I don’t know. I kind of feel like her focus on enlightened self-interest and individualism based on reason, logic and objective reality are more important than ever as we seem to be transition from an “information economy” to a “attention economy”.
My reaction is that Rand’s philosophy is akin to a home cook taking a perfectly reasonable list of common food ingredients, and concocting something inedible bordering on poisonous from them.
There is little to object to in “enlightened self-interest and individualism based on reason, logic and objective reality” None of which, applied correctly, leads to the Randian dystopic worldview of strivers and moochers. But that’s where she ended up, and the world is worse for her confused efforts.
I think it works in broad abstract terms of the system only works if people collectively put in more than they take out. What that means in practice I think is a lot more complex.
I came across this Ayn Rand interview today. She paints a very simplistic straw man of Europeans worshiping the supremacy of the state (whether through monarchs or socialism) vs America’s preference for the rights of the individual.
Now I am not an expert on European history and culture to question whether her assessment is true (I’m not sure it is). I’m pretty sure her assessment of American culture is a bit off and viewed through rose-tinted glasses. Or perhaps simply outdated as the video was recorded in the 80s. Because as I see it, American culture of “individuality” seems to have evolved into a nation of stupid selfish morons who are so isolated and dull-witted they can’t interact with each other and who refuse to entertain the thought of having to consider anyone else’s thoughts, feelings, or needs besides their own. I’m not really sure how that’s “better”.
Agree that short-sighted pig-headed selfishness is a terrible virtue for a society to worship.
The whole point of “enlightened” self interest is that it’s in your interest to be embedded in a society you’d like to live in. And it’s worth recognizing that everyone else has exactly as much right and agency as you do. So it probably matters more to you how they collectively behave than how you individually behave. And the way to get that desirable collective behavior is by behaving as you wish everyone else did. Do unto others …
The selfish thinkers essentially believe they’ll be soo good at being selfish that other people’s lesser selfishness won’t intrude on them. Hint: they’re wrong. They’re not nearly as good at selfish as the collective efforts of the folks around them.
The point of pushing individualism is twofold, First, individuals are weak and helpless, easily exploited, incapable of meaningful resistance. And second, it lets the people doing the exploiting feel good about themselves since “nobody matters but them”.
Very useful for a worldview that’s all about the powerful crushing and exploiting other people. It’s not a coincidence that our society has been atomized while the American “elite” these days is populated by people so self absorbed that they border on solipsism.
Speak for yourself, mate.
Now we get to witness the truest expression of individualism! The right of the strong individual to dominate the weak!
Go ahead, fight at a thousand-to-one odds and see how well that works.
Both of these are really great points that bear repeating. Ayn Rand philosophized, but she was a novelist, not a philosopher. Her works were philosophical, but presented an ideology, not a philosophy. This is the best you can achieve when you start from a conclusion and work backward to a rationalization.
The response to this tends to fall along the lines of:
- Invoking the free-market genie to magically make it such that private contractors will perform critical social services, alleviating the need to even debate the role of government. Or:
- Drawing a distinction between government services that are necessary for protecting property rights and easing the friction of commerce, vs. those that can be seen as equitable wealth redistribution.
I think the latter is important, because the “what about roads” argument in favor of socialism doesn’t really approach the point actually at issue – is it the proper role of government to transfer excessive wealth, income, or opportunity to people who don’t have it?
A socialist would say obviously yes, the government should promote equity. A liberal might say the government has an interest in eradicating poverty because it’s bad for the economy and society, while a Randian would simply say “don’t take my shit” and embark on a flight of fancy about how every single function could be privatized and optional if you really put your mind to it.
A Randian would say “let the poor starve”. An argument I’ve seen made. The only function they want the government to have is to serve as an iron boot to crush all those starving people into submission so they don’t try to stay alive by stealing from the Real People, aka the wealthy.
It’s true they are entirely indifferent to the situation of the poor, and don’t really care if they live or die.
But few are callous enough to outright state “fuck the poor”. They instead tend to go off on elaborate flights of fancy where we don’t have to talk about the poor because somehow Magical Mr. Market will take care of everything. If pressed they will go off on an argument as to why nobody is really entitled to take wealth for others.
All of this constructs to “fuck the poor” but it’s seldom an argument you’ll hear a Randian make outright, because it undermines the air of civilized intellectualism that they crave. This is why they tend to paint a free-market utopia that will take care of everything. That’s why their founding works are fiction, it’s why the movement’s founder is mainly a novelist.
That’s one reason Randians conflict with Libertarians. Libertarians don’t really give a fuck about philosophical respectability, they’re the ones to be blunt about their indifference or hostility to the poor. That’s the practical consequence of Randian thought, but Randians really want to sidestep that detail for obvious reasons.
As famously depicted by a better novelist than Rand:
“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
I’d argue that putting it this way doesn’t really help argue against randianism. From a randian point of view the answer is trivially no. If you answer yes, at best you have been suckered into believing a subjective world view with no basis in objective reality (involving such absurd notions as actually caring what happens to other people, LOL how ridiculous!). At worst you are cynically using bogus ideas about the collective good to advance your own self interest (not that there’s anything wrong with that from the Randian point of view, no selfishness shaming here 
)
IMO “what about the roads” is a more compelling argument as the Randian point of view is an absolutist one, just as much as the communist one. It’s not “we should be careful about what we spend our tax money on” its “forcing people to pay any taxes for the ‘common good’ is an egregious injustice and is just blatant theft, by government officials wrapped up in nice sounding words about helping society as a whole”.
But if you need to force people to pay taxes for roads (and police, and courts, and the army, and sewage, …) the whole thing falls down. You are just saying “forcing people to pay taxes for things in the common good I don’t like is blatant theft, by government officials wrapped up in nice sounding words about helping society as a whole. Forcing people to pay taxes for things I think are in the common good is fine, it’s the common good after all”. Or else you start coming up with outlandish theories about how the unregulated private market will provide all those things, that make the most naive utopian communist ideas look realistic in comparison.
That’s clearly true. It’s not that they hate the poors and the blacks, it’s just they are a sophisticated intellectual who has advanced beyond stupid subjective notions like caring for other people, which are just scams people come up with to take your money in taxes.
However it’s all a moot point in the Trump era. No one is pretending Trump is a randian in any shape or form. Even if you consider Rand’s teaching the absolute gospel truth, then you should be opposing Trump at every turn as a the very embodiment of oppressive government overreach (if say you are fricking literally named for her and have to powers of a US senator you could be using to oppose Trump 
).
The fact all the supposed Randian libertarians I had all these arguments with, suddenly became dyed-in-the-wool MAGA’s, shows it was all bullshit. They never for one moment cared about personal freedom or the constitution or any of that other Randian crap. It was an intellectual fig leaf over wanting bad things to happen to all the people they don’t like. Once it became obvious they didn’t need the fig leaf anymore and they could just come out and say all those terrible things, they abandoned the whole charade.
Or… tax is the return to the common purse on the investment made from the common purse on all those things that enable people to acquire the resources they’re being taxed - from national defence, law&order, education, health and social services, and so on.
Privatised services not funded by the common purse would still expect their return - in other words, taxes by another name. And then you have the argument as to whether it’s more efficient or effective a service if it’s to be funded only by those who directly choose to use it - bearing in mind that we might all benefit indirectly from services we don’t personally use.
The libertarian or randian believes very much that a la carte pricing for private services will be much cheaper overall than the one-price all you can eat buffet pricing of taxation. Beyond that they’re absolutely certain that if government was offered a la carte, they’d choose to buy very few of those offered services. Saving themselves even more money.
Of course they’re deluding themselves. But it’s a seductive delusion. Because it plays so perfectly into the utterly selfish utterly shortsighted 3yo who lives inside us all.
And similarly when the workers control the means of production, efficiency will increase!
Correct me if I’m oversimplifying but my understanding is that Marxists never claimed that capitalism wasn’t efficient. Rather, they claimed that the entire ownership class was parasitic, that the difference between the revenue derived from the sale of production and what the workers were paid was pure rent extraction.
I’ve definitely heard it claimed that the removal of the parasitic capitalists when the workers seize control will lead to an increased efficiency in production as well a more equitable society (this was definitely something the Soviet Union claimed about its factories, despite all the evidence to the contrary). I was just using that as an example of something claimed by communists that seems pretty reasonable compared to this magical Randian system that will provide roads, courts, sewage, army etc. without any evil forced taxation.
For sure there’s a vast amount of wishful thinking about human nature in just about all of these “isms”. And most of these isms focus exclusively on the things that they claim will get better under them vs status quo with no mention, or even with active suppression, of whatever is likely to get worse.
My own rallying cry: What humanity needs is better humans!
Once we fix that the rest is rather trivial. Regardless of which “ism” we choose, we’ll at least do it well & consistently.