• • • Objective economics: The implications of Ayn Rand’s philosophy on the science of economics 
Northrup Buechner, Capitalism Magazine Altruism  |Capitalism  |Egoism  |Image  |Objectivist author  | Excerpt from Objective Economics: How Ayn Rand’s Philosophy Changes Everything About Economics.Ayn Rand’s ethics of rational self-interest is an ethics of egoism, the view that selfishness is a virtue and the individual should be the beneficiary of his own actions. Her ethics is my ethics. By contrast, for the last hundred years, economists have presupposed the opposite ethics as the base for both generating and evaluating theories: that ethics is altruism, the morality of selflessness and self-sacrifice—the morality of the Judeo-Christian tradition—the morality that dominates our age and that has dominated Western civilization for two thousand years. The clash between altruism and capitalism is irremediable. Capitalism is the economic system of self-interest. Capitalism depends on self-interest, it encourages self-interest, it sanctions self-interest. At every level and in every detail, the motivation of self-interest is the motivation of capitalism. Consequently, the altruists have loathed capitalism from its beginning in the Industrial Revolution.   Published: 2011-03-13