Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (62 page)

One of the major differences between Marx and the Austrians lies in their respective resolutions. Marx saw the boom-bust cycle as destructive, but historically progressive because it magnified class struggle and facilitated socialized control of production and capital investment.
²⁵
By contrast, Rand and her Austrian contemporaries saw the trade cycle as retrogressive, necessarily benefiting some groups at the expense of others.

Rand recognized that sustained government intervention in the
market
was partially designed to quell the deleterious effects of boom and bust for which it was ultimately responsible. But continued political intervention thwarted the reassertion of genuine price patterns. Ultimately, the state-banking nexus enables the government to free itself from the limits of its revenues and to engage in deficit financing of its various
welfare
and
warfare schemes. Stepping far beyond its legitimate functions, cutting “the connection between goods and money,” the government becomes a parasite on the private economy, consuming its “stock seed.”
²⁶

While the emergence of the welfare state attempts to deal with structurally generated
poverty
, its primary task is to dilute growing discontent by creating classes of politically privileged dependents. The actual welfare recipients become the “visible profiteers” of institutional altruism. But they “are part victims, part window dressing for the statist policies of the government.” As the government increases the scope of its interventions, it establishes a bureaucratic system of subsidized consumption for the benefit of proliferating pressure groups and economic interests (161–62). The predatory rich wish to rule, while the victimized poor wish to be ruled.
²⁷
Rand argues that “morally and economically, the welfare state creates an ever accelerating downward pull” serving the needs of the groups making demands and the needs of those in
power
“who require a group of dependent favor-recipients in order to rise to power.”
²⁸

But Rand argues that the predatory rich, the pseudo-producers, are the predominant material beneficiaries of the welfare-statist expansion. Welfarism froze the status quo and perpetuated “the power of the big corporations of the pre-income-tax era, placing them beyond the competition of the tax-strangled newcomers.”
²⁹
Having initiated the policy of government interventionism, businessmen became ever more dependent on a political, rather than an economic, process of accumulation. Like Hayek, Rand maintained that the more the state came to dominate social and economic life, the more political power became the only power worth having.
³⁰

Rand believed that
organized labor
was potentially a bulwark against state expansion because it often recognized the differential economic and political benefits that certain businesses derived from interventionism. But the organized union movement sought to counter pro-business controls with pro-labor controls. Though labor was “much more sensitive to the long-range implications” of statist interventionism than business, it too, was involved in an internal contradiction.
³¹
Although Rand supported the right of voluntary union association, the use of the boycott, and the strike, she opposed compulsory unionism. She argued that unions had joined in the statist game of their business counterparts, fueling structural unemployment by forcing wage rates above their market levels.
³²
In Rand’s view, both business and labor were perishing in an orgy of mutual self-sacrifice. She warned: “He who lives by a legalized sword, will perish by a legalized sword.”
³³

THE
WELFARE
-
WARFARE
STATE

The
welfare
state and its widening cartellization did not cease at the nation’s borders.
³⁴
Rand maintained that economic dislocation leads to an expansion of interventionism at home and abroad. Too often, in the face of economic chaos, statists resort to their “favorite expedient … in times of emergency: a war.”
³⁵
In Rand’s view, there is an organic link between
statism
and militarism. A government that does not respect the
rights
of its own citizens will not respect the rights of others living in foreign lands. Just as the rule of physical
force
comes to predominate in statist domestic policy, so too does it determine the direction of statist foreign policy. Statism “
needs
war.” It “survives by looting.” It makes war both possible and necessary. Moreover, it creates a context that benefits those pseudo-producers who are unable to survive on a free market. Such businessmen amass huge fortunes by means of colonialist conquest and foreign exploitation.
³⁶

By contrast, “[t]he essence of capitalism’s foreign policy is
free
trade
—
i.e.
, the abolition of trade barriers, of protective tariffs, of special privileges—the opening of the world’s trade routes to free international exchange and competition among the private citizens of all countries dealing directly with one another.”
³⁷
Even though capitalism has never existed in its purest form, historically constituted semi-capitalism was powerful enough to demolish the remnants of feudalism, mercantilism, and absolute monarchy throughout the Western world. But with the rise of the collectivist, paternalist ideology and nationalistic imperialism of progressive “reformers” such as Theodore Roosevelt,
Woodrow Wilson
, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, relatively free markets gave way to government regulation and privilege.
³⁸

The twentieth-century history of U.S. foreign policy, according to Rand, was a history of “suicidal”
failure
and
hypocrisy
.
³⁹

Failure
—because the U.S. had abdicated the moral high ground, destroying economic and civil liberties from within and losing any rational sense of the country’s moral significance. Pursuit of a reckless foreign policy requires corrosive intrusions into the lives of the citizenry. An advocate of all-volunteer armed forces, Rand maintained that under conditions of freedom, few would choose to become cannon fodder in the pursuit of irrational foreign policy goals. This is why statism often relied on the institutionalization of a military draft. Rand saw the draft as the worst statist violation of individual rights, based upon the premise that a citizen’s life belonged to the state. It allows the state to sacrifice its citizens in wars, such as Korea and Vietnam, that have no clear bearing on national self-defense.
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Hypocrisy
—because the U.S. often fought evil with evil. So, for example, Wilson had led the charge “to make the world safe for democracy,” but the
folly of
World War
I gave birth to fascism, Nazism, and communism. FDR had led the charge for the “Four Freedoms,” but he empowered the Soviets in the process, “surrender[ing] … one-third of the world’s population into communist slavery.”
⁴¹

Rand’s various Objectivist periodicals featured essays discussing the parasitism of the
Soviet Union
, a topic that surely had profound personal significance for the Russian-born author. A series of review essays by various contributors noted that the Soviets had stolen military and other technology from the West, and that it was U.S. foreign policy that had stabilized that regime. Drawing from
John T. Flynn’s
book
The
Roosevelt
Myth
, Barbara Branden stressed that FDR was inspired by Bismarck, Mussolini, and Hitler in establishing a corporatist—albeit a
liberal
corporatist—“New Deal” that further devastated a depressed economy.
⁴²
Provoking war in the Pacific, Roosevelt used “national defense” as a pretext for resolving the unemployment problem of the government-caused Great Depression by drafting American boys to fight and die in foreign wars. He sent $11 billion in Lend Lease assistance to the Soviets, and developed secret postwar agreements with Stalin, sealing the fate of Eastern Europe. Rand herself believed that this strategy made “Russia … the only winner of … World War II.”
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Rand invoked the spirit of the Old Right critics of U.S. involvement in World War II, who had been smeared as “America First” chauvinists.
⁴⁴
This “Old Right” consisted of antiwar opponents of the New Deal, stretching from Albert Jay Nock and John T. Flynn to Rose Wilder Lane and Isabel Paterson. Rand despised those who had coined the “
anti-concept
” of “
isolationism
” as a means of denouncing “any patriotic opponent of America’s self-immolation.”
⁴⁵
Like many of the Old Right, Rand questioned the wisdom of entering the
Second World War
’s European theater on the side of the Soviets—suggesting that a Nazi-Soviet conflict might have severely weakened the victor.
⁴⁶
Taking on one of her left-wing critics, writer
Lillian Hellman
, who had criticized her in the book
Scoundrel Time
, Rand argued:

How many people died in this country, and in Russia or in Russian-occupied countries, because of Miss Hellman’s ideas? God only knows. Nobody could compute the evil of what those Communists in the 1930s did. To begin with, they pushed this country into World
War
II. What would have been a better policy? Let Hitler march into Russia, as he had started to. Let the two dictatorships fight each other, then the West—England, France, and the United
States
—should finish off the winner. Then maybe, today, the world would be safe.
(Except … the ultimate safety of the world depends on philosophy, and nobody has the right ideas.) People like Lillian Hellman were pushing the policy of this country to the left and in support of only one country—not the United States, but
Soviet Russia
.
⁴⁷

Rand repudiated the claim “that
isolationism
is selfish, immoral, and impractical in a ‘shrinking’ modern world.”
⁴⁸
She stood firmly against the “altruistic” evil of foreign “interventionism” or “internationalism” that had undermined long-term U.S. interests.
⁴⁹
She recognized that such foreign interventionism mirrored domestic interventionism in one significant respect: each problem caused by statist intervention led to new interventionist attempts to resolve it. Just as World War I begat World War II, and World War II begat the Cold War, so too did the Cold War beget “hot” wars in
Korea
and Vietnam, in which more than one hundred thousand drafted Americans lost their lives. Vietnam especially had laid bare the inner contradictions of U.S. foreign policy, according to Rand. “There is no proper solution for the
war
in Vietnam,” Rand counseled at the time; “it is a war we should never have entered. We are caught in a trap: it is senseless to continue, and it is now impossible to withdraw.”
⁵⁰

Rand’s opposition to U.S. involvement in both Korea and Vietnam emerged, as well, from her broader understanding of the nature of
freedom
and its prerequisites. She wondered why the U.S. had “sacrificed thousands of American lives, and billions of dollars, to protect a primitive people who never had freedom, do not seek it, and, apparently, do not want it.”
⁵¹
Rand repudiated wars waged on behalf of ‘nation-building’ or of an oppressed people’s ‘right to vote’ themselves into slavery. “The right to vote is a
consequence
,” she emphasized, “not a primary cause, of a free social system—and its value depends on the constitutional structure implementing and strictly delimiting the voters’ power.”
⁵²
For Rand, the right to vote, among other citizens’
rights
in modern democracies, could not usher in a free society in the absence of those personal, cultural, and structural dynamics requisite to its success.

There were instances, however, where Rand failed to question the structural effects of continued U.S. defense build-ups and police actions.
⁵³
In a speech to West Point cadets, for instance, she argued that “the military-industrial complex” is “a myth or worse.”
⁵⁴
But even during the Cold War, Rand excoriated
Ronald Reagan
for “exaggerat[ing] the power of the most incompetent nation in the world [the Soviet Union],” a primitive country she believed was doomed to economic stagnation and systemic collapse. This was “not a patriotic service to the United States,” in Rand’s view.
⁵⁵
Despite her opposition to Reagan’s “fear” tactics, Rand equally opposed
the appeasement of the Soviets. She argued for the strategic importance to the U.S. of Taiwan and
Israel
—despite her antipathy toward the latter’s political and cultural character, which she identified as socialist, religious, and tribalist. For Rand, Israel was preferable to the
Palestinian Liberation Organization
, which had abdicated any “rights” it may have once held by engaging in a sustained policy of terror.
⁵⁶

Terrorism
took on lethal dimensions for the American homeland on 11 September 2001. We cannot presume to know how Rand would have responded to 9/11, but there is little doubt that if Rand were alive, she would have been horrified by the attacks and would have advocated swift action in response. But Rand was never known to examine issues in a vacuum; she brought to bear many complex, interrelated factors in her analysis. We can be confident that Rand would have looked critically into those aspects of U.S. domestic and
foreign
policy that might have contributed to the events of 9/11, much as she did in her analysis of World War I, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. In her typical approach to such cataclysms, Rand did not disconnect events from their antecedent historical conditions or from the larger systemic conditions within which they were embedded.
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