Silicon Graffiti: "Ayn Rand: Goddess of the Market"

Jennifer Burns, the author of the best-selling late 2009 look at Ayn Rand's remarkably contentious history with the American right stopped by the vast Silicon Graffiti production facilities last week to discuss the book. We'll explore Rand's resurgence with the members of the Tea Party, who can pick and choose which elements of Rand's Objectivist philosophy they agree with in a way that Rand would have found anathema while she was still living. We'll also discuss Rand's tempestuous relationship with both the right and the left during the 1940s through the early 1970s, including her look at what she described as JFK's "Fascist New Frontier" in 1962. Plus some thoughts on what the Fountainhead had to say about Rand's take on modernist aesthetics, and the socialistic milieu in which they originally emerged. And finally, what Rand would have thought of 2010, a year which pits, on the left, arguably the most collectivist president since FDR, and on the right, the growing Tea Party movement, and their calls for a return to free-market capitalism, the unknown ideal (to coin a phrase.) Approx. 12-minutes long.

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• ayn rand
• the fountainhead
• atlas shrugged
• goddess of the market