Lars Seier Christensen, Saxo Bank’s founder and CEO on Ayn Rand’s “broad relevance” to today’s society in Full-blown capitalism shrugged off for socialist hybrids:
[…] Ayn Rand removes your insecurity about whether your choices are right and unavoidable or just random and fickle. She provides a philosophical foundation for what most other commentators only present as a utilitarian argument — individualism and capitalism simply work better than collectivism and socialism. Very few advance the moral argument, but that is ultimately the real argument.
That is a very important distinction that has profound consequences. And that begins to reach out for an explanation of The Big Disconnect — why is it that in spite of socialism failing so completely again and again, why is it that in spite of capitalism and freedom improving people’s lives and creating wealth and welfare wherever it is applied, even with that knowledge and experience — we have to fight new attacks on freedom, year after year, decade after decade? The attacks come in different disguises, but always with a moral root — capitalism is evil, it is destructive, it is egoistic, it is anti-nature. We ourselves, on the other hand, fail to advance the moral argument, but the opponents of capitalism always sell their rotten philosophical goods by claiming a higher moral ground, altruism and the need for control of human freedom to protect man against himself by handing over responsibility to collectivists and anti-individualist leaders who know so much better than the rest of us. With enough moral high ground claimed, there is no need for any clear explanation as to why or how they would know better and there is no questioning of why the leadership should necessarily fall to them.
This is an ancient problem and has recurred in different ways throughout the centuries. Right now, we are seeing a solid revival, a significant pushback against all the advances that were made when the Iron Curtain came down and the despotic leaders of the Soviet Union and their satellites were overturned. Some of us foolishly though that this was the final victory for capitalism and freedom and that surely the world would move quickly in a better direction, while the remaining dictatorships would collapse before too long.
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