• • • Capitalism’s Leni Riefenstahl 
Max Dunbar, 3:AM Magazine Altruism  Atheism  Ayn Rand Institute  Atlas Shrugged  We The Living  Capitalism  Personal life  Yaron Brook  Image  Review of Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, by Jennifer Burns.Rand lives on, a grinning ghost in the corridors of power. Sales of her books, always at high plateau, spiked during the 2008 crash. To her supporters, the bank bailouts vindicated Rand. ‘We’re heading towards socialism,’ declared Yaron Brook, head of the Ayn Rand Institute, ’we’re heading towards more regulation. Atlas Shrugged is coming true.’ Cult devotees are famously resistant to the lessons of experience. It evidently didn’t occur to Brook that, like Soviet Communism, Rand’s doctrinaire capitalism had already been put into practice, and found wanting.     Share on Facebook

• • • Bring it on, Ayn Rand geeks 
Michael Lind, Salon Atheism  Capitalism  The public has repeatedly rejected any attempts to privatize Social Security or slash Medicare benefits. Reagan denounced both entitlements, but as president he raised taxes to support Social Security and refused to touch Medicare. Under George W. Bush, a Republican Congress passed the Medicare drug benefit, which, for all its concessions to the pharma lobby, was the biggest expansion of socialized medicine in the U.S. since Lyndon Johnson signed Medicare into law. [....] So bring it on, geeky disciples of Ayn Rand. Gird thy loins and put on thy Spock ears. Demand the abolition of Social Security and Medicare! Call for reducing the U.S. military to the Coast Guard! Insist on tolling every highway and street in America and selling America's infrastructure assets to foreign corporations and foreign sovereign wealth funds! Go Galt! Bring it on! Even confined to a wheelchair, Franklin Roosevelt can defeat Ayn Rand.     Share on Facebook

• • • Who is John Galt? No, really. 
Stephen Herrington, Huffington Post Atheism  Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism  Egoism  Personal life  Ayn Rand was a drawing room capitalist, a theorist on a subject with which she had no practical experience (other than with its opposite). She could not understand, or ignored, the fact that the stifling of creativity and the seizure of work product is not the exclusive prerogative of communism. It happens every day in capitalism. Corporate monopolies act to break the will of competition. Corporations stifle creativity with things like planned obsolescence and the withholding of known solutions from markets in all fields. Corporations buy legislation, passing the cost on to consumers, and stack the legal deck against the public interest with impunity. Corrupt bureaucracy can be found at Wal Mart as easily as the Politburo.     Share on Facebook

• • • Who is Ayn Rand? 
Gillis J. Harp, Review Messenger (Sebeka, MN) Atheism  Atlas Shrugged  Personal life  Inaccurate  Review of Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, by Jennifer Burns.Rand and her circle consistently demonized the state as the principal source of evil in the world. Such a caricature has been alien to Christian political theology from Thomas Aquinas, to Richard Hooker, to Leo XIII and Reinhold Niebuhr. Rand's anti-government stance can lead to troubling contradictions in a representative democracy, and Burns notes how Rand often slipped into an arrogant elitism. The rational faculty she increasingly emphasized in her thought was best exhibited by "the better species, the Superman," and not by that group of mindless citizens she dismissed as mere "human ballast."     Share on Facebook

• • • Ayn Rand, the philosophy of freedom, and a serial killer 
Gus diZerega, Beliefnet.com - A Pagan’s Blog Atheism  Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  We The Living  Egoism  Rand's admiration for a sociopathic murderer is an eye-opener as to the moral sensibility that appeals to all too many 'conservative' and 'libertarian' Americans. She was one very disturbed and deeply wounded person, as her biographies show.     Share on Facebook

• • Robbing the GOP of credibility 
Mark Davis, Tracy Press (CA) Atheism  After Aquila’s Feb. 27 column (“Democrats: Fulfilling the Communist agenda”), I realized the brilliance of Aquila’s efforts. You see, Mr. Aquila is part of a communist fifth column that has infiltrated the GOP and is intent on destroying the party from the inside. [....] He tries to misdirect with contradictory quotes from figures of authority. Aquila thoroughly understood that Ayn Rand’s radical libertarianism and anti-communism was also tinged by the strongest form of atheism. Aquila thoroughly understood that Ayn Rand’s radical libertarianism and anti-communism was also tinged by the strongest form of atheism. One of her quotes: “Faith is the worst curse of man, as the exact antithesis and enemy of thought.” Yet he strategically chose to quote Rand, thus undermining his previous claims about the ungodliness of the communist agenda. With that signal quote, he thereby managed to thoroughly derail any chance at GOP ideological coherence while simultaneously calling into question any commonality of purpose with libertarians.     Share on Facebook

• George Washington: ‘… the Constitution … is sacredly obligatory upon all.’ 
Dan Sherrier, North Star National Atheism  I do believe it’s possible for an atheist to have values (see the writings of Ayn Rand.)     Share on Facebook

• • At the Tea Party 
Jonathan Raban, New York Review of Books Atheism  Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism  Egoism  It's one thing for pro-life evangelicals and secular libertarians to march shoulder to shoulder behind banners saying "Kill the Bill!" and "Oust the Marxist Usurper!" or displaying a portrait of Obama rouged up and kohled to look like Heath Ledger's Joker in the Batman movie Dark Knight. It's quite another to coop up the same people for three days in a hotel, where they must talk to each other through breakfast, lunch, and dinner. At the march on D.C., there were T-shirts proclaiming "I am John Galt" and "Atlas Has Shrugged" alongside others that said "Obama Spends—Jesus Saves" or had the legend "Yes, He Did" beneath a picture of Christ on the cross. At Opryland, devout, abstemious Christians were breaking bread with followers of Ayn Rand's gospel of unbridled and atheistic self-interest. The convention, designed to unite the Tea Party movement, was helping to expose fundamental differences of belief and mindset between people who, before Nashville, had appeared as interchangeable members of a single angry crowd.     Share on Facebook

• • • Ayn Rand, hugely popular author & inspiration to right-wing leaders, was admirer of serial killer 
Mark Ames, AlterNet Atheism  Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  The Virtue of Selfishness  Capitalism  Egoism  Inaccurate  Ayn Rand is a textbook sociopath. Literally a sociopath: Ayn Rand, in her notebooks, worshiped a notorious serial murderer-dismemberer, and used this killer as an early model for the type of "ideal man" that Rand promoted in her more famous books -- ideas which were later picked up on and put into play by major right-wing figures of the past half decade, including the key architects of America's most recent economic catastrophe -- former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan and SEC Commissioner Chris Cox -- along with other notable right-wing Republicans such as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Rush Limbaugh, and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.     Share on Facebook

• • We won’t even know John Galt has gone 
Carl Wernicke, News Journal (Pensacola, FL) Atheism  Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  [Atlas Shrugged] and ultra-free market ideas have become the darling of the conservative right, which tries to ignore [Rand’s] denial of God, whom she displaces with a paganistic adoration of man as the highest ideal; her novel "The Fountainhead" carries that theme to its most explicit conclusion in a storyline about a church and a nude female sculpture; if you're not familiar with the book you'll have to read it.     Share on Facebook

• • • Ayn Rand: Engineer of souls 
Anthony Daniels, The New Criterion Altruism  Atheism  Ayn Rand Institute  Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  Capitalism  Egoism  Leonard Peikoff  Personal life  Review of Ayn Rand and the World She Made, by Anne C. Heller.Rand’s virtues were as follows: she was highly intelligent; she was brave and uncompromising in defense of her ideas; she had a kind of iron integrity; and, though a fierce defender of capitalism, she was by no means avid for money herself. The propagation of truth as she saw it was far more important to her than her own material ease. Her vices, of course, were the mirror-image of her virtues, but, in my opinion, the mirror was a magnifying one. Her intelligence was narrow rather than broad. Though in theory a defender of freedom of thought and action, she was dogmatic, inflexible, and intolerant, not only in opinion but in behavior, and it led her to personal cruelty. In the name of her ideas, she was prepared to be deeply unpleasant. She hardened her ideas into ideology. Her integrity led to a lack of self-criticism; she frequently wrote twenty thousand words where one would do.     Share on Facebook

• • • Who was John Galt? Fittingly, a Wisconsinite 
Mike Nichols, Wisconsin Policy Research Institute Atheism  Ayn Rand Archives  Ayn Rand Institute  Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism  Atlas Shrugged, more popular than ever, has now sold over 7 million copies. I have to confess that I am not a huge fan of its author. Her fervent atheism, casual disregard of charity, and strident doctrinairism make what many consider a philosophical tract for the ages, too often, a sure-fire, 1,168-page alternative to Ambien.     Share on Facebook

• • • Why Ayn Rand? Answers and some questions for discussion 
Douglas B. Rasmussen, Cato Unbound Atheism  Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal  The Fountainhead  The Virtue of Selfishness  Capitalism  Egoism  It is for Rand both right and a right for individuals to live for their own sakes. The moral standard to be followed is for each individual to live as full and as complete a human life as possible. Each individual human being is an end in him- or herself and has no higher moral purpose. One is certainly not merely a means to the ends of others. This is what Rand meant by speaking of the virtue of “selfishness.” Her purpose in using a term that is normally thought of as a vice to describe her fundamental virtue was to indicate just how profound a paradigm shift is needed in order to defend liberty.     Share on Facebook

• Corporate correctness distorts economic reality 
Lance D. Logue, News Herald (Panama City, FL) Atheism  Capitalism  Just as the atheist Ayn Rand has been transfigured to rationalize Wall Street’s crony corruption of government and regulation through both parties, [Dale] Carnegie and [Norman Vincent] Peale have been distorted to become anathema to integrity. "Sincere appreciation" and a "positive mental attitude" have given way to cheerleaders and lukewarm "yes men."     Share on Facebook

• Columnist ignores reality of issues, depends on empty rhetoric 
Colton Griffin, Daily Beacon (University of Tennessee) Atheism  I can’t think of many people more “right” than Glenn Beck, though I guess the modern conservative’s favorite dead atheist and libertarian Ayn Rand is one.     Share on Facebook

• • • Interview with an Objectivist 
Jordan Carr, Stanford Review - Fiat Lux (Stanford U, CA) Altruism  Atheism  Ayn Rand Institute  Atlas Shrugged  Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology  The Fountainhead  The Virtue of Selfishness  Capitalism  Egoism  Elan Journo  Harry Binswanger  Leonard Peikoff  Yaron Brook  Interview with Dakin Sloss, founder and president of the Objectivists of Stanford.     Share on Facebook

• • • Objectivists expand presence 
Jordan Carr, Stanford Review (Stanford U, CA) Altruism  Atheism  Ayn Rand Institute  Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  Capitalism  Personal life  Yaron Brook  Image  If you are wondering whether or not the Objectivist revival at Stanford is a sign of an attitudinal shift in our generation; simply put, it is not. It is no coincidence that Objectivism’s presence at Stanford and at other college campuses is disproportionate to its national influence. Objectivism’s appeal is greatest to students with minimal responsibilities to others, and it does not work within the context of most adults’ lives. One wonders how many of today’s objectivists will remain when it is their turn to write the tuition checks.     Share on Facebook

• • Remaking the coalition 
David Turner, The Inter-Mountain (Elkins, WV) Altruism  Atheism  Inaccurate  Ayn Rand, that highly atheistic philosopher, is the high priestess of [the Tea Party] movement. Despite that she is long dead, she wields more influence than ever in movement politics. In her novels and her writings, she inveighed against the state, seeing it as a conspiracy against the successful. Thus, altruism is regarded as a dangerous sentiment and is only advanced to in fact steal wealth from those that earn it. But Rand was also an advocate of untrammeled personal freedom including sexual liberty. Long denounced by William Buckley and others for her libertine perspective, she was read out of the movement in 1962. However, her ideas remain salient in the anti-statist philosophy of the newest incarnation of the right. Because of these views, she also represents a potential threat to the moralist of the Christian right.     Share on Facebook

• • • Ayn Rand flawed, but her novels still shine 
John F. Di Leo, Illinois Review Atheism  Anthem  Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  We The Living  Inaccurate  Ayn Rand’s four masterpieces are “Atlas Shrugged,” “We the Living,” “The Fountainhead,” and the marvelously slim “Anthem.” Works of fiction, they tower among the greatest novels of the 20th century. Like any work of 800 pages, Atlas and the Fountainhead drag a bit here and there – the two or three 20-page speeches in each are sometimes worth skipping past – but otherwise, they are monuments to great storytelling.     Share on Facebook

• • • Rand odd hero for Religious Right 
Joseph Alfieris, Savannah Morning News Altruism  Atheism  Inaccurate  Ayn Rand exalted the achieved individual above all else. She maintained that man's struggle for self fulfillment and attainment was the only thing worthy of worship and hence her view of him as an "heroic being." Through her philosophy, Objectivism, Rand proposed that only scientific analysis and Reason will lead to this fulfillment and that this endeavor is constantly hindered by government and the church.     Share on Facebook