I don’t know where you’re getting the delusion that Rand was sympathetic to religion, SP. I really don’t know where you get a lot of your ideas. You can’t just claim the “I was there” argument, cause other people were there and disagree with you.
Rand was admittedly an atheist. She opposed faith, and she did not have a crush on Aquinas. The fact that all of her philosophic influences of Aristotle, Aquinas and Locke were also at the least deistic doesn’t amount to much. That’s one of the many reasons she wasn’t in full agreement with any of those men, however significant their works in ethics and epistemology may have been.
In September 2008, it was not the titan Atlas whose shoulders were buckling; it was those of government figures such as Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, who were holding the system aloft, however ineptly.
You want to talk about “blinkered escapist fantasy?”
Mr. Galupo praises with faint damnation when he refers to Paulson and Bernanke as proof that Rand is wrong about government interventionism. (Not that he goes so far as to analyze what Rand has to say on the subject) There is no substance to this article that I can see. Disjointed quotes from reviews by dubious second-handers, and no discussion of Rand’s ideas beyond an incurious reference to her defense of big business.
Not sure what folks here mean by “well written” and “honest.” This article is neither.
You want to talk about “blinkered escapist fantasy?”
Mr. Galupo praises with faint damnation when he refers to Paulson and Bernanke as proof that Rand is wrong about government interventionism. (Not that he goes so far as to analyze what Rand has to say on the subject) There is no substance to this article that I can see. Disjointed quotes from reviews by dubious second-handers, and no discussion of Rand’s ideas beyond an incurious reference to her defense of big business.
Not sure what folks here mean by “well written” and “honest.” This article is neither.
[edit:typo]
I’ll give you some examples:
There are plenty of sources to turn to in the resistance against a newly ascendant left-liberalism, from Ludwig von Mises to Milton Friedman to Thomas Sowell. But those authors don’t buck up the rightist reader in quite the same way that “Atlas Shrugged” does.
This is true. Atlas Shrugged gets people at a deeper level than those other writers.
And then the next paragraph.
The utilitarian argument for free markets — that they’re the most efficient means of determining the value of scarce resources and allocating them — is a far cry from the sanctification of capitalism one finds in Randism.
While the above quote isn’t philosophically deep, what he says is true. Ayn Rand defended capitalism on moral grounds, while the others could only do so on utilitarian grounds. So, this is a vital point.
Ayn Rand was an atheist, although I don’t think she was necessarily “strident” about it, she was absolute about it.
The author thinks Ayn Rand is wrong and those who believe the philosophy live in a “fantasy” land, which is ridiculous, but I don’t see where he misrepresented her ideas.
The author thinks Ayn Rand is wrong and those who believe the philosophy live in a “fantasy” land, which is ridiculous, but I don’t see where he misrepresented her ideas.
You’re right, he doesn’t misrepresent her ideas. That would require that he represent her ideas, which he certainly does not do. The only thing he says in your examples is that Rand “sanctified” capitalism. He does not even point out what you do - that she did so on rational/moral grounds. In fact, to say simply that she “sanctified” (i.e. “made holy”) capitalism implies that her support of capitalism is based on a mystic idolization, rather than a rational/moral principled argument.
I’m in complete agreement with what you write here, but you give him far more credit than he deserves. Either he is wholly ignorant of Rand’s philosophy (which your analysis refutes) or he is being intentionally intellectually dishonest by giving only the briefest peek at Objectivism, technically accurate, perhaps, but so skewed as to provide zero true insight, instead representing it as appealing to “rightist” (is he implying “fascist?”) readers and blind supporters of big business (such as the Wall Street and Detroit cronies?).
I keep telling you gues. we’ve been part of the Right for 35 years. in fact the first political group founded on Objectivism was called the New Righ Coalition in 1971 or 2 in the heart of enemy territory, the Peoples’ Repubic of Massatwochitts. I had two of their buttons a fuscia on that said “Who is John Galt” and a yellow one that said “FIGHT FOR CAPITAL$M”. I used to war them to college.
I have to agree on you with this; in current American political definitions, Right-Wing means two things: Smaller Government, and Pro-America. So that makes us part of the right wing. Libertarians, Republicans, Conservatives, and Independent Center-Rights are also on the “right-wing”. Simple fact.
On the article - it was simply a piece of trash, a neo-con bashing an author whom he’s obviously never given serious consideration and/or read her books. He refuses to consider the possibilities of individual liberty and prefers to live in a constant world of depression and despair, for reasons I don’t understand.