Comments by "SmallSpoonBrigade" (@SmallSpoonBrigade) on "Why is Ayn Rand disliked by so many people | Michael Malice and Yaron Brook and Lex Fridman" video.

Rand isn't even good on paper. Anybody that's actually bothered to read Marx would know that he actually marveled over the accomplishments of capitalism pretty explicitly. Where he had significant issues was the tendency of the owner class to treat the workers like equipment or work animals. A system where the owners owned the factories and businesses, but everything else was done in a capitalist market based way would be consistent with hiss beliefs, but still be nearly entirely what we've got from a practical perspective.
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Unfortunately? The thinking is of low quality and the conclusions are sketchy at best. I see no reason to ban the books, but I do think that exposure to them is really only valuable in the sense that we should have exposure to various ideas, even if they're clearly fatally flawed.
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@thomasjones53 I think that's the problem. People read it without the education or critical thinking to really get what's on the page, and so they view it as being this magical writing. The reality though is that Galt's Gulch is a cartoonish and extremely naive view of what that really was when it existed. A society where people are just doing their own thing tends to break down due to people getting into conflicts and the less desirable things not being done without some degree of force or bribe to make it happen.] In some respects it's a beautiful idea, but it's incredibly naive to think that is possible without infinite supplies of resources and people to put a higher premium on cooperation than following a leader.
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The reason why is that she's incompetent and her books have been used to indoctrinate generations of people into the idea that fascism is good and the government doing things for the people is bad. People latch onto it like it's a good idea, but lack both the education and the critical thinking to recognize that we've been there before. That was like what much of the US, and really world, were like before the invention of regulatory agencies and the like. We have those institutions and those limitations on freedom because not having them was terrible. There are countless history books that one can choose to read to understand just how bad her ideology was. At least with Marx, he recognized that if we simply prevented 3rd parties from owning businesses, we could still get nearly all the advantages of capitalism without treating people like cogs to be worn down and used up.
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