Refusing Impact: Aesthetic Economy and Given Time

Reading the 1200 closely printed pages of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged—in other words, wasting a great deal of time that might have been used more productively—is a reminder that the politics of refusal are not the preserve of the Left. "Refusal" might at first seem an odd term to associate with Rand, who champions greed, selfishness, and material success over what she sees as a wasteland of lumpen, non-productive whingers. Yet her epic free-market fantasy centers on a utopia populated by refuseniks—industrialists, bankers, academics, engineers, artists—who have fled to a secret anti-commune to escape a regime bent on destroying the American economy through its utilitarian, bureaucratic, and welfare-based directives, all of which are designed to serve a coterie of muddleheaded, puritanical conformists. Sympathetic readers of Rand, who include a generation of laissez-faire economists and bankers headed by Alan Greenspan, and members of the Tea Party (with whom Rand's work is enjoying a current vogue), regard her as an iconic figure of resistance in a world dedicated to a left-liberal slave mentality. Yet Rand's rationalism is removed from the conservative agenda of the Tea Party, being intellectual, atheistic, feminist, and anti-family (none of the key players in the novel are encumbered by children). Rand doesn't preach economic freedom supported by social and religious strictures, but defends the freedom of intelligent and productive individuals from any societal force that impedes their progress. An axiom of the economic theory following from her philosophy is that state intervention in the affairs of trade is always a mistake. This puts Greenspan—one of the group of Rand adepts who read Atlas Shrugged as it was being written—in an ethically compromising position. As Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Greenspan was a key mover in exempting the trade in financial derivatives from regulation through the Commodity Exchange Act. The availability of unregulated over-the-counter derivatives was a main cause of the global financial crisis of 2008. Greenspan's response to this crisis—the federal bailout of banks, insurance companies, and major hedge funds, which made up the group of institutions judged "too big to fail"—showed that his free-market convictions failed to extend to his own interests. Like George W. Bush, whose Troubled Asset Relief Program bought up toxic assets to the tune of $700 billion dollars of U. S. tax-payers' money, Greenspan passed off the intervention as unfortunate but "necessary" to the continued stability of the market.

For Rand, however, such compromise amounts to moral failure. "A trader does not ask to be paid for his failures," intones John Galt, the presiding figure of Atlas Shrugged:

"Just as there are no contradictions in my values and no contradictions among my desires—so there are no victims and no conflicts of interest among rational men, men who do not desire the unearned and do not view one another with cannibal's lust, men who neither make sacrifices nor accept them.

"The symbol of all relationships among such men, the moral symbol of respect for human beings, is the trader."

(1022, my emphasis)

Rand's emphasis on the supreme value of free-market enterprise combined with romantic individualism leads her to heroize businessmen as if they share her ethical imperatives. In her Objectivist philosophy, "value" is the self-serving but entirely rational principle of trade; since value stems from trade, traders are implicitly ethical beings operating within a self-regulating system. It does not occur to Rand that the enemy within might not be restricted to social-welfarists, bureaucrats, and those who consume without producing, but could be a corrupting force from within the business community itself. Her pastoral utopia of alienated entrepreneurs betrays nostalgia for a return to the gold standard and the myth of pure use-value, a staggeringly naive proposition considering that advanced capital is based on the priority of exchange-value. There is no sense that markets might come to depend on the growth of an irrational sphere of consumption fuelled by debt, or that private equity firms and hedge funds might...