The 1963 quote from Greenspan would be hilarious if it wasn't still coming out of the mouths of Randroids throughout the country. The problem with it is that we already TRIED that system - and the results were nightmares like the pre-Upton Sinclair Chicago meatpacking industry, or the "patent medicine" crowd. The whole history of the late 19th and early 20th century shows that if people are allowed to sell defective, deceptive and/or dangerous products, they will do so. Not only that, but the hot dog factory that uses 30% sawdust will "outcompete" the real producers, as their inputs are cheaper.

For a more modern example, one need look no further than the rating agency / CDS debacle of the past year to see the same things: a market operating without substantial consumer protection, acting in a way that intentionally defrauds less knowledgeable participants.

"Gee, a neocon at TPM, rara avis.
Have fun."

. Not every advocate of capitalism is a neocon. Ron Paul, for instance, was one of the most vociferous opponents of the Iraq War. As an anarcho-capitalist I am totally opposed to the military and the police.

Free your mind dude.

As far as Ayn Rand, besides being a hot Jewish babe, she was entertaining. But her most important contribution was the energy and attention she brought to the libertarian movement. Government programs for the poor discourage eccononic growth. That leads to a future that's not as bright as it could be. And inevitably they lead to restrictions on our freedom.

You know I must admit David, I never read her. But I have listened to speeches, critiques and panel discussions of Rand on CSPAN. Hours and hours and hours.

Conservatives from time to time will end their diatribes with a panning of altruism as a concept.

India is a subcontinent that has always fascinated me. With China we are speaking of more than a third of all humankind. And it appears that China is succeeding in its new capitalism more than India.

It is always difficult to encapsulate a concept like: What does it mean to be an American? 307 million people cannot be labeled with a perspective.

Certainly the same difficulty is present in a nation with four times our population. Which brings me immediately to the issue of birth control in India since so much is written of birth control in China. Will India surpass CHina in population over the next few decades?

And what happens to Rand if a real plague or famine hits India?

Thank you for this survey course David. Really fascinating discussion here.

since South Africa abandoned apartheid, what other large, densely populated country besides India has such a history of race problems or where the poor are so abandoned to their fate as the USA?

But the poor are still "abandoned to their fate" in South Africa:

Love of Designer Threads Adds Flair to Trial
By Barry Bearak
Published: October 18, 2009
JOHANNESBURG —

....This is one of those trials that promise to offer up juicy tales of the high and mighty involved in things down and dirty — and it has begun as the disconnect between the country’s pampered political elite and its impoverished masses seems particularly extreme.

Recently, Haroon Bhorat, an economist at the University of Cape Town, told Parliament that based on his calculations, South Africa now has “the most unequal society in the world,” falling behind Brazil for this ignominy. He warned that this gap “is a threat to social stability.”

Indeed, some of those at the bottom are decidedly rebellious. So-called service delivery protests have become a staple of the headlines, with the police doing battle with the rock-throwing and tire-burning poor. The protesters commonly lament their lack of water, electricity and toilets and complain that their elected officials are getting rich in back-room deals.

The governing party, the African National Congress, has promised to devote more money to the poor, but the concern of the nation’s leaders, however genuine, seems belied by their displays of extravagant spending....

Just sayin'

Call it a minor nitpick with your essay, or maybe not....after all, most of the poor in the U.S. would be rich elsewhere. And Americans are actually quite high givers to private charity compared to citizens of other nations, which sort of screws up your belief that they are all doped up on Rand, rather than just not as amenable to taxation as citizens of other countries. And even with their dislike of taxation, and even if one gives you that Americans are all Randians, which I think is very inaccurate, most poor Americans have access to water, electricity, and toilets.

So many of your essays seem to start out with the premise: "what can I find today that proves my points about how bad America is." I think that leads you to misinterpret realities, because everything you look at in in terms of "how does this compare to America?" Strikes me with this one that you are seeing things which you label American that might be part of the human condition, i.e., if you erase America from the earth, these things, these ideas, these problems, would still exist.

Other thoughts

The concept of dharma

...In traditional Hindu society, dharma has historically denoted a variety of ideas, such as Vedic ritual, ethical conduct, caste rules, and civil and criminal law. Its most common meaning however regarded two principal ideals; namely, that social life should be structured through well-defined and well-regulated classes (varna), and that an individual's life within a class should be organized into defined stages (ashrama, see dharmasastra)...

is almost antithetical to American society.

While the reality is that the U.S. certainly has classes, its ideological foundations are basically "hey all you old world people, sick of being stuck in those class systems? come and get yourself some land!" and "we have separation of church and state, too, you can basically do what you want as regarding those concerns on that land."

Both Hindu culture and American culture stress the individual, but in very different ways and within very very different systems. Focus on the individual can encourage selfishishness, doh.

Throw into that mix that India has the overlay of British Empire culture adding another class structure atop the Hindu one, and that also happens to be the class structure of the country that the U.S. in its revolution was rebelling against.

If you wanted to play compare two very different cultures, I can't imagine any better choice than India vs. the U.S. To make something out of some in India liking Randian ideas and some in the U.S. liking Randian ideas strikes me as very very misleading and very dead end as to understanding anything. One example: if we are so alike, you'd no longer have the manifest destiny thing to kick around anymore.

"Milton Friedman believed that greed was humanity's sole motivator"

Is that really so?

I am never all that comfortable seeing Friedman, a brilliant academic, tossed in with Rand, a (brilliant?) polemicist... And I think Friedman, like many economists, believed greed is the most consistent predictor/incentivizer of human behavior. Which is obviously quite different from stating it is the sole motivator.

But if you have quotes to re-edumacate me on Friedman, I look forward to being re-edumacated!

Also of note in the Financial Times article that David quotes is the conclusion that while Greenspan and Friedman may have been tossed out of the laissez-faire kingdom, the bigger shift has been geographical. Market power no longer belongs solely to the West.

This is way off. Middle class Indians are attracted to Rand not because of selfishness toward the poor -- they do little for them anyway -- but because the government is an intrusive thief in ways you couldn't imagine here in the U.S.

@cmaukonen She was reacting to the communist system, not the American one.

Thanks for an excellent topic, David. I read it, and the comments, with great interest, especially since my daughter is living for a while in Delhi.
The upper castes have probably been searching for years--ever since they started reading western philosophy and literature--for rationales with which they could reconcile their inherited system of privilege. That they would find fascination in Rand makes some sense. Plato's Republic might fit in as well, along with Confucius on the other side of the Himalaya.
I especially appreciate ArtAppraiser's perspective above.
But for us to try and second guess those Brahmins...that's like, as someone mentioned above, comparing apples and oranges, or comparing lilies to lotus, or attempting to analyze why George Harrison returned from India with a sitar, or why Hollywood and Bollywood get on so well together, or why so many Americans flocked to see Slumdog Millionaire, or why so many Indians even had an interest in silly game shows to begin with, or even why native Americans are called Indians.

50,000 copies sold is peanuts. This sounds like an Ayn Rand foindation marketing attempt. I'd like to compare those sales with other works of equal oddness, like Dianetics.

I will say that there are facets of Indian culture that would be receptive to Objectivity. The three gunas stipulates that every soul has an essential spiritual "spin"; physical, mental, and physical. That is why there are many yogas, as they are all paths to enlightenment that appeals to individual gunas. There is also the concept that hedonsm is man's natural maya-infused state. So it is only natural to embrace Rand's ideas for some because she appeals to hedonism in the scope of liberation from rigid Hindu dogmas.

Finally, I daresay more headway has been made by the less savory aspects of Indian pseudoscience in America than vice versa. I need only point to Krishna Cults and the rise of Deepak Chopra.

I worked with an Indian once...Tiwari family, said to be high caste traditionally. He was a scientist, an expert in electron microscopes. He thought Hinduism and other religions in India were simply superstitions. He told me once that as a kid he got all excited about a swami who was going to bury himself for three or four days while meditating. "When they dug him up and opened the box he was dead. That left an impression on me." He said.

One evening over some brewskis, he told me about his college life in New Delhi. He was a straight A student...almost. "I got a B one time. It was my own fault." He went on to tell me the story of a female student he was sweet on, and how she was accused of cheating on an examination. Tiwari stuck up for her - he went to the professor and argued her case - successfully. The professor dropped the cheating charge against her, but he retaliated against Tiwari by knocking his grade down a notch. "It was the stupidest mistake I've ever made in my life" he told me. I asked him if she was actually guilty, and he said "No, and I was able to prove to the professor that she was innocent."

"Well, then, you did a great thing" I said. "Bullshit - it was really dumb, and it cost me a perfect academic record. I'll regret it to my dying day!"

I tried to soften him up, but he wouldn't acknowledge he did the right thing. "To hell with her, I got a B grade!" I don't know if it was a cultural thing or not, but I just couldn't imagine how he had all that put together. It was inscrutable to me.

David,
I would say that you can't really pigeonhole the dominant classes as the "Upper Castes".
And - by upper caste Indians - do you mean any one who is not a dalit?
For example, politics in Tamil Nadu is completely dominated by the "lower" castes - so much so that 68% of seats in educational institutions are reserved for people from the Backward Castes/Scheduled Castes (Dalits) and Scheduled Tribes. Mayawati - the Chief Minister of UP - India's largest state is a Dalit and won as a result of a coalition between Dalits and Brahmins - the "uppermost" classes. She is not exactly an exemplar of good governance.
I do agree that India is not the nation that Gandhi imagined - and we are getting farther and farther away from that ideal.
BTW, I'm an Indian yuppie brahmin.

Want to know some of the least casteist places in current day India?

They are the American -- yes the dreaded capitalist -- business places. Upper caste and lower caste Indians serve and eat food together at places like Pizza Hut and McDonalds. IBMs, HPs, Intels and other such companies hire engineers in India without ever asking them what caste they belong to. And people of all castes work in these places without any qualms because they get decently paid for their work.

The simple profit motive seems to have done a better job of eliminating casteism than numerous government mandates or even Gandhi's preachings did.

If a lot of Indians are reading Ayn Rand, it is not a reflection of their casteism or selfishness, it is only a sign of their disenchantment of the experience they had with a government controlled economy that throttled Indians aspirations for so many decades.

Before my post rolls off into TPM purgatory, I would leave the last word on Ayn Rand and all who sail in her to a Jewish fellow who lived a long time ago, who once wrote.

If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing. Love is patient, love is kind, and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.