I read all of Anthem, We The Living, and Atlas Shrugged. Finally, in the middle of The Fountainhead, I had had enough and put it down forever. Laisez Faire Capitalism is not “her” philosophy. She is a champion of it, but Milton Fried, Rush Limbaugh and Wm. F. Buckley are better champions by far. And it is good on paper, but you do need to hybridize it somewhat. All by itself it lacks key ingredients that are required by Judaeo-Christian ethics, and would quickly resemble a Dickens novel, or the small-minded demands of Shylocke that a contract be fulfilled to the letter, up to and including a pound of human flesh.
Balancing that hybridization while avoiding the abyss of socialism is not only ethical, but a matter of survival for an enlightened industrial society. Pollution is bad, but does not justify the insanity of environ-mental-ists shutting down all fossil fuels or outlawing plastic straws. Starving people cannot work productively or buy enough to be called consumers. But that does not justify giving corrupt unionists a strangle-hold on all industry. It’s in the interests of employers to pay their workers enough so that they can buy the products they make, such as cars and houses, and still have enough to eat. Collective bargaining might or might not be a part of arriving at the right wage for each industry, depending on the situation. It might kill off employment, too.
Ayn Rand believed in the triumph of reason, but that’s hardly “her” philosophy, either. Ancient Greeks and medieval Talmudic scholars had similar beliefs.
Dated a young lady once who was a dedicated Randian; she had me read ‘Atlas’, which I did, cover to cover. As talented as Rand was at identifying the absurdities of the left, that’s how clueless she was in understanding healthy personal interactions of actual human beings.
In particular, the absence of children in a book the size and scope of “Atlas Shrugged” was especially striking to me. (Granted, the book does begin with Dagney and some others as children, but they’re not really children - if you read their dialogue, they’re apparently small underage humans with the maturity of adults who just haven’t yet crossed some legal treshold of adulthood. And there’s a small mention of kids in the segment on the hidden-away homestead of a group of freedom-loving dissenters. That’s it).
And that absence of children is hardly surprising - as wonderful as they can be in one’s life, they are the ultimate challenge to “the virtue of selfishness”. If you’re going to raise good kids, you pretty much have to buy into something akin to altruism - a whole lot of giving, and no guarantee of any reciprocal behavior in return. I don’t think Rand had a clue what healthy family life would require, and as such, she at least had enough sense not to try to fake it in her written work (or in her actual personal life, for that matter).
Ayn was a diversion for me in my teens and early twenties. With the Objectivists you always needed one more book purchase to fully understand and two seminars. I think the best explanation of her deficiencies was the book review of Atlas Shrugged written by Whittaker Chambers.
https://whittakerchambers.org/articles/nr/bigsister/