Tuesday, October 17, 2006
I became a libertarian without reading ANY Rand...
I apologize dammit! I have completely embraced libertarianism, and not just the "touchy feely" legalize drugs stuff, but the caustic, damn-the-torpedoes, Kool-Aid enhanced version that apparently goes by the designation anarcho-capitalism. But that's not the bad part. I came to these conclusions and embraced this lunacy without reading one single word from any novel by Ayn Rand! Please don't tell anyone. I apologize deeply and hope the amount of Rothbard, Block, and Hoppe I've consumed will get me through. For now.
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4 comments:
Well, at least Block isn't too bad. But you do need to expand your reading. I apologize for ever having read Rothbard. I don't apologize for refusing to have anything to do with Hoppe, Christian Reconstructions like North, League of the South members, white surpemacists, Joe Sobran and his anti-Jewish remarks or such.
I only read one Ayn Rand book before becoming an anarcho-capitalist, and her book wasn't even the primary impetus for my doing so. I suppose you could say I was influenced by her, but it was a guerilla attack on her part--and besides the one I read (Anthem) bore certain strong resemblances to Yevgeny Zemyatin's "We", which I also read at the time (Basically, "Anthem" is "We" with a better understanding of the economic effects of dictatorship and more stuff about hardcore individualism and the ego, blah.). For me, it was Zemyatin/Rand and then Molyneux sealed the deal.
Actually anonymous, you don't need to apologize for not reading a lot of Hoppe. The more one reads of him, the more one might tend to realize that! (He does, I submit, offer some great insights on liberty though.) All kidding aside, there is a little bit too much "South will rise again" lunacy and a little bit too much neo-Confederate overtone in some "libertarian" prose. That's unfortunate, since methodological individualism should be about all individuals, not just the ones with whom one happens to share an ideology or a skin-tone. In other news, I continue to expand my reading. I hope you do the same.
I went libertarian before reading Rand, but then I did read her, and I ended up reading a lot of other writers and philosophers because of her. I had a philosophy class with Ronald Nash that did it for me.
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