9th October 2013
Money Week Magazine
Dear Sir,
Ayn Rand may well be ruining the economy of the world but almost certainly not for the reasons you state. Harry Binswanger, like virtually everyone else on this planet, clearly does not understand Ayn Rand’s work. She NEVER advocated that the rich should not pay taxes. She advocated the total abolition of taxes on the premise that they are an immoral and illegal imposition upon the citizens. She suggested that a government could raise revenue to fund its legitimate function of maintaining criminal and civil law by selling insurance to those who wanted, and could afford, to buy it. Her plan was a bare-bones idea but basically moral in that it involved no force by government against its citizens.
She never advocated selfishness in the gratuitous sense; rather she deliberately chose to use that word to invite people to think. I suspect that in that endeavour she has not really succeeded. She would argue that she had succeeded as she never intended to succour those who did not understand or accept her arguments.
As far as destroying the economy is concerned, your own Bill Bonner put into my head the idea that she may well be controlling the course of history by introducing her colleague and acolyte Alan Greenspan to be the boss of the Federal Reserve. He said himself near to the end of his tenure that he felt his policies had been wrong but that he was too late to change them. Perhaps Ayn Rand knew all along what she was doing and set him up to do to the world what Francisco D’Anconia had done to his copper mines in Atlas Shrugged. If she knew what was happening now her comment would probably be “Brother, you asked for it”.
You my be reasonably sceptical of my idea that Ayn Rand is influencing world events many years after her death but so have many other philosophers. She indicated explicitly in her writings that philosophy is the most powerful weapon on earth. Philosophy has been ignored by the masses, perverted by intellectuals, hated by politicians, despised by soldiers and misunderstood by producers of wealth but it still remains a prime means of survival of mankind. Nothing is more powerful.
Despite over a hundred years of practice showing the evils of comunism, Marx's evil notions are still in evidence in many forsaken parts of this planet. The idea is the ultimate weapon.
As a Chartered Engineer I have spent a lifetime implementing actions to create wealth based on the sciences explained to us by Newton, Einstein and a host of slightly lesser mortals. Ayn Rand is the only philosopher who ever showed anything like the intellect and genius so clearly engendered by those scientists.
Ayn Rand has been vilified and misunderstood for nearly 80 years now but some of her books are still best sellers. Her philosophy of civilisation is the only one I know that will stand any test you can throw at it. This society will survive by her lights or not at all. Much of our present woes may well have been added to, or even caused by, her actions of forty years ago. She certainly made her intentions very clear.
Yours sincerely,
Colin Walker.
Ref aynrand4.docx
28 Dec 2018