Ayn Rand and the World She Made

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Ayn Rand died in her Murray Hill apartment in New York City in 1982, at the age of seventy-seven. Although she had spent her last thirty years as a familiar presence in the city where I lived, offering lectures and readings, I never met her. With no particular evidence, I assumed that her best-selling novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged (the only ones I knew about), were potboilers or propaganda. They certainly had an eerie effect on some of my acquaintances who read them and who began to talk about “the earned and the unearned,” “free markets and free minds,” and an individualist hero named John Galt. Besides, in the 1970s, when I moved to New York, I was busy reading E. L. Doctorow, J. M. Keynes, and Little Magazines.

Hence, unlike most of Rand’s readers, I came across her books not as a young person but in my forties, while working as an editor on a financial magazine. A contributor, Suze Orman, showed me the two-thousand-word text of Francisco d’Anconia’s famous “money speech” from Atlas Shrugged. “So you think that money is the root of all evil?” the capitalist hero Francisco asks a group of New Deal—style lobbyists and bureaucrats. “Have you ever asked what is the root of money?” Rand’s answer, in part, is that money is the “tool and symbol” of a society built on mutual, voluntary trade rather than forced labor, duty to the state, or war. It is an engine of economic progress. “But money is only a tool,” she writes. “It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires.” Orman appended a note: This was exactly what she was trying to say in the essay I was editing.

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