• • Tea parties amd going John Galt: America’s new direction? 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Objectivist author  | "Capitalism," novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand wrote, "is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned." In a completely free society, the government's role is solely to protect individual rights. It leaves men free to produce or not as they choose, to work to the best of their ability or not as they choose, to trade with others, to benefit from their own effort, to save and invest and support charities as they choose. But over many decades government has increasingly violated our rights and eroded our freedom.      View blog reactions

• • Ayn Rand and the financial crisis 
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Capitalism  |Objectivist author  | In this time of financial crisis and the Democrats' irrational response to it, Americans are showing a growing interest in Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Increasing sales of her masterpiece, Atlas Shrugged, have been reported around the United States. Reports in The Economist indicate the same is happening in Great Britain.      View blog reactions

• • America at a crossroads 
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Capitalism  |Objectivist author  | "A right is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man's freedom of action in a social context." [Ayn Rand, "Man's Rights"] To claim that a moral principle is at the mercy of another's wish is blasphemous. Rights do not include the "right" to violate another's rights---no matter what the need, wish, demand, or assumption.      View blog reactions

• They deserve every penny 
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Capitalism  | Letter to the editor.
Re Bryan Tucker's challenge to Ayn Rand fans ("Too little outrage over pay inequity," Letters, Aug. 28): There's no need to apologize for free markets. But because of considerable miseducation, there is a need to explain them. Tucker's use of the phrase "execrable distribution of wealth" indicates his mistaken Marxist-Keynesian views. Properly, wealth should not be "distributed." It should be earned. Chief executives do that.      View blog reactions