Vile talk. But then, women are an inferior species in Rand's world, a place where little girls need not dream of growing up to be President. "By the nature of her duties and daily activities," writes Rand, "she would become the most unfeminine, sexless, metaphysically inappropriate, and rationally revolting figure of all: a matriarch."
Rand's creepy mise-en-scene is as ridden with criminality as it is with misogyny and sexual brutality. One of its cartoonish heroes is a pirate named Ragnar Danneskjold, who's celebrated for stealing from humanitarian relief ships bound for poverty-stricken lands and giving the money -- I'm not making this up -- to the rich.
"I'm after a man whom I want to destroy," says Ragnar. "... Robin Hood ...''
Danneskjold is described as follows:
"... the face had no expression; it had not changed once while speaking; it looked as if the man had lost the capacity to feel long ago, and what remained of him were only features that seemed implacable and dead. With a shudder of astonishment, Rearden found himself thinking that it was not the face of a man, but of an avenging angel."
It sounds more like the face of a psychopath.
Rand's heroes aren't just rapists, woman-beaters, and thieves. They're also terrorists who freely blow up or burn properties for ideological reasons, or simply because things didn't turn out as they might have liked. (Fun exercise: Imagine how conservatives would react to Rand's storylines if all the protagonists were black. Or Muslim.)
Then there's the fraud. It's praiseworthy in Rand's eyes -- if it's practiced by the right sort of people. Francisco, the rapist/hero, even boasts about defrauding investors from the "looters..." parasitical economy. In an ironic foreshadowing of Galt's Gulch in Chile, he brags about building defective housing for Mexican workers as part of a government contract:
"Well, those steel-frame houses are mainly cardboard, with a coating of good imitation shellac. They won't stand another year. The plumbing pipes -- as well as most of our mining equipment -- were purchased from dealers whose main source of supply are the city dumps of Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro. I'd give those pipes another five months, and the electric system about six. The wonderful roads we graded up four thousand feet of rock for the People's State of Mexico, will not last beyond a couple of winters: they're cheap cement without foundation, and the bracing at the bad turns is just painted clapboard. Wait for one good mountain slide..."
"Wait for one good mountain slide" -- with those workers' families inside, of course. Comedy gold, amirite?
Is it any wonder that a venture inspired by this book eventually defrauded its customers? And yet, despite the allegations against them, Gawker's Adam Weinstein tells us that, "GGC developers will still sell you a 1,200-acre "Master Estate" for a mere $500,000. As long as you're also willing to extend GGC developers a $2 million 'Founders Club' loan along with that $500,000, which they'll totally pay back, they swear."
Weinstein snarks, "That silence you hear? That's the sound of Atlas shrugging."
But hold the schadenfreude for a second. Every victim of criminal fraud deserves compassion, even when they admire a writer who idealizes greed. McElroy appears to be the kind of libertarian who, however misguided one may consider her economic views, can be found on the frontlines of many a good fight -- for civil liberties and individual freedom, and against militarism.
McElroy says she still has faith in the project's founder -- Mr. "Yes, you read that right!" -- and believes that other partners were responsible for the malfeasance. But one of the reasons the "Galt's Gulch" crowd chose Chile is because of that country's lax regulatory environment. Regulations exist for a reason. The Randians' blind hatred of them, and of the democratic governments which establish them, flies in the face of reason. Would they object to the recent regulatory actions which resulted in Graco, the baby products corporation, recalling more than six million infant car seats? Would it change their minds if they knew that Graco's improperly designed strollers resulted to the strangulation deaths of four babies in 2010?
But then, a hatred of regulation is part of Rand's profound contempt for democracy itself, which can be seen in her description of "the woman in Roomette 9, Car No. 12 ... a housewife who believed that she had the right to elect politicians, of whom she knew nothing, to control giant industries, of which she had no knowledge."
Rand and her followers don't think that a "housewife" has the right to elect politicians who regulate giant industries. The parents of those four strangled infants would probably disagree.
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