Honoring Rand: All-Absorbing Passion to Create

Ayn Rand began her writing career as an anti-socialist, and, perhaps to some, a seemingly anti-social, original thinker who taught that achievement is the aim of life, and that men are responsible for the ideas that they choose to accept.

Like H. L. Mencken, she had no fear of smashing venerated, established ideas. Her audacity in portraying uncompromising characters with a reverence for creative freedom and a

wrecking ball's approach to obstacles inspired many young innovators to achieve great careers through path-breaking work. The chairman of the Federal Reserve is the one student of Ayn Rand 's influence in the public sector who comes to mind; appropriately, there are an infinite number in the private sector. With twenty million of her books in circulation, there will be more.

Unlike Mencken, Rand’s severe discipline led her away from an early cynicism and instead drove her to later examine every aspect of philosophy and political economy, adjusting her understanding of life and of human motivation as she set a rational case for individual rights.

She integrated and presented a full case for the philosophy of capitalism and was the first to relentlessly popularize the free-market theories of Ludwig von Mises in the United States, bringing him to the attention of a new generation of economists. She championed the individual against the collective, reason over mysticism, self-assertiveness over guilt, and the United States over her native Soviet Union.

Shaping one's character was a core issue for Rand, and, leaning on Aristotelian logic, she argued that a commitment to convictions and reason was essential for a moral life and self-esteem. Free will—conscious choice—a code for rational values, and a dialogue on creating oneself through one's own effort were potent ideals; for a time, the pull of her views began to muffle neo-Marxism in the din of campus coffeehouse conversation.

Ayn Rand believed in the capacity to know and argued against every attempt to evade the responsibility of thinking. Her point, born of an adolescence in the U.S.S.R., that no man exists for the sake of another man, became her anthem. She worked toward and accurately predicted the Soviet collapse. It came nine years after the passing of Alice Rosenbaum (Ayn Rand’s birth name), but given the long struggle for mankind's freedom, Soviet ideas and Ayn Rand's ideals are destined to battle on, and the field of strife will be closer to home.

Edward R. Royce is a Congressman from Orange County, California, and a Senior Member of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.

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