Atlas Shrugged
I finally got around to reading Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand which has been on my reading list for over ten years now. It's touted as a master piece by libertarians and anarchists the world over mainly for its strong support for the free market with no state intervention. It certainly is an amazing book in many ways, and I agree with a lot of her ideals such as being against forced redistribution of wealth, and being repulsed by this modern attitude of rejecting rational thought. But I also had many strong criticisms and actually found myself feeling angry with her at times! Here's a summary of the things I found wrong with her model.
No thought at all about the effects of the profit based model on the environment - e.g. Dagny standing in awe of the "battery of smoke stacks" in the utopia of Galt's Gulch. The fact that it was in the 50's when environmental awareness was not widely thought of is no excuse considering that Ayn Rand is a philosopher who should be no stranger to holistic thinking and full cost accounting. On a more general level, I have a criticism with the whole market paradigm which has the economic bottom-line problem built in to it, which leads to ever-expanding inequality and centralisation of power. Even though there are proposed reasons to be found elsewhere as to why a "true free market" wouldn't suffer from these problems (which I don't accept) such as is described by Samuel Edward Konken III, I believe it's very important for any work that's advocating the free market ideal to address this problem explicitly.
Her whole perspective is extreme materialism, disregarding anything else as being in support of the irrational, believing that rational thought is the absolute highest quality of being. She has no respect or even the slightest understanding of the incredible power of mind that the Taoist, Buddhist and some other spiritual traditions have attained through their intensive investigation of the nature of mind and being over thousands of years. These traditions have realised through thorough investigation and direct experience that thought is just a superficial product of the "coarse mind", and that there are many more subtle levels to mind which lead to a much deeper understanding of the universe and our being than that which can be obtained by mere rational thought.
Another problem which is not raised with regard to the free market model (maybe it's not fair to judge people in the 50's for not foreseeing this) is that it's based on there always being enough employment for everyone. But we live in the age of automation and it would simply not be the most efficient solution for the social mechanism to be needlessly employing people who require more resource and work imperfectly and slowly compared to their machine counterparts. The market paradigm and all currently known variations of it needs to be upgraded drastically or even completely abandoned to cater for the fact that the social mechanism simply doesn't have a need for the labour of most of the population.
in progress...
