I just started Ayn Rand Nation: The Hidden Struggle for America’s Soul by Gary Weiss.  Thankfully, and I must have know this when I ordered it, it isn’t another biography.  It’s about how Rand has gained so much influence in the exact areas that I spoke about, with some bitterness, in my review of Goddess of the Market – business and politics.

Ayn Rand Nation literally starts with Weiss wondering about why the assholes who wrecked the economy in 2008 were so damn selfish.  He goes on to say, “Hey, who is this old woman with Alan Greenspan and the President?”  So, he’s not going to try to do anything “balanced”: his plan is to chart out why Rand’s philosophy of greed and selfishness, an inversion of normal values (he says Western, but they’re not – altruism is as universal a human value as exists), is so powerful in actual government and economics.  Not important to politically impotent libertarians, upset that we have driver’s licenses (true thing), but in one of the two major parties, and in all business.

I suspect we’ll get on fine, this book and I.