Ayn Rand: Getting it Completely Backwards

Saint Petersburg in revolt gave us Vladimir Nabokov, Isaiah Berlin, and Ayn Rand.  The first was a novelist, the second a philosopher.  The third was neither but thought she was both.

                                                --Corey Robin

                                                The Reactionary Mind

It’s been a long time since I read it – because it has been a long time since I was an idiot adolescent – but I recall that there is a scene toward the end of Atlas Shrugged in which Rand’s ragtag team of superhero industrialists, flying in a plane, look down and see the lights of New York begin to go out.

In Rand’s narrative, you see, the Mighty 1%™ had chosen to withdraw their creativity, their entrepreneur-based superpowers, their special genius . . . and now New York and the entire world would go dark.  That’d show the rest of us!

In the Real World, another narrative is shaping up.  The ending is similar, but the story is very, very different.

In the Real World, the narrative runs like this . . . .

Economic Inequality is - Literally - Killing Us

A fascinating article in Time discusses research that shows high degrees of economic inequality in societies leads to greater mortality, less healthy populations, higher rates of addiction, and greater stress levels. This is the case regardless of the overall weath of the country studied, regardless of the fact that the people in lower economic rungs are not actually living in poverty, and regardless of one's access to health care.

And, following up my earlier point about how things in America seem to have taken a turn for the decidedly worse with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, once again we see:

In the U.S., inequality has been rising since the 1980's. Between WWII and Ronald Reagan's election to the presidency, average income grew by about $19,000. The bottom 90% of the country received 65% of that increase.

Between 1981 and 2008, however, average income grew by about $12,000. About 96% of that went to the top 10% richest people in the country. The ratio of pay between CEOs and average workers also became much more extreme over the same time period: in 1980 it was around 35 to 1. Today it is about 185 to 1.

So not only are the very wealthy keeping all the income gains at the expense of everyone else, they're literally killing everybody else by doing so.

Ronald Reagan Was the AntiChrist

Well . . . not really. (Probably.)

But one thing I've become increasingly struck by is how often the phrase "thirty years" pops up whenever people write about how much America's changed -- for the worse. I've certainly referenced it a number of times when pointing out that income stopped growing for working- and middle-class Americans thirty-odd years ago, and that our disastrously high private debt levels really took off at the same time.

Today Howie Klein has a great piece up about the Conservatives' endless crusade to funnel even more money to the uber-rich in which he quotes Robert Reich pointing out that massive tax cuts for the wealthy didn't start until 1980 and cites an article by Benjamin Wallace-Wells in New York Magazine pointing out that America's economy began to be largely remade in the image of Wall Street "during the eighties." Over at The Nation Barbara Ehrenreich has an article describing how difficult it now is to be homeless in America, and how "the current prohibition on homelessness began to take shape in the 1980s."

It does seem like a real sea change took place in America when Ronald Reagan took office, and I don't mean that in a good way. Of course, I don't imagine that Reagan really was solely responsible for this decline in Americans' standard of living -- it seems more to have been a confluence of factors -- but his ascendency to the Oval Office does provide a quick, back-of-the-envelope notation for remembering just when it was our country began to fail.