David McElroy

If Ayn Rand knew how closely she has become identified with libertarians, she would be spinning in her grave. She loathed libertarians, calling them “hippies” of the New Right.

If you read her comments about libertarians — at the website of the Ayn Rand Institute — you quickly see that Rand didn’t understand any system that could do away with the coercive state. You also suspect that she was a bit jealous that libertarians were getting too much publicity, as she sniffed that they were “stealing” and “plagiarizing” some of her ideas.

I read several of Rand’s books before I ever heard the word “libertarian.” When I was about 14 or 15 years old, my father’s boss gave me a copy of “Anthem.” When I liked that, he recommended “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged.” Her books introduced me to many new ideas, some of which I accepted and some of which I rejected. I consider reading those books important in my later political development, even though I reject the core of her philosophy.

And that’s one of the most interesting and complicated things about Rand. Almost everybody I know who has read her books has rejected her philosophy — which she called objectivism — but most of the readers of those books who went on to become libertarians or anarchists consider her work to have been an important step along the way, even though they did reject what was most important to her. How do we reconcile this seeming contradiction?

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I detest the “beauty industry.” Some of the most attractive women who’ve ever been in my life have been terribly insecure about their looks, and I put a large portion of the blame on companies who peddle images of impossible-to-attain perfection in hopes of selling products that can never deliver.

I understand the companies’ motivation. I don’t want to legally ban them from selling what they’re selling. I don’t even want to ban the methods they use to sell their products. But I am happy with a small step in the right direction which came this week, when the advertising industry’s self-regulating group issued a ban on the use of Photoshop in ads for cosmetic products.

This won’t stop many abuses. You’ll still be seeing impossibly perfect men and women in fashion photos and in every other kind of ad. And you’ll still be seeing hideously thin models who can’t be real and would be dead if they were. But at least in the field of cosmetics, if a product is shown a certain way, you can be reasonably sure that it’s at least theoretically possible that it can do what’s shown.

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I decided pretty early in life that I was going to be very different from my parents. It seemed easy at the time to just watch their mistakes and avoid them. So why have I spent so much time over the years hating things about myself that seem to have come straight from them?

Some psychologists would argue that it’s because I learned their habits as I was growing up, so it’s all about the environment. Others might argue that the ways in which I’m like them are simply in my genes (and thus hard to overcome), so it’s all about nature.

I think it’s some of both, as I suspect most people believe today. I think most of us would like to believe we were born as blank slates and that whatever we have is just an accumulation of the “programming” that we got from our parents and whoever else raised us, but I don’t think that’s the case. Economist Bryan Caplan looked at all the studies he could find on the subject and concluded the opposite.

In his recent book, “Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think,” he argues that most of what kids are going to become is encoded in their genes. He says that the studies he looked at prove that most of the things parents do to change their kids have little effect. (Here’s an EconTalk podcast in which Caplan discusses the research and his conclusions. I highly recommend it.)

But whatever it is, why have I so often in the past heard things coming out of my mouth — or seen myself acting in certain ways — that seemed to be the ghost of my (still living) father within me?

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