Ayn Rand Interview

Via Pamela Geller, check out this 1959 Ayn Rand interview with Mike Wallace:

Also, the today's Wall Street Journal features responses to Yaron Brooks' essay last week, "Is Rand Relevant?":

Mr. Brook correctly identifies why Ayn Rand is relevant. Her philosophy provides the previously missing moral foundations of capitalism by showing that it is the only economic system compatible with individual rights and that production is a moral activity.

If need is the fundamental moral criterion, one has no right to life, liberty, or anything else. Capitalism protects rights by outlawing the initiation of force and fraud, while the primacy of need sanctions both. The primacy of need holds that one has no right to what one has produced if others "need" it. In "Atlas Shrugged," we see the logical result of the initiation of force against the productive: the elimination of production and the collapse of civilization.

Rand once said that she wrote "Atlas" as a prophetic novel in the hope that, by doing so, its prophesy would not come true. Unless her ideas prevail, "Atlas" will be prophetic.

Don Richmond
Naples, Fla.