• • Editors’ picks 
C. Rollyson, Choice Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  The Virtue of Selfishness  We The Living  Capitalism  Egoism  Personal life  Review of Ayn Rand and the World She Made, by Anne C. Heller.Although not stinting a concern with Rand's ideas, Heller is mesmerized by Rand the novelist and the person. The biographer pores over Rand's early years in Russia with brilliant results, showing how much Rand (born Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum) drew on her experience in the 1920s Leninist state for her impressive novel We the Living.     Share on Facebook

• • • The Ayn Rand follies 
The New Criterion Altruism  Atlas Shrugged  The Virtue of Selfishness  Capitalism  Egoism  Inaccurate  It was always, we suspect, Rand’s effort to make a “virtue of selfishness” (as she puts it in the title of a collection of essays) that accounted for a large part of her appeal. The shocking quality of advocating something so widely deprecated guaranteed an eager audience. Most human beings do not need special encouragement to be selfish. They come by it naturally enough. How welcome, then, to stumble upon a writer of long books who, far from criticizing selfishness, as everyone from your mother on down has done, tells you that you should be as selfish as possible.     Share on Facebook

• • • Internal affairs: How Ayn Rand followers rationalize “welcomed” rape 
Amanda Hess, Washington City Paper - The Sexist (DC) Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  Capitalism  Egoism  Rand reportedly had this to say about the [rape] scene [in The Fountainhead]: “If it was rape, it was rape by engraved invitation.” But for young people with no practical experience with sex, Rand doesn’t provide any instruction on how exactly to seal the note. If your sex partner is biting you and beating you in the face, how can you be sure they’ve consented “internally”? Between Rand’s idealized heroes and heroines, why is the ideal sexual scenario a violent rape that the woman only privately desires? And for Rand, who was fond of invoking the tautological principle that “A is A,” when is rape not rape?     Share on Facebook

• • • Yevgeny Zamyatin: Libertarian novelist 
Jeff Riggenbach, Mises.org Daily Article Anthem  Atlas Shrugged  We The Living  Personal life  Whatever we decide about whether Rand read We in the '20s or '30s, there's simply no getting around the obvious similarities between Zamyatin's novel and Rand's Anthem. Both are set in the far future in a completely collectivized totalitarian society. Both are told in the first person by their main characters, in We by the mathematician and engineer D-503, in Anthem by the engineer Equality 7-2521. Anthem is the only work of fiction written by Rand to be written in the first person. In We, D-503 meets a woman, I-330, and is led inexorably down a path to rebellion against the government of the society in which he lives. In Anthem, Equality 7-2521 meets a woman, Liberty 5-3000, and is led inexorably down a path to rebellion against the government of the society in which he lives.     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

• • Economist: Financial crisis result of idea failure 
Stacey Mieyal Higgins, Hotel News Now Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism  Egoism  In a sober discussion of the origins and consequences of the global financial crisis, Roger Bootle, managing director of Capital Economics Limited, explained Monday during the International Hotel Investment Forum why regulators were to blame and how capitalism will change as a result. [....] Why it happened: [....] Alan Greenspan’s “Atlas Shrugged” influence. “We can’t leave self-interested bankers and markets to their own devices,” Bootle said.     Share on Facebook

• • Letting the left claim the cerebral high ground 
Tasha Kheiriddin, National Post (Toronto) Atlas Shrugged  From bank bailouts to government health care, not in recent memory has socialism garnered such a toehold in American political discourse. Ayn Rand would recognize much of the statist nightmare of her famous Atlas Shrugged in Mr. Obama’s America: government ownership of lending institutions and car companies, increasing demonization of the rich, and an unelected “czar” in Washington for every policy area under the sun.     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

• • • Ayn Rand’s books are deliciously anti-statist, but her philosophy is borderline Nazi 
James Delingpole, The Spectator Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  Inaccurate  What I find most off-putting about Rand is her hardness of heart. She has a Nietzschean (indeed, borderline Nazi) contempt for human frailty and a total lack of sympathy for the underdog. In her weltanschauung, you’re either a hero (rare) or — much more likely — a mere filler of latrines. Any form of charity, she suggests, is a kind of grotesque liberal indulgence towards people who really aren’t worth saving.     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

• • From the Martian desk 
Gilles d'Aymery, Swans Atlas Shrugged  When asked how she would "cut the deficit without cutting Medicaid and Medicare," [Tea Part activist Keli] Carender answers, "Let's see. Some days I'm very Randian. I feel like there shouldn't be any of those programs, that it should all be charitable organizations. Sometimes I think, well, maybe it really should be just state, and there should be no federal part in it at all. I bounce around in my solutions to the problem." ("A Young and Unlikely Activist Who Arrived at the Tea Party Early," by Kate Zernike, The New York Times, February 28, 2010.) Charitable organizations... Is there a mention of them in Atlas Shrugged, the Libertarian bible? Does she really believe in the generosity bequeathed by the Founding Fathers?     Share on Facebook

• • Suspenseful accounting of economic disaster 
Ted St. Godard, Winnipeg Free Press Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism  Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, a fictionalized panorama of economic philosophy, famously opens with the question, "Who is John Galt?" One must read a great deal of a fairly heavy-handed book to learn the answer, but it puts one in mind of a question surely asked by a number of lay observers of the recent economic melt-down south of the border: "Who are Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac?"     Share on Facebook

• • Sports and social justice with David Zirin 
Timothy Braun, Austin Chronicle Atlas Shrugged  [Q:] This June your book Bad Sports: How Owners Are Ruining the Games We Love will be published. We have two vivacious owners in Mark Cuban and Jerry Jones here in the Lone Star State. Should I expect to be reading about one or both of these men when I review your book? [A:] Well, they both certainly come up because they're never boring. If you are entertaining as opposed to shadowy and nefarious, it goes a long way when we're talking about owners. But the public dollars that went to the Jerry Dome is unconscionable. Cuban is an interesting guy: an Ayn Rand populist, who supports some very dynamic left-wing films and documentaries while simultaneously preaching the gospel of Atlas Shrugged. I wrote about him here.     Share on Facebook

• • Morning must reads—Now that I think about it, Kathleen Sebelius does kind of look like Ayn Rand 
Chris Stirewalt, The Examiner (Washington, DC) Atlas Shrugged  Writers Janet Adamy and Avery Johnson tell us about the administration’s effort to impose health insurance premiums by fiat and a meeting with health insurers summoned to the White House for a whipping that was so over the top that it could have been a scene in Atlas Shrugged.     Share on Facebook

• • • Ayn Rand’s excellent proposal 
Ernest Partridge, Online Journal Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism  Egoism  In Ayn Rand’s sprawling novel, Atlas Shrugged, ubermensch industrialist, John Galt, infuriated over the “theft” of his property by the parasitic government, calls upon his fellow “captains of industry” -- the “producers of wealth” -- to go on strike which, we read, brings down the entire economy. He then proposes that these elite “producers” leave the wreckage of the old “collectivist” order behind and establish their own utopian society. What a splendid idea! I’m all for it! So let’s suppose that each and every CEO of the fortune 500 companies suddenly disappeared, along with Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, Robert Benmosche of AIG, and all those other bankster executives who claimed $150 billion in bonuses last year. (Supplied, by the way, by us taxpayers). Would the US economy collapse? Well, maybe not.     Share on Facebook

• Prime time takes on primary care 
Bruce Watson, Amherst Bulletin (MA) Atlas Shrugged  Humor.The president was right about last week's health care summit. It was not "good television." Unless your idea of "good television" is old Jerry Springer. But could "good television" help Americans understand the nuances of health care reform? What if Prime time tackled the topic? Here's next month's schedule: "Desperate Housewives": One housewife desperately wants breast implants, but her HMO won't cover the procedure. The other housewives e-mail their Congressmen but get no response. So the housewives all go to a Tea Party convention where they seduce angry, unemployed men carrying copies of "Atlas Shrugged." Back home the housewives agree - people who trust rich insurance CEOs more than they trust their elected officials are bound to end up desperate.     Share on Facebook

• • Oil exec urges industry to take political actions: Obama administration ... 
Rod Walton, Tulsa World Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism  [Mike Cantrell] talked about the irony of his reading "Atlas Shrugged" — the libertarian novel that details the gradual, passive collapse of a capitalist, competitive society — during the last presidential election. "That's the option we make when we don't engage politically," he said. "We have to fight for our right to make money."     Share on Facebook

• • A year ago, when the Dow was tanking and the WSJ knew why 
Jay Bookman, Atlanta Journal-Constitution - Jay Bookman Atlas Shrugged  [The market] closed today at 10,444, up 54 percent from the low noted by the Wall Street Journal. So much for a capital strike. So much for going Galt. Apparently those capitalists think a lot more of Obamanomics than the experts at the WSJ believed.     Share on Facebook

• Kudos to SABMiller: THIS is how you run a business 
Patrick Hruby, ESPN Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism  Great Recession. Without SABMiller: Federal government's free-market-worshipping financial decision-makers ignore internal warnings about perils of unregulated big-money black-box market for derivatives and credit-default swaps. With SABMiller: Loose and buzzed, Fed decision-makers decline to take "Atlas Shrugged" seriously; agree to sensible public market oversight.     Share on Facebook

• • • Debating merits of Ayn Rand philosophy 
Spencer Case, Idaho State Journal (Pocatello, ID) Anthem  Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  Capitalism  Egoism  I think of Objectivism as a kind of intellectual chicken pox; most smart people get it when they're young, but usually it runs its course before causing any permanent damage. Don't get me wrong, I think "Atlas Shrugged" is well worth reading , just not as Holy Scripture.     Share on Facebook