A "bleeding-heart" libertarian posted a not-so-nice article on Ayn Rand today in the Wall Street Journal. Here's my letter to the WSJ in response.
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If Ayn Rand were alive today, she would chuckle at the clichéd attempt by Heather Wllhelm (“Is Ayn Rand Bad for the Market?”) to characterize Ms. Rand as “angry” and “vulgar,” as well as Ms. Wilhelm’s attempt to build a strawman of alleged sympathizers (Libertarians and a reverend, for Pete’s sake) in order to have those same “sympathizers” give voice to Ms. Wilhelm’s own immoral altruism.
As Ms. Wilhelm must know, Ms. Rand loathed alleged free-market conservatives and allegedly liberty-oriented Libertarians precisely because they claimed to love free markets but were actually wolves in sheep’s clothing for redistributionist statism and “bleeding-heart” Libertarianism – both of which taking the focus off of individual happiness and hegemony and placing it on strangers’ happiness and welfare.
Ms. Rand’s appropriate ire toward conservatism was primarily for their mysticism (the God thing). Her ire toward Libertarians was a result of her correctly realizing that Libertarians espoused “liberty” without giving it proper justification before a candid (rational) world: i.e. You must first prove the nature of humans (rational); then must determine what rational animals must do to survive and prosper (explicitly discover and define rational morality and values for guidance); then you must determine what type of government best allows such self-determination (unabridged laissez-faire capitalism). Without these principles firmly set in place, a country cannot build and validate a perfect, full-proof (rational) constitution – and therein lies the major fault of the whimsical Libertarians and their erratic and childish “liberty” pronouncements.
As to the infamous “anger” accusations, wouldn’t any rational mind be angry at America’s 20th-century Marxist movement of “from each according to his ability to each according to his need”? I, and most Objectivists, love Ms. Rand’s anger. It’s the pusillanimity of “sympathizers” such as Mr. Wilhelm that we find humorous – and vulgar.
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