Did any of the entrepreneurial superheroes in Ayn Rand's capitalist fairy tales evade the collectivist looters by using offshore tax shelters, or for that matter, use cheap foreign labor or cheap immigrant labor to avoid competing in the free labor market right here at home?

It's the tragedy of the commons all over again, but disguised in an ever more subtle and insidious way. Of course, in the short run and on a small scale you can make your business more efficient (ahem, profitable) by cutting labor costs in any way you can. But what these corporals of industry never stopped to consider is that if you eliminate enough domestic labor expenses altogether, there will no longer be sufficient domestic consumer market to buy the stuff you produce. Unless you export, it is impossible to sell everything you produce because the workers that made it can't afford it.

So this is where credit comes in: Consumer credit so people who can't afford it can buy all the cheap stuff you need to sell, commercial credit so you can leverage yourself to the hilt and expand capacity to make up for it without any real investment, and foreign credit so that overseas businesses and governments can ensure themselves of the American market. And of course, deficit government credit to fill in the gaps where the market system no longer provides essential social services (like education and health) at a reasonable price.

We live in an economy designed to eat its seed corn, and only the middlemen skimming their 10% off the top will prosper--for a while.

Does any of this sound familiar?