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By Root 1697 0

of them, hiding in the bushes, shoots and kills him. A local detective arrives to solve the crime. But the culprit, a physicist and business associate of the dead man, has planned a perfect murder: he’s arranged all the evidence to point so obviously to himself that the detective in charge can’t believe he’s really guilty. The physicist’s motive for killing: to stop the altruist from bestowing a potentially earth-destroying invention, a forerunner of Dr. Robert Stadler’s protonuclear device in Atlas Shrugged, as a gift to a world filled with power-maddened dictators. Rand wanted to dramatize the bad intentions and dreadful effects of a second-handed humanitarian such as Roosevelt, but the murdered character also recalls her marginally sadistic mother, the woman who once donated her daughter’s favorite toys to charity. The play renewed her old interest in science fiction. “You may be amused to note how prophetic I was,” she wrote to an acquaintance in 1948. At the time of writing the play, “I had not heard or dreamed of the atom bomb.” Again, the play did not find a publisher or a producer, but it helped the author to refine some of the “altruistic” stratagems that Ellsworth Toohey employs to blackmail and entrap characters such as Peter Keating.

Two months later, in April, she wrote “The Individualist Manifesto.” The thirty-three-page polemical essay presented her moral philosophy in the fullness of its development at that time. It echoed and amplified Anthem’s closing cry for the sovereignty of the individual mind—“I am. I think. I will”—and anticipated the author’s famous moral and political tracts of the 1960s.

The first thing right-thinking people must understand, she explained in the manifesto, is that man is an independent entity, an end unto himself, and never a means to an end. Since this is so, he has certain inalienable rights. These are not granted by any state, society, or collective, but rather they shield against all governments and societies. They constitute “Man’s protection against all other men” and are absolute. They include the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Bloodthirsty tyrants throughout history have tried to strip men of their rights or lure them into giving up their rights on behalf of the poor, the fatherland, enhanced security, or the common good. Never has a despot confessed to seeking power for himself; he always claims to be serving some nobler purpose. Caveat civis: Those who tell you to give up your rights for the sake of someone or something else typically want to be that someone or something else.

Second, the government exists to protect your rights, and only to protect your rights; you do not exist to obey or serve the state. (In fact, citizens owe the government nothing, not even taxes; government funding should be by voluntary means.) As Communism proved, primary allegiance to the state was a recipe for slavery and stagnation. In fact, taking a leaf from Albert Jay Nock, Rand and Paterson both argued that governments have rarely contributed anything material or spiritual to humankind’s development. Most governments have hounded geniuses to martyrdom. The sole affirmative function of the state is to safeguard individuals from one another so that they may create and work in peace.

Third, there is “and ever has been” one fountainhead of progress: the individual person in a state of political and economic freedom. This was the source of the wheel, the steam engine, the electric lightbulb, and all great music, art, and literature. Laissez-faire capitalism is the only system ever evolved to operate solely on the basis of individual human reason juxtaposed against an opportunity or a need, and as such must be thanked for 150 years of industrial creativity and material progress such as the world had never known.

Perhaps most important, capitalism, unlike Communism, doesn’t demand the impossible. It doesn’t ask people to turn themselves inside out and twist their desires into halos to serve its ends, as Communism does. Although free markets do benefit most men as a consequence