since this is one of my favorite topics:
Ayn Rand made a ton of money from direct sales and the royalties from her books & screenplays, and I'm assuming she had enough money to take care of herself without the payments. This is a bit 3rd hand, but the blog quoted above estimated Rand's net worth to have been
$500,000 when she died in 1982.May 27, 2013
The Myth
She was a Fascist
The Truth:
She was an opponent of fascism and communism and wrote...
"The basic political principle of the Objectivist ethics is: no man may initiate the use of physical force against others. No man—or group or society or government—has the right to assume the role of a criminal and initiate the use of physical compulsion against any man. Men have the right to use physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use. The ethical principle involved is simple and clear-cut: it is the difference between murder and self-defense. A holdup man seeks to gain a value, wealth, by killing his victim; the victim does not grow richer by killing a holdup man. The principle is: no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force."
“The Objectivist Ethics,” The Virtue of Selfishness, 32.
and
"It is obvious what the fraudulent issue of fascism versus communism accomplishes: it sets up, as opposites, two variants of the same political system; it eliminates the possibility of considering capitalism; it switches the choice of “Freedom or dictatorship?” into “Which kind of dictatorship?”—thus establishing dictatorship as an inevitable fact and offering only a choice of rulers. The choice—according to the proponents of that fraud—is: a dictatorship of the rich (fascism) or a dictatorship of the poor (communism).
"That fraud collapsed in the 1940’s, in the aftermath of World War II. It is too obvious, too easily demonstrable that fascism and communism are not two opposites, but two rival gangs fighting over the same territory—that both are variants of statism, based on the collectivist principle that man is the rightless slave of the state—that both are socialistic, in theory, in practice, and in the explicit statements of their leaders—that under both systems, the poor are enslaved and the rich are expropriated in favor of a ruling clique—that fascism is not the product of the political “right,” but of the “left”—that the basic issue is not “rich versus poor,” but man versus the state, or: individual rights versus totalitarian government—which means: capitalism versus socialism."
“‘Extremism,’ or The Art of Smearing,” Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 180.
explanation.
table of contents.
From the
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
"Ayn Rand (1905–1982) was a philosopher and a novelist who outlined a comprehensive philosophy, including an epistemology and a theory of art, in her novels and essays."
link
Sex « Tags « Peikoff – Page 4
Does America Need Ayn Rand or Jesus?
interview with Yaron Brook, President of the Ayn Rand Institute.
and,
According to an associate of Ayn Rand, Ryan, "abjured his former compliments to Ayn Rand".
Ryan said: "I reject her philosophy. . . . it is antithetical to my world view. If somebody is going to try to paste a person's view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas Aquinas. . . . Don't give me Ayn Rand."
more mid way down the page)
The Myth
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