This is what's known in the world of Capital as 'Arbitrage'

Let's look at an example. In 1979 – the year I was born – the dictator of Zambia, Kenneth Kaunda, took out a loan for $15m from the dictator of Romania to buy some tractors. Most didn't work. But after 20 years of non-repayment, the new democratically elected government of Zambia said it had no way to pay the loan, and negotiations began to cancel it. But a multi-millionaire called Michael Francis Sheehan, whose company Donegal International is based in a British tax haven, had spotted a chance. He bought the debt from Romania for $3m, and took Zambia to court in Britain for the full amount – which had now piled up to $55m.

The Zambian government explained that they don't have the money. A fifth of their people are HIV positive, and there are only 600 doctors covering more than 12m people. Most people are dead before their 38th birthday. The Zambian President's adviser, Martin Kalunga-Banda, explained – and aid groups verified – that if the government had to pay out for the dead dictator's bills, "medicines that would have been available to in excess of 100,000 people in the country will not be available.... [and] in excess of 300,000 children will be prevented from going to school." The people who will go sick or uneducated were not alive when the loan was taken out.

The British judge who heard the case was clearly appalled, but he said the law gave him no choice but to require Zambia to pay $15m, a third of what had been demanded. Virtually all the debt relief the country had received that year – as a result of Jubilee 2000 and Make Poverty History – was wiped out.

What happens to the money once it is redirected? Sheehan – who likes to be known as "Goldfinger" – is fond of vintage Cadillacs, and lives in a mansion in Virginia. Singer used the cash he took to become the biggest donor in New York to George W Bush's 2000 Presidential campaign, and then went on to bankroll Rudy Giuliani's bid in 2008.

Vulture Funds: the apotheosis of capitalism

Just why is Ayn Rand so popular anyway?

Wow - I always saw the Randroids as cult-like in their bizarre, absolutist ideological inflexibility; but I never quite realized before that Objectivism is, quite literally, a cult:

She allowed him to run the Nathaniel Branden Institute, a small society dedicated to promoting Objectivism through lectures, therapy sessions, and social activities. The courses, he later wrote, began with the premises that "Ayn Rand is the greatest human being who has ever lived" and "Atlas Shrugged is the greatest human achievement in the history of the world." Rand also presided over a more select circle of followers in meetings every Saturday night, invitations to which were highly coveted among the Objectivist faithful. These meetings themselves were frequently ruthless cult-like exercises, with Rand singling out members one at a time for various personality failings, subjecting them to therapy by herself or Branden, or expelling them from the charmed circle altogether.

So strong was the organization’s hold on its members that even those completely excommunicated often maintained their faith. In 1967, for example, the journalist Edith Efron was, in Heller’s account, "tried in absentia and purged, for gossiping, or lying, or refusing to lie, or flirting; surviving witnesses couldn’t agree on exactly what she did." Upon her expulsion, Efron wrote to Rand that "I fully and profoundly agree with the moral judgment you have made of me, and with the action you have taken to end social relations." One of the Institute’s therapists counseled Efron’s eighteen-year-old son, also an Objectivist, to cut all ties with his mother, and made him feel unwelcome in the group when he refused to do so. (Efron’s brother, another Objectivist, did temporarily disown her.)

Sex and romance loomed unusually large in Rand’s worldview. Objectivism taught that intellectual parity is the sole legitimate basis for romantic or sexual attraction. Coincidentally enough, this doctrine cleared the way for Rand--a woman possessed of looks that could be charitably described as unusual, along with abysmal personal hygiene and grooming habits--to seduce young men in her orbit. Rand not only persuaded Branden, who was twenty-five years her junior, to undertake a long-term sexual relationship with her, she also persuaded both her husband and Branden’s wife to consent to this arrangement. (They had no rational basis on which to object, she argued.) But she prudently instructed them to keep the affair secret from the other members of the Objectivist inner circle.

Yep, it's all there: fanatical veneration of a single person and the principles they espouse; loss of any sort of critical engagement; humiliation and ostracism used as tools of social control; isolation of members from family and others with conflicting beliefs; sexual coercion and manipulation by the leader of her disciples.... all the NBI really needed was some good ol' rhythmic chanting, and "Objectivism" could have been as big today as the Moonies or Scientology.

Absent the driving force of Rand herself and her cult of personality, however, I've been trying to understand just what it is that continually attracts successive generations of adherents to the Rand cult. After all, as the above cited article easily demonstrates, Rand's cartoonish econo-moral framework doesn't survive contact with reality for even a second:

Now, it is certainly true that working hard can increase one’s chances of growing rich. It does not necessarily follow, however, that the rich work harder than the poor. Indeed, there are many ways in which the poor work harder than the rich. As the economist Daniel Hamermesh discovered, low-income workers are more likely to work the night shift and more prone to suffering workplace injuries than high-income workers. White-collar workers put in those longer hours because their jobs are not physically exhausting. Few titans of finance would care to trade their fifteen-hour day sitting in a mesh chair working out complex problems behind a computer for an eight-hour day on their feet behind a sales counter.

[...]

The association of wealth with virtue necessarily requires the free marketer to play down the role of class. Arthur Brooks, in his book Gross National Happiness, concedes that "the gap between the richest and poorest members of society is far wider than in many other developed countries. But there is also far more opportunity . . . there is in fact an amazing amount of economic mobility in America." In reality, as a study earlier this year by the Brookings Institution and Pew Charitable Trusts reported, the United States ranks near the bottom of advanced countries in its economic mobility. The study found that family background exerts a stronger influence on a person’s income than even his education level. And its most striking finding revealed that you are more likely to make your way into the highest-earning one-fifth of the population if you were born into the top fifth and did not attain a college degree than if you were born into the bottom fifth and did. In other words, if you regard a college degree as a rough proxy for intelligence or hard work, then you are economically better off to be born rich, dumb, and lazy than poor, smart, and industrious.

[...]

Is income really a measure of productivity? Of course not. Consider your own profession. Do your colleagues who demonstrate the greatest skill unfailingly earn the most money, and those with the most meager skill the least money? I certainly cannot say that of my profession. Nor do I know anybody who would say that of his own line of work. Most of us perceive a world with its share of overpaid incompetents and underpaid talents. Which is to say, we rightly reject the notion of the market as the perfect gauge of social value.

Now assume that this principle were to apply not only within a profession--that a dentist earning $200,000 a year must be contributing exactly twice as much to society as a dentist earning $100,000 a year--but also between professions. Then you are left with the assertion that Donald Trump contributes more to society than a thousand teachers, nurses, or police officers. It is Wall Street, of course, that offers the ultimate rebuttal of the assumption that the market determines social value. An enormous proportion of upper-income growth over the last twenty-five years accrued to an industry that created massive negative social value--enriching itself through the creation of a massive bubble, the deflation of which has brought about worldwide suffering.

The attraction of Randism for the rich and powerful is obvious, as it gives them an excuse not only to justify but to actually act morally superior about their dedication to base greed and powerlust. And it certainly holds similar attraction for intelligent outcasts like myself, telling us that we deserve to be rich important people with equally smart, rich, important lovers; that it's only the thoughtless parasites of the world who keep us from our rightful place in society. But I'd like to think that folks as smart and purportedly rational as us could more easily see past such vanity long enough to at least take notice of how ridiculous even Rand's factual claims, let alone her moral claims are. So I think there's more to it than that.

As regular readers may know, I'm not afraid to say that I'm ethically and morally a Satanic Egoist; I strongly believe that my own needs must come before the needs of others, that my own wants must come before the wants of others, and that society ought to be arranged in such a way that my needs and wants can be fulfilled with a minimum of pain and sacrifice. I've worked my positions out in detail from first principles. I've examined competing moral theories - Relativism, Utilitarianism, Deontology, Contractarianism, Virtue Theory - and though each of them has contributed important points to my nuanced thought on morality, all of them seem in the end to be inadequate. Egoism seems to me the only self-consistent overarching principle that can satisfy the need for a clear, concise, universally applicable moral framework.

And yet I'm not a Randite. Like a lot of people, I read Atlas Shrugged in college, and in fact I thoroughly enjoyed it. It has an undeniably charming exuberance as a story of heroic magical super-capitalists fighting off a zombie horde of parasitic Commie leeches, despite the inadequacies of its cardboard-cutout characters and lumpen, polemical prose. It's like a philosophical comic book, emotionalism and low drama acted out by reified ideas in business suits instead of capes and spandex. But it wasn't a revelation for me like it seems to have been for so many people. It was a good read that I then put aside and went on to some other trashy sci-fantasy. I never saw what the big deal was.

When I think about it now, though, I come to the realization that Rand is probably a lot of people's first exposure to Egoism, as an attempt at a coherent moral philosophy beyond simplistic 'I got mine'-ism. It's a terrible presentation composed of muddled assumptions, counterfactual reasoning and ridiculous conclusions, but it's presented with panache and drama. Someone who has been raised in the white-lighter's world of sacrificial obligation, but is already beginning to perceive the intellectual void at its centre, probably would see Rand's super-capitalists and bureaucratic parasites as a revelation. I suppose the difference with me, the reason I wasn't infected by the virus of Rand, is that I'd already been inoculated with sterner stuff. I'd read some Nietzsche, whom she was influenced by, and some LaVey, who was strongly influenced by her. I'd also read Marx and other socialist writers, so I had the opposite perspective as well. By the time I actually got around to reading Rand, her schtick was old hat to me. I'd already started working out my own ideas on how Egoism and Utilitarianism could potentially be reconciled. I'd already started to recognize that elementary game theory shows how unmitigated pursuit of immediate gratification is ultimately stupid and irrational.

Randism forms the core of today's political 'Libertarian' movement and 'Neoliberal' economics; ironic, considering that it's hard to find a more illiberal philosophy outside Fascist corpocracy and Stalinist economic centralization. Randism, Christian Identity, and the patriotic cults of petty nationalism and regionalism have become the tripod that holds up the decaying colossus that is nowadays laughably known as 'Conservatism'. The economic crisis of our time is driving a renewed interest in Ayn Rand and her works; the corpocratic media has already begun spreading the narrative that we're seeing Atlas Shrugged coming to life before our eyes. The Left had better start kicking the education and agit-prop into high gear, before the next generation of intellectual outcasts sprouts a fresh crop of Randroids to spend the another few decades extolling the virtue of selfishness and telling us that freedom is slavery.

The Absolute Basics

If you want to understand how I see the world:

1. The universe is very large, and you are very small.

2. The universe does not care about you. It does not love you. It is not going to give you a present.

3. Everyone and everything dies. Nothing and nobody comes back.

4. The only 'meaning' in the universe is that which is attached to it by conscious minds.

5. Your perceptions are the only reality that will ever exist for you, and they will never be more than an approximation at best.

6. Morality is an entirely human creation, not an intrinsic property of the universe, and it changes depending on what the majority of people in the world can be convinced is in their own best interest.

7. Free will is an illusion created by our capability to imagine counterfactual realities. Every effect has a cause. Everything you think, everything you do, and everything you are is entirely determined by the circumstances of your birth.

8. Concepts such as Justice, Personhood, Rights, Dignity, and Freedom are so vague and ill-defined as to be practically meaningless.

9. None of this allows you to evade responsibility for the consequences of your actions. Actions have consequences; whether you chooser to acknowledge them or not, they still occur. Some form of justice must be seen to be done, lest society crumble into the most absolute of barbarity.

10. Every aspect of reality is defined by the constant death and destruction of the inadequate. Destruction is the vital force which causes evolution. Life feeds on life.

11. This does not mean that the successful deserve what they have. The cream may rise to the top; so does the scum. Inequity begets inequity. If people become too unequal, the powerless will resent and eventually destroy their rulers.

12. Yes, life is unfair. Suck it up, buttercup.