Pat Oliphant Editorial Cartoon, August 21, 2012 on GoComics.com

masterskrain said, 10 months ago

Hummm…looks pretty self-explanatory to me!

mikefive said, 10 months ago

A bit inane on a couple of levels.

mdavis4183 said, 10 months ago

Another moronic Oliphant cartoon.

dtroutma said, 10 months ago

Alan Greenspan, among others (like all the neocons) worshipped at the alter of the atheist Rand. Stupid “sociology” and stupider “economic theory”.

SkepticCal said, 10 months ago

@dtroutma

Why are you bad mouthing atheists?
.
Barack Obama’s mother claimed to be an atheist.

fritzoid said, 10 months ago

@SkepticCal

Where was dtroutma badmouthing atheists? Ayn Rand was an atheist, and espoused reprehensible ideas, but those ideas are not representative of atheists. Still, how anyone could be a follower of the principles of both Ayn Rand and Jesus Christ is beyond me. That’s a SERIOUS disconnect…

Michael wme said, 10 months ago

Rand was raised learning Marxist dialectic. Economists never lump all the ‘means of production’ together, but it’s useful for Marxist analyses, and so for Rand’s analyses.

In the 19th century, the owner of a coal mine got 5/6 of the revenue, and all the workers shared 1/6. The owner hired an executive who hired managers who hired miners, but all the employees together shared 1/6 of what the coal was worth. Fair? Many thought not.

The Marxists said the state should own the mine, and, since religion was used to sedate the workers, it should be banned. When they took over Russia, annexed adjacent states, and formed the Soviet Union, control of the mine was taken from the Capitalist pig of an owner and given to a cadre, who took 5/6 of the coal produced and gave 1/6 to the employees. Only the executives and managers were chosen for their Marxist purity, not for their knowledge of coal mining, so the mine produced much less, and the employees had to share a much smaller 1/6th.

Rand didn’t like the pre-Marxist status quo of having incompetent heirs running the means of production, she wanted to give all the means of production to entrepreneurs who dropped out of school after 5th grade and rose by virtue of productivity to control the means of production, producing much more than anyone else could. Having the means of production controlled by the most productive would, of course, be the best of all possible worlds.

But how, exactly, to achieve that is not clear, and Rand’s algorithm does not work at all. Note that Rand accepts all the assumptions of Marxism, including that religion must be banned, but she saw that the conclusions reached by the Marxists—i.e., giving control of the means of production to cadres—were horribly wrong, and so came up with different, but equally wrong, conclusions of her own.

Atma said, 10 months ago

Atheists can’t figure out What’s Going On so they deny it; believers imagine What’s Going On and/or believe as they’re told.

If I haven’t offended you with that statement, congratulations for being Politically Incorrect.

Clark Kent said, 10 months ago

I’m an Atheist and I do not consider ayn rand to be one of us no matter what she said. ayn rand was a psychopath just like many members of the far “right”.

dtroutma said, 10 months ago

Skepticnut: it’s the hypocrisy I dislike, and these guys deserve some “bad-mouthing”.