Happy Birthday, Ayn Rand -- Why are you still so misunderstood? Author Ayn RandAyn Rand Institute In the summer of 1921, a young Ayn Rand saw Moscow for the first time. “I remember standing on a square,” she would later recall. “And it suddenly struck me. . . . ‘How enormous it is, and how many people, and it’s just one city’ . . . . I suddenly had the concrete sense of how many large cities there were in the world—and I had to address all of them.
All of those numbers had to hear of me, and of what I was going to say. Today, on the 107th anniversary of her birth, it’s hard to doubt that the world has indeed heard of Ayn Rand. Rand has clearly inspired millions. But to gauge Rand’s influence, we need to know more about her views than the sound bytes we’re typically offered. Rand is usually thought of as a political philosopher, but that is not how she viewed herself. “I work for nothing but my own profit,” he says, “which I make by selling a product they need to men who are willing and able to buy it. Ayn Rand's appeal. Paul Ryan is Romney’s pick for Vice President and now Ayn Rand’s name is on everyone’s lips. Many on the left are pillorying Ryan as an unrealistic “ideologue” because of his Rand connection.
Many on the right accede, quickly trying to set aside Ryan’s admiration for "Atlas Shrugged" as youthful indiscretion. “Every young conservative has a fascination with Ayn Rand at some point,” Romney’s strategist Eric Fehrnstrom says dismissively. But hold on. If we actually consider the essence of what Rand advocates, the idea that her philosophy is childish over-simplification stands as condemnation not of her position but of the many adults from whom this accusation stems. The key to Rand’s enduring popularity is that she appeals not to the immaturity but to the idealism of youth. “There is a fundamental conviction which some people never acquire,” Rand wrote in 1969, “some hold only in their youth, and a few hold to the end of their days—the conviction that ideas matter.”
Does America Need Ayn Rand or Jesus? Ayn Rand is everywhere and her political opponents are growing nervous. Rand of course is a champion of individual rights, including property rights, and an advocate of laissez-faire capitalism. Walk through any Tea Party gathering and you’ll see signs such as “Who is John Galt? ,” “Rand was right” and “Read Atlas Shrugged.” Paul Ryan says of her, accurately in my view, that “Ayn Rand more than anyone else did a fantastic job of explaining the morality of capitalism, the morality of individualism.” On this shift in the political landscape, Paul Krugman comments in “A Tale of Two Moralities” that gone are the days when policy disputes were about pragmatic differences in accomplishing the same goal.
Today we see a difference in moral principle: one side considers the modern welfare state morally superior to capitalism and the other side considers capitalism morally superior to the welfare state. But whether Krugman knows this or not, many other people do. Romney, Ryan, Ayn Rand and the Religious Right: The Unholy Alliance. In a now mostly forgotten 1959 television interview by the late Mike Wallace, Ayn Rand, Russian immigrant and author of the novel "Atlas Shrugged", gave Americans a chilling explanation of her self-invented philosophy she called 'Objectivism'.
Arguing that reason based solely on self-interest is the only moral required for life, she defines 'altruism' to be an "evil force". Under pointed questioning by Wallace she describes herself as an atheist who doesn't believe in self-sacrifice for others under any circumstance (a view not commonly held by most prominent atheists who profess that altruism and moral character are a natural part of human instinct necessary for survival of the species).
Using this unique and caustic morality she goes on in the interview to justify and indeed promote the notion that unbridled industrialists operating in a totally unregulated free market capitalist model would be the salvation of man. Enter Paul Ryan and his cadre of faux libertarian manipulators. Christian right deifies an athiest — Ayn Rand | Cynthia Tucker. WASHINGTON — It was a cheap stunt captured on video camera, an ambush meant to embarrass a prominent Congressman, but it managed, nevertheless, to highlight an interesting subtext in the narrative of the religious right: Many of its members are enthralled by libertarian novelist Ayn Rand, a self-proclaimed “radical atheist” who mocked Christians. How is it that she has become the hero of so many social conservatives? Last week, just after House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan finished talking to an audience of religious conservatives here, he was confronted by Bible-wielding activist James Salt, who demanded that Ryan read the Gospel of Luke.
Salt, who works for the left-leaning Catholics United, was protesting the budget cuts Ryan has proposed — cuts that will disproportionately affect the poor. Ryan rushed to a waiting vehicle rather than accept Salt’s proffered Bible. Shortly after that, a small group of liberal clerics held a press conference to protest Ryan’s fiscal plans. Ayn Rand. Literary critics received Rand's fiction with mixed reviews,[6] and academia generally ignored or rejected her philosophy, though academic interest has increased in recent decades.[7][8][9] The Objectivist movement attempts to spread her ideas, both to the public and in academic settings.[10] She has been a significant influence among libertarians and American conservatives.[11] Life[edit] Early life[edit] Rand was born Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum (Russian: Али́са Зиновьевна Розенбаум) on February 2, 1905, to a Russian Jewish bourgeois[12] family living in Saint Petersburg.
She was the eldest of the three daughters of Zinovy Zakharovich Rosenbaum and his wife, Anna Borisovna (née Kaplan), largely non-observant Jews. The subsequent October Revolution and the rule of the Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin disrupted the life the family had previously enjoyed. Along with many other "bourgeois" students, Rand was purged from the university shortly before graduating. Early fiction[edit] [edit]