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By 2008, we felt the awful backlash of an acolyte of Ayn Rand's hand on public policy -- in this case, Alan Greenspan. His tenure at The Fed was prefaced by very vocal support of Objectivism and free market with very little regulation. The underlying premise was that markets regulate themselves, that self-interest is inherently moral and reflects itself in human behavior, mitigating any abuses that might arise from lack of regulation or overarching authority.
Ayn Rand's philosophy was of debatable value even at the height of her popularity. That she was a relative elite in Russia (or as elite as Russia allowed Jews to be), and watched her family wealth confiscated by populist Communism essentially molded Objectivism as a radical mirror image of that philosophy, and as with most radical philosophies, is large untenable when scaled upward to large-scale society. Alan Greenspan proved just how untenable when he put those ideals into practice.
Beyond that, Paul Rand has very few actual original ideas. Dialing back the social contract to the Victorian Era is hardly a novel platform in 2015. In addition, we've seen the practical effects of 'hands off' administrations under duress. We could discuss the Hoovervilles of a Depression that dragged on for the better part of a decade, or we could look further back at the cyclical boom-bust Recessions that happened every few years in America prior to that. We could discuss the damage Ronald Reagan's administration did by retracting the regulatory hand of government: decades of stagnant wage growth, predatory lending, the strangulation of public services, unbridled growth of a military-industrial complex drunk on its own bloodmoney.
But really you have not much further to look back than 2008.
Isolationism, laissez faire economics, and reduction of government are not new.
Herbert Hoover ran on the same platform.
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