ultra-rich survive and prosper
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that's life ... get used to it
On Mar 16, 10:34 am, Tommy News <tommysn...@gmail.com> wrote:
> How Ayn Rand's Bizarre Philosophy Made the New Right so Toxic
> Rand's psychopathic ideas made billionaires feel like
> victims and turned millions of followers into their doormats.
> The Guardian
> ByGeorge Monbiot
>
> It has a fair claim to be the ugliest philosophy the
> postwar world has produced. Selfishness, it contends, is good, altruism
> evil, empathy and compassion are irrational and destructive. The poor
> deserve to die; the rich deserve unmediated power. It has already been
> tested, and has failed spectacularly and catastrophically. Yet the
> belief system constructed by Ayn Rand, who died 30 years ago this
> month, has never been more popular or influential.
> Rand was a Russian from a prosperous family who emigrated to the
> United States. Through her novels (such as Atlas Shrugged) and her
> nonfiction (such as The Virtue of Selfishness) she explained a
> philosophy she called Objectivism. This holds that the only moral course
> is pure self-interest. We owe nothing, she insists, to anyone, even to
> members of our own families. She described the poor and weak as "refuse"
> and "parasites", and excoriated anyone seeking to assist them. Apart
> from the police, the courts and the armed forces, there should be no
> role for government: no social security, no public health or education,
> no public infrastructure or transport, no fire service, no regulations,
> no income tax.
> Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957, depicts a United States crippled
> by government intervention in which heroic millionaires struggle against
> a nation of spongers. The millionaires, whom she portrays as Atlas
> holding the world aloft, withdraw their labour, with the result that the
> nation collapses. It is rescued, through unregulated greed and
> selfishness, by one of the heroic plutocrats, John Galt.
> The poor die like flies as a result of government programmes and
> their own sloth and fecklessness. Those who try to help them are gassed.
> In a notorious passage, she argues that all the passengers in a train
> filled with poisoned fumes deserved their fate. One, for instance, was a
> teacher who taught children to be team players; one was a mother
> married to a civil servant, who cared for her children; one was a
> housewife "who believed that she had the right to elect politicians, of
> whom she knew nothing".
> Rand's is the philosophy of the psychopath, a misanthropic fantasy of
> cruelty, revenge and greed. Yet, as Gary Weiss shows
> in his new book, Ayn Rand Nation, she has become to the new right what
> Karl Marx once was to the left: a demigod at the head of a chiliastic cult.
> Almost one third of Americans, according to a recent poll, have read
> Atlas Shrugged, and it now sells hundreds of thousands of copies every
> year.
> Ignoring Rand's evangelical atheism, the Tea Party movement has
> taken her to its heart. No rally of theirs is complete without placards
> reading "Who is John Galt?" and "Rand was right". Rand, Weiss argues,
> provides the unifying ideology which has "distilled vague anger and
> unhappiness into a sense of purpose". She is energetically promoted by
> the broadcasters Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santelli. She is the
> guiding spirit of the Republicans in Congress.
> Like all philosophies, Objectivism is absorbed, secondhand, by people
> who have never read it. I believe it is making itself felt on this side
> of the Atlantic: in the clamorous new demands to remove the 50p tax
> band for the very rich, for instance; or among the sneering, jeering
> bloggers who write for the Telegraph and the Spectator, mocking
> compassion and empathy, attacking efforts to make the word a kinder
> place.
> It is not hard to see why Rand appeals to billionaires. She offers
> them something that is crucial to every successful political movement: a
> sense of victimhood. She tells them that they are parasitised by the
> ungrateful poor and oppressed by intrusive, controlling governments.
> It is harder to see what it gives the ordinary teabaggers, who would
> suffer grievously from a withdrawal of government. But such is the
> degree of misinformation which saturates this movement and so prevalent
> in the US is Willy Loman syndrome (the gulf between reality and
> expectations) that millions blithely volunteer themselves as
> billionaires' doormats. I wonder how many would continue to worship at
> the shrine of Ayn Rand if they knew that towards the end of her life she
> signed on for both Medicare and social security. She had railed
> furiously against both programmes, as they represented everything she
> despised about the intrusive state. Her belief system was no match for
> the realities of age and ill health.
> But they have a still more powerful reason to reject her philosophy:
> as Adam Curtis's BBC documentary showed last year, the most devoted
> member of her inner circle was Alan Greenspan,
> former head of the US Federal Reserve. Among the essays he wrote for
> Rand were those published in a book he co-edited with her called
> Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal.
> Here, starkly explained, you'll find the philosophy he brought into
> government. There is no need for the regulation of business – even
> builders or Big Pharma – he argued, as "the 'greed' of the businessman
> or, more appropriately, his profit-seeking … is the unexcelled protector
> of the consumer". As for bankers, their need to win the trust of their
> clients guarantees that they will act with honour and integrity.
> Unregulated capitalism, he maintains, is a "superlatively moral system".
> Once in government, Greenspan applied his guru's philosophy to the
> letter, cutting taxes for the rich, repealing the laws constraining
> banks, refusing to regulate the predatory lending and the derivatives
> trading which eventually brought the system down. Much of this is
> already documented, but Weiss shows that in the US, Greenspan has
> successfully airbrushed history.
> Despite the many years he spent at her side, despite his previous
> admission that it was Rand who persuaded him that "capitalism is not
> only efficient and practical but also moral", he mentioned her in his
> memoirs only to suggest that it was a youthful indiscretion – and this,
> it seems, is now the official version. Weiss presents powerful evidence
> that even today Greenspan remains her loyal disciple, having renounced
> his partial admission of failure to Congress.
> Saturated in her philosophy, the new right on both sides of the
> Atlantic continues to demand the rollback of the state, even as the
> wreckage of that policy lies all around. The poor go down, the
> ultra-rich survive and prosper. Ayn Rand would have approved.George
> Monbiot is the author Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning. Read
> more of his writings at Monbiot.com. This article originally appeared
> in the Guardian.
>
> --
> Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
> Have a great day,
> Tommy
>
> --
> Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
> Have a great day,
> Tommy
--
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