• What Would Be Creepier: President Santorum or President Paul? A TNR Survey. 

Capitalism  | Michael Kazin: In the creepy sweepstakes, I vote for Rick: Paul would let us all smoke dope, keep our shoes on when we go through airport security, and would not blow up the Mideast by starting a war with Iran. Santorum would outlaw birth control pills, if he could, and basically shares most of Paul’s Ayn Randian views on the economy. Of course, neither has any chance of winning the nomination.  

• • Over-Rated Thinkers 

Atlas Shrugged  | Ayn Rand has earned her presence on this list by the astonishing persistence of her theories, which seem to have attained particular volume as of late, receiving endorsement from everyone from American Enterprise Institute President Arthur Brooks to Representative Paul Ryan (who supposedly requires his staffers to read Atlas Shrugged) to Wall Street Journal economics writer Stephen Moore (“‘Atlas Shrugged’: From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years,” he wrote). Despite the fact that Rand’s worldview is a crackpot Manicheanism, in which the world is divided between virtuous, productive individuals and lazy parasites, Rand’s hold on American conservatism continues to grow, as if real thinking is ever compatible with a cult.  

• • Republicans Used to at Least Talk About Poverty. What Changed? 
,
Whereas [Newt] Gingrich had GOPers read [Marvin] Olasky’s book, [Paul] Ryan suggests, according to New York magazine, that his staff members read Ayn Rand, who was not known (and proudly so) for her warm heart.  

• • A Paul Ryan Campaign? Are Republicans Out of Their Minds? 
,
Atlas Shrugged  | Aside from the laurels he has won by putting together a budget proposal that reflects the long-frustrated conservative goal of demolishing the New Deal/Great Society safety net once and for all, Ryan is also beloved of neoconservatives struggling to rebuff resurgent neo-isolationism in the GOP, and he is a faithful ally of social conservatives as well. And what libertarian can’t help but feel good about a congressman who reportedly has made Atlas Shrugged required reading for his staff?  

• • We’re Being Downgraded For The Wrong Reasons 
,
No other advanced country has a major political party influenced by supply-side economics and the moral teachings of Ayn Rand, and therefore, no other major political party can match the GOP’s theological opposition to revenue.  

• Paul Ryan Exposes Himself 
,
Ryan has carefully nurtured his deficit hawk image by expressing his Randian ideology in the high-minded language of the establishment.  

• The Good News in the Atlanta and DC School Cheating Scandals 
,
Ayn Rand Institute  |Capitalism  | Other than lunatic objectivists and Wall Street water-carriers, nobody reacted to Madoff, Enron, or WorldCom by calling for less enforcement and public reporting of information. Instead, they rightly called for more.  

• Disorder in the Court 
,
By the early ’80s, with Reagan in the White House, conservatives were more interested in transforming the legal culture and the courts than in internecine squabbles. The founding proposal of the Federalist Society, created in 1982, suggests just how eager conservatives were to paper over their differences. As Steven M. Teles relates in The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement, the proposal stressed the importance of avoiding factionalism among “members who span a broad ideological spectrum which includes traditionalists, fusionist conservatives, libertarians, objectivists, classical liberals, and Straussians.” It even recommended that student chapters “not use the adjective ‘conservative’” because “there is no need to become involved in disputes among conservatives, libertarians and other factions about what they call themselves.”  

• The Most Admirable Thing About the Current Mood in the Republican Party 
,
Inaccurate  | For a political party that seems to derive its ideology from Ayn Rand’s embrace of heedless ambition, the Republicans are going through an unexpected Ferdinand the Bull phase. Many of the GOP’s top presidential prospects prefer smelling the flowers—or taking a New Jersey state helicopter to a son’s baseball game—to becoming Teddy Roosevelt’s man in the arena, scrapping for every vote in the Iowa caucuses.  

• • Ayn Rand’s Pseudo-Philosophy 
,
Image  | One of the many hilarious things about Rand is her philosophical crankery. I didn’t get into this issue in my review about Randism, because the point of the piece was to focus primarily on her political impact, but her fraudulence in this realm is pretty striking. She was a true amateur who insisted on seeing herself as the greatest human being who ever lived because she was almost completely unfamiliar with the entire philosophical canon. A pulp screenwriter who had read a tiny bit of philosophy -- about as much as an average undergrad at a liberal arts college -- she developed wild delusions about her place in intellectual history, delusions that managed to seduce the members of her cult.  

• The misguided liberal obsession with school integration 
,
Atlas Shrugged  | A perusal of [Siegfried] Engelmann’s Teaching Needy Kids in Our Backward System shows a callous dismissal of his findings by the Ford Foundation, National Institute of Education and Department of Health, Education and Welfare, on premises so shoddy they recall the endless submission of Rearden Metal to “further tests” in Atlas Shrugged.  

• The WSJ edit page uses predator satiation 
,
It’s like the [Wall Street]Journal, which is itself my favorite target, held a convention of my favorite targets. [....] You have Donald Luskin, last seen calling me a “lying scumbag,” defending Ayn Rand against her unnamed critics.  

• The House GOP vs. the deficit grand bargain 
,
As I argued in a Newsweek column, when [Paul] Ryan invokes the need to avert a fiscal crisis, he is not talking about the numerical gap between revenue and outlays. He is invoking his Randian belief that collectivism is doomed to lead to societal collapse.  

• Ideas rule the world 
,
Book review: The Neoconservative Persuasion: Selected Essays, 1942-2009, by Irving Kristol.
[Irving Kristol’s] resistance to the right was, in large measure, sociological. Voting for Nixon, he joked, was “the equivalent of a Jew ostentatiously eating pork on Yom Kippur.” He simply could not identify with the movement—or its constituencies, those Southern revanchists, Ayn Rand freaks, pre-Vatican II Catholics, or Roosevelt-loathing WASPs. His intimate circle had loudly announced its allergy to the new conservatism.  

• • Dixie Madison: Republicans want Wisconsin‘s economy to become just like the South’s 
,
Capitalism  | Scott Walker is hardly alone among Midwestern Republican governors in pursuing an agenda that combines business-tax cuts and other incentives with attacks on public investments and Southern-style hostility to unions. [....] Why is this model of economic growth so appealing to the Tea Party? For one, it tends to jibe very well with the Ayn Randian belief in producerism: the idea that “job creators”—business owners—are the only source of economic growth in society, and that everyone else—the workers, government employees, and the poor—are just “useless eaters” shackling those who exercise individual initiative. While many Democrats are baffled by Scott Walker’s attack on the unions—shouldn’t he be focused on jobs rather than eliminating workers’ protections? they ask—the fact is that today’s conservatives believe this is the right and only way to create jobs.  

• • • Why I care about Ayn Rand 
,
Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  | The whole point of my focus on Rand has been to call attention to those elements of her philosophy that have been absorbed by the conservative movement. Her lionization of the rich, her abhorrence of redistribution, and her general inverted Marxist political-economic model are precisely the areas of her contemporary influence. When I point out that Paul Ryan is deeply influenced by Rand’s philosophy, I am not suggesting he distrusts physics or abhors Mozart. I’m trying to help explain Ryan’s public philosophy.  

• • Paul Ryan and Ayn Rand 
,
Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |Capitalism  |Individualism  | I think at this point trying to deny [Paul] Ryan’s attachment to Rand is pretty hard to sustain. He’s not requiring his staffers to read Ran because he thinks they need a good love story. And given that it’s not just a teenage fascination but the continuing embodiment of his public philosophy, it’s worth noting again that Rand is a twisted, hateful thinker.  

• Mean regression: The Tea Party is turning states into little Ayn Rand laboratories 
,
It’s hard to imagine a more enthusiastic endorsement of the old moonlight-and-magnolias approach of making lower business costs—including taxes, wages, and all those inconvenient regulations aimed at protecting the workforce or the environment—the sole strategy for economic development, at the expense of other public and private goods.  

• Sympathy for Rand Paul 
,
Atheism  | The ugliest, most illiberal political ad of the year may be this one, from Kentucky Democrat Jack Conway. [....] I actually don’t doubt the implication of the ad, namely that Rand Paul harbors a private contempt for Christianity. He’s a devotee of Ayn Rand, who is a fundamentally anti-Christian thinker. And much of Paul’s history, which he is frantically covering up in an attempt to pass himself off as a typical Republican, suggests among other things a deep skepticism about religion.  

• Hot mess: Why are conservatives so radical about the climate? 
,
Atlas Shrugged  | Destruction of the planet’s fundamental physical systems isn’t creative—it’s just destruction. If Microsoft disappears, innovators will take its place. If Arctic ice disappears, no young John Galt is going to remake it in his garage. The essential question is: Is the environment a subset of the economy, or is it the other way around? Or, more combatively, you really think you can out-argue physics? Hayek’s good, but atmospheric chemistry is a tough opponent.