We need to work on stopping them -- the Randian Reaganites and the Randian Libertarians, such as Paul Craig Roberts and William A. Niskanen, co-founders of Reaganomics and both Cato Institute members. (Roberts has been misleading people with hundreds of articles on OpEdNews.com.
Regarding Ayn Rand, here is a relevant quote from an article, Partisan Politics: The Best Way to Determine Leadership, Or a Corrupt, Failed System?
Right-wing Republicans, Libertarians and the “Tea Party” love laissez-faire government. That’s why Ayn Rand has become a cult hero to many of them (along with Ronald Reagan, who was a champion of laissez-faire government). Some of them even consider Rand a prophet. However, Americans should understand that even though Ayn Rand was surely well-meaning and had some good insights, she was sadly mistaken about some very crucial issues.
Rand was an author born in 1905 in Russia, and her family was financially ruined after the Russian Revolution of 1917. She grew up hating Russian Communism, and she moved to America. Then, when the wealthiest few and the capitalist economic system became so corrupt in America that it caused an economic collapse in 1929 followed by the Great Depression, she simply misunderstood, and therefore feared, the New Deal of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Ayn Rand did not recognize how needed and necessary Roosevelt’s reforms, regulations, safeguards and protections were, and she feared his regulations would be like those of Soviet Communism in Russia. And, since she hated government control because she had seen what it had done in Russia, especially under Stalin, she supported laissez-faire government that left capitalism unregulated. She believed it was the only social political economic system that "protected individual rights" and ensured “free enterprise.”
In the 1980s Ronald Reagan and the Neo-Conservatives revived that Randian ideology, touting “free enterprise and free markets” and claiming that “big government” was antithetical to freedom. But, unfortunately, all that was propaganda and rhetoric designed to make the American people forget or ignore the lessons of history, and forget or ignore how and why laissez-faire government had almost brought about the ruination of America before Roosevelt saved it in the 1930s and ‘40s.
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