I got a lot of letters from folks this week about an online column for Forbes written by a self-proclaimed Ayn Rand devotee named Harry Binswanger (if that’s a nom de plume, it’s not bad, although I might have gone for “Harry Kingbanger” or “Harry Wandwanker”). The piece had the entertainingly provocative title, “Give Back? Yes, It’s Time for the 99% to Give Back to the 1%” and contained a number of innovatively slavish proposals to aid the beleaguered and misunderstood rich, including a not-kidding-at-all plan to exempt anyone who makes over a million dollars from income taxes.
This article is so ridiculous that normally it would be beneath commentary, but there’s a passage in there I just couldn’t let go:
Imagine the effect on our culture, particularly on the young, if the kind of fame and adulation bathing Lady Gaga attached to the more notable achievements of say, Warren Buffett. Or if the moral praise showered on Mother Teresa went to someone like Lloyd Blankfein, who, in guiding Goldman Sachs toward billions in profits, has done infinitely more for mankind. (Since profit is the market value of the product minus the market value of factors used, profit represents the value created.)
Instead, we live in a culture where Goldman Sachs is smeared as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity. . .“
What a world we live in, where Mother Teresa wins more moral praise than Lloyd Blankfein! Who can bear living in a society where such a thing is possible? Quel horreur!
It reads like an Onion piece, just hilarious stuff. I mean, Jesus, even Lloyd Blankfein himself didn’t go so far as to take the “God’s work” thing 100% seriously, and here’s this jackass saying, without irony, that the Goldman CEO literally out-God-slaps Mother Teresa.
The thing is, for all its excesses, Mr. Catyanker’s piece does reflect an attitude you see pretty often among Rand devotees and Road To Serfdom acolytes. Five whole years have passed since the crash, and there are still huge pockets of these Fountainhead junkies who genuinely believe that the Blankfeins of the world are reviled because they’re bankers and they’re rich, and not because they’re the heads of unprosecutable organized crime syndicates who make their money through mass fraud, manipulation and the shameless burgling of public treasure. In this case you have a guy who writes for Forbes, a business publication,and apparently he isn’t acquainted even casually with any of the roughly 10,000 corruption cases involving Blankfein’s bank.
That’s hard to pull off. There are Japanese soldiers still holed up in Pacific atolls, waiting for the final surrender order, who’ve probably heard more about things like the Abacus case than Mr. Binswanger apparently has. In the comments section, someone cheekily asked Binswanger to enlighten them as to how Goldman makes its money. This is what he had to say in response:
On how Goldman Sachs makes money, I repeat what I said in the post: they invest – i.e., channel savings to their most productive uses. If they make a profit it means they bet right: they funded value-creating enterprises; if they make a loss it means they bet wrong: the venture they funded used up more in value than was produced.
Binswanger clearly knows nothing at all about Goldman other than that it’s nominally a bank, and his answer is just a parade of Randian clichés here about how successful banks make money. Asked the same question twenty years ago about a different bank, his answer would have been exactly the same. This would be like someone asking me about A-Rod’s steroid use and me answering with a bunch of Bernard Malamud quotes about the sacred art of hitting.
Just for yuks, let’s fill Binswanger in on some of the ways Goldman has made its money over the years. This is just the stuff they’ve been caught for, by the way…
Click through to Taibbi’s piece for the details. In summary, he presents supporting evidence for his “organized crime syndicates who make their money through mass fraud” assertion.