Donald Trump may have read and liked Ayn Rand, but his scattershot philosophy is light years from Rand’s carefully thought out and elucidated philosophy, reasoned from basic first premises to its revolutionary conclusions. From Steve Simpson at the Foundation for Economic Education, fee.com:
After Donald Trump announced a number of cabinet picks who happen to be fans of Ayn Rand, a flurry of articles appeared claiming that Trump intended to create an Objectivist cabal within his administration.
“Ayn Rand-acolyte Donald Trump stacks his cabinet with fellow Objectivists,” proclaimed one article. Would that it were so. The novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand was a passionate champion of individual freedom and laissez-faire capitalism and a fierce opponent of authoritarianism. For her, government exists solely to protect our rights, not to meddle in the economy or to direct our private lives.
A president who truly understood Rand’s philosophy would not be cozying up to Putin, bullying companies to keep manufacturing plants in the United States, or promising “insurance for everybody” among many other things Trump has said and done.
And while it’s certainly welcome news that several of Trump’s cabinet picks admire Rand, it’s not surprising. Her novel Atlas Shrugged depicts a world in decline as it slowly strangles its most productive members. The novel celebrates the intelligent and creative individuals who produce wealth, many of whom are businessmen. So it makes sense that businessmen like Rex Tillerson and Andy Puzder would be among the novel’s millions of fans.
But a handful of fans in the administration hardly signals that Trump’s would be an “Ayn Rand” administration. The claims about Rand’s influence in the administration are vastly overblown.
To continue reading: Would Ayn Rand Have Cast President Trump As A Villain?
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Conclusion
In 1962, Rand wrote the following in an essay called “The Cold Civil War”:
A man who is tied cannot run a race against men who are free: he must either demand that his bonds be removed or that the other contestants be tied as well. If men choose the second, the economic race slows down to a walk, then to a stagger, then to a crawl — and then they all collapse at the goal posts of a Very Old Frontier: the totalitarian state. No one is the winner but the government.
The phrase “Very Old Frontier” was a play on the Kennedy administration’s “New Frontier,” a program of economic subsidies, entitlements and other regulations that Rand saw as statist and which, like many other political programs and trends, she believed was leading America toward totalitarianism. Throughout Rand’s career, many people saw her warnings as overblown.
We have now inaugurated as 45th president of the United States a man who regularly threatens businesses with regulation and confiscatory taxation if they don’t follow his preferred policies or run their businesses as he sees fit. A recent headline in USA Today captured the reaction among many businesses: “Companies pile on job announcements to avoid Trump’s wrath.”
Are Rand’s warnings that our government increasingly resembles an authoritarian regime — one that issues dictates and commands to individuals and businesses, who then have to pay homage to the government like courtiers in a king’s court — really overblown? Read Atlas Shrugged and her other writings and decide for yourself.