Yesterday I watched The World's Best Speech on Money
and it took me back to my experience reading Rand's Atlas Shrugged.
However, one thing I hated about the book was how Rand caricatures the oppressed minorities who she calls "moochers". It was pretty soulless and felt like contempt dressed up as philosophy. Meanwhile, she elevates the industrialist to the state of a god of moral genius but the reality of capitalism and production is that worthy ideas are rare. So rare that the industrialist oft gets in bed with the bureaucrat so that they are the second order beneficiaries of the Cantillon effect through gated cheap loans, tax havens, and more opportunities for growth that the small scale business man can only dream of.
So no, Hank Rearden is not some moral genius. Neither is Howard Roark despite his architectural genius.
Rand thus fights both the political elite and the dispossessed with equal ferocity, but she never fully acknowledges the fact that these two groups are co-created by the same fiat monetary machinery.
Swinging the pendulum way over the other side does not help either.
If Rand puts genius of production at the helm, then the looter who can successfully take from any industrialist around the world and provide 100% guaranteed return must be the most genius of them all.
This is the world of Machiavelli where Acquisition is all powerful. Alas, we might be far from the days of slavery where looting could be easily seen and called out, now disguised as fiat money, it is abstracted and the average person cannot make this mental connection.
Money, as the YouTube video suggests, is the beginning that oft gets misunderstood. The poor man hates money for many reasons but rarely because the it becomes a tool of oppression and abstracted capital capture, as they never understand that this abstracted looting to call it out until it is too late (hyperinflation).
What's interesting too is that none calls the looting of war evil and we lionize such men as Alexander "the Great" and Ghenghis Khan who wrought havoc on the world because they were the epitome of power projection onto the masses, amassing such influence that they were like gods indeed.
Why, the gods get away with murder. These guys killed millions and weren't put to death or publicly shamed.
It's unheard of, perhaps, because we all have a beast inside of us who wants the same thing.
Enters Bitcoin into the chat, circa 2008.
Bitcoin does not promise vengeance for the man, woman or child oppressed and traumatized by a Machiavellian campaign bulldozing through their lives.
It promises constraints on these Machiavellian drives so that they are more honest, more accountable, more in a truer sense of the word.
Power is not evil and will not corrupt if it is earned by competence and steadfast proper thinking and acting.
Printing money is oft too much power. And indeed if the man is lesser than his money, he will come to ruin.
Bitcoin however also does not promise an anti-fraudulent order free from Randian moochers and looters, but it promises honest discourse and non-violent praxis (get your coins off the exchange, spread knowledge of self-sovereign thinking) so that there are less crocodile tears from all the SJW-like groups we have today, but also, less entitled Princes who can take for themselves whatever they want.
No, there is nobody stopping the invention of a perpetual motion electricity generator. That is silly.
It's just that the human has somehow realized how impossible this is.
So that either we devolve into senseless hedonism because life can be so hard...then you die. Or, evolve towards mindless power thirst akin to the comic book Viltrumites. Seeking battle and dishing death to "weakness" everywhere so that we what, conquer planet's?
In both directions, it is sad and lonely and cold.
We can do better.
In my opinion, the central banker will remain. As will the unionist.
The pharmacist will remain, as will the gender fluid person who by genetics or psychology, feels the need to embody the other gender in character if not (impossibly) in body.
What will change will be our removal of multiple competing truths to have one absolute truth to ground it all. Thou shall not counterfeit. Thou shall Bitcoin.
In this world we're heading towards, the central banker is akin to a masterful keeper of private keys, the unionist a passionate believer in human rights for his fellow workers who can detect the winds of looting from afar.
The pharmacist has a job to keep us biologically stable to the necessary minimum, while the gender fluid person, if they have the means, can safely explore their desires without projecting their other world view to the whole world.
In fact, all these outliers won't be so much if we fix the foundation of how exactly we exchange value. With What as the first step.
For now,
We're broke, and we compare and project too much with/to people who have nothing we need or even desire except power.
We just need our own communities where we can be powerful in our own ways, with a big global community running on real rails. One monetary rail.
Not some paper decrees that nobody can follow.
Or rather, that people form super hierarchies around to the detriment of themselves, their children, up to the 4th generation.
I think she acknowledged that there are good and bad industrialists, and showed how governments attempt to elevate bad ones.
Governments want to elevate their power, not bad industrialists. Bad industrialists happen when government prints money.
Without governments like Trumps one to seize the commodities of countries tries like Venezuela the capitalists would be a sad bunch indeed.
The government is what sets up the legal framework- the property rights and courts and contracts which enable capital to invest.
Good luck getting Venezuelas heavy crude flowing into the hungry veins of US imperialism without at least a semblance of rule of law in Venezuela- a semblance of course heavily in favour of the parasitic Big Oil US corporates who will suck the wealth from Venezuela and fund Trumps next adventure.
Governments are fundamental to the wealth of nations and stupid hysterical cunts like Rand will just never get it.
Indeed we have a beast inside all of us.
Crony capitalists, you mean.
I hope Venezuela actually has 600k Bitcoin and it cannot be seized.
In Rand's view the majority are moochers and the oppressed minority are the producers/architects/inventors.
She lionized Fransisco d'Anconia who's in the silver mining business and Galt's Gultch operates on a gold standard. I would say she was pretty aware of sound money.
The title should be: A Rant on Rand
Haha I tried not to. I guess I like Objectivism.
Machiavelli understood that acquisition and power often arise from the same human impulses regardless of moral framing. In the fiat system these impulses are masked by layers of abstraction making the act of exploitation harder to identify and therefore harder to resist.
Bitcoin’s core contribution here is to strip away some of that abstraction. By enforcing a verifiable and incorruptible monetary ledger it removes one of the most effective tools for unaccountable power. This is not a utopian guarantee of justice nor a protection against selfishness but it is a structural change that denies certain forms of exploitation their easiest path.
Your point about the persistence of central bankers unions and diverse social identities under a Bitcoin standard is astute. Human roles and differences will outlast any monetary reform. What changes is the foundation on which these roles interact. A money that cannot be counterfeited forces participants to operate with transparency and to earn influence through competence not through silent theft.
Ultimately the philosophical debate between Randian individualism and Machiavellian pragmatism shifts when the rules of value exchange are fixed and fair. The battlefield of ideas remains but the terrain changes. Bitcoin offers not the promise of an ideal society but the possibility of one where truth in economic measurement is constant and universal. That alone redefines the scope of what is possible for human cooperation and competition.