[J m HofMarN]

a link I sent Civ a while ago recently caught my eye as it ties the current financial crisis to a philosophy that just about everyone in the forums is bright enough to reject as bollocks, while the US government apparently never got that memo. So, take a look, and let us debate upon Randism and its effects on the economy.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/173514/

excerpt:

It's not easy being Alan Greenspan these days. As the former Federal Reserve chairman, he urged government regulators to take a light touch while banks like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers buried themselves—and the economy more generally—under a mountain of debt. Now that his reputation is plummeting faster than the stock market, he's been forced to admit a "flaw" in his hands-off ideology.

Of course, things look entirely different to members of "free-market advocacy groups," as they like to be called. One such group is the Ayn Rand Institute, named after the matriarch of the movement, whose antigovernment and anti-regulation views are embodied in her best-selling novels "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead." Indeed, Greenspan himself was a friend of Rand's, and a devotee of her extreme free-market philosophy, known as Objectivism. NEWSWEEK's Barrett Sheridan spoke with the head of the Ayn Rand Institute, Dr. Yaron Brook, about why he defends free markets while much of the rest of the world has turned away from them, and what he thinks of Greenspan today. Excerpts: