A Rare and Honest Review of Rand
Book review: Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, by Ayn Rand (from HBL)
She wrote the book because she was confounded by the fact that young people blamed every societal ill on capitalism, which was hardly surprising since they had not lived under any other system. Socialism and communism, at the time she was writing, had legions of promoters and defenders, but capitalist ideals seemed to be trampled on everywhere and held up as evil. An American immigrant who had witnessed the economic misery and attacks on individual dignity that defined communist Russia, Rand had at an early age resolved to be capitalism’s defender.
…
Most of the ‘anti-capitalists’ of today actually know little about the system into which they were born. They have eyes only for some actors within it (such as large companies) and their apparent greed, while being blind to the fantastic freedoms and prosperity they have inherited. Free markets, they believe, will mean a ‘race to the bottom’ of greater and greater exploitation of workers. Such arguments fail to notice that the sweatshop workers in developing countries who make goods sold in the rich world have usually arrived there by choice, leaving behind back-breaking lives of rural poverty. Their wages may be a pittance, but they represent the beginnings of a way out; their conditions look bad, but are little different to those endured by our grandparents or great-grandparents when their countries were industrialising.
The usual accusation levelled at Rand and her followers is of extremism. A more intelligent view is that she was a supreme rationalist who valued personal freedom to the highest degree.
Capitalism for her was not just a system for people to get richer, but was the only system in which people were free to act according to their best interests. Today, because we take our comfortable lives for granted, we take capitalism for granted as well. [emphasis added]
I’m shocked to see such an accurate and objective review of Rand outside of the core Objectivist media circles. This is a very good thing. If you only read one article this week, this should be it.
