Isabel Paterson

The God of the Machine (1943) compared society to an electrical circuit: energy comes from free individuals, and the state can only resist or divert it, never generate it. Paterson's chapter "The Humanitarian with the Guillotine" argued that welfare provision by force corrupts the giver. Published in the same year as Rand's The Fountainhead and Rose Wilder Lane's The Discovery of Freedom, it helped launch modern American libertarianism, and Paterson mentored, then fell out with, Ayn Rand.