#aynrand

The names since claiming Rand as an influence, if not a lifelong guide, are many. President Reagan cited Rand as one of his intellectual—Can we use this word with Reagan?—ancestors. A lot of prominent senators and congresspeople have, too. Mike Pompeo, a legislator and later C.I.A. director and secretary of state during Trump’s first term, was an Ayn Rand man. (“Atlas Shrugged really had an impact on me.”) And so we come to Trump himself, who remarked of The Fountainhead during the 2016 political season, “It relates to business, beauty, life and inner emotions. That book relates to everything.”

There is one thing one ought to keep in mind as these kinds of people cite Rand and her books. In almost all cases they have not read Rand. It is a little like the market fundamentalists who have the habit of citing Adam Smith: Very few have actually read An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Smith’s famous 1776 work. This is obvious from the prevalent ignorance among these people of what Smith actually wrote. Read in an historical context, he was not an advocate of free markets in the way the fundamentalists among us assume. His name simply acquired, over years of citing-him-without-reading-him, a sort of totemic significance.

As these people bastardize Adam Smith, Ayn Rand bastardized Nietzsche (among others) and those claiming to have read Rand but plainly have not—the borderline illiterate Trump most certainly among them—use her as a kind of hood ornament, as we say in America, to give an impression of intellectual heft while invoking a few uncooked ideas: Government is bad, the market must not be regulated, corporations must not be impeded, social-welfare spending is wasteful and wrong. Rand’s Objectivism, crude in its own right, is reduced to a handful of slogans.

Taggart is a buffoon in the 1974 western

Now you might think to yourself: railroad. Taggart. That sounds familiar somehow.

Goddammit Dagny Taggart from Atlas Shrugged (1957) is this guy's grand daughter.

Mel Brooks, you comic genius.

She literally says her family fortune was made by her grandfather by building railroads.

How many years until I got the joke?

Talk about a slow burn.

Five ways Ayn Rand can save America: Empowered individuals, not government, are the key to national salvation

Ayn Rand

Alisa Zinóvievna Rosembaum fue una filósofa y escritora estadounidense de origen ruso, nacida en San Petesburgo en febrero de 1905. 

Desarrolló un sistema filosófico conocido como objetivismo, y que en sus propias palabras define el concepto del hombre como; “un ser heroico, con su propia felicidad como propósito moral de su vida, con el logro productivo como su actividad mas noble y la razón como su único absoluto”. Con este pensamiento, Rand defendía el egoísmo nacional, el individualismo y el capitalismo, argumentando que este es el único sistema económico que le permite al ser humano vivir como tal, haciendo uso de su facultad de razonar.

Ayn Rand era la mayor de tres hermanas de una familia judía, aunque sus padres no eran practicantes, y desde muy joven sintió una gran inclinación por la literatura y el arte cinematográfico. Descubrió al escritor Victor Hugo a la edad de 13 años, y quedó prendada de sus novelas. Fue testigo de la revolución bolchevique y por la cual, ella y su familia tuvieron que escapar a Crimea.

Mas tarde, regresando de Crimea, estudió en la Universidad de San Petersburgo, en donde estudió filosofía e historia, y como gran admiradora del cine que era, escribió guiones cinematográficos. Su mayor influencia la recibió de Aristoteles, y fue gran admiradora de Nietzsche y posteriormente gran detractora.