• Editor’s Note: From the Left/From the Right: To satisfy that avid appetite for politics 

Ayn Rand Institute  | To satisfy that avid appetite for politics Day to day and week to week, the editorial pages of The Standard-Times presents letters and longer opinion pieces primarily from our local readers, whose political leanings cover a great portion of the spectrum of ideology. We also include topical columns from syndicated writers, with opinions spread as wide as the Ayn Rand Institute to the Center for a Stateless Society.  

• • Free market? Looks like socialism, to me 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Individual Rights  |Individualism  |Objectivist author  | We need new intellectuals to complete the American Revolution. For a rational world, without vampires, read Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged.”  

• It’s time to take uniforms — and schools — seriously 
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Individualism  | Society is different now and we genuflect at the altar of individualism. Ayn Rand is more a 2012 saint than Mother Teresa.  

• • • Letter: ‘Well done, Steve Jobs’ 
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Ayn Rand Institute  |Atlas Shrugged  |Objectivist author  | Ever since I heard the news that Steve Jobs died, a certain passage from “Atlas Shrugged” keeps running through my head, although only readers of the novel will understand the full impact of the scene.  

• • Classical liberalism has lost out to rights of ‘society’ 
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Individual Rights  |Objectivist author  | Classical liberalism, which created our Constitution, protects individual freedom from society. Modern liberalism protects society’s “freedom” to sacrifice man’s independent mind to bloody communist equality. Liberals correctly fear Ayn Rand’s philosophy of individual rights, the last defense of America.  

• Your View: Intolerance rears its ugly head 
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The shrill voices just never shut up. We constantly hear attacks on gays in the military, illegal aliens, unions, environmental regulations, helping our neighbors, paying our fair share of taxes, and any number of things of which Ayn Rand would not approve.  

• • Government bad, business good 
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Objectivist author  | As John Galt said in “Atlas Shrugged”, “Get the hell out of my way!”  

• This kind of pension reform isn’t really pension reform 
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Gov. Deval Patrick, House Speaker Bob DeLeo and Senate President Therese Murray this week made a big deal out of pretending they’re reforming the state pension system. They held a press conference, crowed about reform, and did everything but hold hands and light a candle to Ayn Rand. The truth is, however, that the governor, House speaker and Senate president preserved every bit of the pension goodies they themselves will one day obtain.  

• • Net neutrality attacks individual achievement 
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Ayn Rand Center  |Objectivist author  | Ayn Rand said FCC power “rests on ... nonobjective law (which) delivers men’s lives, fortunes, careers, ambitions into the arbitrary power of a bureaucrat who can reward or punish at whim.” Net neutrality is Obamacare for the Internet. For more, see news commentary at the online Ayn Rand Center.  

• Rich guys who think the rich should pay more taxes 
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Capitalism  | There’s evidently two different kinds of wealthy people in the world. People like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and Garret Gruener (the Ask.com executive who wrote a guest editorial in Monday’s Standard-Times saying wealthy people have a responsibility to pay higher taxes). And then there’s wealthy people who are represented by the contemporary Republican Party and/or people who pray to that great goddess of libertarianism, Ayn Rand. Wealthy people like Gates, Buffet and Gruener will be the first to tell you they’ve benefited greatly from the capitalist system and that they feel an obligation to pay back. Then there’s other wealthy people like the Koch brothers.  

• • Memoir provides battlefront perspective 
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The Fountainhead  | Interview with Patrick Hennessey, author of The Junior Officers' Reading Club: Killing Time and Fighting Wars.
[Q:] What was the best book you read during your time in service? [A:] [....] I think the book that I had never come across before which most struck me while reading it as a distraction from being in uniform was probably “The Fountainhead,” by Ayn Rand, which is an astonishing book. [Q:] What book was the hardest to read during battle? I was impressed that you read “The Fountainhead,” which is pretty heavy stuff. [A:] It was actually surprisingly easy to read “The Fountainhead” because over that time I had nothing else to distract me and there’s a wonderful clarity and confidence to Rand’s style which was an interesting antidote to the uncertainty of the context in which I was reading it.  

• • Sects and violence on lifetime 
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The Fountainhead  | Cult Choice. An architect and crusading individualist (Gary Cooper) captivates a young woman (Patricia Neal) in the unintentionally hilarious 1949 adaptation of Ayn Rand’s philosophical potboiler “The Fountainhead” (9 p.m., Eastern, TCM).  

• • Paging through the reading choices of ‘Mad Men’ characters 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Egoism  | Shoeless Bert Cooper, office eccentric, urges everyone to read Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” (1957). In Season 1, Bert tells Don: “You are a productive and reasonable man, and in the end, completely self-interested.” He urges Don to buy a copy of “Atlas Shrugged,” which preaches Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism — that the moral purpose of one’s life is the pursuit of one’s own happiness and self-interest.  

• • Appeasement of jihadists mirrors that of Nazis 
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Liberals confess their intellectual confusion with postmodern toleration. Conservatives confess theirs with faith in tradition and the supernatural. Both appease our enemies. Our scientific-industrial civilization needs Ayn Rand’s philosophy of objectivism in ideas and action.  

• Attack on liberal intellectuals off base 
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I was amused by Stephen Grossman's posturing as one of the Tea Partiers ("Liberal intellectuals have not solved any problems," May 4). There is a natural affection between people with no ideas and those with poorly conceived ones. They tend to converge in rejecting "liberal" values of study, reflection and moderation, along with the recognition of the fact that we're all stuck together in a construct known as a society. If people like Grossman had their way, we'd be worshiping at the altar of 1980s-style greed like Gordon Gecko or Ayn Rand.  

• • Rand’s assessment of America was wrong 
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Personal life  | Rand is wrong in her assessment of the creation of America's abundance. The truly creative minds, the inventors like Whitney, Bell, Edison and the Wrights became wealthy but never amassed huge private fortunes to rival those of robber barons like Astor, Morgan, Carnegie and Rockefeller. These men dealt in commodities such as real estate, railroads, steel and petroleum. Their genius lay in using unethical business practices, oppressing their workers, raping the environment, building monopolies and squeezing every penny out of the system whether they earned it or not.  

• • Progressives hate individual rights 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal  |Objectivist author  | When the latest socialist pie-in-the-sky unravels, as it must, progressives gratefully fall into another coma. They awaken, mercifully free of memory and free to plan other peoples' lives again. Throw the bums out! Vote Tea Party. Get “Atlas Shrugged” and "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal."  

• The right’s big lie 
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By demagoguery, the right wing has sold more than a few on the policies and politics of Ayn Rand and Herbert Hoover. A government of and by the people was not the answer but the problem. As one of their acolytes, Grover Norquist, said, "I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."  

• Return to politics of individual rights 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Objectivist author  | Juanita Schoff ("Founding fathers firmly rooted in faith," Dec. 22) says America's founders were religious. They also wore shoes. True, but coincidental, superficial, not basic. For untold millennia religion imprisoned man in poverty, tyranny, war, and spiritual helplessness. Then the Greeks discovered reason and America's founders created the rational politics of individual rights. America's current enemy is foreign religion. Domestic religions are also the enemy. We must renew the rationally selfish politics of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Read the good book. Read "Atlas Shrugged." Join the Tea Party. Give 'em town hall hell.  

• Everything Bronte is cool again 
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The Fountainhead  | There are quite a few book clubs dedicated to reading the books mentioned in "Lost," including an online club at barnesandnoble.com. I love "Lost," and I love watching closely to see what books they read in each episode [...]. There are 81 books mentioned in the "Lostipedia," including: [....] "The Fountainhead," by Ayn Rand.