I'm sorry, but if a company is deemed too big to fail that the American government has to buy it, how about the American government passes an anti-trust law to break it up so that the crap parts fail and the good parts continue?
Oh I know why. Because no one is allowed to think trusts are bad in Ayn Rand's world. And make no mistake. This is Ayn Rand's world and we're just living in it. She has replaced the Christian virtue of selflessness and sacrifice with the new atheist virtue of selfishness and the world is so much worse for it.
Everybody seems to be talking about what may have been going on in the past that's similar to this. One question mark is a time like the Roaring 20s possibly having precipitated another Great Depression (and make no mistake Ronald Reagan was a big Coolidge fan), but I can't help but think instead back to the 1890s.
The Panic of 1893 was a serious economic depression in the United States that began in 1893. This panic was an extension of the Panic of 1873, and like that earlier crash, was caused by railroad overbuilding and shaky railroad financing which set off a series of bank failures. Compounding market overbuilding and a railroad bubble was a run on the gold supply and a policy of using both gold and silver metals as a peg for the US Dollar value. The Panic of 1893 was the worst economic crisis to hit the nation in its history to that point. To put this event in context, the period of economic crises known as the Long Depression (1873-1896) was worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s.[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Just like eventually after the Civil War, when Reconstruction had run its course and white people felt like they had enough of helping blacks and finally wanted theirs, the "robber barons" stepped in to divide the country Abraham Lincoln had united and exploit cheap immigrant labor on the railroads and use ethnic strife to distract the public from their massive wealth and monopolies.
I am beginning to think the Southern Strategy of Republicans from Nixon until now following the passage of the Civil Rights laws of the 1960s essentially accomplished the exact same thing.
How did we get here -- where the morality of altruism has almost been lost completely?
Well when Ayn Rand's cult got control of our entire global financial system. Namely in the form of Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan.
As Ayn Rand makes clear in this 1959 interview, the world envisioned by Rand is such that acting in accordance with the common good and holding to the notion that I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper is considered immoral.
Wallace quotes some contemporary reviews of her ideas in the interview:
You are out to destroy almost every edifice in the contemporary American way of life -- our Judeo-Christian religion, our modified government capitalism, our rule by the majority will. Other reviews have said that you have scorned churches and the concept of God.
Rand does not contradict that assessment in the interview.
How chilling then to consider that the Rand cult has been running Wall Street and Washington for the last FORTY YEARS in the person of Alan Greenspan and in the ideas of Milton Friedman!!!
Why in the heck were we listening to the Ayn Rand cult followers all these years? This was a bitter hateful woman who came to America angry that the Bolsheviks destroyed her father's pharmacy in their revolt and her entire life was turned upside down. So her way to somehow get back at that was to destroy our communities and collectivist way of thinking with her ridiculous capitalist utopia fantasy that for some inexplicable reason the people in charge of our economy tried to put into practice and the result is we are all wage slaves to these Objectivist pricks who have no concept of or interest in the actual facts that history tells us... because Rand didn't believe in history.
IMO, I think what is needed now are not big company bailouts, but big company breakups. And the rich shouldn't be getting a handout from the government. The rich fatcats on Wall Street should act like J.P. Morgan and John Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie following the Panic of 1907 and pour money back into the system to save the economy instead of asking for a handout. Warren Buffett? Bill Gates? Where are you?
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
We also could stand to have a president like Teddy Roosevelt to bring us some good old-fashioned trust busting.
Rather than simply maintain the status quo, Roosevelt sought a mid-course between Republican laissez faire policies and the socialism advocated by some reform elements.
The president found an ally in an increasingly concerned public that had been wary of big government solutions in the past, but was now more receptive. The trusts' continuing growth in numbers and power convinced many that action was needed.
Roosevelt took the following steps during his first administration to "keep order" in the American economy:
Department of Commerce and Labor. In 1903, Roosevelt persuaded Congress to establish a new cabinet-level department to increase the federal government’s purview over the interstate commerce actions of business and to monitor labor relations. Big business interests lobbied heavily to halt this innovation — the first new executive department since the Civil War — but failed. (Commerce and Labor would be separated into independent department in 1913.)
Bureau of Corporations. As an arm of the newly created department, a Bureau of Corporations was established to find violations under the existing antitrust legislation. The Bureau began investigations into the activities of the meatpacking, oil, steel and tobacco industries, among others.
Antitrust Law Suits. Roosevelt instructed his attorney general, Philander C. Knox, to launch a series of lawsuits against what were deemed offensive business combinations. Such giants as J.P. Morgan’s Northern Securities Company, John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust and James B. Duke’s tobacco trust were targets of the government’s attorneys. In all, forty-four suits were brought during Roosevelt’s administration.
Trust-busting was not a term the president favored. He believed the offending corporations needed to be regulated, not destroyed. Many of his big business critics, however, failed to note the difference.
Hey guys, breaking up the trusts worked once. Why not try breaking them up again?
Oh but wait... trusts are GOOD in Ayn Rand's world.
Of course Ayn Rand's assertions are proven false by future history regarding her claims about how even if Standard Oil had not been broken up that Texaco and Gulf Oil would still flourish. Actually, because of unregulated unfettered capitalism, neither Texaco or Gulf Oil exist today and are both now a part of Chevron -- you know the company that gave us our Secretary of State? A company whose predecessor is Standard Oil of California and which is now so powerful it can negotiate 30-year-deals with the Saudi Arabian petrodictators without U.S. taxpayers able to do anything about it.
Hmmmm... I wonder why it is when we put all these oil executives in charge of our government we wound up going to war with countries rich with oil and drive up our country's oil costs even more? If it wasn't apparent that the Iraq War was a War for Oil, surely it is now.
You know, I have to say kudos to Ron Paul for seeing this all for what it was and recognizing the problem way before the rest of us. Kind of a Williams Jennings Bryan and his Cross of Gold for our time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
The speech was given in the context of a wider debate at the convention about bimetallism, and so the greater part of Bryan's speech is devoted to responses to other speakers whose contributions have largely been forgotten. Bryan's speech places him in the camp of Western interests (largely farmers and other borrowers) against Eastern interests (moneylenders), in the camp of rural interests against urban interests, and in the camp of economic nationalists against internationalists who were concerned about the U.S. abandoning the internationally recognized gold standard. Bryan's speech cemented his role as a leading voice for economic populism.
I never really fully understood Paul's arguments against the Federal Reserve Bank and the income tax but now I do. While I don't agree with his opposition to social service programs like universal health care or social security, I can finally totally understand where his principled opposition to these things comes from. From his Jeffersonian-Jacksonian ideals of limited government and his belief that it's not the federal government's business to set the economy for the whole world.
These are not Ayn Rand's ideals however. As Ron Paul correctly points out when his supporters ask him his thoughts on Ayn Rand, she was very MILITANT. And she did not support libertarianism.
Just think if in 1984 it had been RON PAUL and not PHIL GRAMM who had won that Senate seat from Texas. Damn.
It just breaks my heart to think that these Ayn Rand acolytes have been running the supposed "Christian" party since the advent of Roe v. Wade. It breaks my heart the way that Ronald Reagan killed libertarianism so that the only alternative to tax and spend liberalism is borrow and spend conservatism.
To me, it feels like we don't just need an American Renaissance in our government, but maybe we need a Reformation of our country's theological thinking so obsessed with abortion and gays and not caring at all about our nation's poor. Just think how much greater this country might be had our Martin Luther (King) not been taken from us 40 years ago.