Recently BB&T, a large multi-state bank, made contributions from its Charitable Foundation to three West Virginia universities to promote the ideology of novelist and intellectual Ayn Rand. It has made many similar contributions in other states.

Rand was born Alisa Rosenbaum in Russia in 1905 and immigrated to the United States in the 1920s. She was not an economist but is best known for her novels Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. Her ideas enjoy a strong - some would say cult - following among many prominent business leaders and others, including former Fed chief Alan Greenspan. She died in 1982.

BB&T's choice of Rand for its charitable work is an interesting twist to philanthropy. She called her philosophy "Objectivism" and believed that selfishness was the prime moral virtue and that altruism was evil.

She wasn't a big fan of charity either. In fact, one book about her ideas is titled With Charity Toward None. She once said, "My views on charity are very simple. I do not consider it a major virtue and, above all, I do not consider it a moral duty."

As a committed atheist, she had little use for religion, once telling Playboy that "Faith, as such, is extremely detrimental to human life: it is the negation of reason." At best, religion for her was an early form of philosophy for people too primitive to reason. Her distaste for religion or the idea of God was based on her disdain for valuing anything above the human individual.

In particular, she had no use for religious teachings, such as those of Jesus and the Hebrew prophets, which denounced the depredations of the wealthy and powerful and demanded justice for laborers and the poor. Those ideas needed to be taken out with the rest of history's trash.

Rand believed that the role of government should be limited to police, the army and courts and the protection of property rights. "Not only the post office, but streets, roads, and above all, schools, should all be privately owned and privately run. ... The government should be concerned only with those issues which involve the use of force."

Presumably strikebreaking would be OK.

She was opposed to or would have opposed government programs such as Social Security, Medicare, CHIP, minimum wage laws, and health and safety regulations to protect workers and consumers, all of which belonged in the junk heap along with Jesus and Isaiah. So if we lose some coal miners to unsafe conditions or some kids to toxic toys, we can take consolation in the possibility that future miners and children may make better market decisions.

While Rand denounced racism, she opposed civil rights laws and defended the right of businesses to discriminate on the basis of race or any other factor.

Recently BB&T, a large multi-state bank, made contributions from its Charitable Foundation to three West Virginia universities to promote the ideology of novelist and intellectual Ayn Rand. It has made many similar contributions in other states.

Rand was born Alisa Rosenbaum in Russia in 1905 and immigrated to the United States in the 1920s. She was not an economist but is best known for her novels Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. Her ideas enjoy a strong - some would say cult - following among many prominent business leaders and others, including former Fed chief Alan Greenspan. She died in 1982.

BB&T's choice of Rand for its charitable work is an interesting twist to philanthropy. She called her philosophy "Objectivism" and believed that selfishness was the prime moral virtue and that altruism was evil.

She wasn't a big fan of charity either. In fact, one book about her ideas is titled With Charity Toward None. She once said, "My views on charity are very simple. I do not consider it a major virtue and, above all, I do not consider it a moral duty."

As a committed atheist, she had little use for religion, once telling Playboy that "Faith, as such, is extremely detrimental to human life: it is the negation of reason." At best, religion for her was an early form of philosophy for people too primitive to reason. Her distaste for religion or the idea of God was based on her disdain for valuing anything above the human individual.

In particular, she had no use for religious teachings, such as those of Jesus and the Hebrew prophets, which denounced the depredations of the wealthy and powerful and demanded justice for laborers and the poor. Those ideas needed to be taken out with the rest of history's trash.

Rand believed that the role of government should be limited to police, the army and courts and the protection of property rights. "Not only the post office, but streets, roads, and above all, schools, should all be privately owned and privately run. ... The government should be concerned only with those issues which involve the use of force."

Presumably strikebreaking would be OK.

She was opposed to or would have opposed government programs such as Social Security, Medicare, CHIP, minimum wage laws, and health and safety regulations to protect workers and consumers, all of which belonged in the junk heap along with Jesus and Isaiah. So if we lose some coal miners to unsafe conditions or some kids to toxic toys, we can take consolation in the possibility that future miners and children may make better market decisions.

While Rand denounced racism, she opposed civil rights laws and defended the right of businesses to discriminate on the basis of race or any other factor.

She believed that all human relationships should be based on exchange: "The principle of trade is the only rational ethical principle for all human relationships, personal and social, private and public, spiritual and material."

On that basis, most of us wouldn't have made it past infancy and are in real trouble when we're too sick or too old to fetch a profit on the human interaction market. No wonder that Cathy Young in a generally sympathetic article in Reason Magazine wrote that "Rand's insistence on de-emphasizing, or even denigrating, family, community, and private charity is not a particularly clever tactic for capitalism's defenders."

While Rand professed to be an admirer of the philosopher Aristotle, she missed some of his main ideas. Aristotle taught that the goal of life was happiness, in the sense of developing one's potential over the course of a lifetime, which is possible only in and through society. "He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god." He believed that politics exists for the sake of the good life and warned that republics should be based on a strong middle class and shared prosperity rather than extremes of wealth and poverty.

One of his main ideas seems to have missed her completely - the whole Golden Mean thing. Virtue for him consisted of a mean between extremes. Rand is all extreme all the time.

Of course, self-interest is an important value, but it's not the only one. Besides, we seem to have that one pretty much down. As the great first century Rabbi Hillel famously said, "If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?"

Most rational people have no problem with the profit motive as such. Anyone who has ever planted a garden hopes to get out more than what they put in. But you can't build a good society or sustain a democracy when the short-term gains of unchecked giant global corporations are the only thing that matter.

As the Kentucky rural writer and poet Wendell Berry said, "Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy."

And you can take that to the bank.

Wilson is director of the American Friends Service Committee's West Virginia Economic Justice Project and publishes The Goat Rope, a daily public affairs weblog: www.goatrope.blogspot.com.