Five years ago, I wrote a column that earned more hate mail than all of my other columns combined. It wasn’t about an emotionally charged issue like abortion, euthanasia, or gay marriage. Nor did it advocate something dreadful like malls putting up Christmas decorations before Halloween, call for Oprah quotes on Starbucks cups, or applaud the practice of regularly reclining one’s seat in the economy-class “knee-cruncher” section of an airplane. It also, I might add, did not mention the band Nickelback.
What it did discuss was Ayn Rand. More specifically, it brought up her questionable impact on the libertarian-leaning, limited-government, free-market message. I wrote in the Wall Street Journal that Rand’s strident, elitist, often misanthropic tendencies—in one infamous Playboy interview, for instance, she scorned people who prioritize friends and family in their lives as “immoral” and “emotional parasites”—completely overshadow the most important benefits of capitalism and free markets.
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