That aside, you elect to begin by citing Nietzsche and declaring him to be "intellectually fearless and brutally straightforward." This is pure foolishness. Even the prolific sinner Russell had the common sense to point out that Nietzsche's views were absolutely incongruous with the conduct of his personal life. I have to paraphrase here but Nietzsche wrote "When going to women, don't forget to bring the whip" and Russell reasonably suggests "Nietzsche knows that, in reality, nine out of ten women would have got the whip out of his hand". Nietzsche's greatest problem was that he was the living, breathing, antithesis to what his philosophy held dear. He was nothing more than a weak step on the ladder to Nihilism which made us all realize that nothing mattered.
Interestingly, things still seem to matter, and I'm amazed that you differentiate between Hank Rearden and John Galt in your post. Galt is more vocal in the novel but their ideals are the same. Simplified; if I make something what gives another person any right to it or say in it's distribution?
BTW. I am a reformed lib too. Try not to let it get in the way.
Don't need any slack cut for me, thanks, and wasn't defending Nietszche's ideas by any means, but I don't mistake the man with the mind. The fact that he was physically weak and sickly has nothing to do with the philosophical stance he took: an atheist who followed the ramifications of such an anti-belief in toto, all the way. Of course nihilism is the result, but he didn't shrink from it. And I stand by the central claim: Rand repackaged the raw material of Nietszche's ideas and shaped them into something slick and smooth and easily swallowed by those whose vanity is tickled by the notion that they, too, are Reardon and Galt material. Whether or not 'Reardon Steel' belonged to Reardon is not the central issue of 'Atlas Shrugged', and in the real world, which we common folk somehow muddle through without Rand's quasi-divine arbitration, copyright and patent laws are in place to assure ownership belongs to the creator. The author's contempt for those not part of her self-styled elite is palpable. She spends several interminable pages, for example, explaining why the death of hundreds of people in a railway disaster really isn't such a bad thing since the train crash victims were idealogical bedfellows to the cardboard cutout bad guys in her novel. Conservative thought, as Hobbes and Locke propounded it, is based upon self-interest harnessed to a common good, the polity as a whole. The self-interest Rand advocates is pathologically extreme: selfishness not as a recognized trait of a less-than-ideal humanity, as Hobbes saw it, but as a virtue to be extolled and celebrated.
'Reformed lib' doesn't get in the way of anything. It does, however, give me some experience with power-hungry, self-styled apostles of truth.