Who Said It? (Ayn Rand Birthday Edition)

Atlas Shrugged is a celebration of life and happiness. Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should. [The New York Times reviewer] suspiciously wonders "about a person who sustains such a mood through the writing of 1,168 pages and some fourteen years of work." This reader wonders about a person who finds unrelenting justice personally disturbing.

(Emphasis added).

Who said it? Federal Reserve poobah Alan Greenspan, in a 1957 letter to the NY Times, protesting its trashing of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.

Read that and more like it in Rand-O-Rama. And then check out other Reason takes on Ayn Rand and Randiana (a state of mind due south of Hayekian), on the occasion of her 100th birthday.

And check out the Times' Edward Rothstein on the matter, too. He notes that her books still sell well over 100,000 copies a year and that:

She could never convincingly reconcile elite achievement with democratic culture, which is why she so often seems antidemocratic. She wanted heroes who could straddle that divide. And she created heroes who could presumably be celebrated for their elite achievements within democratic society: the entrepreneur heroes like the industrialists of "Atlas Shrugged," or the artist hero in "The Fountainhead" cut from American folklore, as self-reliant as Paul Bunyan. Rand famously said: "This is the motive and purpose of my writing: the projection of an ideal man."

Whole thing here.