Ayn Rand and Government

“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”    -John Rogers

The intellectual and moral failings of Rand's writings in their own right aside, I would like to share something about Ayn Rand's own relationship with government in her life.  What follows is just a brief synopsis of a few different articles that I found about Ayn Rand's life and thought.

Since she came of age after the Bolshevik Revolution, she was able to acquire a university education since women were now allowed to attend universities.  The Bolsheviks also subsidized the cost of the theater, so Rand was able to attend many live performances which she could have never afforded otherwise due to the poverty of her family.  In America, she found herself unemployed like many aspiring writers during the Great Depression.  Luckily for her, the Works Progress Administration was putting on performances of plays by new playwrights to keep both the actors and writers from starving to death.  One of Rand's plays was put on at government expense and she was paid $10 each time it was performed.  When she was researching various topics while preparing her novels, she received free advice and materials from the New York City public library system.  Later in life, she drew and seemingly relied on Social Security.

To backtrack just a bit to talk about her "research".  In a 1957 interview shortly after the publication of Atlas Shrugged, Rand claimed that she was the most original thinker alive and didn't owe her thoughts to anyone, except perhaps for Aristotle.  None of her ideas were Aristotelian in the least, but some of her notions of the god-like captains of industry do seem a bit Nietzchean.  Rand could have been deluded, could have been a liar, or she could have been functionally illiterate since she never seems to have understood anything that she read.  Perhaps government failed her after all.