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RE: Kill Your Idols: The End of Idolatry is the Beginning of True Freedom!
Libertarians and anarchists too easily choose a specific writer or speaker as a role model without critically examining all of his or her arguments. Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, etc. all had some good ideas and some bad ones. Perhaps a large portion of their philosophies were sound, but there were definite problems with both of them, and they are not unique in their weaknesses.
Agree. If one is objective (or Objectivist :-) about those writers, it's clear that they had some bad ideas along with any good ideas.
Just as with anything, a blanket statement is a recipe for misunderstanding and bias. It's like when someone decries democracy because it led to crony capitalism and destroyed our economies. (Or more accurately, is currently destroying our economies.) That's part of the truth, but that doesn't mean that democracy is intrinsically bad, wrong, or evil.
The same goes for socialism. People point to the fall of the Soviet Union or to North Korea and as proof that socialism is the most horrible political system ever devised. But those systems were far from any ideal of socialism, and again, they sure do not prove that socialism is necessarily bad, wrong or evil.
The one thing we can say about Ayn Rand's writing is that it was ... bad. I've tried to read it, both her fiction and her essays, and could not get very far. In fact, I recently purchased a book about Ayn Rand the effects of her "bad writing." Link below.
https://academic.oup.com/fmls/article-abstract/53/3/377/3976622/Weiner-Adam-How-Bad-Writing-Destroyed-the-World?redirectedFrom=fulltext