Competing big brothers? The wisdom of Ayn Rand (and Stevie Wonder)

Competing big brothers? The wisdom of Ayn Rand (and Stevie Wonder)

One of my closest friends to leans to the left mused “will we end up in a world controlled by competing big brothers?” What a question! Well, Trump’s populism on the right and the progressives’ populism on the left both end up with big government control. Trump wants to buy it while Bernie wants to expropriate it. This almost sounds like a version of Ayn Rand’s distinction between socialism and communism (see below) except Trump is socialism – lite.

Trump wants government involvement in industries that he deems vital to the national interest. Those companies are intimidated to sell and Trump or his cronies end on the boards overseeing executive decisions. Trump has gone where no president has gone before taking a personal hand in the Food and Drug Administration’s drug approvals, the Federal Trade Commission’s merger reviews and the Federal Communications Commission’s authority over broadcast licenses. Bernie must be envious. No conservative would even consider doing these things. The left keeps calling Trump and those on the right “Nazis.” That shows their ignorance because the Nazis were on the left – socialists (National Socialist German Workers’ Party). Doesn’t that sound Marxist? Of course it does because the Nazis, Marxists, fascists and socialists are all peas in much the same big brother pod.

Ayn Rand said it best:

There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism – by vote. It is meremy the difference between murder and suicide.

The difference between socialism and fascism is euperficial and purely formal, but it is significant psychologivally: it brings the authoritarian nature of a planned economy crudely into the open. The main characteristic of socialism (and of communism) is public ownership of the means of production, and therefore, the abolition of private property. The right to property is the right of use and disposal. Under fascism, men retain the semblance or pretence of private property, but the government holds total power over its use and disposal.

Needless to say, under either system (socialism or fascism) the inequalities of income and standard of living are greater than anything possible under a free economy – and a man’s position is determined,not by his productive ability and achievement, but by political pull and force. Under both systems, sacrifice is invoked as a magic, omnipotent solution to any crisis – and “the public good” is the altar on which victims are immolated.

The social system based on and consonant with the altruist morality-with the code of self-sacrifice- is socialism, in all or any of its variants: fascism, Nazism, communism. All of them treat man as a sacrificial animal to be immolated for the benefit of the group, the tribe, the society, the state.

All “public interest’ legislation (and any distribution of money taken by force from some men for the unearned benefit of others) comes down ultimately to the grant of an undefined undefinable, non-objective, arbitrary power to some government officials. The worst aspect of it is not that such a power can be used dishonestly, but that it cannot be used honestly. The wisest man in the world, with the purest integrity, cannot find a criterion for the just, equitable, rational application of an unjust, inequitable, irrational principle.

It’s not that I don’t suffer, it’s that I know the unimportance of suffering. I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside, not to be accepted as part of one’s soul and as a permanent scar across one’s view of existence.

There is only one institution that can arrogate to itself the power legally to trade by means of rubber checks: the government. And it is the only institution that can mortgage your future without your knowledge or consent: government securities (and paper money) are promissory notes on future tax receipts, i.e., on your future production.

Integrity is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake your consciousness, just as honesty is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake existence.

There is nothing wrong in helping other people, if and when they are worthy of the help and you can afford to help them.

I am opposed to all forms of control. I am for an absolute, laissez-faire, free, unregulated economy.

Capitalism is the only system in history where wealth was not acquired by looting, but by production, not by force, but by trade, the only system that stood for man’s right to his own mind, to his work, to his life, to his happiness, to himself.

Finally, remember Stevie Wonder’s “Big Brother”?

Big Brother

Stevie Wonder

Your name is Big Brother 
You say that you’re watching me on the telly 
Seeing me go nowhere 
Your name is Big Brother 
You say that you’re tired of me protesting 
Children dying every day 
My name is nobody 
But I can’t wait to see your face inside my door

Your name is Big Brother 
You say that you got me all in your notebook 
Writing it down every day 
Your name is I’ll-see-ya 
I’ll change if you vote me in as the pres 
The President of your soul

I live in the ghetto 
You just come to visit me ’round election time

I live in the ghetto 
Someday I will move on my feet to the other side 
My name is Secluded, we live in a house the size of a matchbox 
Roaches live with us wall to wall

You’ve killed all our leaders 
I don’t even have to do nothin’ to you 
You’ll cause your own country to fall