"Tea party candidates Sharron Angle in Nevada and Rand Paul in Kentucky have both derided the unemployed as victims of their own laziness, a position that doesn't play well beyond the Ayn Rand right."
The utter disregard for the truth readily on display by the Anti-Ayn Rand Cult is tiresome, but I fired off this rebuttal anyway:
MikeZemack wrote on 07/28/2010 07:54:45 PM:
Where is the evidence that Ayn Rand ever endorsed a shallow, generalized viewpoint that “derided the unemployed as victims of their own laziness”? As a committed Objectivist, I could tell you that there isn’t any. It looks like a bit of guilt by association going on here. While laziness might be true of some of today’s unemployed, including the idle rich whom she disdained, Ayn Rand would have rightly viewed most as victims of disastrous government policies, although she would not hold them totally blameless if they supported the policies that led to their unemployment. She was a true champion of the middle class, which she viewed as “a country’s motor and lifeblood”.
As to “the Ayn Rand right”, there isn’t any. Today’s American right is dominated by the Christian conservatives and to a lessor extent the libertarians, both of whom stand philosophically opposed to Objectivism’s most important metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical essentials. It’s true that many on the right will wave the Ayn Rand banner when it suits them, cherry picking isolated out-of-context bits and pieces of her idea system. But you will learn little about her thinking by paying attention to Angle or Paul.
As to Mr. McManus and his ilk, ad hominem and straw man tactics are common methods of attacking Ayn Rand, because they dare not confront her ideas openly and honestly. This sort of empty, backhand slap at Ayn Rand is typical of those who simply can’t refute her ideas.
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