Laissez — what now?

I just got off the phone with a friend of mine who pointed my thoughts towards the stock mar­ket and pol­i­tics.  Now I see that the Dow was below 6500 on open­ing this morn­ing.  Con­ver­sa­tions keep pop­ping up lately cen­tered around job secu­rity, mar­ket forces, and how the sky is falling.  Addi­tion­ally, I actu­ally recently heard some­one use the term “self­ish indi­vid­u­al­ism.”  (Seri­ously.) It reminded me that one of the com­ments a few weeks ago on Sarah’s blog led me to the Ayn Rand Cen­ter for Indi­vid­ual Rights. Appar­ently, eco­nomic times being what they are, peo­ple have been buy­ing lots of copies of Atlas Shrugged.  This is encour­ag­ing news to me, even though the head­lines today sound as if they are being sniveled out by James Tag­gart him­self.  Even if the reader totally dis­agrees with Ayn Rand’s mes­sage, a truly hon­est mind can­not help being con­victed to exam­ine the integrity of their values.

“One of the meth­ods used by sta­tists to destroy cap­i­tal­ism con­sists in estab­lish­ing con­trols that tie a given indus­try hand and foot, mak­ing it unable to solve its prob­lems, then declar­ing that free­dom has failed and stronger con­trols are nec­es­sary.” — Ayn Rand

Allow­ing the mar­ket to fail and right itself with­out gov­ern­ment inter­fer­ence is the prac­ti­cal solu­tion that isn’t being con­sid­ered.  Those peo­ple who lost their jobs after the dot-com bub­ble burst still are alive today, and many are thriv­ing.  Fail­ure isn’t the end of the world.  Let irre­spon­si­ble banks and insti­tu­tions fail and a truly free econ­omy rise from the ashes.   But no. Laissez-faire eco­nom­ics — too scary.   Actu­ally, so few peo­ple seem to real­ize that this wasn’t the free mar­ket act­ing on its own, and that gov­ern­men­tal inter­fer­ence into things set up a large part of the prob­lem.   I heard an NPR piece recently where the com­men­ta­tor actu­ally said, “The free mar­ket has had its chance, now it’s time to get some adults in there to fix the situation.”

That was a para­phrase, but the word ‘adults’ was used to refer to the gov­ern­ment.  Is that where we are, as a nation?  The gov­ern­ment will save us all?  Since they do such a great job keep­ing things on the up and up in Wash­ing­ton, we want to hand over our own lives to them.  Any­thing to not be per­son­ally respon­si­ble for our­selves.  If we fail, at least it will be because the gov­ern­ment made us.

“My phi­los­o­phy, in essence, is the con­cept of man as a heroic being, with his own hap­pi­ness as the moral pur­pose of his life, with pro­duc­tive achieve­ment as his noblest activ­ity, and rea­son as his only absolute.” –Ayn Rand

When Ron Paul ran for pres­i­dent last year, those of us who sup­ported him were weirdos and nuts (which suits me fine.) To look out­side of the major play­ers was dan­ger­ous and extrem­ist, “even if he did have some good ideas.”  Of course it was.  True indi­vid­u­als are always dan­ger­ous.  I didn’t expect him to win, nor did I expect his ideas to get out there to the extent they did.  I’m tick­led that so many peo­ple heard the mes­sage.  I think that the fact that peo­ple are buy­ing copies of Atlas Shrugged may very well have some rela­tion­ship to his can­di­dacy last year.  Even if it’s not directly related, I’m equally thrilled to hear of this boom in peo­ple read­ing the book.