Offical Book Thread :D

[Minty]

It's probably one of the most disturbing pieces of news this week, that the Objectivists might be getting a toehold once more in the most powerful nation in the world. Objectivists are the followers of writer Ayn Rand, someone who as a "political writer & philosopher" was as grotesque as Hitler.

Amid much talk about "freedom" and stopping "state interference", Rand believed in survival of the fittest, or "rational self interest." Liberty to her was the freedom to exploit others as much as it was possible to get away with it. She hated religion, morality, & anything else that got in the way of people getting wealthy, no matter what the cost. At a time when the United States was finally beginning to realise they'd treated the American Indians brutally over the decades, she spoke out that the European settlers had every right to take all land away from these "savages".

You could call her little better than a fascist, expect like many of her kind she saw them as bleeding hearts for believing in such things as health care being something a civilised nation should provide to all its citizens for free. Rand on the other hand believed that "free" medical care was for "parasites". That didn't stop her taking social security and medicare when her years of chain smoking saw her develop cancer. She was a big flag waver of Israel, even though Israel's welfare state (especially its universal health care system), anti-monopoly laws and coalition party democracy epitomised everything she opposed as standing in the way of "profit".

Rand spoke in favour of what Thomas Hobbes had warned against three hundred years earlier, a world where everyone is in it for themselves, where there is no such thing as society, & everything is there in the world to be used & abused as you see fit & can get away with - the result being a life that is "soliitary, poor, nasty, brutish & short". Rand's philosophy is like most "crisis" philosophies an appeal to people's worst instincts. If her ideas are becoming popular again amongst the political classses in the most powerful nation on earth, start worrying.