• • Ailing US Economy Seeks Jobs Doc, Magic Rx 
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Atlas Shrugged  | I was relieved to see one respondent suggest that the single most important step the government should take to create jobs was “lose the illusion of government job creation.” There. He said it. Get out of the way, which is what Ayn Rand’s hero, John Galt, tells the desperate bureaucrats in “Atlas Shrugged” as they struggle to find someone with a plan to avert a national economic collapse.      View blog reactions

• • • Atlas’s Ayn Rand never in bed with Hollywood 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Egoism  | How is it a novel so many readers describe as “life-changing” took 54 years and a gaggle of producers, writers and directors to bring to the screen? One answer is Ayn Rand herself, author of “Atlas Shrugged,” which was published in 1957. Earlier attempts to make a movie based on the book were foiled by Rand’s insistence on creative control. The second reason is the nature of the 1,168-page book. It’s about ideas. Rand’s characters are caricatures that reflect her ideas and ideals. Businessmen are good, government bureaucrats are bad. There is no middle ground. [....] “Atlas Shrugged, Part I,” takes place in 2016 and ends before we even meet Rand’s hero, John Galt, who is the first to quit and inspires others to join him in his effort to stop the world. (Readers should look for the mysterious man in the raincoat.) “Atlas” is unlikely to win the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival this year. I say this as both an admirer of Rand’s ideas and a devotee of the book.      View blog reactions

• • Mr. Obama, here’s my resume, where’s my job? 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  | What we know is that lower taxes on income and capital provide more of an incentive to take risks and start a new business. If […] that’s what the country needs to create jobs, then by all means the president and the Congress should do everything in their power to ensure taxes stay low. Instead, like the bureaucrats in Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” they keep promising to unveil yet another plan -- the John Galt plan, named after Rand’s hero -- to save the economy.      View blog reactions

• Small business has some news for big government 
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Atlas Shrugged  | What would small business like the federal government to do? “Stay out of our way,” says Sherry Pymer, vice president of Pymer Plastering Inc., a 124-year-old family owned business in Columbus, Ohio. She sounded more like an Ayn Rand hero than a woman dealing with a payroll, unemployment insurance and Ohio’s commercial activity tax. “We don’t want them bailing out banks and big business. We want them to go away with their mandating and meddling and return this country to the principles it was founded on over 200 years ago.”      View blog reactions

• • • Ayn Rand, goddess of the market, led a soap-opera life 
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Atheism  |Ayn Rand Institute  |Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |We The Living  |Capitalism  |Egoism  |Personal life  | Reviews of new Ayn Rand biographies by Jennifer Burns (Goddess of the Market) and Anne C. Heller (Ayn Rand and the World She Made).
If Rand could speak to us directly today, rather than through her work, what would she say? The first thing she’d tell us would be to stop blaming capitalism, whose perceived flaws and abuses are nothing more than government regulation and favoritism.      View blog reactions

• • • Obama needs AIG’s Liddy, not other way around 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  | Somewhere John Galt is smiling. The hero of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” is smiling because he’s seen it all before: the government’s intervention in the private sector; the constraints placed on business in the name of the people; the desperation on the part of government bureaucrats when they realize their leverage is limited; and -- this part is still fiction -- the decision on the part of business leaders to walk away from the enterprises they built.      View blog reactions

• • Keynes revival makes Cato a lonely hearts club 
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Capitalism  | “It’s very lonely,” Cato’s Mitchell admits. “We’re thinking of running an ad on E-Harmony: Seeking small-government conservatives.” Or better yet: “Single white think tank seeks Ayn Rand-type looking to share romantic dinners, walks along the beach and entrepreneurial business ventures. Must be comfortable living in philosophical exile.”      View blog reactions

• Markets need more than random acts of congress 
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Atlas Shrugged  | The 451-page Emergency Economic and Stabilization Act of 2008 [...] is something right out of Ayn Rand's ``Atlas Shrugged.''      View blog reactions

• Wage/price fixation is spiraling out of control 
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As long as there's a “reserve army of unemployed” -- a Marxian concept dusted off and transformed into a “pool of available workers” by no less an objectivist theoretician than Alan Greenspan -- it's easy for companies to just say no to labor.      View blog reactions

• • John Galt Plan might save U.S. financial system 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  | Any day, I expect some government official to unveil the John Galt plan to save the economy. Galt, the hero of Ayn Rand's magnum opus "Atlas Shrugged," stops the world by going on strike. He and the "men of the mind" literally withdraw from the world after watching their wealth confiscated by the looters (the government). Toward the end of Rand's 1,000-plus page novel (or polemic), the economy is in shambles. Desperate, the looters kidnap Galt and prod him to "tell us what to do." Galt refuses, or rather tells them "to get out of the way." You probably can sense where I'm going. Today's economic and financial crisis would resolve itself more quickly and efficiently if the government got out of the way.      View blog reactions

• Greenspan’s memoir shows dangers of irrational book advances 
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On Alan Greenspan's memoir, The Age of Turbulence.
[Greenspan's] thinking was influenced by his Columbia University professor Arthur Burns [...] and libertarian novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand.      View blog reactions

•Greenspan legacy gets its first review 
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Nothing makes a central banker -- even the most ardent Ayn Rand advocate like [former Federal Reserve chairman Alan] Greenspan -- hit the "print money'' button as quickly as the hint of "systemic risk.''      View blog reactions

•Senate stages show trial for big oil executives 
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Senator Pete Domenici, Republican of New Mexico and Chairman of the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, was superb in the role of Wesley Mouch, Ayn Rand's petty-bureaucrat-turned-economic-czar in "Atlas Shrugged."      View blog reactions

• •Greenspan, term ending, returns to Randian roots 
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Commentary on a speech given by outgoing Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan.
It was “Atlas Shrugged” without Dagny Taggart and Hank Reardon to lead us through the struggle. Greenspan was present at the creation of Ayn Rand's masterpiece as part of the free-market philosopher's inner circle in the 1950s. It makes perfect sense that as he gets ready to retire from the Fed on Jan. 31, Greenspan would create an idealized image of himself, even if it differs from reality.      View blog reactions