William F. Buckley vs. Ayn Rand: Ayn Rand's Revenge

[Brant Gaede]

Chris: "Barbara; Why did Buckley keep reprinting the Chamber's review of Atlas? He must have realized that there could be no improvement in the relationship until he made amends for the piece of garbage."

By the time Chambers' review was published again, Buckley would have known there was no possibility of a rapprochement. I cannot imagine what sort of an apology for that review could possibly be adequate.

Rich: "What was his demeanor like when you interviewed him?"

Somewhat to my surprise, he was cordial, apparently forthcoming, even friendly. And he said not one word about Rand that was insulting, or even critical.

Barbara

This should be understood: In spite of his erudition Buckley was not an intellectual and Rand was in the deepest sense of the word. In a thousand years there will be four names principally remembered from the 20th Century: Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Ayn Rand. Three negative and one positive and she will shine and the others shamed.

--Brant

Edited June 15, 2009 by Brant Gaede

[Chris Grieb]

Brant; I would hope someone other than the four you mentioned would be remembered. I would pick Einstein as one more person and eliminate one of the dictators. I would like to think there is another positive person besides Rand.

[Michelle]

Chris: "Barbara; Why did Buckley keep reprinting the Chamber's review of Atlas? He must have realized that there could be no improvement in the relationship until he made amends for the piece of garbage."

By the time Chambers' review was published again, Buckley would have known there was no possibility of a rapprochement. I cannot imagine what sort of an apology for that review could possibly be adequate.

Rich: "What was his demeanor like when you interviewed him?"

Somewhat to my surprise, he was cordial, apparently forthcoming, even friendly. And he said not one word about Rand that was insulting, or even critical.

Barbara

This should be understood: In spite of his erudition Buckley was not an intellectual and Rand was in the deepest sense of the word. In a thousand years there will be four names principally remembered from the 20th Century: Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Ayn Rand. Three negative and one positive and she will shine and the others shamed.

--Brant

I'm fairly certain a person living at the beginning of the 21st Century has no idea how anything will look in a thousand years, least of all what information will be saved from the ravages of time.

[Brant Gaede]

This should be understood: In spite of his erudition Buckley was not an intellectual and Rand was in the deepest sense of the word. In a thousand years there will be four names principally remembered from the 20th Century: Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Ayn Rand. Three negative and one positive and she will shine and the others shamed.

--Brant

I'm fairly certain a person living at the beginning of the 21st Century has no idea how anything will look in a thousand years, least of all what information will be saved from the ravages of time.

I do! I do!

--Brant

building a time capsule to be deposited on the moon

[Rich Engle]

rapprochement...literarily, that is a bad thing, it involves fencing.

I always found, in end, that WFB's writing was poor. He felt like Toohey to me. You can say what you wish about Thompson, but I will stand and say he was a much better writer. Buckley's work smelled like a coffin to me. I will simply say compare the two obits (obits being serious business).

Yeah, run a straight compare/contrast drill on this writing. WFB comes up way light.

By way of association, this is also more logical proof as to someone like Perigo is not remotely close to being a writer. Surely, it reminds me of him, in a minor fashion.

HE WAS A CROOK

by Hunter S. Thompson

MEMO FROM THE NATIONAL AFFAIRS DESK DATE: MAY 1, 1994 FROM: DR. HUNTER S. THOMPSON SUBJECT: THE DEATH OF RICHARD NIXON: NOTES ON THE PASSING OF AN AMERICAN MONSTER.... HE WAS A LIAR AND A QUITTER, AND HE SHOULD HAVE BEEN BURIED AT SEA.... BUT HE WAS, AFTER ALL, THE PRESIDENT.

"And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird."

---Revelation 18:2

Richard Nixon is gone now, and I am poorer for it. He was the real thing -- a political monster straight out of Grendel and a very dangerous enemy. He could shake your hand and stab you in the back at the same time. He lied to his friends and betrayed the trust of his family. Not even Gerald Ford, the unhappy ex-president who pardoned Nixon and kept him out of prison, was immune to the evil fallout. Ford, who believes strongly in Heaven and Hell, has told more than one of his celebrity golf partners that "I know I will go to hell, because I pardoned Richard Nixon."

Return to Atlantic Unbound's interview with Hunter S. Thompson.

Discuss this article in The Body Politic.

I have had my own bloody relationship with Nixon for many years, but I am not worried about it landing me in hell with him. I have already been there with that bastard, and I am a better person for it. Nixon had the unique ability to make his enemies seem honorable, and we developed a keen sense of fraternity. Some of my best friends have hated Nixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together.

Nixon laughed when I told him this. "Don't worry," he said, "I, too, am a family man, and we feel the same way about you."

It was Richard Nixon who got me into politics, and now that he's gone, I feel lonely. He was a giant in his way. As long as Nixon was politically alive -- and he was, all the way to the end -- we could always be sure of finding the enemy on the Low Road. There was no need to look anywhere else for the evil bastard. He had the fighting instincts of a badger trapped by hounds. The badger will roll over on its back and emit a smell of death, which confuses the dogs and lures them in for the traditional ripping and tearing action. But it is usually the badger who does the ripping and tearing. It is a beast that fights best on its back: rolling under the throat of the enemy and seizing it by the head with all four claws.

That was Nixon's style -- and if you forgot, he would kill you as a lesson to the others. Badgers don't fight fair, bubba. That's why God made dachshunds.

Nixon was a navy man, and he should have been buried at sea. Many of his friends were seagoing people: Bebe Rebozo, Robert Vesco, William F. Buckley Jr., and some of them wanted a full naval burial.

These come in at least two styles, however, and Nixon's immediate family strongly opposed both of them. In the traditionalist style, the dead president's body would be wrapped and sewn loosely in canvas sailcloth and dumped off the stern of a frigate at least 100 miles off the coast and at least 1,000 miles south of San Diego, so the corpse could never wash up on American soil in any recognizable form.

The family opted for cremation until they were advised of the potentially onerous implications of a strictly private, unwitnessed burning of the body of the man who was, after all, the President of the United States. Awkward questions might be raised, dark allusions to Hitler and Rasputin. People would be filing lawsuits to get their hands on the dental charts. Long court battles would be inevitable -- some with liberal cranks bitching about corpus delicti and habeas corpus and others with giant insurance companies trying not to pay off on his death benefits. Either way, an orgy of greed and duplicity was sure to follow any public hint that Nixon might have somehow faked his own death or been cryogenically transferred to fascist Chinese interests on the Central Asian Mainland.

It would also play into the hands of those millions of self-stigmatized patriots like me who believe these things already.

If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.

These are harsh words for a man only recently canonized by President Clinton and my old friend George McGovern -- but I have written worse things about Nixon, many times, and the record will show that I kicked him repeatedly long before he went down. I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum.

Let there be no mistake in the history books about that. Richard Nixon was an evil man -- evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency. Nobody trusted him -- except maybe the Stalinist Chinese, and honest historians will remember him mainly as a rat who kept scrambling to get back on the ship.

It is fitting that Richard Nixon's final gesture to the American people was a clearly illegal series of 21 105-mm howitzer blasts that shattered the peace of a residential neighborhood and permanently disturbed many children. Neighbors also complained about another unsanctioned burial in the yard at the old Nixon place, which was brazenly illegal. "It makes the whole neighborhood like a graveyard," said one. "And it fucks up my children's sense of values."

Many were incensed about the howitzers -- but they knew there was nothing they could do about it -- not with the current president sitting about 50 yards away and laughing at the roar of the cannons. It was Nixon's last war, and he won.

The funeral was a dreary affair, finely staged for TV and shrewdly dominated by ambitious politicians and revisionist historians. The Rev. Billy Graham, still agile and eloquent at the age of 136, was billed as the main speaker, but he was quickly upstaged by two 1996 GOP presidential candidates: Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas and Gov. Pete Wilson of California, who formally hosted the event and saw his poll numbers crippled when he got blown off the stage by Dole, who somehow seized the No. 3 slot on the roster and uttered such a shameless, self-serving eulogy that even he burst into tears at the end of it.

Dole's stock went up like a rocket and cast him as the early GOP front-runner for '96. Wilson, speaking next, sounded like an Engelbert Humperdinck impersonator and probably won't even be re-elected as governor of California in November.

The historians were strongly represented by the No. 2 speaker, Henry Kissinger, Nixon's secretary of state and himself a zealous revisionist with many axes to grind. He set the tone for the day with a maudlin and spectacularly self-serving portrait of Nixon as even more saintly than his mother and as a president of many godlike accomplishments -- most of them put together in secret by Kissinger, who came to California as part of a huge publicity tour for his new book on diplomacy, genius, Stalin, H. P. Lovecraft and other great minds of our time, including himself and Richard Nixon.

Kissinger was only one of the many historians who suddenly came to see Nixon as more than the sum of his many squalid parts. He seemed to be saying that History will not have to absolve Nixon, because he has already done it himself in a massive act of will and crazed arrogance that already ranks him supreme, along with other Nietzschean supermen like Hitler, Jesus, Bismarck and the Emperor Hirohito. These revisionists have catapulted Nixon to the status of an American Caesar, claiming that when the definitive history of the 20th century is written, no other president will come close to Nixon in stature. "He will dwarf FDR and Truman," according to one scholar from Duke University.

It was all gibberish, of course. Nixon was no more a Saint than he was a Great President. He was more like Sammy Glick than Winston Churchill. He was a cheap crook and a merciless war criminal who bombed more people to death in Laos and Cambodia than the U.S. Army lost in all of World War II, and he denied it to the day of his death. When students at Kent State University, in Ohio, protested the bombing, he connived to have them attacked and slain by troops from the National Guard.

Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism -- which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.

Nixon's meteoric rise from the unemployment line to the vice presidency in six quick years would never have happened if TV had come along 10 years earlier. He got away with his sleazy "my dog Checkers" speech in 1952 because most voters heard it on the radio or read about it in the headlines of their local, Republican newspapers. When Nixon finally had to face the TV cameras for real in the 1960 presidential campaign debates, he got whipped like a red-headed mule. Even die-hard Republican voters were shocked by his cruel and incompetent persona. Interestingly, most people who heard those debates on the radio thought Nixon had won. But the mushrooming TV audience saw him as a truthless used-car salesman, and they voted accordingly. It was the first time in 14 years that Nixon lost an election.

When he arrived in the White House as VP at the age of 40, he was a smart young man on the rise -- a hubris-crazed monster from the bowels of the American dream with a heart full of hate and an overweening lust to be President. He had won every office he'd run for and stomped like a Nazi on all of his enemies and even some of his friends.

Nixon had no friends except George Will and J. Edgar Hoover (and they both deserted him). It was Hoover's shameless death in 1972 that led directly to Nixon's downfall. He felt helpless and alone with Hoover gone. He no longer had access to either the Director or the Director's ghastly bank of Personal Files on almost everybody in Washington.

Hoover was Nixon's right flank, and when he croaked, Nixon knew how Lee felt when Stonewall Jackson got killed at Chancellorsville. It permanently exposed Lee's flank and led to the disaster at Gettysburg.

For Nixon, the loss of Hoover led inevitably to the disaster of Watergate. It meant hiring a New Director -- who turned out to be an unfortunate toady named L. Patrick Gray, who squealed like a pig in hot oil the first time Nixon leaned on him. Gray panicked and fingered White House Counsel John Dean, who refused to take the rap and rolled over, instead, on Nixon, who was trapped like a rat by Dean's relentless, vengeful testimony and went all to pieces right in front of our eyes on TV.

That is Watergate, in a nut, for people with seriously diminished attention spans. The real story is a lot longer and reads like a textbook on human treachery. They were all scum, but only Nixon walked free and lived to clear his name. Or at least that's what Bill Clinton says -- and he is, after all, the President of the United States.

Nixon liked to remind people of that. He believed it, and that was why he went down. He was not only a crook but a fool. Two years after he quit, he told a TV journalist that "if the president does it, it can't be illegal."

Shit. Not even Spiro Agnew was that dumb. He was a flat-out, knee-crawling thug with the morals of a weasel on speed. But he was Nixon's vice president for five years, and he only resigned when he was caught red-handed taking cash bribes across his desk in the White House.

Unlike Nixon, Agnew didn't argue. He quit his job and fled in the night to Baltimore, where he appeared the next morning in U.S. District Court, which allowed him to stay out of prison for bribery and extortion in exchange for a guilty (no contest) plea on income-tax evasion. After that he became a major celebrity and played golf and tried to get a Coors distributorship. He never spoke to Nixon again and was an unwelcome guest at the funeral. They called him Rude, but he went anyway. It was one of those Biological Imperatives, like salmon swimming up waterfalls to spawn before they die. He knew he was scum, but it didn't bother him.

Agnew was the Joey Buttafuoco of the Nixon administration, and Hoover was its Caligula. They were brutal, brain-damaged degenerates worse than any hit man out of The Godfather, yet they were the men Richard Nixon trusted most. Together they defined his Presidency.

It would be easy to forget and forgive Henry Kissinger of his crimes, just as he forgave Nixon. Yes, we could do that -- but it would be wrong. Kissinger is a slippery little devil, a world-class hustler with a thick German accent and a very keen eye for weak spots at the top of the power structure. Nixon was one of those, and Super K exploited him mercilessly, all the way to the end.

Kissinger made the Gang of Four complete: Agnew, Hoover, Kissinger and Nixon. A group photo of these perverts would say all we need to know about the Age of Nixon.

Nixon's spirit will be with us for the rest of our lives -- whether you're me or Bill Clinton or you or Kurt Cobain or Bishop Tutu or Keith Richards or Amy Fisher or Boris Yeltsin's daughter or your fiancee's 16-year-old beer-drunk brother with his braided goatee and his whole life like a thundercloud out in front of him. This is not a generational thing. You don't even have to know who Richard Nixon was to be a victim of his ugly, Nazi spirit.

He has poisoned our water forever. Nixon will be remembered as a classic case of a smart man shitting in his own nest. But he also shit in our nests, and that was the crime that history will burn on his memory like a brand. By disgracing and degrading the Presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream.

________So that was Thompson's work...

Buckley's was vengeful, but his kung fu lacked, as usual...I post the link alone, because I believe Thompson's work surely occludes that of WFB, so I leave it to the link. HIs Obit of Thompson is flat-out disgraceful, because it belies. It means that Buckley was jealous of many people. Work out the math! This is a person that equally hated Ayn Rand, and Hunter Thompson. That's a weird transpose, and I will only try to pray and forgive for Bucky's transgressions.

~Intermezzo~ BB:; catchup time? rdengl@msn.com

So here it is; behold its weakness:

http://www.nationalreview.com/buckley/wfb200503011513.asp

Edited June 16, 2009 by Rich Engle

[Guyau]

The founders of modern libertarianism (whether or not they liked being a founder) were Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged), Murray Rothbard (Man, Economy, and State), and Robert Nozick (Anarchy, State, and Utopia).

Aren't you forgetting Hayek and von Mises, two of the most influential thinkers of the last century?

As I recall, Hayek’s views were better suited to conservatism than to libertarianism. But I have not studied such things in many years. Here is one fairly recent paper concerning Hayek and libertarianism: Mere Libertarianism: Blending Hayek and Rothbard by Daniel Klein.

Von Mises was not a libertarian in the modern sense of the term, as noted here.

The economics of Von Mises was entered into the modern movement (1960’s forward) mainly by Rothbard’s text. Rothbard was a proponent of individual rights, whereas typically, economists are utilitarians. The two perspectives can be harmonized to some extent with game theory.

Your argument against von Mises in that thread is weak.

It is beside the point anyhow. Von Mises added far more to free-market economic theory than Rand ever did. To include Rand and exclude von Mises because you dislike his support for the draft is ridiculous.

Same goes for Hayek.

Rand was good at popularizing libertarian ideas, but this does not make her an essential figure in the development of libertarian theory.

Michelle,

Whether one supports the military draft is not beside the point concerning the question of consistency with libertarianism. It is square on the point; anyone who supports military conscription is not a libertarian. The issue of conscription is not some peripheral issue. It is a direct and total infringement of the liberty of the individual conscripted.

How much one contributed to free-market economic theory is not entirely beside the point concerning the question of consistency with libertarianism. But it is not square on the point, because free-market economics and libertarianism are not entirely the same thing.

A lighter note: Dagny’s locomotive was a diesel-electric. The one in your photo is not, but I like it anyway.

[Robert Campbell]

Stephen,

I agree that the advocacy of conscription disqualifies the advocate from being a libertarian.

But Ludwig von Mises' contributions to libertarianism (directly, not just via Murray Rothbard or Ayn Rand or some other intermediary) are incontestable.

Robert Nozick also made incontestable contributions to libertarianism, even though he refused to mount any public defense of Anarchy, State, and Utopia, and eventually repudiated parts of it.

Dr. Nozick's biggest hangup wasn't conscription, but inherited wealth. Even when he was finishing his book he expressed misgivings about inheritors of private wealth; later on he would advocate confiscatory estate taxes.

Will Mises be remembered for his advocacy of the draft? Or Nozick for his antipathy to inherited wealth?

Unlikely, in either case.

Robert Campbell

[Guyau]

I concur with Robert and Michelle that Ludwig von Mises contributed to libertarianism both as an intellectual edifice and as a social current.

That conscription is in contradiction to the principles that no one may rightfully initiate the use of force and that that goes also for governmental agency is clear. It has not yet been established that estate “taxes” and inheritance “taxes” are necessarily initiations of the use of force, as opposed to force that is just.

Previously – A

David Kelley correctly observes that although the non-consensual taking of another’s rightful possessions is coercive, an elementary notion of coercion will not suffice to mark off which takings are not rightful nor which possessions are rightful (1984). It remains true that no one has the right to initiate the use of force, but how do we identify the presence of force in takings that entail neither direct attack nor confinement of persons? I say as follows.

Direct coercion is clear because the boundary of a person’s body is (generally) clear. To identify property rights, we must know the boundaries of possessions and the history of their possession.

When a cigarette comes into existence, it is a possession with plain boundaries. One can stand in a strong possessive relation to the object within those boundaries over the entire history of its existence. The boundaries of the land from which the cigarette was produced, the boundaries of land use, are also objective boundaries.

One can use unowned land in various ways, and those ways can then confer various kinds of possession—all of them weak—up to the boundaries of use. Until we draw up boundaries for land to forestall use by others, we cannot possess the land in the clear way that we can possess chattel. Possession is always an incident of ownership, but in the case of land, it cannot arrive before ownership.

What Thomas Schelling said of the role of national boundaries for the process of limiting war also applies to limiting violent conflict between A and B over the use of land. A property line is useful as a stopping place. It is useful to both A and B “in default of any plainly recognizable alternative since both sides have an interest in finding some limit. . . . The rationale behind the limit is legalistic and casuistic, not legal, moral, or physical. The limits may correspond to legal and physical differences or to moral distinctions; indeed, they usually have to correspond to something that gives them a unique and qualitative character and that provides some focus for expectations to converge on. But the authority is in the expectations themselves, and not in the thing that the expectations have attached themselves to” (1960, 259–61).

The convention that a first user of land be accorded ownership of that land is a rule on which A and B can easily converge in many circumstances. There is usually enough land such that production and exchange will better the conditions of both A and B (Nozick 1974, 174–82; Rothbard 1962, 504, 522–28). It can be economically better than non-interaction. It can be far better, economically and morally, than violent conflict.

In such circumstances, it will be right for each to respect the convention, and it will be wrong to breach it. A breach will be reasonably seen as an attack. Taking care not to drop the context, we may say that a first user has a right to appropriate land and defend it.

Imperfect Rights in Land

There is a conventional element to property rights in land. We saw in the preceding section that the rule that a first user of land be accorded ownership of land first used is a rule to which two possible claimants, having available other useful land, might converge without violent conflict. David Hume’s analogies are appropriate to the circumstance: “Two men, who pull the oars of a boat, do it by an agreement or convention, tho’ they have never given promises to each other. . . . In like manner are languages gradually establish’d by human conventions without any promise” (1737, 490). No explicit contract between the parties is necessary to establish ownership in land. What Russell Hardin called contract by convention is sufficient (1982, 155–72, 208–11).

Like Thomas Schelling’s prominence solutions for certain coordination games played with restrictions on communication (1960, 54–58), a rule must possess a psychological prominence to peacefully found a convention (Hardin 1982, 141–42; Sugden 1986, 47–52). Furthermore, particularly for large groups, the rule must be simple (Hardin 1982, 188–200). The first-use rule is simple, and it remains a prominent solution for the drawing of ownership boundaries on land, however large the community.

The first-use rule is, however, not the only plausibly just rule that appears natural and obvious. Furthermore, what should count as a use is not always clear. Mere declaration of intent to use is surely not a use. Murray Rothbard maintained that first preparation of a site for use should confer ownership. As title-conferring first preparations, he would count the activities of draining, filling, clearing, tilling, or paving (Rothbard 1970, 131; 1962, 147–49; see also Becker 1977, 32–56). His focus, like Locke’s, is on productive uses.

What about the reservation of virgin land for esthetic enjoyment or ecological study? Are not those uses? What about occupation, the use of land for a place to be?

Ellen Frankel Paul offers a somewhat different rule for initial appropriation: Title should go to the one who has, through purposive activity, transformed matter into something valuable to humans (Paul 1987, 224–36; cf. Kirzner 1978, 394–406). Richard Epstein adheres to a third rule, the rule of first possession. This is the standard rule at common law. This rule, too, is natural. In addition, like the others, it has some ambiguity. What if A’s occupation is prior to B’s, but B first fenced the land? (Epstein 1985, 10–11, 23–24, 61; see also Becker 1977, 24–31, 75–80).

Even if a just rule for appropriation of parcels of surface land could be settled upon by all the possible claimants (say, Rothbard, Paul, and Epstein), there would remain the questions of the extent of ownership to be recognized above and below the surface parcel. Consider only space above the land. One obvious solution would be the ad coelum doctrine of the common law. Under that rule, ownership would extend to all space directly above the land.

Rothbard would object. He would insist that the landowner only have rights in the space above to the extent that use by someone else can be excluded if it interferes with the landowner’s own health or his use and enjoyment of the land. Furthermore, if noise from aircraft were already a regular presence when the land was acquired, the landowner should have no complaint; the aircraft owner would already own the air for her limited purposes. Epstein would object. Paul would rejoin. (Rothbard 1982, 76–81; Epstein 1985, 117–21; Paul 1987, 89–90, 128–29, 217, 258).

Conflicting reasonable rules arise also for the transfer or conveyances of land titles. Consider the future interest in land known as the possibility of reverter. Thus, A, owner of Blackacre in fee simple absolute, conveys it “to B and his heirs so ling as the premises are not used for the sale of liquor, and if the premises are so used, they shall revert to A and his heirs” (Moynihan 1962, 98). Should such a future interest be recognized? Should such an estate be recognized only for some definite period of years after its creation? (ibid., 97–103).

Consider also a simple conveyance of A’s entire estate in Blackacre to B. What conventional signs of the transfer should be recognized? If B claims, upon the death of A in this case, that Blackacre was given to him, what conventional device should be accepted by C? If B’s claims were false, C might have had a rightful chance to appropriate the land as the next “first possessor” (or user, etc.).

Conventions are social. It is not reasonable to suppose that there exists some unique and complete set of rules for just land ownership that is so natural and obvious (once discovered) that it could be a set of universally accepted conventions upon which a universal contract by convention could be based. That a particular set would be just, if only everyone would buy into it, is not, on this earth, a completely adequate basis for anyone’s particular rights to property in specific land. Justifying private property in only a general way is all too easy (Becker 1977, 23).

The general problem is this: What is required for a would-be landowner to gain a just land title that is good against the world? The solution is this: alliance.

Previously – B

Because of the reasons for the alliance, the combined lands owned by the alliance members will compose a definite, highly contiguous territory of jurisdiction. If an alliance member, an owner of land, were to die intestate, her land would not pass out of the jurisdiction of the alliance. Anyone in the world could rightfully appropriate such land, but the effective alliance would have not only the right, but the effective power to enforce its own particular choice of just convention for settlement of the estate; for example, the land shall go to the next possessor, to the next of kin, or into a lottery for the landless.

About “taxes” on real estate:

Dennis, I thank you, and I thank Michael too, for the comments on my 1987 essay.

Is the assessment on rents at which I arrived, the assessment which would pay for the military defense of the land state (which is at the core of any state), a tax? It is what it is, regardless of whether we call it a tax. But should we think of it as a tax when we are being exact?

The American Heritage Dictionary defines tax as:

1. A contribution for the support of a government required of persons, groups, or businesses within the domain of that government.

2. A fee or due levied on the members of an organization to meet its expenses.

Black’s Law Dictionary defines tax as a pecuniary contribution that shall be made by persons liable, for the support of government. Black’s goes on to say:

In a broad sense, taxes undoubtedly include assessments, and the right to impose assessments has its foundation in the taxing power of the government; and yet, in practice and as generally understood, there is a broad distinction between the two terms. Taxes, as the tem is generally used, are public burdens imposed generally upon the inhabitants of the whole state, or upon some civil division thereof, for governmental purposes, without reference to peculiar benefits to particular individuals or property. Assessments have reference to impositions for improvements which are specially beneficial to particular individuals or property, and which are imposed in proportion to the particular benefits supposed to be conferred. They are justified only because the improvements confer special benefits, and are just only when they are divided in proportion to such benefits.

I suppose that in political philosophy we have some leeway whether we shall use the terms under their general dictionary usage or whether we shall use them as they would be used in law. If we go with the latter, it seems that the rent assessments which fell out of my analysis come to rest somewhere between taxes and assessments.

As most readers here know, Ayn Rand and most modern libertarians opposed any form of taxation, at least in the most just state that might eventually be reached. But what was Rand’s definition of a tax? She writes that they “represent an initiation of force.” She writes in her 1964 essay "Government Financing in a Free Society"

“What would be the proper method of financing the government in a fully free society?”

This question is usually asked in connection with the Objectivist principle that the government of a free society may not initiate the use of physical force and may use force only in retaliation against those who initiate its use. Since the imposition of taxes does represent an initiation of force, how, it is asked, would the government of a free country raise the money needed to finance its proper services?

In a fully free society, taxation—or, to be exact, payment for governmental services—would be voluntary. . . .

For the reasons given in my essay, the assessments on rents would not be an initiation of the use of force. It is false that owners of land (in the general economic sense) have ownership already perfected against all rational contests to those ownerships independently of the land state at the core of the state. The claim of any such perfect property right would be false, so no such right is infringed by the assessment.

Because Rand’s characterization of taxes as entailing the initiation of force is so widely presumed by readers here, it is probably best to decline calling these fundamental assessments on rents a tax. Dennis sensibly writes:

“The dues you speak of are clearly a form of taxation, since a person cannot decide not to pay and cannot secede from the alliance. However, the tax is levied against income from land, whose property rights exist only because of the alliance, so it is reasonable to demand that the cost of the alliance supporting the owner’s right be paid by him. Is this how I should understand your meaning?”

The second sentence, exactly so. Concerning the first, I would say a little more than I have already in this post. As it happens in my own personal case, I have never owned any real estate. I’m just a renter. It’s not so bad. If my landlord did not want to pay the land state’s assessments on his rents, he would have to sell the house and become a renter. In his case, he would go to a nice home for seniors and continue his good and very free life. My serious point is that I don’t see liability to such an assessment on rents as necessarily a great burden to people’s freedom and well-being.

Unknown to me are the macroeconomic differences that would come from financing national defense by assessments on rents rather than by income tax (and inflation).

[Michelle]

The founders of modern libertarianism (whether or not they liked being a founder) were Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged), Murray Rothbard (Man, Economy, and State), and Robert Nozick (Anarchy, State, and Utopia).

Aren't you forgetting Hayek and von Mises, two of the most influential thinkers of the last century?

As I recall, Hayek’s views were better suited to conservatism than to libertarianism. But I have not studied such things in many years. Here is one fairly recent paper concerning Hayek and libertarianism: Mere Libertarianism: Blending Hayek and Rothbard by Daniel Klein.

Von Mises was not a libertarian in the modern sense of the term, as noted here.

The economics of Von Mises was entered into the modern movement (1960’s forward) mainly by Rothbard’s text. Rothbard was a proponent of individual rights, whereas typically, economists are utilitarians. The two perspectives can be harmonized to some extent with game theory.

Your argument against von Mises in that thread is weak.

It is beside the point anyhow. Von Mises added far more to free-market economic theory than Rand ever did. To include Rand and exclude von Mises because you dislike his support for the draft is ridiculous.

Same goes for Hayek.

Rand was good at popularizing libertarian ideas, but this does not make her an essential figure in the development of libertarian theory.

Michelle,

Whether one supports the military draft is not beside the point concerning the question of consistency with libertarianism. It is square on the point; anyone who supports military conscription is not a libertarian. The issue of conscription is not some peripheral issue. It is a direct and total infringement of the liberty of the individual conscripted.

How much one contributed to free-market economic theory is not entirely beside the point concerning the question of consistency with libertarianism. But it is not square on the point, because free-market economics and libertarianism are not entirely the same thing.

A lighter note: Dagny’s locomotive was a diesel-electric. The one in your photo is not, but I like it anyway.

What label can be applied to him is beside the point. Call him a conservative if you like. Or a duck, if you wish. But he is indisputably one of the great innovators when it came to libertarian economic theory.

I stand by my original argument: Von Mises contributed more to libertarian theory than did Rand. This is natural. She was a writer who popularized libertarian ideals in her fiction and philosophy. So it would be profoundly incorrect not to include Von Mises and Hayek on any list of the great 'founders' of modern libertarianism. And it is also improper to include Rand in there.

I can imagine Ayn Rand rolls in her grave every time she is called a libertarian.

As to the lighter note: I'm aware, but it is more in reference to the motive power symbolized by railroads themselves, not so much a reference to Dagny's railroad. And it is a very nice picture, isn't it?

Or you could be a little bit wicked and think of it as a representation of the last ride of Kip Chalmers.

Edited July 17, 2009 by Michelle R

[Philip Coates]

> it is a very nice picture, isn't it?

It is.

[Selene]

Michelle:

I love that train photo, but when you threw out the Kip Chalmers name, I said to myself, where do I know that name from? As if it were in the real world. I did a quick search and that was the number one that popped up.

"As to the lighter note: I'm aware, but it is more in reference to the motive power symbolized by railroads themselves, not so much a reference to Dagny's railroad. And it is a very nice picture, isn't it?

Or you could be a little bit wicked and think of it as a representation of the last ride of Kip Chalmers."

Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged: from romantic fallacy to holocaustic imagination

Modern Age, Fall, 2004 by Thomas F. Bertonneau

A coterie of gangsters begins to complain, as though the inconvenience stemmed not directly from their own sustained depredation on the economy and circumvention of the law but from inimical powers. The chief miscreant, Kip Chalmers, has come from the gang's Washington headquarters to take over a satrapy in California. Like all the other villains in Atlas he talks as though his libido were a divinity itself demanding instantaneous appeasement on every occasion. With the diesel out of commission, however, and with only a coal-fired steam locomotive available, the eight-mile-long Winston Tunnel stands as an insuperable material obstacle between Chalmers and his goal. The railroad people timidly explain this. Chalmers explodes: "Do you think I'll let your miserable technological problems interfere with crucial social issues? Do you know who I am? Tell that engineer to start moving if he values his job." (57)

All competent personnel having long since severed links with the Taggart Trans-continental, those still on the job are the ones who have, in Rand's recurrent and pejorative phrase, adapted themselves to the prevailing conditions. None wants to thwart Chalmers because to do so would put one at risk of becoming a "scapegoat." (58) They conform to the novel's ambient, semi-voluntary, self-abnegating unanimity under coercion. Hitched to a coal-burner, the Comet heads toward the Tunnel.

In earlier instances we have observed how Rand's sacrificial imagination can betray itself by a stylistic discrepancy. So it is again with the Tunnel incident. Rand always editorializes, but she rarely editorializes in such a way as to arrest the action of the story or to jolt readers out of their suspended disbelief. Something important must be at stake to compel Rand to insert the authorial passage that interposes just before the Comet, flaring and smoking, enters the lethal bore: "It is said that catastrophes are a matter of pure chance, and there were those who would have said that the passengers of the Comet were not guilty or responsible for the thing that happened to them." (59) Indeed they are not guilty--by the legally normative standard of justice which Rand putatively upholds in Atlas Shrugged and which she accuses her antagonists in the novel's grand conflict of repeatedly and egregiously violating. Just as Rearden is guilty of no particular demonstrable moral or legal infraction at his trial, except his competence, so are the passengers on the Comet--excluding, let us say, Kip Chalmers and his retinue--not guilty de jure of any proven legal transgression, as none has enjoyed due process.

Who are the unnamed "those" in Rand's sentence who "would have said," absent a hearing by the rules, that, no legitimate sentence could in the moment attach to the fated ones? We can name them as any readers who at this point in the narrative might feel uneasy about what Rand proposes momentarily to execute in her role as author, she who makes things happen. Note how the passive inflection, "happened," in the sentence, as though the event could boast of no agent, dissimulates a great deal: primarily it would dissimulate the author herself, were she not, in the writing of the utterance, betraying her manipulative and determining presence. The luckless ones must be made out as guilty. Rand must demonstrate that the random passengers have sinned sufficiently to substitute for the known "looters."

[Michelle]

Michelle:

I love that train photo, but when you threw out the Kip Chalmers name, I said to myself, where do I know that name from? As if it were in the real world. I did a quick search and that was the number one that popped up.

"As to the lighter note: I'm aware, but it is more in reference to the motive power symbolized by railroads themselves, not so much a reference to Dagny's railroad. And it is a very nice picture, isn't it?

Or you could be a little bit wicked and think of it as a representation of the last ride of Kip Chalmers."

Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged: from romantic fallacy to holocaustic imagination

Modern Age, Fall, 2004 by Thomas F. Bertonneau

A coterie of gangsters begins to complain, as though the inconvenience stemmed not directly from their own sustained depredation on the economy and circumvention of the law but from inimical powers. The chief miscreant, Kip Chalmers, has come from the gang's Washington headquarters to take over a satrapy in California. Like all the other villains in Atlas he talks as though his libido were a divinity itself demanding instantaneous appeasement on every occasion. With the diesel out of commission, however, and with only a coal-fired steam locomotive available, the eight-mile-long Winston Tunnel stands as an insuperable material obstacle between Chalmers and his goal. The railroad people timidly explain this. Chalmers explodes: "Do you think I'll let your miserable technological problems interfere with crucial social issues? Do you know who I am? Tell that engineer to start moving if he values his job." (57)

All competent personnel having long since severed links with the Taggart Trans-continental, those still on the job are the ones who have, in Rand's recurrent and pejorative phrase, adapted themselves to the prevailing conditions. None wants to thwart Chalmers because to do so would put one at risk of becoming a "scapegoat." (58) They conform to the novel's ambient, semi-voluntary, self-abnegating unanimity under coercion. Hitched to a coal-burner, the Comet heads toward the Tunnel.

In earlier instances we have observed how Rand's sacrificial imagination can betray itself by a stylistic discrepancy. So it is again with the Tunnel incident. Rand always editorializes, but she rarely editorializes in such a way as to arrest the action of the story or to jolt readers out of their suspended disbelief. Something important must be at stake to compel Rand to insert the authorial passage that interposes just before the Comet, flaring and smoking, enters the lethal bore: "It is said that catastrophes are a matter of pure chance, and there were those who would have said that the passengers of the Comet were not guilty or responsible for the thing that happened to them." (59) Indeed they are not guilty--by the legally normative standard of justice which Rand putatively upholds in Atlas Shrugged and which she accuses her antagonists in the novel's grand conflict of repeatedly and egregiously violating. Just as Rearden is guilty of no particular demonstrable moral or legal infraction at his trial, except his competence, so are the passengers on the Comet--excluding, let us say, Kip Chalmers and his retinue--not guilty de jure of any proven legal transgression, as none has enjoyed due process.

Who are the unnamed "those" in Rand's sentence who "would have said," absent a hearing by the rules, that, no legitimate sentence could in the moment attach to the fated ones? We can name them as any readers who at this point in the narrative might feel uneasy about what Rand proposes momentarily to execute in her role as author, she who makes things happen. Note how the passive inflection, "happened," in the sentence, as though the event could boast of no agent, dissimulates a great deal: primarily it would dissimulate the author herself, were she not, in the writing of the utterance, betraying her manipulative and determining presence. The luckless ones must be made out as guilty. Rand must demonstrate that the random passengers have sinned sufficiently to substitute for the known "looters."

I'm actually surprised I could recall the name so easily. The guy appears in only a few of the book's pages, and I haven't read ATLAS SHRUGGED in years. Most likely his name has become attached to the symbolic catastrophe of the Tunnel disaster.

It has to be one of my favorite scenes in any work of literature. Almost any other writer would have merely described a train wreck, but Rand suffuses it with philosophical power, thus making the scene all the more dramatic. Through the various descriptions of the passengers on board, Rand demonstrates how bad premises which run against the nature of reality ultimately lead to chaos and death when put to the reality test. Kip really isn't solely responsible: he is merely the straw which breaks the camel's back. Rand demonstrates how almost everyone on that train had a hand in the invisible chain of cause-and-effect which would lead to their doom.

The only truly innocent people on that train were the children, who became victims of their parents' irrationality. It is the innocent who suffer most.

I am fairly certain this is why Rand included children on that train in a novel where children are otherwise almost entirely absent.

Edited July 17, 2009 by Michelle R

[Selene]

Michelle:

Agreed. I re-read Atlas last year for the umpteenth time. I numbered the clues to Galt's identity just for fun. As I read certain passages,

their impacts only increased.

The knowledge, even the first time I read that section, knowing, with absolute certainty, that they were all going to die, made her descriptions

biblical in their finality.

If you choose immoral paths, someone will pay the price.

There was no appeal, no guardian angel that was going to descend and save the innocent children on that train.

Reality was not going to modify itself and be "nice", reality was just going to be.

Kinda epistemological in its certainty,...don't you think?

Kinda reassuring that reality will work just like a god, but without mercy.

Adam

Post script: By the way thanks for the BBC link because the utube was gone by the time I looked at it. I am getting a transcript

of that show because I want to use it as a model for a class I am going to give in adult ed in the fall.

[DavidMcK]

You might remember Kip's name from his even more famous mother ' Kip's Ma ' who was into soybeans, and was responsible for diverting freight trains to CA for the great soybean harvest right when they were most needed in MN for the grain harvest. The acorn didn't fall too far from the soybean did it?

[Selene]

Ahh just like the Detroit Congressman's wife who just was convicted or plead to felonies from money she got for a deal on a well which

Mr. Michigan changed his mind on.

He insists that he knew nothing about his wife's criminal enterprise.

Let's see Michigan:

Unemployment 15.2% and rising

Detroit High Schools struggled to graduate 25% of their students. Mayor of Detroit on his way to jail...hmmm...nah there is no connection at all, just a lot of coincidences.

How's that auto industry doing?

Adam

[Robert Campbell]

I can imagine Ayn Rand rolls in her grave every time she is called a libertarian.

Michelle,

I think this is just a further illustration of unintended consequences.

Mises wasn't a libertarian, and Nozick didn't remain one.

Ayn Rand may have wanted nothing to do with the libertarian movement, but she was one, as the term is generally understood. Her moral case for capitalism was and remains indispensable to most libertarians.

Besides, her rejection of the label "libertarian" came about because she and Murray Rothbard developed a bad case of dueling egos.

In the longer run, it's unlikely that anyone will much care about the ego duel.

Robert Campbell

[9thdoctor]

I interviewed William Buckley in preparation for writing The Passion of Ayn Rand. I was, of course, aware of his decades-long attacks on Rand and on what he called "her desssicated philosophy." I asked him if Whittaker Chambers' review of Atlas was representative of his own opinions. "I never read the book," he replied. "When I read the review of it and saw the length of the book, I never picked it up. I think I read all her other novels. I didn't read her philosophy books. . . . One of these days I'll probably get around to reading Atlas Shrugged."

So much for the integrity and the commitment to first-hand judgment of William Buckley.

Barbara

Here's a new upload to YouTube. Maybe he gives a different answer every time he's asked whether he's read AS.

[Barbara Branden]

I interviewed William Buckley in preparation for writing The Passion of Ayn Rand. I was, of course, aware of his decades-long attacks on Rand and on what he called "her desssicated philosophy." I asked him if Whittaker Chambers' review of Atlas was representative of his own opinions. "I never read the book," he replied. "When I read the review of it and saw the length of the book, I never picked it up. I think I read all her other novels. I didn't read her philosophy books. . . . One of these days I'll probably get around to reading Atlas Shrugged."

So much for the integrity and the commitment to first-hand judgment of William Buckley.

Barbara

Here's a new upload to YouTube. Maybe he gives a different answer every time he's asked whether he's read AS.

Do you knows the date of the Charlie Rose interview with Buckley? I'm wondering if, after my book was published -- quoting Buckley as saying he'd never read Atlas -- he decided it was time to read it. He must have heard from a great many people who were appalled that he had incessantly denounced a book he'd never read.

Barbara.

[9thdoctor]

Do you knows the date of the Charlie Rose interview with Buckley? I'm wondering if, after my book was published -- quoting Buckley as saying he'd never read Atlas -- he decided it was time to read it. He must have heard from a great many people who were appalled that he had incessantly denounced a book he'd never read.

Barbara.

It says 6/17/03. He made her a character in a novel that came out after your biography, so maybe he did finally read Atlas. My gut says he’s lying, however.

[9thdoctor]

BTW, did you catch at 50 seconds in where he says that Atlas Shrugged is “the biggest selling novel in the history of the world”? Also, I looked it up, and Getting it Right, his novel with Ayn Rand as a character, was published in 2003, the same year as this interview.

[Selene]

BTW, did you catch at 50 seconds in where he says that Atlas Shrugged is "the biggest selling novel in the history of the world"? Also, I looked it up, and Getting it Right, his novel with Ayn Rand as a character, was published in 2003, the same year as this interview.

Yes, that comment jumped out. It supports the Library of Congress reference that Atlas Shrugged ranks second to the Bible as the most read book in the world. I wonder if he wanted to separate it from the Bible reference by referring to Atlas as the most read novel in the world.

That would leave the Bible as the most read non-fiction book.

Just a thought.

Adam

[Kimmler]

From the Randzapper website: -

"Randzapper doesn't always keep up on the latest Randian nuttiness, so we are a little behind the times in noticing this remarkable essay by longtime Randolator Harry Binswanger.

Disregarding the old adage that you shouldn't speak ill of the dead, Binswanger launches a salvo of personal attacks on the recently departed conservative pasha William F. Buckley. And when we say recently, we mean recently; Buckley passed away on February 27, 2008, and Binswanger posted his jeremiad on March 10. At least he waited till the body was cold.

The title gives you a pretty good idea of what you're in for: "William F. Buckley, Jr.: The Witch-Doctor is Dead."

Though personally, we think "Ding-Dong, the Witch-Doctor is Dead" would have had more of a, um, ring to it - so to speak.

In case his readers missed the implications of the title - always a possibility when addressing dimwitted Objectivist twits - Binswanger begins his essay with the words, "William F. Buckley, Jr. is finally dead."

Finally! You can just hear Binny breathe a heartfelt sigh of relief. Or it would be heartfelt, if he had a heart or was capable of feeling anything.

Having established his bold, take-no-prisoners stance in defaming a dead guy who can't fight back, the intrepid Binswanger expands on his thesis that Buckley's grave is not worth crying over.

Buckley was the man who initiated and sustained the movement to bring religion into the conservative movement. His first book was "God and Man at Yale," which I haven't read or looked at, but which is said to have criticized Yale education for being both leftist and anti-religious.

Now, ya gotta love this. Binny has not "read or looked at" Buckley's famous book - one of the most influential tomes in modern conservative history - but he just knows it's bad, 'cause somebody told him so. Objectivist intellectualism at its finest! Let's hear it for the independent reasoning mind!

(Has it ever occurred to you that the Randian movement is much like the crowd of disciples in Monty Python's Life of Brian? "You are all individuals," Brian tells them. "We are all individuals," the crowd chants in unison. Except for one guy, apparently untainted by Randism, who says defiantly, "I'm not!")

Anyway, back to Binny and his bete noir.

[buckley] then founded the magazine National Review, which Ayn Rand in her Playboy interview of 1964 called "the worst and most dangerous magazine in America," because of its crusade to tie capitalism to religion.

Get it now? Binswanger knows Buckley was bad without reading his book - because Ayn Rand (peace be upon her) said so.

The guru has spoken. The oracle has prophesied. Case closed.

And she said so in Playboy, which apparently was not "the worst and most dangerous magazine in America," despite its reprehensible overuse of airbrushing.

Inevitably, Binswanger next brings up that continuing thorn in Objectivism's paw, National Review's devastating and brilliant critique of Atlas Shrugged.

The Whittaker Chambers piece on Atlas Shrugged was probably the most hostile and distorted review of that great work ever.

Actually Chambers' essay was amazingly prescient and brimming with insights into the twisted Randian mindset. Read it for yourself. Or, if you're an Objectivist, just take Binswanger's word that it's not worth reading. After all, he's already told you what to think.

In the intervening years, National Review has written at least two major attacks on Ayn Rand. I recall one titled, I think, "Saint Ayn," and it featured on its cover a drawing of Ayn Rand, as if on a stained glass window, looking heavenward.

Heaven forfend! A magazine about public policy and conservative ideas that actually addressed Ayn Rand as a controversial and significant figure! Didn't Buckley know that, having received the Randian revelation, we were all expected to fall to our knees, blinded by the light, like Saint Paul on the road to Damascus? How dare they presume to criticize - criticize! - the Greatest Genius of the Past Two Thousand Years ™?

Notice that Binswanger barely even remembers the cover story on Rand and has to guess at its title. Since he mentions nothing of the content of the piece, it is safe to assume he didn't read it, just as he didn't read Buckley's book. Apparently he did glance at the cover, though. That's what passes for serious intellectual engagement in Objectiworld.

After taking Buckley to task for a couple of policy disagreements, Binswanger retails this unsubstantiated anecdote:

Incidentally, Ayn Rand told me that in the years following her public condemnations of Buckley, he sent her more than one letter "crawling on his knees" (her words) trying to get her approval and/or a rapproachment. Needless to say, he failed in this attempt.

Why do we have trouble believing this claim? Is it because the supremely confident and ever-poised Buckley does not strike us as the type who would crawl on his knees? Is it because Buckley had no conceivable reason to care if Ayn Rand liked him or not, inasmuch as Buckley was an influential leader of conservative thought and Rand was (and is) a sad joke ignored by everyone but dateless college freshmen? Is it because Rand lied so often about other incidents in her life, such as her affair with Nathaniel Branden and her early years in America, that her autobiographical ramblings have not the slightest whiff of credibility? Is it because Rand was obviously a megalomanical, narcissistic, delusional nut whose addled brain chronically conflated fantasy and reality?

After careful consideration and much prayerful reflection, we think the answer is: all of the above.

Not having excoriated the dead man quite enough, Binny lays it on with a trowel in his poisonous concluding graph:

Buckley, more than anyone else, is responsible for subverting the "conservative movement," turning it into its current, depraved status as the anti-reason, anti-man, welfare-statist "religious right." The world is well rid of him.

Nice, Harry. Really ... nice. You and the dead witch you worship were just made for each other.

Now, because what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the goosestepper, let Randzapper emulate your style with this parting thought:

Ayn Rand, more than anyone else, is responsible for polluting the minds of hapless young fools and creating a sick cult of personality that has ruined lives for decades. The world is well rid of this cheap Russian import. Indeed, the world would have been infinitely better off if Alicia Rosenbaum had strangled on her umbilical cord in her mother's feculent womb.

In an uncertain world, at least you can count on Randzapper to stay classy. Always."

[Kimmler]

BTW, did you catch at 50 seconds in where he says that Atlas Shrugged is "the biggest selling novel in the history of the world"? Also, I looked it up, and Getting it Right, his novel with Ayn Rand as a character, was published in 2003, the same year as this interview.

Yes, that comment jumped out. It supports the Library of Congress reference that Atlas Shrugged ranks second to the Bible as the most read book in the world. I wonder if he wanted to separate it from the Bible reference by referring to Atlas as the most read novel in the world.

That would leave the Bible as the most read non-fiction book.

Just a thought.

Adam

Adam,

That is the fantasy...here is the reality

http://www.violetbooks.com/aynrand.html

Oh, she is cruel mistress.

[DavidMcK]

The Bible is non-fiction?

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Kimmler,

Neither the poll nor your link reflect reality. The poll was skewed by Objectivists on a campaign. That's one of the reasons I rarely refer to it. (I also think skewing polls to be a really amateur attempt to manipulate the public.)

As to your link, forget the original Rand-club people. Today, Rand's works sell more than ever. Can you think of another bestselling author from the years she wrote who still sell as much as she does?

If you like, I can back all of this up with reports and facts.

That is reality.

(Is she still cruel mistress to you?)

btw - I get a hoot out of reading Randzapper. But I have to take it in small doses, sort of like watching Keith Olbermann. Too much smarm puts me in a bad mood.

Michael