Jennifer Burns

Their words

Over time, they all come to share Ayn Rand's views and opinions on everything, from music to art, to clothes. She gets a dining room table and a bunch of them get the same dining room table, and it becomes incredibly conformist, because they've all believed they're acting rationally. And they believe that to act rationally is to agree with Ayn Rand and they believe there's no other way to make decisions than rationality. To disagree with her is to be irrational.

Their words

That was her strength because she's so unusual, but it was also her downfall because she looked to herself as a model or to get insight about humanity, and she never quite processed how different she was from other people.

Their words

The big flaw is that it's justified through a fictional world. It's not justified through reference to the real world. It's not empirical in a way. It's not... Rand herself would say this. She's not writing about things how they are, but how they should be. That idealism just really undermines it as a mechanism to understand where we're actually living.

Their words

It seems we're driven much more quickly by moods rather than thought-through ideas. Right now, it seems the ideas they follow the political mood and try to put together the underpinning of it where it really was the opposite for much of the 20th century.

Their words

And so my argument is, that has now opened the door to the presidency of Donald Trump, which is potentially a deeply transformative moment that will change the size and shape of government, that may change our foreign policy profoundly, that may change our immigration policy, that may change the demographics of our country, all of that, and my thesis is that that's all been made possible by inflation.

Their words

And so the great mistake of the past years was to forget how fundamental inflation was to the rise of the last political order and to profoundly underestimate how much inflation would change the current political order.

Their words

I think it's always going to be hard to pull off because I think Americans and their elected representatives don't want to provide a universal benefit. They want to provide a targeted benefit because they believe there's a moral component here.

Their words

And Friedman advanced a policy that was really abstract and really it was devoid of judgment. It was pure and beautiful in that way but utterly impractical.

Their words

And to go back to thinking about money, money works because we all believe in it. It's a form of social trust, and it's a form of belief and faith in our society and in the other people in it. And when that breaks down, the money system will break down as well.

Their words

And that's what matters, how people feel about it, how people perceive it, it matters. And we saw this recently, you can't just come out with a bunch of statistics and tell people you're winning in this game if they feel like they're losing.

Their words

What is important to note though is that they thought of all of those as emergency measures to get through the emergency not as permanent alterations in the state of what had to be and not permanent alterations between state and market

Their words

And almost single-handedly, Friedman will introduce political and ideological diversity into the field of economics because, from his beachhead in Chicago, he will develop the theory of monetarism.

Their words

Milton Friedman is very open to doing things differently in a state of emergency. He will have different ideas during World War II than any other time and that's why I argue I think he would have been supportive of at least the first rounds of coronavirus relief because I think he would have put his emergency thinking hat on.

Their words

Friedman and Schwartz becomes the playbook for the Federal Reserve. We have lived through this, the financial crisis. The Federal Reserve is ready to loan. Covid, the Federal Reserve does all kinds of new things, because no Federal Reserve chair wants to be in Friedman-Schwartz 2.0 that somebody writes, where they're the bad guy who let the economy meltdown.

Their words

So, I think she comes back in to relevancy in a different way than Friedman does, because I think in some ways she's tapped into a more universal human longing for independence and autonomy and self-creation and self-discovery.

Their words

So, she thought of herself as rational. She thought of rationality as what she was doing, but she was actually doing a kind of mythopoetic psychological work as well.

Their words

Milton Friedman, he also does tend to have friends who agree with him, yet he's always willing to debate his opponents, and he's willing to do so with a smile on his face. He's a happy warrior, and he actually will win a lot of debates simply by his emotional affect and his cheerfulness and his confidence, where Rand will lose debates because she gets so angry in the face of disagreement.