• • Rich advice for Romney 
Hillary Chabot and Jerry Kronenberg, Boston Herald Capitalism  | Edward Hudgins of the Atlas Society, which promotes the ideas of late uber-capitalist Ayn Rand, said Romney should stop his sheepish efforts to explain away his wealth. “I would like to see Romney take the moral high ground and take pride in his wealth,” he said.     Share on Facebook

• A missing person 
Idaho Mountain Express (Ketchum) Alan Greenspan  |Capitalism  | The [GOP’s] version of American history jumps straight from the iconic President Ronald Reagan to the evil President Barack Obama. [....] It jumps over an economy left in ruins by unregulated financial institutions guided by Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan, who was seemingly unable to distinguish between an Ayn Rand novel and economic reality.     Share on Facebook

• • The United States of Envy 
Terence Corcoran, National Post Capitalism  | Preoccupation with the incomes of Mr. Romney and the U.S. rich represents class warfare that is also a war on America’s past. Ayn Rand famously also said: “The upper classes are merely a nation’s past; the middle class is its future.” From out of today’s middle class will come tomorrow’s rich. Mr. Obama’s attack on today’s rich is also an attack on tomorrow’s rich, aiming to foreclose on the future ability of American’s to get rich being capitalists.     Share on Facebook

• • Ron Paul, Republican King of Celebrity Endorsements: Does This Mean Change for Liberal Hollywood? 
Zachary Leeman, Big Hollywood Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |Egoism  | We have a new generation of conservatives who care for individual liberties above all else, and it seems a few of them are Hollywood celebrities. We even recently got a film adaptation of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.” [Ron] Paul may not be as modernly Republican as, say, Rick Santorum, but it means something to see actors/artists support a man who preaches doing away with income tax completely and that the self-interest principles taught by philosophers like Rand can lead to peace and prosperity for all as opposed to the nanny states proposed by sitting president Obama.     Share on Facebook

• How Steven Tyler, Newt Gingrich and Rand Paul made their way into our Monday consciousness 
Jon Dawson, The Free Press (Kinston, NC) U.S. Sen. Rand Paul was momentarily detained by airport security in Nashville on Monday. Various media outlets reported something caused a metal detector to start beeping along to the tune of “2112” by Rush. Sen. Paul then refused to let the rather swarthy-looking members of the TSA pat him down to search for whatever was causing the metal detector to start humming the praises of Ayn Rand.     Share on Facebook

• The cult of Ron Paul: revisited 
Devin Wallace, Albany Times Union - Tea Party Voices It’s a black or white world in the Ron Paul camp. You’re either with them on the side of “liberty” or you’re part of the Federal Reserve conspiracy handed down from the lamestream media and eaten up by the drones and the sheeple. There is very little middle ground. Everyone is conspiring against them in their mind; there is no rational explanation why a man like Dr. Paul could ever lose. They fail to acknowledge systemic problems and instead focus on the bogeymen. It’s not an economic system focused on the utter pillaging of the environment, one committed to sucking out every last cent from every last exploited worker. No, it’s Ben Bernanke. Or the rest of the banking cartel, or the globalist, or the climate change agenda, or anyone else who doesn’t subscribe to their Randian view of the world.     Share on Facebook

• The Lost Poet 
Mark Christensen, Willamette Week (Portland, OR) With the passion of a Sepp Dietrich exhorting his doomed troops before the Battle of the Bulge, [Marty Christensen] rallied to the defense of Oregon’s psychedelic answer to William Faulkner and Ayn Rand. “THEY CAN’T DO THIS TO KEN KESEY! THEY CAN’T GET AWAY WITH IT!” What he was alluding to is the Milos Foreman film of Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which Kesey, who did not cotton to the script, Jack Nicholson or his cut of the profits, was unhappy about.     Share on Facebook

• I Love, Therefore I’m Nuts 
Liz Langley, SexIs Magazine Personal life  | Book review: Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love, by Andrew Shafffer.Shaffer gives us the skinny on the private lives of 37 philosophers, all full of various types of affairs, angst, desire, despair and scandal in nicely portioned bite-sized pieces, perfect for the short-attention span reader who likes to graze and jump around (as I do). [....] There are, interestingly, only two women represented but those — Ayn Rand and Simone de Beauvoir have juicy stories to their credit.     Share on Facebook

• • Are the Koch brothers teaching you? 
Robert Greenwald, Huffington Post Capitalism  |Video  | What’s happening to academia in Florida demands national attention. Billionaires Charles and David Koch are infringing on intellectual freedom and independence in colleges and universities. It’s an old fashioned quid pro quo where the Koch brothers get allied professors who’ll preach Ayn Rand, supply side economic policies and the values of the 19th century Guilded Age to students and the college gets some funding. Every year, thousands of individuals move through the Koch-supported classes, lectures and fields of study, which in their totality amount to an ideological assembly line bought and paid for by the Koch brothers. There are Koch-funded agreements at more than 150 American colleges and universities.     Share on Facebook

• • Mediocre line-up 
Frontline (India) Individual Rights  | Ron Paul [is] an ideologically committed libertarian, whose affinity to the ideas of Ayn Rand often takes him to reasonable positions (anti-war, for instance), but which more often allows him to enter very bizarre territory (he opposes the Civil Rights Act on the grounds that it threatened property rights, the right to do what you want in your own establishment, including decline service to those whom you do not like).     Share on Facebook

• The Razzie Awards are Going to be a Little Different This Year… 
William Bibbiani, Crave Online Atlas Shrugged movie  | Likely candidates for this year’s Worst Film include such high profile stinkers as Green Lantern, The Smurfs and Sucker Punch, but maybe they’ll be able to make room for such lower-profile crapfests as Atlas Shrugged and Sanctum this time out.     Share on Facebook

• • Unhappy senator sees equality as distraction 
Erika Shepard, Bellingham Herald (WA) Individual Rights  | Ayn Rand was right when she said “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.”     Share on Facebook

• • Two ideas for dealing with poor 
Ray Zagorski, Post-Crescent (Appleton, WI) Inaccurate  | We have, on one hand, the prevalent philosophy of Ayn Rand that looks at the poor as parasites, as nonpersons. And, on the other hand, we have the Supreme Court designating wealthy corporations as persons with power to rule. What does Jesus say?     Share on Facebook

• Gonsalves: Brady’s honesty scores points 
Sean Gonsalves, Cape Cod Times (MA) Alan Greenspan  |Capitalism  | Imagine if Obama had said, “I should have made jobs my No. 1 priority instead of pushing the Romneycare remix.” Or how about the captain of that Italian cruise ship publicly acknowledging he messed up — bad? Newt? Herman Cain? Anybody on Wall Street? Nope. Instead, we get former Fed Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, a patron saint of Ayn Rand libertarianism, acknowledging the error of his ways only to have fellow travelers continue to peddle the same old, same old — on steroids!     Share on Facebook

• • • Ayn Rand was wrong 
William Missouri Downs, Star-Tribune (Casper, WY) Alan Greenspan  |Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |Capitalism  |Egoism  | I was raised on a steady diet of Ayn Rand. In college she was my hero. But today, I fear that Ayn’s thoughts on selfishness, no taxes, freedom from regulation, and smaller government is leading us to Social Darwinism. I know Ayn speaks of rational self-interest and many philosophers agree with her -- that true happiness comes when you can benefit yourself without harming others -- but this part of her message was thin, and poorly written.     Share on Facebook

• • Built on Shifting Sands 
Richard Girard, OpEdNews This is what is wrong with reactionary radicalism: whether it is Socrates decrying Athenian democracy, or Ayn Rand complaining about our modern equivalent: They always argue that they are superior, and must be atop the hierarchy that they create.     Share on Facebook

• • Harper’s Publisher Fights Back Over ‘Lapham’s Disease’ Dig 
Kat Stoeffel, New York Observer Bloomberg View columnist Michael Kinsley’s [New York Times] review of Baffler editor and Harper’s columnist Thomas Frank’s conservative-debunking tract, Pity the Billionaire, elicited two spirited letters from Mr. Frank’s corner. Chris Lehmann, a fellow Baffler-er, wrote in to defend the book’s focus on Ayn Rand. Mr. Kinsley had written that Mr. Frank’s notion that Atlas Shrugged played a role in right wing ideology was “far-fetched.”     Share on Facebook

• • Understanding Mitt Romney's Bain Problem 
Scott Galupo, US News & World Report Capitalism  | Lots of people, on both the left and right, are deeply uncomfortable with this nebulous idea of “wealth.” This is the source of Rep. Ron Paul’s discomfort with “fiat money.” At the risk of oversimplifying, Marx believed value is produced by physical exertion—turning a tree into a rocking chair, for instance. The adherents of Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand, meanwhile, believe more broadly that value is produced by entrepreneurship and genius. Needless to say, we left behind that simple world—if it ever truly existed—a long time ago.     Share on Facebook

• Monday: Chinese New Year; “Atlas Shrugged” Screening at the Library 
Mary Alexandre, Bristol-Warren Patch (RI) Atlas Shrugged movie  |Image  | Happy Monday! Here are five things you should know today in Bristol and Warren. [....] 5. The East Bay Patriots are offering a showing of the movie “Atlas Shrugged” at the Rogers Free Library.     Share on Facebook

• • • How prophetic was Ayn Rand? 
Times of Malta Capitalism  |Egoism  |Personal life  |Image  | Can capitalism save the world? According to Ayn Rand, it could have – and still can. In a year of financial collapse in the West and the uprising of individuality and social revolt in the Arab world, writer Ayn Rand is once again riding high as the Queen of Capitalism. A new documentary aired last week – Ayn Rand and the Prophecy of Atlas Shrugged – hails Ms Rand as a kind of prophet, a foreteller of the failure of an over-stepping government bent on exploiting the creators of wealth, while all the while squashing human initiative.     Share on Facebook