Capitalist paradise

In a perfect Ayn Rand world, Sohel Rana ought to go Galt if he's regulated by the little people of government. Far better to keep hands off job creators and let their workers decide whether a factory is a safe enough place to alienate their labor!

Authorities in Bangladesh now say the building was illegally constructed, with permits obtained through political influence. The owner, Sohel Rana, now in jail, was illegally adding upper floors to structure at the time the building collapsed, officials said.

If 1,000 people die because greedy bastards like Rana have bought off the government, for economic libertarians, that's just the occasional cost of freedom, collateral damage in a capitalist paradise.

When an industrialist exploiter corrupts government, that's a failure of government, no doubt. But it's a feature of the extreme form of capitalism that Randian libertarians advocate, in which everything is for sale and the "free" market corrects excesses.

Sometimes, the market mechanism takes lives of the proles. But who cares about them? Certainly not Rana Sohel.

The thing we comfortable, lazy Americans may not have noticed is that we live in a nation whose government has been thoroughly corrupted by the moneyed elites. Little by little and sometimes in big hunks, wealth has bought up every institution it could.

The plutocrats think their incipient fascism is by definition right and moral. Even if a few (thousand) have to die.