Category Archives: Ayn Rand

From The Objective Standard, Vol. 11, No. 4.

Photo credit: Courtesy of Ayn Rand Archives

Born and raised under the religious collectivism of czarist Russia and then the Marxist collectivism of the Bolsheviks, Ayn Rand became a champion of Western, non-Russian thought: realism, reason, and individualism. This essay provides a brief survey of her intellectual and professional development.

Ayn Rand was born Alisa Rosenbaum on February 2, 1905, in St. Petersburg, Russia. Her parents, though not professional intellectuals, had intellectual interests, from politics to the arts. Her father, Zinovy Zacharovich, had attended university and was a pharmacist. Well read and interested particularly in politics, he had aspired to be a writer and, Rand reported, considered spreading ideas to be the most important thing a person could do. Her mother, Anna Borisovna, was a language teacher and held salons in her home, where she hosted intellectual discussions.

The intellectual atmosphere of the Rosenbaum family seems to have been rather typical for a European-oriented upper-middle-class family of the early 20th century. Of particular significance were two aspects of Rands family life, one positive and one neutral. Among family members, Enlightenment premises such as free will and the importance of individual responsibility, purposefulness, and pride were widely accepted. These comments in letters from her mother are typical:

Everyman is an architect of his own fortune. . . . Every person is the maker of his own happiness.1

[I]t is boring to walk down a smooth, well-trodden path. Anyone can do that. It is conquering one obstacle after another, getting around barrier after barrier, all the while traveling toward ones firmly chosen goalthat is the fate only of those of strong character. The weak immediately doubt their own abilities and the rightness of their choice. They bow their heads, leave the road, lower their arms and obey the orders of those stronger than they. The strong, who grow stronger in battle, become ten times as strong, lift their heads high and without looking sideways, will walk down their chosen road with firm steps, knowing that they have the right to it and that in front of them lies the goal which they had been striving toward all their lives and which they will reach regardless of any obstacles.2

Perhaps more important than these positive values was the relative lack of negative values, for the young Alisa basically was left alone to develop on her own. Her mother nagged her about such mundane things as diet and health, and she disapproved of Alisas choice of career, but she was not greatly intrusive on this issue. In fact, she provided Alisa with a French tutor and challenging reading material.

Mother literally did not allow me to read any Russian classics apart from whichever we got in schooluntil I graduated from high school. She insisted that we read French. It was strictly for the purpose of having us at home in the language. So its she who started me on Hugo. And Dumas. But not Russian classics. It wasnt censorship because we were too young; it was strictly a linguistic issue.3

Even regarding religion, her family was nonintrusive. They were at least nominally Jewishher mother spearheaded the celebration of the High Holidays, but her father was an agnostic, and the family even had Christmas trees. Her mother was more of a classic Reformed Jew, that isas Rand later put itshe was religious in a kind of emotional way, but not by conviction, more by tradition, and probably to please her own mother. As a result, no attempt was made to force religion on the Rosenbaum children, nor were they subjected to any religious training. They were fortunate because what they missed out on is one of the principal obstacles that children have to overcome in their development into rational adulthood; Alisa did not have to spend mental energy overcoming the irrationality of religion. The children were, as Rand said, neglected intellectually, but she realized that this had an advantage: [Mother] didnt try to inculcate any conventional morality or anything.

In sum, the Rosenbaum household was one that at least allowed forif not actually fosteredthe development of an independent thinker.

Rand described the leitmotif of her early years as a quest for whys. This curiosity was fostered when she taught herself to read at the age of six, two years before she would have learned reading in school. She was aware of books and reading, and was unwilling to wait.

It was simply that there is such a thing as reading and writing and I wanted to know how its done. . . . I grasped what it was that reading consisted of, and I asked people to show me how to write my own name. And I wrote in block letters. Then I would ask different words. And learn more letters. . . .

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1. Letters from her mother, March 7, 1926, and January 1, 1934. For this and other letters from Russia, see the Ayn Rand Papers collection in the Ayn Rand Archives at the Ayn Rand Institute, Irvine, CA.

2. Letter from her mother, February 5, 1933.

3. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes from Ayn Rand are from her 19601961 biographical interviews, audio tapes and a transcript of which are housed at the Ayn Rand Archives, Irvine, CA.

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Ayn Rand's Intellectual Development - The Objective Standard

This essay is part of a compilation ebook, Objectivism, available at Amazon.com.

Ayn Rand (19051982) was an American novelist and philosopher, and the creator of Objectivism, which she called a philosophy for living on earth.

Rands most widely read novels are The Fountainhead, a story about an independent and uncompromising architect; and Atlas Shrugged, a story about the role of the mind in human life and about what happens to the world when the thinkers and producers mysteriously disappear. Her most popular nonfiction books are The Virtue of Selfishness, a series of essays about the foundations and principles of the morality of self-interest; and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, a series of essays about what capitalism is and why it is the only moral social system.

Rand was born in Russia, where she attended grade school and university; studied history, philosophy, and screenwriting; and witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution and the birth of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. In 1925, she left the burgeoning communist state, telling Soviet authorities she was going for a brief visit with relatives in America, and never returned.

She soon made her way to Hollywood, where she worked as a screenwriter, married actor Frank OConnor, and wrote her first novel, We The Living. She then moved to New York City, where she wrote Anthem (a novelette), The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged, numerous articles and essays, and several nonfiction books in which she defined and elaborated the principles of Objectivism.

Rands staunch advocacy of reason (as against faith and whim), self-interest (as against self-sacrifice), individualism and individual rights (as against collectivism and group rights), and capitalism (as against all forms of statism) make her both the most controversial and most important philosopher of the 20th century.

Describing Objectivism, Rand wrote: My philosophy, in essence, is 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.

For a good biography of Rand, see Jeffery Brittings Ayn Rand or Scott McConnells 100 Voices: An Oral History of Ayn Rand. For a brief presentation of the principles of Objectivism, see What is Objectivism? For the application of these principles to cultural and political issues of the day, subscribe to The Objective Standard, the preeminent source for commentary from an Objectivist perspective.

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Who Is Ayn Rand? - The Objective Standard - The Objective Standard

In Donald Trumps America first policy we can detect an unintended reincarnation of Ayn Rand, suggests Arnold Steinberg in The American Spectator.

Rands ideas may well have influenced Trump in some indirect way (the cultural impact of her philosophy is far-reaching). And I would welcome signs of such influence, having written two books that advocate for aligning our nations foreign policy with Rands morality of rational egoism. But when we look past Trumps rhetoric, how committed is he to the principle of putting the self-interest of Americans first?

Trump differs profoundly from Rands conception of American self-interest. Whereas Rands distinctive approach upholds Americas founding ideals of individualism and freedom, Trump exhibits an authoritarian and collectivist streak. We can see that by looking at Trumps approach with a wide-angle lens, one that includes aspects unaddressed in Mr. Steinbergs essay.

Lets start with the seeming echoes of Rands approach in Trumps rhetoric. For Mr. Steinberg and many others (myself included), Trumps rhetoric about firmly confronting enemies resonates with a bracingly self-assertive tone. Regarding alliances, Trump has pointedly and rightly asked, whats in it for us? Trump might do some good, if he sticks to that path. Mr. Steinberg aptly notes, however, that Trumps foreign policy is evolving, but reports that the president remains a critic of using American boots on the ground to build nations or to spread democracy. And he is unlikely to give foreign aid to socialist idiots.

These points call to mind Ayn Rands distinctive approach to foreign policy, which is predicated on her basic philosophic worldview. Rand was a thoroughgoing individualist, and her political views from her support for laissez-faire capitalism to her view that our foreign policy should be guided by the principle of rational egoism stem from that. Individualism regards every person as an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life, a right derived from his nature as a rational being. Man, in Rands view, is capable of using reason to identify and pursue goals necessary for his own flourishing. Thus, for Rand, governments only proper function to protect the individual rights of its citizens domestically and in foreign policy.

Crucially, that rules out treating our citizens as cannon fodder (through a military draft and selfless missions, such as Vietnam and the nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan), or disposing of their wealth by giving handouts to other countries (through foreign aid or international welfare schemes). For Rand, who vehemently opposed the Vietnam war as an instance of senseless, altruistic, self-sacrificial slaughter, the only moral justification for war is self-defense: the elimination of threats against American lives and freedom with decisive force.

But does the reality of Trumps actual foreign policy positions match his rhetoric? Consider two vital implications of a self-interested foreign policy: the paramount importance of moral judgment; and an uncompromising advocacy of free trade. From these positions, Trump diverges sharply.

Rational judgment is critical if we are to sort friend from foe (and everything in between), and act accordingly. Whats true for an individual is doubly true for a nations foreign policy. This entails a commitment to facts and judging other regimes by objective moral standards. We have much to gain from free nations, and a great deal to worry about from regimes that violate the rights of their own citizens, because these latter typically seek to do the same beyond their borders.

Consider Trumps startling assessment of the Russian tyrant Vladimir Putin. Trump fiercely admires Putin, whom he recently praised as a bright and very talented man. This is the same Putin who imprisons reporters, murders political opponents, and wages wars of conquest. Isnt Putin a killer? asked Bill OReilly in a recent interview. Trump responded: There are a lot of killers. Weve got a lot of killers. What do you think? Our countrys so innocent? To admire this killer and then stick up for him is horrendous. To denigrate America as somehow morally on par with an authoritarian regime like Russia: thats the last thing we would expect from a president who really believes American interests are worth defending.

A self-interested foreign policy also entails a commitment to (genuine) free trade without trade barriers, protective tariffs, or special privileges. It means, as Rand noted, the opening of the worlds trade routes to free international exchange and competition among the private citizens of all countries dealing directly with one another. Thats a logical expression of individualism applied to politics and economics. Rand observed that free trade in the 19th century liberated the world by undercutting statist regimes and led to the longest period of general peace in human history.

Consider Trumps vociferous opposition to globalization and international trade. Trumps chief strategist, Steve Bannon, pushes economic nationalism and by all accounts, the president agrees with him. Reflecting that collectivist mindset, Trump vilifies foreigners for stealing jobs and luring away our factories. He promises to solve these problems through protectionism and strongman tactics. Trump has openly threatened to punish American companies that leave the country. This is one more example of Trumps marked authoritarianism. The president emulates his Russian hero.

Trumps collectivist and authoritarian streak underscores his divergence from a genuinely self-interested approach, which rests on the American values of individualism and freedom. Based on those values, what constitutes our national self-interest? It is nothing more than the aggregate interest of each individual American to the protection of his or her rights: the freedom to enjoy life, liberty, and property unmolested by foreign aggressors.

The idea of American exceptionalism, in my view, captures the achievement of Americas political system a system predicated on the moral idea of protecting the individuals right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Thats a virtue that Ayn Rand, who recognized the evil of authoritarianism and collectivism in all their forms, admired in America. In Trumps statements we can sometimes hear a welcome pro-America motif, but the presidents signature positions dont live up to that ideal.

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How Much Ayn Rand Is There in Trump's 'America First' Foreign ... - American Spectator

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Judging Milo Yiannopoulos, ft. Ayn Rand (Episode #24 of MY PODCAST) - ChicagoNow (blog)

From The Objective Standard, Vol. 12, No. 1.

Images: Ayn Rand, Courtesy of Ayn Rand Archives / Friedrich Nietzsche, Wikimedia

Editors note: This article is an edited version by Michael Berliner of Dr. Ridpaths article originally written for a 2005 project that was canceled. Because the article was written prior to the publication of A Companion to Ayn Rand, Allan Gotthelf and Greg Salmieri, eds. (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), it makes no reference to that books chapter on Nietzsche by Lester Hunt.

I disagree with [Nietzsche] emphatically on all fundamentals.Ayn Rand (1962)1

I do not want to be confused with Nietzsche in any respect.Ayn Rand (1964)2

Why was Ayn Rand determined to distance herself from Nietzsche? Because in her time, as today, various writers portrayed her as a Nietzschean, claiming that she embraced his ideas and modeled her characters accordinglywhich she did not.

The notion of Rand as a Nietzschean was promulgated most viciously in Whittaker Chamberss 1957 review of Atlas Shrugged, published in National Review. Although he acknowledged Rands debt to Aristotle, Chambers wrote that she is indebted, and much more heavily, to Nietzsche and that her operatic businessmen are, in fact, Nietzschean supermen.3 Since then, similar claims have been made in countless articles and books, including Goddess of the Market, in which Jennifer Burns declared that Rands entire career might be considered a Nietzschean phase.4

Was Rand influenced by Nietzsche? To some extent, yes. In the 1930s, she called him her favorite philosopher and referred to Thus Spake Zarathustra as her bible. As late as 1942, Nietzsche quotes adorned the first pages of each section of her manuscript of The Fountainhead. But from her first encounter with his ideas, Rand knew that her ideas were fundamentally different from his.

Rand first read Nietzsche in 1920, at the age of fifteen, when a cousin told her that Nietzsche had beaten her to her ideas. Naturally, Rand recalled in a 1961 interview, I was very curious to read him. And I started with Zarathustra, and my feelings were quite mixed. I very quickly saw that he hadnt beat me to [my ideas], and that it wasnt exactly my ideas; that it was not what I wanted to say, but I certainly was enthusiastic about the individualist part of it. I had not expected that there existed anybody who would go that far in praising the individual.5

However attracted to Nietzsches seeming praise of the individual, Rand had her doubts even then about his philosophy. As she learned more about philosophy and about Nietzsches ideas, she became increasingly disillusioned. I think I read all his works; I did not read the smaller letters or epigrams, but everything that was translated in Russian. And thats when the disappointment started, more and more.6 The final break came in late 1942, when she removed her favorite Nietzsche quote (The noble soul has reverence for itself)7 from the title page of The Fountainhead. By this time, she had concluded that political and ethical ideasincluding individualismare not fundamental but rest on ideas in metaphysics and epistemology. And this is where the differences between her philosophy and that of Nietzsche most fundamentally lie.

The roots of both Nietzsches and Rands philosophies can be traced to their youths.

Nietzsche (18441900) was raised in a strict Pietist household, and he fixated on the cosmos as the stage on which God and Satan battled for mens souls. Beginning in his youth, Nietzsche read widely in Greek and Nordic myth, occult literature, and heroic sagas, all of which he interpreted as the form taken by a cosmic war acting within the minds of men. He sought evidence for this cosmic storm in the power of visions and drives within himself, and, upon entering university to study theology, he pledged his life to first knowing and then serving this cosmic storm. He pursued this pledge in all of his writings, and, by the end of his working life, he believed that his insights into this storm were of cosmic significance.

By contrast, Rand (19051982) grew up in a predominantly secular household, was exposed to a world of productiveness, prosperity, stable order, and romantic arta world in which, through the exercise of reason, one could discover facts, grasp laws of nature, and thereby work for success and individual happiness. By an early age, Rand had identified going by reason as her leitmotif, had rejected faith and God, and had decided on a career in writing. In university she studied history and philosophy, and, upon graduation, left communist Russia for America in order to be free of tyrannical rule.

Compared at the beginnings of their respective professional lives, Nietzsches and Rands philosophies stand in profound opposition over two basic issues. Whereas Nietzsche held that the subject matter of philosophy is a cosmic storm of warring forces; Rand held that philosophy studies the fundamental nature of existence, of man, and of mans relationship to existence.8 Whereas Nietzsche held that the proper method for studying philosophy is to look inward, at activities within ones self as a guide to the basic forces of the universe; Rand held that a proper method is to look outward, at objects in the world, and to build, through reason, a conceptual understanding of man and his relationship to existence. Nietzsche referred to his system of views as his ontological myth; Rand held that philosophy is the science of fundamentals.

In 1958, Rand wrote in her philosophical notebook that, in the 19th and 20th centuries, philosophy had admitted into its domain a series of fantastic irrationalities, which, being cosmology, were not part of the rational science of philosophy. As she emphasized the point, Cosmology has to be thrown out of philosophy (italics hers).9

This fundamental difference between Rands and Nietzsches philosophies was in place by their respective university years and would expand with time. This will become increasingly evident as we examine and compare their philosophies.

As a university student, Nietzsche had given up his Pietist vision of the cosmos. He still believed that some kind of forces raged throughout the cosmos, but he no longer believed those forces to be God and Satan, nor that religious faith was the means to accessing whatever forces exist.

Guided by Greek myth and three philosophersHeraclitus, Schopenhauer, and HegelNietzsche developed an early version of his cosmological myth. The most profound influence on Nietzsches life was the myth of Dionysus, who reigned in a hidden realm of formless turmoil and traveled to the human realm in order to show men the boiling cauldron out of which they had temporarily arisen and back into which they would be absorbed.

From a very early paper, The Dionysiac World View (1870), to the last passage of a grand posthumous collection of Nietzsches most significant passages, the Dionysian model of the cosmos remained central to Nietzsches worldview. As he put it in The Will to Power:

And do you know what the world is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; . . . a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing; . . . a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness: this, my Dionysian world of the eternally self-creating, eternally self-destroying, this mystery world.10

Alongside the Dionysian myth, Nietzsche revered Heraclitus, whom he characterized as having the highest power of intuitive conception11 and from whom he took the view that the universe is a random process, a flux, a becoming, out of which specific things emerge, temporarily, and then are reabsorbed. This underlying flux works through the increase and release of tensionthat is, through conflict, struggle, the interaction of positive and negative forces. All things are unifications of opposite states, Heraclitus said. All things happen according to strife and necessity;12 War is father of all and king of all;13 and the world is The eternal and exclusive Becoming, the total instability of all reality, which continually works and never is, as Heraclitus teaches.14

The young Nietzsche was convinced that the universe consisted of two contradictory forces, that these forces are more fundamental than the entities that they create and then reabsorb, and that process, activity, and changenot the things that act and changeare the cosmic fundamentals. There is no being behind the doing, he wrote; the doer is merely a fiction added to the deed; the deed is everything.15 What is basic is not that which acts, but activity itself.

Nietzsche found further support for this view of the cosmos in Hegels belief that the existing cosmos (Hegels Nature) was a realm of interacting and contradictory manifestations of one ultimate force. This dialectical explanation for all change would underlie all of Nietzsches further writings. On this view, reality consists of conflicting, contradictory forces. And entities, including men, are the arenas in which these forces clash. This Hegelian view, Nietzsche held, is the basis of an explanation for all things, all change, all evolutionary advances. (Hegels argument that one cosmic goal was being sought through change in the universe would also come to underlie Nietzsches final cosmic view.)

From Schopenhauer came a view of the cosmos that would prompt Nietzsche to write his first major work, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (the work that Ayn Rand said really finished Nietzsche for her). Unlike Hegels cosmos, Schopenhauers cosmic force was a Dionysian Will bent on destruction, although Nietzsche gave it a more positive connotation. With The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsches early metaphysics, that of two fundamentally opposing cosmic forces interacting, was complete.

In 1881, however, Nietzsche experienced a lightning bolt of inspiration about the ultimate nature of the cosmos. It was given to him that the cosmos was not composed of two opposing forces in dialectical struggle, but rather was one force in two opposing forms. And this force was not Schopenhauers Will-to-Destruction or Hegels Will (to cosmic self-discovery), but rather a cosmic Will to Power, a Will on a relentless quest for ever-increasing cosmic power.

In the next eight years, Nietzsche would interpret everything of interest to him as surface manifestations of this one basic force. The cosmos as Will to Power was Nietzsches ultimate cosmological myth. According to this myth, everything and every event ultimately is reducible to units of will, which he called quanta. These quanta, as he described them, are not things but processes, active centers of force or energy. And despite Nietzsches use of the term Will, he does not have in mind any aspect of consciousness, but rather some mystical force that underlies all consciousness and matter.

What are these quanta doing? Seeking power. The only true existent, wrote Nietzsche, is the willing to become stronger, from each center of force outward. This is the most elementary fact, which results in a becoming, an acting.16

In Nietzsches world, there are no things, no individual entitiesthose are all mental constructions. True reality is activity, power seeking, conflict. Reality, at root, is made up of little imperialistic centers of will, all striving to gain power at the expense of others. Reality, including all life, is reducible to quanta seeking to dominate neighboring quanta and not to be dominated by them. This is Nietzsches version of the war that Heraclitus said was the Father of all and the King of all. In this process, as quanta randomly interact, two strains of quanta-combinations arise. Those encompassing greater strength and capacity for coordination are Nietzsches virile or master strain of the Will to Power, whereas the weaker and less capable are the decadent or slave strain.

Because life is a biologically evolved organization of quanta, it reflects the process of power seeking in which the quanta, whether virile or decadent, are engaged. Thus, Nietzsches Dionysian interpretation of life: Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, conquest of the foreign and the weaker, oppression, harshness, imposition of its own forms.17

Although living things, as individual constellations of quanta, are necessarily egoistic to the core,18 said Nietzsche, the enhancement of their power, rather than the lives of individual men, is the ultimate cosmic goal. Nothing exists for itself alone.19 And further, Nietzsche tells us, There is nothing to life that has value besides the degree of power.20 The deepest desire of life is to create beyond and above itself.21 In other words, power is not for the sake of life; rather, life exists to serve power.

In sum, Nietzsches view of reality denies the fundamentality of individual entities. On the basis of an alleged mystical insight, he asserts the existence and omnipresence of a cosmic Will to Power as the true metaphysical fundamental. Activity is more fundamental than that which acts, and activity is the product of a dialectical clash of contradictions. Power (not life) is the ultimate value. Life is essentially conflict. And life in service to the cosmic Will to Power is the highest fate available to man.

These positions put him squarely in opposition to Ayn Rand.

It is difficult to imagine a metaphysics more opposite to Nietzsches than that of Ayn Rand. Nietzsches worldview is dominated by turmoil, flux, dialectics, contradictions, cosmological mythswith centers of power-seeking activity as the ultimate constituents. In contrast, Ayn Rands metaphysics consists of the axioms of existence, consciousness, and identity, and, as a corollary, the law of causality.

In Rands view, the world out there consists of entities existing independent of consciousness, a world where existence has primacy over consciousness, a world of stable natural law. Her metaphysics, as we shall see, leads to views of human nature, epistemology, ethics, and politics that are opposite to those engendered by Nietzsches metaphysics of turmoil and flux.

Rand held that certain primaries are inescapable, directly observable, irreducible to anything more fundamental, implicit in all facts and knowledge, and rationally undeniable. These axiomatic facts are existence (something exists), consciousness (of which I am aware) and identity (and it is something specific). They are implicit in perception and used in any attempt to deny them.

Regarding the primacy of existence, wrote Rand, every phenomenon of consciousness is derived from ones awareness of the external world.22 Thus, man gains knowledge of reality by looking outward,23 and the development of human cognition starts with the ability to perceive things, i.e., entities.24

In Rands metaphysics, entities exist out there. They are not mere illusory mental concoctions, as Nietzsche claims. And, contrary to Nietzsche, they are not cosmologically intuited constellations of unfolding contradictory forces; they are what we perceive them to be:

A thing iswhat it is; its characteristics constitute its identity. An existent apart from its characteristic would be an existent apart from its identity, which means: a nothing, a non-existent.25

Entities are what they are; A is A; to be is to be something specific; existence is identity. Thus, a contradiction cannot exist; nothing can contradict its own identity, nor can a part contradict the whole; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate ones mind.26

Nietzsches metaphysics was anathema to Rand, who held that change cannot be fundamental, for there is no change without something changing. Nietzsches dynamic universe, wrote Leonard Peikoff, was a resurrection of the ancient theory of Heraclitus: reality is a stream of change without entities or of action without anything that acts; it is a wild, chaotic flux.27 And Rand rejected it outright. All the countless forms, motions, combinations and dissolutions of elements within the universe, she wrote, are caused and determined by the identities of the elements involved.28

Ayn Rands world is not the mystery world of Dionysus. It is a causal world of lawful order. Whether its basic constituent elements are atoms, or subatomic particles, or some yet undiscovered forms of energy, wrote Rand, the universe is not ruled by a consciousness or by will or by chance, but by the Law of Identity.29

Rands world is not a Dionysian cauldron. It is not false, cruel, contradictory, demoralizing, without sense.30 And it is not a place in which mens lives are characterized by conflict, mystery, and fate. It is a world of entities, the identities of which determine their capacities to acta world of natural law and knowable fact. Consequently, it is a world in which individuals can live and prosper.

In Nietzsches view, as we saw earlier, the understanding (or naturalizing, as he termed it) of any subject matter involves reducing it to little bundles of power-seeking energy (i.e., quanta). Human beings are reducible to constellations of quanta, each caught up in the cosmic struggle to increase its power. From this, Nietzsche drew several inferences: . . .

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1. Ayn Rand, Q&A, The Intellectual Bankruptcy of Our Age, The Ayn Rand Program radio series, April 5, 1962, in Ayn Rand Answers, edited by Robert Mayhew (New York: New American Library, 2005), 117.

2. Ayn Rand, Objectivism vs. Nietzscheanism, Ayn Rand on Campus radio program, December 13, 1964.

3. Whittaker Chambers, Big Sister Is Watching You, National Review, December 28, 1957.

4. Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 303n4.

5. Ayn Rand, interview by Barbara Branden, transcript 198, The Ayn Rand Archives, Irvine, CA.

6. Rand, interview, 200.

7. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1989), 228.

8. Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It (New York: New American Library, 1984), 2.

9. Ayn Rand, Journals of Ayn Rand, edited by David Harriman (New York: Penguin, 1997), 698.

10. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1968), 54950.

11. Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy during the Tragic Age of the Greeks, quoted in F. A. Lea, The Tragic Philosopher (London: Methuen: 1957), 46.

12. Heraclitus, B80.

13. Heraclitus, B53.

14. Nietzsche, Tragic Age of the Greeks, quoted in Lea, The Tragic Philosopher, 46.

15. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Book One, sec. 13, translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1969), 45.

16. Nietzsche, Will to Power, quoted in G. A. Morgan, What Nietzsche Means (New York: Harper, 1965), 277.

17. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, quoted in Morgan, What Nietzsche Means, 61.

18. Nietzsche, Will to Power, quoted in Lea, The Tragic Philosopher, 285.

19. Nietzsche, Will to Power, quoted in Lea, The Tragic Philosopher, 212.

20. Nietzsche, Will to Power, quoted in Morgan, What Nietzsche Means, 118.

21. Nietzsche, Will to Power, quoted in Morgan, What Nietzsche Means, 63.

22. Ayn Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, 2nd ed. (New York: New American Library, 1990), 29.

23. Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It, 29.

24. Ayn Rand, Art and Cognition, in The Romantic Manifesto (New York: New American Library, 1971), 46.

25. Leonard Peikoff, The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy, in Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, 105.

26. Ayn Rand, This is John Galt Speaking, in Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual (New York: New American Library, 1961), 126.

27. Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels (New York: New American Library, 1982), 51.

28. Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It, 25.

29. Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It, 25.

30. Nietzsche, Will to Power, quoted in Morgan, What Nietzsche Means, 50.

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Ayn Rand Contra Nietzsche - The Objective Standard

On November 8th of this year, the unthinkable happened. Donald Trump was elected president. Although his campaign sounded more populist that free-market fundamentalist, his choices for cabinet tell a different story. Liberals and progressives and just plain poor people are deeply concerned about the future. Alternet has an article whose title spells it out: Its Ayn Rands America Now: Republicans Have Stripped the Country of Its Last Shred of Morality. Now Trump is hardly the ideal of Objectivists or Libertarians. He doesnt embrace freedom for the individual, not with his pro life and anti-immigrant stance; certainly not with his intention to punish anyone who burns the flag. But the Republican Party representing the 1%, may well make the country Ayn Rands America.

Many enemies of Ayn Rands philosophy (and there are many) like to call her a psychopath. Of course, many of these same people call anyone they disapprove of a psychopath. Is she one? Is her philosophy an expression of psychopathy, par excellence?

A friend of mine who, like me, is a socialist and also a psychopath has admitted that, were he wealthy, he would probably change his politics. I admitted I probably would too. We psychopaths are on our own side first and foremost. In that respect, we think in a way that is similar to the way Ayn Rand thought. But there is a difference. We are amoral and Ayn Rand was very moralistic indeed. We consider altruism optional. If we want to be altruistic, thats our business. She considered altruism evil. Altruism does not mean mere kindness or generosity, but the sacrifice of the best among men to the worst, the sacrifice of virtues to flaws, of ability to incompetence, of progress to stagnation and the subordinating of all life and of all values to the claims of anyones suffering. She does like benevolence which consists of acts of good will towards those one likes. But suffering should not entitle anyone to make demands. Only productivity entitles one to anything. Well, lack of empathy is harmonious with the refusal to considering the fact of suffering a moral imperative. Does that mean psychopaths are against the social safety nets? No. Rational recognition that life in a society with safety nets protects us as well as others can make government benefits look desirable for everyone who belongs to the 99%. Ayn Rand equated poverty with inferiority. She believed and preached that those who encounter economic hardship are incompetent and lacking in value. My article, Libertarianism and Psychopathy, is a rebuttal of that claim.

Her enemies, in addition to denigrating her writing and philosophical strength, made much of an infatuation she had with a serial killer, William Hickman.Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should, she wrote, continuing that he had no regard whatsoever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. He has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel other people. The fact that he brutally murdered some little girls doesnt enter into her description of Hickman, nor does she give any indication that she admired murder. She is said to have modeled the character, Howard Roark of The Fountainhead on Hickman but only his indifference to public opinion seems to have made it into Howard Roarks description. Roark, the architect, was all about producing great buildings. Her mention of the Superman in the above quote is a remnant of her earlier attachment to the philosophy of Nietzsche which she had discarded during her We The Living period. There are actually two versions of the latter, one of which shows Nietzsches influence and the latter of which does not. Although she admired Hickmans sublime indifference to other peoples opinions, she didnt seem to share it.

Ayn Rand put a lot of emphasis on living in a way that is consistent with ones values. However, she didnt manage to achieve that kind of consistency in her own life. While social programs such as Medicare was anathema to her,

she collected Medicare benefits to finance her treatment for lung cancer. She also collected Social Security. In comparing Medicare with criminal expropriation, she said, the private hoodlum has a slight edge of moral superiority: he has no power to devastate an entire nation and his victims are not legally disarmed.

Her excuse was that she paid into these programs so she deserved to benefit. But, if she really considered these programs a form of robbery, she must not have considered the benefits true recompense for the contributions the beneficiaries put into the program. If that were true, after all, the programs could not be compared to bank robbery at all but, instead, to withdrawing ones own savings from from the bank. And she didnt collect under the name of Ayn Rand. She used her married name, Mrs. Frank OConnor. She didnt want the public, including her followers, to know she collected Medicare and Social Security, just as she didnt want them to know she got lung cancer from smoking. She had always glorified smoking. All her followers emulated her. She denied that smoking caused cancer and insisted that cancer came from a defect of character. Once she found out she had the disease, she put out her cigarette and never smoked again. But refused, when asked, to make a public statement warning others about the dangers of smoking. She probably still believed smoking came from a deficit in her character of which she was ashamed. Thats more narcissistic than psychopathic. Her classes in Objectivism which were attended by worshipful admirers provided all the narcissistic supply a narc could ever want. She became increasingly intolerant of disagreement among her friends. She discarded them one by one on grounds of even trivial differences. She ended life cut off from all but the few who were completely submissive. Expressing disgust at the collective stupidity of the masses, she fastidiously withdrew from public life, condescending only to put out a newsletter that was her unchallenged word dispensed to the faithful.

Critics of Trump are divided on whether to call him a narc or a path. His ruthlessness seems psychopathic but his constant bragging and idealization of himself are very narcissistic. His candidacy didnt focus very much on a clear-cut ideology. Instead, he urged the voters to believe in him as the solution. He would make America great again. Once he could do it.

I think both Trump and Rand wanted to create an ideal human being and to embody that ideal. People refer to this idea as the narcissistic false self. That self is a kind of superman, the grandiose god of the narc. Sam Vaknin has called Hitler a narcissist and has stated that a narcissist is more dangerous than a psychopath. Time will tell.

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Donald Trump & Ayn Rand | CLUSTER B

Dan Hayes, ReasonI'm saddened to announce the death of Jerome Tuccille, the best-selling biographer of Donald Trump (among others) and author of the single-best political memoir in existence, It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand. He was 80 years old.

Jerry's son, J.D. Tuccille, is a columnist for Reason and we extend our deepest condolences to him and his family. The libertarian movement has lost one of its greats with his passing, a phenomenal writer and thinker whose intellectual curiosity was only outmatched by his energy and honesty.

Jerry's professional home page is here and his Amazon page is here. An investment manager by day, he wrote more than 30 books over the course of his career, on topics ranging such as his quixotic run for governor of New York on the Libertarian Party ticket; biographies of Donald Trump, Alan Greenspan, Barry Diller, and Rupert Murdoch; and histories of the Gallo wine empire and black "buffalo soliders" who fought with distinction in the Spanish-American War even as they faced institutional racism in the Army. There were also novels such as Gallery of Fools (about inept art-heist criminals inspired by shady family members), analyses of "radical libertarianism" and futurism, investment-strategy books, and important contributions to the critical literature on Ernest Hemingway.

At Reason, we were lucky and honored to interview Jerry many times over the past decade. Here's our interview with him about The Roughest Riders: The Untold Story of the Black Soldiers in the Spanish-American War, a book which showcases his talent for finding lost pockets of history that never should have been forgotten.

Jerry was also the first person to publish a biography on Donald Trump, doing so back in the mid-1980s as the future president was beginning to make his mark on the New York real estate scene. We talked with him in the fall of 2015, as the billionaire's bid for the GOP nomination moved from comic sideshow to serious business. This interview is a reminder of one of the great things about Jerry: If you had a sharp insight, you can be pretty sure he had beaten you to it by a couple of decades.

Other interviews with him include a discussion of Gallo Be Thy Name, his history of the world's greatest wine-making empire, and the reissue of 1972's It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand.

Jerry wrote for Reason magazine over the years (read his archive) and here's an excerpt of his bracingly caustic 1983 takedown of books by Alvin Toffler and Isaac Asimov. From "Spare Us These High-Tech Utopias!":

Asimov seems totally oblivious to economic principles... He blames just about everything, including inflation, on overpopulation: too many people means too much demand and, hence, rising prices. He overlooks all the inflationary evils of big government, including the fact that we actually pay farmers not to produce food in this country. If too many people cause inflation and economic depression, why is Hong Kong, literally teeming with people, so prosperous while socialistic, underpopulated countries stagnate?

Asimov makes an eloquent case for getting government off the back of science. He believes in free, unregulated scientific research, unhampered by governmental restriction. His field he would decontrol, while imposing Draconian controls over just about everything else.

What arrogance! What a pity he didn't extend his case for freedom to the whole arena of economic and social relationships. Alas, when reading Asimov, it pays to be discriminating. The man is witty, and he's a charmer. The Roving Mind is chock-full of stimulating, well-stated ideas. It's just that some of the ideas happen to be dangerous.

Farewell, Jerome Tuccille. You made the world a better and more interesting place and you left everyone you touched through your writings smarter and excited to change the world.

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Jerome Tuccille, Author of It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand and More, RIP - Reason (blog)

Submitted by Steve Simpson via The Foundation for Economic Education,

After Donald Trump announced a number of cabinet picks who happen to be fans of Ayn Rand, a flurry of articles appeared claiming that Trump intended to create an Objectivist cabal within his administration.

Ayn Rand-acolyte Donald Trump stacks his cabinet with fellow Objectivists, proclaimed one article. Would that it were so. The novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand was a passionate champion of individual freedom and laissez-faire capitalism and a fierce opponent of authoritarianism. For her, government exists solely to protect our rights, not to meddle in the economy or to direct our private lives.

A president who truly understood Rands philosophy would not be cozying up to Putin, bullying companies to keep manufacturing plants in the United States, or promising insurance for everybody among many other things Trump has said and done.

And while its certainly welcome news that several of Trumps cabinet picks admire Rand, its not surprising. Her novel Atlas Shrugged depicts a world in decline as it slowly strangles its most productive members. The novel celebrates the intelligent and creative individuals who produce wealth, many of whom are businessmen. So it makes sense that businessmen like Rex Tillerson and Andy Puzder would be among the novels millions of fans.

But a handful of fans in the administration hardly signals that Trumps would be an Ayn Rand administration. The claims about Rands influence in the administration are vastly overblown.

Even so, there is at least one parallel we can draw between a Trump administration and Rands novels, although its not favorable to Trump. As a businessman and a politician, Trump epitomizes a phenomenon that Rand harshly criticized throughout her career, especially in Atlas Shrugged. Rand called it pull peddling. The popular term today is cronyism. But the phenomenon is the same: attempting to succeed, not through production and trade, but by trading influence and favors with politicians and bureaucrats.

Cronyism has been a big issue in recent years among many thinkers and politicians on the Right, who have criticized big government because it often favors some groups and individuals over others or picks winners and losers.

Commentators on the Left, too, often complain about influence peddling, money in politics, and special interests, all of which are offered as hallmarks of corruption in government. And by all indications, Trump was elected in part because he was somehow seen as a political outsider who will drain the swamp.

But as the vague phrase drain the swamp shows, theres a lot more concern over cronyism, corruption, and related issues than there is clarity about what the problem actually is and how to solve it.

Ayn Rand had unique and clarifying views on the subject. With Trump in office, the problem she identified is going to get worse. Rands birthday is a good time to review her unique explanation of, and cure for, the problem.

The first question we need to be clear about is: What, exactly, is the problem were trying to solve? Drain the swamp, throw the bums out, clean up Washington, outsiders vs. insiders these are all platitudes that can mean almost anything to anyone.

Are lobbyists the problem? Trump and his advisers seem to think so. Theyve vowed to keep lobbyists out of the administration, and Trump has signed an order forbidding all members of his administration from lobbying for 5 years.

Its not clear whether these plans will succeed, but why should we care? Lobbyists are individuals hired to represent others with business before government. We might lament the existence of this profession, but blaming lobbyists for lobbying is like blaming lawyers for lawsuits. Everyone seems to complain about them right up until the moment that they want one.

The same goes for complaints about the clients of lobbyists the hated special interests. Presidents since at least Teddy Roosevelt have vowed to run them out of Washington yet, today, interest groups abound. Some lobby for higher taxes, some for lower taxes. Some lobby for more entitlements, some for fewer or for more fiscal responsibility in entitlement programs. Some lobby for business, some for labor, some for more regulations on both. Some lobby for freer trade, some for trade restrictions. The list goes on and on. Are they all bad?

The question we should ask is, Why do people organize into interest groups and lobby government in the first place?

The popular answer among free-market advocates is that government has too much to offer, which creates an incentive for people to tap their cronies in government to ensure that government offers it to them. Shrink government, the argument goes, and we will solve the problem.

Veronique de Rugy, senior fellow at the Mercatus Center, describes cronyism in these terms:

This is how cronyism works: A company wants a special privilege from the government in exchange for political support in future elections. If the company is wealthy enough or is backed by powerful-enough interest groups, the company will get its way and politicians will get another private-sector ally. The few cronies win at the expense of everyone else.

(Another term for this is rent seeking, and many other people define it roughly the same way.)

Theres a lot of truth to this view. Our bloated government has vast power over our lives and trillions of dollars worth of favors to dole out, and a seemingly endless stream of people and groups clamor to win those favors. As a lawyer who opposes campaign finance laws, Ive often said that the problem is not that money controls politics, its that politics controls money and property, and business, and much of our private lives as well.

Still, we need to be more precise. Favors, benefits, and privileges are too vague a way to describe what government has to offer. Among other things, these terms just raise another question: Which benefits, favors, or privileges should government offer? Indeed, many people have asked that question of cronyisms critics. Heres how the Los Angeles Times put it in an editorial responding to the effort by some Republicans to shut down the Export-Import Bank:

Governments regularly intervene in markets in the name of public safety, economic growth or consumer protection, drawing squawks of protest whenever one interest is advanced at the expense of others. But a policy thats outrageous to one faction for example, the government subsidies for wind, solar and battery power that have drawn fire on the right may in fact be a welcome effort to achieve an important societal objective.

Its a valid point. Without a way to tell what government should and should not do, whose interests it should or should not serve, complaints about cronyism look like little more than partisan politics. When government favors the groups or policies you like, thats good government in action. When it doesnt, thats cronyism.

In Rands view, there is a serious problem to criticize, but few free-market advocates are clear about exactly what it is. Simply put, the problem is the misuse of the power that government possesses, which is force. Government is the institution that possesses a legal monopoly on the use of force.

The question we need to grapple with is, how should it use that power?

Using terms like favors, privileges, and benefits to describe what government is doing when cronyism occurs is not just too vague, its far too benign. These terms obscure the fact that what people are competing for when they engage in cronyism is the privilege of legally using force to take what others have earned or to prevent them from contracting or associating with others. When groups lobby for entitlements whether its more social security or Medicare or subsidies for businesses they are essentially asking government to take that money by force from taxpayers who earned it and to give it to someone else. Call it what you want, but it ultimately amounts to stealing.

When individuals in a given profession lobby for occupational licensing laws, they are asking government to grant a select group of people a kind of monopoly status that prevents others who dont meet their standards from competing with them that is, from contracting with willing customers to do business.

These are just two examples of how government takes money and property or prevents individuals from voluntarily dealing with one another. There are many, many more. Both Democrats and Republicans favor these sorts of laws and willingly participate in a system in which trading on this power has become commonplace.

Rent seeking doesnt capture what is really going on. Neither, really, does cronyism. Theyre both too tame.

A far better term is the one used by nineteenth-century French economist Frederic Bastiat: legal plunder. Rand uses the term political pull to describe those who succeed by convincing friends in government to use the law to plunder others or to prevent them from competing.

And she uses the phrase the Aristocracy of Pull, which is the title of a whole chapter in Atlas Shrugged, to describe a society in which political pull, rather than production and trade, has become the rule. Its a society that resembles feudalism, in which people compete to gain the favor of government officials in much the same way that people in feudal times competed for the favor of the king so they could use that power to rule over one another and plunder as they pleased.

The cause, for Rand, is not the size of government, but what we allow it to do. When we allow government to use the force it possesses to go beyond protecting our rights, we arm individuals to plunder one another and turn what would otherwise be limited instances of corruption or criminality into a systemic problem.

For example, when politicians promise to increase social security or to make education free, they are promising to take more of the incomes of taxpayers to pay for these welfare programs. When they promise to favor unions with more labor laws or to increase the minimum wage, they are promising to restrict businesses right to contract freely with willing workers. When they promise to keep jobs in America, they are promising to impose tariffs on companies that import foreign goods. The rule in such a system becomes: plunder or be plundered. What choice does anyone have but to organize themselves into pressure groups, hire lobbyists, and join the fray?

Rand memorably describes this process in the famous money speech in Atlas Shrugged:

But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims then money becomes its creators avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once theyve passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.

Observe what kind of people thrive in such a society and who their victims are. Theres a big difference between the two, and Rand never failed to make a moral distinction between them.

In the early 1990s, Atlantic City resident Vera Coking found herself in the sights of a developer who wanted to turn the property on which she lived into a casino parking lot. The developer made what he thought was a good offer, but she refused. The developer became incensed, and instead of further trying to convince Coking to sell or finding other land, he did what a certain kind of businessman has increasingly been able to do in modern times. He pursued a political solution. He convinced a city redevelopment agency to use the power of eminent domain to force Coking to sell.

The developer was Donald Trump. His ensuing legal battle with Coking, which he lost, was the first of a number of controversies in recent decades over the use of eminent domain to take property from one private party and give it to another.

Most people can see that theres a profound moral distinction between the Trumps and their cronies in government on the one hand and people like Vera Coking on the other. One side is using law to force the other to give up what is rightfully theirs. To be blunt, one side is stealing from the other.

But the victims of the use of eminent domain often lobby government officials to save their property just as vigorously as others do to take it. Should we refer to all of them as special interests and damn them for seeking government favors? The answer should be obvious.

But if thats true, why do we fail to make that distinction when the two sides are businesses as many do when they criticize Wall Street, or the financial industry as a whole, or when they complain about crony capitalism as though capitalism as such is the problem? Not all businesses engage in pull-peddling, and many have no choice but to deal with government or to lobby in self-defense.

John Allison, the former CEO of BB&T bank (and a former board member of the Ayn Rand Institute, where I work), refused to finance transactions that involved the use of eminent domain after the Supreme Court issued its now-infamous decision in Kelo v. City of New London, which upheld the use of eminent domain to transfer property from one private party to another. Later, Allison lobbied against the TARP fund program after the financial crisis, only to be pressured by government regulators into accepting the funds. In an industry as heavily regulated as banking, theres little a particular bank can do to avoid a situation like that.

Another example came to light in 2015, when a number of news articles ran stories on United Airliness so-called Chairmans Flight. This was a flight from Newark to Columbia, South Carolina, that United continued to run long after it became clear it was a money-loser. Why do that? It turns out the chairman of the Port Authority, which controls access to all the ports in New York and New Jersey, had a vacation home near Columbia. During negotiations over airport fees, he made it clear that he wanted United to keep the flight, so United decided not to cancel it. Most of the news stories blamed United for influence-peddling. Only Holman Jenkins of the Wall Street Journal called it what it was: extortion by the Port Authority chairman.

The point is, theres a profound moral difference between trying to use government to plunder others and engaging with it essentially in self-defense. Its the same difference between a mobster running a protection racket and his victims. And theres an equally profound moral difference between people who survive through production and trade, and those who survive by political pull.

Rand spells out this latter difference in an essay called The Money Making Personality:

The Money-Maker is the discoverer who translates his discovery into material goods. In an industrial society with a complex division of labor, it may be one man or a partnership of two: the scientist who discovers new knowledge and the entrepreneur the businessman who discovers how to use that knowledge, how to organize material resources and human labor into an enterprise producing marketable goods.

The Money-Appropriator is an entirely different type of man. He is essentially noncreative and his basic goal is to acquire an unearned share of the wealth created by others. He seeks to get rich, not by conquering nature, but by manipulating men, not by intellectual effort, but by social maneuvering. He does not produce, he redistributes: he merely switches the wealth already in existence from the pockets of its owners to his own.

The Money-Appropriator may become a politician or a businessman who cuts corners or that destructive product of a mixed economy: the businessman who grows rich by means of government favors, such as special privileges, subsidies, franchises; that is, grows rich by means of legalized force.

In Atlas Shrugged, Rand shows these two types in action through characters like steel magnate Hank Rearden and railroad executive Dagny Taggart, two brilliant and productive business people who carry a crumbling world on their shoulders. On the opposite end of the spectrum are Orren Boyle, a competitor of Reardens, and Jim Taggart, Dagnys brother and CEO of the railroad where she works. Both constantly scheme to win special franchises and government contracts from their friends in Washington and to heap regulations on productive businesses like Reardens. Rearden is forced to hire a lobbyist in Washington to try to keep the bureaucrats off of his back.

When we damn special interests or businesses in general for cronyism, we end up grouping the Reardens in with the Orren Boyles, which only excuses the behavior of the latter and damns the former. This attitude treats the thug and his victim as morally equivalent. Indeed, this attitude makes it seem like success in business is as much a function of whom you know in Washington as it is how intelligent or productive you are.

It is unfortunately true that many businesses use political pull, and many are a mixture of money-makers and money-appropriators. So it can seem like success is a matter of government connections. But its not true in a fundamental sense. The wealth that makes our modern world amazing the iPhones, computers, cars, medical advances and much more can only be created through intelligence, ingenuity, creativity and hard work.

Government does not create wealth. It can use the force it possesses to protect the property and freedom of those who create wealth and who deal with each other civilly, through trade and persuasion; or it can use that force to plunder the innocent and productive, which is not sustainable over the long run. What principle defines the distinction between these two types of government?

As I noted earlier, the common view about cronyism is that it is a function of big government and that the solution is to shrink or limit government. But that just leads to the question: whats the limiting principle?

True, a government that does less has less opportunity to plunder the innocent and productive, but a small government can be as unjust to individuals as a large one. And we ought to consider how we got to the point that government is so large. If we dont limit governments power in principle, pressure group warfare will inevitably cause it to grow, as individuals and groups, seeing government use the force of law to redistribute wealth and restrict competition, ask it to do the same for them.

The common response is that government should act for the good of the public rather than for the narrow interests of private parties. The Los Angeles Times editorial quoted above expresses this view. Whats truly crony capitalism, says the Times, is when the government confuses private interests with public ones.

Most people who criticize cronyism today from across the political spectrum hold the same view. The idea that governments job is to serve the public interest has been embedded in political thought for well over a century.

Rand rejects the whole idea of the public interest as vague, at best, and destructive, at worst. As she says in an essay called The Pull Peddlers:

So long as a concept such as the public interest is regarded as a valid principle to guide legislation lobbies and pressure groups will necessarily continue to exist. Since there is no such entity as the public, since the public is merely a number of individuals, the idea that the public interest supersedes private interests and rights, can have but one meaning: that the interests and rights of some individuals takes precedence over the interests and rights of others.

If so, then all men and all private groups have to fight to the death for the privilege of being regarded as the public. The governments policy has to swing like an erratic pendulum from group to group, hitting some and favoring others, at the whim of any given moment and so grotesque a profession as lobbying (selling influence) becomes a full-time job. If parasitism, favoritism, corruption, and greed for the unearned did not exist, a mixed economy [a mixture of freedom and economic controls] would bring them into existence.

Its tempting to blame politicians for pull-peddling, and certainly there are many who willingly participate and advocate laws that plunder others. But, as Rand argues, politicians as such are not to blame, as even the most honest of government officials could not follow a standard like the public interest:

The worst aspect of it is not that such a power can be used dishonestly, but that it cannot be used honestly. The wisest man in the world, with the purest integrity cannot find a criterion for the just, equitable, rational application of an unjust, inequitable, irrational principle. The best that an honest official can do is to accept no material bribe for his arbitrary decision; but this does not make his decision and its consequences more just or less calamitous.

To make the point more concrete: which is in the public interest, the jobs and products produced by, say, logging and mining companies or preserving the land they use for public parks? For that matter, why are public parks supposedly in the public interest? As Peter Schwartz points out in his book In Defense of Selfishness, more people attend private amusement parks like Disneyland each year than national parks. Should government subsidize Disney?

To pick another example: why is raising the minimum wage in the public interest but not cheap goods or the rights of business owners and their employees to negotiate their wages freely? It seems easy to argue that a casino parking lot in Atlantic City is not in the public interest, but would most citizens of Atlantic City agree, especially when more casinos likely mean more jobs and economic growth in the city?

There are no rational answers to any of these questions, because the public interest is an inherently irrational standard to guide government action. The only approach when a standard like that governs is to put the question to the political process, which naturally leads people to pump millions into political campaigns and lobbying to ensure that their interests prevail.

Rands answer is to limit government strictly to protecting rights and nothing more. The principle of rights, for Rand, keeps government connected to its purpose of protecting our ability to live by protecting our freedom to think and produce, cooperate and trade with others, and pursue our own happiness. As Rand put it in Atlas Shrugged (through the words of protagonist John Galt):

Rights are conditions of existence required by mans nature for his proper survival. If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product of his work. If life on earth is his purpose, he has a right to live as a rational being: nature forbids him the irrational. Any group, any gang, any nation that attempts to negate mans rights, is wrong, which means: is evil, which means: is anti-life.

A government that uses the force it possesses to do anything more than protect rights necessarily ends up violating them. The reason is that force is only effective at stopping people from functioning or taking what they have produced or own. Force can therefore be used either to stop criminals or to act like them.

The principle, then, is that only those who initiate force against others in short, those who act as criminals violate rights and are subject to retaliation by government. So long as individuals respect each others rights by refraining from initiating force against one another so long as they deal with each other on the basis of reason, persuasion, voluntary association, and trade government should have no authority to interfere in their affairs.

When it violates this principle of rights, cronyism, corruption, pressure group warfare and mutual plunder are the results.

Theres much more to say about Rands view of rights and government. Readers can find more in essays such as Mans Rights, The Nature of Government, and What Is Capitalism? and in Atlas Shrugged.

In 1962, Rand wrote the following in an essay called The Cold Civil War:

A man who is tied cannot run a race against men who are free: he must either demand that his bonds be removed or that the other contestants be tied as well. If men choose the second, the economic race slows down to a walk, then to a stagger, then to a crawl and then they all collapse at the goal posts of a Very Old Frontier: the totalitarian state. No one is the winner but the government.

The phrase Very Old Frontier was a play on the Kennedy administrations New Frontier, a program of economic subsidies, entitlements and other regulations that Rand saw as statist and which, like many other political programs and trends, she believed was leading America toward totalitarianism. Throughout Rands career, many people saw her warnings as overblown.

We have now inaugurated as 45th president of the United States a man who regularly threatens businesses with regulation and confiscatory taxation if they dont follow his preferred policies or run their businesses as he sees fit. A recent headline in USA Today captured the reaction among many businesses: Companies pile on job announcements to avoid Trumps wrath.

Are Rands warnings that our government increasingly resembles an authoritarian regime one that issues dictates and commands to individuals and businesses, who then have to pay homage to the government like courtiers in a kings court really overblown? Read Atlas Shrugged and her other writings and decide for yourself.

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Would Ayn Rand Have Cast President Trump As A Villain? | Zero ...

More than a half century ago the establishment (is there any other kind?) liberal Bennett Cerf (a panelist on the Whats My Line? television game show that ran 17 years), a founder of the venerable Random House, decided that Ayn Rand was provocative. Cerf urged Rand, the founder of Objectivism, to publish a collection of essays by her and her (then, but later excommunicated) protg, philosophical heir, and sub rosa lover Nathaniel Branden. I never met Rand but in the late-1970s came to know Branden (who died two years ago) and more recently others who were close to Rand, part of her in-group Collective that included Alan Greenspan before he went rogue and eventually became Federal Reserve chairman.

The book was titled The Virtue of Selfishness. Sharon Presley, one of the pioneering women in libertarianism in the 1960s, confronted the Left back then, at Free Speech (now suppressed speech) UC Berkeley, with her bold rejection of collectivism. To her fellow libertarians, Presley said Rands use of the word selfishness was perversely idiosyncratic. Generally, one does not think of selfishness as a virtue or as virtuous behavior. But Rand rejected the association of selfishness with undesirable conduct and said instead that selfishness is concern with ones own interest, and that is a good thing.

President Donald Trump campaigned on a theme of America First, a slogan associated pejoratively with Charles Lindbergh and Pat Buchanan. Oddly, it has its roots with Woodrow Wilson. Perhaps America First may seem like a nationalist extrapolation of selfishness. But implausible as it may seem, Rand was no isolationist. Indeed, she was a believer in what has come to be known as American Exceptionalism. A refugee from Czarist and Communist Russia who came here in 1925, Rand viewed this imperfect nation as closest to her ideal of a society that championed the individual.

In recent weeks President Trump has, some would say, repudiated others would say, amplified his campaign planks on foreign policy. He and his surrogates especially cabinet members such as the Secretary of Defense James Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley have enunciated Administration policy. For example, President Trump is strongly committed to NATO and against Russian imperialism. Also, he will resist Chinas appropriation of the South China Sea, stand with Japan against North Korea, against which he has established an unsaid red line. And watch out, Iran, variations of sanctions are on the horizon.

The evolving foreign policy of Donald Trump is an unintended reincarnation of Ayn Rand. When he says America First, he is effectively saying that the United States should act in what Rand would call its rational self-interest. Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) was founded forty-one years before the 9/11 attack on America, that is, on September 11, 1960 at the Buckley estate, Great Elm. Its founding document ended: That American foreign policy must be judged by this criterion: does it serve the just interests of the United States? Not the United Nations or the Third World, but only the U.S. and, where interests meet, our allies.

Trump remains a critic of using American boots on the ground to build nations or to spread democracy. And he is unlikely to give foreign aid to socialist idiots. The aforementioned is all do-gooder stuff that he rejects.

And Trump has a peculiar approach to immigration reminiscent of a century ago. We want immigrants, he says, who want to be part of America and share its values of pluralism and liberty. In other words, people who come to this country will become Americans, not simply foreigners living in America. Before multiculturalism, Trumps view was not considered weird. Those were the days when immigrants learned English and civics.

President Trump asserts that he will not show his cards and let the enemy know what we will or will not do, or when we will act. He will not publicize our rules of engagement, and those rules will not (Obama-like) unduly burden our generals. Necessarily, he must reconcile keep them guessing with dont mess with us. In other words, the enemies must know our response will be momentous, but nothing more.

And instead of killing bad guys via drones, we might occasionally capture some for spirited interrogation. What a concept.

But what about NATO, England, Japan, and other allies and alliances?

President Trump is unknowingly applying two axioms of Ayn Rand. First, as noted, he is calculating that certain alliances are in the self-interest of the U.S. They are not altruistic but something we do for us. And second, President Trump is reviving the paradox of Rands equation on altruism. If there is such a thing as American exceptionalism, because we are what Ronald Reagan called that shining city on the hill, and altruism is part of that exceptionalism and what we want to do, then being altruistic is selfish.

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The Ayn Rand in Donald Trump: The Virtue of America First | The ... - American Spectator

Just before Christmas, Sajid Javid performed a ritual he has observed twice a year throughout his adult life: he read the courtroom scene in The Fountainhead. To Ayn Rand fans, its famous: the hero declares his principles and his willingness to be imprisoned for them if need be. As a student, Javid read the passage to his now-wife, but only once she told him shed have nothing more to do with him if he tried it again. Its about the power of the individual, he says. About sticking up for your beliefs, against popular opinion. Being that individual that really believes in something and goes for it.

As Communities Secretary, he oversees the planning system and has embarked upon a new mission: addressing the housing shortage which he says has become one of Britains worst social curses. The estimate is that there are at least two million people out there who cant find decent homes and are being forced to live with parents or in overcrowded conditions. Were dealing with a 30-year backlog. He aims to increase the number of homes built from 190,000 a year to between 225,000 and 275,000 at least. And so he has become the latest in a long line of ministers to promise to do something about a housing shortage.

Why, I ask, should we believe hell have any more success than his predecessors? People are right to be a bit sceptical because theyve heard it from governments over 30 years, he says. But Javid has new tools: more support for so-called factory homes pre-fabricated buildings that he says can be erected on-site within a week. And the biggest constraint, he says, is lack of the fundamental raw material: land. This, he says, is where government can help. He plans a use-it-or-lose-it planning permission system to stop developers hoarding land while they wait for its value to rise.

More controversially, there will be a more muscular approach to councils who refuse planning permission; even (or, indeed, especially) Tory ones. Javid has said hell honour the party manifesto commitment to sparing the green belt, but there are exceptions like 6,000 new homes recently authorised outside Birmingham, to the fury of the local Tory MP, former chief whip Andrew Mitchell. He promptly declared war on Javid and has been waging it ever since.

Javid expects more such wars, not just over housing but over the definition of Conservatism. One of the reasons, or the main reason, I joined the Conservative party was to promote social progress and social mobility, he says. The biggest barrier to social progress is our broken housing market. Fixing it means taking on a number of vested interests. It might make me a bit unpopular, but as long as I know Im doing the right thing which I do then thats what Im in politics for.

I ask about the property crash that was supposed to follow the Brexit vote, making homes much more affordable. He laughs, politely. He was an unexpected recruit to the Remain side, to the dismay of many Tories who assumed hed been bought off by David Cameron. The truth is more complicated. Javid has always been a vocal Eurosceptic, but as the referendum approached he decided he could not go so far as backing Brexit.

He told me about his decision during the campaign. Part of him, he said then, would feel a great sense of elation at the freedom and opportunity if Britain voted to leave. But as Business Secretary, he believed the companies who told him of their fears about leaving. As a former banker, too, he feared for the City if financial firms were to lose their passporting rights to do business across the EU. His decision was made with a rather heavy heart, knowing that, in such a polarising campaign, hed please neither side and be portrayed as being all bark and no Brexit.

Has this episode damaged him politically? I dont look at it that way, he says, almost convincingly. The way I see it, you pay a much bigger price if you dont stand up for your beliefs.

This is one of the many ways in which Sajid Javid is not a very good machine politician. Hes the son of a Muslim bus driver who prefers to let others talk about his roots unlike another son of a bus driver, Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, who has a gift for dropping his background into every interview. The biography-is-destiny approach to politics has never appealed to Javid. He grew up in poverty but ended up as a vice-president of Chase Manhattan Bank at the age of 25 he says he struggles to see what he has to complain about.

He found out a few years ago, for instance, that his early home life would nowadays would be categorised as homelessness a family of seven cramped into two bedrooms. But I would not pretend for a moment that I was homeless, he says. I had a loving family, a loving home and a lovely environment to grow up in. Such restraint has its virtues, but could be seen as folly in an era when politicians are expected to blend what they say with who they are and where they came from.

Javid joined the party leadership race last year as the running mate of Stephen Crabb, whose cabinet career was brought to an abrupt end by a sexting scandal. When the winner, Theresa May, signalled a new direction for the Tories, using her party conference speech to attack the socialist left and libertarian right, it sounded as if she might have Ayn Rand-reading cabinet members in mind.

Javid suggests that his definition of politics is the same as Margaret Thatchers: about doing something, not being someone. He sees the Tories as the party of change and opportunity, and says such principles underpin his housing reforms and if they upset fellow Tories, then so be it.

The Conservative party that I joined is not a party that stands up for the privileged and the moneyed, he said. We stand up for ordinary hard-working people helping them to get on in life. And if this means a few more battles with Tory councils andMPs over where to build houses, then he is ready for thefight.

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The Ayn Rand scene Sajid Javid reads every year - Spectator.co.uk