In this commentary today, Amity Shlaes informs us there’s a new Atlas Shrugged movie coming out on the 15th of next month – tax day. After just finishing Matt Taibbi’s Griftopia, it seemed like a worthwhile exercise to pass along a few notes about Ayn Rand, the book’s author, and her most prominent disciple, former Fed chief Alan Greenspan.

Greenspan met Rand in the early 50s after leaving Colombia, attending meetings at Rand’s apartment with a circle of like-minded intellectual jerk offs who call themselves by the ridiculous name “The Collective” and who provided Greenspan with the desired forum for social ascent.

These meetings of The Collective would have an enormous impact on American culture by birthing a crackpot anti-theology dedicated to legitimizing relentless self-interest – a grotesquerie called Objectivism that hit the upper East side cocktail circuit party hard in the 50s and 60s.

It is important to spend some time on the seriously demented early history of Objectivism because this lunatic religion that should have choked to death in his sleep decades ago, would go on, thanks in large part to Greenspan, to provide virtually the entire intellectual context for the financial disasters of the 21st century.

A typical meeting of Rand’s collective would involve its members challenging one another to prove they exist. “How do you explain the fact that you are here?” one collective member recalls asking Greenspan.  “Do you require proof of anything beyond your own senses?”

Greenspan played along with this horseshit and in that instance, reportedly offered a typically hedging answer. “I think that I exist. But, I don’t know for sure”, he reportedly said, “Actually, I can’t be sure that anything exists”.
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Rand’s book, Atlas Shrugged, remains a towering monument to humanity’s capacity for unrestrained self-pity. It’s a bizarre and incredibly long-winded piece of aristocratic paranoia in which a group of Randian Superman decide to break off from the rest of society and form a pure free-market utopia and, naturally, the parasitic lower classes immediately drown in their own laziness and ineptitude.

There’s much more about Greenspan and Rand in Griftopia, central themes throughout the book. It’s well worth reading in its entirety, though I beg to differ on some of his conclusions about the “commodity bubble”, a topic that will be covered here later this week.