What Ayn Rand Didn't Know About America

I spotted another story the other day about some idle rich people who were giving up their US citizenship because they don't want to pay taxes.  Apparently, according to the article they are going "John Galt" on the rest of us.  They are going to show America that we can't do without them because they are the ones who built this country and anyone who isn't rich is just a parasite along for the ride.

Well I've got news for them.  Ayn Rand was not a real American.  She arrived in this country in the 20th century, taken in as a refugee from Communist Russia.  Her family did not build this country.  Her family did not shed their blood for this country.  She came here and wrote some books criticizing the country that saved her ass made some movies and got rich.  She applied what she knew about Russia to the United States and tried to draw some kind of parallel.  Among the things she got wrong is the lie that the rich built this country.  The lie that everyone else is a moocher who is totally dependent on the rich for everything good that comes from this country.

Well, let me tell you, Ayn Rand didn't know the first thing about America.  She was ignorant because she was not one of us.  She could never be one of us and those who choose to follow her philosophy could never really be a part of this great country.  The people we think of as the first Europeans to settle this country were the Pilgrims.  Although there were settlers in Virginia even earlier, we like to think of the Pilgrims as the people who represent our roots.  Why?  Well it certainly isn't because they came here to get rich.  And they weren't rich when they arrived here either.  Unlike the myth that Ayn Rand creates in her novels, it was not the idle rich who built this country.  In fact, some of the Pilgrims gave up comfort and money back in England to come here.  They came here because they wanted to worship their own way.  This is something Ayn Rand would never have understood in a million years.  She was an atheist.  How could she begin to understand the desire that drove the Pilgrims to literally put their lives on the line in order to worship God the way they chose.

In Rand's world it's every man for himself.  The true hero somehow lifts himself up by his own bootstraps without the help of anyone else, even the society that he exists in.  Maybe this is the way Russia works, I don't know.  But it is not the way America was settled.  If the Pilgrims had not worked together, if they had gone off on their own, every man for himself they would have been wiped out.  Not only that, if it had not been for the Native Americans, who showed them how to plant the three sisters, corn, beans and squash, they wouldn't have made it through the second winter.  None of them made it on his own.  That first winter they lost almost half of their community to disease and starvation.

As America grew, there were times when other Americans gave up their citizenship.  The American Revolution comes to mind. Many of the most wealthy of the colonists stood with the king against the revolution.  They were called tories, and when the war was over and the revolutionaries had won they took their money and deserted this country for Canada or they went back to England.  They probably thought the same thing that this current batch of rich people think.  The country will not be able to get along without us.  But, somehow, the country went on without those elite deserters.  In fact, it prospered without them.  You could even say that we didn't even notice their absence.  The founding fathers, Washington, Jefferson, Madison and the rest were not wealthy by continental standards.  What they did have they put on the line, knowing full well that if the revolution failed not only would they lose everything they owned, but their lives as well.  Many of those who signed the Declaration of Independence were ruined by the stand they took.  Some of them died in prison broke and ill.

As the country moved west and settled first the old northwest, then the great plains, and finally the west, the common man drove the movement.  It was not the rich who moved west.  They had everything they needed back east.  They were well set.  The rich did not put their lives on the line and join up in a wagon train to settle the new land.  It was not them who died along the Oregon trail.  In fact, it was not them that financed the western expansion.  The people who went west did not go to their local banker to ask for a loan so they could emigrate.  They saved their money and sold everything they had, just like the Pilgrims did, in order to pursue their dreams.  When they settled, they helped each other with things like barn raising's, quilting bees, and every fall they helped each other with the harvest.  This tradition of neighbors helping each other with the harvest survived up into the 1930s in this country.  There were no Rambos who went out west all by themselves and settled.  Even the earliest explorers traveled in groups.  If you have read about Lewis and Clark you know that an individual white man traveling in Indian country would have been unlikely to survive for long.

After all the danger was gone, after the towns had been built and things were more settled, the rich felt it was safe enough to come out west and to exploit what they could.  Did people start out poor and become rich?  Of course they did.  Did they do it all by themselves?  Of course not.  They were able to become rich because other people risked their lives, paid with blood, to settle the country.  They made it safe so that those who came later could become rich.

When I hear about people resigning their US citizenship because they don't want to pay taxes I don't think
"What a shame, we'll sure miss them, they contributed so much".  If they contributed anything it was just money.  The history of some of the rich in this country during crises has not been good.  During the Civil War, they were allowed to buy their way out of the draft so that they didn't have to serve.  During Viet Nam, they made sure that they got all the choice spots in the National Guard and Army Reserve so they didn't have to go, or they got deferment after deferment for questionable reasons.  During World War Two, some of the rich actually traded with the enemy to make money while Americans were dying.  They also involved themselves in plots to try to overthrow the elected government and to put a Fascist government in place.  Some of the wealthiest people in America were big fans of Hitler.  They thought of themselves as supermen who were superior to the average man and that sure fit in with what Hitler was pushing.  However, it was the average man who defeated Fascism.  It was millions of everyday Americans who saved this country, not a few rich guys sitting in a board room on Wall Street.

Ayn Rand could never understand this country.  She came from a country of slaves, ruled over by a very small elite.  Everything came from the top down in Russia.  To try to compare a country built by free people to a country of slaves is folly.  Those Americans who read Rand and try to live their lives according to her philosophy do not represent what is best about America.  They represent the very worst and we are all better off without them, for they do not appreciate or even understand what this country is about.