A fine gentleman on Gizmodo thought it was appropriate to post this:
Time to come off as an iconoclast.
This may be shocking to some people, and in fact I know it will be shocking to some people, but Martin Luther King Jr. was evil, and that is not hyperbole.
Just to get this out of the way, his fight against government segregation was a totally legitimate and morally praiseworthy fight. However, almost everything else he stood for, both concretely and philosophically, was totally corrupt.
First of all, let us be clear on what kind of “morality” MLK is talking about here. Do not delude yourself into making him a blank page on which to draw your own personal values. King was a socialist, avowedly, and certainly an anti-capitalist. He was pro-slavery at the most basic level, as evidenced by his attacking property rights as immoral.
“We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
That quote is disgusting, but consider what he is actually saying, and what he actually marched for. King is not simply proselytizing leftist and religious anti-capitalist falderal in an attempt to convert you; he wants the government to threaten you with a gun and throw you in jail, something he endured, if you do not agree with him. If you are morally repugnant enough to want to discriminate based on race, King does not just want to change your mind; he wants to steal your property and dictate how you use it. He places needs above rights, which is the primary moral principle underlying Christianity, Socialism, and Communism. What exactly does he mean when he says “people” should take priority over “property rights”? He means slavery. He means that if some people are unhappy, your right to your property must go; you must toil while others reap the benefit of your work, the very definition of slavery.
After all, consider that the event in which King delivered the famous “I Have a Dream” speech was the also-famous “March on Washington for Freedom.” Oh, wait a minute, no it was not. It was actually called the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.”
Notice the corruption of the word freedom. Freedom means you have individual rights, which consist of freedom from force. What King wanted was self-contradictory. He wanted the government to force the provision of jobs through either outright threats or the expropriation of wealth, and “freedom.” Of course, what King really wanted was Orwellian freedom. Freedom is Slavery in the most literal sense for King. You are not free unless you have enslaved another man to provide your needs.
There is of course far more to his horrid beliefs, such as his sickening view of the Vietnam War and his absurd conviction and out-of-context negative appraisal of the idea that the U.S. was the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world” in 1967.
School children have been inculcated for generations with the Trojan Horse idea that he was a great man, and so when they get older they must concede a little bit more and a little bit more to the left and the nihilist egalitarians whenever they bring up MLK. Martin Luther King Jr. was revoltingly anti-American, and it is shameful that a federal holiday was made of him, and even more shameful that he is used, as is Mahatma Gandhi, as a tool by which people get the government to force universal adoration of a freedom-hating icon in order to weaken the position of the freedom-defenders and make them break down in contradiction when they find themselves caught between what they implicitly recognize as the truth and the positive psychological associations for a monster forced on them from childhood.
The only “gap” between our technological progress and morality is the one he served in large part to widen, though, to be fair, he also shortened that gap by legitimizing socialist policies and thereby greatly slowing the technological growth of the United States and the world. Congratulations Dr. King, in the race to catch up to technology, your morality is running the course backwards, but at least it can never get too far behind, because it is dragging the goal post right along with it.
So, I replied:
This idea that only Government can coerce is a hugely popular, and spectacularly wrong, illusion.
I congratulate you for the quality of your writing and the orthodoxy of your opinions. Like many intelligent Americans, you have bought into a simple theory that seems to explain everything.
Of course, in the real world, there’s no such thing.
“Negroes” in the United States lived lives of virtual slavery when Dr. King began his ministry. Despite the Right’s mythmaking, the majority of the impetus to sustain this subordinate status came from private power. Slave wages and terrorized labor make for large profits. Businessmen who made their fortunes on the backs of Blacks funded and led the movements that opposed meaningful citizenship for all Americans.
As Dr. King continued to lead the struggle, it became more and more clear that issues of class and race were inextricably linked.
Just as one’s race could prevent one from developing and exploiting their talents, so could class and income. A society where people serve the economy, rather than the other way around, is a society with few good choices for those of low birth. Those of high birth, on the other hand, can rarely fail completely. Their wealth buys them privileges not available to the merely talented or intelligent. The result is the opposite of meritocracy, it is an aristocracy of wealth, and it leads to a decaying society. That is what Dr. King saw by the middle of the 1960’s, and it was prophetic.
Markets and capitalism are efficient producers of wealth and are necessary to the function of a free society, but not sufficient. Without Democratic institutions to limit the fungibility of economic and political power, no society can resist the pull to Oligarchy.
The weakness of Rand was that she had no understanding of Capitalism. The word means that all the power in the enterprise and the broader economy flows to those that supply one factor of production: money. Under the pure capitalism espoused by Objectivists, the suppliers of labor were systematically and deliberately excluded from the management of the enterprise and their remuneration reduced as much as power could accomplish.
But Rand thought this was practical and just because she thought the suppliers of money were the ones who knew how to do things, and that hasn’t been true for hundreds of years. The reality is that the owners of money are capital specialists whose expertise involves making bets on the abilities of others who know how to turn nature into wealth. Educated middle-class specialists are the source of a modern society’s wealth. If those middle-class experts cannot develop and exploit their skills, capital cannot produce returns and the system fails. That is precisely the crisis that America faces today, largely through the reification of Rand’s theology.
Of course, the central flaw in this Randroid’s argument is the idea that the power of wealth has been diminished in the intervening years. This is absurd. The reality is that the Hobbesian Right has gotten its way and the result has been catastrophe for the kinds of people who actually know how to do things.
Dr. King saw much of this, and recognized the intersection of morality and practicality. Such genius is rare and deserves recognition.
After a little back and forth with this gentlemen’s defender, the new gentleman chimed in with:
“Where is non-governmental coercion in his argument?”
I never said it was there. You’re saying it should be there. I’m saying there’s no reason for it to be there because it is irrelevant to the points he was making.Your entire middle paragraph demonstrates only that you either do not understand Rand or you are deliberately misconstruing her, as evidenced by your demonstrably false claims:
Had she believed private coercion impossible, she’d have been an anarchist. Unfortunately for your pitiful excuse for an argument, she knew full-well of the existence of criminals and coercive people. The entire purpose of government, said she, was to ban coercion from social relations. So much for your first claim.
She went to great lengths to put forth a clear, comprehensive system of ethics. So much for her lack of concern for “moral hazard.”
There is an information asymmetry between everyone, since everyone is their own person and cannot read minds. I fail to see the issue here. It sounds more like a buzzword than an actual point.
Rand knew full-well that economic and political power become ever-more interchangeable in the current governmental system. She understood that when businessmen are allowed to influence lawmakers, mutual corruption ensues. She called for a separation of state and economy. She called for taking away the ability of legislators to grant favors to businesses.
You’ve made it clear that the only training you have, as far as the Objectivist faction goes, is that of misrepresenting the views while attempting to otherwise sound intelligent and knowledgeable, but that fails instantly and miserably once you encounter anyone who actually knows the material you’re smearing.
“If you want to get in a furball with me, boy, do your homework.”
Oh, look at the big tough guy. He’s older than me. He must be more wise and credible than me, due only to his age, since simply existing for a longer period of time automatically bestows more knowledge and a greater understanding of things, but this only applies to people who agree with him, since this greater understanding is only bestowed upon people who agree with him, making this kind of attack utterly meaningless when addressing anyone his age or older, and nevermind the fact that credibility plays no part in whose words make logical sense and whose do not, whose argument is demonstrably true and whose false.If you wish to address Rand’s views, do your homework and try to actually address Rand’s views. Putting forth the strawman-of-the-day only succeeds in making you look ignorant and stupid.
My reply:
You’re right. I cut a corner when I said that Rand thought that non-governmental coercion was impossible. I meant that she didn’t understand that the cumulative effect of market power on individuals was, in modern Capitalist societies, a greater obstacle to individual development than any burden of tax and regulation.
She also didn’t understand that the accumulation of concentrated wealth in a very small number of hands threatened freedom in important ways and represented a more salient threat than phantom images of concentration camps.
So instead of saying all that, I just negated your argument, giving you the benefit of the doubt that you would fill in the gaps. Oops.
As for age not having importance to the validity of argument, it only applies because it’s given me time to study the phenomena we discuss in a deeper way than reading a bunch of adolescent fantasy novels that make you feel like a hero.
As far as reading Rand, I read Atlas Shrugged and Fountainhead, and Peikoff’s intro to Objectivism. (I appreciate in advance your condolences for my pain and wasted time) Don’t think I don’t know her stuff just `cause I don’t put it in her words. Unlike you, I actually have my own.
One of the ways you have revealed your ignorance of Economics is that you do not recognize the technical terms I used to list various forms of market imperfections. Each one represents a set of empirical phenomena that suggests that market power and competitive merit are not the same. Understanding these phenomena and their role in the economy undercuts her claim of wealth as the indicator of merit, thus invalidating the core of her moral and practical arguments for non-interference in the economy.
Perhaps the greatest critique of her ideas is that they have succeeded beyond her wildest imaginings in the last 35 years, and the results have been a sound refutation of her ideas. As taxes and regulations have been thoroughly declawed, social mobility (chance of an individual born in the bottom quintile of earners dying in the upper quintile) has collapsed to less than 1 percent, one of the lowest rates in the world. The UK, where her ideas have also had lasting impact, is right behind us at 2 percent. No other advanced industrial economy has seen its social mobility collapse to the same degree. The positive correlation between deregulation and social mobility is the minimum empirical test of her claims that government regulation and tax distort the competitive process. The actual negative correlation undermines her claim that merit will shine through when government is removed from the economy.
There are almost unlimited ways in which the data from the last 35 years undermine her arguments. A full accounting would be a good project for me to tackle, but are beyond my available time and energy right now. Suffice it to say that as her ideas have been carried into power by the utter victory of right-wing politics in the Anglo-Saxon world, those economies have become less competitive internationally and domestically. We have watched the development of an aristocracy of wealth just when her theory would predict the emergence of meritocratic societies.
Real separation of state and economy is possibly the most fantastic of her claims, because it’s utterly absurd. Since the economy is the only thing of importance in any society, a society without government regulation of the economy is anarchy. Also, nature abhors a vacuum. Holders of market power would seize political power to erect barriers to entry to new competitors. So, instead, her overwhelming influence produces the shitty situation we see today. That’s what happens when oversimplified ideas get raped by reality. Learn that lesson well.
It’s OK to be young and stupid. That’s what youth is for. The question is, are you capable of learning from your mistake, or do you collapse in a puddle of cognitive dissonance? Time will tell.
