Ranting Rand changes Land.

Though I’m heartened that the immorality of rich US Republicans can now be the subject of a BBC4/Open University documentary it doesn’t help redress the problem. The rich control the government, the government legislates and the legislation favours the rich. This state of affairs is the outcome of US economists and Republicans following the philosophies of Ayn Rand, a bourgeois Russian Jewess who had a hard time at the hands of the Bolshevik Revolution. Smarting from being caught in the middle (class) she travelled to America and found a vibrant ‘working’ country free of both an aristocracy and communism. She rationalised what she found into ‘Objectivism’ based on ‘rational self interest’ and the pursuit of one’s own happiness. Like Margaret Thatcher she was the daughter of a reasonably successful shopkeeper and this philosophy sits well with that working/middleclass life. One has enough resources to buy and sell and one’s profitability lays squarely on one’s own effort and nous. It must be tempting to see the whole of society as a broad spectrum of happy shopkeepers from Wal-Mart to street vendors in one long purchasing food chain. It’s as appealing as a summer’s day in the Hamptons, and to be fair America in 1925 was still full of opportunity. So how has it all gone wrong? In 1957 Rand wrote ‘Atlas Shrugged’, a fictional novel in which the creative energetic (rich) class of America, the Wal-Marts, literally shrugged off the weight of the poor and went to live in the mountains to create a prosperous free-market economy while the remaining poor went into terminal decline. Vitriol was heaped on this Enid Blyton tale but it sold 25 million copies and became the bible of the Republicans. I assume it was motivated by her transplanted hatred for the Russian Bolsheviks who ruined her middleclass life but in a strange corollary of fate it turned into a justification for America’s elite to see themselves as Tsarist. Greed is good, the poor are feckless etc. There are two flaws in Rand’s Objectivism. People aren’t rational in their pursuit of self-interest and not everyone is a shopkeeper. The poor can’t afford to buy stock and the rich can rig the market. So in 2012 America has pivoted on the writings of one immigrant into a close approximation of Tsarist Russia, and we all know what happened to them.