I've been watching these Biography of America videos for my history class. The latest one brought up the idea of Privatism. It sounds very much like Objectivism. I was hoping you all could help me draw the lines around (and between) the two more distinctly.

Here's what was said about Benjamin Franklin and privatism on page five of the transcrip.
http://www.learner.org/biographyofameric...

Like Paul Revere, Franklin moved from running a shop to engagement in public affairs. He launched the Pennsylvania Gazette, which became the most successful newspaper in the colonies. And for twenty-five years he published his Poor Richard's Almanack, the most widely read book, next to the Bible, in colonial America. In his Almanack, Franklin dispensed humorous advice on how to get rich, later collecting the best of Poor Richard under the title "The Way to Wealth."

This became a how-to-do guide for the ambitious. Franklin's Puritan father had preached to him the gospel of getting to heaven. The son preached the gospel of getting ahead. "The sleeping fox catches no poultry." "There is no gain without pain." And this is my favorite one. "It costs more to maintain one vice than to raise two children." For this, Franklin's been sometimes called sarcastically, "The Father of all the Yankees."

But behind the Yankee was the Puritan. Growing up in Boston, Franklin skipped church to practice his writing. Calvin's idea of predestination clashed with his self-improving bent. But he did internalize Puritanism's social values: its moral earnestness, its emphasis on hard work and diligence, its self-scrutinizing cast of mind.

What he could not accept was John Winthrop's idea of a fixed human hierarchy, the idea that God had ordained that some should be rich and others poor, and that all should be satisfied with their station in life. Franklin believed that it was impossible to keep self-reliant people down in expanding America. Or as Crevecouer wrote: "As soon as a European arrives in America, he begins to throw off his former servitude and starts acting independently." As one historian has written, "This was a society unlike any in the world, in which people placed a greater value on their status as independent individuals, beholden to no man."

In Philadelphia, Franklin was an advanced agent of an ideological revolution that had begun in his home city of Boston. This was a movement against government controls on money-making and toward greater individual freedom. Colonists still lived in a mercantile world, in which British government controlled most of their trade. But they were beginning to fashion a new idea of economic behavior.

Modern historians call this privatism: the belief that there should be little or no control on the search for wealth; and that if each person fairly pursues his self-interest, the community as a whole will benefit. Franklin believed in this because he saw it working in Philadelphia.

Artisans owned their own one-man shops and controlled the conditions of their work. They also watched over each other's property, and didn't charge ridiculously high prices for their scarce products, fearing other artisans, whose products they needed, would retaliate. That's the kind of self-interest Franklin applauded. These conditions produced urban order as well as prosperity, an order maintained in the absence of a police force and with comparatively little government.

This didn't mean that one had no obligations to the community. Without much government, citizens had to give more of themselves to the community. And Franklin did. He became, in his own words, a "doer of good."

First he organized a club for "mutual improvement." Then he led other members of the club in a flurry of civic activity. He established America's first circulating library, a fire insurance organization, a night watch, a city hospital, a city college, (the future University of Pennsylvania), and the American Philosophical Society, which still meets in Independence Hall.

"Nothing but money is sweeter than honey." Franklin wrote that. But for him, money was merely a means to an end. At age 42, he retired from business, a rich man, to devote himself to public causes and scientific experiments.

By the way, all this came from Biography of America, Episode 3: Growth and Empire/The Best Poor Man's Country closely after the 18 and a half minute mark.
http://www.learner.org/biographyofameric...