Warning: Your Teenager May Be Reading Ayn Rand

Parents, be way of what your kids are reading. No, I'm not talking about pornography or Ann Coulter-actually, that would be pretty much the same thing, wouldn't it-I'm talking Ayn Rand. If you find your kids reading the works of this delusional author, by all means treat it as if it were a handbook on how to make a bomb or join Scientology.

Ayn Rand's books offer empty promises of how something that has come to be known as ethical egoism will make the world a better place. What ethical egoism is selling is a snake oil that appeals to the basest selfish instincts of people, effective giving them a mandate to act only in their own interest. If you act in your own interest according to the tenets of Rand and other ethical egoists, what you accomplish is not only socially acceptable, but more moral than actually helping people. It gets even more surreal, however, because according to ethical egoists, altruism is actually immoral.

Admittedly ethical egoism does not suggest that one act in one's own interest with the specific tangential desire of opposing or presenting obstacles to another's interest. Despite this, it is a truism of human nature that conflict will arise between opposing interests. The foundation of ethical egoism rests on the proposition that somehow every facet of society eventually benefits by each citizen pursuing selfish goals. This reasoning is based on the idea that the core goal of each person is to live long and prosper, and so therefore no one's self-interest could possibly include actions that would present obstacles to that purpose. If only proponents of ethical egoism weren't faced with the inconvenient truth that we are living in the real world!

Several obstacles stand in the way of ethical egoism from being applied to real world situations, but two in particular stand out. In the first place, ethical egoism rides proudly astride the assumption that human beings are creatures of logic. In other words, the majority of us will almost always act in ways that are in our best interest. By taking this approach, it ignores the potential for psychologically deviant and self-destructive behavior. To take just one extreme example, simply consider Adolf Hitler. If anything was in Hitler's self-interest, it was using those eight million concentration camp prisoners he exterminated as slave laborers. Doing so would have enabled him to enlist every blond, blue-eyed, heterosexual, Aryan German Nazi as a soldier. By annihilating what was clearly a precious resource unavailable to the Allied powers, he could potentially have extended the war just long enough to give his scientists-including any bona fide Jewish geniuses that he gassed-enough time to develop the atomic bomb.

Ethical egoism implicitly assumes that every human being will always act rationally in determining what is in their own best interest. Just where exactly in the history of the human race did they come up with that ridiculous idea? Even if this obstacle could be overcome, however, there exists a second argument that prevents ethical egoism from ever being more than a theory in the contemporary world. Most countries in the world today operate under either a capitalist or semi-capitalist economic system. Capitalism combined with ethical egoism results in a decidedly immoral world that denies benefits to the consumer unless they also provide benefit to the producer; in many cases great demand is never met with supply because the cost outweighs the profit.

Capitalism combined with ethical egoism results in oil and auto industries acting in their own self-interests to collect enormous profits while holding back research into more affordable transportation for consumers. It also explains why pharmaceutical companies ignore diseases and illnesses experienced mostly by poor people who cannot afford medications created for profit. As long as capitalism runs the global economy, ethical egoism in pursuit of profit will be the guiding principle, and as a result there can be no invisible guiding hand to provide extenuating benefits.