Tuesday, May 6, 2008

Teaching Ayn Rand's Capitalism

This is making news headlines. Banking firm BB&T is pledging $1 million to Marshall University in West Virginia to establish a class that teaches the capitalist philosophy of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged," and Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations."
The money also would help create the BB&T Center for Advancement of American Capitalism.
Rand wrote "The Virtue of Selfishness." Her philosophy, objectivism, is based on the view that selfishness is the only moral value, according to NPR. I own her collection of essays, "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal," which has input from former United States Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, and I'm the first person to hail Greenspan as one of the better economic thinkers of our time.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90104091&ft=1&f=100
Check out the story at the above link.
Rand and Smith have some great philosophies and ideas that have become cornerstones of modern economic and philosophical thought. But the two people did not exist in our time. I am not discounting the genius of either person, but each person existed in different time and space than what we're dealing with in modern economic times.
Keynesian economics, for example, would have theorized that stagflation couldn't have happened, necessarily, but we saw that in the 1970s and we've seen many theorists who believe it may happen again today.
My point to all this is that of course someone is going to want to teach Rand, just as economics classes rely on Smith as one of the main Founding Fathers of modern economic thought. But recall that Smith was among Classicists who didn't know to account for technology in a production function. That came later, as companies evolved and economic thought evolved with it. Rand's philosophies therefore have to be balanced because standard American capitalism isn't a cure-all for the economic wounds of the world.

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