• • • Essays on Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, edited by Robert Mayhew 
Daniel Wahl, The Objective Standard Atlas Shrugged  Onkar Ghate  Objectivist author  (Full article requires subscription/payment.) Book review.Gregory Salmieri presents two essays (either of which could be reason enough to purchase the book) elucidating the theme of the novel, which Rand specified as “the role of the mind in man’s existence” (p. 219), and discussing how the novel constitutes “the demonstration of a new moral philosophy” (p. 398).     Share on Facebook

• • Will religious conservatives hijack the Tea Party movement? 
Harry Binswanger, Capitalism Magazine Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal  Objectivist author  The phrase "limited government" has suddenly become prominent. This is not exactly an Objectivist term, but Ayn Rand did use it in "The Roots of War," (in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal), and its growing use is a good sign.     Share on Facebook

• • • New ‘rights’ are wrong 
Don Richmond, Naples Daily News (FL) Altruism  Atlas Shrugged  Objectivist author  The Declaration of Independence holds that rights are “self-evident.” However, it is the failure to grasp the true nature of rights which has brought this country to its current condition. It remained for the 20th-century philosopher Ayn Rand to explicitly identify rights as “moral principle(s) defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context.”     Share on Facebook

• • How, why we have grown 
Larry Radtke, Naples Daily News (FL) Atlas Shrugged  Objectivist author  I had never demonstrated in public before last year, when I decided it was time for me to stand up publicly to be counted. I had heard Chicagoan Rick Santelli, a financial reporter on CNBC, make his famous statement on the air that he and his colleagues were going to protest the movement of the U.S. government toward statism by dumping tea into Lake Michigan. He had frequently made public reference to Ayn Rand’s famous novel, “Atlas Shrugged,” and how she had, 50 years ago, shown how and why this statist trend occurred. Being an objectivist myself, I could not agree with him more. I went out to the first local tea party and have been to every one since.     Share on Facebook

• • All business hurt by ‘Wall Street’ smear 
Jonathan Hoenig, Smartmoney.com Capitalism  Objectivist author  Nearly 45 years ago philosopher Ayn Rand identified businessmen, including those who work in finance, as the distinguished symbols of a free and prosperous society. “All the other social groups — workers, farmers, professional men, scientists, soldiers — exist under dictatorships, even though they exist in chains, in terror, in misery, and in progressive self-destruction. But there is no such group as businessmen under a dictatorship. Their place is taken by armed thugs: by bureaucrats and commissars.” Makes one wonder why they’ve even bothered filing charges against Goldman Sachs. In today’s culture, the verdict’s already in.     Share on Facebook

• • 10 must-read investment books 
Jonathan Hoenig, Smartmoney.com Atlas Shrugged  The Virtue of Selfishness  Capitalism  Objectivist author  Be it on a Kindle, iPad or comparatively antiqued book, there is a short list of essential books that, for traders and investors, constitute must-reads. [....] Even before the financial crisis hit, the investment community had already long since embraced Ayn Rand. Scores of investment pros from Monroe Trout to Victor Neiderhoffer to Peter Thiel have advocated her philosophy of reason, capitalism and individual rights, as best known by her seminal 1957 work "Atlas Shrugged." The expansion of government undertaken by both the Bush and Obama administrations has only fueled interest in Rand’s work: "Atlas Shrugged" sold a record 500,000 copies in 2009, doubling the previous year’s record. A lesser-known work of Rand’s also highly beneficial to traders is "The Virtue of Selfishness," a 1964 collection of essays that further refine the morality of egoism, profit-seeking and rational selfishness. At a time in which speculators are derided as destructive parasites wrecking havoc on the economy, the book outlines a moral foundation for capitalism to which every investor will relate.     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

• 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

• • 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