Beyond the grave, Ayn Rand shapes the far-right economic thought patterns.
Rush Limbaugh has been rhapsodizing over Ayn Rand’s "objectivist" concepts fleshed out by her in one of her seminal works, Atlas Shrugged.
Rush Limbaugh, RushLimbaugh.com, Capitalism/Egoism Transcript and audio:
When you vote for politicians who take from your back pocket to give to others, you think it's compassionate, you think it's caring? It's not. It's depriving the recipient of his own quest for self-interest. The brilliant writer and novelist, Ayn Rand, has written about this. Let me give you a couple quotes from Ayn Rand on this...
Please take the time to view Ayn Rand interviewed by Mike Wallace; where she lays out her principles: http://www.youtube.com/...
More below the fold....
Atlas Shrugged has recently returned to Amazon’s top seller list. Dittoheads and corporatist true believers are clamoring for justification for their "rugged individualism" unfettered capitalism, and a basis with which to defend marauding CEO’s and their aggressive "selfishness"--seen as a virtue by both Limbaugh and Rand.
Lest one believes Randism is passe check out the Wall Street Journal article posted by Dr.Yarn Brook, president and executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, March 14, 2009 @ http://www.aynrand.org/...
In his opinion piece Dr. Brook directly references Atlas Shrugged as sterling example a cure to our present financial and investment quagmire:
Ayn Rand died more than a quarter of a century ago, yet her name appears regularly in discussions of our current economic turmoil. Pundits including Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santelli urge listeners to read her books, and her magnum opus, "Atlas Shrugged," is selling at a faster rate today than at any time during its 51-year history.
There's a reason. In "Atlas," Rand tells the story of the U.S. economy crumbling under the weight of crushing government interventions and regulations. Meanwhile, blaming greed and the free market, Washington responds with more controls that only deepen the crisis. Sound familiar?
The novel's eerily prophetic nature is no coincidence. "If you understand the dominant philosophy of a society," Rand wrote elsewhere in "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal," "you can predict its course." Economic crises and runaway government power grabs don't just happen by themselves; they are the product of the philosophical ideas prevalent in a society--particularly its dominant moral ideas.
The Profit Motive: Ayn Rand’s Perspective
The "profit motive," speaking broadly, means a man's incentive to work in order to gain something for himself — in economic terms, to make money. By Objectivist standards, such a motive, being thoroughly just, is profoundly moral. Socialists used to speak of "production for use" as against "production for profit." What they meant and wanted was: "production by one man for the unearned use of another."
Source: Leonard Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand
The Allure of Ayn Rand’s "Moral Justification" for Laissez-Faire Capitalism
Rand’s moral basis for capitalism is liberated from religion or common morality—both based on service to others or self-sacrifice. It is based on a cold, hard Randian "objectivism" which states that man acts is best when he’s "rational" and "reality based" and when he moves directly toward his own needs and fulfillment in terms of that is logically practical, not becoming subjugated to religious or customary moral principles, or the restraints of a "socializing" government with all its restrictions which are structured to benefit the common good (a false altruism, which in Ayn Rand’s view is "evil".
The moral justification of capitalism is not that it serves the public. Capitalism does achieve the "public good" (appropriately defined), but this is an effect, not a cause; it is a secondary consequence, not an evaluative primary. The justification of capitalism is that it is the system which implements a scientific code of morality; i.e., which recognizes man's metaphysical nature and needs; i.e., which is based on reason and reality. A secondary consequence of such a system is that any group who lives under it and acts properly has to benefit. (A brief excerpt, Leonard Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, http://www.peikoff.com/... )
"Acting Properly"
Rand has laid down the goals and objectives of her "objectivism" which can be seen in the pages of Atlas Shrugged where a kind of "superman" purses his own "self interests" in a hyper-heroic manner, to hell with all others.
So strong is the influence of Rand that one devotee of her philosophy as described in his encounter with her tenets expanded in Atlas Shrugged as "something very much like a Conversion Experience." This writer associated with the Friesian School goes on to explain:
She (Rand) very properly realized that, since the free market is built upon voluntary exchanges, capitalism requires firm moral limits, ruling out violence, coercion, fraud, etc. That was certainly not a concern of Nietzsche, but it was very much a concern of Adam Smith, who realized that, in a context of mutually voluntary exchange, people will always go for the best deal, producing the "invisible hand" effect of mutual and public goods being produced by private preferences. This confuses people enough in regard to Smith; and that makes it all the easier to mistakenly see Rand as advocating a view of capitalists as righteous (but not religious) predators -- especially unfortunate when the popular vision of laissez-faire capitalism is already of merciless and oppressive robber barons.
Greed is Good
Ayn Rand turned common economic ethics and understanding on its head. She wrote The Virtue of Selfishness and pursued a new order for economic activity based on a glorified greed and self-seeking that seemed to her more pure and practical than the old order where restrains were placed on the domination of society by the rich and powerful so-called "robber barons".
From Adam Smith to the present, the value standard upheld by capitalism's champions has been the "public good." Individual freedom has been defended either as an ethically neutral means to this end (a common Enlightenment attitude) or, after Kant, as a necessary evil. Capitalism's virtue, in this interpretation, is that it converts the amorality of "prudence" or the wickedness of greed into the nobility of social work. Men who hold this viewpoint...are impelled to minimize one aspect of the causal sequence they uphold here and to emphasize the other. They minimize the individualist cause and emphasize the social effect, which, to them, is the moral primary. Thus they find themselves drawn irresistibly to compromise, cutting back one step at a time on the element they regard as neutral or worse, allowing "some controls" http://www.peikoff.com/...
Obviously "some controls" in the field of acting as fiduciaries of other people’s money are outside the illogical grand schemes of Ronald Reagan, Milton Friedman, Alan Greenspan, and a host of others, who have brought the world of investment and banking to an all time low. One has to believe that the "invisible hand" that battered down the doors and beat into submission any opposition to regulation was aided and abetted by the work of Ayn Rand.
Ayn Rand shared a common ideology with these and other movers and shakers in the world of unrestricted capitalism. Their cherished free wheeling "service economy" which includes manipulating and channeling other peoples money in to inscrutable (fraudulent) finance instruments, eventually has brought both the United States and the entire world to a stalemate of confidence and a state of fear—paralyzing consumer confidence--destroying the equity and life savings of tens of millions who were enticed into the game of rampant capitalism and market fundamentalism by deceptive optimism and outright fraud.
Ayn Rand’s gospel message is always the same: Selflessness is Evil
Vehemently opposed to current actions taken by government to stabilize the economy and unlock credit, Ayn Rand Center's Brook asserts in his Wall Street opine the core theology of Randism:
Most people where taught: "Selfishness is evil; sacrifice for the needs of others is good." But Rand said this message is wrong--selfishness, rather than being evil, is a virtue(...) that is, concern with one's genuine, long-range interest--she wrote, required a man to think, to produce, and to prosper by trading with others voluntarily to mutual benefit.
Rand also noted that only an ethic of rational selfishness can justify the pursuit of profit that is the basis of capitalism--and that so long as self-interest is tainted by moral suspicion, the profit motive will continue to take the rap for every imaginable (or imagined) social ill and economic disaster. Just look how our present crisis has been attributed to the free market instead of government intervention--and how proposed solutions inevitably involve yet more government intervention to rein in the pursuit of self-interest.
Rand offered us a way out--to fight for a morality of rational self-interest, and for capitalism, the system which is its expression. And that is the source of her relevance today.
Ayn Rand’s Influence Leaves an Indelible Stain on Current Wall Street Indulgences and Excesses
Aided and abetted by an underlying mythology centered on the inherent virtue of free market capitalism and the power of the unfettered market to self-regulate outside the oversight of government regulation, the current capitalistic disaster has metastasized to corrupt the market's inner workings and defraud its customers.
Since the time of Barry Goldwater forces have been at work to liberate the nation's financial organizations from excessive regulation, as the free market fundamentalists worked hand-in-hand with Reagan, to deregulate Wall Street and banks, they sowed the seeds of our present financial scandals and collapse, "market magic" as become market arsenic—highly toxic.
This opinion from The New York Times written back in December 2007 frames the current financial situation:
For more than a quarter-century, the dominant idea guiding economic policy in the United States and much of the globe has been that the market is unfailingly wise. So wise that the proper role for government is to steer clear and not mess with the gusher of wealth that will flow, trickling down to the every level of society, if only the market is left to do its magic.
But now the invisible hand is being asked to account for what it has wrought. In this country, many economic complaints -- from the widening gap between rich and poor to the expense of higher education -- are being dusted for its fingerprints.
Snip
Adam Smith used the metaphor of the invisible hand to describe how markets should function: With everyone at liberty to pursue self-interest, the market omnisciently distributes goods and capital to maximize the benefits for all. Since the Reagan administration, that idea has weighed in as a veritable holy commandment, with the economist Milton Freidman cast as Moses
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Within the thinking of Friedman (I’m not a conservative, I’m a believer in freedom) and with Randian follower, Alan Greenspan there is a distinct Ayn Randism embedded in their blind enthusiasm for deregulation and capitalistic selfishness. So much so that the invisible hand they caress and cherish is more that of Rand’s than God’s.
There is institutional financial crime everywhere and no one knows how to prosecute the wrong doing without causing a mushrooming cloud of utter economic devastation:
Taxpayer bailouts and plausible denial by corporate media are much sought after bromides, the cure will hurt much more requiring radical surgery.