“The Philosophy Of A Psychopath”: How Ayn Rand Became The New Right’s Version Of Marx
It has a fair claim to be the ugliest philosophy the postwar world has produced. Selfishness, it contends, is good, altruism evil, empathy and compassion are irrational and destructive. The poor deserve to die; the rich deserve unmediated power. It has already been tested, and has failed spectacularly and catastrophically. Yet the belief system constructed by Ayn Rand, who died 30 years ago today, has never been more popular or influential.
Rand was a Russian from a prosperous family who emigrated to the United States. Through her novels (such as Atlas Shrugged) and her nonfiction (such as The Virtue of Selfishness) she explained a philosophy she called Objectivism. This holds that the only moral course is pure self-interest. We owe nothing, she insists, to anyone, even to members of our own families. She described the poor and weak as “refuse” and “parasites”, and excoriated anyone seeking to assist them. Apart from the police, the courts and the armed forces, there should be no role for government: no social security, no public health or education, no public infrastructure or transport, no fire service, no regulations, no income tax.
Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957, depicts a United States crippled by government intervention in which heroic millionaires struggle against a nation of spongers. The millionaires, whom she portrays as Atlas holding the world aloft, withdraw their labour, with the result that the nation collapses. It is rescued, through unregulated greed and selfishness, by one of the heroic plutocrats, John Galt.
The poor die like flies as a result of government programmes and their own sloth and fecklessness. Those who try to help them are gassed. In a notorious passage, she argues that all the passengers in a train filled with poisoned fumes deserved their fate. One, for instance, was a teacher who taught children to be team players; one was a mother married to a civil servant, who cared for her children; one was a housewife “who believed that she had the right to elect politicians, of whom she knew nothing”.
Rand’s is the philosophy of the psychopath, a misanthropic fantasy of cruelty, revenge and greed. Yet, as Gary Weiss shows in his new book, Ayn Rand Nation, she has become to the new right what Karl Marx once was to the left: a demigod at the head of a chiliastic cult. Almost one third of Americans, according to a recent poll, have read Atlas Shrugged, and it now sells hundreds of thousands of copies every year.
Ignoring Rand’s evangelical atheism, the Tea Party movement has taken her to its heart. No rally of theirs is complete without placards reading “Who is John Galt?” and “Rand was right”. Rand, Weiss argues, provides the unifying ideology which has “distilled vague anger and unhappiness into a sense of purpose”. She is energetically promoted by the broadcasters Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santelli. She is the guiding spirit of the Republicans in Congress.
Like all philosophies, Objectivism is absorbed, secondhand, by people who have never read it. I believe it is making itself felt on this side of the Atlantic: in the clamorous new demands to remove the 50p tax band for the very rich, for instance; or among the sneering, jeering bloggers who write for the Telegraph and the Spectator, mocking compassion and empathy, attacking efforts to make the word a kinder place.
It is not hard to see why Rand appeals to billionaires. She offers them something that is crucial to every successful political movement: a sense of victimhood. She tells them that they are parasitised by the ungrateful poor and oppressed by intrusive, controlling governments.
It is harder to see what it gives the ordinary teabaggers, who would suffer grievously from a withdrawal of government. But such is the degree of misinformation which saturates this movement and so prevalent in the US is Willy Loman syndrome (the gulf between reality and expectations) that millions blithely volunteer themselves as billionaires’ doormats. I wonder how many would continue to worship at the shrine of Ayn Rand if they knew that towards the end of her life she signed on for both Medicare and social security. She had railed furiously against both programmes, as they represented everything she despised about the intrusive state. Her belief system was no match for the realities of age and ill health.
But they have a still more powerful reason to reject her philosophy: as Adam Curtis’s BBC documentary showed last year, the most devoted member of her inner circle was Alan Greenspan, former head of the US Federal Reserve. Among the essays he wrote for Rand were those published in a book he co-edited with her called Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal. Here, starkly explained, you’ll find the philosophy he brought into government. There is no need for the regulation of business – even builders or Big Pharma – he argued, as “the ‘greed’ of the businessman or, more appropriately, his profit-seeking … is the unexcelled protector of the consumer”. As for bankers, their need to win the trust of their clients guarantees that they will act with honour and integrity. Unregulated capitalism, he maintains, is a “superlatively moral system”.
Once in government, Greenspan applied his guru’s philosophy to the letter, cutting taxes for the rich, repealing the laws constraining banks, refusing to regulate the predatory lending and the derivatives trading which eventually brought the system down. Much of this is already documented, but Weiss shows that in the US, Greenspan has successfully airbrushed history.
Despite the many years he spent at her side, despite his previous admission that it was Rand who persuaded him that “capitalism is not only efficient and practical but also moral”, he mentioned her in his memoirs only to suggest that it was a youthful indiscretion – and this, it seems, is now the official version. Weiss presents powerful evidence that even today Greenspan remains her loyal disciple, having renounced his partial admission of failure to Congress.
Saturated in her philosophy, the new right on both sides of the Atlantic continues to demand the rollback of the state, even as the wreckage of that policy lies all around. The poor go down, the ultra-rich survive and prosper. Ayn Rand would have approved.
By: George Monbiot, The Guardian, March 5, 2012
“Unflinching Conservative” Rick Santorum In 1993: “More Government Needed In Health Care”
Rick Santorum’s pitch to Republican voters is simple: He is the “true” and “consistent” conservative in the GOP’s presidential nomination fight. He describes himself as “a candidate who, throughout [his] career, has not only checked the box on conservative issues but has fought for conservative issues.” And he slams front-runner Mitt Romney for flip-flopping on abortion and the Wall Street bailouts and, most of all, for passing government-mandated health care reform in Massachusetts. If elected president, Santorum vows, he will end the “tyranny” of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act.
Yet as an up-and-coming congressman in the early 1990s, Santorum took a much different line. Then—like now—health care was one of the nation’s most divisive issues. In 1993, Republicans were up in arms about a health care reform bill spearheaded by Hillary Clinton and pushed by President Bill Clinton. Republicans decried the measure as excessive government intervention in the marketplace, and Santorum opposed the legislation. But his position was not so clear-cut.
During that fiery debate, Santorum said it would be a mistake to allow the delivery of health care services to be determined only by the market. He asserted that Republicans were “wrong” to let the marketplace decide how health care works. He instead argued that government should play a “proactive” role in shaping the health care marketplace “to make it work better.” (Santorum spokesman Hogan Gidley did not respond to requests for comment.)
Santorum’s call for more government intervention in health care came during a December 1993 appearance on a Pittsburgh TV program, The Editors, hosted by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette‘s Jane Blotzer and John Craig. At the time, Santorum was running in a Republican Senate primary and looking to challenge Democratic incumbent Sen. Harris Wofford. Mother Jones obtained a previously unreported transcript of the interview made by staffers for the Wofford reelection campaign. In 1994 Santorum eked out a narrow win over Wofford, 49 percent to 47 percent, in a bitterly fought race that gained national attention.
In the 1993 interview, the 35-year-old Santorum sounds little like the unflinching conservative he claims to be today. He describes his voting record in the US House of Representatives, where he represented the eastern suburbs of Pittsburgh, as “pretty much in the middle” compared with the rest of the Pennsylvania delegation, which included 11 Democrats and 9 other Republicans. His record, he went on, was “pretty compatible” with that of Arlen Specter and the late John Heinz, both moderate Republican senators from Pennsylvania. (Specter later switched to the Democratic Party.)
In the interview, when asked about the role of government in Americans’ lives, Santorum responded, “I believe that the federal government should set up a system where we create the right incentives for you to make efficient choices.”
On health care, as he called for more government involvement, Santorum said Republicans had “dropped the ball” by not making health care reform a headline issue in recent elections. “I even said it to President Bush when he came to Pittsburgh to campaign for Dick Thornburgh [then running for US Senate] in 1991, that health care was gonna be the big issue and that we had to take responsibility for trying to solve this problem,” Santorum said. “We can’t continue to ignore it and say, ‘Oh well, you know, it will work itself out in the marketplace.’ That’s wrong.”
Government intervention, he continued, was key to creating a functioning health care marketplace. “The government helps set the marketplace up, so we have some responsibility to alter that marketplace to make it work better.”
Talking about health care, Santorum explained: “I take a much more proactive position in government in solving problems than most Republicans, because I believe government has a role. A lot of folks believe, ‘Well, just keep government out of it.’ I don’t believe that.” He added, “I think government has a role in making sure that there is equal opportunity.”
On the campaign trail these days, Santorum denounces government and maintains that it is not government’s job to help those who are suffering (because suffering has its positive consequences, he contends). His top priority, he says, is repealing “Obamacare.” He also wants to privatize Medicare and eliminate the agency that oversees it. “You want the private sector out there competing, driving down costs, improving efficiency,” he said recently.
At a November 2011 debate, Santorum boasted about his unwavering conservative record on health care. “I was always for having the government out of the health care business,” he said, “and for a bottom-up, consumer-driven health care, which is different than Governor Romney and some of the other people on this panel.” Yet Santorum, who has attacked Romney for reversing his positions, has flip-flopped as well.
“Red State America”: Moochers Against Welfare
First, Atlas shrugged. Then he scratched his head in puzzlement.
Modern Republicans are very, very conservative; you might even (if you were Mitt Romney) say, severely conservative. Political scientists who use Congressional votes to measure such things find that the current G.O.P. majority is the most conservative since 1879, which is as far back as their estimates go.
And what these severe conservatives hate, above all, is reliance on government programs. Rick Santorum declares that President Obama is getting America hooked on “the narcotic of dependency.” Mr. Romney warns that government programs “foster passivity and sloth.” Representative Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, requires that staffers read Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” in which heroic capitalists struggle against the “moochers” trying to steal their totally deserved wealth, a struggle the heroes win by withdrawing their productive effort and giving interminable speeches.
Many readers of The Times were, therefore, surprised to learn, from an excellent article published last weekend, that the regions of America most hooked on Mr. Santorum’s narcotic — the regions in which government programs account for the largest share of personal income — are precisely the regions electing those severe conservatives. Wasn’t Red America supposed to be the land of traditional values, where people don’t eat Thai food and don’t rely on handouts?
The article made its case with maps showing the distribution of dependency, but you get the same story from a more formal comparison. Aaron Carroll of Indiana University tells us that in 2010, residents of the 10 states Gallup ranks as “most conservative” received 21.2 percent of their income in government transfers, while the number for the 10 most liberal states was only 17.1 percent.
Now, there’s no mystery about red-state reliance on government programs. These states are relatively poor, which means both that people have fewer sources of income other than safety-net programs and that more of them qualify for “means-tested” programs such as Medicaid.
By the way, the same logic explains why there has been a jump in dependency since 2008. Contrary to what Mr. Santorum and Mr. Romney suggest, Mr. Obama has not radically expanded the safety net. Rather, the dire state of the economy has reduced incomes and made more people eligible for benefits, especially unemployment benefits. Basically, the safety net is the same, but more people are falling into it.
But why do regions that rely on the safety net elect politicians who want to tear it down? I’ve seen three main explanations.
First, there is Thomas Frank’s thesis in his book “What’s the Matter With Kansas?”: working-class Americans are induced to vote against their own interests by the G.O.P.’s exploitation of social issues. And it’s true that, for example, Americans who regularly attend church are much more likely to vote Republican, at any given level of income, than those who don’t.
Still, as Columbia University’s Andrew Gelman points out, the really striking red-blue voting divide is among the affluent: High-income residents of red states are overwhelmingly Republican; high-income residents of blue states only mildly more Republican than their poorer neighbors. Like Mr. Frank, Mr. Gelman invokes social issues, but in the opposite direction. Affluent voters in the Northeast tend to be social liberals who would benefit from tax cuts but are repelled by things like the G.O.P.’s war on contraception.
Finally, Cornell University’s Suzanne Mettler points out that many beneficiaries of government programs seem confused about their own place in the system. She tells us that 44 percent of Social Security recipients, 43 percent of those receiving unemployment benefits, and 40 percent of those on Medicare say that they “have not used a government program.”
Presumably, then, voters imagine that pledges to slash government spending mean cutting programs for the idle poor, not things they themselves count on. And this is a confusion politicians deliberately encourage. For example, when Mr. Romney responded to the new Obama budget, he condemned Mr. Obama for not taking on entitlement spending — and, in the very next breath, attacked him for cutting Medicare.
The truth, of course, is that the vast bulk of entitlement spending goes to the elderly, the disabled, and working families, so any significant cuts would have to fall largely on people who believe that they don’t use any government program.
The message I take from all this is that pundits who describe America as a fundamentally conservative country are wrong. Yes, voters sent some severe conservatives to Washington. But those voters would be both shocked and angry if such politicians actually imposed their small-government agenda.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, February 16, 2012
Sharp Rise In Premiums Exposes Health Insurers’ Greed
According to a study released today by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 2011 health insurance premiums for employer-sponsored family healthcare benefits rose 9 percent over last year’s prices, leaving employees to pay, on average, $4,129 and employer contributions at $10,944. The number represents a surprising rise given that increases experienced in 2010 were just 3 percent.
So, why the sudden increase?
We know that Americans are using fewer medical services since the economy took a dive as people are staying away from the doctor and putting off non-life saving surgeries, such as knee and hip replacements, until they have more confidence that they will have the money required to pay deductibles and co-pays. We also know that fewer medical services are being utilized as a result of the increased popularity of Health Safety Accounts which require deductibles in excess of $2,000 per family, and employer provided policies that have increasingly large deductibles and co-pays.
As a result, can it possibly make sense that medical costs are increasing by the 9 percent reflected in the hefty premium hikes? In a word, no.
That will not stop the anti-Obamacare forces, of course, from putting the blame squarely on healthcare reform. In a sense, I suppose the Affordable Care Act does bear some of the responsibility—if you can consider motivating the health insurers to falsely inflate their prices, by forcing them to do the right thing, to be a blamable offense.
Beginning next year, health insurers will be required to justify any increases in premium rates above 10 percent. They will further be obligated to refund money to customers if an insurer is found to have spent less than 85 percent of their premium income on medical expenses. Thus, it is hardly a stretch to conclude that the insurers are simply taking their last chance to raise premium rates before they find themselves having to be more accountable to the government, particularly when they are pretty much admitting to as much.
As noted by Reed Ableson in The New York Times:
Throughout this year, major health insurers have defended higher premiums—and higher profits—saying that their expenses would rise once the economy recovered and people believed they could again afford medical care. The struggling economy will probably keep suppressing demand for medical care, particularly as people pay a larger share of their own medical bills through higher deductibles and co-payments, according to benefits consultants and others. About three-quarters of workers now pay part of the bill when they go see a doctor, and nearly a third have a deductible of at least $1,000 if they have single coverage, up from just one in 10 in 2006, according Kaiser.
So, the insurance company defense is that they expect prices to rise sometime in the future (clearly an undefined period) and they want to be ready. Somehow, this justifies them to dramatically raise their premium prices now, at time when their costs are actually less and their profits are through the roof.
Not only is such behavior astoundingly predatory, the insurers are playing a major role in keeping the economy in the dumps, as it is precisely this sort of unnecessary premium increase that causes employers to avoid hiring more employees.
For those who believe that we should leave it to the free market to establish the prices in the medical system (of which insurance will always be a necessary part), maybe they can explain how the system is working in this instance? In a time where patient control has risen dramatically as consumers decide if and how they will—or will not—spend on medical services now that they have greatly increased responsibility for the familiy medical bills as a result of much higher deductibles, and at a moment where there are substantially reduced claims coming onto health insurers’ balance sheets due to diminished use of medical services, exactly what is the free market concept that justifies an insurance company raising their premium rates? What’s more, at a time when fewer people are using physician’s services, why would costs go up?
Free market principles would suggest that lower demand should produce lower prices. But that is clearly not what is happening.
I know what some of you are thinking—but before you say it’s all the government’s fault, I would hasten to point out that, with an apples-to-apples comparison, there are no substantial new regulations hitting physicians this year that did not exist last year. And before you blame the president’s health care reform program for the insurance companies’ usurious behavior, note that the two million young people who have been added to the insurance roles as a result of Obamacare’s permitting these people to stay on the family insurance policy, would not increase an insurance company’s costs by 9% over last year’s prices. Indeed, adding all of these healthy kids to the insurance pools should help insurers spread risk more effectively while collecting additional premium revenues.
The bottom line is that there is absolutely no justification whatsoever for the health insurance industry hitting employers with a 9 percent increase. It is a simple matter of greed and it is precisely that greed that has long made access to healthcare continuously more difficult for middle class Americans.
By: Rick Ungar, Mother Jones, September 27, 2011
Hurricane Irene And The Benefits Of Big Government
Don’t expect anybody to throw a tea party, but Big Government finally got one right.
On Monday, six years to the day after Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans and obliterated the notion of a competent federal government, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Administrator Craig Fugate offered an anecdote that showed just how different things were with Hurricane Irene.
On the podium in the White House briefing room, he recalled the satellite images of Irene’s path. “Do you remember seeing the satellite, how big that storm was and how close it was to the state of Florida?” he asked. Fugate, the former emergency management chief in Florida, said that a decade or so ago, “Florida would have had to evacuate based upon this track.”
Instead, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s improved models predicted landfall in North Carolina, and, in fact, “the track was only about 10 miles off of where they actually thought it was going to come ashore.”
This was just one piece of the overall anticipation of Irene and response to the storm that has earned high marks for FEMA and NOAA. Like the killing of Osama bin Laden, it was a rare reminder that the federal government can still do great things, after all other possibilities have been exhausted.
Such successes might provide an antidote to the souring of the public’s confidence in government. By coincidence, a Gallup poll released Monday showed that only 17 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the federal government, a new low.
More likely, however, Americans won’t have long to savor this new competence in government. NOAA has already been hit with budget cuts that will diminish its ability to track storms, and FEMA, like much of the federal government, will lose about a third of its funding over the next decade if Tea Party Republicans have their way.
In the spending compromise for this year worked out between congressional Republicans and the White House, NOAA’s budget was cut by about $140 million (House Republicans had sought much larger cuts) and money for new satellites was cut by more than $500 million from President Obama’s request. NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco warned in May, “we are likely looking at a period of time a few years down the road where we will not be able to do the severe storm warnings . . . that people have come to expect today.”
Congressional Democrats and the White House were somewhat more successful this year in resisting cuts to FEMA that Republicans had proposed. But under the House Republicans’ plan to freeze discretionary spending at 2008 levels over a decade, FEMA cuts are inevitable. According to an analysis by the Center for American Progress’s Scott Lilly that takes into account inflation and population, this amounts to a 31 percent cut in real per capita spending on discretionary functions such as FEMA.
Tea Partyers who denounce Big Government seem to have an abstract notion that government spending means welfare programs and bloated bureaucracies. Almost certainly they aren’t thinking about hurricane tracking and pre-positioning of FEMA supplies. But if they succeed in paring the government, some of these Tea Partyers (particularly those on the coasts or on the tornadic plains) may be surprised to discover that they have turned a Hurricane Irene government back into a Katrina government.
The Irene government would seem to have its benefits. Before the storm struck, 18 FEMA teams deployed from Florida to Maine, repositioning as the emphasis moved to New England. Food, water, generators and tarps were in place along the storm’s path. In Vermont, when the storm forced evacuation of the state emergency operations center, the workers relocated to a FEMA facility. In North Carolina, FEMA provided in-the-dark local authorities with generator power. And everywhere, FEMA, given new authority by Congress after Katrina, didn’t have to wait for states to request help.
“We have to go fast; we have to base it upon the potential impacts,” Fugate said Monday, describing the Irene response. “That’s why we look at these forecasts we get from the hurricane center, and we make the decisions based upon what the potential impacts could be. If you wait till you know how bad it is, it becomes harder to change the outcome.”
That’s one model. The other model is to have a weak federal government, without the funds to forecast storms or to launch a robust emergency response in time to do any good.
You might call that the Tea Party model.
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 29, 2011
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