Libertarian PBS
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
I’ve never understood the antipathy that exists between Objectivists and Libertarians. They believe in the same things –> that self is god and money his symbol of divinity. Perhaps the real difference is that Objectivists have a higher deity –> the goddess Ayn Rand, a selfish polygamist adulteress. But I repeat myself.
I’ve never understood the antipathy that exists between Objectivists and Libertarians. They believe in the same things –> that self is god and money his symbol of divinity. Perhaps the real difference is that Objectivists have a higher deity –> the goddess Ayn Rand, a selfish polygamist adulteress. But I repeat myself.
No clue what Leonard Peikoff and his circle think of the Libertarian Party and other libertarian factions. Rand herself was quite antagonistic to them, finding them frivolous and philosophically vulgar. There are several different flavors of libertarianism.
Critics of Rand (among them the late Florence King, who was tongue-in-cheek about it) found the world of organized Objectivism ca. 1968 to be something of a discussion cult composed of people with artificial personalities. I’ve seen an account that has it that when the cult blew up around 1968 over the fallout from Rand’s discovery that Nathaniel Branden had another side piece, the members resumed their earlier lives and earlier dispositions. I’ve never had the impression that Peikoff, Binswanger, et al were abnormal people apart from their eccentric social and political viewpoint. The one Objectivist I’ve ever run into online was a man who had imbibed a great deal of Aristotle. I couldn’t begin to have a discussion with him. Rand herself (and I believe her successors) had only weak emotional investments in mundane political life; she seemed to think that all politicians will disappoint you, so don’t bother about it too much; she endorsed Barry Goldwater and Gerald Ford and gave her blessing to Alan Greenspan when he took a government job.
Rich Leonardi when he was blogging let it be known that before he got into sales, he was the staff director of a libertarian policy shop in Columbus. Part of his departure from the libertarian fold came when he realized one day that the luminaries of the movement tended to have one thing in common: childlessness. All the variants of libertarianism seem to attract childless people, with the possible exception of the palaeo strain associated with the von Mises Institute and the Pauls (father and son).