Atlas Mugged: Making The World Safe For Sociopaths

What do Ayn Rand, Paul Ryan, the Teabaggers, and Lucifer have in common? (If you want to feel the backward, you must click it.) In Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel and current movie, Atlas Shrugged, the ideological template for those wishing to usher in a new Gilded Age run by billionaire plutocrats like the Koch Brothers, Atlas is meant to symbolize …

OBAMA SHRUGGED

When you have made evil the means of survival,
do not expect men to remain good.
Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for
the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral.
Do not expect them to produce, when
production is punished and looting rewarded.
Do not ask, ‘Who is destroying the world?’ •You are.**

Animating Ayn Rand’s Rotting Corpse

Young Alan Greenspan posing for Atlas Shrugged in Ayn Rand’s apartment Digby explores the Bizzaroworld economic logic and the psychology of greed that inflicts the wingnut universe, rooted as it is in Ayn Rand‘s classic 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged here and here. Ronald Reagan,  a key enabler of the Bush Depression, implicitly adopted Rand’s disdain for government’s role in fostering …