Ayn Rand understood that communism often advances through the moral weakness of those who should defend freedom.

Comment “Rand” and we’ll send you an article about her ideas. For Rand, capitalism and communism were not two equally respectable systems to be weighed with detached neutrality. Capitalism had produced individual freedom, innovation, property rights, social mobility, and a scale of prosperity humanity had rarely seen. Communism, by contrast, concentrated power, destroyed private property, persecuted dissent, and turned economic life into an instrument of political control. But Rand’s deeper point was that a free society can betray itself when it loses confidence in its own principles. When businessmen, intellectuals, and politicians act as if economic freedom must apologize for existing, they surrender the moral ground to those who promise justice while expanding coercion.