The end result is that altruists go extinct. But Trivers showed that altruists can survive if one simple condition is satisfied: Those who fail to reciprocate must be punished through exclusion from subsequent cooperative ventures.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. In contrast, Rand believed that the primary role of government was to arbitrate and enforce such contracts. If a contract is broken by the arbitrary decision of one man, it may cause a disastrous financial injury to the other… This leads to one of the most important and most complex functions of the government: to the function of an arbiter who settles disputes among men according to objective laws.
In other words, Rand clearly expected government to play a role in maintaining fairness in market transactions, a cornerstone of laissez-faire capitalism:. Does laissez-faire work? The American and global economies are still reeling from one of its greatest failures: the economic meltdown. His is disdain for regulation is frequently cited as one of the major causes of the junk mortgage crisis, which in , brought about the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression.
In a congressional hearing, he admitted that he had made a mistake in assuming that financial firms could regulate themselves. Critics of laissez-faire emerged from the beginning, and included such luminaries as Thorstein Veblen, John Commons, Clarence E. Ayres and John Maynard Keynes of the 19th and 20th centuries. In , economists opposed to laissez-faire formed the American Economics Association.
Critics of laissez-faire argue that it creates poverty traps that cannot be escaped through free choice, monopoly power that emerges naturally in the market and allows businesses to exploit consumers and exploitation of the working class that pushes wages down to subsistence and compels laborers to work in harsh and unsafe conditions. These conditions are very much on the public mind today, as is apparent from the strong showing Senator Bernie Sanders is enjoying in the Presidential primary elections with his decidedly socialist political platform.
Yet incarnations of John Galt continue to dominate economic policy. Like Galt, he appears to believe that workers need people like him more than people like him need workers.
Back in , Senator Elizabeth Warren eloquently countered such sentiments :. There is nobody in this country who got rich on their own. Nobody… You built a factory out there — good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for.
You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for.
You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea — God bless! Keep a hunk of it. In fact, several of the key Republican young guns are Fountainhead -adjacent. Senator Rand Paul is not only the son of longtime libertarian crank and Texas Congressman Ron Paul he of the racist newsletters.
For all their quoting of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, it makes their retro version of Objectivism about as useful for 21st-century life as an 18th-century telescope. The Randed-out Peter Thiel, whose commitment to free speech did not keep him from suing a major media company into oblivion, is perhaps the most prominent Valley libertarian. Similarly, the polite Midwestern Nazi profiled by The New York Times , Tony Hovater, was a vaguely leftish heavy-metal drummer until he discovered libertarianism.
The Citizens United decision has unleashed people like Mercer — secretive gazillionaires whose expenditures are often untraceable despite the way they remake our shared reality. Oh, and then there are Charles and David Koch. You could very well spend your days with very little contact with war-mongering neoconservatives.
NOTE: If you want an example of the kind of behavior you can expect from Rand-influenced CEOs as well as other assorted follies check out these posts:. Facts trump man's feelings, wishes, hopes, and fears. It is man's only guide to action and means to survival.
What if we indeed allowed ourselves to be blinded to all but our own self-interest? Lampert broke the company into more than 30 individual units, each with its own management and each measured separately for profit and loss.
The idea was to promote competition among the units, which Lampert assumed would lead to higher profits. Instead, this is what happened, as described by Mina Kimes, a reporter for Bloomberg Business :. An outspoken advocate of free-market economics and fan of the novelist Ayn Rand, he created the model because he expected the invisible hand of the market to drive better results.
Instead, the divisions turned against each other — and Sears and Kmart, the overarching brands, suffered. A close-up of the debacle was described by Lynn Stuart Parramore in a Salon article from It got crazy.
Executives started undermining other units because they knew their bonuses were tied to individual unit performance. They began to focus solely on the economic performance of their unit at the expense of the overall Sears brand. Sears became a miserable place to work, rife with infighting and screaming matches.
Employees, focused solely on making money in their own unit, ceased to have any loyalty to the company or stake in its survival. We all know the end of the story: Sears share prices fell, and the company appears to be headed toward bankruptcy.
What Lampert failed to see is that humans actually have a natural inclination to work for the mutual benefit of an organization. They like to cooperate and collaborate, and they often work more productively when they have shared goals. Take all of that away and you create a company that will destroy itself. What followed was succinctly summarized by Honduran attorney Oscar Cruz:.
The coup in unleashed the voracity of the groups with real power in this country. It gave them free reins to take over everything. They started to reform the Constitution and many laws — the ZEDE comes in this context — and they made the Constitution into a tool for them to get rich. As part of this process, the Honduran government passed a law in that created autonomous free-trade zones that are governed by corporations instead of the countries in which they exist.
So what was the outcome?
0コメント