Stalinist Russia and Maoist China didn’t evolve out of social democracies. Nobel economist Paul Krugman pronounced the correct judgment: “What about the slippery slope from liberalism to totalitarianism? There’s absolutely no evidence that it exists. The Objectivists’ “matter of time” has failed the test of time. We would behold a fulfilled prophecy where, as columnist Cathy Young phrased it, “industries are nationalized wholesale, business people are demonized, and America is overtaken by squalor, ruin and mass unemployment.” The Obama administration ended in a recovery from the recession it inherited. The last great wave was when the Obama administration was met with doomsdayers quoting Atlas Shrugged as if it were the Book of Revelation. Rand’s followers over the past 60-plus years have insisted that her “one of two endings” scenario would play out in the real world. Thomas observed, “Rand herself recognized that she did not have nor know of a well-developed theory for how government could be financed without taxation.” So, what does it mean to assert that such a fantasy projection is a less “invalid, unstable, unworkable system” than the governments we in the democratic West live under?
The book’s thesis-that America is paralleling Germany’s path to Nazism-is reflected in a popular but accurate paraphrase of Rand’s thought: “The difference between a welfare state and a totalitarian state is a matter of time.” Arguably Rand was right-in reverse: East Germany became West Germany, not vice versaĪ direct Rand quote: “A mixed economy (as I have said many, many times) is an invalid, unstable, unworkable system which leads to one of two endings: either a return to freedom or a collapse into dictatorship.” Bear in mind that “a return to freedom” is Newspeak for an unprecedented adoption of no-taxation minarchism-even though, as writer William R. We are living that “tomorrow,” and there is less reason than ever to think they will become part of any “mainstream” at any point.
Leonard Peikoff-is to say that it and he are not of today’s cultural mainstream,” she wrote. “Perhaps the best recommendation I can give this book-and its author, Dr. any guesses? Although Leonard Peikoff’s The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom in America was published in 1982 after Rand’s death that year, her introduction to it is dated November 1980. If you’re the sort who knows that March 6 is the date of Ayn Rand’s passing, you just might also know that November 2020 was the 40th anniversary of.