What Does Obama Think About Ayn Rand? — Laissez FaireLaissez Faire

What Does Obama Think About Ayn Rand? — Laissez FaireLaissez Faire

What Does Obama Think About Ayn Rand?

October 25, 2012 by Don Watkins

In the new issue of Rolling Stone, Obama tells us what he thinks of Ayn Rand’s ideas. Surprise, surprise, he’s against them.

Q: Have you ever read Ayn Rand?
Obama: Sure.
Q: What do you think Paul Ryan’s obsession with her work would mean if he were vice president?
Obama: Well, you’d have to ask Paul Ryan what that means to him. Ayn Rand is one of those things that a lot of us, when we were 17 or 18 and feeling misunderstood, we’d pick up. Then, as we get older, we realize that a world in which we’re only thinking about ourselves and not thinking about anybody else, in which we’re considering the entire project of developing ourselves as more important than our relationships to other people and making sure that everybody else has opportunity – that that’s a pretty narrow vision. It’s not one that, I think, describes what’s best in America. Unfortunately, it does seem as if sometimes that vision of a “you’re on your own” society has consumed a big chunk of the Republican Party.

That last part is half right. Rand does advocate an “on your own” society–if that is understood to mean a free, individualistic society. As Yaron and I have written at Forbes:

What made America great was the fact that it was the first country in history where you were on your own.
Roll back the tape a few thousand years to when every element of life was controlled by the tribe. You could not live an independent existence, you could not choose your own ideas, your own values, your own destiny. You belonged to the group. The group, in turn, gave you a certain measure of protection: so long as you obeyed its commands, kept your place, and tended to its needs, you would get your scrap of food (if there was food to be had).
The story of freedom is the story of how the individual escaped from ownership by the tribe. As Ayn Rand once observed, “Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.”
The Founding Fathers took a crucial leap forward in that process, declaring that the collective has no claim on you; that the government exists only to protect your right to live your own life, earn your own wealth, and seek your own happiness. Other people’s wants and needs are not your responsibility.
The corollary was that you and you alone were responsible for securing your own wants and needs. You were responsible for developing the knowledge, skills, and traits of character you needed to earn a living. You were responsible for saving to meet life’s unexpected twists and turns. You were responsible for educating your children. You could ask for help from other people—but you could not demand it as a right. You were on your own.
Did people shrink from the twin values offreedom and responsibility? On the contrary, the vast majority of Americans during the 18th and 19th centuries eagerly embraced life’s challenges and flourished under the new system. People didn’t flee from America, they fled to America. They came here poor, but ambitious—ready to carve out a life for themselves in a country that offered them the only thing they asked for: an open road.
Of course, Americans during this era were not “on their own” in the lone-wolf, asocial sense implied by Obama. Free Americans developed complex webs of association based on voluntary agreement. An unprecedented division of labor—capitalists, businessmen, and workers coming together to create wealth on an industrial scale—was a product of this newfound freedom.
Far from leaving people unable to afford life’s necessities, it was this system of voluntary cooperation that enabled the masses to afford modern luxuries—things like cars, microwaves, and air conditioning, which the wealthiest men of past eras did not own.
What Americans of yesteryear lacked was not voluntary cooperation and trade, but involuntary servitude (slavery being the glaring, deplorable exception).