• 21 Days To Save Your Life 
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Even with my fortunate education described above, it took twenty years of insidious weight gain for me to come to my senses, and only because I am pre-disposed towards distrusting government propaganda because of my belief in Austrian economics. Even with that interest, it took me fifteen years to reach Austrian economics through a long road of Adam Smith, P.J.O’Rourke, and Ayn Rand, to eventually discover Ludwig von Mises, Murray N. Rothbard, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe.  

• A Letter From Vienna 
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Among those around the table that evening where a Randian objectivist, a Mormon, a Roman Catholic and a Jewish convert to Catholicism from Iceland, Croatia, Belgium, and US via France. With these various backgrounds and profound cultural disagreements I think we all would strongly agree that libertarianism is the economic/political philosophy founded on the principles of nonviolence and property rights that best facilitates cultural development and coexistence. In a particular place or time an individual libertarian might feel more or less strongly against his government.  

• • Advice for Ron Paul 
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Ron Paul is doing just fine in his campaign. He is promoting liberty at a magnificent clip. He is converting people to libertarianism en masse, perhaps more so than any other person in the entire history of the planet (with the possible exception of Ayn Rand; however, she abjured the libertarian philosophy, while Dr. Paul embraces it enthusiastically).  

• • • Two Kinds of Selfishness 
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Altruism  |Atlas Shrugged  |The Virtue of Selfishness  |Capitalism  |Egoism  |Image  | One philosopher who tried to clarify the ignorance and myths about capitalism, and whose ideas contributed to the discussions of the differences between free market capitalism and socialism, was Ayn Rand. Her controversial book The Virtue of Selfishness sought to clarify the ethics and morality of selfishness, in contrast to the destruction of altruism. To this day, it seems that many people – including very highly educated and supposedly informed and sophisticated people – believe that the “enlightened self-interest” aspect of free market capitalism amounts to the businessman selfishly taking away money and opportunities from others.  

• • Neoconservatism Taken Down 
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Leonard Peikoff  |Yaron Brook  | Book review: Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea, by C. Bradley Thompson with Yaron Brook.
Thompson is an Objectivist, and accordingly believes as a general thesis that ideas determine history. Readers will not fail to recall Leonard Peikoff's endeavor in Ominous Parallels to trace the roots of Nazism to Kant's philosophy. I do not think this effort was entirely successful.  

• Libertarian Vampires and the Importance of Fiction 
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We can include Douglas Adams, given his brilliant take on bureaucracy in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; Ayn Rand, George Orwell, and nearly every other dystopian author as having relevance to the libertarian mind.  

• • 5 Reasons Why American Riots Will Be the Worst in the World 

“You can ignore reality, but you cannot ignore the consequences of reality.” ~ Ayn Rand  

• The Jack Ass Show 
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Atlas Shrugged  | They hated John Galt because of his confidence in his own beliefs. Where they had doubts, he had none. Hosts like the Jack Ass are never sure their opinion is right - yet they demand everyone agree with them.  

• • Escape From America 
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Atlas Shrugged  | Just like in Ayn Rand’s great book, Atlas Shrugged, many of the US and western world’s brightest and most industrious are leaving at a rapidly increasing rate. And, just like in the book, at least some of them are gravitating to the same enclave, in northern Argentina.  

• My Anti-Capitalist Twitter Critic 
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Capitalism  | A couple weeks ago a critic of the free market, quite appalled that I would exonerate the free market of blame for child labor, poor working conditions, and the like, unleashed a barrage of comments on Twitter directed my way. She was responding to a blog post in which I promoted [a] presentation to a group of high school students at the Mises Institute. Her tweet read, "How right-wing Ayn Rand disciples INDOCTRINATE high school students." Subtle, she isn’t.  

• I’ll Take the Reactionary Over the Murderer, Thanks 
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Atlas Shrugged  | Let’s just assume the worst about [Ron] Paul: that he’s a corporate libertarian in the Reason magazine/Cato Institute mold that would grant Big Business and the financial industry license to do whatever the hell it wants with little in the way of accountability (I call this scenario the “status quo”). Let’s say he dines on Labradoodle puppies while using their blood to scribble notes in the margins of his dog-eared, gold-encrusted copy of Atlas Shrugged. So. F***ing. What.  

• Montessori, Peace, and Libertarianism 
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One of the less conventional approaches to education is that spearheaded by Maria Montessori (1870-1952), the so-called Montessori Method. Many libertarians may have heard of this approach because Ayn Rand had positive things to say about it.  

• • Happy Mother Earth Day, citizen! 
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Individual Rights  | Philosopher Ayn Rand explains that the concept of rights is a part of moral philosophy, its purpose being to provide moral guidance on how to treat others.[5] According to Rand, the notion of “rights” is a moral concept.  

• Sam Konkin and libertarian theory 
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Many people think that most libertarians, until the recent revolution, supported patents and copyrights. True, Ayn Rand and her followers do indeed embrace IP, but by no means did all those libertarians outside the rigid confines of her system agree with her. To the contrary, anti-IP views were very much in the air thirty years ago.  

• Can we live free in an unfree world 
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There are many other sources for how to liberate your thinking and your life, and many people here have already explored and enjoyed works by writers and philosophers like Ayn Rand, Richard Bach and Scott Peck. There is a lot out there on how to liberate ourselves mentally, physically, creatively, and emotionally.  

• • Is libertarianism compatible with religion? 
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Atheism  | As [Murray] Rothbard warned: “We libertarians will never win the hearts and minds of Americans or of the rest of the world if we persist in wrongly identifying libertarianism with atheism. If even Stalin couldn’t stamp out religion, libertarians are not going to succeed with a few Randian syllogisms.”  

• • May a libertarian take money from the government? 
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Atlas Shrugged  | All libertarian theories of private property rights, of punishment, would agree that of all people in the world, Z is the absolutely least deserving of this foodstuff. Now, it might be nice, it might be virtuous, for X to return the apple to Y. Indeed, this was precisely the relationship between Ragnar Danneskjold (X) and Hank Reardon (Y) in Ayn Rand’s magnificent and monumental novel, Atlas Shrugged. The government (Z) stole from Reardon (and of course others) and Ragnar was just returning these stolen goods to Hank, the victim.  

• Glenn Beck’s non-solutions 
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Although Beck often uses libertarian rhetoric and quotes people that he identifies as libertarians (Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, F. A. Hayek, Hans Sennholz, Ludwig von Mises), he is no libertarian.  

• • Public sector unions in Wisconsin 
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Atlas Shrugged  | As a matter of deontology (rights) it seems clear that taking down the government a peg or two is compatible with libertarianism, even if taxes increase as a result. Ragnar Danneskjold breaks into Fort Knox and liberates some gold (assuming there’s some of this precious metal in there; work with me on this). As a result, the government raises taxes. Does that definitively demonstrate that this hero of Atlas Shrugged was violating libertarian law? Not a bit of it.  

• • • It’s Ayn Rand bashing time, once again 
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Atlas Shrugged  | [Ayn Rand] favored the gold standard. Yet, when she went to the store, she never offered anyone gold coins. Instead, like everyone else, she paid in fiat coin of the realm, even though she properly detested this system. She also favored the privatization of the post office, but she mailed letters care of the hated government monopoly post office. Shall we indict her, too, for hypocrisy on these grounds? But wait, the charges against her mount up even more. Ayn also opposed subsidies to farmers, and yet, ate food produced under this system. Isn’t she really despicable? I hope and trust everyone realizes where I am going with this. I am not at all joining her critics and “piling up” on Ayn Rand. Very much to the contrary, I am demonstrating, via the reductio ad absurdum method, that the argument of these real socialists has not a logical leg to stand upon.