How wrong was Ayn Rand? No ducklings, no ducks. No duh…Photo by: Dave Stokes
His response so far? The same as that for all of libertarianism across its entire schismatic spectrum: Blank out.
But the quick answer to the question imposed by the headline is just that easy: Ayn Rand has almost no presence at Missouri or anywhere else because Ayn Rand’s followers kill their young, on her strident advice. Murray Rothbard’s minions, too, and all their minionettes. Libertarianism grows only by charismatic economics professors by now – which means it does not grow at all. Even religious libertarians deliver too little, too late, but the atheists end up being atomists by default. They are not represented on colleges campuses because they can’t be. The kids that could and should be there don’t exist.
Do you want to say, “So what? The Marxists don’t reproduce, either.” That’s true, but the Marxists take everyone else’s children from birth – by means of the anegoistic art parents ram down their children’s throats even before those kids are born. Rent-seeking academics short on charm crave carve-outs, but the problem at Missouri didn’t start last week – and the war to be fought with these kids as soldiers was won by Marxism long ago.
Ayn Rand’s explicit advice to young people on love, sex, marriage and family is parallel to the Marxist argument, so she cannot be represented to the #Mizzou-vians even by proxy. Her anti-family value structure is the same as theirs and that of the Marxist professoriate, so the fact that John and Dagny left all their little Galtlets at the abortuary doesn’t matter anyway.
Ayn Rand was right about a lot of interesting things, and interestingly wrong about others. But she was massively, irredeemably wrong about everything that matters to the fully-human life – the father-led family, the well-spring of all of human civilization – and hence she is absent from every debate that matters.
