• • Does God have a place in your portfolio? 
Sheryl Nance-Nash, Black Enterprise Ayn Rand Institute  Yaron Brook  Many investors object to investment decisions made with anything other than pure quantitative analysis. Yaron Brook, president and executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, agrees with that sentiment. “You should evaluate an investment based on whether it achieves its intended goal,” says Brook. “In general, the goal of a business is to make money, not to serve a social agenda. Companies should be left alone to maximize their profits.” While that may seem a bit cold, Brook poses some questions for investors to ponder: “What does socially responsible investing even mean? Is it socially responsible to manufacture the weapons we need to protect ourselves in a time of war? Is selling alcohol socially responsible? And if not, what about Big Macs and M&M’s? Socially responsible is an undefined term that’s tailor-made for people who want to control what businesses can and can’t produce.”     Share on Facebook

• Why Rand Paul couldn’t help himself 
Andrew Coyne, Maclean’s I have it on good authority that Rand Paul was not named for Ayn Rand. (His legal name is Randal.) Still, he might as well have been. Soon after his stunning victory in last week’s Republican Senate primary in Kentucky, the younger Paul—his father is the libertarian congressman Ron Paul—stirred up a firestorm of controversy over his opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, or rather to that part of it forbidding private businesses from discriminating on the basis of race. Critics immediately smeared him as a racist. Defenders portrayed him as a man of principle. Me, I’d call him a libertarian nerd.     Share on Facebook

• • Hyperinflation Q & A 
Brianna Aubin, Opinion Forum Ayn Rand Institute  Capitalism  Yaron Brook  One of the main reasons I subscribe to PJTV is because of the Front Page, which usually features Terry Jones of Investors Business Daily and Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute. Klavan on the Culture is hilarious, and the other people on PJTV do produce some good stuff, but my favorite program by far is watching Terry and Yaron hash out the economic and political scene with Allen Barton on the Front Page.     Share on Facebook

• Noam Chomsky: “The center cannot hold: Rekindling the radical imagination” 
Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! Capitalism  NOAM CHOMSKY: [....] It’s [...] unfair to accuse [greedy bankers] of “irrational exuberance”—that’s Alan Greenspan’s phrase in his extremely brief departure from orthodoxy during the tech boom of the ‘90s. Their exuberance was not at all irrational: it was quite rational, in the knowledge that when it all collapses, they can flee to the shelter of the nanny state, clutching their copies of Hayek and Friedman and Ayn Rand.     Share on Facebook

• Weekend news roundup 
Siliconrepublic.com Games have also evolved far beyond the primitive days of Pong and now deliver interactive experiences that blow away the lazy stereotype of games as vacant and violent time wasters. Sim City, for example, took dry urban planning theory and condensed it into an accessible, easily understandable and enjoyable slice of mass entertainment. Then there’s the 2007 game BioShock, which introduced a new generation to the libertarian ideas of Ayn Rand and delivered one of the most memorable fictional settings to grace any medium in recent years with its underwater Art Deco city Rapture.     Share on Facebook

• Fallacies of the left and right 
Scott Sumner, Wall Street Pit Capitalism  Fukuyama showed that large private corporations thrive in cultures where people work well in groups, and don’t do well in cultures where people are distrustful of those outside the family. This is why the Nordic economies are the most multinational corporation-dominated economies on earth. The industries that are privately-owned in the Nordic countries are often state-run in less group-oriented cultures. I admit to knowing little about Ayn Rand (and assume I’ll get pushback here) but based on what I have read about her prickly and individualistic personality, I wonder of a country of Ayn Rands could produce a successful capitalist system.     Share on Facebook

• Fourteener fees? They really do need the dough 
Clay Evans, Daily Camera (Boulder) Capitalism  I` m the kind of guy tea partiers just hate. First off, I believe that government plays (or should play) a crucial role in balancing out the wilder excesses of the free market, which, even Ayn Rand-acolyte Alan Greenspan now agrees, doesn`t always “regulate” itself.     Share on Facebook

• Head strong: A well-financed, and aboveboard, campaign 
Michael Smerconish, Philadelphia Inquirer Capitalism  Arthur Dantchik, Joel Greenberg, and Jeff Yass, founded Susquehanna International Group, a locally rooted financial firm that in just over two decades has grown into one of the world's largest stock-option traders. If you've never heard of them, they will be pleased. They choose to fly below the radar and don't grant media interviews. What little has been published about them offers that they are free-market entrepreneurs in the mold of Ayn Rand.     Share on Facebook

• • • At last, a fair and balanced view of Ayn Rand 
Roddy Matthews, Tribune (London) Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  Capitalism  Personal life  Inaccurate  Review of Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, by Jennifer Burns.Goddess of the Market traces Rand’s irresistible rise from bourgeois Russian origins to fame and fortune in America and shows how the success of her two blockbuster novels – The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957) – which both glorified heroic individualism – allowed her to use her celebrity as a platform for her subsequent career as political ideologue and philosopher. She invented an abstract rational system called objectivism, which was designed to keep the world safe from communism by proving (mostly by assertion) that capitalism was the most rational and moral form of human society.     Share on Facebook

• The Kennedy effect 
Robert Arend, OpEdNews First patriotism was abducted and redefined through the invention of a new enemy: Communism, which they milked for all the wealth-building wars (Korea, Vietnam, and the covert Congo, Nicaragua, El Salvador, etc.). By the Reagan-era, [wealthy industrialists] had even kidnapped and redefined Jesus Christ (Ayn Rand's Immaculate Conception) to revive and entrench the failed army of 1933 throughout Washington D.C. under their syndicated dictatorship by 1983.     Share on Facebook

• • • Will ‘Atlas Shrugged’ (and other “unfilmmable” books) ever get made? 
Gary Susman, Moviefone Atlas Shrugged movie  Atlas Shrugged  [ Atlas Shrugged] is 1,100 pages long, its characters are less flesh-and-blood humans than mouthpieces for various philosophical points, and its climax is a 60-page speech by the mysterious hero, who doesn’t even show up until near the end of the book. None of that has stopped Hollywood from wanting to film it. Those who’ve tried over the last 40 years to make it fly include ‘Godfather’ producer Albert S. Ruddy; NBC (which planned an eight-hour miniseries in the late 1970s); Rand herself (who was at work on a screenplay before her death in 1982); TNT (whose plans for a four-hour miniseries fell apart in 2000); ‘Braveheart’ screenwriter Randall Wallace; Lionsgate (which returned to the eight-hour miniseries idea)/ and Jolie, who reportedly called it “a once-in-a-lifetime project.”     Share on Facebook

• Path diverted—Spinal cord injury changes more than physical 
Justin Cochran, Daily Times (Maryville, TN) To be honest, before my injury I was not a compassionate, sensitive person. I did not feel sympathy for the hungry kids in Africa, the oppressed citizens of China, or countless other dire, unfortunate situations around the world and at home. I read a lot of Ayn Rand books and didn’t even take my clothes to Goodwill as I felt that it would only encourage low income individuals to stay on charity. Back then I had a full functioning body, no allergies, and no sickness of any kind. I was young, agile, tough and independent. I didn’t need nor want anybody’s help and so thought nobody else should either. My entire social mentality was uncaring and unforgiving. This of course all changed the day after Thanksgiving, 2004, when I incurred a C1-C2 spinal cord injury, leaving me paralyzed from the neck down on permanent ventilator life-support.     Share on Facebook

• Strict ideology will force confrontation with reality 
Byron Williams, San Jose Mercury News Kentucky’s Republican nominee for the open U.S. Senate seat, Rand Paul, in his best Ayn Rand objectivist viewpoint, concluded private businesses should have had the right to discriminate against anyone they choose. [....] Paul’s statement [...] reveal[s] the disconnect that exists whenever an individual is strictly beholden to an ideology, there will inevitably come a point where that philosophy is unable to confront reality.     Share on Facebook

• • Actors shrug 
Kelly Jane Torrance, The American Conservative - @TAC Atlas Shrugged movie  Atlas Shrugged  Libertarians and their sympathizers have been waiting for many years to see Rand’s magnum opus on the big—or small—screen, and as this Deadline New York piece notes, there have been many rumors of big names to play Dagny Taggart. But one wonders if the producer—John Aglialoro is the CEO of Cybex International, a brand name known to anyone who’s visited a lot of gyms—understands how Hollywood works. The article says that he ”sent a missive indicating that he’s courting actresses like Theron and Maggie Gyllenhaal to play Taggart.” Actresses tend to schedule projects months in advance.     Share on Facebook

• Boulder a techie mecca - and we’re chopped liver 
John Hazlehurst, Colorado Springs Business Report - Hazelhurst’s Blog [The creative class] can’t imagine that Colorado Springs is easier to live in and more conducive to business formation than Boulder. If they think about us at all, it’s as a laboratory for testing bizarre right-wing social theories, a dysfunctional dystopia that only Ayn Rand could love.     Share on Facebook

• • • John Aglialoro swears ‘Atlas Shrugged’ will start filming despite having no actors 
Linda Arntzenius, Film School Rejects Atlas Shrugged movie  Atlas Shrugged  I believe the only way of attempting to make a successful film from “Atlas Shrugged” would be if a top notch director approached it with no reverence for the material, a good pair of scissors, a fabulous cast and filmed it in 3D.     Share on Facebook

• Aristotle goes 3G 
Christopher Shea, Boston Globe - Brainiac It’s been a rough few weeks for libertarians. Rand Paul recently learned that views that are routinely accepted at Ayn Rand Society meetings — for example, that private businesses and clubs should have the right to discriminate by sex and race — don’t go over so well with the American public, circa 2010. Another go-to libertarian notion, that tough safety regulation on businesses isn’t necessary because the free market will provide the necessary correctives, isn’t polling too well either in the wake of the BP oil spill and those runaway Toyotas.     Share on Facebook

• Present day, present company: A historic woman’s club moves forward 
Linda Arntzenius, Princeton Packet (NJ) Every Wednesday from September until mid-June, the [Present Day] club invites a guest speaker to deliver a presentation to its members. The names appearing on the roster over the club’s long history are recognizable nationally and internationally: Joyce Carol Oates, J. Seward Johnson, Norman Thomas, Ayn Rand, Christie Whitman, and Roger Sessions, to name just a few. Topics range from science to music, art history, local authors, and public policy.     Share on Facebook

• • The thinker 
James Taranto, Wall Street Journal Ayn Rand Center  Thomas A. Bowden  Earlier this week, “one who was there” told the Washington Post that in an Oval Office meeting, Obama commanded: “Plug the damn hole.” This leak--of the information, that is, not the oil--shows that Obama is doing what he conceives to be his job, namely trying to persuade people that he is thinking about the spill. But for those who would actually like to see the damn hole plugged, the president looks impotent and irrelevant--so much so that this response from the Ayn Rand Center is a model of common sense and clarity: “That's the politician's answer to every intractable problem: give orders, issue threats, and wait for obedience. But the creative human mind cannot take orders like that. Notice I didn't say, ‘refuses to take orders.’ I said, ‘cannot take orders.’”     Share on Facebook

• “X-Men 4 ” and “Captain America” casting updates and more movie news 
Mario McKellop, The Examiner Atlas Shrugged movie  Atlas Shrugged  Atlas Shrugged is being made into a series of films by entrepreneur John Aglialoro who plans to start production on the first film in a matter of weeks despite having no cast and director whose only feature film credit was this. Tra-tra-train wreck.     Share on Facebook