How prophetic was Ayn Rand?

Can capitalism save the world? According to Ayn Rand, it could have – and still can.

Economic doom would come through the failure to unleash all people to pursue their economic desires without restraint

In a year of financial collapse in the West and the uprising of individuality and social revolt in the Arab world, writer Ayn Rand is once again riding high as the Queen of Capitalism.

A new documentary aired last week – Ayn Rand and the Prophecy of Atlas Shrugged – hails Ms Rand as a kind of prophet, a foreteller of the failure of an over-stepping government bent on exploiting the creators of wealth, while all the while squashing human initiative.

At least, says Vision writer Dan Cloer, who is interviewed in the documentary, that is the premise Ms Rand used as a basis for her influential 1957 work.

A new special report from Vision, Capitalism’s House of Cards, offers a deeper look at Ms Rand’s work as well as that of other seminal figures who contributed to the foundation of the capitalist idea.

Economic doom, argued Ms Rand, would come through the failure to unleash all people to pursue their economic desires without restraint. A skewed system of redistribution of wealth – from the haves to the have-nots – was the bane of human progress. To be embedded in pure laissez-faire capitalism, to operate selfishly in one’s own best interest, was Ms Rand’s utopia.

But as Ms Rand also noted throughout her writing, there was always a need to “check your premises”.

Life and times of a so-called prophet

• Ayn Rand was born in St Petersburg, Russia, on February 2, 1905.

• At age six she taught herself to read and two years later discovered her first fictional hero in a French magazine for children, thus capturing the heroic vision which sustained her throughout her life.

• At the age of nine, she decided to make fiction writing her career. Thoroughly opposed to the mysticism and collectivism of Russian culture, she thought of herself as a European writer, especially after encountering Victor Hugo, the writer she most admired.

• During her high school years, she was eyewitness to both the Kerensky Revolution, which she supported, and – in 1917– the Bolshevik Revolution, which she denounced from the outset. In order to escape the fighting, her family went to the Crimea, where she finished high school.

• When her family returned from the Crimea, she entered the University of Petrograd to study philosophy and history. Graduating in 1924, she experienced the disintegration of free inquiry and the takeover of the university by communist thugs.

• Every book by Ayn Rand published in her lifetime is still in print, and hundreds of thousands of copies are sold each year, so far totalling more than 25 million. Several new volumes have been published posthumously. Her vision of man and her philosophy for living on earth have changed the lives of thousands of readers and launched a philosophic movement with a growing impact on American culture.