• A new kind of speech 
Mitchell Blatt, Indiana Daily Student (Indiana U, Bloomington) Atlas Shrugged  Humor.[Barack Obama:] “I’d like to thank some individual citizens now. Pro Doodad. Good Will. John Galt of 1957 Ayn Rand Lane. You are the backbone of my publicly financed campaign! People like you, who donated without having your identities verified by the credit card companies, have together raised over $160 million in unreported small donations. Those small donations contributed to my more than $400 million total.”     Share on Facebook

• • Housing crisis has a silver lining 
David Brussat, Providence Journal (RI) The Fountainhead  If Rand were to rewrite The Fountainhead today, she’d make Howard Roark a traditionalist. They are the ones battling the entrenched establishment.     Share on Facebook

• • It takes all kinds 
Leo Rogelberg, Times-News (Hendersonville, NC) Atlas Shrugged  Letter to the editor in response to another letter mentioning Atlas Shrugged.I read Ayn Rand's interminable tome years ago. Boring! I have a vague recollection that that great hero of laissez faire, John Galt, was a wimp in her personal life. Does the writer know that Ayn Rand was vigorous pro-choice supporter?     Share on Facebook

• The legal system failed to protect 
Harsha Sankar, Roanoke Times (VA) Letter to the editor.Ayn Rand stated that the hallmark of authoritarian systems are innumerable and incomprehensible laws. Such systems make everyone an unindicted felon and debtor, and they allow for the exercise of arbitrary government power. Vast wealth, through intricacy and brute means, has been transferred to fund managers, attorneys and high finance executives.     Share on Facebook

• • Rand’s book brought to life 
Richard Terrell, Journal Star (Lincoln, NE) Atlas Shrugged  Letter to the editor.Fifty years ago, Ayn Rand wrote a scathing fictional exposure of the twisted psychology of compassion-mongers, do-gooders and their “looter” friends in governmental bureaucracies whose constant appeal is to people whose whole social vision amounts to whining about “fairness.” The novel is “Atlas Shrugged,” and today’s political scenarios are bringing to life Rand’s exposure of those who seek power in order to take from people who have created and earned something in order to give to those who haven’t. The main villain in Rand’s story is a character named Wesley Mouch. Barack Obama is the real life incarnation of this character, who promises to punish successful small businesspeople by taking, through governmental force, the product of their labor to reward other people who he thinks should benefit from it.     Share on Facebook

• • Atlas mugged 
James Boyle, Financial Times (London) Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism  In his Congressional testimony on the collapse of the global financial system, Alan Greenspan sounded like a man who had seen his universe tremble, whose faith had been challenged. Self-regulating markets ... didn’t. The “smartest,” “most sophisticated” players ... weren’t. Mr Greenspan, who once worshipped at the feet of Ayn Rand, seemed genuinely shaken. How could these things be? This poignant exchange should lead us to ask a larger question. Not “should we abandon capitalism?” Not “should we jettison neo-classical economics?” But how will the events of the last month – and the months to come – change the way we think about markets and politics?     Share on Facebook

• • A crisis of confidence, and much more 
Leonard Fein, Jewish Daily Forward Capitalism  A lack of adequate regulation is more a symptom than the cause of the economy’s collapse. We have had — and celebrated — a system that encourages greed, and therefore we did not bother to develop or apply the tools with which government might have limited greed’s rewards. Instead, we accepted Ronald Reagan’s dictum: “Government is not the answer to our problems — government is the problem.” And so it was that we anointed Alan Greenspan, champion of the virtues of greed. That is what it meant and means to be a devoted associate of Ayn Rand, which Greenspan was from 1950 to 1970. Rand was an unapologetic advocate of selfishness and of untethered capitalism — absolute laissez faire.     Share on Facebook

• Jews against Judaism 
Ilana Mercer, WorldNetDaily Jews [...] have always been among the most individualistic, original and entrepreneurial members of American society. Think of Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard and Milton Friedman.     Share on Facebook

• Comrade Obama? 
Patrick J. Buchanan, Human Events Online One need not be Ayn Rand to see that Barack has picked up from past associates utopian notions that have ever produced nightmare states.     Share on Facebook

• • The fine art of innovation 
Tom Standage, The Guardian - Comment Is Free (London) Capitalism  BioShock, a video-game that came out last year, offered a particularly detailed and vivid depiction of a familiar science-fiction trope: innovation run amok. The game is set in an underwater city, called Rapture, which was established by a wealthy businessman called Andrew Ryan to escape the restrictions imposed by governments on companies, scientists and individuals. His name is a nod to Ayn Rand, and the whole game is steeped in references to her libertarian philosophy of Objectivism which, among other things, advocates a raw, unbridled form of laissez-faire capitalism.     Share on Facebook

• • Gold and a free market: The solutions to our financial crisis 
Brian Simpson, Capitalism Magazine Capitalism  Ayn Rand observed decades ago that "one of the methods used by statists to destroy capitalism consists in establishing controls that tie a given industry hand and foot, making it unable to solve its problems, then declaring that freedom has failed and stronger controls are necessary."     Share on Facebook

• Woman on top 
Rachel Chan, AsiaOne (Singapore) Interview with mountain climber Jane Lee.[Q:] What are your hobbies that aren't sports-related? [A:] I love to read. I make it a point to read for an hour before I sleep. Russian-born female American novelist, Ayn Rand, is one of my favourite writers.     Share on Facebook

• • • Things that money can and cannot do for you 
Michel Pireu, Business Day (South Africa) Atlas Shrugged  Extended quote from Francisco’s money speech.     Share on Facebook

• • • Rethinking Rand 
Bob Worth, Student Printz (U of Southern MS, Hattiesburg) The Fountainhead  Capitalism  Although it's a stretch to compare the current [financial] situation to the horrors of the Soviet Union, both illustrate that when leaders refuse to shape their ideology to the contours of reality, disaster ensues. In Howard Roark's world, the result was years of second-rate architecture and the dynamiting of a tycoon's home. In the real world the stakes are much higher, as has become all too clear. And besides, even Roark's enlightened self-interest didn't prevent him from becoming a rapist. Go figure.     Share on Facebook

• Paterson finds opposition in plea for fed. funding 
Marcia Kramer, WCBS-TV On testimony before a US House Ways and Means Committee hearing.[NY governor David] Paterson and [SC governor Mark] Sanford offered heady arguments featuring quotes from noted economists and the novelist Ayn Rand. But another local witness went lowbrow to make his case. "In the words of the great poet John Lennon of The Beatles, I say help, I need somebody, not just anybody," said Trenton Mayor Douglas Palmer.     Share on Facebook

• • Paying for the follies of the weak 
William Blum, Dissident Voice “I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms. . . . So the problem here is [that] something which looked to be a very solid edifice and, indeed, a critical pillar to market competition and free markets, did break down. And I think that, as I said, shocked me.” A remarkable admission from Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, long-time opponent of government regulation of the corporate world, and friend and devoted follower of Ayn Rand, the selfishness guru who turned the emulation of two-year olds into a philosophy of life.     Share on Facebook

• • The maestro fails 
John Rapley, Jamaica Gleaner (Kingston) The Virtue of Selfishness  Capitalism  [Alan] Greenspan is a disciple of Ayn Rand, the libertarian philosopher whose New York study-group a young Mr Greenspan joined in the early post-war years. Ms Rand refused all government intervention in the economy. As for greed, Ms Rand wrote a book called The Virtue of Selfishness, in which she argued that the most prosperous economy would be one in which everyone was allowed to pursue their greediest desires. So, Mr Greenspan can hardly turn around and say he didn't expect bankers to behave badly. His world view was based on the premise that greed is good, and that left to run free, it would enrich everyone.     Share on Facebook

• Minus plus a minus does not make a positive in our politics 
Herb Nakada, Williams Lake Tribune (BC) Capitalism  Letter to the editor.Within the predatory state of private self interest, the followers of Ayn Rand, and the late Milton Friedman who was absolutely certain of his view, both Christopher Cox, chairman of the New York Stock Exchange and Alan Greenspan testified before the U.S. Congress last Thursday. Both acknowledged that their faith in the “free” market to freely regulate itself was a big mistake.     Share on Facebook

• Dennis Miller: Complete Q&A 
J. Sharpe Smith, Des Moines Register (IA) Interview with comedian and radio talk show host Dennis Miller.[Q:] Political comedy catapulted Al Franken into the race for Congress, and many people get their news from political satirist Jon Stewart on the Daily Show. Don’t you have an impact, too? [A:] I say what I want to say and people can make of what they want to. If they want to use it to change their life, that’s their business. I don’t believe that happens. I hate to sound like an Ayn Rand objectivist, but I am living my own life and if anyone finds it interesting, so be it.     Share on Facebook

• • This election could transform the country, the GOP, and capitalism 
Bernard Weiner, Media Monitors Network Capitalism  Alan Greenspan, the grand doyen behind the American economy for nearly four decades, admitted in public testimony before Congress that the laissez-faire deregulation philosophy that has guided his life is badly flawed. The former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank said the current economic meltdown in the U.S., which has now spread its major recession all over the globe, rested on faulty "models." He was shocked, shocked!, to learn this. We're supposed to believe that the possibility of widespread failure of those greed-at-any-price models never occurred to him. Right. Those "models," which were pushed by far-right conservative thinkers like Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman, derived from an ideological belief that a free market always corrects its excesses, thus keeping the dread hand of government off the financial tiller. Now, Greenspan admits, there appears to be a necessary role for government regulation when banks and other financial institutions don't act in their own self-interest. It's still "SELF-interest," you see, since the Randian conservatives, of which Greenspan is one, refuse to recognize the concept of a "PUBLIC interest."     Share on Facebook