naked capitalism

Jesse says:

The objections of PT are just silly really.

You limit who can engage in one off contracts, and you set tighter restrictions on capital requirements.

It is the same question that is dealt with when the financial regulators consider ANY widely traded group of financial instruments.

Oh no it can’t be done with these because these are DERIVATIVES!!! Back off. You don’t understand them.

Well, bollocks.

DownSouth says:

What a superb program!

That said, however, I nevertheless wish that it would have delved a little more into the underlying dogmas and pseudoscience that underpin the philosophies of Rand, Greenspan, Rubin, Summers, Bernanke and Geithner.

“A consistent pessimism in regard to man’s rational capacity for justice invariably leads to absolutistic political theories,” Reinhold Niebuhr cautions us in “The children of light and the children of darkness”; “for they prompt the conviction that only preponderant power can coerce the various vitalities of a community into working harmony.”

And there can be little doubt as to how Niebuhr would have judged Rand, Greenspan, Rubin, Summers, Bernanke and Geithner: “the moral cynics, who know no law beyond their will and interest, with a scriptural designation of ‘children of this world’ or ‘children of darkness’. “

“This is no mere arbitrary device,” Niebuhr goes on to explain; “for evil is always the assertion of some self-interest without regard to the whole, whether the whole be conceived as the immediate community, or the total community of mankind, or the total order of the world.”

Martin Luther King was to pick up on and greatly elaborate upon the “children of darkness,” their pessimism concerning man’s moral and rational resources to achieve fairness and justice:

Plato, centuries ago said that the human personality is like a charioteer with two headstrong horses, each wanting to go in different directions, so that within our own individual lives we see this conflict and certainly when we come to the collective life of man, we see a strange badness. But in spite of this there is something in human nature that can respond to goodness. So that man is neither innately good nor is he innately bad; he has potentialities for both. So in this sense, Carlyle was right when he said that, “there are depths in man which go down to the lowest hell, and heights which reach the highest heaven, for are not both heaven and hell made out of him, ever-lasting miracle and mystery that he is?” Man has the capacity to be good, man has the capacity to be evil.

And so the nonviolent resister never lets this idea go, that there is something within human nature that can respond to goodness. So that a Jesus of Nazareth or a Mohandas Gandhi, can appeal to human beings and appeal to that element of goodness within them, and a Hitler can appeal to the element of evil within him.
–Martin Luther King, “Love, law and civil disobedience”

What we saw beginning about sixty years ago was the rollout of a full court press by the children of darkness. It pervaded every aspect of our thinking lives—art, science, religion, economics and politics. And the New Atheist Ayn Rand was undoubtedly the high priestess of the paladins of selfishness and greed.

But she has many disciples, including the Four Horsemen—the new New Atheists Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. Probably nowhere are the pseudoscientific half-truths they peddle more amply revealed than in this lecture by Richard Dawkins (beginning at minute 40:00):

http://thesciencenetwork.org/programs/beyond-belief-science-religion-reason-and-survival/session-7-1

For a long time, certainly during all of Rand’s lifetime, the New Atheists, without a doubt due to their deep-pocked patrons and sponsors, ran roughshod over the academic community. Anyone foolish enough to assert “man’s capacity to do good” was exiled into academic oblivion. However, with more recent findings by neuroscientists, the “red in tooth and claw” portrayal of man proselytized by the New Scientists has become empirically indefensible.

So what can be seen in Dawkins’ presentation is his acknowledgment that man does indeed have the capacity to do good, but with the qualification that this is a “mistake” or “misfire.” Man ought to follow his instincts for greed and selfishness, Dawkins advises us, because these benevolent impulses no longer function to enhance survival.

On the religious front, the perversion and corruption is just as egregious. We find the mirror image of Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens in such well-known Christian evangelical figures as Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, Jim Bakker, Tim LaHaye, James Robinson and a host of other millionaire preachers. Other denominations notable for smiling kindly upon greed and selfishness are the Mormons and the Missouri Synod Lutherans. Kevin Phillips, Andrew J. Bacevich and Greg Grandin, between the three of them do a superb job of researching the current state of right-wing religion in America and its celebration of greed and selfishness.

In the arts, we see the “greed is good” message not only overtly verbalized by the artist, but also conveyed in the iconic sharks and gold-plated bulls of the billionaire-artist Damien Hirst.

And I suppose this audience needs no schooling on how, as Amitai Etzioni so thoroughly documented in The Moral Dimension, “neoclassicists have labored long and hard to show that practically all behavior is driven by pleasure and self-interest.” “The neoclassical paradigm does not merely ignore the moral dimension but actively opposes its inclusion,” he writes.

And politics? What can we say about politics?

Francois Haas in “German science and black racism—roots of the Nazi Holocaust” posits a rather interesting theory. Traditional political theory, Haas explains, holds that “science under dictatorship becomes subordinated to the guiding philosophy of the dictatorship.” Haas, however, says: “I am proposing the inverse, that Politics under Science becomes subordinated to the guiding philosophy of that Science.”
http://www.fasebj.org/cgi/content/abstract/22/2/332

So as the little piece of ground that the New Atheists stand upon is eroded away, as the tyranny they inflicted upon the academe is swept away, does that not give hope that the evil politics they inspired will also be swept away?