• • 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

• • Expert answers to the global meltdown 
Abby Wong, The Star (Malaysia) Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal  Capitalism  Book review: Freefall: America, free markets and the sinking of the world economy, by Joseph E. Stiglitz.What would the late Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged, have said about the recent financial crisis and the US government’s massive bailouts of banks and financial institutions? Rand, a strong advocate of laissez-faire capitalism, believed that the government’s role in an economy was to protect individual rights without intervening in the conduct of free market. To the dismay of Rand and her cult believers, the US government, in its efforts to subdue the crisis, has done everything that violates her definition of capitalism. [....] While Rand is no longer present to condemn the mess, Joseph Stiglitz is.     Share on Facebook

• • Conservative view 
Larry Radtke, News-Press (Fort Myers, FL) Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal  Capitalism  Objectivist author  Re: "Rules for capitalism," Joseph Gormley, Jan. 29. Congratulations to Mr. Gormley for recognizing the hypocrisy of religious conservatives who advocate self interest in economics and self sacrifice in morality. He is dead wrong, however, to believe that our economy has ever been unregulated, that conservatives stand for capitalism, and that Ayn Rand is one of their heroes.     Share on Facebook

• • Is bipartisanship a desirable goal? 
Deborah B. Sloan, American Thinker Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal  What compromise could be reached between advocates of government-run health care and those who want the freedom to make their own decisions? No justice could ever be achieved by seeking compromises of this fundamental nature -- compromises of principle. In her book, entitled Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal, Ayn Rand wrote, "In any collaboration between two men (or two groups) who hold different basic principles, it is the more evil or irrational one who wins." In a compromise between life and death, freedom and slavery, good and evil, only the latter group can win. Of course, there are instances in which bipartisanship is appropriate. Specifically, it is appropriate when both parties agree on the essentials and the principles involved, and they compromise where necessary to sort out the particulars. But that is certainly not the case now, when one party is struggling to preserve the semblances of freedom and protection of individual rights in this country, while the other is engaged in a full frontal assault on our freedom, seeking to establish a system of government that is more similar to fascism than capitalism.     Share on Facebook

• • The dissatisfaction of compromise 
Nick Ottens, Atlantic Sentinel Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal  Image  Machiavelli warned against the practical dangers of seeking compromise. Four hundred and fifty years later, philosopher Ayn Rand (1905-1982) argued against the righteousness of it. In an article entitled “‘Extremism,’ or The Art of Smearing,” published in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966), Rand declared that, “There can be no compromise on basic principles,” nor, she opined, “on moral issues.” In “The Cashing-In: The Student ‘Rebellion’,” published in the same volume, Rand elaborated. “Contrary to the fanatical belief of its advocates,” she noted, such compromises do not satisfy anyone; they dissatisfy everyone. “Those who try to be all things to all men, end up by not being anything to anyone. And more: the partial victory of an unjust claim, encourages the claimant to try further; the partial defeat of a just claim, discourages and paralyzes the victim.” [....] Rand believed in absolutes and liked to reiterate from her novel Atlas Shrugged (1957) in which she wrote: “There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.”     Share on Facebook

• • Conservative view 
Larry Radtke, News-Press (Fort Myers, FL) Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal  Capitalism  Re: "Rules for capitalism," Joseph Gormley, Jan. 29. Congratulations to Mr. Gormley for recognizing the hypocrisy of religious conservatives who advocate self interest in economics and self sacrifice in morality. He is dead wrong, however, to believe that our economy has ever been unregulated, that conservatives stand for capitalism, and that Ayn Rand is one of their heroes. In 1957, devout Catholic William F. Buckley, conservative icon and publisher of National Review, published Whittaker Chambers' vicious review of Ayn Rand's newly published "Atlas Shrugged." More recently, John Podhoretz in his The Weekly Standard review of Alan Greenspan's memoir "The Age of Turbulence," denigrated Greenspan's earlier association with Rand. As Federal Reserve chairman, Greenspan himself repudiated the principles of laissez-faire he once shared with Rand, thereby repudiating her philosophy, Objectivism.     Share on Facebook

• • • The winnowing of Ayn Rand 
Roderick Long, Cato Unbound Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal  The Fountainhead  Capitalism  Egoism  As for whether the Randian approach successfully crosses the fact-value gap, I would say that identifying X as good for some organism is safely on the “factual,” value-neutral side of the ledger. (A shark’s eating me may be good for the shark, but my recognition of that fact doesn’t, absent further argument, give me any reason to endorse the shark’s doing so.) But once I recognize not only that X is good for some organism, but that I am the organism in question, it’s hard to see how I could reasonably continue to take a value-neutral attitude toward X.     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

• • Financial lessons of the ages 
Doug Wakefield, Safe Haven Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal  Capitalism  While some suggest that "fractional reserve" banking does not necessarily foster dishonesty, this essay, from Ayn Rand's 1967 work, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, helps us see that the creation of new money dilutes the value of all money that currently exists: “The abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists to use the banking system as a means to an unlimited expansion of credit. They have created paper reserves in the form of government bonds as the equivalent of what was formerly a deposit of gold. In the absences of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value.”     Share on Facebook

• • • Queen of hearts 
Pradeep Sebastian, Businessworld Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal  The Fountainhead  The Virtue of Selfishness  We The Living  Personal life  Review of Ayn Rand and the World She Made, by Anne C. Heller.I came under the spell of Ayn Rand in high school. I was drawn to her natural gift for plotting and storytelling, the scale of her melodrama, her improbable characters, and most of all, her absolute, uncompromising idealism. But I was never crazy about her philosophy. But after all these years you still get a high from encountering her tormented romantics taking on the world.     Share on Facebook

• • • Ayn Rand and Christianity 
Reginald Firehammer, Independent Individualist Altruism  Atheism  Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal  The Virtue of Selfishness  Egoism  Leonard Peikoff  Critique of John Piper’s The Ethics of Ayn Rand.Ayn Rand was no more anti-Christian or anti-religion than protestants are anti-Catholic or Catholics are anti-protestant. Just as they disagree with each other, she disagreed with them both. She wrote a little in opposition to those specific teachings of religion she found rationally untenable, but as far as I know, she never wrote a work or made a speech strictly against religion. It just was not important enough to her to oppose everything she did not agree with, of which religion was only one.     Share on Facebook

• • Doug Casey on Bungling Ben 
Louis James, HoweStreet.com Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal  Capitalism  [Doug Casey:] In the 1960s, [Alan Greenspan] was an acolyte of Ayn Rand and wrote a famous essay defending the gold standard, which I read in her book, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. And then he goes on to become the most inflationary Fed chairman in history – until Bernanke superseded him. The really shameful thing about Greenspan is, not only were his policies the igniters of the giant bubbles we saw in the stock market and then in real estate, but since he was associated with pure capitalism through Rand, his failures through government intervention in the market have falsely discredited capitalism as a system in many people’s view.     Share on Facebook

• • Hell no, we won’t go ... again 
Camillo "Mac" Bica, Truthout Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal  Ayn Rand in her "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal," writes, "Of all the statist violations of individual rights in a mixed economy, the military draft is the worst. It is an abrogation of rights. It negates man's fundamental right - the right to life - and establishes the fundamental principle of statism: that a man's life belongs to the state, and the state may claim it by compelling him to sacrifice it in battle. If the state may force a man to risk death or hideous maiming and crippling, in a war declared at the state's discretion, for a cause he may neither approve of nor even understand, if his consent is not required to send him into unspeakable martyrdom, then, in principle, all rights are negated in that state, and its government is not man's protector any longer. What is there left to protect?" Correlative to this inalienable right to life is the legal and moral obligation not to kill another human being, i.e., not to violate this right in others. For the Pacifist, this right is absolute and the immunity afforded by these rights can never be overridden or forfeited. Consequently, war is never a moral option.     Share on Facebook

• • Inflating away our human rights 
Ben O'neill, Mises.org Daily Article Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal  Capitalism  As Ayn Rand has explained, “A collectivist tyranny dare not enslave a country by an outright confiscation of its values.… It has to be done by a process of internal corruption. Just as in the material realm the plundering of a country's wealth is accomplished by inflating the currency — so today one may witness the process of inflation being applied to the realm of rights. The process entails such a growth of newly promulgated "rights" that people do not notice the fact that the meaning of the concept is being reversed. Just as bad money drives out good money, so these "printing-press rights" negate authentic rights.”     Share on Facebook

• • Economic freedom and peace 
Joshua C. Hall and Robert A. Lawson, Atlantic Economic Journal Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal  Capitalism  Many contend that societies with more market-oriented economies will be more peaceful than politically-planned economies. Ayn Rand wrote, “Laissez-faire capitalism is the only social system based on the recognition of individual rights and, therefore, the only system that bans force from social relationships. By the nature of its basic principles and interests, it is the only system fundamentally opposed to war.” (Rand, Ayn. 1967 (1946). “The Roots of War” in Ayn Rand (ed.) Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. New York: Signet, page 33). Indeed, it appears clear empirically that market economies engage in fewer international conflicts [...]. Whether market economies exhibit more domestic peace and tranquility is perhaps less clear.     Share on Facebook

• • The moral case for capitalism 
Noah Stahl, DailyMe Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal  Capitalism  Objectivist author  Though [conservatives] often advocate the free market as the most practical choice for creating wealth, their allegiance to religious altruism leads them to apologize for capitalism's implicit endorsement of self-interest. Thankfully, there does exist a rational, moral defense of capitalism in the works of Ayn Rand. In her books and essays, particularly in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, you can find a detailed explanation of what capitalism is, the morality it is based upon, and which facts support and validate that morality. And you can judge Rand's case for claiming, in her words, that "no politico-economic system in history has ever proved its value so eloquently or benefited mankind so greatly as capitalism".     Share on Facebook

• • • Objectionable content 
Gerald L. Houseman, Times Higher Education (London) Altruism  Atlas Shrugged movie  Ayn Rand Institute  Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal  The Fountainhead  The Virtue of Selfishness  We The Living  Capitalism  Inaccurate  Capitalism is, according to one of her titles, "the unknown ideal". And the foremost task of Objectivists is to provide capitalism with a strong intellectual defence. It is a big responsibility, no doubt, but there are only a few tenets to understand: there can be no real disputes between rational thinkers, the rules of self-interest and rationality are discoverable and discernible, and all individuals are blessed with rights while societies, which are a mere abstraction, have no rights. No collective, no group has any rights because any notion of collective rights would ultimately mean that some have rights but others do not. A rude and cynical class consciousness intrudes on all these thoughts, of course, and Rand demonstrates this by soaking any working-class people in her novels with a generalised blame rooted variously in inattentiveness, laziness, doltish attitudes and, above all, envy.     Share on Facebook

• • YAL hosts Southern Students conference 
Adam Edwards, Old Gold & Black (Wake Forest U, Winston-Salem, NC) Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal  Capitalism  Many of the speakers focused on the philosophic underpinnings of the concept of liberty rather than on pure politics or economics. Among them was John Allison, who spoke on the core values of BB&T, which strongly emulate those of Objectivist philosophy, and Brandon Turner of the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism, who spoke on classical liberalism.     Share on Facebook

• • • Ayn Rand and the philosophers 
Tibor R. Machan, Orange County Register (CA) Atheism  Anthem  Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal  The Fountainhead  The Virtue of Selfishness  We The Living  Capitalism  Egoism  While Rand received a lot of flak for supposedly championing reckless egotism and wild capitalism, she, in fact, defended the very same political system we find sketched in the Declaration of Independence. And her ethics are in line with common sense: Decent people take good care of themselves first and foremost – they practice the virtue of prudence – while also showing generosity to those who need and deserve help.     Share on Facebook

• • The four cardinal errors that almost destroyed America 
Steven Yates, NewsWithViews.com Atheism  Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal  The Fountainhead  Capitalism  There were a few exceptions to the rule that a philosopher must be a professor. Ayn Rand comes to mind. A self-taught Russian immigrant, she would gain a substantial following in the 1960s and 1970s, especially among college students (much to the chagrin of their philosophy professors). Unfortunately, Rand, too, was essentially a materialist who accepted the Enlightenment view of human nature and made autonomous Reason into the equivalent of a deity, capable of solving all human problems. Rand’s “unknown ideal” was (what else?) capitalism, to which she sought to supply the philosophical foundation she maintains capitalism never had. Eventually, though, one had to notice that the perfect capitalist heroes of her novels, such as Howard Roark of The Fountainhead (1943) or John Galt and Hank Rearden in Atlas Shrugged (1957), simply have no counterparts in real life.     Share on Facebook