End the Fed: Seminar Write-Up~ John A. Allison

[JVParkour]

Hey everyone,

Today, Gardner-Webb University hosted a seminar called "Principled Leadership." John A. Allison, the former CEO of BB&T was the speaker. Allison, while at BB&T helped grow its assets from $4.5 billion to $152 billion dollars!

I attended the seminar, mostly because Allison is a known Objectivist. His speech was really good; he touched on all sorts of things, ranging from selfishness, to taxes, to justice, etc.

What really really shocked me, and the reason I had to post this immediately after getting back, was because of some of the things that he said during the Q&A session. One guy in the audience asked him something along these lines, "Since the collapse in 2008, everyone has been pushing for more regulation and guidelines, what do you think?" (More or less...) He responded by saying how the government isn't any smarter than the rest of us, and then he detailed why the crash happened. He started by saying how greed on Wall Street wasn't a factor, because greed on wall street is always at its maximum level . Then he flat out said it was all the Feds fault. He basically explained Austrian Economics in a nutshell, and how the Fed tampering with interest rates was part of the problem, as was all the money printed up by Greenspan. He also said he took place in a seminar a few weeks ago at Wake Forest that talked about whether the Fed was even a good idea or not!

A minute went by, and then I asked him this question, "Regarding your previous comments about the Fed, what do you think about Quantitative Easing and also what do you think about Auditing the Fed?"

He trashed QE as simply printing of money. He said that all the Fed's printing is causing commodity price inflation, and that may be part of what led to the Egyptian Revolution. Then, coming the the Auditing the Fed question, he simply responded with, "I think we shouldn't just Audit the Fed, I think we should end it!"

It was pretty awesome, and there were a lot of claps from the audience (none of his other responses got claps). Another cool thing is the local GOP had a bunch of its members there, so hopefully that got them thinking...

But anyway, I was just super excited and wanted to share my experience. This guy is LOADED with money, and he probably would love to be a keynote speaker at future End the Fed rallies. Since he also talked about cutting taxes across the board, maybe we could get him to support Ron Paul, or help fund us. I don't know, but I was excited about a potential ally that has A LOT of influence.

 

[low preference guy]

Hey, this guy could make a nice V.P. to Ron Paul!

 

[JVParkour]

Yea, like seriously. This guy is quality material and has an OUTSTANDING reputation. http://people.forbes.com/profile/john-a-allison/10776

 

[Travlyr]

Awesome news! Very cool. End The Fed! The sooner the better!

 

[Austrian Econ Disciple]

Is this our secret billionaire?

 

[JVParkour]

Bump

 

[Gaius1981]

Not going to happen. John A. Allison is an active member of the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI), and he's pretty much the right-hand-man of its President, Dr. Yaron Brook. They represent the purest form of Objectivism. All his political contributions and activism goes towards the ARI. I'm not certain how familiar you are with the ARI, but they strongly distance themselves from Ron Paul and his brand of libertarianism, and would be more likely to support political candidates such as John Bolton. They're very much national security hawks, and strongly pro-Israel.

 

[low preference guy]

Not going to happen. John A. Allison is an active member of the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI), and he's pretty much the right-hand-man of its President, Dr. Yaron Brook. They represent the purest form of Objectivism. All his political contributions and activism goes towards the ARI. I'm not certain how familiar you are with the ARI, but they strongly distance themselves from Ron Paul and his brand of libertarianism, and would be more likely to support political candidates such as John Bolton. They're very much national security hawks, and strongly pro-Israel.

huh?

John Allison Contribution List in 2008

$2,300 RICHARD BURR COMMITTEE
$2,000 ELIZABETH DOLE COMMITTEE INC
$2,000 MCCAIN-PALIN VICTORY 2008

Link

You can't predict 100% how a person will act based on his associations. Brooks himself is a lot less hardcore than other Objectivists.

 

[Gaius1981]

huh?

John Allison Contribution List in 2008

$2,300 RICHARD BURR COMMITTEE
$2,000 ELIZABETH DOLE COMMITTEE INC
$2,000 MCCAIN-PALIN VICTORY 2008

Link

You can't predict 100% how a person will act based on his associations. Brooks himself is a lot less hardcore than other Objectivists.

I wasn't aware of his other political contributions -- good catch. Still though, those are national security hawks, and I sincerely doubt he'd make any contributions to Ron Paul; there's a very strong resentment of him in the Objectivist movement. Consider that even the "moderate" Objectivist group, the Atlas Society, published this magazine, referring to Ron Paul as a "perversion of liberty."

Dr. Yaron Brook is by no means less hardcore; he's basically the "gold standard" of Objectivism, and fully approved of by the extremely uncompromising intellectual heir to Ayn Rand, Dr. Leonard Peikoff. Brook fully rejects Ron Paul, Murray Rothbard, anarchocapitalism, and so forth, when asked during Q&A sessions after his lectures. Brook may have a less argumentative style than other Objectivists, thought he's still a hardcore Objectivist. If he wasn't, he'd been "excommunicated" from ARI by Peikoff, like so many before him who turned out not to be 100% purists.

 

[low preference guy]

I wasn't aware of his other political contributions -- good catch. Still though, those are national security hawks, and I sincerely doubt he'd make any contributions to Ron Paul; there's a very strong resentment of him in the Objectivist movement. Consider that even the "moderate" Objectivist group, the Atlas Society, published this magazine, referring to Ron Paul as a "perversion of liberty."

Dr. Yaron Brook is by no means less hardcore; he's basically the "gold standard" of Objectivism, and fully approved of by the extremely uncompromising intellectual heir to Ayn Rand, Dr. Leonard Peikoff. Brook fully rejects Ron Paul, Murray Rothbard, anarchocapitalism, and so forth, when asked during Q&A sessions after his lectures. Brook may have a less argumentative style than other Objectivists, thought he's still a hardcore Objectivist. If he wasn't, he'd been "excommunicated" from ARI by Peikoff, like so many before him who turned out not to be 100% purists.

Again, you can't deduce the political views of John Allison in foreign policy based on his associations. Even if you agree with the fundamentals of Objectivism, it doesn't necessarily follow that you'll have an interventionist foreign policy. Many Objectivists are non-interventionists. Allison is an independent thinking Objectivist, and you're making the conclusion that he is some sort of national security hawk with no evidence whatsoever.

ARI gives away Ayn Rand's books, which is Allison's favorite book. So he funds them heavily. That's as much as you can deduce from their association.

 

[Gaius1981]

Again, you can't deduce the political views of John Allison in foreign policy based on his associations. Even if you agree with the fundamentals of Objectivism, it doesn't necessarily follow that you'll have an interventionist foreign policy. Many Objectivists are non-interventionists. Allison is an independent thinking Objectivist, and you're making the conclusion that he is some sort of national security hawk with no evidence whatsoever.

ARI gives away Ayn Rand's books, which is Allison's favorite book. So he funds them heavily. That's as much as you can deduce from their association.

You're underestimating his involvement with the ARI. He donated $2M to endow ARI a chair in Objectivism at the University of Texas, he's a main speaker at all of ARI's annual Objectivist conferences, he's a regular speaker in ARI's Objectivist Lecture Series, he's a member of ARI's President's Circle, etc. I read ARI's monthly newsletters, which is an old habit, as I supported them for two years before coming around on foreign policy. Allison is no more likely to endorse Ron Paul than Rudy Giuliani is, if you ask me. It would be "completely irrational of him to do so, and a breach of his principles," as an Objectivist might say, and Allison personally teaches Objectivism to MBA students, and made it central to BB&T's corporate culture. No sense in debating this further though; time will prove me right.

 

[low preference guy]

You're underestimating his involvement with the ARI. He donated $2M to endow ARI a chair in Objectivism at the University of Texas, he's a main speaker at all of ARI's annual Objectivist conferences, he's a regular speaker in ARI's Objectivist Lecture Series, he's a member of ARI's President's Circle, etc. I read ARI's monthly newsletters, which is an old habit, as I supported them for two years before coming around on foreign policy. Allison is no more likely to endorse Ron Paul than Rudy Giuliani is, if you ask me. It would be "completely irrational of him to do so, and a breach of his principles," as an Objectivist might say.

If you show me a quote of John Allison which shows he is a national security hawk, I might bother to keep reading your posts.

 

[JVParkour]

Interesting. Regardless, I don't guess it would be a bad thing to keep him on the radar, even if only to speak at an End The Fed rally or something...

 

[Gaius1981]

If you show me a quote of John Allison which shows he is a national security hawk, I might bother to keep reading your posts.

Take my opinion for what it's worth. I was active with the ARI for two years. I'm not going to go through his many ARI lecture Q&A sessions to find one of the quotes where he expresses support for interventionism or rejection of libertarianism and Ron Paul; you can do that yourself if you want to. Whether you "bother reading my posts" or not couldn't have less significance to me. Why would I even lie about this; what on earth would be in it for me?

 

[MarkoH]

I’m afraid GAius1981 is right. Absent a sea change in Allison’s thinking, his huge support of ARI means he would never support Ron Paul.

And if there was such a sea change and he came to support Ron Paul, ARI would reject him.

I posted the following in another thread, relevant here ...

Here’s Leonard Peikoff, founder of ARI (Yaron Brook is the president):

“... I don’t know anything about Ron Paul, so I wrote Yaron Brook: ‘Could you tell me something that would be relevant to answer this question?’ I’ll read his answer, and that’s all I’m going to say about him:

“ ‘Unfortunately but not unpredictably I have only bad news regarding Ron Paul. He ran for president once or twice as a Libertarian before he switched to the Republican party. His foreign policy is typically libertarian. He blames 9-11 on America; if only we disengaged from the Middle East Bin Laden will leave us alone. On abortion he, like many libertarians, believes it should be left up to the states to decide, i.e. he advocates democracy, not individual rights.’
​

“And then he [Yaron] ends the letter: ‘I could go on, three dots.’ I find that very persuasive. I’m not ever going to say another thing about Ron Paul.”
​

You can read the background at:
2008 Presidential Elections – Ayn Rand and ARI

ARI -- their protests to the contrary -- is more or less a neoconservative organization, and consequently they associate with some hardcore neoconservatives. See:
Birds of a Feather

A question for GAius1981: Do you have any referenced quotes of Allison himself denouncing Ron Paul? I’m not questioning your sincerety, I’d like to be able quote them myself.

 

[RSLudlum]

My signature is a quote from a seminar that Allison spoke at a few years back. IIRC, he also stated that all upper management at BB&T were required or strongly suggested to read Hazlitt's Economics In One Lesson.

Here's the YouTube of the 2007 seminar in which he spoke on "Leadership and Values".