atlas shrugged...

You imagine that the customers who choose your competitors business over yours now will have no choice but to then accept you as a second choice? It's possible you're right, it's possible America will be weakened and it's people will have to accept lesser products and services. It's also possible the consumers second choice will be to not spend or spend with businesses overseas. If you're wrong America might experience an economic downturn, trade deficit or begin to see a lot of out sourcing.

If business closings or growth slowdowns are no danger to our economy, if someone will always step in to realize these opportunities, I have to wonder why we are wasting money with stimulus.

 

Galt's entire motives lie around his obsession with property privileges. The character is obsessed with privilege. Rearden's case is more direct, dealing with his ownership over rights to rearden metal and everyone else's insistence that he give it up.

 

You think property ownership is a privilege? Why?

 

Because as a right the lefts efforts to steal and control would be immoral...as a 'privilege' the governments simply 'regulating'.

 

My company's ability to grow is limited by the relatively small demand and my direct competitors. The product I deliver is no worse, and the prices are about the same as competitors. Getting rid of the competition would just let me make more money; I would have higher sales while not having to sacrifice margins. The customers would get the same product at the same price because I am happy enough with my present margins. I certainly wouldn't spoil such an opportunity by raising prices and encouraging someone else to jump in thinking they could undercut me if my competitors did decide to bow out and go farm squash in the mountains.

You're assuming I'm being outcompeted by someone, but that's not the case at all. My pricing and product are at least as good as my competitors, but I could certainly do more business if they quit.

Well, since we're assuming that I get my way on the rich folks, let's also assume I get my way with the rest of it, and I'd have trade barriers in place to prevent customers from buying cheap goods made overseas by slaves. Free trade is for equal partners, not between owners and slaves. If I were elected president, you would never hear me refer to the companies that specialize in dirt cheap labor as anything other than "slaveowners".

Ask yourself this; how much of the stimulus went to the lazy, greedy, privilege seeking investor class, and how much went to the poor? The answer to that is that most of the stimulus money went to the lazy, indolent rich, not to the people progressives like me would have wanted it to go. If it were up to me, I would have nationalized the banks rather than handed them wheelbarrows full of money like Bush and the Republicans did. I would have let GM die but I would have extended unemployment and job training for the displaced workers, and forced GM to sell its assets to cover the cost of the pension program. The stimulus would have been structured so that about a third of it went to a universal housing payment subsidy, a third of it to owner-managed business development block grants, and the remainder split up between infrastructure programs and educational subsidies.

If it had been up to me, I would not have settled for a health care reform measure short of a universal national health insurance plan on the grounds that American businesses simply cannot compete in the global economy without an efficient personally-managed health care system. Since the private employer-sponsored health care system is clearly failing and failing badly, we have to look at what literally the rest of the developed world has succeeded at doing, and adopt those measures here. Rather than making people serfs in the service of their employers, they would be free to take whatever job they want and whatever job was available.

I would have let wall street collapse, but I would have nationalized the assets that were "too important to fail" (the shareholders would have been wiped out, not paid generously for it), with the intention of breaking those firms up and privatizing the remains again when the markets weren't as volatile. Yes, people would have lost their retirements they had invested, but they would have new opportunities to work for a living, and they'd have a universal health care program to cover medical costs. The nonsense people throw around about how Obama has been so liberal and progressive is nonsense, since he's done literally nothing on the progressive agenda. Everything he has done has been in the service of the lazy, privilege-seeking rich.

 

People only naturally own the things that they hold with their own two hands. Every sort of ownership that extends beyond that is a privilege granted by society.

 

Uhhh.... ok then. I'm not quite sure what you mean by "hold with their own two hands". I own a house. Is this house small enough for me to hold with my own two hands? What property owned by some is not held with someone's own hands and why does this make that property a socially granted privilege as opposed to a right?

 

You own a house because society says you do. Society is what keeps someone else from shooting you and taking the house as theirs.

How is it anything other than a socially granted privilege? It's clearly not a right because you had to pay for it, because you have to pay taxes on it, and because you only "own" it in as much as the government recognizes your possession of it and prevents others from claiming it as theirs. The whole concept of ownership is a socially granted privilege.

There are only two types of rights; the right to do things that no one can stop you from doing (thinking the things you want to think, believing what you want to believe), and the privileges that society grants its members at no cost.

 

You are half right.

You own a house because society says you do.

GOVERNMENT is what keeps someone else from shooting you and taking the house as theirs.

 

"But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made – before it can be looted or mooched – made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.




"If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose – because it contains all the others – the fact that they were the people who created the phrase 'to make money'. No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity – to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted, or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words 'to make money' hold the essence of human morality.

"Yet these were the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of the looters' continents. Now the looters' credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide – as, I think, he will.

"Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns – or dollars. Take your choice – there is no other – and your time is running out."

Some quotes from Francisco's 'Money' Speech from "Atlas Shrugged"




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

And GOVERNMENT is also the most likely to steal it from you for failure to pay them....

 

Exactly the problem, when people confuse government with society and vice-versa, many problems ensue such as government taking your property.

 

We passed the point many years ago when what we bought with government was a net plus for society...today we buy bureaucrats, regulators, and an alarming amount of debt.

 

You are telling me your potential customers are choosing your competitor over you. Your customers are perceiving your offering to be less than their first choice. I don't know if your price or product is good enough to be competitive (as you seem to believe), or if instead you are failing at marketing, channel management, promotion, stock management, branding, customer service, selection, or otherwise... but these customers are choosing your competitor over you. By definition, you are being out competed by your competitor for those sales.

You are also telling me that you provide no innovation or product distinction that might serve as a competitive advantage and thus contribute to advancing the industry or your business. And that might well be why you are not, and won't become, one of the "big boys" you think are in your way.

 

A pill can stop you from thinking the things you want to think... a bullet can stop you from believing the things you want to believe.

Ownership is something that can exist quite outside society. Find a dog with a bone, try and take it from him. You'll find the dog understands the concept quite well without ever having paid a dollar in taxes.

 

This is worse than the post to which you replied. A dog doesn't understand concepts at all. He merely desires the bone. If he understood the concept of property, he wouldn't be a dog and what if the dog took another dog's bone. (incidentally, it is the dog's owner that owns the bone, not the dog.)

 

Try to explain that to the dog.

 

Good grief, what a bunch of hooey this is. A right to property is in the act (labor/trade) that causes the acquisition and possession of the object, not in the agency formed to protect the right. You are putting the cart before the horse.

 

Interesting how you atribute ownership of the bone to the second dog.

 

... so we don't own our kidneys?

 

Well technically the other dog belongs to his owner so I could have said the other's dog's owner's bone but I didn't want to sound ridiculous I guess.

 

When I and the others in this area charge roughly the same price for roughly the same service, the sales are pretty much randomly distributed. I'm not willing to cut my margins to maybe steal some business because that's just more work for me for no extra pay. We're at an appropriate equilibrium point given the low demand.

How so? Some customers choose me, some choose them, another choose a third, and so forth. There's not really much difference in what we're doing, and as far as I know none of them are doing appreciably better than I am. I've certainly lost no existing customers to them, and they have lost some to me.

The notion that I'm getting outcompeted is silly, since none of them are doing well enough to force me out, and if anything I'm probably going to be outlasting them.

It's not really something to be innovative with. Old folks get nervous when you start trying to change things or introduce innovative new ways of doing business. It just causes problems to shake up the profitable, but low volume status quo.

I played that game for years; I make a lot more profit now than I ever did playing the margins game.

 

Gee, it appears someone doesn't understand a common expression.

 

Just try selling your kidney and you'll learn how much ownership you have over it.

 

i was talking to the dog...