• The economy: It’s always someone else’s money 
Richard Deight, Orange County Register (CA) As a nation, we like our entitlements. Perhaps the worst example, Social Security, is a gigantic wealth-redistribution and Ponzi scheme that would mean a prison sentence for the ringleaders if anyone but government ran it. Also at the top of the list is the ADA, which transfers private property rights from the able-bodied to the handicapped. "Special rights" trump individual needs and self-determination every time. After all, we must all do our part to provide for the "greater good." If Ayn Rand were alive today, she would have a field day.     Share on Facebook

• • Socialized healthcare is a severe threat to individual liberty 
Andrew Foy and Brenton Stransky, American Thinker Altruism  In Radicals for Capitalism Brian Doherty stated Ayn Rand's belief that, "people don't care if something doesn't work as long as the dominant morality of altruism tells them that it is right." For opponents of government-run healthcare to succeed they must not only convince the public that the Administration's plan will fail to deliver on its promises but also explain how the plan will severely infringe on individual liberty, which the government of this country was designed to protect.     Share on Facebook

• Saver nation 
John Nadler, International Business Times FreedomFest 2009, scheduled for July 9-11 [...] in Las Vegas, will smash all records, with over 1,000 expected to attend, including dozens of experts, authors, think tanks, and media. [....] See Missouri history professor Steven Watts on “Fantasyland, Walt Disney, and the American Dream,” followed by “Playboy, Hugh Hefner, and the American Dream”…..plus Don Hauptman on Ayn Rand's Playboy interview.     Share on Facebook

• • State of the city: Good 
Greg Glover, WRCB-TV (Chattanooga) Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  Capitalism  Half an hour into a speech that was sometimes somber, sometimes mystical, Mayor Ron Littlefield declared, "Ladies and gentlemen, the state of the city is good." [....] He cited urban reports, commissioners, CEO's, an antebellum speechmaker, Ayn Rand and Niccolo Machiavelli in calling on the citizenry to rise to the challenge of an uncertain economy and keep Chattanooga at the forefront of whatever is next.     Share on Facebook

• Hicksville High School’s class of 2009 
Hicksville Illustrated News Ayn Rand Institute  Anthem  Nancy Desai, Class of 2009 Salutatorian. [....] She participated in and placed second at the regional level of the American Legion Oratorical Contest and was an Anthem Essay Finalist in the Ayn Rand Institute Essay Contest.     Share on Facebook

• • Tea parties amd going John Galt: America’s new direction? 
Sylvia Bokor, Capitalism Magazine Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism  Objectivist author  "Capitalism," novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand wrote, "is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned." In a completely free society, the government's role is solely to protect individual rights. It leaves men free to produce or not as they choose, to work to the best of their ability or not as they choose, to trade with others, to benefit from their own effort, to save and invest and support charities as they choose. But over many decades government has increasingly violated our rights and eroded our freedom.     Share on Facebook

• Gift of the write stuff can lead to problems 
Michael Riley, Asbury Park Press (NJ) Reading can expose you to all kinds of crazy ideas — those of Karl Marx and Ayn Rand just to name two. And don't get me started Nietzsche. . . . What it is about all that "Will to power, God is dead" stuff that attracts males in late adolescence? Personally, I blame violence-laden video games.     Share on Facebook

• • Creeping statism 
Lori Grof, Tulsa World Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal  Capitalism  For ammo - ideas to combat the evil principles of statism - read “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal,” a collection of essays by Ayn Rand and Alan Greenspan.     Share on Facebook

• • Mistakes were made, and sometimes admitted 
Robert J. Gregorio, Catholic Star Herald (Camden, NJ) The Virtue of Selfishness  Capitalism  Egoism  [Alan Greenspan] admitted to Congress last year that the bedrock foundation of his economic rationale was flawed. He had taken guidance from Ayn Rand, celebrated apologist of egoism (her 1964 title might give her away: “The Virtue of Selfishness”). It was his idea to deregulate the financial markets and allow them to regulate themselves because he thought that the banks’ self-interest would collectively police the whole apparatus. But give him credit for fortitude. He took ownership of his naive faith in lawless individualism. Digging out from the rubble of Vietnam and from today’s depression that has wrecked the lives of millions, it helps to hear such rare apologies from on high.     Share on Facebook

• Violent direct action is terrorism, not protest 
D. Christian Moore, The Examiner I support a robust and engaged civil society, complete with free expression from all sides of the spectrum. Heck, I am an objectivist and a strict constitutionalist, I want people protesting everything, just so politicians know we will hold them accountable.     Share on Facebook

• • • Farrah’s brainy side 
Amy Wallace, Daily Beast Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  Personal life  A recent email exchange with the late Farrah Fawcett reveals the unlikely friendship between the Charlie's Angels star and the novelist Ayn Rand, who helped the actress understand her place in culture—and longed to cast her in a TV version of Atlas Shrugged.     Share on Facebook

• The source of the current economic crisis: “A Chicago state of mind” 
Maidhc Ó'Cathail, Global Research Capitalism  “Then Clinton-era ‘reform’ of investor protections, led by Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin, former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, enabled the ‘financial supermarkets’ at the core of this collapse -- including Citigroup where he became a senior executive alongside CEO Sandy Weill,” [says Jeff Gates]. [....] “Rubin successor Larry Summers (now Barack Obama’s top economic adviser) fought for ‘reforms’ that de-regulated financial derivatives -- magnifying the impact of the crash as those arcane arrangements grew from $88 trillion a decade ago to a market that now represents transactions with a face value of $600 trillion,” Gates says. “Add to that toxic mix the easy credit policies of a central bank overseen by Alan Greenspan, a disciple of Ayn Rand, a Russian-Ashkenazi philosopher and market fundamentalist.”     Share on Facebook

• Technoprogressives and transhumanists: What’s the difference? 
Mike Treder, Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies It’s not always easy [...] for me to appreciate [...] some of the extreme Ayn Randian dogma that makes up a small segment of transhumanist viewpoints.     Share on Facebook

• • Guilford College gets ethics grant 
Business Journal (Greensboro, NC) Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism  Guilford College has received a $500,000 grant from BB&T to support programs exploring the ethics of capitalism, according to an announcement. The gift is the latest from the Winston-Salem bank to colleges around the country for programs centered on morality and ethics in capitalist society. [....] The grants typically encourage the study of the writings of Ayn Rand, a free-market philosopher who is greatly admired by BB&T Chairman John Allison. At Guilford College, students will read and discuss Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged as well as works by John Maynard Keynes, Paul Krugman and others as part of a new “The Moral Foundations of Capitalism” course.     Share on Facebook

• • Meg & Dia are smart singing sisters 
Tom Lanham, San Francisco Examiner Atlas Shrugged  Egoism  “I don’t enjoy reading modern books at all,” [Meg Frampton] says. “For education, I’ve relied on classics by Fitzgerald, Salinger, because I’m really interested in the way they saw things.” That’s how the exotic Korean-American beauty [...] stumbled across her most crucial text: Ayn Rand’s 1957 classic “Atlas Shrugged,” which details Objectivism, the author’s controversial philosophy of pursuing one’s own self-interest. “That’s the book that really got me going,” she says. “When I read it, it was the absolute truth, and that was how I was going to live my life. There’s a bad connotation to the word ‘selfish,’ but there shouldn’t be — it means that you look out for yourself, not walk all over people to get what you want. And if you’re doing it the way Rand says, you actually help others along the way.”     Share on Facebook

• • Obama contra Churchill 
Edward Cline, Family Security Matters Atlas Shrugged  Objectivist author  In her novel Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand dramatized the workings of the death premise. This point cannot be over-emphasized. If they cannot live to exercise their power, if they cannot reap the benefits of usurpation, if they cannot take satisfaction in the spectacle of men blindly taking orders and in forcing the recalcitrant to act against their will, they will want the country to die. That is, as well and after all, the Jihadist way. Obama and his allies wish Americans to submit, or else perish as a free people. In that respect, they share the goals and means of the Islamists.     Share on Facebook

• • Where’s the hope in 2009? 
Debra Rae, NewsWithViews.com Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism  Having grown up under Communism in Soviet Russia, author Ayn Rand gained insights into the destructiveness of socialism. Her classic novel, Atlas Shrugged, describes economic carnage caused by big government run amok. Although Rand foresaw our making the same politically expedient mistakes, America’s politicians remain hell bent on committing the very acts of economic lunacy that Rand parodied in 1957.     Share on Facebook

• Not much ado about nothing 
Nancy Coppock, American Thinker While nihilism is a respectable philosophical school, it is best handled by those who actually think. In the hands of those who do not, it is an easy philosophy to practice but deadly to cultural advancement. Even the Republican Party is having trouble becoming a Randian man, an Adam, standing separate from the devolving popular culture. The situation is beyond apathy, as the apathetic at least have an inkling of the ideas they believe cannot be changed.     Share on Facebook

• Unrecognizable to a Scribner 
Roger Baylor, News and Tribune (Jeffersonville, IN) Today's rant isn't about tax rates, free enterprise, “don't tread on me” or Ayn Rand's positivist philosophy. It's about paralytic dissenters, Lilliputian naysayers and the corrosion wrought by the knee-jerk instinct of voters to anoint oblivious ward heelers whose only discernable platform is abject surrender to the debilitating defilements of urban decay management.     Share on Facebook

• Ex-Lehman partner cooks up frisky domestic diva, hot IPO 
Laurie Muchnick, Bloomberg Review of the novel Love and Money, by Michael M. Thomas.[Characters] Clifford and Jekyll sometimes sound as if they’ve wandered in from an Ayn Rand novel, lecturing each other on morals: “If this country’s most-advantaged citizens, the people with the most chips, don’t stand up for what’s right and principled, there’s no hope,” Jekyll says, trying to convince Clifford to go along with the case.     Share on Facebook