ReasonTV
@ReasonTV·1.4M subscribers·4.8K videos
Stossel: Ayn Rand–The Author People Love to Hate
Posted
October 10, 2017
Views
191,479
Likes
8,674
Comments
1,125
Engagement
5.12%
October 10, 2017
191,479
8,674
1,125
5.12%
Every word spoken in this episode is indexed. Type any phrase to jump straight to the moment it was said.
Type any word or phrase that may have been spoken. Click a result to seek the player to that exact moment.
Try a name, a topic, or a quoted line
4:50Now Playing60 years ago today, Atlas Shrugged was published. The novel still sells 100,000 copies a year.
----------------
Subscribe to our YouTube channel
Like us on Facebook
Follow us on Twitter
Subscribe to our podcast at iTunes
Reason is the planet's leading source of news, politics, and culture from a libertarian perspective. Go to reason.com for a point of view you won't get from legacy media and old left-right opinion magazines.
----------------
Not everyone will celebrate Atlas Shrugged's anniversary. Ayn Rand is someone people love to hate. Years after her death, people still feel compelled to attack her ideas.
A recent John Oliver segment said her philosophy, objectivism, "is just a nice way of saying 'being a selfish asshole.'"
Fortunately, not all people think that way. Many young people, discovering Rand for the first time, say her ideas inspire them. Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, a free market advocacy group that promotes Atlas Shrugged on college campuses, says "it's surprising how much appetite there is" for Rand's ideas. Stossel challenges him, saying, "no, college students are socialists!" Kirk responds, "they're not socialists… 60% say they think socialism is a good idea and then 70% say they don't want to pay higher taxes and they don't trust the government. They just don't understand what socialism really is."
Driena Sixto discovered Rand through Turning Point USA. "I brought to class a ton of laptop stickers that said 'This laptop was brought to you by capitalism'. Towards the end of the semester I had most of the class on my side."
Jennifer Grossman, CEO of the Atlas Society, argues that it's important to expose young people to Rand's work because "Fiction is more powerful than facts".
Facts matter more. But often it's fiction that expands people's minds and changes how they think.
Produced by Naomi Brockwell. Edited by Joshua Swain.
Sentinel Indexing in Progress
Metadata and chapters are available. Claim extraction for this episode is pending.
All video content is delivered via YouTube embedded players in accordance with the YouTube Terms of Service. Sentinel provides research tools that promote discovery and accountability across political media.
