http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzMUWuA-Rq4&feature=player_embedded

But Cerf offered Rand an alternative: if she gave up 7 cents per copy in royalties, she could have the extra paper needed to print Galt’s oration. That she agreed is a sign of the great contradiction that haunts her writing and especially her life. Politically, Rand was committed to the idea that capitalism is the best form of social organization invented or conceivable.

Giving up her royalties to preserve her vision is something that no genuine capitalist, and few popular novelists, would have done.

So, what do you think capitalism is? Making a buck? Greed is good? Dog eats dog?

The following generally accepted definition, displayed even in Wiki, is equally misleading:

Capitalism is an economic and social system in which capital, the non-labor factors of production also known as the means of production, is privately controlled; labor, goods and capital are traded in markets; profits are distributed to owners or invested in technologies and industries; and wages are paid to labor.

Are you ready for the definition of capitalism? Want to think a little more?
Here it is:
Capitalism is a social system wherein two adults can freely enter into any contract between themselves.

When two people are not able to enter freely into a contract – it’s not capitalism. When one adult can freely pay another willing adult to medically treat him, that’s capitalism. When another person has to be preapproved (licensed) by somebody else, or when the treatment should be preapproved by somebody else (FDA), or when the payment should be received only from another person preapproved by somebody else (insurance), or when either of them has to pay to somebody else for the entering into the contract (taxes), then it is not capitalism.

What Ayn Rand and her publisher did was a true example of capitalistic exchange: both entered freely into a contract. Ayn Rand got something worthy from this contract, otherwise she wouldn’t have entered it. And the publisher did. The idiot who wrote the article doesn’t understand it:

Giving up her royalties to preserve her vision is something that no genuine capitalist, and few popular novelists, would have done.It is the act of an intellectual, of someone who believes that ideas matter more than lucre.

Look what I found on Internet:

All men are created equal. Therefore all persons alive on this earth are of equal value before the law.

Racism has no place on this planet, in any way, shape or form.

We reject positive action (or direct action, or positive discrimination) as a negative, discriminatory policy, which enslaves minorities within a social cast.

Believing in objective values, we reject quotas and other methods of social engineering. Work and functions must be allotted to those who are objectively best qualified for it, whatever their race, faith, age, gender or culture.

Striving for political neutrality, we have no business perpetuating socialist dialectic. Victims are people, who have been willfully and unjustifiably injured. Being born into a particular social cast, doesn’t constitute an injustice.

Of course, it is humane, honorable, and virtuous to help a fellow individual or a group ob people in time of need. It’s ok,  if your resources are exhausted, to ask other people to join you. But it’s not ok for person A to use person B to force person C to help person D,  especially if by doing it you are harming person E. That’s why I have doubts about affirmative action done by the government. After all, the whole idea of Publicani is based on the self-evident truth that all people are equal.

What do you think?