John Snow, Bush’s former treasury secretary gets ripped by Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN) over a photograph her staff unearthed from 2003 showing high ranking Treasury officials together with banking executives in a photo-op for “cutting the red tape” in which they take pruning shears and a chainsaw to a stack of federal banking regulations. Subtle.
Meanwhile, former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan admits to a slight flaw in his Randian free-market approach; specifically, that people are greedy, avaricious bastards who will, when unfettered by constraints, readily exploit the greed and ignorance of others for their own selfish enrichment and aggrandizement to the detriment, if not ultimate ruination of the system as a whole. Imagine that.
Red Tory v.3.0.3 
I see a new Obama campaign ad…..
I can’t wait for this stupid election to be over. It’s just painful at this point.
It’s painful to listen to Objectivists…always has been. Their fatal flaw is that they believe their ideology is the most open to information, but it remains one of the most closed to wisdom and knowledge (they actually don’t really distinguish among these concepts). And you have no greater proof than Alan Greenspan, who, at a very, very advanced age, has finally discovered that after 40 years, a serious flaw exists in his way of thinking.
“specifically, that people are greedy, avaricious bastards who will, when unfettered by constraints, readily exploit the greed and ignorance of others for their own selfish enrichment and aggrandizement to the detriment, if not ultimate ruination of the system as a whole. Imagine that.”
Ah yes, but don’t forget it all produces bargains, bargains and more bargains. So says Buffet and Trump. You just have to know where to look, and have the capital to buy up the shattered dreams wherever they may be found. Question is, is it by accident or by design?
While considering this issue, does it give you some possible answer to the questions you ask in your post on vulgarity and politics?
Not all people are stoopid, and being misinformed or worse, misled, isn’t exclusive to any particular segment of a given population.
So what is it about Greenspan that was supposed to be impressive?
Some people are stupid, and they know it. Others are smart, and they know it. A rare and enlightened few are smart, but think that they are not. An unfortunately disproportionate number are stupid but think that they are smart. They cling to dumb-ass philosophies that validate their simple-minded adolescent fantasies…particularly those philosophies that attempt to *sound* high-minded. These are the people the rest of us call Randians, although they would rather be called Objectivists.
Apparently there is a movie coming out based on Atlas Shrugged. It stars Angelina Jolie. I will be visiting the theatre to see the crowd of deluded ignorami, if only to make note of any consistent characteristics that can help me identify them in the future.
Dave — I have to admit that when I was a “yute” I was quite stirred by the lofty individualistic aspirations of Rand as embodied in Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead even though it militated quite strongly against my more naturally altruistic and “socialist” instincts. Heck, I even delved into the convoluted workings of her Objectivist epistemology… But, despite its atavistic appeal to the artistic spirit of creative rebellion, it all rang fairly hollow to me — essentially, little more than a strenuous justification for boundless exceptionalism and a supposedly hyper-rational construct that attempted to defend the indefensible. It is, root and branch, a theory of merciless selfishness and greed that rejects entirely the well-being of the collective. Such talk is quite unfashionable these days, of course. Oh well. I’ve arrived at these conclusions through experience, and as such, they’re incontrovertible.
To me, that is. I could well be wrong. It’s just my take on the deal.
Objectivism has a lot of flaws, but I think the quality of its arrested development is the worst. If you think anything you discovered as a teenager (which, most scientists will tell you, is a stage of human development that most resembles insanity…it’s true, you can look it up) can remain central to you for the rest of your life, then you’re in serious trouble.
There’s something a little off-putting about a word-view that has no place for humour.
Well indeed. Which, in part, is why I have to reject out of hand, anything that carries the scent of Calvinism with it. Such morbidly dour ideologies are monstrously oppressive to the soul.
I always thought Objectivism was dead and buried back in the 70’s when I first came across it, but I know now that it’s revived with every new generation, when a new crop of teenagers reads Atlas Shrugged. It only persists into adulthood in the US, though. Probably due to some critical mass issues and this persistent worship of solipsism…er…individualism.
Initially, I found the hyper-individualism of ethical egoism to be satisfying because I imagined myself to be a “hyper-individual”. As Ti-Guy alluded to, that was when I was an adolescent and I wanted to rationalize my selfishness. It didn’t take long to realize that objectivism is ethically bankrupt (How do you call it an ethical theory when it is based on the absence of any presumed universality? How can one equate a private value system with an ethical system? How does an ethical objectivist – essentially an egoist – give someone ethical advice?). I can’t recall the details, but I remember that it was based on some pretty dodgy, pop-epistemology that, after the fact, always seemed to be of the “if we ignore details and reduce knowledge down to these oversimplified abstractions, then we can make oversimplified ethical abstractions from it” variety.
I really should go back and re-read it again, but to be honest, I found it ludicrously boring. Ultimately my realization came when I was reading Atlas Shrugged (which I never did finish) and recognized that I wasn’t connecting at all with the protagonist. What’s more, it became clear that I wouldn’t be worth squat in Rand’s elitist utopia.
I believe Rona Ambrose celebrates her Randianism. I remember hearing something about it a few years ago. Clearly, it worked for her. Why was I so foolish?
I almost equate it to Scientology now.
I just remembered the other thing that initially bothered me about Objectivism, and the thing that I find, almost without fail, in its adherents. That is a near-complete aversion to nuance and an incapability or unwillingness to entertain viewpoints (philosophical or otherwise) outside of their limited Randian drumming circle. I’ve never found a “philosophical” school of thought with members that are so cult-like, hence my equation with Scientology. I think this is why it appeals to the pseudo-intellectual right wing…they seem to abhor nuance anyway, so they latch onto the Rand club and use it to focus down their-already narrow POV.
The closest I ever went to Rand was watching the Fountainhead, which I found odd. All of the characters just blurted out the reasons why they did things. The lead female character seemed insane.
It appears as though the Ayn Rand Center has issued a statement against Greenspan.
Their explanation — low interest rates. (Damn government interference once again.)
Yes, low interest rates does cause inflation, but it’s odd that a group that believes in free will acts as though A had to lead to B and that people didn’t have the choice but to engage in a speculative boom because of low interest rates. If people decided to engage in such activities it was because there was money to be made from it… if only for a short period.
Also going to thow in the book Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay in the discussion. There are a number of chapters on speculative booms like the Mississippi Scheme, the South Seas Bubble, and Tulipomania, and the things that occurred during those bubbles seem to pop up in the recent ones. Throwing a quote from Sir Robert Wapole about the bubble (made before it burst):
“The great principle of the project was an evil of first-rate magnitude; it was to raise artificially the value of the stock, by exciting and keeping up a general infatuation, and by promising dividends out of funds which could never be adequate for the purpose.”
(Walpol apparently invested in the stock, but managed to sell it before it burst, but it shows that even critics or potential critics aren’t immune to bubbles.)
Anyway, the more things change…
Dave — I don’t think the comparison to Scientology is all that misplaced from what I’ve heard/read about the peculiarly cultish and paranoiac nature of its adherents.
I suppose every philosophical creed is prone to manifestations of that dynamic to a certain extent, but objectivists seem to take it to the extreme, as is usually the case with all intellectual radicals who presume to have discovered the one “true” path to enlightenment… or whatever.
It’s kind of funny that such an essentially crackpot school of thought could have insinuated itself into the very heart and centre of our economic system (in the person of Mr. Greenspan, no less) and helped in no small measure to finally pulverize the relatively benign “socialism” of FDR and his successors (including Republicans like Eisenhower and Nixon, I might add) that sought to “lift all boats” on an ever-rising tide of widespread prosperity and affluence on the merciless shoals of individualistic greed and selfish excess.
Sharon — Heh. That’s a wonderful book and should be required reading for anyone studying economics, or human nature for that matter — which come to think of it are pretty much the same thing in many respects. It’s long astounded me how completely irrational the movements on the stock market are — guided it seems more by emotion, petulance, fear, panic, exuberance, reckless optimism, and so on, rather than sound business fundamentals. This really isn’t how money should be moving in the system, but such is the case. The whole notion of “bear” and “bull” markets is pretty ludicrous when you think about it. Essentially, it translates into how many people are willing (and able) to subscribe to a particular “mood” that the collective investor class has at any given time about perceived trends that are shaped by a variety of infometrics, all of which are hopelessly compromised on every level.