Check Your Premises

Ah, The New York Times. 

In fact, any editor certainly would cut the Bible, if an agent submitted it as a new work of fiction. But Cerf offered Rand an alternative: if she gave up 7 cents per copy in royalties, she could have the extra paper needed to print Galt’s oration. That she agreed is a sign of the great contradiction that haunts her writing and especially her life. Politically, Rand was committed to the idea that capitalism is the best form of social organization invented or conceivable. This was, perhaps, an understandable reaction against her childhood experience of Communism. 

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Yet while Rand took to wearing a dollar-sign pin to advertise her love of capitalism, Heller makes clear that the author had no real affection for dollars themselves. Giving up her royalties to preserve her vision is something that no genuine capitalist, and few popular novelists, would have done. It is the act of an intellectual, of someone who believes that ideas matter more than lucre. In fact, as Heller shows, Rand had no more reverence for the actual businessmen she met than most intellectuals do. The problem was that, according to her own theories, the executives were supposed to be as creative and admirable as any artist or thinker. They were part of the fraternity of the gifted, whose strike, in “Atlas Shrugged,” brings the world to its knees.

Capitalism, in the sense she explained repeatedly, was not simply an economic system, but a socio-economic system that recognized individual rights. Had she employed the more generic term "free society," it would have failed to capture her argument. Back in the 1950s the free market was under sustained assault by the government and intellectual classes. The battleground for freedom was being fought in economics. Thus her use of the term capitalism. 

Rand had a keen seen of drama, read her books, the display of a gold dollar sign was a statement of defiance to contemporary morality and politics. She was not a narrow materialist seeking to make a quick buck. She was an artist and intellectual seeking to express her view of the world, like all artists and intellectuals. Monetary gain was nice, but it was a secondary motive. That fact that you believe sometime is a positive value, does not mean you have to dedicate your life to pursuing it. Old Publius thinks engineering and medicine are very good things, but I've no interest in becoming an engineer or doctor. It also doesn't mean I think all doctors and engineers are upright, decent people I'd like to know as friends. To assume otherwise, as the author of the piece does above, is to read Rand and her life at an extremely superficial level.