(A) Everyone has.

I mean if you look at the sales of books by and about Ayn Rand, we have over 50 individual titles, tallying about 50 million copies. (Far more The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged - about 8 million each - than Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology - about 100,000.).

We the Living, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged were made into movies. Anthem has been recrafted into at least two different graphic novels. Anthem is often assigned in middle schools, along with Call of the Wild, and The Pearl, and other classics that kids can and will actually read.

We do a lot of grousing here about the end of the world, but the influence of Ayn Rand's ideas is known deeply and broadly by all manner of engineers, especially those working in information technologies. The fact is that unlike railroads, computers are still largely unregulated. There's a reason for that. And the reason is Ayn Rand.

It is just that very many more people say that they were "influenced" by Rand's ideas than have consciously adopted all of the tenets of her philosopohy of Objectivism. House Speaker Paul Ryan is a great example. He was happy to embrace Rand's ideas on the way up, but once he was nominated to run for VP, he distanced himself from her "atheist" philosophy.

Allow me to offer just one point: Gold is legal. I mean it was never really illegal, but, broadly, here in the USA, you had to have special knowledge and interest to own gold. Then, it was legalized again. Now eveyrone can have it. The US government even strikes gold coins and has been for 30 years. That is quite an improvement over the world of 1937, 1947, and 1957.

(B) Not everyone has to be. Maybe one-third of the people in the Colonies supported the American Revolution. There's a good line from the British comedy, "The Black Adder." The hero is dressing down an idiot nobleman who cannot count on his own fingers, "So, the Renaissance was just something that happened to other people." Not "everyone" participated in the Renaissance, the Age of Reason, or the Industrial Revolution. They all still happened.

The people who make a difference know the works of Ayn Rand. Every year thousands of young people are introduced to Anthem, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged. It would happen even without the Ayn Rand Institute. It did for me. And our little Ayn Rand clique in high school was not unique. We made the world a better place.

And more to the point....
(C) Objectivism is a philosophy for individuals who seek to make their own lives better. It begins and ends with me. And I am happy to discover that there are millions of others who share that on their own.

(D) To the extent that any person faces reality and understands the world through reason, willing to stand by their own judgment of their own self interest, they have accepted (however implicitly, even accidentally) the philosophy of Objectivism.