• • • Ayn Rand's Case for Human Liberty 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Individual Rights  |Individualism  | Although most libertarians and classical liberals are champions of human (individual) liberty, the reasons they give vary. Some are utilitarians and hold, along with John Stuart Mill, that when free, men and women are most likely to advance the cause of the greatest happiness of the greatest number; some are Christians and hold that unless the virtuous life is freely chosen, one will not gain (God’s) credit for doing what is right; some hold that human freedom is a precondition of prosperity and progress and other good things. Ayn Rand, the Russian-American novelist-philosopher, has advanced a line of argument in defense of individual liberty that draws a bit on all of these although hers is really a secular version of what the Christians believe. She believed that only free men and women are capable of choosing their conduct and of taking credit for doing so properly or being blameworthy for failing to do so. In other words, Rand argued that human freedom is a necessary precondition for living a morally significant life. This, ironically, is something Rand had in common with Immanuel Kant, a philosopher whose views Rand found offensive.      View blog reactions

• • The story of entitlement addiction 
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Ayn Rand’s monumental novel of 1957, Atlas Shrugged, [...] pretty much foretold what we are now witnessing and must tell about to our children and grandchildren who will be the most severely hit by it all.      View blog reactions

• Dogmatism on the left 
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People like [Mark] Lilla are dogmatic about their views, seeing no need to justify them, just as they accuse people in the Tea Party of being the same. Sure, being university faculty these folks are probably more articulate and erudite about rendering their positions, invoking their version of history and calling upon their famous experts in various disciplines. But in the end that is not what makes one knowledgeable about political economy. It is what Ayn Rand liked to call “argument by intimidation.” My bunch has fancier intuitions than yours! End of argument.      View blog reactions

• • Entitlement foibles 
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Individual Rights  | Ayn Rand once wrote a column, if I recall right, titled “It’s Earlier Than You Think,” suggesting that even Americans, with their unique and exceptional political tradition stressing individual rights, aren’t quite ready to accept the responsibility of living in a bona fide free country. They are still suffering from the illusions associated with ancient regimes and with modern statism, given how many reputable people — at colleges and universities and in the media across the land — clamor for these. (Just consider that nearly all of our educational institutions live off government!)      View blog reactions

• Does he understand freedom? 
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Millions have denounced the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, various examples of important literature and so forth. Books by Karl Marx, by Harriet Beecher Stowe (who wrote “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”), Ayn Rand and by thousands of others have gotten condemned as well as praised. But, as that wise saying has it, “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.” Indeed, denouncing people is something acrimonious but peaceful, as is offending them, and in a civilized world one is free to do what is peaceful — however offensive.      View blog reactions

• Does the general understand freedom? 
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In a pluralistic world millions of people constantly denounce millions of other people, including by way of insulting the books they deem important. Millions of people have denounced the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence, various examples of important literature, and so forth. Books by Karl Marx, by Harriet Beecher Stowe (who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin), Ayn Rand and by thousands of others have gotten condemned as well as praised. But, as that wise saying has it, “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.” Indeed, denouncing people is something acrimonious but peaceful, as is offending them, and in a civilized world one is free to do what is peaceful however offensive it may be.      View blog reactions

• The self-delusions of statists 
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Capitalism  | There is a provocative recent comment attributed to Harvard University and Nobel Laureate economist Amartya Sen in The Philosopher’s Magazine (3rd Quarter 2010, p. 12 and taken from what he reported wrote in the New Statesman magazine). It is that “The nature of the present economic crisis illustrates very clearly the need for departures from unmitigated and unrestrained self-seeking in order to have a decent society” and it is extremely disappointing. Sen, who used to co-teach courses at Harvard University with the libertarian political philosopher Robert Nozick and therefore must have a pretty clear grasp of free market ideas and of libertarians, must also know that no one who defends the free market advocates any sort of system he is caricaturing here, not Milton Friedman, not F. A. Hayek, and not even the late Ayn Rand.      View blog reactions

• • What do we cherish “as Americans”? 
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Anthem  | George Orwell’s masterful novella, Animal Farm, amounts to, among other things, a fierce indictment of the effort to politically engineer a society to be equal. Ayn Rand’s novella, Anthem, is no less a superb fictional work that shows the viciousness of such an effort.      View blog reactions

• Skepticism about government regulation 
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Spinoza [...] began to argue for greater and greater dispersion of power among the citizenry and oppose extensive centralization. Spinoza’s worries were beginning to be shared by many others and the classical liberal movement was born, with such figures as John Locke, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and, more recently, Ludwig von Mises, Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, F. A. Hayek and Robert Nozick, all putting their heads to work on the problem. What they concluded, after their study of human nature and human history, is that the problem of the threat of lawlessness cannot be dealt with by making government all powerful since government poses the greatest such threat.      View blog reactions

• Misunderstanding the fiasco 
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Capitalism  | Because Greenspan was once associated with radical capitalist thinking, such as Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, he is constantly being derided. But it’s pure politics or ideology; no one really knows what or who in this country’s terribly mixed economy brought about the recent financial fiasco.      View blog reactions

• Is the US self-interested? 
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Egoism  | As Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and others have maintained — but recently with only a few such as Ayn Rand and quite a few psychotherapists joining them — the virtues are necessary to advance one’s proper self-interest. Morality for these thinkers is about making it possible to succeed in one’s human life, doing well at living as a human individual.      View blog reactions

• • • Rand and Libertarianism 
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Capitalism  |Egoism  |Personal life  | Rand is now being more and more judged, even by sympathizers such as the authors of the two recent biographies, one from Doubleday, the other from Oxford, not so much by whether her case for her ideas is sound but by reference to her upbringing or history. Since she was raised in Soviet Russia, she is often deemed to be captive of her origins. This is nonsense, of course, considering how many others who find her ideas sound didn’t share her history at all.      View blog reactions

• Left nor right embracing liberty 
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Capitalism  | The right wing in the United States isn’t mostly fascist or royalists but religious and traditionalist. But since a central feature of tradition in American politics is classical liberal or libertarian, labeling champions of the fully free system “right wingers” makes a certain amount of sense. But it can also serve a dubious agenda of the Left, namely to associate free market capitalism with right wing statism, as if the likes of F.A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand and so on had anything at all in common with fascists and royalists.      View blog reactions

• People must strive for own success 
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Egoism  | A healthy ethical egoism is probably very timely by now. Sadly it has to be noted that, despite the clarity of both philosophers’ prose, the selfishness of philosophers David L. Norton and Ayn Rand is unlike the economic man type, which is not a moral thesis at all but an attempt to describe what motivates us all, all the time. The neo-Aristotelian selfishness, one that implores everyone to strive to be a happy individual, acknowledges that human beings are social — belong to families, communities, fraternities, etc. — and to strive for one’s own success in life must involve the social virtues as well as the personal ones: generosity and compassion, not only prudence and ambition. With such a morality at hand, the human race would be in far better shape than it is with all the scolding it receives for not being selfless enough.      View blog reactions

• Everything can’t be mind construction 
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A central topic of philosophy throughout the ages has been whether human beings can trust their minds, including their sensory awareness and thinking. Skepticism about this has been a major challenge and many from Socrates to Ayn Rand and John Searle have responded with more or less elaborate arguments defending our capacity to get things right about the world.      View blog reactions