Word: ayn
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...Brits might fondly recognize in today’s Tea Partiers some of the old colonial intransigence, so oddly like that of their own Young Men. It’s telling that the names of anti-fascist writers like Ayn Rand and George Orwell are so often invoked. In Tea Party eyes, the problem is simple: the U.S. government won’t leave well alone. All they really want is a bit of land and a house, maybe a firearm or two, and certainly the freedom to do as they like (within legal limits) without any civil servant nosing...
...idea, where the role of government is to promote equal opportunity?" he asks. "Or do we want to replace that with a more Western European notion of a welfare state, where the role of government is to equalize the results of people's lives?" Ryan, not surprisingly, is an Ayn Rand acolyte - he once cited her as the thinker who spurred his pursuit of public service. And while he says he does not subscribe to Rand's objectivist philosophy, he shares her conviction that the American promise is predicated on capitalism. "I do believe government has a role in making...
...bourgeois Jewish family in St. Petersburg, Rand was 12 when the Bolshevik Revolution took place. Her family, suddenly poor, was forced to flee, and Rand's hatred of communism and any sort of collectivism would guide her life. Arriving in the U.S. in 1926 with a new name, Ayn (rhymes with fine) made her way to Hollywood, where she had modest success as a screenwriter and married an aspiring actor, Frank O'Connor. Her politicization came when she and her husband worked on Republican Wendell Willkie's losing presidential campaign in 1940. According to Burns, "Before Willkie she had been...
...knew how to make an entrance. Her dark hair cut in a severe pageboy, Ayn Rand would sweep into a room with a long black cape, a dollar-sign pin on her lapel and an ever present cigarette in an ivory holder. Melodramatic, yes, but Rand didn't have time to be subtle. She had millions of people to convert to objectivism, her philosophy of radical individualism, limited government and avoidance of altruism and religion. Her adoring followers--some called them a cult--revered her as the high priestess of laissez-faire capitalism until her death...
...midst of the newly rekindled debate, two excellent biographies have just been published: Ayn Rand and the World She Made, by Anne C. Heller (Doubleday; 592 pages), is a comprehensive study, in novelistic detail, of Rand's personal life, and Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, by Jennifer Burns (Oxford; 369 pages), leans more heavily on Rand's theories and politics...