• • All opinions are not equally relevant 
,
Capitalism  | Lately a great deal of attention has been newly attached to the philosophy of Ayn Rand who seemed to feel that the business community held a monopoly of brains and talent. In a review of a new book on Rand, Adam Kirsch writes: “Rand’s particular intellectual contribution, the thing that makes her so popular and so American, is the way she managed to mass market elitism - - to convince many people, especially young people, that they could be geniuses without being in any concrete way distinguished.” (NY Times Book Review, 11/1/09.) Indeed, that very concept is playing out among a confused, poorly-informed public.      View blog reactions

• • It wasn’t like Woodstock… 
,
Ayn Rand Institute  |The Fountainhead  |Yaron Brook  | One of the more curious speakers [at the DC taxpayers’ rally] was from “The Ayn Rand Association” who told attendees emphatically that it's “your life, you’re not your brother’s keeper”, that neighbor who didn’t save and got himself into financial trouble. But if most of the audience had even a clue about Rand's writings they might have recoiled at the terrorist act of her hero in The Fountainhead who blew up buildings that didn’t conform to his original design. Oh well, Rand was just making some kind of point, sort of like Ann Coulter who said she regretted that Timothy McVeigh didn’t target the NY Times building in NYC instead of the one in Oklahoma. Fiddle de Dee.      View blog reactions