Day 74: A Libertarian Flu Blogger’s Political Devolution

I woke up to a nasty message from she who doesn’t relent. “The liberal enemy Rand puts forth in The Fountainhead is a cartoonish shinyheaded intellectual who is feminizing the man’s world with his squishy socialist tricks,” she writes. Even her italics sneer as she asks: “I always thought you were cute, but arrogant. Are you simpleminded, too?”

IN 1933 (AND 2008), AMERICAN BANKS ENTHUSIASTICALLY WALLOWED IN 'COLLECTIVIST GREED'

Boy, am I. Some of what our shadowy friend says is true, and she says it well. But who can resist Rand’s lurid tales of high principle and hot sexuality? Not I. It looks like fun to tell all those predictable mediocrities to stuff it.

I should hook our hectoring correspondent up with the devoted libertarian who wrote in to denounce Jimmy Stewart for having starred in It’s A Wonderful Life. Not because the Christmas classic is sentimental. It’s “collectivist, bank-bashing propaganda” aimed at “robbing the fruitful to enable failure.”

I’d have snapped to attention for such rhetoric until 2008, when America’s megabanks stirred up so much havoc that they extracted grand subsidies from the Feds to stay in business and charge us more. (Shades of 1933, after which they at least kept a straight face—and books—for a few decades.) In 2009, the bank Nina works for bounced a credit check it had just sent me, then charged me a bad-check fee! I wonder what Rand would have said about such an enterprise. (Sadly, she never warned that borrowing money is the ticket to credit serfdom, as too many Americans have learned.)

I see now that I must be devolving into a moderate. (Our malcontented correspondent doesn’t get it, but hey—I’m still waiting for her to finish composing the voluntarist manifesto she asked me to post.)

Mom would be thrilled that I’m mellowing (girls hate all that talk), Dad sullenly disappointed (real men don’t care what girls think). Please don’t tell them.