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That free, chaotic and uncontrolled market was pottering along quite happily. Supply of - say- baked beans was meeting demand for baked beans at that variety of prices across outlets and brands. The system was working. Now, apparently, it isn’t. So, why?
Water and baked beans sell out after public told to stockpile food
Sales of emergency rations surge after the Defence Secretary urged country to prepare for cyber attacks
Well, there we are. We require government action to produce shortages.
We did actually test this concept to destruction back a while, the command and planned economies were rent with shortages, the market-based ones were not. We call that experiment the 20th century. Folk seem not to really grasp it all the same.
Britain has, arguably, a shortage of houses, building land, health care, even education is said to be in short supply by quality. Which are the parts of the British economy planned, or controlled, by government? Housing, building land, health care, education - see how this goes?
Perhaps, now that the shortages are of something as important as baked beans we’ll all learn the lesson properly?
Tim Worstall
What does Jeff Bezos add to my life? And Elon Musk? and Mark Zuckerberg? and Steve Jobs? and Jimmy Wales?
Jeff Bezos gave me the everything store. Almost any book, in print or not, arrives at my door within a day or two, often for less than the high street charges. Kindle put a library in my pocket, and it opened publishing to authors who bypass gatekeepers entirely. Less visible is Amazon Web Services, which hosts a large share of the websites and apps you use daily. Many businesses never had to buy a server because Bezos rented them his. I can buy goods from Amazon without having to trek to shops that might not have them in stock.
Elon Musk made electric cars desirable rather than dutiful. I bought the first Tesla in Cambridge and happily drove electric for seven years. Tesla dragged the whole motor industry towards electric years sooner than it would otherwise have gone. SpaceX did something stranger. It made rockets land and fly again, and cut the cost of reaching orbit dramatically. Satellites behind weather forecasts, navigation and communications now get there more cheaply. Starlink brings broadband to ships, remote farms and war zones where cables never reach. Before all that, his early work helped give us PayPal. Soon he’ll give me driverless cars.
Mark Zuckerberg gave me free tools to keep in touch with almost anyone I’ve ever met. WhatsApp is how much of Britain organizes families, clubs and workplaces, at no charge. Facebook and Instagram let small firms reach customers without buying expensive advertising in newspapers. His company also gave away software that others build on, including the React framework behind countless websites and the open Llama AI models.
Steve Jobs put a powerful computer in my pocket and made it simple enough for a child or a grandparent. The iPhone did not invent the smartphone, but it defined what one should be, and every rival followed. Before that, the Mac popularized the graphical interface I now take for granted. Along the way he turned Pixar into a studio that made computer animation an art form.
Jimmy Wales gave me the largest encyclopedia in history, free, ad-free, and in hundreds of languages. Settling a pub argument used to require a trip to the library. Now it takes ten seconds. I have the world’s knowledge in my pocket.
The striking point is how little of this value the founders keep. The economist William Nordhaus estimated that innovators capture only around two percent of the social value their innovations create. The rest goes to us, as consumer surplus. Studies by Erik Brynjolfsson and colleagues found people would demand substantial sums to give up free services like search, email and maps, services that appear nowhere in GDP because they cost nothing. The fortunes look vast. The benefits are vaster, and spread across billions.
Jimmy Wales is the instructive exception. He is the only one on my list who is not a billionaire. He chose to give it away, which may make him the most generous businessman of them all.
Some people think that these tech giants should be restrained and brought under political control. I don’t.
Madsen Pirie
***TWO BIG ANNOUNCEMENTS***
***I am interrupting the final couple of essays in my series on marriage to share with you some very BIG news on things that my team and I have been working on at Clemson University. I am delighted to make the following two announcements.
First, the Clemson University Board of Trustees approved this past April the creation of a new academic department at Clemson that shall be known simply and solely as The Lyceum (see mission statement below).
Second, the CU Board of Trustees also approved two weeks ago the creation of new academic center at Clemson that is named the Clemson Center for the Study of the American Founding. (I will have something to say about the new “founding” center in a couple of weeks).
Both the new department and the “founding” center will be under the purview of the Snow Institute for the Study of Capitalism.
The ossified system of higher education as we have known it in the decades since the end of the Second World War is imploding. Creative destruction is coming to higher education and from the ashes . . . may I present . . .
THE LYCEUM:
MISSION STATEMENT
Sapere Aude—“Dare to know”
The Lyceum at Clemson University—inspired by Aristotle’s fourth-century school in Athens—is a new kind of academic department that seeks to revive the original vision and purpose of higher education: to inspire young men and women to pursue intellectual and moral excellence through a rigorous engagement with the great philosophic, historical, literary, and economic texts of Western civilization. To that end, The Lyceum is an academic community devoted to reason, objectivity, truth-seeking, the ascent to wisdom, character formation, and the perpetuation of a free and virtuous society.
Faculty and students in The Lyceum shall be guided by six pedagogic directives. First, the pursuit of Truth is our highest responsibility. Second, the discovery of fundamental truths about the most important human questions is both possible and necessary. Third, reason and objectivity are the means of discovering fundamental truths about the human condition. Fourth, knowledge and wisdom are cumulative and can be transmitted from one generation to another. Fifth, living in accord with true moral and political principles is a requirement of human flourishing. Sixth, truth, wisdom, knowledge, and moral virtue are necessary preconditions for citizenship in a free society.
The Lyceum seeks to foster a new kind of education that is not simply contemplative but that reconciles theory and practice in the daily lives of our faculty and students. At The Lyceum, we accept Francis Bacon’s aphorism, “Knowledge is power,” and we assist our students in applying that knowledge to their private and public lives. Knowledge can, of course, be used for good or evil, but at The Lyceum our students are instructed in those moral and political truths that point them toward good and honorable lives. Ultimately, our goal is to teach our students how to think in principles and how to act on principle, so that they can fulfill their greatest potential and achieve their highest aspirations.
The Lyceum Approach
The Lyceum uses a Great Books approach to studying the history of liberty, capitalism, the American founding, and the principles of moral character. Faculty and students join a 2,500-year-old conversation (and sometimes a battle of ideas) that has defined Western civilization by reading, debating, and wrestling with the deepest and most influential thinkers of the Western tradition as well as the statesmen of the American political tradition.
Faculty and students should think of The Lyceum as a place where they can explore the greatest intellectual, scientific, political, economic, and artistic accomplishments of Western civilization and beyond. In The Lyceum, faculty and students shall examine together the relationship between ideas and actions; the requirements of character formation; the history of human accomplishment; the political and cultural architecture of free societies; and the economic principles and institutions that foster wealth creation and human flourishing.
The Lyceum also understands that there is an intimate relationship between education and citizenship. All forms of education result in the formation of a certain kind of human being and citizen. The Lyceum educates its students to be self-owning, self-governing, and self-reliant citizens of a free and virtuous society—citizens who have the motivation and ability to defend the principles and institutions of their society. This kind of principled patriotism represents a return to, and the completion of, the founders’ understanding of the relationship between education and citizenship.
Whereas the modern academy has fragmented knowledge into narrow disciplinary silos, The Lyceum is intellectually capacious in its approach to teaching and learning. It integrates philosophy, politics, literature, economics, history, and ethics through the canon of Great Books and the enduring questions that have shaped Western civilization and the American experiment in self-government. More particularly, The Lyceum approach is driven first and foremost by the great questions that have animated all civilizations, such as:
What is truth?
What is wisdom?
What is knowledge?
What is justice?
What is virtue?
What is honor?
What is freedom?
What is tyranny?
What is friendship?
What is love?
What is grief?
What is happiness?
What is death?
The Lyceum approach does not, however, mean the endless—and ultimately nihilistic—pursuit of questioning for its own sake. The true philosophic way of life recognizes that reality is knowable; that the human mind is capable of discovering the truth about the most important questions; that it is both possible and necessary to live according to true moral principles; that a life of accomplishment and honor is open to all men and women; that the pursuit of happiness and a fully human life are possible only in a free society; and that the free society must be defended from its enemies.
The Lyceum is therefore reconceptualizing what it means to think, teach, and learn. Our department shall be a community of scholars in which faculty and students work together to create a close-knit “small college” experience inside a larger university. Professors and students in The Lyceum will set off together on an intellectual journey in pursuit of truth and knowledge through the close reading of core texts, Socratic-style discussion, and careful writing.
The department insists on the close, careful, and repeated reading of classic texts along with frequent and rigorous writing assignments. We also seek to foster certain habits of mind—curiosity and logical thinking, intellectual humility and courage, and clarity and precision—that equip students to think wisely, deeply, and independently in an age of ideological and emotive conformity. In so doing, we hope to liberate and elevate the minds of our students and to deepen the meaning of their lives.
The Importance of Teaching Above “Scholarship”
The Lyceum is also reconceptualizing what it means to be a professor and teacher in higher education. We seek to recover the forgotten art of classical teaching, which places teaching and mentorship above “scholarship.” In fact, The Lyceum regards much of what is today considered academic “scholarship” to be a form of trivial pursuit with little or no value for students, taxpayers, or the general public.
The Lyceum is committed to the restoration of teaching as a high intellectual and moral responsibility—one centered on the formation of free minds rather than the mere transfer, absorption, and recitation of information. Faculty in The Lyceum are chosen not merely for specialized academic expertise and research but for their capacity to engage their students in the world of ideas and to serve as models of moral and civic virtue.
In reclaiming the lost art of Socratic instruction, The Lyceum embraces and elevates undergraduate teaching and mentoring above research and publication. Teaching, rightly understood, is the noble vocation of awakening young minds to the permanent questions of human life, equipping them with the intellectual virtues necessary for living as citizens of a free society, and inspiring them to pursue truth and excellence wherever it leads.
By restoring teaching to its rightful place at the center of its mission, The Lyceum aspires to produce teachers and students who shall set off on life’s journey in the pursuit of truth, wisdom, virtue, and excellence in all they do.
While teaching and tutoring come first at The Lyceum, we do encourage our faculty to read, think, research, write, and publish, but we have a much more capacious understanding of what is known as academic “scholarship.” To whatever extent faculty in The Lyceum shall engage in research, writing, and publishing, we will support their efforts in the hope that they will write on topics that engage with and deepen our understanding of the great questions and debates animating Western civilization. Our greatest hope is that our faculty will have the capacity to impact and improve the lives of their students and fellow citizens. Otherwise, what is the point?
The Socratic Tutoring Program
At the heart of The Lyceum is our innovative and transformative “Socratic Tutor” program. Each semester, Lyceum Scholars will be assigned a “Socratic Tutor” (a faculty member of The Lyceum), who will meet individually with each of his or her tutees every other week for approximately one hour.
The purpose of the Socratic Tutor program is twofold: first, to help our students translate the true theories and principles of the philosophic texts they are reading into their lives here and now; and second, to help our young men and women think seriously and deeply—possibly for the first time in their lives—about the question of moral character, and about their own moral characters in particular.
Following in the tradition of America’s Founding Fathers, The Lyceum takes seriously the notion that there is an intimate connection between moral virtue and a free society. As John Adams once said, “Public virtue cannot exist in a Nation without private Virtue, and public Virtue is the only Foundation of Republics.” A core tenet of The Lyceum and the Socratic Tutor program holds that the philosophic or contemplative way of life is incomplete without the ability and willingness to live out moral truth in practice and to translate ideas into action.
It is also imperative that Socratic Tutors serve as models of moral virtue for their students. Socratic Tutors in The Lyceum must bear witness to their vocation and to the lessons they teach. It is not enough for young people to read books about virtue and the good life. They must see these principles lived out in practice by the men and women who instruct them.
Our Socratic Tutor program is utterly unique in higher education. No other college or university anywhere in the world has anything like it.
The Model Lyceum Student
In today’s morally uncertain and sometimes chaotic world, many young people and their parents think that the purpose of higher education is job training. At The Lyceum, we view the purpose and function of education differently.
At The Lyceum, we read old books with young people, and we talk about how to apply true moral principles to our private and public lives. That is our job. The kind of education offered at The Lyceum does not train young men and women to become “professionals,” but a Lyceum education is a necessary precondition for success in life and profession.
Our practical aim is not to produce astronauts, business executives, computer programmers, doctors, engineers, lawyers, plumbers, politicians, or scientists. Instead, The Lyceum trains young men and women to seek understanding and excellence in whatever they do; to fulfill their highest ambitions in and outside their careers; and to fill their lives with meaning and purpose by knowing how this world came to be the way it is, and by knowing how to navigate the future based on expansive knowledge of the past. For in knowing the past, we can know the present, which is our gateway to the future. In short, The Lyceum educates young men and women to be successful, honorable, and happy in any chosen field or endeavor.
This is how liberal education was once seen by some of its greatest proponents. The eighteenth-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau summed up rather nicely the purpose of a Lyceum education: “Let my student be destined for the sword, the church, the bar. I do not care. Prior to the calling of his parents is nature’s call to human life. Living is the job I want to teach him. On leaving my hands, he will, I admit, be neither magistrate nor soldier nor priest. He will, in the first place, be a man.” A century later, John Stuart Mill, in his 1867 “Inaugural Address Delivered to the University of St. Andrews,” described a liberal education as making “a man a more intelligent shoemaker, if that be his occupation, but not by teaching him how to make shoes; it does so by the mental exercise it gives, and the habits it impresses.”
The Lyceum seeks to revolutionize higher education by restoring its original purposes and functions in the context of the twenty-first century. We shall revolutionize higher education by rediscovering and conserving the great monuments of the human mind, which have been lost or forgotten in our postmodern world. The highest aim of The Lyceum is to introduce our students to the pursuit of knowledge about human greatness and achievement. We seek to inspire all our students to the best within them.
Conclusion
From Plato and Epictetus to Rousseau and Mill, Western civilization’s deepest thinkers have understood the transformative role that a broad and deep education can play in the life of an individual and that of a nation. Liberal education is the name of the tradition that captures and promulgates this principle in The Lyceum. At The Lyceum, we seek to preserve the best that has been thought, said, and done in Western civilization. If the latter is to survive, the former must prosper.
The Lyceum seeks to restore the possibility that young minds can still be intrigued, charmed, seduced, and improved by a good book, a great conversation, a provocative question, or a vigorous debate in an environment of civility. Knowing this, we at The Lyceum know that the fate of Western civilization rests on the fate of liberal education and its quest for truth, freedom, and greatness.
***IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN LEARNING MORE ABOUT EITHER THE NEW DEPARTMENT OR CENTER, PLEASE CONTACT ME DIRECT AT: tthomp2@clemson.edu
This essay by Aaron Smith was originally published in New Ideal on September 15, 2021.
Both Stoicism and Ayn Rand’s philosophy, Objectivism, purport to offer guidance on the pursuit of values and the conduct and improvement of our lives. But, unlike Objectivism — which upholds free will — Stoicism embraces a deterministic worldview that’s incompatible with moral guidance, or so I argue in my article “The False Promise of Stoicism.” “For a philosophy to be useful as a guide,” I wrote, “it must at least acknowledge that we have some genuine, volitional control over our actions and choices — actions and choices that make a difference to where we end up in life.”
Massimo Pigliucci, a professor of philosophy at The City College of New York and a prominent voice in the contemporary Stoicism movement, disagrees. In his essay “Epic Battles in Practical Ethics: Stoicism vs Objectivism,” Pigliucci insists on a perspective held by many philosophers and scientists today — namely, that to reject determinism, as Objectivism does, amounts to believing in magic.
Consider Pigliucci’s argument for this position.
Is free will magic?
“Determinism,” writes Pigliucci, in its “simplest and broadest definition” means that “things happen as a result of cause-effect, or because there are laws of nature.”
If you accept that the cosmos works by cause-effect, then your attitude about human volition (“free will”) can fall into one of two categories: (a) You believe there is no such thing as volition, it’s an illusion (deterministic incompatibilism); or (b) You believe that volition is just another aspect of the lawful behavior of things in the universe, including human beings (compatibilism).
If you don’t like either of the above two stances on volition, then your only remaining choice, (c) is to reject the premise of determinism and claim special status for human free will (contra-causal incompatibilism). The Stoics — like most contemporary philosophers — chose option (b). Smith, apparently, wants something like (c). Which, based on what we know of how the world works, amounts to believing in magic, just like many religious people do: it’s called “contra-causal” free will because the notion is that, somehow (but how??), human volition can transcend the laws of physics and biology.1
Observe that Pigliucci’s argument relies on equating determinism with cause and effect and scientific lawfulness. This equation is of course not unique to Pigliucci. Daniel Dennett, one of the most influential philosophers in the contemporary free will debate, characterizes determinism similarly as “the idea that every event has a cause, which has a cause, which has a cause, in a causal chain that goes back to the Big Bang, if you like, and that there are no events without causes — undetermined events.”2 (My emphasis)
The reason Pigliucci gets Rand wrong is that the Objectivist view of free will (and causality) doesn’t fit the alternatives that he and others consider viable contenders.
This equation — which, as we will see, Objectivism rejects — leads Pigliucci to narrowly frame our theoretical options as either: (i) accept the universality of cause and effect and scientific lawfulness (and therefore determinism) — dismissing free will as either an illusion or a deterministic action or (ii) accept free will and therefore reject the universality of cause and effect and the laws of nature (i.e., determinism). Since Objectivism openly rejects determinism, Pigliucci assumes that Objectivism must endorse a non-causal (or “contra-causal”) theory of free will.
But it doesn’t. Volition, according to Objectivism, is both causal (no need for magic) and free (non-deterministic). Perhaps the reason Pigliucci gets Rand wrong is that the Objectivist view of free will (and causality) doesn’t fit the alternatives that he and others consider viable contenders.
To be in a position to evaluate Objectivism’s account of free will, one would need to consider what Rand wrote (or endorsed) on the subject and seek to understand it, especially since Rand’s view offers an alternative to those envisioned by Pigliucci.3
Rand on free will and causality
Consider just a few aspects of Rand’s account.
According to Objectivism, causality (or cause and effect) is not a principle relating antecedent events to their necessary consequences (determinism), but one that relates an entity’s identity (what it is) to its actions (what it does). Objectivism holds that since every entity has a specific identity, constituted by its specific set of characteristics, it can perform only those actions it has the capacity to perform; it cannot act apart from or in contradiction to its nature. As such, there can be no uncaused actions and no miracles. (There goes anything “contra-causal.”)
Objectivism accepts the universality of cause and effect. But it stresses that the principle of cause and effect by itself does not legislate that all cause-effect relations are deterministic (such that one and only one outcome is possible from — and indeed necessitated by — a given set of antecedent circumstances). Nor does the principle of causality tell us which specific actions an entity can take in a given context; it tells us only that an entity must act in accordance with its nature; it cannot act in contradiction to it.
Contrary to Pigliucci’s assumptions, the Objectivist view of free will is not that volition magically transcends identity and causality — as God’s volition is traditionally supposed to. Rather, Objectivism holds that volition is a form of causation.
Questions about what specific actions entities are capable of must be settled by reference to observed facts about the behavior of the relevant entities. And when it comes to human volition, the proper place to begin is with the data of introspection — i.e., with what we can directly observe of the operations of our own consciousness. What we observe thereby is that we possess a certain kind of control over our consciousness. This observed control, this causal power to initiate and direct action, is what Rand calls “free will.”
As Rand puts it, what is fundamentally and directly under our control is the process of thinking:
To think is an act of choice. . . . Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct. The function of your stomach, lungs or heart is automatic; the function of your mind is not. In any hour and issue of your life, you are free to think or to evade that effort.4
To say that we have “free will,” in Objectivism, is to say that reason operates by choice. You can choose to think — to exercise your cognitive faculties, to seek to know, to classify, to reach a wider and deeper understanding. Or, you can allow your mind to drift — letting it glide on autopilot, guided only by undirected stimuli, emotions, and associations. Or, you can choose to deliberately throw your mind out of focus — to refuse to know, to pretend facts are other than they are, turning your mind away from the goal of awareness, thereby subverting its functioning. You can also realize (clearly or dimly) that you are out of focus and choose to exert the effort that a state of goal-directed awareness requires — an effort nature does not compel you to exert or sustain.
Contrary to Pigliucci’s assumptions, the Objectivist view of free will is not that volition magically transcends identity and causality — as God’s volition is traditionally supposed to. Rather, Objectivism holds that volition is a form of causation. Free actions, according to Rand’s theory, are caused not by antecedent events (as determinism would have it), but by the actor choosing to initiate action, fundamentally cognitive action.
To say that a process of thought is caused by the actor, does not mean only that it is caused by factors that are internal to the actor rather than external, as many determinists would say. It means that the actor possesses the capacity to initiate action and chose to exercise that capacity.
It is only because we have free will that we need, and can make use of, a philosophic perspective to guide our choices toward a vision of what our lives and character could and ought to be.
If the deterministic framework that so many philosophers and scientifically minded people today accept doesn’t allow for this directly observable form of causation, then that framework should be revised. The alternatives — dismissing the observed fact of choice as an illusion (deterministic incompatibilism) or rewriting it to fit the prevailing theory as compatibilist accounts of volition like Pigliucci’s attempt to do — are unscientific.5
Pigliucci’s compatibilist account of volition
Pigliucci — as someone offering advice on how to live and what to value — seems to want to maintain some genuine notion of free will, presumably because he realizes that moral agency is impossible without it.
Our decisions are the result of external causes (other people’s opinions, events, etc.), combined with internal causes (our character, considered judgments, etc.) Human beings aren’t passive receivers of external influences . . . we are part and parcel of how the universe works. And the intriguing thing . . . is that volition, as an internal cause, can act on itself in a recursive fashion. A fancy way to say that we can reflect on our own judgments and change them. And the more we engage in cognitive and behavioral steps, the more we change our internal causality. If our changes are in the right direction we become better persons, the goal of Stoic practice.
This is as close as one gets to “free will” in a universe governed by laws and by relations of cause-effect.
Summarizing this perspective later in the essay, he writes:
Nothing is really ours, except the considered judgments we arrive at. Those are the ones on the basis of which we should be thought of as worthy or unworthy human beings. And lucky for us, those are under our control. Which means that the objective of living a life worth living is also under our control.6
But when Pigliucci says that our considered judgments are “under our control” and that “we can reflect on our own judgments and change them,” the essential question is: are both alternatives — to consider or not consider, to reflect or not reflect, to think or not to think — within our power to choose under the circumstances? Or is our act of reflecting or not reflecting itself necessitated by antecedent events? If we take determinism seriously, then whether we become a better or worse person today or tomorrow is not within our power to choose. It was determined for us long before we were born.
In his book Stoicism and the Art of Happiness, fellow modern Stoic Donald Robertson presents the Stoic position on determinism more accurately as “the idea that absolutely everything in life necessarily happens as it does.”
Your own thoughts and actions are necessitated as part of the whole “string of causes” that forms the universe . . . so that even if there are things in life that seem to require great effort on our part to achieve, whether or not we make the effort is fated along with the outcome . . .
What happens next will depend, in part, on what you choose to do next because you are a tiny but essential cog in the vast machinery of the universe. However, your choices themselves are the consequences of a massive string of causation set in motion countless billions of years before you were even born, at the beginning of the universe.7
The essential point here is that, for a cog — whose every thought and action is necessitated by factors outside his control — a philosophy of life is useless. It is only because we have free will that we need, and can make use of, a philosophic perspective to guide our choices toward a vision of what our lives and character could and ought to be.
If you’re seeking a philosophic perspective on life according to which there genuinely are things that are up to you — that you face genuine alternatives, such that if you make the right choices, you can become a better person and live a better life — you need a philosophy that embraces free will, not one that gives you the illusion of freedom while insisting on a worldview that denies it.
1
Massimo Pigliucci, “Epic Battles in Practical Ethics: Stoicism vs Objectivism.”
2
Daniel Dennett, “My Brain Made Me Do It (When Neuroscientists Think They Can Do Philosophy),” (European University Institute, Max Weber Lecture Series, December 15, 2010), 2.
3
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, pt. 3, chap. 7; Ayn Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics,” in The Virtue of Selfishness A New Concept of Egoism (New York: Signet, 1964 Centennial edition); Nathaniel Branden’s “The Contradiction of Determinism,” Objectivist Newsletter 2 (May 1963), “What Is the Difference Between the Objectivist Concept of Free Will and Traditional Concepts?,” Objectivist Newsletter 3 (January 1964), “The Objectivist Theory of Volition,” Objectivist 5 (January–February 1966), and “Volition and the Law of Causality,” Objectivist 5 (March 1966). See also Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (New York: Dutton, 1991), chap. 2, and Harry Binswanger, “Volition as Cognitive Self-Regulation,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 50 (December 1991). For a discussion of the Objectivist concept of volition by academic philosophers, see Allan Gotthelf and Gregory Salmieri, eds., A Companion to Ayn Rand (Chichester, UK, and Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), esp. chaps. 5 and 11.
4
Ayn Rand, “This Is John Galt Speaking,” For the New Intellectual (New York: Signet, 1964 Centennial edition).
5
As one scholar puts the point: “According to compatibilist theories [of volition], determinism and freedom are compatible, because ‘freedom’ is understood as a certain way in which one’s actions are predetermined.” (Gotthelf and Salmieri, Companion to Ayn Rand, 260)
6
Massimo Pigliucci, “Epic Battles in Practical Ethics: Stoicism vs Objectivism.”
7
Donald Robertson, Stoicism and the Art of Happiness (London: Hodder & Stoughton; New York, McGraw-Hill, 2013), 84.
Socialism isn’t known for making things affordable, if for no other reason that its price controls make so many things unavailable. Capitalism not only creates new, never-before-seen goods but transforms them from luxuries into necessities.
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