Jason Hartman hosts Dr. David Kelley on this 10th Episode. Dr. Kelley gives us a brief overview of his background as founder of The Atlas Society and current Chief Intellectual Officer for the society. He explains the basic principles of Ayn Rand and how he applied them to her life. The discussion ends with thoughts on the entitlement mentality that’s seen throughout the nation and the consequences of this mindset.
Announcer 0:01
This show is produced by the Hartman media company. For more information and links to all our great podcasts, visit Hartman media.com.
Announcer 0:11
Welcome to the holistic survival show with Jason Hartman. The economic storm brewing around the world is set to spill into all aspects of our lives. Are you prepared? Where are you going to turn for the critical life skills necessary to survive and prosper? The holistic survival show is your family’s insurance for a better life. Jason will teach you to think independently to understand threats and how to create the ultimate action plan. sudden change or worst case scenario, you’ll be ready. Welcome to ballistic survival, your key resource for protecting the people, places and profits you care about in uncertain times. Ladies and gentlemen, your host, Jason Hartman.
Jason Hartman 0:59
Welcome to the show. This is Jason Hartman, your host and every 10th episode, we do something kind of special kind of different. What we do is we go off topic, so regardless of which show it is on the Hartman media network, whether it be one of the financial shows economics, real estate investing, a travel, longevity, all of the other topics that we have every 10th episode, we go off topic, and we explore something of general interest, something of general life success value. And so many of our listeners around the world in 164 countries have absolutely loved our 10th episode shows. So that’s what we’re going to do today. And let’s go ahead and get to our guests with a special 10th episode show. And of course, on the next episode, we’ll be back to our regular programming. Here we go. And it’s my pleasure to welcome Dr. David Kelly to the show. He is founder and now retired chief intellectual officer of the Atlas society, coming to us from Washington, DC David, welcome. How are you?
Dr David Kelley 2:06
Thanks, Jason. I’m great. It’s good to have you. So
Jason Hartman 2:09
what is the Atlas society?
Dr David Kelley 2:11
The Atlas society is an organization founded in 1990, to promote the ideas of iron Rand and her philosophy of objectivism. And to do it with a, I think, a greater spirit of openness and engagement with people who are interested in the ideas, but not necessarily convinced yet, we also have, of course, a great many people who are, you know, lifelong objectivist as a way of life and the way of thought, but we wanted to promote the ideas to promote scholarship, reaching deeper and exploring the ideas at a fully academic way really, and but also to teach what it means to apply the ideas to grow in life and to the political and cultural issues that we have around us surely published a huge amount of articles and now lots and lots of videos and audio courses and so forth.
Jason Hartman 3:06
Yeah, it is really amazing the movement eine Rand started and and how her book sales, I guess, especially of Atlas Shrugged are that well give or take 1200 page masterwork tour de force, exactly. how well it sells years later, and how, at least when Obama was president, she really predicted a lot of things. It was some many things were sadly coming true. Maybe the pattern is reversed. We can talk about that. But um, what do you attribute that to? Why has the EIN Rand philosophy Why has objectivism been so enduring?
Dr David Kelley 3:43
Well, I think there are two reasons. One is the point you just mentioned that the book was written in 1957. But readers today, readers during the Obama era, and I would say even it continues into the Trump era. So many things are happening around us in the real world, that very relatable to the sequence of events that she described in Atlas Shrugged, which is a story about a society in which government is increasingly growing, adding layers upon layer of regulation, wielding increasing power, controlling investments, business, and to the point where if growth slows, and people start, economy ultimately collapses, but so many of the steps along the way, in the novel are happening, not exactly she wrote, she wasn’t literally kind of predict she was telling the story. But anyway, that her oppressions is I would say one big factor. Another one is simply that this is a great book. It’s an intellectual thriller. It has a philosophical mystery at its core, it has larger than life characters, but ones that you can relate to as ideals as heroes. It has a very inspiring call for freedom, both political and economic freedom, but also the human freedom to aspire and follow. Your dream. So I think many many people have related to different aspects of it. Atlas Shrugged was a very big into a huge influence on the libertarian movement. But it’s also over the years I’ve met so many people who aren’t all that interested in politics per se but they say it changed my life. It gave me the courage to do something that bold, risky, but ultimately really fulfilling. Sure, sure. You mentioned the characters. And I don’t know how much of this you want to give away because many people listening probably haven’t read the book. Maybe some aren’t even familiar with iron Rand. But the famous question is who is john Galt? Yeah. Well, we can ask the question because the novel actually starts with that question. That’s the first line of the book. But I really hate to give away spoilers. But then john Galt is a character who the phrase who is john Galt is introduced in the book as a symbol of despair and resignation to what seems to be a general decline in the economy and people’s lives. And it becomes increasingly clear that there actually is a person named john Galt we don’t meet him until part three, the last known part of the novel, and we learn why we get the answer to several big mysteries about what’s been going on in the story up to that point. So I hate the giveaway. The
Jason Hartman 6:32
I wasn’t actually asking you to give it away. Yeah, I was I was sort of teasing the the idea there a little bit. So I hope you didn’t think I was asking for a spoiler. But it’s interesting, you know, let’s talk about how this interplays with the economy, because so many of our listeners are investors, and they’re thinking about personal finance, and, and so forth. The age old? Well, maybe it’s not it’s age old enough, but it’s not that old. I would argue that the most famous economist who ever lived, sadly, was Karl Marx. Right?
Dr David Kelley 7:07
Is that a fair statement? I think, in terms of the following that he gathered, absolutely. I don’t think he was a very good economist. I don’t think so either. But he influenced more of the human race than possibly any other non religious figure, okay. And while it kind of became a religion, sadly, in that desperate experiment, has just failed many places on earth, and many times in history, and we see this movement in America from the left, you know, with AOC, and Bernie Sanders and, and others, promoting these same wornout ideas that just fail every time. Why is that happening? It boggles the mind boggles my mind, at least, I think the answer lies in ethics. You know, like Karl Marx wrote Kopitar, which is enrolled work of economics, but what really attracted the following is not people who were, you know, reading his economic textbook saying, Oh, yeah, that’s right. No, they were responding to his calls for equality, for distributing goods, from the capitalists, to the workers. And that is still the same siren call that people have today. You can hardly lose in politics by offering some people something for nothing. And Marx was, you know, his famous statement from each according to his ability to each according to his need help, and people thought, okay, I like that morality. I like this brotherhood, it’s solidarity is all truism. And those are morally good things. And that’s why it keeps coming back. Because you can point out the economic disasters and the political disasters of the communist era, all you want, but you have to get out and this is what we specialize in. at the Alamo society, you have to get at the corrupt moral Foundation, you have to defend the individual’s moral right to live his own life, and to deal with other people freely.
Jason Hartman 9:12
That’s what people never realize, though. It’s like this childish mentality that just says, give me give me give me you know, redistribute the wealth, give me free health care, give me free this, give me free that, but they never stopped to consider that someone actually has to produce some value in the economy. To pay for that. You have to enslave another human, essentially at the point of a gun because that’s what it all comes down to, you know, if you don’t pay your taxes, eventually, people will show up at your door with guns and handcuffs, and take you away. And that’s slavery, right? You can’t be anything else.
Dr David Kelley 9:56
But this is where Marx was very clever and the Marxist today are very clever. Because they say, okay, you can call that slavery. But look, in a capitalist economy workers have slaves of the the owners, the owners are just after profit, they exploited the worker, right? consumers. And so we’re just countering one form of coercion with another form of coercion. Now, that’s, that’s,
Jason Hartman 10:19
that’s what they say. And that’s exactly where I wanted you to go with this discussion. By the way, that’s exactly where I wanted you to go. Because the crux of it seems to be this age old debate between the value of labor versus the value of capital. And I’d like to get into that with you. But just finish finish up your point there, if you would, and then we’ll
Dr David Kelley 10:42
go there. Yes. And I think the the underlying connection here is that Marx also introduced class analysis, last conflict, and his focused on, you know, workers versus capitalists, business owners, and investors, today that’s been expanded to, you know, men exploiting women, White’s exploiting, you know, minorities, this whole idea of political correctness is essentially about class conflict. And they got that idea from Marx. So once you set up class conflict, it just under completely undermines the idea of a free economy of people who are dealing peacefully and voluntarily with each other. Some succeed more than others fine. But no one loses out from being part of a, you know, an economy in the long run. That is free. Yeah, the most productive people shower, all kinds of benefits on us way beyond any wealthy, they actually get person.
Jason Hartman 11:38
But some of them do get incredible wealth. But the question is, you know, it’s a question of allocation, look at Capital always has some restriction on it. And labour always has some limit to what it can earn. So the question is always really just a matter of degree, right? I mean, nobody’s going to invest, or save, to have the ability to invest in the first place. If capital formation isn’t rewarded. The fools on the left don’t seem to understand that they think, you know, investors should get no return on their money, right? But of course, they don’t, they won’t invest. If they don’t get a return. They won’t bother to form capital, everybody will just be living a hedonistic instant gratification life, if there’s no reward for delaying gratification. Right. Right. Although in that case, it will be a declining form of hedonism because it will lead to increasing poverty. Sure, no argument there. But I’m just saying that the decision we all have to make every day with virtually everything we do, is do I want a reward now? Or do I want to wait and delay gratification for a bigger reward later, we can all just eat till, you know, we become gluttons. We can have sex all day, you know, we can get drunk, we can abuse our bodies for a momentary pleasure, or we can just be spendthrifts and spend all our money and not save any, and not invest any. But we have to be rewarded for something longer term, there has to be a vision of a bigger future, to delay gratification today, right? I mean, that’s in essence, the debate we all have, right as humans, and we make trade offs in both directions for that. But how much should capital be rewarded? versus how much should labor be rewarded? It does seem to me that capital is rewarded pretty highly nowadays, in at least in the US. And you know, those on the left would say labor doesn’t get enough reward. You know, why are people at Walmart only making minimum wage versus the, you know, I heard Bernie Sanders yesterday yelling about the Walmart family is, you know, they got a company worth 100 and $80 billion, and people are making $11 an hour, blah, blah, blah, you know, where do you how do you rationalize that?
Dr David Kelley 14:02
If we were talking about a genuinely free economy, people who invest and have the insight and risk tolerance to create a business in the first place, they are creating the opportunity for other people to work and earn money by in the form of a salary or a wage. And that’s something that didn’t exist before the business created and the investors behind it created the origin of the company in the first place. So you know, people get used to saying, Well, you know, there ought to be a job for everybody. Well, wait a minute, who creates those jobs. So the people who are working at Walmart, they chose to work there. They could leave. The Walmart family is not going to their house with guns and dragging them in right and making them work at gunpoint. Sure. They’re choosing to do that. Right now. The way an economy works is it’s competitive. There’s competition among businesses, to get what survival businesses right consumers, but there are Competition for workers. Absolutely. And it ends up being supply and demand.
Jason Hartman 15:04
The funny thing that’s happened in today’s world is somehow this country has degraded to the point where people think these what should be transient minimum wage jobs or like permanent careers. He’s Since when did that then it wasn’t that way when I was a kid, no one thought that, hey, I’m gonna go to work at Walmart or McDonald’s for the rest of my life or be in food service. These were transitional things that, you know, young people did to get their life going. Now somehow it’s considered a career, I don’t get it. What happened?
Dr David Kelley 15:39
Well, the more people adopt an entitlement mentality, the more they think they’re entitled to this, that and the other thing, I mean, we have entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, etc. But the entitlement mentality is broader than that, is the idea that it’s somebody else’s responsibility to create a job that will give me a salary that I’m comfortable with. No, you’re not entitled to that. People will offer it because it’s a good deal. If you are willing and able to work, I can tell you as as having created and run the Atlas society for almost 30 years, I was desperate for good people. When I found someone who’s got he would do almost anything for them within the realm of financial possibility. And I think I mean, especially today, a lot of people in business are saying, you know, they’re scrambling to find workers any way they can. So, you know, going back to the entitlement mentality, people are, we’ve partly created that in time with mentality through government programs and offering a lot of entitlements. Oh, great things like the minimum wage, right. And also, a really awful aspect of the mixed economy today, is the kind of mostly municipal licensing that makes it extremely difficult for very poor people, especially, you know, minorities, blacks in New York, Hispanics, elsewhere, they can’t just start a business around that, that again, this ties into that life. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. You see, in developing countries, you see people selling stuff on the street. Now, granted, those countries have a capital formation problem. And that’s why they’re
Jason Hartman 17:14
selling stuff on the street, rather than buying a franchise and opening a real store. But at least they can be entrepreneurs. The regulation here prohibits people from doing that you get arrested, if you open a lemonade stand, you know, the minimum wage causes unemployment, because when the government gets in the middle of a transaction that two parties want to do, but the government says no, you can’t do this, because we’re making it illegal, then you have no meritocracy, right? If they’re really low skilled people want a job, and you want to pay them five bucks an hour versus 10 bucks an hour. What this is the government to get in the middle of that? Yeah. Where did that come from?
Dr David Kelley 17:59
labor. I mean, in purely economic terms, labor is like any other commodity, there’s supplies, there’s demand. And the demand for labor on the part of those who have jobs to water is a demand that’s based on what can this person produce? That person has to be able to produce? You know, enough to cover the wage that I have to pay him? I’m the owner. So we’re living wage people. That’s even if you have to start at a very low salary, like you $5 an hour. If you’re any good, you’re not going to stand you’re gonna go. Yeah, you’re gonna rise? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. No. I mean, I started working at 16. You know, picking up trash in the city parks. dollar, I think was dollar 15 hour. Right. Right. Right. I didn’t do that for very long. Right, exactly, you know, not just because, I mean, I had lots of advantages. So I’m not comparing myself chermoula. Yeah. Who are much worse situations, but that’s a universal
Jason Hartman 18:54
trait as well. Didn’t I didn’t have lots of advantages. And, and I somehow figured it out. And, you know, everybody starts off with, you know, rich parents, poor parents, tragedies, some people rise above them, others don’t. We’ve all heard the stories, Horatio Alger rags to riches stories, look at there’s more socio economic mobility in the US than probably any other country on Earth. So the point is, if we have this embedded mentality in our culture of entitlement that is toxic, because everybody is just going to act like they have a chip on their shoulder, and they’re never going to do anything. It’s so disempowering, isn’t it?
Dr David Kelley 19:33
It is. It’s really appalling today, because the polarization that everyone talks about is it’s partly political, and that’s one domain. But there’s also just a kind of much wider sense in that tagging ism among people that I’m seeing everywhere. I’m seeing on campuses I’m seeing workers in to some extent in the meat to movement, although there are many cases there are many valid points that the feminists make there. But still, I would say there are two things that people Just not getting. One is that when you make a trade, it’s when when, if you’re free to make that great or not, you’re not going to make them unless you think what you’re getting is better than what you have to give up. And that includes saving for the future, which is also brings in the second point. You know, that’s an exercise of rationality. That’s one of the reasons I’m, you know, I’m so big on iron Rand, because that’s one of our core virtues is being rational. And the whole idea that you can just not even think about the feature is irrational.
Jason Hartman 20:33
Yep, absolutely. Okay. Well wrap this up for us, if you would, and just answer one more question. What is the difference between closed objectivism and open objectivism? I’d never heard that before. There’s some distinction there, right. Yeah, this
Dr David Kelley 20:46
goes back to the conflict I was having back ladies 90, which led me to found the my organization, a conflict with the Iran Institute. The idea of closed objectivism as I understand it is that objectivism as a philosophy is all but only what Iran said or wrote or endorsed, while she was alive. That is, it’s a fixed closed systems, nothing will be added to the philosophy. It is complete. And all we can do is expound what Ren said to me as an intellectual, as a philosopher, that struck me as crazy as when I began to realize that that was part of the operating policy. I think of objectivism as a body of knowledge, like any other body of knowledge. I mean, I use Darwin as as an example. Darwin, you know, was a genius who created the theory of evolution, but the theory of evolution didn’t stop with Darwin Darwinism, you know, we could say, keeps expanding by people who biologists are adding to his insights standing on his shoulders. And you say the same thing. But you know, physics and Isaac Newton, or Einstein. So, I think there are a lot of questions in philosophy that Iran did not address. I’m it’s amazing the number that she did, um, she was a genius. But there’s still lots of questions that we’d like to develop good and solid answers do. And so that means, the idea of open objectivism is that the philosophy is open to expansion to possible revision, if we find out that things have to be revised, not the core principles, it does have a core set of ideas, if I believed that those were false, I would certainly not call myself an objectivist. But I think there are lots of things that are not at the surface. And that’s what I do as a philosopher is explore and write about those issues. And I think I’ve advanced the philosophy in various ways.
Jason Hartman 22:38
Good, good. Wrap up the discussion we were having and give out your website for so just go back to the discussion. And just give us a closing thought on that and give out your website, if you would.
Dr David Kelley 22:48
Our website is Atlas society dot orgy. We have a huge library of articles going back over 30 years about the philosophy. We also have lots and lots of videos, audio courses. And we also have a now a very active Facebook page. So you can just search for Atlas society. On Facebook, we have one of our things that we do a lot of is the graphic means, you know, just a picture and a saying and just make a quick point, you know, a quick point. Yeah. Right. So, but they’re, they’re very effective. I urge your listeners who might be interested or who are already familiar with iron Rand, to take a look at the site. And I think what you’ll find there, among many other things is much more discussion of the kinds of issues that Jason You and I have been talking about, especially you know, the difference between crony capitalism and real capitalism, the role of the effects of government intervention on the economy in all the different ways it does everything from Social Security, to minimum wage to national licensure right down the board. These are very important topics. So
Jason Hartman 23:57
go check out Atlas society.org and Dr. David Kelly, thanks again for joining us.
Dr David Kelley 24:03
That’s it. My pleasure.
Jason Hartman 24:07
Thank you so much for listening. Please be sure to subscribe so that you don’t miss any episodes. Be sure to check out the show’s specific website and our general website heart and Mediacom for appropriate disclaimers and Terms of Service. Remember that guest opinions are their own. And if you require specific legal or tax advice, or advice and any other specialized area, please consult an appropriate professional. And we also very much appreciate you reviewing the show. Please go to iTunes or Stitcher Radio or whatever platform you’re using and write a review for the show we would very much appreciate that. And be sure to make it official and subscribe so you do not miss any episodes. We look forward to seeing you on the next episode.