Today would have been Ayn Rand’s 99th birthday. She was born on February 2, 1905 in St. Petersburg Russia and died in 1982. After immigrating to the US she became famous as a novelist and a prominent philosopher of individual liberty and capitalism. Rand’s writings were clearly more influential than any other author’s in the formation of the modern day libertarian movement. Organizations such as the Cato Institute, the Reason Foundation, and the Libertarian Party among others, all find their roots in the writings of Ayn Rand. Reason’s slogan “Free Minds and Free Markets” is lifted right out of the pages of Rand’s work (See For the New Intellectual, p. 25.) This is in spite of the fact that she always rejected the “libertarian” label. In fact, back in the 1970s she disparagingly would refer to the new libertarians as “hippies of the right.”
In the mid-1990s the Library of Congress conducted a national poll asking people to name the books that they had been most influenced by. Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged come in second only to The Bible.