NYTimes.com has a multipage article on the resurgence of interest in Ayn Rand, particularly her novel Atlas Shrugged, which seems eerily prescient in light of its crystalline depiction of the corrosive effects of state intervention in the economy. Although the author of the piece grinds the usual axes, it’s mostly a fair piece (as fair as I expect from this source). The article focuses on the founder and former CEO of BB&T (the country’s eleventh largest bank) who made the values espoused by Rand— in his words, “reason, independent thinking and decisions based on facts”— core guidelines for his business. Seems to have worked well for him.
MR. John A. Allison IV of BB&T has the tall, lean frame, copper-colored hair and confident demeanor of many of Ms. Rand’s fictional heroes, including John Galt — a look “which would not seek forgiveness or grant it.”
He also has a résumé befitting a Rand prophet. He started at BB&T, once known as the Branch Banking and Trust Company, in 1971 and became chief executive in 1989, when the bank had $4.7 billion in assets.
By the time he retired as C.E.O. in December, he had overseen 60 bank and savings-institution acquisitions and turned BB&T into the 11th-largest bank in the nation, with $152 billion in assets, according to the bank.
A 60-year-old who speaks in a rapid-fire Southern accent, Mr. Allison says the current financial crisis is primarily the government’s fault. He criticizes the Fed as trying to manipulate normal business cycles and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as facilitating mortgages to people who couldn’t afford them.
The government’s remedies have made matters only worse, he says: “Almost everything that has been done since this crisis started is going to reduce our long-term standard of living.” [... Read on...]
I can’t quote it exactly until I see it again, so you’ll have to trust me that there’s a television commercial for ski resorts in Park City, Utah that begins with the pitch (paraphrased):
Come to Park City, Utah. It’s like dying and going to heaven……. but easier.
Note the procedural specifics of this ad’s concrete language. They’re not using the familiar simile, “like heaven on Earth.”
As great as dying and going to heaven… but easier… in what way? Easier to get to than heaven? Easier to stay in than heaven? Logically speaking, can anything here on Earth be better in any way than it would be in heaven? And how would somebody actually compare the experience of dying and going to heaven with the experience of staying at a ski resort in Utah? Are there souls in heaven enjoying the slopes but secretly longing for that, je ne sais qoi, “easier” quality of Park City, UT?
Perhaps the ad writers were inspired by the following Ayn Rand quote:
“Ask yourself whether the dream of Park City, Utah ski resorts should be waiting for us in our graves – or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.”
UPDATE
The phrasing in the commercial has been altered to, “Heaven has never been closer… “. Brilliant.
As of this weekend, I’ve now watched all five seasons of The Wire. Wow.
I hope that people will find the time to rent/buy seasons of this series and appreciate its place among the best television shows/documentaries every produced. The Wire’s commitment to developing an intimate understanding of its characters’ contexts, incentives and motivations, and its challenging presentation of intricate, multi-layered storylines requires patience (episodes do not wrap up neatly a la Law and Order), but then rewards that patience with tremendously moving and thought-provoking climactic moments. Set in Baltimore, the show painstakingly details and poignantly reveals the lives of its police and politicians and criminals and reporters, their highs and lows, their triumphs and failures, their everyday grind and their choices, big and small. There is dark and light in all of the characters. All of them are capable of making heroic and tragic choices and all of them do.
I simply can’t recommend the show highly enough. Let the details of each episode sink in, ease into the hyper-realistic pace of the storytelling, and watch a Season over the course of a week (or weekend!). Resist the initial impulse to reject the show’s tempo. Take a deep breath. You will not be disappointed.
I did not become a libertarian because of this show, though without that background I might have been inspired by the show to seek an intellectual frame of reference for making sense of the behavior of The Wire’s government officials.
While my reading of Enlightenment philosophers (Hume, Locke, Adam Smith, Rousseau, Condorcet), Austrian economists (Mises and Hayek), public choice theorists (Buchanan), Charles Darwin, Frederic Bastiat, H.L. Mencken (“Sage of Baltimore”), and Ayn Rand over the last twenty-five years certainly facilitated my acceptance of the merciless accuracy with which the Wire’s creators depict politicians and bureaucratic systems and their deleterious effects on society, I wouldn’t believe that anyone, regardless of their biases, could watch The Wire’s docudramas unfold with an open mind and sustain a positive view of our cities’ and states’ and federal governments’ behavior. I’m sure that I’m as susceptible to confirmation bias as anyone else, so perhaps I’m seeing what I’m inclined to see. But somehow, because The Wire is among the least contrived shows I’ve every seen, more like dramatized truth-telling than a fictional account, I would go as far as to argue that it would be difficult for a person to make a convincing argument for continuing the war on drugs after watching any one of the seasons, or for government involvement in education after watching season four, or for government stewardship of any substantive charitable/humanitarian effort after season five.
The Wire highlights the impact of unintended consequences in public policy and even challenges me to defend the feasibility of a “minimal state.” My inner anarcho-capitalist is warning me that a libertarian state only exists in a theoretical vacuum and promises to say “I told you so” as it does when it observes how far our government has diverged from its founders’ original intentions. If the only way to avoid a class of politicians who would never be satisfied to operate within the constraints of a libertarian system is to promote anarchy, so be it. The Wire is a snapshot of the futility of big government and an affirmation of its conditional inevitability (ie, given an apathetic public and quiescent journalism, expect government to grow relatively unchecked).
Many truths shine through in the Wire. Those who work for the government are no better than the rest of us, but their worst appetites and least noble character traits are rewarded by the system within which they work. So, does it really make sense to have them be in charge of schools and social safety nets and policing? The best intentions of a particular politician matter less to the formation of policy than the overriding desire to achieve re-election or rise to higher office. These incentives drive a politician and his/her closest aides to take positions that promote the perception of progress while substantively undermining real progress.
The penultimate expression of that trend is a public living impoverished lives while extolling the virtues of “the nation” and politicians’ wealth and power expanding as they extoll the virtues of “the nation.” But how long will that last? The ultimate expression of this trend is revolution.
Rush out and rent this series.
