Head-banging

Shoulda known I’d stir up a Google-initiated hornets’ nest with the mere mention of a derogatory critique on Objectivism.  Alas, the respondent is…well, you’ll see.  From comments in the post below this one, from another Rand supporter, Ardsgaine:

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.

Note the assertion that my disagreement cannot possibly be because I did in fact read nearly everything Ayn Rand published and came to the reasoned conclusion that it was a flawed, destructive, inconsistent, and ultimately unworkable nightmare-dystopian philosophy.  No, it was simply that I didn’t read enough of it.  Or I deliberately and maliciously misunderstood it all, because it is otherwise perfect and workable, and in no way ignores all of human sociology, psychology, and history.  Yeah.

Also, there’s the loaded language…

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.

I never said Rand was pushing anarchy.  Her system was one were the Industrialists and Producers were free to do anything they wanted with their property.  They were also free to acquire as much property as they could.  (Federal parkland?  Public property?  No way.)  It was, in essense, the polar opposite to Communism (workers control and own the means of production), and scholars far better than I have made the obvious connection that one of Objectivism’s main points was a foil to counter 1950s era Soviet Communism.

Moreover, while Rand may have said goverments are necessary, she also pushed for strict limits on what regulations they could enact and was vehemently anti-tax.  Thus ensuring that the resulting goverment would be thoroughly toothless.  (Or this is the 2nd step in the whole Underpants Gnomes business plan:  (1) Deregulate everything and abolish taxes.  (2) ???  (3) Profit!)

I didn’t even dispute that governments were supposed to have a policing and military protection role.  But fictional John Galt’s entire 38 page diatribe was that government had no legitimacy in enacting any regulations or laws that interfered with business and commerce — save to enforce any voluntarily entered contract and protect private property.  And so if some worker signed a contract to give 20 years labor in return for some pittance (say, a life-saving operation for his or her child), the government’s only responsibility would be to make sure that contract was enforced.  Even if it included a term requiring that child to fulfill her parents’ contract in the event of untimely death.  Whee, instant bonded servitude.

In any case, anarchy easily becomes tyranny because humans are social critters, and eventually some strong alpha type starts gathering power and influence.  Many of the most tyrannical regimes got their start by stirring up and/or taking advantage of anarchic situations — but the end result has always been not anarchy but an excess of domineering control.  Communism.  Fascism.  Theocracy.  Plutocracy.  In each of these systems, the individual’s rights are diminished, degraded, or eliminated, and that of the controlling powers are enhanced. People are told it’s for their own good.

Objectivism holds that individual rights are paramount, provided one’s actions do not interfere with the rights of others.  It further limits goverment to a retaliatory role in enforcing violations of individual rights.  But who judges when rights have been violated?  Or takes note when ‘mutual consent’ was not actually given, but in fact coerced?  Who is there to ensure that fraud was not committed, or crimes hidden, if there are no regulatory, oversight or investigatory functions in government?

There is no one to stop the capitalist who, because he believes the Earth is to be used to the fullest extent by man, and that global warming is a myth, from dumping toxins and greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.  He thinks he’s not interfering with anybody’s rights — the atmo belongs to everyone, right?  And the ocean?  It’s not his fault that air and ocean currents cause massive die-offs and degrades the environment to the point of 3-headed fish and human sterility.

Moreover, in the totally free market, there are no public schools or universities.  No public roads or infrastructure.  No public sewer systems or clean water (unless you buy it for yourself).  No goverment funding for pure science projects.  No right to healthcare.  No safety-net for the disabled, the young, or the old.  Absolutely no common welfare.  It’s your own damned fault if you end up destitute and diabetic, living in a refrigerator box next to the city dump.  There is no help for those whose luck is bad or who were victimised by someone else.

There is no kindness, no altrusim in ideologically pure Objectivism.  Such impulses are actively ridiculed and derided throughout Rand’s writings, not just in her implausible self-justifying fiction.

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.

I did.  Why does vehement disagreement on my part imply I didn’t read what Rand wrote?  (And, for that matter, wrote two lengthy papers on while in university…)  I often assess philosophies by the resultant actions of their followers and adherents.  I’ve yet to meet an Objectivist who I didn’t conclude was a self-absorbed ass.  Sorry.

The current world economic crisis gives every appearance of what happens when laissez-faire hyper-capitalism runs amok.

This is also a rather blatant attempt to put me on the defensive, despite the fact that twice I said it was deeply ironic that someone who named his company after the iconic John Galt should then turn around and engage in appalling fraud.  (Displaying the vast personally enriching potential in ‘The Virtue of Selfishness’ (Rand’s essays, 1962).  Probably thought it wasn’t his fault the government wasn’t checking to see if his company actually delivered the cleanup materials to WTC-7.  Of course, in pure objectivism, there’d be no goverment role whatsoever in any clean-up of the WTC sites.  It’d be up to industry to let it rot, or rebuild, or whatever.  Nevermind the toxins and asbestos still permeating the area…)

Still, is also precisely this instance of rank hypocrisy that exposes the fatal flaws of Rand’s Objectivism:  It only takes a few opportunists to bring the whole system down, especially when nobody’s watching very closely.  All they have to do is cook the books, fake some ‘profitable’ quarters, hide a pyramid investment scheme, create arcane financial instruments that nobody really understands — and voila!  I got mine, and the rest of the world can go to hell.

Exactly like Marx’s communism, Rand’s objectivism depends entirely on an unrealistic human homogeniety and optimised behaviors…with mutually contradictory incentives.  Only she kept making the assertion that by behaving selfishly with sufficient purity, one would contribute to unbounded human progress, with no downside.

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.

Right.  The S&L failures of the 80s (by allowing them to invest in risky ventures).  The dot-com bubble.  The real-estate bubble.  Support for Bush’s insane tax cuts and massive off-the-books deficit spending.  Over and over during his lengthy career, Greenspan testified before Congress that what was needed was less regulation, less taxes, less government oversight — never, ever more.

Forget all that.  Alan Greenspan was a close personal friend of Rand from 1952 until her death in 1982.  He wrote extensive essays in her publications.  He was a member of her inner circle, ‘The Collective.’  Right — that never happened, no correlation here, just move along.

Only in October of this past year was Greenspan quoted as saying he wrong about the ability of commerce to regulate itself.  Prior to that, nothing he pushed could’ve been construed as anything but “deregulate it all.”

Ah, but I forget, now that he’s admitted he was in error, he has become a heretic among the Objectivists, therefore his decades of overt support for laissez-faire capitalist policy was Goldstein-esque double-plus unperson speak.

There was no deregulation.

Excuse me while I laugh.  Bwa-hahahahahahahaha!

Oh my, you nearly had me going there.  No deregulation.  That’s rich.  Beyond rich.   Never heard of Phil Gramm ?  The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999?  The current global melt-down engendered through the trading of unregulated mortgage securities?  Telecom deregulation.  Utility deregulation (I personally experienced the Enron-led rape of California’s economy, through $300/mo electricity bills).  Transportation deregulation.  Oil deregulation.

Wow.  That’s truly breathtaking revisionism.  (Or have I stepped into Bizarroworld here?)

Here’s an entire section on the history of worldwide deregulation — and its results — for the last 40 years (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.

‘Created’?  Hardly.  Enabled and abetted?  Sure.  Campaign contributions from these institutions and individuals made certain this would happen.

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.

Um.  Wow.  So it’s all the government’s fault.  It made those bond funds create derivatives and repackaged mortgage securities…and ordered the ratings agencies to give them AAA+ scores.

I see where this is all going.  “Officer, it’s your fault I robbed that bank.  And the bank’s fault for being there.”  Governments are MAKING the financial sector plunder everything.  (Wha…?)

In a free market, there’s no one to pump an endless supply of funny money into the economy.

In a totally ‘free’ market, no goverment issues any sort of currency.  We go back to the days of gold & silver, and in bank notes issued by institutions which assure us they have reserves to back it (but might not — we don’t know, because nobody checks).  This is what led to a number of the economic boom-and-crash cycles during the early days of post-feudal industrial age capitalism.  They didn’t call them ‘robber barons’ for nothing.

The ‘free’ market isn’t free at all.  It costs us all, and results in the unscrupulous hyper-wealthy few who, through their massive piles of money (fake or not), essentially buy government influence.  Money begets power begets more money…and individual human beings are devolved to irrelevant theoretical cyphers.  “We respect the individual right of a father to sign his underaged daughter (aka, child = ‘property’) into slavery… It’s a voluntary contract!”

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.

How to unpack this? Okay. Banks and lending institutions were depending on cheap gov’t provided money and freedom from asset-requirement regulations to enable them to create imaginary value.  They wanted the cost of borrowing to remain cheap, because it was making them insanely wealthy.  Secondly, they were counting on an essentially ‘infinite guarantee’ of repayment (hence the credit default swaps).  They were lending to high-risk borrowers because all the sensible ones were sitting nice and safe in their fixed-rate affordable 1st home mortgages.  Demand for mortgage securities was the incentive to get more securitized debt.

In a totally free market, there’s nothing to stop creditors from charging loan-shark interest rates (check cashing & ‘payday loan’ stores), or revising loan agreements on the fly (current day credit cards).  Or loading up mortgage agreements with deceptive terms, or even flat out lie and tell people they’re getting X, when in fact it’s Y.  (The free market has no respect for people not smart enough to decypher 20-odd pages of financial legalese, and who lack the means to hire lawyers.)

People are denied the means to declare bankruptcy, even under hardship, whereas companies “too big to fail” are given strings-free handouts from governments.

‘There is no one’ — to take that all a step farther — with the power, laws, or means to stop rogue corporations or hyper-rich individuals from plundering everything in sight.  (This ‘free market’ sounds a hell of a lot like the anarchy Ardsgaine was complaining about at the top of this post.  Then again, objectivism never was a consistent philosophy.)

Money itself does not exist unless there’s a social compact agreement that certain counters mean something.  Representing goods and/or services and/or productive capacity.  Now control over the setting of that value can be in the hands of governments which, under ideal conditions, derive their power from the informed consent of the goverened citizens, and thus answer directly to them.

Or, under objectivism, it can be in the hands of corporations and business leaders, who as some kind of secondary side-effect, are expected to respect the rights of individuals, in their own extended self-interest.  Even though in the short term, there’s massive piles of money to be made and power to be gained through cheating the system, to the detriment of other people.  (Objectivism totally ignores the seductive power of temptation and greed.  But goverments, somehow magically able to regulate in the absence of regulation and to function in the absence of public taxation, are supposed to manage all this.  Without impeding the free market in any way whatsoever.  Talk about circular reasoning.)

A totally unregulated free market is never inherently self-regulating.  It transforms quite readily from symbiosis with human culture in an actively destructive parasitism.  Just look at the American health insurance industry.

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.

People don’t need encouraging to act irrationally.  Or to commit crimes of breathtaking proportion.  There just needs to be a pile of money and/or power to be had.  There are enough borderlines and sociopaths among us to ruin everything for everybody.  Even supposedly ordinary, decent people — family people — can justify and objectify the exploitation of others.  Lord Acton: “Power corrupts.”

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.

This here is outright misrepresentation.  In socialism, there is no ‘borrowing’ to get a house!  You just get one because you need one.  Mortgages are a capitalist invention.  (But by this point, I can see I’m arguing with a guy who doesn’t even understand his own terminology and can’t be bothered to Google beyond the Objectivist/hyper-Libertarian websites.)  My commenter is displaying outright ignorance of political philosophies and their definitions.

Nobody forced those banks to make those crazy mortgages.  All they had to do was say ‘No, we won’t lend you the money.’  Or, ‘Let’s check your income against the payments.’  They stopped doing that because, in the deregulated mortgage securities market, it was in their best interest not to.  Marginally-secured debt came to equal short-term massive bond profits.  This ain’t rocket science.

Or they could have acknowledged the reality that real estate values do not always go up, not when we’re playing, “Let’s pretend this 1985-era 3-bedroom split-level house near LA is actually worth $1.5 million.  And that a 110% mortgage on that theoretical value to a family making $100k/year tops is rational.”

What happened was there was such a hugely inflated demand for the repackaged mortgage security derivatives and default swaps that it created its own demand for more debt.  Not just debt, but BAD debt was itself given a value and then traded — that is to say, in the credit default swaps, it was presumed that there’d be defaults, that those defaults would then be compensated through AIG and other gov’t-backed insurance schemes, and the future potential value of those reimbursements was then openly traded as commodities.  More naked parasitism and plundering.

Everything was directed toward showing short-term profits — by which means inflated, temporary gains could be claimed… resulting in multi-million (sometimes billion) dollar bonuses.  If only one person in a thousand is greedy enough to be tempted by such prospects… but then, that’s exactly what was happening.

The government didn’t try to make it so people could borrow for unaffordable homes.  Banks asked to be released from regulations requiring them to have viable assets to back up the loans they’d made.

Socialism says that we should share each other’s burdens, so now we’re all paying for the $700 billion bailout.

Rubbish.  Capitalism held a gun to the American economy’s head and said, “Give us this money, no strings, or we pull the trigger.  Great Depression 2, suckas.  Now hand it over.”  And George Bush, the GOP (and far too many of the Dems) and Congress are so beholden to these moneyed financial interests, they handed it over.

Socialism would’ve been if the government had nationalized these industries.  This did not happen by any stretch of the imagination.  Again, a breathtaking display of rank misrepresentation.

It is socialism that is running this economy, as it has been since the 1930s.

So…Reagan and Gingrich and both Bushes and the GOP were all crypto-socialists?  Now I’ve heard everything.

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.

Saying it’s so doesn’t make it so.  These are the guys who worshipped Ronald Reagan (who made deregulation his mantra).  The ones who laughed knowingly when Norquist talked about making government small enough to drown in a bathtub.  Who turned on Bush the Elder like rabid weasels because he dared to raise taxes in an effort to balance the deficits created by his sainted GOP predecessor.  Who insisted vehemently that Clinton keep Alan “Bubble-Boy” Greenspan as Fed Chairman.  Who enabled Phil Gramm (R-Texas and USB) and his cohorts in Congress to deregulate like mad.

This is the same classic argument made by the conservatives now:  It’s failed because it was never really tried.   Their former disgraced leaders are disavowed as ever having been in support of the very policies they enacted.  The policies themselves are denied as having existed.

They just want us to forget everything that’s happened, and who’s been running everything when it all went belly-up.

Thanks for playing, Ards.  You’ve been fun.