The Case for Ayn Rand

The summer after my 10th grade year a college student stopped at our house to tell my mother that I was rated one of the top students in my class and was thus eligible to purchase his $10 dictionary with special reference materials inside. Of course my mother bought one. Before he quizzed us and got the name of a brainy girl who lived up the street (clever fellow) we got into a conversation. He tore off a piece of paper and wrote “Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand” and handed it to me. He told me to read it.

The next summer I was at Boy’s State and as I wandered through the university bookstore I saw it sitting there on the shelf. It seemed like fate, so I immediately bought a copy. I had always been an avid reader, but this was the first book that altered the way I looked at the world. If you quiz any libertarian conservative you will likely discover that they read the book at some point and that it had an impact on their life.

My friend Jesse Mayshark ripped the book and the movie in a review last week and I do concede that the book is a “verbose potboiler” that was condemned by conservatives at the time—conservatism in the 1950s (Bill Buckley, Whittaker Chambers) being entwined with the church and a deep faith in God as a bulwark against godless communism, which the agnostic Rand rejected out of hand.

But the reason the book has sold millions of copies over the years, to libertarians and free-enterprise capitalists, is not because it defends big business. The worst villains in the book are people like Jim Taggart, the head of a railroad who uses his Washington lobbyist to enact laws to strangle his competition. The mercantile heads of American business join with the fake science think tanks and the social engineers to hamper ideas and prevent innovation. Rather than create things on their own, they blindly depend on the efforts of others. Sound familiar?

In 1957 Rand wrote that the future of American energy supplies was conversion of oil shale in the mountains of Colorado. She somehow divined, in that early era, that one day American business would consist of 500 lobbyists in Washington using the government for bailouts, anti-competitive regulations, a government takeover of car companies and trade policy with “people’s states” (i.e. China) detrimental to America’s interest.

The Virtue of Selfishness, Rand’s credo, argues that when people like Bill Gates and Paul Allen created a software company that runs most of the PCs in the world and get obscenely rich it also benefits society and the rest of us. The enclave of industrialists in Colorado in Atlas Shrugged bear some resemblance to Silicon Valley, a group of entrepreneurs that jump started the American economy in the 1990s and created an entirely new industry. Internet companies pursued their dreams and made a pile of money. That they produced eBay and Amazon and Kindle and any number of new Internet business models was a virtue of their “selfishness.”

Republicans today would do better to re-read the book, perhaps they have forgotten its lessons. Otherwise they wouldn’t be bailing out the Jim Taggarts of Wall Street and inefficient non-competitive car companies.

The essence of the 1,000-page novel is summed up in a simple phrase. A is A. Aristotle’s first principle. Existence exists. You can’t deny reality and have it go away. Lessons which should be taken to heart in Washington these days.

I saw the movie at Downtown West. I also agree with Mayshark that it is not a good movie. But it is faithful to the ideas of the book. (At least the first third of it.) A movie with better actors and a better director might have made a better movie. But it would have enraged fans of the book. The ideas are complex. The 1,000-page novel has hundreds of characters. That’s why it has taken since 1957 getting to a movie house.

But go see it. And, oh yeah, read the book.

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