Alan Greenspan, Ayn Rand and the Panic of 2008

For some, especially people of low family culture and without access to serious philosophy as a result of political or religious censorship, Rand creates self-esteem and teaches self-valuation. Such wounded and damaged spirits often appear in Philosophy 101 classes at third-rate universities.

But for the most part, the results of actually putting her "philosophy" into practice has been disaster.

Her ethics, by reversing the meaning of common-sense terms, has been used many times to justify nonpayment of child support and business fraud. Her bold claim, that "altruism is evil" is verbally hedged about with qualifications which can be used after the fact to make "altruism" denote a conveniently defined subset of altruistic acts, those seen, after the fact, to have bad effects, but (as a real American philosopher, Sydney Hook, noted in a review of Notes for the New Intellectual in 1962) this is simply the fallacy of informal logic known as "definition against disproof".

Her ontology allows her adepts to fantasize that abstractions are real because Rand, who had significant cultural aporias, didn't seem to be aware of the meaning of the word "to reify", which is to treat a concept as a thing.

In "Taking a Hard Look at the Greenspan Legacy " (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/09/business/economy/09greenspan.html?_r=1...), Peter Goodman links Alan Greenspan, as he's been linked before with no disclaimer from this former chairman of the Federal Reserve, to Rand as a follower and adept.

Greenspan recently, as documented by Goodman, has been making rather Kantian-sounded noises about a basic need for honesty and integrity to undergird the "objectivist" ethics, epistemology, and ontology of financial markets, worlds in which shitting on other people is explained with a smirk, knowledge excludes imagination and whistle blowers are fired under the rule that because today, A=A, 'twill be ever thus, and Gradgrinds reify Facts as eternal verities.

Greenspan in other words grasps the other horn of the dilemma so quietly posed by Sydney Hook in 1962. In the fat years, let le bon temps roler, and explain to the defrauded and the terminated-at-will that they need not expect altruism, or even basic decency, doing so with George Bush's smirk in the termination interview.

And when Pharaoh's kine turn lean, talk as if you always meant a strange form of anti-altruism, one that never excluded an integrity, an honesty over and above getting them to sign on the line which is dotted.

Fuck you, Alan Greenspan, and fuck the gibbering ghost of Ayn Rand. Your insane philosophy has destroyed my country.