Cheers,
Blog Review

So in my blog today, “Dworkin, Leiter, and Wilkinson are All Off the Mark; 'Blame It On Ayn Rand'” http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/2008/10/rand... . I show all of you where you are wrong–I hope! You were implying that Rand has no intellectual prowess to be the shaker and mover of the economic status quo, were you not?

I've got you and Leiter on my Google read list, which is how I found this discussion.

Many happy returns.

It's funny, but not the way you think it is.

If so, that's a funny.

The “but-for causation” is the fundamentally flawed lending strategies pushed by Fannie and Freddie et al. It wasn't “design flaw” or “material failure” that caused this collapse. It was the original decision to build on sand.

It amazes me that no matter how many stupid moves the government makes, some will always claim that freedom is the problem. For goodness' sake, people, too-loose credit has been government policy ever since the first altruist noticed that some people didn't own a home. What did you *think* was going to happen?

In some fictional authoritarian future, as the last of us are loaded into cattle cars to be shipped off to labor camps, those same critics of capitalism are apt to yell: “Damn you, Thomas Jefferson, you greedy bastard! This is all your fault!”

Help avoid that future by reading something like this instead of Kos: http://www.forbes.com/opinions/2008/07/18/fanni...

So says, apparently unselfconsciously, the same guy who a couple of months ago was positing a 50-50 chance of effectively infinite future economic growth due to the positive environmental externalities of modern industrial capitalism. Ayn Rand was a piker!

Wall Street was supposed to be in charge of reducing risk and effectively allocating capital. They were effectively left to their own to do so. Instead of being responsible they came up with a pyramid scheme that hid risk, increased risk, skirted competition, monopolized markets and mis-allocated capital. No one in the government made them do that. But they certainly took every advantage to raid the peoples treasury and to spend massive amounts of dollars to change the lobbying system as well as to fund it to buy off all the favors they could need from the government. Oh and they also used their extra money to fund “think”tanks designed solely to sway and inculcate public perceptions to amass an army of Orks to believe in and to help advance their cause.

In the process of letting the Wall Street Cowboys innovate toxic financial products which roughly started with Reagan we saw their share of the nations corporate profits go from 10% to 40%. They got rich producing nothing but bad debt and toxic pieces of paper designed to pull money from the truly productive economy (what was left of it after outsourcing) and to bankrupt the middle and lower classes.

They failed to raid the social security stash and needed to find some other source to fund their CEO's billion dollar salaries. With consumer savings all spent and credit debt totaled out the only equity left in the system was college students needing loans, people needing pay day advance and equity in peoples houses. On they charged…pirates with some more treasure to raid. They lobbied and pressed and changed the system and the rules to get the maximum return with the least amount of effort. No planning for the future or the good of society only short term profits. The computer age and high tech physics, math and computer Phd's could all come together and design “efficient” wealth creating productivity stealing products.

CRA, ACORN and poor people did not do this… yes indeed Ayn Rand and her cult of unrepentant misanthropes played a big role.

Republican massive debt accumulation and Republicans breaking the government as well described in The Wrecking Crew by Thomas Frank pretty much explains the other ingredients needed to create yet another Republican lead disaster bring our country and even the world to its knees.

And on and on the Cheerleaders cheer and indeed the hackery abounds!

Anyway, it's a bit weird that you describe the post as Leiter's “free association.” He wrote approximately one sentence of it.

On substance, the claim in the op-ed that Leiter quotes is that Greenspan's resistance to regulation on derivatives had conspicuous toxic effects. Leiter snarkily suggests it's likely Rand may have had a latent influence on the imperfectly objectivist Greenspan in this respect. Mirabile dictu.