Free Republic

At first glance, a lot of the social problems and resource waste emerging from government intervention seem pretty easy to fix: the government should just stop doing whatever it is doing that is creating the problems and the waste. The stubborn persistence of institutions and organizations that keep societies poor is a vexing problem for social scientists. In Political Capitalism, the economist Randall Holcombe takes on this problem by analyzing “political capitalism” as a distinct economic system with its own logic and features rather than as some kind of midpoint between capitalism and socialism. As he points out, people do...

As they plough through their GCSE revision, UK students planning to take politics A-level in the autumn can comfort themselves with this thought: come September, they will be studying one thinker who does not belong in the dusty archives of ancient political theory but is achingly on trend. For the curriculum includes a new addition: the work of Ayn Rand.

Hey team - I'm going to make a suggestion. That now is not the time to be sloppily bandying about Atlas Shrugged. It's a pretty clear concept, and I don't think it's good to be calling 'not buying newspapers' the same thing as 'shrugging.' It's the left's job to mutiliate words and concepts, not ours. But instead of harping on that, I'm going to take another road. "I don't believe it matters to me- that they're going to destroy it. Maybe it hurts so much that I don't even know I'm hurt. But I don't think so. If you want...

Hollywood won't remake The Fountainhead. They'll remake Robin Hood over again until the message sinks in. This is the problem. Liberal patriarchs allocating their resources. Monopolizing a medium. Unworthy of continued existence. Let's end the business. No more talk of revolutionizing it. We don't need them anymore. Our dollars only strengthen them. We're all nuts. We must be. For thinking that they have an agenda. Every message, every virtue, every scene – meant to indoctrinate and to normalize an idea into the status quo. Like ironing wrinkles in, not out. The cloth of our minds, stained. Any doubt about Hollywood's...

The number are in, and paleo-capitalist Ayn Rand’s hot again. “Atlas Shrugged” is selling at a pace not seen since the novel was published in 1957. Sales of her other major novel, “The Fountainhead,” are up as well. It’s clear that the recession and a very liberal political leadership have caused the renewed interest. Economist Stephen Moore recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the Obama strategy mirrors the plot of “Atlas Shrugged. “The more incompetent you are in business, the more handouts the politicians will bestow on you,” Moore said. I recently re-read “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead.”...

It's a response that might incite laughter, as it did from conservative pundit Monica Crowley and MSNBC paleocon talker Pat Buchanan. According to Newsweek's Eleanor Clift, the current problems facing the country and President Barack Obama are due to capitalism. Clift, appearing on the syndicated April 26 "The McLaughlin Group" gave Obama high marks for his first hundred days and said Republicans were misguided for attacking the growth of the size of government. "I give him a B+ because there's a lot of outcomes that haven't come in yet," Clift said. "But look, this isn't about the failure of government...

February 2, 2009 -- Ayn Rand was born on February 2, 1905; in 2009 we are sorry to be seeing the foresight she had of her future and our present. Is Atlas shrugging? Will Obama be the real-life Mr. Thompson? Join with us to celebrate Ayn Rand's great achievements and the legacy that she left us all! Just look at the influence Rand has had on today's world: Her strong moral defense of freedom and capitalism inspired many who have fought over the years for limited government, individual liberty and free markets. Her great novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged,...

I was confronted by three strands of cultural connective tissue this week which portend the death of artistic expression. No, it has nothing to do with the First Amendment or government suppression. It has everything to do with the tearing down of greatness and the worship of mediocrity by the dominant cultural elite. First, Terminal 5 at John F. Kennedy International Airport. Second, the Zurich Opera's production of Richard Wagner's Parsifal. And third, that gaping hole in the ground where New York's World Trade Center once stood

If you need an alternative to watching the bootlicking during the unclothed emperor's coronation tomorrow... The Fountainhead is airing on TCM (Turner Movies) at 7:30 a.m. Link to TCM overview

Page 103, Chapter "Peter Keating". Ellsworth Toohey is speaking to a crowd of striking workers while Peter Keating and Toohey's niece, Catherine, are listening to the loudspeaker outside the hall: It was not a voice, it was a miracle. It unrolled as a velvet banner. It spoke English words, but the resonant clarity of each syllable made it sound like a new language spoken for the first time. It was the voice of a giant. Keating stood, his mouth open. He did not hear what the voice was saying. He heard the beauty of the sounds without meaning. He felt...

Video clip of Howard Roark (Gary Cooper) giving his speech in the courtroom in The Fountainhead. Very applicable in these pre-election days, considering that the "parasites," collectivists, and redistributors have a shot at ruining this country in less than a week.

February 2, 2007 -- Ayn Rand was born on February 2, 1905; in 2007 we celebrate her great achievements and the legacy that she left us all! Rand has had a significant influence on today's world: Her strong moral defense of freedom and capitalism inspired many who have fought over the years for limited government, individual liberty and free markets. Her great novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, show the terrible consequences of the wrong philosophy on both individuals and societies and present the vision of happy, joyous lives in a benevolent society that is the consequence of human achievement,...

Visionary student architect Howard Roark strives to break away from the classically inspired designs of ordinary architects. His unwillingness to compromise, despite the advice of his ambitious friend, Peter Keating, causes him to be kicked out of school, but earns him a job with Henry Cameron, a talented architect, who also believes that form must follow function. After Cameron is completely destroyed by the system, Roark sets up his own company, but gets only an occasional job. Roark is offered a commission to build a bank building, but when he learns that the bank wants him to add some classical...

Ayn Rand at 100: The Moral Defense of Freedom By Edward Hudgins ehudgins@objectivistcenter.org She was born on February 2, 1905, in Russia. At the age of nine she decided she wanted to be a writer. As a teenager she lived through the horrors of the communist revolution, and at age twenty-one she made her way to the United States. She learned English and became a best-selling author; her books still sell hundreds of thousands of copies a year and in 1991, over a decade after her death, a Library of Congress survey found that her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, was...

just some thoughts to think about:

 In Praise of Mel Gibson Mel Gibson is a hero. I do not mean he is my hero, or a hero to any particular group, but symbolically, he is an American hero. There is another symbolic American hero named Howard Roark, who, though a fictional character, is the same kind of hero as Mel Gibson.The author of the book in which Howard Roark appears is another of those same kind of heroes. Her name was Ayn Rand, and the name of the book is The Fountainhead.Ayn Rand would not have liked Mel Gibson's movie. Ayn Rand was an atheist. Mel...

Meet Joe Dirt Stuart K. Hayashi In 2001, comedian David Spade came out with a movie titled "The Adventures of Joe Dirt." It now appears that the film was about Joe Conason, the author of "Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth" and an editorialist for the liberal-biased Salon.com. In the person of Brad Pitt, you've already Met Joe Black. Now Meet the Real Joe Dirt. His book purports to expose how right-wingers harness the corporate media to brainwash society. Instead of demonstrating such, however, Joe is too busy flinging his Dirt around. In two...

"Don't set out to raze all shrines — you'll frighten men. Enshrine mediocrity — and the shrines are razed . . . Kill by laughter. Laughter is an instrument of human joy. Learn to use it as a weapon of destruction. Turn it into a sneer. It's simple. Tell them to laugh at virtue. Don't let anything remain sacred in a man's soul — and his soul won't be sacred to him. Kill reverence and you've killed the hero in man" In a famous speech from Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead (p. 637), arch-villain Ellsworth Toohey explains one way to seize...

"Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men." Thus declared Howard Roark in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. In the context of this statement, the private-public distinction is employed not in politicoeconomic terms (which are, however, derivative), but in an individual, ethical sense, pertaining to the objectively correct atmosphere which one should experience in and away from the company of other men. Any rational treatise, including this one, will undertake a definition of terms prior conducting their...