Reply to Rawls on Wall Street

In reply to Steven Mazie’s article, Rawls on Wall Street, what “we are the 99%” recognizes is not so much that we are all the same, but that we are all equally threatened. When you look at the job and professional categories that are endangered by off-shoring or significant pay cuts, it’s clear that everyone making six figures or less is among those the plutocrats deem expendable.

What kind of society, though, will we have when “you’re not needed anymore,” is the general excuse for a pink slip. Are we all supposed to go back to becoming subsistence farmers? What land are we going to farm when most of it is already privately owned? Maybe should all become sand-hillers like some of our Scot’s-Irish forebears who arrived too late to get good bottom land. Once you draw people off the land by providing jobs in factories, and then corporatize all the good farmland, it limits the choices people have.

The problem with Ayn Rand and the Libertarians is that their society is not a cooperative enterprise. It is a thoroughly competitive, dog eat dog affair in which only those without conscience, the psychopaths and sociopaths, can thrive.

That is precisely the kind of society we have become since Ayn Rand devotees, such as Reagan, Thatcher and Alan Greenspan were put in positions of influence. As attractive as her ideas might seem to adolescents at Groton or Exeter, it is long past time for recognition that the schoolboy’s dream is a nightmare.