HALLOWEEN FUN IS OK!

Paul B. Farrell posts (31 October) on Market Watch HERE 

“Halloween’s midterm-election monsters are killing capitalism”

Yes, bad news, lots. And the future gets worst: Affordable health-care repeal? GOP Senate? Weak recovery? Dream Act? Ebola? ISIS? Bush III? Fear oozes from media. Nasty news. Creepy cable.

In desperate times like these, truth is rare: Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz sees a scary Frankenstein capitalism ideology in “Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy” ... Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the 21st Century” is a mausoleum of misleading data ... a relentless unstoppable negative trend is undermining global capitalism ... the inequality gap is widening ... democracy is on life support ... 67 billionaires already own half of the world’s assets ... by 2100, with 11 trillionaires at the top, capitalism will rule the global economy, 10 billion souls ... until a revolution burns in our spirit. …

… Why the relentless Halloween horror story, every year, why the midterm madness? Because Ayn Rand’s “mutant capitalism” (as Jack Bogle calls her narcissistic godless atheism) destroyed the moral foundations of Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand economics that made America great the first two centuries after 1776. And because Ayn Rands’s mutant capitalist economics is vacuous, empty, hollow without Adam Smith’s “Moral Sentiments.”

And soon Ayn Rand’s mutant capitalism will self-destruct, taking with it the Big Oil energy industry and the GOP.

Paradoxically, this Halloween chaos also opens the way for a paradigm shift ... to economic enlightenment in a post-capitalist world that reinstates morality, the Greater Good and the Invisible Hand back into our politics, our economics, our culture.

Comment

Ayn Rand’s role in economic thought is grossly exaggerated. She made a living from being a controversial and a Hollywood script writer and novellist. She preached ‘selfishness’ as a moral choice upon which she erected her pro-capitalism and feminist stances (both admirable objectives in themselves) but misled her passionate (in all senses of the word) supporters.  Up close and personal she does not appear, at least to me, to have many redeeming features. Her influence on market philosophy was less than benign. 

Of Paul B. Farrell I know nothing and I am not sure what exactly his article in Market Watch (of which I also know nothing) is about. 

Our grandchildren are out and about tonight, as was and is traditional in Scotland (long before it re-appeared across in the colonies), and as I was at their age too.  A bit of fun, lightly pretend scary, to which our wilder shores of religious zealotry used to denounce as ‘devil worship’ that fortunately no longer attracts draconian punishments.

Donate your pennies/cents, sweets and such like generously.  It’s part of children growing up and it also promotes adult employment and 'capitalism'. 

'Killing capitalism'?   Lighten up Paul!