I never thought about it before, but considering how popular Ayn Rand's books are, I'm a little surprised that there aren't more people named Ayn.

Probably so. I've always heard it pronounced pretty much like the German "ein."

That's part of why there's the dyslexic effect.

I feel like I ought to be good at word games, but I'm not, especially. And I'm terrible if they require quickness, like Boggle. I hate Boggle. My wife destroys me at it.

Yeah, it's almost a more visual than verbal thing. Or as much, anyway.

See, I'm not the only one that gets confused.

AMDG

>>"I’ve suspected that what they, the Christians, do is to separate Rand’s economic ideas from her metaphysics."

More or less what Christian socialists do with Marx. It's not impossible, but it's dangerous.

You're right, Mac.

There is, first, and most obviously, the hellish anarchy of objectivism and its mirror image, the hellish statism of communism.

There is, secondly, the evangelical zeal that characterizes adherents to both philosophies. This is less true of communism now, almost 150 years after its proclamation and in the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse, than it is of objectivism, which is barely 60 years old and -- unlike communism -- still untainted by any empirical failures on a national scale. It's difficult to find an intellectually committed Marxist nowadays outside of certain Ivy League faculty lounges. And it's equally difficult to find a self-contained economy whose members would be willing, on a majority basis, to adopt Rand's "virtue of selfishness" as a guiding civic value. (Perhaps if Malibu or the Hamptons could secede from the Union, we might get a test case.)

Either way, both these visions of human society exhibit the cultic power of utopianism -- communism because (in the eyes if its adherents) it has never been given a realistic chance; objectivism because it has never (yet) been given any chance at all. As is the case among all "true believers" -- Marxists and Randians alike -- hope springs eternal, regardless of what real life tells us is true.

Jeff, I think that Communism is growing. There are a couple of generations that don't remember anything about the cold war and what little they have been taught in history classes, doesn't say anything about the evils of Communism. I think the fact that those OW demonstrations took place on May 1 is huge. And there are also Marxists in Protestant seminaries, and I don't think it's just Ivy League colleges.

Daniel, I'm wondering if a distortion of the real thing is not sometimes worse than something outside that rises in opposition. And truly I mean that I'm wondering; I'm not stating that as a fact. Of course, I agree about Objectivism. I horrifies me when someone whom I know to be a committed Catholic recommends her books.

AMDG

I really want to like Paul Ryan, but frankly I don't know what to think. Here's another clip of him gushing over Rand, in which, among other things, he does say her books are "required reading" for his staff (ignore the sensationalist presentation of it--for instance, I don't believe he's a literal atheist, and it's not a "secret" recording at all): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqO5JnvQSm0

He most assuredly was a disciple of hers. He never qualified any of his statements in the least. I really hope he's seeing the light now. I'm thinking maybe (hopefully) he didn't quite understand the full implications of her philosophy, as you suggested. Hopefully he's beginning to truly understand what it means to be Catholic. (That might sound bad...I just don't know how anyone could admire her to the extent that he did/does and pretend to also be Catholic.)

I see that clip is 7 minutes, Noah, so, as I'm at work, I'll have to wait till later to watch it. I believe this must be the talk I've seen referred to in several things about him.

The discussion is not advanced by saying that someone's criticism does not advance the discussion, either. Rather more helpful would be an attempt to point all the good points in Rand's economic thought.
But you can't, because there are none. Her whole approach begins with the fallacy that wealthy entepreneurs are the "producers", when of course without labor to make the goods or provide the service the man with the idea and the cash remains impotent. Her economic thought begins with a hostility to solidarity, which is the fundamental principle of a just social order. Might is right in Rand's world, and the poor and needy are to be despised as worthless.
I am pretty broadminded, willing to sift through a lot of error in search of the truth, but I see none in Rand. It is like saying that one must glean the wisdom in the thought of Anton LeVay of the Church of Satan (whose thought is identical to Rand's, except LeVay chose to use Satan as a symbol of his selfish ethos). Or saying that one can find truths amid the error in Alistair Crowley or Adolf Hitler.

But if I am missing something please enlighten me.

I think that one of the things that draws people to Rand (and believe me, I am in no way one of these people) is the idea that government does not have any business taxing the rich to give to the poor. And while Thomas does say, and I believe that our excess belongs to the poor, I don't think he would say that government should effect the transfer of this excess.

I may be wrong about this, but I do know that I can see that the more the government takes over the welfare of the poor, the more this eviscerates the Church. Christians, seeing that the poor are receiving help from the government, cease to give the help. Christians who want to help the poor have less to give because taxes are higher. Laws make it more difficult for churches to give help to the poor. And charity becomes cold and faceless, or if their is a face, it's bored and rude and contemptuous. I know this from experience.

So, I'm not saying that Rand is good in any way, I'm just saying that this may explain what some people see in her "philosophy."

AMDG

Daniel, why should I respond to someone who has just said he's had enough of my nonsense?

I usually have the feeling when we try to discuss topics like this that you're responding to something that's a bit off to one side of what I actually meant. Whether this is my fault or yours or some of both, I don't know, but I see that happening here.

My main point is not to defend Rand but to try to understand what people like the person Janet mentions (and Paul Ryan, assuming he's sincere) see in her, and why they don't see the contradiction between Rand's ideas and their own Christian beliefs. My point is not that Rand's economic ideas can logically be separated from her philosophy, but that people do in fact seem to separate them.

One reason that you are so outraged by that is that you're actually making Rand worse than she really is, and God knows she's bad enough. As I've mentioned, Atlas Shrugged is the only big work of hers I've read. If we take it as definitive of her thought, her foundational economic principle is not rapacity but rather a sort of extremely pure abstract justice, in which each person gets *exactly* what he or she has worked for. The villains are not the workers or the poor, but those who take others' work by force. Never mind incompatibility with Christianity, this isn't even a viable worldly principle in the pure form that she wants it to be. But it's not what you seem to think it is.

"My point is not that Rand's economic ideas can logically be separated from her philosophy, but that people do in fact seem to separate them."

One can say the same thing about Mises, actually, but Rand is much worse -- like Mises on steroids. The only thing "good" in Rand is her critique of statism, but considering that there are other equally good critiques of statism out there I don't see the need for any Christian to bother with Rand.

The problem is that Rand, and the libertarians, do not just critique Statism, which the Church also rejects. They reject the State, and see it as an evil, even if the more moderate see it as a necessary evil. To the Church the State,is, of course, like the family, a natural human institution. That many states have been evil proves no more than the fact that many families have been evil.
And Thomas presents the universal destination of goods as a matter of justice, as do many of the Fathers (St John Chrysostom was particularly radical). And as Thomas saw the State as an arbiter of justice it is hard to argue that he objected to taxing the rich. There is nothing immoral about progressive taxation, and when you add in the fact that much (most?) wealth in the modern capitalist economy is created not by producing a useful good or service, but by manipulating money and markets in ways that are rapacious, taxing those who earn such profits it utterly a matter of distributive justice.
And Mac, it really is hard to exaggerate Rand's evil. She was a wicked woman who lived her life in accordance with her sick principles. And she created an economics to match.

Of which Rand herself was one. Wonder how many compatriots this guy has. It really would sort of make sense if Randism caught on there. Auden once said that the US and Russia were more like each other than either was like England.

Interesting, especially the latter. If the praise of Lenin was early enough, it would be forgivable, especially if it was before her conversion. Failure to see Stalin especially for what he was is much more culpable.

And what part of what I said do you consider an exaggeration? Seriously.

Chiming in from Canada --I think Rand is a mostly an American thing. I grew up in/spent alot of time around some pretty libertarian folks up here and she never really came up. Our current government, which by Canadian standards is fairly free market, is very open about its debt to Hayek. Hayek's not nearly as obnoxious as Rand, mostly just a classical liberal on steroids, though he still doesn't leave much for the poor, weak, or unborn.

"Rand is mostly an American thing"

I've thought that might be the case. There is certainly a huge area of sympathy between her notions and a lot of traditional American ones. She herself was wildly enthusiastic about America.

That a Randian social order would lead to evils, I agree. However, I think they would be considerably less than those of a Marxian order have in fact proven to be. The USA of the early 20th century is probably not too far from the kind of society Rand envisioned. Hardly hell on earth.

That isn't exactly what Chambers said, and anyway I think he was a little off base in that particular remark, to the extent that it suggests that her ideas actually suggest gas chambers, though I understand what he saw in AS that made him say it.

"If an ideology that hopes for justice and equality can lead to terror..."

See, this is where I think the grand fallacy of sympathy for Marxism et.al. lies. I think it's a very serious mistake to take the putative goals of an atheistic materialistic philosophy at face value, whether Rand's or Marx's. Jim's description of Hayek as "classical liberalism on steroids" really could be applied to Rand. Or "classical liberalism with a mean streak," maybe. But her ethics, when you peel away the rhetoric and clanky philosophizing, can be boiled down to "live and let live", and I'd much rather take my chances with that than with those who would turn absolute power loose on the project of creating a new man. Rand vs. Marx is essentially libertarianism vs. communism, and while both are wrong the latter has certainly proven more harmful in earthly terms.

"only because it possessed the power to do the damage"

Well, yeah, the seizure of that power is half the point. The other half is what it intends to do with it. Radical libertarianism denies the legitimacy of that power and repudiates it.

I wondered if there was some particular context you were thinking of, where DD was given the opportunity to condemn Stalin but didn't, or hedged or something.

The first of those paragraphs just says that "Destalinization" was a manoeuvre in internal Soviet politics, not a genuine attempt by the Communist Party "to admit past mistakes, past sins, and gigantic ones at that". It may be light-hearted, but there was something ludicrous about the way the Soviets blackwashed Stalin from 1956 (rather like the way "the Gang of Four" got the blame for everything in Deng Xiaoping's China). Is the problem that she's blaming the gigantic sins on the Soviet Communists in general, rather than on Stalin individually?

In the second paragraph she speaks of both the history of oppression in pre-Soviet Russia and the history of persecution by pre-Leninist revolutionary movements. Both are undeniable, and relevant. That isn't really what I would understand as "moral equivalence".

She mentions Stalin by name in that passage from The Long Loneliness, along with Trotsky and Lenin, as well as the leaders of the major powers in World War II. I don't think it's a way out to say "She only condemned Stalin alongside other leading Soviets and contemporary war leaders, she didn't single him out for specific and individual condemnation." She still condemned him as a mass murderer, even if only in a list of others.

But in any case there is certainly no lack of instances of people who should know better sympathizing with communism, theory and practice.