• The world is obsessed with the US presidential poll, but the congressional elections matter more 
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British Toryism can be surprisingly unpolitical. It’s an instinct rather than an ideology. Or, rather, an amalgam of instincts: patriotism, distrust of officialdom, respect for property and so on. American conservatism is a far more doctrinal affair. Its exponents become as passionate when debating the virtues of Rothbardian versus Randian libertarianism as when weighing the merits of, say, Gingrich versus Santorum.      View blog reactions

• Meet Gary Johnson, the most libertarian candidate ever to seek the US presidency 
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Alright, you might be saying, so he’s a libertarian. So are thousands of Ayn Rand-reading students around the world. No one holding these views ever gets elected to anything important. That’s where you’d be wrong. Gary Johnson was elected on precisely such a manifesto in the swing state of New Mexico, and promptly set about putting his beliefs into practice.      View blog reactions

• • Atlas Shrugged trailer released 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Video  | Atlas Shrugged fails as literature, not least because it is a thousand pages too long. Condensing the story into a two-hour film can hardly fail to improve it.      View blog reactions

• • Banks are ordered to make more easy money available. Isn’t that what caused the crash? 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Image  | Since the credit crunch hit 28 months ago, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged hasn’t been out of the bestseller lists. Not bad for a novel published in 1957 – a novel, moreover, which, judged strictly on its literary merits, must be reckoned a failure. Yet there is something downright uncanny about the way in which the Russian émigrée anticipated our present discontents.      View blog reactions

• How we should have responded to the credit crunch 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  | The elites of almost every Western country have reacted mistakenly to the banking crisis, because they took their advice mainly from bank chiefs. [....] Giving people legal ownership of their bank deposits is a more reasoned and proportionate reponse than stimulating inflation: the solution preferred in the UK by Mr Bean ( see here) and in the US by the Fed [...]. No wonder sales of Atlas Shrugged have surged in the past two years.      View blog reactions

• As America goes to the polls, CNN makes one last attempt to smear the Tea Party 
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Polls of Tea Party supporters suggest that their top concern is the deficit, followed by opposition to state healthcare, lower taxes, hostility to the bail-outs and support for welfare reform. One recent survey showed that 28 per cent of Tea Partiers are independents, and 17 per cent Democrats. A student called Emily Ekins has carried out an empirical study of the banners and placards waved at Tea Party rallies. The overwhelming majority attack the size of the state: “Don’t tread on me!”, “Taxed Enough Already!” “Who is John Galt?“.      View blog reactions

• Come and meet the world’s leading Austrian economist 
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Capitalism  | The Hayek Lecture is the child of Toby Baxendale, entrepreneur, philosopher, Iron Man competitor and all-round Mensch. A couple of years ago, Toby decided to dedicate himself to promoting honest money and banking reform, causes which then seemed somewhat abstruse but which are suddenly looking very urgent indeed. The meeting is open to the public and – in contradiction of strict Randian principles – free.      View blog reactions

• The Tea-Party tradition 
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The last time I was in D.C., I spoke at the Wednesday Meeting run by Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform. Here, gathered under one roof, was Hillary Clinton’s “vast right-wing conspiracy”: vaster, indeed, than I had ever imagined. Think-tankers rubbed shoulders with congressional aides, contrarian columnists with right-wing academics, Ayn Rand devotees with anti-health-reform campaigners, Republican candidates with sympathetic businessmen. Although there were many ideological and stylistic differences among those present, they were all there to advance a common cause. I kept thinking of Bismarck’s remark about the German socialists: “We march separately, but we fight together.”      View blog reactions

• The lobbying affair should be bigger news than the expenses revelations 
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Atlas Shrugged  | Two political stories over the past 18 months have struck me as truly scandalous. First this one, in which legislators were caught on tape offering to move amendments in return for cash; now this one, in which an MP cheerfully describes himself as being like a taxi for hire. Both episodes take us into the world of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged: a world in which businessmen and politicians conspire together against the public weal. Yet, for some reason, neither has generated anything like as much public anger as the revelation that MPs were using their allowances to buy sofas and saucepans.      View blog reactions

• Barack Obama and Gordon Brown biff the bankers: good politics, bad economics 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  | As Douglas Carswell says, we are in the world of Atlas Shrugged, a world of back-room deals, of ententes between big government and big corporations, of conspiracies against the public weal hatched in the name of necessity.      View blog reactions

• • • Ayn Shrugged 
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Atlas Shrugged  | Atlas Shrugged is too long. Way too long. Its point could have been very adequately made in 200 pages rather than the 1,168 of my Penguin edition. Now you might argue that some books need to be long. A novelist who sets out to create a plausible universe, and to people it with developed characters, must give himself room, be he Tolstoy or Tolkien. But there is nothing especially developed about the characters in Atlas Shrugged. They are all more or less interchangeable, speaking in dissertations and behaving in set patterns.      View blog reactions

• • • Atlas Shrugged: Great philosophy, terrible novel 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  | I may have just written the single most unpopular article of my life. In the new issue of American Conservative (subscription only), I argue that – viewed strictly as literature – Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is a calamitous failure. Pace, all you Randians, I am one of you. As a political tract, the book was (for once the word is truly apposite) seminal. Its effect on the development of Western political thought has been vast and benign. But, as a novel, it is dreich. Its characters are wooden and interchangeable; its dialogue takes the form of improbable philosophical treatises; its plot is marred by small errors; every twist in the story, every deus ex machina, is so ploddingly flagged up as to be robbed of any dramatic impact.      View blog reactions

• Eurocrats are extreme, Tories are moderate 
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Atlas Shrugged  | Working in Brussels [as a member of the European Parliament] is like being trapped in Atlas Shrugged. EU institutions were designed by and for lobbyists and bureaucrats.      View blog reactions

• • Conservative Party conference: Where are all the Tories? 
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Atlas Shrugged  | The place resembles a business convention rather than a political rally, and fringe events are filled with cautious, sleekit, Europhile PR types. I am reminded of the brilliant description of a company board in Atlas Shrugged: “Men whose careers depended on keeping their faces bland, their remarks inconclusive and their clothes immaculate”.      View blog reactions

• • What connects John F Kennedy, Margaret Thatcher and John Galt? 
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Atlas Shrugged  | JFK was assassinated on 22 November 1963. Margaret Thatcher was toppled on 22 November 1990. And 22 November is the date on which John Galt, hero of Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, seizes the airwaves and reveals himself to the nation. (I thought I’d mention this now, because I know that my friend Douglas Carswell MP is racing through the book and, the moment he finishes, will start claiming that it influenced him before it influenced me. He’s touchy that way.) Spooky, eh? The three events where everyone can remember where they were when they heard the news, all on the same date.      View blog reactions

• More evidence of the Brussels racket, as Irish Euro-enthusiasts turn to business leaders 
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Atlas Shrugged  | Why [...] did Michael O’Leary [of Ryanair], who once described the EU as “the evil empire”, reverse his position [on the Lisbon Treaty]? His four stated reasons for recommending a “Yes” vote make no sense at all: all are defences of the status quo, and none has anything to do with Lisbon (see here). [....] O’Leary’s problem is that Ryanair depends on the EU for its survival. It was the Commission’s decision to block his airline’s grants from small airports and business consortia that provoked his “evil empire” remark in the first place. His current plans to take over parts of Aer Lingus will also require EU approval. He would be a brave man indeed to risk alienating Brussels. (Not that his supposed Euro-enthusiasm will necessarily save him: he should read Atlas Shrugged).      View blog reactions