Rand Paul Teaches the Senate About Ayn Rand
Kentucky's elaborate practical joke, "Rand Paul," has struck again! Not a month after equating reproductive rights to his freedom to buy different kinds of toilets, Paul is now summarizing Ayn Rand novels during Senate committee hearings.
Ayn Rand wrote a novel, Anthem, it's a dystopian novel where individual choice is banned and the collective rules society. There's a young man and his name is Equality 72521. He is an intelligent young man but he is been from achieving or reaching any sort of occupation that would challenge him. He is a street sweeper.
Over time he discovers an abandoned subway and rediscovers the incandescent light bulb. And he thinks, naively, that electricity and the brilliance of light would be an advantage for society and that it would bring great new things as far as being able to see at night, being able to read and the advancement of civilization.
He takes it before the collective of elders, and they take the light bulb, and basically it's crushed beneath the boot heel of the collective. The collective has no place basically for individual choice.
Yes, the junior Senator from Kentucky just gave a book report about an Ayn Rand novel, and not even one of the famous ones. Paul's point, in summarizing Anthem, is that Big Government is "taking away people's freedom to buy products they want to buy," which is, of course, the Most Important Freedom, even more than The Freedom To Breathe Non-Cancerous Air. Your tax dollars at work, ladies and gentlemen: Using the 20th century's worst novelist to illustrate a morally and intellectually bankrupt position.