Although her creed, that acting out of
selfishness results in the best outcomes, is neither a description of
how we actually act and has been discredited as a proscription for
how we should act, she does draw a clear and useful distinction
between those who work and produce, and those whose actions are
extractive. The bureaucrats of her old world produced nothing of use,
worked to expand mini-empires with the command economy, and they were
the ones who ended up with the summer homes, the cars, the better
life-style, while many faced hardship enduring goods shortages (the
images of the breadlines come readily to mind.)
These parasites, the one's who so
steadfastly stood in the way of entrepreneurs like John Galt (from
Atlas Shrugged), who condemned the working man or woman to a lifetime
of ill-spent productivity by their miss-allocation of production
(creating both vast waste and shortages as they ill-anticipated the
needs and desires of the population); These mindless wasters of both
the labor capital and intellectual capital of their countrymen: About
them Ayn Rand heaped her derision. Galt's 50+ page speech in Atlas
Shrugged is simply a condemnation of a command Economy and its flaws,
interspersed with unchecked praise for an American-style Capitalist
Economy.
The more we learn about the inner
workings of the American Economy, however, places things in a new
perspective. Reports
about the influences and outcomes
of the financial sector; reports
about the actual results of applying Private Equity, keep
enforcing the idea that we have built a purely extractive layer upon
our vaunted production (ideas, manufacturing, services). What the
entrepreneurs and laborers of America put in, our financial services
(and corporate elite) take out for personal use, trading lobbying
power for actual production.
American Capitalism has degenerated
into a quasi-Command Economy: The Banking members of the Federal
Reserve set the dollar and maintain it high to benefit those who lend
(extracting great wealth for themselves along the way); Congress
interests itself with passing laws that maintain wealth or provide
easy avenues for those with wealth to build more; The massive
corporations use their market position and power to squelch new ideas
and new innovations (or buy them up and squelch them internally or,
after the initial pay-out to the entrepreneur, hoard the future
income from the idea for themselves, along with accounting
control fraud to extract more from the economy than the
production of the idea or product places in.)
Just as this parasitic behavior was
detrimental to the well-being and expansion of old Russia, so, too,
this parasitic behavior has
profound negative consequences for America's future. As labor is
squashed, less demand is created for the production of the
entrepreneur, curtailing the advancements that can and will be
realized. As the benefits of the productive classes flow more and
more to the parasitic classes, the velocity of money slows, reducing
the opportunities for new ideas to enter the market; as the money
available to educate all decreases, the number of fertile minds (and
hence the number of innovations) decreases, leaving America a
second-(or worse!) class producer and member of the world stage.
The irony arises, then, because all of
these self identified acolytes of Rand are members of this parasitic
class: From Greenspan to Geithner, from Cantor to Bernanke, from
Romney to Ryan: Each is a member of the extractive classes, producing
nothing, but extracting greatly. None of them would be heroes in a
Rand novel, but rather would be the derided antagonists, standing in
the way (and ultimately failing) the onslaught of a true producing
giant. I think that Galt would smite them with a snort!
