Last week I paraphrased a statement made by Ayn Rand in a post about “Planet New Fundamental Rights� that was recently rediscovered by socialist mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco when he declared that internet access was a ‘right’.
Well now y’all are screwed because the replacements to my Rand book collection lost many moons ago to the fire suppression system at a storage unit I was renting are starting to arrive. The first of which was 1967’s Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (where I pulled last week’s paraphrase from). I immediately went into the appendix and found her essay “Man’s Rights�.
Re-reading that essay after all these years was like getting kicked in the balls with a lightning bolt in its attention grabbing qualities and I have decided to feature paragraphs from that essay in a new daily series here at RNS. The paragraphs will not be in any particular order, most certainly not in the order they were printed in the essay, but will be tossed up for the reading pleasure of the folks who stop by RNS and for any criticism folks want to toss their way. I will move on to other essays of hers when we complete that one.
Rand is a somewhat of a controversial figure in the world of philosophy, mostly due to her unapologetic nature and the fact that she would stomp a mudhole into the ass of just about every collectivist philosophy instructor alive today, the vast majority of whom can only fault her philosophy by misrepresenting it during their presentation. I don’t fault them too heavily in their misrepresentations, it is easy to do that to something they’ll never understand.
I by no means believe or believe in every single thing she writes, but I do hold her in higher esteem than the great number of fools out there who are trying to tell me that I need to be a giver and not a taker. Nor am I posting these to try and influence or change anyone’s mind. It is your right to believe what you want.
I have a sneaking suspicion that most RNS regulars will be nodding their heads when they read the quotes, however.
It’ll also mean that even when I’m busy there will be content here other than just a post telling you all how busy I am.
So anyway, to start; I present the quote that I was wanting to pass on last week:
If some men are entitled by right to the products of the work of others, it means that those others are deprived of rights and condemned to slave labor.
Any alleged “right� of one man, which necessitates the violation if the rights of another, is not and cannot be a right.
Ayn Rand “Man’s Rights�
(BTW I am typing these in by hand as I have been unable to find this essay reprinted anywhere in the web. Any typos are mine, but I’m planning to have zero typos here)
No knock on the rightist philosophy as generally stated, but didn’t Ayn Rand make a hero out of a commerce-rading pirate in “Atlas Shrugged” (or was it “The Fountainhead” (I haven’t read them in 35 years, I don’t remember which book that scene was in)?
Such a positive portrayal of a pirate seems to run against her absolute statement of rights.
That’s why absolutes are SO hard to defend. One can usually find the exception that disproves the rule.