How Ayn Rand caused the GFC

[canetoad]

How Ayn Rand caused the GFC
MATT TAIBBI
April 25, 2010

SO GOLDMAN Sachs, the world's greatest and smuggest investment bank, has been sued for fraud by the American Securities and Exchange Commission. Legally, the case hangs on a technicality.

Morally, however, the case may turn into a final referendum on the greed-is-good ethos that conquered America in the '80s - and in the years since has aped other horrifying American trends in spreading across the Western world like a venereal disease.

When the globe was engulfed in the flood of defaults and derivative losses that emerged from the collapse of the US housing bubble two years ago, few understood that the crash had its roots in the lunatic greed-centred objectivist religion, fostered in the '50s and '60s by ponderous emigre novelist Ayn Rand.

Outside America, Russian-born Rand is probably best known for being the unfunniest person Western civilisation has seen since maybe Goebbels or Jack the Ripper, but inside America she is upheld as an intellectual giant. Her ideas are worshipped even by people who've never heard of her. The right-wing Tea Party movement is just one example of an entire demographic that has been inspired to mass protest by Rand without even knowing it.
http://www.theage.com.au/business/how-ayn-rand-caused-the-gfc-20100424-tknu.html

[Oregone]

1. Why, oh why, is her face not on the new $100 bill?

[angstlessk]

2. 1 question...where in nature has altruism proved to be deliterious?

just askin?

[canetoad]

3. Umm, all those billionaires

who gave all their money away and became street people? :shrug:

[Rex]

4. Amazing.

Well not really, just like some Christians have taken Jesus and turned him into a Rambo type character - GFC as the 'beacon of capitalism' took the idea of our own self-interest's protecting the fabric of society as a collective and turned it into our self-interests...that is it, fuck society! People turning the 'social good' toward their own self-interest sounds about right if you look at Bill Gates, however he can control a monopoly and still help the world. GFC took their own partners and bent them over the table...they ate their food supply, got greedy and ate the food supplies handlers. Ooops...no one left.

IMO Jeb and Neil Bush really paved the way at what you can and cannot get away with...currently we are waiting on the cannot part.