Jeez, I didn't know Ayn Rand was this messed up.
I admit it, in my stupider adolescence I was an Ayn Rand fan... for a feverish few months. Pretty soon though I realized that only children with absolutely no idea what human beings were really like could write, or love, her novels. In Rand's universe, the only ill-gotten wealth was government tax revenue. All priests were deceiving hucksters. All rich people liked each other and got along because they recognized their fellow Supermen. There was one fascist standard of true art, (which Objectivist Supermen would immediately recognize), and everything else was trash. Family and friends were parasites distracting the capitalist gods from realizing their all-important productive work. Rape was sometimes OK. And "true" love could only result from an "objective" assessment of the paramour's productive value.
Her philosophy was just as cold, materialistic, fascistic, and anti-democratic as that of the Soviet Union which she escaped as a little girl. Only she turned Marx around by worshipping the capitalists and hating the proletariat. Both of these ideological extremes were absurd, wrong, and deadly when put in practice.
So it's amazing when you think that leading figures like Alan Greenspan and Clarence Thomas are Ayn Rand fans, because you realize that they must really hate and despise the America in which they find themselves, the government that pays them, and most of their fellow citizens. Ayn Rand would have found most of you literally disgusting and immoral.
Ayn Rand, Hugely Popular Author and Inspiration to Right-Wing Leaders, Was a Big Admirer of Serial Killer
Today her works treated as gospel by right-wing powerhouses like Alan Greenspan and Clarence Thomas, but Ayn Rand found early inspiration in 1920's murderer William Hickman.
By Mark Ames
February 26, 2010 | AlterNet
URL: http://www.alternet.org/story/145819/?page=entire
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