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Politics : The Trump Presidency
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To: bentway who wrote (3152)12/22/2016 3:59:21 PM
From: Lane3  Read Replies (1) of 360364
 
No (D)'s in that list, eh?

Not likely to find D's. D's are communal and big, centralized government. No place for Rand there.

Re your additional "evidence," there are lots of libertarians out there, each with the obligatory wave to Rand and to Hayek. Which means you find the occasional hint of Rand in the government. But in molehill territory. It seems to me that you are lumping together opposition to communal and centralized government and hanging them on Rand. She was an apologist for opposition to both but both can and would exist had she never lived. Her added value was that she offered a moral justification for capitalism and an atheism.

Lots of people go through a Rand phase. Here's Ryan's take on it:

Paul Ryan genuinely fell out of love with Randian ideas, says Stanley, and that comes with age.

"Atlas Shrugged was a very exciting book to read when you're young but then you grow up and get a family and develop a relationship with God.

"Rand teaches you that the individual is in complete control of their life and adolescents are terrified of being told what to do.

"She tells students that when they leave college they will work for liberals who will take their taxes and don't know anything. She massages the egos of juveniles."

A personal note. When I finished college and went home to register to vote, I planned to register as a socialist. I was disappointed when my state didn't ask me to choose a party. I didn't know much about socialism except that it was the cool thing among intellectuals at the time and the caring thing to be and I wanted to be cool and caring. I remember arguing at a US embassy party in Mexico my junior year for centralized government. I thought that it was inefficient--a waste of resources--for everybody to have to figure everything out by themselves. It made more sense for very smart people with expertise in this or that to set the standard for everyone. Despite having had a semester of economics, I did not understand at the time the difference between process efficiency and economic efficiency. It took be some time for that particular light bulb to come on. Atlas Shrugged was the start.
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