WEBVTT NOTE Ayn Rand: The Greatest Novelist of All Time 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:04.160 I want to pay a compliment to the organizers of this conference, and the compliment is 2 00:00:04.160 --> 00:00:05.160 as follows. 3 00:00:05.160 --> 00:00:09.640 Bill Barnett and I brought up four students from New Orleans, Loyola New Orleans, and 4 00:00:09.640 --> 00:00:13.840 I was going over with them what the marching orders are for tomorrow, and I said, we'll 5 00:00:13.840 --> 00:00:18.280 call for you at a certain time, and you know, we might have lunch, et cetera. 6 00:00:18.280 --> 00:00:23.400 And one of the kids said, can't we stay here? 7 00:00:23.400 --> 00:00:29.360 Which I think is a marvelous indication of what's going on here, that kids want to stay 8 00:00:29.360 --> 00:00:35.360 here. It's really great. Atlas Shrugged is the greatest novel ever written. Now, there 9 00:00:35.360 --> 00:00:41.920 are some people, idiots, who disagree with this, and they say that the book is full of 10 00:00:41.920 --> 00:00:48.360 slogans and they're unrealistic characters and it's too long, it's 1,100 pages, and 11 00:00:48.360 --> 00:00:52.520 they read speeches to each other and they're just stick figures. What do they know? They're 12 00:00:52.520 --> 00:00:59.280 just morons. I have a praxeological proof that this is the greatest novel. A is A, premise. 13 00:00:59.280 --> 00:01:06.000 and Business, Ayn Rand features A is A in her novel, QED, it's the greatest novel. 14 00:01:06.000 --> 00:01:14.440 A little applause at this time wouldn't come out, thank you, thank you, thank you. 15 00:01:14.440 --> 00:01:18.760 Obviously it's a subjective thing, we're talking thymology, we're not talking praxeology, it's 16 00:01:18.760 --> 00:01:23.640 a matter of taste, I mean I like Mozart, Bach, Handel, Vivaldi and Beethoven, other people 17 00:01:23.640 --> 00:01:30.120 Rand didn't like them, but she was wrong on that. 18 00:01:30.120 --> 00:01:34.440 My own personal story on this, how I first came to Atlas Shrugged is I was a student 19 00:01:34.440 --> 00:01:40.480 in Brooklyn College and Ayn Rand came to lecture there and I was left Jewish type in Brooklyn, 20 00:01:40.480 --> 00:01:45.240 which means socialist, and she came to speak and I came to boo and hiss her and I booed 21 00:01:45.240 --> 00:01:49.580 and hissed her all through her speech and then at the end the Ayn Rand study club said 22 00:01:49.580 --> 00:01:53.000 anyone who wants to come and have lunch with her can, you don't have to agree with her 23 00:01:53.000 --> 00:01:57.560 and I didn't get enough booing and hissing at her so I came to the lunch and there was 24 00:01:57.560 --> 00:02:01.600 a long, long table, maybe 50 people on each side and I was relegated to the foot of the 25 00:02:01.600 --> 00:02:06.600 table and Ayn Rand was at the head of the table with Nathaniel Brannon and Leonard Peacoff 26 00:02:06.600 --> 00:02:14.440 and all the other high muckamucks, including Alan Greenspan and I turned to my neighbor 27 00:02:14.440 --> 00:02:20.080 and I said, oh, you know, socialism is great and capitalism is evil, getting ready to get 28 00:02:20.080 --> 00:02:50.080 on. And he said, well, I don't really know, but the people who do are at the other end of the table. So I stuck my head between Ines and Nathans. And I said, there's a socialist here who wants to debate someone on these issues. And I said, who is it? I said, it was me. I was, you know, 20 years old, a chutzpahnik in those days, still am. And Brandon was very nice. He said, I'll come to the other end of the table and I'll talk to you on the two conditions. One, the discussion will not lapse at this point, will continue until one of us convinces the other. And the other is you read two books that I 29 00:02:50.080 --> 00:02:55.480 to suggest, and one was Atlas Shrugged, and one was Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt. 30 00:02:55.480 --> 00:03:00.520 And to make a long story short, I read the books, I talked to Ein and Nathan and other 31 00:03:00.520 --> 00:03:06.080 people four or five times, and I was converted. I was now a free enterprise of the Einran 32 00:03:06.080 --> 00:03:12.640 stripe. I read Atlas Shrugged the first time, I couldn't put it down. I mean, it just blew 33 00:03:12.640 --> 00:03:17.360 me away. And I've read it maybe the first time I was age 20, and every 10 years since 34 00:03:17.360 --> 00:03:47.360 and I've read it again. I'm now 70, so I've read it in 30, 40, 50, 60 and 70. And each time I get more out of it, it is the most glorious book. It's an inspiration. It has probably converted more people to libertarianism than any other book. And maybe she more than any other person, with the possible exception of Ron Paul. I'm not sure about that. It's an empirical issue, but certainly she's in the top two in terms of converting people. I mean, Murray Rothbard and Mises and Hayek and Friedman and other people 35 00:03:47.360 --> 00:03:53.600 People like that did convert people, but not on this mass, mass scale. 36 00:03:53.600 --> 00:04:00.160 I want to read some objective, well, not really objective, but some surveys of this book. 37 00:04:00.160 --> 00:04:05.880 Here's one, books that made a difference in readers' lives, and I'll read the top ten. 38 00:04:05.880 --> 00:04:11.040 The Bible, Atlas Shrugged, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Road Less Traveled, The Lord of the Rings, 39 00:04:11.040 --> 00:04:14.880 Gone with the Wind, How to Make Friends and Influence People, The Book of Mormon, The 40 00:04:14.880 --> 00:04:22.640 The Feminine Mystique, Passages by Gail Sheehy, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, so she's number two there. 41 00:04:22.640 --> 00:04:30.400 Another one, 25 Books That Have Shaped Readers' Lives, Huckleberry Finn is number one, Atlas Shrugged is number two. 42 00:04:30.400 --> 00:04:41.120 Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Malcolm X, The Bible Comes in Fifth, Catcher in the Rye, Charlotte's Web, Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, Don Quixote, 43 00:04:41.120 --> 00:04:46.880 Gone with the Wind, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Ayn Rand is in very fast company here. 44 00:04:46.880 --> 00:04:54.120 Here's another survey, influential books, top books that have made a difference in people's lives, The Bible, 45 00:04:54.120 --> 00:05:00.480 number two, Atlas Shrugged, number three, Road Less Travel, number four, To Kill a Mockingbird, Lord of the Rings. 46 00:05:00.480 --> 00:05:05.180 One more last survey, very interesting survey, Modern Library. 47 00:05:05.180 --> 00:05:13.180 There are two surveys to mention the top 100 books, and one was by employees of a modern library, 48 00:05:13.180 --> 00:05:17.180 and the other was by customers of modern library. Here's the customers first. 49 00:05:17.180 --> 00:05:24.180 Ayn Rand number one, fountainhead number two, Ron Hubbard, Battlefield Earth three, The Lord of the Rings four, 50 00:05:24.180 --> 00:05:31.180 Killing Mockingbird five, 1984 six, Anthem by Ayn Rand seven, We The Living by Ayn Rand eight. 51 00:05:31.180 --> 00:05:33.180 So she's got four in the top ten. 52 00:05:33.180 --> 00:05:36.180 Now, the other list, she doesn't make the top hundred. 53 00:05:36.180 --> 00:05:43.180 It's mainly literature majors that become employees of this company, Modern Library, 54 00:05:43.180 --> 00:05:48.180 and they hate, well, the Purple Passion Free Enterprise, which is sort of similar of academia, 55 00:05:48.180 --> 00:05:54.180 and I was going to say sociology departments, but I have to withdraw that because we had the previous speaker who was magnificent, 56 00:05:54.180 --> 00:06:02.180 but apart from that, sociology departments, literature department, history, you know, they're all a bunch of pinkos and would hate Ayn Rand. 57 00:06:02.180 --> 00:06:16.180 I don't care that there were slogans, I don't care that they read speeches to each other, the speeches were magnificent, well with the exception of the John Gault speech, I never read that, it's like a hundred page speech, it was sort of boring, but the other speeches are magnificent. 58 00:06:16.180 --> 00:06:26.180 On the other hand, I'm not an un-exceptionable supporter of Ayn Rand, she does have some weaknesses. 59 00:06:26.180 --> 00:06:38.180 She ran a cult. After I got converted to it, I would come to their meetings and the only questions that were allowed was on page 482 you said this, could you please expound on that? And she would say yes. 60 00:06:38.180 --> 00:06:49.180 But if you said anything that was slightly critical of her, oh, get out, you're evil, you're an abomination, you know, this is not a way to treat people. 61 00:06:49.180 --> 00:07:19.180 She was also very pro-war. She was a statist, although an Atlas Shrugged is not one single solitary sentence that favors the government. Mr. Thompson was the head of state and she didn't say anything good about him, although in the movie, which I thought was really good, brought tears to my eyes, there was one sentence about limited government, but it was not an Atlas Shrugged. She also favored the Moonshot. She wrote about the Moonshot, how this is just wonderful, and you know, I just thought it was a socialist venture in private. 62 00:07:19.180 --> 00:07:21.460 and private enterprise should have done that. 63 00:07:21.460 --> 00:07:26.140 She favored Gerald Ford over Hospers, which is a little weak, I mean Hospers was an admirer 64 00:07:26.140 --> 00:07:32.420 of hers that she split with because he said one sentence against her. 65 00:07:32.420 --> 00:07:38.780 She called libertarians hippies of the right, she pronounced it hippis of the right, I don't 66 00:07:38.780 --> 00:07:44.020 mind the accent, you know, she was a Russian speaker, but she really got the idiom of the 67 00:07:44.020 --> 00:07:45.720 English language. 68 00:07:45.720 --> 00:07:50.160 Another one was cashing in the student rebellion at Berkeley. She didn't like them because 69 00:07:50.160 --> 00:07:54.160 they were hippies, but the point is it was public property that they were trashing. It 70 00:07:54.160 --> 00:08:00.160 wasn't private property, and she was writing as if it was public property. 71 00:08:00.160 --> 00:08:03.120 There are two heroes of mine in the book, and I want to talk a little bit about each 72 00:08:03.120 --> 00:08:08.000 of them and how they've been important in my life. The first one is Ragnar Danishkald. 73 00:08:08.000 --> 00:08:12.620 He was the pirate who would attack government ships and take the money and give it to Hank 74 00:08:12.620 --> 00:08:19.500 Well, a lot of the problems we face as libertarians is what about a public library? Suppose you 75 00:08:19.500 --> 00:08:23.980 go into a public library and you put a book under your shirt or your jacket and you walk 76 00:08:23.980 --> 00:08:32.780 out with it. Did you steal it? Or did you liberate it? Well, you know, it can be a case 77 00:08:32.780 --> 00:08:36.660 made for the second because they stole it from us in the form of money. They converted 78 00:08:36.660 --> 00:08:41.700 into a book and we're just grabbing it back. So, you know, it's a very complicated issue. 79 00:08:41.700 --> 00:08:45.660 A lot of people write to me, and they say, I've become a libertarian and I don't want 80 00:08:45.660 --> 00:08:51.420 to go to public school. Because to go to public school or to be a professor in a public college 81 00:08:51.420 --> 00:08:55.460 is to steal other people's money. And they feel guilty, and only a libertarian would 82 00:08:55.460 --> 00:08:59.920 feel guilty. And what are you going to do, become a hermit? Because, you know, how did 83 00:08:59.920 --> 00:09:03.700 we get here? We use the public street. What do we have in our wallets? Public money or 84 00:09:03.700 --> 00:09:09.860 fiat currency. We use the postal system. We eat food. Food is subsidized. So no matter 85 00:09:09.860 --> 00:09:17.860 You know, what we do, we're in the jowls of the state, and for us to not take government money, you know, I can now take social security. 86 00:09:17.860 --> 00:09:23.860 I'm 70 years old, I'm going to take social security. The less money they have and the more money we have, the better. 87 00:09:23.860 --> 00:09:28.860 So people shouldn't feel guilty about going to a public school or any of that. 88 00:09:28.860 --> 00:09:34.860 Well, what about the public librarian salary? Would we be justified in going up to the public librarian with a gun and say, 89 00:09:34.860 --> 00:09:44.860 Give us some of that money. This is a very complicated issue, but at least with the idea of Ragnar Danischkohl, you can think about it, and you don't summarily dismiss it. 90 00:09:44.860 --> 00:09:50.860 Whereas without Ragnar, magnificent Ragnar, we would just say, well, that's theft, but it's not so clear. 91 00:09:50.860 --> 00:09:58.860 Another one is Ron Paul. Should he accept matching funds from the government, as he's entitled to? 92 00:09:58.860 --> 00:10:08.860 and I wrote about that on lewrockwell.com and my view was it would be very unwise politically, but it would be justified, which again comes from Ragnar Danischkohl. 93 00:10:08.860 --> 00:10:20.860 Another problem with her is the fountainhead. They blew up a building, which was okay because it was, you know, they stole the ideas or something like that, not that I'm for IP, but that's another issue. 94 00:10:20.860 --> 00:10:31.860 But then they paid for it. Should the architect have paid for it is an issue where I think she's a little inconsistent with her magnificent Ragnar. 95 00:10:31.860 --> 00:10:39.860 Also that scene about rape where she sort of supported rape, you know, it's an invasion, you're not supposed to be supporting rape. 96 00:10:39.860 --> 00:10:49.860 Although the way she made it, it wasn't really rape, but I don't want to get into that. It's very politically incorrect to even talk about rape, I guess. 97 00:10:49.860 --> 00:10:59.860 Okay, another my favorite villain is Robert Stadler. Robert Stadler was the guy who knew better. 98 00:10:59.860 --> 00:11:06.860 Who was a scientist, who was a genius, who was brilliant, who was magnificent, who shouldn't have been supporting the evil. 99 00:11:06.860 --> 00:11:14.860 So I wrote an article, Milton Friedman as Robert Stadler. I mean, Milton Friedman should have known better. 100 00:11:14.860 --> 00:11:20.940 What better? He was a bright guy. He knew about liberty. He wrote a book, Capitalism 101 00:11:20.940 --> 00:11:25.580 and Freedom. I mean, how dare he write a book, Capitalism and Freedom, and favor the negative 102 00:11:25.580 --> 00:11:34.380 income tax and favor vouchers instead of legalizing private schooling. The volunteer military, 103 00:11:34.380 --> 00:11:38.600 which is a complicated thing, volunteer military is good because you're against the draft, 104 00:11:38.600 --> 00:11:45.360 The reason he favored the volunteer military is so that the U.S. could pursue its imperialist 105 00:11:45.360 --> 00:11:50.640 war in Vietnam more effectively, which makes it very complicated. 106 00:11:50.640 --> 00:11:55.120 Look, we're all against the concentration camps. 107 00:11:55.120 --> 00:12:05.200 But suppose the concentration camps were, what do you call it, no, they were drafted. 108 00:12:05.200 --> 00:12:08.100 They were drafted into the concentration camp. 109 00:12:08.100 --> 00:12:15.100 Suppose we said, well, the problem with concentration camps is that the guards are drafted and we have to have a voluntary tortuary. 110 00:12:15.100 --> 00:12:21.100 That's not libertarian. In other words, it's a very complicated issue. On the one hand, yes, you want to get rid of the draft. 111 00:12:21.100 --> 00:12:24.100 On the other hand, you don't want to do it in order to pursue the war better. 112 00:12:24.100 --> 00:12:27.100 You want to do it in spite of the fact that it'll pursue the war better. 113 00:12:27.100 --> 00:12:31.100 But Friedman wanted to do it in order to make the war more efficient from the US side. 114 00:12:31.100 --> 00:12:37.100 And if you assume it's an unjustified war in the first place, well, then you're on the wrong side. 115 00:12:37.100 --> 00:12:43.200 He was viciously against gold, he supported the Fed, he loved neighborhood effects, externalities, 116 00:12:43.200 --> 00:12:48.980 he believed in all sorts of market failures, favored antitrust, he was a supporter of Ronald 117 00:12:48.980 --> 00:12:53.060 Coase who was pure evil, for other reasons I can't go into now. 118 00:12:53.060 --> 00:12:58.900 He was a road socialist, I once debated him on this, I wrote a book, Why We Should Privatize 119 00:12:58.900 --> 00:13:03.620 Highways, and he just thought it was crazy, so I called him a road socialist, and he didn't 120 00:13:03.620 --> 00:13:08.660 much like that. I can't understand why. I mean, you know, if it walks like a duck and maybe 121 00:13:08.660 --> 00:13:14.540 cracks like a duck, maybe it is a socialist. He favored the withholding tax. The withholding 122 00:13:14.540 --> 00:13:19.940 tax is really bad. I mean, if people had to pay all that stuff on April 15th, first they'd 123 00:13:19.940 --> 00:13:22.900 realize what they're paying and secondly they wouldn't have the money and what are they 124 00:13:22.900 --> 00:13:26.580 going to do, arrest all of us? And Milton, now it's true, he apologized for it later 125 00:13:26.580 --> 00:13:31.780 in Two Lucky People, his autobiography with his wife, but still, you don't find Murray 126 00:13:31.780 --> 00:13:36.340 Murray Rothbard advocating any withholding taxes, fiat currency. 127 00:13:36.340 --> 00:13:41.500 Another Robert Stadler is Alan Greenspan. 128 00:13:41.500 --> 00:13:46.740 Alan Greenspan, when he was a young man, he wrote brilliantly about the gold standard. 129 00:13:46.740 --> 00:13:51.340 And gold standard is wonderful and fiat currency is bad. 130 00:13:51.340 --> 00:13:56.500 And when he got appointed head of the Fed, I said, whoop-de-doo, shows how much I know. 131 00:13:56.500 --> 00:13:58.780 The Fed will be gone in about a month. 132 00:13:58.780 --> 00:14:04.060 I mean, look, if Ron Paul wins and he calls upon me to be head of the Fed, the end of 133 00:14:04.060 --> 00:14:08.580 the Fed, in about a month or so, or maybe people will criticize, why a whole month? 134 00:14:08.580 --> 00:14:11.300 You know, okay, well, maybe a couple of weeks. 135 00:14:11.300 --> 00:14:17.740 But, you know, Alan Greenspan is in charge of this, and he's supposed to be for freedom. 136 00:14:17.740 --> 00:14:23.100 One of the things that ticks me off is this group, OPPE, Association of Professional, 137 00:14:23.100 --> 00:14:25.540 what the hell is it? 138 00:14:25.540 --> 00:14:28.700 Private Enterprise Educators, thanks, Roderick. 139 00:14:28.700 --> 00:14:33.060 And they have the head of the Fed as the president, but it's the Dallas Fed, so it's the free 140 00:14:33.060 --> 00:14:34.060 enterprise Fed? 141 00:14:34.060 --> 00:14:39.860 I mean, that's sort of like saying, well, this part of the Politburo is the free enterprise 142 00:14:39.860 --> 00:14:40.860 part of the Politburo. 143 00:14:40.860 --> 00:14:44.660 I mean, the Fed is the central planning for the money supply. 144 00:14:44.660 --> 00:14:48.380 You can't have a free enterprise Fed, even if they're good on free trade and getting 145 00:14:48.380 --> 00:14:53.220 rid of rent control and stuff, you know, this is the belly of the beast. 146 00:14:53.220 --> 00:14:58.700 So in conclusion, since A is A, and she talks about A is A, we can apodictically prove 147 00:14:58.700 --> 00:15:02.100 that this is the greatest novel, and I thank you for listening to my comments.