Tag: Ayn Rand

(1905 – 1982) Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter.

There is no ‘we’ without ‘I’

Any group or ‘collective,’ large or small, is only a number of individuals. A group can have no rights other than the rights of its individual members. In a free society, the ‘rights’ of any group are derived from the rights of its members through their voluntary individual choice and contractual agreement, and are merely the application of these individual rights to a specific undertaking … A group, as such, has no rights.

Immoral morality of the elites

It was not the tycoons of big business, it was not the working classes, it was the intellectuals who reversed the trend toward political freedom and revived the doctrines of the absolute State, of totalitarian government rule, of the government’s right to control the lives of the citizens in any manner it pleases.  This time, it was not in the name of the ‘divine right of kings,’ but in the name of the divine right of the masses. The basic principle was the same: The right to enforce at the point of a gun the moral doctrines of whoever happens to seize control of the machinery of government.

Difference between socialism and fascism

The difference between [socialism and fascism] is superficial and purely formal, but it is significant psychologically: it brings the authoritarian nature of a planned economy crudely into the open. The main characteristic of socialism (and of communism) is public ownership of the means of production, and, therefore, the abolition of private property. The right to property is the right of use and disposal. Under fascism, men retain the semblance or pretense of private property, but the government holds total power over its use and disposal.