Capitalism Straw Man takes another hit

Randex finds news stories that mention Ayn Rand and Objectivism. A lot of the stories it finds are derisive to both.

Today, Randex found a slap at The Ayn Rand Society in a Jewish Journal Op-Ed called "Beyond sicko." The author fears what would happen if that group started lobbying public officials. I doubt the author actually knows to which organization he's referring, or even that an organization by that precise name exists. If he did, I also doubt he would have picked on it: it's "a professional society affiliated with the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division" -- in other words, its members are a bunch of philosophy professors. Hardly the most likely Ayn Rand-affiliated group to start lobbying public officials.

The column is a call to concentrate on preventing poor health by abandoning "exhausted dogmas" like the free market and instead relying on the government to fix the causes of poor health. That is:

To me, the underlying reason America has fallen so far behind in the healthiest nation race is the exhausted dogmas that have dominated public discourse for something like 30 years -- Horatio Algerism, social Darwinism, the magic of the marketplace, deregulation is good, government is bad, pull yourself up by your own bootstraps and devil take the hindmost.

We now know what America looks like when those kinds of ideas rule, and not only in the health sector.

This nonsense is fundamentally evasive at best and dishonest at worst. No-one who seriously reflects on the American economy can possibly believe it's been a free market for the past 30 years -- it's never been completely free, and the era of its greatest freedom was the end of the 19th century, over one hundred years ago. Since the enactment of New Deal legislation in the Great Depression, government regulation of our lives has been pervasive.

I mention this Op-Ed because it's a particularly egregious call for a nanny state. Marty Kaplan, the author of this Op-Ed, is a professor at USC, and as a professor, he should know better than to engage in the fallacy of attacking a straw man. For anyone as educated as Kaplan, to claim that any broad cultural or policy failures should be laid at the door of free market principles is sicko.