Is Julia Gillard channeling Ayn Rand?

When John Quiggin accused Julia Gillard of embracing neoliberalism one of his readers suggested the PM was taking advantage of Ayn Rand’s renewed popularity to chase the libertarian vote. Rand seems to be everywhere these days. With the release of movie based on her 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged, her work is even being discussed in the opinion pages of The Age.

Of course no one seriously thinks the Prime Minister is channeling Ayn Rand. When Gillard talks about work and opportunity she’s reading from the same centrist script as Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and David Cameron. It’s a story about how government should look after people who work hard and play by the rules rather than those who don’t. But unlike these professional politicians, Rand wasn’t impressed by hard work and conformity. In her eyes, ordinary working working people who wanted someone else to pay for their age pension, their kids’ education, or their health care were parasites. She didn’t care how early they set their alarm clocks.

Rand argued that wealth is created by scientists who develop new theories, engineers and inventors who put those theories into practice and managers who efficiently coordinate resources. She wrote about a ‘pyramid of ability‘ with intellectual workers at the top and manual workers at the bottom. In Atlas Shrugged, the industrialist Hank Rearden develops a metal alloy that’s lighter and stronger than steel. The intellectual labour embodied in his factory enables workers to be far more productive than they ever could be if left to their own devices. As Rand’s fictional hero John Galt explains:

The machine, the frozen form of a living intelligence, is the power that expands the potential of your life by raising the productivity of your time. If you worked as a blacksmith in the mystics’ Middle Ages, the whole of your earning capacity would consist of an iron bar produced by your hands in days and days of effort. How many tons of rail do you produce per day if you work for Hank Rearden? Would you dare to claim that the size of your pay check was created solely by your physical labor and that those rails were the product of your muscles? The standard of living of that blacksmith is all that your muscles are worth; the rest is a gift from Hank Rearden.

According to Rand, workers are not owed a minimum wage. They are entitled to whatever people like Hank Rearden are willing to pay them. And they are not entitled to have the government tax more productive workers in order to pay for their retirement, health care or children’s education. If they can’t earn enough to pay for these things themselves, they should do without. As she wrote in the Virtue of Selfishness:

There is no conflict of interests among men who do not desire the unearned, who do not make sacrifices nor accept them, who deal with one another as traders, giving value for value.

When the PM says that "every Australian should pull his or her own weight" she doesn’t mean that neglected children, the elderly and people with severe disabilities should stop asking taxpayers for help. But this is exactly what Ayn Rand meant. As John Galt, the hero of Atlas Shrugged put it:

The doctrine that ‘human rights’ are superior to ‘property rights’ simply means that some human beings have the right to make property out of others; since the competent have nothing to gain from the incompetent, it means the right of the incompetent to own their betters and to use them as productive cattle.

Many of Rand’s followers share her contempt for those who expect to live off the work of others. Writing in Salon, Alyssa Bereznak tells how her Rand-obsessed father tried to persuade her to petition for emancipation while she was in her sophomore year in high school. "What does that mean?" she asked. "You would need to become financially independent," her father said. "You could work for me at my law firm and pay rent to live here."

Bereznak’s parents had divorced several years earlier. And after a long legal battle a judge decided that Bereznak’s father had to pay her mother the child support he owed along with her attorney fees. In the end, he had to sell the house. At least he didn’t blow it up.