• • Whole Foods’ Better Business 
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Capitalism  |Egoism  |John Allison  | Book review: Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business, by John Mackey and Raj Sisodia.
Although he calls free enterprise and entrepreneurship the source of “unprecedented prosperity for humanity,” Mackey challenges the philosophical vanguards of capitalism, Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman. He rejects the Randian notion that “selfishness” and “greed” are virtues and denies Friedman’s view that the only responsibility of capitalist firms is to maximize profits to their shareholders. [....] Unfortunately, [the authors] don’t discuss Charles Koch’s market-based management (MBM) [...] or John Allison’s Objectivist model that transformed BB&T into the fastest growing regional bank in the country.  

• • Counterculture Conservatism 
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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.  

• • Steven Soderbergh, Political Theorist 
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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.  

• • It’s Still Jon Huntsman’s Moment 
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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.  

• • The Conservative Vote: A Symposium 

Atlas Shrugged  |Paul Ryan  | Jeremy Beer. [....] If you’re pro-life, Catholic, and of a conservative disposition, isn’t it obvious that the Mormon/Randian ticket is the only choice? I mean, the only pragmatic choice? This is politics, people! It’s all about compromise and getting your hands dirty. And I, for one, refuse to compromise my pro-life beliefs and dirty my hands by refusing to compromise my pro-life beliefs and dirty my hands. Even if that dirt is really blood.  

• • • Objectivists For Empire 
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Altruism  |Ayn Rand Institute  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Egoism  |Elan Journo  |Individualism  |Leonard Peikoff  |Paul Ryan  |Yaron Brook  |Image  | In recent Foreign Policy article, “Galt Goes Global,” objectivist international affairs analyst Elan Journo argues for the influence of Ayn Rand’s philosophy on Paul Ryan’s foreign policy views. As Journo admits, those influences are not substantive. And for this, we should be thankful. But the question remains, what kind of foreign policy would Rand support?  

• Cryptic fascist? 
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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.  

• Let’s get this party STARTed 
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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.  

• What to do, what to do 
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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.  

• • Wards of the state 
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Atlas Shrugged  | [Hilaire] Belloc, lover of guilds and family life, was hardly a libertarian in the manner of Ayn Rand.  

• Spiritual capitalism 
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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.  

• Rand Paul revolution 
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Rand Paul  | [Rand Paul] advances a libertarian intellectual framework, nurtured in a household where Hayek, Ayn Rand, and von Mises were familiar names.  

• • • Ayn Shrugged 
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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.  

• • Ms. Sand never does anything out of her subjective feelings, only out of reason 
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Atheism  |Capitalism  | One need not be on the editorial board of The American Prospect to regard Ayn Rand as the god that failed of the Bush era. I personally see no reason not to regard Alan Greenspan as having been the logical outcome of putting her ideas into practice, not only with respect to the great inflation itself but to the Bush/Rove political motives behind it - both the funding of their wars and of the housing bubble designed to build their permanent exurban majority.  

• Idol with clay feet 
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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.  

• • Finding Atlas 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  | On author Isabel Paterson.
Rand’s disciples are a devoted lot. A recent issue of the New Yorker profiled one local group – the dentist with “John Galt,” the hero of Atlas Shrugged, on his license plate; the wealth manager who piously intones, “I’ve been a follower of Ayn Rand for five years”; the helpful fellow who suggests, “When civilization collapses, we’ll just have to organize an Objectivist gang.”  

• Carter conservatism 
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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?  

• Plain right 
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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.”  

•La Raza’s lapdogs 
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"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.