If anyone on this thread is foaming at the mouth and spittle-spraying--and is establishing himself as just bloody uninformed--it's Goofus. If someone points out something he posted that reveals his abysmal ignorance, he becomes especially vitriolic and insulting.

That's a major tip-off.

Ayn Rand's writings have formed the philosophical base of the Republican and general Right-Wing position, and the particularly rabid Tea Party bunch. Rand's particular heroes are modeled after HER real-life heroes:   the robber barons, industrialists and financiers, who ruled the roost in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century.

Among other things, she wrote a tract on rescinding child labor. And I found it particularly interesting when Newt Gingrich suggested cutting to cost of education by firing school janitors and custodians (isn't that going to add to the unemployment problem?) and assigning students to do the janitorial work!

One of Ayn Rand's more telling quotes is when she says, "How much money a man possesses is a barometer of his virtue."

Well, I might agree with that in reverse, considering what some of the wealthy have done to attain their wealth!

Wikipedia has quite a good article on Ayn Rand.

Don Firth

P. S.   I am VERY familiar with Ayn Rand and her works. I was a big fan of The Fountainhead, especially when I was getting grief in the U. of W. School of Music because I was interested in folk music (Howard Rourk's hassles with the architecture school he was attending early in the book), and it encouraged me to ignore the jibes and stick to my goals. And I got caught up in other people's enthusiasm for her view of the world in Atlas Shrugged, and, despite some growing misgivings, I took the Nathaniel Brandon lecture series on "The Basic Principles of Objectivism." And I read Rand's non-fiction as well. So I am very conversant with her work and her views.

It was in her Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal that I grew up. Her vitriolic assaults on any attempts to regulate the excesses of the corporations—and how bloody wrong her view of the world was caused me to re-evaluate everything of hers that I had read.

Among other things, after telling her disciples to question everything and use their own judgment, whenever one of them questioned anything SHE said, she turned into a screaming shrew!