• • • Individuality, freedom, and superiority: Returning to Ayn Rand’s problems 
Gus diZerega, Beliefnet.com - A Pagan’s Blog Rand's model of the individual is lacking in depth because it does not address how each of us as individuals came to be who we are. She simply takes them for granted as elemental forces of nature. As the African proverb puts it: "I am because we are."     Share on Facebook

• Keynes for today 
Johann Hari, The Progressive Capitalism  Book review: Keynes: The Return of the Master, by Robert Skidelsky.The notion that deregulated markets will reach an “equilibrium”—which provides the best of all outcomes—turns out to be a quasi-religious fantasy. The economic models “proving” it is so are lies and act, as Professor Paul Davidson puts it, as Weapons of Math Destruction, shoving us towards the abyss. Unregulated markets will seesaw wildly between booms and busts. Only tough regulation can stop the market from devouring its own internal organs, and only big government spending can prevent a bad recession souring into a depression. This was all willfully forgotten by the Chicago School economists and Ayn Rand devotees who conquered America. They didn’t prevail because they had the best arguments; their predictions were about as accurate as Sybil the Soothsayer’s. No, they prevailed because their arguments served the interests of the super-rich, who lavishly funded the campaigns of politicians who picked them up.     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

• • What Washington state does about its budget deficit is a taxing mess 
Jon Talton, Seattle Times Americans face a future where even the basic government services they long took for granted are in doubt. This may be heaven for some acolytes of Ayn Rand. But she wrote fiction.     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

• • Bob Barr visits Cartersville 
Kursten Hedgis, Six Mile Post (GA Highlands College, Rome) Inaccurate  Libertarian Bob Barr arrived eight minutes late with smiles and waves for his Feb. 16 appearance sponsored by [Georgia Highlands College]'s Libertarian Club. [....] [He] spoke about the new RFID chips that are placed in passports so travelling will be, as he said with sarcasm, "easier for you." However, he explains this convenience often comes at a price, the ultimate price in his eyes: an individual's privacy. These trends and examples all lead to his main point, for which he quoted Ayn Rand, "The right to privacy is the basis of our freedom and liberty."     Share on Facebook

• Keynesian creationism: Part II of ‘A curious resurrection of libertarianism’ 
Max Borders, The Examiner (Washington, DC) Libertarianism was never really dead. [Jacob] Weisberg was drumming on the casket of a straw men made vaguely in the form of Ayn Rand and Fed pooh-bahs. He wove together a number of disparate narratives from prominent leftish intellectuals and passed it off as something epic.     Share on Facebook

• Look to grassroots to reinvent Toronto 
Stephen Kerr, Toronto Star Toronto is a bottom up, democratic city. No, we're not France, and we shouldn't try to be like New York. We should try to just be who we are. We don't need mega-projects imposed on us by "great men" whose greatest ideas came from an Ayn Rand novel. We need more democratic participation.     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

• Progressives undermine their cause by attributing free-market principles to their opponents 
Dean Baker, Boston Review Capitalism  Banks such as J.P. Morgan and Citigroup were arguably too big to fail even three decades ago, before growth and mergers expanded their size several-fold. In the last decade they grew so big that their collapse would undoubtedly have jeopardized the health of the financial system. Everyone knew that, so creditors could lend them money without concern for the banks’ soundness: the government, ultimately, would stand behind their debts. This has nothing to do with Ayn Rand’s libertarianism. Huge financial institutions simply took advantage of taxpayers by getting insurance without having to pay for it.     Share on Facebook

• The right’s big lie 
Henry Ferreira, Standard-Times (New Bedford, MA) By demagoguery, the right wing has sold more than a few on the policies and politics of Ayn Rand and Herbert Hoover. A government of and by the people was not the answer but the problem. As one of their acolytes, Grover Norquist, said, "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."     Share on Facebook

• An educator’s change of heart 
Peter Sacks, New York Times Diane Ravitch’s self-described intellectual U-turn is a case study in how some ideas, however bad, are created and perpetrated in the service of power, while other ideas, however truthful, rarely see the light of day. Dr. Ravitch fashioned herself into the Ayn Rand of educational policy and rose to fame as a result of a free-market ideology that came into fashion in George W. Bush’s administration.     Share on Facebook

• • Undermining 1st Amendment from the top 
The Times and Democrat (Orangeburg ,SC) Ayn Rand Center  Don Watkins, an analyst with the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, writes: “You might think this radical call for government control of the media is at odds with the First Amendment and the ideals of its authors. Not according to [Federal Communications Commission Chief Diversity Officer Mark] Lloyd and his fellow travelers, who portray their vision of a government-funded press as a continuation of the American tradition. The founders, they say, weren’t committed to protecting a profit-seeking press from government control. Instead, their primary concern was making sure the press could effectively educate and inform Americans, and they obsessively sought to subsidize the press in order to achieve that goal.” Lloyd’s approach is dangerous in a country founded on the ideal of free speech, with the founders even writing into the Bill of Rights the guarantee of a free press.     Share on Facebook

• • Not quite a bull’s-eye 
Daniel M. Ryan, Enter Stage Right Personal life  Review of the book Panderer to Power: The Untold Story of How Alan Greenspan Enriched Wall Street and Left a Legacy of Recession, by Frederick Sheehan.[Frederick] Sheehan goes out of his way to highlight Ayn Rand's first impression of [Alan Greenspan] when they met: "'Do you think Alan might basically be a social climber?'" (p. 9.) This quote serves as a leitmotif of the book as Sheehan digs into Greenspan's later life. He decided that the other Greenspan – the man who hitched his wagon to Arthur Burns's star early on – was the real Greenspan. The impression he conveys is that Greenspan wasn't even much of an Objectivist, although Sheehan doesn't intimate that Greenspan was drawn into Rand's inner circle out of a desire to rub shoulders with a popular novelist. He presents Greenspan as a man who did believe in Rand's philosophy in his own way, but shed it while ascending the socio-political heights. Like many libertarian critics of Greenspan, Sheehan brandishes "Gold And Economic Freedom" as a reproach – even if he holds his nose a little while doing so.     Share on Facebook

• Fringe politics becoming dangerously acceptable in US 
Harvey Dzodin, Global Times (Beijing) [Joseph] Stack's inchoate anger is reflected in a growing wave of angry Americans. Some believe that federal income tax is illegal and they have a right to not pay it. Many more feel that tax dollars are being needlessly spent and national expenditures should be limited to police, fire and self-defense functions. These libertarian followers of Ayn Rand include the now discredited Alan Greenspan.     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

• A dream of Morlocks and Eloi getting along with each other 
Glenn Contrarian, Blogcritics In today's polarized political world, conservatives tend to consider liberals as clueless children, as naive little Pollyannas adrift in a world beyond their comprehension... whereas we liberals tend to frame conservatives as mindless Ayn Rand clones, as Nietzschean fugitives from the wrong side of Pink Floyd's rock opera The Wall.     Share on Facebook

• ‘Socialist’ profs didn’t sink economy 
Jack Hannold, Star-Ledger (Newark, NJ) Capitalism  In a letter published on Feb. 28, (”Another liberal will poison our students”) Len Testa deplored the appointment of Van Jones to a teaching fellowship at Princeton. [....] Actually, our current economic crisis was the work of legions of MBAs on Wall Street and throughout the upper echelons of corporate America. And their professors were, by and large, conservatives. Many of those professors were, and are, adherents of the “Chicago school” of economics, just like the government officials who enabled Wall Street to run wild by deregulating financial markets. Today, their extreme laissez-faire philosophy stands discredited, except in the eyes of the most dedicated followers of economists Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman — or of those who, like former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, are unregenerate acolytes of Ayn Rand.     Share on Facebook

• Nonfiction: “You are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto,“ by Jaron Lanier 
Evelyn Mcdonnell, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Book review.All the unemployed writers, broke musicians and worried filmmakers who see their professional horizons melting into the ether of cyberspace -- not to mention the lowly cephalopod (I'll explain later) -- will be cheered by Jaron Lanier's latest curmudgeonly screed. The virtual-reality pioneer champions the role of the artist as Promethean in the face of the rise of mob mentality. It's a bracing dose of economic realism and Ayn Rand philosophy for all those techno utopians with their heads in the clouds.     Share on Facebook