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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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?

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’.