Obama: Ayn Rand Is for Misunderstood Teens

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By now you probably know how we feel about Ayn Rand. Sure, her boldly individualist philosophy might have been the kind of thing that appealed to us the first time we read The Fountainhead in ninth grade, but fortunately, we’ve moved on since then — and we’re not interested in dating you if you haven’t. As it turns out, President Obama feels pretty much the same way.

“Ayn Rand is one of those things that a lot of us, when we were 17 or 18 and feeling misunderstood, we’d pickup,” he tells Rolling Stone in the upcoming issue of the magazine, in response to a question about Paul Ryan’s obsession with her work. “Then, as we get older, we realize that a world in which we’re only thinking about ourselves and not thinking about anybody else, in which we’re considering the entire project of developing ourselves as more important than our relationships to other people and making sure that everybody else has opportunity – that that’s a pretty narrow vision. It’s not one that, I think, describes what’s best in America. Unfortunately, it does seem as if sometimes that vision of a ‘you’re on your own’ society has consumed a big chunk of the Republican Party.” Feel free to let us know whether you agree with him or not in the comments! [via BuzzFeed]