• • 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

• Apple’s suit against HTC pits patents against innovation 
David Veksler, Christian Science Monitor - Mises Economics Blog Capitalism  Objectivist author  It’s interesting that the justifications of patents I’ve seen (even from Objectivists) is on utilitarian premises – a justification of the “social” benefits of the patent system. But the evidence suggests the opposite – that patents are a net cost, not a benefit to both innovators and consumers.     Share on Facebook

• • Apology philosophically 
Jim Smith, Naples Daily News (FL) The Virtue of Selfishness  Egoism  Objectivist author  To act selfishly means to act in your own self-interest, which includes both the short term and the long term. If [Tiger] Woods is truly “dedicated to making sure” that he helps “young people achieve their dreams through education,” then he should start by recognizing the “Virtue of Selfishness” as first identified by author philosopher Ayn Rand and available in her book of the same name.     Share on Facebook

• • McVeighing against the tea parties 
Robert Tracinski, Jewish World Review Capitalism  Objectivist author  If you want to commemorate the American Revolution and the Founding Fathers by celebrating April 19 — then that automatically makes you a racist militia conspiracy theorist. This smear is so crude that it long ago ceased to be convincing. Forty years ago, Ayn Rand dismissed it as an "old saw of pre-World War II vintage" and named its purpose: to offer us a choice of "a dictatorship of the left or of an alleged right — with the possibility of a free society, of capitalism, dismissed and obliterated, as if it never existed." And that what all the stuff in the New York Times about conspiracy theories and militias is meant to accomplish. It is meant to divert our attention from other details that the reporter felt he has to include but doesn't want us to notice: the fact that, under the influence of Glenn Beck, Tea Party supporters have "explored the Federalist Papers, exposés on the Federal Reserve, the work of Ayn Rand and George Orwell."     Share on Facebook

• • Islam is the enemy 
Edward Cline, Family Security Matters Altruism  The Fountainhead  Objectivist author  In war, as well as in peace, as a nation’s policy or as a personal one, the object of selflessness and altruism is to sacrifice a value for a non-value, to elevate mediocrity as a means of razing shrines. (See Ellsworth Toohey’s speech on the means and ends of altruism wedded to collectivism in Ayn Rand’s novel, The Fountainhead, for clarification on that issue.)     Share on Facebook

• • Celebrate true meaning of love on Valentine’s Day 
Gary Hull, Orange County Register (CA) The Fountainhead  Objectivist author  The nature of love places certain demands on those who wish to enjoy it. You must regard yourself as worthy of being loved. Those who expect to be loved, not because they offer some positive value, but because they don't – i.e., those who demand love as altruistic duty – are parasites. Someone who says "Love me just because I need it" seeks an unearned spiritual value, in the same way that a thief seeks unearned wealth. To quote a famous line from Ayn Rand's novel "The Fountainhead": "To say 'I love you,' one must know first how to say the 'I.'"     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

• • Green crusade falls short 
Alexander Hrin, Michigan Daily (U of MI, Ann Arbor) Ayn Rand Center  Keith Lockitch  Objectivist author  It’s time for Americans to re-evaluate their decision to allow the Green Crusaders to become spokesmen for the future of energy, technology and even morality in our country. The Students of Objectivism will be hosting a guest speaker to further discuss this issue. Keith Lockitch, a fellow from the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, will speak on Wednesday, Feb. 3 at 7:30 p.m. in Angell Hall Auditorium C.     Share on Facebook

• • Don’t blame banks 
Glenn Woiceshyn, National Post (Toronto) Capitalism  Objectivist author  Government printing of money to fund its spending (not to mention forcing banks to give low-interest loans to risky home buyers) leads to artificial booms that necessarily end in bust. To blame such busts on banks is a moral obscenity. As a champion of capitalism and an admirer of Ayn Rand [...], I would advocate, among other pro-capitalist things, the privatization of money, thereby preventing such busts. Gold, not paper, would be the standard of money, and governments would not be able to print it to fund their wasteful and destructive spending. As Ayn Rand observed, government controls breed more controls, and your editorial is a clear and sad example of this.     Share on Facebook

• Mencken, Islam, and political correctness 
Edward Cline, Family Security Matters Objectivist author  [Mencken] never solved the paradox of the power of belief to anaesthetize that part of the minds of otherwise rational men, the part which requires a morality by which to conduct one’s life, and render it reason-proof against all logic and evidence. (That task remained to be achieved by one of his admirers, Ayn Rand.)     Share on Facebook

• • The moral case for capitalism 
Yaron Brook and Greg Foster, Claremont Review of Books Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism  Egoism  Objectivist author  Letter to the editor, and a reply from the author of the article criticized.[Greg] Forster laments that a "robust moral philosophy of capitalism" failed to "emerge from 20th-century capitalist thought." But in her novel Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand argued on rational, secular grounds that human life requires productive achievement, and that the noblest act of moral virtue is using one's mind to create life-sustaining values. She argued that profit is moral because it enriches the individual who achieves it—that someone like Bill Gates deserves the highest moral praise, not for giving away his wealth, but for creating it in the first place. Thus Rand lauded capitalism precisely because it is the only system that rewards the profit motive and respects the individual's right to act on his own judgment in pursuit of his life and happiness. That is the moral defense capitalism desperately needs.     Share on Facebook

• Hollywood vs. America 
Edward Cline, Family Security Matters The Fountainhead  Objectivist author  The conservatives are as anti-American as are the liberals. As Hollywood. The film that defines America is neither Wall Street nor The Ten Commandments, but, to date, The Fountainhead.     Share on Facebook

• Return to politics of individual rights 
Stephen Grossman, Standard-Times (New Bedford, MA) Atlas Shrugged  Objectivist author  Juanita Schoff ("Founding fathers firmly rooted in faith," Dec. 22) says America's founders were religious. They also wore shoes. True, but coincidental, superficial, not basic. For untold millennia religion imprisoned man in poverty, tyranny, war, and spiritual helplessness. Then the Greeks discovered reason and America's founders created the rational politics of individual rights. America's current enemy is foreign religion. Domestic religions are also the enemy. We must renew the rationally selfish politics of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Read the good book. Read "Atlas Shrugged." Join the Tea Party. Give 'em town hall hell.     Share on Facebook

• • Ayn Rand 
Edwin A. Locke, Harvard Magazine Atlas Shrugged  Objectivist author  Letter to the editor in response to an article by Jennifer Burns.There are now at least 60 academic programs that involve reading Ayn Rand’s works. There are at least 155 professors who teach and study Rand’s works. The American Philosophical Association includes an Ayn Rand Society which will soon have its own journal. Both Cambridge University Press and Blackwell have published or have in press books or collections of essays on Rand’s ideas. Atlas Shrugged has sold over seven million copies and has shown dramatic increases in sales in the last few years. Rand was a cultural pariah in the 1960s, but her ideas are now on the verge of changing the culture itself.     Share on Facebook

• • • Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right by Jennifer Burns 
Robert Mayhew, The Objective Standard Ayn Rand Archives  Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  Capitalism  Egoism  Personal life  Objectivist author  Although Burns claims to be “less concerned with judgment than with analysis” (p. 4), her book demonstrates the opposite to be true. Time after time, she presents Rand’s views on some issue with insufficient care or analysis, only to assert in conclusion some arbitrary negative judgment. A particularly egregious instance of this occurs late in the book, in a discussion of environmentalism. Burns devotes three quarters of a paragraph to the content of Rand’s 1970 “The Anti-Industrial Revolution,” and then comments: “As usual Rand was unwilling to accept the claims of a political movement [i.e., environmentalism is about clean air] at face value, convinced that hidden agendas [i.e., the destruction of technology] drove the environmental movement” (p. 262). In light of the now widely known nature and antics of 21st-century environmentalists, Rand deserves applause for her astonishing (though unfortunately Cassandra-like) prophetic powers.     Share on Facebook

• Letter to a sincere leftist: Let’s smash the state power of the corporations 
Robert Tracinski, Jewish World Review Objectivist author  Dear Friend on the Left, As a tea party-goer and an advocate of the laissez-faire philosophy of Ayn Rand, I never thought I'd say this: let us join together in a common cause. Let us work together to defeat the health-care bill that is about to be passed by the Senate.     Share on Facebook

• • • Capping our carbon and crushing our spirits 
Robert Tracinski, Jewish World Review Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  Objectivist author  [George Monbiot] talks about a "new movement, most visible in North America and Australia, but now apparent everywhere" that "will not be constrained by taxes, gun laws, regulations, health and safety, especially by environmental restraints." And he's right about our choice of literary and philosophical inspiration: he describes us as "clutching their copies of Atlas Shrugged." I am clutching my copy of Atlas Shrugged, because it has never seemed more relevant than it is now. But in reading Monbiot's column, another Ayn Rand novel comes to mind: The Fountainhead, Rand's classic portrayal of the struggle of the independent creator against the grey conformity of collectivism. With a few updates in his ideology-environmentalism in place of socialism-Monbiot gives us a creditable audition for the role of Ellsworth Toohey, the manipulative intellectual who seeks to crush the human spirit in order to make men submit to his influence and control.     Share on Facebook

• • Our Jane: Romantic and honorable 
David Elmore, Wall Street Journal Objectivist author  A reader cannot use Austen (or any author) as a guide for morality. Novels are representations of morality. You either connect with them or you don't, depending upon your own morality. I, for example, am an Objectivist (philosophy of Ayn Rand) and believe that humans can rationally run their own lives and give honor to others who do the same. In Austen's novels, I find that honor between the best characters, and I see these characters correcting their false pride and prejudice or mistaken consumption of false mores, thereby achieving happiness. Austen's morality, therefore, reflects my own. I do not learn from her.     Share on Facebook

• • • Celebrate Thanksgiving the Ayn Rand way: Thank yourself 
Debi Ghate, Christian Science Monitor Altruism  Egoism  Objectivist author  Children are taught that Thanksgiving came about when Pilgrims gave thanks to God for a bountiful harvest. It seems we vaguely mumble thanks for the food on our table, the roof over our head, and how lucky we are in spite of these hard economic times. After all, our lives are so much better than, say, those in Bangladesh. But surely there is something more to celebrate, something more sacred about this holiday. What should we really be celebrating on Thanksgiving? Ayn Rand described Thanksgiving as "a typically American holiday" whose "essential, secular meaning is a celebration of successful production. It is a producers' holiday. The lavish meal is a symbol of the fact that abundant consumption is the result and reward of production." She was right.     Share on Facebook

• • • Why Ayn Rand still resonates 
Onkar Ghate, FOXNews.com Altruism  Ayn Rand Institute  Anthem  Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  Egoism  Essay Contests  Objectivist Academic Center  Onkar Ghate  Objectivist author  When you actually consider the essence of what Rand teaches, the accusation that her philosophy is childish over-simplification stands as condemnation not of her ideas but of the adult world from which the accusation stems. The key to Rand’s enduring popularity is that she appeals not to the immaturity but to the idealism of youth. She wrote in 1969: “There is a fundamental conviction which some people never acquire, some hold only in their youth, and a few hold to the end of their days--the conviction that ideas matter.” The nature of this conviction? “That ideas matter means that knowledge matters, that truth matters, that one’s mind matters. And the radiance of that certainty, in the process of growing up, is the best aspect of youth.”     Share on Facebook