>Outside of fiction, the only way to create the image of a hero worth dying for today is through a totalitarian system that exercises control over the flow of information. If Elon Musk was born two hundred years ago, perhaps all we would know about his life would be his amazing technological accomplishments and he’d be seen as a demigod. But today we’ve all scrolled his X account.
>When it comes to villains, Josh Hawley seems closer to Ellsworth Toohey than any industrialist is to Francisco d’Anconia. Perhaps it helps to build up an Elon Musk — or even a Donald Trump — as a symbol to rally around, as long as the more intelligent among us remain realistic about such individuals.
One thing I found consistently odd about American political culture is the way Americans have this tendency not just to admire but to practically DEIFY their preferred politicians in their lifetimes. I've lost count of how many crude paintings I've seen of Trump in the White House signing a bill into law (or whatever), with Jesus standing behind him with his hand on Trump's shoulder. And this is a bipartisan phenomenon: Democrats draw superhero comics about Obama, or direct fawning romantic hagiographies about him (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_(2016_film), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southside_with_You).
There really is no equivalent in Ireland: even if an Irish person earnestly believes that X is the best man to serve as the next Taoiseach, depicting X as having been chosen by God to lead the nation (or whatever the secular equivalent is) would be unthinkable.
I'm wondering if this has something to do with the relative population sizes. I assume that any artist drawing Christian fanart of Trump has never met him personally, or met anyone who's met him personally, or met anyone who etc. That kind of psychological distance enables the artist to maintain a kind of idealised parasocial relationship with Trump, which would shatter if he were ever to meet him in person and observe him belch or break wind just like everyone else. But Ireland is so small and everyone knows everyone else: within seconds of you saying "X was chosen by God to lead the nation", somebody would jump in to retort "Him? I went to school with him, did I ever tell you about the time he shat himself in Irish college?"
I know, it's weird. I like to come up with reasons for these things being features of our culture rather than bugs. Like, maybe we do this because we are passionate about causes and that same passion led us to be entrepreneurs and to defeat the Nazis and communists. Perhaps we have the right combination of zealotry and rationalism that allows us to tackle big problems without needing to conquer the world to make ourselves feel important. Or maybe we are just irrational lunatics, I don't know.
It's fun to see a relative newcomer to Rand's ideas digesting them publicly as you are doing here, and I think you've done a great job overall of absorbing and distilling her essential approach to ethics and her defense of capitalism.
I think you may have misunderstood her bit when you say she would have claimed that Genghis Khan was acting altruistically. A person can fail ethically in Rand's world without being an altruist. I think she would have simply called Khan a nihilistic criminal, not an altruist. Rand wrote:
"The basic principle of altruism is that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue and value."
That certainly doesn't describe Genghis Khan! You might want to revisit her definitions of altruism, and see if this part of her philosophy, which you admittedly couldn't reconcile, makes more sense on a second visit.
Otherwise, I think you did a great job summarizing many of her key moral points here and I'm enjoying this series on Rand.
OK, 1300 words was a little much. So I'll try to condense.
Rand's no worse than some people like Foucault or Marx modern academics love, and capitalism does make countries that adopt it rich. Her literary chops aren't that great, but there are so few people doing what she does I'm inclined to say she does add something new. And Soviet Communism was really bad and would make a doctrinaire capitalist out of a lot of people.
But just as you can eat too much food and get fat, you can have too much capitalism, in the sense of deregulation causing problems. The 2008 financial crash, caused by financial deregulation, caused a lot of poverty and made lots of leftists. Climate change is doing enough damage (look at California on fire, or New Orleans underwater) that it requires government intervention, and that needs to be coordinated between the nations of the world. Also, even if everyone gets richer overall, having lots of poor people creates a lot of instability that can lead to revolutions--and you know how those usually go. The current health insurance system produces worse health outcomes with more money. And finally, uncontrolled immigration produces cohesion issues that can lead to populism.
In many cases, laissez-faire is self-terminating--the instability it produces leads to transition to another system, whether it be the end of the Gilded Age, the 1930s, or the recent neoliberal era.
You can have too much of a good thing.
Also, Albert Ellis was a pretty funny guy: "When I'm mad at someone, I like to tell them to go unfuck themselves, because fucking is a nice thing and is fun."
Absolutely agree. Especially about the idea that laissez-faire is self-terminating. Herbert Hoover is a perfect example of this. He epitomized the idea that government should be limited and not get involved in the economy. As soon as economic disaster hit, the public blamed him and elected the guy pitching maximum economic interventionism. We are very lucky that we got FDR and not Stalin or Mussolini. David Brooks once wrote that if only fascists would enforce the border then the people would elect fascists. During any economic disaster they will elect whoever offers to fix the economy, real or not.
I could have sworn that was David Frum. But I agree with you. Hoover's a good example I did not think of, thank you!
And, honestly, it's the system working as advertised. We had too much capitalism, so we elected a guy who turned the dial a few notches toward socialism and stayed democratic for the next 92 years.
I came here ready to hold your arguments in contempt but I ended up agreeing with almost everything you said. I have a few points to add though.
Saying that her villains were fake doesn't even begin to capture how bad they were. The heroes have names like Hank Rearden and Francisco d’Anconia but the looters have names like Tinky and Kip and Balph and Cuffy and Chick. They behave like they are made of blancmange and they are so stupid they can barely complete a sentence.
Business people in the real world are nothing like Rand's heroes. They are more like James Taggart. I wonder what Rand would have to say about Trump and Zuckerberg? What would she say about the politicians who run the Republican party or, in my country, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage?
I'm a fan of capitalism and the individual right to do what is right but what would Rand say about laws that prevent pollution? In Rand's time, the River Thames was a chemical stew. There are otters living in there now and it's government interference that brought them back. My city recently introduced a 'clean air' charge on diesel vans and our air is breathable again. If business people were as honourable as Rearden and Galt, perhaps we wouldn't need regulations. But they are not.
My favourite episode in the book is where the amazing short-order cook in a diner impresses Dagny so much that she wants to hire him. He turns out to be the best philosopher in the world who wanted to escape the corruption in academia.
The focus on individual virtue is the best part of her story but the idea that this can scale up to the captains of industry is just a fairy tale.
> The two boys had the open, joyous, friendly confidence of kittens who do not expect to get hurt [...] "They represent my particular career, Miss Taggart," said the young mother in answer to her comment, wrapping a loaf of fresh bread and smiling at her across the counter. "They're the profession I've chosen to practice, which, in spite of all the guff about motherhood, one can't practice successfully in the outer world. I believe you've met my husband, he's the teacher of economics who works as linesman for Dick McNamara. You know, of course, that there can be no collective commitments in this valley and that families or relatives are not allowed to come here, unless each person takes the striker's oath by his own independent conviction. I came here, not merely for the sake of my husband's profession, but for the sake of my own. I came here in order to bring up my sons as human beings. I would not surrender them to the educational systems devised to stunt a child's brain, to convince him that reason is impotent, that existence is an irrational chaos with which he's unable to deal, and thus reduce him to a state of chronic terror. You marvel at the difference between my children and those outside, Miss Taggart? Yet the cause is so simple. The cause is that here, in Galt's Gulch, there's no person who would not consider it monstrous ever to confront a child with the slightest suggestion of the irrational."
You haven't changed anything in my opinion of Rand's novels as completely unreadable, and kitsch, and her philosophy as devoid of any value. Let better novelists and good thinkers defend capitalism (but which flavor of capitalism?) She does not stand in a great tradition and did not spawn a great, or even middlingly good, tradition. I find her a joke and cannot see how anybody with an eye for literary or intellectual quality could take her seriously.
I am just not sure where she is trying to go with her defense of selfishness. It seems to me that an important thing that makes humans special is our ability to coordinate and cooperate together. Our moral senses arguably evolved to allow us to thrive as individuals within larger competitive/cooperative groups.
The sweet spot for human morality is that place where selfishness, altruism and utilitarianism merge or intersect. A better collective term is “mutualism.” It is where what is good for me is also good for you and good in general for most of us, in most ways, most of the time.
I think it makes sense if you consider her as reacting to the extremes of Communism. In that system, anything less than total submission to the collective is "selfish." That isn't an ideal either, that's a requirement. To be "altruistic" one would have to not only give up their possessions and their labor (that's the minimum), they must dedicate their life to it and make sure others do the same. Rand may be trying to reclaim the terms "selfish" and "altruistic" from that context by reversing their usual connotations. "Wanting to own property is selfish? Then selfishness is good, actually. Ratting out your neighbors to the government for not giving up all their harvest is altruistic? Then altruism is bad, actually."
Rand says that working together, especially with people that share your life-affirming values, is rationally selfish. You're trying to improve your life, and you're also improving the lives of others who you care about.
She might also say that when you sacrfice your time or values or life for others when you don't want to... and when you get nothing in return, either emotionally or materially - that's altruism and that's evil.
Ayn Rand understood that “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil. Usually the strength of a mass movement is proportionate to the vividness and tangibility of its devil.” (Eric Hoffer)
Capitalism in the abstract is fine, and leftists doing the "ugh, capitalism" complaint is a net negative for society.
But that doesn't give you a moral hall pass when it comes to the *means* in which profit is earned. Dumping waste into rivers really is bad. Adjusting the nicotine levels in cigarettes to keep smokers hooked really is bad. Allowing disinformation on your platform really is bad.
It's a spectrum but the most blatant examples are sock puppet accounts created by governments specifically to lie and create confusion. Russia, China and Iran have done that it in the US and other countries. The US has done it in China and probably in other places too.
I have no idea what this means. Either something is "disinformation" or it isn't. What would it mean for something to exist on the "disinformation spectrum"?
A government agency that creates disinformation is on one end. Someone who shares it because it serves their political goals or it makes them money is not as bad as the creator, but they are benefitting from it.
Disinformation consists of narratives that are explicitly created to obscure the truth. It's not enough to be wrong. People unknowingly share incorrect information all the time. The purpose of disinformation is to get people to believe and repeat it.
re: EM and DT, (the negative features of) Rand's personal life acts as the perfect example of the contrast between the ideal and the reality.
Individuals are good to the extent that they uphold... objective... virtues. (Obviously a belief that long predates all of us)
If in a public sphere you find yourself attaching that value to individuals themselves, unrelated to how they actually live up to them, - whether Rand herself or anyone else - then surely you've gone wrong in a cult of personality sort of way.
On that note, this might seem pedantic, but your title "Ayn Rand for Pragmatists" is exactly the issue. Obviously using the name generates (hate-)clicks, but to a pragmatist - focused on real world benefit - Ayn Rand the real person is just historic baggage. If she did/said good things - with pragmatic benefits - then great! If she created a weird cult of personality and didn't live up to her own ideals, then bad.
I am a pragmatic free market capitalist, therefore I think everyone should focus on the ideas instead of the people.
Great analysis! Love the way you point out the potential contradictions. You can love Ayn Rand while admitting that not everything she believed made sense.
It's interesting that you think Elizabeth Warren comes closest to being a looter, she once gave the most beautiful moral case for capitalism that I have heard. I can't find the interview anymore, but it's basically just her describing the net benefit of voluntary exchange. I know that's basically just capitalism 101 but the way she described it in moral terms is something I hadn't heard outside of reading Atlas Shrugged. Obviously she changed since then, but I think you have fallen for the straw man version of her you see in headlines.
"She also correctly pointed out the environment was becoming an excuse to stamp out economic freedom" -I too dislike the environmental movement, but it's easy to forget the context of the 1970s when rivers literally caught fire and smog was so thick you couldn't see further than a single city block. Adding lead to gasoline probably caused global decreases in IQ and could have been responsible for the crime wave of the 80s and 90s. Ayn Rand would have bent her ideology into a logic pretzel in order to find a way for these issues to be trivial or to somehow blame them on collectivism, instead of just admitting that capitalism without government regulation incentivizes companies to act in ways they would not act as moral individuals. Without rules about waste disposal, a company must pour their waste in the nearby river or be priced out by the company with the least scruples. Economists understand these negative externalities have to be accounted for. I've been to foreign countries that have no environmental regulations, you wouldn't want to live there no matter how efficient their market is.
Adam Smith pointed out in The Wealth Of Nations that companies would naturally try to form monopolies and that such power would destroy the efficiency of the market. Sectors of the economy like water and sewer systems don't allow competitive markets to function properly. I've only read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead but I get the feeling that Ayn Rand would ignore pieces of this puzzle that didn't quite fit into her world view precisely because she saw it as a moral question rather than an empirical one the way you and I would. I saw an interview once where she said she didn't even believe in the government building roads or funding a fire department. At a certain point libertarians just become anarchists and the horseshoe is complete.
"These are businesses that have by any reasonable measure made humanity better off." -Several studies have found that Walmart makes communities poorer. It's possible they are wrong, but given that we know about dangers with monopoly control and rent seeking, it seems at least plausible. Local stores keep capital in the community while corporations take their profits elsewhere. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/12/walmart-prices-poverty-economy/681122/
The free market is wonderful, but free market absolutists start to sound no different to me than communist utopians. Unable to handle real-world problems or to admit that tradeoffs exist. Men are neither naturally selfless nor selfish. We are survivalists who respond to incentives but aren't ruled by them. Nor are we all the same. Some evil men will do evil things. If their evil behavior is rewarded, then good men are incentivized to act in evil ways. Some men will never commit an evil act even if it is in their best interest, but such men are as rare as those who are truly evil. We also like to take shortcuts, and if we can make money by lying and cheating then that's a hell of a lot easier than inventing a new technology or cure. If regulations don't keep out the cheaters then they overwhelm the market and destroy everything good about it. Only children think you can never have too much of a good thing.
I wonder if New York libertarians organize Ayn Rand tours. There's some interesting history there and it might be a fun way to meet people with similar views in a place where those are rare.
Can you explain Rand's antipathy towards state support and social security, but in her twilight years was dependent on the same state support and social security?
Seems to be a significant contradiction of her life's work and the ideology, backgrounded by large corporate players including Musk, fossil fuels etc. receiving direct or indirect subsidies?
Accordingly, why would such a faux 'free market' ideology or outlook be followed by anyone except members of the <0.01%?
Rand believed that Social Security should not exist, but that, having paid into it, she was entitled to collect the benefits.
Her critics often exaggerate the extent of her dependence on Social Security. At the time of her death in 1982, her estate was between $500,000 and $1,000,000, which is between $1.6 and $3.2 million in 2024 dollars. One might expect it to be larger, but she was hardly dependent on state aid to pay for food. And she had continuing income streams from her books, which were still in print.
"Seems to be a significant contradiction of her life's work and the ideology, backgrounded by large corporate players including Musk, fossil fuels etc. receiving direct or indirect subsidies?"
Oh, yeah, uh, if you want to criticize rich guys getting government subsidies, you should... definitely read the books.
"Accordingly, why would such a faux 'free market' ideology or outlook be followed by anyone except members of the <0.01%?"
Maybe because the next 95% or so also sees benefits as well? You can obviously assert yourself "this ideology should only appeal to the .01%" but it seems like the discovery that people beyond that .01% like it might lead you to consider whether that's an accurate assertion.
But that's exactly the problem. Without some degree of redistribution, there isn't enough in it for the next 95% or so, and they quite naturally vote for more economically left parties, or (if the situation is extreme enough) have a revolution.
This is why populism and socialism never go away; a pure free-market distribution leads to a level of inequality that becomes untenable. It's why you get mixed economies that wind up in a tension between capitalism and socialism.
The middle isn't necessarily bad. You wouldn't want to weigh 100 pounds, or 300. You wouldn't want the temperature to be 20 degrees, or 120.
"Without some degree of redistribution, there isn't enough in it for the next 95% or so"
That's a claim that's critically dependent on the numbers, and unfortunately, highly contradicted BY the numbers we actually see Are you really claiming that in the US, the only thing keeping the 90-95th percentile income brackets from "not having enough" and therefore supporting a socialist revolution is redistribution? They (and a number of brackets below them) are net losers from redistribution. Wouldn't this logic imply they should support a capitalist revolution?
More capitalist-esque countries have absolutely achieved levels of pre-redistribution "enough" for vastly more than just .01%, (though obviously not 100%). You can just look at the data! You're saying that without redistribution, 95% of people won't have enough?
"a pure free-market distribution leads to a level of inequality that becomes untenable. [...] or (if the situation is extreme enough) have a revolution."
There may have been a time in which this was true, but this theory is just dead now. The problem is that people actually do not care about inequality (to a sufficient extent) to overwhelm how much they care about absolute standards of living. Is it not surprising this would occur after decades of rising per-capita wealth in all of these countries?
Yes people will revolt if inequality means Louis the Sixteenth has a palace and millions don't have enough bread, but if it means Warren Buffett has billions of paper wealth and most people have enough money for bread and iphones and rent and circuses, then... no, they aren't gonna revolt.
And they super aren't gonna revolt (at least in a socialist way) when they realize that moving towards capitalism has resulted in higher (absolute) living standards, even for the lowest brackets (also it funds the redistribution), for billions of people around the world.
The [Extreme Capitalism > high inequality > socialist revolution] theory is honestly dead. There may indeed be extremes that cause it, but we are so far from them that it's not really a helpful system.
"The middle isn't necessarily bad. You wouldn't want to weigh 100 pounds, or 300. You wouldn't want the temperature to be 20 degrees, or 120."
Sure, I'm fine with a capitalism/redistribution balance, but to extend your metaphor, people are also very capable of realizing there are win-win choices on the margin given the context, and the context is we're at a weight/temperature where moving in the capitalism direction is positive-sum. If I'm 200 pounds, and I add 10 lbs of muscle: win. If it's 69 degrees but I want to go swimming, I'd appreciate 20 more degrees. Sure if we get to 300 lbs or 120 degrees, bad things will happen but... that would take a long time, and there's no real constituency for it.
Wait....the 'next 95%' refers to the 4th-99th percentiles, i.e. the vast majority of the population. The vast majority of them (except the tippy-top) would benefit from redistribution. I would definitely imagine the 90th-95th percentiles, i.e. the upper middle class, would not benefit from redistribution!
I'm saying without some level of redistribution, you get either votes for left-wing parties *or* a revolution. The first is by far more common, since most people are too risk-averse to start revolutions. (And obviously involves much less bloodshed and a better chance of better outcomes. The Russians would have been better off if the Czar had won, and the Chinese if the Nationalists had won.)
However, whether electing social democrats (or the watered-down version here in the USA) or revolting, it is not true that nobody cares about inequality if living standards are going up. People often don't notice living standards going up, particularly if they are going up for everyone; they just assume it's technological progress or whatever. (Yes, that's an increase in living standards.) People are acutely sensitive to differences in status, and that is not purely economic either--the arrogance of the woke elite probably contributed to Trump's victory, even though they are not the absolute top of the economic structure.
I guess our only real disagreement, though, is whether more or less capitalism at this point on the curve is preferable. I would argue we need less (though *not* all the way to full socialism, I should clarify-perhaps as far as other Anglophone nations like Australia or New Zealand)--deregulation has caused financial failures and climate change, deindustrialization has caused opioid epidemics, housing has gotten expensive enough to impair family formation, and mass immigration in excess of the (really quite high relative to Europe or East Asia) assimilative capacity of the nation has contributed to ethnic strife. We've gone about as capitalist as we can go, the pendulum is starting to swing back.
"Wait....the 'next 95%' refers to the 4th-99th percentiles, i.e. the vast majority of the population. The vast majority of them (except the tippy-top) would benefit from redistribution. I would definitely imagine the 90th-95th percentiles, i.e. the upper middle class, would not benefit from redistribution!"
Ok, maybe I don't understand, but you said: "Without some degree of redistribution, there isn't enough in it for the next 95% or so"
Does that not imply that you're saying, in America, the 4th-99% are dependent on redistribution to have "enough"? "The vast majority of them (except the tippy-top) would benefit from redistribution." But they aren't, currently. Anyone who's a net after-transfers taxpayer doesn't currently benefit (on net) from redistribution. That's way more people than just the top 5%.
"it is not true that nobody cares about inequality if living standards are going up"
Again, I definitely am not saying "not at all," but I am saying that the benefit of rising living standards can and does swamp how much people care about inequality, especially if people do not think the inequality was arrived at in an unjustified way.
"People are acutely sensitive to differences in status"
They are, it's just that they are less sensitive to differences in status than they are to actual material concerns. If you don't have enough baby formula you might revolt. If people think Warren Buffett is higher status than you, you might loudly complain about that, but you aren't going to sell the baby formula to take out an ad denouncing him.
We just live in such a wealthy society that, as you say, people don't notice. But it still guides their (in-)actions.
"the arrogance of the woke elite probably contributed to Trump's victory, even though they are not the absolute top of the economic structure."
This proves my point. If people cared about economic inequality, they wouldn't hate woke journalists, and wouldn't vote for a dude who ostentatiously displays his wealth whenever he can. But if they care about "power/influence inequality" they would. Which happened?
"deregulation has caused financial failures and climate change, deindustrialization has caused opioid epidemics, housing has gotten expensive enough to impair family formation, and mass immigration in excess of the (really quite high relative to Europe or East Asia) assimilative capacity of the nation has contributed to ethnic strife"
I think the implication that these are problems caused by capitalism is wrong. Not defending capitalism, just that I think lots of them are... unrelated, orthogonal to your Capitalism Score. Capitalism isn't a meter that goes from 0 to 100, and if it goes too far to the right you get an opioid epidemic, and if you push it back to the left, it goes away. There are all kinds of things that caused those things, some are capitalist, some are socialist, some are neither. There are lots of potential solutions to them, some are capitalist, some are socialist, some are neither.
To take one example: "housing has gotten expensive". But how is this "capitalism." Is restrictive zoning "capitalism"? Is a developer wanting to build a giant apartment, but not being allowed to, "capitalism?" Is people moving to one town and driving up rents there, "capitalism"? Wouldn't it be more predicated on say, a policy of freedom of movement, which a country could or could not have?
"We've gone about as capitalist as we can go"
What, how? Like I said, capitalism is not some Sim City single value meter that can, pendulum like, swing back and forth. You can have a 0% capitalist healthcare system and a 100% capitalist real estate system. You have to look at each thing, you have to understand the mechanics of which features are causing the benefits/problems, and which will be affected by - for that item - moving in a capitalist/non-capitalist direction.
How do you explain the right wing or conservative parties, politicians and rich guys of <0.1% worshipping Ayn Rand and receiving subsidies or in kind, being catered to? Orwellian or hypocritical?
Why would... subsidies be "Orwellian?" It's not just a synonym for "bad." The word has a meaning.
"How do you explain the right wing or conservative parties, politicians and rich guys of <0.1% worshipping Ayn Rand and receiving subsidies or in kind, being catered to?"
Obviously it's hypocritical! The question is: what does this conclusion get us? A smug sense of satisfaction? If only some free market capitalist type people had addressed this in the past! I mean, just walk through the steps:
You are an insane free market Randian capitalist. You start a widget business. The government decides that for their own reasons - you're currently too small to bribe them - they want there to be more widgets, so they subsidize it. You receive that subsidy. Great for you! Why wouldn't they accept it? (or if it's a purchase subsidy, they can't even elect to not receive it)
Don't you WANT these people to dial it down and participate in polite subsidy-happy social democracy society? Is the goal just proving that people we don't like are hypocrites? And then we just walk away?
Half the rationale behind why insane free-market-capitalists are against subsidies are that they are so beneficial for the recipient (while having costs for everyone else) that they can't logically refuse them, and then get addicted to them (and lobby for more). You should definitely bring this objection up to the.... people who create the subsidies. Notably, they don't usually seem to be insane Randians.
Just damn! Excellent work you've done here. She's the GOAT when it comes to a proper defense of capitalism, and you not only analyzed her thoughts well, you added some constructive things to consider.
Rand's idea of "right" is flawed. Certainly "right" is not something bestowed by a supernatural entity, but what is it then? As with most of Rand's philosophy the best ideas were expressed first and better by Spinoza. Right is the same thing as power.
>Outside of fiction, the only way to create the image of a hero worth dying for today is through a totalitarian system that exercises control over the flow of information. If Elon Musk was born two hundred years ago, perhaps all we would know about his life would be his amazing technological accomplishments and he’d be seen as a demigod. But today we’ve all scrolled his X account.
>When it comes to villains, Josh Hawley seems closer to Ellsworth Toohey than any industrialist is to Francisco d’Anconia. Perhaps it helps to build up an Elon Musk — or even a Donald Trump — as a symbol to rally around, as long as the more intelligent among us remain realistic about such individuals.
One thing I found consistently odd about American political culture is the way Americans have this tendency not just to admire but to practically DEIFY their preferred politicians in their lifetimes. I've lost count of how many crude paintings I've seen of Trump in the White House signing a bill into law (or whatever), with Jesus standing behind him with his hand on Trump's shoulder. And this is a bipartisan phenomenon: Democrats draw superhero comics about Obama, or direct fawning romantic hagiographies about him (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_(2016_film), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southside_with_You).
There really is no equivalent in Ireland: even if an Irish person earnestly believes that X is the best man to serve as the next Taoiseach, depicting X as having been chosen by God to lead the nation (or whatever the secular equivalent is) would be unthinkable.
I'm wondering if this has something to do with the relative population sizes. I assume that any artist drawing Christian fanart of Trump has never met him personally, or met anyone who's met him personally, or met anyone who etc. That kind of psychological distance enables the artist to maintain a kind of idealised parasocial relationship with Trump, which would shatter if he were ever to meet him in person and observe him belch or break wind just like everyone else. But Ireland is so small and everyone knows everyone else: within seconds of you saying "X was chosen by God to lead the nation", somebody would jump in to retort "Him? I went to school with him, did I ever tell you about the time he shat himself in Irish college?"
I think the god-king is one of those archetypes that keeps coming back, for better or worse. We don't have a monarchy so we have this instead.
I know, it's weird. I like to come up with reasons for these things being features of our culture rather than bugs. Like, maybe we do this because we are passionate about causes and that same passion led us to be entrepreneurs and to defeat the Nazis and communists. Perhaps we have the right combination of zealotry and rationalism that allows us to tackle big problems without needing to conquer the world to make ourselves feel important. Or maybe we are just irrational lunatics, I don't know.
It's fun to see a relative newcomer to Rand's ideas digesting them publicly as you are doing here, and I think you've done a great job overall of absorbing and distilling her essential approach to ethics and her defense of capitalism.
I think you may have misunderstood her bit when you say she would have claimed that Genghis Khan was acting altruistically. A person can fail ethically in Rand's world without being an altruist. I think she would have simply called Khan a nihilistic criminal, not an altruist. Rand wrote:
"The basic principle of altruism is that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue and value."
That certainly doesn't describe Genghis Khan! You might want to revisit her definitions of altruism, and see if this part of her philosophy, which you admittedly couldn't reconcile, makes more sense on a second visit.
Otherwise, I think you did a great job summarizing many of her key moral points here and I'm enjoying this series on Rand.
Nice response.
OK, 1300 words was a little much. So I'll try to condense.
Rand's no worse than some people like Foucault or Marx modern academics love, and capitalism does make countries that adopt it rich. Her literary chops aren't that great, but there are so few people doing what she does I'm inclined to say she does add something new. And Soviet Communism was really bad and would make a doctrinaire capitalist out of a lot of people.
But just as you can eat too much food and get fat, you can have too much capitalism, in the sense of deregulation causing problems. The 2008 financial crash, caused by financial deregulation, caused a lot of poverty and made lots of leftists. Climate change is doing enough damage (look at California on fire, or New Orleans underwater) that it requires government intervention, and that needs to be coordinated between the nations of the world. Also, even if everyone gets richer overall, having lots of poor people creates a lot of instability that can lead to revolutions--and you know how those usually go. The current health insurance system produces worse health outcomes with more money. And finally, uncontrolled immigration produces cohesion issues that can lead to populism.
In many cases, laissez-faire is self-terminating--the instability it produces leads to transition to another system, whether it be the end of the Gilded Age, the 1930s, or the recent neoliberal era.
You can have too much of a good thing.
Also, Albert Ellis was a pretty funny guy: "When I'm mad at someone, I like to tell them to go unfuck themselves, because fucking is a nice thing and is fun."
Absolutely agree. Especially about the idea that laissez-faire is self-terminating. Herbert Hoover is a perfect example of this. He epitomized the idea that government should be limited and not get involved in the economy. As soon as economic disaster hit, the public blamed him and elected the guy pitching maximum economic interventionism. We are very lucky that we got FDR and not Stalin or Mussolini. David Brooks once wrote that if only fascists would enforce the border then the people would elect fascists. During any economic disaster they will elect whoever offers to fix the economy, real or not.
I could have sworn that was David Frum. But I agree with you. Hoover's a good example I did not think of, thank you!
And, honestly, it's the system working as advertised. We had too much capitalism, so we elected a guy who turned the dial a few notches toward socialism and stayed democratic for the next 92 years.
And people say Ayn Rand was long-winded.
I laughed, but she has a 60 page speech by John Galt in Atlas Shrugged.
"Zat was 57 pages, your irrationalist neo-meestique!"
I came here ready to hold your arguments in contempt but I ended up agreeing with almost everything you said. I have a few points to add though.
Saying that her villains were fake doesn't even begin to capture how bad they were. The heroes have names like Hank Rearden and Francisco d’Anconia but the looters have names like Tinky and Kip and Balph and Cuffy and Chick. They behave like they are made of blancmange and they are so stupid they can barely complete a sentence.
Business people in the real world are nothing like Rand's heroes. They are more like James Taggart. I wonder what Rand would have to say about Trump and Zuckerberg? What would she say about the politicians who run the Republican party or, in my country, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage?
I'm a fan of capitalism and the individual right to do what is right but what would Rand say about laws that prevent pollution? In Rand's time, the River Thames was a chemical stew. There are otters living in there now and it's government interference that brought them back. My city recently introduced a 'clean air' charge on diesel vans and our air is breathable again. If business people were as honourable as Rearden and Galt, perhaps we wouldn't need regulations. But they are not.
My favourite episode in the book is where the amazing short-order cook in a diner impresses Dagny so much that she wants to hire him. He turns out to be the best philosopher in the world who wanted to escape the corruption in academia.
The focus on individual virtue is the best part of her story but the idea that this can scale up to the captains of industry is just a fairy tale.
Exactly right about Randian villains. What a paradise it would be if all the worlds bad guys were so stupid and incompetent.
There are no children in Ayn Rand's world. It's pretty obvious why.
> The two boys had the open, joyous, friendly confidence of kittens who do not expect to get hurt [...] "They represent my particular career, Miss Taggart," said the young mother in answer to her comment, wrapping a loaf of fresh bread and smiling at her across the counter. "They're the profession I've chosen to practice, which, in spite of all the guff about motherhood, one can't practice successfully in the outer world. I believe you've met my husband, he's the teacher of economics who works as linesman for Dick McNamara. You know, of course, that there can be no collective commitments in this valley and that families or relatives are not allowed to come here, unless each person takes the striker's oath by his own independent conviction. I came here, not merely for the sake of my husband's profession, but for the sake of my own. I came here in order to bring up my sons as human beings. I would not surrender them to the educational systems devised to stunt a child's brain, to convince him that reason is impotent, that existence is an irrational chaos with which he's unable to deal, and thus reduce him to a state of chronic terror. You marvel at the difference between my children and those outside, Miss Taggart? Yet the cause is so simple. The cause is that here, in Galt's Gulch, there's no person who would not consider it monstrous ever to confront a child with the slightest suggestion of the irrational."
You haven't changed anything in my opinion of Rand's novels as completely unreadable, and kitsch, and her philosophy as devoid of any value. Let better novelists and good thinkers defend capitalism (but which flavor of capitalism?) She does not stand in a great tradition and did not spawn a great, or even middlingly good, tradition. I find her a joke and cannot see how anybody with an eye for literary or intellectual quality could take her seriously.
I am just not sure where she is trying to go with her defense of selfishness. It seems to me that an important thing that makes humans special is our ability to coordinate and cooperate together. Our moral senses arguably evolved to allow us to thrive as individuals within larger competitive/cooperative groups.
The sweet spot for human morality is that place where selfishness, altruism and utilitarianism merge or intersect. A better collective term is “mutualism.” It is where what is good for me is also good for you and good in general for most of us, in most ways, most of the time.
I think it makes sense if you consider her as reacting to the extremes of Communism. In that system, anything less than total submission to the collective is "selfish." That isn't an ideal either, that's a requirement. To be "altruistic" one would have to not only give up their possessions and their labor (that's the minimum), they must dedicate their life to it and make sure others do the same. Rand may be trying to reclaim the terms "selfish" and "altruistic" from that context by reversing their usual connotations. "Wanting to own property is selfish? Then selfishness is good, actually. Ratting out your neighbors to the government for not giving up all their harvest is altruistic? Then altruism is bad, actually."
Rand says that working together, especially with people that share your life-affirming values, is rationally selfish. You're trying to improve your life, and you're also improving the lives of others who you care about.
She might also say that when you sacrfice your time or values or life for others when you don't want to... and when you get nothing in return, either emotionally or materially - that's altruism and that's evil.
Ayn Rand understood that “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil. Usually the strength of a mass movement is proportionate to the vividness and tangibility of its devil.” (Eric Hoffer)
Capitalism in the abstract is fine, and leftists doing the "ugh, capitalism" complaint is a net negative for society.
But that doesn't give you a moral hall pass when it comes to the *means* in which profit is earned. Dumping waste into rivers really is bad. Adjusting the nicotine levels in cigarettes to keep smokers hooked really is bad. Allowing disinformation on your platform really is bad.
What is your personal definition of "disinformation"?
It's a spectrum but the most blatant examples are sock puppet accounts created by governments specifically to lie and create confusion. Russia, China and Iran have done that it in the US and other countries. The US has done it in China and probably in other places too.
>It's a spectrum
I have no idea what this means. Either something is "disinformation" or it isn't. What would it mean for something to exist on the "disinformation spectrum"?
A government agency that creates disinformation is on one end. Someone who shares it because it serves their political goals or it makes them money is not as bad as the creator, but they are benefitting from it.
But you still haven't actually defined what "disinformation" is.
Disinformation consists of narratives that are explicitly created to obscure the truth. It's not enough to be wrong. People unknowingly share incorrect information all the time. The purpose of disinformation is to get people to believe and repeat it.
Here is a book on the subject.
https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Handbook-of-Disinformation-and-National-Security/Arcos-Chiru-Ivan/p/book/9781032040509
re: EM and DT, (the negative features of) Rand's personal life acts as the perfect example of the contrast between the ideal and the reality.
Individuals are good to the extent that they uphold... objective... virtues. (Obviously a belief that long predates all of us)
If in a public sphere you find yourself attaching that value to individuals themselves, unrelated to how they actually live up to them, - whether Rand herself or anyone else - then surely you've gone wrong in a cult of personality sort of way.
On that note, this might seem pedantic, but your title "Ayn Rand for Pragmatists" is exactly the issue. Obviously using the name generates (hate-)clicks, but to a pragmatist - focused on real world benefit - Ayn Rand the real person is just historic baggage. If she did/said good things - with pragmatic benefits - then great! If she created a weird cult of personality and didn't live up to her own ideals, then bad.
I am a pragmatic free market capitalist, therefore I think everyone should focus on the ideas instead of the people.
Great analysis! Love the way you point out the potential contradictions. You can love Ayn Rand while admitting that not everything she believed made sense.
It's interesting that you think Elizabeth Warren comes closest to being a looter, she once gave the most beautiful moral case for capitalism that I have heard. I can't find the interview anymore, but it's basically just her describing the net benefit of voluntary exchange. I know that's basically just capitalism 101 but the way she described it in moral terms is something I hadn't heard outside of reading Atlas Shrugged. Obviously she changed since then, but I think you have fallen for the straw man version of her you see in headlines.
"She also correctly pointed out the environment was becoming an excuse to stamp out economic freedom" -I too dislike the environmental movement, but it's easy to forget the context of the 1970s when rivers literally caught fire and smog was so thick you couldn't see further than a single city block. Adding lead to gasoline probably caused global decreases in IQ and could have been responsible for the crime wave of the 80s and 90s. Ayn Rand would have bent her ideology into a logic pretzel in order to find a way for these issues to be trivial or to somehow blame them on collectivism, instead of just admitting that capitalism without government regulation incentivizes companies to act in ways they would not act as moral individuals. Without rules about waste disposal, a company must pour their waste in the nearby river or be priced out by the company with the least scruples. Economists understand these negative externalities have to be accounted for. I've been to foreign countries that have no environmental regulations, you wouldn't want to live there no matter how efficient their market is.
Adam Smith pointed out in The Wealth Of Nations that companies would naturally try to form monopolies and that such power would destroy the efficiency of the market. Sectors of the economy like water and sewer systems don't allow competitive markets to function properly. I've only read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead but I get the feeling that Ayn Rand would ignore pieces of this puzzle that didn't quite fit into her world view precisely because she saw it as a moral question rather than an empirical one the way you and I would. I saw an interview once where she said she didn't even believe in the government building roads or funding a fire department. At a certain point libertarians just become anarchists and the horseshoe is complete.
"These are businesses that have by any reasonable measure made humanity better off." -Several studies have found that Walmart makes communities poorer. It's possible they are wrong, but given that we know about dangers with monopoly control and rent seeking, it seems at least plausible. Local stores keep capital in the community while corporations take their profits elsewhere. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/12/walmart-prices-poverty-economy/681122/
The free market is wonderful, but free market absolutists start to sound no different to me than communist utopians. Unable to handle real-world problems or to admit that tradeoffs exist. Men are neither naturally selfless nor selfish. We are survivalists who respond to incentives but aren't ruled by them. Nor are we all the same. Some evil men will do evil things. If their evil behavior is rewarded, then good men are incentivized to act in evil ways. Some men will never commit an evil act even if it is in their best interest, but such men are as rare as those who are truly evil. We also like to take shortcuts, and if we can make money by lying and cheating then that's a hell of a lot easier than inventing a new technology or cure. If regulations don't keep out the cheaters then they overwhelm the market and destroy everything good about it. Only children think you can never have too much of a good thing.
I live on the same floor of the building where she lived and published The Objectivist newspaper. It’s trippy.
I wonder if New York libertarians organize Ayn Rand tours. There's some interesting history there and it might be a fun way to meet people with similar views in a place where those are rare.
Can you explain Rand's antipathy towards state support and social security, but in her twilight years was dependent on the same state support and social security?
Seems to be a significant contradiction of her life's work and the ideology, backgrounded by large corporate players including Musk, fossil fuels etc. receiving direct or indirect subsidies?
Accordingly, why would such a faux 'free market' ideology or outlook be followed by anyone except members of the <0.01%?
Rand believed that Social Security should not exist, but that, having paid into it, she was entitled to collect the benefits.
Her critics often exaggerate the extent of her dependence on Social Security. At the time of her death in 1982, her estate was between $500,000 and $1,000,000, which is between $1.6 and $3.2 million in 2024 dollars. One might expect it to be larger, but she was hardly dependent on state aid to pay for food. And she had continuing income streams from her books, which were still in print.
Deflection that does elaborate.
Deflection thatv does not elaborate or help understanding?
These guys do a good job elaborating further what Pete said: https://newideal.aynrand.org/we-took-ppp-funds-and-would-do-it-again/
"Seems to be a significant contradiction of her life's work and the ideology, backgrounded by large corporate players including Musk, fossil fuels etc. receiving direct or indirect subsidies?"
Oh, yeah, uh, if you want to criticize rich guys getting government subsidies, you should... definitely read the books.
"Accordingly, why would such a faux 'free market' ideology or outlook be followed by anyone except members of the <0.01%?"
Maybe because the next 95% or so also sees benefits as well? You can obviously assert yourself "this ideology should only appeal to the .01%" but it seems like the discovery that people beyond that .01% like it might lead you to consider whether that's an accurate assertion.
But that's exactly the problem. Without some degree of redistribution, there isn't enough in it for the next 95% or so, and they quite naturally vote for more economically left parties, or (if the situation is extreme enough) have a revolution.
This is why populism and socialism never go away; a pure free-market distribution leads to a level of inequality that becomes untenable. It's why you get mixed economies that wind up in a tension between capitalism and socialism.
The middle isn't necessarily bad. You wouldn't want to weigh 100 pounds, or 300. You wouldn't want the temperature to be 20 degrees, or 120.
"Without some degree of redistribution, there isn't enough in it for the next 95% or so"
That's a claim that's critically dependent on the numbers, and unfortunately, highly contradicted BY the numbers we actually see Are you really claiming that in the US, the only thing keeping the 90-95th percentile income brackets from "not having enough" and therefore supporting a socialist revolution is redistribution? They (and a number of brackets below them) are net losers from redistribution. Wouldn't this logic imply they should support a capitalist revolution?
More capitalist-esque countries have absolutely achieved levels of pre-redistribution "enough" for vastly more than just .01%, (though obviously not 100%). You can just look at the data! You're saying that without redistribution, 95% of people won't have enough?
"a pure free-market distribution leads to a level of inequality that becomes untenable. [...] or (if the situation is extreme enough) have a revolution."
There may have been a time in which this was true, but this theory is just dead now. The problem is that people actually do not care about inequality (to a sufficient extent) to overwhelm how much they care about absolute standards of living. Is it not surprising this would occur after decades of rising per-capita wealth in all of these countries?
Yes people will revolt if inequality means Louis the Sixteenth has a palace and millions don't have enough bread, but if it means Warren Buffett has billions of paper wealth and most people have enough money for bread and iphones and rent and circuses, then... no, they aren't gonna revolt.
And they super aren't gonna revolt (at least in a socialist way) when they realize that moving towards capitalism has resulted in higher (absolute) living standards, even for the lowest brackets (also it funds the redistribution), for billions of people around the world.
The [Extreme Capitalism > high inequality > socialist revolution] theory is honestly dead. There may indeed be extremes that cause it, but we are so far from them that it's not really a helpful system.
"The middle isn't necessarily bad. You wouldn't want to weigh 100 pounds, or 300. You wouldn't want the temperature to be 20 degrees, or 120."
Sure, I'm fine with a capitalism/redistribution balance, but to extend your metaphor, people are also very capable of realizing there are win-win choices on the margin given the context, and the context is we're at a weight/temperature where moving in the capitalism direction is positive-sum. If I'm 200 pounds, and I add 10 lbs of muscle: win. If it's 69 degrees but I want to go swimming, I'd appreciate 20 more degrees. Sure if we get to 300 lbs or 120 degrees, bad things will happen but... that would take a long time, and there's no real constituency for it.
Wait....the 'next 95%' refers to the 4th-99th percentiles, i.e. the vast majority of the population. The vast majority of them (except the tippy-top) would benefit from redistribution. I would definitely imagine the 90th-95th percentiles, i.e. the upper middle class, would not benefit from redistribution!
I'm saying without some level of redistribution, you get either votes for left-wing parties *or* a revolution. The first is by far more common, since most people are too risk-averse to start revolutions. (And obviously involves much less bloodshed and a better chance of better outcomes. The Russians would have been better off if the Czar had won, and the Chinese if the Nationalists had won.)
However, whether electing social democrats (or the watered-down version here in the USA) or revolting, it is not true that nobody cares about inequality if living standards are going up. People often don't notice living standards going up, particularly if they are going up for everyone; they just assume it's technological progress or whatever. (Yes, that's an increase in living standards.) People are acutely sensitive to differences in status, and that is not purely economic either--the arrogance of the woke elite probably contributed to Trump's victory, even though they are not the absolute top of the economic structure.
I guess our only real disagreement, though, is whether more or less capitalism at this point on the curve is preferable. I would argue we need less (though *not* all the way to full socialism, I should clarify-perhaps as far as other Anglophone nations like Australia or New Zealand)--deregulation has caused financial failures and climate change, deindustrialization has caused opioid epidemics, housing has gotten expensive enough to impair family formation, and mass immigration in excess of the (really quite high relative to Europe or East Asia) assimilative capacity of the nation has contributed to ethnic strife. We've gone about as capitalist as we can go, the pendulum is starting to swing back.
"Wait....the 'next 95%' refers to the 4th-99th percentiles, i.e. the vast majority of the population. The vast majority of them (except the tippy-top) would benefit from redistribution. I would definitely imagine the 90th-95th percentiles, i.e. the upper middle class, would not benefit from redistribution!"
Ok, maybe I don't understand, but you said: "Without some degree of redistribution, there isn't enough in it for the next 95% or so"
Does that not imply that you're saying, in America, the 4th-99% are dependent on redistribution to have "enough"? "The vast majority of them (except the tippy-top) would benefit from redistribution." But they aren't, currently. Anyone who's a net after-transfers taxpayer doesn't currently benefit (on net) from redistribution. That's way more people than just the top 5%.
"it is not true that nobody cares about inequality if living standards are going up"
Again, I definitely am not saying "not at all," but I am saying that the benefit of rising living standards can and does swamp how much people care about inequality, especially if people do not think the inequality was arrived at in an unjustified way.
"People are acutely sensitive to differences in status"
They are, it's just that they are less sensitive to differences in status than they are to actual material concerns. If you don't have enough baby formula you might revolt. If people think Warren Buffett is higher status than you, you might loudly complain about that, but you aren't going to sell the baby formula to take out an ad denouncing him.
We just live in such a wealthy society that, as you say, people don't notice. But it still guides their (in-)actions.
"the arrogance of the woke elite probably contributed to Trump's victory, even though they are not the absolute top of the economic structure."
This proves my point. If people cared about economic inequality, they wouldn't hate woke journalists, and wouldn't vote for a dude who ostentatiously displays his wealth whenever he can. But if they care about "power/influence inequality" they would. Which happened?
"deregulation has caused financial failures and climate change, deindustrialization has caused opioid epidemics, housing has gotten expensive enough to impair family formation, and mass immigration in excess of the (really quite high relative to Europe or East Asia) assimilative capacity of the nation has contributed to ethnic strife"
I think the implication that these are problems caused by capitalism is wrong. Not defending capitalism, just that I think lots of them are... unrelated, orthogonal to your Capitalism Score. Capitalism isn't a meter that goes from 0 to 100, and if it goes too far to the right you get an opioid epidemic, and if you push it back to the left, it goes away. There are all kinds of things that caused those things, some are capitalist, some are socialist, some are neither. There are lots of potential solutions to them, some are capitalist, some are socialist, some are neither.
To take one example: "housing has gotten expensive". But how is this "capitalism." Is restrictive zoning "capitalism"? Is a developer wanting to build a giant apartment, but not being allowed to, "capitalism?" Is people moving to one town and driving up rents there, "capitalism"? Wouldn't it be more predicated on say, a policy of freedom of movement, which a country could or could not have?
"We've gone about as capitalist as we can go"
What, how? Like I said, capitalism is not some Sim City single value meter that can, pendulum like, swing back and forth. You can have a 0% capitalist healthcare system and a 100% capitalist real estate system. You have to look at each thing, you have to understand the mechanics of which features are causing the benefits/problems, and which will be affected by - for that item - moving in a capitalist/non-capitalist direction.
Evidence 'Oh, yeah, uh, if you want to criticize rich guys getting government subsidies, you should... definitely read the books.'
What does that even mean?
That the books are full of the author criticizing rich guys getting/angling for government subsidies?
How do you explain the right wing or conservative parties, politicians and rich guys of <0.1% worshipping Ayn Rand and receiving subsidies or in kind, being catered to? Orwellian or hypocritical?
Why would... subsidies be "Orwellian?" It's not just a synonym for "bad." The word has a meaning.
"How do you explain the right wing or conservative parties, politicians and rich guys of <0.1% worshipping Ayn Rand and receiving subsidies or in kind, being catered to?"
Obviously it's hypocritical! The question is: what does this conclusion get us? A smug sense of satisfaction? If only some free market capitalist type people had addressed this in the past! I mean, just walk through the steps:
You are an insane free market Randian capitalist. You start a widget business. The government decides that for their own reasons - you're currently too small to bribe them - they want there to be more widgets, so they subsidize it. You receive that subsidy. Great for you! Why wouldn't they accept it? (or if it's a purchase subsidy, they can't even elect to not receive it)
Don't you WANT these people to dial it down and participate in polite subsidy-happy social democracy society? Is the goal just proving that people we don't like are hypocrites? And then we just walk away?
Half the rationale behind why insane free-market-capitalists are against subsidies are that they are so beneficial for the recipient (while having costs for everyone else) that they can't logically refuse them, and then get addicted to them (and lobby for more). You should definitely bring this objection up to the.... people who create the subsidies. Notably, they don't usually seem to be insane Randians.
Just damn! Excellent work you've done here. She's the GOAT when it comes to a proper defense of capitalism, and you not only analyzed her thoughts well, you added some constructive things to consider.
Rand's idea of "right" is flawed. Certainly "right" is not something bestowed by a supernatural entity, but what is it then? As with most of Rand's philosophy the best ideas were expressed first and better by Spinoza. Right is the same thing as power.