But please answer one question for me, RnBram. What happens to the poor and the disabled in a completely free market capitalism? It seems to me that that system favors the strong, with no provision to help the weak. Is it simply dog eat dog and the strongest and most ruthless win — and devil take the rest?

Or is there any compassion and morality in the pure capitalist system?

That’s nearly 54,000 NEW regulations, added to what was there before, in only 12 years!

That is hardly Rand’s laissez-faire capitalism; that’s massive socialist/fascist government interference! At root, those are the very ideologies Rand spent her lifetime hoping to save Americans and America from. Now, when the effects of those destructive ideologies from Washington hit the fan, everyone is blaming laissez-faire capitalism instead. They are ridiculous, uninformed, or dishonest.

Greenspan dropped any pretense of understanding Rand’s arguments well before he became head of the Fed., and he then became a major part of the problem. His monetary policy and suppression of interest rates (1%!!), when Rand would have said “let the market decide”, were an appalling government intervention. Add in the HUD, CRA, CDS, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the recipe for a catastrophically distorted market, including the trading of derivatives, was complete.

Edward Cline wrote, “Reason and rationality flee when force becomes a factor in men’s decisions, to be replaced with the pragmatism of punishment-avoidance or a risk-free shot at easy money.”

So imagine YOU are the CEO of a large financial organization. Your competitors are complying with the regulations and appear to be making good for their shareholders, while things are getting tight for your firm. What do you do?

You want to buy a house, and the government directly or indirectly tells your lender they will protect him from default so long as he keeps the mortgage interest low. What do you do?

You do the pragmatic thing, join in, and trusting in the state’s easy money guarantee. As a CEO, if you are able to understand the fraud in the government’s game, you build yourself some protection for when the government’s house of cards collapses. Most people believe the “government is here to help” (say by regulation), so they don’t protect themselves.

You would not have dared to engage in the risky lending or buying that lead to the crisis, were it not for the handful of people in the US government who believed they were smarter than the free market and installed legislation to distort it. Without those people, lending rates would have adjusted themselves years ago, paper money would not have been printed like it grew on trees (e.g. “helicopter Bernanke”) and the present crisis would never have materialized.

Capitalism is the only *moral* system because it let’s a man keep what he produces; it was the American system. An historical and geopolitical look at nations shows that those which are more free have citizens who prosper more by their own effort, and live more peacefully. Free markets made America great, from 1776 to the late 1800′s, and then serious regulations began. Even America’s poor were wealthy compared with the middle class of other nations. Ayn Rand was right, and should not be blamed for a protegé’s failures.

Wikipedia gives their dates: The Fountainhead, 1943; Animal Farm, 1945; and it has this to say about Animal Farm:

“The short novella is an allegory in which animals play the roles of the Bolshevik revolutionaries and overthrow and oust the human owners of the farm, setting it up as a commune in which, at first, all animals are equal; however, class and status disparities soon emerge between the different animal species. The novel describes how a society’s ideologies can be manipulated and twisted by those in positions of social and political power, including how a utopian society is made impossible by the corrupting nature of the very power necessary to create it.”