FEMA Slow Response to Katrina Blamed on Rand

[Aggrad02]

http://www.onlinejournal.com/artman/publis...ticle_448.shtml

I was going to put this in the Articles and News section but figured that it wasn't worthy, so I placed it here. This article is such a piece of trash it is highly humorous. Especially since the website slogan is to provide uncensored and accurate news, articles and commentary.

One bright piece of the article is that the author, as a way of trying to prove his point, actually ask his readers to pick up a Ayn's Virtue of Selfisness. Hopefully some of them will.

[Kat]

If FEMA’s response had been swift and effective it would have looked heroic, for both the common person and for the common good. FEMA’s inaction was not a botch. There are deep corridors behind this.

It was close to what Ayn Rand’s disciples have in mind, and I believe there are plenty of Rand’s disciples in places of high influence.

Ayn Rand’s ideology, powerful since the 1940s, denies the common good. It actually prescribes not helping. In particular, selfishness and greed are virtues, altruism is a vice.

You laugh: that’s a stretch, nobody reads Rand anymore. Actually Rand’s ideology, an elaboration of the Nietzschean superman ethic which was carried in two novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and two books of essays [3] is still selling very well; one biographer estimates that after 50 years, Ayn Rand’s books and those of her followers are still printed worldwide at 400,000 copies a year [4] -- and I am guessing there are dog-eared copies on many American baby-boomer’s bookshelves.

While she was alive and touring, Rand’s oratory was persistently confrontational. She was restlessly negative and she did everything she could to hoist herself up to position of philosopher and authority, to establish her dogma. In practice she was a humorless bully, and she browbeat her students. Philosophers largely rejected her published harangues, but she did attain status as an ideologue of the era.

Rand’s toxic ideas of the good life, and how businesses should be conducted, are more than popular: they saturate upper business echelons. Alan Greenspan was a personal student of Rand’s; he contributed three of the essays to her Capitalism [5]. The Reagan administration was largely Randian [6]. And her values, expanded in derivatives such as Ringer’s popular Looking Out For Number One and Winning Through Intimidation were catalysts for the ‘me’ generation of the 1970s and 80s. They continue to spread.

The trademark arrogance in her ideas (and personally Rand always insisted on everything) also animates her novels’ protagonists. They were heroes who were no-holds-barred productive, and who were arrogance incarnate. Rand rewrote Nietzsche’s point that very successful people, the very strong, are categorically different from the rest of us. They are above public morality. Rand also insisted on no compromises, because compromise betrays weakness [7]. She argued for a return to the 1890s Golden Age style of business, monopolies run on personal will power, in which great fortunes were made, partly through inhumane exploitation of immigrants and the poor.

The dark side of business is nothing new, but in Rand’s utopia there was nothing wrong with letting the laggards perish. Rand was also a Social Darwinist. Social Darwinism was a robber baron-era philosophy which held that evolutionary pressures -- natural selection -- apply to humans. It held that you actually help the nation along by permitting the weak to fall by the wayside: thus welfare is a mistake because it interferes with nature’s way of weeding out the unfit. Absolute laissez-faire was Rand’s ideal -- no government constraint on business and no assistance to the poor, only glorious liberty to be as selfish as you want. This, she said, is also rational.

One of her novel’s heroes stated that a nation’s morality is its money. That was a silly thing to say; but modern Libertarians embrace these points, and many young readers still find her message uplifting.

My second point: if you tried to overlay the administration’s post-Katrina actions on Ayn Rand’s dogma, the fit would be snug.

*coughing up hairball*

This type of reaction is a very common misconception and is what we have to fight against. Why don't people understand that big government is the problem and not the solution?

Kat

[SaulOhio]

Are they talking about the same Ayn Rand that I have studied? Is there some other Ayn Rand that actually IS a Social Darwinist?

[Charles R. Anderson]

This funny piece is so strange and internally inconsistent, that I suspect that some readers will figure that Ayn Rand must have at least been an interesting and unconventional thinker. They will want to check out her work for themselves, it only to better understand how she has manipulated government and come to control industry!

[C. Jordan]

I have the impression that the author of this piece has never actually read THE FOUNTAINHEAD or ATLAS SHRUGGED.

Instead, Mr. Edney must have read the reviews of ATLAS SHRUGGED. The ones quoted in PASSION OF AYN RAND gave the impression that Rand was all for such things as "Social Darwinism."

If something like this had happened in a Rand novel, Dagny and Hank Rearden would have been struggling to solve the problem, in spite of whatever new directive the bastards in government had just passed.

[SaulOhio]

I have the impression that the author of this piece has never actually read THE FOUNTAINHEAD or ATLAS SHRUGGED.

Instead, Mr. Edney must have read the reviews of ATLAS SHRUGGED. The ones quoted in PASSION OF AYN RAND gave the impression that Rand was all for such things as "Social Darwinism."

And my response to those reviewers is the same as my response to the author of the article in question. Are we talking about the same Ayn Rand, and the same Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead? Is there some other author with the same name that wrote novels with the same names? Because the reviews bear little resemblance to what I read in those books.