• Gingrich campaign is back on the ropes 
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[Gingrich supporter Neil] Matheson said he had been involved in Republican politics since he “read a book by Ayn Rand” and predicted that Mr Gingrich would “slide by” and win the Florida primary, despite recent weakness in the polls, which he blames on “money and those horrible ads”.  

• • On the money? 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |Capitalism  | Last year, that prophetess of capitalism, Ayn Rand, almost saw – from her cloudy eminence in the afterlife – her novel Atlas Shrugged brought to the big screen. Part one of a proposed three-part adaptation hiccupped into movie theatres in April. For critics and audiences it was simultaneously too little and too much. Rand’s vision of an unconstrained laissez-faire Utopia seemed as challengingly batty as ever. Yet the film was under-cast, under-directed and under-powered.  

• The inalienable right to tweet 
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As Ayn Rand, Ron Paul and other great thinkers over the ages have said, the gummint has no place in the bedrooms or cars of the nation.  

• After all, what’s a hit every 50 years? 
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Alan Greenspan  |Capitalism  | Ayn Rand rides again (“Regulators must risk more to push growth”, July 27). Alan Greenspan evidently believes that all regulations and government involvement will kill growth and therefore must be eliminated.  

• Republicans test the limits of their power 
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The picture of the House Republicans as radicals is far from the truth [...] say conservative commentators, and largely a smokescreen for the fact that the Democrats have not been able to come up with budget plans of their own. “They are not trying to get back to some kind of Ayn Randian utopia,” said Mike Franc of the Heritage Foundation. Mr Franc says the Republicans simply want to return government spending as a share of economic output to the levels it was before the financial crash, of around 20 per cent.  

• • Ecuador’s leading newspaper in mute protest 
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As Ecuadoreans clustered around news kiosks on Friday to read the front pages of their daily papers, the only words El Universo offered its readers were by the author Ayn Rand: “When you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice, you may know that your society is doomed.”  

• 20 questions: Sara Blakely 
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The Fountainhead  | [Q:] What is the best business book you have ever read? [A:] Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.  

• • Winners, also-rans and the terminally bad 
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Alan Greenspan  |Capitalism  |Individualism  |Personal life  | All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace (BBC2 Mondays) conforms to [Adam Curtis’s] pattern: once again, a small group of political extremists – disciples of the Russian-American libertarian novelist Ayn Rand in the postwar decades – managed to dictate an agenda to the world. This was free market fundamentalism, whose main carrier was the early Randian and later Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan. It was crossed with a Randian individualist faith, held by some of the early Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, that total human autonomy was possible with the aid of computer networks, making governments increasingly irrelevant. Curtis’s stuff is kind of fun, but it depends on too many fallacies, unproven deductions and irrelevancies.  

• Tech backer flies high in the windy city 
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Profile of Lightbank co-founder, Brad Keywell.
Interests: planning Chicago Ideas Week; canyoneering; Ayn Rand; married with two children.  

• Hedge fund lessons on letting stars shine 
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Egoism  | Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater, a $90bn fund with 1,000 employees, is one of a few hedge fund titans to have written a theory of management. Called “Principles”, it reads like a curious mating of Ayn Rand and the Dalai Lama, with a dash of sharp-elbowed MBA.  

• • Why economists stubbornly stick to their guns 
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Alan Greenspan  |Capitalism  | [Alan] Greenspan will no doubt be an enthusiastic viewer of Atlas Shrugged, the film of the novel by his mentor Ayn Rand, which is released in America this week. Many libertarians will go to cheer; a few on the left to jeer. But again no minds will be changed. [....] Not everyone suffers from confirmation bias. If I eschew a visit to Atlas Shrugged, it will be because the plot is silly and the prose turgid, not because of its message.  

• • • Ode to Ayn Rand captures her tone 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Egoism  |Image  | Rand described Atlas Shrugged as a mystery story, and the first part sets up the big revelation in Part III. But as a standalone film Atlas Shrugged Part I does not work. The producers are pressing ahead with the remaining parts, but in a recent interview one suggested that the final chapter could be a musical. It was not quite clear whether he was joking. Either way, we will have to see the next instalments before we can judge how well part one has done its job.  

• • A children’s ski holiday in St Anton 
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The Fountainhead  |Capitalism  | St Anton is unabashedly macho, even in its architecture. [....] The entrance to the new lift is housed in glass so you can watch the huge cogs and wires smoothly slotting the individual pods alongside the edge of the platform. My husband Andrew remarks that it reminds him of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. For me, Lang’s grim futuristic mega-city is far too dark an image. I feel like Ayn Rand taking in the Manhattan skyline for the first time. Whereas Rand’s skyscrapers are monuments to capitalism, St Anton’s lifts are the manifestation of the town’s unapologetic commitment to advances in skiing.  

• • The Master Builder, Minerva Studio, Chichester 
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The Fountainhead  | I’ll bet Ayn Rand loved The Master Builder. Its young, fiery, self-willed female antagonist Hilde Wangel suddenly reappears in master builder Solness’s life 10 years after an incident in her childhood which he had all but forgotten; but she would have made an ideal partner instead for Howard Roark, Rand’s own architect protagonist in her novel The Fountainhead. Strip away the bits of Henrik Ibsen’s play about unseen demons, dark forces and defying the Almighty, and it’s all about making one’s life, both personal and professional, the purest possible embodiment of will in the teeth of conventions and scruples. That is rather the point. As Rand would probably not have recognised, remove those elements and there is no drama: nothing to say and no worthwhile way of saying it. Ibsen is all about these tensions.  

• America consumed by angry noises 
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Tea-party backed Senate candidate Rand Paul, fresh from a landslide win over Trey Grayson, the Republican establishment’s candidate for Senate, took it into his libertarian head to argue that private businesses should not have to conform to civil rights legislation that prohibited discrimination on the basis of race. Digging his hole even deeper, he then suggested the government’s recent comments about keeping a “boot on the throat” of BP for its culpability in the Louisiana oil catastrophe were “un-American in [their] criticism of business”. After some qualifications, he then wisely absented himself from the air waves. Rand Paul is not actually named after Ayn Rand, the high priestess of libertarianism, but perhaps anyone who shares the name might be expected to hold such views.  

• Absurd political theatre will pass 
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Atlas Shrugged  | [The current] immoderate and populist leanings of the [Republican] party are very similar to those of the Democrats during the heyday of anti-globalisation protests in the 1990s. The Antis was also a populist movement that lacked coherence and it was known mostly for its “most stupid and least tolerant face”. Instead of dressing up as Paul Revere, members adopted the black garb of Russian nihilists and bohemian communards; and instead of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged their paranoid lexicon was shaped by Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. [....] Such ridiculous political theatre from either side is possible only in periods of relative peace and security.  

• 20 questions: Enrique Salem, Symantec 
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Atlas Shrugged  | [Q:] What are you reading? [A:] Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand; The Blind Side by Michael Lewis; The Art of Cycling by Robert Hurst.  

• Speculators eyeing euro gamble set to enjoy only brief triumph 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  | I believe that sooner rather than later, European officialdom will impose higher taxes, credit restrictions and transaction barriers aimed at global macro traders. [....] After that, there are likely to be increasing levels of "monitoring" of international capital flows, leading to exchange controls in everything but name. At this point some earnest young person with a dog-eared copy of Ayn Rand's dystopian novel, Atlas Shrugged, will say that such controls would only injure the country, or currency area, that imposes them. Oh, and free capital movements are required under the Maastricht Treaty amendments to the Treaty of Rome. The response of the officials administering these controls would be, so what?  

• Beating the bulge brackets 
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Profile of investment banker Ken Moelis.
Known for his self-deprecating humour, the father of four enjoys golf and is a fan of Ayn Rand.  

• • Public shrugs at Goldman’s claims to genius 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  | Ayn Rand’s most famous acolyte in US public life is Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, but I am beginning to think she must have a lot of readers at 85 Broad Street, the headquarters of Goldman Sachs. That is the best explanation I have hit on for why the leaders of the smartest investment bank on Wall Street – they were not only better positioned than anyone else before the crash, they have made the most spectacular recovery in its aftermath – are taking such a beating in the court of public opinion.