Objectivism and Kurt Goedel

Over at Discarded Lies, they quote C&F, quoting an Objectivist:

In its crazed campaign to keep a brain-dead woman alive against the will of her husband, Congress has now passed a law violating the separation of power between the legislative and judiciary and between federal and state governments by arbitrarily altering the jurisdiction of the Terry Schiavo case—and doing so ad hoc, not as part of any general rule affecting all such cases universally.

These people are extremely upset by the apparent shedding by Republicans of their "small government" philosophy.

Discarded Lies rebuts with

Occam's razor tells me this is just sloppy, ill-thought-out work, which is funny considering how proud Objectivists are of their reasoning skills. A cartoon is supposed to distill issues to their essence, with wit, and provoke thought. This one muddles the issue, is besides the point, and achieves nothing but making other Randroids nod their heads and feel superior to all of us who are more concerned with the mundanity of saving a life than with a minor expansion of the jurisdiction of the federal courts. Which, remember, is explicitly listed as one of the powers of Congress in the constitution.

Objectivism is a very pure philosophy that leads people to consistent opinions. So ruthlessly consistent that they turn into moral monsters, because they'd rather be consistent moral monsters than admit of ambiguity and imperfect situations in the world. Situations that their perfect philosophy doesn't accomodate. What they care about isn't the world, and the people living in it. It's maintaining their [...] ideological purity. Nothing must be allowed to sully the precious theory, especially not messy reality.

Although I usually cringe when I see others extend ideas from hard science and mathematics to sociology and philosophy, I'm going to do it because I think it fits.

We know from Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem, that any "sufficiently powerful"[*] set of formalized axioms -- in other words, a philosophical point of view -- must either be able to formulate statements which are formally True but cannot be proven by the axioms within the system, or else, if every True statement can be proven in the system, it must be inconsistent (meaning it must then also prove as true some statements that are actually False).

So take your pick: lack of universality of application, or inconsistency.

If Objectivism is taken as consistent, then, by Goedel's Theorem, it cannot have universal applicability to every question.

([*]Of course, technically speaking, all we can really be sure of is that Objectivism is too weak a philosophy to define the natural numbers and integer arithmetic...)