This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Friday, November 6, 2009.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Ain Rand could have appropriately seen herself as just one of many people in a long intellectual tradition, but she didn't.

She could have viewed libertarians in general as something more than thieves of ideas she claimed

as her own.

She didn't.

And despite her odd personal animosities,

Enran's writings have had incredible shelf life and influence.

Jennifer Burns' new biography of Enran is goddess of the market. Enran and the American Right. of definitions that we've got in the United States, where were her friends in politics in like

the 40s and 50s?

Well, the first group that Rand really made contact with in terms of her political interests and her political organizing were American

businessmen who were opposed to Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.

So that was the early eager audience for the fountainhead and for her novel anthem, which was actually

reprinted by a group called the pamphleteers, which was one of the first Libertarian groups

started in the early 40s by Leonard Reed who went on to form the

Foundation for Economic Education. So this was the first group Rand Found and she

tended to focus on smaller businessmen,

those who saw Roosevelt's New Deal

as a violation of traditional patterns and norms

of governments who felt that programs like the NRA and things like that were not constitutional or were not traditional or were not traditional,

really not ethical.

And so what Rand tried to do was provide them with a set of arguments and persuasive material they could use to promote their ideas.

...