• Introducing Wall Street’s hottest offspring, Part II 
Gus Lubin And Courtney Comstock, The Business Insider Victor Niederhoffer has six daughters and one son. [....] Rand, 26, started a fashion company in Brooklyn. She is clearly named after her father's favorite author, Ayn Rand.     Share on Facebook

• Tyler Felton 
Idaho Mountain Express (Ketchum) Obituary.The words of Ernest Hemingway and Ayn Rand struck deep cords within him and he named many of his dogs after characters in Hemingway's books (usually "Jake").     Share on Facebook

• Fix him a manly meal tonight 
Melony Carey, Muskogee Phoenix (OK) Atlas Shrugged  Interestingly, three women authors did make the Man’s Essential Library 100 list. Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “The Book of Deeds of Arms and of Chivalry,” a medieval mother’s guide for her son by early anti-misogynist Christine de Pizan, and Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” evidently represent the women in touch with their more masculine side.     Share on Facebook

• Can the Smoker in Chief really lead America in health care reform? 
S.E. Cupp, New York Daily News As I approach my 10-year college reunion, it's clear that I missed a few classes that would have proved helpful. Those classes include "Leadership and Ethics" and "Ethical Theory," offered by the Program on Ethics and Public Life at my alma mater, Cornell University. See, I'm certain that at some point those classes would have covered the issue I've been grappling with recently, in which case I'd be able to tell you what Plato and Aristotle said about it. Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas, too. I bet you Hobbes and Locke have really super advice on this one. And you just know Ayn Rand would be all over it. [....] With President Obama making his final push for health care reform, I ask you to consider the following "If, Then" theorem: If our health is the President's business, then the President's health should be our business.     Share on Facebook

• Spitzer madam Kristin Davis busts into New York governor’s race 
Mike Colapietro, Daily Caller After she met fellow [Eliot] Spitzer critic Roger Stone on a radio show [Davis] started reading and writing about women’s rights, feminism, prostitution, drug policy and prison reform on her blog Manhattan Madam. Stone gave her Von Mises, Ayn Rand, Hayek and Friedman, and she decided she was a Libertarian.     Share on Facebook

• Keynes for today 
Johann Hari, The Progressive Capitalism  Book review: Keynes: The Return of the Master, by Robert Skidelsky.The notion that deregulated markets will reach an “equilibrium”—which provides the best of all outcomes—turns out to be a quasi-religious fantasy. The economic models “proving” it is so are lies and act, as Professor Paul Davidson puts it, as Weapons of Math Destruction, shoving us towards the abyss. Unregulated markets will seesaw wildly between booms and busts. Only tough regulation can stop the market from devouring its own internal organs, and only big government spending can prevent a bad recession souring into a depression. This was all willfully forgotten by the Chicago School economists and Ayn Rand devotees who conquered America. They didn’t prevail because they had the best arguments; their predictions were about as accurate as Sybil the Soothsayer’s. No, they prevailed because their arguments served the interests of the super-rich, who lavishly funded the campaigns of politicians who picked them up.     Share on Facebook

• Make way for local elections 
Hafiz Noor Shams, The Malaysian Insider Atlas Shrugged  The 2008 Malaysian general election demonstrated that individual citizens do have the power to change the course of the country. It is a reminder that the kind of confidence in individuals that seemed to exist only in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged does exist in the real world. It blew away the feeling of helplessness that nothing can be done. It proves that in the face of a titan, individuals can be as fearsome as the titan can.     Share on Facebook

• Keynesian creationism: Part II of ‘A curious resurrection of libertarianism’ 
Max Borders, The Examiner (Washington, DC) Libertarianism was never really dead. [Jacob] Weisberg was drumming on the casket of a straw men made vaguely in the form of Ayn Rand and Fed pooh-bahs. He wove together a number of disparate narratives from prominent leftish intellectuals and passed it off as something epic.     Share on Facebook

• Look to grassroots to reinvent Toronto 
Stephen Kerr, Toronto Star Toronto is a bottom up, democratic city. No, we're not France, and we shouldn't try to be like New York. We should try to just be who we are. We don't need mega-projects imposed on us by "great men" whose greatest ideas came from an Ayn Rand novel. We need more democratic participation.     Share on Facebook

• Progressives undermine their cause by attributing free-market principles to their opponents 
Dean Baker, Boston Review Capitalism  Banks such as J.P. Morgan and Citigroup were arguably too big to fail even three decades ago, before growth and mergers expanded their size several-fold. In the last decade they grew so big that their collapse would undoubtedly have jeopardized the health of the financial system. Everyone knew that, so creditors could lend them money without concern for the banks’ soundness: the government, ultimately, would stand behind their debts. This has nothing to do with Ayn Rand’s libertarianism. Huge financial institutions simply took advantage of taxpayers by getting insurance without having to pay for it.     Share on Facebook

• The right’s big lie 
Henry Ferreira, Standard-Times (New Bedford, MA) By demagoguery, the right wing has sold more than a few on the policies and politics of Ayn Rand and Herbert Hoover. A government of and by the people was not the answer but the problem. As one of their acolytes, Grover Norquist, said, "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."     Share on Facebook

• An educator’s change of heart 
Peter Sacks, New York Times Diane Ravitch’s self-described intellectual U-turn is a case study in how some ideas, however bad, are created and perpetrated in the service of power, while other ideas, however truthful, rarely see the light of day. Dr. Ravitch fashioned herself into the Ayn Rand of educational policy and rose to fame as a result of a free-market ideology that came into fashion in George W. Bush’s administration.     Share on Facebook

• Fringe politics becoming dangerously acceptable in US 
Harvey Dzodin, Global Times (Beijing) [Joseph] Stack's inchoate anger is reflected in a growing wave of angry Americans. Some believe that federal income tax is illegal and they have a right to not pay it. Many more feel that tax dollars are being needlessly spent and national expenditures should be limited to police, fire and self-defense functions. These libertarian followers of Ayn Rand include the now discredited Alan Greenspan.     Share on Facebook

• A dream of Morlocks and Eloi getting along with each other 
Glenn Contrarian, Blogcritics In today's polarized political world, conservatives tend to consider liberals as clueless children, as naive little Pollyannas adrift in a world beyond their comprehension... whereas we liberals tend to frame conservatives as mindless Ayn Rand clones, as Nietzschean fugitives from the wrong side of Pink Floyd's rock opera The Wall.     Share on Facebook

• ‘Socialist’ profs didn’t sink economy 
Jack Hannold, Star-Ledger (Newark, NJ) Capitalism  In a letter published on Feb. 28, (”Another liberal will poison our students”) Len Testa deplored the appointment of Van Jones to a teaching fellowship at Princeton. [....] Actually, our current economic crisis was the work of legions of MBAs on Wall Street and throughout the upper echelons of corporate America. And their professors were, by and large, conservatives. Many of those professors were, and are, adherents of the “Chicago school” of economics, just like the government officials who enabled Wall Street to run wild by deregulating financial markets. Today, their extreme laissez-faire philosophy stands discredited, except in the eyes of the most dedicated followers of economists Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman — or of those who, like former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, are unregenerate acolytes of Ayn Rand.     Share on Facebook

• Nonfiction: “You are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto,“ by Jaron Lanier 
Evelyn Mcdonnell, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Book review.All the unemployed writers, broke musicians and worried filmmakers who see their professional horizons melting into the ether of cyberspace -- not to mention the lowly cephalopod (I'll explain later) -- will be cheered by Jaron Lanier's latest curmudgeonly screed. The virtual-reality pioneer champions the role of the artist as Promethean in the face of the rise of mob mentality. It's a bracing dose of economic realism and Ayn Rand philosophy for all those techno utopians with their heads in the clouds.     Share on Facebook

• Chesterfield student wins T-D spelling bee 
Melissa Ruggieri, Richmond Times-Dispatch (VA) The Fountainhead  [Ryan Oppenheim is] a devoted reader, currently plowing through Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead" for a school project.     Share on Facebook

• Happiness is my computer 
Danny Scott, The Times (London) Interview with Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia.[Jimmy Wales:] I take pride in my work and I like to focus my mind on it. I think our first responsibility as humans is to think, to focus our minds and consider what we're doing and what we ought to be doing. Philosophically, I'm an objectivist.     Share on Facebook

• People watching 
Giridhar Khasnis, Deccan Herald (Bangalore, India) [Arnold Newman] photographed many Presidents of the United States, and made a mark through his extraordinary and intense portraits of artists, actors, writers and performers like Piet Mondrian, Ayn Rand, Alberto Giacometti, [...] Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, Marilyn Monroe, Man Ray, and many others.     Share on Facebook

• File under “shameless self-promotion” 
Mike Hofman, Inc. Our colleagues in Inc.'s art department are celebrating five merit awards presented by the Society of Publication Designers. SPD recognized Inc. for the still-life photography in the Inc. 500 issue, an illustration of author Ayn Rand that appeared in the November issue, and our recurring photo essays "Behind the Scenes," "Passions," and "Innovation."     Share on Facebook