Renewable Energy

Ayn Rand and the Virtue of Selfishness

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From a reader:  Okay… confession: I only physically read about a quarter of it.

I’ll make an even greater confession: I read “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead” back-to-back when I was a teenager, and they meant a great deal to me at the time.

It was a couple of decades later that I realized that “the virtue of selfishness,” as Rand described her philosophy, is a horrible basis on which to build a society. Fortunately, there isn’t a nation on Earth where everything is privatized: roads, tunnels, bridges, airports, law enforcement, criminal justice, disaster relief, libraries, national defense, bank deposit insurance, emergency healthcare, food safety, etc.

Moreover, hoping that rich and selfish people will restrain themselves from ruining the environment is a joke.

Ayn Rand and the Virtue of Selfishness

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