Male privilege gives her a boner.

-1 star for providing libertarian jack-off material.

I submitted this because Randians will worship everything she ever said but if you see clips of her, she's just a sad, bitter, empty shell of a woman who hated practically everyone.

Humility is not the absence of pride. It is the absence of arrogance.

You can be proud of yourself without going overboard and being a prick. I sure as hell would rather have a humble president who undersells his achievements that one who overestimates his own competence, building himself up as some infallible savior and celebrating victory in some ridiculous and overblown way, perhaps before victory has even HAPPENED, while wearing a flight suit on an aircraft carrier.

Also: The baseball player analogy is pretty good. Should you be proud of breaking a record? Yes. Should you keep in mind that in the grand scheme, being good at a game is insanely trivial? Also yes. In the end a humble person is really just someone who has a proper perspective of who they are and what they've done.

While I think she's completely full of shit, this is still an interesting interview.

Fap fap fap fap, ooooohhhh yeaaaaaaahhhhhh, five stars baby, FIVE STARS! WOOOOOOOO OBJECTIVISM! Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, and Phil Donahue, an orgy in my mind!

And what the hell? 5:31, a young Richard Dawkins in the audience?

The philosophy of libertarianism is so twisted that it turns the brain into mush; as seen in this exhibit.

For some reason, she got me to agree with her the vast majority of the time in this interview. I think I need to change careers. Being a social worker has made me a bitter, hateful, cynical bastard. And poor.

She's an awful person. Her philosophy seems to be a kind of poor man's Nietzsche minus all the nuance, self-reflection, and revelling in indeterminacy. She is hateful, angry, simplistic and she contradicts herself many times. How the fuck did she become so popular in the first place? Perhaps she is a salesman, not a philosopher.

Ayn Rand hated Libertarians, and most Libertarians don't care much for her either. I speak as one of those Libertarians who agrees with pretty much any nasty thing you can say about her. She was simplistic and angry and petty and so on. Libertarianism was around before Ayn Rand, and it's doing just fine without her.

She was the L. Ron Hubbard of her generation.

If I was born in St. Petersberg in 1905 I'd have probably ended up like this too.

So that's how you pronounce her name.

HEY ASSHOLES - spend some time listening to elderly Russian women talk and you'll realize that she sounds like EVERY DEMENTED BABUSHKA EVER, not some brilliantly accented superbrain. Seriously, if she had stayed in Russian she would have been like every other raving crazy wandering down tvertskaya ulitsa, and NOT BECAUSE THE COMMUNIST MAN WAS KEEPING HER DOWN

I think Mr. Futurebot is onto something. +5 for Donahue's coke bottle glasses.

This is the woman who provided intellectual/moral/philosophical cover to the dudes responsible for supply-side Reaganomics and the accelerated deterioration of America's inner cities.

Which come to think of it, there'd by no "The Wire" without Ayn Rand. So...thanks!

"Charlie's Angels" is not about retarded children???? Now I need to talk to my therapist again.

First of all, Libertarians believe that things like the police and military should no longer be government property, but owned by private companies that can change the laws however they see fit. Like Marxists, Libertarians believe that we'll ultimately see a world where government has no place in human society, as if laws in general should be the property of a marketplace. Ayn Rand said that everything except for the police force, military, and legal system should be protected as private property. But when it comes to laws and crime prevention, she thought they needed to be uniform and devised in a central government, to protect the rights of all individuals. That can't be done in a business marketplace, or subject to individual opinion, as Libertarians wish. Chaos would be the result, without a court system or police force to help. Hence, Libertarians support a form of mob rules, and Objectivists (the name of Ayn Rand's philosophy, not Randists) support individualism.

If you think Ayn Rand sounded somewhat bitter in this video, you have to realize that this was taken just after her husband died, and after decades of listening to people scream at her with the same criticisms many of you have expressed. As for "retards," the point she was making was this: why is it that governments believe it's okay to force charity into our lives, as if we were only children who shouldn't be trusted to make our own decisions? The wealth of America was created by rational self-interest, with each individual able to work and invest his time and effort without fear that his savings would be stolen by a king, a dictator, or even a public tyranny. This idea is incredibly important: to be given the freedom to decide for one's self, allowed to support the ones we call family. Such a freedom lends itself to human generosity and self-esteem (what she called pride--pride in one's work and one's existence). With people who are disabled, under such a system, they would no longer have to be fed by public money, because those that surround them and care about them would be wealthy and strong enough to lend whatever help that is needed.

Still, even in America, it is such ideas that are beaten down before they take hold. Simply look at history: the most generous gifts (whether money or supplies) have been given by Americans (no matter how despised) since the birth of industry. Billions upon billions every year are sent to those in need; yet what many of us focus on are the cynical miscreants and poor that still exist because of crippling laws. As if their existence is somehow proof of the failure of capitalism. Yet it is capitalism that, still to this day, has never been given an honest chance. Things like health care, roads and utilities, and many businesses in the financial sector, are either partially regulated or completely controlled by government overseers. And if anyone has been to the DMV or done anything at a government office, you should know just how poorly such things run through red tape.

I know it's probably impossible to persuade most of you to see it from my point of view, but at the very least, before you bash every last thing that Ayn Rand stood for, at least read "The Fountainhead" or "Atlas Shrugged" first. The point of her philosophy wasn't to create a legion of blind followers that "jack off" to her stuff like some sort of insane cult, but the opposite: to appeal to an individual's sense of reason and intelligence. And in reality, she didn't care all that much to "invent" her own philosophy, but found no other philosophies present that fit with her view of the world, so she had to invent her own.

As for people like Reagan, please, to call him a disciple of Ayn Rand is ridiculous. He, much like our last president, did nothing but spend vast quantities of government money on programs that did nothing but create massive debt, crippling our military forces and our legal system. That was hardly rational and hardly capitalism. To call him a conservative makes about as much sense as calling a cow a vegetable.