Ayn Rand

In community college in Tampa I was fortunate to have crossed paths with a free market economist named Prof. Stuart Forbes, one of relatively few Capitalists among the mostly liberal-biased educators. While I and most of my classmates defended big government and the welfare state, Prof. Forbes challenged me personally to read Atlas Shrugged. I did, and the experience changed my life forever. Over the next several months I would shed my religious upbringing, become an ardent defender of human rights, begin to understand the virtue of selfishness, and uphold reason as man's only legitimate means of understanding reality. No other book or single event has had such an impact on my life. To this day, despite some faults in Rand's personality, her philosophy of Objectivism is the most coherent and defensible belief system I have encountered.