Law Prof Tom Smith at the Right Coast (who is consistently one of my favorite commentators) muses on the relevance of Ayn Rand's novels to the current political scene. Sample:
In my view, Rand has something very important going for her, and that is, she seems to be right about a very big thing. There just is something about the state that causes it to surround and attach itself to productive and creative activity and to parasitize it. This activity seems to emit, the way a squid emits ink, a kind of gas of moral arguments to obfuscate what it is really doing. Many sincere people are pulled along thinking they are doing good, but there are also plenty of people, and I've met them in DC, who know or should know that they are not really helping anybody but themselves. . . .
I don't think it's surprizing that Rand should be making a comeback at a time when the federal government is trying to, for want of a better phrase, take over health care, and that's just for starters. . . . What Rand seems to have gotten her head around is the opposition between the people who want to run things from above, the Will to Supervise, and those who oppose them, who believe in freedom and creation. This is a very fundamental opposition and I don't think political philosophy understands it all that well. Schumpeter obviously understood capitalism as creative destruction and the importance of entrepreneurs, but I'm not sure he grasped the importance of the anti-entrepreneurs. But Rand alerts us to the danger to freedom posed by Progressives, which is probably as good a name as any for those who oppose freedom in the interests of their own power with the rationale of making things better for various clients groups that are supposed to have some moral claim or other on all of us. [Emphasis added.]
The people seem to be catching on, which is why both parties have low approval ratings, and quite a few supposed sophisticates are likely to get incinerated if the smoldering populist fire gets hotter, especially those businesses that chose to join anti-entrepreneurs.
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