The top two quotes are shockingly pertinent to two very recent events: the USSC decision on Obamacare and Obama’s comments about businessmen:
2) “America’s abundance was created not by public sacrifices to ‘the common good,’ but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America’s industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance—and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way.”
This is the antithesis of Obama’s statement and belief. It is the foundation of capitalism and freedom: that the pursuit of self-interest will result in the most efficient use of resources and the greatest growth, to the benefit of all. To a Marxist like Obama, Rand must be viewed as the devil incarnate.
1) “We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.”
Chief Justice Roberts had given America the “ultimate inversion”. He has decided that the government can do anything it pleases, so long as they call it a tax. This taxation power is pure coercion. It will start with people being severely fined for not obeying the government’s dictates, but will quickly morph into physical force as those who refuse to comply or who don’t have the resources to comply are jailed.
It is interesting that most of those who attack Rand here and other places do not choose to attack her actual statements or actions. They choose instead to put words in her mouth. It is not necessary to put words in her mouth... she has a large volume of work where she made observations on just about every aspect of our society. As far as the attacks on her character... she was a person who appears to have lived by an uncompromising honest code. Most others make her look like a saint by comparison.
We are all shaped by the times and the circumstances of the world we are born into. Escaping from a country that fell into a terrible abyss of totalitarianism, Ayn Rand certainly faced challenges that those of us born and raised in the United States in the last 50 or 60 years can hardly imagine. I enjoy and appreciate the body of work she left us. It would be no more fair for me to judge her by my standards than those liberals who judge our founding fathers by the standards of today.
As to la Rand, there is nothing but a black hole where the personal morality is supposed to be. A woman, wife and mother who lives a life of moral dedication might also view la Rand as "the devil incarnate."
I also doubt that Barbara Branden, for example, spends much time nowadays in Rand worship.
Rand was a brilliant writer and an extremely flawed human being. When, as is quite often the case, she is right, she appeals to the best that is within us and earns the dollars we spend on her writings. When she is wrong, she is toxic.