Wednesday, November 12, 2014

The Horrors of an Ayn Rand World: Why We Must Fight for America's Soul

http://www.alternet.org/books/horrors-ayn-rand-world-why-we-must-fight-americas-soul
"All laws protecting consumers would be erased from the statute books.
Mass transit would grind to a halt in the big cities as municipal subsidies come to an end.
Corporations would no longer be enslaved by antitrust laws, so monopolies and globe-spanning, price-fixing cartels would flourish. The number of publicly held corporations would be reduced to a manageable, noncompetitive few. Big Pharma would manufacture drugs without adequate testing for safety and efficacy—deterred only by concern for their reputation, as described by Greenspan in 1963. Except that with competition reduced by mergers and legal price-fixing, the market would be a feeble substitute for even the FDA.
Securities laws and stock market regulations would be eliminated.
Corporations would operate in secret if they so desired, or with only selective, cursory disclosures to their investors and customers. Only outright fraud would be prosecuted; otherwise the public— a concept no longer recognized as valid— would be on its own.
Insider trading, now legal, would become the norm. Wall Street now would truly be a sucker’s game. “Let the buyer beware” would replace the fifty state regulators and the SEC."