• • 2025 and all that: The 2009 Brash report 
Keith Rankin, Scoop (New Zealand) Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  To fully appreciate the true believer mindset, one needs to read Ayn Rand's turgid novels, such as Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. They are Platonists, who have an ideal vision - in this case an internally inconsistent vision - that they believe can be made real if what they see as institutional impediments to market nirvana are removed. These classical liberals, like other sects of idealists before them, they have a mission to construct heaven on earth.     Share on Facebook

• • Talking comics with Tim: Gary Phillips 
Tim O'Shea, Comic Book Resources Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  Interview with Gary Phillips, author of Bicycle Cop Dave.[Q:] One of the major villains in the story is a developer--is the character inspired by any real world counterparts? [A:] Is the major developer a villain…or is he in the mode of, oh, John Galt and Howard Roark? Merely a man who understands how to get what he wants – which doesn’t necessarily mean everyone else looses. Now, before y’all sharpen your pencils for your missives, I’m no apostle of Ayn Rand, but I do believe in doing my best to portray dimensional characters with different points of view who are neither all black nor all-white.     Share on Facebook

• • Is multiculturalism smart business or racism 
Rick Weaver, The Examiner Ayn Rand Institute  Ayn Rand and others believe multiculturalism pits one culture over another without stating which culture belongs at the top. They contend this leads to a culture of “separatist groups competing with each other for power”. Yet true multiculturalism recognizes the broad spectrum of cultures represented in each individual.     Share on Facebook

• Book review: A fan of letters 
Daniel Okrent, CNN/Money Book review: Yours Ever: People and Their Letters, by Thomas Mallon.Most of the people whose letters Mallon explores are literary sorts [...]. But Mallon's erudition (which he wears lightly) and his curiosity (which he shares generously) have sent him diving into words left behind by royalists and revolutionaries, murderers and lovers, Ann Landers and Ayn Rand.     Share on Facebook

• • The evils of islamic political ideology: The conceptual drivers for Mumbai 
Alyssa A. Lappen, Right Side News [Pamela Geller:] Ayn Rand says that only its sanction is what makes evil possible.     Share on Facebook

• • Don’t fear socialized medicine 
Fran Quigley, Indianapolis Star Rand [...] conceded that the market is not well-suited to provide some services, like police protection. Health care needs to be added to that list. If you don't believe me, ask the 70 million uninsured or underinsured Americans who are casualties of the U.S.'s open-market scheme.     Share on Facebook

• • UK to expand the remit of financial services compensation scheme 
Thomas Cowen, Gov Monitor Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism  “Let me give you a tip on a clue to men’s characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonourably; the man who respects it has earned it.” (Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged). All of the fuss regarding remuneration was recently labelled as the “reddest of herrings” in Niall Ferguson’s latest report for the CPS and he is no doubt correct. The idea that the financial crisis arose due to greedy bankers is laughable, but what is more interesting and damaging is the current siege on the very concept of the profit motive.     Share on Facebook

• Weddings and divorces 
Neil Pendock, The Times (Johannesburg) Off to the Groenberg outside Wellington yesterday for the wedding of the season between glamorous Seattle shoe-sales stunner Rachel Carrigan and Apollonian Andy Barns, winemaker and self-taught engineer at Mischa Estate. The knot was tied in the cellar by an Ali G and Ayn Rand quoting Presbyterian minister cum psychologist and I could swear the wedding march is on the Buddha Bar CD.     Share on Facebook

• WTO protesters were right 
Jon Talton, Seattle Times Capitalism  Alan Greenspan, an acolyte of Ayn Rand, personified the worship of the "free market" that remains our guiding ideology yet it is actually a market of bubbles, costly bursts, a casino on Wall Street and America deep in the hole.     Share on Facebook

• Academy strives to teach students self sufficiency 
Debra McCown, Herald Courier (Bristol, VA) The academics [at Freedom Mountain Academy] are non-traditional, with the class of 14- to 18-year-olds tackling intellectual heavyweights across the ages, from Plato to Ayn Rand. They study ethics and alternative history along with science and English – and they’re told they must question everything.     Share on Facebook

• • Consent of the exploited 
Bradley Harrington, The Bulletin (Philadelphia) “Men cannot be enslaved politically until they have been disarmed ideologically. When they are so disarmed, it is the victims who take the lead in the process of their own destruction.” — Ayn Rand, “The Wreckage of the Consensus,” 1967.     Share on Facebook

• Review: Green capitalism: Manufacturing scarcity in an age of abundance 
Jason Walsh, Forth Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism  It would be fanciful to expect business leaders to read this book. Assuming they can pull themselves away from their colleagues’ auto-hagiographies and the asinine self-help nonsense like ‘Who Moved My Cheese?’ beloved of Newstalk, they will likely continue to read Ayn Rand, imagining themselves heroic Galt-like figures, all the while reducing their actual investment in productivity and squeezing as much pocket change as possible from outdated methods of production. Still, just because the capitalists have lost faith in their own historic mission doesn’t mean the rest of us should let them get away with denuding business of the only progressive characteristic it has: raising living standards through mass manufacturing.     Share on Facebook

• Stuck in traffic with Adam Smith 
Baynard Woods, Columbia City Paper (SC) Capitalism  Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations articulates three major ‘laws of capitalism.’ 1. Self-interest (it is better for the nation as a whole when I seek what it good for me) 2. Competition (it is better for the nation when people compete economically) 3. Supply and demand (prices are set through the complex balance of availability and desire). All three of these argue that economic health is determined by millions of small actions rather than centralized orchestration. These ideas sound right (unless you’re reading Ayn Rand in which case the same ideas sound like the ridiculous ravings of a b-movie idiot). But are they?     Share on Facebook

• • Why the left failed to make a drama out of the crisis 
Guy Rundle, Spiked Capitalism  Book review: First As Tragedy, Then As Farce, by Slavoj Žižek.One response to Obama’s highly conservative and restorative bailout plan was a revival of interest in Ayn Rand, and her pure insistence on the anti-humanist virtue of capitalism: that we would be either ruled by ‘blood, whips and guns or money – make your choice, there is no other’. This brutal assessment was of a piece with the Republican right’s rejection of the bailout, or the kamikaze Ponzi scheme of Bernie Madoff. For Žižek, these disclose more effectively the character of capitalism, its escheresque totality, than those who try to find the human and inhuman parts of the system.     Share on Facebook

• • • ‘These rocks are here for me, waiting for the drill’ 
Dolan Cummings, Spiked Atheism  Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  Capitalism  The biggest obstacle to Rand’s ideas sweeping the American right is that they have nothing to do with capitalism as it actually is. Free-market purists like Rand have a lot in common with the type of socialist for whom socialism is an ideal system to be imposed on the world rather than something that might be derived through politics from the world as it is. They are just as politically naive, and indeed romantic. The difference is that whereas socialists dream of a fundamentally different kind of society, free-market libertarians idealise certain aspects of capitalism, imagining that they are some how separable from all the other stuff they don’t like.     Share on Facebook

• Capitalism doesn’t prevent fraud 
Paul Furlong, The Journal (Clifton, NJ) Capitalism  Ayn Rand cult-member Mark Kalinowski repeats his mantra, "Capitalism prevents fraud." Doesn’t he read the papers? Doesn’t he know about Bernie Madoff, James Nicholson and Marsha Sladich to name the tip of the iceberg of Ponzi schemers?     Share on Facebook

• • • A populist Frankenstein 
Lee Siegel, Daily Beast Atlas Shrugged  The Democrats had better start learning what Ayn Rand knew, despite her foolish solipsism. They need to stand firm on simply stated principles. They need, in other words, to borrow celebrity’s idiom without its shallowness, to get heroically one-dimensional, and to start governing from the gut.     Share on Facebook

• • The greedy bully 
Bret Burquest, The News (Salem, AR) Quote for the Day -- "The only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off." – Ayn Rand.     Share on Facebook

• Pop cultured 
Duncan Day-Myron, The Ontarian (U of Guelph, ON) Despite the fact that almost every vampire on Twilight, Vampire Diaries and True Blood is, for lack of a better word, a total babe, there is something inherently flawed in writing something which seeks to romanticize one of literature's greatest monsters (slightly ahead of Frankenstein's monster, but still way behind Ayn Rand) because, in order to do so, almost everything that made the vampire mythos so interesting and enduring must essentially be dismissed, or, at the very least, repackaged as interesting and sexy. A man wants to kill you and eat you. How debonair! How mysterious! It must be love!     Share on Facebook

• • Meet Pearl: The real Howard Roark 
Wall St. Cheat Sheet The Fountainhead  Capitalism  Howard Roark possessed a special talent for architecture. His creative skills made the world a better place. However, Howard had no concern for money or fame. His only focus was to maximize his potential as a person. Meet Pearl. Pearl has set out to transcend tradition and freely express his potential. Pearl and his incredible garden are exhibits of the human spirit unlimited by preconceived notions of beauty, style, race, socioeconomic status, or formal education.     Share on Facebook