Is Rand Relevant?

That’s the title of an op-ed, referring to Ayn Rand, in today’s Wall Street Journal by Yaron Brook, president and executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute.  The answer is “yes,” perhaps now more than ever.

You can read it here:  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123698976776126461.html

The article is very short.  A more detailed explanation is available in an interview with Dr. Brook here: http://www.theobjectivestandard.com/issues/2009-spring/ayn-rand-atlas-shrugged.asp

As a teenager in Russia during the Communist Revolution, Rand saw the state confiscate her father’s pharmacy business.  At once  appalled by the collectivist policies of her country while falling in love with the idea of the freedom and capitalism of America, she decided to be a writer to promote individualism.  And write she did as soon as she learned English well enough since she wanted to write, not in Russian, but in her adopted language.

Her 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged, is now one of the best selling books on Amazon due to it’s ominous parallels to today’s political scene – the clash between the capitalists, thinkers, creators and actual workers on the one hand and the hangers-on, welfare collectors and the government bureaucrats that enable them on the other.  Rand thought that capitalism, rather than being  something evil, is the only moral economic system, because it is the only system that promotes true liberty by allowing each person to create and trade in his or her rational self interest to the best of his or her ability without limitation or interference.

At over 1,000 pages of small print reading Atlas Shrugged is a project.  An easy introduction to her thought is Anthem, at only about 100 pages of larger print.  Somewhere in the middle is The Fountainhead, which was made into a movie starring Gary Cooper (it would be interesting to compare his character as the architect in The Fountainhead with his character as the sheriff in High Noon).  In fact, the Ayn Rand Institute offers essay contests on these three novels:  Anthem for 8th, 8th and 10th graders, The Fountainhead for 11th and 12th graders, and Atlas Shrugged for college students and graduating high school seniors.

Rand sums up her work as: “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.”

She adds: “My personal life is a postscript to my novels; it consists of the sentence: ‘And I mean it.‘”