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Comment by jeeringmole | Hacker News Reader

Ah, yes.... The collectivists controlled the Presidency, the Senate, and the House of Representatives and used their power to regulate the credit derivatives market out of existence. How much better things would have been if the Chairman of the Federal Reserve had heard of Objectivism!

Even the off-hand pop culture references are crapulous: "A Confederacy of Dunces" surely counts as a "classic novel of recent decades that was never made into a movie", and it is a lot funnier than anything Ayn Rand ever wrote.

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"Chairman of the Federal Reserve had heard of Objectivism!"

FYI Greenspan was a friend of Ayn Rand and was part of her inner circles.

http://www.noblesoul.com/orc/bio/greenspan-time.html

He knows that; that's the joke.

I kind of suspected that but not sure plus most of the HN readers unlikely to know this somewhat obscure piece of information. Hence the comment.

Um, the rest of that paragraph is sarcastic, too, FYI...

Greenspan turned his back on Objectivism during the 70s.

He did? In what way? (Genuinely curious.)

My understanding is that, despite some of his views being at odds with her own, Rand was happy to have him in her inner circle anyway.

Before: http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north204.html

After: Central banker

That's the gist of the argument. I'm not going to pretend to know where the line between Objectivism's general ideals and economic ideals lies.

He's always defended his involvement as being a necessary compromise. An unusual stance for an Objectivist, but an Objectivist nonetheless.

he expanded the money supply in 1995 and again in 2000 in order to create growth. Since you can't create growth out of thin air these bubbles eventually burst. This is blatant Keynesian economics, the opposite of the free-market.

Guess WWII never happened.

war is the broken window fallacy writ large.

Yes, I think that was intended to be part of the irony.

You're right about A Confederacy of Dunces, but it seems to me that Ayn Rand wasn't exactly going for funny.

But I am, so -- uh-oh, I said "it seems to me." Better dodge that falling giant copy of Atlas Shrugged that's aimed for my head.

Ayn Rand thought she had something important to say about society. And I've seen interviews with her on the media, where she's seemingly invited in just to be mocked and called greedy. So frankly, I think she had - and still has - a point.

I think the writer's being over-the-top, but I also think that the bailout is going vastly over-the-top and I think that Obama's plan to continue it isn't helping things at all.

Don't understand your first sentence totally. You do admit that collectivists have controlled the Presidency and House and Senate for the last 8 years, yes? Bush, in particular, is no anti-collectivist. Some people get confused by labels, e.g., Republican, so I just want to make sure.

Asset bubbles always happen. They probably always will happen. Now that the bubble is bursting, the collectivist mismanagement over the last several years is making us extra vulnerable. Even more horribly, the current and coming response is dooming the recovery to a much longer period than if the economy were allowed to reach equilibrium on its own.

Don't understand your first sentence totally. You do admit...

Adjust your sarcasm detector.

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