• • Is There Any ‘Reasoned’ Defense of the Atlas Shrugged Guy? 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Image  | [I]t's time for a couple of "reasoned" defenses. First, someone speaking up for the Guy himself: “Your latest installment of Atlas Shrugged Guy detractors was overwhelmingly a slew of those crying hypocrisy on the part of our Randian in question. After reading through five or six of them espousing essentially the same argument - that this man is profiting from the very institution he denigrates - I thought it high time for me to finally get involved in your Atlas saga.”      View blog reactions

• • • Let's Get Back to the Atlas Shrugged Guy 
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Altruism  |Atlas Shrugged  |We The Living  |Capitalism  |Egoism  |Individualism  |Personal life  |Image  | Quasi-defense: “ [....] As someone who has collected and read most all that Ayn Rand wrote and published, and as someone who believes in her philosophy’s core principles of Realism, Rationalism, Individualism/Egoism and Capitalism, and has followed them all his life, I completely agree with the second poster and those who supported him. Call me an Ayn Rand liberal. [....]”      View blog reactions

• • Atlas Shrugged Watch, California Division 
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Atlas Shrugged  | Yesterday, while still in a relatively balmy part of Alaska, I posted two quasi-defenses of the original "Atlas Shrugged Guy." [....] [H]ere is a set of responses to the longer of the two Atlas quasi-defenses.      View blog reactions

• • Getting Back to the Atlas Shrugged Guy 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Egoism  |Image  | 1. In today’s dispatch, I quote two sort-of-supportive comments about the Atlas Shrugged Guy, though both of these readers are criticizing-ASG-critics rather than actually supporting him. 2. As soon as I can manage, and I hope later today, I’ll give a sampling of the several thousand anti-Atlas Shrugged Guy messages that have come in.      View blog reactions

• • Here we go: One Last Immersion in the World of the ‘Atlas Shrugged’ Guy 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Image  | The “Atlas Shrugged Guy” made his first appearance in this item. In it, I quoted two self-identified small-business owners, one a tech-world person whom I actually knew, the other someone who wrote in over the transom, on what would happen if Barack Obama were re-elected.      View blog reactions

• Placeholder on Atlas Shrugged Guy: Uncle! 
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Atlas Shrugged  | I have arrived in New York, during a welcoming blizzard, to find the mailbag blowing apart at the seams with responses to the Atlas Shrugged Guy.      View blog reactions

• • The Election-Night Thoughts of the 'Atlas Shrugged' Guy 
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Atlas Shrugged  | It’s too late at night for me to plug in the links to the preceding items about the “Atlas Shrugged Guy,” who has promised to close down his business and its $500,000 annual payroll if the election went the wrong way.      View blog reactions

• • The ‘Atlas Shrugged’ Guy Has His Full Say 
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Atlas Shrugged  | I open the electronic mailbag to find 150 or so reader replies about the 'Atlas Shrugged' guy, who plans to close his business and eliminate its "$500k total payroll" if Obama wins today.      View blog reactions

• • • The 'Atlas Shrugged' Guy Pushes Back! 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Egoism  |Going Galt  |Individualism  | Earlier in today's Festival™ I quoted a self-reported small business owner who said that if Obama is re-elected, as now seems likely, the businessman will live out the reality of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and deny the "takers" in the economy the benefit of his wealth- and job-creating efforts. A lot of readers made fun of him, many suggesting that the letter was a clumsy parody designed to make anti-tax, anti-Obama attitudes look bad.      View blog reactions

• • • No Love for the ‘Atlas Shrugged’ Guy 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Image  | “What these Randians don’t get is that their jobs do not provide money for employees like mannah from heaven. His customers will become someone else's customers, his employees someone else's employees, and no one will miss him.”      View blog reactions

• • What If the GOP Loses? ‘Atlas Shrugged’ vs. ‘The Fire Next Time’ 
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Atlas Shrugged  | What if Obama wins? Atlas will shrug. From a person whose geographical location (or, in fact, anything else about him) I don’t know. To be clear, he says he runs a high-tech business, but I can’t vouch for that myself.      View blog reactions

• In defense of the self-pitying wealthy poor 
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In response to this recent item, plus this and similar previous posts, two readers empathize, sort of, with the put-upon University of Chicago law professor. [....] “The skyrocketing costs of education -- and the stratification of private education, are driving upper-middle professional families broke. And type-A Ivy League types might be the worse off as a result of the expenses. Does that justify whining: no. Does it let some Randian idiot at UoC off the hook: no. But it should give everyone pause that this depression is driving some very successful people into the hole.”      View blog reactions

• Sad news from Shanghai: Gary Heyne 
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Atlas Shrugged  | [Gary] was sure he had a “book in him,” and was in a nonstop effort to enlist someone as co-author of his Iraq memoir, which as he imagined it would have the combined virtues of Catch-22, War and Peace, The Best and the Brightest, Atlas Shrugged, etc.      View blog reactions