CNBC.com has a story up celebrating the 110th birthday of Ayn Rand, here (I don't recall seeing one for Ronald Reagan this week, whose 104th it was), entitled "Ayn Rand is 110 and still in your face after all these years".
Well, she wouldn't be in your face this week if it weren't for CNBC. And I swear the Randians use Google Alerts to swarm the comments section for any story that pops up about their heroine. CNBC even egged them on with an online poll embedded in the article.
Those of us old enough to have voted for the Gipper remember the critical verdict against Ayn Rand from the likes of Reagan's intellectual compatriots William F. Buckley Jr. and Whittaker Chambers, and against libertarians generally from people like Russell Kirk, all of whom insisted that man does not exist for his own sake, implying a transcendent, as opposed to a purely immanent, moral order. It was that precisely ideological character of Objectivism, that theological mistake, which made it but the other side of the totalitarian coin which Ayn Rand still carried in her pocket from the USSR, and which American conservatives instinctively rejected.
