Ayn Rand: capitalism’s enduring crusader

April 30, 2009 by Tom Bowden

The title of this article in The Week magazine was so perfect, I made it the title of this post. Ayn Rand was indeed a crusader for capitalism, one whose works have proven to be enduring. Just witness the surging sales of Atlas Shrugged and the burgeoning interest in her philosophy.

The article has some factual errors (such as describing Alan Greenspan’s tenure at the Federal Reserve as the “apogee of Objectivism”) and misses some big points. However, I can’t resist quoting a few of the article’s better passages:

  • [I]t was Atlas Shrugged that made her a national institution and gave the world a new philosophy, known as Objectivism.
  • What is Objectivism? Rand described it as “the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.” The only social system consistent with this morality, Rand insisted, is pure, unfettered capitalism, and the only function of government is the protection of individual rights.
  • John Galt in his own words. The hero of Atlas Shrugged outlines Objectivism in a 60-page speech. These excerpts provide a sense of the character’s-and the author’s-intensity: “While you were dragging to your sacrificial altars the men of justice, of independence, of reason, of wealth, of self-esteem, I beat you to it, I reached them first. I told them the nature of the game you were playing and the nature of that moral code of yours, which they had been too innocently generous to grasp. I showed them the way to live by another morality-mine. It is mine that they chose to follow.”
    …”The world will change when you are ready to pronounce this oath: I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for the sake of mine.”

It’s never a bad day when thousands more readers are treated to a taste of Ayn Rand’s provocative point of view, in her own words. Qualified kudos to the editors of The Week.