The professor in Car no 9
After Rand had finished gloating over the impending demise of the woman in Car No 8, who considered that she had a right to travel on a train merely because she had bought a ticket to do so, there were still plenty of other passengers who were awake and about to meet their well-deserved ends. They included a professor of philosophy.
read moreThe value of gold
Gold seems to be enjoying a resurgence, and its fans are promoting the Randian fantasy of a return to a gold standard. But how would that work?
read moreRand and the weather
Ayn Rand hated altruism. How would she have responded to natural disaster?
read moreGrenfell
Ayn Rand thought that only government bureaucrats had immunity for the consequences of their mistakes. She was wrong. In today’s world, businessmen share that immunity.
read moreRand and monopoly
One of the things about which Ayn Rand had something to say in one of her essays on capitalism was the emergence of monopoly. It is clear she had not grasped some of its essential features.
read moreConsequences
Ayn Rand was fond of claiming that if a businessman made a mistake, he suffered the consequences. We shall see how that works out for the executives and board of Crowdstrike. The precedents are not encouaging.
read moreAtlas Shrugged – the sequel
Ayn Rand was a great one for setting up ‘straw man’ imagined futures, as a way of showing how terrible things would be if her precepts were not followed. It seems fair enough, therefore, to play that same game with her imagined future, as presented in ‘Atlas Shrugged’ and imagine what would have happened next.
read moreRand and the motorist
In its desperate search for straws from which to fashion an election platform, the UK government has turned to the motorists, hoping against hope that they will gather votes from the people who see global conspiracies everywhere. They would have had Ayn Rand on their side
read moreRand and Thames Water
In the Thames Water saga, two of the key words are monopoly and environment. In her novels Ayn Rand largely ignored the latter, bu the environment and environmentalists were the subjects of one of her longest public lectures.
read moreMad Vlad and the 13th Century
Ayn Rand had a history degree from Petrograd University. She would surely not have muddled her centuries in the way that Valadimir Putin did, when talking to Tucker Carlson
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