Ayn Rand is so great she can put her foot in her mouth 30 years after she’s dead!

There’s an old ARI Q&A that’s been making the rounds lately. I last read about it this morning from Robb Allen. And everybody seems to get as far as reading “But of course, anarchists are collectivists,” and then their heads explode. Being an anarchist, I’ll admit the first time I read it I wanted to resurrect Ayn Rand because only the living can be properly bitch-slapped.

Then I got to thinking about the popular image of anarchists in the first part of the 20th, and even the utopian fantasies of self-labeled anarchists themselves during that period. Judging from their own statements, most anarchists during the period when AR came of age were, in fact, socialists. A socialist is a collectivist by definition. I suppose they can be forgiven for that, given that at the time socialism had never been given a full-scale try. Nobody has that excuse any more, which is why I’m so perplexed by so-called anarcho-socialists.

AR never came across as a person willing to re-examine previous misconceptions, so I guess I see where she was coming from with that remark. Doesn’t make her right.

Personally I’m more amused by her accusation that libertarians plagiarized all her best ideas. She never seemed to grasp the difference between plagiarism and homage, and really did seem to have convinced herself that every beautiful thing she wrote was completely and brilliantly original. And she wasn’t right about that, either.