Conversation

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our OT was about "capitalism as an ideal". Rand might have little to do with the operations of real capitalism, but functions as an important point of ideology, with "big believers" including Alan Greenspan. Its driven the propaganda mills for years.
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This is like claiming Ayn Rand is to capitalism as Jesus or Martin Luther are to Christianity or Marx, Lenin, or Mao to communism. It simply isn’t true. There is an impedance mismatch between the scale, scope and contents of the thing being pointed to by the term versus Randism
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I didn't say Ayn Rand founded capitalism or is central to it; I said that she provided a form of capitalist idealism that has been greatly useful to ideologues of capitalism, which is absolutely true.
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"there is no real belief system called capitalism, which works and reproduces itself according to principles other than ideology. Ayn Rand types are unimportant; not foundational; the system would work just fine without them."
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Yes, this is our disagreement. Capitalism would continue to exist if all ideologues trying to speak for or against it disappeared in a way that’s not true of any true ideology.
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That is what capitalism wants you to believe -- that it is as natural and inevitable and ultimate as the laws of physics. There is an ideological industry devoted to promoting this view, and an emerging movement in the streets devoted to refuting it. Winner TBD.
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I don’t think I’m buying into that, while that industry does exist as you say. This is my Occam’s razor fit to the history of commerce as I understand it from reading history. But I don’t think it’s “necessary” in an argument-by-nature sense, or teleologically inevitable.
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Ie it summarizes the history of commerce so far pretty well, even into certain animal behaviors in apes, but there’s no absolute reason to believe it can’t be supplanted by a stable form of Star Trek post-scarcity for eg.