16 September 2009

Objectivist Childhood

.....Around the age of five, Alissa Rosenbaum's (aka Ayn Rand's) mother instructed her to put away some of her toys for a year. She offered up her favorite possessions, thinking of the joy that she would feel when she got them back after a long wait. When the year had passed, she asked her mother for the toys, only to be told she had given them away to an orphanage. Heller remarks that "this may have been Rand's first encounter with injustice masquerading as what she would later acidly call ‘altruism.’ " (The anti-government activist Grover Norquist has told a similar story from childhood, in which his father would steal bites of his ice cream cone, labelling each bite "sales tax" or "income tax." The psychological link between a certain form of childhood deprivation and extreme libertarianism awaits serious study.)

From an interesting article here on Randites and their influence on the GOP.

1 comment:

Norm said...

Ouch! Well done, Mr Chait. I especially liked the closing lines, having had similar thoughts while watching the Tea Baggers on TV.