Dr. Ed Crane (a principal founder of the Cato Institute) once requested just tell them I am in the tank for Ayn Rand as his preferred manner of introduction. We therefore take it that Dr. Crane’s essential philosophy aligns the Ayn Rand Institute’s motto:

My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.¹

Crane’s past antipathy toward SFEcon is then easily understood in terms of our prospective alignment of economic science with the Western science generally — which has gotten beyond its adolescent Scholasticism to accommodate the frank irrationality of the reality exterior to human comtemplation.

SFEcon is periodically assailed by economists acting on the authority of Ayn Rand. Their a priori knowledge, acquired through the faculty of reason, together with their knowledge of universals, are most often used to demolish our theory at its foundation, viz.: Roemer’s mathematically closed-form solution to the polynomial factoring problem.

None of these demolitions have proceeded by citing the error that positively must be present in one of this demonstration’s eight algebraic steps — which, considering our context, brings to mind one of Dagny Taggart’s more fraught laments:

It was useless to argue, she thought, and to wonder about people who would neither refute an argument or accept it.²

All refutations of polynomial factoring to date have elaborated essentially the same syllogism:

There are no general solutions to non-trivial polynomials of degree greater than four;

Definition of the Pareto optimum involves solution to simultaneous complex polynomials of arbitrary degree;

Ergo, there can be no quantitative representation of the economic optimality from which our theory descends.

Those of us for whom doubt is the only absolute will mistrust syllogistic thinking on the ground that you can never be sure that your major premise, however true, entirely covers your minor premise. Many complicated polynomials can be factored; and there are certainly many more such polynomials yet to be discovered. So just how can we be sure that economic optimality cannot be described by an unknown polynomial that can always be factored, irrespective of its degree?

Though the possibility of such a polynomial is to be rejected by reason, we also have every reason the to suspect its presence in reality. Do we not observe bold tendencies toward general optimality in the functioning of macroeconomic systems? If this mysterious polynomial does not exist, and is not in some objective sense being factored, how might we then, in all reason, account for mainstream economics’ observations of its central premise in action?

Unfortunately, these questions do not occur in Objectivism’s scientific canon. For those who believe, no further explanation should be necessary. Those who do not believe might as well be attempting to inform the College of Cardinals as to the height and weight of the Holy Ghost. As lá Rand herself was wont to say, in countless variations, there can be no conflicts of interests among rational men.

While the possibility of a rival rationalism does not seem to have existed for Rand, it certainly did exist for Libertarian stalwart Murray Rothbard. Rothbard was a principal founder of the now thoroughly Objectivist Cato Institution; and he later helped originate the Mises Institute, where he set up shop with other bitter refugees ³ from Cato. Rothbard's revenge took form in a biting little one-act play ⁴ lampooning his experience with the Objectivist subset of Libertarianism. He further essayed what he eventually came to regard as the Ayn Rand Cult, concluding that . . .

libertarians, despite explicit devotion to reason and individuality, are not exempt from the mystical and totalitarian cultism that pervades other ideological as well as religious movements ⁵

Might we now break through (to use the language of all those self-improvement cults flowing from Randian materialism) to a realization that reason and individuality are projections upon nature; and that they must be used with judgement, lest we be made ridiculous by them. At least Rand allowed that Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it.