Reply To: Atlas Shrugged and the Torah

OOM: I basically agreed with those rants. Although I can understand if you don’t like to mix your rants with your novels. It wasn’t my favorite book either; I read it because I figured I should read a book that so many people talk about.

Although I don’t agree with them, it’s understandable that many people believe that private charity should take care of all poor people, with government doing very little or nothing in the chesed department.

I don’t think there can be any such thing as a government charity in a democracy, unless the people receiving are not allowed to vote. I think that is her main point on that end.

However, Rand’s extreme libertarian or anarcho-capitalist views are also incompatible with the Torah’s economic laws, such as the requirement to pay a worker on the same day as he finishes his work. Any legislation of that nature would be absolutely forbidden under Rand’s worldview, as presented in the interview you quoted.

I think you’re being a bit too precise with that. The req to pay on time is the baseline; I think you can contract around it. For example, if the worker knows that the employer always pays after the market day, then the employer does not violate by doing that.