Regarding Ayn Rand: I see Rand as a person who started a very good idea, and then carried it to such a ridiculous extreme that it is impossible to take her seriously anymore. It is good to encourage people to embrace their individuality, to give themselves permission to pursue their own happiness. But she ignores the fact that human beings are also social and emotional creatures. We crave human relationships, we have a basic need to be part of a community, and we have a basic impulse toward spirituality. We cannot achieve our full potential as individuals without these things.

I used to LOVE Ayn Rand…until I grew up and realized that while her ideals are good, the realities of them are impossible and most of the people who claim to adhere to them, only do so as long as they work FOR THEM. Her philosophy on selfishness is important, but if everyone were to follow her practice in its most pure sense, we would have complete anarchy. This was a great piece!

Alan Greenspan abandoned Ayn Rand’s philosophy long before he accepted the job of economic dictator as Fed chairmen. In a capitalist system, one in which markets are totally free of government coercion, the government’s sole purpose is to protect individual rights. An economy hamstrung by thousands of government regulations, cumbersome legislation like Sarbanes-Oxley, and of course, a central bank that controls interests rates and the money supply–is by no means a free market. Alan Greenspan abandoned reason, egoism, free markets, and Ayn Rand. Consequently, he became one of the chief architects of the economic collapse.

I finished “Atlas Shrugged” as a book on CD just two weeks ago – I cannot tell you what a liberating experience it was to see that philosophy in black and white. The stress I have felt worrying about struggling siblings, step-children, and other relatives and acquaintances melted away while I listened. I still feel somewhat responsible to try and help them, but now have a healthier attitude about it. I did not cause their problems, and their expectation that I will solve them places no moral obligation on me to do so. I wish I had read this book at 22 instead of 52 – it might have saved me some dental, back, heart, and skin problems that I have had over my lifetime.

Yes, we are social animals but moral social animals strive to be producers not parasites. And those who can’t quite produce enough or at all are good to be thankful for charity. As for those who feel entitled to human sacrifices, no matter how much that might augment their self-esteem, that seems to be the epitome of anti-social to me.

I think this time we can link the sales of Atlas Shrugged recently to something more mundane, Television exposure. The critically acclaimed and Emmy winning AMC series “Mad Men” has several enigmatic references to Atlas Shrugged throughout key episodes, with the protagonist Dan Draper being favorably compared to John Galt and several shots of the Atlas Shrugged novel on the bookshelves of the Madison Avenue radical that started the firm Sterling Cooper. In one dramatic scene, Don is given a huge bonus and when he tries to say something along the lines that he doesn’t deserve it, he is boldly told- “Take some of that bonus and buy a copy of Atlas Shrugged so we don’t have to have this conversation again.” As it is now in it’s third season and has picked up quite a following, I imagine it alone has generated quite a few sales as people try to find context for all the references. I would be more thrilled to hear that the new demand related to a changing perspective, but I think it may just be from the series.

“Atlas Shrugged” might also have found new fans in our time because it reads like Peak Oil doomsday porn. Rand shows that an energy crisis in her fictional U.S. leads to a Malthusian die-off of all the people who don’t meet her heroes’ philosophical standard. Meanwhile, the heroes, with their hoards of gold, ride out the population crash in their comfortable Rocky Mountain doomstead while planning to rebuild the economy minus the burden of all the people who can’t take care of themselves (the incompetent poor, children, the handicapped and the elderly). Rand doesn’t explain where the new economy’s employees and customers will come from, however, even though Wal-Mart has made a fortune from employing or selling to the kinds of people Rand despised.