“Where’s the chapter that has the holy captialist privatizing years and years of gains only to run to the government for hundreds of billions of dollars in bailout money paid for by taxpayers in order socialize their losses and maintain their plutocracy”
Check your premises. This NOT capitalism!! This is socialism in the name of not allowing businesses to fail, or jobs to be “lost”. And we (our government) should not have bought in to it. Capitalism DEMANDS that businesses and individuals be allowed to fail, in order to free capital and labor to move to where it is needed and away from where it is not. Read Joseph Schumpeter.
One can hardly expect anyone, Capitalist or Socialist, Marxist or Feudalist not to look to his own self-interest, and accept (or even demand) alms, IF THEY ARE AVAILABLE. But that doesn’t reflect on the economic system, rather on the people within it. The free market is the ONLY one in which society is benefitted by the natural selfishness of men, and is not dependent on largesse (even if such selflessness might exist in sufficient amount to provide for society’s needs).
I’ll state it baldly: NO economy can long exist which ignores the individual and his selfish motives as its driving force, and when “selfless” people, usually bureacrats with a vested interest in the status quo, attempt to drive an economy in the direction in which they THINK it should go, regardless of economic reality, you will get the kind of chaos we are now seeing.
It will be interesting to see how many “green” cars GM will sell per government mandate (it’s easy talking “green” when it doesn’t cost anything), and how long it will be before they come to Washington to ask for more money. Oh, wait; they already did.
BTW, has anyone noticed, re. a previous thread, that “General Motors” has its corporate mouth firmly pressed to the Federal teat, but (Henry) Ford does not? And (Walter) Chrysler doesn’t count; I doubt they will see the end of the year as an “independent” company. Schumpeter will be satisfied, at least to that extent.
Kirk
True. Everything you said in your post was true.
But the path from one system to another passed through something I call "creditism".
Henry Clay was correct when he said, "The United States were built on credit," back when the renewal of the Second Bank of the United States was being discussed during Jackson's second term. Credit is very important, a precious object that needs to be properly maintained in order to work. Hamilton understood that when he monetized our war debt to make those worthless Continentals have some value. What went wrong was the profligate use of credit where it was not warranted.
Our own modern Lee Hunsacker (Mayor Young) perverted credit when he insisted on managing the growth of Detroit according to liberal principles that had nothing to do with capitalism or Schumpeter. Detroit should have been plowed back into the farmland from which it rose if it served no useful purpose. Social need trumped wise use of credit.
By creating the character of Eugene Lawson, Rand pinpoints the abuse of credit as the source of what went wrong. Compare this with Hank's willingness to defer accepting payment from the railroad for his metal. That decision was driven by financial wisdom, not trying to do Dagny (and Jim) a favor. It was credit well applied.
We seem to have lost that value in our current world.