I’m not outright disagreeing with you, and you make some good points, but I think it is not as black and white as you are portraying.

As to “take it or leave it” offer of contract, we all do that.  Very few, if any, markets are inelastic.  You will buy a certain number of apples at a certain price, but at a higher price you will buy something else or take your money elsewhere.  What a supermarket is willing to pay for produce is directly linked to what you and I are willing to pay.  What’s to stop the farmer from selling his produce directly, cutting out the middleman?  Extra work?  Well, then the supermarket is providing a valuable service to the farmer.  Is the temporary 10% below cost enough for a supermarket to ditch a trusted business associate?  Maybe, maybe not.  There could be any other number of factors involved.  Maybe the other farm is a better provider and they are willing to risk a temporary loss to prove that.

Taking sides in a business transaction is dangerous. We just don’t have all the facts. In a free market, the people with the best information are the ones directly making the transactions—that is why central planning never performs as well.

I believe that one of the problems, as shown in the blog entry is this — a free market finds its balance with one group holding power over the other. And of course, such a free-market balance is seen as fair and reasonable when tested against free-market values.

Take the British situation of supermarkets and the farmers who supply them: the supermarkets carry great power over the farmers by increasing financial/auxiliary demands while threatening a “take it or leave it” offer of contract. The farms may have spent years fitting themselves to the supermarkets’ whims and fancies only to be told, “We’re sorry, we’re dropping you like a stone and going for someone else who can subsidise the deal another 10% below cost while they get into favour.

I believe that denial of the inherent value of good relationship in work and business is widespread, all in the name of the free market. This is hurting souls and the community we share.

Mt 7:7-11 (NKJV)

7 “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. 8 For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. 9 Or what man is there among you who, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? 10 Or if he asks for a fish, will he give him a serpent? 11 If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask Him!

Matthew 7:7-11 (NKJV)

Men do have a conscience and they do know right from wrong, provided they haven’t done so many wicked things that they are already blinded to the truth.  Now we can debate whether the good gifts of the fallen are really considered good or not in God’s eyes or not, but Jesus uses this analogy that even a Father knows to give his son bread to eat when he is hungry.

Some things I think are natural despite the spiritual condition.

I started out by saying that Ayn Rand gets a lot of things wrong. If no one minds if I throw out a perhaps heretical question, I would like to see what others think.

If God creates and saves us for His own good pleasure, it is hard for me to imagine fallen men ever actually being totally selfless.  Whether it is a fulfillment of a sense of duty or moral obligation, even the most selfless acts are done at some level for our own pleasure.  Perhaps our pleasure is derived from pleasing God and being obedient to Him, but aren’t we still ultimately serving our own desires?  Did God make the greatest of all sacrifices for us—absolutely!  But He did it for his own good pleasure, His great desire was to show us love, because that is who He is.

It’s a mystery to me.

True, but both God’s love and human need were necessary but insufficient reasons for the incarnation.  It took the union of those two realities to cause the God who created the world for his own good pleasure to also came as a man and submit himself to a cruel death at the hands of his creatures.  This God made man further told His disciples to serve others and to follow in His example.  Ayn Rand thought this altruism to be contradictory and in fact opposed to societal good.  The economic system she proposed is irreconcilable with Christianity, because she doesn’t acknowledge the need for love and self-sacrifice.

MB

John Galt,

I think you may be misunderstanding where others are coming from, so please, hear me out.  I do think that American capitalism is probably the best economic system for this country.  Also, when it comes to how the poor in America, it is tough to find a country with more opportunities for advancement.  Short of imbecility or chronic health problems, about the only reason to remain poor in this country is laziness and family dissolution (i.e., character issues).  Opportunities abound for those who get their arses off the couch and away from the TV, as almost any intact immigrant family can show you.  My own dad was born in a tent, without running water, a toilet or creature comforts like electricity.  His first tortilla was straight off the skillet of a Mexican immigrant in the migrant camp where he was living at the time, yet he was able to provide a middle class lifestyle for his family and a decent educational foundation so that all of his kids could go to college.  My family is living proof that you can do just about anything in America if you work hard and get a good education… and the greatest advances were made before the advent of the modern welfare state.

But that doesn’t mean that left to their own devices people will create a utopia where the poor are treated justly. Original sin and concupiscence have a huge effect on the human heart.  We are a sinful, prideful, selfish species.  All the good that American charities do can’t magically negate the evil that happens because Americans and American companies turn their eyes away from the injustice that they help to create.  For instance, there is a decent chance that some of the sugar you ate today was harvested by a slave.  Today, in the 21st century, slaves still work in the Dominican Republic on sugar plantations, while American companies and consumers do little, if anything, to stop it.  From reading this blog, I know that Shaun has visited the Dominican Republic and suspect that he has seen this slavery first-hand, so I suppose he can be forgiven for being a little more cynical about our economic system than the rest of us.  We Americans do have faults, based on our human traits of selfishness and pride.  Perhaps these sinful traits would have worse manifestations under a different economic system than capitalism.  I strongly suspect they would.  Shaun may agree or disagree.  I personally find his post too ambiguous to tell, but I’m also not sure that was the point.  Capitalism may be the best system overall for encouraging mutual cooperation and negating the effects of selfishness and indifference to injustice, but it doesn’t mean that capitalism is a perfect system or leads to an idyllic society.  It is good now and then to pause and question how to remedy the injustice we see in the world, even if it means asking uncomfortable questions, like, “What am I going to do about the slave trade in the Dominican Republic?” or “Do I care how my sugar is produced, as long as it is cheap?” or…

http://www.iabolish.org/slavery_today/country_reports/do.html

MB

I was thinking about this thread this weekend, and I think my real problem with this blog post is the tendency toward moral equivalence.  There is a right and wrong, and even more Biblical types of economies and it doesn’t do us any good to group the successful systems with the failed systems.

While Ayn Rand has some good things to say, ultimately she is fundamentally opposed to love and the teachings of Christ.  For her, subjugating selfish desires for the good of others is nonsense.  I don’t see how anybody who has had children can give much credence to her views on altruism, and I suppose it is not surprising that she never had children herself.  Anyway, I’d be careful about using quotes from Atlas Shrugged and a philosopher/novelist whose ideas of the ideal economic system are based exclusively on selfishness and the ego.

MB