A Companion to Ayn Rand by Gotthelf Allan; Salmieri Gregory;

Author:Gotthelf, Allan; Salmieri, Gregory; [Gotthelf, Allan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781118324912
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated
Published: 2015-12-10T00:00:00+00:00

The collectivist premises that Rand identified in Friedman did prevent him from advocating the separation of state and economy and state and education that Rand held were essential to capitalism. For example, it led him in 1962 to endorse both wealth redistribution (in the form of a negative income tax) and governmental involvement in education (Friedman 2002, 85–107,190–195). Rand summed up her ultimate view of Friedman in a 1980 response to a question about his television program “Free to Choose”: “He is not for capitalism; he’s a miserable eclectic. He’s an enemy of Objectivism, and his objection is that I bring morality into economics, which he thinks should be amoral” (Answers 43).48

This same criticism dominates her marginal comments on Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (Marginalia 145–160). She notes that he endorses free markets only as the best “method of guiding economic activity” and that he holds that there are cases in which “the holder of coercive power” will need to employ alternative methods.49 The essentially collectivist character of Hayek’s argument explains why Rand, in a 1946 letter, classified him as “real poison” and an enemy of her cause (Letters 308, cf. Marginalia 145–160).

Thus Rand rejected Hayek and Friedman (and, to a lesser extent, Smith, von Mises, and Hazlitt) as advocates of capitalism. But this is not to say that she dismissed them as economists, for she did not think that this sort of advocacy was the task of economics. Indeed, in a fundamental sense for Rand there are not different economic systems from which to choose and advocate (and there certainly exists no standard of “economic efficiency,” separable from morality, by which to evaluate different systems). There is only production and trade under freedom, the governing principles of which economics studies and codifies. When rights are violated, and statism ensues, economics studies how production and trade are distorted and ultimately extinguished. Thus the basic task of economics is to enable man to grasp how production and trade on a free market occur, not why they should occur.

Rand’s criticism of these thinkers, therefore, should not be taken as a denial that their work contains valuable insight into economics. Nevertheless, she would insist that (what she identified as) their philosophical errors undermine, not just their advocacy of capitalism, but their work as economists. For, as we have seen, she held that a moral-philosophical perspective on capitalism is not only fundamental to understanding the nature, justification, and basic principles of the free market, it is also necessary for defining and grounding the specialized science of economics.

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