I'd reconsider Rand. She has been Co-Op'ed from the neoliberals...

Here are some disqualifiers for Rand:
The reason why so many people like Rand is because she gives them a false sense of identity... most of the people who adore Rand aren't the producers or innovator she writes about, rather they are the moochers or parasites. It is all really childish and unrealistic... yet attractive. Most people would not know how to go Galt if they really wanted too.....

 

Snarge,

I must admit that I know nothing of William Hickman. I will not defend it. I understand the criticisms of Rand and some have validity. Again, my intent is not to start a debate about her, but I appreciate your delineation.

All men are imperfect. But all men can decide to think rationally unless there is something physically wrong with them. Life is a journey of discovery that requires rigorous scientific/intellectual honesty.

I want to know why and how events unfold.

 

Here's a couple outstanding reads off the top of my head...

 

John Adams was a great read... so was Team of Rivals... however, I was curious about cyclical history and man's constant destruction and rebirth.....

 

What's so hard to understand about mankind's refusal to learn from history and it's insistence upon re-inventing the wheel every few generations?

It's called "Human Nature", and it's driven by the ego. That's where the 2nd book above comes into play.

 

Which was sort of eluded to in the Matrix movie series... in way, though man also evolves.... so the curiosity is... can man break the cycle?

 

Not quite, but it is easy to see why many people are much easier to attack than their ideas.

Collecting SS after you have been forced to pay into it all your life, is not exactly a deviation.

As to Hickman:In 1928, the writer Ayn Rand began planning a novel called The Little Street, whose hero, Danny Renahan, was to be based on "what Hickman suggested to [her]." The novel was never finished, but Rand wrote notes for it which were published after her death in the book Journals of Ayn Rand. Rand wanted the hero of her novel to be "A Hickman with a purpose. And without the degeneracy. It is more exact to say that the model is not Hickman, but what Hickman suggested to me."[4] Rand scholars Chris Matthew Sciabarra and Jennifer Burns both interpret Rand's interest in Hickman as a sign of her early admiration of the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche, especially since she several times referred to Hickman as a "Superman" (in the Nietzschean sense).[wickie}

The Atlas shrugged movies may have flopped, but Honey BOO-
Boo is a winner with the public.

Lots of people got a raw deal during the Russian revolution, possibly 100 million got the rawest deal possible. Perhaps this caused a lot of hard feelings that continue even today. I know they still exist in former soviet states.

If you think Greenspan was actually a Rand follower, you have no idea what you are talking about and neither did he. He may have harbored fantasies, but you really don't understand his job-it was based completely on free market intervention and still is for that matter.

Rand's ideas may not reflect her own life, but that does not make them invalid nor does it prove their worth for they have never really been given a trial on a large scale.

What few people really understand is that there is not a dimes worth of difference between what we call liberal and conservative today, it is almost purely sleight of hand. None of them have actually done us any favors and both of them have created far more problems than they have solved.

Whether we like to admit it or not, humans-much like other species-are locked into competition for many things on many levels. Like it or not we aren't about raising mankind out of the mud, we are more concerned with the group we identify with-state,local,family,country. The system that seems to work best is to allow people the greatest range of individual choice in free markets and social parameters while supporting technical advancement.

Hammering humans against the anvil of social engineering in an effort to improve them has not provided those results. It has created long periods of stagnant development, a much larger class of have nots and a much greater concentration of wealth and special treatment in much smaller numbers. It has also killed a hell of a lot of innocent people.

 

LOL

"Perhaps"??

Actually, almost (<---note the qualifier) every single person left alive and stuck behind the Iron Curtain got a raw deal, both during and after the Russian Revolution, and this right on up to the collapse of the communist system in that part of the world. Indeed, most folks in Eastern Europe consider America to be ideal compared to their experience(s) under the former Soviet system.

This is fact.

Don't try to sugar-coat communism. If you think it's so wonderful, then move to China or North Korea.

 

Some of us need lttle sarcasm flags or overt indications of wry humor, and some don't. I'll flag it for you next time.

 

Why read antiquated, out of touch fiction novels from a by-gone age (Atlas Shrugged) when you can read current economists observations.

This is Capitalism 4.0 (2011)

Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of a New Economy in the Aftermath of Crisis: Anatole Kaletsky: Amazon.com: Books

Book over-view: "In this provocative book, Anatole Kaletsky re-interprets the financial crisis as part of an evolutionary process inherent to the nature of democratic capitalism. Capitalism, he argues, is resilient. Its first form, Capitalism 1.0, was the classical laissez-faire capitalism that lasted from 1776 until 1930. Next was Capitalism 2.0, New Deal Keynesian social capitalism created in the 1930s and extinguished in the 1970s. Its last mutation, Reagan-Thatcher market fundamentalism, culminated in the financially-dominated globalization of the past decade and triggered the recession of 2009-10. The self-destruction of Capitalism 3.0 leaves the field open for the next phase of capitalism’s evolution. Capitalism is likely to transform in the coming decades into something different both from the totally deregulated market fundamentalism of Reagan/Thatcher and from the Roosevelt-Kennedy era."

Regarding fairy-tales like Atlas Shrugged. Might as well read Lord of the Rings. The author of Atlas Shrugged Ayr Rand was a woman at one point fascinated with real life American killer, William Edward Hickman, whose gruesome, sadistic dismemberment of a 12 year old girl named Marrion Parker in 1927, shocked the nation. Rand filled her early notebooks with worshipful praise of Hickman. What did Rand admire so much about Hickman? His sociopathic qualities: "Other people did not exist for Hickman, and he does not see why they should. Hickman has no regard whatsoever for what society holds sacred and with a consciousness of his own. He has the true innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel other people." This echos almost word for word, her description of her character Howard Roark, the hero of her novel The Fountainhead: "He was born without the ability to consider others." (Mark Ames: Ayr Rand Hugley Popular Author and Inspiration to Right-wing Leaders was an Admirer of Serial Killer, February 26th, 2010)

So. You can either learn how to think about the economy from economists, or the groupie of an early 20th Century Psychopath. I know. Tough choice.