The Fall 2004 issue of Modern Age includes an essay on Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged written by Thomas Bertonneau. Stay tuned to the ISI Forum for a discussion on the article and the merits of Rand's work.

Below is a link to Thomas F. Bertonneau's article (as a PDF) from the Fall 2004 issue of Modern Age, "Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged: From Romantic Fallacy to Holocaustic Imagination."

http://forum.isi.org/files/bertonneau.pdf

I have become disenchanted with ISI over the years and can see why ISI would attack Ayn Rand. She and many others, especially Ludwig Von Mises, has exploded the economic fallacy of third way economics. ISI, and its trad/neo con catholic supporters continue to uphold this medieval nostrum in the face of reality. This months Intercollegiate Review resurrects an old essay from Ralph Aneil on Wilhelm Ropke, showed zero intellectual growth by ISI over the last few decades. The fact that ISI sells Ropke's books and heralds him as some kind of economic genius truly shows a dumbing down of conservative thought.

the recent article form the president of FEE once again drives a stake through this socialist incrementalist economic fallacy. The German Economic Miracle and the "Social Market Economy"
By Richard Ebeling http://www.fee.org/publications/the-freeman/article.asp?aid=8270


Whether Ropke,. Belloc or Chesterton this medievalist musings and crying over the destruction of the old order were a infantile preoccupation of grown men over their childhood memories lived in wondrous fantasies where the good little peasants, the guild and the merchants all served the wise and noble king and the church. Such nostrums of the old order if implemented would rocket us all back to the static and stultifying suppression of the ancient regime.

Anything that threatens the monarchic illusions of this brand of neo-connism must be attacked and quickly dealt with. I am nto a Randian, but I will defend what she says against this most horrific of "conservative" beliefs.

Your response is filled with more vitriol than substance, which is fairly typical, I find, of "objectivists," deriving their name from a philosophy so puerile and lacking in influence that they had to market it in a newsletter.

But, be that as it may, I suppose that you think Hayek was an "anti-socialist." Surprise, surprise! Hans Hermann Hoppe shows that he supported government largess for of all things "public amusements" and imbalances in private investment. Your beloved Rothbard was a flat-out reactionary in the moral sense. All we're left with is the plastique ubermenschen of Rand's sophomoric mock-Teutonic ego vehicle, where the bad guys ("looters, no less") all have handlebar mustaches, and monopolistic collusion -well hey, everybody's doing it! It not a wonder that Rand's largest audience was between 16 and 25. Thereafter interest in Rand fades in direct proportion to one's grasp on the way the world, and mens' minds, actually work.

The trouble with anarcho-capitalists is that they have great difficulty showing where anarcho-capitalism has ever worked, or why it should work. They also have trouble with the notion that their "value free" neo-liberal Austrian orthodoxy HAS its own implicit values, despite what they would like to pretend, and that those values are so destructive of social cohesion that only an insane person, or a child, would espouse them. They cannot even see that their capitalism depends on extra-economic values that are impossible under the schema of their value-free economics.

Ah, I know where anarcho-capitalism can succeed, in a wertfreiheit petree dish where the only value is "price." Talk about longing for childhood, how about the pubescent fantasy of a world where the only value ever under consideration is the $, and where there is no such thing as "society," that is, group interests don't exist. No one's going to tell YOU what to do, eh? What tyranny! Imagine the infamy of LAWS other than property laws. That's well and good until your own cherished twitches of conscience are under threat, and then it's bombs away.

Value free ain't. It has a very, very high price.