China would never agree and the British would never even raise the issue with the Chinese, or even notice Rand.
The Fountainhead Filibuster: Tales from Objectivist Katanga
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China would never agree and the British would never even raise the issue with the Chinese, or even notice Rand.
Winston Smith
Banned
Is it me, or does the "violation of economic rights" not make sense? The guys a volunteer, doing his work for free.
Exactly, and that's the problem! His gross immorality is massively undercutting the local suppliers, and in fact undercutting the very nature of the antisocial contract! Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? Not if some hippy volunteer doctor is giving away the same thing for free!
Meerkat92
Banned
But if he's too stupid to charge a price for his services like a non-parasite, then he must know that his services are too shitty to rationalize putting a price on! So why waste your time with him anyway?
Um, whaaat ?!
Listen to this song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHWmxCoTV3Y
Interesting article on Randist monetary policy:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2...yn_rand_fandom_means_for_monetary_policy.html
http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2...yn_rand_fandom_means_for_monetary_policy.html
Aids 20 years early? Maybe this timeline is eligible for a Vlad Tepes award (now that I know what they're awarded for).
I was actually reading about how blood samples in Kinshasa dating from 1958 have tested positive for HIV, so this isn't really such a stretch- although the presence of a large population of black African IV drug users (many of them migrant workers) and, erm, more libertine sexual mores among the jet-set sections of the Katangan population are going to send out some ripples.
Haha, I'm really glad somebody got that! There's also one more hidden pop culture reference in the last chapter that nobody's quite got yet.
Honestly, I think you should wait until the end of the TL before trying to award any Vlad Tepes awards to a TL about the Congo. I mean, this is the place in OTL where 5 million people have died in Civil War.
True but what with an objectivist filibuster and aids 20 years early it doesn't look like any kind of improvement next to OTL.
This is exactly the thing that is not going to happen ATL. I'm still playing around with how American conservatism will develop with Ayn Rand as an insane fringe figure.....well, a more insane, bloodthirsty, African warlord fringe figure...and I'm coming to some interesting conclusions.
Although there's still going to be a Chicago school, and a Hayek and a Milton Friedman and all that, there's not going to be this sort of ethical, driving fire behind the pro-free market, supply-side policies that make up Neoliberalism OTL. Republicans aren't going to up and start loving state intervention and Keynesianism, but they aren't going to be so wedded to inflation-phobic privatization sprees.
I'd look to Nixon and Goldwater- basically pre-Reagan US republicans- broadly for how things are going to develop for the US right without Rand. There might be some more libertarian influences, maybe, but overall American conservatism is going to be more about, well, conservatism, and less about driving the government out of the economy with flame and sword. They're going to expect stuff like Amtrak to make money, and they might (haha, will) want to cut back on social programs, but anybody talking about privatizing social security or shutting down government run mental institutions in the Republican party will look like- and be treated like- they're fucking crazy.
Now the real interesting part is how the Democrats are going to wind up. I'm not gonna go into too much depth but due to butterflies and especially due to how differently the UN winds up, the party of foreign military adventurism will not have an elephant on the side. Not to worry, though- American liberals are willing to pay any price, bear any burden for a better world.
Ding ding ding! Everybody is going "Oh my god this TL is so awful!" when really, all this shit basically happened in real life, with Bob Denard's les affreux running wild in the Congo and other bands of mercenaries straight-up enslaving people in Katanga. Katanga OTL was a crisis which itself kicked off a period of Congolese history full of all sorts of bizzare foreign intervention (French, Belgians, basically every Great Lakes state, Moroccans?), economic exploitation, and perpetually full of bands of gang-raping high-out-of-their-minds teenagers with rifles.
Yeah, there are Objectivists running around, yeah Tshombe's Katanga is morphing from a shabby neocolonial secessionist regime into a hyper-ideological settler puppet state, yeah a lot of heinous shit is going to come out of that, yeah they have ex-Nazi mad scientists building them jet fighters and they've got Amphetamine cigarettes and Scientologist arms smugglers, but this TL is becoming an exercise- for me at least- in compressing the most insane stuff that actually happened into one time and space.
It's an absurd TL, and I'm having a huge amount of fun with it, but like all good AH- I'm thinking about stuff like Fight and Be Right here- You read it and have a "woah" moment and realize that, absent a few devices, a lot of that stuff actually happened.
I like your interpretation of this TL's context, but I was kinda diverted here because I thought for a second you meant that Michigan and Wisconsin invaded the Congo.
Now the real interesting part is how the Democrats are going to wind up. I'm not gonna go into too much depth but due to butterflies and especially due to how differently the UN winds up, the party of foreign military adventurism will not have an elephant on the side. Not to worry, though- American liberals are willing to pay any price, bear any burden for a better world.
Much will depends on how Vietnam go, just the absence of McNamara is an huge butterfly (but not only here, for all the shit he is got, he basically keep the nuclear arsenal more in control retiring all that pre-signed authorization order give by Ike and stopped the expensive and not really functional pet project of the bomber mafia like the B-70). The war in Vietnam basically assured that for more than a decade (hell till Desert Storm) no serius deployment of USA ground troops was even thinkable and the radicalization of the protest (plus watergate) greatly shaped the Democrats.
One of the more vicious and flamboyant African militias, the "Cheese heads" were known for their bright colored triangular hats, absolute faith in the Green Bay Packers, and frequent, brutal machete massacres.
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