Ayn Rand

I happened to look at a friend’s page, and saw that they were a fan of Ayn Rand. That was a bit of a disappointment, as I used to think the person was at least moderately intelligent.  The person is comparatively young, so perhaps I should chalk it up to ignorance, but it is disturbing nonetheless. Obviously I am not a fan of Ayn Rand, though it seems a number of folks on the far right and the libertarian wing are fans. 

I confess to having read some of her work. Long ago, a friend recommended ‘Fountainhead’, and I bought and read it a couple of times. Howard Roark, as she depicts him, is very talented and iconoclastic, and not willing to arbitrary conventions, when he sees clearly that they are wrong and arbitrary. I can see the appeal in a character like Howard Roark, particularly to those who feel they know so much more than the people who seem to be calling the shots.

Even in ‘Fountainhead’, there are some disturbing elements. Everything is drawn very much black and white, and the villains generally have little redeeming value. Ellsworth Toohey is shown as a particularly vile character, and one who promotes ‘collectivism’. Peter Keating is only semi-talented, but advances through unethical means. Roark suffers because of his brilliance and his unwillingness to bow towards convention. On the surface, it is easy to like the heroes and hate the villains. Even when Roark rapes Dominique Francon, she ends up falling in love with him.

Much of it boils down to one of Rand’s central contentions, which is that all value in society comes from a handful of creative geniuses, who cannot be limited by the same rules which restrain ordinary people. Common people just ride along on the value created by the extraordinary people, and any effort to give them a share in the value created is stealing from the true creative geniuses, to help the undeserving. It becomes easy to understand why Ayn Rand has become a guiding light to the libertarians and far right. It is the source of the right wing dichotomy between ‘makers’ and ‘takers’.  Would that things were indeed so simple. 

To understand Ayn Rand, you have to understand where she was coming from. Rand was born into a bourgeois family in St Petersburg Russia before the Bolshevik revolution which overthrew the Czar. Her family lost its business and most of its possessions, though Rand was allowed to attend college.  Much of her philosophy is a reaction, or over-reaction to early communist propaganda which praised the proletariat (read: ordinary workers) while condemning the bourgeoisie (read: entrepreneurial class). Collectivism, under communism, was seen as a way to properly share the product of the economy as a whole. So to Rand, collectivism and elevation of common workers, was an evil to be avoided.

In point of fact, a Marxist-Leninist society does not work effectively. Though communism has a level of appeal to some even today, the economies based on communism have failed over the long run. When Marx proposed that all value comes from labor, he was wrong – innovation and entrepreneurship both play important and crucial roles in economic value. At the same time, to contend, as Rand seems to, that all value comes from innovation and entrepreneurship, is also wrong. The most brilliant ideas ever created are of no value without the ordinary work of many people to help them become reality. 

I am reminded of the quote from Sir Isaac Newton, who was clearly a mathematical genius, whose work advanced mathematics and physics by no small degree. He said, “If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.” Newton recognize that while he did indeed see so much more than others, that it was the work of many others who came before him and taught him, which made his work possible.  In fact society as a whole is like that. Einstein made great advances in mathematics and physics, but again, it was previous advances and his teachers who made his insights possible, and it was a society willing to accept and reward those insights which made them valuable.

In addition, the economic rewards that come from innovation require a civil society with certain legal rights. Patent rights, copyrights, contract law and enforcement, along with a police force, a civil service, and a justice system which are relatively free from corruption. It also requires a school system and transportation infrastructure, to facilitate the realization of that idea. It also requires ordinary workers who provide the raw materials, transport the raw materials, build parts for the product, assemble the product, transport the product to the ultimate consumers, and sell the product to the consumers, along with those who handle the financial transactions that make all of the above possible. 

We have to accept that the innovator and entrepreneur clearly deserve to receive rewards from their efforts. All of the other workers whose efforts contributed to the entire process also deserve to receive a part of the rewards of those efforts. That is where Ayn Rand falls short, just as communism fell short. Rand recognizes nothing more than the efforts of the innovator and entrepreneur, while communism refused to recognize those same efforts. In both instances, they see only half the picture.

Ayn Rand and her followers would say the government has no right to take ‘their’ money, in the form of taxes, to support all manner of things which they may not approve of. Taxes at various levels support a number of things which make their ability to make and keep money possible. Those taxes pay for a school system which trains most of the workers at various levels of the production system. The taxes pay for roads, bridges, highways, police, fire protection, military, courts, and the support services necessary for all these things. 

No, not every individual will approve of everything that government does, nor will they all make equal use of each government function. We vote and elect representatives who are expected to represent our interests in the process. The assumption is that the people who have financially benefitted the most from the system, should also bear the greater part of the cost of maintaining that system. To try to institute a pay-as-you-go system for all such things would be far more financially onerous than the current system of taxation, and in many instances is impossible to precisely calculate. Taxing based on one’s ability to pay has generally been felt to be fairest to the greatest number of people.

Ayn Rand and her followers would also say that the government should have no right to impose certain rules on them. Minimum wage laws, civil rights laws, pollution control restrictions are among the things that they have opposed. They feel their ‘rights’ are being violated by imposition of these rules, and that the ‘system’ will rectify any inequities. 

There are several problems with their idea. The first problem rises from an idea in economics called externalities. In externalities, the costs and benefits of an action may not be borne by the same person. One person may receive the benefits, while others pay the costs. Pollution is one example. We can look at the recent toxic spill in West Virginia as an example. Without pollution laws to even the balance, the company would have benefitted by not having to pay to clean up the waste from their operations. The people whose water was undrinkable for weeks paid the cost of that pollution. That is one example only, but indicative of the principle of externalities. 

We have pollution laws to compel companies to pay the cost of cleaning their waste, rather than spoiling the water, air, or land used by the community as a whole. Not cleaning up after themselves is cheaper in the short run, and more profitable for the companies. The fact is that most consumers will not check on the pollution record of a company before deciding which products to buy. If a product is cheaper to make, it can be priced cheaper, and the system will not remedy the pollution of the environment unless society, through government forces the company to play by these rules.

Minimum wage laws are another thing which is problematic. Rand’s followers would say that if a company is not paying well enough, it will not find enough workers. The problem being that this only works when there is full employment and a number of potential employers for any given worker. When unemployment rises, or there are few potential employers or jobs, employees may (and often have been) force to accept whatever the companies have chosen to pay.  

Henry Ford, and some other businessmen, realized that unless their workers made enough money to buy their products, the potential market for those products would be limited. That requires a long term focus, along with enough economic power to materially affect wage rates in the community. When the workers, as a whole, have more money, the economy, as a whole, is stronger for all participants. You can get a ‘first mover’ penalty for being the first employer to make the sort of move Henry Ford did. If your business is not large enough to hire enough workers to affect general wage rates, you push your own costs up, without necessarily creating the increased economic demand that would benefit your business. Minimum wage laws put more money in workers’ hands, which does drive increased demand, benefitting all companies and workers.

Work rules, like those imposed by OSHA, are also opposed by Rand and company. In far too many cases, the workers lack the economic power to force employers to make the workplace safer. We can look at things like the Triangle Shirtwaist fire for evidence. There were many small garment manufacturers, none of whom wanted to expend the money necessary to make their workplace safer. The workers did not have many alternative source of employment, apart from those with unsafe conditions. The unsafe conditions resulted in one of the deadliest industrial accidents in US history, with 146 workers dying because they could not escape the fire. The government had to step in and impose safety restrictions on employers, to prevent any sort of recurrence. 

There is a saying that ‘your freedom to swing your fist ends where my nose begins’. Far too many of the followers of Ayn Rand focus solely on the ‘freedoms’ which they feel have been taken away, without ever looking at the consequences of improper use of those freedoms. We have government to protect all of the members of society. Protecting other members of society may require some ‘freedoms’ to be curtailed. Your freedom to drink and drive is curtailed because intoxicated drivers are more likely to cause auto accidents. Your freedom to shoot off a firearm at random is curtailed by the fact that innocent others may be hurt by that. Your freedom to pollute the environment is curtailed because others may be poisoned by that pollution.

With the philosophy of Ayn Rand, the individual is preeminent, and their rights and freedoms should be not be curtailed. In order to protect all the members of society, it is necessary to curtail some freedoms. This is something that Ayn Rand and her ilk are never willing to acknowledge, and that is one of the  essential flaws in her philosophy.