Ayn Rand & Paul Ryan, Rand is the Goddess of the Great Recession

[roseBudd]

Ayn Rand: Goddess of the Great Recession
Why Christians should be wary of the late pop philosopher and her disciples.

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2010/september/2.36.html?start=1

"Whereas traditional conservatism emphasized duties, responsibilities, and social interconnectedness, at the core of the right-wing ideology that Rand spearheaded was a rejection of moral obligations to others."

—Jennifer Burns, in Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right

the Financial Industry Inquiry Commission held hearings on the world's recent financial crisis. The star witness was Alan Greenspan. The Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan translated Greenspan's typically elusive testimony this way: "I didn't do anything wrong, and neither did Ayn Rand by the way, but next time you might try more regulation."

There were obviously many reasons for the Great Recession. But I believe Noonan got to the root of one particular evil.

Fortune magazine once labeled Greenspan "America's most famous libertarian, an Ayn Rand acolyte." (While Rand formally rejected libertarianism, libertarians nonetheless admire her.) But today, both libertarians and Randians are disassociating themselves from Greenspan as quickly as Wall Street. This is the Wall Street that worshiped the former Federal Reserve chairman when Worth ran a cover story describing how he was "playing God at the Fed." Fortune detailed Greenspan's "love of free markets, suspicion of do-gooders, and righteous hatred of the state apparatus," evidenced by his previous deregulation of the savings and loan industry for Charles Keating and such. Few of us Reaganomics supporters understood his role in that fiasco, so history was bound to repeat itself with the recent subprime mortgage scandal....

Greenspan once testified before Congress that investment firms should be "unburdened of the perceived need" to consider investors' interests. The Randian did not succeed in turning that into policy, but too many CEOs, mortgage traders, and regulators obviously found the spirit of Rand appealing, even if investors didn't find it quite as enriching. Years ago, Southern Methodist University economics professor Ravi Batra wrote on the first page of Greenspan's Fraud, "The picture that emerges is one of an intelligent man centered on the self. More than anything else, Mr. Greenspan seems to take care of Mr. Greenspan. His life and accomplishments turn out to be a fitting monument to Ayn Rand's philosophy of rational selfishness."

Perhaps imitating Greenspan as he imitated Rand, few Washington and Wall Street players have accepted responsibility for what has recently happened in our society. After Goldman Sachs was brought before the Senate, the Financial Times noted the most surprising development, that "three executives danced around the question" of whether Wall Street "had a duty to act in the interests of clients."

[turtlerescue1]

1. Your words are well taken.

Just wondering, up 'til I came across a copy of Rand's "For The New Intellectual", I really had trouble understanding Ayn Rand. She was crammed down our throats in a 1977 English 1A course by a Jesuit, who became my mentor. Still Rand was hard to take, there was just something ungood, with all the precise logic, something wasn't right. So not being quick or intellectual, I had to keep reading her works.

I knew Greenspan to be her "protege". And I know precisely where I was and exactly what I was doing when he became head of the FRB. That same Jesuit had assigned me the topic of my semester research, the FRB. Which ended me being on the JohnBirch mailing list for three years, not someplace a liberal democrat is ever happy about. So-suddenly the names Rand; Greenspan and FRB all being in the same place many years later was shocking.

Did you ever read "the new intellectual"?

[Igel]

4. Rand is easy to understand. If you know where she's coming from.

She was created in the cauldron of the Russian Revolution, that huge mass of injustice and hate and greed and destruction that the victors decided to make all nice and clean and good.

She's part Lenin and Stalin and Trotsky. The atheism, resulting in her view of theodicy. The absolute confidence that she and only she understands what's right. The complete indifference to the plight of millions. Let them die, she says, because they don't matter--they're not the blessed of society.

But she rejected parts of Lenin and Stalin and Trotsky. The blessed and deserving aren't the poor by virtue of being poor; government should not be deciding the victors and losers based upon the political views of a few men in power or how they can bribe or flatter a majority. Rights aren't bestowed and rights aren't collective--so that justice is individual and deserved. She learned the lesson of the NEP all too well: If everybody's the same, why did the economy collapse? Stalin's after-the-fact rehash was wrong. The NEP showed that the bourgeois had skills, but the state decided just to use those people and, when it was done using people, it disposed of them. In a way that makes anything that corporations have done seem petty or even kind.

The key thing she rejected, though, was the emphasis put on the state. If you put all power in the government, in the state, then the individual is shit. This had a bit of a Sartrean "nausee" quality about it. She so totally rejected the state-as-all that she was left with the individual-as-all.

Pretty much everything else about Rand is corollary. Her logic and assumptions drive her to untenable positions; she is forced by the power of the trauma-induced convictions to adopt certain views that render her almost a sociopath. (Then again, consider Lenin and Stalin.)

[jenmito]

2. I think we should call him Paul Rand or Paul rAyn. n/t

[The Magistrate]

3. An Interesting take On the Matter, Sir: Thank You for Sharing It

"Romney loves America like a tick loves a dog."