• • Greenspan’s implausible denial 
Bob Adelmann, The New American Capitalism  While studying economics at NYU and Columbia in the late ‘40’s, [Alan Greenspan] began studying under Ayn Rand and was “converted to Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism by her associate Nathaniel Branden.” He wrote several essays that appeared in Rand’s book, Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal, including one entitled “Gold and Economic Freedom.” In that essay, Greenspan clearly identifies the need for a gold standard to keep government spending under control.     Share on Facebook

• • TWiST #46 with David Heinemeier Hansson 
Jason Calacanis, This Week In Startups Capitalism  Video  (Relevant section begins at approximately 1:03:30.)[Q:] Are you, like, an Ayn Rand guy or something? Is there some Objectivist thing that I need to know about? [A:] No.

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• • Say ‘yes’ to capitalism 
Walter Block, LewRockwell.com Capitalism  Every word we use to describe ourselves is precious. We must keep them all, jettison none of them. And this includes (classical) liberals, free enterprisers, libertarians, Austro-libertarians, anarchists, anarcho-capitalists, laissez faire capitalists, and, yes, plain old unadorned "capitalists." Ayn Rand, bless her heart, never failed to rally to the banner of capitalism. I do not of course agree with everything she ever wrote, but on this matter I am very grateful to her. There were few wordsmiths in our movement better acquainted with the importance of language.     Share on Facebook

• Greenspan returns 
Mike Whitney, Counterpunch Capitalism  [Alan] Greenspan doesn't believe in regulation, because he thinks the market is the manifestation of Ayn Rand’s immortal plan and mere humans shouldn't interfere in its divine workings.     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

• FPD Forum 2010: Inconvenient truths on the future of finance 
John Nellis, Seeking Alpha Capitalism  Eugene Fama and other Chicago economists say there is no such thing as a bubble. Maybe Ayn Rand wrote this someplace too, thus persuading Greenspan?     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

• • Montgomery County PR firm’s tongue-in-cheek congressional bid lampoons corporate rights 
Daily Record Capitalism  Murray Hill Inc., a Silver Spring public relations firm and admitted corporate entity, is vowing through its handlers to continue its bid for the 8th District congressional seat. [....] Murray Hill’s campaign video [....] is nearing 190,000 views on YouTube — Murray Hill’s profile lists two Ayn Rand titles under its favorites and identifies “capitalism” as its only hobby — and almost 6,000 people have signed up on the campaign’s Facebook fan page.     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

• Avoiding a new great recession 
Bob Williams, Record Searchlight (Redding, CA) Capitalism  Alan Greenspan, an admirer of libertarian novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand, favored little or no regulation. After not one, but two financial bubbles burst, and complex derivatives became too complex, no bank knew where they stood; all credit froze.     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

• • A Republican plan to save the safety net 
NPR Capitalism  [Rep. Paul] Ryan is often touted as the Republican with ideas. President Obama praised his road map for deficit reduction from the podium at January's Republican retreat in Baltimore. Ryan has been quoted in the past as admiring the objectivist philosophies of Ayn Rand, but, he says, he doesn't believe in a purely laissez-faire system. "I do believe you have to have a safety net in society," he says. "The problem we have is the safety net itself is going bankrupt. What I do in this bill is repair the holes in the safety net."     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

• Google CEO says company doesn’t care about profits 
Jackson West, NBC Capitalism  Jackson West wonders how a company full of libertarian engineers who love Ayn Rand could be interested in anything but money.     Share on Facebook

• • Paul Ryan and the Republican vision 
Jonathan Chait, The New Republic Capitalism  The core of the Randian worldview, as absorbed by the modern GOP, is a belief that the natural market distribution of income is inherently moral, and the central struggle of politics is to free the successful from having the fruits of their superiority redistributed by looters and moochers. What's telling about Ryan's program is not so much that a hard-core ideologue like him would advocate it. It's that virtually the whole of the conservative movement has embraced him. [....] The rise of Ryan is a sign that the possibilities for bipartisan cooperation on domestic issues are, at the moment, essentially nil. This point is obscured by the figure of Ryan, a cheerful and courteous man who gives every sense of wanting to deal in good faith. But his goals, which are now fully the goals of the conservative movement and the Republican Party, are diametrically opposed to the liberal vision of capitalism shorn of its cruelest edges. His basic moral premises are foreign, even abhorrent, to liberals. He seems like a person you'd like to negotiate with, but there's nothing to negotiate over. Ryan is waging a zero sum fight over resources on behalf of the most fortunate members of society and against everybody else.     Share on Facebook

• Ignore socialist label 
Jeff Gadt, Kansas City Star (MO) Capitalism  On banks and the financial markets, Obama’s economic advisers and Treasury Secretary are staunch free-market advocates. Unless you’re comparing them to Ayn Rand, Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner cannot be accused of being market obstructionists. Regulating Wall Street’s ruinous greed is balancing "too big to fail" and "too small to care about." It is not socialism. For the sake of our country, tune out the fear mongers and turn on the brain.     Share on Facebook

• ‘What’s the Matter With Kansas’ liberal filmmakers get a dose of Wichita 
Robert W. Butler, Kansas City Star (MO) Capitalism  “I’m a natural-born pessimist,” [documentary author Thomas Frank] said. “People shouldn’t be waving pictures of Ayn Rand and cursing liberals when we’re sinking into a worldwide recession. But the Democrats can’t seem to get a handle on it.     Share on Facebook

• • The good work of government 
William J. Linn, Star-News (Wilmington, NC) Capitalism  The lessons learned from the 19th century robber barons are sufficient to reject [the] naive Ayn Randian notion that the “businessman would never willfully harm his customers and thereby hurt his own future business prospects.” Tell that to the tainted peanut butter “businessman.”     Share on Facebook

• • 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