Saturday, April 13, 2013
Wednesday, February 06, 2013
• •
Counterculture Conservatism
,
Fans of Ayn Rand or Milton Friedman will want to stop reading here and flip to the next article. If Ronald Reagan’s your hero, sorry—you won’t like what’s coming. Ditto regarding Ron Paul.
Tuesday, February 05, 2013
• •
Steven Soderbergh, Political Theorist
,
Capitalism |
When we imagine businessmen “fixing” the government, we imagine commanding Randian heroes mercilessly scything through bloat. When we imagine a more professional government, we imagine diligent researchers writing theoretically optimal regulations based on science. We don’t imagine somebody like Soderbergh who, from the evidence of the way he talks about his work and from the body of his work himself, has a keen awareness of how much more effective he is when he starts not with an idea, or with his own desire to “make a difference,” but with the thing itself, as it is, in all its complexity, and puts himself at that thing’s service. That approach is as applicable to reforming the health-care system as it is to making a tent-pole movie.
Monday, February 04, 2013
• •
It’s Still Jon Huntsman’s Moment
,
Republicans should understand that what Ayn Rand and John Bolton have to say about these issues is irrelevant and cannot be sold to the American people. Period.
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Saturday, January 22, 2011
•
Cryptic fascist?
,
Yaron Brook |
One has to wonder why Straussians provide fulsome endorsements for works that treat [Leo] Strauss as little better than a running dog of the Third Reich. Last year [Catherine] Zuckert penned a flattering blurb for a denunciation of the “fascist” Strauss produced by two Randians, C. Bradley Thompson and Yaron Brook. After being told for years that Strauss was a nice liberal democrat, his defenders are talking up Strauss’s most slanderous and perhaps least plausible detractors.
Tuesday, November 09, 2010
•
Let’s get this party STARTed
,
In the Senate, although it is now claiming more, the Tea Party managed precisely three [pick-ups]: one who had won the seat as soon as he had won the Republican primary, another who faced divided opposition, and a third whose supporters mistakenly believed that they were voting for his father; those last will rue the day that they sent Ayn Rand to the Senate.
Saturday, July 24, 2010
•
What to do, what to do
,
The Fountainhead |
There needs to be more work done by think thanks, university economics departments, or new institutions of some sort that can organize [...] ideas into policy proposals to give conservatives and libertarians more constructive things to do than read passages from the Fountainhead into the minutes of city council meetings.
Thursday, July 22, 2010
• •
Wards of the state
,
Atlas Shrugged |
[Hilaire] Belloc, lover of guilds and family life, was hardly a libertarian in the manner of Ayn Rand.
Thursday, April 29, 2010
•
Spiritual capitalism
,
Capitalism |
Defenders of the liberal order have often unwittingly adopted the framework of their enemies, who in turn have defined liberalism by the silliest things that Jeremy Bentham, Ayn Rand, John Rawls, and Robert Nozick have said.
Thursday, February 04, 2010
•
Rand Paul revolution
,
Rand Paul |
[Rand Paul] advances a libertarian intellectual framework, nurtured in a household where Hayek, Ayn Rand, and von Mises were familiar names.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
• • •
Ayn Shrugged
,
Atlas Shrugged |
Atlas Shrugged is too long. Way too long. Its point could have been very adequately made in 200 pages rather than the 1,168 of my Penguin edition. Now you might argue that some books need to be long. A novelist who sets out to create a plausible universe, and to people it with developed characters, must give himself room, be he Tolstoy or Tolkien. But there is nothing especially developed about the characters in Atlas Shrugged. They are all more or less interchangeable, speaking in dissertations and behaving in set patterns.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
•
Idol with clay feet
,
Capitalism |
Review of The Norman Podhoretz Reader.
By far the most brazen claim Podhoretz makes is that the Old Right never existed as a serious intellectual force. “It was the neo-conservatives who decided that the time had come to drag capitalism out of the closet,” he assures us, citing two books of the late 1970s by Irving Kristol and Michael Novak. So much for Ludwig von Mises, Nobel Prize winners Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, Henry Hazlitt, and Ayn Rand, among others, not one of whom was a neoconservative and all of whom “dragged capitalism out of the closet” decades before the neoconservatives had shed their pink diapers.
Tuesday, May 05, 2009
Saturday, April 04, 2009
•
Carter conservatism
,
Egoism |
We are at a turning point of our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I’ve warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others,” [said Jimmy Carter]. Could Russell Kirk or Richard Weaver have said it any better if they were debating Ayn Rand?
Monday, March 02, 2009
•
Plain right
,
Capitalism |
[South Carolina governor Mark Sanford] draws lessons from Ayn Rand’s work (“She doesn’t believe in the social compact really”), but is unfamiliar with basic sports metaphors, claiming, “We got the proposal to the 99-yard line.”
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
•La Raza’s lapdogs
,
"Why the elite press won’t report seriously on immigration."
While libertarians enjoy displaying their feelings of economic superiority— their Randian confidence that they can claw their way to the top of the heap no matter how overcrowded it gets—liberals feel that laxity on illegal immigration shows off their moral superiority.