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Rand wrote novels and some non-fiction which espoused an enlightened but total selfishness. She despised notions of welfare and industrial subsidies, and followed a long line of U.S. intellectuals such as Emerson ("I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots, and the thousand-fold Relief Societies;-- though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar, which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.") in arguing against them.
Rand is the poster demon of the U.S. left, for fairly obvious reasons, but it pays to remember her history. She was born in Russia in 1905 and was a supporter of the democratic February Revolution of 1917, but not of the October Revolution which arguably was the anti-democratic action of a cadre of Leninist revolutionaries. The subversion of Russian education and society by the Bolshevik party - and the removal of power from the Soviet system, which was profoundly democratic, and its transfer to the Party system, which was totalitarian - persuaded her that Socialism (or rather Leninism-Stalinism, though the distinction at the time was unclear) was a monster which would leech creativity and work from the nation and from the individual.
The knee-jerk reaction against Rand is a waste of energy. Her books are decent enough as trashy novels, and her politics are a product of the time. What she really objected to was the dehumanising effect of bureaucracy and the anti-democratic force of the cadre/old-boy network which sometimes accompanies and undermines liberal reform (vide Blair, Anthony). If she were writing now, you could reasonably expect her to be something like a Green/Right/Anti-Globalisation activist. |
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