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The odd couple: Ayn Rand and Karl Marx |
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This opinion piece was published in the Daily Herald on December 1, 2009.  Several of our Utah County GOP legislators claim to be supporters of a totally unregulated free market with only the barest minimal government. This stand is usually labeled libertarianism. Much of the intellectual base of this ideology comes from the writings of Ayn Rand, whom the Provo Daily Herald editors recently praised, saying that they are useful for "understanding the underlying political tectonics of 2009."
Actually, Ayn Rand's ideas are as dangerous as those on which Communism is based, but Rand's ideology of no-holds-barred capitalism and minimal government has attracted many American followers, including former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. Since the recession of 2007, however, Greenspan has admitted that the market was much less able do the right thing than Rand had predicted, and his confidence in the Mother of Libertarianism has been badly shaken. But many others still remain true and parrot the "less government, more market" slogans as though they were a panacea for our time.
Ayn Rand's popularity in church-going America and Mormon Utah is odd. Like her philosophical rival Karl Marx, Rand hated and ridiculed religion. She taught a fiercely anti-Christian philosophy of "Rational Egoism" and wrote a book entitled The Virtue of Selfishness.
Perhaps her initial success was partly due to lucky timing. She became well known in the 1950s, during the depths of the Cold War, when Americans were desperately seeking any philosophical answer to Communism. Having grown up in Soviet Russia, Rand knew how badly things go under that variant of Marxism, and she attacked it with passionate zeal.
Rand and Marx were both talented critics: Marx had expertly pointed out the failures of the dominant system of his age—predatory capitalism/imperialism in 19th Century Britain. But both were worse than bad at prescribing remedies for their respective economic systems.
Their predictions and prescriptions were polar opposites, but equally flawed: Marx hated the power of money, while Rand worshipped it. Marx predicted the collapse of capitalism because of its excesses and a revolt of the working class. Rand predicted the collapse of socialism/communism because of its stifling bureaucracy and a revolt of the thinking entrepreneurial class. Marx failed to see that capitalism would be saved by legislation against monopolies and promoting workers' rights. Rand failed to see that Social Security and reasonable economic regulation would preserve equality of opportunity both for talented poor families and for the thinking business class that she so ardently worshipped. Marx held a fatefully naive faith in government to solve all problems of humanity, while Rand had a no less dangerous belief that unchained capitalism could solve all those same world problems by itself.
So how "useful" are the writings of Rand or Marx for understanding our politics today? Not very. Our American system involves a complex and constantly shifting dynamic tension between democratic government and the free market. Finding the best balance between them is central to every election in every state and requires the best thinking of leaders and voters. The answers are seldom easy.
On the proper balance between government and the market, both Marx's communism and Rand's libertarianism are disastrously wrong--two sides of the same bad penny.
Jarvis has worked extensively in Russia under communism and later under Yeltsin's 'anything-goes' capitalism. He saw plenty of suffering under both systems.
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