[asveikau]

Such Randian nonsense. If the dems are such egalitarians and want to destroy the wealth of others, why do you have growing disparity and retain the Bush tax rates? And if you say Obama has more of this than Clinton, why are wealthy people paying less taxes now than they did in the 90s?

[javert]

> Such Randian nonsense

What I said is my own opinion, didn't come from Rand.

All the supposed refutations of Rand online are laughably ridiculous, including the popular one by Huemer. Until you provide a reasonable one, please don't dismiss people by linking them to Rand. (And please never dismiss ideas by _falsely_ linking them to Rand, as you did in this case.)

As to all the other stuff you said: Obama can't set tax rates unilaterally.

[asveikau]

> As to all the other stuff you said: Obama can't set tax rates unilaterally.

If you had been following "negotiations" with Congress (take late 2010 as an example) you'd know that the president basically did a song and dance where he started out pretending he wanted higher taxes and proceeded to leave things exactly the same.

He did not assert his strong position in that. If Congress literally did nothing, taxes would have been raised. He declined to fight for the tax-raising side of that argument and forfeited a superior negotiating position. If he really believed it in the beginning, he did not think highly enough of it to do what he could have.

Edit: removing trollish comment about Rand, because it's bad to flamebait. Let me just say that it was clear to me from your comment that you have been influenced by folks nearing the Rand side of the spectrum, and that you can cease to compare it with Rand but it still comes out awfully similar... Thus I don't hesitate to say, even after your objections, that the comment was very Randian, in the sense that it is Rand-like.

[javert]

For all I know, Obama traded advocating higher taxes for getting Obamacare through.

A short list of partial evidence for what I said about Obama: Blocking the keystone pipeline, his foreign policy, Obamacare, attending a church for many years where the evil of America was explicitly preached, involvement with Bill Ayers, his explicit pragmatism (i.e., denial of any valid principles), his election being the first day he was proud of America (according to his wife).

Anyway, the "egalitarian-nihilist" label needs much broader observations and analysis to validate than any list I could give you. But that's some stuff I have a problem with.

> the comment was very Randian, in the sense that it is Rand-like.

That's simply untrue. Rand said that nihilism and egalitarianism are bad (among many other things). But we simply do not know if she would apply those labels to Obama. As an Objectivist, I can tell you that there are some things where her applying her philosophy is more straightforward if you understand it, but this is not one of them.

(The reason it is tricky is because Obama doesn't come out and say what he believes, and chances are, he doesn't have any specific opinion on these kinds of abstractions. So we have to infer what's going on in his mind from what he says and does.)

[asveikau]

> For all I know, Obama traded advocating higher taxes for getting Obamacare through.

He had already signed the healthcare bill 9 months prior to the events I am talking about. And again, one must understand that he was in a position where if nobody did anything, the person favoring higher taxes would win. It took effort to get the outcome that we did.

> As an Objectivist,

Thanks for confirming.