Ayn Rand — VOICES for REASON

In honor of the 105th anniversary of Ayn Rand’s birth (February 2, 1905), I’d like to recommend Jeff Britting’s short but surprisingly comprehensive biography, Ayn Rand. Lavishly illustrated with items from the Ayn Rand Archives (a special department Britting manages within the Ayn Rand Institute), this biography is especially valuable because it pays close attention to the mental choices and processes by which Ayn Rand shaped her own character and ideology.

Britting’s biography traces Rand’s brilliant successes to the fundamental choices she made—choices about how to manage her own thinking and action. It started in early childhood, Britting observes, with a vigorously questioning attitude “aimed at understanding the things around her.” (p. 4) As she entered her teens, she “began asking why she liked what she did and, as a result, she began integrating her ideas into wider generalizations. She called this approach to integrating ideas ‘thinking in principle.’” (p. 13) Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s an unpublished letter ARC’s Yaron Brook sent to the Wall Street Journal in response to an op-ed by Heather Wilhelm:

Dear Editor,

After indulging in a truly dazzling series of ad hominem attacks on philosopher Ayn Rand, Heather Wilhelm does manage to raise one important issue: she asserts that Rand, whose books continue to sell in the hundreds of thousands a year, is not an effective salesman for capitalism. Whereas Rand is allegedly “elitist, cold and laser-focused on the supermen and superwomen of the world,” Wilhelm claims that what capitalism truly needs is an explanation of “how everyone, especially society’s neediest” benefit from economic liberty. That claim betrays an appalling ignorance of history.

Capitalism’s defenders have appealed to its beneficent effects since its inception. Accepting the conventional view that service to the needy is the essence of morality, they have downplayed and denied the essence of capitalism: the profit motive and the unrestricted pursuit of rational self-interest. This approach hasn’t worked. So long as even the free market’s defenders feel guilty and embarrassed by capitalism’s selfish nature, any attempt to reverse the anticapitalist trend is hopeless. Who is going to believe that vice is the path to the good?

What Rand offers is a radical alternative—a proper, moral defense of capitalism’s essence.

Rand argued that the proper standard of morality is the objective requirements of human life. She argued that human life requires productive achievement, and that the noblest act of moral virtue is using one’s mind to create life-sustaining values. She argued that profit is moral because it enriches the individual who achieves it—that someone like Bill Gates deserves the highest moral praise, not for giving away his wealth, but for creating it. Thus Rand advocated capitalism precisely because it is the only system that rewards the profit motive and respects the individual’s right to act on his own judgment in the pursuit of his own life and happiness. And yes, that includes not only the most intelligent and successful, but every individual committed to making his life the best life it can be. Capitalism is good, Rand argued, because selfishness, correctly understood, is a virtue.

Wilhelm’s views aside, Rand continues to be the greatest salesman capitalism has ever had. It’s not hard to discern why: whereas the rest of the world looked at capitalism and saw the hollow pursuit of material gain, Rand saw man the hero free to seek his highest values.

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Today is the 20^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, arguably the most famous event signaling the fall of Communism. In the days following November 9, 1989, the world saw residents of East Germany—a satellite state of the supposedly great and powerful Soviet empire—flee en masse to West Germany, revealing how hellish life under Communism truly was. The sight of Germans literally breaking down the wall is an inspiring one that should be remembered as a great landmark of the 20^th century—as Yaron Brook and Onkar Ghate explain in this must-see interview.

As we celebrate an event that revealed to the world the oppression of Communism, it is important and instructive to note that for the seven decades of the Soviet Union’s existence, many journalists, authors, and intellectuals in the West evaded the atrocities of Communism, even as Communist states were racking up death tolls in the tens of millions.

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The Wall Street Journal recently commissioned Karen Armstrong, author of numerous books on religion, and Richard Dawkins, author of numerous books on evolution and atheism, to answer the question: “Where does evolution leave God?”

What I found most interesting about the exchange was an issue that neither discussed explicitly, but which lurked just beneath the surface of their answers: the fact that religion has co-opted the entire realm of the spiritual.

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CNBC just published a blog post by ARC’s Yaron Brook and me on Ayn Rand’s relevance to today. (Last I checked, it topped CNBC’s “most shared” story list.) The short answer:

Atlas Shrugged shows us an all-too-familiar pattern: Washington do-gooders blaming the problems they’ve created on the free market, and using them as a pretext for expanding their power. And more: it provides the fundamental explanation for why the government gets away with continually increasing its control over the economy and our lives.

I encourage anyone interested in learning more about the relevance of Atlas to today’s events to attend The Atlas Shrugged Revolution, coming up in September.

I’ve registered my pleasure at the news that FCC chairman-to-be Julius Genachowski has vowed not to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine. But some of you may recall an article in which Ayn Rand seemed to support the Fairness Doctrine and even recommended extending it to the field of education. Let’s look at what she actually said.

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“What we need is a moderate approach—we can’t afford to go to extremes.”

How many times have you heard that from Washington, and in how many contexts? We need to be “moderate” in our response to the financial crisis—we don’t want to strangle businesses completely with regulation, but we need to yank back their leashes a little. We need to be “moderate” in our response to North Korea—we don’t want to subject our citizens to a nuclear attack, but we can’t be too firm about it or we’ll jeopardize negotiations. We need to be “moderate” about free speech on the airwaves—we like the idea that people should have the right to speak their mind, but only if they don’t offend anyone or hold an unpopular opinion. This list could continue ad infinitum if one follows today’s news.

I was reading Objectively Speaking: Ayn Rand Interviewed, and came across a brilliant statement by Ayn Rand on her views regarding what a “moderate” means: Read the rest of this entry »

Here is a flyer I wrote for the upcoming Independence Day Tea Parties. Many of those attending today’s Tea Parties are fed up with the assault on freedom they read about in each morning’s paper–but they have no positive alternative to offer. If the Tea Parties are to have a lasting impact it will be because they go from being a grassroots outpouring of frustration to a movement that stands for limited government, individualism, and individual rights. This, I argue, is the value of Atlas Shrugged to Tea Party attendees: it provides a powerful and revolutionary defense of those ideals.

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The publication of “Essays on Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged,” edited by Dr. Robert Mayhew, couldn’t come at a better time. With all the attention the book and its author are getting in the media lately, those interested in learning more about the novel, its development and the revolutionary message it contains will find a wealth of information and analysis from experts in this new volume.

As a contributing author, I received my advance copy of the book today and am looking forward to reading it cover to cover. My own essay, titled “The Businessmen’s Crucial Role: Material Men of the Mind,” argues that Atlas Shrugged had to have businessmen such as Hank Rearden and Dagny Taggart as its heroes by necessity because of Rand’s chosen plot-theme: “The men of the mind going on strike against an altruist-collectivist society.” Given that the leader of this strike says that the strikers will return to the world only when the lights of New York City are extinguished, what will it take to extinguish those lights? Who is it that keeps those lights on? My full answer is in Chapter 16.

As I look over the table of contents, I see titles of chapters such as “Who Was John Galt? The Creation of Ayn Rand’s Ultimate Ideal Man” by Shoshana Milgram, “No Tributes to Caesar: Good or Evil in Atlas Shrugged” by Tara Smith, and “Discovering Atlantis: Atlas Shrugged’s Demonstration of a New Moral Philosophy” by Greg Salmieri. Each of the twenty-two essays brings out the virtues of the novel and its underlying philosophy, Objectivism. Holding this volume in my hands, I am reminded once again of the sheer genius behind Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. I’m honored to have had participated in this project.

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: Read the rest of this entry »