How Ayn Rand caused the GFC
MATT TAIBBI
April 25, 2010
SO GOLDMAN Sachs, the world's greatest and smuggest investment bank, has been sued for fraud by the American Securities and Exchange Commission. Legally, the case hangs on a technicality.
Morally, however, the case may turn into a final referendum on the greed-is-good ethos that conquered America in the '80s - and in the years since has aped other horrifying American trends in spreading across the Western world like a venereal disease.
When the globe was engulfed in the flood of defaults and derivative losses that emerged from the collapse of the US housing bubble two years ago, few understood that the crash had its roots in the lunatic greed-centred objectivist religion, fostered in the '50s and '60s by ponderous emigre novelist Ayn Rand.
Outside America, Russian-born Rand is probably best known for being the unfunniest person Western civilisation has seen since maybe Goebbels or Jack the Ripper, but inside America she is upheld as an intellectual giant. Her ideas are worshipped even by people who've never heard of her. The right-wing Tea Party movement is just one example of an entire demographic that has been inspired to mass protest by Rand without even knowing it.
http://www.theage.com.au/business/how-ayn-rand-caused-the-gfc-20100424-tknu.html