Daily Archives: March 6, 2017

Though she died in 1982, huge numbers of people still come to Ayn Rand through her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and their lives are changed as a result. No wonder. These novels assert the nobility of using your mind to reach your full potential. They make self-belief cool.

Rands heroes are individualists who live by their own creative talentsexisting for no one else, nor asking others to exist for them. They are rebels against the establishment and its ways. They do not conform to social norms, but stand by their own vision and truth: a vision built on their own values and a truth built on fact and reason, not on the false authority of others. They are the creative minds who discover new knowledge, who innovate, drive progress and consequently benefit all humanity.

But minds cannot be forced to think. Creativity, and therefore human progress, depends on people being free to think and act in pursuit of their own values. That is a powerful case for liberty, values, mind, reason, creativity, entrepreneurship, capitalism, achievement, heroism, happiness, self-esteem and pride. And against the life-destroying consequences of coercion, extortion, regulation, self-sacrifice, altruism, wishful thinking and refusing to use ones mind.

Nowhere do Rands ideas change more lives than in her adopted United States, where her novels tap into the American ideals of self-reliance and individualism. In the early 1990s, a decade after her death, a survey by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club rated Atlas Shrugged as the most influential book after the Bible. Today, Rands ideas are taught in colleges across America and discussed in academic and popular journals. Institutes and groups have been set up to promote her ideas.

Her ideas are accelerating in other English-speaking countries too, such as the UK (where 20,000 Rand books are sold each year), Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and India, where English is widely spoken. Even Indian footballers and Bollywood stars acknowledge her influence on their lives.

Beyond the English-speaking countries, Sweden, a country of just 9.5m people, leads the world in Google searches for Ayn Rand. About 25,000 copies are bought each year in Rands native Russia, another 13,000 a year in Brazil, 6,000 in Spain and 1,000 each in Japan and Bulgaria. Even in China, some 15,000 Rand books are bought each yeara number which, given that countrys economic and intellectual awakening, can only increase.

All this gives Rand a significant impact on the political debate. In the United States, many of those she inspired rose into public office. Former US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan (1926-) was an early member of Rands inner circle. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas (1948-) shows his new clerks The Fountainhead movie. Politicians such as former Congressman Ron Paul (1935-), his son, Senator Rand Paul (1965-) and House Speaker Paul Ryan (1970-) cite Rand as an influence. Even President Ronald Reagan (1911-2004) described himself as an admirer of Ayn Rand.

Nor is this only a US phenomenon. Annie Lf (1983-), leader of Swedens Center Party and former Enterprise Minister, helped launch the Swedish translation of The Fountainhead, calling Rand one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th Century. Rands ideas were praised by the reformist Prime Minister of Estonia, Mart Laar (1960-), and influenced Australias Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser (1930-2015), along with many other past or current political leaders.

What other novels have had such an impact on events, more than half a century after their publication? And what other novelist?

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Is Ayn Rand still relevant 35 years on from her death? - The Adam Smith Institute (blog)

GEORGE F. WILL Washington Post Writers Group Published: March 5, 2017 12:00 AM CDT

WASHINGTON Although America's political system seems unable to stimulate robust, sustained economic growth, it at least is stimulating consumption of a small but important segment of literature. Dystopian novels are selling briskly Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" (1932), Sinclair Lewis' "It Can't Happen Here" (1935), George Orwell's "Animal Farm" (1945) and "1984" (1949), Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" (1953) and Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" (1985), all warning about nasty regimes displacing democracy.

There is, however, a more recent and pertinent presentation of a grim future. Last year, in her 13th novel, "The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047," Lionel Shriver imagined America slouching into dystopia merely by continuing current practices.

Shriver, who is fascinated by the susceptibility of complex systems to catastrophic collapses, begins her story after the 2029 economic crash and the Great Renunciation, whereby the nation, like a dissolute Atlas, shrugged off its national debt, saying to creditors: It's nothing personal. The world is not amused, and Americans' subsequent downward social mobility is not pretty.

Florence Darkly, a millennial, is a "single mother" but such mothers now outnumber married ones. Newspapers have almost disappeared, so "print journalism had given way to a rabble of amateurs hawking unverified stories and always to an ideological purpose." Mexico has paid for an electronic border fence to keep out American refugees. Her Americans are living, on average, to 92, the economy is "powered by the whims of the retired," and, "desperate to qualify for entitlements, these days everyone couldn't wait to be old." People who have never been told "no" are apoplectic if they can't retire at 52. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are ubiquitous, so shaking hands is imprudent.

Soldiers in combat fatigues, wielding metal detectors, search houses for gold illegally still in private hands. The government monitors every movement and the IRS, renamed the Bureau for Social Contribution Assistance, siphons up everything, on the you-didn't-build-that principle: "Morally, your money does belong to everybody. The creation of capital requires the whole apparatus of the state to protect property rights, including intellectual property."

Social order collapses when hyperinflation follows the promiscuous printing of money after the Renunciation. This punishes those "who had a conscientious, caretaking relationship to the future." Government salaries and Medicare reimbursements are "linked to an inflation algorithm that didn't require further action from Congress. Even if a Snickers bar eventually cost $5 billion, they were safe."

In a Reason magazine interview, Shriver says, "I think it is in the nature of government to infinitely expand until it eats its young." In her novel, she writes:

"The state starts moving money around. A little fairness here, little more fairness there. ... Eventually social democracies all arrive at the same tipping point: where half the country depends on the other half. ... Government becomes a pricey, clumsy, inefficient mechanism for transferring wealth from people who do something to people who don't, and from the young to the old which is the wrong direction. All that effort, and you've only managed a new unfairness."

Florence learns to appreciate "the miracle of civilization." It is miraculous because "failure and decay were the world's natural state. What was astonishing was anything that worked as intended, for any duration whatsoever." Laughing mordantly as the apocalypse approaches, Shriver has a gimlet eye for the foibles of today's secure (or so it thinks) upper middle class, from Washington's Cleveland Park to Brooklyn. About the gentrification of the latter, she observes:

"Oh, you could get a facelift nearby, put your dog in therapy, or spend $500 at Ottawa on a bafflingly trendy dinner of Canadian cuisine (the city's elite was running out of new ethnicities whose food could become fashionable). But you couldn't buy a screwdriver, pick up a gallon of paint, take in your dry cleaning, get new tips on your high heels, copy a key, or buy a slice of pizza. Wealthy residents might own bicycles worth $5K, but no shop within miles would repair the brakes. ... High rents had priced out the very service sector whose presence at ready hand once helped to justify urban living."

The (only) good news from Shriver's squint into the future is that when Americans are put through a wringer, they emerge tougher, with less talk about "ADHD, gluten intolerance and emotional support animals."

Speaking to Reason, Shriver said: "I think that the bullet we dodged in 2008 is still whizzing around the planet and is going to hit us in the head." If so, this story has already been written.

George Will's email address is georgewill@washpost.com.

WASHINGTON POST WRITERS GROUP

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George Will: A wry squint into our grim future - NewsOK.com

Jennifer Burns

Ayn Rand is dead. Its been 35 years since hundreds of mourners filed by her coffin (fittingly accompanied by a dollar-sign-shaped flower arrangement), but it has been only four months since she truly died as a force in American politics. Yes, there was a flurry of articles identifying Rand lovers in the Trump administration, including Rex Tillerson and Mike Pompeo; yes, Ivanka Trump tweeted an inaccurate Rand quote in mid-February. But the effort to fix a recognizable right-wing ideology on President Donald Trump only obscures the more significant long-term trends that the election of 2016 laid bare. However much Trump seems like the Rand hero par excellence a wealthy man with a fiery belief in, well, himself his victory signals the exhaustion of the Republican Partys romance with Rand.

In electing Trump, the Republican base rejected laissez-faire economics in favor of economic nationalism. Full-fledged objectivism, the philosophy Rand invented, is an atheistic creed that calls for pure capitalism and a bare-bones government with no social spending on entitlement programs such as Social Security or Medicare. Its never appeared on the national political scene without significant dilution. But there was plenty of diluted Rand on offer throughout the primary season: Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Carly Fiorina and Ted Cruz all espoused traditional Republican nostrums about reducing the role of government to unleash American prosperity.

Yet none of this could match Trumps full-throated roar to build a wall or his protectionist plans for American trade. In the general election, Trump sought out new voters and independents using arguments traditionally associated with Democrats: deploying the power of the state to protect workers and guarantee their livelihoods, even at the cost of trade agreements and long-standing international alliances. Trumps economic promises electrified rural working-class voters the same way Bernie Sanders excited urban socialists. Where Rands influence has stood for years on the right for a hands-off approach to the economy, Trumps America first platform contradicts this premise by assuming that government policies can and should deliberately shape economic growth, up to and including punishing specific corporations. Likewise, his promise to craft trade policy in support of the American worker is the exact opposite of Rands proclamation that the essence of capitalisms foreign policy is free trade.

And theres little hope that Trumps closest confidants will reverse his decidedly anti-Randian course. The conservative Republicans who came to power with Trump in an almost accidental process may find they have to exchange certain ideals to stay close to him. True, Paul Ryan and Mike Pence have been able to breathe new life into Republican economic and social orthodoxies. For instance, in a nod to Pences religious conservatism, Trump shows signs of reversing his earlier friendliness to gay rights. And his opposition to Obamacare dovetails with Ryans long-held ambitions to shrink federal spending. Even so, there is little evidence that either Pence or Ryan would have survived a Republican primary battle against Trump or fared well in a national election; their fortunes are dependent on Trumps. And the president won by showing that the Republican base and swing voters have moved on from the traditional conservatism of Reagan and Rand.

What is rising on the right is not Randian fear of government but something far darker. It used to be that bright young things like Stephen Miller, the controversial White House aide, came up on Rand. In the 1960s, she inspired a rump movement of young conservatives determined to subvert the GOP establishment, drawing in future bigwigs such as Alan Greenspan. Her admirers were powerfully attracted to the insurgent presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater, whom Rand publicly supported. They swooned when she talked about the ethics of capitalism, delegitimizing programs like Medicare and Medicaid as immoral. They thrilled to her attack on the draft and other conservative pieties. At national conferences, they asked each other, Who is John Galt? (a reference to her novel Atlas Shrugged) and waved the black flag of anarchism, modified with a gold dollar sign.

Over time, most conservatives who stayed in politics outgrew these juvenile provocations or disavowed them. For example, Ryan moved swiftly to replace Rand with Thomas Aquinas when he was nominated in 2012 for vice president, claiming that the Catholic thinker was his primary inspiration (although it was copies of Atlas Shrugged, not Summa Theologiae, that he handed out to staffers). But former Randites retained her fiery hatred of government and planted it within the mainstream GOP. And it was Rand who had kindled their passions in the first place, making her the starting point for a generation of conservatives.

Now Rand is on the shelf, gathering dust with F.A. Hayek, Edmund Burke and other once-prominent conservative luminaries. Its no longer possible to provoke the elders by going on about John Galt. Indeed, many of the elders have by now used Randian references to name their yachts, investment companies and foundations.

Instead, young insurgent conservatives talk about race realism , argue that manipulated crime statistics mask growing social disorder and cast feminism as a plot against men. Instead of reading Rand, they take the red pill, indulging in an emergent internet counter-culture that reveals the principles of liberalism rights, equality, tolerance to be dangerous myths. Beyond Breitbart.com, ideological energy on the right now courses through tiny blogs and websites of the Dark Enlightenment, the latter-day equivalent of Rands Objectivist Newsletter and the many libertarian zines she inspired.

Once upon a time, professors tut-tutted when Rand spoke to overflow crowds on college campuses, where she lambasted left and right alike and claimed, improbably, that big business was Americas persecuted minority. She delighted in skewering liberal audience members and occasionally turned her scorn on questioners. But this was soft stuff compared with the insults handed out by Milo Yiannopoulos and the uproar that has greeted his appearances. Rand may have accused liberals of having a lust for power, but she never would have called Holocaust humor a harmless search for lulz, as Yiannopoulos gleefully does.

Indeed, the new ideas on the right have moved away from classical liberalism altogether. American conservatives have always had a mixed reaction to the Western philosophical tradition that emphasizes the sanctity of the individual. Religious conservatives, in particular, often struggle with Rand because her extreme embrace of individualism leaves little room for God, country, duty or faith. But Trump represents a victory for a form of conservatism that is openly illiberal and willing to junk entirely the traditional rhetoric of individualism and free markets for nationalism inflected with racism, misogyny and xenophobia.

Mixed in with Rands vituperative attacks on government was a defense of the individuals rights in the face of a powerful state. This single-minded focus could yield surprising alignments, such as Rands opposition to drug laws and her support of legal abortion. And although liberals have always loved to hate her, over the next four years, they may come to miss her defense of individual autonomy and liberty. Ayn Rand is dead. Long live Ayn Rand!

Jennifer Burns is an associate professor of history at Stanford University and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.

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Jennifer Burns: Randian philosophy losing cachet among modern conservatives - Norwich Bulletin