NY Times tells us the obvious: Selfish a-holes love Ayn Rand September 17, 2007 Jill I’m with Gore Vidal — the selfish, blind ideology promoted in Atlas Shrugged is “nearly perfect in its immorality.” Apparently lots of people disagree. Whoever would have guessed?
Waaaah always picking on libertarians waaaaaah some kind of obsession waaaaaah we should be allies waaaaaaah don’t you have anything better to do waaaah. I like some Randians, but the ones I like are the ones that acknowledge that there are reasons to dislike the great AR.
Yeah, take Jill’s advice zuzu … I’m a scifi nut, and I’ve read a lot of scifi in the libertarian randian style, and I end up throwing the book across the room into the wall, as I get pissed off I’ve wasted 7 odd dollars on the book espousing heroes constructing a society I know, as a sociologist, is just impossible to the extreme. Hard scientists may write excellent science in scifi, but they don’t seem to have a frigging clue how to write societies that could actually, you know, convincingly exist.
I slogged my way through The Fountainhead. It has a couple of strange scenes where the strong, no-nonsense leader of men heroine waits patently for her lover, heart all a flutter, wearing nothing but the diamond necklace he bought for her. … I got about 20 pages into Atlas Shrugged before I gave up and threw the book across the room. These are the same kind of assholes who follow Leo Strauss, who taught Paul Wolfowitz.
In high school I ate books for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I was always on the lookout for new stuff to read, always pestering my English teachers and librarians for recommendations. My 10th grade English teacher told me I should read something by Ayn Rand and the library had “Anthem” which was short, so I read that. Jill said it best, I wanted to burn my brain afterward: I hated the book, although I didn’t really understand why at the time. I didn’t know much about politics, or anything about AR or libertarians. I just knew that the book was evil and awful and celebrated an outlook on life I wanted no part of. The English teacher was really surprised at the vehemence of my reaction. OTOH, a year or two later I read a bunch of Robert Heinlein and went around cleverly thinking Social Darwinist thoughts until I made a Really Obnoxious Racist Comment, got dressed down for it, and realized I was being fucking stupid. That article is interesting. All those people were really young when they read AR and got suckered in. Not quite as young as I was when I tried on those assholish ideas I got from Heinlein, but close. You wonder, did they run around spouting this stuff and never get challenged on it? Or did they get challenged and just ignored the challengers as lesser beings? If we’re talking CEOs then it’ll be mostly white boys, so of course they’ll have been right about everything, even when they were 19.
These are the same kind of assholes who follow Leo Strauss, who taught Paul Wolfowitz. i don’t think wolfie studied under strauss (could be wrong , though). you may be thinking of allen bloom, who was very dismissive of rand. there’s not much of a connection between srauss/bllom/wolfowitz and rand, other than the atheism and right-leaning philosophy within the confines of classic liberalism. bloom’s political philosophy was much less ideological than rands, more nebulous, pragmatic, and statist. and he had great respect for religion and tradition despite being an atheist, whereas rand was dismissive of this, preferring ideological purity over realpolitick.
I had to read The Fountainhead as a summer reading assignment for an invitation-only senior Modern Lit seminar at my HS. It infuriated me, disgusted me, and only solidified my socialist, ‘no one wins if we can’t all cross the finish line together’, bleeding heart progressivism. So, on that level, thanks Ayn Rand! When my best friend wrote an essay for an Objectivist Society competition and won a thousand bucks off it, I nearly disowned her 🙂 (Not really, but I did feel…really grossed out.)
the fountainhead is the best book to start with since its not really politcal, though the free-market implications are there. its really about integrity and being true to oneself in a world full of phonies, social climbers, and people who live thru the eyes of others. its a very adolescent theme, like the catcher in the rye. her definition of selfish is interesting, since an individual who gives money to charity, but does not tell anyone, would be committing a very selfish act, by her definition. yeah, i once had an ibanking client (a ceo of a biotech company) who was obsessed with rand that he would speak of her during our meetings. this lead my young analyst to read the fountainhead, which lead him to question his religion more than anything else.
Ayn Rand actually did a lot for my feminism. There is nothing quite like reading the line [paraphrase] “She had the ultimate look of femininity, that of being chained,” being written about a female railroad baron to make you start screaming at the top of your lungs. I have always regarded Rand as one of those writers whose books should interest self-absorbed college freshmen. Then they need to be abused by their English profs until they grow up and know better. (I also think that naming your corporation after John Galt is like naming your kids Bilbo, Frodo, and Pippin. Theoretically possible, but *why*?)
I used to read Atlas Shrugged all the time as a young teen, which freaked my father out. He probably thought I was secretly running around implementing my plans for Libertarian Domination. What I was really doing was going over the passages where Hank Rearden and Francisco D’Anconia meet up and have a huge, secret gay love affair. I swear, I thought those two were in love, and only the delicacy of the author kept their love from being spoken of outright. All those long, lingering looks between them! Their terrible lover’s spat! Their inability to keep away from one another, even though they want to! Rearden being referred to as D’Anconia’s Ultimate Conquest! Really, could these two BE any more in love? It was like a romance novel to me. A delicious, delicious gay romance novel. I always just skipped over all the interminable pages where some asshole ranted on and on about how the rich tycoons must be protected from the government, etc. Bo-ring! Not to mention stupid and selfish. Just goes to show how subtext can be found in just about anything, even the most unlikely of places. I’ve devoured a lot of books like that strictly for the homoerotic subtext, simply because there was nothing for me to read that had actual homoerotic text. I’d find it where I could. ….I really shouldn’t admit to this sort of thing in public, should I.
I tried to read Ayn (and didn’t she change her name from something a whole lot less butch, something like Babs Plotkin?), but she was such a crummy writer I just couldn’t do it. She makes Danielle Steele look like Toni Morrison.
for some reason ayn rand is huge in india, where the wretched poverty and pure evil of license raj socialism, coupled with recent free market reforms lifting an astonhing 100 million people out of poverty in a decade, makes the moral argument against socialism and for capitalism wildly appealing.
I’ve only (thankfully) managed to read Anthem, and I have to say, subtlety isn’t one of Rand’s strengths. To me, this is as big of a problem as her outlook. I’ve found that a lot of AR fans echo her condescending attitude that the virtues of unabaited libertarian capitalism are obvious. When you’re a 19 year-old white dude, and someone with a book tells you that you’re right to be a greedy a-hole, and implies that everyone who questions you is either stupid or some sort of Commie that wants to take away all your rights, it’s pretty easy to go through life smuggly blowing off any challenges to your ideology. That’s what I hate most about Ayn Rand– the smugness. Yes, there are smug liberals, but dammit, arch-conservatives are more than capable of the same thing.
I have to admit, Atlas Shrugged is one of my favorite books. I absolutely disagree with Ayn Rand, but I like the stories she tells. And I can relate to being true to yourself in a world full of phonies. Sometimes, it seems like this world we live in really does reward mediocrity, and that horrifies me. But seriously, almost every Randian or Libertarian that I’ve met seem to be this whiny, emotionaly stunted, upper-class, white guys.
I keep thinking I should actually read one of those books one of these days. Nah, just rent the movie version of The Fountainhead with Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal. It’s shorter and much, much funnier, especially since Rand wrote the screenplay herself and it was directed by the king of movie excess, King Vidor. My favorite part was that all of the architecture was ripped off from Frank Lloyd Wright who, um, wasn’t exactly oppressed or compromised during his career.
But seriously, almost every Randian or Libertarian that I’ve met seem to be this whiny, emotionaly stunted, upper-class, white guys. I am not white!
I didn’t mind The Fountainhead so much, as it’s shorter, but I’ve never been able to get more than halfway through Atlas Shrugged. It’s just long, and boring, and Rand’s writing style is way too preachy and obnoxious, even for someone who tends to agree with most of her underlying premise. I’m kind of surprised to keep seeing “selfish” as an epithet here. I’m almost positive I’ve seen posts about the virtues of selfishness and doing what’s right for you on this blog.
I actually didn’t hate the Fountainhead, for the reasons Manju mentioned. But I threw Atlas Shrugged across the room at several points during reading it. And I gave up altogether during the internimable speech from John Galt at the end (seriously, it goes on for like 30 pages… a better writer would find a way to work all that into her book instead of putting it in as a very boring 30 page speech0>
I tried to read Atlas Shrugged in the tenth grade. I gave up 100 pages from the end. I just couldn’t take it anymore. I swear, if it hadn’t been a library book, I’d have burned that sucker. And I got that feeling that Readen and D’Aconia had a thing for eachother too.
My favorite (in a depressing sort of way) quote from that article: Rand’s idea of “the virtue of selfishness,” Ms. Moore said, “is a harsh phrase for the Buddhist idea that you have to take care of yourself.” OH MY GOD!!!!! I’ve never seen a more grossly ignorant assertion about Buddhism, or a more self-serving interpretation.
I mean, Buddhism is about the total obliteration of the self. It’s about the opposite of selfishness. For God’s sake!
Thing is, no actually functioning capitalist economy has ever operated along purely laissez-faire, free-market principles, largely because no one – capitalists included – actually wants that. The economists and business people who think Rand is the greatest thing since sliced bread are being rather selective about the desirability of a “Randian” economy.
I read a few of Ayn Rand’s books in high school, until I got to the part in one of them (I forget which, it’s been a long time) where the main male character raped the main female character. And somehow, this got turned into a good thing, reconnecting her to her emotions and allowing her to have a relationship, with the man who raped her. That was a bit too much for my teenaged brain to deal with (now I’d be more angry than confused), and that was the end of my Ayn Rand fandom.
haven’t read any Rand, ’cause my head would just explode. wan’t it the Rand Institute (or Center, whatever) that, after the tsunami, encouraged the world to not help the survivors? thay says it all, really.
Same here, Marle. It’s Howard Roark, in the Fountainhead, who rapes Dominique. I kept reading after that, but I just kept thinking, “Wait – he RAPED her. Why is this good again?” And then one of the other climactic scenes in the book is when he totally humiliates her by unveiling a nude sculpture of her in a public building. I’m supposed to identify with rape and female humiliation? No thanks.
Oh my god, evil fizz, yeah. That’s the one scene/phrase in the book that I still remember clearly. *shudder* While I don’t much like Rand’s worldview in general, that little bit about femininity == submission disturbed me more than all the rest put together.
And then one of the other climactic scenes in the book is when he totally humiliates her by unveiling a nude sculpture of her in a public building. I’m glad I didn’t get that far. Eeek.
the funny thing about the “rape” scene is that it is one of the few times she’s actually being realistic about sex, exploring dark Dionysian desires, like wanting to be dominated. the rest of the time she has a very catoonish view of sexuality, basically she believed people of integrity are only attracted to other morally virtuous people, and if you are attracted to someone morally reprehensible, its an indication of some flaw or contradiction in your character. but obviously the world, especially sexual attraction,. is not that convenient, as Zuzu’s secret crush on rush limbaigh demonstrates.
Kristen from MA, the Rand Institute came out with a statement saying that individuals should help out as they wish, but that the government shouldn’t offer aid, as the money is not theirs to give. Just as stupid really, but there it is. Here’s the statement: http://lonewacko.com/blog/archives/002608.html
when it comes to sexuality, rand had the classic feminist dillema. her desires didn’t jibe with her philosophy, not unlike simone de beuvoir’s unfeminist like relationship with jean paul satre. her own husband was a slacker.
These are the same kind of assholes who follow Leo Strauss, who taught Paul Wolfowitz. the funny thing, rich, is that while what i said in #8 is true, in my case you hit the nail right on the head. I’m an asshole who loves both the “fountainhead” and “the closing of the american mind.”
the funny thing about the “rape” scene is that it is one of the few times she’s actually being realistic about sex, exploring dark Dionysian desires, like wanting to be dominated. the rest of the time she has a very catoonish view of sexuality, basically she believed people of integrity are only attracted to other morally virtuous people, and if you are attracted to someone morally reprehensible, its an indication of some flaw or contradiction in your character. but obviously the world, especially sexual attraction,. is not that convenient, as Zuzu’s secret crush on rush limbaigh demonstrates. Have you ever been raped, Manju? I’m guessing no, considering that you wrote the above. It is a vicious, horrific crime that changes the way that you look at the world forever.
I should point out that libertarians proposed another form of aid to tsunami victims: http://jfsac.cf.huffingtonpost.com/ It’s actually surprisingly similar to the liberal position in many ways.
Have you ever been raped, Manju? I’m guessing no, considering that you wrote the above. It is a vicious, horrific crime that changes the way that you look at the world forever. i know. rand also said the same thing. but in her view, the rape scene was not real rape. dominique wanted roark to dominate her, and roark knew it, because the 2 were in love and completely connected. it was de facto consensual, she argued. as far as rape fantasies go, i’m quite sure some women have them. this may be an inconvient truth but one shouldn’t deny truth because it doesn’t fit one’s philosophy. after all, that’s the flaw in rand.
I remember the feminine as being chained passage, too, and it squicked me out, even as a kid. And I got that feeling that Readen and D’Aconia had a thing for eachother too. Oh, good, I’m not the only one! I’m kind of surprised to keep seeing “selfish” as an epithet here. I’m almost positive I’ve seen posts about the virtues of selfishness and doing what’s right for you on this blog. Perhaps the apparent disconnect here is because it is not right when people in power are selfish, but people individually should be able to balance social responsibility with personal freedom. Like, it’s okay to want to be happy and eat the last piece of cake sometimes, but it’s NOT okay to own a giant corporation and stomp on anyone who gets in your way, destroy the environment, and keep workers at unsupportable wages because you’re in charge and you want the money. That’s how I’m seeing it, at least.
Jesus, Manju, you’re getting creepier by the minute. Repeat after me: rape is not the same as rape fantasies.
I’m almost positive I’ve seen posts about the virtues of selfishness and doing what’s right for you on this blog. Let me try and explain. When feminists advocate things like “doing what is right for you” and “being selfish” what they mean is that women in our society are taught to swallow their own wishes and desires and submit to whatever the person nearest to them wants. The person they’re required to submit to is usually a man. Women are taught to take care of other people, and this can happen at a huge cost to themselves. Men are not asked to do this in the same way. (e.g., Women give up their careers to follow their husband to his new job frequently, men rarely do that for their wives.) On the other hand, thinking that the government has no right to your billion dollars because you earned it (and somehow manage to not drive on any roads or anything, I guess) and that you don’t have any obligation to help the guy who is starving to death right in front of you makes you a huge prick. And has nothing to do with the paragraph above, unless you think it’s selfish that women get to decide when and with whom they get to have sex, for example. It’s little pricks who refuse to share vs women not being a servant class. Obviously I don’t speak for all feminists everywhere, but this is my take on the issue.
Manju you are correct about Wolfowitz. I give you that. And I respectfully agree: you are an asshole. When you start out by saying ‘the funny thing about the “rape” scene…’, that’s a sentence you just don’t want to finish.
… didn’t she change her name from something a whole lot less butch, something like Babs Plotkin? According to Wiki, her birth name was Alisa Rosenbaum.
zuzu & rich: you have to read the book. it was consensual sex. its debatable, for sure, but at least that was the author’s intention. that’s why i put “rape” in quotes. and i meant funny as in odd, not ha ha. but if you didn’t read the book (or maybe even if you did) i can see how my sentence reads creepy. i didn’t mean to be so glib about rape. my apologies.
Jesus, Manju, you’re getting creepier by the minute. zuzu, i understand why you think i’m creepy, but what did jesus do?
ou have to read the book. it was consensual sex. its debatable, for sure, but at least that was the author’s intention. that’s why i put “rape” in quotes. and i meant funny as in odd, not ha ha. I’m really not reading that scene as consensual. The argument about how it’s all about knowing someone’s deepest desires and giving them what they want over their objection doesn’t ring true for me at all. The whole thing makes me think of the rapist going “But she wanted it!”
You know, I really enjoyed reading Atlas Shrugged and The PeckerFountainhead. Red hot page turners they were and that’s no lie, although her preverted approach to l’amour en haut made me more than a little squicky. I also got a big kick out Robert Heinlein’s novels prior to Stranger in a Strange Land. I particularly liked Asimov’s “Spaceship and Sun” novels when I read them in grade school. I still enjoy rereading Jack Vance’s space romances. Bester’s The Stars My Destination was just plain brilliant. And so on. But for crying out loud. Face it, all this stuff is silly kiddie fantasy. There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but what kind of adult – Hell, who older than thirteen years of age – could possibly take this nonsense seriously as any kind of halfway realistic description of the actual world? I read that Alan Greenspan was a devoted Randite and I’m just aghast. I couldn’t imagine putting anyone who takes Randism seriously in any position more responsible than dishwasher. No wonder the American economy is so deeply fucked, with a looney-tune like that mismanaging it for decades.
Mary Gaitskill’s novel “Two Girls Fat and Thin” is a terrific spoof on the Ayn Rand phenomenon. My favorite line is about the Rand character’s gravelly voice–“as if she had swallowed ground glass and been surprised by how good it was.”
I made a whole-hearted effort to read Atlas Shrugged and it and Fountainhead still sit in my library with me happily ignorant of their full contents. I gave up on Atlas and figured I could skip Fountainhead since I saw part of the movie (which I thought was wooden, windy and creepy as well). When I learned to stop wasting my time on crazy people, silly, unrealistic ideas went with that. What is kind of funny is the article stating that Ayn Rand cried reading her negative reviews. For someone who preached that one should never allow concern for others or what they think slow one’s ambitions, I’m surprised she couldn’t follow her own advice. Which of course points up the entire silliness of all of Rand’s works, or any of the constant bleating of the libertarian sheep. If you think you’ve got a great idea, you don’t want to pay for anyone else in anyway and you see everyone’s altruism as a hindrance, then shut the fuck up and get on the island! Or move to Idaho or something. Just shut up and go away, why try to sell me or give a hoot about whether I care or not? Prove me wrong! Please! Go now!
And also, Ivan Boesky I believe preached the “Greed is Good” doctrine as well and I think most of us know where that got him.
I went through a Rand phase and read everything she wrote. The thing is, she was bright and the ideas are compelling, but they have major flaws that need to be worked out and that’s just fucking obvious. But here’s the thing: Her ideas are not evil. They’re flawed. She never promoted capitalism the way people have interpreted her to have. They’ve mischaracterized her words. And the NY Times piece was just another example of this. She wouldn’t have approved of the greedy, hurtful capitalism we’ve got now. Her motto was “rational self-interest” not “get all you can, as quickly as you can, regardless of who it hurts.” In fact, she thought that rational self-interested persons would never conflict, that is, there’s not really such a thing as greed. That was a major flaw in her ideas. The trouble is, she’s become a symbol for evil greed. And the evil ones use her as justifications for the evil. And the good people spend time attacking her instead of the ideas or the evil people. She’s dead. Her books and ideas are flawed. And that’s that.
In my experience, the desire to throw reading material across the room is evidence that one should in fact keep reading and not throw it across the room. The failure of a writer to share your moral premises is not ipso facto a writing failure. Instead, one should read on and identify the (violent?) dissonance between the writer’s stated and unstated premises and one’s own, the reasons if available for that dissonance. It should be remembered that Rand, i.e. Alyssa Rosenberg, was a Russian and Jewish fugitive from both Tsarist antisemitism and Communist collectivist tyranny. This may be a useful fact to remember when analyzing both her perspective and the vehemence of her views. While she is identified largely with the libertarian movement or philosophy today, her essays are filled with bitterness and opposition both to self-described small “l” libertarians and large-“L” Libertarian Party activities and operatives. I guess that the smartest way to read Rand is about the same way one reads Marx: a revolutionary, provocative thinker whose controversial ideas stand in opposition to mainstream, friendly liberal consumerist thinking that informed the nice folks who write nice things like Seinfeld and Friends. A thinking person would not throw Das Kapital (with two hands, probably) across the room but would keep reading and then ask, why is he wrong? Some attack Rand for being cultish, but Marx’s cultists killed millions and built shrines to the killers. Rand’s odd-ball followers have been a good deal less violent.
Jill Says: > > zuzu Says: > > > > I keep thinking I should actually read one > > of those books one of these days. > > Don’t. It’ll make you want to burn your brain. Zusu, don’t listen to her! She’s no fun. Do read at least one of them. For one thing you won’t be able to laugh half so hard at Randites without, just like you can’t really sneer at Scientologists without at least skimming Dianetics. Get good and drunk first; you gotta be loose to get the best out of that kind of stuff. What’d be really cool is if you got some friends over with copies of their own (the used book stores abound!) You could stand up and read aloud in corny radio hero/villain voices, one of you playing Elwood Ptui (sleazy snide snotty and high-pitched), another Dominique Francais (a hot foreignesque vamp), another Howard Bark (syllables carved outa cold granite).
well if you’re gonna moderate it anyway, while you’re in there could you also fix zuzu’s name where I mispelt it? Jeez, durrr…
In my experience, the desire to throw reading material across the room is evidence that one should in fact keep reading and not throw it across the room. No. In my experience, that desire means the justified decision that life is too short to waste on crap. So many books, so little time. And I never have to read Stephen King again.
From the article: Rand’s idea of “the virtue of selfishness,” Ms. Moore said, “is a harsh phrase for the Buddhist idea that you have to take care of yourself.” All of a sudden, I can enjoy Atlas Shrugged is I interpret it as a 1200-page book with that sentence as the punchline. Hilarious!
It’s funny; I fundamentally disagreed with almost every aspect of Rand’s philosophy, but I still have an odd respect for her. It’s possible that it comes from having my own unique an often repulsive-to-others philosophy. Maybe it’s because she’s a woman responsible for so much change in slice of the population not known for accepting women (let alone taking their cue from them or invoking their name!). I started that book with absolutely no idea what I was reading. I read it because my mom told me to and I needed as much money for college as I could get. I think I was about halfway through before I realised they probably wouldn’t like what I had to say about the book. Oddly, my equally liberal minded, socially consious boyfriend and I bonded over the book. It wasn’t all a big hate fest, though. We could have easily bonded over hating Bush. This was different. It was really meay food for thought and I think we really sharpened our own ideas disecting hers. Anyway, I would call her a sociopath except that the negative reviews apparently deeply affected her. Instead, I’ll go with smart and deeply wrong.
Also, Bioshock was crazy fun. How weird is it that I spent all my time playing that game geeking out over my knowledge of a person I despise?
I was really young when I read Atlas Shrugged. (A favorite high school teacher used to slip me books, promising to disavow any knowledge of them.) I hated it then, and, really, that’s all I remember about it. Got over Heinlein pretty quickly, too, as a matter of fact. . . .
ChrisR – Sarah in Chicago, Are you really Taffy Reiflin? lol, nah … I’m just your average lesbian atheist that knows NOTHING about jeebus in the slightest, because, you know, haven’t ever heard of him or anything. I just need to be saved! 😉
Technically speaking,, Dominique posed for that naked sculpture, knowing it was intended to go on public display. I don’t think that was a problem for her- consent was involved. I like reading The Fountainhead, in a sick sort of way. I kind of liken Objectivism to Communism in the “yeah, that’s not gonna work in real life” sort of way, but I do kind of admire the “be true to your art” thing, to a point. (Not the point of blowing shit up, though. That’s a bit silly.) Dominique Francon (Keating Wynand Roark) is one of the most fucked up characters in literature, though. I am not remotely thrilled with the rape thing at all, but given how the character behaves the rest of the time, I can actually buy what Rand says about it being secretly consensual (though it’s still freaking wrong). The woman clearly only gets off when something bad is going down to her or to someone else, and though she obviously had the hots for a guy she considered beneath her, she wasn’t going to make a move. That said, she needs thirty years of therapy and some freaking self-esteem to stop marrying people she regards as being at the bottom of the trash heap, sabotaging her secret boyfriend’s career so she can get her rocks off, etc. Oy fucking vey. Never read Atlas, am not particularly inclined to. I think I read Anthem and remember jack squat about it, so I guess it sucked.
In my experience, the desire to throw reading material across the room is evidence that one should in fact keep reading and not throw it across the room. So when I was in high school and I got pissed off reading a Harlequin romance because the heroine was getting ready to give up her job, move herself and her child to a remote island, and become the unpaid housekeeper for her emotionally abusive ex-boyfriend, I really needed to finish the book? And, yes, to me, Ayn Rand’s philosophy is at about the same intellectual level as that of a Harlequin romance.
one of my favorite philosophers used to be jean paul sartre. his notions of integrity and individualism are similar to rands, though his epistemology is very different. the phrase “hell is other people” (from “no exit” i think) is very randian. the fountainhead is a warning to not live thru the eyes of others and many of the villains are not socialists (as in atlas) but rather corporate comformists like peter keating. roark’s architecture is a metaphor, for productive achievement, and a warning to people that to compromise ones art for popularity or money is to sell one’s soul. atlas replaces architecture with entrepreneurship and here is where things get explicitly political and more dogmatic. i always thought sartre’s communism contradicted his existentialism (especially existential free will vs. dialectic materialism) so rands capitalism struck me as a logical progression. and , of courses, once you’ve owned your own business, the sense of violation one gets when the government steps in to regulate, is not unlike the one artists feel when they are censored. but i suspect the themes of the fountainhead may be more palpable to those of you here on the left.
You guys need a kinder, gentler ayn rand. like “atlas hugged” or “we the giving” Or just listen to 2112.
Thing is, no actually functioning capitalist economy has ever operated along purely laissez-faire, free-market principles True, most economies today are considered “mixed economies”, or economies that are both socialist and capitalist. The USA is a mixed economy by the way. largely because no one – capitalists included – actually wants that. The economists and business people who think Rand is the greatest thing since sliced bread are being rather selective about the desirability of a “Randian” economy. Not neccessarily so. Have you ever heard about anarcho-capitalism? Basically, its capitalism w/o government. Ancaps, or anarcho-capitalists, are also considered to be libertarians.