Atlas Coughed in Embarrassment

By Dan Hagen

Ayn Rand’s fans should, perhaps, get into their private industrialist super-planes and fly them to Rand's Atlantis where they will find like-minded companions who never needed anyone else, never had a vulnerable childhood — or any other kind of childhood — and who share a perfect, harmonious contempt for anyone who is, unlike them, imperfect. 

They will find this libertarian Never Land in Colorado, right behind the invisible force field.

When I was a young man, I was besotted by Rand's philosophy, which works wonderfully in the fantasy world of supermen that she created for herself.

However, intellectual honesty eventually won out, and I saw that while her philosophy does offer certain useful anthems to the individual, it is finally destructive.

Rand offers nothing but sophistic rationalization on monopoly power. She creates a fantasy world in which greedy monopolists are somehow NOT permitted to seize government power, and then pretends it can exist.

She failed to see, or refused to see, that vast monopoly wealth is finally IDENTICAL with power — that liberty creates wealth, but then wealth works tirelessly to DESTROY liberty.

Did you ever consider that not one of those Ayn Rand heroes had a childhood? If they had grown up, that would mean that they had once been dependent on someone else’s help and support, and that would never, ever do. So Rand had her supermen and superwomen spring full-grown from the mind of Zeus.

In other words, in order to make her philosophy work, she had to edit out an extremely large chunk of the human experience.

I hope that her fans can summon that same intellectual honesty. If they do, they will find that Marcus Aurelius was a much better philosopher than Rand. He said, "The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are."

And here’s what they are — I remember when they had the “Atlas Shrugged” film premiere in Effingham as an Ayn Rand Tea Party rally in a theatre bankrupted by capitalists who cheated their ticket holders and got bailed out by city government money. I found that pretty funny, all things considered.