Thursday, October 15, 2020

Two Areas in Which I Guess I Remain an Unreformed Randian ...

Area #1:

Over the last three days, I've come across at least two commentaries -- here and here -- on the need for "faith in freedom."

Rand: "A dogma is a set of beliefs accepted on faith; that is, without rational justification or against rational evidence."

Area #2:

I'm in the early stages of a critical reading of Murray N. Rothbard's For a New Liberty, which proceeds from postulation of non-aggression as an axiom.

Rand: "An axiomatic concept is the identification of a primary fact of reality, which cannot be analyzed, i.e., reduced to other facts or broken into component parts. It is implicit in all facts and in all knowledge. It is the fundamentally given and directly perceived or experienced, which requires no proof or explanation, but on which all proofs and explanations rest."

If libertarian ideas are important -- and I agree that they are -- they're important enough to build on solid underpinnings instead of on dodges like faith and fake axioms.

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