/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.19829966]

>To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss–the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery–that you must offer them values, not wounds–that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men’s stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best that your money can find. And when men live by trade–with reason, not force, as their final arbiter–it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability–and the degree of a man’s productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?

>Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another–their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.

>Then you will see the rise of the men of the double standard–the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money–the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law–men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims–then money becomes its creators’ avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they’ve passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.

Holy. Fucking. Based.

[Anonymous No.19830009]

>>19829966
People who apply a moral basis for money bad is a straw man and or a redditor, money is completely neutral and hasn’t changed, we have.

[Anonymous No.19830164]

>>19829966
>Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return.
this is technically outdated since nixon closed the gold window under Brenton Woods, and gave the government complete control over the value of the dollar. and sure enough, every year they tax people to death through: federal state, sale, estate, and inflation.

[Anonymous No.19830449]

>>19830164
>inflation
How do they do that?

[Anonymous No.19830657]

>>19829966
This understanding of money seems viciously circular. If I make a widget and sell it to Alice, then I receive what Alice thinks the widget and the effort of making the widget are worth, in the form of money. But the value of the money I receive from Alice is precisely that I can acquire goods and effort from a third party, perhaps Bob. So Alice's estimation of the worth of my widget and my effort is measured by my estimation of the value of Bob's goods and effort, and so on. Money is a sort of measure of value, but the value is in the goods and services, not in the money. and the value exists independently of what an individual might be willing to pay.

[Anonymous No.19831363]

>>19829966
>except the voluntary choice
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choice_architecture
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_theory
Except it exists as much as Santa Claus does.

>Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except
Money rests on the assumption that you'll get beaten by the gov, if you don't pay taxes in those special coloured papers they tell you to.

>Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)
"The new Whig administration, influenced by the doctrine of laissez-faire, believed that the market would provide the food needed. They refused to interfere with the movement of food to England, then halted the previous government's food and relief works, leaving many hundreds of thousands of people without access to work, money, or food."

>Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil.
Does your mother, for example, demands exact monetary compensation for raising you?
>Money demands that you sell
Money demands that you extirpate anything human from interaction, and subject yourself to some blind ritual. Hoping that some magical Invisible Hands works like some kind of godly Providence, and not as Cthulhu that is going to rip you to shreds and devour you.

>the men of the double standard–the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade
>In a moral society
Read Plato's "Euthyphro", dumbass. The things that some Zeus commands you to do, are not the things that Zeus himself does. To prescribe morality, one need to stand outside it.

[Anonymous No.19831382]

>>19829966
Is this novel actually good?

[Anonymous No.19831407]

>>19829966
It's been awhile since I read this. Even when I was 20 I found the allegory over the top, hackneyed, and repetitive. Like, it had to hit you over the head with each point multiple times in black and white terms.

Despite all that, the tone was pretty good. It did have this sort of haunting, apocalyptic, but still very early 20th century industrial feel to it. I could see why people liked it, even if the philosophy it was espousing had major holes in it and the vehicle was quite simplistic.

I think people actually dislike nuance. Maybe this is my problem as a writer. I always want to explore gray areas. I also want to bolster my arguments by looking at counter examples, and other arguments, other explanations, etc. When authors do this, and don't reduce opposing viewpoints to strawmen, they get more refined points and can be honest about where they might be wrong. But I don't think the public actually likes that. Look how much better partisan conspiracy sells than some detailed treatment. They want explicit statements.

[Anonymous No.19831441]

>>19831382
Yes, just finished it last night. It was quite a ride. I dropped C&P and TBK both about 180 pages in but Atlas Sharted could not put down.

[Anonymous No.19831455]

>>19831407
Anyhow, in the 11-13 years or so since I read this I've taken under grad micro econ and macro, then another 12 credits in graduate economics, along with two graduate degrees in adjacent fields, with course work mostly in pol sci, public admin, and finance. I got to be a TA for a graduate course in econ. Then I had a career in finance and eventually made it to CFO for a medium sized organization, about 6,000 employees/$1 billion annual revenue. Now I work as a consultant and teach undergrad econ on the side. I've also studied a lot more philosophy since.

It seems to me that whenever I reflect on this book, the big "economic philosophy" of our time that so many politicians claim is their favorite philosophical work, the more problems I see.

The reasoning on the value of money is circular here. Not only that, but it also seems to misunderstand how currency works. I recall in other parts of the book characters who are obviously supposed to be "the good guys," want payment in gold as a sort of true currency. However, issues with the money supply can occur with currencies under a gold standard or even in places using actual prescious metals as the medium of exchange. The highest inflation in US history occured under the gold standard. There are examples of destructive, massive fluctuations in prices in societies using precious metals as the medium of exchange throughout history. There is no reason a given medium makes prices immune to fluctuations driven by shifts in demand for goods or their supply.

Famines still hit the supply side of food and cause steep price increases. War disrupts supply chains and hits prices. Precious metals have the problem of supply being disconnected from changes in the economy at large, so you can get robust growth without an increase in the money supply, which causes deflation, curbing lending and making debts taken out for new ventures cost more, in turn reducing growth and innovation. Point being, it's complicated and often times counter intuitive things happen. A huge expansion in the money supply in the US from 2008-2019 saw historically low inflation and two periods of deflation. The EU had similar issues.

Also, I don't recall the book ever bringing up the issue of natural monopolies (i.e. goods with very high fixed costs, such that competition isn't profitable, a common example is power grids, it doesn't make sense to build 5 different power grids, so the owner gets a monopoly). Which is funny because it focuses on railroads, which are close to behaving like natural monopolies.

The study of complex systems overall should tell us the markets are actually almost never going to be in equilibrium. It's a moving landscape, multi-peak system. Conventional single equilibrium point graphing is done to teach concepts, it isn't how modeling should work.

I don't recall externalities either. It's like all the complex problems of economics got thrown out.

[Anonymous No.19831478]

>>19831455
I think Aristotle and Aquinas would be horrified to see modern US politics, with its huge focus on the economic sphere, the oikus, instead of politics being the sphere of values.

We focus on how policy effects home and hearth. And of course, in a quite liberal system like the US, the government has limited control over business cycles, but the state of the economy ends up driving political discussions. Now if you're a Dem, maybe this isn't such a bad area of focus, because you're interested in equity of distribution, and being led by the thinking of folks like Rawls on that front. However, the GOP seems like it has long had this internal conflict with an appeal to higher values, freedom, responsibility, man as the political animal, but then also almost a century and a half of neoliberalism as it's main ruler for policy prescriptions. So part of the intellectual heritage is folks like Aristotle and Aquinas who saw private property as a necessary evil to deal with the tragedy of the commons, but then neoliberalism makes it the goal itself.

It's even weirder now because "neoliberal" has become a slur term, effectively used as a lable for folks like Hillary Clinton. This started on the left, but somehow the right picked it up. I guess having "liberal" in the word works, but their policy is neoliberalism. That was quite explicit going into the 2000s, and if you look at a lot of Trump policy, particularly the biggest thing he did in terms of resource allocation, the tax cuts and removing regulations, it's more neoliberalism.

[Anonymous No.19831506]

>>19831455
>The highest inflation in US history occured under the gold standard.
In Europe, similar shit has happened ~500 years ago already.

[Anonymous No.19831541]

>>19831455
>almost never going to be in equilibrium
There ain't no equilibrium as a phenomenon, at all

https://evonomics.com/what-do-economists-mean-when-they-talk-about-capital-accumulation/

"The basic reason that real capital cannot be measured is aggregation. Considered as a productive economic entity, capital consists of qualitatively different objects: tractors are different from trucks, ships are different from airplanes and automobile factories are different from oil rigs. This heterogeneity explains why the heterodox Cambridge economists claimed that capital has no “natural unit”: there is no simply way to compare and add up its components, and that inability makes it difficult to decide “how big” or “how small” it is."

"Now, these are only three examples, and as our reader by now can imagine, we can give many others – in fact, as many as we wish – each based on a different PCE point and each yielding a different quantitative series. The crucial point here is that these different series all pertain to the same capital stock, so obviously only one of them, if any, can be “correct” – but which one is it?
Sadly, nobody knows.
As far as we can tell, nobody – not even top-of-the-line winners of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences – can identify PCE when they see it (assuming this is a meaningful social state to start with). And as long as PCE remains invisible, there is no way to decide which series, if any, shows the “true” magnitude of capital."

[Anonymous No.19831581]

>>19829966
She truly was the jewiest of jews

[Anonymous No.19831620]

>>19829966
Listen to this speech on audiobook every day as I head to the gym, makes me restless and ready to get money.

Atlas Shrugged is far better than most seem to credit it.

Best of luck in the future OP.

[Anonymous No.19831630]

For me it's Roark speech to Wynand about second-handers in The Fountainhead.

https://courses.aynrand.org/works/the-nature-of-the-second-hander/

[Anonymous No.19831637]

>>19829966
Truly a midwit book

[Anonymous No.19831854]

>>19830449
Fiat currency supply expansion & contraction

[Anonymous No.19831863]

This book is terribly written and not entertaining in the slightest but whenever someone asks me I name it as my favorite book of all time because I love to watch leftoids seethe at the mere mention of Rand

[Anonymous No.19831868]

>>19829966
My God

[Anonymous No.19831878]

>>19831407
>the vehicle was quite simplistic.
you live in the age of postmodernism. literally every show on tv has "gray" anti-heroes. she purposefully wrote romantic characters. and as for "simplistic." her philosophy is very complex.

>>19831455
after brenton woods, the US became the only issuer of dollars. Under MMT this means the dollar has become the tool the US has used to enact political change. If congress wants to look good for re-election, they can create a social program to help "interest group X" and they inject dollars into that program. The US doesn't need our taxes, taxes are used to manipulate the people. soldiers wouldn't fight, if they didn't need to pay taxes under MMT. Also there's the Guaranteed Job programs to keep shaneequa busy. And the people who have to pay the bill is us productive members of society through inflation. If you are as rich as you say you are, then you're paying over 50% of your income in federal + state + inflation. all because you're assets are in dollars. So yes, gold isn't infallible, but it used to fulfill the need for people (before bitcoin) as an alternative to the government's planned devaluation. Also, (even though the National Debt is irrelevant under MMT) government spending was kept under control. you have to admit you're getting fucked while holding dollars (we all are).
Also, externalities are a form of Altruist Ethics, which are antithetical to her Objectivist philosophy of selfishness. So she did mention them. they're the bad guy of the book.

[Anonymous No.19831901]

>>19829966
If you've ever traded shitcoins and made millions of dollars in less than a year, you know how fucking ridiculous and idealistic this notion of money is. While people work their hands to the bone for $8 an hour I can put my stablecoins in a 100% apy farm or liquidity pool and literally do nothing for $200k a year. My portfolio goes up and down by like $50k every day and I don't even blink an eye anymore. When you really see for yourself what highly liquid markets are like, you realize that there are two worlds: the world of people who believe that money is real, stable, and somehow related to hard work and moral living, and the world of people who understand that it has nothing to do with that, and really it's just an amoral force with a mind of its own that just flows where it likes in its own, often quite whimsical and humorous way. Not to mention that 40 percent of all USD ever printed in history was created last year. The USD is literally a shitcoin where the devs can just mint more to pay themselves whenever they like, I have no idea why you would be holding it.

[Anonymous No.19832110]

>>19829966
Literally just pic.

[Anonymous No.19832704]

>>19829966
Ayn Rand died in public housing while on welfare

Holy. Fucking. Based.

[Anonymous No.19832719]

>>19831901
Some people work the jobs that they do because they enjoy it.

I worked in mortages for 3 years and made more money than I ever needed and got bored and tired almost immediately. Every rich retired client I ever spoke to would immediately tell me they're looking to go back to work again because they dont know what to do now. People in the desks around me would spend their free time looking for the next big item to save up for.

Getting money for the sake of having money is a circular concept that leads to emptiness.

[Anonymous No.19832867]

A pitiful jewess with a shitty retoric,

still shilled at large...

Wow, so proud

[Anonymous No.19832900]

>>19829966
>To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will
What does a Jewish Woman know about White Men lmao

[Anonymous No.19833026]

>>19832110
Isn't that literally every ideology that belives in some kind of Utopia that can be attained by man
Whether it be Capitalism, Liberalism, Communism they all believe their system will reach Utopia
Only one I know of that was realistic enough to relise that man could never reach such a state were the Fascists

[Anonymous No.19834092]

>>19833026
How about not thinking in absolutes? That way you get to laugh at Ayn Rand and aren't led to advocate fascism.