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Ayn Rand was stupid …

…….. which really wouldn’t matter, except that we now have a Home Secretary (widely tipped as the next Chancellor of the Exchequer) who is said to read a chapter of one her books, the Fountainhead, at least twice a year for inspiration!

Mad 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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Rand and reality

Ayn Rand hated communism, which had deprived her of what would have been a very sheltered and privileged life, and socialism, which she regarded as synonymous with it. However, the government she described with such scorn in Atlas Shrugged had far more in common with the right-wing, military-backed populist governments of the 1930s. Or indeed, with the UK’s increasingly  right-wing, Conservative Party.

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Road Rand

Our modern society relies not just on roads but on a road network. That connectivity has to be countrywide. How can that work without taxation? This was a question that Ayn Rand avoided, although in her books, although she assumed that road networks existed. Modern libertarians have addressed that question, but have they provided satisfactory answers?

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Rand and Christmas

I assumed that Christmas would be a time of misery for Ayn Rand, being a time at which many people were giving each other presents, and in her Galt’s Gulch Utopia even the word ‘give, was forbidden. I was wrong. She loved it.

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Suella and Rand

The political future of Stella Braverman, Home Secretary of the United Kingdom, hangs in the balance, as she pursues her aim of becoming leader of the Conservative party. But what sort of a leader would she be? Is she, as are some others on the right of the Tory party, an admirer of Ayn Rand?

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Rand and the Palestinians

By a macabre coincidence, I had just reached the point of commenting on Ayn Rand’s take on Israeli-Palestine relations, as revealed in her speech to the West Point graduating class of 1974, when Hamas launched its attack. Not a good time to be writing about that area, I thought, but then I looked at the note at the end of the passage (which was also the end of the talk) and I saw the words ‘thunderous applause’.

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Rand and the Amerindians

Having dealt  with the question of slavery and its undeniable existence in the pre-Civil War United States, Rand backtracked to answer an earlier question from the West Point graduating class concerning the treatment of the Native Americans. If anything bad had been done to them, it was, according, entirely their own fault, for not obtaining clear title to the land they occupied, before the Europeans arrived. In any case, it was their treatment of the new arrivals that aroused her ire.

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More of Rand on racism

Having dealt with the benefits conferred by slavery on the West Africans transported to North America, Ayn Rand turned her attention to racism, and the responsibility of liberals for its existence.

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Rand on racism and slavery

In 1974 Ayn Rand was invited to address the graduating class at West Point, and in the discussion that followed defined her position on three different topics, one of which was slavery. She was against it, but her justification of that position forced her into some very contorted reasoning, and also revealed her astonishing ignorance of historical fact.

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Dagny Taggart – risk taker

Ayn Rand was obsessed with railways, which she saw as symbols of progress. It is therefore not surprising that so much of the action in Atlas Shruggedl centres around a railway, or that some of its most famous passages focus on a rail disaster – the death in the Winston Tunnel of everybody on board the Taggart Comet.

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