April 13, 2012--Ayn Rand's Greatest Hits

Suddenly, everyone seems to be talking about Ayn Rand.

She is the Russian exile author who in 1947 published The Fountainhead and ten years later, Atlas Shrugged. These are more than just page-turners because embedded in the narratives is adoration of individual efficacy that calls for the liberation of superior achievers from most of society' norms and restraints. Especially those controls that derive from governments.

In The Fountainhead, for example, the protagonist hero, architect Howard Roark, dynamites and destroys a skyscraper he designed because his plans were altered without his permission. He is put on trial and of course acquitted. To Rand, he embodies the human spirit, and his struggle represents the triumph of individualism over collectivism.

In Atlas Shrugged, to Rand's acolytes her magnum opus, she portrays a dystopian United States where society's most productive citizens refuse to be exploited by increasing taxation and government regulations.

Led by John Galt, they go on strike. He describes it as "stopping the motor of the world" by "withdrawing the minds" that drive society's growth and productivity. In today's conservative political parlance, they are the "job creators." In their efforts, these people "of the mind" seek to demonstrate that a world in which the individual is not free to create is doomed, that civilization cannot exist where every person is a slave to government, and that the destruction of the profit motive leads to the collapse of society. The protagonist, Dagny Taggart, sees society collapse around her as the government increasingly asserts control over all business.

During the 1950s, literally sitting at Rand's feet in her Manhattan apartment squatted the young Alan Greenspan, taking it all in. Later, as chairman of the Federal Reserve, he supported Randian laissez-faire policies that led to the build-up of the housing bubble, which, when it collapsed, almost brought down the world's economy.

And, more recently, Congressman Paul Ryan, author of the Republican-supported Ryan Budget, though no relative of hers, is an fervent Ayn Ryan fan. He invokes her name and principles in speeches as he recently did before the Heritage Foundation when he warned his audience that “We're coming close to a tipping point in America where we might have a net majority of takers versus makers in society and that could become very dangerous if it sets in as a permanent condition.”

Ryan is such a Rand devotee that he requires his staffers to read Atlas Shrugged, since he believes President Obama's economic policy is the nightmare described in it.

And of course, Ron Paul (remember him?) so loves Ayn Rand that he named his first begotten son Rand.

So, for the initiated, here below are her ten most quoted lines:

1. A government is the most dangerous threat to man’s rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims.

2. Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be waiting for us in our graves – or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.

3. Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

4. Do not ever say that the desire to “do good” by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives.

5. From the smallest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from one attribute of man – the function of his reasoning mind.

6. Government “help” to business is just as disastrous as government persecution… the only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off.

7. I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

8. Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).

9. It only stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting the sacrificial offerings. Where there’s service, there is someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and intends to be the master.

10. Man’s unique reward, however, is that while animals survive by adjusting themselves to their background, man survives by adjusting his background to himself.