• • The White House Gives Credibility to the Psychotic Radicals of the Tea Party | BuzzFlash.org 
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Capitalism  | President Obama implicitly and explicitly asserts that those who would protect Medicare and Social Security, for instance, are leftist counterparts to Ayn Rand followers who want to destroy the federal government and create free-market anarchy to replace it.  

• • • What do Ayn Rand, FOX Fraudcasting, and Alan Greenspan have in common? 
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Alan Greenspan  |Ayn Rand Institute  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Egoism  |Yaron Brook  | FOX’s Freedom Watch - with Judge Andrew Napolitano as the host - is one of the few shows that could tout “the virtue of selfishness” on Thanksgiving, which it did. Napolitano had a spokesman on from the Ayn Rand Institute exalting the “morality” of not caring about the fate of other people, while Napolitano bemoaned the money that the government “steals” from the well-off to help those less fortunate. Rand’s extremist cult of the ego fits like a glove with unregulated capitalism because the moral high ground is defined by the acquisition of personal wealth without any obligation to society.  

• Regulation is just another distraction; the answer is public ownership 
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Back in 1999 on a radio program I had in NYC at the time, I was stridently critical of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which was euphemistically called "The Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999" by the very appropriately named Teabagging maestro, Dick Armey. On the radio program, for months I protested every day that this law was nothing but yet another attempt to inflict Ayn Rand feudalism on hapless Americans.  

• • All opinions are not equally relevant 
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Capitalism  | Lately a great deal of attention has been newly attached to the philosophy of Ayn Rand who seemed to feel that the business community held a monopoly of brains and talent. In a review of a new book on Rand, Adam Kirsch writes: “Rand’s particular intellectual contribution, the thing that makes her so popular and so American, is the way she managed to mass market elitism - - to convince many people, especially young people, that they could be geniuses without being in any concrete way distinguished.” (NY Times Book Review, 11/1/09.) Indeed, that very concept is playing out among a confused, poorly-informed public.  

• • It wasn’t like Woodstock… 
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Ayn Rand Institute  |The Fountainhead  |Yaron Brook  | One of the more curious speakers [at the DC taxpayers’ rally] was from “The Ayn Rand Association” who told attendees emphatically that it's “your life, you’re not your brother’s keeper”, that neighbor who didn’t save and got himself into financial trouble. But if most of the audience had even a clue about Rand's writings they might have recoiled at the terrorist act of her hero in The Fountainhead who blew up buildings that didn’t conform to his original design. Oh well, Rand was just making some kind of point, sort of like Ann Coulter who said she regretted that Timothy McVeigh didn’t target the NY Times building in NYC instead of the one in Oklahoma. Fiddle de Dee.  

• Ha-Joon Chang’s ‘Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism’ 
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Capitalism  | Book review.
Chang shows how countries that rose to become industrial or trade superpowers did so only by totally repudiating the Milton Friedman/Tom Friedman "free trade" and "small government" mythos, and instead following Alexander Hamilton's tried-and-true formula [of protectionism and government funding of industry]. [....] America held such policies, too, until the 1980s when Ronald Reagan became president and his economic advisers began advancing the radical Libertarian views of Milton Friedman, and the (Ayn Rand) Objectivist views of Alan Greenspan (who had been inducted into Rand's cult in her New York apartment in the 1960s).  

•Thom Hartmann comes to the defense of the embattled, and shrinking, middle class 

Interview with radio host Thom Hartmann.
There are two groups of people participating in the destruction of the American middle class. The first is those who benefit directly from it economically [....]. Then the second group is the ideologues, the true believers -- the libertarians and objectivists who read Ayn Rand and truly believe that pure unrestrained laissez-faire capitalism is not only a good economic system, but is also a good political system. They’re perhaps the most dangerous and destructive. [...]. And they get it that there’s something in it for them.  

•I nudged, he nudged 
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On Drudge Report publisher Matt Drudge.
Rather than being at odds with the media establishment, a colleague of mine sees him more like a cyber Gail Wynand, the media tycoon in Ayn Rand’s novel, The Fountainhead. Motivated solely by what sells, rather than, say, what might be good for society, his work is an asset to the powers-that-be, not a challenge.  

•Thom Hartmann, now syndicated on Air America Radio 

Interview.
I prefer to have on guests with whom I disagree. Today, I had a guy on from the Ayn Rand Foundation. I think having people on with whom you agree all the time makes for boring talk radio, frankly.