• Neoconservative Rising 
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It was, and still is popular in conservative circles to claim quasi-libertarian ideals: “I am libertarian/Randian/Rothbardian on the economy, conservative on morality,” et cetera. Republicans are certainly not afraid to pay lip service to thinkers like Hayek, Rand, and von Mises when votes are involved.  

• • • The Atlas Shrugged Phenomena 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  | One would think with all the negative press surrounding Atlas Shrugged, The Movie - Part 1 that it would have disappeared from theater screens and gone direct to DVD the day after it was released. Instead, a week after its premier in a scant 299 or so theaters, the movie not only expanded to just under 500 screens, but many of those sold out the moment the names of the theaters appeared on the movies website.  

• • • Atlas Shrugged the movie - Part 1 review 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  | I’m not going to post a debate on the political or philosophical themes of the movie since they reflect more Ayn Rands original text and have been talked about ad nauseam by other reviewers. Instead, Im going to give my honest opinion on what I saw on the theater screen.  

• Years of the modern 
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Alan Greenspan  | Federal Reserve, under the wise supervision of former Ayn Rand disciple Alan Greenspan, progressively blew one bubble after another through its easy money policies.  

• • • Atlas Shrugged - The meaning and the movie 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Individualism  | Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is my favorite novel with an unforgettable story and an extremely memorable lineup of characters. Rand’s goal was to challenge the attitude of society and government that men of superior achievement “owe” something to the men of mediocrity. An old Japanese proverb states “the nails that stick out get pounded down”, and the pounding that takes place in Atlas Shrugged is accomplished through government nationalization, forced redistribution of assets to the politically favored, and laws and regulations that supposedly equalize competition.  

• • Equalization of Opportunity Bill for Literature passed! 
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Atlas Shrugged  | Under the recently passed Equalization of Opportunity Bill for Literature, all reading material must now be offered only in digital content for FREE! We’ll save the trees, we’ll be a paperless nation, free to exchange every written word that has ever been or ever will be published at absolutely no cost to the reading public. [....] Opponents of the bill have voiced concerns that this may be rather tough on writer’s bank accounts, but as the sponsor of the bill stated, “only those whose motives are not moneymaking should be allowed to write.” So said Ayn Rand, more than 50 years ago in Atlas Shrugged and here we all are, looking at the reality of FREE ebooks, or a universal price of .99.  

• •Scott Adams’ Noprivacyville, anarcho capitalism’s utopian dream or blueprint for Hell on earth? 
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Alan Greenspan  |Personal life  | There once was a little girl in Russia named Alissa Rosenbaum whose family owned a pharmacy. A bunch of utopist nasty people took her family pharmacy away and made it state property because they had a vision of a utopia. Well, to make a long story short she never forgot that, moved to Paris, started writing, then moved to Hollywood, then hit it big with her work. So big that she eventually started a philosophy circle in NYC whose proteges included the future Federal Reserve Chair whose dedication to deregulation helped bring on the current financial crisis! Just as the utopian collectivist dunderheads who stole the Rosenbaum family pharmacy wound up creating Ayn Rand, so too would their Libertarian counterparts wind up creating monsters we can not forsee if Noprivacyville ever becomes a reality!  

• Live free or die 
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Atlas Shrugged  | Most people can eventually be roused to action if sufficiently provoked, but the difference between a liberty-lover and normal sheeple is more than just a matter of degree: if a liberty-lover ever shrugs his shoulders at a loss of liberty, it will only be in the sense of Atlas Shrugged.  

• Political triage 
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Anarchists, minarchists and objectivists [...] tend to share the pursuit of freedom from behavior they dislike. They also usually want a shield from the past so they can define their existence in a ridiculous environment promoted by academic naval-gazers like those at LRC. They also promote political self-marginalization and self-righteous futility and political victimhood. They are worthless to the defense of individual liberty; the whole lot of them.  

• Heroic - L. Neil Schulman 
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Atlas Shrugged  | If Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” was the elementary school of a very effective education in freedom, then J. Neil Schulman’s “Alongside Night” has to be the post-graduate studies course.  

• • • A brief reply to J. Neil Schulman 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  | Rand presents as proven, objective fact a worldview that contradicts empirical reality on practically every point. Her followers often become so robotized in their dogmatic acceptance of this worldview purely on her authority (!) that their fellow libertarians have labeled them “Randroids”. Among other errors, they frequently espouse what Kevin Carson has called “vulgar libertarianism”, in which they identify actually-existing state-corporate capitalism with a truly free-market economy.  

• • The ethics of capitalism vs. socialism vs. communitarianism 
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Laissez-faire is a fantasy where everyone acts like the moral characters in an Ayn Rand novel, without the moral failings all-too-common in the real world.  

• • Rand’s argument from intimidation and Obama 
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The Virtue of Selfishness  | Ayn Rand wrote on what she calls the "Argument from Intimidation" in 1964 in the Objectivist Newsletter and it was republished in the 19th article in The Virtue of Selfishness. [....] The Argument from Intimidation is often composed of statements like "you can't possibly think…" or "everybody knows that…" or "that's ridiculous" or it may be inclusive of derisive labels calling people heartless, stupid, or worse.  

• • Poofertarianism - What it is and how it’s killing us 
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Egoism  | Rational interest, which libertarian theorists invariably copy wholesale from Randian Objectivism means everyone acting for their own welfare. It's arguably the simplest concept of human nature defined, as well as the most logical.  

• The dangers of libertarian radicalism 
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There is a reason why most Supreme Court justices grow more liberal in their decisions over time. It's because relativism that favors the left. Ayn Rand explained this quite thoroughly.  

• • Rand Paul: In it to win it 
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Personal life  | Rumor has spread around the Internet that [Paul] was named after Ayn Rand, the late novelist. He laughs and says, "No, my given name at birth was Randall, but when I met my wife she thought I was too old to be 'Randy' any more, so now I'm just Rand." He does emphasize, however, that he is a fan of Rand's work, noting that it's sad that she chose to be so authoritarian in her social circle.  

• • Book review: Douglas Gnazzo’s “Honest mMoney” 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  | "Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, men become the tools of men. Blood, whips, and guns - or gold. Take your choice - there is no other - and your time is running out." - Ayn Rand.  

• • Childs’s argument for anarchism 
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Capitalism  | Political theorist Roy A. Childs Jr.'s career was bracketed by the question of anarchy. As a young man he shot to prominence in the nascent Libertarian movement with two essays -- "The Contradiction in Objectivism," followed by "An Open Letter to Ayn Rand." (1) -- in which he made his famous argument that Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism mandates a stateless society. Later in life he repudiated anarchism, and planned to write an essay refuting his earlier argument; however, that essay remained unfinished at his death. Is the argument irrefutable? Rand never dealt with it; the only Objectivist response to Childs's open letter was cancellation of his subscription to her magazine (though there is no historical evidence that Rand made that decision, or even saw his letter).  

• • Radicals for Capitalism 
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Review of Brian Doherty’s book, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement.
Ayn Rand and her Objectivism always make for entertaining reading, what with the bountiful irony of a purported ideology of freedom that starts on grounds that cannot be taken seriously by anyone with a minimal knowledge of science and philosophy, goes on to create a self-sealing belief system that simply discounts any inconvenient empirical facts while considering anyone who dares to disagree as not just mistaken but eeeevil, and ends with a dogmatic personal authoritarianism that wreaks as much havoc in the lives of its robotized, Randroid followers as any political authoritarianism could hope to.  

• • • “Atlas Shrugged”: Why has Wikipedia removed key elements? 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  | Will the [Wikipedia] entry for “Atlas Shrugged” continue to be redefined slowly, eliminating the final references to failed government policies and actions, so that just becomes a fiction novel about anything but the failure of government? The reason this book is popular is not because it is about railroads, sex, or futuristic engines. The book is popular because it is about the abject failure of a government when they try to pick the winners, share the wealth, and intervene where they do not understand how things really function.