| | I highly recommend The Future and Its Enemies by Virginia Postrel. An editor at Reason, Postel compares (and contrasts) the Green anti-technology people with the right wing millennarians, including Objectivists, who predict with great enthusiasm the end of civilization. The Greens are somewhat more successful in bringing it about in that they advocate for legislations which governments are only too happy to enact.
Over on MSK's OL, Kat has discovered a book called Going Galt, apparently a rehash of 70s survivalism advice on how to cope with the end of the world brought about by socialism.
On my blog, Necessary Facts (http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.org) I have an essay, Cities that pays tribute to Jane Jacobs. It started as a reply in February to a retreatist post on the "Whiskey and Gunpowder" blog.
Civilization is not going away - nor should we want it to.
Ayn Rand's theory is that human ability depends on volitional reason. Indeed, the choice to think is powerful and productive. However, as Ed Hudgins notes: "Consider the report about Michael Finaldi, the 60-something-year-old head of Tele-Solution, a successful business in New Jersey. One watches with pain as this otherwise solid, responsible, individual... " Ayn Rand's theory is that his unintegrated reasoning ability is betrayed by his mystical beliefs. He must have the ability to reason, we say, because he is a successful businessman. We wring our hands because Bill Gates is not an Objectivist. We villify George Soros even though he earned billions speculating in currencies. We believe that all businessmen can be T.J. Rodgers and Ed Snider -- and should be.
In The Anti-Capitalist Mentality Ludwig von Mises takes on a mixed gang of opponents, including social high brows and authors of pulp fiction, who usually harass each other, but join in complaining about the free market because millions of people made Rex Stout and Agatha Christie wealthy because the authors ripped the lid off high society and showed them to be tawdry and not very clever murderers. Von Mises's point - and mine - is that it does not take brains to be rich, nor should it, any more that it requires any other better sort of moral standing. All you need to do is serve the wants of other people at prices they are willing to pay.
Not only are Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Martha Stewart, Donald Trump, or any other of the million millionaires not Objectivists, they might not even be practicing volitional consciousness. Have you ever driven home from work, with your mind "some place else"? How did you do that? That's how some people (apparently) navigate commerce. They are not immoral. Morality only applies to volitional beings.
Even if Ayn Rand's psycho-epistemology accurately describes the entrepreneur who does not perceive and understand the taproot of self-interest, what is that to you? If Bill and Melinda Gates want to "give back" what they did not really take in the first place, you can still run Windows. We have to accept the fact that these people probably did read Atlas Shrugged and were not converted. As Ernst Samhaber pointed out in Merchants Make History: A good merchant does not argue religion with his client.
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