I read Ayn Rand’s novels when I was in high school. That’s about the right age to be absorbed by a philosophy that presents a total world view as a moral imperative.
Today Rand has become a darling in the Tea Party firmament, at least in the atheist wing.
Now I see someone has made the first of a three-part movie series of her sprawling paean to the free enterprise system, “Atlas Shrugged.”
By all the accounts I’ve read, the movie is simply awful. Reviewers have given some wickedly funny accounts of wooden acting and improbable plotting.
I am a little surprised to find that someone could get financing for such a movie. Certainly no practicing capitalist would be this foolish.
Her books pushed something she called Objectivism, a view that held rational self-interest as the highest moral calling. I felt a little like an escapee from a cult after I moved on to college and a better class of fiction.
Rand based her world view on a logical construct that posed as something as serious and profound as the works of Aristotle, Descartes or Hume.
Actually, it’s mostly mumbo jumbo. She was no philosopher. Her views are better attributed to her escape from Soviet Russia than to any breakthrough of logic. Her ideas are reactive — simply the exact opposite of communism.
She had good reason to hate Stalin, but she confused economics with morality.
Capitalism is an efficient means of producing goods and services. But if it was a road map for good, hedge fund managers would be the most moral people among us and Enron employees would have gotten awards instead of jail cells.
And I’d love to hear Rand explain how the executives of BP couldn’t have benefitted from a little government oversight as they went about their search for oil in the Gulf of Mexico last year.
Rand disciple and former Fed chief Alan Greenspan told a congressional committee that he was stunned by the economic collapse caused by just the kind of deregulation Rand championed.
I was stunned that someone responsible for the well-being of the U.S. economy was unaware that there were a lot of criminally greedy people on Wall Street.
As I look back on the simplistic world Rand created in fiction, I wonder how anyone can believe that her philosophy would work in a world populated with real people.
After my dalliance with unfettered lassez faire economics and a quick look at the actual world we live in, I decided that anyone who claims to have the perfect economic system simply doesn’t know what he or she is talking about.
The world is messy and these tidy little philosophies are for some other universe.
I cringe with the same embarrassment of seeing a picture of myself in bell-bottoms as I do when I think of plowing through “Atlas Shrugged.”
It describes how the talented and productive people of the world go on strike in response to growing collectivism. It was a polemic with characters drawn only to serve her argument. It wouldn’t have been more removed from reality if she had set it in Hogworts.
Rand’s view of the ideal world would be something like the late 19th century in the industrial world. No regulations, few taxes and a small number of very rich people living very well while most people struggled simply to survive.
Charles Dickens did a far better job of describing that Darwinian hellscape.
Contact Tom Hawkins, editorial page editor of the Springfield News-Sun, at 328-0343 or thawkins@coxohio.com.
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