• • Could Atlas be about to shrug? 
David Hudson, Associated Content Atlas Shrugged  In [Atlas Shrugged], Ayn Rand has described three classes of people; the producers (business owners and those who provide services for profit), the moochers (those who use the services provided by the producers, but spurn and vilify them for their "greed"), and the looters (typically politicians, who loot the producer's of their wealth for the purpose of re-distributing it to the moochers... usually at their request).     Share on Facebook

• • Progressives hate individual rights 
Stephen Grossman, Standard-Times (New Bedford, MA) Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal  Objectivist author  When the latest socialist pie-in-the-sky unravels, as it must, progressives gratefully fall into another coma. They awaken, mercifully free of memory and free to plan other peoples' lives again. Throw the bums out! Vote Tea Party. Get "Atlas Shrugged" and "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal."     Share on Facebook

• • Letter to the editor 3/19 #1 
Tamar Toledano, Pitt News (U of Pittsburgh) I am concerned about the potentially dangerous messages conveyed in Giles Howard’s March 17 column entitled “Keep the focus on yourself in college.” Howard’s theory, via Ayn Rand’s objectivist creed, would resonate if mainstream societal norms were already geared toward social, economic and political justice and equality. So perhaps it is important to note that the culture at many American universities runs counter to the larger American culture geared toward individualism, wealth and consumerism.     Share on Facebook

• On theater: ‘Hamlet,’ ‘Rabbit’ on Mesa stages 
Tom Titus, Daily Pilot (Costa Mesa, CA) The Fountainhead  Architecture is not a subject around which tense and often inflammatory dramas revolve. One must reach back to Ayn Rand’s melodramatic “The Fountainhead” to find a story in which the architect’s vision is of paramount importance.     Share on Facebook

• Area library staging literary March Madness 
Terry Morris, Dayton Daily News (OH) Atlas Shrugged  “Opening round” battles include “Moby Dick” vs. “The World According to Garp,” “Atlas Shrugged” colliding with “Rabbit Is Rich,” “Catch 22” testing “Ragtime” and “The Scarlet Letter” going head to head with “The Bean Trees.” Much like those in the NCAA college basketball tournament, the clashes will progress to a field of 32, a sweet 16, elite 8, final four and then the champion.     Share on Facebook

• Peter Costello: Up close and very personal 
Tim Roberts, New Matilda Atlas Shrugged  Satire.The following transcript was found in Peter Costello’s Canberra apartment, sandwiched between battered copies of Thus Spake Zarathustra and Atlas Shrugged. It appears to be the outline of a speech which we speculate was intended for delivery via videotape.     Share on Facebook

• Gossip: Bernie Madoff beaten—or just exhausted? 
Bruce Watson, Daily Finance The Bernie Madoff fraud scandal has been a tragedy for his many investors, but it has proven a gold mine for the business media. Finance writers, exhausted from years of trying to inject drama into the Randian mutterings of Alan Greenspan and the scholarly condescension of Ben Bernanke, have finally found a hot headline grabber of their own.     Share on Facebook

• Ben Bernanke tells Ron Paul: Low interest rates didn’t cause bubble 
Tim Cavanaugh, Opposing Views Bernanke has plausible deniability: The bubble was caused by the freebooting ways of his Ayn Rand-maddened predecessor.     Share on Facebook

• • • Capitalism’s Leni Riefenstahl 
Max Dunbar, 3:AM Magazine Altruism  Atheism  Ayn Rand Institute  Atlas Shrugged  We The Living  Capitalism  Personal life  Yaron Brook  Image  Review of Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, by Jennifer Burns.Rand lives on, a grinning ghost in the corridors of power. Sales of her books, always at high plateau, spiked during the 2008 crash. To her supporters, the bank bailouts vindicated Rand. ‘We’re heading towards socialism,’ declared Yaron Brook, head of the Ayn Rand Institute, ’we’re heading towards more regulation. Atlas Shrugged is coming true.’ Cult devotees are famously resistant to the lessons of experience. It evidently didn’t occur to Brook that, like Soviet Communism, Rand’s doctrinaire capitalism had already been put into practice, and found wanting.     Share on Facebook

• FPD Forum 2010: Inconvenient truths on the future of finance 
John Nellis, Seeking Alpha Capitalism  Eugene Fama and other Chicago economists say there is no such thing as a bubble. Maybe Ayn Rand wrote this someplace too, thus persuading Greenspan?     Share on Facebook

• • Per Ayn, lights in California are going out 
Stephen Schork, CNBC Atlas Shrugged  [California’s] politicos are carrying on like the antagonist out of an Ayn Rand novel. [....] Jeez, what’s next…? Thought Police? To paraphrase Ayn, the lights in California are going out.     Share on Facebook

• Russia’s economy is going to recover, and its political system will not change 
Mark Adomanis, True/Slant Atlas Shrugged  I am not trying to claim that Putin’s Russia has been magically transformed into Galt’s Gulch, merely that it is more liberal, adaptable, and flexible that the administrative socialism that characterized the Soviet system.     Share on Facebook

• • NeoCon progressive Michael Lind gets it wrong on Rand Paul’s name change 
Eric Dondero, CCN News Online I was there when [Rand Paul] formally announced to everyone that he wanted us all to refer to him as “Rand.” His motivation was two-fold; his admiration for Ayn Rand, and the distinction of Rand as unique and more formal sounding.     Share on Facebook

• Fisher on Greenspan and the irrational exuberance bull 
Bradley Davis, Wall Street Journal - Deal Journal Atlas Shrugged  At a forum on the euro and the dollar sponsored by the Dallas Federal Reserve, its president Richard Fisher was asked about his view of former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan. Fisher said he wouldn’t comment — though he did mention that he had never been able to finish “Atlas Shrugged,” Greenspan mentor Ayn Rand’s paean to capitalism.     Share on Facebook

• • Intellectual journal jousts Web commenters—in print 
Jared Keller, AtlanticWire High-minded cultural journal New Criterion has had a strange adjustment to Internet age. The monthly intellectual review boasts heady criticism on piano recitals, Matisse, and ballet--and has no pictures or illustrations. Yet in the March issue, the editors made an unusual stab at engaging the Web: they responded to commenters in print. The editors got so flustered by comments on a critical piece about Ayn Rand that they devoted their monthly editorial to addressing them. They cited these online guerrillas as proof of the selfishness of Rand's followers.     Share on Facebook

• • Eating wrong 
Zane Fischer, Santa Fe Reporter Atlas Shrugged  In Ayn Rand’s free-market bible Atlas Shrugged, it’s suggested that Atlas—and by metaphorical extension any “pillar” of society and industry—shrug off a planet that has become unbearable to hold. But the prevailing attitude at the food summit suggested that the world only becomes unmanageable as a result of our mismanagement. If we all throw a shoulder in, Atlas can stop feeling like an exploited migrant worker in New Mexico’s industrial agribusiness machine and become part of a process in which responsibility and wealth are shared.     Share on Facebook

• • A halo of virtue 
Sandy Telcocci, The Oklahoman (Oklahoma City) Atlas Shrugged  In response to Walter Williams’ "Is health care a right?” (Commentary, March 10): Williams is apparently familiar with the premise of Ayn Rand’s "Atlas Shrugged,” which should be required reading (or rereading) for all our politicians prior to even running for office. Below is a partial quote from the book made by the character Ragnar Danneskjold about Robin Hood and why he wanted "the last trace of him wiped out of men’s minds.”     Share on Facebook

• The repo men’s new Lehman shrug 
Max Abelson, New York Observer There are two ways to react to the biblically proportioned report that Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy examiner released last Friday, which over its 2,209 pages (not counting appendices) has echoes of Grisham, Orwell and Ayn Rand. The first is to lose faith in man. [....] The second reaction is to shrug.     Share on Facebook

• • Weird press releases, Volume IV: Libertarians don’t want to be counted, dammit. 
Sarah Fisch, San Antonio Current - Curblog Image  Dude. [Congress is] not asking us what we're reading, who we're hooking up with, or whether we're Communists (although Ayn Rand was totally in favor of that type of interrogation, having appeared as a friendly witness in front of the House UN-American Activities Committee in 1947). If "additional information to fine tune its control over the lives and money of the American people" is required by the Census Bureau to determine, say, how many homeless people there are and how many of us aren't the assumed-default White Guy, that's cool by me.     Share on Facebook

• Chill, bro. $50B swindle ain’t no thang 
Foster Kamer, Village Voice - Runnin’ Scared (New York) [A] banker said [Lehman Brothers’ masking of $50 billion in debt] just wasn't "that big of an event," and then compared the supposedly unnecessary outrage at Lehman to the leadup to the American invasion of Iraq. [....] If you're intelligent enough to understand why the outrage building up to Iraq was so ridiculous, why're you still working at a bank making the world worse? The answer, obviously, is cash, and because "worse" is a very subjective term in this context, and probably invokes Ayn Rand at some point.     Share on Facebook