• • Public Schools Are Black Holes, Don’t Drop Your Child into One 
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Egoism  | Our prior learning has the dual nature of both informing and constraining our inquiries. Heisenberg’s "uncertainty principle" reminds us that the observer is the observed; that what we see is filtered through the lenses of what we have seen previously; that our prior experiences provide the categories and other concepts with which we define the present. This is why – contrary to the faith of the Objectivists – we can never be certain that what we know and observe comports with "reality." That our learning may, in fact, be identical with "reality" does not overcome the inherent and inevitable character of the subjective nature of what we know. Such an awareness compels us to refine the Cartesian proposition "I think, therefore I am," into "I think that I think, therefore I think that I am."  

• • US Economy, We Can Ignore Reality! 
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“We can ignore reality, but we cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.” Ayn Rand. With apologies to Ayn Rand, let’s explore some examples of ignoring reality.  

• • • Rational Egoism, Irrational Greed And Ayn Rand’s Creed 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Egoism  | Ayn Rand is often described, by detractors, as mean-minded and psychologically unstable, but her lack of any knowledge about the economy is less open to challenge: her views on the role of debt not being the mirror image and counterparty of credit are “homely” and, for some, could be called “Austrian” but are nonsensical and have no relation at all to the real world. In her works like ‘The Strike’, the precursor to ‘Atlas Shrugged’, debt is called servitude and the King’s evil way of stifling indvidual and private greed, replacing it with Royal greed. One very current example concerns Germany, where “Ayn Randists” are peddling her New Philosophy with gusto. Should Germany quit the Eurozone “to its greater benefit and profit”, RE-style, before the Eurozone falls apart - and certainly causing it to fall apart when or if Germany leaves?  

• • Subversive Influences by Government Officials and their Allies to Shape Public Opinion 
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Atlas Shrugged  | Did we mean, "Who is John Galt?" No, however, though we are all familiar with the profound inference surrounding the famous question from Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, today we ask instead, who is John Birch?  

• • The World Economy Stalls; Meanwhile Dubai Bounces Back: So what’s The Secret? 
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Inaccurate  | Personally I put the driver of Dubai’s economy down to the limited instruction set line of the much loved and sadly departed H.H. Sheikh Rashid Al Maktoum….”I will build the infrastructure and the rest will follow”. Which sounds a bit like something Milton Friedman or Ayn Rand might have said, except of course, (a) Rashid said it first, and (b) Rand also said that all Arabs (Muslims) are “totally primitive uncivilized racist savages”. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uHSv1asFvU&feature=related Oh well, perhaps there are things that can be learned from totally primitive uncivilized racist savages?  

• • Taxpayers Forget Retirement 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  | Atlas will shrug. I do not mean the Atlas of Ayn Rand’s novel about a tiny band of heroic elite producers. I mean the Atlas of non-heroic taxpayers. They will say, “we’re stopping the gravy train,” In Rand’s novel, society collapses when the tiny band of heroes of enterprise departs into their Happy Entrepreneurs’ Valley in the Rockies. They shrug; society collapses. But society is not what she envisioned. Its productivity comes from the decentralized efforts of billions of entrepreneurs.  

• The 1% Loves Socialism 
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[The 1%] do whatever it takes to make money. They don’t believe in Capitalism or communism. They believe in interest. Naked self serving interest… and money. That’s all they believe in. Their morals and beliefs are purely situational. If your home sits on a parcel of land they need to build a warehouse for their communist made imports, they have the government force you out of it. They tell you it’s all for the collective good of society that you got the boot. Total by the book Karl Marx communism. The sanctity of private property, they don‘t care. As long as it’s not their property. Talk about nationalizing one of their businesses and all of the sudden then it’s all about private property and freedom... Ayn Rand said ... blah, blah, blah.  

• • The Economic Terror of 9/11 and What Really Happened 
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If you have always accepted the official story [of 9/11] and never done your own research into what happened that day then I implore you to take some time to do so. Some say, “I don’t want to know what really happened,” fearing what they might discover. To that I quote Ayn Rand who stated, “One can ignore reality, but one cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality”.  

• • Globalization and Global Financial and Economic Chaos 
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Capitalism  | According to Ayn Rand, “individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual).” Since the global collective is the ultimate political majority, it is also the greatest threat to individual rights.  

• There Is Life after Debt Default 
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The Constitution is important [...] not only for its text (some would argue the text is largely ignored today anyway), but also for its symbolic value. It represents a particular myth of the American founding, usually associated with reason and noble ideals (e.g., Bernard Bailyn, Ayn Rand, Schoolhouse Rock), but occasionally with power or material self-interest (e.g., Charles Beard, Bertell Ollman).  

• • The Political Tide Against the Ratings Agencies 
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As Ayn Rand demonstrated in all of her fantastic novels, you can’t force people into success (with the gun).  

• Charting the Course to $7 Gas 
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The banks got bailed out from billions of dollars in bad loans that they issued, then they got literally $1.2 trillion (as you can see from the chart above) of free money that they then turned around and invested in Treasuries, the interest on which is one of Obama’s biggest line-item budget expenses. Are we living in an Ayn Rand novel?  

• Anne Hathaway and automatic stock trading 

Atlas Shrugged movie  | Dan Mirvish at the Huffington Post broke the story, in an article cleverly titled, "The Hathaway Effect: How Anne Gives Warren Buffett a Rise." Mirvish documents the apparently irrational correlation. [....] (I wonder if [Dan] Mirvish could do another story on the fortunes of the Rand Capital Corporation as the new Atlas Shrugged movie premieres?)  

• • The commodity price rollercoaster and the CRB golden ratio failure 
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Atlas Shrugged  | It is only now coming into focus, but objective reason is winning the day. The Internet is triggering human action and spontaneous order is trumping the chaos of human design; you are observing the objectivation of the world unfold. The looters are on notice. Ayn Rand would recognize what is occurring, as the chaos in the cities is growing and darkness threatens. Unlike the novel Atlas Shrugged, the prime movers remain hard at work, they did not leave the scene of the looters crime and head for the mountains of Colorado. Atlas is refusing to shrug. He has dropped into the heart of the action and is fighting back.  

• • Address structural economic problems of unemployment, debt, and inflation with chicanery 
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Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal  |Capitalism  | [Ironically] one of the better explanations of what money is and how inflation works was done by [Alan] Greenspan in the 1960s when he published a piece that was printed in Ayn Rand’s Capitalism.  

• China casts shadow over Asia, flawed conventional wisdom on the Chinese economy 
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A few months ago, I watched a movie about Ayn Rand and it talked about how Americans in the 1930s looked at the Soviet Union’s flavor of managed economy as being superior to the American version of capitalism. At the time America was just coming out of the Great Depression, so that view made a lot of sense. So in the short run, and especially after the ugly side of creative destruction has paid us a visit, the grass of managed economy may look greener. So when we look at China, the conventional wisdom says that the government is very, very smart, and therefore they can do a very good job in steering the economy in the right way.  

• • • In defence of Alan Greenspan: The Age of Turbulence re-visited 
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Capitalism  | Greenspan was influenced by Ayn Rand as a young man. She was not his only influence, and after that he spent twenty years building up his consulting business before he entered public service. Ayn Rand passed away in 1982. Greenspan was put in charge of the Fed in 1987. It’s a bit of a stretch to blame her for something that happened a quarter of a century after she died  

• Europe’s fiscal dystopia: The “new austerity” road to financial serfdom 
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Capitalism  | The idea of a free market in the 19th century was one free from predatory rentier financial and property claims. Today, a “free market” Alan Greenspan and Ayn Rand style is a market free for predators. The world is being treated to a travesty of liberalism and free markets.  

• • Chairman Alan Greenspan, a fiat mind for a fiat age 
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Capitalism  |Nathaniel Branden  |Personal life  | Greenspan never had an ideology. He probably never understood what Ayn Rand was talking about. Nathaniel Branden, Rand’s number one acolyte in the 1950s and also the Randian closest to Greenspan, wrote years later: “Now, looking at [Alan], I wondered to what extent he was aware of Ayn’s opinions.” Branden continued: Complimenting Ayn on some [paper she had written and read to the group], Greenspan might say, “On reading this...one tends to feel...exhilarated.” Platitudes and assurances also mesmerized the nation 50 years later. By then, that’s about all we could get from any public figure. Of course, as a nation we did not demand more. Ayn Rand seems to have understood why Alan clung to her apron strings, if she wore an apron. She asked Branden: “Do you think Alan might basically be a social climber?” She hit the nail on the head.  

• • Digital gold currency (DGC), long wave innovation, Ft. Knox gold, and the dawn of The Great Republic 
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There are fatalists who believe this author is just a dreamer, and that our collective doom is sealed. Don’t drink that hemlock! That is exactly what the looters want you to believe. In the words of Ayn Rand, “Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be waiting for us in our graves—or whether it should be ours here and now and on this earth.”