Trying to convince a true “rational believer” that his theory may be false is like the following tale:
A philosopher asks an idolator, “According to your beliefs, what holds up the world?”
“A giant turtle.”
“What holds up that turtle?”
“Another turtle.”
“And below that?”
“It’s no use arguing, it’s turtles all the way down”

Ann Ryand?
Isn’t she the woman who had a six-foot dollar sign at her funeral?
Yes it was Any Ranyd followers who did this.
Did Rand Ayn give out quarters to beggars? Ever?
Isn’t Ann Raynd the fiction writer who conned everyone with her selfish, me-first philosophy?
Good riddance to her and her selfish ideas!

A swifter (Swiftian?) put-down cannot be found, nor a funnier one.

“…each man must live as an end in himself”

Of course, reason is our only guide to action: “this, being such, is to be done,” “this, being such, is to be avoided” are judgments of the practical intellect.

That “his highest moral purpose is the achievement of his own happiness… each man must live as an end in himself”

Well, yes. It is a commonplace of the Schools that God is the objective final end of man and happiness is his subjective final end; to argue that “the Good” is not, in some sense, “my Good” comes perilously close to being a contradiction in terms. Thus St Thomas can say that God is only offended, when our actions are contrary to our own good (“Non enim Deus a nobis offenditur nisi ex eo quod contra nostrum bonum agimus”, (ScG III. 122))

What is novel is the notion that this is somehow an argument against “altruism….that man must sacrifice himself to others….”

Curious, too, that Ms Rand fails to notice that, as Chesterton pointed out, to preach egoism is to practice altruism. If life is a war of each against all, why give one’s opponents lectures on strategy?

The critisism I’ve read here is plainly unfounded. Rand herself defended her philosophy quite well…

Rights come from our humanity, but according to Rand our worth comes from our capacity for Reason. She understood that we are all ultimately alone, pursuing our own self interest as a natural state while various institutions pit us against ourselves artificially.

She understood Love better than most. She saw how you can value another for their virtues and give/recieve support based on the selfishness of wanting love in return.

Rights can be seen as existing without a religious or political context. My right to life is as valid as any other being and no others or groups of others have the authority to force me to submit my labor for the sake of any one else. Based on my being equal to any other human, regardless of religion.

I’m not sure what intentional means in this context. Are globes popular symbols to use in advertising, decorating and so on? Yes (how many people with little globes on their desk are actually called upon to ever use them to locate where a country is in their work?). Is there some type of secret society that links together Ayn Rand followers and Obama supporters? Probably not. What do you make of the fact that Clark Kent works for “The Daily Planet” which has a giant globe on top of its building???? Has the Obama campaign used time travel to alter our early comic book history to acclimate our minds to its symbols?

On Rand-

People on the right often treat Rand with kid gloves….kinda like ‘yea she’s with us except for her atheism’ sorta thing… but in thinking about her I think her philosophy has a deeper issue…namely she’s unAmerican.

If you think about the Founders, they wrote about how we should govern, but they didn’t write as much about actual policy. Rand, though, is all about policy. There’s no real government in Rand’s universe in the sense of people deciding what policy should be enacted. Every question always seems to have a very precise answer that is derived by her philosophical system the way Eclud derives theorems from his postulates.

What would gov’t be about in a Randian universe? On one forum, Randites attacked the idea that many towns have contracted to have curbside garbage pickup. This was attacked as an infringement on the sacred right of individual homeowners to contract their own garbage pick up as if the local gov’t was opening up concentration camps and gassing dissenters. When even the most minor issues have only one ‘right’ answer and getting it wrong makes you the enemy then what exactly would people go to the polls and vote on in a Randian universe? The name of a town? The state bird?

The US,though, wasn’t founded on policy so much as process. The Founders thought a lot about how to handle different interest groups, how to pull the different sections of the US together without pulling so tight that differences would be oppressed. Rand, though, came from a system where ‘the people’ never even had a remote chance of deciding for themselves and while she hated the USSR her political philosophy seems to be in the same ‘top down’ mindset. Namely get the ‘blueprint’ right and all questions get answered by just drilling deeper and deeper down. Not surprisingly, Rand’s followers earned a reputation for their slavish devotion to even the most trivial of personal decisions. For example, Randites took up smoking because that indicated an ‘individualistic mindset’….which they knew because their leader liked to smoke.

Rand’s politics are, IMO, anti-American at their core in the sense that they neglect a vitally important element from American history that’s hard to put into words but might be phrased as ‘trust the people from the bottom up….but not too much’. Rand’s philosophy, though, often carries a lot of appeal (it did for me in HS when I read The Fountainhead….never got around to Atlas Shrugged). But it’s only a partial philosophy. It’s appealing at a certain right spot in many people’s lives. That late teenage spot where you have no direct responsibilities (you don’t have kids, your parents are still young enough to care for themselves) and you need psychologically to take ownership of your life. At that point Rand’s messages may be quite positive but that’s only a brief period of time. Later on most people realize that they aren’t islands unto themselves but much more interconnected to everyone else than it seemed when they were young. A lot of this probably comes from kids (a subject Rand never had to address in her life or philosophy) but it hits those who don’t have kids as well. We realize that our life is a bit like a stage and sometimes we are the center of attention and other times others will be….if we try to hog the entire stage we’ll just ruin the entire production rather than glorify ourselves.

She’s always going to be popular because of the self-help aspect of her work but her philosophy is shrill and empty and fatally so IMO.

An inalienable right is a right that has firepower behind it.