When I was in college, I read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. For those of you haven’t read it, here’s a summary from Wikipedia:
Atlas Shrugged is a novel by Ayn Rand, first published in 1957 in the United States. Rand’s fourth and last novel, it was also her and contains Rand’s most extensive statement of Objectivism in any of her works of fiction.
The book explores a dystopian United States where many of society’s most productive citizens refuse to be exploited by increasing taxation and government regulations and disappear. They are led by John Galt. Galt describes the strike as “stopping the motor of the world” by withdrawing the minds that drive society’s growth and productivity. In their efforts, these people “of the mind” hope to demonstrate that a world in which the individual is not free to create is doomed, that civilization cannot exist where every person is a slave to society and government, and that the destruction of the profit motive leads to the collapse of society. The protagonist, Dagny Taggart, sees society collapse around her as the government increasingly asserts control over all industry.
I enjoyed her characters and the love story between Dagny Taggart and the mysterious John Galt. Then I reached the very long speech that Galt made – 27 or 30 pages – on capitalism and profit and thought, Huh? Why didn’t an editor cut this sucker to two paragraphs?
At the time, I didn’t understand enough about capitalism to realize that speech formed the core of Rand’s dangerous belief system. In a nutshell, her take on capitalism is that there should be no government regulation. None. The free market regulates itself and when government tries to regulate it, creativity is stifled and profits nosedive. And oh, there are no free lunches – no Social Security, no Medicare, no welfare, no health care for the poor. Forget all that.
I re-read the book about ten years later and hated it. I didn’t know at the time that a man named Alan Greenspan was a student of Rand’s; Greenspan served as Chairman of the Federal Reserve of the United States from 1987 to 2006. After 9-11, he’s the one who encouraged Americans to use their homes as ATM machines, to refinance and use that additional money to bolster the economy by shopping.
Like economist Milton Friedman, Greenspan was a proponent of a self-regulating market, a term I never really understood. I mean, is a market a human being with a conscience? Does a market know the difference between right and wrong? Greenspan – like Friedman, like Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, like Congressman Paul Ryan – believes in trickle down economics.
I’m sure you’ve heard the term: the upper one percent in the U.S. shouldn’t have their taxes raised because they are the job creators, the ones who supposedly hire you and me and all the rest of us. And because they are the job creators, the belief says, we – the middle class, the poor, the elderly – should be the ones who pay higher taxes. Huh?
Congressman Paul Ryan is the author of the infamous Ryan plan for how to put the country back on track to a brighter economic future. The core of it? Cut social services across the board – i.e., scrap Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, and give the very rich a new tax break, and get rid of government regulations on everything, so that the oil companies and insurance companies and banks will have higher profits. And really, don’t worry about it, all you peons out there, because the market self-regulates.
Well, once it became public knowledge that Ryan – a Catholic – was a proponent of Ayn Rand, an atheist, some Catholic bishops denounced him. So now Ryan, no surprise, suddenly doesn’t embrace Rand’s teachings.
What is so puzzling is that even though the financial meltdown of 2008 was the result of trickle down economics, of the Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan and Ayn Rand economical view, even though the self-regulating market on Wall Street turned out to be enormously greedy, this philosophy is still advocated as an answer to economic woes. But don’t take my word for it. Read Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine.
“Based on breakthrough historical research and four years of on-the-ground reporting in disaster zones, The Shock Doctrine vividly shows how disaster capitalism – the rapid-fire corporate reengineering of societies still reeling from shock – did not begin with September 11, 2001. The book traces its origins back fifty years, to the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman, which produced many of the leading neo-conservative and neo-liberal thinkers whose influence is still profound in Washington today. New, surprising connections are drawn between economic policy, “shock and awe” warfare and covert CIA-funded experiments in electroshock and sensory deprivation in the 1950s, research that helped write the torture manuals used today in Guantanamo Bay.”
The bottom line, I think, is that as we move deeper into 2012, many of us are becoming even more aware of how the old paradigms no longer work. It’s time to turn Rand’s form of capitalism, based on personal greed at the expense of everyone and everything else, on its head. It’s part of that dying belief system. Politicians who advocate cutting social safety net programs that protect the most vulnerable in society, who propose banning contraception and overturning abortion, who believe that corporations are people, who propose doubling the interest rates on student loans, who think it’s okay to drill oil wells a mile deep in the ocean, who believe that torture is just fine…it’s time for these guys to hit the road, Jack. Their worldview is broken.
It’s up to the rest of us to put the pieces together in a new way that is beneficial for all people, not just the privileged few.
