#7. Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand despised libertarians, and yet she has become an icon for them because of her unquestioned defense of free market capitalism. She was a supporter of rational and ethical egoism, and had harsh words for altruism. She was a laissez-faire capitalist, and opposed collectivism and anarchism. Rand saw libertarianism as a subset of anarchism, which she thought was naive and subjective.
Rand had harsh words for libertarians, but they still love her and see her as one of their own, despite the following statement:
“Capitalism is the one system that requires absolute objective law, yet they want to combine capitalism and anarchism. That is worse than anything the New Left has proposed. It’s a mockery of philosophy and ideology. They sling slogans and try to ride on two bandwagons. They want to be hippies, but don’t want to preach collectivism, because those jobs are already taken. But anarchism is a logical outgrowth of the anti-intellectual side of collectivism. I could deal with a Marxist with a greater chance of reaching some kind of understanding, and with much greater respect. The anarchist is the scum of the intellectual world of the left, which has given them up. So the right picks up another leftist discard. That’s the Libertarian movement.”
