But this is too simple an explanation. Last year, Ayn Rand Institute president Yaron Brook apparently said that Rand “would have never advocated for the kind of policies Greenspan instituted. By holding interest rates for two-and-a-half years below the rate of inflation, [Greenspan] encouraged the debt and credit boom we’re suffering the consequence of” today. Greenspan, “betrayed” Rand’s teachings, Brook complained, in his efforts to encourage economic growth in the aftermath of 9/11.
Furthermore, the role of the chairman of the Federal Reserve is to supervise and regulate banking institutions, protect the credit rights of consumers, and manage the nation’s money supply in order to achieve maximum employment, stabilize prices, maintain the stability of the financial system, and contain risks in financial markets. Perhaps I’m missing something, but the very notion of the Federal Reserve therefore seems anathema to Rand’s doctrine. She may have felt that the world should favor the rich, but she didn’t support the idea of the government setting up complicated machinery, like income tax deductions or allowing real estate developers to set up limited liability shell corporations to avoid financial responsibility when the project doesn’t make money, in order to help the rich out. She just wanted them to be free to make as much as they pleased.
Beyond this, Greenspan is so obviously an exceptional figure in the movement. He may have been an Objectivist with power, but most Objectivists, it seems, are people who live in dank basements and chain-smoke Merits and work at places like Office Depot. We are, for instance, introduced to a man in New York who gives walking tours of Murray Hill, “Ayn Rand’s New York.” A pleasant guy in his mid-fifties, he’s been a committed Objectivist since he was in college. A graduate of SUNY Cortland, he’s written “a rambling but intriguing self-published volume of Ayn-Rand-inspired thought” and works as a proofreader at a law firm. He meets other Objectivists regularly for meetings in coffee shops in Manhattan, where they chiefly seem to complain about Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin. The Objectivist movement doesn’t seem like a path to power. It, and the Tea Party, just seem like groups of ordinary, slightly unsuccessful middle class people who don’t much like the Democratic Party in general and President Obama in particular.
Weiss writes that the reason why many businessmen and Republican politicians today question the wisdom of workplace protections, Social Security, environmental regulations, civil rights, and child labor laws “lies squarely with Ayn Rand.” Really, not National Review, or AEI, or the consolidation of business into several large conglomerates? It’s all Rand? Weiss seems to argue that Rand influenced thought-leaders, thought-leaders influenced policy, and then the rank-and-file Republicans signed on to these ideas without necessarily understanding their origins. It’s an interesting point, but you can’t trace all this back to Rand with anything near the certitude that Weiss tries to muster.
The Republican Party, for instance, is not Objectivist. Even leaving aside the religious question, it just isn’t. Newt Gingrich, for example, likes to gut and even eliminate government programs. Rand wanted to eliminate most government programs too. The two of them might even use the same terms to explain their reasoning, such as encouraging work and discouraging parasitic behaviors. But Newt Gingrich isn’t an Objectivist. In fact, he’s really, really into governmental social planning, he just doesn’t like to pay for social welfare programs. Just because a policy is conservative doesn’t mean it’s Randian. A policy idea isn’t Objectivist just because it’s callous and unrealistic. Maybe it comes from Rand, but it’s probably more likely from Friedrich Hayek (or even some interpretation of Barry Goldwater or Ronald Reagan).
Greed is also not Rand’s invention. Weiss writes that, while hedge funds played no significant role in the financial crisis of 2007, “the salient feature of the hedge fund pay model is that it is totally selfish. There is no real downside to making reckless bets. That me-first structure…—and the financial system endangered by their recklessness—was conspicuously Randian.”
The guiding abstract principle of Objectivism is atheism.
The guiding practical principle of Objectivism, as with libertarianism and all anti-Christian ideologies, is individualism.
Objectivism is the flip side of Communism; the former worships the individual; the latter worships the state.
Both hate God.
#1 Posted by Newspaperman, CJR on Mon 2 Apr 2012 at 04:13 PM
"misanthropic"
You're a liar, Luzer.
"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." -Ayn Rand
That is the opposite of misanthropy. You're a liar.
#2 Posted by Deco, CJR on Mon 2 Apr 2012 at 04:39 PM
@Deco. No, it isn't. Misanthropy is generalized dislike, distrust, disgust, contempt or hatred of the human species or human nature. A philosophy celebrating an idealized conception of man is not the same thing as liking actual people.
#3 Posted by del2124, CJR on Mon 2 Apr 2012 at 06:43 PM
I know the definition. It still doesn't apply to Rand.
#4 Posted by Deco, CJR on Tue 3 Apr 2012 at 03:56 AM
Ayn Rand is pop-Hayek for the masses and young. People won't read all the economic textbooks put out by the Austrians and Monetarists like Milt Friedman, they won't subscribe to back issues of Buckley's NRO, but they will get the same flavor of world view from the saucy crap Ayn Rand wrote.
Which is why conservatives subsidize Ayn Rand reading in classrooms.
Gotta break this post up for the links :(
#5 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 3 Apr 2012 at 12:35 PM
The problem is the world does not conform to the Ayn Rand model and the people that absorb that model end up becoming monsters.
Why is that?
#6 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 3 Apr 2012 at 12:45 PM
Largely because her philosophy was modeled based on a monster.
When segments of society starts living according to the rules of this dementia, you get an American Psycho society.
We should all be a little scared of that.
#7 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Tue 3 Apr 2012 at 12:56 PM
To understand Rand et al, let me recommend a book that, in my opinion, did not receive the attention it deserved.
Dr. Albert Ellis'"Is Objectivism a Religion?" was the result of a contentions debate between Dr. Albert Ellis and Rand follower Nathaniel Branden. Both were clinical psychologists.
Dr. Ellis was critical of dogmatic religions. He contended they were harmful to people. He read Rands writings and concluded her "philosophy" was a religion in the dogmatic sense, authoritarian, ridgity,irrationality, etc.
You may agree or disagree with his analysis, but whatever your perspective listed to his argument, judge his evidence, and see what you think.
#8 Posted by David Reno, CJR on Tue 3 Apr 2012 at 02:32 PM