I knew she was behind it somehow

How Ayn Rand caused the Global Financial Crisis.

My personal theory is that anyone who has ever read Atlas Shrugged feels a burning need to get revenge on the society that allowed it to be published but thats just me. Matt Taibbi has a more nuanced view:

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.

...

This was based almost entirely on the Randian belief system, under which the leaders of Goldman Sachs appear not as the cheap swindlers they look like to me, but idealised heroes, the saviours of society.

In the Randian ethos, called objectivism, the only real morality is self-interest, and society is divided into groups who are efficiently self-interested (the rich) and the ''parasites'' who wish to take their earnings through taxes. Rand believed government had virtually no natural role in society. She conceded police were necessary, but refused to accept any need for economic regulation.

Maybe we can burn her in effigy. 

I admit that I am not a Rand fan but that is because I find her entire philosophy amoral and at the same time hopelessly utopian.  It's not because the idea of efficient self-interest, which is central to almost every economic school, except Marxism, is wrong. 

There is a chance that some additional regulation may have avoided the worst of the abuses associated with the CDOs, but that isn't a given.  If the banks were truly engaged in fraud and not just being criminally stupid they would have found another way to proceed.

Posted by: chad98036 at 08:02 PM | Comments (24) | Add Comment
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