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Alternative_Effort t1_j22q6au wrote

Reply to comment by D_Welch in Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand by gothiclg

>It's my grandmother trading a chicken for eggs from the neighbor. There has to be a name for this type of system and Capitalism is what it is.

Randians like to fall back on trading chicken eggs as though "Capitalism" just means bartering or that Capitalism is somehow 'natural'. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Property is what you can carry -- anything else is an agreement. Your grandmother can own the eggs, but not the chickens, and certainly not the land beneath the chicken's feet. Most of all, she can't own any songs she sings or ideas she has.

The dark genius of Rand was her starting off with "I'm just a simple unfrozen caveman lawyer, and when I wanted to trade eggs..." and yet somehow finishing with ultra-specific conclusions about the capital gains tax in the 21st century.

>We are constructed as selfish beings who care more about breathing and food and survival foremost, before we can ever think of others.

But we're not 'constructed' that way -- mammals in general but especially human parents will routinely prioritize the lives of their children over their own. If there's even ONE crying baby on a plane, every single person on the plane has an instinctive bad reaction that way out of proportion with the actual volume of the noise produced by the baby.

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