The Mugwumpery

I saw the above on r/ExplainTheJoke. It’s HP Lovecraft, Neil Gaiman, Ayn Rand, and George Lucas.

I just want to talk about Rand and a reaction on Reddit.

JesusIsMyZoloft said “Bottom Left is Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged. Far-right libertarian who believes that not only should it be legal to do immoral things (the fundamental tenet of libertarianism) but that therefore you should actually do immoral things.”

It’s an interesting take on libertarianism, and maybe explains a lot of the hostility toward it.

I’m more classical liberal than libertarian these days. A commonality is the idea that freedom means being allowed to make decisions that society thinks are poor ones (yes, including re morality), provided no one else is harmed. (If it doesn’t mean that, whatever does it mean?)

In practice much of this is about opposing paternalism – laws that are for “your own good”. For example libertarians think it should be legal to use an unlicensed vet to care for pets, as long as the vet doesn’t fraudulently claim qualifications they don’t have. Or buy non-FDA approved drugs. Neither has anything to do with morality.

Rand herself hated libertarians with a passion, but that hasn’t prevented her from being the patron saint of a certain subset of them.

Personally I think Rand was a pretty good fiction writer (The Fountainhead is quite good), and a terrible non-fiction writer.