Some people may find my critique nitpicky or reading too much into what is stated. And some might say that I just don’t really understand what is stated because I haven’t investigated it enough, or read the literature from them enough. All I am doing is contributing to the conversation about these things. Perhaps some of these things look simple, but when challenged appear more complex or difficult than originally thought. Maybe some things in fact aren’t really principles. When the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were being written, it took months of vigorous debate. The principles in those documents did not readily appear, and no one person agreed with all that was written. Also, thoroughly discussing and challenging what is written in the Constitution and Bill of Rights can yield a greater understanding and appreciation for them, and perhaps reveal shortcomings. Maybe the same can be said for the statements of Free Capitalist.
I am not affiliated with Free Capitalist or have any involvement with any company that does any business with them, to my knowledge.
15 comments:
I saw your post on the FreeCapitalist website and want you to know I really appreciate what you’re doing here.
I also saw Rick’s response telling you to change the name of your blog or face legal action. Don’t be swayed by this threat. He’s full of it. FreeCapitalist may be a trademark but that doesn’t stop you from using in the way you’re doing it. What you’re offering is criticism that falls under the realm of commentary. Rick is simply paranoid that people will Google FreeCapitalist and come across your blog. You could have a blog called IBM critique or New York Giants critique and you’d still be safe. So long as you aren’t pretending your associated with the FreeCaptialst project or try to make money off the trademark you’re fine. Rick is simply trying to intimitdate you. He doesn’t understand anything about intellectual property.
Thanks for the info and the support.
I would also like to thank you for your thoughts. You appear to be genuinely interested in an honest discussion of these ideas, as opposed to the anonymous poster who appears to become gleeful at any prospect of taking the Free Capitalist down a notch. He is not an honest seeker of truth or understanding. I sincerely believe that if you will maintain an attitude of sincere truth seeking as opposed to tearing down, you will become satisfied with what Rick and The Free Capitalist Project have to offer. Thanks again.
"I would also like to thank you for your thoughts."
I appreciate that. Thank you. And I thank you participating here.
utahn,
I would very much like to chat with you offline via email. Is there a way I can get in touch with you?
anonymous, no sorry. I want this to be a discussion out in the open. If you have anything you would like me to see, please post it here. If you have anything that you don't feel comfortable posting here, then I don't think I want to see it. I am only debating ideas, and I am not getting involved in anything beyond that.
I'm interested to know how you came across the Free Capitalist Project and what prompted you to choose it as the object of your critique. Granted, there is plenty to discuss and I think you are going about it the right way, but with so many companies out there, I'm curious what persuaded you to spend so much time on this one as opposed to, say, Wal-Mart, or Nu-Skin, or Carlton Sheets or the Mike Watson Institute etc, etc. I find your points of view well thought out and articulate so I'm not coming down on you-just wondering...
Sorry- I didn't mean to be anonymous-
Thanks for the well thought out and worded critique, I for one enjoyed it and hope you will continue to provide a perspective.
I would like to thank everyone who has posted on here. I have read every comment, but I have refrained from writing "thanks" to many of them just because I didn't want to cause their to be too many comments, especially from me. So this is where I'd like to say thank you to everyone that has commented, both to those that agree with me, and those that disagree.
It's important, I think, to have a meeting of the minds in order to really discuss anything, and this doesn't mean that there is agreement, but rather just understanding. After understanding the other's view comes endorsement or critique. However, I had expected that an argument against my critique would be that there really hadn't been an understanding on my part, that my disagreement with the Free Capitalist movement would be due mostly to the fact that I didn't understand what they taught. I don't claim to know everything they teach, but I did go to their own sources that are available publicly to anyone and I responded to that. Like I wrote in the Pyramid Scheme post, once the essence of something is understood, the details will not change the essence (otherwise, you didn't get to the essence in the first place). People may disagree that I did get to the essence of a lot of these things, but that's why this is a discussion, and anyone is free to critique my critique.
I wanted to participate in the "discussion" (what little there was) of the Free Capitalist movement, so I did, and I didn't expect my critique to be the last word. So I thank you all for making this an actual discussion.
There's still more I want to write on all this, 2 or 3 really big points, but I think I've made most of my critique, although I keep learning new things all the time.
The next post is going to be on where the core philosophy of the Free Capitalist movement has come from, which I think will be a very important post. Please stay tuned for that.
still looking foward to your conclusive post....
I have posted the much-anticipated (by some) article on where the ideas of the Free Capitalist movement come from. That's the piece that I think explains most everything else.
This article I believe to be the most important. Everything else seems to hinge on it.
http://freecapitalistcritique.blogspot.com/
I read much of the original post on your blog and wanted to respond. It's strange that there are only positive comments on your blog, here. What's that about? Or did I miss something?
Anyway, I think you're having a knee-jerk reaction to Rick Koerber and Ayn Rand.
Let's stick with Rand. You would do well to read all of her writings and estalish more context for her philosophy. I, too, am bothered by the Atheism that is there, but aside from that, her philosophy closely paralells the gospel.
The idea that, "you shouldn't work for the benefit of others" is simply explained by the fact that no one really works for the benefit of others, including you. Or am I wrong and you put in 40 hours a week for free? How do you make a living? You greedy capitalist. How dare you take money for something you have said you should only be doing because you love your fellow man? Working out of love is a great ideal, but in reality, it is impossible to not be rewarded for any kind of work/service/value creation in which we engage. If it's evil to seek rewards, why are the scriptures so explicit about the rewards that always correspond to service and obedience. Is the desire for happiness or any other reward evil? I believe you are the childish one, not miss Rand if you believe that you or anyone on earth is doing much of anything productive with absolutely no thought of reward, and money (or the things it can buy) is one earthly reward.
In closing, the overall message I get from Ayn Rand is that the initiation of force is evil. And to seize goods/services/products is the very definition of the initiation of force. Slavery was supposedly outlawed in our country, but it has existed for at least 75 years. Who are the slaves? The Producers. The government, through the initiation of force, tells the producers for whom they can produce, how much, how and how not to. They control everything and then take, by force, a huge proportion of the reward from those who earned it. This evil is what we all as Americans should be concerned with and fighting against. Not squealing like stuck pigs about people whose shoes we're not worthy to shine. By the way, I believe the scriptures when they say "ye shall know them by their fruits." I've seen Rand's and Koerber's fruits and it's apples and excrement when I compare them to yours, here
Scott: I don't think most of the comments on this blog are positive. If you take out my own posts, most of them are from people in the Free Capitalist movement. I haven't done anything to delete or change any comments.
Look, as for working only for yourself. There is a blog article on this which I hope you have read. You gave me an example of working for yourself, but that doesn't mean you always and only do things for your own benefit. As Koerber says, you never work for anyone else's benefit. In fact, you can't, he argues, because anything you ever do ultimately just benefits yourself. So you always work for your own benefit. That's not true.
Obviously we all spend plenty of time working for out own benefit, but that's not the same that you only work for your own benefit, ever. And that's what Koerber says. Listening to the audio clip in the article titled "You Only Serve Others for Your Own Ultimate Benefit"
As for me knee-jerking, c'mon, I've only been reading official Free Cap stuff and listening to hours of free Cap Radio archives, writing blog articles and engaging in defenses of what I write with people in the free Cap movement. I've probably spent more time on this stuff than lots of people in the movement.
As for Ayn Rand, yeah she's got some good points. The dystopia she portrays in the book in messed up. People's rights are being infringed; productivity is being quashed. I'm on board with that. Forcing people to produce for you is evil. I'm with her on that. But we part ways pretty soon after that. She develops this philosophy about why that's evil and what would be moral, but she's way wrong. And if you follow her ideas (and she does too in the book by creating a utopia based on her ideas), you end up with one messed up society and with messed up views of people, and rights, and morality. And then if you try to live them in real life, which is what I think Koerber and the Free Cap people are trying to do, all those errors in Ayn Rand's philosophy go from being a mental exercise to real-life problems.
I suppose if people want to create a society and experiment and say, "let's live according to Ayn Rand's priciples in Altas Shrugged," I'd be interested in seeing the outcome. If people say, hey this is what the scriptures really mean, and this is the "correct" interpretation of what the church leaders are saying, and if you disagree then you are a "consumer" and "scarcity-minded" and if people are falling for this, getting in way over their head, constantly telling me and others that we need to come to these seminars to learn the "ancient" principles of finance and what the founders knew, and so that I can be "financially free" like them, and I look around and no one is offering any critique....well that's when I go start up a blog and give my opinion.
Thanks for getting around to posting your latest blog. I am sure you have been putting in alot of time in your research, I also have been doing some reading of my own. I think you did a fine job on your other critiques but have to admit that I was hoping that this one would be alittle more enlightning and decisive.
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