'Atlas Shrugged': From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123146363567166677.html?mod=rss_Today%27s_Most_Popular

by epi0Bauqu • 18 years ago

105 141 18 years ago

online.wsj.com

Ah, yes.... The collectivists controlled the Presidency, the Senate, and the House of Representatives and used their power to regulate the credit derivatives market out of existence. How much better things would have been if the Chairman of the Federal Reserve had heard of Objectivism!

Even the off-hand pop culture references are crapulous: "A Confederacy of Dunces" surely counts as a "classic novel of recent decades that was never made into a movie", and it is a lot funnier than anything Ayn Rand ever wrote.

dgordon5• 18 years ago

You're right about A Confederacy of Dunces, but it seems to me that Ayn Rand wasn't exactly going for funny.

But I am, so -- uh-oh, I said "it seems to me." Better dodge that falling giant copy of Atlas Shrugged that's aimed for my head.

unalone14• 18 years ago

Ayn Rand thought she had something important to say about society. And I've seen interviews with her on the media, where she's seemingly invited in just to be mocked and called greedy. So frankly, I think she had - and still has - a point.

I think the writer's being over-the-top, but I also think that the bailout is going vastly over-the-top and I think that Obama's plan to continue it isn't helping things at all.

bstadil2• 18 years ago

"Chairman of the Federal Reserve had heard of Objectivism!"

FYI Greenspan was a friend of Ayn Rand and was part of her inner circles.

http://www.noblesoul.com/orc/bio/greenspan-time.html

jorgeortiz85• 18 years ago

Yes, I think that was intended to be part of the irony.

Eliezer2• 18 years ago

He knows that; that's the joke.

maxharris• 18 years ago

Greenspan turned his back on Objectivism during the 70s.

ellyagg3• 18 years ago

Don't understand your first sentence totally. You do admit that collectivists have controlled the Presidency and House and Senate for the last 8 years, yes? Bush, in particular, is no anti-collectivist. Some people get confused by labels, e.g., Republican, so I just want to make sure.

Asset bubbles always happen. They probably always will happen. Now that the bubble is bursting, the collectivist mismanagement over the last several years is making us extra vulnerable. Even more horribly, the current and coming response is dooming the recovery to a much longer period than if the economy were allowed to reach equilibrium on its own.

andreyf2• 18 years ago

Don't understand your first sentence totally. You do admit...

Adjust your sarcasm detector.

jules• 18 years ago

> readers rated "Atlas" as the second-most influential book in their lives, behind only the Bible.

olefoo4• 18 years ago

And for many of the same reasons, it gives a sense of surety in an uncertain world, it provides a sense of tribal belonging and ready-made membership in a like-minded community.

That said, I find it somewhat creepy to base one's life around a work of fiction.

ojbyrne2• 18 years ago

It's a little sensationalist, and probably shouldn't say it, but your last sentence immediately brought the Bible to mind.

_5y6p• 18 years ago

> it gives a sense of surety in an uncertain world

In particular, a false sense of moral certainty derived from an elitist denial of social complexity.

ellyagg3• 18 years ago

God, that's kind of despicable. I'm no Objectivist, but there's a big freaking difference between a work of superstition and one of reason and logic. Whether you agree with Rand's premises, you must have had no exposure to her writing if you don't recognize her brilliance. She's not all right, but she's not wrong about everything either: The government confiscates citizens' money at the point of a gun.

fuzzmeister• 18 years ago

That's pretty disturbing, considering one of the book's main arguments is against altruism.

unalone14• 18 years ago

It's not altruism if you benefit from the results.

It was in Rand's best interests to influence as many people as possible, since she promotes a system of logic and selfishness to better people. If people subscribe to her theory of belief, she gains as much as they do.

prospero• 18 years ago

I have striking insights into totalitarianism. The left, naturally, hates me.

rw2• 18 years ago

The right, naturally, hates you.

GavinB• 18 years ago

Absolutism: Simple. Satisfying. Wrong.

ellyagg3• 18 years ago

Well, you have to realize that up until Ayn Rand, the only popular absolutism was Marxism. People were pretty excited to have an absolutism that promoted striving for excellence rather than striving for grey sameness.

davidw4• 18 years ago

Good point. If you read Rand in that spirit, it makes for an interesting point of view. The important thing is to avoid getting caught up in it and think that "Objectivism" is a sensible or even possible way of running the world. People are neither 100% collectivist oriented, nor 100% individual oriented, and going in either direction too far is to go against how we function (but please note that I'm not arguing for splitting the difference right down the middle - obviously modern capitalist societies are far better than various attemps at communism).

mmmurf7• 18 years ago

I disagree with your premise that it's absolutism. Rand called herself a capitalist and Atlas Shrugged is simply Rand's argument about the morality of capitalism.

Notably, Atlas Shrugged is more of a treatise against crony capitalism than it is against socialism.

seehafer2• 18 years ago

I don't know.... I'm certain that I absolutely need food and water to survive. That's simple, satisfying, and quite helpful.

One of the many misunderstandings of Rand is that she's supposedly some dogged "absolutist" saying "thou shalt do this, that, and the other", when the truth was that Rand stressed the importance of context in making decisions. One holds principles as absolutes, yes, but principles are only useful if they are applied to reality -- to the particular situation at hand.

ph0rque• 18 years ago

That sounds like an absolute statement... is absolutism always wrong?

dgordon5• 18 years ago

I was saying this in the summer of 2007, partly inspired by the fact that a Mr. Thompson (Fred) seemed to have a good chance of becoming a presidential candidate. It's interesting to see people and organizations repeating it around me now.

By the way, this guy needs to pull out his copy of the book, or at least the Cliff's Notes, on a few counts. Notably, the appropriation of Rearden Metal was hardly immediate.

gills• 18 years ago

I read this book for the first time, last summer. It was actually a little bit spooky -- OK, very spooky -- to read basically the same thing (metaphorically) in the book and the news most days of the week.

unalone14• 18 years ago

Very! I had the same experience when I read The Fountainhead for the first time, in the middle of an ego clash happening at my school.

It's important, I've found, not to mistake Rand's works for wholesale reality. She makes some incredibly good points, and I love her concept of the virtue of selfishness, but things are more complex than she writes about. She was aware of this too: her books are deliberately overstated in order to drive her points home. The economy, along with people in general, is more complex than headlines might make it seem.

jonny_noog• 18 years ago

If more of Rand's proponents were apparently aware of this fact that "things are more complex than she writes about" nor, might I add, are things as absolute, I would have less of a problem with Objectivism.

endtime4• 18 years ago

I know what you mean - I felt the same way after reading Age of Tolerance (similar to Atlas Shrugged but specific to contemporary American political issues) and then saw people singing the national anthem in Spanish, but with the words politically modified.

I've read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged too, but it was a while ago.

eru• 18 years ago

> then saw people singing the national anthem in Spanish,

Would this be a good or a bad thing?

jfoutz• 18 years ago

It's much stranger seeing people change the words of a drinking song into a national anthem.

unalone14• 18 years ago

Would you recommend Age of Tolerance as a book?

nomoresecrets• 18 years ago

http://www.angryflower.com/atlass.gif

dmix2• 18 years ago

I'm more on the less-government side but that comic always bothered me.

There are many instances in Ayn Rands writing where she praised the laborers for their hard work. My impression was that she didn't believe that only a few "men of the mind" should be at the top and everyone else does the hard work for them.

It was more about valuing the laborer who works harder then everyone else instead of the one who believes he deserves higher compensation without contributing anything more then the minimum requirements.

joe_bleau• 18 years ago

Agree that she respected manual labor: after all, the heroic Howard Roark character worked in a granite quarry for a time in "The Fountainhead".

Eliezer2• 18 years ago

Comic author noted afterward that he hadn't actually read the book, wasn't aware that Rearden had (in the ficton) invented the metal himself, etc.

dgordon5• 18 years ago

Why am I not surprised? Thanks for mentioning that.

jderick• 18 years ago

The movie is in production:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0480239/

Maybe this is just a veiled promo?

benzim• 18 years ago

I certainly see parts of Atlas Shrugged becoming reality in the current financial crisis. If failing businesses continue to be propped up on a large scale it won't be too many years before the US economy grinds to a halt. If the productive are constantly taxed to help the unproductive the incentive to create wealth will disappear.

vitaminj• 18 years ago

Wow, this article has some very tenuous links between Atlas Shrugged and real life. I'm going to just pick on one:

The appropriation of Rearden metal by the government in Atlas Shrugged was compared to Hank Paulson's insistence that the banks (which the government would bail out) had to hand over a percentage of their future profits back to the government. Apparently, these situations are eerily similar because in both cases the government did it for the "public interest".

Notwithstanding the fact that in Atlas Shrugged, Rearden actually invented something of value (which the govt appropriated), whereas in real life, the bankers fucked up their own balance sheets and were coming to the government cap in hand for help. As far as I'm aware, one is theft, the other is repaying a favour.

The only thing eerily similar about these two situations is that they both have a guy named Hank involved.

natrius• 18 years ago

Some banks didn't want to take the government's money but were basically forced to.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/blog/2008/oct/15/banking

nazgulnarsil5• 18 years ago

It's called nationalizing and any serious business concern would like to avoid it.

jhancock2• 18 years ago

sometimes I won't click on a link simply because to do so may encourage writing more content of its nature. this is one of those times ;)

unalone14• 18 years ago

So you're saying that you think that closedmindedness on your part is a good way of stopping other people from discovering ideas? Even if those ideas are closedminded, you do better to critique the actual article rather than avoid it. Criticism is the quickest way to kill a bad idea.

jhancock2• 18 years ago

uh no. I'm saying exactly what I said. And I disagree that criticism is the quickest way to kill an idea. I'm not out to :kill: ;).

jwesley2• 18 years ago

Atlas Shrugged is propaganda masquerading as art. The characters are thin shells used to promote Rand's thinking and in no way reflect reality.

The idea that unbridled self interest leads to the greatest good guided Greenspan's monetary policy and got us into this mess.

There is certainly a lot to be said for enlightened self interest and personal freedom, but the absolutism of objectivism is just as wrong as communism.

seehafer2• 18 years ago

"The characters are thin shells used to promote Rand's thinking and in no way reflect reality."

Well, whose thinking do you think they should have promoted, exactly? And why do characters in a novel necessarily need to exactly reflect reality? I haven't run into any elves, dwarves, or immortal wizards, but that didn't stop me from enjoying Tolkien.

"The idea that unbridled self interest leads to the greatest good guided Greenspan's monetary policy and got us into this mess."

Really? How do artificially low interest rates translate into unbridled self interest?

jwesley2• 18 years ago

1. If a novel is intended to be realistic fiction, it should reflect reality, not the author's philosophical agenda. (My opinion, but I think this is the only way serious art reveals truth. Imagine if Marx had written a novel.) This is distinct from fantasy. I'm a Tolkien fan too, but I don't think anyone would turn to LOTR for economic guidance.

2. Artificially low interest rates reflect Greenspan's belief that given enough liquidity, markets will be self correcting. He thought banks were in the best position to protect themselves from risk because they bear the greatest consequences of failure. (He has since admitted the failure of this belief.) Clearly they were not, as the low interest rates lead to further inflation of the credit bubble.

unalone14• 18 years ago

You could say the same thing about every character ever written. They're all extensions of the author. Even a character as complex as, say, Stephen Dedalus, is in the end a product entirely of his creator's mind. One of the catches of reading fiction is that you always need to remember that they are the product of a single mind.

> There is certainly a lot to be said for enlightened self interest and personal freedom, but the absolutism of objectivism is just as wrong as communism.

But which concept is better? When you subscribe to an idea you do it for the practical idea of it. Communism says that you should put everybody in front of you, and do what everybody else thinks you should. (Or rather, subjectivism does, since that's the true opposite of Objectivism; Communism rather states that the community is more important than the individual, which is closer to subjectivism.) Objectivism says that you should rely on yourself to do what's right. The one is much healthier mentally, and that's a good sign.

awfabian• 18 years ago

Hmm. I tend to think that Rand's philosophy misses some important points, like:

1. Humans hate inequality, esp. those who are on the losing end, but it seems to make everyone unhappier in general. Inequality is useful, but probably needs some managing.

2. Massive wealth generated in modern societies, though it tends to fall into the hands of a few (exponentially so), is generated by having a society/collective. If you have more wealth than you could ever generate with your own two hands, then you're benefitting from society in a major way, regardless of how much society takes back. (Even this is not strictly true--what you can generate with your own two hands depends on education, inventions society has given to you (like language), etc. It's hard to calculate one's debt to society.)

JeffL2• 18 years ago

I think (1) is a really interesting point, but don't you think that humans also strive for inequality? People don't just want to keep up with the Jones's, they derive great satisfaction from being ahead of the Jones's.

2) I think society benefits more from the generators of massive wealth than they do from the society. Obviously it is mutually beneficial, but the fountains of wealth would probably do fine with or without society.

dgordon5• 18 years ago

"Massive wealth generated in modern societies, though it tends to fall into the hands of a few (exponentially so), is generated by having a society/collective. If you have more wealth than you could ever generate with your own two hands, then you're benefitting from society in a major way, regardless of how much society takes back. (Even this is not strictly true--what you can generate with your own two hands depends on education, inventions society has given to you (like language), etc. It's hard to calculate one's debt to society.)"

You know, if you replace every instance of "society" in that sentence with "people throughout history who were left free to create things that make life easier, without having the product of their effort stolen from them," you'd get something Ayn Rand might have written herself.

fauigerzigerk2• 18 years ago

I think it's important what kind of inequality we're talking about. Are we talking inequality between two people with similar opportunities and education, one lazy and unimaginative and the other a creative risk taker?

Or are we talking inequality between joe the dock worker, son of a dock worker, working the dock reasonably well, but never looking beyond, and jack the corporate lawyer, son of a corporate lawyer, working the legal docs reasonably well, but never looking beyond?

Inequality throughout history was rarely down to merit. I very much sympathise with Rand's point of view, but after having lived in one of the most run-down parts of the UK, I know that poverty breeds poverty.

Yes the superstars rise from poverty through their own work and they should not be punished for it. But for every superstar there are 100 joe/jack pairs and the difference between their income is based on little else than class.

[edit] Jill the waitress might have been a better example since dock workers have a powerful trade union in some countries.

Retric2• 18 years ago

I think the closer you get to merit based accumulations of wealth the better for society. Let's suppose you could give 15 million inflation adjusted to your children, but after that it's taxed at 75%. Now clearly 4 billion to 1 billion is not going to eliminate wealth quickly, but the history of the ford family and the ford company is going to look vary different.

Now do the same thing but start that at 250k vs 15 million. Your still going to have the corporate lawyer issue but that still has a lot to do with education and a type of drive.

Tangurena2• 18 years ago

I came across an interesting analogy about how Atlas Shrugged was the first book in a trilogy. And how Anthem was the 3rd book (the second book, "shrug harder" not having been written or released).

> Then [John Galt] went further and, in a fit of offended pique, promised to "stop the motor of the world," to kill 90% or so of Earth's population by intentionally wrecking the economy. Which he then did. How? By finding every other competent engineer or manager in the US and persuading them to be just as selfish as him, just as unwilling to pay back or protect their country; he declared a covert "strike of the mind," as he called it. He hid them all in a secretive compound in the Rocky Mountains, protected by force field and invisibility cloak, and waited for the US economy to collapse, which, obligingly, it did -- because John Galt had carefully sabotaged the bridges and railroads that made it possible for fuel and seeds to make it from the coastal cities to inland farms, and make it possible for food grown on inland farms to make it to the coastal cities. And as chaos was breaking out, he and his fellow inventors hijacked every radio transmitter in the US to broadcast his manifesto: You all deserve to die, for asking us to pay you back even one nickel, because we are all so selfish we don't consider any of the things you all paid for out of your taxes and that you did with your labor to have been at all helpful to us as entirely self-sufficient brilliant inventors and managers. So die.

> And that's where the series is interrupted. But from where the third book picks up, and by applying a little common sense, we can outline the main plot points, if not the characterizations, from the untitled middle volume, the one I'm whimsically calling Atlas Shrugged 2: Shrug Harder. When the previous book ran out, America was winding down to what was clearly going to be the last harvest, ever, and the Strikers were planning for the day that they, as the only people possessing any high tech or any capability of mass production of food or anything else, would ride out of their hidden Colorado fortress as humanity's saviors. They were pledging to themselves to build a new world based, as John Galt's manifesto had promised all Americans, on the virtue of selfishness. They assumed that a grateful (or at least desperately needy) and vastly reduced in number population would welcome them as liberators, chastened and having learned their lesson. Except that we know from the third book that that's not what happened, and anybody who knows human nature should have been able to predict that.

> Outside the valley, the conversion to local subsistence farming and the work of scavenging the dead cities for any usable metal would have been rough. No time or energy would have been available to save even minimal technology. We're looking at a collapse all the way back to (at best) early iron age levels, maybe even all the way back to the bronze age, and nobody will even have time to teach the next generation to read and write. But one thing very clearly did happen, in every survivor's village, and became world-wide policy as soon as even minimal travel and communication made it possible for the chiefs of the scattered villages of survivors began to reunite society into any kind of a civilization, and that is a fierce determination to make sure that the next generation remembered who had done this to them, and why they had done it. They would have educated their children to remember the names and descriptions of every one of the hated Strikers who had personally murdered four and a half billion people for a political point. And they would have educated their children that one idea, one idea in the Strikers' twisted minds, had lead to those four and a half billion deaths, the greatest act of genocide in human history: selfishness. How far did they go to eradicate selfishness? They went so far as to eradicate the first person pronoun from the language.

> Anthem is actually the best book of the three. And it's a credit to Rand that she realized just how monstrous the real results of the Strike would be. Many, many so-called Objectivists and Libertarians, who only read the first book, thought they were supposed to cheer for the Strikers, believed the Strikers' personal delusion that the Strike, and the resulting mass genocide, would usher in a techno-libertarian paradise on earth. No, in Anthem we get a view of John Galt's Earth from the viewpoint of someone who grew up in the next generation, never having known a technological world, knowing only a world in which selfishness is labeled the ultimate sin. http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/393124.html

walterk10• 18 years ago

That is a fantastic post and thread. Thanks for linking.

orib• 18 years ago

It might be a good read if it actually talked about what happened in the book. However, it didn't.

yummyfajitas2• 18 years ago

because John Galt had carefully sabotaged the bridges and railroads

John Galt destroyed nothing except a room full of his own inventions. The railroads were destroyed due to the poor management of Dagny's brother (forget his name) and interference from Washington.

Also, from that link:

John Galt, outraged that anybody would even suggest that he or the company he worked for owed anything to the nation that provided his education, protected him from infectious disease outbreaks, protected him from Communist invasion, built the roads that got him to work each day, provided the police that kept him safe, and provided the court system that protected his property rights at all, sabotaged the Galt Engine, so nobody could have it.

As I recall, one of the heroic characters (Ragnar?) specifically states that these are all legitimate functions of the government and that they should be financed by taxes. In fact, one of the strikers actually worked for the government (Judge Narragansett).

It's always helpful to read a book before criticizing it.

unalone14• 18 years ago

Yeah. It ticks me off that Rand is associated with anarcho-capitalism (I think that's the phrase to describe people that want to replace government with corporations, no?). She isn't. She's all for government, but she has it restricted to three primary functions: depending people physically (with police), depending people morally (with law), and defending the nation (with a military). However, she says that these functions should be kept as minimal as possible, so as to give people maximum freedom.

It bugs me, because the Anthem argument ignores so much to make a snarky point (and Anthem is a terribly-written book, both Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged are better-writ). It goes by this vision of Rand as a near-Nazi who wants conformity to her Galtian standard. She doesn't, and she says this repeatedly. Rather, she wants Galt to be the bringer of the message that you ought to do things using your own abilities, primarily for yourself.

She's fine with charity, as long as you give what you want to and not what you feel compelled to. She's fine with tax, as long as you're only being taxed for the services that directly apply to you. She's entirely fine with people disagreeing with her, provided they disagree based on their own moral convictions rather than on the convictions they read of others. (I thought that made the OP a bit ironic.) This all gets ignored for the blind Rand-hate that exists solely to counteract all the blind Rand-love. It's frustrating.

APLonDrugs• 18 years ago

Agree...Also, from that link: ‘built the roads that got him to work each day’ and they built those roads without your consent like the stimulus package now, you will get it from your tax money regardless if you want it or not. How many cameras did those roads include so your government can watch you? How many $2,000 hammers? How many pay-offs to the political class were made for it to happen, behind closed doors? The argument you ‘owe society’ is false, what you owe is freedom within that society that let it happen and that is all. The greater the personal liberties are held foremost in society the greater the benefits that can be developed for your fellow man. How much good for society happened under Mao, Hitler and Stalin? The infrastructure that the Weimar Republic built centered on promising its citizens too much. This led to huge budget deficits that created inflation on a level the world had never seen before. I’d rather take my chances without everything the link says government gave me:-)

mattmaroon2• 18 years ago

So because government programs in a work of fiction caused more harm than good, all government programs in the non-fiction world must be bad. Good logic.

fauigerzigerk2• 18 years ago

Oh, don't interfere with the beautiful ways of ideology ;-)

But seriously, government programs are in great danger of failing because _all_ big projects are in great danger of failing. I think you would easily find evidence of that.

Taking a centralised decision on how to spend over a trillion dollars within a year or two, allowing no time for readjustment or seeing what actually works, is a very high risk business, no matter if it's government or anyone else who does it.

Granted, a lot of that money is not going to be spent on new projects but will be used to speed up existing ones.

mattmaroon2• 18 years ago

That's at least a valid argument. I just don't think it's a good idea to base opinions on government programs on any work of fiction. Many treat Atlas the way the religious right treats the Bible.

electromagnetic2• 18 years ago

There has been great success in large-scale projects in the past. It's just that back in the 1950's and earlier when they were spending vast amounts of money on single projects, people had been talking about them for over a decade.

Perhaps today we don't need 10 years to come up with a plan on how to build a network of highways, perhaps all our computers and better analytical models help greatly in predictions. However, it's hard to tell if software is giving you a good prediction until you begin getting results and I don't think many people would have felt comfortable betting on Deep Blue before it publicly won its first game of chess.

DanielBMarkham• 18 years ago

It's called a thought experiment.

Rawsock• 18 years ago

I think Marx's "The Capital" explains better the current economical situation.

But meanwhile, in Fantasyland ...

davidw4• 18 years ago

I think there is a middle ground between Marx and Rand that is much better at explaining the current situation: serious economics.

electromagnetic2• 18 years ago

Personally I find this article stupidly hilarious.

> "Rand, who had come to America from Soviet Russia with striking insights into totalitarianism and the destructiveness of socialism..."

I'm sorry, I thought it was capitalism that just fudged the butter causing this economic crisis. I mean there was the whole mortgage deal (that only happened in the largely non-socialist US) that started screwing the economy up because the US doesn't have enough legal protections in place to stop people who physically don't have the money to pay a loan to get a loan in the first place. I mean there used to be the day in the US where if you had no money you'd get a credit check and then be refused like everywhere else in the world.

The subprime mortgage fiasco caused the big swathe of mortgages defaulting. Basically this made the banks need to get their money back or face bankruptcy, then the NYSE went down the crap hole, gas went through the roof and then the mixture of shit vehicles, crappy prices, high gas price/low mileage and big debts caused chaos for the big 3 automakers in the US.

I'm sorry, but correct me if I'm wrong, but that little summarization (essentially thanks to wikipedia) never once mentioned a country other than the largely non-socialist US.

The US's major butter fudging caused all the economic problems in the more socialist countries like the UK. The funny thing is, is that if the US had nationalised health care (like the UK) they would pay approximately half what they currently do for health care and would result in them being twice as healthy. Ironically this would mean more americans would have more money to spend and would have less reasons to not spend it, which is exactly what the economy needs right now.

On the side of Ayn Rand's background, she came from soviet Russia, which completely fucked up the whole socialism thing by preventing anyone losing a job or being unemployed. They avoided buying combine harvesters for farms because it would make some people unemployed not realising that those very people would become reemployed in other jobs... like fixing the combine harvesters.

Now I have a cute little pet bunny balled up in a blanket in between my legs whom, much like me, cares little about Atlas Shrugged and any misconceived links to the current financial crisis and he only cares that the prices of his food and hay and treats have all gone up a couple of dollars thanks to the US.

yummyfajitas2• 18 years ago

1) Plenty of other countries are having real estate bubbles bursting, for instance Ireland and Spain.

2) It has long been a goal of the government to increase home ownership and inflate the bubble. Regarding down payments, the government tried to help people unable to come up with downpayments to get a loan anyway.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/06/20020618-1.h...

(Scroll down past the "hunt down terrorists" part.)

http://www.hud.gov/offices/cpd/affordablehousing/programs/ho...

Our top free market politician warned us about the bubble-producing effects of this in 2002, and tried to put an end to it.

http://www.ronpaul.com/2008-09-26/ron-paul-on-the-housing-bu...

(Sorry for the paulspam, but it might be the one time it's relevant.)

jerf• 18 years ago

"I mean there was the whole mortgage deal (that only happened in the largely non-socialist US) that started screwing the economy up because the US doesn't have enough legal protections in place to stop people who physically don't have the money to pay a loan to get a loan in the first place."

Exactly backwards. And I mean exactly backwards.

There are, in fact, laws that forced banks to give out loans to those people. Laws which have not been repealed. Entire non-profit groups making sure those laws were enforced, and who have not learned anything from what happened.

How is "government overriding the good sense of the mortgage industry by government fiat" capitalism?

The mortgage industry was highly regulated. It couldn't hardly have been more regulated. The problem is that the "perfect government regulator" is a myth that lives only in our minds. Your argument, like almost everybody else, assumes that regulation always works, and thus, if something didn't work, it must not have been regulated. QED. A moment's clear thought will show that to be completely false. If you can handle the idea that a market made of people is imperfect, even must be imperfect, why do so many carry around the idea that a government made of people will somehow be immune? It's just people! Markets, governments, consumers, all just people.

Government may not be 100% responsible for what happened, but they are 100% responsible for creating the environment in which it occurred. Nobody else had the power to force bad loans but the government.

...

There is a great danger here. Months into this crisis and huge numbers of people still have no clue what happened. Forget ideology for a second; if you want to make good decisions, you need truth. The truth is complicated, and I can't lay it all out, but I can tell you that the idea that this was all caused by rampant laissez faire capitalism is an objective falsehood. Government was involved deeply and pervasively. What exactly that means, I don't know and I'm not trying to make a claim here. (I have elsewhere, but not here.) All I am saying here is that you need to know the truth before spouting off.

Even as a little-l libertarian, I would feel a lot more comfortable with calls for regulation if people didn't implicitly treat it as some sort of atomic entity, where you either have "more" or "less", but that's the only dimension. That's wrong and frankly stupid. There's also good regulation and bad regulation and it's not usually obvious which is which. If we frame the debate that way, I'd be a lot less scared, but nobody does! It's all "we need more" or "we need less" and nobody talks about what more or what less, just "more" and "less".

I'm "little l" because I'm not against all regulation, but I'm against bad regulation, and that is what got us here. Not "no" regulation. Bad regulation. It exists! ... so why does that common-sense declaration feel so subversive to say?

mmmurf7• 18 years ago

Superb comment!

jfornear• 18 years ago

> Not "no" regulation. Bad regulation. It exists! ... so why does that common-sense declaration feel so subversive to say?

I wonder this same thing to myself every time I turn on the news or get into an ideological argument with a friend!

I wish I could just give all my karma to your comment. I agree with everything you said. You put it well.

manny• 18 years ago

I wish I could upmod you twice.

olefoo4• 18 years ago

Please name the regulation that said that any bank had to give a loan to someone with No Income, No Job, No Assets?

Please name the laws that are (you claim) still forcing banks to make loans to unqualified borrowers.

Now I would agree that there were many failures of regulation in the mortgage industry; but if you are trying to claim that things like http://www.usdoj.gov/crt/housing/title8.php forced banks into making bad loans you are full of shit. Racist shit, that doesn't even make sense.

But since you can't even name the "laws that forced banks to give out loans to those people." I'm guessing that you or your fellows will try to nail me on the use of profanity rather than addressing the facts.

AlexeyMK• 18 years ago

Libertarians and Objectivists are so good at being half-right. Yes, public money should not be used to help mediocre businesses, but the way to prevent that from having to happen is to impose restrictions on company market share in certain industries (Banking, specifically) to make sure that no one is 'too big to fail'. Regulation is a necessary component of any business environment. Businesses need to either follow strict regulations or be limited by size and investors such that their failure would not be acceptable.

chadmalik• 18 years ago

Remind me of how Moore was opposing the Greenspan monetary policies and Bush fiscal policies? Oh, right, he didn't.

It defies parody that a Rand protege (Greenspan) and Rand supporters like Moore basically created this mess.

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