Rand set out to create an anti-Marxism and she succeeded... in creating a dogmatic totalistic philosophy that inverts Soviet-style fundamentalist Marxism. Neve

Rand set out to create an anti-Marxism and she succeeded... in creating a dogmatic totalistic philosophy that inverts Soviet-style fundamentalist Marxism. Never fight against-- you inevitably become that which you fight. (to paraphrase Nietzsche) Like Marx, Rand was far better at criticizing than she was at proposing a solution. Both proposed scenarios with a big hand-wavey "magic happens here" step in the middle followed by a utopia. I also have to say this: Rand's admiration for big business and for "captains of industry" was obviously coming from someone who'd never actually worked in the high corporate world. Your average executive is almost indistinguishable from a Soviet apparatchik, and corporations are internally not terribly unlike Soviet bureaucracies (especially big ones). The number of real executives who at all resemble Rand heroes is something you can count on one hand -- and interestingly most of them don't espouse Randian-type ideology. Most seem to be either apolitical or slightly to the left. Some of Rand's ideas are interesting and well stated. I think she's worth reading. But a lot of her politics sounds really archaic now that we're almost 25 years past the cold war. Today's totalitarians are mostly ultra-right-wing theocrats, strong men like Putin, and neoliberal state-capitalists who are attempting to create a kind of high-tech feudalism. The fanatical totalistic version of socialist ideology is dead (that's a good thing-- one down, three or four to go). I'd personally take European or Canadian style "light socialism" over Iran or Singapore, thank you very much.