Atlas Shrugged and unemployment

One of the most famous passages penned by Ayn Rand discusses the value of money, especially gold, as the epitome of value and virtue. In the United States, we have a simple way of placing value on things, we price them. While there is some talk about the dignitiy and moral worth of every person, at the end of the day we value the work that people do, which is an important part of their personality, by paying them different amounts of money. The basic idea is that money should usually approximate value and that people who contribute to society will obtain wealth. We believe this so strongly that there are scarcely other ways to express value. Engagement rings, large weddings, the price of a fancy dinner, private planes, nice cars, a chic apartment, a nice home, a good neighborhood, a large television, all of these things are ways of advertising status and displaying the value of our lives to strangers, family, friends, and lovers.

I am not advocating that we all give up creature comforts or that the things we buy are in some way all evil. My sole point is that they are not signs of virtue or talent either. The underlying statement of Ayn Rand is that property is acquired through virtue and innovation. That the accumulation of wealth is somehow morally praiseworthy. The converse was also argued forcefully; those who do not amass wealth are morally blameworthy, lazy, unintelligent, and destructive of society.

Neither of these things is true. For the most part, people want to be productive for reasons other than just money. Also, the most important predictor of social class at death, is what social class a person is born into. In other words, what seperates the haves from the have nots has more to do with differences in opportunities at birth than anything else.  

Nevertheless, we live in a society that places fundamental value on the myth that social status is conferred based on hard work and talent. For my part, even though I know that a broad downturn in the economy has led to my current personal long term unemployment crisis, I nevertheless ponder every day whether I have anything of value to contribute to our society. After all, no one so far is willing to pay me for my work.

Drugs and OIl

There are two topics in the headlines right now about problems with commodities that the United States consumes in larger quantities than any other country in the world.

Oil

One problem is the major oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Since the oil rig explosion on April 20th of this year millions of gallons of oil have been flowing into the gulf of Mexico and will continue to do so for some time. Wildlife is being devastated, 11 workers lost their lives, the people living along the Gulf Coast have lost their livelihoods, many people along the gulf coast will lose their way of life, and a major oil company has shown that with all the technology we have today we cannot plug a hole in the ground on the bottom of the ocean. There is a man made disaster going on and many blaming the lax standards of a greedy oil company.

I don't want to pick a side in that fight. I want to point out only that oil spills happen. In fact this is not even the worst one to occur, it is merely the worst that has been in United States territory. The bottom line is that drilling for, bringing up, transporting, and using fossil fuels is going to always involve risk and until we as a society find another source of energy we are not going to be able to eliminate the impact of those risks.


Drugs

The other is the problem of illegal immigration from Mexico and boder security. I saw a report yesterday detailing how the Mayor of a Mexican border town was assassinated by cartel lords who did not like the fact that he was in faovr of law and order. What amazes about this story and the broader debate about immigration is that somehow the United States consumption of illegal narcotics is almost always overlooked. Our society is funding the war lords of that region by buying narcotics at a tremendous rate and yet we don't want to acknowledge that the real reason so many people are trying to cross the border is that Americans are destroying large regions of thier country.

This is not to say that I blame drug addicts for border problems. I don't. I have scarcely any understanding of why we as a society consume so many narcotics. What I do know for certain is that our policies for managing the use of illegal narcotics have not been successful in limiting their use. I also know that hundreds, if not thousands of people in the border area of Mexico die in fights to control who gets to supply our demand for narcotics. I can't come up with some simple solution that is going to solve this problem. I do think we should at least start by acknowledging that a tremendous amount of the instability down there is a result of narco trafficking. Continuing to pretend that cutting off the flow of drugs and people is a more reasonable solution than cutting off the demand is a hypocritical way of blaming our problems on another country.


Conclusion

While we seem to be obsessed with how oil is damaging the livelihoods of Americans and we are in the mood to start innovating a way to cut our consumption of oil, we may want to think about how we can cut our consumption of narcotics as well.

On the other hand, we could just continue to condemn the lawlessness of the Mexican side of the U.S. Mexican border and the greed/recklessness of oil companies and wait for more people to die.

What do You Fight For?

I was recently watching the movie Citizen X (the one about the Russian serial killer) and one of the lines in the movie struck me as fairly profound. The hero of the movie was bantering with a man who was his superior about the proper way to go about catching the serial killer. Hero says "You believe a man is what he says?" The superior says "when he is paid to talk for a living." The hero admonishes "A man is what he fights for."

Growing up in the U.S. I think I have become far too caught up in the idea that what I am is somehow inextricably caught up with how I am employed. (A topic I intend to come back to in another post). I found this hero's idea of self definition or really self-ideation to be much more interesting and perhaps useful. Undoubtedly, at least in part, because I find the things that I fight for to be much more important than the things that I have so far found employment doing.

For starters I would have to clarify what I mean by "fights for." In my mind to fight for something has nothing to do with physical violence. Instead to fight for something is to make a commitment to an ideal that you carry through in your day to day actions. You fight for passionate beliefs you feel compelled to take risks for. The ideas you fight for are the ones you would hazard losing your best friends over, rather than compromise those beliefs.

The core concept is one of personal integrity. Is my identity whole if I refuse to live by x or y ideal that I have set up for myself? Most of the times these struggles will take place in your own mind.

Of course not every personal belief will fall into the category of things that someone fights for. For some people, none of their beliefs have this strong of a value.

As for myself, there are many things that I fight for in this way. I don't have all the answers for how I would want the world to look, or how the infinite details of it should be organized. But I do have a few ideas and basic principles that I know I want to be a bigger part of it. Agope, as preached by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., tolerance, equality, understanding, and love are a few of the things I fight for.

In some sense I guess that means I fight against violence, intolerance, inequality, ignorance, and hatred, but I would much rather think about what I am fighting for instead. I would challenge people to think about the things that they fight for and decide whether they would want others to judge them based on those things.