In a perverse way, I’m glad that there are places such as Greece and Illinois. These profligate jurisdictions are useful examples of the dangers of bloated government and reckless statism.

There also are some cities that serve as reverse role models. Detroit is a miserable case study of big government run amok, so I enjoyed a moment or two of guilty pleasure as I read this CNBC story about the ongoing decay of the Motor City. Here are some excerpts:

Detroit neighborhoods with more people and a better chance of survival will receive different levels of city services than more blighted areas under a plan unveiled Wednesday that some residents fear may pit them against each other for scarce resources.

…[T]he boundaries of the 139-square-mile city aren’t receding. The plan also backs away from forcing the redistribution of what’s left of the population into areas where people still live and where the houses aren’t on the verge of caving in.

…Detroit’s population of about 713,000 is down about 200,000 from 10 years ago, according to U.S. Census figures, and has fallen more than 1 million since 1950. Some areas have fewer occupied homes than vacant ones.

…A 2010 survey found Detroit had 33,000 vacant houses and scores of empty, weed-filled and trash-cluttered lots.

How predictable, I thought. This is what happens when vote-hungry politicians adopt policies that reward people for riding in the wagon and punish the folks who are pulling the wagon.

But there was also something about this story that rang a bell. It took a few minutes, since I’m getting old and decrepit, but then I realized that “blighted areas” was an eerily familiar term. Didn’t Ayn Rand use that term in one of her books?

Indeed, she did. Thanks to the miracle of Google Books, here is one of several passages in Atlas Shrugged that references Detroit—oops, I mean “blighted areas”:

No railroad was mentioned by name in the speeches that preceded the voting. The speeches dealt only with the public welfare. It was said that while the public welfare was threatened by shortages of transportation, railroads were destroying each other through vicious competition, on “the brutal policy of dog-eat-dog.” While there existed blighted areas where rail service had been discontinued, there existed at the same time large regions where two or more railroads were competing for a traffic barely sufficient for one. It was said that there were great opportunities for younger railroads in the blighted areas. While it was true that such areas offered little economic incentive at present, a public-spirited railroad, it was said, would undertake to provide transportation for the struggling inhabitants, since the prime purpose of a railroad was public service, not profit.

Many people say that Atlas Shrugged is not very good literature, despite the amazing sales figures. Others say Ayn Rand’s philosophy is flawed, despite the profound influence of her writings.

I’m not competent to comment on those debates, but I can say that Atlas Shrugged does an amazing job of capturing the statist mindset and it tells a compelling story of how excessive government is self-destructive.

Fifty years ago, the book was viewed as a dystopian fantasy. Today, Greece, Illinois, and Detroit are making Ayn Rand seem like a prophet.

Atlas Shrugged Comes to Detroit is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

El Universo, the newspaper with the largest circulation and the paper that publishes my weekly column, ran a mostly blank front page today that features only this quote from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged:

When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion–when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing–when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors–when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you–when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice–you may know that your society is doomed.

This quote is from Francisco D’Anconia’s speech on “The Meaning of Money” which you can read here. (I used it in my column last month.) How did Rand’s quote get there? It’s a response to the latest and most prominent attack on freedom of the press in Ecuador and Latin America.

In less than four months the Ecuadorian courts, known for being slow, resolved the specious lawsuit President Rafael Correa filed against op-ed writer and editor Emilio Palacio, the directors of El Universo and the newspaper itself for libeling the country’s president. According to Correa, Palacio slandered him in this op-ed (in Spanish), and the newspaper and its directors “contributed” to committing the supposed crime. Incidentally, this court has had five different judges overseeing this case since February; the last one came in on Monday and issued his judgment yesterday, minutes before his authority expired.

The court’s decision sentences the directors of El Universo and Emilio Palacio to three years in jail and orders them to pay a total of $30 million to the President. The judge also ordered that the newspaper company pay an additional $10 million to President Correa.

This decision sets a dangerous precedent of making third parties responsible for what an individual says. It is a clear act of intimidation of all independent media outlets and of the citizens of Ecuador. Even though this is not the first blow to freedom of expression during this government, it certainly is the most radical given the context. On May 7^th, a referendum gave the President unprecedented power to essentially pack the courts. Soon, the entire judiciary will be on the long list of state institutions captured or co-opted by the executive (including the constitutional court, the electoral authority, and the national assembly, among others).

Once the judiciary is completely captured and after this historic decision, we can expect more self-censorship or more people sued/jailed for expressing their opinions, or a combination of both. It is a harsh blow against liberty in our country, but a logical outcome of Correa’s populist push to centralize ever more economic and other power in his own hands.

Ayn Rand on the Front Page of Ecuador’s Major Newspaper is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

John Blundell, former director of the Institute of Economic Affairs in London, has written a new comic book biography of Ayn Rand. Find it in comic book stores, at Barnes and Noble, or on Amazon. Publisher Bluewater says:

“Female Force: Ayn Rand” will hit comic shops and online retailers on June 22nd. The 32-page comic retails for $3.99….

The comic book provides an entertaining yet scholarly look at the author of such seminal works as The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Even 30 years after her death, her sales of her books continue to sell in the hundreds of thousands each year. Bluewater also worked with the Ayn Rand Institute on the comic book.

“When the American economy went into a nose dive recently what did we all turn to? Did we dig out battered old Econ 101 textbooks? Did we turn to the writings of some aged Ivy League professor? NO! Instead we dusted off or repurchased The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged those great classic American novels by Russian immigrant Ayn Rand which deal so brilliantly with the fundamentals of a free and prosperous society of responsible individuals,” said author John Blundell.

Blundell, author of Margaret Thatcher: A Portrait of the Iron Lady as well
as Bluewater’s Thatcher bio comic, and formerly the Director General of the
Institute of Economic Affairs in London, emphasizes the relevancy and
potency of Rand’s Objectivism ideas in 21st century America.

Blundell also has a book coming in September, Ladies for Liberty: Women Who Made a Difference in American History. That one, I think, will have words but no pictures.

Female Force: Ayn Rand is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Communitarian “guru” Amitai Etzioni debated Roger Pilon at Cato two weeks ago. Also me, 18 years ago. And last week he had two postings at the Encyclopedia Britannica blog. I offer some thoughts on individualism, communitarianism, and implausible misrepresentations of libertarianism at the Britannica today.

When I hear communitarians like Etzioni describe the libertarian view of individualism, I wonder if they’ve ever read any libertarian writing other than a Classic Comics edition of Ayn Rand….

There’s no conflict between individualism and community. There’s a conflict between voluntary association and coerced association. And communitarians dance around that conflict.

Do you believe that “The libertarian perspective, put succinctly, begins with the assumption that individual agents are fully formed and their value preferences are in place prior to and outside of any society”? Of course not. Who would? Read the Britannica column to find out who says you do.

Communitarians and Libertarians is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

This article about donors who want to give colleges money with strings attached, published in Bloomberg Markets and splashed across a full page of the Sunday Washington Post, leads with the story of former BB&T chairman John Allison’s campaign to get the books and ideas of Ayn Rand into college classrooms and is lavishly decorated with big photographs of Rand.

Most of the story is actually about much less titillating demands — donors who variously want a say in hiring the next football coach, a change in the school’s tuition policy, a rejection of money from other donors. But apparently editors know that Ayn Rand’s name can bring in the readers. So they act in their rational self-interest and put her name on the cover and her picture at the top of the page.

At least the Post had the good sense to drop the dumb last line of the Bloomberg story: “As private donors gain more power on campuses, it’s just the kind of shift away from state control that Rand would applaud.” Actually, giving private money to state institutions is not the sort of privatization that libertarians seek. (And Ayn Rand was a libertarian, whether she liked to admit it or not.)

Ayn Rand Sells Magazines is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

On NPR, Mara Liasson tells Melissa Block that we’re in a “libertarian moment” in politics:

BLOCK: And Ron Paul appears to be running. Again, he got a lot of devoted followers on the Internet last time during the 2008 bid, not so many votes in the primary. So this time around, is he a significant addition to the Republican field or more of an asterisk?

LIASSON: Well, I don’t think he’s a huge factor in terms of the nomination. In the 2008 GOP primary, he got only about 6 percent of the Republican vote. However, as you said, he does have a devoted following, lots of libertarian-leaning young people. He can raise millions of dollars online in a single day in one of his famous money bombs. So he brings energy to the party, and the Republican Party base seems to have caught up to him on the issues.

The GOP is in a real libertarian moment right now, and Paul has always been all about the debt and the deficit and taxes and spending. You could call him the godfather of the Tea Party.

Of course, Paul may have to split the libertarian Republican vote with former two-term governor Gary Johnson. Johnson also was “a Tea Partier when tea-partying wasn’t cool,” according to the Capitol Report of New Mexico. He vetoed 750 bills in eight years, not counting line-item vetoes. And since today’s libertarian moment goes beyond spending and health care to include rising support for gay marriage and marijuana legalization, Johnson might be better positioned to ride that wave and attract younger and independent voters.

Footnote: Two weeks ago NPR speculated about an Ayn Rand moment building from the financial crisis to the opening of Atlas Shrugged.

The Libertarian Moment? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

• They passed the bill, and now we’re finding out what’s in it.
• We’re finding out that the war in Libya could really be about protecting European interests.
• In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand described a world in which government both partly produced and partly subsidized goods; we’re finding out she wasn’t far off the mark.
• We’re finding out that “American exceptionalism” is a cloak for military adventurism.
• The longer America fights a war on drugs, the more we find out about how detrimental it is to our fiscal outlook:

Friday Links is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

• What are Republicans doing to stop ObamaCare? Not much.
• Conflating the Taliban with al Qaeda isn’t helping our foreign policy dialogue.
• “Sitting in a Volt that would not start at the 2010 Detroit Auto Show, a GM engineer swore to me that the internal combustion engine in the machine only served as a generator, kicking in when the overnight-charged lithium-ion batteries began to run down.”
• The new issue of Regulation looks at price gouging, soda taxes, the Durbin Amendment, and more.
• Who should decide when we tap into strategic oil reserves: The president? Or market forces? 

Friday Links is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Ayn Rand’s books have been selling strongly for more than 50 years, a constant irritant to the literary and academic establishments. And since the acceleration in government growth about 18 months, they’ve been selling better than ever. In the middle of that surge of interest, two new biographies of Rand were published, whose authors were featured at a Cato Institute Book Forum last fall. Now Charles Murray, the author of such books as Human Accomplishment and What It Means to Be a Libertarian, reflects on Ayn Rand in a review of those books.

Murray does a great job of showing what was wrong — and what was very right — with Ayn Rand. To the certain annoyance of her fans, Murray insists that “there is a dismaying discrepancy between the Ayn Rand of real life and Ayn Rand as she presented herself to the world. The discrepancy is important because Rand herself made such a big deal about living a life that was the embodiment of her philosophy.” Nevertheless, he muses, “Why then has reading these biographies of a deeply flawed woman—putting it gently—made me want to go back and reread her novels yet again? The answer is that Rand was a hedgehog who got a few huge truths right, and expressed those truths in her fiction so powerfully that they continue to inspire each new generation.” He concludes:

Ayn Rand never dwelt on her Russian childhood, preferring to think of herself as wholly American. Rightly so. The huge truths she apprehended and expressed were as American as apple pie. I suppose hardcore Objectivists will consider what I’m about to say heresy, but hardcore Objectivists are not competent to judge. The novels are what make Ayn Rand important. Better than any other American novelist, she captured the magic of what life in America is supposed to be. The utopia of her novels is not a utopia of greed. It is not a utopia of Nietzschean supermen. It is a utopia of human beings living together in Jeffersonian freedom. 

Read the whole thing.

I note that the excellent new group blog Pileus got to this review before I did. Plenty of other good thoughts there, too, on topics ranging from Adam Smith to David Souter to a comparison between Rand and Marx.

Charles Murray on Ayn Rand is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

I’ll be speaking at Free Minds 2010, along with Nathaniel Branden, Anne Heller, David Kelley, Tibor Machan, Henry and Erika Holzer, Nigel Ashford, and two dozen more scholars and practitioners of Ayn Rand’s ideas and other libertarian thinkers. The conference will be held in Alexandria, Virginia, near Washington and Reagan National Airport, June 30 to July 8. If that’s too long, you can register for either the pre-July 4 or the post-July 4 half of the seminar. Either way, you can spend July 4 wandering the city the Founders established and wondering what they would think.

Check it out.

Objectivist-Libertarian Summer Conference is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Who would have thought? The Washington Post, which took two months to run a review of the two important new books about Ayn Rand that were published in October, now declares Ayn Rand to be “In” for 2010. Well, technically, in the paper’s annual New Year’s Day Out/In list, it declares “Twihards” (fans of the Twilight series, I take it) to be Out and “Randroids” to be In. But the splashy display in the print paper illustrates “Randroids” with a classic photo of Ayn Rand, the one that graces the cover of Barbara Branden’s biography The Passion of Ayn Rand.

Rand had a pretty good 2009, so it’s impressive that the Post thinks she’ll be bigger in 2010. 

While the renewed interest in Rand has been noticed everywhere from the Times Higher Education Supplement to the Wall Street Journal to the left-wing Campus Progress, William Kristol apparently missed it entirely. He wrote on December 29 about the revival of conservatism in response to the challenge of the Obama administration.

Of course, as conservatives, we also know many of the very best ideas are old ideas. And I’m struck by how many people are rediscovering Hayek’s “The Fatal Conceit,” Irving Kristol’s “Two Cheers for Capitalism,” or Tocqueville’s account of soft despotism in “Democracy in America.”

There are great ideas to be found in that list of books. But as everyone but Kristol has noticed, the author who’s really being rediscovered in this first 18 months or so of financial crisis and government expansion is Ayn Rand. Consider the sales figures for the different books. In 2009 about 2000 copies of The Fatal Conceit were sold. (Kristol should have cited The Road to Serfdom, which sold 21,000, more than double its sales the year before and about six times its sales in 2007, before the financial crisis began.) About 20,000 copies of various editions of Democracy in America. And 300,000 copies of Atlas Shrugged, along with 95,000 copies of The Fountainhead and even 60,000 copies of Anthem. (Two Cheers for Capitalism is out of print, so its rediscoveries can’t be tracked by BookScan.) It’s clearly Ayn Rand who has gotten the most help from the Bush-Paulson-Geithner-Bernanke-Obama-Geithner-Bernanke policies of the past 18 months.

Note: In addition to the new books on Rand from two of the world’s greatest publishers, the revitalized Laissez Faire Books has just published, for the first time in book form, the lectures on Ayn Rand’s philosophy that Nathaniel Branden gave back in the 1960s. Known then as “The Basic Principles of Objectivism,” now published as The Vision of Ayn Rand, these lectures were instrumental in tying Rand’s fiction to philosophy, politics, and economics, and in creating one of the first organized libertarian movements. As I said in a jacket blurb:

This is the most important work on Objectivism not written by Ayn Rand, available at last in book form. These lectures were delivered by the person closest to Ayn Rand, designated by her as her intellectual heir, often with her sitting in the audience and answering questions about them, and endorsed by her. Rand’s subsequent falling out with Nathaniel Branden over personal matters doesn’t change that. This is the organized, comprehensive treatise on Objectivism that Ayn Rand never wrote. Philosophers, historians, and economists may — and should — debate the claims of Objectivism. In this book they have a systematic work with which to engage. These lectures were also a milestone in libertarian history, as the lecture sessions brought together for the first time large numbers of young people who shared an enthusiasm for Ayn Rand and the individualist philosophy. The lectures were given as taped courses in more than 80 cities, and people drove for miles to listen to them on tape. Wasn’t that a time!

Ayn Rand Is In is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Yes, folks, it’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for: John Stossel launches his new weekly show on the Fox Business Network Thursday evening at 8 p.m. (Even though the vaunted Fox News machine can’t seem to put a notice about it on their website, I have it on good authority that the show will go on!) Rumor is he’ll be talking about Ayn Rand on the first show. It’s a good time for a show about freedom and limited government — as the Baltimore Sun says, “Stossel’s new show should have no trouble finding an audience of viewers eager for a discussion about the pedal-to-the-metal pace of expansion [of government] since Barack Obama took office.”

Some people ask, Why give up ABC for the smaller Fox networks? (Presumably, these are not the same people who asked Stossel for years, “Why don’t you go to Fox?  They’d love you there.”) The good news is that now Stossel has an hour a week to talk about freedom — as well as appearances on other Fox shows such as Beck and O’Reilly. His hour-long specials at ABC were excellent, and drew solid ratings, but ABC hasn’t put one on in more than a year. And even his “Give Me a Break” segments on 20/20 had become rare. So what’s the point in being part of a big but declining network that isn’t actually interested in serious political commentary? Now he’s on a smaller but growing network that wants him to do 44 hours of pointed commentary and analysis, plus contribute to other shows.

If you haven’t seen Stossel’s ABC specials, you need to. I can never decide which one I think is best. Of course, I’m partial to “John Stossel’s Politically Incorrect Guide to Politics,” in which I get a bit of screen time. But “Greed,” with Walter Williams, David Kelley, and Ted Turner, is great, too. And so is “Is America #1?,” featuring Tom Palmer. But there were plenty of others — “Stupid in America,” “Are We Scaring Ourselves to Death?,” “John Stossel Goes to Washington,” “Sex, Lies, and Consenting Adults.”

You can view some of them, including “Is America #1?,” at a website called Freedom Channel. And for the time being, at least, you can still watch lots of shorter Stossel videos at ABC News.

But meanwhile — tell your mama, tell your pa, to watch “Stossel” this Thursday at 8 p.m. on Fox Business Channel. And note: it will repeat at 10 p.m. Friday, giving you a chance to show ABC what they lost by watching “Stossel” instead of “20/20.”

It’s Stossel Thursday is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting column that asks whether Ayn Rand, the famous libertarian novelist and philosopher, is a net plus for the free-market movement. This seems like an odd question. After all, her books (especially Atlas Shrugged) have been hugely influential, exposing countless people to a libertarian message.

But the column’s author, Heather Wilhelm of the free-market Illinois Policy Institute, has a good point. Rand’s emphasis on individual freedom is laudable, but she makes herself an easy target by asserting that this requires über-individualism and leaves no room for altruism. Indeed, I’ll always remember being somewhat put off by the scene in Atlas Shrugged where one of protagonists rents, rather than lends, his car to a friend. And even though I’m rarely in a church, her insistence that atheism was a necessary component of her philosophy also struck me as odd (not to mention needlessly exclusionary).

From Wilhelm’s column:

Rand seems to be roaring back. Sales are surging—Brian Doherty, author of “Radicals for Capitalism” (2007), recently calculated that in one week in late August, “Atlas” sold “67 percent more copies than it did the same week a year before, and 114 percent more than that same week in 2007.” Two buzzed-about Rand biographies hit the shelves this fall, and an “Atlas” cable miniseries is reportedly in the works. Designer Ralph Lauren recently listed Rand as one of his favorite novelists, and CNBC host Rick Santelli, whose on-air antibailout rant inspired hundreds of “tea party” protests across the nation, admitted the same. “I know this may not sound very humanitarian,” he said, “but at the end of the day I’m an Ayn Rand-er.”

…But in an age where hope, change and warm-hearted marketing clearly resonate, is revitalizing and glorifying Rand’s acerbic “virtue of selfishness” doing the free-market movement any good? Doubts are starting to emerge. Leonard Liggio, a respected figure in libertarian circles and a guest at Rand’s post-”Atlas Shrugged” New York get-togethers, sees value in Rand but admits she wasn’t a bridge builder. …Others, however, go further. “Rand has this extremist, intolerant, dogmatic antigovernment stance,” says Brink Lindsey of the libertarian Cato Institute, “and it pushes free-market supporters toward a purist, radical vision that undermines their capacity to get anything done.”

…How are free markets best “sold”? A more compelling approach flips Rand’s philosophy on its head, explaining how everyone, especially society’s neediest, benefits from economic liberty. It’s a compelling story about how freedom and prosperity can change lives for the better. And Ayn Rand is of little help in telling it.

As an economist, I certainly don’t pretend to be an expert, but Rand’s philosophy seems vulnerable. And her personal style apparently was less than perfect. But, returning to the main issue, surely Rand has been a net plus for the cause of liberty. I’m not a Randian (and am not even sure what that entails), but I have probably given copies of Atlas Shrugged to about 50 people over the years. Simply stated, the book is a very compelling introduction to the idea that government is corrupt, that it attracts (and benefits) corrupt people, and that redistributionism is a corrupt philosophy.

Is Ayn Rand Good for the Cause of Liberty? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

• The Democrats’ ingenious plan to disguise the true cost of their health care bills.

• The health care legislation moving through Congress could increase young adults’ premiums by 100 percent.

• Why raising taxes won’t fix the deficit. Just look at California. And Rhode Island. And New York.

• “What profiteth a political party if it gains congressional seats but loseth its soul?” —Michael D. Tanner (Yes, he’s referring to Republicans.)

• Here we go again: The No Child Left Behind Act is up for renewal.

• Podcast: “Ayn Rand’s Affinities and Animosities“

Weekend Links is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

• Three cheers for divided government: “Since the start of the Cold War, we’ve had only a dozen years of real fiscal restraint” …And all of them occurred when the White House and Congress were held by opposite parties.

• Well here’s an idea: Only pay for health care that works.

• The case against tort reform in health care.

• Video: The authors of two new Ayn Rand biographies discuss their work and research.

• Podcast: “Ayn Rand and the World She Made“

Tuesday Links is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Many thanks to Lisa Snell at Reason for bringing this interesting historical fun fact from 1973 to light: Ayn Rand was a fan of education tax credits:

In the face of such evidence, one would expect the government’s performance in the field of education to be questioned, at the least, [but] the growing failures of the educational establishment are followed by the appropriation of larger and larger sums. There is, however, a practical alternative: tax credits for education.

The essentials of the idea (in my version) are as follows: an individual citizen would be given tax credits for the money he spends on education, whether his own education, his children’s, or any person’s he wants to put through a bona fide school of his own choice (including primary, secondary, and higher education).

Rand’s support for credits is interesting for a number of reasons, not least the fact that she explicitly endorses credits, not vouchers. I’ve had numerous and largely fruitless arguments over which policy is most “free-market” or least distorting. To me it is obvious that credits are the most “free-market” education reform. Now I can skip the arguments and yell, “Ayn Rand!”

Rand’s essay also highlights the fact that education tax credits were, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the most prominent private school policy on the scene. Federal tax credits were a live issue under Nixon and Carter. Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party gave strong and explicit support for education tax credits throughout the 1980’s – with tax credits, but not vouchers, mentioned specifically in the Republican Party platforms of 1980, 1984, and 1988.

The largely forgotten history of education tax credits . . . interesting . . .

History Fun Fact: Ayn Rand Liked Ed Tax Credits is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Two new books about Ayn Rand are just hitting the bookstores: Ayn Rand and the World She Made, by Anne C. Heller, and Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, by Jennifer Burns.

As Janet Maslin writes in the New York Times, reviewing the two books, the 1970s were “one Rand moment. This seems to be another.” Brian Doherty, historian of libertarianism, agrees. Sales of The Fountainhead are soaring in India. The chairman of BB&T was inspired by her work to renounce lending to eminent-domain projects and to spread her ideas in schools and colleges. She’s being blamed for the financial crisis on government TV, but the takeovers and bailouts have caused sales of Atlas Shrugged to soar.

Both the books are getting good reviews, though reviewers have varying perspectives on the subject of the bios. Rand has been denounced in the New Republic (yet again), and defended against TNR‘s criticisms by our own Will Wilkinson. Embattled governor Mark Sanford declares her prophetic in Newsweek. New York magazine calls her “Mrs. Logic,” not without irony. Caroline Baum of Bloomberg says Rand would tell us to stop blaming capitalism for problems caused by regulation and cronyism. Conor Friedersdorf can’t believe how wrong Hendrik Hertzberg gets her in the New Yorker.

Find out for yourself next Wednesday when Burns and Heller speak at a Cato Book Forum, “The Life and Impact of Ayn Rand.” If you can’t get to Washington, watch it on the web.

Talking about Ayn Rand is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Apparently Ayn Rand’s popularity is growing on the subcontinent.  For more on Rand’s resurgence, attend or watch online this Cato event next week.

(H/T: Josh Blackman.)

Who Is John Gupta? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Sales of Atlas Shrugged have risen sharply this year, and various observers from the Ayn Rand Institute to the Economist have attributed the jump to “uncanny similarities between the plot-line of the book and the events of our day,” in the words of ARI’s Yaron Brook. The Economist writes,

Whenever governments intervene in the market, in short, readers rush to buy Rand’s book. Why? The reason is explained by the name of a recently formed group on Facebook, the world’s biggest social-networking site: “Read the news today? It’s like ‘Atlas Shrugged’ is happening in real life”.

Brook told CNN:

“So many people see the parallels with actually what’s going on, with the government taking over the banks, with the government kind of taking over the automobile industry, a president who fires the CEO of a major American corporation. These are the kind of things that come out of ‘Atlas Shrugged.’ “

But is this story right? Do news headlines generate book sales? How did people who read about TARP or bank nationalizations know that those events were reminiscent of a novel published in 1957? Maybe their friends told them “It’s just like Atlas Shrugged,” and they ran out and bought the book.

Or maybe something more direct is required. One Atlas Shrugged fan suggested to me that the real boost came in January, with a Wall Street Journal article by my former colleague Stephen Moore. So I decided to investigate, using the sales figures in Nielsen’s Bookscan. And indeed those figures seem to point in a different direction. The boom in sales of Atlas Shrugged really took off in mid-January, after Steve Moore’s essay ”‘Atlas Shrugged’: From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years” appeared in the Journal on January 9. Steve wrote:

Many of us who know Rand’s work have noticed that with each passing week, and with each successive bailout plan and economic-stimulus scheme out of Washington, our current politicians are committing the very acts of economic lunacy that “Atlas Shrugged” parodied in 1957….

For the uninitiated, the moral of the story is simply this: Politicians invariably respond to crises — that in most cases they themselves created — by spawning new government programs, laws and regulations. These, in turn, generate more havoc and poverty, which inspires the politicians to create more programs . . . and the downward spiral repeats itself until the productive sectors of the economy collapse under the collective weight of taxes and other burdens imposed in the name of fairness, equality and do-goodism….

David Kelley, the president of the Atlas Society, which is dedicated to promoting Rand’s ideas, explains that “the older the book gets, the more timely its message.” He tells me that there are plans to make “Atlas Shrugged” into a major motion picture — it is the only classic novel of recent decades that was never made into a movie. “We don’t need to make a movie out of the book,” Mr. Kelley jokes. “We are living it right now.”

Here’s a chart taken from Bookscan’s data on weekly sales of the mass-market paperback edition of Atlas Shrugged:

The sales in late 2008 are very similar to those in 2007, with a Christmas bump that was higher in 2008. But sales started to diverge after January 9, suggesting that it was in fact the Wall Street Journal essay that kicked them into high gear. Then they slowly fell, and then there was an even bigger peak in early March. Why? That’s not so clear. Perhaps it’s a case of self-fulfilling prophecy and the accumulating effects of media buzz. ARI put out its press release about soaring sales on February 23, and the Economist picked up the idea five days later, as did many bloggers. Then on March 2 and 5 the popular blogger Michelle Malkin talked about the idea of “Going Galt” — pulling back on work and investment in response to projected tax increases and regulations — in her blog and syndicated column, and the New York Times picked that up. Both Malkin and the Times’s Opinionator blog linked to the original ARI story about soaring sales, giving the idea further legs, and the Freakonomics blog picked up the Economist’s story. On March 14 the Wall Street Journal ran another op-ed on the contemporary relevance of Atlas Shrugged, this one by Yaron Brook. There’s a reason that publishers put “bestseller” on their book covers — people like to read what other people are reading. And there’s no question that once this media buzz got started, the sales have remained much higher than last year.

It seems that Greenspan, Bernanke, Fannie, Freddie, Barney Frank, Bush, Paulson, Geithner, and Obama all created the objective conditions for an Atlas Shrugged sales bump, but it took Steve Moore and subsequent commentators to create the “subjective conditions” — actually talking about the relationship of Atlas Shrugged to political and economic events — to set off the actual boom.

Two other minor points: The weekly sales in late 2007 were somewhat higher than in late 2006. So if you think, as the Economist suggests, that sales of Atlas Shrugged in the United States were pushed up by the British bailout of Northern Rock and the U.S. Treasury’s pressure on banks to assist subprime borrowers, then maybe the 2007 sales figures were already reflecting the impact of economic policy events. But the total sales in 2007 were barely ahead of 2006, and obviously the real jump has come this year.

Second, the bestselling edition of Atlas Shrugged is the mass-market paperback, which is of course the cheapest. That’s the edition whose sales are tracked in the chart. But the bestselling edition on Amazon is the more expensive trade paperback, which is the one whose sales the Economist analyzes. Why? Are Amazon customers older and more affluent, so that they prefer the larger book even at a higher cost? Do many local bookstores carry only the mass-market edition?

Thanks to C. Alexander Evans and Tom Firey for help in compiling and presenting these data.

What Caused Atlas Shrugged Sales to Soar? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Here’s a few bloggers who are writing, citing and linking to Cato research and commentary:

• Blogging from the 2009 International Conference on Climate Change, The Foundry‘s Nick Loris covers Patrick J. Michaels’s lecture on an EPA program that will “circumvent Congressional legislation to curb greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) and regulate carbon dioxide.”

• Natch Greyes pens his thoughts on Thursday’s  book forum featuring Patrick J. Michaels’s new book, Climate of Extremes: Global Warming Science They Don’t Want You to Know.

• Dan Kenitz cites an article by David Lampo on gun control.

• David Kirkpatrick links to Richard W. Rahn’s op-ed in The Washington Times about the increasing loss of liberty in the United Kingdom.

• Free-market energy blogger Robert Bradley, editor of Master Resource, cites Cato’s recognition of the women who launched the libertarian movement: Ayn Rand, Rose Wilder Lane and Isabel Paterson.

• Scott Horton 0f Anti-War Radio interviews Doug Bandow about relations between the US and China.

Let us know if you’re blogging about Cato by emailing cmoody@cato.org or drop us a line on Twitter @catoinstitute.

Who’s Blogging about Cato is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog