COLUMN: Rand’s 100th cause for thoughts about society
“I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.” -Ayn Rand
I have lived my life by these words for some time now and this road less taken has made all the difference. Thus, in a celebration of liberty, we should give pause for the 100th anniversary of the birth of its author, Ayn Rand. Her works, like the words above, have been immortalized as a potent arrow in freedom’s quiver. They are as prophetic as compelling and we as a society, especially a political society, would do well to heed the lessons she left us.
Rand taught three important lessons that I believe everybody should know. The first is that society cannot forge men for its own purposes, the cargo does not exist for ship, therefore society must rely on the self-interest of man. The framers of the Constitution taught this principle as well. Men, existing for their own sake, and thriving for their interest, will provide every necessity and pleasure of life. Government, our ship, cannot provide this because they have no means of gathering all the information represented in the prices of goods produced independently that is necessary to provide such thing. They can only make value judgments as to what the people might need. The only way the information can be condensed is through the price fixed on the good by independents (Wal-Mart does not arbitrarily decide how much to charge, you do by buying goods at certain rates).
Thus money represents everything that is good about humanity. Productivity and ingenuity are all rewarded with money giving the proper incentives to continue creating and producing. Money is the greatest tool modern society has to preserve freedom and prosperity. Money represents man’s ability to be productive and benefit society. Money is the common bond among men representing tradable productivity. Everything you enjoy today, everything, has arisen out of love and pursuit of money.
“The man who damns money has obtained it dishonestly; the man who respects it has earned it.” If you produce and make money, that money is a matter of freedom and all that is good. Thus, “run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter.” Only those who do not earn their money believe it can be taken and given to others without consequence, that money destroys those who receive it unearned. They corrupt the principle behind money.
This leads to the second principle of Rand’s works. Redistributive welfare in any form is nothing more than government sanctioned theft and, as such, is detrimental to society. Imagine a situation in which there are three people: person A has three horses, person B has one and person C has none. The latter two cannot gang up and rob the former simply because they feel that person C deserves a horse. That is stealing. Taxation for redistribution is the same principle. It creates incentives for men to not be their best and instead try and fight over government handouts. It doesn’t emphasize and promote the ideals that money represents: productivity and ingenuity; the ideals that civilized society are built upon. By creating entitlements, the purity of money is lost, as well as the high ideals it stands for. Also lost are the incentives created by having to be equal to your money (creating the work necessary to earn it). To empower people is to stop government theft and let people have the responsibility of living for themselves. This is the only way to combat poverty.
These first two principles rest on the third and final principle: reality is objective. There are no complications about the implications of certain action for they are all measurable. We can measure how productive and worthy those who earn money are as well as the detrimental effects socialistic policy has on society. Being politically correct only succeeds in losing track of truth and purity. This is why socialism fails. No matter how much you wish something to be true, it does not make it so. Life is not normative and such policies are unattainable and undesirable.
If we understand Rand’s teachings, we see that these are the same principles that the founders envisioned and tried to set up in the Constitution. We have destroyed them today. We have all become the proverbial thief, whether we receive Pell Grants or milk at its subsidized price. We have trashed our heritage of freedom in favor of a looters’ paradise. The only problem is that eventually those who produce, those equal to their money, are going to stop carrying us on their shoulders one day and shrug. Leaving us lost in the bed we made. When will we remember that giant corporations are not the enemy, rather the only virtue that is left? When will we remember that it is not workers vs. employers, but that they need each other? When will we not believe it is rich vs. poor rather than everyone is responsible for himself? Who is John Galt?
Jared Westbroek is a senior majoring in law and constitutional studies. Comments can be sent to jwestbroek@cc.usu.edu.