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Ayn Rand, born Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum, was a Russian-born American novelist, philosopher, playwright and screenwriter. She is widely known for her best-selling novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and for developing a philosophical system called Objectivism. Rand advocated rational individualism and laissez-faire capitalism, categorically rejecting altruism, religion and socialism. Her ideas remain both influential and controversial.
Rand considered the initiation of force or fraud to be immoral and held that government action should consist only in protecting citizens from criminal aggression (via the police), foreign aggression (via the military) and in maintaining a system of courts to decide guilt or innocence for objectively defined crimes and to resolve disputes. Her politics are generally described as minarchist and libertarian, though she did not use the first term and disavowed any connection to the second.