Books - Why Ayn Rand’s economic arguments make sense—and why they’re ignored

To the Randians of All Parties

Brian Dimitrovic

If the Randians either limited themselves to economics or beefed up their philosophical and historical knowledge, they would do a lot more to advance the free-market cause.

Free Market Revolution: How Ayn Rand’s Ideas Can End Big Government, by Yaron Brook and Don Watkins (Palgrave Macmillan, 272 pp., $27)

One of the many unfortunate things about the Great Recession and the weak recovery since is that the free-market economy has taken so much of the blame. 

Here was the central narrative as the panic hit four years ago: “predatory lenders,” “complex derivatives,” and even tax cuts (all of which either operated beyond government oversight or scooted government out of the way) stoked the housing bubble and poisoned the economy, bringing the terrible bust. 

Then, as the recession settled in, critics found examples of deregulation over the past generation—one favorite was Senator Phil Gramm’s 1999–2000 legislation permitting larger financial enterprises and options trading—and argued that they, too, played a role in bringing the economy to the brink. A sense has unsurprisingly formed among many Americans that the driving force of the private economy is greed. Leftists, liberals, and Democrats assert this as an obvious truth. 

Then they impute to their conservative and Republican rivals the crude justification for greed offered up in the 1987 movie Wall Street: “Greed is good.” 

For their part, supporters of the free market too often concede that the Wall Street line does, in fact, represent their position.

So it’s cause for optimism that Ayn Rand’s books have flown off the shelves since 2008 and now sell a half a million copies a year, as Yaron Brook and Don Watkins tell us in Free Market Revolution. 

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