THE EMERGENCE OF LIBERTARIANISM

Yaron Brook

My goal in this chapter is to evaluate three prominent economists who influenced conservative and libertarian views on economic liberty, highlighting their successes and failures as advocates of free markets from the perspective of Ayn Rand’s philosophy of objectivism. This is by no means a comprehensive presentation of the libertarian movement and its impact on conservatives, or of Ayn Rand’s thought; I want to focus only on a few essentials.

To understand the growth of modern conservatism in America and its relationship to modern libertarianism, you have to go back to the end of World War II. The Allies had just defeated Hitler and the Japanese, two fascist empires with ideas of world domination—two ideologically collectivist regimes. But at the same time, communism was an ideology on the rise, stronger than ever in the Soviet Union and just taking hold in China. The United States and its allies had surrendered virtually the whole of Eastern Europe to communism, and Korea would become a battleground for communist control. To all appearances in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the nations of the world were falling under the spell of communism, which was enthralling people, especially Western intellectuals.

At the same time, the United States was emerging from the Great Depression era, when collectivism—the idea of sacrificing individual liberty for the sake of the state, for the sake of the economy, for the sake of the group—had been dominant. For more than fifteen years, the United States had significantly increased the size and role of government, on collectivist rationales such as reducing unemployment.

These twin collectivist threats—communism abroad and statism at home—aroused fear among those who admired liberty, venerated the Founding Fathers, and cherished the spirit of individualism that characterized America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A number of prominent thinkers were discussing these issues and arguing against collectivism, Ayn Rand among them. She had published a semi-autobiographical novel in 1936 called We the Living, based on her experience under Soviet communism before she escaped to America in 1926. In terms of sales, the book was a complete failure, thanks in large part to an American intelligentsia enamored of collectivism and therefore unwilling to take seriously or recommend an author who described Russian communism accurately. Not until the 1950s and ’60s, when it became impossible to evade the evidence of Stalin’s misdeeds, did some American leftists and intellectuals begin to acknowledge the evils of communism.

THE GREAT FREE MARKET ECONOMISTS

Friedrich Hayek

One voice that resonated powerfully with conservatives and others who worried about the rise of communism was Friedrich A. Hayek (1899–1992), whose The Road to Serfdom was first published in the U.K. in 1944. Hayek is probably the most influential libertarian thinker of modern times; he is certainly the libertarian thinker with the most influence on conservatism.

Hayek was a brilliant Austrian economist, one of the great economists of the twentieth century and an advocate for minimal government intervention in the marketplace. The thesis of The Road to Serfdom is this: if you plant the seed of collectivism and allow government to grow, what you get in the end is authoritarianism. Hayek argued that Nazism did not arise spontaneously from nothing—it sprang from the seed of collectivism that was cultivated for years in Germany and matured into fascism. His account of communism’s growth was similar: it did not arise spontaneously but grew slowly from the seed of collectivism.

Hayek powerfully and prophetically described what was happening in the West in the 1940s. As hard as it is to imagine, the West was moving left so fast that even the war hero Winston Churchill couldn’t maintain his leadership. Despite his historic success in helping lead the Allies to victory over fascism in World War II, Churchill had to vacate the prime minister’s office in 1945 when his Conservative Party lost to the socialists in Britain, the Labour Party. Hayek warned the British that this was going to happen.

Unlike Rand’s 1936 novel, Hayek’s book was a publishing sensation when it came to America later in 1944, and it spurred many thinkers to come forward in support of anti-collectivist ideas. The problem is that Hayek, though he supported the free market overall, was also a compromiser who acknowledged the state’s legitimate role in such areas as “facilitating competition” and “helping markets along.” Hayek was not a purist when it came to markets—he allowed for significantly more government intervention than many free market thinkers did, at that time and since. This is why many conservatives like him, precisely because he is not a purist. Conservatives are not purists when it comes to free markets—they don’t believe in limiting government’s economic role to setting up property rights and leaving the markets alone. Conservatives want to tinker with the economy.

Hayek was a thinker who is associated with and adopted by both conservatives and libertarians; however, he never considered himself a conservative. He actually wrote an essay entitled “Why I Am Not a Conservative,” in which he criticized conservatives and the term conservatism itself. What, exactly, are they trying to conserve? Hayek asked. To adopt conservation as a principle means preserving a lot of undesirable things. So Hayek considered himself a liberal—not a modern liberal, mind you, but a nineteenth-century liberal. Those liberals considered themselves Progressives, because they were for genuine progress. They were not leftist Progressives who advocate that government move things forward. Hayek’s type of liberal wants to leave markets and individuals alone for the most part so they can achieve progress. Such liberals are revolutionaries and radicals, not conservatives who cling to tradition. If you look at the way many libertarians write about their history, they trace their roots to these early liberal thinkers. But twentieth-century liberals in America reversed the word’s meaning, and what was a pro-capitalist term became a pro-government term.

As a side note, Hayek ultimately taught in London at the Institute of Economic Affairs and had great influence on Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher completely changed the British economy and the U.K., revolutionizing it toward more freedom. She will go down as one of the great political figures of the twentieth century—greater than Ronald Reagan, because she had a more profound impact in the U.K. than Reagan had in America, and because the U.K. was in much worse shape in the late 1970s. Thatcher studied Hayek. So through Thatcher, Hayek had a profound impact on the politics of the U.K.

Ludwig von Mises

Hayek’s teacher was Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973), probably the greatest economist of the twentieth century. Mises advocated a pure form of capitalism, real free markets. The school of thought that combines the thinking of Mises and Hayek is called the Austrian school of economics, and in my view it’s the best school of economics in the world today.

Hayek was a socialist when he came to study with Mises, and Mises turned him into a capitalist—so Mises is responsible in a certain sense for the economist that Hayek became. Mises believed that government has only one role in the economic sphere, and that is the protection of property rights. Government sets up rules for property rights, and then catches the criminals who violate those rules. Mises advocated no regulations, no incentives, no manipulation of the market, and no role for any of the regulatory agencies that we have today. It is hard to imagine, but he wanted to eliminate government involvement in the economy, meaning no Food and Drug Administration, no Securities and Exchange Commission, no Department of Commerce, no Department of Labor, no special rules for unions (which should be free to organize, but without government privileges).

Mises had, and still has, a huge influence on free market economists and libertarian thinkers. These economists provided us with a deep and unique economic understanding of the world. Mises said, in essence: “Markets work. We need government to protect our property rights but otherwise leave us alone.” In his view, economics teaches this: if you leave people alone, lots of good things happen. And if you look at history, when we leave markets alone, boom!—the standard of living goes up, quality of life goes up, we get industrialization, we get technology, we get iPhones and iPads—we get good stuff. But when government regulates and controls the economy, the result is a distorted marketplace, and you get crises, declines, recessions, depressions, poverty.

In a purely economic analysis, the market provides solutions to problems that are supposedly government concerns. For example, in the absence of an FDA, private entities will emerge to test drugs and food, and to investigate risk factors. Not only will free market incentives lead people to do what is required, but the results will be more trustworthy overall than those generated by bureaucrats. For every important question, Mises and the Austrians indicated how things would work out better in a free market, under true capitalism.

Mises was probably the most influential of the economists within the libertarian movement. He taught at New York University, but it is interesting that both he and Hayek (who taught at the University of Chicago) couldn’t get regular tenured positions from their universities because the schools, even then, were dominated by collectivist, anti–free market, anticapitalist forces. So the free market economists had to rely on external funding from foundations and other institutions.

Milton Friedman

Probably the best-known libertarian economist is Milton Friedman (1912–2006). Along with Frank Knight at the University of Chicago, Friedman started the so-called Chicago School of economics. Friedman made many arguments on behalf of free markets. But when comparing Friedman to Mises, it is important to remember that Mises was part of the Austrian School of economics, which occupied a position outside of mainstream economics and rarely published in the prestigious academic journals. By contrast, Friedman employed the tools of conventional, mainstream economics to advocate on behalf of free markets, and as a consequence, he became more well known than the Austrians did—certainly within the field of economics. Even Friedman’s opponents held him in high regard as an economist.

Friedman was a strong advocate for free markets on grounds of both efficiency and principle. He held that leaving individuals alone to seek their own ends is right, and it works. This recalls Adam Smith, writing in The Wealth of Nations (1776), who showed that when you leave individuals alone, the economy grows.

Friedman had a very successful career at the University of Chicago. At universities all over America today, in the field of economics, Chicago-trained faculty wield a disproportionate influence compared with those educated at other schools. This is partly due to the fact that Friedman, like Hayek, was willing to compromise on matters of principle when it came to practice and policy. For example, there is a hotly contested debate among free market advocates about the need for a central bank. Pure and uncompromising advocates of free markets reject the idea that a central bank is required. They advocate free banking without government intervention in money or banking. But Milton Friedman supported the idea of a central bank, although toward the end of his life he changed his mind. As for Hayek, it is less clear what his position was: sometimes he’s for a central bank, and sometimes he’s against one. Mises, however, never supported a central bank, and many of today’s Austrian economists agree with him.

What did these three prominent economists have in common? Clearly they were united by a certain respect for the marketplace, a respect for capitalism, a respect for the idea that if markets are left alone, they create enormous amounts of wealth. Free markets allow the poor to rise up from poverty. They allow technological innovation. They allow creativity. Not only do they allow for everything we want materially, but the wealth produced on free markets makes possible much of what we want spiritually.

The Anarchists

I don’t want to be accused of not including the anarchists, so I will briefly mention that part of the libertarian movement. These are the libertarians who believe that there should be no government (by contrast, Mises, Hayek, and Friedman all believed there should be government). The leader of this influential part of libertarianism was an economist named Murray Rothbard, who ended his career at the University of Las Vegas. Libertarian anarchy emerges from this approach: “Why stop at privatizing the post office and privatizing schools? Let’s privatize the police force and the military, and let’s have competing governments in the sense of competing police forces and so on.”

Today, a significant portion of the libertarian movement believes in anarchy. This belief manifests itself not only in direct arguments for no government, but also in a hatred of government, a resentment of all government functions. Anarchists view government as the biggest initiator of force, as the biggest violator of our rights, and therefore hate and resent the very institution of government. Of course, there’s an element of truth to this, because the biggest violator of individual rights today, the biggest imposer of force on our lives today, is indeed government. But does this mean one should hate all government on principle? I would rather fight as the Founders did, to confine government to its proper and necessary function: the protection of individual rights.

Libertarian Influence

What impact have these libertarians had on the American conservatives? Not much. I think they have had an impact on what some people say, maybe even on what some people think. But I’d say they’ve had almost no impact on what conservatives actually do when they rise to positions of power. Many people in the Reagan administration, for example, would have considered themselves economic libertarians in the sense of believing in a very, very minor role for government. But they didn’t do much toward that end. The fact is that under Reagan, the government didn’t shrink—it grew. It grew perhaps at a slower rate, and it was somewhat deregulated, but deregulation had already started under Jimmy Carter. Conservatives don’t like to admit it, but the fact is that many of the benefits Reagan got credit for resulted from deregulation that occurred under Jimmy Carter’s administration. Indeed, Gerald Ford really started it, and then came Carter. For example, government used to control the price of airplane tickets; Jimmy Carter deregulated that market. And the government used to control prices in the trucking industry; Jimmy Carter deregulated that market. Broker fees used to be regulated, and interest payments on savings accounts used to be controlled under Regulation Q. All of that was freed up in the 1970s under Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, not under Reagan.

So Ronald Reagan benefited from the fact that there was already some momentum toward deregulation. During his tenure, there was certainly some deregulation and tax cutting—but there was no shrinkage of government. For instance, Reagan came into office saying he was going to do away with the Department of Education. But by the end of his second term, that agency was far bigger than when he started. So the rhetoric of the pro–free market economists was there, but the actions—not so much.

You’ll hear similar rhetoric from modern presidential candidates. In 2012, Mitt Romney talked about the need to shrink government dramatically, and about the importance of individual rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Then moments later he was discussing which industries he wanted to subsidize or penalize, which programs he wanted to increase, and how he was going to boost the American economy by going after the Chinese. Rick Santorum wanted to give special privileges to manufacturers, claiming that manufacturing is somehow superior to service industries. Newt Gingrich wanted to provide tax favors to industries he favored. These candidates opposed free trade and supported expansion of regulatory state power. Each wanted to manipulate the market in a different way, based on his agenda. That is typical of conservatives—they don’t advocate markets free of government intervention.

And then there’s George W. Bush. I saved him for last because where do you end if you start there? Consider this: during the first six of his eight years in office, Bush’s Republican Party had majorities in both houses of Congress, including a lot of conservative senators. Yet in 2002, Congress enacted Sarbanes-Oxley, one of the biggest regulatory bills since the 1930s, and one of the costliest. Sarbanes-Oxley probably shaved $1.5 trillion off the nation’s GDP. It is a horrific, stupid law that impedes innovation and growth, causes a huge misallocation of capital, and—not surprisingly—catches no crooks. Bernie Madoff happened anyway. The housing crisis and Wall Street shenanigans happened anyway. Sarbanes-Oxley accomplished nothing.

This wasn’t all George Bush’s fault. The conservatives in the U.S. Senate didn’t help—exactly none of them voted against Sarbanes-Oxley (the vote was 99–0). The bottom line is that conservatives may talk the talk, but they don’t walk the walk when it comes to economic liberty. That’s what history shows, and it’s true no matter who’s in Congress or who occupies the White House. Government has grown for more than a century—that is, government has only grown, never shrunk. Regardless of whatever deregulation occurred, there were always other areas that were very quickly reregulated or regulated anew—along with new taxes, new regulations, and new schemes for redistribution of wealth. We saw all that under George W. Bush, who was the biggest regulator and expander of government programs since Lyndon B. Johnson.

In this quick overview of three economists associated with the libertarian movement, we see two things. On the one hand, these economists have defended free markets from an economic perspective. They have shown brilliantly that, indeed, markets do work. Yet on the other hand, as we see in the conservative movement, these arguments don’t seem to have had real effects on policy, or on the perceptions of the American people. The drift away from free markets continues, without effective opposition.

AYN RAND AND THE MORAL DEFENSE OF CAPITALISM

In her lifetime, Ayn Rand observed all these trends and arrived at a diagnosis of why the free market economists keep losing the fight. It comes down to this: most people don’t care about economics because economics is not what life’s about. Life is not just about wealth, or how much GDP we can create, or what kind of iPhone we can buy. There are much more important values involved in politics. People don’t vote their pocketbook. If they voted their pocketbook, we would have laissez-faire capitalism in America today, because capitalism is clearly better for your pocketbook than statism. We have great economists—both Hayek and Friedman won Nobel Prizes—who have demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt the relationship between economic freedom and wealth creation. But the fact is that people want to believe what they’re doing is right, just, fair, good. People care most about moral values, which means the ultimate driver of politics is not economics—it’s morality.

On Rand’s view, collectivism will keep winning in the political arena until people come to understand why it’s morally wrong to view people fundamentally in groups. But I would argue—and Rand would argue—that most conservatives are collectivists. Again, I’ll give you Rick Santorum. What is the basic unit—the unit of morality, the unit of politics, the unit of economics—for Rick Santorum? It’s the family, not the individual. In an interview, Santorum once said individual happiness is not the goal—the family is the goal, the solidity of the family. That’s collectivism, and a dramatic departure from the Founders’ view. And if the basic political unit is the family, then policy prescriptions will be concerned not with individual freedom but with what’s “good” for the family. And so if I think outlawing divorce would be good for the family, then I’ll outlaw divorce. This illustrates the basic problem conservatives face: because they are themselves collectivists in one form or another, they can’t attack collectivism on a moral level, much less offer a moral defense of individualism.

Libertarians face this same problem, even when they deny allegiance to collectivism in any form. Rand’s insight here is key: neither conservatives nor libertarians challenge collectivism at its root—because what’s at the root of collectivism is the morality of altruism. What is altruism? Altruism doesn’t mean being nice to other people, or holding the door for a senior citizen. Altruism is the idea in ethics that the well-being of other people is your primary moral responsibility. So when you think about “the good,” the good is “what I can do for other people,” not “what I can do for myself.” Altruism is about self-sacrifice—the sacrifice of your values for the sake of others. The choice comes down to altruism versus egoism (self-interest).

For altruism, the fundamental unit is other people, not the individual or the self—and so it’s not about pursuing your own happiness. But the Declaration of Independence doesn’t say you have a right to be your brother’s keeper, or to go and help your fellow man, or to become a Mother Teresa. Instead, the Declaration affirms your right to “the pursuit of happiness.” The Founding Fathers were being profoundly selfish in that document. They declared that you have inalienable rights—rights that can’t be taken away by anybody—to pursue your own life and happiness.

At the root of collectivism, Rand tells us, is the notion that virtue comes from self-sacrifice. How does that play out in real life? Consider the businessman turned philanthropist Bill Gates. This man made billions of dollars during the 1990s and 2000s by heading up the Microsoft Corporation. But what did we think of him morally when he was making all that money? Morally, we didn’t think well of him at all. Okay, so he’s a great businessman—but that’s not the moral life, like Mother Teresa lived. We think of Mother Teresa as a saint, while Gates was just out to make money. But then look what happened next: Gates retired from business and set up a charitable foundation, to give his money away—and now he’s a good guy, he’s a moral example for others. And if he wanted to make the push for sainthood, all he would have to do is give away everything and move into a hut or a tent—and if he bled a little bit and showed some suffering, that would pretty much guarantee sainthood.

In short, we don’t ethically admire the creation of wealth—​we admire people when they give it away. I once gave a talk in Charleston, South Carolina, at a luncheon sponsored by The Citadel’s business school to honor local business leaders. I was the keynote speaker, and so I watched as everybody went before me and introduced the businessmen who were receiving awards. It was fascinating, because it all fitted perfectly into the thesis that I hadn’t even delivered yet. The introductions began by describing the honorees’ business achievements, the wealth they created, the employment they created, the great standard of living they had provided for their family and for themselves—all that crammed into about two minutes. And then, for the next fifteen minutes or so, they described the honoree’s philanthropy and community service. I regard that as bizarre, for reasons that will become clear as we proceed.

When Bill Gates made his billions of dollars, how much did he help us? We all bought his products, which made us hugely better off, by an amount many multiples of the money he made. Microsoft helped standardize software on computers all over the world, making networking possible, ultimately making the Internet possible in the form that we have today, benefiting billions of people all across the world, including the poor. I believe he helped many, many more people in a much more profound way by running Microsoft than by giving away his money philanthropically. There’s no question about that. And there’s no question that through Microsoft, Gates helped many more people in more profound ways than Mother Teresa ever did. But what’s the difference, morally speaking? It’s this: as Microsoft CEO, Gates earned a return on helping people. He made money for himself in the process. He helped himself by helping other people. That is morally unacceptable by an altruist standard—which explains why, when he stopped making money and started giving it away, his moral standing improved even though he was helping fewer people. That’s what altruism demands: it demands that you give without expectation of getting. That’s what sacrifice is: sacrifice is giving and not getting. Sacrifice is lose/win—you lose, and somebody else wins (on this earth, at least).

As Microsoft CEO, Bill Gates engaged in trade. When I trade something with you—let’s say I sell you a car and you pay me $20,000—which of us has lost? Nobody has. I won, because the car was worth less than $20,000 to me, so I made a little bit of profit. And you won, because the car was worth more than $20,000 to you—that’s why you were willing to give up the money. All voluntary trades are win/win in this sense—both sides intend to benefit (although in any given case, for various reasons, the actual result might fall below expectations). Now what’s the moral status of win/win transactions in our culture? They earn you no moral credit. But as soon as we’re talking win/lose, then it must be morally good, because somebody lost a value. It’s bizarre, but that’s what altruism demands.

The flip side of altruism is self-interest. What do we think of self-interested people, morally speaking? If I say, “That person is selfish,” what do we think, immediately? Without even a pause to think, what comes to mind is: he’s got to be bad. Why? Because he’s probably lying, cheating, and stealing—or he would be if the government weren’t watching him like a hawk. If he’s selfish, he’s in the same camp with Bernie Madoff.

But in reality, what is business all about? It’s about making money. It’s about making great products, the products you want to make. I love the example of the iPhone, because Steve Jobs made a lot of money on it. The profit margin was about 60 percent. If Jobs had cared about me in an altruist sense, he would have sold it cheaper or given it away, but he didn’t. He wanted to make money by creating a product he enjoyed. How many customer surveys did Jobs do before designing the iPhone? Zero. None. He created what he wanted to create, based on what he thought we should like. Steve Jobs was a self-interested—call him “selfish”—businessman. All businessmen are. That’s why we’re so embarrassed by them. That’s why we spend only two minutes describing their business activities at an awards dinner, because they’re selfish. We all know it. We know capitalism is about a bunch of people pursuing self-interest.

Adam Smith understood that in 1776. The baker doesn’t bake bread to make you better off. He doesn’t care about you in an altruistic, self-sacrificial sense. He makes the bread to make a living, and he gives you good customer service—not because he loves you above himself, but because that’s how he sells more bread. That’s the reality: we all, in the business world, are after self-interest. And yet we are taught that self-interest involves lying, stealing, cheating—so of course we want regulations. We want government bureaucrats overseeing what selfish businessmen do, because the bureaucrat is not acting out of self-interest.

The conflict here is between self-interested capitalism and the morality of altruism. If the epitome of virtue is to sacrifice, then how can we complain when our taxes go up? All the government is trying to do is help somebody. It wants us to give up some of our wealth, so that somebody else is supposedly better off.

The key to understanding our political world is that people vote their morality, not their pocketbooks—which typically means taking an altruist path, even if it conflicts with their economic understanding of markets. They want to be good, morally good—and President Obama understands this really, really well. For Obama, every election is about fairness, about the kind of economy and the kind of world we want for our future. He is about the “vision thing.” He frames the election in terms of morality, not economics, because in economics he loses, and he knows it. But he has a chance of winning when the choice is between altruism and self-interest.

This is what Rand challenges. She says, in effect, “Yes, you economists are all correct, especially Mises, in the way you’ve described the economy. You’ve shown that everybody who’s willing to work is better off under capitalism. But that’s not the reason to adopt capitalism, or to be an individualist, or to advocate freedom. The reason is that capitalism is moral.” Rand can say that persuasively only because she rejects altruism. She can say that only because she is willing to challenge every secular philosopher of the last two thousand years—every thinker since Aristotle (with a few exceptions here and there)—who basically said that your purpose in life is to sacrifice for others. She is willing to challenge the Judeo-Christian tradition of morality, which is altruism. Rand advocates a different morality: the morality of self-interest. She says that your proper purpose is to pursue your own life, to make your life the best it can be, to live the most flourishing, successful, happy life you can. If you think about it carefully and look around at the world, you will discover that this doesn’t involve lying, cheating, and stealing, because those things turn out to be incredibly self-destructive. The moral life is a rational, long-term life of honesty and a sense of justice and integrity. It’s not easy to be rationally selfish, because it involves discovering what in fact leads to happiness—but it is possible.

Rand believed this to be the only morality consistent with America’s founding: my life is the standard—I don’t want to live for somebody else—I’m not your servant—I don’t owe you anything (unless we’re trading)—I don’t owe my life to any group, to any other individual—I am here for me. And yes, I want to trade with other people in all kinds of ways—some of them material, some of them spiritual—but I don’t want you to sacrifice for me. I don’t want you to give me stuff that I haven’t earned. And I don’t want to give you stuff you haven’t earned. I want all our interactions to be win/win. This is the only morality consistent with that part of the Declaration that affirms the inalienable right to life and liberty. The Founders were talking about individual lives: they weren’t talking about “the American life” or “the family’s life.” They were talking about individuals’ liberty—your ability to think what you want to think, do what you want to do, and pursue the values you choose, not what somebody else chooses for you—not what the group decides is in the common good, but what you decide is for your good. Finally, the Declaration contains the most selfish political statement in human history, recognizing your right to pursue your own happiness. And that’s the essence of Rand’s morality.

Now think about a rational, productive individual who’s concerned only about the pursuit of his own happiness. What kind of government does he want? Does he want a government that looks over his shoulder like a paternalistic mother and says, “Don’t do that! Don’t eat that! Oh, no, trans fats, that’s not good for you! Don’t go into that elevator! An inspector wasn’t there. Don’t go west, young man—don’t take risks. Don’t invent an iPhone—do this instead.” Does he want that? No. Individuals who want to pursue their own life, pursue their own interests, pursue their own passions, pursue their own values, to make of themselves the best they can be—those individuals want just one thing from government: to be left alone—to have their freedom protected from crooks and that is it. They don’t want government telling them what to do, because government doesn’t just make suggestions, it issues orders. Government puts a gun to your head and says, “Don’t eat trans fats or you go to jail.”

Rand held that the morality of self-interest is a core, foundational idea for the establishment of limited government. On her view, you’re not going to achieve or sustain the limited government envisioned by the Founders without a new morality, and that means rejecting altruism. Of course, there’s more to it than that. Rand was a philosopher who appreciated the need of a philosophic foundation for politics. Ayn Rand said she was an advocate of capitalism because she was an advocate of individualism—and she was an advocate of individualism because she was an advocate of self-interest—and she was an advocate of self-interest because she was an advocate of reason, and unless we understand that reason is the standard for knowledge and guide to action, we’ll never get the rest. This is what differentiates her from libertarian thinkers—her view that a philosophical approach was needed to defend capitalism. And her philosophical ideas are still rejected by most libertarians and clearly contradict the tenets of conservatism.

But what Rand provides, that the libertarians or conservatives cannot, is the answer to an important question we should all care about: What makes America special?

Everywhere in the world, before the founding of this country, the individual belonged to someone else. Your life as an individual, your body as an individual, your soul as an individual, belonged to the tribe—it belonged to the king—it belonged to the pope—it belonged to society. The world was always a collectivistic world, without exception. What’s unique about this country is that for the first time in history, a nation was founded on a truly radical, revolutionary, moral principle. This is what the American Revolution was all about: your life does not belong to anybody—it is yours to live on your own terms.

This is the greatest country in the history of mankind because of that founding principle, because of that founding idea. And that’s the founding principle we need to recapture, explain, and defend. If only we can grasp that idea—that our lives are ours to live, to pursue our own happiness, as the Founders put it—then the future is ours. But if we lose that idea, then the future is lost, and we will go down the road that Atlas Shrugged lays out in chilling detail, the road to collectivistic destruction.