Note: This is the first article in a two-part series on the life and thought of Ayn Rand. To watch or listen to a discussion of her work I had with Alex Epstein, see here.

From the time she published her novels, it has been said that Ayn Rand’s heroes are unrealistic. When the psychologist Albert Ellis made this point in a 1967 debate with the author, Rand responded, “Am I unreal? Am I a character who can’t possibly exist?”

I love this exchange because it captures the boldness that made Rand a force of nature. Given her life story, it is easy to see how she could have come to see herself through a romantic lens. Ayn Rand arrived in the United States from the Soviet Union at the age of 21, during a brief window of time when it was still possible for those living under communism to get visas to visit abroad. She ended up writing in her non-native language and becoming arguably the most influential novelist of her era, with a cult of followers who considered her an oracle with deep and penetrating insights into philosophy, science, economics, politics, and art.

Through her own life experiences and fiction, Rand taught the world to dream big. With a fury that could only have come from growing up as a unique talent stuck in a totalitarian nightmare, she told us that heroes could be real, and that the progress of civilization could be understood as a romantic struggle in which beauty, truth, and the rational faculty of man have triumphed over weakness, ugliness, and the bland hateful conformity of the mob. Not only that, but we still have a role to play in this one great historical drama, despite how boring policy differences might sometimes look on the surface.

Trying to find transcendental meaning through politics usually ends in disaster. But that’s because most people who take that route have false beliefs about the way the world works, and are therefore attracted to statist and authoritarian ideas. What Rand provided to the world was the joy of a Manichaean political movement – the moral certitude, the connection with others engaged in a sacred war, enemies to hate – married to the liberal ideals that have moved humanity forward. The tensions inherent in such a project worked themselves out in the incredible story of Rand’s personal life, which saw her become the leader of a movement that was riven with sex scandals, factional fighting, and the denunciation of heretics, eerily reminiscent of the social dynamics within communist movements that she spent her life denouncing.

Yet rather than seeing what happened to Rand’s immediate circle as discrediting her ideas, the better lesson is to understand that truth and what most people find satisfying to believe are often in conflict, so it is no wonder that one of the twentieth century’s most successful proponents of anti-totalitarian ideas ended up becoming in certain ways similar to her enemies. There seems to be a weak or even negative correlation between how good it feels to believe in a political idea and how connected to reality it is. One of my main missions in life is to find a way to address this unfortunate aspect of human nature, and it was Rand who originally provided insights into how this might be done. If it is true she ended up going too far in her dogmatism and intolerance of dissent, she still has much to teach us in a world where defenders of capitalism have almost universally not gone far enough in standing up for what they believe is true, to the detriment of the pro-liberty movement.

To say that friends of liberty have been moral squishes over the last century or more would be a radical understatement. I’ve seen this, having spent much of my life in academia. Of that time, attending the University of Chicago Law School was easily the most intellectually rewarding experience. At our 2010 orientation, Michael Schill, the then dean, told us that we were at a place where there was “no such thing as political correctness.” As he explained, there were probably more Democrats than Republicans on the faculty, but conservative ideas were still much more represented than they were elsewhere. There was a norm that if you had something to say, it’s fine, as long as you could defend it.

The idea that political correctness did not exist was an exaggeration, but pressure to conform to left-wing ideas and values, particularly on sensitive topics of race and sex, mostly came from the students rather than the faculty or administration. I’m not sure how much things have changed since; it became a news story when my old First Amendment professor Geoffrey Stone announced he would no longer say the n-word in 2019. But when I was there, a white professor could use whatever word he wanted in its proper context.

Beyond free-flowing racial slurs, the majority of our first-year curriculum was centered around Law and Economics, an intellectual movement that began as a critique of left-wing orthodoxy from a perspective that took markets seriously. We were constantly taught to think in terms of concepts like unintended consequences, moral hazard, and misaligned incentives. Seminars were taught by figures like Richard Posner, both a pioneer of the movement and the most cited judge in American history.

The economic perspective permeated all intellectual life throughout my time at Chicago. Commonly, lectures and class discussions would center around the question of “efficiency versus values.” Efficiency on any particular issue was usually synonymous with the laissez-faire position. Values meant something like racial equity or an unquantifiable concern like privacy. It sometimes meant individual liberty too, but never in the economic sense. So free speech and the right to a fair trial were values, but not necessarily the right to sell one’s own labor for below a wage set by the government or run a business according to one’s convictions and beliefs. We were taught there was a point in American history when judges did take economic rights as seriously as other rights, and that is referred to as the Lochner era. Some professors would give Straussian defenses of the doctrines of that time, but they were generally taught to be outdated.

While I was glad to be in an academic environment where pro-market ideas got a fair hearing, the efficiency versus values framing always left me unsettled. Here we had capitalism, a system that both gives primacy to the rights of the individual and also produces the greatest good for the greatest number. Instead of being celebrated and championed, facilitating and allowing free markets was treated as a kind of dirty task society must perform in order to achieve outcomes we want. Business and the operation of markets were like cleaning toilets. Everyone likes the end result, but the process of how you get there is unpleasant, unromantic if not embarrassing.

I came to realize that this efficiency versus values dialectic exists outside of the hallowed halls of the University of Chicago Law School. In the world of empirical reality, the pro-market position continues to win. East and West Germany, North and South Korea have provided our most famous natural experiments. But even in the years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, we’ve seen the success of America over Europe, population and capital flowing from blue to red states within the US, and the UAE establishing the closest thing the world has to a utopia based on the free flow of goods and labor. There is no evidence that we are anywhere near the optimum amount of economic freedom anywhere in the world. Housing, the major market that has failed most in first world nations, is clearly dysfunctional due to too much government regulations.

And yet, economic collectivism not only survives in the United States and across the world, but is in certain ways growing stronger. We are told by populists on both sides of the political spectrum that neoliberalism has failed and is the cause of all our problems, from the degradation of the environment to low birth rates. Such arguments are made without much in the way of reasonable comparisons to any possible alternative. There is nothing new in calls for, say, more restrictions on free trade. Such ideas have been tried, they’ve failed, and their contemporary proponents have not made any theoretical breakthroughs or pointed to compelling empirical data that can explain why we should accept them now. Populist arguments are heavy on emotion and appeals to solidarity based on identity, whether we are talking about wokeness on the left or demagogic populism on the right.

Capitalism has theory and reality on its side, but has failed in the war for hearts and minds. David Broockman reports that when you get a focus group together, they’ll agree on the need for new housing but reconsider when they find out that someone might actually make money in the process of getting there. Private property and economic liberty remain respected mostly due to the inertia of our institutions, and a realization among elites that indulging too much in anti-market bias is bound ...