Let him with something have everything, and him with nothing have less than nothing. If you love this logic, then you would really like this book, which isn't so much philosophy as agenda, manifesto, something that tells you what to believe, what to think, what to feel, and how to react.

I will forever regret the time I wasted on this. I have never read something so dedicated to the use of amorphous language to conflate ideas and reality alike. To save you some time.... Greed is good; privatize everything; misinformation is the reason the public is unaware that the true victims are businessmen; if you use 'freedom' and 'free' enough your half-baked ideas on reality will work themselves out; and "me-me-me-mine-mine-mine." Just when you think she is about to present some redeeming language on i.e. slavery, the draft or the state of education her utterly disappointing rationale makes you wonder why you even bothered.
This is a perfect example of writing in an echo chamber or a book of words that mean nothing. This work leaves you with more questions than answers and not in a good way. Had I known this was the lens through which she wrote her books I would have never touched any of them.
If you see this book RUN, don't walk. Even if you pick up this tragedy of a book to see how the "other side" see things, you have been forewarned that only mental anguish and disappointment will find you.

Well...Ms. Rand certainly pulls no punches, and can be quite caustic at times, but she does produce some gems of thought. I learned quite a bit in this book, and found Rand's positioning of capitalism as a moral framework (vs. just an economic model) quite interesting.

Some quotes I'd like to remember:

On the wealth gap between nations: If concern for human poverty and suffering were one’s primary motive, one would seek to discover their cause. One would not fail to ask: Why did some nations develop, while others did not? Why have some nations achieved material abundance, while others have remained stagnant in subhuman misery? History and, specifically, the unprecedented prosperity-explosion of the nineteenth century, would give an immediate answer: capitalism is the only system that enables men to produce abundance—and the key to capitalism is individual
freedom.

On the US Constitution: There are two potential violators of man’s rights: the criminals and the government. The great achievement of the United States was to draw a distinction between these two—by forbidding to the second the legalized version of the activities of the first.

On monopolies: Every coercive monopoly that exists or has ever existed—in the United States, in Europe, or anywhere else in the world—was created and made possible only by an act of government: by special franchises, licenses, subsidies, by legislative actions which granted special privileges (not obtainable on a free market) to a man or a group of men, and forbade all others to enter that particular field. A coercive monopoly is not the result of laissez-faire; it can result only from the abrogation of laissez-faire and from the introduction of the opposite principle—the principle of statism.

On fascism vs. communism: It is too obvious, too easily demonstrable that fascism and communism are not two opposites, but two rival gangs fighting over the same territory—that both are variants of statism, based on the collectivist principle that man is the rightless slave of the state—that both are socialistic, in theory, in practice, and in the explicit statements of their leaders—that under both systems, the poor are enslaved and the rich are expropriated in favor of a ruling clique—that fascism is not the product of the political “right,” but of the “left”—that the basic issue is not “rich versus poor,” but man versus the state, or: individual rights versus totalitarian government—which means: capitalism versus socialism.

On the modern "mixed economy" of capitalism and statism: A mixed economy is rule by pressure groups. It is an amoral, institutionalized civil war of special interests and lobbies, all fighting to seize a momentary control of the legislative machinery, to extort some special privilege at one another’s expense by an act of government—i.e., by force. In the absence of individual rights, in the absence of any moral or legal principles, a mixed economy’s only hope to preserve its precarious semblance of order, to restrain the savage, desperately rapacious groups it itself has created, and to prevent the legalized plunder from running over into plain, unlegalized looting of all by all—is compromise; compromise on everything and in every realm—material, spiritual, intellectual—so that no group would step over the line by demanding too much and topple the whole rotted structure.

Great collection of essays that covers a broad range of topics--economics, sociology, psychology, business ethics, politics, and modern philosophy. If you've never read Ayn Rand before this is a good starting point. Worth reading even if you don't completely agree with Rand's take on things. Seems like nobody writes quite like this anymore and it's a nice change of pace from today's vapid internet musings.

It's an economic perspective that succeeds her virtue of selfishness. It's Ayn Rand. Love her strong writing style, which although at times are brutal, it's still pretty effective in my opinion. I still prefer her virtue of selfishness over this, but still really enjoyed this collection of her essays along with Branden and even Greenspan's essays. Many of the old essays about the capitalism and the Fed are surprisingly still very relevant today. Although the 2008 crash may led many people to have more ambivalent attitude towards capitalism, there are many gems illustrating the beauty of capitalism.

Even if you don't like Ayn Rand, I prefer one to start with the two essays on the Appendix section as a taste of her rich idea and writing style.The two essays on the role of the government and individual are also included in her Virtue of Selfishness.

Although at times, I view Rand's idea as too extreme, her writing and logic really makes her work worth a read.

The writing in these are fine. It isn't all Ayn Rand, but there is that general academic tone to it.

I'll be upfront and say that I read this in a sort of "know my enemy" kind of quest. I definitely understand a bit more about libritariansm (or really just the difference between it and anarchism). Ayn Rand references Atlas Shrugged a lot, which is her landmark work but also would be repetitive if you read it. There's a wide variety of topics in here, from public schooling to critiques against modern conservatives to the railroad industry, and the viewpoints aren't exactly consistent.

I will say, I enjoyed some of the political commentary even if I'd plan on using it to support an ultimately different end.

Best book on politics ever! Yaron Brook is more entertaining on youtube. De regulate and let economy be endless booom

yes great depression caused by gov

yes 2008 as well

yes clinton ruined new free market the net in 6 years

yes obama is worst of all time, even worse than FDR who caused great depression with feds help

this book is a semi-coherent amalgamation of articles from Ayn Rand, Alan Greenspan, and other Objectivist thinkers. The topics are mostly commentaries on the collectivist shenanigans of government in the 60's, which makes the analysis a bit short-sighted.

I am puzzled by Ayn Rand. As far as I can tell from this book (I admit, I haven't read her other works) she wants to ground individual rights as a moral issue from the metaphysical fact of man's existence and nature. From this, she infers the moral principle that man has a right to life, which then extends to property. Thus, government should protect these rights by acting as the delegated arm of force.

I agree with all of that, but I don't understand how you can infer an ought from an is. How can one ground moral values in materialism? I think Christianity, which is often derided in this book, provides the only moral groundwork for rights in the first place.

The last two appendices are probably the only articles worth reading. They do a good job of arguing for the nature of government and the rights of man, albeit inconsistently, as I mentioned above.

Still, the main thesis of this book, which is that capitalism must have a moral foundation, not merely a pragmatic one (it works better than say, socialism) is sorely needed today. But, this is grounded in "Thou shalt not murder" and "thou shalt not steal"!

Who owns your life? Ayn Rand’s answer to that question differs from every ruler, political and religious leader, and media personality in history. Her answer likely differs from yours. Her answer is that your whole life belongs to you alone.

From this foundational principle, Rand builds her philosophy and attacks all others. The firmness of her convictions yields a purity of thought that leaves no room for compromise. The implications of her answer are deep and vast.

But what’s the big deal; isn’t she just stating the obvious? Everyone agrees that your life belongs to you, right? No, actually. Most people are more than willing to sacrifice one man’s life to save another’s. Some proudly think that such sacrifice is altruistic and therefore moral. Others may reluctantly calculate that such sacrifice increases total social utility, is for the “greater good,” so it is therefore worthwhile. Still others won’t admit (even to themselves) that they are sacrificing anyone at all.

Jumping to the most extreme example, which critics of Rand’s philosophy always run to, will illustrate the point. Imagine a happily married woman with two children. Both she and her husband work. One day her husband leaves her and the children—he just disappears, and the woman has no idea where he went, why he left, or even if he is still alive. She can’t find him or contact him. A year later the woman is fired when the company she works for goes out of business. She soon finds other work but at lower pay. She takes the job so that she will have some money, which is better than none. She develops cancer. She has insurance, which covers much, but not all of her bills. She chews through her savings. Her failing health, mounting expenses, and two children eventually lead her to bankruptcy. Query: is there moral justification in a government forcibly taking money from Mark Zuckerberg to give it to this mother and her two children, who will surely die without it?

Collectivists answer yes. Collectivist is a broad term connoting the basic idea “we’re all our brothers’ keeper,” or “we’re all in this together,” or “we all have to look out for each other.” Their idea is that everyone is responsible for everyone else. To think of yourself is deemed “selfish.” As Marx said, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” Statists, socialists, communists, fascists, the Catholic Church (particularly as described in Pope Paul VI’s encyclical), democrats, republicans, Eric Fromm, and many others accept the moral principle of altruism. Altruism means sacrificing yourself for others; it means helping others because they are in need, regardless of whether they are deserving. The differences between the collectivist camps are in degree and implementation, not in kind. For example, communists feel entitled to all of any man’s wealth, whereas republicans ostensibly feel compelled to take only a “reasonable” amount of a man’s wealth. Neither disagrees that they are entitled to at least some portion of the man’s wealth.

Ayn Rand’s answer to the Zuckerberg/pauper problem is a categorical “no.” It would be immoral for anyone to initiate force against Zuckerberg if he is unwilling to provide aid. Morally, the mother may rely only on herself and voluntary charity. Even assuming insufficient charity and certain death does not change Rand’s answer because “misfortune is not a claim to slave labor.” Zuckerberg’s life cannot be forfeited to that woman or to anyone else. Zuckerberg did not cause the woman’s plight, and he has no moral obligation to alleviate it.

Some may object that taxing a man, or taking some of his wealth is not taking his life. Rand disagrees. The right to property is an extension of the right to life. Property is the physical manifestation of a man’s work and ideas; it is the product of his life. So, for example, imagine a farmer who farms 10 acres of land over the course of the year to produce one ton of rice. Enter starving widow and orphan. To the extent some of the man’s rice is stolen from him and given to the widow and orphan by the government, the man has become a slave to the government, the widow, and the orphan in proportion to the amount of rice that is stolen from him. To produce the rice required time and effort from the man. If it took an hour to produce each pound of rice, and the government takes 10 pounds of rice from him, the man has lost 10 hours of his life. He was forced to work, against his will, for the benefit of someone else. This is slavery. Theft and slavery are immoral as a matter of first principles. The same logic applies to workers paid in currency for different types of labor.

The essence of Rand’s philosophy is nonaggression. The initiation of physical force is immoral. Moving downstream from the first principle of nonaggression, the only moral system of government is complete laissez-faire, free market capitalism. Government has a monopoly on the use of physical force. Therefore, it is imperative that the government’s actions be strictly limited to its proper functions, which include: 1. Police to protect citizens from criminals, 2. Military to protect citizens from foreign invaders, and 3. Courts to provide a forum for citizens to resolve their disputes via objective, rational, and known rules of law. The rightful purpose of government is to protect individual’s property from other individuals. The United States constitution implicitly—but not explicitly—captured these principles. These principles led to the wealthiest, freest nation in history. But they are constantly under assault from altruism and the natural urge to want to help the needy.

In Rand’s philosophy, the rich man's rice is the most extreme possible scenario of the nonaggression principle. It is enough to turn most people off—and understandably so. Barring sociopaths, everyone has pity for the wretched. And there can be inherent pleasure in helping others in need. That this pity and pleasure is tied to the well-being of others likely arose from evolution. Directly looking out for others is essential for survival in an intimate clan or small tribe.

But forced altruism makes less sense in a modern industrial society or a planet with 7 billion people where most everyone is a stranger and many are enemies. Moreover, the amount of need in the world, if used to dictate how a man’s product is disposed, would completely swallow that man’s entire life. To illustrate: the government can steal some portion of Zuckerberg’s $35 billion net worth to help one widow and one orphan. If given a million dollars, the widow and orphan would be much better off, and Zuck’s standard of living will not have perceptibly diminished. But there are more than two needy people. There are 7 billion people on the planet, and half live on under $2 per day. That’s 3.5 billion people. Isn’t Zuck morally obligated, under altruism, to help all these needy people? He can’t stop at one widow and one orphan. So, divide up his wealth and distribute it evenly. Each person in the bottom half gets $10. The needy are slightly better off for a short time. But Zuck is now one of them. He has nothing left after giving it all.

Taking the logic of altruism to the extreme, no one is permitted to keep any wealth above mere subsistence. The Catholic Church has said precisely this: “No one is justified in keeping for his exclusive use what he does not need, when others lack necessities.” In other words, until everyone has the bare necessities, no one can keep what they do not “need.” Good bye luxury cars, or any cars, toys, extra sets of clothes, any food other than oatmeal, movie tickets, music, books, computers, etc. By the logic of altruism, you can keep NOTHING beyond bare necessities until everyone has all necessities. Peter Singer has made the identical argument about drowning children: if a child is drowning and you can save him with little cost to yourself, you are morally obligated to do so. But what is morally required when the entire world is drowning and the cost to you is your entire life?

Collectivists evade this question because the answer is uncomfortable to admit. To be consistent, everyone would literally have to be a slave to everyone else. The rich man's rice dilemma is the problem faced by Rand. Enslavement of the entire planet and abject poverty for all is the dilemma faced by collectivists. History bears this out.

As a practical matter, Rand’s philosophy is sound. Free market capitalism is the engine of prosperity. It has lifted more people out of poverty than any alternative. Producers are the heroes of the story. All the collectivist ideals in the world are utterly dependent upon producers. There is nothing to distribute (or “redistribute” as is often incorrectly stated) until something is produced. And the actual consequences of collectivism never help the needy anyway. Instead, there is crony capitalism from mixed economies and corrupt dictatorships in the more thoroughly collectivist systems of communism and fascism. The number of truly needy people unable—as opposed to unwilling—to help themselves is small enough to be covered by charity in a truly capitalistic system. As Shimon Peres wisely and succinctly put it, “The friends of liberty have done better by equality than the friends of equality have done by liberty.”

So who owns your life? Rand’s right: you do.

Memorable Quotes:

“(The small minority of adults who are unable rather than unwilling to work have to rely on voluntary charity; misfortune is not a claim to slave labor; there is no such thing as the right to consume, control, and destroy those without whom one would be unable to survive. As to depressions and mass unemployment, they are not caused by the free market, but by government interference into the economy.)”

“The economic value of a man’s work is determined, on a free market, by a single principle: by the voluntary consent of those who are willing to trade him their work or products in return. This is the moral meaning of the law of supply and demand; it represents the total rejection of two vicious doctrines: the tribal premise and altruism. It represents the recognition of the fact that man is not the property nor the servant of the tribe, that a man works in order to support his own life—as, by his nature, he must—that he has to be guided by his own rational self-interest, and if he wants to trade with others, he cannot expect sacrificial victims, i.e., he cannot expect to receive values without trading commensurate values in return.”

“A government holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force.”

“No individual or private group or private organization has the legal power to initiate the use of physical force against other individuals or groups and to compel them to act against their own voluntary choice. Only a government holds that power. The nature of governmental action is: coercive action. The nature of political power is: the power to force obedience under threat of physical injury—the threat of property expropriation, imprisonment, or death.”

“The only proper function of the government of a free country is to act as an agency which protects the individual’s rights, i.e., which protects the individual from physical violence. Such a government does not have the right to initiate the use of physical force against anyone—a right which the individual does not possess and, therefore, cannot delegate to any agency. But the individual does possess the right to self-defense and that is the right which he delegates to the government, for the purpose of an orderly, legally defined enforcement. A proper government has the right to use physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use. The proper functions of a government are: the police, to protect men from criminals; the military forces, to protect men from foreign invaders; and the law courts, to protect men’s property and contracts from breach by force or fraud, and to settle disputes among men according to objectively defined laws.”

“If I were asked to choose the date which marks the turning point on the road to the ultimate destruction of American industry, and the most infamous piece of legislation in American history, I would choose the year 1890 and the Sherman Act—which began the grotesque, irrational, malignant growth of unenforceable, uncompliable, unjudicable, contradictions known as the antitrust laws.”

“Under the antitrust laws, a man becomes a criminal no matter what he does. If he complies with one of these laws, he faces criminal prosecution under several others. For instance, if he charges prices which some bureaucrats judge as too high, he can be prosecuted for monopoly, or, rather, for a successful ‘intent to monopolize’; if he charges prices lower than those of his competitors, he can be prosecuted for ‘unfair competition’ or ‘restraint of trade’; and if he charges the same prices as his competitors, he can be prosecuted for ‘collusion’ or ‘conspiracy.’”

“The prohibition of ‘restraint of trade’ is the essence of antitrust—and…no exact definition of what constitutes ‘restraint of trade’ can be given. Thus no one can tell what the law forbids or permits one to do; the interpretation of these laws is left entirely up to the courts. A business man or his lawyer has to study the whole body of the so-called case law—decisions—in order to get even a generalized idea of the current meaning of these laws; except that the precedents may be upset and the decisions reversed tomorrow or next week or next year.”

“Retroactive (or ex post facto) law—i.e., a law that punishes a man for an action which was not legally defined as a crime at the time he committed it—is rejected by and contrary to the entire tradition of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence.”

“The impetus behind the movement for the earliest legislation gathered strength during the 1870’s and the 1880’s. . . . After the Civil War the railways with their privileges, charters, and subsidies became the main objects of suspicion and hostility.”

“In the entire history of capitalism, no one has been able to establish a coercive monopoly by means of competition on a free market. There is only one way to forbid entry into a given field of production: by law. Every coercive monopoly that exists or has ever existed—in the United States, in Europe, or anywhere else in the world—was created and made possible only by an act of government: by special franchises, licenses, subsidies, by legislative actions which granted special privileges (not obtainable on a free market) to a man or group of men, forbade all others to enter that particular field.”

“A coercive monopoly is not the result of laissez-faire; it can result only from the abrogation of laissez-faire and from the introduction of the opposite principle—the principle of statism.”

“A nation-wide depression, such as occurred in the United States in the thirties, would not have been possible in a fully free society. It was made possible only by government intervention in the economy—more specifically, by government manipulation of the money supply.”

“The gold standard is incompatible with chronic deficit spending (the hallmark of the welfare state). Stripped of its academic jargon, the welfare state is nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes. A substantial part of the confiscation is effected by taxation. But the welfare statists were quick to recognize that if they wished to retain political power, the amount of taxation had to be limited and they had to resort to programs of massive deficit spending, i.e., they had to borrow money, by issuing government bonds, to finance welfare expenditures on a large scale. . . . A large volume of new government bonds can be sold to the public only at progressively higher interest rates. Thus, the government deficit spending under a gold standard is severely limited.”

“The chaos of the airways was an example, not of free enterprise, but of anarchy. It was caused, not by private property rights, but by their absence. It demonstrated why capitalism is incompatible with anarchism, why men do need a government and what is a government’s proper function. What was needed was legality, not controls. What was imposed was worse than controls: outright nationalization.”

“It is the philosophy of the mysticism-altruism-collectivism axis that has brought us to our present state and is carrying us toward a finale such as that of the society presented in Atlas Shrugged. It is only the philosophy of the reason-individualism-capitalism axis that can save us and carry us, instead, toward the Atlantis projected in the last two pages of my novel.”

“Government control of a country’s economy—any kind or degree of such control, by any group, for any purpose whatsoever—rests on the basic principle of statism, the principle that man’s life belongs to the state. A mixed economy is merely a semi-socialized economy—which means: a semi-enslaved society—which means: a country torn by irreconcilable contradictions, in the process of gradual disintegration.
tFreedom, in a political context, means freedom from government coercion. It does not mean freedom from the landlord, or freedom from the employer, or freedom from the laws of nature which do not provide men with automatic prosperity. It means freedom from the coercive power of the state—and nothing else.
tThe world conflict of today is the conflict of the individual against the state, the same conflict that has been fought throughout mankind’s history. The names change, but the essence—and the results—remain the same, whether it is the individual against feudalism, or against absolute monarchy, or against communism or fascism or Nazism or socialism or the welfare state.”

“That cancer is the morality of altruism. . . . Capitalism was destroyed by the morality of altruism. Capitalism is based on individual rights—not on the sacrifice of the individual to the ‘public good’ of the collective. Capitalism and altruism are incompatible. It’s one or the other. It’s too late for compromises, for platitudes, and for aspirin tablets. There is no way to save capitalism—or freedom, or civilization, or America—except by intellectual surgery, that is: by destroying the source of the destruction, by rejecting the morality of altruism.
tIf you want to fight for capitalism, there is only one type of argument you should adopt, the only one that can ever win in a moral issue: the argument from self-esteem. This means: the argument from man’s right to exist—from man’s inalienable individual right to his own life.”

“Ever since Kant divorced reason from reality, his intellectual descendants have been diligently widening the breach. In the name of reason, Pragmatism established the range-of-the-moment view as an enlightened perspective on life, context-dropping as a rule of epistemology, expediency as a principle of morality, and collective subjectivism as a substitute for metaphysics. Logical Positivism carried it farther and, in the name of reason, elevated the immemorial psycho-epistemology of shyster-lawyers to the status of a scientific epistemological system—by proclaiming that knowledge consists of linguistic manipulations. Taking this seriously, Linguistic Analysis declared that the task of philosophy is, not to identify universal principles, but to tell people what they mean when they speak, which they are otherwise unable to know (which last, by that time, was true—in philosophical circles). This was the final stroke of philosophy breaking its moorings and floating off, like a lighter-than-air balloon, losing any semblance of connection to reality, any relevance to the problems of man’s existence.”

Memorable quotes continued in the comments below.

I very much enjoyed this work by Ayn Rand. I listened to it on audiobook, and continue to like her writing style. She is one of the only authors that I have found that really can use diction and syntax to substantially help her overall argument. Her use of sarcasm was priceless and points out some of the obvious problems when opposing viewpoints are taken to their natural conclusion.

Being written back in the 1960's there has been 50 years to reflect upon what has happened since it was written. Many of the issues discussed then still exist today. Near the end of the work she is discussing protests on college campuses revolving around free speech. Those same protests are still happening today, and even at the same campuses. She wrote during the middle of the cold war, and now there are 50 years to reflect upon how policies have impacted the different systems (capitalism and socialism).

Overall a great read that I would highly recommend, especially given that the conversation between capitalism and socialism is reappearing in society today.

La realidad es que Ayn Rand es una pensadora fiera. Con su prosa inteligente uno puede por fin llegar a entender el appeal del neoliberalismo. No solo eso; a partir del egoísmo como fundamento ontológico-político, descubrirás porque cosas como el trabajo infantil en el sXIX por fin tienen justificación. Sarcasmo y exageraciones aparte, es un libro de lectura agradecida que recomiendo especialmente a aquellas personas que se conciben de izquierdas. En esta autora encontramos el pilar teórico de la defensa actual del capitalismo, y podemos constatar qué idea del neoliberalismo se ha construido propagandísticamente desde la exageración, y qué principios verdaderamente forman parte de su núcleo duro (aún así, la mayoría de “rumores” son ciertos…).

If anybody wants to understand the essence of what capitalism is actually about I would recommend this book.