• • Boris Johnson shows that Labour is flagging 
Matthew d'Ancona, The Telegraph (London) The Fountainhead  In theory, the Tory default position is to favour liberty and to oppose the intrusions of government. The Conservative instinct is to applaud Howard Roark's great speech at the end of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead: "The only good which men can do to one another and the only statement of their proper relationship is - 'Hands off!'?" And yet every practising politician in this country knows it is not quite as simple as that. [....] The only thing Britons moan about more than state intervention is state inaction.     Share on Facebook

• What’s your story?: Amy Alkon 
Cheryl Miller, Doublethink Profile of syndicated advice columnist Amy Alkon.As opinionated as Alkon is, she refuses to be pigeonholed when it comes to politics: “I’m not Left or Right…I find both parties creepy.” When I ask if she voted in the recent primaries, Alkon hesitates, and then admits she voted for Barack Obama, but only because she wanted to vote “against Hillary Clinton.” She also cops to a brief Ayn Rand phase—“I was mostly insufferable during my college days,” she laughs—though she’s not entirely sure about the “libertarian” label. Still, she counts herself as a big fan of Reason and its editor, Matt Welch, a former Angeleno. She’s found the Right more welcoming than the Left, but, as a self-professed “godless harlot,” doesn’t care for the religious bent of the Republican party.     Share on Facebook

• • It isn’t a zero-sum game 
Newsweek Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism  “Newsweek's Business Roundtable looks at the two faces of globalization, and whether the U.S. can stay ahead.”M. Kathryn Eickoff, former chief economist of The Office of Management and Budget under President Reagan: [....] With communism and socialism as examples of disastrous economic policies, the world is rushing to embrace capitalism, although not necessarily consistently; only the U.S. wants to run the other way. People in countries around the world know how much better off they are now than a decade ago. However, there are those among us-politicians, union leaders, and government-fed businesses and others, who whine about the good old days. As Washington's economic dictator says in Ayn Rand's far-sighted novel Atlas Shrugged, "We've got to stand still. We've got to make those bastards stand still!" Well you can't make the brightest and the best, the most conscientious and most productive stand still without destroying the economy.     Share on Facebook

• Poverty prevention 
Yolande Kersey, Tampa Tribune Ayn Rand Institute  Letter to the editor.Social Security in any form is morally irredeemable," says Alex Epstein of the Ayn Rand Institute, a libertarian think tank. What happened to the dictum: "Be your brother's keeper?" Should that apply only to blood brothers? Ayn Rand thought so, but Jesus didn't.     Share on Facebook

• Greed decade spirals into a dark humor in “Search and Destroy” 
Misha Berson, Seattle Times Theater review.A central difficulty is Gabe Franken's one-note portrayal of Martin, a shaggy-haired, B-tier showbiz booker (think "Smurfs on Ice") who falls under the spell of an Ayn Rand-style novel by a smarmy pop-psychology guru.     Share on Facebook

• Barack Obama isn’t Santa Claus 
Rachel Marsden, Human Events Online Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism  The reality of Obama’s “corporations” isn’t the big multinationals -- it’s the little people. They’re society’s backbone -- the builders, producers and innovators to which Ayn Rand refers in her book, Atlas Shrugged. Stick it to those people, and a free market economy collapses onto itself with government being the only viable institution left standing.     Share on Facebook

• How the Chicago boys wrecked the economy 
Mike Whitney, CounterPunch Capitalism  Interview with economist Michael Hudson.[Hudson:] To [Alan Greenspan’s] Ayn-Rand view of the world, one way of making money was as economically and socially productive as any other way of doing so. Buying a property and waiting for its price to inflate was deemed as productive as investing in new means of production.     Share on Facebook

• Perversion for profit 
Phil Hall, Film Threat Capitalism  Review of a 1964 short film on the pornography industry.Before you can say “Ayn Rand,” the film quickly shifts from the capitalist aspects of this industry to socio-political concerns. For starters, the film insists that pornographic literature will “weaken our defenses to the Communist masters of deceit.”     Share on Facebook

• Mad Men’ invade Twitter; AMC lawyers not amused 
Michael Duff, Avalanche-Journal (Lubbock, TX) Atlas Shrugged  It's 3 a.m. on Thursday morning and I'm writing text messages to a fictional character. Peggy Olson wants to read "Atlas Shrugged" and I'm trying to stop her.     Share on Facebook

• • Critic of Sen. Dorgan needs a logic lesson 
Philip A. Haugrud, The Forum (Fargo, ND) Atlas Shrugged  Egoism  Letter to the editor.John Galt’s letter to the editor (Aug. 26) shocked me by its paradoxical language. He calls Sen. Byron Dorgan’s, D-N.D., concern over corporate tax evasion ridiculous, but he never adequately explained his reasoning. [....] Galt ought to put down “Atlas Shrugged” and rewrite his letter. This time, his argument could have a lot less egoism and a lot more than two sentences supposedly justifying corporate tax evasion.     Share on Facebook

• Allison’s departure 
Winston-Salem Journal (NC) Editorial on the retirement of BB≈T Bank head John Allison.Allison is known for being almost as much of a philosopher as a businessman, and he is a fan of the writer Ayn Rand.     Share on Facebook

• Peculiar practices 
http://www.newstatesman.com/life-and-society/2008/08/intimate-sex-wallace-famous, New Statesman Personal life  Review of the book The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People, by Irving Wallace, Amy Wallace, David Wallechinsky and Sylvia Wallace.The new entry on Diana, Princess of Wales has not materialised, but this edition does name and shame 11 fresh celebrities, including Ayn Rand (made love on a mink coat, like a true capitalist) and Anna Nicole Smith (whose diaries, sold on eBay, disclosed "I hate sex").     Share on Facebook

• • CEO’s top man will run BB&T 
Christina Rexrode, Charlotte Observer (NC) Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism  [Retiring BB&T CEO John] Allison, a Charlotte native, is fond of philosophy: He quotes Aristotle and gives managers a copy of Ayn Rand's free market manifesto "Atlas Shrugged."     Share on Facebook

• • In excelsis Ditko 
Fish Griwkowsky, See Magazine (Edmonton) Review of the book Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko, by Blake Bell.[Bell] quotes Alan Moore, whose unmatched Watchman graphic novel satirized Ditko’s political ideas and post-Spider-Man characters. “I have to say that I found Ayn Rand’s philosophy laughable,” Moore says. “It was a ‘white supremacist dreams of the master race’ burnt in an early 20th century art form. I would basically disagree with all of Ditko’s ideas, but he has to be given credit for expressing those ideas.”     Share on Facebook

• Too little outrage over pay inequity 
Bryan L. Tucker, Boston Globe Capitalism  Letter to the editor.The short paragraph on your Aug. 25 editorial page ("CEO salaries: executive excess," Short Fuse) may have sounded like the punchline of a Jay Leno joke, but the subject matter was deadly serious: The average chief executive makes 344 times as much as the average worker in major US corporations. [....] I challenge any "free"-market apologists, clutching their Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman books, to come up with a reasonable explanation for this execrable distribution of wealth.     Share on Facebook

• • Permanent damage 
Steven Grant, Comic Book Resources Altruism  Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism  Personal life  I've always suspected that Rand, who fled to America as a result of Stalinist persecutions, at least according to her data, was a Soviet sleeper agent sowing discord in America by effectively starting a religion that raised self-satisfaction to the highest of human aspirations [...] and openly mocked and scorned concepts like altruism and charity     Share on Facebook

• Wonkette Weekette! August 28, 2008 
Sara K. Smith, Los Angeles City Beat Someday Andrea Mitchell will publish her memoirs and it will be the most rollicking account of a sassy girl reporter navigating our nation’s halls of power since Barbara Walters’s book came out. It will be all about crazy three-ways with Objectivists and that time she shared a spliff with Spiro Agnew.     Share on Facebook

• BB&T CEO Allison to retire this year 
News & Observer (Raleigh, NC) Capitalism  [John] Allison [...] is an avid reader and a fan of Ayn Rand, the Russian-American philosopher and advocate of capitalism.     Share on Facebook

• • Totally selfish? They’re a minority 
Bill Hanford, Livingston Daily (Howell, MI) The Fountainhead  Egoism  Letter to the editor.I read "The Fountainhead" shortly after I returned from the war. It was a bestseller in 1944, with the war going on. I was amazed. To think that she was being celebrated for her philosophy of total selfishness while thousands of young Americans were overseas unselfishly giving their lives for their country, it surprised me only because I didn't consider who her enthused readers were. In the years since, I have reconsidered. For every man who went to war then, there were two who either dodged the draft or got early discharges to avoid the war. That gave her more people who needed to agree with her than those who could disagree. No wonder she had a bestseller.     Share on Facebook

• White whale is wrong tale 
Stephen Grossman, Standard-Times (New Bedford, MA) Letter to the editor on a proposal to make Moby Dick the "state novel" of Massachusetts."Moby-Dick" is a vicious, nihlist attack on values. As philosopher/novelist Ayn Rand said about modernist intellectuals, they hate the good because it's the good.     Share on Facebook