraged.
Rand saw the mentally handicapped as basically useless and perhaps mental health institutions would be better if we all supported them rather than just leaving it up to the affected people to deal with the problem. I guess my beef with Objectivism is the Self as the center of the universe and all other problems being filtered through how they affect you. That doesn't gel with me at all.
How did these laws get passed?
Persuasive family members.
So if they were persuasive enough to get legislation passed providing aid to the mentally handicapped, why is it so unreasonable that the same efforts could go towards helping to established charities that do exactly the same thing? The primary difference between government assistance and charities is that charities look after their own particular interest while government assistance is subject to budget cuts during debt crises like the one we're in.
Would a NPO have to worry about being on the chopping block to keep the military spending from dipping too low and weakening our own defense capabilities?
And while she was a bit too blunt in the way she said it, she had a point. It's already a losing situation when a child is born with a mental handicap. It completely devastates the lives of the parents, and while I don't agree that they're less than human like she bordered on suggesting, it certainly doesn't make any sense to set the same goals for them that are set for everybody else, and it ISN'T right for one parent to neglect their own children for the sake of another child, no matter the situation.
No communist country (and none of the socialist countries for that matter) have found a better solution to the issue of special needs. But even Ayn Rand's system is better than what happened in the countries of communist traditions. Even people who were physically "inferior" were dismissed as being embarrassments to the nation. Those types of systems inevitably leaned back on nationalist archetypes of capable workers that were mentally and physically superior than other nations. The disabled and mentally handicapped weren't just viewed as "subnormal", they were treated as subhuman and seen as burdens on the state.
Centralized systems don't make the issue better miraculously, they whitewash it with backwards rhetoric.
Nonprofits organizations are far superior to both that situation and the situation of budget cuts from financial crunches.
If it feels so good why doesn't everyone give instead of buying large houses and PS3's?
The idea that "me first" is an acceptable way to live when you are one of 7 billion doesn't make sense to me. Why should you trump others especially when in the western world we live such relatively luxurious lives.
The charitable world of "me first.....
Because we're self-oriented creatures by nature. We each have an individual reality, we aren't part of a hive mind. It's why Descartes' groundbreaking contribution was "I am", not "We are."
We look after our own concerns and the concerns of our most loved ones first and foremost. Charity feels good, but so does a good meal, a new car, and a vacation. The freedom to choose makes everybody happier, rather than an enforced contribution to a government charity which isn't very effective for the reasons listed above and, by depriving us of our own security from the perspective of a taxpayer, makes us more conscious about how we spend our money. And when we get more conscious of how we spend our money, our natural instinct is to turn inward and spend in ways that secure our current lifestyles and set up security for the future.
Which happens anyways, but is even more potent when we already know taxes are high in order to contribute towards the needs of others. From that perspective, if we're already paying into a system to take care of others, why donate more money to help anybody else? Why be nice to others when we've already paid for part of their assistance?
Except in a socialist system where taxes are manageable and government assistance completely covers the needs of those who are struggling, which is a great thing. Except that it's paying for things on a credit card without any kind of realistic way to pay for it in the future. Our dessert today for our dieting tomorrow.
That's why so many European nations are collapsing and the entire Eurozone about to collapse. Too many nations set up socialized systems without any way to pay for it, and now that their economies are buckling under the pressure of the debt they're beginning to blame each other instead of realizing that it's their own faults.
And who's suffering from the austerity measures? The poor and the disabled who the systems were set up to benefit from the very beginning. It's short-sightedness.
So I'm not saying Ayn Rand has all of the answers, but her answers are more realistic and more manageable than the answers of other systems. Systems of government inherently forget to account for the realistic actions of human beings and set things up based on ideals. It's what's also wrong with most economic theories, and why behavioral economics is making such an important impact on economic theory that covers the gaps of all the major schools (except for Austrian, which blatantly points out the illogic of human beings and was the first to say that you couldn't put human action into a theory with any accuracy).
You can set up a system that works on paper and says how a person SHOULD live their life, but we're all individuals, and we won't necessarily act that way. So setting up a system based on an ideal has to account for the flexibility that will occur when each individual citizen lives their lives the way they wanted. The only answer is to back off the communist approach and return to something more sensible or to crack down on individuals like in a Stalinist regime. Either way, the loss in effectiveness of the political theory increases proportional to the stress placed on how each individual should live.
That's why free markets and free societies are functionally the most adaptable of all theories. They have the most amount of space built into their to absorb the shock of economic downturns, social change, technological advances, etc...
In that sense, I consider Ayn Rand's philosophy, while by no means perfect, to be the most applicable to us as self-oriented humans. By realizing that we all have the natural instinct to secure ourselves before we secure others, our society is strengthened at the atomic level, and slack can be picked up as needed, rather than a system where a single failure can influence cause all of the poor and disabled to be impacted at once.
That's ultimately the core of it. We can't help others if we need help ourselves. Like in airplanes. Put on your own oxygen mask before you put on your neighbors =P
And if he needs one, don't try to put it on him because he can do it better than you. Just like we can each put on our own pants better than other people can put on our pants for us. Who knows their situation and what it needs better than the person experiencing it?
