• • In Defense of Corporations 
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Ayn Rand Institute  |Capitalism  |Don Watkins  |Objectivist author  | In the United States, the protesters should be occupying Washington, not Wall Street, asking why and how politicians bend to corporate pressures. As Ayn Rand Institute analyst Don Watkins observed, the goal should be to take the “crony” out of crony capitalism, not the capitalism.      View blog reactions

• Donald Trump is no capitalist 
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Atlas Shrugged  | Trump, of course, is free to run and support whatever platform he wishes, as are his many fans across the country. But despite his personal fortune, they should know his proposals and political philosophy are far from capitalist. Punitive and redistributionist taxes, centralized planning, barriers to trade and an entitlement “social safety net” are all ideas straight out of Karl Marx, not John Galt .      View blog reactions

• • Get off our backs! 
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Capitalism  | As philosopher Ayn Rand wrote, “political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries.” People who aren’t free to trade their property, time or productive effort in accordance with their own values aren’t free at all.      View blog reactions

• • The glory of gold 
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Alex Epstein  |Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal  |Capitalism  |Objectivist author  | The best-articulated case for gold I’ve read was written by no other than Alan Greenspan, more than 35 years ago. In an essay later reprinted in Ayn Rand’s Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, Greenspan outlined how, “in the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value.”      View blog reactions

• • All business hurt by ‘Wall Street’ smear 
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Capitalism  |Objectivist author  | Nearly 45 years ago philosopher Ayn Rand identified businessmen, including those who work in finance, as the distinguished symbols of a free and prosperous society. “All the other social groups — workers, farmers, professional men, scientists, soldiers — exist under dictatorships, even though they exist in chains, in terror, in misery, and in progressive self-destruction. But there is no such group as businessmen under a dictatorship. Their place is taken by armed thugs: by bureaucrats and commissars.” Makes one wonder why they’ve even bothered filing charges against Goldman Sachs. In today’s culture, the verdict’s already in.      View blog reactions

• • 10 must-read investment books 
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Atlas Shrugged  |The Virtue of Selfishness  |Capitalism  |Objectivist author  | Be it on a Kindle, iPad or comparatively antiqued book, there is a short list of essential books that, for traders and investors, constitute must-reads. [....] Even before the financial crisis hit, the investment community had already long since embraced Ayn Rand. Scores of investment pros from Monroe Trout to Victor Neiderhoffer to Peter Thiel have advocated her philosophy of reason, capitalism and individual rights, as best known by her seminal 1957 work "Atlas Shrugged." The expansion of government undertaken by both the Bush and Obama administrations has only fueled interest in Rand’s work: “Atlas Shrugged” sold a record 500,000 copies in 2009, doubling the previous year’s record. A lesser-known work of Rand’s also highly beneficial to traders is "The Virtue of Selfishness," a 1964 collection of essays that further refine the morality of egoism, profit-seeking and rational selfishness. At a time in which speculators are derided as destructive parasites wrecking havoc on the economy, the book outlines a moral foundation for capitalism to which every investor will relate.      View blog reactions

• • The next hot collectible? 
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Atlas Shrugged  | Back in 2001, I recommended purchasing first-edition copies of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” as a collectible likely to increase in value. Since that time, interest in the book has soared, with roughly 300,000 copies of sold in 2009, twice the number sold in 2008 and triple that of recent prior decades. Google searches for the book have also leapt, suggesting renewed interest. Today, first-edition copies regularly fetch more than $2,500 each.      View blog reactions

• • A taxing philosophy: We’re all collectivists now 
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Capitalism  |Egoism  |Objectivist author  | If you listen to the rhetoric coming out of Washington, you’ll soon discover the government is blaming capitalism for the economic crisis. It’s greedy, reckless businessmen who are being vilified. It’s rational self-interest that is being condemned. And when you hear free markets being blamed for a societal ill, keep in mind that, in the words of Ayn Rand, “political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries.”      View blog reactions

• • Companies are showing government how it’s done 
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Objectivist author  | "Human good does not require human sacrifices and cannot be achieved by the sacrifice of anyone to anyone,” wrote Ayn Rand. “There is no conflict of interests among men who do not desire the unearned, who do not make sacrifices nor accept them, who deal with one another as traders, giving value for value.” That’s just the sort of American stimulus we need.      View blog reactions

• • Why Michael Jackson should be in your portfolio 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Objectivist author  | Back in 2001 I wrote about my investment in first edition copies of Ayn Rand’s "Atlas Shrugged." Only 100,000 were printed, making for a small float relative to the book’s influence. Unclipped copies with original dust jackets sell for $4,000 or more. Compared to the S&P 500 over the same period, the asset has been a home run.      View blog reactions

• • Get mad at Bernard Madoff, not hedge funds 
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Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal  |Capitalism  | As Alan Greenspan pointed out over 40 years ago in Ayn Rand's "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal," "A fly by night securities operator can quickly meet all the S.E.C. requirements, gain the inference of respectability, and proceed to fleece the public." Indeed, regulation doesn't eliminate the potential for fraud, it simply makes it harder to detect.      View blog reactions

• • Some of the best ideas and trades of 2007 
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Millions of successful businesspeople, including names like Mark Cuban and Monroe Trout, have been inspired by the work of Ayn Rand, whose philosophy of Objectivism explains the morality of capitalism. So at a time in which bankers such as Countrywide's Angelo Mozilo or investment firms like Goldman Sachs are increasingly vilified for creating wealth, you'll certainly enjoy picking up a copy of The Objective Standard, a quarterly journal that relates Rand's philosophy to current events.      View blog reactions

•Hugo Chavez’s control: Property rights in Venezuela 
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As Ayn Rand wrote, "without property rights, no other rights are possible." Chavez’s socialism, under which private property does not exist, is bringing this once-promising country back to the third world.      View blog reactions

•The dollar dilemma 
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The government is able to promise [entitlements] essentially by spending money it doesn't have. Writer and philosopher Ayn Rand describes it as a process in which "the government borrows money today, which is to be repaid with money it will borrow from you tomorrow, which is to be repaid with money it will borrow from you the day after tomorrow ... and so on."      View blog reactions

• •Economic power 
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Business column on why it's big government, not big business, that people should be worried about.
"Economic power," as philosopher Ayn Rand wrote, "is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value; political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction. The businessman's tool is values; the bureaucrat's tool is fear." Of course, the bureaucrat represents political power, which, these days, is the power of government to do essentially whatever it damn pleases.      View blog reactions