Don’t ask AYN RAND for twenty five bucks!!

Anyway, we sound similar. I’m always doing things for friends and neighbors with expectation of reciprocity but even that gets weird when someone adopts the idea I’m working for them instead of doing them a favor. ~IS

I concur. Many, today, cannot change brake pads on their vehicles much less change the oil. I offer them a good service at a discounted rate. Somedays I feel like ripping them off, as our FED does, but for the life of me I cannot.

KB, Ayn was not trying to “control” her niece- she was only trying to control the conditions under which she, Ayn Rand, would lend money, and she was trying to control the way people treated her.

And all loans come with conditions. Lots of them, like that the collateral will be repossessed or your paycheck or bank account mulceted, if you don’t pay it back. Good to learn at a youthful age that nothing you get in life comes to you without conditions, except through the generosity of people who love you… because they love you.

We all try to do that, if we have any sense or self-respect. Being willing to let the world mooch off you does not make you a better person.

Very few girls ever got a dress that cost $25 in 1950. Most girls do not get outfits that cost $250 (today’s equivalent of $25) now, and I think a long time before I spend that on one dress, and hardly ever buy one. My mother had to go to work as a bank teller for her first high-quality clothes. My grandparents would not buy her those, even though they were affluent. Some things have to be EARNED, they told her.

Stucky, Ayn Rand had very strange (or maybe NOT strange) taste in men, but I note she never associated closely with these violent, macho “hero” type men. I can’t help but notice that men like this serial killer who she wrote of, never got near her. All of the significant men in her life were extremely gentle, nurturing men, notably her husband, the gentle artist Frank O’Conner, her much-younger, long-time lover, Nathaniel Branden (who I greatly admire), and her designated heir and most faithful and worshipful acolyte, Leonard Piekoff.

I suppose you had to be that type of guy to win her approval, or to be able to tolerate her. Rand became more and more like a cult leader as her fame increased and her works became controversial, as she sheltered behind her little “collective” of fawning worshipers.

Her relationship with Alan Greenspan is interesting, too, as is his 360-degree evolution in his thought on matters economic. You see, when Greenspan was introduced to Rand in the early 50s, he was a thorough Keynesian. After exposure to Rand’s ideas, which drew heavily upon Von Mises, Hayek, and Lysander Spooner, he reluctantly came around to agreeing, though reluctantly, with Rand’s philosophy. However, he was always somewhat aloof from the rest of the group, and in the late 60s forward, he began to detach himself from Rand, though being careful (or so it seems to me) not to say or do anything that would anger her. But it is interesting that from the moment of her death in 1982 forward, Greenspan started to return to his Keynesian roots, and even though he never publicly renounced his Randian beliefs, he once again became a thorough Keynesian, with results that we have seen. It was as though he had never heard of Rand.

The tragedy of Ayn Rand was the trait she was most proud of, which was her “hero worship”, the worship of “super hero” type men. This trait does not comport with reason and freedom, her other stated core values. I personally never cared for her fiction, and always felt that she should have heeded the advice she gave to artists, which is to find another profession besides art if you have any internal conflicts or traits that you wish to conceal, because when you create a work of art, your deepest self is on display, warts and all. Her worst self is unfortunately very manifest in her most famous novels, with their savage self-righteousness, improbable plots, and real ignorance of the ways in which our industrial empire was really built. They had many great ideas in them, and some great characters- for example, I thought that the steelmaker Hank Rearden was a much more admirable character than John Galt, and much more believable in his struggle to reconcile the drives he’d been trained to view as “despicable”, with his love and admiration for the female lead. However, on the whole, I’ve found her non-fictional writings are much better expositions of her philosophy than her bombastic, unrealistic fiction.

In all, she was one of the finest thinkers of the 20th century, in spite of her personal flaws. However, there are very few people, “great” or otherwise, who are not as flawed. It perhaps doesn’t pay to scrutinize too closely the personal lives of the artists, thinkers, and other great contributors to civilization, and I’m always prepared to be disappointed. So far, only two people have stood my scrutiny: Albert Einstein and Alvin Weinberg, two great scientists who look even better the more closely you look at them. They were both two extraordinarily gentle, humble men who led exemplary personal lives. Yet there are many who will fault them because they played the major part in developing a science and its offshoot technologies, that has given us the power to literally destroy the planet for every form of life, with the push of a button.