Libertarian and objectivist ideologies have pretty much dictated US policies on the financial markets during the past decade and a half. This is one of the two main causes of the crash of 2008, the other being the Iraq War.

The crash of 1929 proved that libertarianism is wrong. All you have to do is to learn about US history to see that libertarianism is intellectually bankrupt. Libertarianism is the Lehman Brothers of political ideologies.

Dismally failed former Federal Reserve Chief Alan Greenspan is a Randroid who applied libertarian and objectivist ideology to the Federal Reserve and successfully pressured the politicians into going along. This quote from Greenspan's testimony alone shows how far the objectivist mind is divorced from reality.

As I wrote last March: those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder’s equity (myself especially) are in a state of shocked disbelief. Such counterparty surveillance is a central pillar of our financial markets’ state of balance. If it fails, as occurred this year, market stability is undermined.

Any rational person who has read an American history book would know how dangerous it is to depend on disreputable people like bankers and brokers to police themselves.

Logically speaking, the Ayn Rand Institute and the Libertarian Party really should fold up their tents and fade into obscurity, their leaders pretending that they never had anything to do with idiocy that was disproven long before they were born. Yet, the Randroids are trying to spin the current situation, forcing facts and inventing fallacies to rationalize their failures rather than giving up like sane and sensible people would. The Libertarians are pretty much trying to pretend that nothing has happened in the past few months and that everything is hunky dory for their world view.