Preach it, brother!

[thewayne]

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs. --John Rogers, Kung Fu Monkey

I tried reading The Fountainhead once as I could find it as a free ebook. Rand was just a horrible author, it was unreadable for me. I've read reviews of her political philosophy by professional political scientists and philosophers, and they say it's unbelievably puerile and poorly conceived. Yet it is the gospel for the Teabaggers.

I have a file of phrases on my iPhone in the Notes app, this one has been there for a few years now.

Comments

[cp.livejournal.com]

And most Teabagger devotees of Rand's philosophy have no idea that she was fervently anti-religious. I suspect they're a bit conflicted when they find out!

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Very true, I think it was part of her Russian upbringing.

[moiraj.livejournal.com]

I know I expressed disbelief about this to someone, I'm not sure who, so I hope I'm not repeating myself, but I saw a tiny part of an interview with her, and she was against any public funding for absolutely anything, including roads. How the hell can a country the size of the US function without public roads? So freaking stupid.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

I once saw a bumper sticker that said "If you hate socialism, get off the road!"

Yeah, I've never heard a good answer as to what's going to happen to the infrastructure once they've drowned the government in a bathtub. We are slowly finding out that without road maintenance, people die. There was a recent incident where a huge chunk of concrete fell off a bridge and killed a family of four. The odd thing was that the bit that fell off wasn't near where they were working, so they didn't antiticpate that.

[silveradept]

Yet it seems like we're going to have to study Rand for a very long time to come, as her devotees keep getting themselves elected to office so that they can lay waste about them.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Having admittedly not read Rand and I could be laboring under a false assumption, as I recall she extolled the self-made man. I'd like to see some of these congresscritters, such as Mitt Romney or any of the field of Republican hopefuls, start over at a minimum wage job and with no help from outside sources, make themselves back in to millionaires.

Romney got his start from his dad's trust fund, McCain got his from the Coors fortune, etc. There's nothing wrong with marrying in to or inheriting wealth, but if you then use it as a base to proclaim the virtue of a self-made man, then your political philosophy needs a fundamental reevaluation.

Obama? He didn't start with money, he stared with a pretty solid middle or lower-middle class upbringing. He's infinitely more a self-made man than most other of these idiots.

There's a saying that it's easier to make $2 million from $1 million than it is to turn $1 into $1 million, but not according to these idiots.

[silveradept]

Well, it's true. Once you get past a certain income threshold, you start having enough excess money that you can then take advantage of things like investments, tax breaks, and loopholes. Once you can do that, and hire someone to manage it all, the money basically makes itself without your intervention. It's only if you have to spend everything you make that you can't get the money to work for you.