Certainly not the US with its ‘immoral’ piecemeal social welfare programmes? I’m from the UK which has a most generous welfare state in tandem with socialised healthcare. I’m exceedingly proud of this but I assume Ayn Rand would have loathed all this public spending in the name of social security.
So what exactly is Ayn Rand calling for? My best guess is Chilean Chaicago Boys deregulation and free market economics. Thatcherism on steroids if you will.
I’ll be glad to be corrected.
@irreligious – The preceding two links are definitely the Rand view. In short, she thought of each individual that comes to adulthood successfully as an end-in-themselves and capable of autonomy, a good thing. She saw universal individual rights protected by a government and not itself abrogating any such rights as the only completely just and proper government; it protects individual autonomy. The only proper endeavors she saw for government hewing to protection of the individual rights of its citizens—which properly are the rights against initiation of force against persons and their property—would be provision of law enforcement and judicial system and common defense against foreign aggression. She supported free trade all around, including free international trade, regardless of how “unfair” the trade might seem. She opposed military conscription or other mandatory national service as violations of rights of individuals to life and liberty. She opposed (and all this is implicit in the basic conception of individual rights) government regulation to what one does in bed, between consenting adults, and to what peaceful things one produces and exchanges.
Rand opposed government assistance to the needy. Citizens should be left with their own property to give directly to whatever charitable causes they see fit. The government should not deprive them, by taxes or inflation, of their property, for its own choice of charitable purposes. In late high school and early college, I was a democratic socialist. I was opposed to private property because it allowed people to be selfish, which I thought wrong. And I was concerned for the less fortunate. Rand said rightly that the first thing to do for the poor is to see to it that you do not become poor. I myself did not have any assets but my labor. I got a college education, but what was commercially valuable for many years after college was my unskilled labor.
There has been a shift here in quarters favoring government assistance to the needy during my last seven decades. There is now more emphasis on “income inequality”, not simply looking at what a low level are the poor. I care about the latter, not the former.
The other evening, we watched the former Brit John Oliver, and at one point he just blithely assumed that the only way ordinary folks here could get care for their children, especially if more than two children, was for that support to be supplied by government. When I was a young man, I knew I could not support a family, and that was part of the reason I did not undertake to issue children. Life, it is said, is what happens while you were making other plans. I know that if I had ended with children, I’d have found a way to support them. For crying out loud. Just as our ancestors had. My parents grew up on farms during the Great Depression. Those were in commerce, but they also had considerable self-sufficiency as far as putting food on the table. The local government provided for public education, which I approve of, unlike the Objectivist position on that. Those families had between five and nine children. Everyone labored all the time in those days. By the time I came along, we were all better off in so many ways than King Henry VIII, what with so much invention and much individual freedom under a framework with much protection of individual rights under the law.