07.03.12
The poor man’s John Galt on July 4
This year Ted Nugent has been using his “we’re the producers” and the rest of you are parasites shtick about twice a month.
In his July 4 column, he lays it on thick:
In a sea of soulless, sheeplike dependency, it’s easy to spot the fiercely independent people who continue to declare our independence. We are the producers, the people who make the country work …
Fiercely independent Americans are shocked and saddened by how far our beloved country has slid into socialism.
Defiance is in the DNA of fiercely independent Americans. We defy the notion that the wealth we create through our hard work, sweat and risk can or should be spread around for others. We find that concept to be abhorrent – anti-freedom and anti-American.
July 4, like most big American holidays, morphed into something utterly phony decades ago. Eat hot dogs and hamburgers, watch the fireworks, have a big party for the sake of a party. That’s it.
However, I don’t believe I’ve ever read anything anywhere linking the philosophy of Ayn Rand to the day commemorating the adoption of the Declaration of Independence in 1776.
In Pity the Billionaire, Thomas Frank writes that by all accounts, Ayn Rand’s rep should have been permanently toasted after 2008. Perhaps her most famous fan, Fed chief Alan Greenspan, had been publicly shamed, forced to admit he’d never seen the economic collapse coming.
Writes Frank:
When the economic collapse disgraced certain Ayn Rand acolytes, the novelist’s [biographer Jennifer Burns] told Politico in 2009: “Wow, Ayn Rand. Dead and buried forever. But she’s come roaring right back.”
Frank informs that Objectivism — the catch-all name for Rand’s philosophy of pure selfishness as the pinnacle of rationality — was essentially whatever she said it was.
He does this humorously.
“When [Rand and her cohorts] weren’t banishing one another from the inner circle … the novelist and her followers were determining, by dint of pure deductive reasoning, that cigarette smoking was life affirming … ” reads the book in one tongue-in-cheek takedown.