Comments on: Blame It On Ayn Rand?

By: Virus Protection

Virus Protection — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 11:01:20 +0000

Now there’s the intellectual force behind the status quo structure of American monetary and regulatory policy!

By: coldblood

coldblood — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 04:01:20 +0000

Now there’s the intellectual force behind the status quo structure of American monetary and regulatory policy!

By: suchig57

suchig57 — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 08:27:59 +0000

I totally agree with you. The article depicts the fact of life.

By: Sunglasses

Sunglasses — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 02:50:44 +0000

I agree with this paragraph. “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. Great post..

By: Traveller_Adventure

Traveller_Adventure — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 21:39:08 +0000

Very very interesting post..I like this one. gotta bookmark this one.

Cheers,
Blog Review

By: metanaturalist

metanaturalist — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 22:51:27 +0000

I'm an atheist blogger who is more civil and rational with my religious guest authors than you and Leiter are with each other. I've told Tom Clark of Naturalism.Org that his humanist reductivism is not "naturalism," yet we are civil with each other. I call him a reductivist because Tibor Machan told me he was, so I looked it up, and darn it! He was right!

So in my blog today, "Dworkin, Leiter, and Wilkinson are All Off the Mark; 'Blame It On Ayn Rand'" http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/2008/10/rand... . I show all of you where you are wrong--I hope! You were implying that Rand has no intellectual prowess to be the shaker and mover of the economic status quo, were you not?

I've got you and Leiter on my Google read list, which is how I found this discussion.

Many happy returns.

By: DMonteith

DMonteith — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 21:59:13 +0000

No, I'm not referring to the current crisis. I'm saying that excessive adherence to abstractions frequently leads to absurd, if not outright hackish, arguments.

It's funny, but not the way you think it is.

By: Mark

Mark — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 16:29:45 +0000

The bottom line is this: laissez-faire capitalism, otherwise known as “free market” capitalism, only exists where government has no involvement in the economy. No matter whether one wants to blame Washington or Wall St. for the current crisis, one _cannot_ blame the free market. That, clearly, hasn't existed in the financial markets (or any other, for that matter) in, well, forever, or the 1920's, depending.

By: JA

JA — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 14:36:27 +0000

DMonteith, I'm genuinely confused by this. Are you saying the current crisis disproves Will's thesis?

If so, that's a funny.

By: JA

JA — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 14:30:48 +0000

muirgeo, structured products might be market esoteria, but they are not problematic per se. the same goes for mark-to-market valuation. rather than being responsible for the mess we're in, these practices *aggravated* it because of the complex interdependencies they create.

The “but-for causation” is the fundamentally flawed lending strategies pushed by Fannie and Freddie et al. It wasn't “design flaw” or “material failure” that caused this collapse. It was the original decision to build on sand.