Free Market Revolution: How Ayn Rand's Ideas Can End Big Government.

• Author: Burrus, Trevor
• Position: Book review

Free Market Revolution: How Ayn Rand's Ideas Can End Big Government

Yaron Brook and Don Watkins

New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 251 pp.

In Free Market Revolution: How Ayn Rand's Ideas Can End Big Government, Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI), and Don Watkins, a fellow at ARI, give a full-throated and spirited defense of Rand's arguments for freedom, self-actualization, and the just society. The book is a clear explanation of objectivism that weaves in timely and accurate policy discussions, such as the chapter on health care, that buttress the overall point.

Watkins and Brook are as uncompromising as Rand. "Only Rand's morality of rational selfishness," they write, "can resolve the contradiction at the root of the founding and provide the idealism, the consistency, and the intellectual clarity necessary to end Big Government." Such directness is often needed when defending free markets, but it is not 'always the best strategy. In this case, that uncompromising nature condemns the book to be praised by those who already agree and derided by those who do not.

Free-market advocates often say that we're on a precipice--a choice looms before us: totalitarianism or freedom. Free Market Revolution effectively argues that it is time for a radical reassessment of the American character. Between looming debts, fiscal instability, and a brave new world of centralized health care, between the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, there is something in the air.

For Brook and Watkins, the only answer to our problems, as is clear from the title, is the ideas of Ayn Rand. While free-market luminaries such as F. A. Hayek and Milton Friedman have ostensibly pushed for a freer society, the authors argue that they have failed to create a moral justification for capitalism. As such, "today's 'alleged free market champions are powerless to stop Big Government." "To do that," they say, "you need Ayn Rand."

Full disclosure: I am not an objectivist. I have considered myself a libertarian since I was a teenager, but, unlike most teenage freedom-lovers, I did not find my way to Rand's books until my mid-20s. By that time I had read most of the libertarian canon, and I did not need to be converted. When I first read Rand I was struck by her uncompromising positions, and I admired her Aristotelian/Nietzsehean approach to the philosophy of freedom. I 'also admired her understanding that freedom needs a moral defense, even if I believe her...