Ayn Rand's Acolytes Have a Lot for Which to Answer

What on earth did this misanthropic woman write that was so appealing to her disciples and how could we have allowed them to use her warped creed to further their own political ends and enrich their cronies?

Allan Brawley, Huffington Post

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Instead of running the country's economy in accordance with the principles that most of us learned in college economics courses, our leaders have been basing public policy on the teachings of a morally challenged fiction writer. Ayn Rand. In Rand's warped view, especially as expounded in her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, business tycoons are superheroes and everyone else is worthless. Ordinary working people are beneath her contempt and government is inherently evil. Most noteworthy among her disciples is long-time chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan, who assiduously promoted the most extreme forms of Randian anti-government free market capitalism throughout his long career in public service.

He was not alone, of course, having the support of such luminaries as former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, holder of a series of high-level federal economic policy positions. These three were hailed by Time magazine in 1999 as the ultimate authorities on modern economics and their views were taken as gospel. While claiming to be beyond ideology, they promoted economic and financial practices that drove the country to the edge of disaster in 2008, created income inequality unseen in generations, and is close to destroying the middle class in America, as well as in those countries around the world that bought into their supposedly unassailable free market dogma.

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Related:

Atlas Drugged (Ayn Rand Be Damned!) ~ Stephen L. Goldstein, Reviewed by davidswanson, Democrats.com

• If this is where free-market principles lead, if the catastrophe carved out by the job-creators in this book is what we're consciously attempting to arrive at, then we'd better reject as absolutely evil many of the assumptions and claims we encounter every day in the rhetoric and the policy coming from our politicians, including of course -- this being reality after all -- both of our leading candidates for president.
• Ayn Rand's Acolytes Have a Lot to Answer For