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And in Atlas Shrugged, remember that Hank Rearden was on good terms with the head of his company's own labor union. The two men agreed that they had no conflicts, that their common enemies were Orren Boyle and Fred Kinnan.
In Atlas Shrugged, Fred Kinnan is like an "unsaved" Gail Wynand. When the looters are talking themselves into Directive 10-289, he loses patience with Dr. Pritchett and Jim Taggart as they dialectically collude on the non-existence of consequences, saying "I know what I am talking about because I never went to college." He is a pure power looter, who says that for his own survival, he has to deliver the goods even to the lowest wharf rat. Not the best of cases, but among the looters and moochers he is perhaps the only one with a creditable backstory.
(The story you are thinking of is Ivy Starnes of the 20th Century Motor Company. Read the book a couple of more times and you will have them memorized.)
"Pursuit of Happiness" is not an idle phrase, but few modern liberals (progressives) can get over the intellectual challenges within Ayn Rand's works, which do, indeed, praise selfishness and greed (properly defined).
My point is that -conservatives- misunderstand Ayn Rand. They see Atlas Shrugged the movie and maybe read the book but see it as a political statement. They do not understand the metaphysics and epistemology upon which morality and ethics necessarily depend.
Conservatives are defined by FAITH and TRADITION, both of which Ayn Rand declaimed against.
I do not know what you mean by "rightwing politics." To me it means taking control of every woman's reproduction, allowing (i.e. requiring) prayer in public schools, penalizing and then criminalizing households on the basis of sex and gender, giving tax breaks to corporations in return for "jobs", and benign racism.
Take the last point first. Objectivism is a _moral_ philosophy and that morality rests on metaphysics. Describing the steel mill, Rand said that every girder was placed in answer to one question: "right or wrong?" Right and wrong are moral terms.
You surely do have a _political_ right to become a heroin addict, but you will not find that defended anywhere in Objectivism. It would be irrational; and the irrational is immoral because it is anti-life. So is racism.
But "right wing politics" includes decrying both "black racism" and "affirmative action" as "reverse discrimination" which is like arguing that alcohol is worse than marijuana (which it may well be); and so not only should pot be legal (agreed), but that we should all smoke it. Or that you have a political right to form or join a voluntary communist farming collective - which you do. So, if some people want to form such collectives, we should take up the cudgels on their behalf.
Instead, according to Objectivist morality, a person committed to reality and reason would view racial discrimination like smoking pot and being in a commune. You would not associate with anyone who did those.
You are 100% correct that Ayn Rand hinted at but did not deeply delve into the sociology of complex organizations. Corporations are just free market socialism, if you want to think of it that way.Commercial insurance is wonderful, but "group health plans" even if privately funded always rewarded people for sitting in doctors' offices at the expense of those who actually showed up to work. So, this fundamental collectivism that may come with our simian genes is a whole other kind of discussion. Ayn Rand's _The Fountainhead_ tells that as a story, but no explicit prescriptions followed.
I am thinking about the private ownership of cannons and its partial ban in 1934. I have no idea what the taxes on owning a black powder cannon (which I think you can still own).
I think that she pretty much predicted the fall of communism. We were propping them up, of course. More fundamentally, looter societies cannot prosper and so must collapse. The "muscle mystics" believe that possession of industrial tools gives them the power to produce. Of course, it does not.
Note that she also cautioned against an armed revolt as not very practical. In fact, the failure of Shays's Rebellion and the success of Col. Hamilton against the Whiskey Rebellion pretty much made the Second Amendment moot. No revolt against the federal government has succeeded. In the War Between the States, the South had better commanders, morally committed troops, fighting a defensive war on home ground -- and they lost.
The real battle is philosophical Win that one and the other is unnecessary.
The American Revolution had a lot of support in Britain. We only wanted our rights as Englishmen. We did not see how we lost them when we colonized the New World. Two British generals refused commissions to put down the rebellion, one resigned from the Army completely rather than fight. William Pitt was not alone in Parliament. It is conceivable that short of independence, eventually, something like a Commonwealth could have been created, a truly global government based on rights. Parliament hired the king. They could fire him. Heck, they beheaded one. Just to say, work on the philosophy of Reality and Reason; the rest will follow.
"Ayn Rand did not cite Max Weber or John Stuart Mill when she said that the government holds a legal monopoly on force."
Can you explain this? It seemed a little out of the blue to me. Why would Rand cite either?