• • Why Conservative Bestsellers Are Widely Ignored 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  | [Mark Levin] seems to be under the misimpression that all utopianism is statist. “Utopianism’s authority... knows no definable limits,” he writes. “Utopianism relies on deceit, propaganda, dependence, intimidation, and force... In utopia, rule by masterminds is both necessary and necessarily primitive, for it excludes so much that is known to man and about man... Utopianism requires power to be concentrated in a central authority with maximum latitude to transform and control.” So many counterexamples come to mind. Has he never heard of Ayn Rand? In her utopian novel Atlas Shrugged, the plot unfolds with all the capitalists in society withdrawing to a hidden Colorado valley where private property is sacrosanct, the initiation of force is prohibited, and sex among consenting adults proceeds after a completely rational assessment of partners. There are all sorts of reasons Galt’s Gulch wouldn’t work. But no one can say that it relies on a central authority with “maximum latitude to control.” And it is anything but statist!  

• 12 Hours at CPAC, the ‘Mardi Gras of the Right’ 
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At lunch, I plopped down in the hotel lobby next to the Shadrix family, up from Raleigh, N.C., as they tucked into Chipotle burritos. They capture the CPAC demographic pretty well -- white, well-educated, strong Christian values, happy to chat with a perfect stranger. [....] Wendy Shadrix stopped me as I stood up to leave. She and Tom chose to home-school Shawn and his sister, Mikayla, and she knew how home-schooling evangelical Christians are depicted in the “liberal” media. She hoped I won’t caricature her, she said. So here are the facts: Shawn and Mikayla have read Shakespeare and The Voyage of the Beagle under their mom’s tutelage. They have not read Ayn Rand. They are bright, charming, look-you-in-the-eye-when-making-conversation kind of kids.  

• For Critics of Libertarianism, It’s Always 1964 
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Critics of American libertarianism clarify nothing by acting as if the early 1960s are the only prism through which libertarian ideas should be evaluated. Never mentioned is how much misery the application of libertarian ideas could’ve prevented at other historical moments -- as the slave trade began, for example (something [Jonathan] Chait’s nemesis Ayn Rand would’ve objected to in the most strenuous terms imaginable) or during the rise of Prohibition.  

• The Attempt to Pin Ron Paul’s Shortcomings on Libertarianism 
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David Boaz wrote a 2008 post titled "Ron Paul's Ugly Newsletters" that included the following passage: “[....] 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.”  

• • Listening in on When an Acclaimed Director and Video-Game Maker Meet 
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BioShock  |Atlas Shrugged  | [Ken] Levine, who was influenced by everything from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged for BioShock to Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City for next year’s BioShock Infinite frets, “I’m always worried about crawling up my own asshole and getting so into the things that I’m interested in that I forget I have to keep this interesting for an audience, while still retaining those things [I like to delve into] like objectivism and art deco.” At one point in the podcast, he admits that he wanted to include the 50-page speech at the end of Atlas Shrugged in BioShock.  

• • Religious Structures Around the World 

The Fountainhead  | Deeply rooted in tradition, the religious buildings of the past were dominant, didactic figures -- in social life but also in architecture, as made clear by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s claim that architecture “compels and glorifies ... where there is nothing to glorify there can be no architecture.” A new point of view emerged in 1920s New York City, setting of The Fountainhead, with Howard Roark’s Temple Dedicated to the Human Spirit. It seemed both religious buildings specifically and architecture generally were on the threshold of being democratized. Outside of literary fiction, though, the actual process of change didn’t take off until a couple of decades later.  

• How Much of Rick Perry’s Secret Energy Plan Will Be Revealed Today? 
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Atlas Shrugged  | He’ll just pull back some regulations, and poof, 1.2 million jobs created and energy independence. It’s no wonder he appeared not to care about the outcome of the debate: he’s got John Galt’s motor!  

• • Hey, Conservatives: It’s Safe to Go to the Movies Again 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  | Atlas Shrugged made only $4.6 million on a reported budget of $20 million, and The Undefeated made only $116,000 on a reported budget of $1 million. Granted, both films received mixed reviews, at best. Nonetheless, as conservative film critic Christian Toto pointed out in a recent Daily Caller article titled “Why don’t conservatives support conservative films?,” the popularity of Rand’s original Atlas Shrugged novel and of Sarah Palin as subject matter should presumably have led to greater enthusiasm among conservatives for these projects. Yet they didn’t.  

• • Perry’s Problem: A Pitch That Contradicts Decades of GOP Rhetoric 
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Atlas Shrugged  | It’s no wonder that [Mitt] Romney, successful businessman and one term governor, is the preferred candidate on the economy, and regarded as having superior experience when compared to a rival who has spent his whole career inside the confines of government. Inserted into an Ayn Rand novel, [Rick] Perry would likely as not wind up a villain, the kind of pol with whom Hank Rearden regrets having to deal, and who gives a rival of Dagney Taggart a taxpayer-funded subsidy that confers an unfair advantage. Meanwhile, Romney would be the ambitious self-made man who suffered a regrettable bout of moral confusion, like Francisco d’Anconia or Gail Wynand -- the sort of character whose unseemly actions are mourned but forgiven. And Herman Cain would be Ellis Wyatt, a likable hero, but ultimately incidental to the plot.  

• European Soccer Needs a Dose of American-Style Socialism 
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Perhaps sport is a safety valve for Americans where they can blow off a little socialist steam. People spend a few hours watching an arena of social justice, and then fully refreshed, they get back in the capitalist game. For Europeans, it’s the reverse. Soccer is a chance to release their inner Ayn Rand--before once again becoming good welfarists.  

• • • Ayn Rand vs. America 
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Atheism  |Ayn Rand Institute  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Individualism  |Onkar Ghate  |Personal life  |Image  | A few weeks ago, Maureen Fiedler, the producer of the weekly radio show, Interfaith Voices, asked me to participate in a debate with Onkar Ghate, a senior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute. I eagerly accepted. I wanted to hear how a follower of Rand would defend proposals to cut Medicare, Medicaid, and food stamps while exempting the wealthy from paying their fair share.In one sense there was agreement. Maureen, a Sister of Loretto, argued that Republican budget proposals turned their back on Christ’s admonition to care for “the least among us,” the hungry, the sick, the homeless. Ghate did not dispute that. Rand, he said, was an atheist who did not believe in government efforts to help those in need.Ghate countered Sister Maureen’s religious position with a moral argument. He maintained that redistribution of wealth was unfair to the rich and weakened the ambition of the rest. I wasn’t surprised by this position, since I’d heard it repeatedly during the fight on welfare reform. What I did find startling was Ghate’s insistence that just as there should be a separation of church and state, so there should be a separation of economics and state. That notion really got me thinking.  

• Picture of the Day: A Tea Party ‘TV Show’ 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  | Entertainment media seems to be a popular new model for tea partiers. In the fall of 2009, former House majority leader Dick Armey’s group FreedomWorks promoted a tea-party documentary. More recently, that group and other tea partiers promoted the feature film Atlas Shrugged: Part 1.  

• Libertarians Aren’t All Selfish Jerks 
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Egoism  | There are a lot of libertarians working on issues that could be construed as self-interested - lowering taxes is the obvious example. There are even some hard core Ayn Rand sycophants who embrace little more than themselves. Find that repugnant? Have at ‘em! But you’re just misinformed if you think that libertarians as a whole care for nothing more than their self-interest. Countless libertarians are working to advance the freedom and fair-treatment of people other than themselves.  

• Picking 25 Books That Shaped America 
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Interview with Thomas C. Foster, author of Twenty-Five Books That Shaped America.
[Q:] Were there any books you wanted to include but didn’t? [A:] I get into AP English classes on a fairly regular basis, and there was a class over in East Kentwood, right by Grand Rapids, and I said, “Ok, I’m going to do this book on 25 American books—what should I include?” And I got the usual smattering of answers—everything from Gatsby to Ayn Rand to Chuck Palahniuk.  

• • ‘Republican Virtues’? I Don’t Think So 
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Egoism  | I’ve been mulling over a column by David Brooks on “The Politics of Solipsism” for the past couple of weeks. What he wrote is nervy to say the least. He argues that America has lost the republican virtues on which it was founded, namely, the curbing of self-centeredness in the interest of the public good. I too am a fan of Cicero, but Brooks fails in one of the primary republican virtues by not forthrightly acknowledging that Republicans, the adherents of Ayn Rand, are the ones who have most blatantly deserted these same virtues. Self interest has center stage on their platform  

• • Whittaker Chambers Pans ‘Atlas Shrugged’ 
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Atlas Shrugged  | Great find from Ben Smith, who links to Whittaker Chambers's brutal takedown of Ayn Rand's 'Atlas Shrugged' in National Review in 1957 and notes that Chambers could really write.  

• The view from somewhere 
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Political labels are impossible to escape entirely in this corner of the blogosphere, if only because those of us engaged in a game with different objects are constantly beset upon by people who don’t understand them. But the reader earnestly attempting to size me up and assess where I’m coming from is owed a few words about influences far more powerful than my ideological proclivities. Attending Catholic School in grades K - 12, I also read Ayn Rand at an impressionable age. I like to think that the countervailing forces resulted in just the right amount of guilt.  

• • How skyscrapers can save the city 
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The Fountainhead  |Individualism  | Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead is believed to be loosely based on the early life of Sullivan’s apprentice Frank Lloyd Wright. Sullivan and Wright are depicted as lone eagles, Gary Cooper heroes, paragons of individualism. They weren’t. They were great architects deeply enmeshed in an urban chain of innovation.  

• The howling wilderness of carbon credits 
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Capitalism  | Think of a carbon credit as property in a free market economy -- Ayn Rand, meet Global Warming.  

• • The rise of the new global elite 
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Alan Greenspan  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  | You might say that the American plutocracy is experiencing its John Galt moment. Libertarians (and run-of-the-mill high-school nerds) will recall that Galt is the plutocratic hero of Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged. Tired of being dragged down by the parasitic, envious, and less talented lower classes, Galt and his fellow capitalists revolted, retreating to “Galt’s Gulch,” a refuge in the Rocky Mountains. There, they passed their days in secluded natural splendor, while the rest of the world, bereft of their genius and hard work, collapsed. [....] This plutocratic fantasy is, of course, just that: no matter how smart and innovative and industrious the super-elite may be, they can’t exist without the wider community.