I will accept that in a perfectly rational society, everyone will hold Objectivist values. However, my point is that markets simply serve the values of consumers regardless of what they are. A free market where most consumers have irrational values (which is theoretically possible) will serve those irrational values. Markets are the instruments of the set of values that consumers hold. Second, you neglect the fact that morality and economic outcomes do not reflect eachother even under Objectivism, as shown by the examples I brought up. If you concede this point, then my case stands on that alone.

http://www.clubtroppo.com.au/2006/12/30/hayek-shrugged/#comment-76020

Natch. Cos it always comes down to epistemology in Objectivism…;-)

>So markets are not in themselves instruments of cosmic justice, this depends on the values of the consumers.

I don’t want to quibble too much, but I’ll go another round on this one. In a fully rational society, everyone will hold Objectivist values, thus markets will truly be able to trade properly for the first time without mixed economy (and epistemology!) distortions. Recall that justice in Objectivism is each person getting what they deserve, expressed by the trader principle. Markets are, therefore, clearly the instruments of this justice. (this justice is of course “cosmic” in what she would call the metaphysical sense).

So Catallaxy’s description here, far from being “totally untrue”, I think is on examination not a bad one.

>As for the train-tunnel-collapse scene in Atlas, that was a metaphor.

Yes, obviously, but the underlying message of the metaphor is the interesting part.

We need people in every venue to push the case.

Now Hayek is this MR REASONABLE guy. And he tries to bend over backwards to appeal to the good side of these various thugs and thieves that we argue with. But yet each person in various stages of their lives might fall on various parts of the spectrum between thief and righteous man.

But on top of that Hayeks employment situation was always precarious.

Such is the vindictiveness of the leftist faux-intellectuals who run these institutions of learning-come-indoctrination.

Hayek and Friedman represent the outer limit and the true acid test to where we can say an economically literate person would fall down to the left of libertarianism and still be considered a man of good will.

If he is to the left of these guys in non-defense spending in their compromise mode (which is not necessary their sober judgement) we must suspect economic ineptitude, ill-will, or the wages of relentless bullshit-momentum.

Look I’ll go with any NIT or vouchered education system so long as they are to mitigate hardship in transition and so long as they contain within them an automatic phase-out.

These are the things you bring to socialists to say….. “Whats wrong with you man? Are you even fair dinkum. I don’t believe your JIVE but if your self-assessment is right then how can you object to this compromise scheme?”

So lets not go hard on these two guys. They were our guys on the inside. And we can adapt their ideas for the transition.

And should it come to pass that we free things up. And it really is a world of rich guys doubling their money without effort. And poor people getting by like the worst parts of the Irish potato famine….

If it wound up like that then we can take and apply these compromise ideas for a few years at a time and see if things improve.

Rand ranked Hayek’s alleged epistemological faults as worse than (or the root of) his political compromises. However I will not deny that Rand was inscensed Hayek did compromise. However that still means Catallaxy is wrong on why Rand loathed Hayek.

In Rand’s rational society, Keating and his ilk would not have succeeded. But remember, this is because even in that society, consumer sovereignty still reigns. Markets are democratic, in that the consumers values, rational or irrational, will reign supreme. So markets are not in themselves instruments of cosmic justice, this depends on the values of the consumers. And as stated before, to be a good man according to Objectivism, its not your intelligence (or innate traits) that matters but how they are used (your volitional traits).

This also touches on the objection you raised regarding Eddie Willers. Galt’s Gulch was not a place for all moral people, it was a place for people of exceptional ability. Rand (for novel’s sake) assumed all people of exceptional ability would be moral, but not that all people that were moral would have exceptional ability. As for the train-tunnel-collapse scene in Atlas, that was a metaphor.

I don’t this this is quite right. Rand hated Hayek, as noted Rand scholar Chris Sciabarra puts it, “for his compromises with interventionism.”

http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sciabarra/essays/rprev.htm