Ayn Rand, by the way, was not a conservative or a liberal either. As a refugee who escaped communist Russia penniless, she was a person who believed in individual rights. She decided to come to America after being taught about it in high school history and obtained a visa when it was still possible. Married to the same man for 50 years, she was a feminist and pro-abortionionist, though she preferred to call herself a male chauvinist. She was anti-war and said Americans should oppose communism and fascism at home not in the jungles of Vietnam. She invented a philosophy called Objectivism where facts are facts and there's a belief in the separation of state and economics. She was also an atheist.
All her books are still in print, and a movie of her greatest work "Atlas Shrugged" was released this week.
One problem people today would have in following her philosophy is that many do not have a concept of simple economic terms. For instance, Rockefeller was able to corner the market on oil not just because of innovative ideas like shipping oil in large special tanks instead of by the barrel and buying railroads and refineries but because once he had a market, he would use politicians to pass laws to prevent competitors from competing with him. There's no myth of monopoly caused by capitalism instead of government that holds up under inspection. You can't destroy competitors with below market pricing and then raise prices without creating new competitors unless there's legislative interference.
Many people also don't know what fascism is though they may accuse a conservative of it. A fascist; however, isn't a conservative because fascists believe in private ownership with strict government controls. So many nations called socialist today are actually fascist.
And since the word fascism has a bad taste to it; fascists hide under gentler names and will put past villains, even their own in the camp of their enemies or co-opt patriotic words but give them different meanings ( Hitler constantly used the word "freedom").
As an example, in politics a right winger believes in a return to a past social order and a left winger believes in a creating a new social order, so Hitler was actually a left winger. Yet he's called right wing by the mainstream media, the uninformed and the undeclared fascists today. To write that he was actually left wing makes some people on the left angry, but it's only the truth, and truth was something Ayn Rand loved with a passion.
Today fascism is alive and well, unfortunately. This isn't to say that a strong government isn't needed. No one wants raw sewage in rivers. But freedom can be accomplished with a strong government that values equal protection of its citizens to prevent monopolies, when there is a division of power with checks and balances jealously guarded and where politicians who are self-centered are thus checked and balanced by other self-centered politicians..
Our founders understood this. We have lost it.
By
Jeffrey Ruzicka
Jeffrey Ruzicka is a retired executive of a small company that specializes in industrial water treatment. He lives happily with his wife in Western Pennsylvania and is a contributing writer to ManufacturingWorkers, ManufacturingWorkersBlog and Nexxt.
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