Gary Weiss' new tome, Ayn Rand Nation , looks to be the first critical examination of Rand from the Left that we've seen since Ellis...

Politics of Human Nature 19: Businessmen and the state. In the last post, I examined how economic interests can bias even businessmen again...

Politics and the non-rational 2: constructivism. In the last "Objectivism and Politics" post I introduced the concept of non-log...

Conclusion. In The Virtue of Selfishness , Rand makes the following remark: [T]he Objectivist ethics is the moral base needed by that polit...

Ayn Rand's insistence on the separation of the economy and the state means that she opposes all regulations, even those that would preve...

Uncertainty. Central to the Objectivist philosophy is the notion that certainy is possible. Rand went so far as to suggest that the denial...

Privatization of Roads. Leonard Peikoff on his mid-90s radio show on KIEV in Los Angeles stated his belief that public roads should be priv...

Rearden/Mouch dichotomy. It is well known—nor would Objectivists disagree—that many businessmen want government help. What are all these ba...

Limits of free-trade. Ayn Rand and her followers are well known advocates of free trade. In her Playboy interview, Rand explained: The esse...

Laissez-faire as a rationalization for fraud. In her essay “The Nature of Government,” Ayn Rand wrote, A unilateral breach of contract invo...

Dishonesty, cheating, and theft. A recent study by the Josephson Institute found that 30% of today’s teenagers admit to having shop lifted ...

Schumpeter’s challenge. The economist Joseph Schumpeter created quite a stir in the forties when he warned that “the capitalist order tends...

Rand’s “objective” value theory. Austrian economics ascribes to what is called the “subjective value” theory: An individual's actions a...

Objectivism and Austrian Economics: Salsman as “hyper-inflationist.” Stefan Karlsson over at mises.org complained a few years ago that man...

Objectivism and Austrian Economics: entrepreneurship. Richard Salsman is on record for criticizing von Mises’ “(absurd) theory of the essen...

Objectivism and Austrian Economics: Salsman’s Revisionism. In the recommended bibliography of Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal , one finds mor...

The Fed. According to Jerome Tuccille, Alan Greenspan once testified in front of congressional committee that if it were up to him (i.e., G...

Role of deregulation in current crisis. David Horowitz, in his blog over at frontpagemag.com provides additional evidence of the role tha...

Greenspan’s primary error. Despite the howls of condemnation hurled against Greenspan by the Objectivist rabble, which hsa been fervently t...