Ayn Rand Comments

Paul Ryan, on the influence of Ayn Rand, said at the Atlas Society, the official name of the Ayn Rand fan club, back in 2005:
"I grew up reading Ayn Rand and it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my value systems are and what my beliefs are. It's inspired me so much that it's required reading in my office for all my interns and my staff."
And what's more,
"the reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand. And the fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism."

Laura Hollis invites us to reflect on Ayn Rand in the following way.

Neither Rand's stilted delivery, nor her deep-seated sexual pathologies, nor even her mischaracterization of Christianity takes away from some essential truths that she identifies and catalogs in her novels, with some powerful success. One must remember that she fled the Soviet Union, having seen firsthand and suffered through the privations and depravities thrust upon the population by the ideologues who controlled it - slavish adherents of collectivism. She knew that at its core, this was a completely renunciation of any value of the individual, except as a part of the state.

Rand celebrated selfish individualism as a reaction against collectivism in all its forms and the widespread misery and destruction of life it caused, not only in the Soviet Union, but in Communist China, Cuba, North Vietnam, North Korea, and Cambodia - all of which she lived to see, and all of which only served to reinforce her perspective. Given the starvation, political persecution, imprisonment, and death that Communism has brought everywhere it was implemented, one can hardly blame her.

Rand resonates with people now because she sounded the clarion call against all collectivist philosophies which would subordinate the individual to the state, and which - of necessity - denounce individual achievement and accomplishment as "greedy," or "selfish" as justification for doing so. The United States is the most prosperous country in the history of the world, and Americans are the most generous when viewed by any standard of philanthropy: the donation of money or time, or the creation of foundations and other charitable organizations. And yet, with each passing day we hear the steady drumbeat of denunciations of all business as "greedy," "exploitative," "corrupt." Regrettably, the fountainhead ( yes ) of this viewpoint is the president of the United States whose views about business are well- known to anyone who has bothered to read his works or (more importantly) the works of those who inspired him. This reached its recent apotheosis in the president's statement in Roanoke, Virginia last month: "If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen."
For those of us who know how businesses are *really* built, and who entrepreneurs *really" are – and Rep. Paul Ryan is among them -- this is not only the consummate insult, but a statement of staggering ignorance. We now live in a Bizarro-world society where certain social scientists and politicians would have us believe that huge swaths of the population cannot be held responsible for their own poor choices, but those of us who do not make those choices are at fault and will be forced to pay for them, not as charity, but by claim of right. Taxation is no longer cast as the contributions which are made to support civil society, but as reparations for blame. And yet, ironically, those among us who devote their lives and everything they own to building successful businesses that provide employment for millions of people, as well as goods and services that have created the highest standard of living in the history of the planet are not responsible for the fruits of their own work, but faceless strangers who never donated a dime or lift a finger to build those businesses are given the credit.
Rand is celebrated not because she was a great writer, but because she understood human nature and its relationship to political power. She understood that humans who celebrate government as God eventually act as if they have God's power. Her reaction was to reject the idea of God altogether. But many of us who believe in God have no difficulty separating her decision from our own. We simply acknowledge that no human is God and no human institution will deliver utopia. We study history and realize that a government which downplays or demonizes individual achievement, and excuses and subsidizes human failings under the guise of calling for higher and higher taxes will eventually be filled with a population which achieves little and expects much - all to be paid for on the backs of the shrinking numbers of people who still seek to accomplish something. Furthermore, it will be a system where power is held not at the level of individuals, families, communities - where it is most responsive, most diffused and least dangerous - but in the hands of a few whose primary contributions to society are their powers to take from some and distribute to others. At best, it is a system designed for financial collapse. At worst, it is a pathway to societal collapse.
Either way, we do not want it. And those of us who find value in Ayn Rand’s works understand that for all her faults, Rand foresaw it.