did albert einstein become a multibillionaire? after all, his work is the foundation of modern physics. did the inventor of the smallpox vaccine become a billionaire? after all, he destroyed the last great plague that bedeviled manking. anyone who takes a chemistry class learns the names of the great men of chemistry whose discoveries enabled our great medicines and modern chemicals. those guys were pretty much all academics who were content to do their research in their labs because they were truly interested in natural phenomena, not for material gain.

anyone who studies history and science will know that ayn rand’s ideas are just total fantasies. the government does the VAST BULK of scientific research, either directly in its own labs in public universities and places like NASA and the NSF, or indirectly by giving funding for places like stanford, harvard, MIT, etc.

a cursory study of history shows that generally the private sector is sucking the teat of the public sector. anyone who can’t even face these minimal, undisputed facts isn’t part of the world of reality.

Sanford’s bull shit analysis about why his beloved St. Rand holds the future of the human race in her writings reminds me of the the old saying:
Democrats “work for you” – Republicans “just work you”…

The rendering of the human being into commodity, of chattel, is an project to sever at the root any connection between human beings as animals and our environment, to snuff out a part of us by denying any wild origins. Thus, does libertarianism feel free to write any environmental consequences of “freely entered into contracts” off the books, relying on the threat of lawsuit after the fact to clean up any messes, floating us up the Love Canal.

Libertarians are so infatuated with commerce and willing to ignore their dogma and trade in ill-gotten gains that they reduce the human being to chattel under the artifice that we own ourselves as we would own a hammer, and prioritize their fetishization into this notion that property rights are more important than the right to life, to access goods required to survive given that access to those goods requires that one work. Brains are like computers but nobody conceives of a person as a computer, to the contrary, the goal is to get computers to be more like people.

That kind of coercion, that you are first and foremost an economic instrument, that you must work to eat, when the “natural” law that these libertarians craft opportunistically out of whole cloth, derived from the pre-scarcity period prior to hunters and gatherers settled into sedentary agriculture, was that access to the necessities of living was available to all.

Now that land has been commodified, enclosed, privatized, it is no longer possible for most people to fend for themselves. In the early days of American urbanization, there were hobo jungles established along train lines in what is now the exurbs. The subdivision of these peripheral zones where those who did not fit into the contrivances of a work-wage-food economy eliminated the places where these folks survived and drove them into the cities, creating the homeless problem. Now that there is scarcity, these worshippers of property rights who see taxation as equivalent to slavery, are happy to ignore the slavery required to access food and shelter that their economic sharia imposes on billions.

The irony here, of course, is that amongst the best of times in the US, at least for white guys, was the 25 years after WWII, when the tax rate was northwards of 70%, infrastructure was a priority, education was honored and the workplace relationship was a two-way street. Never mind that most libertarians who fund today’s shriek box do not sell their labor for wages, rather clip coupons and fund think tanks to be sure that they keep as much of those coupons–crystallized labor of others–as possible. And they would not hesitate to use their economic might to coerce most people who don’t own significant property into paying taxes to police private property, as if that was exempt from the notion of taxation of slavery that they so abhor.

Libertarians historically are a reaction asserting individual autonomy in the fact of utilitarianism which claims that the rights of individuals should be subsumed to some greater good, that we can be used as pawns in greater projects. Of course libertarian capitalism has no such pretensions, ignoring that forcing labor on people subsumes their autonomy in favor of commodification and exchange. Thus, true libertarians abhor democracy because the have nots would simply use the artifice of state to redistribute wealth.

The best thing about libertarianism is that under such a regime, people would not consent to taxation to protect private property, this would result in a decay in the ability of capital to fund military forces to keep capitalism stable, and industrial society would collapse due to lack of energy and access to raw materials. Thus, the furthest idealistic right wing capitalist theory would double back upon itself and deliver the kind of “back to the Pleistocene” primativist anarchy, where corporations could not get that much bigger than the number of people with a direct interest in that corporation, that comes closer to my ideal of Green Anarchy (not to be confused with John Zerzan, please).

That said, we can agree with libertarians on social liberty while we disagree on economic liberty, the freedom to wage work or starve, and work with them as appropriate. And it is always fun to chat with them and make their brains turn to mush.

Medicare Part D and the subsidized private Medicare Advantage plans are outstanding, costly examples.

You say…

My commitment to you is to always communicate to you honestly and quickly. If you have a question, don’t understand something or want to share a concern or inspiration…please reach out to me by any of the methods below and I will get in touch with you shortly.

Are you really an individual?

The movement that has been created by the heritage of man, which is trying to make you into something different from what you are, comes to an end, and so what you are begins to express itself, that’s all, in its own way, unhindered, unhandicapped, unburdened by the past of man, mankind as a whole. So such a man is of no use to the society; on the other hand he becomes a threat.

What do you really believe?

I believe that if you are happy there isn’t much need for hope. And I believe that more individual freedom = more humanity = more happiness.

So now we know… happiness is:

watching tourists get stuck in winter or mud season.

Maybe you could give them a warm puppy too. And security is a thumb and a blanket, don’t you know…

As for hope…

There is no self, there is no I, there is no spirit, there is no soul, and there is no mind. That knocks off the whole list, and you have no way of finding out what you are left with.

Jeez…

Comforting relief from the use of irony, mocking and conveying contempt.

Take some Damitol and chill… soon it will all be water under the bridge…

You are just an animal, but you are not ready to accept that. You are not more intelligent than the other animals.

And don’t forget — “We’re all Bozo’s on this bus!”

How’s that for “socialist”…