• • Could Atlas be about to shrug? 
David Hudson, Associated Content Atlas Shrugged  In [Atlas Shrugged], Ayn Rand has described three classes of people; the producers (business owners and those who provide services for profit), the moochers (those who use the services provided by the producers, but spurn and vilify them for their "greed"), and the looters (typically politicians, who loot the producer's of their wealth for the purpose of re-distributing it to the moochers... usually at their request).     Share on Facebook

• • Progressives hate individual rights 
Stephen Grossman, Standard-Times (New Bedford, MA) Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal  Objectivist author  When the latest socialist pie-in-the-sky unravels, as it must, progressives gratefully fall into another coma. They awaken, mercifully free of memory and free to plan other peoples' lives again. Throw the bums out! Vote Tea Party. Get "Atlas Shrugged" and "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal."     Share on Facebook

• Area library staging literary March Madness 
Terry Morris, Dayton Daily News (OH) Atlas Shrugged  “Opening round” battles include “Moby Dick” vs. “The World According to Garp,” “Atlas Shrugged” colliding with “Rabbit Is Rich,” “Catch 22” testing “Ragtime” and “The Scarlet Letter” going head to head with “The Bean Trees.” Much like those in the NCAA college basketball tournament, the clashes will progress to a field of 32, a sweet 16, elite 8, final four and then the champion.     Share on Facebook

• Peter Costello: Up close and very personal 
Tim Roberts, New Matilda Atlas Shrugged  Satire.The following transcript was found in Peter Costello’s Canberra apartment, sandwiched between battered copies of Thus Spake Zarathustra and Atlas Shrugged. It appears to be the outline of a speech which we speculate was intended for delivery via videotape.     Share on Facebook

• • • 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

• • Per Ayn, lights in California are going out 
Stephen Schork, CNBC Atlas Shrugged  [California’s] politicos are carrying on like the antagonist out of an Ayn Rand novel. [....] Jeez, what’s next…? Thought Police? To paraphrase Ayn, the lights in California are going out.     Share on Facebook

• Russia’s economy is going to recover, and its political system will not change 
Mark Adomanis, True/Slant Atlas Shrugged  I am not trying to claim that Putin’s Russia has been magically transformed into Galt’s Gulch, merely that it is more liberal, adaptable, and flexible that the administrative socialism that characterized the Soviet system.     Share on Facebook

• Fisher on Greenspan and the irrational exuberance bull 
Bradley Davis, Wall Street Journal - Deal Journal Atlas Shrugged  At a forum on the euro and the dollar sponsored by the Dallas Federal Reserve, its president Richard Fisher was asked about his view of former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan. Fisher said he wouldn’t comment — though he did mention that he had never been able to finish “Atlas Shrugged,” Greenspan mentor Ayn Rand’s paean to capitalism.     Share on Facebook

• • Eating wrong 
Zane Fischer, Santa Fe Reporter Atlas Shrugged  In Ayn Rand’s free-market bible Atlas Shrugged, it’s suggested that Atlas—and by metaphorical extension any “pillar” of society and industry—shrug off a planet that has become unbearable to hold. But the prevailing attitude at the food summit suggested that the world only becomes unmanageable as a result of our mismanagement. If we all throw a shoulder in, Atlas can stop feeling like an exploited migrant worker in New Mexico’s industrial agribusiness machine and become part of a process in which responsibility and wealth are shared.     Share on Facebook

• • A halo of virtue 
Sandy Telcocci, The Oklahoman (Oklahoma City) Atlas Shrugged  In response to Walter Williams’ "Is health care a right?” (Commentary, March 10): Williams is apparently familiar with the premise of Ayn Rand’s "Atlas Shrugged,” which should be required reading (or rereading) for all our politicians prior to even running for office. Below is a partial quote from the book made by the character Ragnar Danneskjold about Robin Hood and why he wanted "the last trace of him wiped out of men’s minds.”     Share on Facebook

• Health care, Dennis Kucinich, and being a decent country 
Zaid Jilani, True/Slant Atlas Shrugged  What this [health care] bill would declare — other than our government is far too beholden to the very industries it’s supposed to be standing up to while making legislation — is that we aren’t going to let people die anymore because they literally can’t afford to live. It’s a gigantic blow against the idea that we’re on our own, that we aren’t our brother’s keepers, and that we should all pick up copies of Atlas Shrugged and simply look out for ourselves.     Share on Facebook

• • Too righteous for facts 
Daniel McCarthy, The American Conservative - @TAC Atlas Shrugged  Michael Lind is a smart guy, but he’s also an ideologue so hellbent on the righteousness of his social-democratic worldview that he doesn’t let niggling things like facts get in the way of his proclamations. In his amusingly titled “ Bring it on, Ayn Rand geeks,” Lind tells us Ron Paul is such an acolyte of the Atlas Shrugged author that he “named his son Rand Paul.” Devastating, except that Randal Paul, known to his family as Randy, isn’t actually named after Ayn, and while the Pauls may appreciate the novelist, the Texas congressman’s plan for transitioning away from the welfare state hardly evokes the pitiless ethos of Objectivism.     Share on Facebook

• Tax time number crunching adds up to columns of confusion 
Neil Crone, durhamregion.com (ON) Atlas Shrugged  I'm going through a bit of an insane dance with my accountants right now. We're faxing and e-mailing back and forth, trying to get my books and theirs to some kind of resemblance to one another. We're still a little ways apart. And by 'a little ways' I they're reading Atlas Shrugged and I'm looking at Goodnight Moon.     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

• • A virtuous profit 
Charlie Macarthur, Steamboat Pilot & Today (Steamboat Springs, CO) Atlas Shrugged  This week, the Steamboat community stepped in the way of a producer and for that we owe an apology. We should not apologize for turning down the 700 project, for that was a force of the free market. We should apologize for lying to Danny Mulcahy and to ourselves. Like Francisco d’Anconia in Ayn Rand’s infamous novel “Atlas Shrugged,” Mulcahy made the terrible mistake of giving the public exactly what it had been asking for.     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 in Uganda 
Scott Noble, Dissident Voice Altruism  Ayn Rand Institute  Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  The Virtue of Selfishness  Capitalism  Personal life  Inaccurate  Rand’s philosophy represents a revolt against human nature. Not only are we hard-wired to feel emotions like empathy, it is precisely our ability to share, commiserate and act collectively that allows us to survive as a species. Moreover, recent data suggests that the great bugaboo of libertarianism – equality of outcome – is actually the single most important determinant of health and happiness in society.     Share on Facebook

• • Capitalism advocate will deliver message at Wheeling Jesuit 
Linda Harris, State Journal (Charleston, WV) Ayn Rand Institute  Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism  Egoism  [Eric] Daniels will be on the Wheeling Jesuit University campus to discuss the “Morality of Capitalism” at 7 p.m. March 17 and explore the most common arguments in favor of capitalism. Sponsored by the BB&T Charitable Foundation, it’s part of the college’s annual Institute for the Study of Capitalism and Morality (ISCM) speaker series and is offered to provide a series of forums for discussing issues regarding capitalism and morality, business ethics, and related issues. Wheeling Jesuit Business Professor Ed Younkins, executive director of ISCM, said Daniels finds that those arguments “all break down in the face of the popular argument that capitalism is immoral and destructive because it is selfish.” “Dr. Daniels explains that only Ayn Rand's crucial insight — that capitalism is the only moral social system because it is based on "the virtue of selfishness" — can truly defend capitalism. He illustrates the need for a moral, and not just an economic, defense of capitalism,” Younkins said. Rand was a 20th century author who wrote “Atlas Shrugged” and other books that extolled the virtues of capitalism.     Share on Facebook

• • For the love of business 
Monika Mitchell, OpEdNews Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism  Egoism  A senior manager in finance explained to me that he functions equally on "Christian principles" and devotion to the theories of Ayn Rand. The author of the 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged, Rand influenced a generation of market making economists including the two decade Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan. Rand's belief of self-interest over self-sacrifice defined the deregulation doctrine of the last thirty years of government. Yet "Christian principles" revolve around the antithesis of self-interest and focus on community and common good. I asked my friend how he reconciled both conflicting interests, he replied, "self-interest is self-love." Self-interest is indeed self-love, yet the doctrine leaves out an essential part of the contract, love for one's neighbor.     Share on Facebook

• • Hollywood honors American values 
Wayne Murray, Arizona Republic (Phoenix) Atlas Shrugged  James Cameron would be wise to consider picking up the rights to make his next epic picture "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand. He may even consider asking his ex-wife, [Kathryn] Bigelow, to collaborate in directing. Now, that would be an Oscar sweep.     Share on Facebook