Ayn Rand: Discredited By Greenspan

I have longed to see this day. Naturally, it took the pain of tens of millions worldwide to reach it.

Greenspan Concedes Error on Regulation

Although he defended the use of derivatives in general, Mr. Greenspan, who left office in 2006, told members of the House Committee of Government Oversight and Reform that he was “partially” wrong in not having tried to regulate the market for credit-default swaps.

But in a tense exchange with Representative Henry A. Waxman, the California Democrat who is chairman of the committee, Mr. Greenspan conceded a more serious flaw in his own philosophy that unfettered free markets sit at the root of a superior economy.

“I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms,” Mr. Greenspan said.

Referring to his free-market ideology, Mr. Greenspan added: “I have found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I have been very distressed by that fact.”

Mr. Waxman pressed the former Fed chair to clarify his words. “In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working,” Mr. Waxman said.

“Absolutely, precisely,” Mr. Greenspan replied. “You know, that’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.”

Emphasis added by me.

Ayn Rand was a self-alienated drug-addicted psychopath. To her, people should act like robotic and inevitable logical syllogisms.

Her own life was fucked-up by that belief.

She crushed her husband, turning him into a depressed, emasculated dipsomaniac.

She began an affair with her most-devoted acolyte, Nathaniel Branden, which just about destroyed Branden's marriage (a marriage Nathaniel and Barbara Branden each admitted never should have happened to begin with -- and wouldn't, had they not been in Rand's orbit) and did manage to destroy the "movement" he had created.

Her own philosophy destroyed her fiction writing career by painting her into a corner from which she couldn't escape.

My own questioning of her judgment came when she proclaimed Charlie's Angels -- one the worst programs of the 1970s -- to not only be worth watching, but "the last gasp of Romanticism" on TV!

I was lucky. I came to her well after the breakup with Branden. The fans I met would never speak frankly about what happened.

It wasn't until Nathaniel Branden's book that I found out the truth. The fans were content to remain deaf, blind, and obeisant!

Imagine that: people who looked at independent and self-sufficient Howard Roark and John Galt and Hank Reardon acting more like Peter Keating and James Taggart!

That was her handiwork. That was her true legacy.

And now the worldwide failure of Greenspan's belief in laissez-faire and rationality as the prevailing value among human beings.

I'd laugh. I'd dance with glee.

But too many people are suffering because of it.

See the video: