Number one, as an objectivist who admires Ayn Rand, I'm totally in line with her ideas. Expressed in atlas shrugged, that just because it's your son they should get no special avantage.
This is a bit of a red herring, because Rand was talking about people being given privileges out of a sense of entitlement. She didn't actually say that no one should ever make use of an existing brand or family name to further a cause properly. Saying that a family can't continue it's own family branding is sort of like saying that family businesses shouldn't exist, or that branding a personal name is immoral or something. I mean, going down that road you would end up with a moral imperative that basically says you can't profit or benefit from
anything at all you didn't create yourself; what's the difference whether it came from family or any other place? Except the thing is no one can create or produce anything
other than on the backs of everyone who came before. It's literally how process development works over time, whether for a brand or a technological innovation. I mean, what, the Waltons can't allow their kids to work in the business, they'd better go get a job at Target or something? Or if Hershey has a big name in candy, now if they develop a new candy line it's somehow unethical because really this new candy is just benefiting from the merits of some other candy and not on its own? I know I'm getting a bit funny with this last example but I do believe you end up with turtles all the way down when you want to go down the road of people not benefiting 'unfairly' from what they did not personally create.
Having said all that, I'll remind you that I'm separating all of this from nepotism in the sense of giving underqualified or unqualified people positions in order to simply wield power or gain favors. As there is possibly overlap with Trump's family, this bears mentioning. I think it is possible to argue that Trump is guilty of nepotism if it was true that those he assigns are unqualified. For his own daughter...it's pretty tough to really call that nepotism. I mean having your own child work in your family's financial empire is really as close to home as it gets, and it would be a real stretch to call that invalid. I mean she'd have to be *pretty* inept for that to be nepotism. Inepotism, I guess.
And having said
all that, I'm not even endorsing what might be called the capitalistic ethic, but I am trying to describe what I think is a reasonable interpretation of how the current system is
supposed to work. You have to go really far, as Rand did, to actually tell your child to think twice that they're going to be in your family business. In fact it's practically unethical to do that purely on principle, notwithstanding that many kids obviously want or need to go their own way. This is similar to Rand's examples of 'fidelity' to a person sexually speaking, whether her ideal in theory of going with the greatest person, most closely aligned with your values, in practice means little more than never having fidelity to anyone because someone better might come along tomorrow. On paper it may sound noble and selfless, in practice it's highly unethical and damaging (which is reflected in the results of her own experiments in this regard). So I think examples like this from Atlas Shrugged are best taken as a metaphorical concept of doing away with parasites trying to leach off of those who actually create value (which is reasonable to an extent) and of not being with someone romantically just because you happen to be standing next to them in social milieu (also reasonable). But the practical application cannot possibly resemble the literal content of the story; at least not without everyone being miserable. To paraphrase an old idea, a worse thing than people getting what they don't deserve, would be everyone getting what they deserve.
