Ayn Rand continues................

Another excerpt from Alvin Toffler's interview with Ayn Rand in the March 1964 issue of Playboy:


PLAYBOY:  You are a declared anti-communist, antisocialist, and antiliberal.  Yet you reject the notion that you are conservative.  In fact, you have reserved some of your angriest criticism for conservatives.  Where do you stand politically?

RAND:  Correction.  I never describe my position in terms of negatives.  I am an advocate of laissez-faire capitalism, of individual rights - there are no others - of individual freedom.  It is on this ground that I oppose any doctrine which proposes the sacrifice of the individual to the collective, such as communism, socialism, the welfare state, fascism, Nazism, and modern liberalism.  I oppose conservatives on the same ground.  The conservatives are advocating a mixed economy and a welfare state.  Their difference from the liberals is only one of degree, not principle.

PLAYBOY:  You have charged that America suffers from intellectual bankruptcy.  Do you include in this condemnation such right-wing publications as the National Review?  Isn't that magazine a powerful voice against all the things you regard as "statism"?

RAND:  I consider the National Review the worst and most dangerous magazine in America.  The kind of defense it offers to capitalism results in nothing except the discrediting and destruction of capitalism.  Do you want me to tell you why?

PLAYBOY:  Yes, please.

RAND:  Because it ties capitalism to religion.  The ideological position of National Review amounts, in effect, to the following:  In order to accept freedom and capitalism, one has to believe in God or in some form of religion, some form of supernatural mysticism.  Which means that there are no rational grounds on which one can defend capitalism.  Which amounts to an admission that reason is on the side of capitalism's enemies, that a slave society or a dictatorship is a rational system, and that only on the grounds of mystic faith can one believe in freedom.  Nothing more derogatory to capitalism could ever be alleged, and the exact opposite is true.  Capitalism is the only system that can be defended and validated by reason.