A colleague points out this unusually slick and funny anti-government song parody from last year, Tim Hawkins’ “The Government Can,” based on “The Candy Man.” Given how much mileage the left gets out of priding itself on having the edge in hipness and irony, we need more of this. A half-century ago, they thought they [...]
Even though this “Month of Ayn Rand” I declared saw me reading a Rand speech at Yale and mentioning her frequently (though not in as much depth as I’d planned) on this blog, it’s worth mentioning again that I’m not an Objectivist. Indeed, as I noted last month, in this clip, at the four-minute mark, [...]
Today, with a Tea Party occurring at 11am in front of New York City Hall, I’m reminded that fat statist bastard Mike Huckabee said one reason he skipped the CPAC event this year is that the libertarians are taking it over, and they’re not real Republicans. He says he prefers the Tea Parties. [...]
Tomorrow, Saturday, Feb. 27 — one year after the small first New York City Tea Party protest at City Hall that led to a gigantic, underreported Tea Party protest there a month or so later (both of which I attended) — there will be an 11am Tea Party anniversary rally, once more at City Hall. [...]
It’s disappointing that a movie of Atlas Shrugged with Angelina Jolie didn’t quite happen — and that we’ll never see the ad campaign that likely would have resulted, with Jolie accompanied by the question “WHO IS JOHN GALT?” In what may be just an odd coincidence, Jolie is now being seen in ads for her [...]
Ayn Rand’s novel about a collapsing, overregulated economy, Atlas Shrugged, sold over a half-million copies in 2009 alone — and that was over twice the previous one-year record, set in 2008, according to the Ayn Rand Institute. This suggests that the narrative of our economic woes being caused by unregulated capitalist greed has not fully [...]
With my Italian libertarian economist friend, I rewatched the very libertarian Italian movie We the Living, adapted in 1942 without Rand’s authorization (but with her retroactive approval decades later) from her early novel about a young woman in Rand’s native Soviet Union dreaming of escape and torn between two lovers, one anti-communist but driven to [...]
Here’s something with political ramifications we can discuss tonight at Manhattan Project (6:30 at Merchants NY East) or tomorrow after my Rand speech at Yale (6pm at Harkness Hall, Room 119): nerd-beloved director Kevin Smith was ousted from a Southwest Airlines flight for being too fat. A side effect of creeping health-nannyism, or exactly [...]
Examining Ayn Rand’s novels with fresh eyes all these years after reading them in college, I can’t help but be struck by how pervasive and obvious the (at least superficially unlibertarian) ethos of the “bdsm community” (fans of bondage, domination, and sexual sadism and masochism) is in her work. It’s an accusation routinely leveled [...]
Well, the Phillips Foundation gathering scheduled for New York City today fell through because Washingtonians are afraid of snow — whereas little can stop the mighty engine of commerce that is my town, or at least there’s no need to worry that some residual slush will prevent unemployed bankers picking up their welfare checks and [...]
One of the economists responsible for spreading the idea, alluded to in yesterday’s entry, that we should abolish the Federal Reserve — no longer quite as obscure a position as it once was — was Murray Rothbard. He was also a disgruntled former member of Ayn Rand’s circle who felt that, among other problems, Rand [...]
Tonight, at last, I finally see the recent mini-series remake of The Prisoner. Will it be as libertarian — almost Randian — in tone as the original? Or will it sadden me in the same way that recent talk of making a “green technology”-themed Tom Swift movie did?
Mere hours after noting Milton Friedman’s grandson in yesterday’s entry, I watched the man himself debating school choice on an old Firing Line DVD (up against Al Shanker and other anti-choice villains). Milton could fight even bigger battles very effectively, of course (while wisely avoiding the kind of foundational philosophical arguments that draw a few [...]
Rand’s depiction of Galt’s Gulch in Atlas Shrugged sometimes gets called utopian, but compared to actual utopian novels like the ones I looked at back in October, Galt’s Gulch is pretty plausible. For one thing, it’s small, and there’s a real history of tiny idealistic communities springing up and even faring quite well, if [...]
Chris McDonald’s obvious enthusiasm for his fellow Canadians, the Ayn Rand-influenced rock band Rush, does not stop him from making some very astute, scholarly observations about the ways in which the band perfectly embodies what might be called suburban ideology. This tome does a good job of making manifest things that are almost too [...]