A Libertarian reads "Atlas Shrugged"--Part I--DKos

[Louisiana1976]

I think I was the only libertarian in the world who had never read Atlas Shrugged.

I knew about the book, its reputation and its controversial author, of course. Through the same cultural osmosis that tells me more than I care to know about Jon and Kate, I knew the basic plot and philosophy and its status as the gateway drug to libertarianism.

But I’d never read it myself. So when the teabaggers, Limbots and Beckholes started talking about "Going Galt", I decided to pop my Rand cherry and see what all the donner und blitzen is about. Is it really as bad as everyone says? Why do people love/hate it so passionately? Why do so many people say it "changed my life"?

snip

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/12/6/811414/-A-Libertarian-Reads-Atlas-ShruggedPart-1

[deadmessengers]

1. Interesting discussion

That's probably one of the most intelligent and least dogmatic discussions of Rand's work that I've ever read.

[regnaD kciN]

3. The author correctly calls out Rand...

...for turning the argument on libertarianism into merely a dualistic struggle between the productive "supermen/women" and the incomptent, leeching "vulgar herd" of her fictional worlds, rather than demonstrating how libertarianism and laissez-faire can be better for average people. The question which he ducks is "what if you can't show that, because it isn't true?"

It's no coincidence to me that the libertarian end of the political scale got taken over by Rand and her devotees in the 1940s and 1950s. While earlier libertarians could claim that "a rising tide lifts all boats," the development of the Gilded Age at the turn of the century through the 1920s pretty much put the lie to the notion that the free-market leads to anything but further and increasing economic stratification between the "haves" and the "have-nots." Then, the Great Depression showed the rotten underpinnings of our free-market system, and the New Deal proved that concerted government action along at least semi-socialist lines could do a great deal to pull people out of the mess to which unbridled capitalism had led them.

So, by the end of WWII, it was pretty much impossible to claim that a hands-off economic approach was better for the average person. It was the "genius" of Ayn Rand to re-frame the matter along Social Darwinist lines; not that "capitalism is best for the average person," but that "capitalism is best for those who deserve to survive"...and then create fictional worlds that would allow the easily-impressionable (and, especially, easily-impressionable adolescents) to identify with the supermen and superwomen of her stories, and convince them that they, too, were misunderstood and persecuted geniuses whose interest, therefore lay with adopting her extreme right-wing position.

[regnaD kciN]

2. I can hardly wait for part two...