The most common thing you’ll see when people talk about Ayn Rand’s philosophy is “A is A”. This is shorthand for “Existence exists, independent of the perceptions and biases of the viewer.” In other words, “wishing doesn’t make it so.” She objected to Immanuel Kant’s subjectivism, the belief that things can be whatever we perceive them to be. Instead, she believed that things are what they are, and our task is to use empiricism and our senses to discover them.
This can be summed up as: Metaphysics: objective reality
From that axiom, she derives her epistemology. Man’s tools for discovering and understanding the details of the universe are his senses and reason, and the tools of logic. You could not discover reality through religious experience. There is no God, there are only people with brains attempting to understand the objective world around them.
This can be summed up as: ** Epistemology: Reason**
For man to be able to use reason, he must have freedom. Freedom to think and communicate whatever he wants. Freedom of thought, of expression. Man must also have the right to keep the fruits of his labor and be able to benefit or suffer based on his actions.
Rand did not believe that it’s wrong to help others. She felt that altruism was wrong. Altruism defined as the belief that it is more moral to help others than to help yourself.
In other words, if I donate to the Heart Foundation because I believe they do good work and are helping build a better world for my children and they espouse values I support, there’s nothing wrong with that. But if I am told that I MUST help the Heart Foundation because otherwise I am greedy and selfish and immoral, that is wrong. There is absolutely nothing wrong with living your life in a way that promotes your own happiness. No one has a claim on you.
A logical reason for this is that a system where everyone looks after their own interests is better than one in which everyone looks after someone else’s interests, because the individual is the best judge of what he or she needs. Adding a layer of indirection by making everyone responsible for everyone else just muddies the waters and removes the incentive and ability for people to use their minds in the most effective way. She ties the right to self interest with the exercise of reason. She hated hedonism, for example.
This can be summed up as: Ethics: Rational Self-Interest
So given that the ‘correct’ behavior of man is to use his intellect to improve his own life and to improve society by promoting his own values, it follows that the proper form of government is one which recognizes the supremacy of individual rights, including the right to create and sell products and services, choose who he wants to do business with and on what terms, and to benefit or be punished by objective reality based on the decisions he makes. Out of this comes the need for a government that enshrines free markets, freedom of thought and expression, absolute property rights, and the right to life for the benefit of oneself and not be a chattel of the state or of others.
This can be summed up as: Economics: Laissez Faire Capitalism
That’s a very short, very broad outline of what she believed.
