1950's book review of Paul Ryan's idol

[ScreamingEagle]

many things Ayn Rand wrote strike a chord with conservatives but throw lefties into a snarling hissy fit....a few of her quotes:

-It stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there’s service, there’s someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master.

-Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another — their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.

-So you think that money is the root of all evil? ... Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?

-Man’s unique reward, however, is that while animals survive by adjusting themselves to their background, man survives by adjusting his background to himself. If a drought strikes them, animals perish — man builds irrigation canals; if a flood strikes them, animals perish — man builds dams; if a carnivorous pack attacks them animals perish — man writes the Constitution of the United States. But one does not obtain food, safety or freedom — by instinct.

-Just as man can’t exist without his body, so no rights can exist without the right to translate one’s rights into reality — to think, to work and to keep the results — which means: the right of property.

-Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).

-Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

-Government “help” to business is just as disastrous as government persecution... the only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off.

-“Rights” are a moral concept — the concept that provides a logical transition from the principles guiding an individual’s actions to the principles guiding his relationship with others — the concept that preserves and protects individual morality in a social context — the link between the moral code of a man and the legal code of a society, between ethics and politics. Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law.

-Potentially, a government is the most dangerous threat to man’s rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims. When unlimited and unrestricted by individual rights, a government is men’s deadliest enemy. It is not as protection against private actions, but against governmental actions that the Bill of Rights was written.

-The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights, cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.

 

[LogikAndReazon]

What else can you expect from marxist rubes...

 

[Truthmatters]

she was a hack even while she collected SS

 

[peach174]

she was a hack even while she collected SS

She was forced to collect SS just like all of us are TM.
A hack?
Have you ever read any of her books TM?

 

[Crackerjaxon]

Its story merely serves Miss Rand to get the customers inside the tent, and as a soapbox for delivering her Message. The Message is the thing. It is, in sum, a forthright philosophic materialism. Upperclassmen might incline to sniff and say that the author has, with vast effort, contrived a simple materialist system, one, intellectually, at about the stage of the oxcart, though without mastering the principle of the wheel. Like any consistent materialism, this one begins by rejecting God, religion, original sin, etc. etc. (This book’s aggressive atheism and rather unbuttoned “higher morality,” which chiefly outrage some readers, are, in fact, secondary ripples, and result inevitably from its underpinning premises.) Thus, Randian Man, like Marxian Man, is made the center of a godless world.

Therein lies the central perplexity behind the far right's Randian philosophy fetish.

No, therein lies an unsupported, sophomoric attempt at literary criticism. Rand , to her credit, understands that practical people do what is necessary to keep the world running. They support the people who write the inanities that pass for intellectual discourse today. If they stopped, the privileged class would be forced to productive work and would most likely perish.

She does have this understanding in common with Marx, as well as sharing his atheism.

So what?

How does that negate what she has to say?

What is apparent in comparing the two is that Rand believes that our salvation comes from individual effort, while Marx relies on the collective.

Gee, that's a lot like the rift betwen conservatives and progressives today, isn't it?

 

[ScreamingEagle]

she was a hack even while she collected SS

she paid INTO ss (under the force of law)......so why the hell wouldn't she try to get her money back....?

 

[LogikAndReazon]

Nor has the author, apparently, brooded on the degree to which, in a wicked world, a materialism of the Right and a materialism of the Left first surprisingly resemble, then, in action, tend to blend each with each, because, while differing at the top in avowed purpose, and possibly in conflict there, at bottom they are much the same thing. The embarrassing similarities between Hitler’s National Socialism and Stalin’s brand of Communism are familiar. For the world, as seen in materialist view from the Right, scarcely differs from the same world seen in materialist view from the Left.

Absolutely prescient. In recent years we have seen a rise of a vicious totalitarian streak from the Right which matches that of the Left.

Pity these hysterical drama queens ...

 

[Londoner]

The history I've read about and lived through is different than your account.

The modern conservative movement aka the New Right started in the mid-50s. That's when the fusion of conservatives and liberarians began and anti-communism was the dominant issue.

I used to watch Buckley every chance I had back then. Buckley was definitely a heavy supporter for the New Right, but I don't recall him being much involved in religion or the Southern Strategy. I haven't seen evidence to give Buckley the credit you have and don't get me wrong, I really liked Buckley back then.

This is well stated and fair-minded. Buckley was very shrewd in his support of the Southern Strategy, with only one famous quip about how whites were the advanced race. His book "God and Man at Yale" talks about how Yale undermined student faith in Christianity and the Free Market. Here is a good review of the book. http://www.mmisi.org/ir/37_01/bramwell.pdf

But we agree to a point. I thought Buckley did his most passionate work not as a racist or theologian but as a Cold Warrior. I remember his debate against Chomsky on foreign policy. I've always marveled at how the Cold War was used. The Soviet threat was the perfect context for Washington to intervene in the global south in order to construct the postwar global market system. Nearly every country we tussled with supplies cheap labor and raw material. Both Russia and the USA used the threat of the other to manage their territories. The USA didn't have territories in the colonial sense; they had "market arrangements" - but make no mistake, many of the global assets accumulated during the Cold War are now very vital sources of labor and material. Go into any Walmart and read the labels on where stuff is made. The Cold War helped John Gault make his money overseas with sweatshop labor from dictator run countries. Gotta love his patriotism.

It was a hoax. In the front of the house they preached against the evils of Communist China; while in the back of the house China was slowly becoming the chief manufacturer for our capitalists. Indeed, the capitalist makes more money when his Nike's are made for pennies in Taiwan by workers who live in hovels. But that same capitalist benefits when Americans are so afraid of the far and middle east that the Pentagon has to send war ships ... to protect his supply chains and shore up the dictatorial power of his trading partners, the "enemy". Buckley was a Cold Warrior who helped shield the woman, children and republicans from the truth about the hardball geopolitics that went into creating the American-lead global market system. I think he opposed Rand's atheism in the same way that he over-inflated the danger of a crumbling Soviet Union - as a cynic whose movement had voters to scare and elections to win.