I am a capitalist like Rand. Capitalism is the most efficient way of allocating resources as long as sufficient regulations are in place. Rand herself likened Libertarians to anarchists and fought them and their lawless philosophy.
I find it very odd that conservatives glom onto her. Rand hated conservatives as much as she hated communists. She called Reagan an “enemy of freedom”.
So today Rand would be like George Soros - a capitalist who fights the far right.
Where did she liken libertarians to anarchists? Since you associate them with “lawless”, it sounds to me like anarcho-capitalists, and not libertarians as it is usually used.
Neither. She would be an Objectivist, which is pretty darn close to being a Libertarian, even if she would never admit it.
I think the early days of the Libertarian Party saw it attract it’s fair share of “hippy anarchists who just wanted to smoke pot”.
But I doubt she’d be too keen on the LP today, either, since she demanded absolute purity and wasn’t too keen on sharing the limelight with another group.
But Rand herself admits Objectivism is a form of Existentialism - which is Liberalism all the way. She breaks from tradition (Conservatism) in other words.
Nevertheless I will look up her views on Open Society - of which I am a proponent.
“Liberalism” in the 19th century sense of the term. Not the way it is used in the US today. And I don’t believe she thought Objectivism is a form or Existentialism. She may have admired Nietzsche when she was younger, but she disagreed with his philosophy.
She didn’t like the shift of conservatives towards the Religious Right, that’s for sure. Not sure about “traditional conservatism”, though. She was definitely pro-choice, which puts her at odds with most conservatives today.
That’s the thing - some of the precious “values” that conservatives wish to conserve, Rand would consider irrational nonsense just as much as some of the liberals’ ideas of fixing society to make it “more just”.
American Conservatives of c. 2000 tend to favor her more than American Liberals of c. 2000 because both have interpreted her to be saying: “make your profit and f*&^ everyone else, you owe them nothing”.
She didn’t dislike Libertarians for their politics. She disliked them because she wanted to be the center of her own cult, and Libertarians were encroaching on her turf. There isn’t a Libertarian out there who sees a distinction between Objectivism and Libertarian ideology, except for Rand’s insistence that one wasn’t the other. She never was able to adequately describe the difference, though.
As best I could tell from what she wrote, the key to it is that she had developed a framework of belief and morality, and by learning that, you could make benevolent and useful decisions. Libertarians, regardless of whether they wanted many of the same things or not, basically did it out of self-desire, with no morality or logic behind it.
Ayn Rand was closer to Jesus or Confucius than to say Paul Krugman or Ron Paul. Personally, I think that anyone who expects people to somehow become better and more moral beings - regardless of what moral system it is you preach - is deluded. People are going to act like people, regardless of what book you put before them. But I’ll grant that Objectivism isn’t Libertarianism.
The problem is Rand was not concerned with efficiency arguments. Rand was a capitalist because she saw capitalism as moral. A lot of self-styled libertarians are the same. They like to appeal to efficiency arguments because it is convenient and sounds nice but when the same math that proves efficiency proves something like the neutrality of one-time transfers, Randistas are put off and would never consider such a thing as neutral. First and foremost her position on capitalism is moral. It had nothing to do with economic theory. You can look at monopoly rents and taxes as the same thing to the consumer. They carry a deadweight loss. But to Randistas, and others, there is a real moral difference between the tax man and the monopolist, and the monopolist is ok—and then there’s some backpedaling because really there are no monopolies anyway, and even if there were they’d be short-lived, and if they weren’t well it’s just moral to let them be monopolists.
She did have a rather dismal view of libertarianism.
I doubt it. Rand liked Rand. She also liked those who liked Rand.
Maybe I once thought that the collective “we” shouldn’t hold back the few who were really talended and driven, since they’d rise like tent posts and draw up the ceiling for all of us, instead of everyone forced to crawl under the same carpet. But then I went to a few karaoke parties.
You’ve been to that party where they have a karaoke machine set up? You’re not the greatest singer, but it looks like fun and maybe you’ll try it. But there’s always one guy there who’s really into it, and he’s a pretty good singer, too. Why would you insist he stop just so you can make an ass of yourself? And anyway, you didn’t come to a party looking for conflict, so you let him sing. You gravitate out to the kitchen or the porch and talk to people on the periphery of the party. later, you look back into where the party used to be, and he’s still there all by himself, happily yapping along to the video screen.
Because conservatives and capitalists (professional or ideological) understand pefectly well what you should learn, that Rand’s message can actually help them without actually threatening them.
Rand is neither a liberal or conservative in the modern American sense because “liberalism” and “conservatism” in America have no internal consistency. There is no ideological connection between light/no business regulation and opposition to same-sex marriage, and vice versa.
Parts of Rand’s philosophy are perfectly in tune with the platform of the Democratic Party, parts are perfectly in tune with the GOP, and parts are just whack.
I think she used the word ‘hippie’ as a more generic insult and anarchism as a form of collectivism than anything to do with pot somkers, see the first Q&A in this post.