What “daffy” or “hideous” things do you imagine she espoused?

Whittaker Chambers was once a Communist and never really renounced Marxist values, only Communist methods. His essay is entirely ridiculous and predictable. For instance, he claims Rand worships power, but Rand makes it clear that the competent are powerless before the looters. He claims she “plumps for a technocratic elite” that will usher in “dictatorship” but this is so absurdly out of the step with the book’s message of individual rights as to make one wonder if he even read the text.

Yes, she was anti-Marxist–as I say, her philosophy strikes me as a funhouse mirror of Marxism, because it’s one hideous philosophy constructed purely in reaction to the other hideous philosophy.

She was vindicated for defending capitalism as capitalism is obviously better than communism. She was also vindicated for telling the truth about just how evil communism was. But again, that’s not something she was alone in. And it’s not like she was vindicated on everything she said. Just read The Roots of War. World War I and II DID result in an expansion of democracy, but not in her reckoning. And, she defends with business interests that urged us not to go to war against Hitler. How embarrassing for her.

Part of this may be all the run-ins I’ve had with Objectivists, who (with only rare exception) seem to be quite as mad as hatters to me. Like communists, they’re stark raving bonkers.

Rand never argued that free markets were perfect, nor does anyone else. Markets are always prone to bubbles and busts. They’re just the least worst system.

This recession is very mild in absolute terms: no one is going hungry or unclothed; today, the poverty line is roughly where the median income was in the 1950s. The reason for that is the decades of gradual improvements the free markets have given us.

Rand was above all an anti-Marxist, and one of the great evangelists of human freedom. I’d say she’s been vindicated by history, and then some.

Still, she was a remarkable woman.

I do, however, think there are big things about which Rand was fundamentally incorrect (“stupid” is deliberately pejorative, I’m willing to stick with “wrong”). One major one: she believes people are fundamentally rational and have the foresight to understand how their current actions will affect their future self-interest. I think the current crisis demonstrates only too well that people can be short-sighted and reason inconsistently when their emotions are involved (which, honestly, is always in the real world).

Dagny Taggart, main character of “Atlas Shrugged”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dagny_Taggart

No, not smarter, just better read in objectivist literature. Whether that’s a good thing or bad thing you be the judge.