Public Interest Over Ayn Rand Objectivism

Individualistic selfish thinking doesn’t have a place in government policy because the policies that a government makes are not and never were intended to benefit an individual. They should be made with the public interest in mind and little else. And public interest, by its definition is not about one person, but rather people as they are, many individuals in one jurisdiction interacting with each other.

In today’s US political debates, however, public interest frequently seems to have fallen off the map, in many cases in favor of obviously biased propaganda, but in many others toward the focus on one individual or one situation.  Modern debate has “Joe the Plumber” examples of one guy not liking a situation and that is enough to tear down a whole taxation policy which could make millions of people better off. This appears to be because, as frustrating as it is, these individual allegorical stories resonate with the public better than logical debate. Which appears to be supported by the fact that I know who Joe the Plumber is. Fuck Joe the Plumber. Not the actual guy, I don’t really care about him either way (though I probably disagree with him on most important things). But fuck Joe the Plumber the political tool used to dumb down the conversation and move debate away from public interest. His interest is not public interest. If a policy is good for the public at large, that is all that matters and as long as we are transparent in how we get to that policy and we openly weigh competing interests against each other, there really shouldn’t be a problem. And if there is, it means there is something we have overlooked, or circumstances have evolved, perhaps differently than anticipated, and now we must look again and determine the current state of public interest on this issue.

Libertarians, especially the Ayn Rand objectivist types, essentially deny that there is such a thing as public interest, or that multiple people matter. But I have to ask: If only the individual matters, then why is there a government in the first place? Can’t we just make that person accountable to keep track of their own rights? The flat obvious response is a definitive “No”. The objective reality (if we’re debating government policy anyway) is that people cohabitate in the same spaces and must interact with each other. This is where the limits of self-interested personal philosophies become exposed and this is the reason that Ayn Rand’s objectivism doesn’t really fit with reality.