• • • Among the Objectivists 
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Alan Greenspan  |Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |Capitalism  |Individualism  | It’s not easy being a libertarian Ayn Rand buff in New York City, a town where even the rich people are communist sympathizers. At the PTA meeting or the charity gala, you’re almost always the only soul standing up for freedom of choice, unfettered capitalism, drug legalization and the gold standard. And nobody wants to hear it. Happily, the city’s tiny colony of Objectivists, as Rand fans call themselves, manage to find each other: at the Ayn Rand Meet-Up (489 Objectivists and growing), local chapters of the Libertarian Party and monthly meetings of Junto, an Objectivist investing salon hosted by speculator and former hedgefund manager Victor Niederhoffer. The year’s big event: a birthday bash for Rand, who would have turned 107 this month.  

• Promoting Art and Israel 
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The Global Arts Group worked with [David] Datuna to bring his “Steve Jobs-Ayn Rand” portrait to SCOPE Miami, an art show, late last year.  

• Romney Wins but Takes a Beating 
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Individualism  | Rick Santorum has a lot going for him, most especially a deep identification with and caring for the working class, for the displaced and unempowered people who once worked in steel mills and factories and have seen it all go away. He is a Catholic who sees society not as an agglomeration of random Randian individualists but as part of a community, part of a whole. He cares about the American family and walks the walk.  

• Litigating for Liberty 
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[Institute for Justice chief Chip] Mellor traces his political evolution back to his days as a student protester at Ohio State University in the late 1960s. This was the time of the Vietnam War and Mr. Mellor, while marching against it, had the “epiphany of my life,” he says. “It became undeniably obvious to me that both the left, which I was a part of, and the right were really after the same thing, which was power. And I didn’t want any part of that.” So began an intellectual odyssey that took him from Whittaker Chambers to Ayn Rand and Friedrich Hayek and led to law school at the University of Denver.  

• • Why Ron Paul Matters 
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Individualism  |Syndicated  | As for the Ron Paul newsletters, the best response was by my colleague David Boaz when the subject was raised publicly in 2008. About them he wrote in the Cato Institute’s blog: “Those words are not libertarian words. Maybe they reflect ‘paleoconservative’ ideas, though they’re not the language of Burke or even Kirk. But libertarianism is a philosophy of individualism, tolerance, and liberty. As Ayn Rand wrote, ‘Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.’ Making sweeping, bigoted claims about all blacks, all homosexuals, or any other group is indeed a crudely primitive collectivism. Libertarians should make it clear that the people who wrote those things are not our comrades, not part of our movement, not part of the tradition of John Locke, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, and Robert Nozick. Shame on them.”  

• Exchanges Aim for Northern Exposure 
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Farmers under the old system could only sell their wheat to the Canadian Wheat Board. Now, under new legislation that went into effect on Dec. 16, they can sell wheat to the market like farmers in the U.S. and will want to use futures contracts to lock in returns and hedge exposure to grain prices. Farmers also will be able to sell to the wheat board. Days before the law took effect, farmer Jim Pallister drove seven hours from his 14,000-acre farm in Manitoba to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, to hear ICE executive Brad Vannan and several economists discuss the new market. Frustrated over the monopoly and inspired by the novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand, Mr. Pallister stopped growing wheat three years ago. He now may add it back into his crop, preferring the futures contract ICE will launch next month.  

• Stranger In a Strange Land 
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Book review: Estonia, by Alexander Theroux.
The flak is not confined to Estonia. Other targets include Israel, Ayn Rand, America’s treatment of the Arabs (positively Nazi-like, apparently) and the “dunce” George W. Bush, a “smirking, bowlegged . . . frat-boy” who reduces the usually inventive Mr. Theroux to cliché.  

• • The Tedium Is the Message 
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Atlas Shrugged  | He won’t appreciate the comparison, given the inclusion of a paper-thin, arch-libertarian hypervillain in “Blink of an Eye,” but there is something of the Ayn Rand in [William] Cohen. Whittaker Chambers’s coruscating review of Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” applies here: “In this fiction everything, everybody, is either all good or all bad, without any of those intermediate shades which, in life, complicate reality and perplex the eye that seeks to probe it truly.”  

• • Occupying vs. Tea Partying 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  | When you look for defining values in Occupy Wall Street, you discover only a disparate set of competing demands. Many are against capitalism per se and wealth-creation in general. They want to redistribute the pie, not grow it. [....] I can’t help but think of the fate of the Twentieth Century Motor Company in Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” where the edict “to each according to their contribution” was replaced with “to each according to their need.” The disastrous results left an entire community—the 99%—jobless, angry and destitute.  

• • Steve Jobs Made Insanely Great but Transient Things — Letters to the Editor 
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Anthem  | [Steve Jobs] needed the protections of private-property rights (intellectual property in this case), access to financial partners and the magical forces of markets to bring his ideas and products to the world. What a contrast to the society portrayed in “Anthem,” the dystopian novella by Ayn Rand. Jobs’s anthem was one of hope. But interestingly, hope that is founded squarely on free markets and individual liberty, by rights endowed by the Creator, among them “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”  

• ‘If You Love Me’ 
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Atlas Shrugged  | [A] reader thought Obama might have been inspired by the only book in history to outsell "Atlas Shrugged." John 14:15 quotes Jesus as saying: "If you love me, keep my commands."  

• • Freedom Doesn’t Mean an Absence of Responsible Values 
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It wasn't the abandonment of religious principles but rather the abandonment of individual responsibility caused by government welfare programs that caused the breakdown in Western societies. Moral precepts can be ascertained without the benefit of religion, as evidenced by Aristotle and Ayn Rand, but once people seriously believe that they are entitled to a free lunch and something for nothing, then the downward spiral begins.  

• • Give Two Cheers for Calvin Coolidge 
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Alan Greenspan  |Egoism  | The experiences we have had under Presidents Coolidge and Bush should prove to all but the most ideological the need for the government to provide guidelines and limits. Unlimited selfishness only works in Ayn Rand novels—regardless of what Chairman Alan Greenspan believed while running the Federal Reserve.  

• A Scary Peek Under Energy’s Cover 
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Atlas Shrugged  | After reading Energy Secretary Steven Chu's unabashed admission that, "We are taking away a choice that continues to let people waste their own money" [...] , I had to reconfirm that the quote was indeed from the Journal and not "Atlas Shrugged."  

• Atlas Shrugged. Will Regulators? 
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Atlas Shrugged  | Reference in title and graphic only.







 

• • • Call It ‘Atlas Snubbed’ 
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Atheism  |Capitalism  |Egoism  |Personal life  |Inaccurate  |Syndicated  | Love for Ayn Rand goes unrequited. Libertarians love her, but she rejected them as “emotional hippies of the right.” Conservatives love her, but she opposed Ronald Reagan, saying, “His likeliest motive for entering the Presidential race is power lust.” Right-leaning Christians love her, but she was an atheist, an abortion supporter and a champion of the anti-Christian ideal that selfishness is a virtue. She also called religion a “sign of a psychological weakness.” Her fans -- including Republican Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, talk radio’s Rush Limbaugh and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas -- would be crushed to learn she might never love them back, either.  

• • Debt: We Aren’t Thinking Very Clearly 
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All of these numbers bandied about have little meaning to most people. Someone needs to calculate what the tax rates would need to be for all current tax categories to balance the budget. People would be shocked at the rates that would be required to balance the current budget. Only at that time, those in denial (most people) would understand that spending will need to be cut dramatically, no matter what. This is a good time to remember Ayn Rand’s quote: “You can avoid reality, but you can not avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.”  

• Home Builders Lobby Defends Government Guarantees 
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Ayn Rand Institute  |Capitalism  | You would think that a district that is as conservative as ours (and the home of the Ayn Rand Institute) could send a genuine free-market capitalist to Washington. It is hoped that Republicans will wake up and replace Rep. Campbell as our Republican candidate in the 2012 election.  

• Darkness Too Visible 

Books We can Recommend for Young Adult Readers. [....] Old School by Tobias Wolff (2004). Set in a smart New England prep school in the 1960s, this story of a young man’s search for authentic identity captures the mixture of longing and ambition that causes so many adolescents to try, if only for a time, to shape themselves along other people’s lines. Here, the admired models are writers—Ernest Hemingway, Ayn Rand, Robert Frost—who visit the school and for whom the young protagonist contorts himself in painful and revealing ways.  

• • The Enduring Appeal of the Apocalypse 
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Atlas Shrugged  | A similar article was published on June 7 in New Scientist.
In most doomsday scenarios, destruction is followed by redemption, giving us a sense of both fear and hope. The ostensible “end” is usually seen as a transition to a new beginning and a better life to come. [....] Consider John Galt, the hero of Ayn Rand’s anticollectivist novel “Atlas Shrugged” and an inspiration for many of today’s tea-party activists. In the book’s final apocalyptic scene, the heroine Dagny Taggart turns to Galt and pronounces, “It’s the end.” He corrects her: “It’s the beginning.”