2-21-09

2-21-09—Mr. [Nouriel] Roubini tells me that bank nationalization “is something the partisans would have regarded as anathema a few weeks ago. When I and others put it in the context of the Swedish model [of the 1990s]—i.e., you take banks over, you clean them up, and you sell them in rapid order to the private sector.... at some level it’s good to have a framework to think about the world, in which you emphasize the role of incentives and market economics ... fair enough! But I think it lead to an excessive ideological belief that there are no market failures, and no issues of distortions on incentives. Also, central banks were created to provide financial stability. Greenspan forgot this, and that was a mistake. I think there were ideological blunders, taking Ayn Rand’s view of the world to an extreme.” --WSJ A9

--2007--Gaitskill gives Granite/Rand the needling she deserves, and it would all be very funny except for the fact that people beyond Dorothy take Rand seriously. People like Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, and a number of other people on the Right who now enjoy positions of great power and influence in this country. Indeed, the rest of the people on the Right who might not seem inclined to share the religionless vision of Rand and Greenspan nevertheless seem to embrace the worldview summarized in The Gods Disdained excerpt given above. Again:

The book was about the struggle of a few isolated, superior people to ward off the attacks of the mean-minded majority as they created all the beautiful important things in the world while having incredible sex with each other. It ended with almost all the inferior majority being blown up in chemical disasters, perishing in airplane wrecks or collapsing buildings, all more or less simultaneously, all as an indirect result of their own inferiority. (163)

With some minor adjustments, the paragraph might well describe the essence of the Left Behind fantasies of the Christian Nazis who revel in their dreams of apocalypse.
In short, it might be fine if these issues of power, abuse, and abasement were confined to the bedroom. Unfortunately they leak and pour into offices, schoolyards, workplaces, and politics. Ayn Rand and her Christian allies share one solution.
--Bachmann, EXTREME PROUST p. 337