Author’s Note: Below is Chapter 9 of my book, where I build from the foundations of Ayn Rand’s politics and look at her unique philosophical defenses of property rights and capitalism. As a guy who grew up in the Midwest, I couldn’t resist giving the humble corn seed a prominent role. Given the change in contemporary circumstances, I also spend a little time on her views on representative government, and I dare to ask whether Ayn Rand was a liberal democrat (with both words in lower case).

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There’s only one chapter left after this, but it’s one where I came up with some big new ideas after the lectures on which these are based, so it might take a little longer.

Here’s the chapter.

Chapter 9: The Metaphysics of a Corn Seed

Of all the rights we can claim—life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness—the one that is central to Ayn Rand’s unique political view is property rights. She is not just a defender of a free society in the sense of representative government and freedom of speech. She is specifically a defender of capitalism: a free economy based on the right to private property.

Property rights are central to Rand’s political philosophy because the activities protected by property rights are central to her morality. The distinctive virtue of her morality is productiveness. Her most philosophical novel, Atlas Shrugged, is an epic set in the world of capitalism, giving a sense of heroic grandeur to commerce and production.

If the essence of morality is the final causation of choosing the means to the ends of human survival, then the central means of survival is productive activity. The central individual right is the right that protects production: the right to property.

We should expect, then, that Rand offers a detailed, well developed, and unique theory of property rights. Yet her actual theory is surprisingly diffuse. She discusses it only in short snippets, often in passing on her way to another point. When she does write about it, she sometimes writes in terms reminiscent of a previous, highly influential theory of property rights: the theory of John Locke. For example, she defines the basic issue behind capitalism this way: “Is man a sovereign individual who owns his own person, his mind, his life, his work, and its products?”1—a thoroughly Lockean formulation.

This can produce the impression that she is merely relying on the foundation provided by Locke. Yet there is a central idea in her writings on property rights that is coherent, integrated, and unique to her.

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