12 comments

• 

  William B

  8 months ago

  It's hard to tell where the sarcasm begins and ends in that last paragraph.
  reply
• 

  Michael Drake

  8 months ago

  Yep, you'd definitely have to be an economic illiterate to quote Keynes in the context of this financial crisis.
  
  Anyway, it's a bit weird that you describe the post as Leiter's "free association." He wrote approximately one sentence of it.
  
  On substance, the claim in the op-ed that Leiter quotes is that Greenspan's resistance to regulation on derivatives had conspicuous toxic effects. Leiter snarkily suggests it's likely Rand may have had a latent influence on the imperfectly objectivist Greenspan in this respect. Mirabile dictu.
  reply
• 

  adina

  8 months ago

  You missed Naomi Klein on KPFK radio this morning. She spoke about how dangerous the free marketers are because of their suggestions for privatising Fannie and Freddie, which were both apparently fabulous organizations that was on the road to providing everyone a home, all until we disasterously "mostly privatised" them in 1968. If you want another chance to hear her, KPFK having a big fund drive! ! When you use your tax-deductible donation to support the anti-capitalist mission for social justice , you are automatically entered to win a free imac or ipod!
  reply
• 

  muirgeo

  8 months ago

  The problem was opaque complex financial products developed by Wall Street outside of regulations. These were the ingredients require to leverage 60 trillion dollars over 100 billion.
  
  Wall Street was supposed to be in charge of reducing risk and effectively allocating capital. They were effectively left to their own to do so. Instead of being responsible they came up with a pyramid scheme that hid risk, increased risk, skirted competition, monopolized markets and mis-allocated capital. No one in the government made them do that. But they certainly took every advantage to raid the peoples treasury and to spend massive amounts of dollars to change the lobbying system as well as to fund it to buy off all the favors they could need from the government. Oh and they also used their extra money to fund "think"tanks designed solely to sway and inculcate public perceptions to amass an army of Orks to believe in and to help advance their cause.
  
  In the process of letting the Wall Street Cowboys innovate toxic financial products which roughly started with Reagan we saw their share of the nations corporate profits go from 10% to 40%. They got rich producing nothing but bad debt and toxic pieces of paper designed to pull money from the truly productive economy (what was left of it after outsourcing) and to bankrupt the middle and lower classes.
  
  They failed to raid the social security stash and needed to find some other source to fund their CEO's billion dollar salaries. With consumer savings all spent and credit debt totaled out the only equity left in the system was college students needing loans, people needing pay day advance and equity in peoples houses. On they charged...pirates with some more treasure to raid. They lobbied and pressed and changed the system and the rules to get the maximum return with the least amount of effort. No planning for the future or the good of society only short term profits. The computer age and high tech physics, math and computer Phd's could all come together and design "efficient" wealth creating productivity stealing products.
  
  CRA, ACORN and poor people did not do this... yes indeed Ayn Rand and her cult of unrepentant misanthropes played a big role.
  
  Republican massive debt accumulation and Republicans breaking the government as well described in The Wrecking Crew by Thomas Frank pretty much explains the other ingredients needed to create yet another Republican lead disaster bring our country and even the world to its knees.
  
  And on and on the Cheerleaders cheer and indeed the hackery abounds!
  reply
• 

  Ralph C Whaley MD

  8 months ago

  Confused about issues? Read Ayn Rand!
  reply
• 

  DMonteith

  8 months ago

  "In times like these the hackery abounds."
  
  So says, apparently unselfconsciously, the same guy who a couple of months ago was positing a 50-50 chance of effectively infinite future economic growth due to the positive environmental externalities of modern industrial capitalism. Ayn Rand was a piker!
  reply
• 

  JA

  8 months ago

  DMonteith, I'm genuinely confused by this. Are you saying the current crisis disproves Will's thesis?
  
  If so, that's a funny.
  reply
• 

  DMonteith

  8 months ago

  No, I'm not referring to the current crisis. I'm saying that excessive adherence to abstractions frequently leads to absurd, if not outright hackish, arguments.
  
  It's funny, but not the way you think it is.
  reply
• 

  mtnrunner2

  8 months ago

  This whole credit episode is playing out exactly like something out of Atlas Shrugged, with Eugene Lawson in charge at Treasury.
  
  It amazes me that no matter how many stupid moves the government makes, some will always claim that freedom is the problem. For goodness' sake, people, too-loose credit has been government policy ever since the first altruist noticed that some people didn't own a home. What did you *think* was going to happen?
  
  In some fictional authoritarian future, as the last of us are loaded into cattle cars to be shipped off to labor camps, those same critics of capitalism are apt to yell: "Damn you, Thomas Jefferson, you greedy bastard! This is all your fault!"
  
  Help avoid that future by reading something like this instead of Kos: http://www.forbes.com/opinions/2008/07/18/fanni...
  reply
• 

  JA

  8 months ago

  muirgeo, structured products might be market esoteria, but they are not problematic per se. the same goes for mark-to-market valuation. rather than being responsible for the mess we're in, these practices *aggravated* it because of the complex interdependencies they create.
  
  The "but-for causation" is the fundamentally flawed lending strategies pushed by Fannie and Freddie et al. It wasn't "design flaw" or "material failure" that caused this collapse. It was the original decision to build on sand.
  reply
• 

  Mark

  8 months ago

  The bottom line is this: laissez-faire capitalism, otherwise known as "free market" capitalism, only exists where government has no involvement in the economy. No matter whether one wants to blame Washington or Wall St. for the current crisis, one _cannot_ blame the free market. That, clearly, hasn't existed in the financial markets (or any other, for that matter) in, well, forever, or the 1920's, depending.
  reply
• 

  metanaturalist

  8 months ago

  I'm an atheist blogger who is more civil and rational with my religious guest authors than you and Leiter are with each other. I've told Tom Clark of Naturalism.Org that his humanist reductivism is not "naturalism," yet we are civil with each other. I call him a reductivist because Tibor Machan told me he was, so I looked it up, and darn it! He was right!
  
  So in my blog today, "Dworkin, Leiter, and Wilkinson are All Off the Mark; 'Blame It On Ayn Rand'" http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/2008/10/rand... . I show all of you where you are wrong--I hope! You were implying that Rand has no intellectual prowess to be the shaker and mover of the economic status quo, were you not?
  
  I've got you and Leiter on my Google read list, which is how I found this discussion.
  
  Many happy returns.
  reply