Ayn Rand and her capitalist super heroes.

 

I've read Ayn Rand's book Atlas Shrugged and her fictional heroic capitalists aren't real estate developers or edge fund managers. They're steel and oil barons, car manufacturers and railway tycoons.

Although Rand has acquired many devotees over the years, mainly on the right of politics, her gospel of selfishness didn't go down very well in late 1950s America. Rand was criticised for being immoral and her advocacy of unrestrained laissez-faire capitalism, wasn't popular either. The National Review described it as a "silly book", which I think is fair comment. 

The book, which some consider to be the Bible of the American Congress, is also very American. One government employee, called Cuffy Meigs, is straight out of the wild west. He carries a loaded revolver even in the office, and a rabbit's foot for good luck.  

The Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, the archpriest of neoliberal capitalism, wrote to Ayn Rand in 1958 praising the book. He basically told her that she had the courage to tell the masses what no politician was prepared to tell them. That they were inferior and that they owed their conditions in life and social improvements in life, to the efforts of "men who are better than you." Margaret Thatcher would have subscribed to this view. She believed that all of us are indebted to a small number of talented people (wealth creators), for our conditions in life. 

Yet, I think it's true to say, that the greatest of inventions, is never likely to see the light of day or leave the drawing board, if we haven't got the labour and skills to make it. As Adam Smith tells us, it's labour that creates wealth and some have argued that all wealth should go to labour. The relationship between labour and capital is a dialectical relationship. 

I don't think Ayn Rand can be considered a serious philosopher. She was once asked if she could sum up her philosophy when standing on one foot. She answered: Metaphysics, 'Objective Reality'; Epistemology, 'Reason'; Ethics, 'Self-Interest'; Politics, 'Capitalism'. 

Like Charlie Kirk, Rand railed against altruism and despised government welfare systems that support the poor. Yet, in later life, when her health failed her, she finished up on social security and Medicare. She couldn't even live up to her own philosophy. Rand is one of very few authors to have written a pro-capitalist novel and her capitalist super heroes, who like Atlas, hold up the heavens aloft on their shoulders, are like Nietzsche's supermen. Rand denied that she had ever been influenced by Nietzsche.