Reader Norman Fraser quotes from this anti-Rand piece:

In Rand’s novels the heroes pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. They made big profits in unfavorable economic climates. Try pulling yourself up by your shoelaces. It can’t be done. Its all story telling, with no basis in documented experience.

And of course, she does not consider the collaborative context (school, roads, community) that make individual success possible. Rand’s own life was a cauldron of broken connections, sexual indulgence, war on other people’s marriages, and narcissism of atomic proportions. Nothing new to show business. But pressing social issues are not show business. There is no real economics in Rand, and certainly no moral logic.

A dim quote from a dim link.

Where exactly do the supposed ‘big profits’ made by the heroes appear in the book? On the contrary, the point of the book is that they run down their own businesses to nothing, to stop the state from looting them first. They refuse to be exploited.

And of course she considers the ‘collaborative context’ – the whole book is about nothing else. Her argument is that once the state has the monopoly on power, a genuinely free collaborative context is hugely reduced in favour of inexorably growing oppression. As indeed happened across most of Europe at the time she was writing, and seems to be happening in much of the West now as the state refuses to shrink itself and greedily plunders future generations in a drunken binge.

Lots of people suffer as a result of the heroes’ actions in Atlas Shrugged, but that’s the stark issue the book poses: is it just for the state to force (ultimately by torture) some people to give their energy and talent for the sake of others? Do we have the right to withdraw our labour from enforced collectivism? If not, what obligation lies on those who receive the benefits of such labour but only sneer idly in return?

It is no surprise that these Randian ideas for better or worse are coming back into fashion, since the opportunities for spontaneous private collaboration are soaring (iPhone apps aplenty) just as sprawling, unaccountable state structures are failing.

The main glaring failure for me in the two Rand novels is the absence of any family life involving children – the unambiguous case where caring for others not on the basis of trade between free individuals but rather through simple instinctive love is essential.

The social question arising from that is at the core of modern politics – is a society like a massive family in which everyone has unambiguous and specific obligations to literally everyone else, which only a powerful and often unaccountable state can define and enforce?

If you think that is the case, how is the moral character of the state vis-a-vis the individual upheld in practice to maintain some balance?

Is there a de facto tipping-point issue here, when things change from people owning the state to the state owning the people?

Rand drove deep into these uncompromising questions, which is why I think her books are fascinating and profound.

Manifold flaws and all.

Update:  reader Norman Fraser warmly disgrees (again) – see Comment – although at least he has the good grace to admit that he has not read the two books concerned. He instead says that he has read the critics, but not apparently the large numbers of critics who give the books high ratings on Amazon for many different reasons. 

Oh well. Here for Norman and for anyone who has yet to read it is the famous Money Speech and the towering passage about honesty and responsibility which is so relevant today as governments in the West grapple with the results of their own greed – and try to keep our money honest:

When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money.

Not an ocean of tears not all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor–your claim upon the energy of the men who produce.

Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money, Is this what you consider evil?

Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes.

Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions–and you’ll learn that man’s mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.

But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to think.

Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy?

Money is made–before it can be looted or mooched–made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability.

An honest man is one who knows that he can’t consume more than he has produced…