A (conservative) Christian response to Ayn Rand: The positives

            I guess it’s part of my personality or upbringing, but when criticizing someone or someone’s philosophy I like to start out with the good. When it comes to Ayn Rand, she’s definitely a mixed bag for a politically conservative Christian like me, but there are a lot of positive things to note.

            First and foremost, I need to give the lady credit for her courage. Even in the late 1950’s there was huge pushback against what she said about Leftism. She had absolutely nothing positive to say about the Soviet Union, the welfare state in America, or for collectivism in general.

            I’m going to get more into Atlas Shrugged in a couple of days (see a plot synopsis here if you want), but let me a make a couple of points which really illustrate what I mean. In Atlas, the heroes are all free-enterprise businessmen (or women, since one of the main characters is a woman in charge of a railroad company). Please note that we’re not just talking about small businessmen, which even Democrats extol at times. Not just entrepreneurs, although one of the other main characters, Hank Rearden, is an entrepreneur and inventor. Dagny Taggert, one of the main heroes of the book, inherited her railroad company from her father; she didn’t build her company from the ground up like Rearden. She's just really good at running a company, making good business decisions and administering it effectively. These are the heroes in this story.

            Think about it for a moment. Can you name for me another example in popular fiction anywhere in which the hero is a businessman who is heroic for being a businessman? Where running a company is presented as heroic? I tried to come up with one myself. I’m a big fan of comic books, so I immediately thought of Bruce Wayne (Batman). But Mr. Wayne isn’t presented as heroic for being a businessman, for running his father’s company. At best, the sole purpose of his company seems to be to finance his activities as Batman (there’s no way he’d be able to do what he does without a truckload of money behind him).
            A much better example would be Tony Stark aka Iron Man. He was a businessman who inherited a lot of wealth, but he also got wealthier by being an entrepreneur. At times in his life, his personal demon of alcoholism has caused him to lose everything he owned, so he had to start over from scratch with completely new ideas and inventions. And he uses his money for good causes, and his involvement with the FMS--starting and owning a company--are presented as positives for his employees. When his company with thousands of employees goes under, that's a bad thing. 

Of course, 99.99999% of the time in popular culture, if you see a businessman in movies or TV, especially a CEO, you can usually guess as soon as the character’s introduced that he’s the villain of the piece. But in Atlas, the only heroes are those who run businesses (explicitly with the purpose of making a profit) and the few ordinary people who happen to appreciate them.

Once you read this novel, you’ll feel grateful (or should) towards the people who make everyday life possible. Atlas is a futuristic dystopia where society falls apart when the people who run businesses get tired of being derided, harassed and persecuted for what they accomplish. So they start disappearing, abandoning the companies they’ve been running. Atlas, the mythological character who bore the world on his shoulders, decided that he was tired of carrying the world on his shoulders and getting nothing but grief for it. Hence the title of the novel.

In the novel, when the CEO’s and other people who run businesses start fleeing, the entire system—and I mean everything—falls apart. The trains derail. Store shelves are empty. Electricity gets turned off. A harsh winter sets in and thousands of people in New York City freeze to death because there’s no power for heat. Civilization starts crumbling, and people start roaming the countryside foraging for food like our primitive ancestors thousands of years ago.

That’s the word that kept echoing through my mind, no doubt the purpose of Ms. Rand: Justice. Throughout the book, men and women who run companies and make a profit thereby are publically treated with contempt. The very concept of the Free Market is disparaged, and open competition between businesses is looked down upon. The public largely applauds as the government runs more and more, then as their plan starts to fall apart peoples’ wages are frozen, and eventually people are even forbidden by law from leaving their jobs and seeking better employment elsewhere. And the situation deteriorates until, as we’ve mentioned, they start to starve or freeze to death. My friends, it’s the FMS that’s brought us out of sustenance-level poverty. When people A) take for granted the benefits of the FMS, and B) do everything in their power to abandon the FMS and attack those who make it work, then why should anyone be surprised when our standard of living starts falling back towards those of aboriginal tribes? To me, the only thing that should be surprising is that people are surprised.

But please don’t misunderstand. People on the Left tend to think that people on the Right are automatically pro-business. Um, no. Adam Smith, the primogenitor of advocacy of the Free Market System (FMS), was not a fan of big business or of businesspeople in particular. No, he--and we on the Right—were/are fans of economic freedom and the prosperity that it produces. All too often businesspeople abandon the Free Market way of doing things and take shortcuts by colluding with government and make special deals with it. When GM and Chrysler get a bailout from the government, that’s not the FMS at work. That type of action is called crony capitalism, and it’s disgusting to us, maybe even more so than honest socialism or communism which straight-up confiscates (steals) property. As Rearden put it (as quoted in the blog a while back), a burglar can break into my home, but the difference between 1) said burglar and 2) what the villains in Atlas are doing is “the burglar does not ask me to sanction his act.”

            The reason I bring up the point from the above paragraph is because Ayn Rand understood this. Dagny’s brother, James, co-runs the company with his sister, and he’s the prime example of this. He seeks to secure economic security for himself and his company, not by succeeding in the Free Market, but by securing special deals for himself and his friends. He and leaders of other companies, labor leaders, and government officials collude, just as Smith predicted, to pass laws which benefit everyone involved in the collusion and which cheat everyone not included in the deal, especially the regular consumers. Naturally to the public this is all presented as being “for the people.” This is “standing up for the little guy.”

            Economics is called the “dismal science.” It’s boring for most folks: The charts, graphs, esoteric theories, terms that no one outside the field knows or cares about, etc., would make most people reach for a sharp object to poke themselves in the eye rather than learn about. But economics is about real life. It makes a huge difference whether you (and a society) believe in economic freedom or not. In the most extreme cases, it’s the difference between life and death. Hundreds of thousands of children die of starvation and easily preventable diseases in nations which don’t appreciate the FMS, and they don’t in societies that do appreciate it. If you want to truly “love your neighbor” instead of just feeling good about yourself, then this is something to take into account.

            And there’s another word that comes to mind when I consider these issues: Gratitude. The Lord has blessed us in (literally) countless ways through businesspeople wanting to make a profit through the FMS. Every day people take advantage of these blessings and either take no notice of how these blessings reach them, or (even worse) mouth off against the people who make their lives possible. It seems to me that if you read the history of God’s dealings with the Israelites after the Exodus, this might seem somewhat familiar. We need to express gratitude to the One who blesses us so abundantly, but we also should show gratitude to the people through whom he does so.

            As I mentioned before, there are a lot of people who’ve been pulled out of the fog of Leftism through Ms. Rand’s work. They read Atlas, and for the first time, they saw businesspeople not as automatic villains but as the people who make their lives possible. For the first time their vision cut through the high-sounding proclamations which boil down to crony capitalism. They saw protection of property rights as just as important as any other natural rights such as freedom of speech or freedom of the press. They saw--for the first time in any popular literature--that any state that doesn’t respect property rights will not respect the other types for very long. And for that, I applaud her.