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# Reader can’t stand Rand
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/reader-cant-stand-rand-editor/
- Published: 2007-06-18T15:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-24T01:10:42.000Z
- Author: Guest Author
- Tags: Opinion, Santa Monica, #archive-import

*By Robert Moskowitz Santa Monica*

I can't believe you give over an entire column in your newspaper to propaganda from the Ayn Rand Institute! I have been having conversations with a dear friend of mine who is a committed "Randy" (my parlance — they tend to call themselves Libertarians or Objectivists), and I can tell you these people are so out of touch with reality that it's disappointing and scary.

Last week’s column is perfectly typical (”What to do about rising fuel prices,” page 4, June 14): "There is only one sense in which we are entitled to tell the government to do something about gasoline prices: Insofar as these prices are made artificially high by the government's many regulations on oil and gasoline production."

That sentence, alone, is so fraught with errors of fact and understand that you do your readers a serious disservice to publish it without giving equal space to someone who actually knows the oil and gas business who can explain the "real world" situation which Alex Epstein purports to be discussing.

Objectivists live in a world where corporations, like oil and gas producers, are extremely concerned with satisfying the needs of their customers, and would never think to pollute, cheat, price gouge, falsify documents, or compete unfairly against their competition merely to enhance their bottom lines. Never! And because they believe this, they also believe that government regulation is an unnecessary and inordinately expensive burden that does little more than infringe the property rights of those poor, bedeviled oil and gas producers! There is practically no instance in which oversight by the mass of people, in the form of government, can be justified if it limits in any way the rights of a corporation to do whatever the heck it wishes.

And don't let an Objectivist get started on Environmentalism either. There they believe that Environmentalists actively hate humankind and would rather see human life eliminated in favor of the lowliest bugs and fishes and birds! Never mind that the UN and most other documents on environmentalism explicitly say that the goal is to preserve the environment for the benefit of people.

I have not been able to get across to my Libertarian friend the simple (to me) notion that if property rights are so supreme, then the property rights of the group ought to trump the property rights of the individual. There is apparently no place in their limited Randian world view to deal with a conflict between the property rights of one person and the combined property rights of two people. They revert to repeating mantras and fail to grasp the failure of their own logic.

What's more, even the smartest of their debaters — and I have been referred by my Libertarian friends to the writings and teachings of many "experts" from the world of Objectivism — are so heavily laced with factual errors, ignorance of human history, and simple-minded errors of logic that I despair of ever waking up my friend to the fact that the world is not a black and white place, but one filled with shades of gray, and colors, too.

As a loyal SMDP reader, I insist that you either dump the Libertarian propaganda from your pages, or balance it with factual and knowledgeable argument from someone who is not wearing a pair of Ayn Rand designer blinders.

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on June 18, 2007.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/061807.pdf?ref=smdp.com)