Tag Archives: Ayn Rand

 The Road to SerfRanddom I have always enjoyed chapter 10 of Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom — “Why the worst get on top.” Always referring to the last quarter century or so since I first read it. Hayek’s argument struck me immediately as  watertight but I was puzzled that he seemed to exempt his own preferred collective from his argument. Maybe he just wanted to slip it past the unwary? Individuals may be individuals but individualists are a...

The Most Evil Rant in Aynkind’s History n previous posts, I discussed the Senate confirmation hearings plagiarism by Keisha Russell of a Washington Post column by Marc Thiessen and the shoddy scholarship of the former history professor, Allen C. Guelzo that underwrote the bizarre claim that “critical race theory is a subset of critical theory that began with Immanuel Kant.”  In the latter post, I stuck to the source that Guelzo cited in his...

Frank LI takes on Ayn Rand. To understand Libertarianism and American Conservatism, one needs to study Ayn Rand, which is what this post is about.… Ayn Rand was a successful novelist. But her works on philosophy should be irrelevant, because they are too extreme, thus more wrong than correct. Rand constructed a fantasy world in her novelist's mind, which is what novelist's do, but then she believed in it, confusing it with the real world. So do a lot of other people that can't...

Ayn Rand made her mark by writing and lecturing on a philosophy called Objectivism. It’s a philosophy that flips upside down everything that most Americans hold dear. Under Objectivism, greed is good, selfishness is noble, helping one’s fellow human beings is for suckers and an outright evil. The philosophy also holds that big government is bad and obscenely rich corporate titans are the real heroes of society. (See related articles below.) The Koch brothers’ network of billionaires has...