Objectivism offers good ideas

You drive into Telluride, an old Colorado mining town where the plainest homes now cost a couple of million and the view is worth more. After checking into your motel room, you ride a gondola up one side of a dramatic, even astonishing box canyon to Mountain Village. It's time to see what the objectivists are up to.

Quite a bit, it seems, and with disciplined intensity. Hundreds of followers of the late anti-collectivist, pro-individualist thinker and novelist Ayn Rand are meeting thousands of feet above sea level not to have a high old time, but to study and learn about law, ethics, history, science, drama, philosophy, economics and more.

I myself attend several courses, including one called "Giants of Law." Thomas Bowden, a lawyer with a master's degree in history, is exceptional in conveying the magnificence of law in human affairs. He does this mainly through discussing a number of remarkable figures, such as Edward Coke, an Englishman who put himself at grave risk in the 1600s by defending the rule of law against the druthers of a king and left us a dictum Bowden kept repeating: "Reason is the life of the law."

Anyone suspecting an anarchistic strain in objectivism is disabused of this notion as Bowden talks about the imperative need for law, but law that is understandable, accessible and authoritative, that is "validated" by adherence to "the principle of individual rights" and that "governs the government."

Another superb course is on corporations. Accenting the objectivist devotion to laissez-faire capitalism, the instructor, Yaron Brook, extols the American corporation as an efficient, wealth-creating form of business that constitutes the marrow of our economy. The holder of a Ph.D. in finance, he skillfully explains how corporate regulations are already distorting the market to ill effect and what the dangers would be if corporations should fall victim to social activists. Their interference would hit corporations where it hurts most — profits — and all of America would feel the pain.

Brook, as you might guess, is not a socialist. The president and executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute that is sponsoring the conference, he once was. He was 16 then, and an Israeli, and he happened upon a book that has reshaped the thinking of countless numbers of young and old, Rand's powerful "Atlas Shrugged." It turned his outlook inside out. Now a U.S. citizen, he is involved in an objectivist program to get this tale of independent, creative individuals who figuratively hold the world on their shoulders in the hands of as many high-school students as feasible.

My first question to him in an interview is to tell me what objectivism is — a social movement, a political idea, what?