Forbes Calls Goldman CEO Holier Than Mother Teresa

I got a lot of letters from folks this week about an online column for Forbes written by a self-proclaimed Ayn Rand devotee named Harry Binswanger (if that's a nom de plume, it's not bad, although I might have gone for "Harry Kingbanger" or "Harry Wandwanker"). The piece had the entertainingly provocative title, "Give Back? Yes, It's Time for the 99% to Give Back to the 1%" and contained a number of innovatively slavish proposals to aid the beleaguered and misunderstood rich, including a not-kidding-at-all plan to exempt anyone who makes over a million dollars from income taxes.

Give Back? Yes, It's Time For The 99% To Give Back To The 1%

It’s time to gore another collectivist sacred cow. This time it’s the popular idea that the successful are obliged to “give back to the community.” That oft-heard claim assumes that the wealth of high-earners is taken away from “the community.” And beneath that lies the perverted Marxist notion that wealth is accumulated by “exploiting” people, not by creating value–as if Henry Ford was not necessary for Fords to roll off the (non-existent) assembly lines and Steve Jobs was not necessary for iPhones and iPads to spring into existence.

Let’s begin by stripping away the collectivism. “The community” never gave anyone anything. The “community,” the “society,” the “nation” is just a number of interacting individuals, not a mystical entity floating in a cloud above them. And when some individual person–a parent, a teacher, a customer–”gives” something to someone else, it is not an act of charity, but a trade for value received in return.

Right-to-Work: The (Ayn?) Rand Formula

There's reluctance among Canadian proponents to call for it by name. But Right-to-Work (longer, harder, without representation or recourse, for less money and fewer sick days or pee breaks) seems to be the flavour du jour amongst… ahem… politicians of a certain age.

(By which I mean the Age of Dickens. Pip-pip, cheerio, y'all.)

There are some folks who think we hit the high-water mark for social progress in the workplace somewhere between Cro-magnon Man and Ward Cleaver. So to bring things back into balance, a few individuals and their well-connected friends are hell-bent on dragging unionized workers -- for their own good, of course -- behind the woodshed to administer a free-market thrashing.

Paul Ryan, Ayn Rand Fan, Brings Writer's Philosophy To Presidential Stage

WASHINGTON -- When Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney selected Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) as his running mate, he wasn't just picking a self-proclaimed nerd and policy wonk, he was picking Ayn Rand's latest and best literary agent.

Rand's windy, melodramatic prose has been a conservative and libertarian inspiration for decades. Her novels "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead" are deemed essential philosophical tracts in defense of capitalism and the will of the individual over a society based on shared sacrifice. Rand titled one of her books "The Virtue of Selfishness."