• Business as usual 
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Alan Greenspan  |Capitalism  | An Ayn Rand acolyte, [Alan] Greenspan was so enthralled with the magic of the free market he thought it would even prevent, unaided by government, financial fraud.  

• Progressives undermine their cause by attributing free-market principles to their opponents 
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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.  

• • The Rules: Government’s proper role in the market 
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Capitalism  | Ayn Rand was an articulate, powerful voice for libertarianism, the notion that each of us individually deserves to own what he or she creates, and that the role of government must be minimized. For 30 years a libertarian ideology dominated leadership circles, beginning politically with President Reagan, who led a fundamental transformation in our political discourse—about the government’s role in everything from marginal tax rates to regulation. Many people think that Reagan was brilliant, and that his policies were necessary. Whether or not you agree with that assessment, you have to acknowledge that the Reagan agenda dominated our discourse until the fall of 2008, when the entire economic world appeared to collapse. A year later we have Ken Feinberg, appointed by the president to determine how much CEOs will be paid. We’ve gone from finding government intervention anathema to accepting that a bureaucrat determines how much someone gets in stock options. But angry populism—180 degrees from libertarianism—is no better a guide than Rand.  

• • Edit this page 
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Egoism  | In his first book, The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia, Andrew Lih leads readers through the site’s exciting history. [....] Lih [...] point[s] out that [founders Larry] Sanger and [Jimmy] Wales were heavily influenced by Ayn Rand’s Objectivism (shades of Alan Greenspan), according to which, reality exists independent of consciousness and life’s great purpose is the rational pursuit of self-interest. Wales’s fascination with Rand was so deep that he even named his daughter after a protagonist in one of Rand’s books. But Lih does not explain the steps from Objectivism to an encyclopedia that “could detail what is true in the world without judgments.”