CNN’s got a little piece on the upswing in Rand sales. Their LA Festival of Books booth was a corner booth and much bigger than in previous years.
BUT…
Where was this popularity when Free Market was crashing down? Right. So who was at the top of the Amazon Top 50 books then? Exactly.
Ayn Rand books are good books. Whether they are good or sound strategies for the world, well, you decide.
From the dude at the top of Ayn Rand institute:
“So many people see the parallels with actually what’s going on, with the government taking over the banks, with the government kind of taking over the automobile industry, a president who fires the CEO of a major American corporation. These are the kind of things that come out of ‘Atlas Shrugged,’ ” Brook said.
My opinion… if we’ve written down enough theories of how it should all work someone is going to be right some of the time. Marx? Revelations from the Bible? 2012 cults? Hale Bopp? Ayn Rand?
For me, the world is far too complicated to predict the fate of a country, a financial system or the world in a single book or perhaps even all the books.
Three words: Tit for tat.
Some complex systems which are related to socioeconomics (systems of agents, that is), show remarkable stability. Others don’t.
Additionally — have you ever read “The Road to Serfdom”? Though the book was pre-Axelrod, Hayek expresses how order and structure seems to emerge from the free market of its own will. What he means is that the free market encourages a certain kind of game which results in the emergence of stability and the general trend of prosperity.
Before you pooh-pooh the free market, keep in mind that engineered markets/social systems have never had the success of the free market, though they’ve been tried in various permutations time and time again.
There is a logic behind it all, and hiding behind the veil of “it’s complex” is dismissing that and is generally dismissive. We all have our personal philosophical leanings – I am a Rand fan, because I believe her philosophy is based on an informal understanding of how certain stable and prosperous arrangements can emerge from certain preconditions.
If you’re not a Rand fan, fine. But I’d expect better arguments as to why her ideas (which tie back to the free market in general) can be so summarily dismissed as comparable to a cult mindset, for instance.
And blaming our mess on the free market is short-sighted and sounds more like a political line than actual reasoned thought. Theft has always been illegal, and if the market was inflated using means that were comparable to theft though not recognized as such in the regulations until now, that’s a fault of the regulations and those who failed to recognize the activity as criminal. Theft has no place in a free market (you can’t freely trade if you’re always worried about being robbed). Free markets can’t exist in an anarchist system; they need a government, they need protections. Protecting individuals from theft is one of the key components of a truly free market.
Additionally, the housing bubble had a lot to do with interference from the legislature, which in various ways encouraged lenders to lend to risky individuals. To say that was a free market failure isn’t correct: no rational individual would lend to someone who fell above some reasonable measure of risk. Undoubtedly there were other failures when it came to housing, but the base failure was that there were a lot of people who got mortgages who shouldn’t. What changed between the late 90s and now so that, for the first time in American history, banks were lending to people who couldn’t pay them back? It isn’t sensible. There’s a part of the story that’s missing — the free market would never allow banks who continually lent to individuals who couldn’t pay back their loans to exist.
and here’s a TAT.
i wasn’t really making a comment on the specific philosophy. I was suggesting that the popular philosophy is contingent on the circumstances and that all economic philosophies are limited in their reach. i.e. one philosophy can’t cover it all.
ratatat that! 🙂