Ayn Rand Was a Teenager Once, Too

I really want to write something about unregulated greed and the healthcare industry. But after reading Paul Krugman's hilarious column this morning, I can't resist a little Ayn Rand deconstruction. Like many of my contemporaries, I read Atlas Shrugged and the Fountainhead in high school (and saw the 1949 film with Patricia Neal and Gary Cooper as Howard Roark -- lovely lighting). Even then, at age 15 or whatever, I recognized in these two novels the simplistic archetypes equating financial success with moral superiority and financial failure with moral depravity.

A little context: the thing I haven't seen much written about Rand (by the way, please tell me that Ron Paul did not name his son after Ayn) is her childhood. She was a teenager living in Petersburg when the Bolsheviks came and seized her father's successful pharmacy. So, of course she worshipped an unobstructed and regulation-free market. Her experiences living through Communism shaped her point of view dramatically for the rest of her life. And I think we can all agree now, in 2012, that Communism was a colossal failure. No argument there.

The extreme circumstances Rand lived through in her youth -- coupled with a ripe imagination -- allowed her to construct a world of black and white. ANY check on the successful, strong or smart, whether in the form of a tax or a regulation, was always wrong in her mind. (The sky high tax rates during the 1940s and 50s, when Rand was living and working in Hollywood, didn't seem to temper her love of the USA, however).

So, really, Rand was only reacting to what she had seen and experienced. But what about the Alan Greenspans and Ron Pauls and Paul Ryans of the world? They grew up here, in a place where free markets clearly had their use, as did checks and balances on those markets. So what is their excuse for seeing the world in these fantastical archetypes of economic good and evil?? Here, Greenspan admits that the philosophy he's embraced for the past forty years, heavily influenced by, yes, Atlas Shrugged, was ... dead wrong.