Randism Rocks the world... literally

The case for Paying out AIG Bonuses
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/17/business/17sorkin.html
There is simply no case. Any and all arguments are superficial and do not hold up to even the simplest scrutiny.



Argument 1. Sanctity of Contracts.

There is no such thing as sanctity of contracts as far as "retention bonuses" for any AIG employee goes unless he or she is a PR agent. Retention bonuses are for people to stay back. And as the author himself describes, many have already packed up and still received their so called retention bonuses and you and I know that the minute they receive the money, so will the rest. Moreover, by definition a bonus is a share of the profits from a profitable company that goes to an employee for having made a significantly positivie contribution to that company's profits. Hmm.. AIG has plunged depths that even the Dutch East India Company didn't and not only did these employees NOT contribute anything, they were directly party to the mess the world financial markets are in.
The emotional would also add that if the sanctity of contracts is not upheld for the millions of middle class workers in the Auto, IT, Manufacturing etc. etc. sectors, why in the bloody hell is it important to uphold it for incompetent fatcats?
If Auto contracts are only under "negotiation" so are these. We know finally how the blue collars at GM & C etc. will fare. So please spare us the hijinks.

Argument 2. A.I.G. built this bomb, and it may be the only outfit that really knows how to defuse it. taxpayers need to keep some of these brainiacs in their seats.

Bollocks. First AIG didn't build it. It was a second rate party that gave the people who built it, the erstwhile Wall Street, the rating organisations and the Main Street divisions, the bulwark to keep going at it by insuring possible defaults to the main culprit, CDOs, by issuing CDSes.

Now... the people who created CDOs.. you gotta admire them ... give loans, chop em up and sell them and other parties make CDOs and spread it around till no one can actually see any risk. Now on the other hand how can anyone who insures these things be anything but a complete and utter idiot?

These are no "brainiacs". If they were, they wouldn't have been party to this "risk mitigation" scheme in the first place. Any brainiac would've known that this was in fact a brush the risk under the carpet scheme. Problem of course was that the lump of risk was big enough to trip the whole world's economy. And any brainiac would've at the right time, maybe mid or late 2007, skipped out of AIG and traded against AIG's books. These are no brainiacs, these were incompetent fools with inflated egos for whom innovation was not about creating money or empowering people with it but thieving it.

Argument 3. A.I.G. knew it needed to keep its people.

So? They'll leave irrespective of what you offer them. Which you already have. And quite a few have already left. This goes against the grain of market economics. So you'll pay significantly HIGHER for incompetent people to work in a failed firm propped up by tax dollars? Umm.. how really does this work?
AIG fuelled by incompetent and greedy fools, requires tax money to keep it afloat. And then you give the same fools Higher than usual pay to KEEP them? So that this incompetent organisation doesn't get into a depper hole... which it will manage to do by paying the same fools to do the same job? Wow! that blows my mind!


Dear Mr. Sorkin. You seem earnest in your arguments. From 13000 kms across the world, maybe seeing it from here gives me a more objective perspective than one who's in the thick of things. Or maybe I'm just a guy who like black and white or maybe its because I'm from a country where politicians and fatcats are honestly acknowledged to be thieves. Here's my two pence or 10000 shares of AIG - What we're seeing here is a kleptocracy run by thieves who've been discovered because they grabbed too much too fast and are making a last ditch attempt to distribute the loot.And it seems to me that its not just AIG but endemic to all the bailouts that the US Govt. is offering.

All of this of course is assuming what seems to be taken for granted... the world will collapse if not for AIG, and the other bailed out minions. I still haven't seen one good case... hell! ANY case.. for the people who vote in your country to pay for this world-saving gesture even as they battle lay offs and erosion of their property values. Its always been implied and no one, not even Jon Stewart, who I suppose is the only remaining person in your country with a modicum of intelligence has tried to prove it.


All this only serves to demonstrate, quite dramatically, in fact that the current system, constructed and encouraged by Messrs. Reagan and Greenspan and Paulson bowing to the Goddess Rand does not favour merit and rewards incompetents who had parents rich enough to pay for Harvard. Everything that critics had to say about Ayn Rand zealots has come to pass. Does the egg in your face and the peasants with pitchforks at your door force the least bit of remorse on you people?
If I were anyone with authority, I'd take my chance with "government appointed financial people" ,that some NYT reader contemptuously labels them, trying to disentagle this. They may not be Harvard or Wharton but I'm assuming that there's every chance that they're not inbred boston brahmin neanderthals and can tell a loan from a deposit.

Has anyone thought how satisfying it would be to actually hold these people accountable? To make them live in an industrial town and sign up with the UAW and get 200 days of work a year where they actually make a nut or a bolt instead of weaving themselves money from other people's entrepreneurship and work for the simple service of moving money from one place to another?

Why does Nancy Kress need just 40 pages to destroy Ayn Rand?

Beggars in Spain Book1 is all of 36 pages. 36 pages of unassuming science fiction literature.
Did Nancy Kress have a political stand? Does Beggars in Spain have a political agenda. No. It most certainly doesn't. Its starts out as a one of the three main types of science fiction. That which revolves around a singular invention/innovation/discovery that has intended/unintended consequences to a human/ alien or human/alien society and therein lies the story.
Does she have a long complex plot, a compelling hero, character building for innumerable characters, clear, dirty eminently hate-able villains or a clearly made out contemptible society?
Um... No, no, no, no and no.

But in 36 unpretentious pages, Nancy Kress effectively destroys any and all argument that Ayn Rand builds over two best selling books, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, political support which came as a by product of vitriolic anti-russian opinion, celebrity endorsement and more than one foundation dedicated to her and Objectivism.
Now did Nancy ever actually want to do this? I should think not. I assume while she did express her heartfelt opinion, she certainly didn't intend it to be political philosophy.

Beggars in Spain follows the life of "the Sleepless" , a group of genetically modified humans who do not need sleep and particularly Leisha Camden, one of the early Sleepless. They are modified by a group of geneticists who've come to the conclusion that sleep is an evolutionary leftover like tonsils and remove it with genetic modification. The resulting "Sleepless" are invariably intelligent because of the extra 12 hours of stimulation they get per day as children and the extra 8 hours of the day they have as adults. They are pragmatic and well-adjusted (some hormonal side-effect) and are all mostly followers of Yagaaism something that is very similar to Libertarianism.
Things come to a head when it is discovered that another "side-effect" of the turning off of the sleep gene is extremely efficient cell replacement in their bodies. i.e. they are effectively immortal. The Sleepless' pragmatism is confounded by the resistance and hatred they provoke in the normal population. They see themselves as an invaluable cog in the wheel of trade with a lot to offer to the world economy. But the Sleepers see the Sleepless less as cogs and more as a threat and replacement of normal human beings.
With increasing resistance culminating in the hate-killing of a Sleepless, the Sleepless move into an enclosure created by them for themselves called "Sanctuary". They cultivate hate for the Sleepers for their irrationality and their inability to match their prowess and refer to them as "Beggars".
The first book ends with it dawning on Leisha that the Beggars aren't really Beggars but are the receiving end of the economy because of context. Trade is not linear but conducted in an ecology where the beggars not only form an essential part but when the context changes, the Beggars may turn out to be the ones giving charity.

Now why do I say that this destroys Ayn Rand?
1. Trade IS an ecology. It certainly isn't linear and depends on context. The context might change with changes in economic environment, physical environment, socio-cultural environment, evolution... any number of things. Rand's view of the economy is simplistic to the point of being laughable.
2. As with the Fountainhead, in "beggars in spain", the epitomes of libertarianism necessarily HAVE to be EXCEPTIONAL people. As with Roark an exceptional architect, the Sleepless have to have exceptional things to give to the economy to prove their point. Why? Why can't Rand have used an ordinary worker at a Detroit auto factory to prove her point? Because she can't. At least not the way she defines her "Objectivism". Objectivism has a helluva lot of problems than libertarianism. As she defines it, there can be only one person with one exceptional ability. There can only be one exceptional architect. If there are two the other will starve to death. One might argue that if the other offers an advantage by working twice as long as the other but has only 1/2 of the creative ability, the market will be given a choice. No! You're forgetting that the rest of the society is objectivist too. They will all see the same benefits. They will ALL choose the same architect. The other will still starve to death. We are also assuming that this architect who will build a good architecture consultancy will, on his retirement, give his business totally up to the next competent architect wherever he might be. (Don't ask me how the next architect arrives precisely at the time this guy retires as he would've died of starvation if he's arrived earlier and society will have to do without an architect if he arrives later) without ensuring nurturing his blood progeny instead.
3. A civilisation based on "objectivism" reverts to tribalistic society. Small groups of people each providing a service/product to each other that they do best and others cannot; as purely objectivistic society cannot exist in larger groups with competing resources of same competence. Consequentially, innovation and invention suffers as society needs multi-disciplinary individuals, multi disciplinary teams, many people of similar competences etc. to further technology, thought and philosophy.
I honestly don't believe that an objectivist society that celebrates selfishness and ego ever developing the steam engine much less sub-atomic physics or spacecraft.
WORK IN PROGRESS :D