Community and Selfishness examines Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, where unregulated "noble" capitalists abandon society, yet real-world examples—like California oil blowouts or toxic mining waste—show exploitation thrives without oversight. Rand’s "greed is good" ignores systemic harm, while her libertarian-influenced policies under Reagan, Thatcher, Greenspan, and Mulroney fueled crises like the 2008 financial collapse. The episode argues human nature demands regulation to prevent parasitic behavior, not just moral virtue. [Automatically generated summary]
This episode has full spoilers for Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.
You had 66 years to read it.
And we're back with Truth Unrestricted, the podcast that would have a better name if they weren't all taken.
I'm Spencer, your host, and I'm back again today with Jeff.
How you doing, Jeff?
Hey, not too bad, buddy.
Been a while.
Yeah, been a couple minutes.
So I'm going to get right into it today.
The episode today is going to be community and selfishness.
I have probably no surprise to anyone here, but I have my own definition of community, and I'm very proud of it.
It goes something like this.
So you or me or anyone as a person, as people, as an individual, whenever I make a choice in my life, I don't, you know, don't usually openly realize it all the time, but when I make a choice, I include the interests of other people in my life when I make that choice.
This is a part of the inner workings of my social being that prevent complete anarchy.
And when I make those choices and I include other people, other people's interests in the calculation for how I choose things, that's an indication that those people are part of my community, that I consider them to be part of my community.
Okay, with you so far.
Right.
And so other people, when they make decisions, also include some of my interests when they make decisions.
And this gets complicated.
I mean, it seems really simple at first, but it gets very, very complicated because every decision has context.
The people I work with, I make a different level of decisions than the people I live with, etc.
So I'm in a community with the people I work with.
I'm in a separate community with people I live with, etc.
In the end, it's tens of thousands of tiny decisions with several different communities.
And it's very, very complicated.
But each one of these individual decisions has this aspect to it in that I am including other people's interests when I make those decisions.
And one of the major decisions that gets made on this ground and to sort of raise an advance flag on the Ayn Randishness we will be discussing soon is the payment of taxes.
The largest community that you belong to is usually the municipality or province or state or nation that you belong to that you pay taxes to.
And you take next to no decisions on how that money gets spent.
But you willingly give over in most countries a sizable chunk of your paycheck for ostensibly the greater good.
And we won't get into a discussion of how efficiently that money is spent.
That's not what this episode is about.
But there is a decision that is made by the worker or the earner to give up a portion of their earnings to the community.
Right.
So I'm glad that you brought up that that's not really what this is about because people will immediately say, I don't choose to pay taxes.
It's forced on me.
I think that that needs to be another episode eventually because too many people bring that up whenever it comes up.
But all sorts of, I mean, I think of even the little decisions, when you choose whether or not to throw garbage out the window while you're driving or whether you do throw garbage out the window while you're driving, throwing the garbage out the window while you're driving is an indication that you don't care about the cleanliness of the landscape that you're driving past.
I mean, that's that's pretty simple.
That that's part of a community arrangement that you don't care about, that you're not connected to.
But there's also like there's some things that tie us.
There's some decisions that we make, keeping our community in mind, where we make those decisions out of a personal desire or sense of greater good to serve the greater community and do it willingly.
And there's decisions where we keep the sense of community in mind because there is a community imposed penalty for non-compliance.
You know, like the decision to not speed.
You know, it's safer.
You're putting less people's lives at risk on the road by not doing it.
But most people don't speed because they don't want to get a ticket.
On the surface, yes.
But most people also stay in their own lane, mostly because they don't want to crash.
Yeah.
They most people will park in the spot that's between the lines, even when the whole row is clear.
Most people will still park between the lines because that's courteous for the next people who have to come in.
And maybe they have to park and they, you know, there's no law that says you have to park between the lines.
There's no actual rule.
But everyone understands this is part of the social contract.
This is the part of the fabric of the social contract, the individual thing.
And this, what I like about this definition is that it becomes its own practical test.
When you need to make decisions about who you're going to trust in your life and what you're going to trust them with, this is a key element.
This is, you know, when you look at this, you should look at someone else's decisions to see if they include you and your interests in those decisions.
Your neighbor who stays up till two in the morning playing loud music, for example, doesn't really care about you.
Not really.
They're not considering you when they make that decision to do that.
Not a community-oriented person.
And it is those people who for whom bylaw officers exist.
Well, yeah.
But most people don't refrain from doing things like playing loud music at night because worry of the bylaw officer, right?
Most people do it because they're curse.
Yes.
Even though there is a lot on rules.
It's important to note that a lot of the rules in society that most of us obey because of service to the social contract, like you say, there is a portion of society that follows those rules only because there's a penalty for not doing so.
Yes, I had a whole episode on rules that I did with David Bloomberg, and we discussed that exactly, that exact thing.
The rules essentially exist because we need people to follow them.
But, you know, what rules exist tells us something about the sorts of things that people are likely to do on their own and the things that they need to be told to do.
Right.
And that is so this ties directly into that too, I guess, is where I'm getting at with this: is that when we choose to, you know, we make a choice and there's a rule that's built around that choice, a law or a bylaw or even just an informal social rule.
Some people are only constrained by the rule, but the vast majority of people are not merely constrained by the rule.
also looking to be cohesively fit in with the rest of their society.
And some people will fit in with most of the things and then break some rules.
And that says something about them too.
But this is the what I really want to focus on here is just the part about that a sense of community, a sense of living with other people comes with the idea that you're going to make your decisions and include other people's interests in those decisions.
You don't have to have the same interests as them, but you will include some of them in that.
Another thing I like about this definition is that it doesn't require that you know the other people in your community.
Like, I don't need to know who's going to park next to me in the parking lot in order to park between the lines.
I don't have to be to know them and know their interests and know all about their life and how busy they are and everything else.
I don't know exactly how Ministry of Children and Families spends their budget, but I do know that a portion of my tax dollars goes to help abuse children that I've never met and never will probably.
I don't have any children in schools, but I don't need to have children of my own in schools in order to understand that some of my tax dollars go to fund schools, which work to educate people.
I recognize that education is good for society as a whole.
Yeah, that kind of stuff.
Yes, as we sometimes say, I want my tax dollars to fund hospitals because I don't want to be surrounded by sick people.
And I want my tax dollars to fund schools because I don't want to be surrounded by ignorant people.
So Ayn Rand has come up a couple times already in the episodes we've done previously on this podcast.
And every time her name comes up, I steer the car away and I go, oh, well, we'll get to Ayn Rand eventually.
Well, today is that day.
My God, finally getting to Ayn Rand.
Right.
Yeah, I know.
We steered close and you turned away.
I'm like, oh, you goddamn tease.
Drooling at the possibility.
Like, when do we get to go to Disneyland, Dad?
Beautiful.
Today is the day.
So quick refresher for anyone who doesn't know who I'm talking about.
Ayn Rand was an author who articulated and encouraged the adoption of a philosophical idea called objectivism.
The core concept of objectivism, as described by Ayn Rand, was the elevation of selfishness as a virtue.
In objectivism, the worth of a person is entirely based on what they could accomplish.
Not only should each person then be rewarded for these accomplishments, but according to the tenets of objectivism, society as a whole would greatly benefit if everyone focused only on their own achievements to the exclusion of any other considerations.
Objectivism openly and loudly proclaims that laissez-faire capitalism taken to its extreme with no government intervention or oversight of any kind is the best way to organize a marketplace.
In objectivism, charity is a sin, as are all social pressures that are placed upon people to become charitable.
So one to interject, Rand's own words, sort of one of the cornerstone, really shaky foundation stones that this mecca of objectivism has been built on is, as in Rand's own words, the concept of man as a heroic being with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity and reason as his only absolute.
So she embraced a sort of a philosophical idea that like rule number one, it is a fact.
All men are good.
Deeply, deeply, deeply, deeply flawed premise to start a philosophy from.
And there's no shortage of evidence anywhere as to the capacity of man for evil and selfishness.
But like the entire philosophy is built upon this foundation that just by his nature, man is a heroic being.
He will do the right thing.
And it's fine for him to just pursue his own happiness because he's not going to take advantage of anybody on the way to that pursuit.
He's just going to look out for his own interests, just like everybody else.
And we're all going to get along being chummy and selfish.
And everybody's going to work hard and everybody's going to make money to their ability only.
And they're never going to take advantage of any situation or slide anywhere.
Exactly.
Like it's, it's laughable.
It's, it's like, right.
People say, pardon my language, people say fucking communism is not a workable philosophy.
Like this is just absolutely bloody laughable.
Yeah.
It doesn't take into account human nature.
So Ayn Rand wrote a novel spec.
She wrote a book specifically about objectivism, but she also wrote two very popular novels about this concept.
The first was called The Fountainhead.
It fairly well known in this time, but not as well known now.
But the really big novel was called Atlas Shrugged.
Atlas Shrugged.
Yeah, baby.
And for those of you who haven't read it, the cornerstone idea of Atlas Shrugged is like, we get introduced to a couple of these heroic humans that Ayn Rand philosophizes about.
A man by the name of Jim Reardon.
Hank Reardon.
Hank Reardon, sorry.
Yes.
John Galt.
Yes.
And these are all basically entrepreneurs, capitalists.
They have built great empires with their minds and their own ability and gumption and pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and are fabulously wealthy because of it.
And they just get beaten down by the pressures of the world, government and unions and regulation, which they paint as all of these as like horribly corrupt, completely morally lacking parasites.
Like even his own family members are just parasites living off of him like leeches.
The word used in the novel is usually referring to them as looters.
Looters, exactly, exactly.
They don't make anything.
They don't do anything.
They just figure out how to do it.
They legislate a way to take it and then just use up its resources and then move on to a new thing.
And so all of the producers decide to go on strike and they just step away from the world scene and stop producing.
And all of the looters are left to try and handle the machine without the real movers and shakers of the world.
And of course, everything comes crashing down.
It's a wonderful work of fiction.
Yeah, fiction, total fiction.
The market that she builds is complete fiction.
Oh, 100%.
Yeah.
But it convinced me.
I read that book for the first time about two years after I graduated university.
And it resonated with me at a time in my life when, as a young parent, I was struggling to make ends meet.
Frustrated as a lower middle class income earner at the bite that I saw taken out of my paycheck by both levels of government and just couldn't scrape enough shekels together on what I was earning to take care of my family.
And this idea that I am entitled to 100% of the fruits of what I do and nobody should be looting my pockets resonated with me so well that I actually voted conservative for one election when I was in my early 30s.
The only time I've ever done it.
And Ayn Rand was at least partially to blame for that decision.
Well, the novel itself is well written.
I'll give it that.
She has two very lengthy speeches, characters who essentially go on extended rants.
One of them lasts for I think it's 80 pages.
That's when John Galt finally has the big reveal and gives his big speech.
And like it is, it's it, you're right.
It's it's north of 80 pages and it's just shameless soapboxing by the author.
Like it may as well be just her preaching her philosophy to the reader.
Well, that's exactly what it is.
Yeah.
That's exactly what it is.
It's her philosophy coming out of the mouth of one of the characters.
Yeah.
And I wasn't convinced by this novel.
I was handed this novel by at the time a friend, and that friend was very disappointed that I didn't hold this novel in the extreme esteem that they did.
But I just, to me, it didn't fit when I tried to put the characters as, you know, like we talked about the models of the mind, and I talk about this a lot.
Every person you have a model of.
And when I try to, when I watch TV and when I read books, I take the characters and I make a model of the characters.
And when they're not acting in a way that makes sense to me, it takes me out of the moment.
It makes me question too many things.
And that's, that's the, the measure I have for good fiction and not good fiction.
Things like The Sopranos was top five of all time fiction for me because I can understand almost every decision that's made there.
Even if it's made by a mob boss and he's choosing to kill someone and it's not something I would do, I generally am understanding.
Yeah, you can connect the dots on what got him there.
Yeah.
But many of the decisions of the characters in Atlas Shrugged didn't make sense to me because it occurred to me that there was another way to do most of the things they were doing.
And I couldn't catch on to why they weren't doing them that other way.
Yeah.
The noble characters in the novel are always shown as avoiding using, you know, they're named different things in the novel, but they would essentially be politicians who are meant to sway the system for you.
And I immediately thought to myself, why don't they use those?
They just choose to not use them.
And in reality, we know the opposite is true.
Yeah, of course we know that nobody, nobody lobbies politicians like the private sector.
Yes.
And maybe you're going to look really hard and find someone who refrains from doing it.
But that's not the norm.
And the cornerstone.
The norm's philosophy is that a heroic human who only takes the noble path is the norm.
Yeah.
And that is false.
The Tea Party movement in the early 2000s, I believe that was when it was rising or maybe shortly after that.
Did the Tea Party start before or after the?
I thought it was the teens.
Yeah, okay.
The Tea Party started after the, okay, we got to back up just a little bit here.
We didn't get to Alan Greenspan.
No, we didn't.
So Alan Greenspan was the chairman of the U.S. Reserve from 1987 to 2006, 19 years.
I don't know if anyone has ever come close to that, but he served several presidents.
He was sworn in under Reagan, served George H.W. Bush the entire term, both terms for Clinton and much of the time that George W. Bush was in power.
And he was, he knew Ayn Rand.
He read her novels before they were in print because he knew her personally.
And he regularly referenced Ayn Rand and her philosophies when he was making decisions as his position as chairman of the U.S. Fed.
And at the end of the day, after 19 years of this, he left office and a year later, the system crashed.
And he was forced to examine the decisions he made that led up to this because it wasn't a thing that happened over the course of a year.
The spring had been coiled very tightly over the course of decades and then slipped loose and crashed.
And he had to had a sort of a come to Jesus moment where he had to say, you know, maybe I was wrong about all that stuff.
Maybe I was wrong to keep the interest rate low for decades at a time and just ramp the economy up to huge levels.
Yeah, maybe that was, maybe that was a mistake.
I, you know, of course, he wasn't in position to do anything about it and wasn't going to help anyone anyway, because who cares if he had a good moment?
He's someone else is in charge now anyway.
Well, too bad he didn't have it, you know, 15 years earlier.
Maybe there would have been a lot of things different in our world at that time at that point.
And like, it's, it's important that I think it's important to note that like it was during Greenspan's reign as chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, like he got appointed during the latter years of Reagan's reign and was responsible for with Reagan's goading, was responsible for some of the deepest slashes to taxes to corporations in the upper class of the United States since since the war.
The Federal Reserve only deals with monetary policy, actually.
So like the interest rates and as part of a larger strategy to grow the economy, Reagan definitely wanted to cut taxes, but the Federal Reserve doesn't actually do that.
No, what they did was provide lots and lots and lots of really cheap money to capital.
Oh, yeah.
And Reagan made sure that all of the profits that they made off that really cheap money, they got to keep.
Yeah.
Right.
Well, he definitely did that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like, like, I understand you tying in Greenspan, but like, Greenspan wasn't the only one who was suckling it at the Rand philosophical teat.
So was Reagan.
So was Thatcher.
So was Mulroney.
Yeah, they just weren't as vocal and open about it as Greenspan was.
Yeah.
The late 80s was a time when monetary policy in North America and Europe really got turned on its ass and slid hard to almost a libertarian end where, you know, the not the metric, what's the word I'm looking for?
The message was, you know, entrepreneurs are the job creators.
They're providing society with a gift of creating jobs.
So we shouldn't be burdening them with taxes.
We should be giving them access to cheap money because they're the job creators.
No, that's bullshit.
Like anybody who can objectively look at that looks recognizes that, like, demand is what creates a market, and the entrepreneur seeks to fill that demand.
They don't create the jobs, the market creates jobs.
Yeah, yeah.
Having everyone with no money would mean there's no market.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, you would have China in the 70s at that point.
Yeah, yeah.
But after the financial crisis of 2008, the Tea Party rose in prominence in the United States.
And many of the Tea Party people, the vocal people in the public who were talking about this, were referencing Ayn Rand directly.
Several of them hilariously talked about the idea of doing this strike that is done in Atlas Shrugged.
Yeah.
And of course, they didn't because as soon as they mentioned it, other people went, okay, go ahead.
Go ahead.
Let's see if we can live without you.
Yeah.
When do you want to start?
Like that's an easy bluff to call.
Yeah.
Because, yeah, it's, it's not going to end the way you think.
Like, you're not going to be interested.
Like in Ayn Rand's world, all of the people who were the noble people were perfectly comfortable living in a shack in a commune in Colorado and just going to work every day doing the thing they loved.
I mean, that was the philosophy, again, you know, like there's someone out there whose ability caps out at corner convenience store worker and they're just content to live their best life as a convenience store worker.
Right.
But even the noble creatures in her novel, like Hank, Hank Riordan, for example, he ends up going to this place and living in his little shack and doing his little steelworking thing.
He's essentially a blacksmith because he doesn't have a huge factory, just has himself.
And everyone is just a little entrepreneur working for themselves and everyone gets along and everyone lives a much quieter, more humble life.
And they're perfectly happy doing that.
Yeah.
But that's not how it is in real life.
The people who have all this money want to keep that money.
They want the things that come with that money.
They want to have the same level of power and decision making that that money gives them.
They want to have all the creature comforts that that money gives them.
And the other cornerstone was the idea that if they disappeared, everything that they ran would grind to a halt without them.
Yeah, that was the other tradition of the novel.
That is just simply not the case.
Yeah, just simply not the case.
That there was only a handful of capable people and that all those capable people were getting used essentially by society to survive.
Yeah.
And that these people would just go away and then society would collapse.
And the whole thing is complete fiction.
It's not, it's not real.
It doesn't work.
Well, because like the entrepreneur, you know, let's say, well, you have a great deal of expert experience in the oil industry.
Like an entrepreneur who has a license to start doing test drills in a region to try and find oil to extract.
Unless there's a rule in place saying that he has to clean up his mess when he's done, what motivates him to do that?
Nothing.
And nothing at all.
And we have seen ample examples in unregulated economies in Africa, in the Middle East, even in the United States and here in Canada.
Yeah, I was going to say you don't need to look as far as Africa.
Yeah.
Where, when nobody in government is telling them they have to do it, they just don't.
You can find stories of the early days of the oil rush in California, where they had no regulations on this activity at all.
There was no royalty structure.
There was no rights to a zone.
If you got there and you got it out of the ground, it was yours and that's all.
And they have oil fields in California that are larger than in Texas, than in some of the places in Saudi Arabia.
I mean, the oil fields in California were truly massive.
Yeah.
But they had such a rush on this.
There are stories of people who had, I mean, the oil derricks there were made of wood in that day.
Yeah.
Where the derricks were one derrick would be built right next to the other, where the ends of the derrick that are kind of at an angle into the ground are touching each other.
They're that close.
And there would be fights between workers on one rig to the next rig for tools, trying to slow them down so they don't get there as quickly.
Right.
And they've seen I've seen the same attitude in the years I worked construction on badly run construction job sites where you've got foremen from one crew hoarding tools or materials so their crew looks better than the other crews.
Like, like mankind really is a piece of shit chips down.
And like if you've got an opportunity to cheat or shave points or steal to get to the same finish line with less effort, most people, unless there's a rule saying they can't and a consequence for breaking that rule, will take it.
Yeah.
Not most people, but enough of them that you got to have the structure.
But there were oil fields in California where they were drilling so many holes close together that they fractured what's called the cap rock that's above it.
There's a sealed rock layer above the hydrocarbon that seals it in.
Otherwise it would have just escaped long ago.
Glad to the surface, yeah.
And they drilled so many holes in close proximity that they fractured that cap rock.
And that pressure that's within the zone leaked into the zone above and they ruined, completely ruined entire oil fields, huge oil fields, just leak off, all the pressure just leak off in the zone above.
It's called a thief zone and it just bleeds off into there.
So no one gets any pressure to pull any of this hydrocarbon out at all.
And it's just for sticking too many straws in the milkshake at once.
At once.
Yeah.
In one close, you know, in close proximity.
Yeah.
That's a real thing that happened.
You need to have a set of rules to properly produce this material because also true, if they're not doing it responsibly, you have pressure in that well.
That pressure can push to surface.
If they're not doing it properly, you get a blowout.
It ain't pretty.
It ain't pretty at all.
And in that day, they either had to let it blow out and let it come up or they had to light it on fire most times.
I have a picture of a gas well that was lit on fire.
It wasn't here.
It was actually from Iraq.
My dad took it, but they tried to keep traffic away from it.
But whatever was going on that night, he got close enough and he got a solid picture of this stream of fire getting pushed into the air and they couldn't stop it.
They just had to burn it off.
But you have to do this stuff responsibly.
And you can't just rely on anyone who has the technology of getting there having the ability to hold it in.
Well, and also, yeah, like to broaden the conversation back out outside of our trade talk.
Sort of a cornerstone as to why objectivism fails to pass the sniff test is, as we said at the beginning, it exists, relies rather on the premise that humankind is innately noble and is and innately content with whatever means their ability rises to supply for themselves.
There's no real sense of greed in any of Rand's work because whatever you have, whatever you produce, you deserve.
Yeah, she's, she actually said explicitly that greed is good.
Yeah.
Greed is a good thing.
Everyone, if everyone were equally greedy, that's the way in which the world would run the best.
Yeah.
But like the problem with that is that when people are greedy, people take more than they need and then people wind up with less than they need.
Like that we, there was never really clearly shown in any of Rand's works the other side of that equation.
And we've seen, we've seen it in the real world, left, right, and center.
Yeah.
So I like these two ideas together because my definition of community when I was thinking about it, and I, in my brain, it ran up alongside the part of the puzzle that was the Ayn Rand part.
It fit very well.
Ayn Rand's objectivism has no sense of community, certainly not according to the way I define it here tonight.
No.
And in Ayn Rand's objectivism, no one considers anyone else's interests when they make any decisions.
And in fact, in her world, it would be a sin to ever do that.
That's stated pretty explicitly.
Any notion that you are considering anyone else, really, that's a no-no.
You don't do that.
You only consider yourself.
This mecca that all of the able-bodied, able-minded Atlases flee to when they go on their strike, they have a currency set up in there of like hard gold coins.
And there's no favors.
Rand makes a point of underlining this.
It's one of the parts of the book that stuck with me.
I think it was just Hank tries to borrow a neighbor's car and the neighbor puts his hand out and it gets explained.
No, no, no, there's no borrowing.
There's no favors.
We don't owe anything to anyone.
You just pay what it's worth.
So they exchange gold for everything.
Yeah, I think that's the rules of the new place where they go to when they leave society.
But of course, hilariously, that place is also powered.
I don't know if you noticed.
It's powered by the patron saint of scientific capitalism as commandeered by people, not named as himself, but most other people look at Nikola Tesla as this guy, this patron saint of all the good things in the world.
And of course, John Galt, one of the main characters who makes everything happen in this world, he builds an engine that's working the same way that the rumor is that Nikola Tesla was supposed to have been working on an engine.
Nikola Tesla wanted to build an engine that ran on static electricity.
And we know now that this isn't possible.
It might be possible to build an engine that runs on static electricity, but there isn't enough power there to do anything with it.
He could tell there's a lot of large amount of voltage there, but there's just no current.
And so his idea, he didn't have all the equipment to know that.
He just had an idea and went, oh, wouldn't that be neat?
And a lot of people say he got shut down because he was going to provide free power.
And of course, that's exactly what in her novel, John Galt has done.
He's built an engine that runs on static electricity to provide this free power.
And of course, this idea sitting next to all of her other ideas is like, well, that ship don't sail, man.
Yeah.
Why would you want free power?
Why is that good?
Why shouldn't everyone be paying through the nose for every ounce of power that they could possibly get?
Exactly.
Because capitalism, maybe.
Yeah.
I think we would be doing a disservice if we didn't mention the other boatload of bad ideas that is tightly wound up with Ayn Rand's particular set of bad ideas.
That boatload of bad ideas is libertarianism.
Oh, yeah.
I'm sure, do a deeper dive on its own episode, but it's worth mentioning now that many of the ideas in the libertarian movement come directly out of Ayn Rand's playbook.
The idea of having no oversight at all, just let everything be the way it is and everyone figures it out for themselves.
That's exactly what libertarianism is.
It's about a hands-off approach from the government perspective of all life.
Don't tread on me.
Yeah.
The government just does nothing at all.
And I get to keep everything I make and I get to keep all of the fruits of my labor and my capital.
No taxes.
And the government never spends any money on anything.
And if you need to take your garbage out, you have to walk it to the garbage dump, I guess.
I don't know.
And also perform my own open heart surgery.
Yeah.
And put out my own house fire.
Well, in her world, I guess you would just live a healthy life and never need open heart surgery.
Sure.
Maybe.
I don't know how that works.
But in her world, in Ayn Rand's world, people would still be worried about things like legacy and reputation.
And that's one of the reasons why they wouldn't do things like mining companies wouldn't poison streams with mining waste, right?
Because that would be a problem for their legacy and their reputation.
And people aren't going to put out massive pollution and anything because that would be a problem for their reputation in the world.
But already, even with laws, those are a problem.
Even with rules about this stuff, those are a problem.
We still have heavy metal that leeches into the ground in some places because mining companies and smelting companies haven't done their work properly.
And they just tried to hide it.
And a lot of them do exploration under numbered holding companies to limit their own financial exposure if the exploration goes bust and doesn't produce anything.
Then they can abandon the damage they've done.
That entity can go bankrupt and the parent company isn't affected at all.
This kind of behavior doesn't exist in Ayn Rand's world, right?
Like that's that sort of, it's bitterly ironic because the sort of parasitic behavior that she attaches to the looters is the very behavior that exists within the capitalist class and is the reason why all these rules have to exist.
Yeah.
In her world, if the people, if humans were just essentially noble, one would have to ask her, and I don't know why anyone never did, why we would need to have any written laws of any kind.
Why do we need police?
Yeah.
Why do we need police?
Why would we need police?
If everyone was just going to be perfectly selfish and work to their own interests and stick their nose in their own business only, why would we need any of those things?
Except that we do.
Yeah.
We do have people that will only be reigned in by consequences.
And, you know, if we're going to allow powerful people, we have to have powerful consequences.
And that's all there is to it.
Unless we're going to take away all the powerful executives, then we can go back to just having little consequences.
But I don't see that happening anytime.
No, unfortunately not.
Well, on that incredibly cheerful note, that'll have to be a discussion for another day because there's still a reason we have them.
But I feel like that's a whole other discussion.
I think so.
Yeah.
So anyway, I think that's on that note.
That's a good one to sign off on.
Have anything else to add?
No, I think we chewed on that pretty thoroughly, buddy.
Great.
So if anyone has any feedback, any gripes, any complaints, any glowing words of praise, anything like that, you can send that email to truthunrestricted at gmail.com.
And if you're really interested in a fun time, you can go to Twitter.
I'm Spencer G. Watson on Twitter, and you can find me there.
Oh, you're back in the Twitterverse.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm slipped right back in the slipstream there.
Pick any fights yet?
Every day.
And Jeff is going to remain anonymous for the sake of his family.