• • • Is It Time To Starve The Beast? 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Personal life  | Ayn Rand nailed it more than 55 years ago with her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged. The author, who spent the first 21 years of her life under oppressive communist rule in Vladimir Lenin's U.S.S.R., understood the dilatory effects of statist control and regressive policies.  

• • Prudence or Purity? A Political Dilemma 
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Egoism  | The libertarian moral neutrality that abandons many of conservatism's social issues -- fueled by the Randian Ethical Egoism that has captured the imaginations of Americans, has also split off a good segment of what we characterize as the provenance of the Republicans. For the philosophical libertarian, the political locus has ever been the individual while the state is a necessary evil -- with a bold emphasis on the evil.  

• • • Bill introduced in Idaho that makes reading ‘Atlas Shrugged’ a requirement for graduation 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Egoism  | Reading Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" may become a requirement for high school graduation in Idaho if Coeur d'Alene Senator John Goedde, chairman of the Idaho Senate's Education Committee, decides to pursue the matter. [....] To put it nicely, this is a crock. As an allegorical tale, "Atlas Shrugged" has its place in literature. But its more than 1,000 pages of turgid prose makes it nearly unreadable - even if you agree with the concepts laid out in the book.  

• • Articles: Will We Ever Get Our America Back? 
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Atlas Shrugged  | The most horrible thing about this coming economic catastrophe is that all those (the 47%) who don't pay taxes but get benefits from the government treasury will be the very ones who are hurt most when the train wreck comes to a full and complete stop. They are like hungry, vulnerable baby birds in a nest chirping for more. But there will be no more. There will be nothing left to give, and for that matter, there will be nothing left to take. As in Atlas Shrugged, there may not even be anyone to take it from.  

• • A Traveler's Thoughts 
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Atlas Shrugged  | The threat of economic calamity looms. The left has not yet reaped what they have been sowing. Let the bitter harvest come with their dear Obama as President. Then no way can they blame it on Mitt Romney, or even George Bush. They will likely claim we were simply we not worthy of them, as did Atlas Shrugged character Ivy Starnes after the failure of the Twentieth Century Motor Co. experiment with Marxism: “....the plan was a noble ideal, but human nature was not good enough for it.”  

• Articles: We are not outnumbered. 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Going Galt  | Maybe the real shift was in 2006, or even as early as when President Bush Sr. reneged on his "no new taxes" pledge.  Did conservative voters abandon politics entirely because of feckless Republican leadership and the tweedle-dee, tweedle-dum approach of establishment Washington?  These voters might be "going Galt" in politics.  Those who are still voting don't trust the Republican party.  

• Obama vs. the Rule of Law 
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Individual Rights  | Moral short-cuts, as wise philosophers from Cicero to Ayn Rand remind us, are neither moral nor practical in the long run.  

• Time to Let the Country Crash? 
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Atlas Shrugged  | If a group plays identity politics, that's its Achilles heel. Let those who live by it succumb to it. Remember, you have to pick off only a few.  That's how the game is played when it's played to win.  You do want to win, right?  Or will being allowed to carry your copy of the Bible or Atlas Shrugged into the destitute camps be enough for you?  

• • Going John Galt 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Going Galt  | Ayn Rand misunderstood many things -- the role of Christianity in providing the unprecedented ethical underpinnings upon which market interactions ultimately depend, for one -- but she absolutely understood that you can cause the “motor of the world” to stop. Expect to see the sad employment results as thousands of current and potential entrepreneurs “go John Galt” as the effects of our “generational election” play out.  

• • • What a Shock—Obama Doesn’t Like Rand! 
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Capitalism  |Egoism  |Objectivist author  | Here we go again with the misconception that Ayn Rand promoted living for self-gratification at the expense of others. That does not represent Ayn Rand’s philosophy. What she advocated was a morality of rational self-interest. This means that your life is your own and that you determine the course of your own life, while respecting the rights of others to pursue their own lives.  

• • John Walker Lindh Doesn't Deserve the Right to Pray 
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Individual Rights  |Objectivist author  | What is important to remember, especially in times of war, is that individual rights are not absolute. They are contextual absolutes, existing only within certain conditions. Contrary to the idea that rights are gifts from a god or permissions from a benevolent government, rights are, as philosopher Ayn Rand put it, "conditions of existence required by man's nature for his proper survival," but more specifically, "a 'right' is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man's freedom of action in a social context."  

• • • Red-Baiting vs. Rand-Baiting 
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Capitalism  |Individual Rights  | Ayn Rand is a passionate defender of the liberal order -- individual rights, free markets, and laissez-faire capitalism -- that by unleashing the human potential has given our nation the greatest prosperity in human history. Rand's defense of liberty isn't merely utilitarian, but one that is rooted in an elevated concept of human dignity. The individual has a right to own his own life, define and pursue his life-goals, and join with others to thrive together. Respect for individual liberty -- the freedom to apply reason to productive and human affairs -- is the foundation of a prosperous and just society.  

• • • Ryan and Rand: A Radical Connection? 
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Ayn Rand Institute  |Capitalism  |Egoism  |Individual Rights  |Individualism  |Paul Ryan  |Objectivist author  | With Paul Ryan now entering the race as Mitt Romney's VP pick, we will undoubtedly hear much about Ryan and his politics in the weeks ahead.  One aspect of Ryan that will assuredly be discussed is his respect for controversial philosopher Ayn Rand.  While Ryan is definitely not a disciple of Rand, and has even distanced himself from parts of her philosophy, Ryan has credited Rand's radical ideas of laissez-faire capitalism, ethical egoism, and political individualism as an inspiration to him becoming an elected official.  

• • • Where is John Galt? 
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Atlas Shrugged  | "Who is John Galt?" That question, of course, is the opening sentence of Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged, arguably the first major novel written with a sledgehammer and the first (but, thankfully, not last) to drive generations of liberals crazy and in the most delicious and poetically justified way: by simply depicting a society in which liberals get everything they want. After 55 years and total sales of well over half a billion, I hope I can be forgiven if I “give away the shock ending” by explaining to those who have not read the book who John Galt, in fact, is.  

• • Economic Inequality is a Small Price to Pay for Staying Human 
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Capitalism  | To paraphrase Baudelaire, the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world of the moral superiority of collectivism.  According to Ayn Rand, if we don't convince the world otherwise, nothing else will work.  Our greatest ally in this fight is human nature.  Our greatest asset is morality itself, which is really, truly, undeniably, and absolutely on our side.  

• • The Conservative Legacy of Bradbury 
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Atlas Shrugged  | The left lives on emotions and images. There is no leftist counterpart to Thomas Sowell or C.S. Lewis or Ayn Rand or Alexander Solzhenitsyn.  

• • The Unseen Message of The Hunger Games 
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Capitalism  |Individualism  | When I learned that my teenage sons -- macho young lads, to be sure -- were suddenly captivated by a book series featuring a 16-year-old female protagonist, I was intrigued, to say the least -- intrigued enough to read the books myself. As I progressed through the story, I found myself checking and re-checking the cover several times to make sure the author wasn’t Ayn Rand.  

• • Wild Bill O’Reilly 
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Altruism  | In [a] dust-up several years ago [...] with Fox Business Network Host Neil Cavuto [...] O’Reilly shouted: “Private industry can cause a depression. Private industry can cause people much suffering. Our elected officials have got to say, ‘They’re not running their companies the right way. Get out of there.’” Leon Trotsky could have said it better. Cavuto corrected Bill with this: “The government cures are worse than the disease they address. They make the economy worse than it otherwise would be.” Ayn Rand might remind Mr. O’Reilly that all dictatorships are based on altruism. Indeed, be very careful what you request.  

• A Blind Eye toward Athens 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  | President Obama, in his Osawatomie, Kansas speech, spoke of free enterprise without government interference, saying, “It doesn’t work. It has never worked.” The preceding examples refute that comment. Actually, free enterprise has never been tried without some interference, but anywhere it comes close, it works. The residents of prosperous Asian economies like Thailand, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Singapore would agree. Even China found what happens when people are permitted to have the fruits of their own labors. A long list of thinkers and economists would disagree with the president: Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell, Walter E. Williams, Murray N. Rothbard, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Ayn Rand, and many more.  

• • A Muslim Apostate Sings the West’s Praises 
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The Fountainhead  | In Why the West Is Best, Ibn Warraq uses New York City as a microcosm for the Western civilization that is in every sense -- intellectually, technologically, morally -- superior to the Islamic civilization that is challenging the West every which way nowadays. He isn’t just using New York as a metaphor. He sees it something like the way Ayn Rand described it in her unforgettable passage [in The Fountainhead].