There has developed, in recent years, an irritating and unhelpful practice of characterizing the views of those who believe that, generally speaking, efficient and sustainable practices should be preferred to inefficient and unsustainable ones and that, generally speaking, reasonably regulated markets are both equitable and efficient mechanisms for dealing with the "likely to be with us for the long haul" realities of scarcity and diverse preferences, as "Randian." One reason the practice is so irritating, of course, is that Rand's writing and thought are awful.
I'm not sure how I managed to miss it for all these years, but I read this morning Whittaker Chambers's review of Atlas Shrugged, which was published in The National Review in 1957. Wow. A taste:
Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal. In addition, the mind which finds this tone natural to it shares other characteristics of its type. 1) It consistently mistakes raw force for strength, and the rawer the force, the more reverent the posture of the mind before it. 2) It supposes itself to be the bringer of a final revelation. Therefore, resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent, or just humanly fallible. Dissent from revelation so final (because, the author would say, so reasonable) can only be willfully wicked. There are ways of dealing with such wickedness, and, in fact, right reason itself enjoins them. From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: “To a gas chamber–go!” The same inflexibly self-righteous stance results, too (in the total absence of any saving humor), in odd extravagances of inflection and gesture-that Dollar Sign, for example. At first, we try to tell ourselves that these are just lapses, that this mind has, somehow, mislaid the discriminating knack that most of us pray will warn us in time of the difference between what is effective and firm, and what is wildly grotesque and excessive. Soon we suspect something worse. We suspect that this mind finds, precisely in extravagance, some exalting merit; feels a surging release of power and passion precisely in smashing up the house. A tornado might feel this way, or Carrie Nation.
