FEE's Ex Nihilo Attack on Ayn Rand

Over at FEE is a piece by Lawrence Reed whose headline reads, "Indians, Property Rights, and Ayn Rand," and whose blurb elaborates: Ayn Rand got many things right, but on the issue of Native Americans she made a big error.

Interesting I thought. I don't recall Rand specifically positing or critiquing a general Amerindian stand on that issue.

As a labor of love (which my respect for intellectual property rights will otherwise keep obscure and thus financially unrewarding), I have been gradually creating a searchable database of the works of Ayn Rand and some of her students. (It is, albeit incomplete, a superset of this one.)

Although I like to imagine myself a good researcher, I found nothing directly or indirectly addressing this issue by Ayn Rand herself. (Anyone knowing otherwise should feel free to point to a source in the comments to this post, or by emailing me directly. But read the rest of this before you do.)

This is odd by itself, but it was hardly the only swipe at a position allegedly held by Ayn Rand, but unsubstantiated. The piece actually, and bizarrely, starts its out-of-the-blue swipe at Rand with the following:

Philosopher Ayn Rand (author of Atlas Shrugged) got many things right, but she also got two very big things wrong. One was that life is the result not of intelligent design but of pure chance, an observation that science is increasingly debunking (see Science Is Affirming Creation, Not Accident). [link to creationist web site omitted]

This attack is quite easy to refute:

I am not a student of the theory of evolution and, therefore, I am neither its supporter nor its opponent. ("The Missing Link" in The Ayn Rand Letter, vol. II, no. 17, May 1973)

Since, as of now, I have heard Rand accused of both dismissing and espousing evolution, I think it's worth also quoting Leonard Peikoff, her most important student, on this matter:

Darwin's theory, Ayn Rand held, pertains to a special science, not to philosophy. Philosophy as such, therefore, takes no position in regard to it. (Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, Chapter 11, footnote 19)

So on at least one count, FEE's piece is demonstrably wrong, which is the best that can be said for it. (To be clear, this is not to say that Rand espoused creationism.) As far as I can tell, its assertions about Rand's opinion on what "the Indians" thought about property rights is, as Wolfgang Pauli might put it, "not even wrong," as far as any casual reader of the article is concerned.

That said, in a comment on the article, Reed cites an off-the-cuff answer Rand gave to a question on the matter after her West Point address as the source of his allegation about Rand's views. Nevertheless, it is clear that this matter was not a prominent theme she developed in her commentary, and one wonders if she might have said the same thing had she known more about some Amerind cultures. (It is instructive to consider what she says about so-called "collective rights.") Conversely, if we take Reed's assessment of the Nez Perce at face value, it is likely incorrect to apply it to all Amerind tribes.

All in all, it behooves anyone looking to FEE for help defending capitalism to consider how slipshod this piece is, as well as why it goes out of its way to attack Ayn Rand, whose defense of capitalism is so sorely needed today.

I don't have a good answer to that question, but Ayn Rand, who wrote the following in 1946 to FEE's founder, Leonard Read, would doubtless have been unsurprised by something like this coming:

Image by Ritam Baishya, via Unsplash, license.

The mistake is in the very name of the organization. You call it The Foundation for Economic Education. You state that economic education is to be your sole purpose. You imply that the cause of the world's troubles lies solely in people's ignorance of economics and that the way to cure the world is to teach it the proper economic knowledge. This is not true -- therefore your program will not work. You cannot hope to effect a cure by starting with a wrong diagnosis.

The root of the whole modern disaster is philosophical and moral. People are not embracing collectivism because they have accepted bad economics. They are accepting bad economics because they have embraced collectivism. You cannot reverse cause and effect. And you cannot destroy the cause by fighting the effect. That is as futile as trying to eliminate the symptoms of a disease without attacking its germs. (Letters of Ayn Rand, pp. 256-257)

As we see, Read ignored Rand's advice about the name and purpose of his organization.

And now, nearly eighty years later, we see it not just ignoring the need for the right premises to promote capitalism, but actively undermining Rand in part for not espousing Creationism -- in an article supposedly making a case that at least some Amerindian cultures upheld a theory of property rights in some form.

In light of the above, I would urge any reader to consider for themselves Rand's commentary on the ethical origins of collectivism and how they relate to mysticism, i.e., religion.

-- CAV