The Gods of the Copybook Headings

April 15 2011

HT

Ayn Rand, Welfare Bum?

The usual suspects:

An interview recently surfaced that was conducted in 1998 by the Ayn Rand Institute with a social worker who says she helped Rand and her husband, Frank O’Connor, sign up for Social Security and Medicare in 1974.

Federal records obtained through a Freedom of Information act request confirm the Social Security benefits. A similar FOI request was unable to either prove or disprove the Medicare claim.

Between December 1974 and her death in March 1982, Rand collected a total of $11,002 in monthly Social Security payments. O’Connor received $2,943 between December 1974 and his death in November 1979.

(HT)

The article then details an interview given by a social worker, who assisted Rand in applying for benefits.

I'll just get right to the point (sometimes I do that). Yes, I think Rand probably did go on Medicare (the American government health care program for those 65 and older). Does that make her a hypocrite? No. As she observed in an article opposing the draft, you don't stop the juggernaut by throwing yourself in front of it. Was she right to go on Medicare and Social Security? Absolutely.

Now, gentle reader, you might be wondering how a staunch free marketer like Old Publius, should after all these years be saying it's OK to mooch off the state. No, my Randroid instincts are not kicking in. Follow.

Among the many problems with the Leviathan of the welfare state is its, well, size. It's so damn big. Once it grows past the weed stage, going around it becomes more than an inconvenience, it can be down right impossible. Even the most militant of libertarians drives on government roads. Why? Because he has to.

Could Rand have obtained private health care insurance? Unlikely. Medicare had crippled the American health insurance market by the 1970s, and it's only gotten worse since. It's difficult to sell an insurance policy for the elderly when they can get a comparable product for "free." A private element was reintroduced in the form of Medicare Part C, fifteen years after Rand's death in 1982. This lack of private insurance alternatives left Rand and her husband having to pay out of pocket. Imagine driving a car without insurance. That's the sort of risk they were taking by not enrolling in Medicare.

Was Rand mooching off the American taxpayer? Hardly. Rand's highest earnings years - when The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged were first flying off the bookstore shelves - co-incided with upper marginal tax rates in the 70% to 90% range. This is a woman who had paid her own way since stepping off the boat in 1926. She owed nothing to nobody, except a handful of people - like Cecil B DeMille and H.L. Mencken- who voluntarily helped her early on. 

Collecting government benefits- after having spent a lifetime being forced to pay into the system - is not hypocrisy for a free marketer, it's like getting a partial refund from the mugger. When the state denies an individual the means of fending for himself properly, and so is forced to rely on its largesse, the individual is still a victim.

Look at it another way: How is it immoral to take bread and water from the prison guards? Whether you deserve to be behind bars or not, you've got little choice. Rand also attended a communist run post-secondary institution (the then Petrograd State University), does that make her a hypocrite as well? Did she have a choice?

It's been pointed out that Isabel Paterson, the redoubtable Canadian-born libertarian, refused to collect Social Security as a matter of principle. I neither condemn or praise such an action. While it is loathsome to participate in such a program, getting back what has been taken from you by force is hardly evil. 

I think the difference between Paterson and Rand's approach was upbringing. The former grew up in a free country. Hardscrabble though Paterson's youth was, she could always manage to get by, either by finding work or - at very last resort - private charity. Rand grew up in an authoritarian, then totalitarian, society. Worse she was a minority - Jewish - in a deeply bigoted society. People who grow up in such torture chambers learn to compromise, in order to survive. To escape from the Soviet Union Rand also blatantly lied to communist officials, promising she would return after visiting family in America. Yet she considered honesty the highest virtue.

For many this image of Rand as shrewd survivalist is at odds with her heroes, like Howard Roark and John Galt. True, but she also created Kira Argounova, the heroine of her first novel, We the Living. It's true that Howard Roark preferred to work in a quarry, rather than see his artistic vision compromised. But Howard Roark was an early twentieth century American. Kira Argounova was a Russian trapped in, what was arguably, the most evil regime in human history. The seventy something Ayn Rand was an American in a nation turning its back on freedom. Like the lady said, you don't stop the juggernaut by throwing yourself in front of it. You stay alive and keep fighting.

 

Friday Night - Ayn Rand

Atlas Shrugged - The Movie

Hmmm.

While numerous big name producers and actors have, in the past, expressed interest in adapting Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged for the big screen, nothing has ever materialized. Shortly before his rights to the film were set to expire, however, producer John Aglialoro began filming the first in a trilogy of movies based on the epic novel. The crew wrapped up the principal photography phase of production yesterday. Yet, with a budget of only $5 million and a relatively inexperienced cast and crew, there are questions about whether they can produce a quality adaptation.

Voices For Reason

Call me clueless, and many of you have, but I had absolutely no idea the Ayn Rand Institute (actually a subsidiary, the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights) had a blog. I mean a real blog. Not some ghastly collection of ARI press releases. The bloggers are actual, you know, writers. People who can string words together in sentences that are both cogent and interesting. This is, actually, an innovation. Since Yaron Brook took over ARI in 2000, he has brought an immeasurable improvement in its quality and efficiency. Voices For Reason is only the latest example of this. For many years the promotion of Objectivism had a "your parents' basement" feel to both the people and material. To those old enough, think mimeograph. I've added this blog to the blog roll on the right. I encourage you to read this professional and interesting blog. Another sign, however small, that Objectivism is moving out of its formative period, becoming a serious mainstream intellectual force. And not a moment too soon.

The Modern Method

Robert Mayhew, an old Objectivist hand I met years ago, begins this book review, of a recent biography of Rand, with a very appropriate quote from Oscar Wilde.

Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography. . . . Formerly we used to canonise our heroes. The modern method is to vulgarise them. —Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist” (1891)

What follows is an effective dissection of Jennifer Burns' Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right. The problem, as Mayhew sees it, is not that Burns is hostile to Rand, simply that she fails to appreciate that Rand was, after all, a philosopher. Instead of attempting to analyze the system of ideas Rand proposed, Burns simply gives a series of disconnected opinions. She, so to speak, fails to see the forest for the trees.

Burns does acknowledge that “Rand and Hayek had very different understandings of what was moral” (p. 105), but she does not bother to ask and answer what those differences are, or how Rand came to her conclusions, or why Rand insisted so fervently that such questions matter. To Burns, Rand and Hayek had roughly the same political opinions—they were both pro-freedom of one sort or another—and they both used the same language. They may have differed on why they supported freedom, but surely they could have banded together to fight for common goals—if not for Rand’s unreasonable demands for consistency and proof.

She's Everywhere!

I've never seen so many mentions of Ayn Rand in the media! She's sweeping the country! Of course, the media, being leftist for the most part, is indignant. The below article from Slate is just too amusing. The hatred really leaps off the page. The cheap shots and innuendoes. Usually only a living figure, like Rush Limbaugh, gets this kind of treatment. How does a woman, who has been dead for twenty-seven years generate such vitriol? Because of her uncanny ability to strike just the right nerve. Not bad for a "third-rate philosopher" and "mediocre" novelist:

Ayn Rand is one of America's great mysteries. She was an amphetamine-addicted author of sub-Dan Brown potboilers, who in her spare time wrote lavish torrents of praise for serial killers and the Bernie Madoff-style embezzlers of her day. She opposed democracy on the grounds that "the masses"—her readers—were "lice" and "parasites" who scarcely deserved to live. Yet she remains one of the most popular writers in the United States, still selling 800,000 books a year from beyond the grave. She regularly tops any list of books that Americans say have most influenced them. Since the great crash of 2008, her writing has had another Benzedrine rush, as Rush Limbaugh hails her as a prophetess. With her assertions that government is "evil" and selfishness is "the only virtue," she is the patron saint of the tea-partiers and the death panel doomsters. So how did this little Russian bomb of pure immorality in a black wig become an American icon?

For the Objectivists in the audience, don't get all hot and bothered. This is the MSM's way of paying her a compliment.

Wednesday Night - Ayn Rand

Atomistic Individualism

And he humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna, which thou knewest not, neither did thy fathers know; that he might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord doth man live.

Deuteronomy 8: 2-3 (KJV)

I once had a professor of economic history who used to begin every year with the most famous part of that quote: "Man doth not live by bread only."  He was not by any means a religious man but he felt the quote helped remind his students, everyone of them either economics minors or majors, that economics wasn't everything, that Economic Man was not Man.  Many libertarians, who frequently become so because of their readings on economic topics, tend to forget this.  It's why political discussions with libertarians can become quite tedious.  I am not referring to most serious scholars who are of an Austrian or libertarian bent, but to those who can be called vulgar libertarians, people who agree with the idea of laissez-faire government but lack the tools to properly fight the battle. 

They frequently have a limited knowledge of history and philosophy and often say very silly - though well meaning - things that are promptly torn apart by leftists like John Ralston Saul and Linda McQuaig.  A bad defense, as Ayn Rand noted, is usually worse than no defense.  Statists have succeeded in implementing their agenda by distorting both ideas and history, as such a sound knowledge of both is needed to defend the cause of individual rights and minimal government.  Saying that poverty is caused by government intervention belies the complexity of the topic.  In a laissez-faire society people will still be sick, unfortunate or simply irrational.  All those issues must still be dealt with.  Saying that utopia is just a take cut away makes one sound fool hearty, and even at times like an outright fool.  I have seen many very bright people say some very silly things because they're specialization is in an unrelated field.  The opposition will cut you no slack.

I bring all this up in response to a post over at Burkean Canuck:

Why I don't want "Tory" to mean "Libertarian Party of Canada"

Or, "Why I don't the Conservative Party of Canada to be thorough-goingly libertarian." In yesterday's National Post, here, Brian Chen, self-described as "a teenaged, card-carrying Conservative living in Ontario," argued against "social conservatism" in the Conservative Party and "for small government and personal freedom." I disagree with Mr. Chen's first contention, and I have a different understanding of what the second means, and how it may best be achieved:

In the name of radical individualism, varieties of libertarianism -- including Ayn Rand's objectivism -- take too little account of the importance of institutions and associations. Here, even von Hayek departs from radical individualism as he recognizes the importance to society of such institutions as family and church . . . in his The Road to Serfdom, if I recall correctly. This may be an instance of "the Law of Unintended Consequences" -- ergo, until radical individualism has done its work and diminished institutions and associations, we may not be aware of just how important they are to things like, oh, freedom. Burke wrote of associations as "little platoons," the British associationists of the turn of the 19th to the 20th century saw their importance, and over the last twenty-five years or so there has been a revival of interest in the importance of "intermediating institutions" between the state and the individual. 

He is largely correct on this point, though he misrepresents Rand's thoughts (Rand, not incidentally, was highly critical of libertarians because of their refusal to ground their defense of freedom in anything but technical and non-essential arguments).  Many, but by no means all, libertarians do fail to take into account "intermediating institutions."  Partly, I suspect, this comes from an over emphasis on economics in much of libertarian analysis, and partly because of an ignorance of the history of methods of social provision prior to the development of the welfare state.  They are not alone in this.  A surprising number of educated, and generally honest and well meaning, people accept with little dissent the statist assertion that if not for government the poor would starve, most of the sick would die for lack of medicine and that other untold horrors would visit the land. 

The too common conservative, libertarian and occasionally objectivist reply is; "Well, tough."  Some vague mention of private charity or insurance is on occasion offered but it often sounds more like a desperate fig leaf than a well thought out alternative.  The skeptical come away believing even more that we are faced with either big government or mass misery.  Call it the "King or Chaos" defence.  During the 1935 General Election Mackenzie King, then in one of his uncharacteristic periods in opposition, declared that Canadians could either continue with the Depression wrought, or prolonged, by the governing Conservatives or they could accept him as Prime Minister, yet again.  The alternative, however, isn't between big government (King) and mass suffering (Chaos), it's between the suffering caused by big government and the genuine and effective compassion resulting from private and voluntary action.

Rand herself was, if you read her journal writings and letters, perfectly cognizant of intermediating institutions, and she probably assumed so was everyone else.  She was, after all, born in 1905 and wrote her majors works from the 1940s through to the 1960s.  There were still many alive then who remembered what American society was like before the New Deal.  The intellectual battle of the time was over the future.  Capitalism was blamed for the Great Depression and for the mass poverty that inside.  The reason for this intellectual consensus lay less in the economic theories of Keynes and his allies, which were anyway riven through with theoretical gaps and omissions, but in the widespread philosophical assumption that individualism was evil. 

Individualism was equated, rather logically, with selfishness.  Selfishness was regarded as an evil, as was the creation of wealth.  That a moral evil might lead to economic disaster and harm matched the intellectual assumptions of the 19th and 20th centuries far more neatly than Smith's counter-intuitive declaration that selfishness is not harmful if properly understood and applied.  That Smith did not, in Rand's sense, properly understand either the self or selfishness does not undercut this point.  The sin was greed, the punishment poverty and economic collapse.  Of course some are poor, declared the Progressives and the New Dealers, is that not to be expected when we allow such "selfish" monsters as Rockefeller, Carnegie and Morgan to run our economy?  Of course we suffer from economic crises, untamed individualism creates economic anarchy, only planning and intervention can lead to stability.

Rand sought to challenge the philosophical assumptions behind statism rather than its technical failings.  A small army of economists was doing exactly that from the 1950s onward.  Any honest historian could look at the past and see how capitalism had actually worked.  Few were challenging the basic assumptions of the age, and those who were, such as William F. Buckley, she believed were doing so in a deeply flawed and ultimately harmful way.

Burkean Canuck continues:

Libertarians favour not just a limited state, but a minimalist state

As Dooyeweerd presents it, however, the role of government and the State is to pursue "public justice" with the over-riding objective of achieving human flourishing. That means that while government -- the State -- has no business being in business, er, profit-making enterprises, it does have a role in creating a level playing field for profit-making enterprise countering mercantilism and monopolism, and laying the ground rules for employer-employee relations, for example;

The pursuit of public justice is precisely what the Progressives and the New Dealers were fighting for too.  It was, however, their very flawed conception of both that lead them to argued for big government.  One of the key principles behind the argument for laissez-faire is that public justice cannot be accomplished if the state exceeds its proper bounds.  Public justice and laissez-faire are not exclusionary but corollary ideas here.  One may argue as to what the proper role of government is, though that requires a deeper discussion of the ideas of both public and justice, but to place justice ahead of freedom is to create a needless and dangerous conflict.  John Ralston Saul talks a lot about public justice too, so did Tommy Douglas.

Burkean Canuck continues:

Libertarianism wants a public square characterized by thoroughgoing secularism and the autonomous individual.

Some libertarians, and again I believe that Burkean is confusing vulgar libertarians with the more scholarly variety, believe that autonomous means atomistic.  They do seem to believe that every man is an island, to twist Donne's wordings.  There is however an important concept that must always be kept in mind when discussing individualism and laissez-faire; individual sovereignty.  The idea that an individual may be part of a society, and join in its civil institutions, yet always have the right of withdrawal.  Morally and legally a man maybe an island, if he chooses.  That it generally is not in his interests to do so is a separate issue.  Indeed an often very highly active participation might very well be within his or her interests and often is. 

As for secularism; there is a secularism that insists on the separation of church and state and that religious dogma, or ideological dogma, may not interfere in the freedom of public debate in the public square.  That many now extend that, or more accurately contradict, that principle to exclude those of faith is a plain injustice.  The reasons have less to do with secularism, extreme or not, as secularism did not mean in the 18th or 19th centuries that religion was to be banished from serious discourse.  Certainly many of those who led the fight for the separation of church and state were highly critical of either organized religion or faith itself.  Thomas Jefferson comes to mind in the former sense.  But few intended to bar the participation of Christians, Muslims, Jews or members of any other religion.  They wanted the freedom of debate previously denied to them to be turned into an established social principle. 

The type of secularism that Burkean decries is really statism attempting to squelch public debate.  Statists, and their intellectual courtiers, do not like competition.  Religion has always been a powerful competitor for intellectual influence over society.  Just as those who called for smaller, limited or minimal government were banished from serious intellectual debate a half century ago now the same attempt is being made against the religious.  The point of allowing freedom of debate is not whether religion is a positive or a negative thing, or even whether the religious are deluded in thinking that some type of supreme being presides over the destiny of men, but the freedom itself. 

The religious will not change their convictions through suppression and contempt, the history of Christianity alone demonstrates that clearly enough.  Suppressing such debate either through formal censorship, which we do not have in Canada - though the various "Hate Crime" laws are a disturbing trend in this regard - or through the more common avenue of snide disregard, accomplishes nothing.  These ideas need to be debated as freely as possible.  To do otherwise is to drive such ideas underground and have them pop up in unexpected places, often with unpleasant results.  When people believe they are not being heard in the public square they choose other avenues of expression.  This may seem a fantastic comment in a society like Canada but peaceful societies remain peaceful because they allow for free public debate.  Even if violence is not the end point apathy and discontent are enough of a danger to a free society to warrant an open forum.

On a side note as regards libertarian contempt for religion I again refer to the influence of economic analysis as one of the causes.  Religion cannot be fit into a Cobb-Douglas function.  Another reason for this dismissal of religion out of hand is that we live in many ways in a post-religious society - indeed, in a post-philosophic society too.  Many young libertarians have little direct experience with religion except through popular culture, whose rendition is often crude and overly simplistic, as well as being hostile.  That the religious are nothing but a collection of foaming fanatics demanding a return to the 8th century is a caricature many cannot get passed.  Particularly those who have been exposed to nothing else.  Those libertarians who have had personal contact with religion are often in rebellion against it.  Why is a another question.  It is difficult to ask for context from those who are in full fight against what they view as a clear evil.

I am not a religious person by any stretch.  Some of my "secular" friends criticize me for not attacking religion with greater vigor.  My answer to them is that I have more of an issue with faith than with religion.  Faith, to me, is an abdication of reason.  It is the demand that I place a wish above an understanding.  This may seem too stark a phrasing for some.  Those who follow in the footsteps of Thomas Aquinas will counter that reason and faith are not - as public justice and laissez-faire are not - exclusionary but corollary.  I do not agree with this.  I believe they are by necessity exclusionary. 

Religion, and the religious, are, however, an almost completely separate topic.  All that the religious share as a group is an acceptance of faith and some organized creed derived from it.  It is a concept that subsumes the fanatic, the thoughtful, the deluded and a whole range of opinions and beliefs.  The religious are too heterogeneous a group to either damn or praise as a group.  It should not have to be reiterated that the "religious" include figures such as Gladstone, Wilberforce, Reagan and Thatcher, to mention only some of the devout Christians who have furthered the cause of freedom.  That faith made their arguments less strong than they might have been, and need to be if we are to move forward, does not discount their accomplishments or reduce the debt we owe to them.

A Strange & Remarkable Woman

Perhaps this post should be titled "William F. Buckley Says Something Sort of Nice About Ayn Rand."  Buckley, in the early days of the National Review, published a vicious and dishonest review of Ayn Rand's opus Atlas Shrugged by the reformed communist Whittaker Chambers.  We have not forgotten and there is no reason to forgive.  The reason I suspect for the hatchet job on Atlas almost a half century ago was that Rand so thoroughly rejected religion; which of course Buckley and Chambers did not.  Nevertheless WFB can write, and this review of Stephen Cox's new bio on Isabel Paterson, The Woman and the Dynamo, deserves the attention of any Paterson fans in the audience.  That said, WFB misses the point of The God of the Machine, Paterson's masterwork, and the only of her ten books and novels to be remembered today. 

Yet, looking back, it was as if a couple of enterprising buglers had risen in the libraries and sounded trumpets to demobilize the great statist aggregations: Ayn Rand and Rose Lane and Isabel Paterson and Albert Jay Nock and Friedrich Hayek warning against the burgeoning public sector. But nobody paid them much heed. In Britain, socialism was formally affirmed. In the U.S., Americans egged on the New Deal at home, and the colleges' economics departments settled down as branches of Lord Keynes.

Mr. Cox's Woman was born in 1886, and died in 1961. Isabel Paterson was born in Canada and raised in rural Michigan in extreme poverty. She worked as a waitress, a dishwasher, a bookkeeper, and was finally spotted as having an acute verbal intelligence, which discovery led to a full-time editorial life. She married and quickly divorced, all but obliterating the memory of her husband, of whom she never spoke. She published nine relatively unnoticed novels and took on her famous book column.

My Thirty Years With Ayn Rand

To celebrate Ayn Rand's Centenary the institute that bears her name is hosting a new site dedicated to the philosopher's works and life.  Included is this speech by Leonard Peikoff recounting his experiences with Rand.  What makes this lecture truly worth while is the emphasis Peikoff places on Rand's methods of thought rather than interesting anecdotes.

Eulogy for Ayn Rand

This is an excerpt from Peter Schwartz's 1982 eulogy for Ayn Rand, published in the Intellectual Activist.  Hat Tip TIA:

Ayn Rand taught the world how to value human life. She was man's great idealizer and defender. In her novels, in defiance of the cynics, she portrayed her heroes as figures to be looked up to and emulated. In her philosophy, in opposition to the skeptics, she defined man as a rational being, whose power of reason left no part of the universe unknowable and no goal unattainable. In her cultural/political writings, she identified the meaning of the seemingly innocuous slogans and projects and policies that posed deadly intellectual threats. Someone who knew and admired her commented sadly, upon her death: "The world is unprotected, now."

Ayn Rand believed that happiness should be viewed as man's normal state of mind. She taught people to *expect* happiness and not to settle for less--to regard frustration and misery as the exception, as unnecessary--to recognize a "benevolent universe" where success is achievable if only men use their minds. She wanted man to be the very best he could be, and she gave us the knowledge of how to do so.

Her radical theory of morality established man's happiness as the central purpose of his life. But achieving it, she said, comes not from surrendering to some mindless hedonism or from obedience to some supernatural authority--but from the commitment to live by rational values. She taught that living an honest, productive, *selfish* life entails greater effort and greater integrity--and greater reward--than adopting the life of a Mother Theresa. Ayn Rand glorified man. She believed that life was precious, too precious to be thrown away in the form of self-sacrifice. She showed that virtue consists in productivity, not renunciation, and in pride, not selfless humility. Ayn Rand taught the world that it is the most moral of acts to achieve happiness.

In *Atlas Shrugged* her theme is that the world rests on the shoulders of the men of productive ability, the men of the mind. But, if it is they who hold up the world, it is Ayn Rand who upholds the upholders. It is *her* shoulders upon which they themselves ultimately rest. It is she who identified their importance, who gave them a philosophy and a moral sanction, and who was--is--their only defender. Ayn Rand is the "Atlas" to whom all men are indebted.

Ayn Rand Links

As part of our celebration of Ayn Rand we would like to offer this collection of links from around the web highlighting Rand's ideas and accomplishments.

From the Ayn Rand Institute:

The Appeal of Ayn Rand

By: Onkar Ghate

It remains, however, all too common for a young person to be told that his interest in Ayn Rand is a stage he will soon grow out of. "It's fine to believe in that now," the refrain goes, "but wait until you're older. You'll discover that life is not like that."

But when one actually considers the essence of what Rand teaches, the accusation that her philosophy is childish over-simplification stands as condemnation not of her ideas but of the adult world from which the accusation stems.

The key to Rand's popularity is that she appeals to the idealism of youth. She wrote in 1969: "There is a fundamental conviction which some people never acquire, some hold only in their youth, and a few hold to the end of their days--the conviction that ideas matter." The nature of this conviction? "That ideas matter means that knowledge matters, that truth matters, that one's mind matters. And the radiance of that certainty, in the process of growing up, is the best aspect of youth."

Ayn Rand: A Legacy of Freedom and Reason

By Michael S. Berliner

Born 100 years ago in Holy Mother Russia and educated under the Soviets, Ayn Rand became the quintessential American writer and philosopher, upholding the supreme value of the individual’s life on earth. She herself led a "rags to riches" life, wrote best-selling novels that championed individualism, and developed a philosophy of reason that validates the American spirit of achievement and independence.

The story of Ayn Rand's life is, in the words of the Oscar-nominated documentary Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life: "a life more compelling than fiction." Born February 2, 1905, she wrote her first fiction at age 8, when she also showed signs of being an intellectual crusader, vowing to refute a newspaper article claiming that school was the sole source of a child's ideals. A year later she decided to become a writer: inspired by the hero of a children's story, who embodied "intelligence directed to a practical purpose," she had a "blinding picture" of people--not as they are but as they could be.

[While the following article misrepresents Rand's ideas on several points it does show the impact of her ideas on current culture. - Publius]

Rereading 'Atlas' on Ayn Rand's 100th

By: Julia Keller

There it sits, a thick rectangle whose soft sides -- it's made of paper, after all, ordinary paper -- belie the harsh astringency within.

You sense the need to keep an eye on it. You can't just leave it there on a corner of your desktop as if it were an ordinary book, letting it cool its heels amid the messy papers and dried-up pens and the dark-chocolate wafer of your laptop.

No telling what it might do, this paperback copy of "Atlas Shrugged" (1957) by Ayn Rand, all 1,069 pages of it. No telling what impact it might have on the desk's detritus or the rest of the room.

It's like a radiation leak: You can't see the danger, but you know it's there.

Rand, of course, would adore the notion that the novel she began writing six decades ago, right after she'd wrapped up "The Fountainhead" (1943), still is regarded as perilous and possibly even lethal -- lethal, that is, to complacency and lazy thinking and easy goals.

But here's the funny thing: Re-reading Rand as an adult in 2005 is not what you thought it would be. It's not a "Oh, wow, what a chump I was!" feeling. In fact, the ideas from "Atlas Shrugged" you thought you had outgrown don't seem all that outlandish, after all. The themes you abandoned as hopelessly naive and almost comically operatic -- all those fist-shaking tirades about human destiny, all those "Greed is good!" screeds that predate Oliver Stone's "Wall Street" by three decades -- somehow start making a bit of sense again, in a world upended by religious fanaticism and a nation crippled by soaring government deficits.

Flaws and all, "Atlas Shrugged" still is a powerful novel, a sweeping epic that either pulls you into its sphere or scares the bejesus out of you, or maybe both.