6 GEN 2010 · Ayn Rand's books sell between eight hundred thousand and a million copies a year.Her first novel We the Living was admired by Mencken. Night of January 16th opened on Broadway. Her major novel The Fountainhead (1943) was "masterful". In the fifties, Rand (50) and Nathaniel Branden (25) begin a romantic affair with the consent of their spouses. Rand's husband Frank O'Conner played the role of her supportive wife. Atlas Shrugged (1957) was Rand's magnus opus. When Branden fell in love with a young girl, Rand spurned him and shut down the Nathaniel Branden Institute. The Objectivist movement imploded. Many then drifted into the libertarian circles. 

12 GEN 2010 · In Ayn Rand and the World She Made Heller goes to bat for Rand as a fiction writer. Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right by Jennifer Burns is a poorer book because it is confused. Rand is not a Conservative. Most conservatives stand for mixed economies. They are proponents of big government and statism, not individual liberty and free markets.

19 GEN 2010 · Spooner was an American individualist anarchist with radical opinions on everything. His true calling was writing pamphlets and books on issues of the day. His private postal service was forced out of business by the government. He again lost everything and lived out his years as an urban recluse. His most famous work was The Unconstitutionality of Slavery. No Treason is his most famous political tract (1867). "Although Spooner’s argument on the unconstitutionality of slavery had no legal basis, his concept of natural law contained the germs of anarchistic theory of government".

26 GEN 2010 · Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is thought to be the greatest work of the 20th century with 150 million readers. The book's thesis - Evil power cannot be defeated by power - is libertarian. Lord Acton phrased this concept as Power tends to corrupt and Absolute power corrupts absolutely. This was why the one ring in Lord of the Rings had to be destroyed.

2 FEB 2010 · Autodidactic influential libertarian, Isabel Paterson is best known for The God of the Machine (1943). Ayn Rand contributed ideas to it but continued to learn from Paterson both politics and history. Rand rescued the book and promoted it.

9 FEB 2010 · Obama's White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs is run by Cass Sunstein. Sunstein and Vermeule's paper on conspiracies theories, e.g. JFK, TWA 800, global warming fraud, MLK killed by feds,concludes that some theories create problems for government to solve. Thus, government should target, undermine and silence those (false, not true) conspiracy entrepreneurs with, at least, censorship.Nock prescribes the study of classical Greece and Rome for disciplining the mind. Thus equipped, current events can be put in perspective. Rothbard's The Anatomy of the State reveals the problem the state has in gaining support from the public. The majority must view their government as good and beneficial. Court historians are groomed to persuade the public to the state's position. Conspiracy theories breed skeptics.Barnes and Beard wrote revisionist histories, importantly exposing truths and facts - often the reverse of what had been previously accepted. Revisionists have been blocked from documents about WWII and US Foreign Policy since 1933. Revisionists might reveal the US to be morally repugnant.

16 FEB 2010 · Ultimately, he and the woman are caught, imprisoned, and tortured. In the end, he is sincerely repentant of his crimes and is completely devoted to the all-encompassing government that has done him all this harm.We was the work of a not-very-well-known Russian writer, Yevgeny Zamyatin. Nineteen Eighty-Four, by contrast, is extremely well known in the West today, particularly in England and the United States, where words and phrases like "Newspeak," "doublethink," "thoughtcrime," and "Big Brother Is Watching You" are familiar to millions who have never read the novel from which they come. And there is no getting around the similarities between 1984 and Zamyatin's We. 

23 FEB 2010 · Paine became a privateer in 1753 to locate and rob enemy ships in order to escape his family business - corset making. The blunt but brilliant Paine was helped by Benjamin Franklin to join the American Revolution as editor and writer. Common Sense was a huge success.Common Sense was so influential that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Adams said, "Without the pen of the author of Common Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain.""These are the times that try men's souls..." Paine wrote in The American Crisis pamphlet series. General Washington had this read to his soldiers. Paine suggested the phrase United States of America. The Rights of Man was popular in France, but not in America. The Age of Reason was about deism, not atheism as was thought. All three books were high sellers, perhaps because Paine wrote to be read aloud.

2 MAR 2010 · Five figures starred in Radicals for Capitalism by Brian Doherty: Mises, Hayek, Friedman, Rand, and Rothbard. But, by the 1970s the irrepressible Rothbard became the indisputable Mr. Libertarian. An erudite, brilliant intellectual, Rothbard's strategic vision to make the libertarian movement thrive and grow is credited with the robust growth that has occurred.

9 MAR 2010 · Browne is known as the libertarian investment guru who wrote books like How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World. Browne represented the Libertarian Party in two presidential elections. His voice was consistent and principled. He was a giant.Galambos was the unknown libertarian, but those who met him and the students in his courses seemed profoundly effected by him and his Free Enterprise Institute. Browne was not permitted to teach ideas that Galambos maintained were his. Students were not allowed to tell you about the mysterious classes.