No, I am saying that the universe is deterministic. Its basic particles don't have choices. A ball bearing pushed rolling down a forking path at a particular angle must go left. A person starting on the same path will see that it forks, will recognize that there is a choice, and may shift right instead. You argue that the "choice" is an illusion, because you can't explain how a non-choosing system gave rise to choosing beings. That's fine. I've seen people say the same of consciousness, and even (more rarely) of life. But the truth is that that in all cases amounts to no more than an argument from ignorance, a sort of fit of pique because science not only doesn't explain any of these things very well but probably can't.

>What im trying to say is, wealth and value are seperate things. Of course wealth can be produced and grown, im not arguing that. But to produce that wealth, first someone needs to agree on the value you placed on something, and they need to actually give you their wealth in order for you to produce it.

Why? You don't normally pay the author of a book you buy for the book before you buy it, do you?

>Can you answer me how can one generate wealth, or money, without someone else giving up their own wealth?

The same way one produces anything - through their own productive effort.

>If I work at a bookstore and sell 10 $10 books, I do not receive $100. That’s what it means for a worker to receive the full value of the work they do. What would the business owner get under this arrangement, don’t know, the value of whatever books they sell also.

Then you have merely failed to understand the value of labor. The value of the labor of a clerk at a bookstore is not equal to value of the books she sells. The value of the book is precisely the sum of the values added by the author, the publisher, the distributors, the bookstore, and, yes, even the sales clerk. She gets compensated for her portion of that value.

>But when you write a song or a movie, its not like it has some inherent value to it.

So? Nothing has inherent value to it. That doesn't mean you can't creste things people will find valuable.

>You assign some value to it and if enough people agree on the value you placed, you can sell that thing to generate wealth.

Yes, right.

>Just because we assigned some abstract value to these things, does not mean it creates wealth out of nowhere.

Of course it does. That is what all wealth is - stuff that people assigned an abstract value to. To create wealth you labor to create something or to do something that either a) at least a few people will put a high value on or b) that a lot of people will put a low value on.

>If people dont agree on the value you placed, they will not give you their wealth and you will not be producing wealth.

Sure, yes, of course. You might try to write a good book and produce crap. You might try to grow a crop of potatoes and overwater them so they all die. You might dig up a bunch of shiny rocks and discover no one wants them. You might compose a song and find no one wants to listen to it.

I said wealth can be produced and grown. I never said you personally had the skill and talent necessary to produce it, or that every effort to do so would succeed. Creating wealth is difficult. It has to be, because economic value is largely a function of scarcity.

>It happens every single day. It’s called work. What benefit do I get if a store or a business succeeds?

You continue to have an organization you can sell your labor to. If it fails, you won't, and then you starve.

> It’s the submission of one’s own goals before that of another. It’s exploitative because the employee receives less value than is produced by their labor.

No, they recieve exactly the value of their labor. If you were receiving less than the value of your labor, you would sell it to someone else, instead.

>People work because they have to, it’s a captive audience and there is nothing fair about these arrangements.

Yes, right, you have to work to eat, because food needs to be produced before it can be consumed, and you have to work to get shelter, because houses have to be built before they can be lived in, and you have to work to clothe yourself, because clothes have to be manufactured before they can be worn. But this isn't some terrible unfairness that only occurs under capitalism. That is the nature of reality itself, and would remain true under any economic system.

>What i dont understand is, in order for you to produce wealth, someone else needs to lose that same amount of wealth.

But that isn't true. If you sit down and write a good book, you have created something valuable that didn't exist before. The same is true if you program a videogame. Or write a hit song. And so on. There are plenty of ways to make society (and yourself) richer without someone else losing wealth. Likewise, the value of your phone lies less in the material resources that make it up and the labor put into to arranging those resources and more in the ingenuity of the idea behind how to arrange those resources. The same is true of most of the material goods we collectively would call "wealth".

I mean, I'm not sure that your own examples don't disprove your point. McDonald's has plenty of competion - even within the fast food subset of restaurants. So does Coke. Even Google has a solid list of alternatives you can quickly find by using Google.

There are specific markets that tend towards natural monopolies, and these generally need some form of regulation to keep whatever company gets that monopoly in check. And of course individual actors within capitalism can behave badly, and need to be policed as humans always do. But there's a reason all the wealthiest countries use some version of regulated capitalism instead of some other system, and that's because once you understand that wealth is something to be produced and grown rather than a limited thing to be fought over, society gets a hell of a lot better.

>You're honestly saying that people profiting from others' labor aren't excelling at the expense of others?

Outside of slave societies, this never happens. Why would someone labor to profit another when they could just profit themselves? People sometimes sell their labor to others, as one component of what that other person is making, but there the trades are generally fair.

>There is no such thing as infinite growth. The wealth of first world nations absolutely came at the expense of the resources and labor of less advantaged nations.

Nonsense. There's more to wealth than just resources. If you don't believe me, just smash up your phone and try to trade it for an unbroken one - after all, it's the same amount of plastic and metal either way.

>You seem fine with the idea that the universe is deterministic. But then you say that some parts of the universe (humans, for example) are non-deterministic. How can you claim this, without invoking magic?

The same way I am fine both with the idea that the universe is non-living and that some parts of it are living. Or that it is non-conscious yet some parts of it are conscious. That you (or I) cannot currently explain a given phenomenon doesn't mean that the answer has to be magic, or that the phenomenon somehow isn't real. That's just an argument from ignorance.

> No "choices" really exist, except in our imagination. If possessing a mental image of imagined options is "free will" then free will means very little I think.

What makes you think they don't really exist? I mean, the universe as a whole is an non-living system, yet some objects in it have the emergent property of being alive. The universe as a whole is a non-conscious system, yet some objects in it have the emergent property of being conscious. The universe as a whole is a deterministic (non-choosing) system, yet some objects in it have the emergent property of being free-willed (making choices). And that is, after all, how we experience ourselves, as living, conscious, free-willed beings. Mostly the arguments in favor of determinism seem to be arguments from ignorance - I can't explain how free will could exist, so it must not be real! But I think this is just the prejudice of a society that overvalues science, which has little interest in the subjective experiences of people because they are not something science is well-equipped to handle.

But isn't the great insight of capitalism precisely that you can excel without it being at the expense of others? That wealth isn't just something static lying out there in the world, but something that can be grown? Which is why any first world nation is much wealthier now than they were 500 years ago.

No, from universities that teach them to believe all the beliefs that benefit the urban elite. That they think that believing in status quo bromides reflective only of blindly repeated talking points makes them clever critical thinkers is, of course, what makes them so intolerable to everyone else.

But all love must be expressed materially, because we are not psychic. We never get to truly know how another person feels about us. We can only infer it from their actions. And "love languages" are just ways of categorizing which actions make a person feel loved. For some it is being held; For some it is being told; For some it is having things done for them; For some it is receiving gifts. The last one can be problematic if what is wanted are expensive gifts, but as a love languages the point is generally not the value of the gift but the fact of a gift being given, such that the gifts themselves might cost less than you could earn in say, the time it took to give someone a really good cuddle, or to compose a flowery poem.

My point is that ethics is generally something you learn from society, and as institutions of higher education are basically there to promulgate the status quo, they are unlikely to convince anyone of anything new. Put another way, I don't think anyone who didn't already believe in stoning criminals to death will come away with that belief after taking lessons, because such lessons will only reinforce the current social expectation that you not support that. And if you did hold such a belief already, the lessons likely won't convince you, because you must already have strong reasons for holding such a belief in defiance of conventional wisdom and societal disapproval.

It seems to me that the author first needs to show that there is some meaningful correlation between advanced study of ethics and actually having ethical behavior. Do people with philosophy degrees commit crimes at lower rates than people with STEM degrees? Do criminals forced to take ethics classes reoffend less than those who aren't? Because if not, the argument in the article falls apart before it even begins.

I think the problems you are talking about are less system specific and more a matter of scale. We evolved to live in tribes of 150 or so people, and instead live in nations of millions, or in many cases, tens of millions or hundreds of millions. And at that scale any sociopolitical system is going to suffer from terrible distortions and breakdowns. The issue with Biden and Trump isn't that one is the right person and the other is wrong. It's that one is right for millions of people and wrong for millions more, and so is the other. And there are millions more for whom they are both wrong.

Likewise, people like Musk benefit from the fact that, at high enough scales, you can add a small amount of value to a large amount of things to make an awful lot of money. And money itself in large enough amounts can be used to generate more money simply by manipulating the system rather than through generating productive value.

But no system you design is going to avoid those sorts of problems at our current scale. Any system complex enough to handle things will also provide opportunities that those running it can exploit. And the very scale means you do need someone running things, because the alternative is anarchy in the sense it's detractors mean, violent chaos leading to endless warfare.

Merit is simply effectiveness at whatever task you are doing. A janitor who is on the ball and keeps everything spic and span is a meritorious janitor. A doctor who repeatedly gets the best medical outcomes for his patients is a meritorious doctor. A CEO who maximizes profit and makes his company millions is a meritorious CEO. Some qualities tend to make people more meritorious across a wide variety of tasks - being conscientious, hard working, intelligent, etc., especially in combination. And I don't think it is particularly insane to want doctors who are good at doctoring, or politicians who are good at politics, or chefs who are good at cooking. It is probably impossible to have a pure meritocracy, given our tribal tendencies, but some systems are more meritocratic than others, and we should prefer those.

Ideally, of course, you'll have some sort of meritocracy, but any system that concentrates authority will work better than one that doesn't. And of course it won't be one person ruling really. You'll have the deep state, the bureaucracy full of thousands of civil servants, all screened through the need to get degrees and certifications, who do the heavy lifting.

And you're right! Things can go very wrong if the people at the top suck. Sure, of course. But a system where you have someone in charge coordinating a response to complex problems as they arise is still better than one where you have no one in charge hence no coordinated responses. The former may sometimes fail, even fail spectacularly, but at least it can sometimes succeed. The later can only fail, always and forever, until someone takes charge.

Why is it odd? Half of any group of a respresentative cross-section of humanity is going to be stupid. And to the extent that other traits follow a similar normal distribution, half will be lazy, emotionally unaware, criminally inclined, etc. It is precisely because people in general are not very good at self-governing that we need heirarchal systems that put those handful who are good at governing in charge. It would be odder to believe in heirarchal systems and to believe that everyone was equally good at self-governing.

>Finding enjoyment in those things is not the same as finding happiness and I doubt the author meant you could not find joy or pleasure in those things.

Ah, the author had some mystical idea of "happiness" in mind, then, which they have no doubt defined as excluding those things they think ought not to produce it.

>Why does "evolutionary strategy" matter if the fundamental question is how to live one's life? Is parasitism a valid strategy to pursue one's own happiness or self-esteem?

Sure? I mean, you only really get three basic roles to choose from - predator, prey, or parasite. The "productive" types working ordinary jobs are your prey. The rich types who inherit their wealth initially and grow it by gaming the system or exploiting others rather than producing anything themselves are your parasites. And those who murder and rob as they see fit are the predators.

Of course, the metaphor falls apart very quickly if you try to work with it, because the use of the term "parasite" wasn't exactly intellectually honest in the first place. It was just an emotionally loaded term meant to forestall debate.

>I think the article demonstrates quite clearly otherwise. I liked the example of a thief who resents transactions as a nuisance who is in discord with their emotions and what they desire.

You mean the literal straw man, the person who doesn't exist whose fictional emotions you can pretend to understand?

This article runs into several of the issues that plague Rand in general.

First, it rails against the option of living as a parasite. But parasitism is a valid evolutionary strategy, and there's no rational reason any given human being should avoid choosing it. Indeed, it makes much more sense for an average person to prefer a system that allows them to engage in a certain amount of "parasitism" than it does for them to support a system where they are left at the mercy of the handful of people at one end of the IQ bell curve.

Second, it treats "individual thought" as the primary method of man's survival rather than the much better candidate of "social conditioning". You may have to think hard about how to eat and what to eat if you are trapped alone on a desert island, but in real life most people are guided into jobs that earn them money they can go to spend at the supermarket, where the poisonous berries have already been screened out.

Third, it presupposes that there is an objective psychological thing called a "human being" with a fixed nature. But people are wildly varied and, well, not as collective as Rand ironically assumes. So you get statements such as "you can't find happiness in procrastination, promiscuity, or pot", which is laughable given how many people find real enjoyment in those things.

Basically, while Rand is very interesting in that she lays out her premises very clearly and straightforwardly, in a way that few other philosophers dare to do, she ends up falling prey to the fact that she is writing in reaction to her communist upbringing, and so therefore ends up basically accepting a communist framework. She becomes a mirror image of Marx, agreeing that society is defined by a class struggle, only siding with the other class. But the Marxist framework is inherently flawed and reductive, and cannot be saved merely by flipping it.

I think the problem there is that people don't generally know such probabilities in the first place. I doubt the vast majority of people could tell you what their chance of being in a car accident is normally, or what it increases to when they are drunk. Nor do they probably think of it as a chance of "them killing someone". An accident is by definition beyond someone's personal control. Likewise, your charitable donation example seems unrealistic, because those numbers are pretty much never going to come up - charities typically rely on emotional appeals rather than mathematical ones.

And the numbers tend not to matter anyway. Obviously it is better to donate and try to save a life than to not donate and guarantee the death (if you believe in a moral obligation to save lives), even if the chance of success is low.

"It is morally wrong to hold malicious attitudes toward other people even when we don’t act on those attitudes "

This is a huge and unfounded claim in the article. It is not at all clear that thought-crime should be considered a valid moral concept.

Most of these are not issues that involve science, and that you present them as if they are shows only your own misunderstanding of them.

>More guns create more gun related crime and death, while gun restrictions have reduced them, historically.

More cars create more car related deaths. So too more swimming pools create more swimming pool related deaths. That is not a reason to impose more restrictions on cars or swimming pools.

>Societies with legal safe abortion have better health outcomes for women and longer life expectancies.

Societies with slavery have better health outcomes and longer life expectancies for slave owners. That doesn't make slavery right.

>The big governments of socialist democracies in Scandinavia and Northern Europe report happier people because they are free from worry living in an interdependent society that provides the necessary Healthcare and Education that are bankrupting people here and enable entrepreneurs there.

Ah, so you think other countries should aim for higher levels of ethnic homogeneity, such as Denmark. And cull their population down to 14 people per square kilometer, to match Norway?

And so on.