Free Republic

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHrTsMLh1sw

Ayn Rand is one of America's great mysteries. She was an amphetamine-addicted author of sub-Dan Brown potboilers, who in her spare time wrote lavish torrents of praise for serial killers and the Bernie Madoff-style embezzlers of her day. She opposed democracy on the grounds that "the masses"—her readers—were "lice" and "parasites" who scarcely deserved to live. Yet she remains one of the most popular writers in the United States, still selling 800,000 books a year from beyond the grave. She regularly tops any list of books that Americans say have most influenced them. Since the great crash of 2008, her...

Whenever Ayn Rand met someone new—an acolyte who’d traveled cross-country to study at her feet, an editor hoping to publish her next novel—she would open the conversation with a line that seems destined to go down as one of history’s all-time classic icebreakers: “Tell me your premises.” Once you’d managed to mumble something halfhearted about loving your family, say, or the Golden Rule, Rand would set about systematically exposing all of your logical contradictions, then steer you toward her own inviolable set of premises: that man is a heroic being, achievement is the aim of life, existence exists, A is...

Despite a number of differences I have with Ayn Rand on issues of religion and philosophy, her 1957 magnum opus, "Atlas Shrugged," definitely steered me away from the leftist upbringing I had, and introduced me to the world of conservative ideas and authors: Ludwig von Mises, Henry Hazlitt, Milton Friedman, Isabel Paterson, and many others. Universally panned by literary critics of the day, "Atlas" was, nevertheless, a bestseller in 1957, and continued to sell about 100,000 copies a year for 51 consecutive years. 52 years later -- just after the inauguration of zerobama -- "Atlas" has apparently tripled its sales...

Particularly valid today, in the age of Obamessiah, Pelosocialist and Reichd. Enjoy watching

Businessmen are favorite villains in popular media, routinely featured as polluters, crooks and murderers in network TV dramas and first-run movies, not to mention novels. Oil company CEOs are hauled before congressional committees whenever fuel prices rise, to be harangued and publicly shamed for the sin of high profits. Genuine cases of wrongdoing like Enron set off witch hunts that drag in prominent achievers like Frank Quattrone and Martha Stewart. By contrast, the heroes in "Atlas Shrugged" are businessmen -- and women. Rand imbues them with heroic, larger-than-life stature in the Romantic mold, for their courage, integrity and ability to...

...There is a special reason why you, the future leaders of the United States Army, need to be philosophically armed today. You are the target of a special attack by the Kantian-Hegelian-collectivist establishment that dominates our cultural institutions at present. You are the army of the last semi-free country left on earth, yet you are accused of being a tool of imperialism--and "imperialism" is the name given to the foreign policy of this country, which has never engaged in military conquest and has never profited from the two world wars, which she did not initiate, but entered and won. (It...

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...

In her 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand imagined a monstrous world in which the laws and the political regime, rather than protecting productive individuals, actually make it easy and legal for the rapacious and the envious to steal from them. Not surprisingly, many producers drop out of this society. In response, politicians warn the remaining producers not to leave their jobs, claiming that it is their duty to serve society. This nightmare scenario is now breaking out across the United States. The victims are physicians. Faced with the high costs of malpractice insurance and bogus lawsuits, plus onerous government...

A Credit to the Corporate Raider Stuart K. Hayashi The media's exploitation of the 2001 corporate scandals in its hysterical (and popular) campaign to defame businesspeople in general harkens back to another anti-capitalist witch hunt they conducted in the 1980s. That era is now pejoratively dubbed "the Decade of Greed," as it saw the proliferation of honest but controversial characters known as "corporate raiders." "Corporate raiders" are the mavericks who launch "hostile takeovers," trying to take over failing mega-corporations for themselves. (Successful companies have higher stock prices and are thus harder to buy out.) To do this in the...

Some time in the 1960s, I believe, the Library of Congress invited Ayn Rand to will the manuscripts of her novels to them. She replied that she was happy to do so. Subsequently, they sent her a form to fill out, in order to make her intention legally binding upon her death. She refused to fill it out, then or later, expressing various doubts about the Library, which she had since come to entertain. When she died in 1982, she willed all of her papers to me, having told me to "do with them whatever you want." 2. For some...