This is so touching. Here's this guy, from the Ayn Rand Institute (? !) all earnest about how we need to get schools to teach her books so then her ideas will sound mainstream and not so nutty and far out. You gotta love it.
The Institute will pay your kid big bucks for a little indoctrination, BTW. First place in the high school essay contest brings in $10,000.
I read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged in college--not because they were required but because my friends recommended them as good old-fashioned bodice rippers. They were all full of virile men with strong jaws battling society and winning their women by the sheer power of their macho manliness. Not much sex in them, as I recall, but they were hot, in a repressed college girl kind of way.
Now I hear middle-aged Republican men are totally into Ayn Rand, and I can't get past the hilarious image of some balding guy in tasseled loafers up in his bedroom all engrossed in the plot. Honey, have you done your homework yet?
Reading Ayn Rand and actually paying attention to the ideas on capitalism is a lot more painful. Ideologically, she has all the subtlety of one of those 1930s posters from the Soviet Union celebrating the masses. Only everything is in reverse. That guy with hands on hips facing into the wind is not a farmer or factory worker but a determined corporate CEO or top investor, fighting the mewling complaints of those envious of his life.
To read these books you had to suspend reality to get around the completely ridiculous plot. In Atlas Shrugged, the hero, John Galt, is a wealthy industrialist so enraged by demands on his genius by the inferior masses that he drops out of capitalism, takes some others with him and retires to watch the end of society as we know it. Because as we know, all the credit for any successful business goes to the two or three guys at the top. They could put out the product all by themselves. We should just be thankful they're generous enough to give out jobs to us undeserving users.
For a time after Obama took office, you'd hear a lot about outraged upper class guys wanting to take their marbles and go home, "go John Galt." You don't so much any more, though.
Maybe it's the realization that this is real life and real money. It's one thing to go Galt on your family, but quite another to abandon your business. Or maybe the ego bubble is beginning to deflate. Maybe they realize that it wouldn't be that hard to find somebody else in short order who could do a better job.
So, reason number one to be optimistic about the influence of Ayn Rand: Recent economic deveolpments have finally proved how ridiculous she was.
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