• • Not much to fear in a Wildrose victory 
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[Wildrose leader Danielle] Smith’s personal philosophy - she cites author Ayn Rand as her literary hero - smacks of the purity that comes before a rude awakening. Rand’s philosophy, like that of Friedrich Nietzsche, is bracing stuff for late-night talk in the dorm when you’re 22 - less useful for grown-ups.  

• The heck with Debbie Bosanek, where is John Galt? 
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Atlas Shrugged  | To say that the President needs to focus more on how to grow the pie than on how to slice it is an understatement. At this point, we should be asking: “Where is John Galt”?  

• • • Object lessons 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  | Atlas Shrugged opened in April on a handful of U.S. screens and has taken a beating from critics and moviegoers alike, but fans of Rand should enjoy the philosophical pontificating. Then again, they may want to wait for the Nov. 8 DVD release. The film has a small-screen, miniseries feel, all the more intensified by the cliffhanger ending. Rating 2.  

• Something special about hotel bar java 
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After settling into the kind of chair you might find in a film version of an Ayn Rand novel, my coffee was delivered respectfully in a two-cup urn with a bowl of brownsugar cubes and a pot of milk.  

• • A country held hostage to right-wing purists 
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Atheism  |Individualism  |Inaccurate  | When not reading aloud from centuries-old documents, the Partiers are incanting passages from Ayn Rand’s blunderbuss screeds. They love Rand’s uncompromising vision of the supremacy of the individual and the tyranny of government. They gloss over the fact that the only individuals Rand respected were Nietzschean übermen. She referred to people who actually work for a living as “savages.” And she held religion in greater contempt than even Karl Marx did.  

• Debt-limit madness 

As David Brooks and others have pointed out, surveys show that most Americans realize that taxes on some Americans are going to have to go up in order to for the country to cure its massive budget deficit. But such is the state of populist agitation in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, that GOP leaders don't feel powerful enough to take on their own angry, Ayn-Randian fringe.  

• A narrow view of the libertarian creed 
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As for [Stephen] Metcalf 's critique of Robert Nozick, it should be noted that Nozick actually is not a towering figure of libertarianism. [....] The Libertarian Reader— the collection of libertarian works that Metcalf cites —devotes a mere 16 of 458 pages to an excerpt of Nozick’s book. In setting up the excerpt, the editor states that “philosophers who seek to justify a more extensive state have been compelled to address Nozick’s arguments, though they still often avoid responding to the different arguments of Mises, Rand, and Rothbard.” And this is exactly what Metcalf has done.  

• • Time to expose the destructive left 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Individual Rights  |Objectivist author  | Robert Fulford neglected to mention Atlas Shrugged, the new movie that is based on Ayn Rand’s classic novel. It portrays successful businessmen, who are the creators of wealth and prosperity, as heroes. Ms. Rand correctly identified that the primary motivation of leftists like Rick Salutin is a vehement hatred of success, especially in business. Such hatred is often disguised as concern for the poor, the weak or the environment. But the logical consequence of their positions is the destruction of prosperity, made possible by capitalism, which in turn is based on the protection of individual rights.  

• • Let’s look at this objectively 
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Anyone who reads what Ayn Rand foresaw in the mid 20th century, has only to change the names of the characters, in order to recognize what is going on in our own times. The threat is clearly greater than that of shared financial poverty alone.  

• • Who Is John Galt? 
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Atlas Shrugged  | A famed clock hangs in the sky above Manhattan in Ayn Rand’s novel, Atlas Shrugged. The clock stops working and people shrug and ask, “Who is John Galt?” a catch-all reference to the civilizations’ fundamental powerlessness to halt a steady decline.  

• Dangerous Jews 
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Atheism  | The issue of Jews accepting Jesus as the Messiah is of little significance because only a small number of mediocre Jews believe this. Of greater concern is the hugely disproportionate number of elite Jews of our time who are or were atheists, the antithesis of belief in Judaism. They include writers Mordecai Richler, Ayn Rand, Sam Harris (top advocate of atheism) [...] [and] Israeli war hero Moshe Dayan.  

• Civil liberties vs. knee-jerk loyalties 
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Governments don’t care what party you voted for, or what you think about the war in Afghanistan, or whether your bookshelf’s stuffed with Noam Chomsky or Ayn Rand. If it’s in their best interests to steamroll you, they will. Ideological partisanship dilutes by half the democratic force of the revulsion we feel -- or should feel -- when they do.  

• Sticking to the formula 
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Rush was never that band. They marched to the beat of their own drummer, that drummer being Neil Peart, also the lyricist. His discovery of inspiration in black holes, the works of Ayn Rand and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem Kubla Khan probably condemned the band to early critical scorn more surely than Lee’s famously reedy voice or that orgy-porn look with the facial hair and kimonos ( “We were never very good at the fashion/ image thing,” Lee concedes in the film).  

• • Letting the left claim the cerebral high ground 
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Atlas Shrugged  | From bank bailouts to government health care, not in recent memory has socialism garnered such a toehold in American political discourse. Ayn Rand would recognize much of the statist nightmare of her famous Atlas Shrugged in Mr. Obama’s America: government ownership of lending institutions and car companies, increasing demonization of the rich, and an unelected “czar” in Washington for every policy area under the sun.  

• • Shinan Govani’s worthy 30: The men 
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Capitalism  | Here — in no particular order — are some of the lovable lotharios, chivalrous mensches and intellectual linebackers that make the city go. [....] Matthew Barrett. Age 65. Sign Libra. Gig Known as a showboat CEO — at both Bank of Montreal and Barclays Bank in Britain — he recently returned to Canada with both Irish twinkle and charm-offense intact. An enthusiast he is of the good life, great tomes and complicated women. “I’m a recovering Randian [Ayn Rand]. She gave a good intellectual and philosophical defence of capitalism which I liked. I would have mixed a little human compassion into all this. She is a bit Darwinian and I think, Nietzschean — all this about supermen and superwomen. Someone once said leadership means getting extraordinary performance from ordinary people. I think she underestimated that. It isn’t just the superman or superwoman at the top — it’s thousands and thousands of little people."  

• The town that said ‘No’ 
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Atlas Shrugged  | Local [Colorado Springs] businessmen are convinced they can run the city's budget better than its politicians can. A privately funded group calling itself The City Committee is forming to perform a citizens' audit of sorts. [....] The problem is not confined to Colorado Springs -- cities all across the United States are struggling, said Chuck Fowler, a committee member. "Atlas is shrugging," Mr. Fowler said.  

• What do you stand for? 
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Atlas Shrugged  | As soon as anyone tries to use legislation, force or moral suasion to make corporate social responsibility mandatory, I'm switching sides and joining [Financial Post editor] Terence Corcoran on the Atlas Shrugged team.  

• • Don’t blame banks 
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Capitalism  |Objectivist author  | Government printing of money to fund its spending (not to mention forcing banks to give low-interest loans to risky home buyers) leads to artificial booms that necessarily end in bust. To blame such busts on banks is a moral obscenity. As a champion of capitalism and an admirer of Ayn Rand [...], I would advocate, among other pro-capitalist things, the privatization of money, thereby preventing such busts. Gold, not paper, would be the standard of money, and governments would not be able to print it to fund their wasteful and destructive spending. As Ayn Rand observed, government controls breed more controls, and your editorial is a clear and sad example of this.  

• Moral hazard in U.S. Banking 

Capitalism  | The basic problem, from a capitalist perspective, is that America's banks [...] really are "too big to fail." Which is to say, they are so big, and so integral to the globalized economy, that they should be thought of more as a utility -- like the electric power grid, phone lines, and the Internet -- than a conventional widget business. Without a solvent banking system, everything else in the economy seizes up, too. And so some element of moral hazard is inevitable: The price of punishing poorly performing banks and other large financial institutions by letting them all go bankrupt is a return to 1929. Loyal followers of Ayn Rand might be willing to let this happen as a sacrifice to the gods of market purity, but no politician would.  

• • • Ayn and Alan 
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Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |Capitalism  |Egoism  |Personal life  | Excerpt from Panderer to Power: The True Story of How Alan Greenspan Enriched Wall Street and Left a Legacy of Recession.
Alan [Greenspan]'s rise from bottom to top of Rand's group was a marvel, especially since Rand wanted no part of him. Greenspan was not sure if he existed: "I think that I exist. But I don't know for sure. Actually, I can't say with certainty that anything exists." Rand was bemused by the debates her top acolyte, Nathaniel Branden, held with Greenspan: "How's the undertaker?" she would sneer. Branden played devil's advocate and pressed the future Federal Reserve chairman with such queries as, "How do you explain the fact that you're here? Do you require anything besides the proof of your own senses?" Apparently, Greenspan did.