Not to leave you in suspense, the answer is: definitely not. But when I share with you a statistic I recently came across, you might be excused for thinking so.
Washington Post writer Steven Pearlstein recently published a thoughtful piece on the morality of capitalism that has gotten a lot of attention. I have a lot to say about it, and I want to start with one of the more intriguing questions raised by Pearlstein.
From Obama’s inauguration speech: “The commitments we make to each other — through Medicare, and Medicaid, and Social Security — these things do not sap our initiative; they strengthen us.”
“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should conduct a happiness survey to make sure that at least 51 percent of people will be made ‘very happy’ by the decision.”
Why has Ayn Rand been so influential on the right? That was one of the questions a segment on CNN today tried to answer. According to one of the guests, Rand critic Gary Weiss, the answer is simple: “Ayn Rand made it morally acceptable to be harsh in your treatment of the poor.”
Either Maddow has not read Ayn Rand — in which case she should not be reporting on the content of Rand’s works as if she had — or she has read Rand but utterly failed to understand her. Either way, she owes her viewers a correction and an apology.
Ayn Rand, author of the 1957 classic Atlas Shrugged, is one of history’s most celebrated champions of capitalism. Her books have sold in the tens of millions, and her ideas continue to be debated thirty years after her death. Many of today’s top opinion leaders, businessmen, and politicians—everyone from Rush Limbaugh to Mark Cuban to Paul Ryan—have cited Rand as an important influence on their development.
In his new book The Road to Freedom: How to Win the Fight for Free Enterprise, AEI President Arthur Brooks makes the point that the egalitarian supporters of wealth redistribution have no right to claim that they are the representatives of “fairness.”
The egalitarians equate fairness with equality, writes Brooks, and therefore conclude that income inequality is unfair. Solution? Take from those with high incomes and give to those with low incomes.
