The what-if economy
What if Wall Street dirt bags had not concocted credit default swaps? What if banks had acted as if we could bank on their prudence? What if Washington had not drunk too deeply of Ayn Rand’s toxic fountainhead?
What kind of economy might we have had had we not the flim-flam economy that has now collapsed? Where would jobs and growth have come from? In what direction would our future have stretched out before us?
And why aren’t these questions being asked by the bought-and-paid-for know-it-alls who daily explain our lives to us?
The questions imply, don’t they, that we’ve been living in a fool’s paradise. We didn’t have a boom, we had the illusion of one. Yes, some people got rich or richer, the kind of selfish unpatriots Ayn Rand and her disciple Alan Greenspan licensed to pilfer the commonweal, but no one took responsibility for building a real, diverse and forward-looking economy.
What would a real economy look like? You know, one with a future for those of us who don’t buy $3,000 suits.
It would create jobs in a wide spectrum of fields, like nanotechnology and photosynthesis research, robotics, renewable energy, medical science, infrastructure renewal, modern mass transit, and a wealth of other promising endeavors. It would figure out how to stop bleeding jobs to cheap labor markets in other countries, many of which don’t wish us well. It would not rely on ruining the environment by building an overstock of houses in areas where we have to drive around too much. It would manage our re-urbanization, which makes sense as we search for new energy sources and try to conserve what we have. It would not depend on guys running around in inefficient pickups trashing the landscape with styrofoam and beer cans. It would build what we need, not what we think we’re entitled to.
So, instead of yakking about all those pesky immigrants, family values, gay marriage, Roe vs. Wade—and any other red herrings so regularly served up on the airwaves we happen to own—how about some t-h-o-u-g-h-t about the economy we could have had if we hadn’t been beguiled into hocking our future to the developers and their banker buddies?—DM
This crisis was not a failure of Ayn Rand’s ideas or of laissez-faire capitalism, it was a failure of intensive government regulation, in which Greenspan took part. In unbelievable, mass stupidity, the most commonly touted solution is more regulation!
From The American Competitive Enterprise Institute:
“While the Dow collapses, we have a bull market in government regulations. The 50-plus departments, agencies and commissions are now at work on 3,882 rules; 757 will affect small businesses. More than 51,000 final rules were issued from 1995 to 2007.”
That’s nearly 54,000 NEW regulations, added to what was there before, in only 12 years!
That is hardly Rand’s laissez-faire capitalism; it is fascism/corporatism & socialism. At root, those are the very ideologies Rand spent her lifetime hoping to save Americans and America from. Now, when the effects of those destructive ideologies from Washington hit the fan, most ‘pundits’ are blaming laissez-faire capitalism instead. They are ridiculous, uninformed, or dishonest.
Greenspan dropped any pretense of understanding Rand’s arguments sometime before he became head of the Fed., and he then became a major part of the problem. His monetary policy and suppression of interest rates at 1%(!), when Rand would have said “let the market decide”, were an appalling government intervention. Add in the HUD, CRA, CDS (an effort akin to any insurance approach, by which lenders sought to protect themselves ), Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the recipe for a catastrophically distorted market, including the trading of derivatives, was complete.
Edward Cline wrote, “Reason and rationality flee when force becomes a factor in men’s decisions, to be replaced with the pragmatism of punishment-avoidance or a risk-free shot at easy money.”
So imagine YOU are the CEO of a large financial organization. Your competitors are complying with the regulations and are making good for their shareholders, while things are getting tight for your firm. What do you do?
You do the pragmatic thing, join in, and hope for easy money. If you are able to understand the fraud in the government’s game, you build yourself some protection for when the government’s house of cards collapses; evidently most people are not that smart.
You would not have dared to engage in the risky lending or buying that lead to the crisis, were it not for the handful of people in the US government who, believing they were more intelligent than the free market, installed legislation to distort it. Without those people, lending rates would have adjusted themselves years ago, paper money would not have been printed like it grew on trees (e.g. “helicopter Bernanke”) and the present crisis would never have materialized.
Capitalism is the only *moral* system because it let’s a man keep what he produces; it was the American system. An historical and geopolitical look at nations shows that those which are more free have citizens who prosper more by their own effort, and live more peacefully. Free markets made America great from 1776 to the late 1900’s, and then serious regulations began. Even America’s poor were wealthy compared with the middle class of other nations. Ayn Rand was right, and should not be blamed for a protegé’s failures. Now they are likely to elect Obama, as the first President ever, who is explicitly socialist, objects to the restrictive nature of the Constitution, accepts multiple donations from the same credit card used under different names (breaking campaign rules) , advocates self-sacrifice to the community (read, mob), seeks to quash free speech, advocates a *domestic* military, and clearly rejects the founding principles of America, with no small degree of hatred for his own nation. McCain is just as bad as Bush, with an even greater likelihood of battering dpwn the wall between church and state.
Although you are echoing mainstream media sentiment, they are largely wrong, have not done due diligence as professionals (which includes you) & have done Americans a massive disservice.
Thanks, Richard. I’m glad for you to have your say, which happens to be as mainstream in some quarters as you say my own views are. I think you’re dead-bang wrong, and as a Christian I think it unlikely, however much I might re-examine my own views in light of arguments such as yours, that I will do anything but continue to gag on Ayn Rand’s ideas.—DM
Richard shows us his spirit when he defines “community” as “mob” and “moral” as letting “a man keep what he produces” (apparently damn all the other men, women, and children who may produce less due to circumstances outside their control). Capitalism unchecked is cancer, which kills by its soulless growth. Thank you, I refrain from imagining myself the CEO of a large financial organization, because I prefer visualizing the evolution of the human spirit, not its pollution.
It is interesting how you, djelloul, are uninfluenced by straight facts. That is a hallmark of the unreason of subjectivism.
Brent grasps my point, but in doing so he chooses its opposite principle, advocating robbing Peter (the producer that all “other men, women and children” benefit from) to pay Paul. Paul then, lives morally off stolen goods. Economic freedom does not “damn” the people he sees as less fortunate, it provides them with opportunity that socialism/communism removes. It was that economic freedom that made the American poor wealthier than the middle class of most other countries. That remains true to this day, but the gap is rapidly decline solely because the American administrations, over the last hundred years, have persisted in acting on Brent’s (and djelloul’s) politico-economic nonsense.