• • No, Paul Ryan Does Not Want To Strengthen The Safety Net 
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Atlas Shrugged  | One of Ryan's oddest ticks is that along with a passion for reducing spending on programs that benefit poor people and a passion for programs that benefit Ayn Rand, he loves to talk about his devotion to the safety net!  

• Ron Paul’s Billionaire 
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Thiel is what the hard-working objectivist wants to be when he grows up. When he’s introduced at last, and the students hear how much Thiel made from the PayPal sale—“$1.5 billion”—they ooooh with respect.  

• Steady State 

The Fountainhead  | You can get House Republicans and some number of Senate Republicans on board with a War on Loopholes. But leading off by talking about the “wealthiest Americans?” That sends them scrambling back to their copies of The Fountainhead. (I kept an eye on Rep. Paul Ryan last night, who couldn’t have looked less impressed at this stuff if he was watching a flea circus.)  

• “Ron Paul Is My Homeboy” 
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Atlas Shrugged  | Unlike supporters of, say, Obama or Mitt Romney, Paul supporters tend to talk about an absolute truth, one that others would see, too, if they could just be persuaded to read certain materials. Among them: Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. These, of course, come from Paul, who gives an exhaustive list of recommendations at the back of what he calls his “manifesto.”  

• • • Bad week for right-wing TV and movies 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |Egoism  |Image  | Did you, like most Americans, run out to your local Cato Institute gift shop and buy a DVD copy of “Atlas Shrugged: Part I” the second it was released? If you did, I’m afraid you’ve bought a defective product. Unfortunately, these DVDs all came from the factory loaded with a turgid, impenetrable, morally indefensible and wholly incoherent film about railroads and fancy steel. Also the copy on the back of the case is misleading.  

• • • Who Is John Galt and Why Is He on Lululemon Bags? 
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Atheism  |Anthem  |Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |Capitalism  |Egoism  |Individual Rights  |Individualism  |Personal life  |Image  | Silly product names and a preachy website are one thing. But a couple of weeks ago, Lululemon moved beyond the usual semi-mystical yoga treacle. The company has begun printing on its signature reusable bags—those cute totes you see slung over shoulders at organic grocery stores and farmers markets across North America—the question “Who Is John Galt?” The cryptic tagline of objectivist philosopher Ayn Rand aligns with the company mission to “elevate the world from mediocrity to greatness,” according to the Lululemon blog entry announcing this unusual ad campaign. Customer reaction has been mixed, with some threatening boycotts. The average yoga enthusiast seems to have a vague idea that Rand is a darling of the right, Alan Greenspan’s fairy godmother, and a bad lady who would definitely throw your chakras out of balance.  

• Liberals Can Take Hostages, Too! 
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Republicans fear their base, and they know 1) they can be primaried by conservatives if they buckle on taxes and 2) they can't be rescued by pro-business groups, which aren't so Randian, like the Chamber of Commerce.  

• • The Liberty Scam 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Personal life  | By the ’50s, with Western Europe and America free, prosperous, happy, and heavily taxed, libertarianism had lost its roguish charm. It was the Weltanschauung of itinerant cranks: Ronald Reagan warming up the Moose Lodge; Ayn Rand mesmerizing her Saturday night sycophants; the Reader’s Digest economist touting an Austrian pedigree.  

• • Live Free or Move 
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Image  | [Keene, NH] is one of the epicenters of the Free State Project, the decade-old effort to build a libertarian beachhead of 20,000 like-minded souls in New Hampshire. [....] [Inside the Keene Action Center,] a calendar near a bar says who’s cooking and when; on the other side of the room, a bookshelf has homemade jam and copies of novels by Ayn Rand.  

• Huckless 
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Atlas Shrugged  | Voters who Tivo Rick Santelli’s CNBC hits or tote “Who Is John Galt?” signs at Tea Parties no longer have a candidate they truly hate or fear. The men (and one or two women) who are actually running for president have just been spared a bitter opponent, a man who can hardly type the name “Mitt Romney” without flinging his keyboard out the window.  

• Love in bookstores 
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There are many reasons why bookstores are naturally romantic environments: the smell of paper, the soft lighting, the baseline understanding that those inside like to read, and are therefore probably not morons. Browsing customers often circle each other like timid sharks, the piles of books in their hands their only weapons. Heidegger implies late-night conversations over coffee and cigarettes; Rumi, a bathtub surrounded by candles. Ayn Rand indicates a need for a wide berth; Sarah Vowell means mornings spent listening to NPR while baking gluten-free cupcakes.  

• • Off the rails: Why do conservatives hate trains so much? 

Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  | In the movie version of Atlas Shrugged, there is a scene in which Ayn Rand’s libertarian heroes defy all odds, deploy some untold amount of private funding, and launch the fastest high-speed train in history over rails of experimental metal. “The run of the John Galt Line is thrilling,” wrote the libertarian federal judge Alex Kozinski. “When it crossed the bridge made of Rearden Metal, I wanted to stand up and cheer.” That’s in the fantasy world. In the real world, libertarians aren’t cheering for high speed rail but rather trying to stop it from being built.  

• • • Libertarians shrugged 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Egoism  |Image  | I saw the [ Atlas Shrugged] movie, which is scheduled to be released nationwide April 15—a date not chosen at random—at a screening for journalists and libertarian activists on Wednesday. The consensus was that the movie is not as bad as libertarians had feared it would be, after all those delays and those iffy prerelease clips and that tiny budget. [....] It doesn’t need to be good. Atlas Shrugged has sold somewhere between 7 million and 8 million copies in the United States. In 2009, the first year of the Tea Party, it sold around 500,000 copies. Themes from the novel, like the question “Who is John Galt?” and the concept of “looters” who subsist on the work of others, were sketched onto Tea Party signs. Members of Congress compared President Obama’s policies to the policies of the novel’s villains, a flabby crew of lobbyists and lazy businessmen.  

• The politics of entitlement: David Brooks will decide when it’s time for you to die 
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What happens when there is no money to give to the people who have no money? That is the moral question. It’s fine to say that the old people should have saved more, they should have worked an extra job, they should have done without cable TV, they should have invested more wisely. Saying that doesn’t change the fact that there will be old people who do not have money. These old people will believe that they need food and shelter and medical care. Will they get it? At the arch-plutocrats’ end of things, the Koch brothers’ end, the end occupied by the most devout worshippers of Ayn Rand, the answer is: no. That’s the goal. It’s long since time for the sloppy, implicit, badly supported social contract to go away.  

• Republicans’ spending cuts could cost the country hundreds of thousands of jobs 
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Capitalism  | “These analyses by the Keynesians are missing a key part of the story,” Rep. John Campbell, R-Calif., explained Monday. “One hundred percent of the money they’re talking about is borrowed. Republicans, right now, are talking about cutting spending on the margins, and 100 percent of what we don’t cut will be borrowed. The capital that they’re putting to work is capital that’s not improving something in the private sector, and all of these studies fail to take into account the interest we’re paying on the deficit.” Campbell, an Ayn Rand disciple, has been saying this for a while.  

• Tea Party Express calls Jared Lee Loughner liberal 
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We The Living  | Loughner’s YouTube page listed The Communist Manifesto among his favorite books, alongside Alice in Wonderland and Ayn Rand’s We the Living.  

• The Tea Party and the Tucson tragedy 
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There’s something offensive, as well as pointless, about the politically charged inquiry into what might have been swirling inside the head of Jared Loughner. We hear that the accused shooter read The Communist Manifesto and liked flag-burning videos— good news for the right. Wait—he was a devotee of Ayn Rand and favored the gold standard, so he was a right-winger after all. Some assassinations embody an ideology, however twisted. Based on what we know so far, the Tucson killings look like more like politically tinged schizophrenia.  

• • Why are so many great architects short of stature? 
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The Fountainhead  | The most famous architect in literature is undoubtedly Howard Roark in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, who was played by Gary Cooper in the movie. Coop was 6 feet 3 inches; they should have cast Alan Ladd (5 feet 4 inches) instead.  

• Defenders of civil liberties look for a new champion to replace Russ Feingold. 
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[Russ] Feingold’s civil liberties record was barely an issue in his failed re-election campaign. When it came up, Feingold’s opponent, Ron Johnson, an Ayn Rand devotee, said he liked the idea of reviewing the Patriot Act but his main concern about liberty was how President Obama was undermining it.  

• • The not-so-great debates 
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Atlas Shrugged  | Responding to a question about Ayn Rand, [Ron] Johnson declared that “Atlas Shrugged is a huge warning as far as what we need to avoid.” In past years, that line would get a candidate laughed out of the race. This year, it just might get him elected.