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.

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.

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.