Ayn Is Innocent!

Great post by NNW over here, but there's one thing I don't agree with. The whole 'Objectivism' thing was intended as a rebuttal to libertarianism which, even back then, was sliding rapidly downhill into the moral equivalence sludgebucket.

I'm sure Ayn Rand would be no friend to a police service that refused to actually provide any actual policing services. Equally, she would have no problem with condemning this kind of harassment as objectively wrong. Then again, you can say the same for Frank Field or, for that matter, Clement Atlee. It's not about the state.

We're not screwed because the state is too big or too small, we're screwed because our political culture is mired in exactly the kind of goofy relativism Rand predicted years ago. Some are liberals, some are libertarians, but all are firmly wedged in the Starbucks of the soul where objective reality is, like, squaresville, dude, vicious thugs are just sticking it to The Man and it's considered a winning argument to sonorously intone 'first they came for the violent headcases...'.

UPDATE:

Knew I had it somewhere....

Here's Ayn Rand on libertarianism:

All kinds of people today call themselves “libertarians,” especially something calling itself the New Right, which consists of hippies, except that they’re anarchists instead of collectivists. But of course, anarchists are collectivists. Capitalism is the one system that requires absolute objective law, yet they want to combine capitalism and anarchism. That is worse than anything the New Left has proposed. It’s a mockery of philosophy and ideology. They sling slogans and try to ride on two bandwagons. They want to be hippies, but don’t want to preach collectivism, because those jobs are already taken. But anarchism is a logical outgrowth of the anti-intellectual side of collectivism. I could deal with a Marxist with a greater chance of reaching some kind of understanding, and with much greater respect. The anarchist is the scum of the intellectual world of the left, which has given them up. So the right picks up another leftist discard. That’s the Libertarian movement.

UPDATE II:

Actually, the quote at the bottom of the page sums it up even better:

Libertarians are a monstrous, disgusting bunch of people: they plagiarize my ideas when that fits their purpose, and they denounce me in a more vicious manner than any communist publication, when that fits their purpose. They are lower than any pragmatists, and what they hold against Objectivism is morality. They’d like to have an amoral political program