I read many of her books when Young - I knew of her fascistic tendencies, yet read through 3 at least and over 1,000 pages each.

(rated)

The Pruitt-Igoe housing developement proved Rand's ideals in the book The Fountainhead wrong.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruitt-Igoe

Unsurprising to me, Ocularnervosa.

I mean to add in my comment that her style is quite intricate and entrancing - it draws you in, even as you know it IS fascistic.

How can talking about removing the power of the state fascistic? That is the opposite of true. You don't decrease poverty by giving a woman $30,000 to have 3 kids. You increase poverty by 3. 3 more people who will probably spend their lives on the goverment payroll. Each kid making it harder to work or go to school for the mother. The Great Society had the exact opposite effect that was intended. It funded learned helplessness, codependency and enabling. Calling for no social programs is extreme but you have to look at why she would have such a strong aversion to government confiscation and control. She grew up in the Soviet Union and hated socialism.

We came closest to her concept in the last 8 years. Went really well, didn't it?

awesome.....whoa, those eyes!
yes she was a pure thinker and I read every book she wrote.
I was so young though and would like to re-visit. It seems
that some of her predictions are coming true huh...
more like all of them (nuts or not)

I think Ayn Rand's "philosophy" appeals to young people, who generally have great egos, and who think that they are special and heroic in a mediocre world.

Living until middle age or beyond usually puts that to rest for good. Objectivism is a worldview that starts and ends with the self, which is why I think it's a dead end.

Jeanette is right, Rand appeals to the young. It is pretty easy to cut her arguments to shreds. Wanting to have the state have less power over our lives is one thing, wanting to have no state power is yet another.

What Jeanette said -- this crap is for children who believe in the Tooth Fairy. It is utterly ridiculous to imagine that handing the economy over to the greediest bastards on the planet without adult supervision will benefit the Commonweal.

Even Alan Greenspan has finally seen the light on Ayn Rand's nonsense. See my post:

Decline and Fall of Alan Greenspan

Yes, it's a wonderful politico-economic philosophy IF the world were filled with high-minded rugged individualists. It's not. It's filled with well-connected, ignorant incompetents like GWB, venomous paranoid sociopaths like Cheney, and greedy corporate capitalists and banksters who have no morals and no economic plan beyond maximizing the price of their company's stock by the end of the next quarter.

Even Bush the Elder got this right when he called Reaganomics Voodoo Economics. Too bad Junior never listened to the old man about economics any more than he did about foreign policy.

I agree with what Tom said so eloquently.

Great Post. Your a very intelligent person

Anthem is a classic. The rest...
Why we had someone as Fed Chair who was a cult member of Rand, and that is what the Collective was, a cult, is beyond me.
Having said that, she was not all wrong in the sense of Hayek and Mises that one loses freedom with collective action, so that there is an optimal amount of it.

Ayn Rand basically turned selfishness into a philosophy. The concept that an individual is so much more important than everyone else is the definition of selfish. Ayn Rand and her friends loved money, wanted every bit of it that they could get, and didn't want to have to bother with silly things like taxes, charity or looking out for your fellow man. For anyone to claim that it's anything other than greed is ridiculous.

jimgalt sez;"...She grew up in the Soviet Union and hated socialism."

It's not so much her hatred of socialism as her admiration of Czarism that puts her on the wrong side of history.

Jeanette D writes: "I think Ayn Rand's "philosophy" appeals to young people, who generally have great egos, and who think that they are special and heroic in a mediocre world"

Whereas Jeanette D is clearly a mediocrity living in a special and heroic world.

Rand was, if anything, limited in her clairvoyance. Even she could not have imagined how someone like Obama and his collectivist cronies could do so much damage to the U.S. in such a short time.

Being of Russian birth, she would have been especially fond of the parade of czars chosen to make sure that the human spirit has no chance of survival in Obamaworld.

Most amusing is the concept that Rand's vision was most realized under Bush. Read Rand again. Rand's vision was quashed with the defeat of Goldwater and hasn't had a chance since. I'm afraid it will take a total collapse of modern liberalism to clear the way for a rational political philosophy to emerge. Fortunately, Obama is moving us toward that collapse at an alarming speed.

This excellent work John. I love it

Rand was totally opposed to public education. Anyone who has seriously considered her writings could/should have figured that out.

Er.. couldn't the title be: "Ayn Rand: Alan Greenspan's Goddess?"

"Ayn Rand--Alan Greenspan's God"

That is completely ridiculous.

In Rand's work Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal she blasts the Federal Reserve banking system and names it the cause of the Great Depression (pg.79-81). She continues on the Fed:

"All government intervention in the economy is based on the belief that economic laws need not operate, that principles of cause and effect can be suspended, that everything in existence is 'flexible' and 'malleable,' except a bureaucrat's whim, which is omnipotent; reality, logic, and economics must not be allowed to get in the way. This was the implicit premise that led to the establishment in 1913 of the Federal Reserve System . . ."

Greenspan wrote a peice in that very same book entitled "Gold and Economic Freedom" where he boasts:

"under the gold standard, a free banking system stands as the sole protector of an economy's stability and balanced growth".

Greenspan later becomes the 13th Chairman of the Federal Reserve: the very entity Ayn Rand condemned and he himself supposedly opposed the function of.

Have absolutely NO ILLUSIONS. Alan Greenspan is a betrayer of Objectivist philosophy. Greenspan is to Rand what Judas is to Jesus.

Go here for more reasons why this author and the majority of the people commenting here are completely ignorant:
http://capmag.com/article.asp?ID=5353