Ayn Rand's relevance

Ayn Rand's novels, especially her more mature works such as Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, have been justly famous and influential. It is difficult to read those two books and look at the world in quite the same way again.

In a recent Newsweek interview, the current head of the Ayn Rand Institute discusses the alleged failure of free markets in our current crisis.

Traditional conservatism has a mixed relationship with Rand. On the one hand, her novels cut to the heart of socialism, collectivism, and government regulation in their various forms in a way that is readable and indeed gripping. A page-turner like Atlas Shrugged probably did more than the writings of a dozen prominent economists ever could, creating a healthy suspicion of "managed" economies and helping ordinary readers to understand the inextricable connection between the loss of economic liberty and the loss of all liberties.

Think of them as being similar to the recent, grittier movie adaptations of super-hero comic books such as the (quite impressive) Christian Bale Batman movies.

On the other hand, her hostility to traditional religion and her lack of any respect for tradition in general caused most thoughtful conservative thinkers, in the end, to reject her ideas as being just as flawed and potentially dangerous as were the communist and socialist ideologies she was mercilessly flaying in her writings.

That word -- "mercy" -- is actually apt, since the absence of anything resembling mercy and compassion in Rand's writings are one of their most striking features. Whittaker Chambers was perhaps being a little unfair in the most famous line of his justly famous piece in National Review (one that marked the "official banning" of Rand and her Objectivists from polite conservatism) when he wrote: From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: "To a gas chamber — go!"

Chambers did express appropriate sympathy for many of Rand's observations and sentiments, and he quite rightly concluded his essay with a more tempered statement: "the brew is probably without lasting ill effects. But it is not a cure for anything."

At the root of traditional conservatism's rejection of Rand is that her books are highly ideological, and as such, are inimical to how conservatism sees the world. Ideologies believe that they have arrived both at what is wrong with the world and at exactly how to fix it. The free-market supermen of Rand's novels portray her belief in the perfectability (or perhaps more precisely, innate perfection) of certain individual men, just as the Marxist thought she detested portrays the perfectability of human society.

By contrast, our American constitutional system of government is based, fundamentally, on the conviction that man is flawed (although without any hubristic notions that the exact nature of the flaws can be defined with precision, let alone remedied,) and must be restrained when governing others, lest too much power be placed in the hands of any individual or any interest. Conservative thought in the American context is likewise suffused with these ideas, and with the conviction that man's imperfections and limitations mean that radical changes will, by definition, bring radically unintended consequences that are at least as likely to be for ill as for good.

So where does this leave Rand's thought in these days of economic crisis? The Randian interviewed in the Newsweek article demonstrates a characteristic lack of humility regarding any possible flaws that the Objectivist strain of libertarian thought might have. But he (as we should also in fairness expect) has some acute observations, perhaps best summarized in this exchange at the end:

Q: With free markets now in disrepute, what's going to happen to the popularity of Ayn Rand's most famous book, "Atlas Shrugged"?

A: I think it's going to go up dramatically. I think it already has. [People] are saying, "We're heading toward socialism, we're heading toward more regulation." "Atlas Shrugged" is coming true. How do we get out? How do we escape?

Unfortunately, there is no escape. Businessmen are panicking, and I think they should be panicking. Many of them understand that this was not a crisis of free markets. There was no free market to fail. What we have is a regulated market, and the regulated market has failed. (Emphasis added)

This is unquestionably true. But at the same time, we have to understand that our economy has been regulated for a very long time, and there is no sense pretending that the path back to economic freedom could ever be a safe one, let alone easy.

Just as acts of regulation will have adverse unintended consequences that wise legislators will try to foresee, and then try to limit the damage, the same is true of deregulation. Deregulating a regulated sector of the economy is no less tricky than is detoxing a heroin addict, and one doesn't get the impression that our government adequately took that into consideration in some sectors of our economy. Freddie and Fannie, for example, knew they would ultimately get their next fix from the government if need be, so they didn't need to worry about taking ordinary precautions.

Which is why we should have been more cautious about getting our financial institutions addicted to taxpayer dollars and why we should be cautious about giving that first hit to the automakers. (Part of the current argument seems to run that automakers have just as much right to become addicts as bankers do -- out of a sort of twisted sense of fairness.)

Those of a progressive bent might seem to believe that the answer is just to call addiction normal, and make no attempt at withdrawal -- indeed that such "normality" should be expanded. Unfortunately, the Bush administration and the Republican Congress during their brief time in power couldn't decide whether to be Mr. Hyde the pusher or Dr. Jekyll the healer -- and all too often they were a hideous chimera combining the two.

Republican failures at the federal level have led to a situation where for the foreseeable future, we will have a government controlled by those who have no such confusion or internal conflict. As such, one fears that our economy will be made of industries and individuals who will resemble crack-house inhabitants scrapping over who gets the next fix while the dealers, lordlike, survey their realm, such as it is.

The duty of a rational human being in such a situation is, as much as is possible within the constraints of economic survival, to find little ways to "just say no."