Matt Taibbi takes aim at an amazingly bizzare Forbes article written by Ayn Rand devotee named Harry Binswanger. I was curious about Ayn Rand back when I was 18, but I moved on. Binswanger hasn’t and, in fact, has doubled down. As always, Taibbi’s serious message is wrapped in entertaining prose:
It reads like an Onion piece, just hilarious stuff. I mean, Jesus, even Lloyd Blankfein himself didn’t go so far as to take the “God’s work” thing 100% seriously, and here’s this jackass saying, without irony, that the Goldman CEO literally out-God-slaps Mother Teresa.
The thing is, for all its excesses, Mr. Catyanker’s piece does reflect an attitude you see pretty often among Rand devotees and Road To Serfdom acolytes. Five whole years have passed since the crash, and there are still huge pockets of these Fountainhead junkies who genuinely believe that the Blankfeins of the world are reviled because they’re bankers and they’re rich, and not because they’re the heads of unprosecutable organized crime syndicates who make their money through mass fraud, manipulation and the shameless burgling of public treasure. In this case you have a guy who writes for Forbes, a business publication,and apparently he isn’t acquainted even casually with any of the roughly 10,000 corruption cases involving Blankfein’s bank.
Taibbi’s article contains a succinct rundown of many of the ways Goldman Sachs actually makes money. Hint: It’s not by producing goods or services helpful to ordinary Americans.
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/top-10-lessons-strange-mirror-universe-ayn-rands-atlas-shrugged?paging=off¤t_page=1#bookmark
“Over the past year, I’ve been reading and reviewing Ayn Rand’s massive paean to capitalism, Atlas Shrugged. If you’re not familiar with the novel, it depicts a world where corporate CEOs and one-percenters are the selfless heroes upon which our society depends, and basically everyone else — journalists, legislators, government employees, the poor — are the villains trying to drag the rich down out of spite, when we should be kissing their rings in gratitude that they allow us to exist.”
Erich, I met the person self-described as the “head of the Objectivist Society in Canada.” I was travelling to Albany as the person representing consumers injured through no fault of their own before various legislative committees.
I had read Rand when in high school and discarded it as worse than Dianetics but, she was scorching hot. I finally could not reconcile my base desires with the need for the possibility of redemption. I asked a simple question, “who dies in a society of scarcity?” The answer was something like the “less worthy” and my comparison of the answer to thought in post-Weimar Germany got me an empty seat next to mine.
P.S. I did not use the “N” word.