Our most notorious export product: the Ayn Rand novel ... corrosive article at VICE about the current slick promotion of Rand in the UK.
On Tuesday, I went to a talk held by the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI) titled "Ayn Rand: More Relevant Now than Ever" in London's luxurious Goldsmiths' Hall, a grand old building near St Paul's Cathedral.
The crowd was mostly white, male, and wearing sharp suits, as you'd expect at an event devoted to Rand—the novelist-philosopher who came up with "the morality of rational self-interest," a worldview that says you should pretty much do whatever benefits you and if that results in someone else getting screwed over, well, fuck them anyway.
It was the second annual Ayn Rand lecture hosted by the Adam Smith Institute, a libertarian think tank. I was in a temple of the free market.
London’s objectivists are coming out of the woodwork, eager to wage a moral war on those who denounce the evils of capitalism. They are a strange army—a horde of pale men in patent leather shoes, pink-eyed political wonks and traders, investment bankers and IT nerds. It’s difficult to be terrified, but this could be the new breed of ubermensch.Perhaps a new breed of uber-morons... doesn't sound like this young woman who is the author at VICE is buying any of the Rand psycopathy at least; our MNE readers may think this is a fun read.
When are you folks going to realize Rand was a prophet? Perhaps it's difficult for you; none seem to grasp that money can exceed the speed of light as I've already explained, but I'll try again.
ReplyDeleteCapitalism is fundamentally woven into the fabric of the universe, a fact confirmed when physicists discovered GIMPs (Government Interacting with Markets Particles) in 1984. We now know empirically that existence of government regulation or welfare in any form emits GIMPs which interact only with market molecules and create distortion and disequilibrium. Rand intuitively understood this decades before and tried to give us a heads-up but anti-science Keynesians under control of their powerful Lord Thulsa Doom have afflicted Capitalism with government radiation at every opportunity, making it sick and prone to not following DSGE models.
Neo-liberal physics is the only methodology which recognizes this yet it cannot be successful unless we strictly obey what it says, never minding what it was was saying five minutes ago. Only it offers a deflector shield that can protect the economic reactor from big government radiation experiments and only it can save us from developing economy sicknesses like govkemia, Lenin Gherig's disease and Poortism Spectrum Disorder.
Can't you just this always put the economy before yourselves?
Yeah, there are genuine prophets and false prophets.
ReplyDeleteBTW, "prophet" in the traditional sense did not refer to predicting the future but rather expounding a teaching to live by not only in words but also in works.
Adam Smith and Ayn Rand are as incompatible as the Bible and Ayn Rand.
ReplyDeleteWhere is all this idiocy and lack of logic coming from?
Ignacio wrote: "Adam Smith and Ayn Rand are as incompatible as the Bible and Ayn Rand."
ReplyDeleteRe economic theory, they are almost identical, but you are quite correct, that if we take Smith as a moral-political thinker, he's quite captive to the Judeo-Christian morality of sacrifice. But that part of him is not what he is known for, not what he contributed. His economics is and is so far above any "neo-classical" or Keynesian theory that the latter doesn't even look like economics anymore.
His economics is and is so far above any "neo-classical" or Keynesian theory that the latter doesn't even look like economics anymore.
ReplyDeletePeople focus on Adam Smith and an economic liberal and forget that classical economics was opposed to economic rent. Neoclassical economics eliminated consideration of economic rent and Keynes reintroduced it.