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Saturday, March 06, 2021

A Contradiction I Frequently Notice

"To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one’s thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one’s mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality." -- John Galt in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged

I've come across some libertarians, even prominent ones, who simultaneously hold that:

  1. There are only individuals. The groups they organize are not collective "super-organisms" with their own rights, interests, property etc. that are separate from the rights, interests, property, etc. of their members; BUT
  2. A business model (the "corporation") in which only a collective, and not that collective's individual members/owners, can be held liable for torts or debts is defensible.
The first holding is clearly anti-collectivist. The second holding is clearly collectivist. They can't both be true. Logically, you have to pick (at most) one.

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