[longshadow]

Your bet has become moot. Didn't take long.

Predictable, though. Authoritarians just can't sit by while anyone says anything nice about Rand.

By the way, did you ever read Rand's commencement address at West Point? Great stuff.

I've heard about it, but have never read it...... until NOW....

[RJCogburn]

Aw, don't be too hard on CJ and Kevbo. Their predictable appearance on this thread is a tad suggestive of characters in a Rand novel, IMO.

Maybe sometime in the near future we can start a thread....something like who in a Rand novel does CJ or Kevbo most remind you?

[Odyssey-x]

The biggest problem with Rand is she is a dialectisit in the Grand ol' tradition of Hegel and Marx. She's just a right wing dialectisist. Dialectisits like to pretend that the dualities like "reason and emotion" , "theory and practice" , "government and the governed" are hindering the progress of society and can be eliminated so as to create a perfect society. She also takes a natural rights approach to everything which is not going to convince people who have different metaphysical principles, especially the devoutly religious.

Far Far better of a conservative is Ludwig Von Mises who basically argued for the free market not from a natural rights approach but from the idea that socialists always would get the opposite of what they were aiming at because of problems of information, calculation and valuation. All his predictions about what would cause the systematic failure of communism came true and he made these back in the early 1920s when Russia had just had it's revolution. He didn't base his arguments on the idea that Communism is immoral, etc. He just said that it was broken in that it would fail miserably to accomplish it's ends for various systemic reasons that he explains in great detail. Go read "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth" over at Mises.org and you will be amazed at his brilliance.