VitalSigns posted:

What's funny about Rand is that her books also require the men of ability to be the underdogs, hated and shunned by society and opposed by men of wealth and power.

CommieGIR posted:

The argument against Rand is that Rand argues that the wealthy and the leaders cannot be wrong.

EvanSchenck posted:

It's autobiographical. Rand saw herself as an artistic genius who was objectively and by definition right about everything, but was marginalized and ignored by the ignorant masses and exploited or mistreated by powerful elites (in her case, movie studios and publishing companies). This is why you have characters in Atlas Shrugged who are entrepreneurs or scientist-inventors, but the way those occupations work in the novel has no resemblance whatsoever to the reality of business or engineering. They're written as creative types, artists or writers, but with a thrown-over veneer of a more immediately productive occupation like railroad management or metals manufacturing.

Nintendo Kid posted:

Don't forget that Ayn Rand had to put in a literal free energy machine for her Galt's Gulch to function at all.

VitalSigns posted:

Yet they still needed that oil tycoon to come drill oil wells for some reason

Nintendo Kid posted:

Oil wells are an expression of man's domination of the earth, after all.

VitalSigns posted:

Yet they still needed that oil tycoon to come drill oil wells for some reason

V. Illych L. posted:

i was going to write something about the unsettling psychosexual implications of this but i managed to gross myself out

asdf32 posted:

Yeah a result which is generally true only if being wrong leads to losing money which is exactly what's happening in this example.

Who What Now posted:

He, personally, is not losing any money, though.

Guilty Spork posted:

As I understand it he's managed to make quite a bit of money off of this whole debacle.

So what excuse do our libertarian friends give for the fact that it's not only possible but common for unethical people to make lots of money by shifting the actual damage onto others? Lampert is well on his way to destroying Sears, thereby putting (googles) 196,000 people out of work, while he's basically set for life.

asdf32 posted:

So yes Sears is failing but pointing out how a rich guy is losing all his money by running a business badly is not an argument against Rand.

Ron Paul Atreides posted:

Is lampert also majority shareholder? Is Sears not public anymore?

Cause if there is a board that hasn't moved to get rid of him yet wtf is wrong with them

QuarkJets posted:

He's running a business badly because he's a strict adherent to Rand's ideas. That's an argument against Rand.

Who What Now posted:

He, personally, is not losing any money, though.

QuarkJets posted:

He's running a business badly because he's a strict adherent to Rand's ideas. That's an argument against Rand.

Ayn Rand's ideas are killing Sears.

Mr Interweb posted:

So this has been on the front page on r/politics all day:

http://reason.com/archives/2015/08/20/the-federal-reserve-is-not-your-friend

I hear this all the time from libertarians so it's nothing new, but anyone wanna take a moment to take this down?

Rand Paul Trying To Convince Us To End The Fed posted:

Rather than bailing out struggling homeowners who were underwater, with higher mortgage debt than their homes were worth, the Fed instead loaded up on U.S. Treasuries (its own IOUs) and mortgage-backed securities—the very same "toxic assets" that reflected the horrible judgment of many investment bankers and the ratings agencies that signed off on the shenanigans. It is no coincidence that the federal government was able to run trillion-dollar-plus deficits for four consecutive years with no concern from the financial markets; everyone knows the Fed stands in the wings, willing to "print" new legal tender and sop up Uncle Sam's IOUs (which eventually come due, as we are now seeing in Greece).

When it comes to money, politicians are often seen as the least trustworthy. But in the debate over income and wealth inequality, few people point the finger at the biggest benefactor of the wheeler dealer crony capitalists: the Federal Reserve. The nation's central bank, which regulates all other banks and has the power to create money simply by buying assets, should be under the utmost scrutiny. Yet, perversely, members of Congress have to fight an uphill battle just to audit the Fed. We do not want to politicize monetary policy (as our detractors allege), but rather simply shine a very bright light on this unaccountable and unchecked (and thus entirely un-American) power. By doing this, we may finally be able to rein it in.

Rand Paul When The Fed Tries To Help Us Even A Tiny Bit posted:

PAUL: I think that the TARP funds that are left should go to restore the deficit and to try and pay off debt. I think the TARP funds, the whole entire $800 billion should have never been spent…I would vote for any unused funds to go back to try to offset the deficit. […]
Q: What’s going to happen to those people [who are underwater on their mortgages]?
PAUL: Well, nothing good. And it’s not something that makes any of us happy. I mean, it’s really a tragedy. But the tragedy really, if you want to think this through, is the bad policy by Barney Frank and others.

quote:

Imagine that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was a corporation, with its shares owned by the nation's major pharmaceutical companies. How would you feel about the regulation of medications? Whose interests would this corporation be serving? Or suppose that major oil companies appointed a small committee to periodically announce the price of a barrel of crude in the United States. How would that impact you at the gasoline pump?

quote:

Such hypotheticals would strike the majority of Americans as completely absurd, but it's exactly how our banking system operates.

quote:

The Federal Reserve is literally owned by the nation's commercial banks, with a rotation of the regional Reserve Bank presidents constituting 5 of the 12 voting members of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the body that sets targets for certain interest rates. The other 7 members of the FOMC are the D.C.-based Board of Governors—which includes the Fed chairperson, currently Janet Yellen—and are nominated by the President. The Fed serves its owners and patrons—the big banks and the federal government, while the rest of Americans get left behind.

quote:

The Federal Reserve has the ability to create legal tender through mere bookkeeping operations. By the simple act of buying, for example, $10 million worth of bonds, the Federal Reserve literally creates $10 million worth of money and adds it into the system. The seller's account goes up by $10 million once the Fed's monies are received. Nobody's account gets debited for $10 million. This is a tremendous amount of power for an institution to possess, and yet the Fed shrouds itself in secrecy and is accountable to no one.

quote:

In December 2008, Congress summoned then-Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke to provide information concerning the enormous "emergency liquidity" programs that had begun during the financial crisis earlier that fall—all the new acronyms Wall Street analysts would come to know, such as TAF (Term Auction Facility), PDCF (Primary Dealer Credit Facility), and TSLF (Term Securities Lending Facility). Bernanke did not need Congress' permission to conduct those programs, but even worse, he refused to disclose the recipients of the $1.2 trillion in short-term loans that we now know were being administered behind closed doors. This staggering secret loan payouts doesn't even include hundreds of billions in "swaps" to foreign central banks. Bernanke's rationale was that if the Fed announced the names of the big banks being rescued, then depositors and investors would flee, thus defeating the whole purpose of the rescue operations.

quote:

Americans then and now were lectured that the trillions in loans and asset purchases were all for their own good and eventual benefit, to resuscitate the credit markets and bolster home values. Yet the truth remains—it is Wall Street that benefits from the Fed at the expense of Main Street. To make things worse, in October 2008—one month after Lehman Brothers collapsed and precipitated the worst of the financial crisis—the Fed began exercising a new policy of paying interest on reserves. The Fed began to subsidize and directly pay the nation's bankers not to make loans to their customers and keep their reserves parked on deposit with the Fed.

quote:

Today, Fed officials can give all sorts of technical explanations for that policy—a move that remains in effect today. Yet your average depositor received no such direct subsidy and likely still receives almost no interest on short term deposits.

quote:

It's unfortunately in keeping with Fed policies that disproportionately favor wealth—like low interest rates, a policy benefiting those that have the most assets and first access to borrowing, not for people who have little or no capital.

quote:

No matter how much the Fed protests to the contrary, it shows little regard for the average Joe or Jane. Consider the types of assets it bought as the Fed's balance sheet exploded from $905 billion in the beginning of September 2008 to $2.2 trillion by the end of the year. (The Fed currently holds some $4.5 trillion in total assets, after the various rounds of "quantitative easing.")

quote:

Rather than bailing out struggling homeowners who were underwater, with higher mortgage debt than their homes were worth, the Fed instead loaded up on U.S. Treasuries (its own IOUs) and mortgage-backed securities—the very same "toxic assets" that reflected the horrible judgment of many investment bankers and the ratings agencies that signed off on the shenanigans. It is no coincidence that the federal government was able to run trillion-dollar-plus deficits for four consecutive years with no concern from the financial markets; everyone knows the Fed stands in the wings, willing to "print" new legal tender and sop up Uncle Sam's IOUs (which eventually come due, as we are now seeing in Greece).

quote:

When it comes to money, politicians are often seen as the least trustworthy. But in the debate over income and wealth inequality, few people point the finger at the biggest benefactor of the wheeler dealer crony capitalists: the Federal Reserve. The nation's central bank, which regulates all other banks and has the power to create money simply by buying assets, should be under the utmost scrutiny. Yet, perversely, members of Congress have to fight an uphill battle just to audit the Fed. We do not want to politicize monetary policy (as our detractors allege), but rather simply shine a very bright light on this unaccountable and unchecked (and thus entirely un-American) power. By doing this, we may finally be able to rein it in.

Caros posted:

Do we really not have a Ron Paul emoji by the by? Not even an "Its happening" one?

SedanChair posted:

Mr Interweb posted:

Thank you, Caros.

SedanChair posted:

Zizek Salon Article posted:

All of which is another painful reminder that, at least with regard to the form of organization, today’s radical-populist Right strangely reminds us of the old radical-populist Left. Are today’s Christian survivalist-fundamentalist groups, with their half-legal status and seeing the main threat to their freedom in the oppressive state apparatus, not organized like the Black Panthers in the 1960s? In both cases, we have a militarized group getting ready for the final battle. How long will this masterful ideological manipulation continue to work?
..
So now we finally know who John Galt is—the idiot responsible for the 2008 financial meltdown and, consequentially, for the threat of the shutdown of state apparatuses.
...
The underlying idea is that, freed from this higher control of markets (and experts), parliamentary-democratic decisions are “irresponsible.
....
Another example of such magic thinking (and a true model of what Hegel called abstract thinking) is the so-called “Laffer curve,” evoked by free-market advocates as a reason against excessive taxa­tion.

Zizek Salon Article posted:

The im­plicit premise of this reasoning is that today the tax rate is already too high, and that lowering the tax rate would therefore not only help business but also raise tax revenues. The problem with this rea­soning is that, while in some abstract sense it is true, things get more complex the moment we locate taxation into the totality of economic reproduction. A great part of the money collected by taxation is again spent on the products of private business, thereby giving incentive to it. More important even, the proceeds of taxation are also spent on creating the appropriate conditions for business.

Let us take two comparable cities, one with a lower business tax rate and the other with a higher one. In the first, city public education and healthcare are in a bad condition, crime is exploding, and so on; the second city, meanwhile, spends higher revenues on better education, better energy supply, better transport, etc. Is it not reasonable to suppose that many businesses would find the second city more attractive for investment? So, paradoxically, if the first city decides to follow the second in its tax policy, raising taxes may give more incentive to private business.

Salon Article posted:

(And, incidentally, many half-developed ex-Communist countries to which developed countries are outsourcing their industries are exploited, in the sense that Western business gains access to a cheaper skilled workforce that has benefited from public education: thus, the socialist state provides free education for the workforces of Western companies.)

BrandorKP posted:

http://www.salon.com/2015/08/24/slavoj_zizek_ayn_rands_tea_party_lie_now_we_know_who_john_galt_is/

The highlights:


After what amount to a solid nut shot, the categorizing of Libertarian though as "abstract thinking" , he then goes to out abstractly think the "lower taxes always good argument":


And the gratuitous, nigh pornographic, money shot.

BrandorKP posted:

he then goes to out abstractly think the "lower taxes always good argument":

QuarkJets posted:

To be fair, he doesn't say that; he refers to the Laffer curve as an argument against excessive taxation and doesn't define what "excessive" means in this context.

Anubis posted:

Which is pretty much the only way you'll see someone bring up the Laffer curve because it's practically useless, since it usually only starts appearing somewhere north of 80%.

HP Artsandcrafts posted:

poo poo, it's somewhere north of 91%.

GreyjoyBastard posted:

Probably depends on the country and circumstances. It's been a while, but I seem to recall Sweden accidentally experimentally determining that their inflection point at the time was like 80%.

Baronjutter posted:

Free clean energy doesn't mean they don't need petro chemicals, they're used for a lot of stuff other than burning for energy, plastics, lubes, all sorts of stuff.

Nintendo Kid posted:

Don't forget that Ayn Rand had to put in a literal free energy machine for her Galt's Gulch to function at all.