ayn rand : conservatism as theme park

Atlas Shrugged. The Ayn Rand cult of individualism. The Fountainhead of sorrow? Can something as American as individualism be questioned? Actual events in the past few years seems to have mirrored the nightmare vision of economic collapse amid an unrelenting government expansion. She is the poster child of the conservative movement; the one who seemed to anticipate the Barney Frank’s, and economists like Paul Krugman and Joseph Stieglitz who keep pimping fiscal expansion and the alchemous miracle of creating liquidity for the economy. After Mr. Frank’s experience with mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, their collapse prompted Mr. Frank asserted that the “cure” would be to “give us more authority.”

However, the real evil nemesis of Atlas Shrugged is railway CEO James Taggart, whose particular brand of capitalism seems to accelerate the economy’s demise more than government regulation. Rand seemed to be anticipating the Angelo Mozilo’s of this world, the Countrywide Financial kahuna who finagled government subsidies to his firm under the banner of virtuous homilies such as home ownership for all.

But, most of the heroes for Rand are big businessmen who are persecuted by the government. Still, the truth is more complex than the simple pro-business narrative being peddled retail by the conservative movement. A movement, that in general is still stuck in the industrial age, and who earnestly believe that in today’s environment, business investment will lead to more employment. In truth, if corporations start reinvesting their cash hoard, the technologies will resulting in greater numbers collecting pogey. In fact, when Rand died in 1982, she was basically loathed by the conservative movement for her atheistic views and personal conduct as an exemplary feminist. She was also pro-choice and had an open affair with a much younger man after having informed her husband and the young man’s wife before commencing.

If anything, Rand’s position on relationships, her pro-choice leaning, anti-Vietnam and opposition to segregation should have lent her credibility as a spokesperson for the Left. She had arrived penniless to the U.S. in 1925 and was the archetype of the American immigrant experience. But, she was impossible to politically categorize. She disliked Eisenhower and wrote against the candidacy of Reagan on the grounds he didn’t support laissez-faire in its undiluted form. But, she supported Nixon since he supported abolition of the military draft. The question to be posed is whether she really grasped economic principles or was recycling an immigrant vision of the American Utopia. The power of the a dynamic state sector, as Krugman has pointed out, is what drives the economy.

Its easy to see where Rand’s thinking can lead to.It’s always odd that leading industrialists almost always side with what appears to be enlightened foreign policy: Nafta, North South trade, two state solution in Palestine etc. This is done for quite good reason: permanent neo-colonial dependencies like El Salvador makes sense. The maquiladoras, assembly plants, Mubarak sponsored Egyptian cheap labor, a Palestinian hinterland offers low cost labor and awful conditions. Plus, less worries about pollution and other constraints on profit making. It is far better for them to be across a border, in their own “state,”  . This enlightenment is also a useful weapon against the American working class since it offers ways to undermine their wages and benefits. Also, it offers means to break strikes or prevent them since U.S. manufacturers, can create minimal cost excess capacity abroad used to leverage labor unrest here. So, as Rand could not foresee, there’s a good reason to be in favor of a Palestinian state, new Iraq’s, Afghan pacification, Kurdish semi autonomy. Everyone wants a little “pet” nation that is in a condition of permanent neo-colonial dependency.

So,  the United States  now has tremendous inequality,  high levels of poverty, stagnating or declining wages and deteriorating working conditions.Much like other Western countries.  In the United States, the economy is based on the state sector, usually concealed under a rubric of military industry. But the American system of global order is collapsing. It

sustainable. It can’t even be called conservatism. These outpost nations are not accepting it any longer and outside the U.S., Canada and to a limited extent, England, there is very little support. When the business world begins to protest because they are being forced to cede opportunities to foreign rivals, you know the structure is fragile.

Ultimately, the definition of Rand, is that of an individualist: a life promoting the inalienable right of the individual. Its this paean to individualism that has kept Atlas Shrugged in the news in the wake of tax revenues being channeled to big business in the form of subsidies. She has been used and appropriated to conceal some darker contexts that betray most of her principles. The rub with Rand is that our consumerist culture, senseless consumption,  is not about conformity, it’s about distinction, and there is a blurry segregation between distinction and individualism that is transgressed often. As Joseph Heath has pointed out,  people consume in order to set themselves apart from others generating a series of comparative preferences that serve to generate competitive consumption, and Rand seems silent on this perspective.

Joseph Heath:We find ourselves in an untenable situation On the one hand, we criticize conformity and encourage individuality and rebellion. On the other hand, we lament the fact that our ever-increasing standard of material consumption is failing to generate any lasting increase in happiness. This is because it is rebellion, not conformity, that generates the competitive structure that drives the wedge between consumption and happiness. As long as we continue to prize individuality, and as long as we express that individuality through what we own and where we live, we can expect to live in a consumerist society. Read More:http://this.org/magazine/2002/11/01/the-rebel-sell/

ADDENDUM:

Alex Epstein:If there is one economist who embodies everything that is wrong with the modern economics profession and the influence it wields, it is Nobel Laureate, Princeton Professor, and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. For nearly a decade, Krugman has consistently blamed any free elements of our mixed economy for our economic problems, and held more government intervention as the solution. Given his prestige in the field of economics, most Americans are inclined to regard him as a source of sage wisdom on economic recovery. For his part, Krugman’s recurring theme has been that the Obama administration is absolutely right to increase government control over the economy at unprecedented levels — it should just do it more.

Well, in my opinion every column of Krugman’s is an impeachment of his economic ideas, his political convictions, and his cherry-picking intellectual dishonesty. But let’s leave that aside for now and focus on one particularly impeachable fact about Krugman that has been evaded for way too long: his advice early this decade, post dot-com bust, when the government was beginning to inflate the housing bubble.

From 2002: “To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.” (Emphasis added.) Read More:http://blog.aynrandcenter.org/paul-krugmans-inconvenient-track-record/

Read More:http://leftsolutions.wordpress.com/ayn-rand-sociopathic-politics/
David Weigel: In the movie version of Atlas Shrugged, there is a scene in which Ayn Rand’s libertarian heroes defy all odds, deploy some untold amount of private funding, and launch the fastest high-speed train in history over rails of experimental metal. “The run of the John Galt Line is thrilling,” wrote the libertarian federal judge Alex Kozinski. “When it crossed the bridge made of Rearden Metal, I wanted to stand up and cheer.”…

…That’s in the fantasy world. In the real world, libertarians aren’t cheering for high speed rail but rather trying to stop it from being built. They are succeeding. In Ohio, Gov. John Kasich campaigned against a high-speed rail line funded by the stimulus, got elected, and turned down the funding. In Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker did the same thing, only more so—his anti-train campaign even had its own Web site. …

…But it could hardly make less sense to liberals. What, exactly, do Republicans, conservatives, and libertarians have against trains? Seriously, what? Why did President George W. Bush try to zero out Amtrak funding in 2005? Why is the conservative Republican Study Committee suggesting that we do so now? Why does George Will think “the real reason for progressives’ passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism”?… Read More:http://www.slate.com/id/2287539/

…Making life difficult for cars could be, in fact, described as a form of class war, but one that works in the long-term interests of the poor and working class. Interesting that Atlas Shrugged is about trains.

Typical of auto advocates is that any move to curtail car domination is an attack against the little guy because automobiles give everyone equal access to mobility. The mantra being the car allowing the little guy, the great unwashed total freedom of movement; the automobile being an egalitarian creation, that connects the quality-of-life gap between rich and poor creating a form of “social solidarity.” The  truth is that the automobile, when used as the primary mode of mass transit, results in greater cost to the poor.  And, the poor use cars because there is no other option in a society built to serve the needs of the automobile.

Simultaneously, the automobile is an important way for the rich to assert themselves socially since a prestigious brand allows the society to know that you have arrived in all its glorious senses. All in all, you have to question whether the ingenious “self-actualization” of a Maslow and Rand’s individualist proclamations were such usable pawns in promoting the destructive wheel of competitive consumption and its parallel offshoots of militarism and racism that permitted the delivery of these goods and services at subsidized prices.