I find it understandable that Bill Buckley would kick out Ayn Rand from the conservatives in good standing club while she was alive (and by all accounts a horribly obnoxious person). Was Rand a rival as a possible leader of intellectual conservatism? Any by all accounts, Bill Buckley was often a horrible person (read Chris Buckleys book).

Now that they have both departed this earth, no need to snark on Rand to maintain favor with Bill. Is the Daniels piece, and Kimballs post here, simply the result of their inculcation under the Buckley wing? Ok, done psychoanalyzing for now.

On to what Rand actually wrote. I first read The Fountainhead and then Atlas Shrugged in college. I thought The Fountainhead had serious flaws. (Why are you sitting in your office all day, Roark, waiting for a phone call? Even if you are a genius architect, how are people supposed to find out? Do a little advertising and promotion, will ya?)

Atlas Shrugged was a revelation. Sure, the prose is Russian (does that mean its bad? Parlor game: every time she writes as if take a drink of your red wine.). Sure, its long, could have used an editor to cut out 200-300 pages. Sure, Galts speech is WAY too long (are we seriously to believe that someone would give such a speech to an actual audience of the entire country? And they would listen to the whole thing? Galt makes Obamas speeches look concise.) And, sure, as gus3 at #55 writes, and as my Jurisprudence professor at Notre Dame, Charlie Rice, said to me, funny thing about those Ayn Rand books. There are no children in them.

But when she nailed it, SHE NAILED IT. This is why National Review/TNCs reflexive dismissiveness towards Rand bothers me so. Didnt Reagan say that one who agrees with you 80% and disagrees with you 20% is an ally and a friend, not a 20% traitor? Why does Rand get such a bad rap? Why cant she be treated as an 80% ally on the horrors of statism, and morality of economic conservatism, and a 20% dissenter on family values?

Cmon Kimball, cmon Daniels, tells us why the extensive quote Alfred Centauri cites at #48 is jejune and the prose awful. Would that any Republican politician gave that same speech! It is worth repeating:

An excerpt from Francisco’s “Money Speech”:

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“Then you will see the rise of the men of the double standard–the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money–the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue.

In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law–men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims–then money becomes its creators’ avenger.

Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they’ve passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality.

When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.”

“Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue.

When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion–when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing–when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors–when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you–when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice–you may know that your society is doomed.

Money is so noble a medium that is does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.”

“Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men’s protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values.

Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced.

Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked, ‘Account overdrawn.’”

“When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, ‘Who is destroying the world? You are.”