• • • Leave Ayn Rand out of the Economics Canon 
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Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |Capitalism  |Individualism  | Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead are inspiring to some, but the idea that the economics which those stories portray has any resemblance to reality is ludicrous. Howard Roark’s career as an architect in The Fountainhead in written entirely in service to the story’s narrative arc and the business tycoons in Atlas Shrugged don’t behave like actual businessmen. To put it another way, Hayek and Friedman had to justify their free market positions with math and facts, unlike Rand who used just tautological assertions about what is “rational”.  

• Poll Results: President Should Keep Campaigning on Fairness 
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Astrong majority of readers thought the President’s fairness theme was a winning message. balconesfault: “It’s not that Obama says ‘fairness’ that often. It’s that the word is like fingernails on the chalkboard for today’s Randian Conservatives, who don’t really believe that fairness of opportunity is important to America, much much less fairness of outcome.”  

• • Mike Wallace’s Best Interviews 

Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |Video  | Wallace got to the source of Objectivism, “a new and unusual philosophy which would seem to strike at the very roots of our society,” in an interview with little-known Russian-American novelist Ayn Rand. The author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead spoke about her philosophy, describing it as a rational and moral approach to the achievement of happiness.  

• • The ‘Mad Men’ Book Club 
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Alan Greenspan  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Individualism  |Image  | Bert Cooper, the eccentric co-owner of Sterling Cooper, is an admirer of the philosopher and author Rand. Her Atlas Shrugged profiles the terror of government control; its emphasis on individualism and free markets has made it a popular text once again in these days. Among noteworthy acolytes was former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan.  

• In Antigovernment Arizona, Even the Shooting of a Representative Can’t Change Politics Much 
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Jared Lee Loughner, 22, was branded a socialist pot-smoker; a right-wing militant; a devotee of Ayn Rand; a flag-burner; a disgruntled job seeker; a dropout loser; someone who might have been dazzled into violence by the political action committee of Sarah Palin, whose website featured little doodads that looked like target marks over districts of vulnerable Democrats such as Giffords. People saw in Loughner what they wanted to see.  

• Ron Paul’s Surprisingly Young Support Base 
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Young voters aren’t as beaten down by reality as the rest of us. They aren’t as accustomed to compromise. And they’re searching for a system—religion, Objectivism, Beat poetry, whatever else we were all into in high school and college—to make sense of the world around them. They are, in other words, idealists. And so is the 76-year-old they came to see tonight, whatever else he is.  

• Ron Paul’s Christian Reconstructionist Roots 
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Atlas Shrugged  | Paul has been able to create one of the strangest coalitions in American political history, bringing together libertarian hipsters with those who want to subject the sexually impure to Taliban-style public stonings. (Stoning is Reconstructionists’ preferred method of execution because it is both biblical and fiscally responsible, rocks being, in North’s words, “cheap, plentiful, and convenient.”) “I described it recently as people who are mixing the philosophies espoused in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion,” says [Steve Deace, an influential Iowa evangelical radio host]. We’re about to learn whether that can be a recipe for victory.  

• Yes, Ron Paul Has 4000 Babies 
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[Ron] Paul put his overtaxed money where his Ayn Rand-quoting mouth was: he famously refused to accept Medicare and Medicaid payments from his patients, opting instead to provide free services to expectant mothers in need.  

• Backstage at Marchesa 
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An hour before show time, things backstage seem relatively calm. The designers are doing interviews with a steady stream of reporters, and models are trickling in from the morning’s other shows. They’re whisked into hair and makeup—sometimes both at once. Some models read books (we spotted both Ayn Rand and C. S. Lewis), others text, some chat with the girls straightening their hair, and others pick at plates of cold pasta salad.  

• • Tea Party: The Christian Right in Disguise? 
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Tea Party candidates like O’Donnell and Bachmann have campaigned on libertarian economic platforms, leading some commentators to dig into old Ayn Rand novels for the source of this new economic populism. But what they’ve missed is that the Tea Party’s obsession with the size of government has been part of Christian conservatives’ platform for decades. The Tea Party was just a new name coined by clever activists and the media—a rebranding that has made it much easier for Christian-right candidates to run for office without having to air their views on social issues, which are increasingly viewed in a negative light by the general public.  

• • • Ayn Rand: The GOP’s Favorite Bonkers Demagogue 
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Capitalism  |Individualism  | I was pleased to see this ad from a progressive religious outfit called the American Values Network, which attacks the Ryan budget as immoral. Wait, doesn’t immoral in politics mean you kill babies or sleep with someone of your own sex? It doesn’t have to. It can mean what it meant for millennia in public life: atrocious treatment of the less fortunate in society. Imagine that. And the best thing about the ad is the way it links Ryan—speaking of demagoguery—to the most unjustifiably self-important, crashingly tedious, and plainly bonkers demagogue in American history: Ayn Rand.  

• Right-Wing Fervor Drives Republicans into Suicide Pact 
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Atlas Shrugged  | Politico reports that Senate Republicans believe they must “make the case that their proposals would ‘save’ Medicare — while Democrats are content with leaving the program on the brink of collapse.” That sounds like a brilliant idea, except Republicans in upstate New York repeatedly used that line against Kathy Hochul. [....] Perhaps young Republicans can drop out of college for a couple of years to knock on doors, clutching copies of Atlas Shrugged and spreading the Good News.  

• • • Braving the Atlas Shrugged crowd 
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Alan Greenspan  |Altruism  |Atlas Shrugged movie  |For the New Intellectual  |The Fountainhead  |We The Living  |Capitalism  |Individualism  |Image  | Many have pointed out that the release of Atlas Shrugged is ill-timed, coming as America is just beginning to dig itself out of a financial collapse caused, in large part, by the practical application of Rand’s ideas, most notably the deregulation of capitalism. Her disciple, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, confessed to Congress in October 2008, that after all these years he had found a flaw in her ideology, namely that it had never taken into account “the power of human greed.” (Why hadn’t he?) But that’s the power of ideology--in the minds of its followers, there can be no flaws. As the fellow sitting in front of me put it, “If we had followed her vision completely, we wouldn’t be in this mess now.” When the credits rolled, there was some polite and perfunctory clapping. Most of the audience seemed a bit puzzled, as if they didn’t know how they were expected to respond. The followers of the high priestess of individualism kept looking at each other, as if for a clue as to whether or not they liked what they had just seen.  

• The budget-hacking maniac 
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The number one issue listed on [Steve Stivers’] website is protecting Social Security from privatization and fighting off attempt to raise the retirement age. The rest of his listed positions sound more anodyne than Ayn Rand.  

• The budget storm Orszag’s successor faces 
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Capitalism  | Moderate Republicans like [Judd] Gregg and George Voinovich are on the way out. A number of Tea Party candidates devoted to unconventional, sometimes even absurd Randian notions of fiscal policy may be on the way in.  

• The left’s unlikely Tea Party target 
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The man who this week became a symbol of Tea Party intolerance with his D.C. Tea Party map was once a major Democratic donor, contributing tens of thousands of dollars to the party. [....] It’s been a surreal week for Majors, who has been accused of racism, homophobia, nativism, and just plain ignorance thanks to a short guide to Washington, D.C. he wrote for Tea Partiers attending Glenn Beck’s rally from from out of town. [....] While he’s been a hardcore libertarian ever since he read Ayn Rand in ninth grade, Majors said he only moved toward conservative politics in the last few years as the economy overtook social issues in the national conversation. “If traditional marriage were a big part of it, I wouldn’t be part of it,” he said of Saturday’s rally.  

• • Why women don’t have sex scandals 
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Personal life  |Image  | Ayn Rand was a novelist well-known for her theories about sex and objectivism. She had a notorious open affair with the much younger Nathaniel Branden while still married to her husband. In 1958, her young lover set up the Nathaniel Branden Institute to study Rand’s philosophy. In the 1960s, Branden took up with young actress Patrecia Scott. When Rand found out, she wrote an article attacking Branden for “irrational behavior in his private life.”  

• • Our favorite books of 2009 
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Ayn Rand and the World She Made: The exploits of Ayn Rand—the Sarah Palin of philosophical fiction—are made more gripping by Anne Heller’s refusal to treat her subject as a joke and to accept her as the force she remains in politics (tea partiers) and to each successive generation of selfish undergrads.  

• • Fitting in at Fox 
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Atlas Shrugged  | Interview with John Stossel.
[Q:] Tell me a little bit about what [your new Fox Business show] is going to be. [A:] It will be one subject. The first subject will be maybe Atlas Shrugged or global warming—Atlas Shrugged because I think 50 years ago, Ayn Rand predicted today. It sort of sums up what I’m going to be reporting about. [Q:] Ayn Rand predicted what? [A:] Big government, nice-sounding legislation like “The Preservation of Livelihood Law,” which mandated that Hank Rearden’s production must not be bigger than any other steel mill, to make it a level playing field. It’s silly. [Q:] Is that a new law passed by this Congress? [A:] No, but it’s what Wesley Mouch, the evil bureaucrat in the book, passed. And what Tim Geithner and what Barney Frank might like to pass.  

• • • A populist Frankenstein 
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Atlas Shrugged  | The Democrats had better start learning what Ayn Rand knew, despite her foolish solipsism. They need to stand firm on simply stated principles. They need, in other words, to borrow celebrity’s idiom without its shallowness, to get heroically one-dimensional, and to start governing from the gut.