THE GHOST OF AYN RAND STRIKES BACK!

I think our nation is being haunted by a malevolent spirit. Not a spirit in the religious sense but more metaphysical in nature. We are talking here about the world of ideas. There are many ghosts in that world, ideas left over from dead people. There is a dark and a light side to the world of ideas sort of like in Star Wars. Some are good and enrich our lives, think Jesus, while others have staying power like Shakespeare, still others lurk in libraries barely noticed waiting for their opportunity to reinfect the minds of men. It is one of this last group that I fear has reemerged to vex mankind and our nation specifically. 

Ayn Rand was the person that spawned this powerful new ghost who walks among us. It lives in the pages of "Atlas Shrugged," her most important work. It has infected the minds of many powerful people including Alan Greenspan the former Fed Chairman, Congressman Paul Ryan Chairman of the powerful House Committee on the Budget, and Senator Rand Paul a potential Republican Presidential Candidate just to mention a few. Objectivism is the name that Ayn Rand wrapped around her ideas but you can see parts of her thinking spreading to the libertarian right, mainstream conservatism, and even the Tea Party to some degree. If unchecked it will soon form the intellectual foundation for the Republican Party and much of our economic elite on Wall Street if it hasn't already.

When you look closely at the core values of her philosophy the number one thing that jumps out at you is that she believes that selfishness is right and altruism is evil. So greed really is good and compassion is more than misguided in her book. At the top of the food chain in Rand's world are the economic elites which are in a life or death struggle with corrupt governmental elites for dominance. Everyday working people, the middle class, working class and poor are pretty much parasites wanting benefits that they have not earned. It reminds me a lot of the 47% Speech given by Mitt Romney in the 2012 Presidential Campaign and the fact that he was using her basic arguments to induce the  rich to give him their money tells me that the wealthy elites of our nation have already bought into her ideas whether they realize it or not. This type of thinking leads directly the situation we are now in, where the public is crying out for the government to invest in infrastructure, education and job creation but a Republican controlled Congress is forcing austerity measures, threatening to default on our national debt and trying to hack away at our social safety net programs.

I believe one of the reasons for the successful resurgence of Rand's ideas is that they are invisible to the public at large. Like a ghost they are moving among us undetected. We must change that! Many who are being baited in by parts of Objectivism do not understand the whole package they are buying into. For instance, many in the Tea Party love Rand's anti government rants about the virtues of unrestrained capitalism yet what many of these fine Christian people don't realize is that Rand hated Christianity specifically and religion in general. So they are being sucked into following a philosophy which is anti religious and anti Christian. It's hard to imagine that they would continue following her ideas if they understood the whole picture. This is just a small part of this malevolent philosophy and all of it needs to be dug up and exposed.

We on the left of the political spectrum can no longer afford to ignore Rand and her followers. If we want to have a society which is here to help all of it's citizens not just the elites and is not ripped apart by class warfare then Ayn Rand's Objectivist ideas must be challenged and debated openly so all can see where they will take us.