Is Ayn Rand Bad for the Market?

[question everything]

DECEMBER 4, 2009

Is Ayn Rand Bad for the Market?

By HEATHER WILHELM
WSJ

Say what you will about Ayn Rand, but one thing is certain: She had no use for common niceties. A grimly precocious, friendless Rand declared her atheism at age 13. "Atlas Shrugged," Rand's secular sermon-as-novel, boils with revulsion toward the "looters" and "moochers" who consume public funds. Rand scornfully excommunicated followers who disagreed with her, and in 1964 she told Playboy that those who place friends and family first in life are "immoral" and "emotional parasites."

Shoddy manners aside, 52 years after the release of "Atlas Shrugged," Rand seems to be roaring back.. Two buzzed-about Rand biographies hit the shelves this fall, and an "Atlas" cable miniseries is reportedly in the works. Designer Ralph Lauren recently listed Rand as one of his favorite novelists, and CNBC host Rick Santelli, whose on-air antibailout rant inspired hundreds of "tea party" protests across the nation, admitted the same. "I know this may not sound very humanitarian," he said, "but at the end of the day I'm an Ayn Rand-er."

To many, it doesn't sound humanitarian at all. To be an "Ayn Rand-er" sounds, as the New York Times recently put it, "angry" and "vulgar." In its review of the new Rand biographies, the New Republic bemoaned the "cacophony of rage and dread" surrounding Rand's acolytes. Even in Rand's heyday, many conservatives shrank from what they saw as her toxic blend of atheism, absolutism and ruthless individualism. "William F. Buckley must be spinning in his grave to hear all this chatter about Rand," says Jennifer Burns, the author of "Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right," "because it was a goal of his to make Rand an untouchable."

(snip)

But in an age where hope, change and warm-hearted marketing clearly resonate, is revitalizing and glorifying Rand's acerbic "virtue of selfishness" doing the free-market movement any good? Doubts are starting to emerge. Leonard Liggio, a respected figure in libertarian circles and a guest at Rand's post-"Atlas Shrugged" New York get-togethers, sees value in Rand but admits she wasn't a bridge builder. "She used strong, confrontational language, forcing people to react," he says. "And maybe that's not the best way to educate people." Others, however, go further. "Rand has this extremist, intolerant, dogmatic antigovernment stance," says Brink Lindsey of the libertarian Cato Institute, "and it pushes free-market supporters toward a purist, radical vision that undermines their capacity to get anything done." The Rev. Robert Sirico, head of the free-market Acton Institute, agrees. "If you want to offend, Rand accomplishes that. But if you want to convert — well, for instance, who could imagine Rand debating a health-care bill? I wouldn't want to take an order from her in a restaurant, let alone negotiate a political point."

(snip)

For her fans, Rand's appeal lies in her big-picture, unified, philosophical approach to man's purpose and the meaning of life. But ultimately ideas need more than size and a potboiler plot to overtake the dominant, big-government political paradigm. Rand held some insight on the nature of markets and has sold scads of books, but when it comes to shaping today's mainstream assumptions, she is a terrible marketer: elitist, cold and laser-focused on the supermen and superwomen of the world. How are free markets best "sold"? A more compelling approach flips Rand's philosophy on its head, explaining how everyone, especially society's neediest, benefits from economic liberty. It's a compelling story about how freedom and prosperity can change lives for the better. And Ayn Rand is of little help in telling it.

—Ms. Wilhelm is vice president of marketing and communications at the Illinois Policy Institute, a free-market public-policy organization.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704402404574525702581182272.html

[lapfog_1]

1. I'm sure the teabaggers and Ron Paul idiots love her.

A cancer on the body politic.

[DeadEyeDyck]

2. I tried reading Atlas Shrugger

but couldn'nt reach page 100 beofre i fell asleep.

[patrice]

5. I read all of it when I was about 19. Tried AS again not long ago and couldn't. It isn't

even decent literature: depends too much on exposition; preachy, unidimensional characters; limited imagery.

The one piece that does stand up as literature is Anthem; it's shorter, more imagery, more metaphorical, more intellectually challenging.

[question everything]

17. I liked "We the Living"

I think that it was more of a story, a compelling one to me, and less of a manifesto.

[patrice]

3. Randians aren't the type that you'd want to work with. Though you could expect them to be

honest to the degree that they communicate, you could also expect that their self-centeredness would also limit what information they share.

I have also heard that Rand pretty much expected to be the center of anything and was dysfunctional when she wasn't; read that NEEDY.

[baldguy]

4. It takes predatory & uncivilized attitudes

which would normally destroy any society they're inflicted upon - and turns them into virtues.

No wonder America is so fucked up.

[rwheeler31]

6. I'm sorry that writer hated everyone.

[Taitertots]

7. It is just what silver spooners use to beat up people who haven't had everything handed to them

There are no poor Ayn Rand followers. The whole ideology revolves around ego boosting, pretending to be special compared to the people denied the opportunity they had.

Rand is bad for the market. The invisible hand of the market doesn't have to slap people in the face. That is to say that self interested utility maximization doesn't mean selfish, greedy, nihilist, and socially devoid.

[burning rain]

8. Ultimately, yes, she's bad for the economy.

Her views that there should be next to no government or public services, so far from creating an ultramodern super-prosperous society, lead to feudalism, a small number of the super-rich, the rest trapped in mindless poverty. More practical conservatives do well politically to bang away on the evils of government, while touting private charity as a false substitute--it sells a lot better than her open contempt for most of humanity.

[keep_it_real]

9. Rand's putting the individual against the collective is a non-agrument

There hardly few ideas were instituted in society that was not done through collective will and effort. Sending people into outer space not one individual ego of an idea. Stem cell research is a collective effort by thousands of people through out the world. The effort to find curs for diseases are collective efforts through out the world. Think of all the things built in this world through collective people working together. The individual needs the collective and the collective needs the individual.

[struggle4progress]

10. Translation: the wackos will peddle their free market poison under a brand other than Rand

[Lydia Leftcoast]

11. The perfect author for affluent brats

A nasty person with no redeeming writing talent.

[TexasObserver]

12. Ayn Randers are selfish, delusional, angry people who think they created their world.

She's the mommy who didn't love them, and never will.

[Prophet 451]

13. Ayn Rand should have been shot

and no, I'm not being hyperbolic, her "philosophy" destroyed more lives than swine flu. She was a vicious, delusional viper with no redeeming features and no writing talent. Her entire "philosophy" is an overbearing, overwritten screed that substitutes vocabulary for actually having something to say, yet another entry in mankind's endless attempts to justify naked greed. Michael Douglas's Gordon Gecko character summed up the entire "philosophy" in about ten minutes and was vastly more entertaining.

[Lost Jaguar]

14. She seems to me to be...

...an atheist, an adulteress, a misanthrope, and an undocumented immigrant. At least she that last one going for her, but I wonder what her current adherents think of that. Her contempt for putting family and friends before oneself is pathetic. I pray that her present incarnation is learning compassion, love, and selflessness.

[hatrack]

15. To me, it always made PERFECT sense to idolize sociopaths' goals and ideals!!

EDIT

(Rand) headed for Hollywood, where she set out to write stories that expressed her philosophy: a body of thought she said was the polar opposite of communism. She announced that the world was divided between a small minority of Supermen and "the naked, twisted, mindless figure of the human Incompetent" who, like the Leninists, try to feed off them. It is evil to show kindness to these "lice": the "only virtue" is selfishness.

She meant it. Her diaries from that time, while she worked as a receptionist and an extra, lay out the Nietzschean mentality that underpins her later writings. The newspapers were filled for months with stories about serial killer William Hickman, who kidnapped a 12-year-old girl called Marion Parker, raped her, and dismembered her body, which he sent mockingly to the police in pieces.

Rand wrote great stretches of praise for him, saying he represented "the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatsoever for all that a society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own... Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should." She called him "a brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy". Rand had only one regret: "A strong man can eventually trample society under its feet. That boy was not strong enough."

EDIT

She never really recovered. We all become weak at some point in our lives, so a thinker who despises weakness will end up despising herself. In her seventies Rand found herself dying of lung cancer, after insisting that her followers smoke because it symbolised "man's victory over fire" and the studies showing it caused lung cancer were Communist propaganda. By then she had driven almost everyone away. In 1982, she died alone in her apartment with only a hired nurse at her side. If her philosophy is right - if the only human relationships worth having are based on the exchange of dollars - this was a happy and victorious death. Did even she believe it in the end?

EDIT

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/ayn-rand-can-two-new-biographies-unravel-the-mystery-of-the-mad-sad-heroine-of-the-american-right-1819464.html

[question everything]

18. This is horrible

Of course, today some would look at it as a desire to get attention by being outrageous, but I think that she really meant it.

[regnaD kciN]

16. This should ALWAYS be included in any discussion of Rand...

:rofl:

[Dr.Phool]

19. You got it!

That's the first thing I thought of. Who's going to pamper their asses, and do the necessary work to survive?

[groovedaddy]

20. The human ego run amuck. A product of the guilded age bringing us a philosophy

certain to increase human suffering. She's not missed.

[Tutankhamun]

21. The amazing thing about this woman is that anyone ever took her seriously.

[rantormusing]

22. Shrug

<i>Rick Santelli, whose on-air antibailout rant inspired hundreds of "tea party" protests across the nation, admitted the same. "I know this may not sound very humanitarian," he said, "but at the end of the day I'm an Ayn Rand-er."</i>

To rand, Santelli would be a moocher, same thing with Kudlow, after watching his friends in Wall Street get their bailout, Rand would have looked at him like she just stepped in dog mess. The banks, the oil companies, heck, they would all be parasites in her book.

Santelli and his ilk need to get a retroactive abortion, sick mentality that misuses another person's ideas to justify their hate.

[formercia]

23. I don't know, but her early editions are worth money

I have a first printing hardcover 'Atlas Shrugged', and if someone doesn't buy it by Spring, I'm going to take it out to the range and use it for target practice. :evilgrin: