My mother made me a libertarian

[supergee]

We now know that Ayn Rand's excesses can be blamed on her childhood. Her mother made her give her toys to the needy, and she grew up to blame all our problems on mandatory altruism.

I have now learned that Ma in Little House on the Prairie is portrayed as the same sort of mother. Laura Ingalls Wilder's daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, whose contribution to Little House was somewhere between editorial assistance and writing the whole thing, was one of the leading libertarian thinkers of the 1930s.

My mother made me feel bad ("you should be grateful"*) about having toys but never actually took them away from me, so I was able to get over libertarianism.

* When I read in Stranger in a Strange Land that gratitude always includes resentment, I believed it, but I've learned that such feelings are nowhere near universal, and I figured out how not to feel that way about those I love.

Thanx to Making Light.

Comments

[andrewducker]

Seems a bit unfair to blame her mother, when it was the Russian Revolution and Communism that formed her opinions:

"The subsequent October Revolution and the rule of the Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin disrupted the comfortable life the family had previously enjoyed. Her father’s business was confiscated and the family displaced. They fled to the Crimea region of Ukraine, which was initially under control of the White Army during the Russian Civil War.... After graduating from high school in the Crimea at 16, Rand returned with her family to Petrograd (as Saint Petersburg was renamed at that time), where they faced desperate conditions, on occasion nearly starving."

[supergee]

Good point. There's never only one cause.