Ayn Rand and Individualism

Ayn Rand has remained influential in the United States since her death in 1982. More than one million copies of her novel Atlas Shrugged have sold since the 2008 US presidential election. She is said to have become a prophet among Tea Partiers. Congressman Paul Ryan has mentioned her in at least one of his speeches. On television Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn said she is reading or intends to read her.

Wikipedia writes:

Although she rejected the labels "conservative" and "libertarian," Rand has had continuing influence on right-wing politics and libertarianism.

Ayn Rand dislikes collectivism. While in her early teens in Russia the Bolsheviks confiscated her father's pharmacy, no doubt creating hardship for her family. She was one of those who had to endure the burden of being labelled a member of a bourgeois family. She acquired a disgust for communism and socialism -- as in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics -- and the altruism on which collectivism was based. She acquired a respect for independent thinking, imagination and intelligence against mass mediocrity, conformism and bureaucratic authority.

In 1926, at the age of 21 or so, Ayn Rand visited relatives in the United States and stayed. Between collectivism and an extreme individualism, Ayn Rand went completely to individualism -- no middle ground, compromise or balance. In a television interview in 1959, Mike Wallace asked her whether she believed in "no right to tax, no welfare legislation, no employment compensation." She responded that she was "opposed to all forms of control," that she was for an "ABSOLUTE laissez faire, free, unregulated economy.".

Her position of freedom of speech and the freedom to disseminate one's points of view were the same as any liberal, and, similar to liberals, she said she believed that in our democracy people had no right to vote away individual rights.

At issue was exactly what those rights are. She was opposed to the majority of US citizens or the government putting restrictions on the right of individuals to their wealth and property.

Taxation has at time been excessive. Ronald Reagan writes of having been in the 94 percent tax bracket during his acting days. Abroad, taxation could be used to destroy a political opponent: South Korea's dictator, Park Chung Hee, used taxation to destroy financially the democracy advocate who was mayor of Pusan. Liberals do not believe necessarily in excessive taxation -- excessive being an elastic word. Ayn Rand stretched it to mean no taxation whatsoever. This was part of her absolutism. Taxation for her was oppression. In her essay "Government Financing in a Free Society," she wrote:

In a fully free society, taxation -- or, to be exact, payment for governmental services -- would be voluntary. Since the proper services of a government -- the police, the armed forces, the law courts -- are demonstrably needed by individual citizens and affect their interests directly, the citizens would (and should) be willing to pay for such services, as they pay for insurance.

Her position on taxes, in other words, was extreme -- an extreme individualism. One is not hearing a chorus call from Republicans for the complete elimination of taxes. What is heard are objections to the higher taxation rates that exist in Europe. There, something between Soviet-style collectivism and Rand-style individualism has developed called the welfare state.

It shouldn't be hard to find any Canadians, Australians, Germans, Swedes or Danes who believe they have individuality while supporting the welfare policies in place in the country they live in. In the United States -- also a welfare state -- centrists and left-of-center people also believe they have sufficient individuality. If they thought about it they would probably place themselves somewhere between an absolute, absurd, altruism on one side and Ayn Rand's egoism on the other.

Ayn Rand told Wallace that "we are moving toward disaster until and unless all those welfare-state conceptions have been reversed and rejected, because precisely we can, we are, moving toward complete collectivism or socialism, a system under which everybody is enslaved to everybody." This was back in 1959. She was wrong. The Soviet-style collectivism she feared and abhorred has been fading to non-existence, and, in welfare states like Germany, Sweden, Canada and Australia, people are still pursuing the happiness and prosperity that she believed in.

YouTube: the Wallace interview: part 1, part 2.
YouTube: Senator Rand Paul talks about Ayn Rand.