War Handwavium

I was thinking about Ayn Rand Objectivists and their rather childish John Galt approach to the world: Fine, if you won’t play by my rules, I’ll take my ball and go home, and THEN you’ll wish you hadn’t been mean to me.

“Going John Galt” has become a meme that means threatening to leave if you don’t get exactly your way.

And then I was thinking about the God that Objectivists worship: The Invisible Hand of capitalism.

Objectivists will argue that if you have a completely unregulated market, then the Invisible Hand will step in and nudge the individual actors towards the best possible solution, the most efficient solution for everyone involved.

But what struck me was that the Invisible Hand has the exact same personality as John Galt. If you have even the slightest amount of regulations on the market, the Invisible Hand takes its ball and goes home.

Many would say that the reason behind the recent economic crash was because regulations had been relaxed and investors and companies started taking gambles that they really couldn’t afford, but were too short-sighted and greedy to turn down. And when the market started to crash, everyone realized they were in over their heads. And the solution to prevent this from happening again, therefore, is to reinstate market regulation.

But that’s not how the Objectivists see it. That’s not how they see the hand of their God operating in this world. Objectivists wil tell you that the reason the market crashed was because even though we had removed a bunch of regulations there were still *some* regulations left. And they will then explain to you that those regulations interfered with the natural process of the market’s self-correction capabilities.

And what I realized is that they are basically saying that their god, the Invisible Hand, saw that there were some regulations on its market, didn’t like that, and decided to take its ball and go home. And then the market crashed because there was no Invisible Hand, and boy, won’t we all be sorry we had worshipped at the false idol that is market regulation.

The Invisible Hand went John Galt and that’s what caused the market crash.

And then I realized that it made perfect sense for Objectivists to create their God in their own image.