Terry Blanton wrote: > I'm impressed, Jed. You are absolutely correct. However, I think you > might wish to reconsider your opinion of AR. She *lived* > socialism/communism.
You mean she was Russian and lived through the revolution until 1925. Yes, that is obvious! She is a pure Russian intellectual. They tend to go to extremes, in one direction or the other. They love ideology and purist ideals, and they have no regard for real world considerations, or tradition, the complexity of real people, or a sense that we do not fully understand human nature so we should not experiment too much with social institutions. My parents spoke Russian, and they along with many of their friends were posted to Russia during WWII to work for lend-lease. So I knew several Russians of Rand's generation when I was growing up, including the daughter of the first Soviet Foreign minister, and the painter Raphael Soyer, and others. I read a lot of Russian books in translation, and spoke a little Russian. My father used to say that he never met such right wing conservative people as the Stalinist officials he dealt with in Russia. I think the same goes for the extreme anti-communists and idealistic capitalists such as Rand, the neo-Cons, and religious fanatics. Those people have more in common with one another than they realize, and they are all equidistant from me. Of course Russians are not all extremists! The Russian expatriots I knew disliked extreme anti-communists as much as they despised the Stalinists. They learned their lesson. Rand did not. She remained an extremist at heart, convinced that people can perfected by the power of an idea -- that one perfect idea can solve all of life's problems, purify us, give us a purpose, and make us whole. > IMO, you take out the top 3% of the producers and the economy will fail. And if you bankrupt the bottom 90%, or even the bottom 20%, the economy will fail. > But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. "I could be wrong" is just what Rand and communists would never say. They thought their economic systems were constructed on scientific principles. - Jed
