Ayn Rand: The Greatest Novelist of All Time

0:00I want to pay a compliment to the organizers of this conference, and the compliment is as follows. Bill Barnett and I brought up four students from New Orleans, Loyola New Orleans, and I was going over with them what the marching orders are for tomorrow, and I said, we'll call for you at a certain time, and you know, we might have lunch, et cetera. And one of the kids said, can't we stay here? Which I think is a marvelous indication of what's going on here, that kids want to stay here. It's really great. Atlas Shrugged is the greatest novel ever written. Now, there are some people, idiots, who disagree with this, and they say that the book is full of slogans and they're unrealistic characters and it's too long, it's 1,100 pages, and they read speeches to each other and they're just stick figures. What do they know? They're just morons. I have a praxeological proof that this is the greatest novel. A is A, premise.

0:59and Business, Ayn Rand features A is A in her novel, QED, it's the greatest novel. A little applause at this time wouldn't come out, thank you, thank you, thank you. Obviously it's a subjective thing, we're talking thymology, we're not talking praxeology, it's a matter of taste, I mean I like Mozart, Bach, Handel, Vivaldi and Beethoven, other people Rand didn't like them, but she was wrong on that. My own personal story on this, how I first came to Atlas Shrugged is I was a student in Brooklyn College and Ayn Rand came to lecture there and I was left Jewish type in Brooklyn, which means socialist, and she came to speak and I came to boo and hiss her and I booed and hissed her all through her speech and then at the end the Ayn Rand study club said anyone who wants to come and have lunch with her can, you don't have to agree with her and I didn't get enough booing and hissing at her so I came to the lunch and there was

1:57a long, long table, maybe 50 people on each side and I was relegated to the foot of the table and Ayn Rand was at the head of the table with Nathaniel Brannon and Leonard Peacoff and all the other high muckamucks, including Alan Greenspan and I turned to my neighbor and I said, oh, you know, socialism is great and capitalism is evil, getting ready to get on. And he said, well, I don't really know, but the people who do are at the other end of the table. So I stuck my head between Ines and Nathans. And I said, there's a socialist here who wants to debate someone on these issues. And I said, who is it? I said, it was me. I was, you know, 20 years old, a chutzpahnik in those days, still am. And Brandon was very nice. He said, I'll come to the other end of the table and I'll talk to you on the two conditions. One, the discussion will not lapse at this point, will continue until one of us convinces the other. And the other is you read two books that I

2:50to suggest, and one was Atlas Shrugged, and one was Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt. And to make a long story short, I read the books, I talked to Ein and Nathan and other people four or five times, and I was converted. I was now a free enterprise of the Einran stripe. I read Atlas Shrugged the first time, I couldn't put it down. I mean, it just blew me away. And I've read it maybe the first time I was age 20, and every 10 years since and I've read it again. I'm now 70, so I've read it in 30, 40, 50, 60 and 70. And each time I get more out of it, it is the most glorious book. It's an inspiration. It has probably converted more people to libertarianism than any other book. And maybe she more than any other person, with the possible exception of Ron Paul. I'm not sure about that. It's an empirical issue, but certainly she's in the top two in terms of converting people. I mean, Murray Rothbard and Mises and Hayek and Friedman and other people

3:47People like that did convert people, but not on this mass, mass scale. I want to read some objective, well, not really objective, but some surveys of this book. Here's one, books that made a difference in readers' lives, and I'll read the top ten. The Bible, Atlas Shrugged, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Road Less Traveled, The Lord of the Rings, Gone with the Wind, How to Make Friends and Influence People, The Book of Mormon, The The Feminine Mystique, Passages by Gail Sheehy, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, so she's number two there. Another one, 25 Books That Have Shaped Readers' Lives, Huckleberry Finn is number one, Atlas Shrugged is number two. Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Malcolm X, The Bible Comes in Fifth, Catcher in the Rye, Charlotte's Web, Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, Don Quixote, Gone with the Wind, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Ayn Rand is in very fast company here.

4:46Here's another survey, influential books, top books that have made a difference in people's lives, The Bible, number two, Atlas Shrugged, number three, Road Less Travel, number four, To Kill a Mockingbird, Lord of the Rings. One more last survey, very interesting survey, Modern Library. There are two surveys to mention the top 100 books, and one was by employees of a modern library, and the other was by customers of modern library. Here's the customers first. Ayn Rand number one, fountainhead number two, Ron Hubbard, Battlefield Earth three, The Lord of the Rings four, Killing Mockingbird five, 1984 six, Anthem by Ayn Rand seven, We The Living by Ayn Rand eight. So she's got four in the top ten.

5:33Now, the other list, she doesn't make the top hundred. It's mainly literature majors that become employees of this company, Modern Library, and they hate, well, the Purple Passion Free Enterprise, which is sort of similar of academia, and I was going to say sociology departments, but I have to withdraw that because we had the previous speaker who was magnificent, but apart from that, sociology departments, literature department, history, you know, they're all a bunch of pinkos and would hate Ayn Rand. I don't care that there were slogans, I don't care that they read speeches to each other, the speeches were magnificent, well with the exception of the John Gault speech, I never read that, it's like a hundred page speech, it was sort of boring, but the other speeches are magnificent. On the other hand, I'm not an un-exceptionable supporter of Ayn Rand, she does have some weaknesses.

6:26She ran a cult. After I got converted to it, I would come to their meetings and the only questions that were allowed was on page 482 you said this, could you please expound on that? And she would say yes. But if you said anything that was slightly critical of her, oh, get out, you're evil, you're an abomination, you know, this is not a way to treat people. She was also very pro-war. She was a statist, although an Atlas Shrugged is not one single solitary sentence that favors the government. Mr. Thompson was the head of state and she didn't say anything good about him, although in the movie, which I thought was really good, brought tears to my eyes, there was one sentence about limited government, but it was not an Atlas Shrugged. She also favored the Moonshot. She wrote about the Moonshot, how this is just wonderful, and you know, I just thought it was a socialist venture in private.

7:19and private enterprise should have done that. She favored Gerald Ford over Hospers, which is a little weak, I mean Hospers was an admirer of hers that she split with because he said one sentence against her. She called libertarians hippies of the right, she pronounced it hippis of the right, I don't mind the accent, you know, she was a Russian speaker, but she really got the idiom of the English language. Another one was cashing in the student rebellion at Berkeley. She didn't like them because they were hippies, but the point is it was public property that they were trashing. It wasn't private property, and she was writing as if it was public property. There are two heroes of mine in the book, and I want to talk a little bit about each of them and how they've been important in my life. The first one is Ragnar Danishkald.

8:08He was the pirate who would attack government ships and take the money and give it to Hank Well, a lot of the problems we face as libertarians is what about a public library? Suppose you go into a public library and you put a book under your shirt or your jacket and you walk out with it. Did you steal it? Or did you liberate it? Well, you know, it can be a case made for the second because they stole it from us in the form of money. They converted into a book and we're just grabbing it back. So, you know, it's a very complicated issue. A lot of people write to me, and they say, I've become a libertarian and I don't want to go to public school. Because to go to public school or to be a professor in a public college is to steal other people's money. And they feel guilty, and only a libertarian would feel guilty. And what are you going to do, become a hermit? Because, you know, how did

8:59we get here? We use the public street. What do we have in our wallets? Public money or fiat currency. We use the postal system. We eat food. Food is subsidized. So no matter You know, what we do, we're in the jowls of the state, and for us to not take government money, you know, I can now take social security. I'm 70 years old, I'm going to take social security. The less money they have and the more money we have, the better. So people shouldn't feel guilty about going to a public school or any of that. Well, what about the public librarian salary? Would we be justified in going up to the public librarian with a gun and say, Give us some of that money. This is a very complicated issue, but at least with the idea of Ragnar Danischkohl, you can think about it, and you don't summarily dismiss it. Whereas without Ragnar, magnificent Ragnar, we would just say, well, that's theft, but it's not so clear.

9:50Another one is Ron Paul. Should he accept matching funds from the government, as he's entitled to? and I wrote about that on lewrockwell.com and my view was it would be very unwise politically, but it would be justified, which again comes from Ragnar Danischkohl. Another problem with her is the fountainhead. They blew up a building, which was okay because it was, you know, they stole the ideas or something like that, not that I'm for IP, but that's another issue. But then they paid for it. Should the architect have paid for it is an issue where I think she's a little inconsistent with her magnificent Ragnar. Also that scene about rape where she sort of supported rape, you know, it's an invasion, you're not supposed to be supporting rape.

10:39Although the way she made it, it wasn't really rape, but I don't want to get into that. It's very politically incorrect to even talk about rape, I guess. Okay, another my favorite villain is Robert Stadler. Robert Stadler was the guy who knew better. Who was a scientist, who was a genius, who was brilliant, who was magnificent, who shouldn't have been supporting the evil. So I wrote an article, Milton Friedman as Robert Stadler. I mean, Milton Friedman should have known better. What better? He was a bright guy. He knew about liberty. He wrote a book, Capitalism and Freedom. I mean, how dare he write a book, Capitalism and Freedom, and favor the negative income tax and favor vouchers instead of legalizing private schooling. The volunteer military, which is a complicated thing, volunteer military is good because you're against the draft, The reason he favored the volunteer military is so that the U.S. could pursue its imperialist war in Vietnam more effectively, which makes it very complicated.

11:50Look, we're all against the concentration camps. But suppose the concentration camps were, what do you call it, no, they were drafted. They were drafted into the concentration camp. Suppose we said, well, the problem with concentration camps is that the guards are drafted and we have to have a voluntary tortuary. That's not libertarian. In other words, it's a very complicated issue. On the one hand, yes, you want to get rid of the draft. On the other hand, you don't want to do it in order to pursue the war better. You want to do it in spite of the fact that it'll pursue the war better. But Friedman wanted to do it in order to make the war more efficient from the US side. And if you assume it's an unjustified war in the first place, well, then you're on the wrong side.

12:37He was viciously against gold, he supported the Fed, he loved neighborhood effects, externalities, he believed in all sorts of market failures, favored antitrust, he was a supporter of Ronald Coase who was pure evil, for other reasons I can't go into now. He was a road socialist, I once debated him on this, I wrote a book, Why We Should Privatize Highways, and he just thought it was crazy, so I called him a road socialist, and he didn't much like that. I can't understand why. I mean, you know, if it walks like a duck and maybe cracks like a duck, maybe it is a socialist. He favored the withholding tax. The withholding tax is really bad. I mean, if people had to pay all that stuff on April 15th, first they'd realize what they're paying and secondly they wouldn't have the money and what are they going to do, arrest all of us? And Milton, now it's true, he apologized for it later in Two Lucky People, his autobiography with his wife, but still, you don't find Murray

13:31Murray Rothbard advocating any withholding taxes, fiat currency. Another Robert Stadler is Alan Greenspan. Alan Greenspan, when he was a young man, he wrote brilliantly about the gold standard. And gold standard is wonderful and fiat currency is bad. And when he got appointed head of the Fed, I said, whoop-de-doo, shows how much I know. The Fed will be gone in about a month. I mean, look, if Ron Paul wins and he calls upon me to be head of the Fed, the end of the Fed, in about a month or so, or maybe people will criticize, why a whole month? You know, okay, well, maybe a couple of weeks. But, you know, Alan Greenspan is in charge of this, and he's supposed to be for freedom.

14:17One of the things that ticks me off is this group, OPPE, Association of Professional, what the hell is it? Private Enterprise Educators, thanks, Roderick. And they have the head of the Fed as the president, but it's the Dallas Fed, so it's the free enterprise Fed? I mean, that's sort of like saying, well, this part of the Politburo is the free enterprise part of the Politburo. I mean, the Fed is the central planning for the money supply. You can't have a free enterprise Fed, even if they're good on free trade and getting rid of rent control and stuff, you know, this is the belly of the beast. So in conclusion, since A is A, and she talks about A is A, we can apodictically prove that this is the greatest novel, and I thank you for listening to my comments.