$1 Million Theft Charges at Troubled Demolition Project – NYTimes.com
The former purchasing agent for the subcontractor hired to dismantle the former Deutsche Bank building, which was damaged in the Sept. 11 attack in Lower Manhattan, has been charged with stealing more than $1 million by filing false invoices and using the money for expensive vacations and luxury cars, the authorities said on Tuesday.
The agent, Robert Chiarappa, who worked for the John Galt Corporation, approved invoices for supplies that were never delivered…
(emphasis added) Yep, that whole “market manages itself” thing works about as well in actual practice as communism. The naive hyper-capitalism espoused by Ayn Rand never takes into account the sheer destructive potential of short-term selfish self-interests.
In other words, also, if I were to dump…oh, a few million metric tons of coal fly ash into an unstable holding pit, and make a whole pile of money by ignoring the dangers and health risks to nearby residents, then pass the inevitable clean-up costs on to the public… oh right, that’s been done, too.
You have a strange idea of what Ayn Rand advocated. Theft and fraud are proper targets for government intervention according to her political philosophy. So is poisoning people.
Not really — Alan Greenspan was a direct ‘disciple’ of Ms. Rand herself, and became the voice of market deregulation and ‘innovation’ which has been enabling predatory corporations to ravage the world economies and ecologies.
The Rand philosophies dictated that self-interest alone was a sufficient restraint on the behaviors of individual and group actors. That furthermore the only valid roles for government were common defense (military and police) and enforcement of any voluntarily entered-into contract.
By the way, in the spirit of disclosure to my (few) readers here, ‘Mark’ has an email address that links back to an Ayn Rand ‘Objectivism’ advocacy website. He also completely misses my point that it remains deeply ironic that a company whose founders were so enamored with Rand they named it after an iconic character from her fiction.
I continue to maintain the philosophy was never truly ‘objective’, but rather selfishly ‘subjective’. And furthermore misinformed as to the deviousness of some opportunists. To wit, the corporate leaders who do not care about the long-term health of the corporation or their country or the planet, but only what they themselves can win as personal rewards.
Or to put it still another way: Utopian fiction most often goes astray because the author has a fundamentally flawed understanding of human behavior.
Don’t assume I haven’t thought about this a lot… I may have strange ideas, but they were not come by casually.
Really. You may have thought about this a lot, but you haven’t read much of Ayn Rand if you think that she considered it in one’s self interest to violate the rights of others. Nor did she ever say that self-interest alone is a sufficient restraint against predatory behavior. She recognized that there will always be people who will act immorally, and she believed that governments are absolutely necessary to protect individual rights. She was not an anarchist, and she loathed that political philosophy, believing that it led ultimately to tyranny.
And you can’t measure the worth of her philosophy by the fact that an idiot named his company after one of her characters. That’s ridiculous. Read what she wrote.
As for Greenspan, he left Objectivism behind years ago. At no time during his tenure as Fed president did he advocate anything that an Objectivist would recognize as a move towards laissez-faire capitalism. There was no deregulation. The government exercises complete control over the financial sector–over every sector of the economy. This crisis was created in Washington DC by our politicians. From the continual inflation of the money supply, to the Fed-imposed low interest rates, to the boom in mortgage loans manufactured by the government-backed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and to the resulting 700 billion dollar bailout… None of this is what happens in a free market.
In a free market, there’s no one to pump an endless supply of funny money into the economy. There’s no one to prevent the cost of borrowing from increasing as more and more loans are being made. There’s no one to provide an infinite guarantee of security for banks that make bad loans. There’s no one beating banks with a stick for not loaning to high risk borrowers, while dangling a carrot in front of them if they do.
That’s not to say people would never act irrationally in a free market, but there would be no one there to encourage it, and to protect them from the consequences when they did by forcing the rest of us to share the burden.
Socialism says everyone should have a house, so the government tried to make it so that everyone could borrow money for a house, regardless of whether they could pay it back. Socialism says that we should share each other’s burdens, so now we’re all paying for the $700 billion bailout. It is socialism that is running this economy, as it has been since the 1930s. Capitalism has been dead longer than Trotsky, but you guys continue to blame it for everything that goes wrong. No matter how much the government controls the economy, when the bottom falls out, you always say it’s because people had too much freedom. The truth is exactly the opposite.
“Don’t assume I haven’t thought about this a lot… I may have strange ideas, but they were not come by casually.”
I assumed nothing. Your ideas about Rand are simply wrong, however much time you’ve spent coming to them. See the excellent comment above.