Grotesquely Rich People Have Meeting to Gush About Ayn Rand, Smear Poor People
Posted by digby on @ 9:28 am
Article printed from speakeasy: http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy
URL to article: http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/0... /

This post first appeared on Hullabaloo.

Alex Pareene reports that the aristocrats have decided that they’ve just about had enough of all this whining from the lower order:

At the Atlantic Magazine’s “Aspen Ideas Festival,” the idle rich go to a ski resort town and pay the Atlantic Media Co. a great deal of money to listen to rich people with intellectual credentials of some kind talk at each other for a while. It may surprise you to learn that these wealthy elites think the biggest problem facing America today is that the wealthy elite have to pay taxes, while the poor and unemployed sit around collecting “Social Security” and “food stamps” and “unemployment benefits.”Real estate tycoon Mort Zuckerman — an intellectual nonentity who buys newspapers and magazines for the express purpose of pretending at being a Serious Public Thinker — and historian Niall Ferguson — a neo-imperialist who excuses or whitewashes atrocities done by empires in the name of market liberalization and who parlayed his scholarly expertise into a gig as an idiotic right-wing (occasionally blatantly racist) columnist — apparently successfully convinced Barbra Streisand and James Brolin that our current economic woes have been caused by Obama’s hatred of business and that the only solution is to “remove the incentives for idleness.”

Oh Barbra.

Appropriately, the gossip columnist Lloyd Grove is covering the conclave and reported what they were all so excited about:

Ferguson called for what he called “radical” measures. “I can’t emphasize strongly enough the need for radical fiscal reform to restore the incentives for work and remove the incentives for idleness.” He praised “really radical reform of the sort that, for example, Paul Ryan has outlined in his wonderful ‘Roadmap’ for radical, root-and-branch reform not only of the tax system but of the entitlement system” and “unleash entrepreneurial innovation.” Otherwise, Ferguson warned: “Do you want to be a kind of implicit part of the European Union? I’d advise you against it.”

Seriously, he’s quoting Paul Ryan, the infantile, crackpot Randian to a bunch of wealthy socialites, Hollywood liberals and self-interested tycoons. And these people actually seem to be gaining traction:

Rand developed the objectivist philosophy, which values the self, capitalism and laissez-faire economics. Ryan, the ranking member of the House Budget Committee, reportedly requires staffers and interns to read her opus, Atlas Shrugged, and gives out copies as gifts.

In his keynote address to CPAC last year, Ryan said Obama’s policies sound “like something right out of an Ayn Rand novel.”

Fearing political suicide, Republican leaders have tried to distance themselves from Ryan’s “roadmap” budget proposal, which calls for privatizing Social Security. But Ryan is upfront about it.

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http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/0... /