{"id":29354,"date":"2015-12-24T01:00:44","date_gmt":"2015-12-24T06:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=29354"},"modified":"2015-12-15T09:08:42","modified_gmt":"2015-12-15T14:08:42","slug":"qotd-ayn-rands-view-of-the-commercialization-of-christmas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/12\/24\/qotd-ayn-rands-view-of-the-commercialization-of-christmas\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Ayn Rand&#8217;s view of the commercialization of Christmas"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Ayn Rand, the poet-theorist of capitalism, had a clever Lucy-like line about the \u201ccommercialization of Christmas\u201d: she said it was the best thing about Christmas. \u201cThe gift-buying\u2009&#8230;\u2009stimulates an enormous outpouring of ingenuity in the creation of products devoted to a single purpose: to give men pleasure,\u201d she said in 1976. \u201cAnd the street decorations put up by department stores\u2009&#8230;\u2009provide the city with a spectacular display which only \u2018commercial greed\u2019 could afford to give us.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Rand saw exchange as the ideal model for all human relationships. Sometimes the free-marketeers who have borrowed her style and her ideas are accused of heartlessness for this attitude. Things like holidays and families, they say, should be shielded from the supposedly brutalizing effects of mere trade. What one notices about these arguments is that they smuggle in the notions of exchange and mutual advantage by the back door: everyone benefits selfishly from having havens from selfishness.<\/p>\n<p>What one notices about the people who make these arguments, on the other hand, is that they have an excuse for not being attuned to giving as much as they get in personal relationships or social environments. If you\u2019re exchange- or trade-minded, you will usually be asking yourself whether you\u2019re paying your parents back well for raising you, doing right by your friends, being a good guest when hospitality is extended, observing implied social contracts correctly.<\/p>\n<p>As Rand said, there is a Christmas ideal of \u201cgoodwill toward men\u201d that is connected with all these things, and not exclusive to Christianity. The gift-giving part of Christmas, the part where silly mammals rummage in the marketplace trying to please and surprise one another by selecting shiny material objects, has swallowed the part in which we celebrate rescue from hell. It\u2019s a good thing, Charlie Brown. Or a very entertaining sort of racket, at any rate.<\/p>\n<p>Colby Cosh, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.macleans.ca\/society\/peace-on-earth-and-good-commerce\/\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;Good grief! The commercialism of Christmas isn\u2019t so bad&#8221;, <em>Maclean&#8217;s<\/em><\/a>, 2014-12-25.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ayn Rand, the poet-theorist of capitalism, had a clever Lucy-like line about the \u201ccommercialization of Christmas\u201d: she said it was the best thing about Christmas. \u201cThe gift-buying\u2009&#8230;\u2009stimulates an enormous outpouring of ingenuity in the creation of products devoted to a single purpose: to give men pleasure,\u201d she said in 1976. \u201cAnd the street decorations put [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[831,25,10,41],"tags":[67,345,576],"class_list":["post-29354","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-economics","category-liberty","category-quotations","tag-aynrand","tag-christmas","tag-philosophy"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7Ds","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29354","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29354"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29354\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29355,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29354\/revisions\/29355"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}