President Obama on Ayn Rand
When asked by the Rolling Stone about U.S. Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan’s favourite author, Ayn Rand, U.S. President Barack Obama was able to provide quite an interesting response.
“Ayn Rand is one of those things that a lot of us, when we were 17 or 18 and feeling misunderstood, we’d pick up,” Obama said. “Then, as we get older, we realize that a world in which we’re only thinking about ourselves and not thinking about anybody else, in which we’re considering the entire project of developing ourselves as more important than our relationships to other people and making sure that everybody else has opportunity – that that’s a pretty narrow vision.”
“It’s not one that, I think, describes what’s best in America,” Obama said in describing Rand’s philosophy. “Unfortunately, it does seem as if sometimes that vision of a ‘you’re on your own’ society has consumed a big chunk of the Republican Party.”
