It's the mind that creates value

The 'Amazing Physics' account observes:

This is a 1000-gram [steel] bar. 

In its raw form [as a steel billet], it’s worth around $1.

If it’s turned into horseshoes, its value rises to about $100. 

If it’s made into sewing needles, its value jumps to roughly $500. 

If it’s crafted into watch springs and gears, it can be worth around $100,000. 

And if it’s transformed into precision laser components, like those used in lithography, its value can reach $10-50 million.

What gives escalating value to the simple raw material is the mind. It is the mind that transforms the value of a metal bar into the value of those horseshoes, needles, watch springs, and precision labour components. 

Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions—and you'll learn that man's mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.

That was Ayn Rand, writing in answer to the question: "What is Capitalism?" 

Rand was almost unique in writing about the role of the mind in man's existence; about its role in invention and production and valuing. "It is the mind," her novel Atlas Shrugged illustrates, "that is the root of all human knowledge and values -- and its absence is the root of all evil."

Read more here, in two parts:

• Atlas Shrugged on the Role of the Mind in Man’s Existence, Part 1: The Human Form of Consciousness: - Greg Salmieri, NEW IDEAL
• Atlas Shrugged on the Role of the Mind in Man’s Existence, Part 2: The Valuing Faculty - Greg Salmieri, NEW IDEAL

[Note: I have corrected the values shown in the original post.]

"We never had to take any of it seriously, did we?"

On Ayn Rand Day (which was on Monday, apparently) let's remember what to take seriously.

In a letter to a fan, she said of her novel Atlas Shrugged:

You ask me about the meaning of the dialogue on page 702 of ATLAS SHRUGGED: 

'We never had to take any of it seriously, did we?' she whispered.

'No, we never had to.' ...

Let me begin by saying that this is perhaps the most important point in the whole book, because it is the condensed emotional summation, the keynote or leitmotif, of the view of life presented in Atlas Shrugged. ...

What Dagny expresses here is the conviction that joy, exaltation, beauty, greatness, heroism, all the supreme, uplifting values of man's existence on earth, are the meaning of life—not the pain or ugliness he may encounter—that one must live for the sake of such exalted moments as one may be able to achieve or experience, not for the sake of suffering—that happiness matters, but suffering does not—that no matter how much pain one may have to endure, it is never to be taken seriously, that is: never to be taken as the essence and meaning of life—that the essence of life is the achievement of joy, not the escape from pain.

"I find it astonishing that out of a population that contains the wealth of talent present in the United States, two such mediocre candidates have been nominated for the most powerful office in the world."

"In a by now text book example of 'progressive' thinking, [the Herald's Simon] Wilson suggests that taxing the tech billionaires isn’t actually going to hurt them. And this is where the Left gets it wrong.
    "Wilson and his ilk are of the view that those who are better off, who are 'richer,' who have taken risks to get where they have reached, who have used initiative and creativity to develop products which the market clearly wants — that they should be made to pay. For what? Wilson isn’t clear on this.
    "The approach seems to be that the Silicon Valley elites have more than many others, and so they should have less because they can afford to do without. It is this thinking that underpins the criticisms of the socialist approach made by Ayn Rand in 'Atlas Shrugged' and 'The Fountainhead.' ...

"As far as the US election is concerned I find it astonishing that out of a population that contains the wealth of talent present in the United States, two such mediocre candidates have been nominated for the most powerful office in the world. ...
    "The problem with Trump is that he is a crook. ... [H]e will allow the dictators and fellow authoritarians in Russia, North Korea, Iran and China to flourish and become more powerful. ... Harris will do damage to the economy and it is doubtful that she has the heft to maintain the US position on the international stage.
    "Anyone but Trump, sadly, is not an answer. ...
    "One wonders if 5 November 2024 will see the beginning of the destruction of the American experiment with democracy."

~ David Harvey on 'Reflections on an Election'

"Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy ... "

"Happiness is not to be achieved at the command of emotional whims. Happiness is not the satisfaction of whatever irrational wishes you might blindly attempt to indulge. Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy—a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction, not the joy of escaping from your mind, but of using your mind’s fullest power, not the joy of faking reality, but of achieving values that are real, not the joy of a drunkard, but of a producer. Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions."

~ Ayn Rand, from 'Galt’s Speech' in her 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged. Hat tip psychologist Jean Moroney — who "chews" the paragraph sentence by sentence in her latest blog post. There's a lot packed in there, she reckons. "When I re-read this paragraph," she says, "I felt like it had taken me 30 years to understand it in detail, and I still had more to learn from it." You too, probably.

"My Conversion from Anti-Industrialist to Lover of Human Progress'"

"Sometimes when I talk and write about the importance of science, technology, and entrepreneurship to human opportunity and living standards, people ask me why I seem so obsessed with progress.
    "There is a simple reason: I did not use to believe in it.
    "When I was around fifteen, I shared many of the ideas of the people I now spend my time arguing against. I was very unhappy about modern, industrial civilisation. I looked upon highways, cars, trucks, and factories as blights on the landscape. I thought the hustle, bustle, and stress of consumerism and modernity were unnatural and unhealthy. ...

"I thought that there must have been a better time in the past, when we lived in harmony with one another and with nature. ... There, I thought, were the good old days. This view predisposed me to look at technology and construction and consumption only in terms of their negative impacts on traditional lifestyles, livelihoods, and the environment. ...

"I read the Existentialists, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Henry David Thoreau; I read Franz Kafka and plenty of other disturbing fiction, all of which reinforced my sense that something was seriously wrong with the world and humanity. It made me a pessimist, almost even a misanthrope. Such stupid people, to ruin their world like that!

"... I don’t think that I ever became clinically depressed, but as a friend of mine put it, I had made myself 'philosophically depressed.' The world and everything in it just seemed hopeless. And that became a self-fulfilling despair.
    "Two things began to lift me out of the intellectual hole that I had dug for myself: reading about history—boy, was that an eye-opener—and studying politics. ...

"Whatever period I read about, and whichever region I turned to, the 'good old days' were nowhere to be found. ... I found that the desperate struggle to find something, anything, to feed your family and stave off hunger for another few weeks was the defining experience of all previous eras. ... My ancestors in northern Sweden had not lived a good life; they had fought hard for food, shelter, and clothing, and when the weather was bad, the crop failed, and they starved. In bad times, they had to dry and grind tree bark into flour to prepare their daily bread. ...
    "Once I began to pull this thread, I found it hard to stop. I just had to find out what made the difference between their lives and ours. Why is it that for ten thousand years, people did not experience any lasting improvement in their material condition, and then suddenly, in the past five or six generations, we saw an explosion of wealth and technology?
    "For the first time, I started to actually think about the impact of railways, steamboats, international trade, corporations, financial markets, and so on. I had to ask myself: Where would I have been without them? Probably in the graveyard, or never born. ...

"This was the beginning of my obsession with human progress. I could no longer take modern civilisation as a given—or a curse.
    "Step by step, I realised that the modern world was not so bad after all. But my heart was not in it. ... Then some friends in [the freedom] community told me that I had to read Ayn Rand, whom I had never heard of. It happened at an important moment in my thought process. ... 

    "I had yet to experience, in visceral form, the meaning of industrialisation and commerce, and so I was left with a hollow, less-than-inspired ideal. That began to change when I read Atlas Shrugged and Rand’s nonfiction books.

    "For the first time, I read someone who talked about man as a heroic being, with happiness as his moral purpose, and science, technology, and industry his noblest activities. I was appalled. And deeply fascinated!
    "Rand had this annoying ability to get to the bottom of every question and challenge my every belief. ...
    "If scientists and entrepreneurs provide us with the knowledge and wealth that make the world an amazing place, why weren’t they the heroes in my story? And why were the whiners and moaners good guys—just because they dressed in black like me and had the better tunes? Previously, I had identified government intervention as a bad thing and had been involved in libertarian activism against it, but I had not clearly identified or articulated the good that deserved protection against it. Thanks to Rand, I began to shift from fighting against what’s bad to fighting for what’s good—for progress, and not just against oppression.
    "Interestingly, and perhaps ironically, the biggest impact of reading Rand was on my emotional outlook—the part of my personality that had not kept up with my intellectual transformation. She helped me see the beauty in exploration and achievement and that technology and innovation can be romantic adventures. I credit her at least partly with my bright sense of life, my belief in mankind, in progress and the future. In Rand’s novel 'The Fountainhead,' the sight of one man’s achievement provides a young boy with “the courage to face a lifetime.” In time, that’s what Rand’s works provided me.
    "This intellectual journey of discovery is why I am obsessed with progress. It is fueled in part by my gratitude for the people who keep on working and thinking and producing, even when people like my old self denigrate them. I had always taken progress for granted. I did not recognise it, and I did not understand it, and now I am trying to make up for it.
    "As a convert to the cause, I hope you will forgive my missionary zeal. You see, I am trying to get a younger version of myself to see the error of his ways."

~ Johan Norberg from his article 'My Conversion from Anti-Industrialist to Lover of Human Progress'. His most recent book is The Capitalist Manifesto – Why the Global Free Market Will Save the World

"When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing..."

"When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - When you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - When you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you - When you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - You may know that your society is doomed."

~ Ayn Rand, from her 1953 novel Atlas Shrugged

"The pronouncements of progressive politicians, woke academics, and senior bureaucrats increasingly sound like characters out of 'Atlas Shrugged'."

"A friend who shall remain nameless suggested something last week that I can't shake: The pronouncements of progressive politicians, woke academics, and senior bureaucrats increasingly sound like characters out of [Ayn Rand's 1953 novel] 'Atlas Shrugged.'
    "I liked Atlas Shrugged--still do--but also shared the common view that the villains were overdrawn. And as of the 1950s, when Rand was writing it, they were. As of the 2020s, not so much. Merit is racist. Individualism is evil. Objective truth is an illusion.
    "There's an op-ed to be written, with direct quotes from leading contemporary progressives and direct quotes from Wesley Mouch, Robert Stadler, and Floyd Ferris. The parallels are amazing."

~ Charles Murray

"It’s not just high taxes that are driving people out of cities.
    "There are other costs—moral, social, and cultural—when you create communities that spurn property rights and celebrate looting.
    "IRS data only tell us so much. If you want to better understand those costs, pick up 'Atlas Shrugged.'"

~ Jon Miltimore, from his post 'America’s ‘Atlas Shrugged’ Moment Has Already Arrived, New IRS Data Show'

"...happiness matters ... suffering does not "

 

"You ask me about the meaning of the dialogue on page 702 of 'Atlas Shrugged', i.e.: 

"'We never had to take any of it seriously, did we?' she whispered. 

'No, we never had to.' 

"Let me begin by saying that this is perhaps the most important point in the whole book, because it is the condensed emotional summation, the keynote or leitmotif, of the view of life presented in 'Atlas Shrugged'. "What Dagny expresses here is the conviction that joy, exaltation, beauty, greatness, heroism, all the supreme, uplifting values of man's existence on earth, are the meaning of life—not the pain or ugliness he may encounter—that one must live for the sake of such exalted moments as one may be able to achieve or experience, not for the sake of suffering—that happiness matters, but suffering does not—that no matter how much pain one may have to endure, it is never to be taken seriously, that is: never to be taken as the essence and meaning of life—that the essence of life is the achievement of joy, not the escape from pain."

~ Ayn Rand, in a letter to a fan, about her novel Atlas Shrugged [hat tip Secular Foxhole podcast]

Your Lies Enslave You

"People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I've learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one's reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one's master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person's view requires to be faked. And if one gains the immediate purpose of the lie - the price one pays is the destruction of what the gain was intended to serve. The man who lies to the world is the world's slave from then on."

~ Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged [hat tip Dan T.; commentary from The Book of Self-Mastery]

"Justice consists first not in condemning, but in admiring..."

"Justice consists first not in condemning, but in admiring -- and then in expressing one's admiration explicitly and in fighting for those one admires....
    “It is, if anything, more important to praise and reward the good than to condemn the evil. To speak up and to fight for the men who are right and who represent rational values.
    “Granted, the evil must be fought and condemned … but then, brushed aside.
    “What counts in life … and this is the issue, of course, of the potency of virtue … what counts in life is the good.
    “They are the men who create the values life requires. They are the men mankind relies on. They are the men whose virtues and achievements must be acknowledged above all, if justice is a virtue, and if life is the standard.
    “So it is important to tell Plato, for instance, that he's wrong. But it is more important that Aristotle hear somebody who recognizes that he is right.
    “It's important that James Taggart not get away with the fraud that he runs Taggart Transcontinental, but it is more important that Rearden find someone who can understand what he is achieving.
    “The first duty of justice is to acknowledge and defend the good.
    “And in this respect, I might point out the whole of 'Atlas Shrugged' is a passionate act of justice.”

~ Leonard Peikoff, composite quote from his book Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand and lecture 'Objectivism and the Moral Foundations of Government' [hat tips Felipe Lapyda and Robert Nasir]

A liberty lesson delivered by Dan Sanchez from 'the slap heard round the world.'

Ayn Rand

Image Credit: Public Domain

What John Galt Would Say to Will Smith

Guest post by Dan Sanchez

I'm not an avid follower of celebrity news -- truth be told I'm barely aware of who all these alleged celebrities are, or how they achieved this so-called status -- but there was an altercation at the Academy Awards last night that is not only consuming the attention of the media and the public, but is actually quite relevant to the ideas that this blog promotes. Call it a short hard lesson in liberty.

I'll let you look up the night's details if you haven't heard them yet, but this is what happened in brief. After the host Chris Rock delivered a joke about actress Jada Pinkett Smith, her husband Will Smith—the A-list actor—walked on stage and literally slapped Rock on live television. Smith then walked back and cursed the host from his seat.

As it turned out, later that night, Will Smith won the Oscar for Best Actor. In his acceptance speech, Smith tearfully apologised (although not to the person he struck).

Now, in a sense, this is a tempest in a teacup. In a world in which governments around the globe are waging wars on liberty, and in the Russian government's case even waging literal war on a civilian population, one highly-paid entertainer striking another in a public meltdown may be considered a distraction. But given that it is (appropriately or not) commanding public attention, we may as well try to extract lessons from it: especially for the benefit of teens and kids.

For most people, it is plain as day who was in the wrong on that stage. But it can be illuminating to reflect on exactly why.

Any young person would do well to frame what happened last night by reading "Galt's speech" from the best-selling novel Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. In that famous speech, Rand's character John Galt proclaims:

"So long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate—do you hear me? no man may start—the use of physical force against others."

This has been referred to by many others since as the "non-initiation of force" principle. The "initiation" part is key, because it establishes that forceful self-defense is legitimate. Understanding this principle is fundamental to understanding liberty and justice.

When judging any violent conflict, people naturally ask an important question -- and that important question is: "Who started it?" But a more precise phrasing would be: who started the violence? Who kicked off the force? Who initially violated someone else's person or property? In short (as you mother might have asked when you'd made your kid brother cry) who swung their fist first?

Will Smith clearly felt Chris Rock's joke was offensive and disrespectful. He may have thought it impugned his wife's honour. He may have regarded it as damaging to his family's reputation (although it can hardly be more damaging than how he responded).

But as Murray Rothbard wrote in The Ethics of Liberty, nobody has a property right in their reputation, because a reputation "is purely a function of the subjective attitudes and beliefs about him contained in the minds of other people." And a person, "can have no property right in the beliefs and minds of other people."

So, Rock's joke, whether it was funny or not, or all in good fun or even needlessly cruel, violated nobody's rights, and the one who initiated force was Smith, and was in the wrong.

It may seem silly to litigate a celebrity slap, but it is worthwhile to clarify these principles when they do come up because, however commonsensical they may seem, people reject them all the time (or misunderstand them, or ignore them... ), and we all suffer for that. For example, the way people frequently use the term "microaggression" threatens speech rights by blurring the line between non-violent behaviour and initiatory force. ("She microagressed me; that's hate speech!") And the bulk of public policy today uses government force to counter non-violent behaviour that some people find objectionable.

Liberty is constantly endangered because most people don't clearly see the line that separates just from unjust force. To save liberty, we need to educate the public (young people especially) about the ideas of liberty, especially the non-initiation of force.

To do that best, put down your phone replaying the slap, and pick up that book called Atlas Shrugged. Worst comes to worst, you can always use its weight in self-defence.

* * * * 

DAN SANCHEZ

Dan Sanchez is the Director of Content at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) and the editor-in chief of FEE.org, where a version of this article previously appeared.

“In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are at its worst..."

"The most selfish of all things... "

 

"The most selfish of all things is the independent mind that recognises no authority higher than its own, and no value higher than its judgement of truth."

~ Ayn Rand on the single-most important principle of rational egoism, from her novel Atlas Shrugged

"Why had she always felt that joyous sense of confidence when looking at machines?"

"[Dagny] felt the sweep of an emotion which she could not contain, as of something bursting upward. She turned to the door of the [diesel combustion engine], she threw it open to a screaming jet of sound and escaped into the pounding of the [locomotive]’s heart. . . . 

    "Why had she always felt that joyous sense of confidence when looking at machines?—she thought. In these giant shapes, two aspects pertaining to the inhuman were radiantly absent: the causeless and the purposeless. Every part of the motors was an embodied answer to ‘Why?’ and ‘What for?’—like the steps of a life-course chosen by the sort of mind she worshipped. The motors were a moral code cast in steel. 

    "They are alive, she thought, but their soul operates them by remote control. Their soul is in every man who has the capacity to equal this achievement.”

          ~ Ayn Rand, from her novel Atlas Shrugged

[Hat tip Stephen Boydstun]

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Quiz: ‘Atlas Shrugged’ or real life?

 

It’s said that Ayn Rand’s villains are unrealistic, far-fetched, pure fantasy – that few if any bad guys would walk, talk or act like she writes them.

Really?

Test it out for yourself in this short quiz:

Who Said It: Atlas Shrugged  Villain or Real-life Public Figure?

And then buy the book.

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A message from Ayn Rand [updated]

UPDATE:

Rand and Cruz in the House

During his marathon 21-hour speech on the US Senate floor yesterday, filibustering against the failing ObamaCare plan, Senator Ted Cruz read from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged …

[Hat tip Julian D.]

100 years of coming and going

Manhattan’s Grand Central Station, a classic of architecture, transport engineering and cinema—and the busiest train station in the States—is 100 years old.

Over the years, the terminal has appeared in many books and a host of movies:

It might look like the Paris Opera House from outside, but the inside was said to be the model for the Taggart Terminal in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

Every day more than 750,000 people come through its doors, where its main hall provides  the perfect model of spontaneous order: no cops, no ropes, no centralized direction, just order through individual liberty.

Atlas in South America

Turns out that Atlas Shrugged, Objectivism and Ayn Rand—and Austrian economics—are growing in popularity in South America, including reports from Cuba of a tractor and cart used for transportation between two villages wit he words “John Galt” emblazoned on its sides.

And in Guatemala the Universidad Francisco Marroquin (UFM) has a Ludwig von Mises library, a Centro del Capitalismo, a Centro Henry Hazlitt, and has made Atlas Shrugged required reading for all students—with the events in the novel integrated with the economics courses—and The Fountainhead assigned reading for all architecture students. “Our mission,” says the University, “is to teach and disseminate the ethical, legal and economic aspects of a society of free and responsible individuals.”

If only other universities could say the same.

Here’s the  sculpture by Walter Peter Brenner adorning the business school:  photographed in 2007 at its unveiling to commemorate the golden anniversary of Atlas Shrugged’s publication, the fourteen-foot square bronze relief is called “Atlas Libertas,” and described as “a tribute to the spirit of enterprise and creative power of the individual.”

[Hat tip Greg D. and the  HB List]

Mikkelsen shrugs? [updated]

Golfer Phil Mickelson may call it quits due to climbing tax rates.

[Hat tip Shaun H.]

UPDATE: Golfer Phil Mickelson Is Not Alone In Fleeing Taxes