Ayn Rand's Gospel of Selfishness and Billionaire Empowerment Is Plaguing America

[Makalakumu]

http://www.alternet.org/economy/ayn...ionaire-empowerment-plaguing-america?page=0,0

The United States and other independent governments around the world are crumbling while Ayn Rand’s billionaires are taking over.



February 7, 2013 |

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Thirty years after her death, Ayn Rand’s philosophy of selfishness and billionaire empowerment rules the world. It’s a remarkable achievement for an ideology that was pushed to the fringes for most of her life, and ridiculed on national television in a notorious interview with Mike Wallace.
But, it’s happened. And today, the United States and other independent governments around the world are crumbling while Ayn Rand’s billionaires are taking over.

It's very obvious to me that the authors haven't read the book.

She divided the world into makers and takers (or what she called “looters”).
On one side are the billionaires and the industrialists. People like Dagny Taggert, a railroad tycoon, and Hank Rearden, a steel magnate. Both were fictional characters in her book Atlas Shrugged, but both have real-world counterparts in the form of the Koch Brothers, the Waltons, and Sheldon Adelson. According to Rand, they are the “Atlases” holding up the world.
So, in Atlas Shrugged, when the billionaires, tired of paying taxes and complying with government regulation, go on strike, Ayn Rand writes that the American economy promptly collapsed.
On the other side are the “looters,” or everyone else who isn’t as rich or privileged, or who believed in a democratic government to provide basic services, empower labor unions, and regulate the economy. They are the leeches on society according to Rand (and according to Mitt Romney with his 47% comments). And, as she told Mike Wallace in in 1959, they do not even “deserve love.”

If the authors had read the book, they would have discovered that Ayn Rand spits most of her criticism at a class of billionaires that use the power of government to crush their competition and line their pockets. I've never understood why Liberals constantly ignore this...

Or maybe they do understand it...

Or she may have come to understand that corporations and billionaires owe their wealth to the state and not the other way around. Without favorable patent and copyright laws, a court system, an educated workforce, and an infrastructure to move goods about the country, then no one would be able to get rich in America.

So, Mr. Thom Hartmann, are you saying that without super rich patent trolling lawyers that squash innovations that would create competition and new wealth, without a court system that is regulated and tilted toward the rich where justice is determined by how much money you have to spend, without a dumbed down and indoctrinated populace that is cowed to lick the boots of their masters, without infrastructure projects that create a monopoly for auto and oil companies, no one would get rich in America?

Mr. Hartmann, read the damn book next time.

 

[granfire]

maybe because conservatists don't get it either?

I don't think Mitt's running buddy got the message....

 

[Omar B]

Too many people name check Ayn with only a nebulous idea of what her philosophy is. She's often turned into a pariah by people who have never read her work who are observing people thinking they are acting in an objective manner.