Tamiko Bolton has won the ‘Opportunist of the Year’ award by agreeing to marry George Soros’ bank account. It is these sorts of exercises that give fair womanhood a bad name, while offering temporary ‘comfort’ in exchange for money is short of murdering business associates by way of the slow drip, perhaps what Bolton and Bank have in mind is some poisoning on the side (not necessarily each other).

Born to shake down: most in this world have nothing to sell other than the willingness to behave themselves for a fee. This fee can be remarkably small: a TV set, shack-space in a mega-slum, a pittance in food stamps and welfare- social security ‘benefits’. Here then is the impulse to producing large numbers of offspring: with time one (two) can muster gangs of armed robbers, villains, safe-crackers or violent schizophrenics all under one roof, every man-jack of them requiring the appropriate fees from each other by way of government ‘or else all will go astray’.

Hostage taking for ransom and blackmail have become our grand organizing regime in this our twilight of industrialization. How many skeletons are in George Soros’ bank account’s closet again?

More poison: presumptive Republican presidential candidate Willard Romney has joined his fortunes with/hired as a valet Senator Paul Ryan as Republican vice-presidential candidate. Vice-candidate Ryan has expressed his boyish admiration for noveliste, ex-Soviet emigre Ayn Rand (LA Times):
 

Ryan made no bones about his philosophical influences just a few years ago. He told the Weekly Standard in 2003 that he gave his staffers copies of “Atlas Shrugged” as Christmas presents. Speaking to a group of Rand acolytes in 2005, Ryan said, “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand. And the fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism.”

Why, sweet Jesus, why? ‘Atlas Shrugged’ for Christmas is on a par with finding bags of cement and a shovel under the tree. In 25 words or less, ‘unreadable’ pretty much covers the entire ground. Doing advance-man, exculpatory legwork for tycoons isn’t literature, it’s spam.

Dig a little deeper into the murk from which Rand emerges and it is very murky, indeed. The younger Rand voluntarily associated herself with hanged California armed-robber and child killer William Edward Hickman.

Hickman-Rand sketches the outline of Rand’s Objectivism, moral relativism, undercooked Nietzsche and economic determinism: might makes right at least for a little while. Here is the dark underbelly of Ponzi rationalization as well as the most enduring character within twentieth-century pop culture, the Gay Outlaw: is William Hickman really ‘Atlas Shrugged’ lead character/mystery man John Galt?

Who is John Galt?

(Rand) admires Hickman’s stated credo, “What is good for me is right.” In her journals, Rand writes in response, “The best and strongest expression of a real man’s psychology I have heard.” Rand is planning a novel, The Little Street, to feature a character based on Hickman, who she considers her “ideal man.” In her journals, Rand writes that Hickman “is born with a wonderful, free, light consciousness—[resulting from] the absolute lack of social instinct or herd feeling. He does not understand, because he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people … Other people do not exist for him and he does not understand why they should.”

That the Psychopath-Rand association might be a problem is poorly understood by Rand’s apologists. Linda Kasabian, Susan Atkins and Patricia Krenwinkle voluntarily associated themselves with Charles Manson: Rand did not go so far as to write ‘Atlas Shrugged’ in pigs’ blood but given time and place who knows what the petty villain Hickman might have inspired Rand to do.

Ayn Rand might have patterned Galt on a more fitting superman, Carl Panzram.

In his autobiography, Panzram wrote that he was “rage personified”, and he would often rape men whom he robbed, not necessarily because he was homosexual, but because it was his method of dominating and humiliating people. He was noted as having extreme physical strength, which aided him in overpowering most men he encountered. He also engaged in vandalism and arson, at one point considering an ambitious plot to scuttle a British warship docked in New York harbor in order to provoke a war between Britain and the United States.

The only differences between Panzram and Lloyd Blankfein or Jamie Dimon are matters of style, one is a bit more direct than the others, the outcomes are identical.

Here is modernity’s idea of self-justifying means: the machine-man as a monstrous yet sexual all-powerful thing-that-cannot-be-switched-off, its right to act as it will under its own set of self-determined rules, to extinguish the rights of others without any inputs or considerations because narrow, reinforcing heedlessness is what the machine allows. Panzram:

“Is it unnatural that I should have absorbed these things and have become what I am today, a treacherous, degenerate, brutal, human savage, devoid of all decent feeling…without conscience, morals, pity, sympathy, principle or any single good trait? Why am I what I am?”

Why indeed? Who really is John Galt?

Romney’s valet would be assured of more votes if he had handed out copies of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’ to his staff instead of ‘Atlas Shrugged’. Rand and Fitzgerald describe the same gangsters aiming to be conventionally successful but who emptied out those same conventions by way of their own actions. Moral relativism begins as the yellow-brick road but ends up as a railway siding in Treblinka.

In an attempt to obtain financial contributions from industrialists, Hitler wrote a pamphlet in 1927 entitled The Road to Resurgence. Only a small number of these pamphlets were printed and they were only meant for the eyes of the top industrialists in Germany. The reason that the pamphlet was kept secret was that it contained information that would have upset Hitler’s working-class supporters. In the pamphlet Hitler implied that the anti-capitalist measures included in the original twenty-five points of the NSDAP programme would not be implemented if he gained power.

Hitler began to argue that “capitalists had worked their way to the top through their capacity, and on the basis of this selection they have the right to lead.” Hitler claimed that national socialism meant all people doing their best for society and posed no threat to the wealth of the rich. Some prosperous industrialists were convinced by these arguments and gave donations to the Nazi Party, however, the vast majority continued to support other parties, especially the right-wing German Nationalist Peoples Party (DNVP).

Fitzgerald had a grasp of the bigger picture: success in the immediate term gained by whatever means come to hand: poison or pleasure. In the end what we desire is always out of reach, the rich are never rich enough, never diabolical enough, never have enough left of a soul to sell to a devil that isn’t interested. The requirement … is to always up the ante, to feed more capital into the fire for diminishing returns:

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther … And one fine morning –

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Too bad there is no burial ground for ideas that have outlived their usefulness. The emergence of economy as a self-rationalizing operating principle is credited to the Physiocrats Quesnay and Turgot leading to the works of Adam Smith, Ricardo, List, Wicksell, to Robbins and Keynes, Minsky, etc.

Here is “the obscure hero of Libertarianism: Bernard de Mandeville”. Is Mandeville John Galt?

Born in Rotterdam in 1670, Bernard de Mandeville came to England in the wake of William of Orange’s accession to the throne. A doctor by profession, Mandeville became better-known as a satirist. More importantly, Mandeville was also a Satanist, linked with the Blasters and Hell-Fire Clubs of 18th-century England.

Although Mandeville’s name has been all but erased from contemporary mainstream economical discourse, many free-market thinkers lavish glowing praise on his insights.

In a lecture delivered at the British Academy in 1966, Friedrich von Hayek extolled Mandeville as a “mastermind” and “great psychologist” whose theories anticipated those of David Hume, Adam Smith, and Charles Darwin, and praised his poem The Fable of the Bees as a “remarkable” work.

John Maynard Keynes was also a fan, the Paradox of Thrift is contained within the Fable:

Thus every Part was full of Vice,
Yet the whole Mass a Paradice;
Flatter’d in Peace, and fear’d in Wars
They were th’ Esteem of Foreigners,
And lavish of their Wealth and Lives,
The Ballance of all other Hives.
Such were the Blessings of that State;
Their Crimes conspired to make ’em Great;
And Vertue, who from Politicks
Had learn’d a Thousand cunning Tricks,
Was, by their happy Influence,
Made Friends with Vice: And ever since
The Worst of all the Multitude
Did something for the common Good.

The capacity for vice is limited only by the population of victims, a form of resource constraint, Hayek whitewashes Mandeville:

His main contention became simply that in the complex order of society the results of men’s actions were very different from what they had intended, and that the individuals, in pursuing their own ends, whether selfish or altruistic, produced useful results for others which they did not anticipate or perhaps even know; and, finally, that the whole order of society, and even all that we call culture, was the result of individual strivings which had no such end in view, but where channeled to serve such ends by institutions, practices, and rules which had also never been deliberately invented but had grown up by the survival of what proved successful.

It was in the elaboration of this wider thesis that Mandeville for the first time developed all the classical paradigmata of the spontaneous growth of orderly social structures: of law and morals, of language, the market, and of money, and also of the growth of technological knowledge. To understand the significance of this it is necessary to be aware of the conceptual scheme into which these phenomena had somewhat uneasily been fitted during the preceding 2,000 years.

There is nothing to suggest that Mandeville was actually a Satanist but his writings scandalized the Anglican church which had its own hypocrisies/products to promote. Mandeville offers a syllogism rather than a thoroughgoing analysis: there are no two parallel societies, one that is virtuous and another corrupted that can be compared. Had there been such societies in 1720 there would have been no unprejudiced means to measure them. At the extremities Mandeville’s argument does not hold together: vice and virtue, there are no returns on one for the other, it only appears to be so. The greatest depravities have no accompanying great virtues … or even small ones.

Rand and the rest do not understand how industrial economies work. Modern business entrepreneurs are entirely creatures of the nanny state. There are no self-created supermen only opportunists beating endlessly against the current. Tycoons borrow their fortunes and leave it for the rest of society to repay the debts. This obligation to repay requires a society that is itself solvent rather than dissipated. Funds are useful only because of the implicit guarantees on the part of the public. Industrial processes are singular, uni-directional, constrained by thermodynamics. No power of will can negotiate with- or outmaneuver entropy which is its own law unto itself. The Rands, Mandevilles, Hayeks and Panzrams of this world make believe that it is possible to cheat physics and to do so by simply pressing claims against third parties. At some point there becomes an excess of claims: debts cannot be retired, society itself is insolvent.

No economy can put resources back into the ground. When these become exhausted and thence too costly for the economy to afford there is no reprieve from the consequences/hangman.

A villain can succeed on his or her own terms for the shortest period. Afterwards is chaos: the train runs to Treblinka for only so long, the railroad company burns through its paying customers, the enterprise collapses under the weight of its own ‘success’ …

“The only thanks you and your kind will ever get from me for your efforts on my behalf is that I wish you all had one neck and that I had my hands on it … ”

John Galt

Carl Panzram stole a .45 caliber automatic pistol that belonged to ex-US president William Howard Taft, Panzram burglarized Taft’s house. He used the automatic to commit several murders, Ayn Rand would have certainly appreciated the irony.