I reject that Objectivist argument as an example of Ayn Rand’s moral bankruptcy. Rather, the root of all evil is the scarcity of resources, which our Lord summarized for his followers, who were mostly not well trained in the science of Economics, as money, since money is of course the nominal representation of scarce resources in a society.
In the case of the Nazis, perceived and actual scarcities were directly responsible for their long term objectives, and their strategic military actions, respectively, not to mention their atrocities. The whole point of the war was to secure lebensraum, based on a perceived shortage of land resources; the premise of the Holocaust and other barbarities, was that Jews, physically disabled people, dissidents, hardcore Christians like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally ill, and others deemed unproductive or undesirable wasted resources, and these perceived wasted resources were seen as justification for exterminating these populations.
It was not a question of rationality or irrationality, indeed, even today one can find people making arguments in favor of rationing healthcare based on the likelihood of the patient to recover and be productive in society, and the promotion of “euthanasia” and “assisted suicide”, which is to say, murder, for elderly people who have serious illnesses. One could make a case that providing expensive medical treatments to elderly people is irrational, and one might be logically correct, in the abstract, but one would be morally repugnant for advancing such an idea; Christian morality requires that we sometimes embrace a course of action which is not strictly logical or rational based on secular criteria, because of our moral obligation to love our neighbor as ourselves.
Likewise, the Nazis made, for the most part, rational decisions concerning their overall war plans based on resource constraints. The invasion of Romania and Southeastern Europe, for example, was a tactical imperative, in order to ensure access to vital supplies of petroleum, needed to fuel the vast war machine of the Third Reich. The worst decision the Nazis made, Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Sovietsky Soyuza, was again driven not by insanity but rather by the underlying concerns over lebensraum, over the scarcity of land and agricultural resources, and an anger over the use of those resources by Slavic people that Nazi scientists had, based on 1930s ideas of eugenics, concluded were inherently inferior to the Germanic people. So we see a reduction in rationality with this decision, but the decision was still nominally rational within the context of the irrational Nazi system of thought, which was irrational chiefly because it was predicated on a fear of the depletion of arable land and natural resources and the exclusion of Germans from access to those resources. Many of these concerns we have since learned were not unfounded, but what made the Nazis evil was their willingness to pursue what to them were rational decisions, based on resource scarcity, whereas Christians are taught to disregard the scarcity of resources and trust in God to provide, which to many people even today, would seem ridiculous.
Now, to be clear, I am not accusing Ayn Rand, a celebrated female Jewish author, of being a Nazi, because that would be stupid and untrue. Rather, I am rejecting the Objectivist precept that irrationality is the root of all evil, and reasserting the Christian doctrine that it is money, the constituent tokens of which, while usually devoid of any substantial value in and of themselves, represent access to the scarce resources of society, which forms the root of all evil, and Christianity responds by dictating an approach to money which is not rational according to secular logic, but which can be justified only in the context of our apostolic patrimony of revealed and experiential theology.
