I just finished reading Jennifer Burns’ biography of Ayn Rand. The exact title is “Goddess of the Market Ayn Rand and the American Right”. The author is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Virginia. The 286 page book was printed in 2009 and its Epilogue includes opinion of our 2008 – 2011 Great Recession and how it relates to Rand. Each chapter of the book starts with a dollar sign.
Ayn Rand was clearly irrevocably impacted by her childhood in Czarist and Communist Russia. Her undying allegiance to a form of society that does not exist, except in theory, is the absolute opposite of some kind of free society that Karl Marx had envisioned. Watch Youtube videos of Mike Wallace interviews of Ayn Rand and you will understand that she was unmovable by his reasonable questions about her allegiance to a theory.
The last sentence in the book tells it all. “…Rand lay facing the world in an open casket. Next to her coffin was an enormous topiary, shaped into the sign of the dollar.”
Unfortunately too many American conservatives think such a society can exist.
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