Ayn Rand is getting a lot of press these days. The Governor of SC just wrote an essay praising her in Newsweek.
I used to be a big fan of Ayn Rand. Unfortunately, her books operate on the assumptions that:
1) Big Business (the heroes of “Atlas Shrugged” are all titans of industry) is the natural enemy of Big Government.
2) Competition forces a free market to operate honestly.
In reality, of course, Big Business and Big Government are largely one and the same. And, as anybody who has ever dealt with an insurance company can probably attest, the bigger the business, the less honestly it deals with its customers, and the less genuine any competition actually is.
The real threat to personal freedom is the accumulation of power – regardless of by whom, or under what circumstances. Rand’s devotion to the ideals of capitalism blinded her to the fact that the proponents of capitalism frequently fails to live up to those ideals.
Does the idea of Big Brother managing healthcare scare me? Sure it does. But the idea of letting Blue Cross Blue Shield continue to do so scares me even more.
Does the idea of Big Brother taking care of the environment scare me? You bet. But the idea of Exxon, ConAgra and Dow Chemical continuing in their stewardship of the Earth scares me a whole lot more.
The free market ain’t free, and we have to do the best we can with what we have. Unfortunately, that means choosing the lesser of two intertwined evils. When Rand was growing up, during the 1940s, the lesser evil may well have been Big Business (remember, during the WWII era, global leadership wasn’t exactly at its best, and even the US government was fascist, by today’s standards), but I would argue that, today, the greater threat to personal freedom – and the planet we all share, without which freedom is a moot point – comes from Wall Street, not Washington.
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