Philosophy: Who needs it?

Ayn Rand

Find this book at buch7.de | eurobuch.com | buchhandel.de | books.google.com ASIN=0451138937, Category: Philosophy, Language: E, cover: PB, pages: 228, year: 1982.

Quote (p60): If certain centuries are to be identified by their dominant characteristics, like the Age of Reason or the Age of Enlightenment, then ours is the Age of Guilt.
What is it that people dread - and what do they feel guilty of? They dread the unadmitted knowledge that their culture is bankrupt. They feel guilty, because they know that they have brought it to banruptcy and that they lack the courage to make a fresh start.

Quote (p61): The three values which men had held for centuries and which have now collapsed are mysticism, collectivism, altruism. Mysticism -as a cultural power- died at the time of the Renaissance. Collectivism -as a political ideal- died in World War II. As to altruism - it has never been alive. It is the poison of death in the blood of the Western Civilization, and men survived only to the extend to which they neither believed nor practiced it.

Quote (p63): In Western civilization, the period ruled by mysticism is known as the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages. I will assume that you know the nature of that period and the state of human existence in those ages. The Renaissance broke the rule of mystics. "Renaissance" means "rebirth". Few people today will care to remind you that it was a rebirth of reason - of man's mind.

Quote from the chapter entitled "Egalitarianism and Inflation" written 1974 (p125):

"Inflation is a man-made scrourge, made possible by the fact that most men do not understand it. It is a crime committed on so large a scale that its size is its protection: the integrating capacity of the victims' minds breaks down before the magnitude - and seeming complexity- of the crime, which permits it to be committed openly, in public. For centuries, inflation has been wrecking one country after another, yet men learn nothing, offer no resistance, and perish ..."

"AYN RAND's writing have altered and shaped the live of millions. This selection of essays is an example of her best."
-- Alan Greenspan [in 2001, longterm Chairman of the FED (Federal Reserve Bank of USA) ]

"In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value."
-- Alan Greenspan, from an article written in 1966 entitled "Gold and Economic Freedom". Quote found in The Federal Reserve: Instigating Crisis Since 1913, Minyanville Staff Aug 25, 2009*.

Let me close with a quote from John Maynard Keynes' road map for political survival amid an economic disaster, which I found in The Greenback Effect by WARREN E. BUFFETT Published: August 18, 2009:

"By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.... The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose."

Notes:
*) The article ends with the following words:

"When the next crisis causes the dollar to collapse and uncontrollable inflation to result, abolition of the Federal Reserve will become feasible. Average Americans have been victims of the boom and bust caused by the Federal Reserve policies. The sole beneficiaries have been bankers, politicians, the military industrial complex, and the super-rich elite."