As a personal manifesto of non-conformism, however, I can see the appeal of Rand on (mostly) young minds as they try and find their identities and come out from under their parent's shadow, or break from the larger conformism of a particular community. My MIL was a huge Randian for a good part of her early adult life — mostly because reading Atlas Shrugged helped her realize that there was more to life than what she experienced growing up in the culturally conservative city of Modesto, CA in the 1950s.

As a personal manifesto of non-conformism, however, I can see the appeal of Rand on (mostly) young minds as they try and find their identities and come out from under their parent's shadow, or break from the larger conformism of a particular community. My MIL was a huge Randian for a good part of her early adult life — mostly because reading Atlas Shrugged helped her realize that there was more to life than what she experienced growing up in the culturally conservative city of Modesto, CA in the 1950s.

The housing crisis and the financial collapse are due to too little regulation and government involvement? Throw in health care (the other industry in greatest crisis) and you have the three most heavily regulated industries in the country, the most coercively deformed by government edicts of all kinds. Where was this supposed laissez-faire?

I'm not a conservative or neocon and I loathed Bush and the congressional Republicans. I'm certain that they gamed the system on behalf of cronies and sweetheart deals etc as much as any Democrat. You could put a regulatory stanglehold on an entire industry and then lift controls selectively for your buddies but that's not true deregulation. That's extortion for campain funds and we both know how the system is gamed.

How do tax cuts lead to Enron? You've lost me there- I think you need more than just the government stealing less cash I think you need something called criminal fraud and collusion with government monopoly ratings agencies and a compliant crony relationship with the SEC and the New York Fed. FYI- The reason I can be self employed and write and compose in this environment is because my background is in finance and I made a nice living as executive assistant to the Chief Risk Officer of Morgan Stanley for the two years covering the whole global financial collapse. So if you really want to discuss how the world actually works and how this thing went down, I'm glad to. I was there in the middle of it.

I don't say the stimulus is a step towards communism- it's merely a step towards bankrupting the currency and is a massive payoff of crony money to shady connections in democratic districts. It's corrupt- but it's the same corruption you find under nazism or fascism or any other dictatorship- it's not particularly communist. We're not going communist we're going statist- Rand described us as becoming a fascist country with communist slogans.

You need to try and understand that Atlas is not necessarily a slide into communism- it's a slide into statism per se- to blind pragmatism, short-term whims, and bureaucratic ideological inertia pushing an economy to halt, and then to that state regime devolving into looter gangs. It's a accurate depiction of a collapse into statism by the absence of an opposing force of freedom-seeking individuals: essentially it runs into the ground when those who make its contradictions possible are no longer there to save it- it collapses on the contradiction of a mixed economy. There's no positive revolution of some ideological group that comes in like the Red Army and conquers everyone- in Atlas the democratic institutions are there, but no one follows the law- the courts exist, but they are corrupt and have no standard of justice. It's the story of a country with its head cut off- the absence of the mind used as a literary device to show that it is the mind that sustains a nation and keeps it moving. Rand is depicting a nation dying of rot and incompetence, and of power lusting little nobodies like Wesley Mouch devolving into men like Fred Kinnan with the leather leggings. You're really missing the point.

There is a popular Objectivist dating service. You're willfully misunderstanding and misrepresenting the idea of romantic love. It's not sex or dating or friendship- it is all these plus a 'spiritual' element. What elevates love above fuck buddies or dating or even loveless marriages is the spiritual connection between people- nothing supernatural- by spiritual i mean pertaining to consciousness. The last step of progression to love is the recognition of your own highest values in another person- that they are to you an embodiment of the aspects of life that you cherish- both intellectual and moral and general sense of life and way of thinking. This is a heroic view of love, but why shouldn't it be?

I know you're in the Galt speech now- pay extra close attention to the sections on sacrifice- all the things you describe as parts of relationships are not sacrifices or comprimises- you need to value the other person more than the minor inconveniences and negotiations of life- they need to be of profound personal and selfish value to you for you and they to be happy together. That's why your willing to pay all the little prices- because the big prize means more and the cost is worth it.

Similarly, to compare a stimulus plan designed in hopes of warding off a Depression, or a four-point bump in the top marginal tax rate, to the onset of Atlas Shrugged-like American communism is pure drivel. We can disagree on the role of government all you want, but my biggest problem with Atlas Shrugged is its all-or-nothing mentality when it comes to characters, circumstances and philosophies alike.

You can argue til you're blue in the face that Rand has set up an “alternate reality” here that needn't hew too closely to realism. And you can call me “witless” for failing to see your point. But the difference between “Atlas Shrugged” and novels like “1984″ and “Brave New World” is that at least Orwell and Huxley (and Margaret Atwood in “A Handmaid's Tale” and Edward Bellamy in “Looking Backward,” for that matter) had the sense to create oppressive (or “utopian,” for better or worse) societies, regimes, etc. that were recognizably foreign to their readers even if they were set in the same nations in which those readers held their books. Rand, on the other hand, picks around the edges (changing the titles of leaders, for example) yet expects us to go with her concept that America could slide into Communism with its democratic institutions intact, at least in theory if not in practice.

But the glory of American democracy, as we're seeing right here in 2010, is that (thanks to little quirks like frequent elections and judicial oversight, which have been present right from the beginning) no ideology has ever been able to pull the nation nearly as far from its center of gravity as Rand imagines. All I'm saying is that if she wanted to put forth her philosophy in a convincing way to the greatest number of people — which, I assume, is why she loaded it all into a novel like Atlas Shrugged, rather than into the types of essays that far fewer people read — she might have been more successful (and let's not petend that Objectivists are more than a tiny, tiny, though highly convinced minority) had she found a way to show the higher morality and greater efficacy of her ideas in a more realistic context. (And maybe if she hadn't created such one-dimensional characters…but that's another issue.)

As for love/romance/etc. — do Objectivists have their own online-dating service? You should, because I'd like to hear the “after” stories of couples that got together after each made an “objective” calculation that the other person's virtues rewarded his/her own qualities … and then, only later, confronted the other person's flaws and needs.

Sorry, dude, but to me “romantic love” is based on immediate mental, emotional and/or physical attraction and compatibility, followed by a never-ending cycle of two people adapting to and compromising with each other's desires, ambitions, and (yes!) needs and flaws — hopefully undertaken with a nice, healthy balance of self-interest and altruism. The way I just phrased all of that sounds hardly more “romantic” than Rand's own formulation — but I'm willing to bet that my expectations (and hopes, and goals) are a hell of a lot more realistic, not to mention romantic, than hers.

You've decided that “Atlas” is “the Mellowmas of politics and literature” entirely second-handedly, on hearsay with no direct knowledge.

You really should skip “Atlas” and go directly to “The Fountainhead” with particular attention to the character of Peter Keating.

You write: “I make my Rand/rom-com comparison ironically, of course, because the notion of two people finding love seems entirely foreign to her; apparently romance is just one more silly human trait that must be jettisoned along the way to self-actualization.”

Rand writes: “Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another.”

I trust anyone reading this thread can judge the method of the first and the quality of the second. I wont make any comment.

Have you ever looked at the actual villains in this world? Guys like Barney Frank or George Bush or Bernie Madoff? They are wet noodles- congenital incompetents who self-destruct eventually taking good people down with them. It's the normal conception of villainy that is unrealistic- evil is not one and powerful and big but many, smutty and small. Are the villains over the top? If Obama were a character in Atlas he would fit right in- proclaiming the answer to massive deficits is ever more spending. Is Mr. Thompson a less realistic politician than Fred Thompson? Is Tim Geithner less over-the-top than Wesley Mouch? Is “Cash for Clunkers” and “Cap and Trade” more rational than the Equalization of Opportunity Bill? Is a Pay Czar more reasonable than a Unification Board?

“Plopping them down in a 1950s US”- there's no dates in the book and no historical figures cited more modern than Aristotle. It's meant to be without a particular time- an alternate US- the reason Rand uses “Legislature” and “Head of the State” rather than “Congress” and “President” is an old fashioned desire to be respectful of those offices which were still somewhat worthy of respect in her day. In your desire for “Realism” you are getting hopelessly mired in concretes (like any good materialist) and completely missing the abstractions. If Rand had written a novel mired in concretes of 1950s America it would not be relevant and selling fifty years later- this is the nature of Romantic Literature as opposed to Naturalistic Literature. Do you despise Huxley because pigs don't actually speak? Or Orwell because '1984' was not an accurate depiction of the Reagan Era? This is such an obvious point that I can't believe you are witless enough to miss it- so I can only assume that you are ignoring the obvious because to do so gives you something to complain about. You obviously are looking for things to complain about.

As to her inability to pick a “fair fight”, I've yet to see you take on any substantial or central idea in the book. You've certainly pushed a lot of smarmy around about the characters and plot, but I've not her you debate or even identify a single principle or idea of Rand's.

What is it that you disagree with? Does the universe not exist? Does causality not function? Is reason not our tool of survival? What standard of morality should be valid if not the standard of life as a rational being? Do you grant yourself the right to be a thief of others' property? Do you believe that collective interests require the sacrifice of the individual? Are you prepared to argue that you are for the initiation of force in human affairs? Are you then NOT practicing and preaching a morality of death?

Drool over the sex scenes all you want- poke fun at character names or literary conceits or anachronisms, but don't call that sort of surface-only horseshit a “fair fight”. Your review is a consistent evasion of the issues purpose and theme of the book. The theme of the novel is the role of the mind in human life- that the mind does not operate under force and must be free to function and create if humanity is to be worthy of the name. If you want to argue the opposite, or some other issue- feel free. But don't pretend you're addressing the novel when you're systematically ignoring, evading or pretending not to notice the central messages that constitute its nature.

This is not really an attack. I'm glad to see a liberal actually reading the opposition and kudos to you for doing so. I would invite you to read Rand's actual nonfiction- not her journals which are unpublished musings or a biography which is going to be a third hand account. I recommend “Philosophy: Who Needs it?”, “Capitalism the Unknown Ideal” “The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution” and, since you're a writer, “The Romantic Manifesto” which explains the thoughts behind her literary method and practice. I'm glad to discuss if you actually want to address something and not dick around on these surface issues. Best.