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Who: Kimball Corson. Text and Photos not disclaimed or that are obviously not mine are copyright (c) Kimball Corson 2004-2016
Port: Lake Pleasant, AZ
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Ayn Rand's Central Idea Is Wrong

24 August 2012 | Pago Pago, American Samoa
Kimball Corson
Ayn Rand's Central Idea Is Wrong

"The idea is that the United States is divided into two classes--the hard-working productive elite, and the indolent masses leeching off their labor by means of confiscatory taxes and transfer programs."

My take -- an anathema to Republicans -- is different. It has two central tenets.

One is that the process of capital formation is not really what we have been taught, namely that capital is accumulated in increments by the difference between income and consumption. My notion is that capital has much more been acquired as deriving from 1) surplus rents on land and natural resources, 2) the usurious compounding of interest, 3) distorted capital reallocations which target on large unearned capital gains and 4) ownership interests in banks which create new money as new loan funds costlessly and then get an interest return on that money. This is how capital in fact has been accumulated for the most part. Unearned capital whose owners claim it is derived by the sweat of their brows and that it belongs to them and only them by divine right. In their minds, they don't have to share it with anyone.

Two, as the absolute income return on this capital grows, both initially and derivatively, the absolute income to labor, including the growing surplus of labor of those displaced, drops relatively. Worldwide wage equalization from free international labor markets compounds this problem.

We find ourselves in the Randian income positions, but her characterization is all wrong. We deal not with a hyper productive elite, but with the accumulators initially of unearned capital who subsequently have acquired derivative capital from it as well. Virtually all "unearned," but the latter less so. The rich monopoly game character is not fat from over work.

Labor then is in surplus supply, as Marx predicted. It is displaced by capital and lower waged labor on distant shores. Its marginal productivity in aggregate and across the labor pool has fallen, even though for some few working with much capital, it has risen. There are too few jobs. Unemployment is high. Indeed, many have dropped out of the labor market altogether. We need to consider the labor pool as a whole and the impacts on it. On balance, it has suffered net losses in this process.

The Randian notion of no redistribution of income in this situation is therefore absurd. It is crazy. There is no significant real class of either hyper productive gainers or lazy, indolent and base losers, though exemplars of each can be found to muddy the waters in ad hoc fashion. More, the situation is some wallow in unearned income and the fruits of it and much of the labor pool is cut out of the production process entirely because of a surplus of labor caused my more labor becoming available and by capital being substituted for labor.

This world is not sustainable without income redistribution in one manner or another. Marx was correct here. What are these Randian Republicans thinking or are they?
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Vessel Name: Altaira
Vessel Make/Model: A Fair Weather Mariner 39 is a fast (PHRF 132), heavily ballasted (43%), high-aspect (6:1), stiff, comfortable, offshore performance cruiser by Bob Perry that goes to wind well (30 deg w/ good headway) and is also good up and down the Beaufort scale.
Hailing Port: Lake Pleasant, AZ
Crew: Kimball Corson. Text and Photos not disclaimed or that are obviously not mine are copyright (c) Kimball Corson 2004-2016
About:
Kimball Corson: I am a 75 year old solo sailor, by choice. However, I did take on a personable, but high maintenance female kitten, now a full grown cat, named KiKiPoo when she is sweet, or KatKatPo after she has just killed something like a bird or bat. [...]
Extra:
Although I was a lawyer and practiced law with good success for thirty years, creating significant new law, I never really believed in the law, the politics of law or in the over reaching self-interest of most lawyers I met. Too much exposure to Nietzsche and other good and seriously thoughtful [...]
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Profile

Who: Kimball Corson. Text and Photos not disclaimed or that are obviously not mine are copyright (c) Kimball Corson 2004-2016
Port: Lake Pleasant, AZ