Interview with Yaron Brook: Why Ayn Rand Still Matters

“I really don’t see the Republican Party standing for a real free market or getting the government out of our lives on the domestic front. I don’t see them…proposing winding down the welfare state.”

From 2000 to 2017, Dr. Yaron Brook led the Ayn Rand Institute on a day-to-day basis, and today he serves as the chairman of the organization’s board. He is known for his advocacy in promoting Ayn Rand’s ideas in American society. On May 11th, he joined Merion West to discuss the Republican Party’s relationship with Objectivism, which has been notably adopted by some of the Party’s leaders, the intersection of religion and the movement, and his own background having grown up in a family of Socialists.

Dr. Brook, good afternoon. I spoke with your colleague Steve Simpson for an interview in December of 2017, and I look forward to speaking with you today.

For my first question, growing up in a socialist family, how did one novel, Altas Shrugged, persuade you to abandon your previously held beliefs?

Well, I just really challenged everything I believed in, in terms of collectivism, the morality of altruism, and socialism. I challenged them by presenting an alternative in rational, logical terms that I thought of. I couldn’t find any faults in the kind of arguments presented in Atlas Shurgged. These arguments proposed the alternative of rational self-interest, individual likes, reliance on individualism, and the defense of capitalism. I kept trying to poke holes in it and couldn’t. It took me a long time to read Altas Shrugged, but by the time I was finished, she had convinced me.