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"jubba"  wrote in message news:XnsA00DE2F1CD112dds@88.198.244.100...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/mar/05/new-right-ayn-ran...
(snipped for brevity)

"It has a fair claim to be the ugliest philosophy the postwar world has
produced."

# Well yes.   But the post-war scene wasn't mean to be that ugly.  Fear of 
the Russians sped up the process.  Post-war was a marvelous time for 
businessmen because so many things were invented during the war and screamed 
out for further development.  Big amounts of capital were needed.  There was 
much Christian good-will and capital extended to our  enemies.  It was a 
Christian act.  Show me who else would ever behave in such a manner.

There was at first a mental euphoria from the destructiveness of war.  Men 
came home from it to plenty of work for the first time in a generation.  New 
businesses, new homes being built, refrigerators and cars.  It was a 
wonderfully mentally liberating time.

But the usual suspects were already subverting the government.  Subverting 
and controlling with graft money.  Russian spies thieving technology and 
planning more destruction on us...as if the defeat of Germany wasn't enough 
misery to go through.     The Berlin Airlift was no Boy Scout  joke.
   The wartime control was excellent in the distribution of food and 
resources and focusing the mass mind on a worthy goal.  But now the greed 
factor overtook national interest.   The war emergency laws were no longer 
in power... greed was looking for power.

Maybe it's only war regulations that control the greed factor,  and stops 
corruption of the initiative of business to provide for the population. 
Certainly Stalin didn’t provide.  Even during the war the Americans were 
risking their ships and lives  to provide food and trucks to the maniac 
Stalin and his failed  economic philosophy.   Excess of certain mental 
factors of the human mind is what corrupts...it's not simply a monetary 
distribution problem.
There is a nasty thread of of a certain type of mind that runs all the way 
through this pre-war and post- war scenario of greed.  It was not of a 
Christian making.  Christian peoples after the war forgave, married our 
enemies, extended credit, worked on research programs together.   The 
problem was elsewhere, like a cancer  metastasizing.   Ayn Rand was not a 
Christian and neither is Greenspan.


"a notorious passage, she argues that all the passengers in a train
filled with poisoned fumes deserved their fate. One, for instance, was
a teacher who taught children to be team players; one was a mother
married to a civil servant, who cared for her children; one was a
housewife "who believed that she had the right to elect politicians,
of whom she knew nothing".

Rand's is the philosophy of the psychopath, a misanthropic fantasy of
cruelty, revenge and greed. Yet, as Gary Weiss shows in his new book,
Ayn Rand Nation, she has become to the new right what Karl Marx once
was to the left: a demigod at the head of a chiliastic cult. Almost
one third of Americans, according to a recent poll, have read Atlas
Shrugged, and it now sells hundreds of thousands of copies every year.

Ignoring Rand's evangelical atheism, the Tea Party movement has taken
her to its heart. No rally of theirs is complete without placards
reading "Who is John Galt?" and "Rand was right". Rand, Weiss argues,
provides the unifying ideology which has "distilled vague anger and
unhappiness into a sense of purpose". She is energetically promoted by
the broadcasters Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santelli. She is
the guiding spirit of the Republicans in Congress.

Like all philosophies, Objectivism is absorbed, secondhand, by people
who have never read it. I believe it is making itself felt on this
side of the Atlantic: in the clamorous new demands to remove the 50p
tax band for the very rich, for instance; or among the sneering,
jeering bloggers who write for the Telegraph and the Spectator,
mocking compassion and empathy, attacking efforts to make the word a
kinder place.

It is not hard to see why Rand appeals to billionaires. She offers
them something that is crucial to every successful political movement:
a sense of victimhood. She tells them that they are parasitised by the
ungrateful poor and oppressed by intrusive, controlling governments.

It is harder to see what it gives the ordinary teabaggers, who would
suffer grievously from a withdrawal of government. But such is the
degree of misinformation which saturates this movement and so
prevalent in the US is Willy Loman syndrome (the gulf between reality
and expectations) that millions blithely volunteer themselves as
billionaires' doormats. I wonder how many would continue to worship at
the shrine of Ayn Rand if they knew that towards the end of her life
she signed on for both Medicare and social security. She had railed
furiously against both programmes, as they represented everything she
despised about the intrusive state. Her belief system was no match for
the realities of age and ill health.

But they have a still more powerful reason to reject her philosophy:
as Adam Curtis's BBC documentary showed last year, the most devoted
member of her inner circle was Alan Greenspan, former head of the US
Federal Reserve. Among the essays he wrote for Rand were those
published in a book he co-edited with her called Capitalism: the
Unknown Ideal. Here, starkly explained, you'll find the philosophy he
brought into government. There is no need for the regulation of
business – even builders or Big Pharma – he argued, as "the 'greed' of
the businessman or, more appropriately, his profit-seeking … is the
unexcelled protector of the consumer". As for bankers, their need to
win the trust of their clients guarantees that they will act with
honour and integrity. Unregulated capitalism, he maintains, is a
"superlatively moral system".

Once in government, Greenspan applied his guru's philosophy to the
letter, cutting taxes for the rich, repealing the laws constraining
banks, refusing to regulate the predatory lending and the derivatives
trading which eventually brought the system down. Much of this is
already documented, but Weiss shows that in the US, Greenspan has
successfully airbrushed history.

Despite the many years he spent at her side, despite his previous
admission that it was Rand who persuaded him that "capitalism is not
only efficient and practical but also moral", he mentioned her in his
memoirs only to suggest that it was a youthful indiscretion – and
this, it seems, is now the official version. Weiss presents powerful
evidence that even today Greenspan remains her loyal disciple, having
renounced his partial admission of failure to Congress.

Saturated in her philosophy, the new right on both sides of the
Atlantic continues to demand the rollback of the state, even as the
wreckage of that policy lies all around. The poor go down, the
ultra-rich survive and prosper. Ayn Rand would have approved."