'Atlas Shrugged': From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years

"I mean there was the whole mortgage deal (that only happened in the largely non-socialist US) that started screwing the economy up because the US doesn't have enough legal protections in place to stop people who physically don't have the money to pay a loan to get a loan in the first place."

Exactly backwards. And I mean exactly backwards.

There are, in fact, laws that forced banks to give out loans to those people. Laws which have not been repealed. Entire non-profit groups making sure those laws were enforced, and who have not learned anything from what happened.

How is "government overriding the good sense of the mortgage industry by government fiat" capitalism?

The mortgage industry was highly regulated. It couldn't hardly have been more regulated. The problem is that the "perfect government regulator" is a myth that lives only in our minds. Your argument, like almost everybody else, assumes that regulation always works, and thus, if something didn't work, it must not have been regulated. QED. A moment's clear thought will show that to be completely false. If you can handle the idea that a market made of people is imperfect, even must be imperfect, why do so many carry around the idea that a government made of people will somehow be immune? It's just people! Markets, governments, consumers, all just people.

Government may not be 100% responsible for what happened, but they are 100% responsible for creating the environment in which it occurred. Nobody else had the power to force bad loans but the government.

...

There is a great danger here. Months into this crisis and huge numbers of people still have no clue what happened. Forget ideology for a second; if you want to make good decisions, you need truth. The truth is complicated, and I can't lay it all out, but I can tell you that the idea that this was all caused by rampant laissez faire capitalism is an objective falsehood. Government was involved deeply and pervasively. What exactly that means, I don't know and I'm not trying to make a claim here. (I have elsewhere, but not here.) All I am saying here is that you need to know the truth before spouting off.

Even as a little-l libertarian, I would feel a lot more comfortable with calls for regulation if people didn't implicitly treat it as some sort of atomic entity, where you either have "more" or "less", but that's the only dimension. That's wrong and frankly stupid. There's also good regulation and bad regulation and it's not usually obvious which is which. If we frame the debate that way, I'd be a lot less scared, but nobody does! It's all "we need more" or "we need less" and nobody talks about what more or what less, just "more" and "less".

I'm "little l" because I'm not against all regulation, but I'm against bad regulation, and that is what got us here. Not "no" regulation. Bad regulation. It exists! ... so why does that common-sense declaration feel so subversive to say?

That may have been intentional.

Superb comment!

Yeah. It ticks me off that Rand is associated with anarcho-capitalism (I think that's the phrase to describe people that want to replace government with corporations, no?). She isn't. She's all for government, but she has it restricted to three primary functions: depending people physically (with police), depending people morally (with law), and defending the nation (with a military). However, she says that these functions should be kept as minimal as possible, so as to give people maximum freedom.

It bugs me, because the Anthem argument ignores so much to make a snarky point (and Anthem is a terribly-written book, both Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged are better-writ). It goes by this vision of Rand as a near-Nazi who wants conformity to her Galtian standard. She doesn't, and she says this repeatedly. Rather, she wants Galt to be the bringer of the message that you ought to do things using your own abilities, primarily for yourself.

She's fine with charity, as long as you give what you want to and not what you feel compelled to. She's fine with tax, as long as you're only being taxed for the services that directly apply to you. She's entirely fine with people disagreeing with her, provided they disagree based on their own moral convictions rather than on the convictions they read of others. (I thought that made the OP a bit ironic.) This all gets ignored for the blind Rand-hate that exists solely to counteract all the blind Rand-love. It's frustrating.

Rand already failed. Old News.