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THE EDUCATION OF AYN RAND, 1905–1943
Deal. Rand admired Nock’s writing and had high hopes for his participation
in her organization. When she fi nally met the great man, however,
she found him to be fatalistic, mystical, and gloomy. Nock was in
his seventies and appeared worn down. Freedom was a rare, accidental
exception in history, he told the group. Although he wished them well,
they didn’t stand a chance. He argued that individualism as a political
concept should be replaced by subjective “self suffi ciency.” Rand was
unconvinced. “Why surrender the world?” she retorted. 10
Rand also became uneasy about Pollock’s role in the organization.
She began to question his sincerity and his commitment to the cause;
too many people had joked to her about Pollock’s wanting to run for
president. When he brought in the gravy boys, professional fund-raisers,
they talked only about how to raise money, eclipsing discussion of all
other issues. She sensed that Pollock and his contacts clung to individualism
out of inertia rather than true commitment: “They were going out
of fashion. And that that fi ght was much more to retain the status quo or
the personal status of being leaders of public opinion, rather than what
did they want to lead the public to, nor what were their opinions.” 11
What bothered her most of all was a sense of resignation she detected.
Almost Marxists at heart, some of the group seemed to feel they had
ended up on the wrong side of history.
Rand was right to notice a whiff of decay around the advocates of
capitalism. Through the campaign and her organizing efforts she had
encountered the last remnant of nineteenth-century laissez-faire, loosing
its fi nal breath into Willkie’s anti–New Deal campaign. The pessimism
of her compatriots was in many ways an accurate assessment of
reality, for the intellectual climate had shifted decisively against limited
government. Once infl uential free market economists like Frank Knight
and Joseph Schumpeter had raised dire warnings against government
interference in the economy, only to see their ideas eclipsed by the rising
star of John Maynard Keynes, a Brit who argued that government
stimulation should play a vital role in supporting industrial economies.
First published in 1936, Keynes’s General Theory of Unemployment,
Interest, and Money launched a full frontal assault on the received wisdom
of classical economics and the hands-off doctrine of laissez-faire. Instead
Keynes offered what came to be known as the theory of “pump priming.”
When the economy became sluggish, governments should intervene
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