Ayn Rand lived a remarkable life, even though she mostly stayed at home. Her main pursuits were writing and intellectual conversation. What makes her life an adventure is that she lived consciously. She looked for the principles behind what people said and did.

She always looked to integrate new facts with the rest of her knowledge. I think you could say she lived an integrated life; concrete and principle, theory and practice, fact and value were all integrated. Thus many of the mundane facts of life people talk about in this book take on a greater interest because they reflect the philosophy by which she lived.

Ayn Rand also had a sense of drama and a knack for witty rejoinders that keep the book lively. When her Christian housekeeper met her as she was dying, she said, “This is not going to be a death-bed conversion!”

We learn many new things in this book. We’ve been told before she didn’t like facial hair on men, but now we know that she dealt with bearded men in a teasing way, not as some rude anti-facial hair fanatic. In fact, one of the themes that comes out, in interview after interview, is that she was the opposite of people’s preconception of her. She was well mannered and gracious, and there was not a speck of diva in her. She thought of herself as a middle class American, and acted like one.

The book starts on a negative note with the interviews of Ayn’s appalling sister Nora. Nora did not like America because there were too many brands of toothpaste and no one to dictate to her which one to buy. So she went back to her paradise, the Soviet Union, where she lived in security, knowing that the state would provide one kind of toothpaste and relieve her of the anxiety of choice. (I assume the toothpaste problem resumed when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991. Who told her what brand to buy then?)

Nora hated the book We the Living. She said of it, “I can’t admire this falsehood. Go ahead, judge me!”

Consider yourself judged, Nora.

There are many other fascinating interviews, from Objectivists to her Trotskyite editor at New American Library, Patrick O’Connor. O’Connor might have been an old leftist, but he was also an honest man who saw that Rand’s books kept NAL in existence. He was outraged that none of the other leftist editors would even read the books that paid their keep.

Cynthia Peikoff shows how Barbara Branden mischaracterized her last meeting with Ayn Rand. Books like this are an act of justice in that they correct the smears of Rand’s enemies.

The book has a climax of sorts. It ends with a 36-page interview with Harry Binswanger that looks at Ayn Rand’s character in more philosophical depth than most of the other interviews.

This is a book any fan of Ayn Rand will find entertaining and informative.

The Tea Party movement represents the best hope of halting the federal Leviathan. We have written many words on the subject. In fact, several of us have participated in events for the first time in our lives. However, the whole affair elicits trepidation and pause. While a lot of the slogans, statements, and views are refreshing and spot on, a popular movement attracts those who would get out in front of it and use it to achieve real power.

Its decentralized nature is a blessing and a curse. The lack of central leadership means that no one person or group controls the message; its fractious nature engenders distrust of anyone who would try to do so. In a way, this makes the tea party a marketplace of ideas: the best ones garner the support and crackpots get shunted to the periphery. But with this dispersion comes the risk of a tent too open, unprincipled and unable to advance its ends effectively. The tea party movement rallied in support of Scott Brown’s election to the Senate to replace the late Ted Kennedy. He scared the dickens out of the Administration because he could play a pivotal role in blocking their agenda. But he’s already playing politics as usual, and displaying his superficial support for limited government. These sorts of hollow victories will continue to plague the tea party movement until and unless it firms up its core set of principles.

There are those who would co-opt the movement. Sarah Palin, for one, desperately wants to be the face of the Tea Party. She certainly stands the best chance of doing so with her outside-the-Beltway pedigree, down-home style, and incessant demagoguery. Others seek to steer it towards anti-abortion and anti-immigrant stances. The Republican Party certainly wants to assimilate its members back into the fold—practically taking for granted that the GOP is the movement’s natural home.

DIck Armey’s book, Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto, recognizes all of this. It’s a clear, delimited outline of how the movement should proceed. If DIck Armey, a former economics professor and one of the principal authors of the 1994 Contract with America, and this book take hold of the movement, then we’re in better shape than I had feared.

In Chapter 4 “What We Stand For,” Armey writes:

You’ll notice this is a short chapter, and that is intentional. It just doesn’t take a lot of words to say that we just want to be free. Free to lead our lives as we please, so long as we do not infringe on the same freedom of others. We are endowed with certain unalienable rights and delegate only some of our power to the government to protect those rights. Defenders of limited government understand that the U.S. Constitution lists the specific powers it delegates. If it’s not mentioned, we retain that power.

He gets it. When he says that “Tea Partiers value equality of opportunity, not equality of outcomes” and “America is different because we are all about the individual over the collective” (by way of introducing a quote from The Fountainhead), this is the sentiment and direction the Tea Party needs to go if it is to fulfill the legacy inherent in its moniker. A return to the individualism of the past will go a long way towards righting the wrongs of modern America.

Give Us Liberty has no philosophical flaws, mostly because it confines itself to defending liberty and freedom in the vein of the Founding Fathers. Stylistically, it is a bit ham fisted about its FreedomWorks connection. The two authors are the think tank’s chairman and president, and it sometimes reads like FreedomWorks’ new employee orientation manual. The organization has done great work guiding and fomenting the movement, so I can overlook the institutional cheerleading.

Obviously, historical America, while freer than today, contained the seeds of the modern welfare state. In failing to properly delineate the limits of government and to mount a thorough defense of individual rights, our ancestors left far too much unsaid and uncodified. The moral code of self-sacrifice and the collective over the individual opened a door to the statist twentieth century—the ostensible defenders of capitalism (the conservatives), deprived of a moral ground by sharing the collectivists premises, could only point to the utilitarian benefits of freedom. Such a meek defense quickly fell and led to the federal overreach we have today.

A proper defense of capitalism and freedom requires an explicit commitment to individual rights. The challenge, then as now, is to mount a defense of property rights. Life and liberty are fairly easy to protect: people generally like to live and don’t cotton to people telling them what to do. But standing up for property rights is difficult under a morality of altruism and self-sacrifice. Arguing that Wal-Mart can build a super center wherever it wants—providing it can acquire the land—or that a single mother has no claim on your income runs afoul of the conventional view that the collective trumps the individual or that you are your brother’s keeper.

But property rights are the most fundamental of the individual rights because we cannot sustain our life or liberty without being able to produce. Unless the Tea Party movement can elaborate a capable defense of property, it will fail at shoring up our freedom. That defense must necessarily be based on Ayn Rand’s ethical system of egoism, which offers a consistent, principled justification in opposition to the conventional morality of altruism. Armey’s book is not that defense.

Without this concomitant cultural change, any political success will be short-lived. A movement that espouses individual rights yet allows that man has a duty to his fellow man has accepted a contradiction that will tear it apart at the first conflict. But the way things are heading today, electing a crop of politicians that at least pay lip service to limited government and economic freedom might give us the time needed to effect such a culture swing. At the very least, it will delay the dictatorship that is inevitable down the statist path.

As a historian, I am all too familiar with the dangers of placing too much stock in contemporaneous sources. Present events and actions attract the most attention, leading to a myopic search for explanation. Causation is best determined from afar since the historian has a diverse group of hypotheses from which to choose and can evaluate subsequent events for corroboration. But one cannot fully discount contemporary analysis; it offers up a rich source for facts and, uncommonly, spot-on assessments. With this trepidation, I cautiously read Thomas Woods Jr.’s 2009 book Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse. Woods, an Austrian economist with the Ludwig von Mises Institute, sought to present an alternative to the previous and current administrations’ indictment of the free market on the charge of causing the present economic predicament.

The primary value in the book is re-locating the blame for the recession back where it belongs: government interference in the economy. He dismisses the Community Reinvestment Act, mortgage-backed securities, and credit default swaps for the noise that they are. These all had an impact on the depth of the recession but Woods’ identifies the singular perpetrator as the Federal Reserve.

The Fed manipulates interest rates in order to “stimulate” or put the brakes on the economy, depending on the direction they set the interest rates. The Austrians—and Woods here—correctly identifies that interest rates are effectively the pricing mechanism applied across time: how much is wealth deferred now worth in the future. In a free market, interest rates arise from individual savings preferences: if few people are willing to defer spending now, then the interest rate will increase due to diminished supply. They also may be induced to defer spending by an increased demand for money to lend. It’s a simple matter of supply and demand.

But the Fed’s increase of the capital stock does not represent deferred spending. It is an artificial adjustment to the supply without a corresponding increase in demand. This dislocation acts as a signal to businesses and consumers of capital that now is the time to undertake projects that are profitable only with cheap credit. Woods cites an apt analogy from Ludwig von Mises to illustrate this distortion:

Mises draws an analogy between an economy under the influence of artificially low interest rates and a home builder who falsely believes he has more resources—more bricks, say—than he really does. He will build a house whose size and proportions are different from the ones he would have chosen if he had known his true supply of bricks. He will not be able to complete this larger house with the number of bricks he has. The sooner he discovers his true brick supply the better, for then he can adjust his production plans before too much of the finished house is produced and too many of his labor and material resources are squandered. (69)

Woods also briefly covers the Austrian business cycle theory to illustrate that such economy-wide movements aren’t the fault of the free market such as it is. Their theory also posits that higher-order goods, like capital and wholesale products, are the most sensitive to interest-rate fluctuations while consumer goods are the last to respond. The recent boom and bust provides ample evidence of this observation, as capital-intensive industries were affected first and only recently have some consumer good manufacturers started to have trouble. The reason is solely due to money supply manipulations by the Federal Reserve.

Books of this nature always conclude with policy recommendations: it’s practically de rigueur. Refreshingly, Woods’ suggestions are entirely about how the federal government can extricate itself from money. He notes Mises’ observation that the “history of money is the history of government efforts to destroy money.” I have no beef with any of his ideas, which include abolishing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, getting rid of the Fed, and ending the system of fiat money that allows for hidden government spending.

This book is wonderful if for no other reason than introducing the reader to the Austrian School of economics, which is the most consistent defender of the free market in the economics profession. “Most consistent” here means that its defense of freedom rests on practical grounds—that liberty and economic freedom work well and much better than socialism. Woods’ book doesn’t go far enough: it’s not grounded in individual rights and the nature of man like John Allison’s talk was. But as an accessible, accurate analysis of the source of the current situation, it deserves a wide audience.

The story is about a writer who goes on a journey to find the man who started World War 1. He meets a man named Mered who takes him around the world of the past and present with a glimpse of the future of 1950 showing how civilizations keep destroying themselves and giving his reasons why. It’s scary how many ideas that were popular then are again so now.

I won’t mention any spoilers here and I recommend this site for a good in-depth review of the book.

Mered’s thought processes are sometimes loaded with juicy mental somersaults as in this paragraph where he explains to the writer about a union meeting of miners deciding whether to go on strike for more money and benefits:

“Again,” said Mered, “listen rather to what they mean than what they say. The question here is whether the state has still the strength to say on what terms half a million shall continue to perform the drudgery of digging coal. Their dilemma is that the coal diggers are politically free. Therefore they cannot be chained to their work. But on no account can they be allowed to stop; nor can they be permitted to name their own terms. Thus you approach involuntary servitude under conditions of political freedom.”

Wow! Sounds like political science professors of today instead of 1921.

I recommend this book.

While in 2008 I took a needed break from reading as many often do, this year I’m ratcheting up my reading once again. I’ve always enjoyed reading a few, if not several, books at a time, alternating back and forth between them. Usually, it takes a few months to complete any one book. I’m presently switching back and forth between four non-fiction books, having just completed a fifth. Here are my assessments so far:

Abraham Lincoln by James M. McPherson

With the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday approaching on February 12, I’ve noticed a slew of new books on our 16th president at my local Barnes & Noble. I counted 15 in all! I’ve never been all that interested in reading about Lincoln, and from what I’ve gathered reading about him in Objectivist circles, he seems to be a rather mixed figure. At my job as an editor-reporter at a newspaper on Long Island, the higher-ups have asked us to do some stories on black history month. I decided to take a look at how Lincoln is taught in schools, as well as try to find a Lincoln or Civil War buff and look into what the local library may be doing to commemorate the bicentennial.

So to prepare for this, I decided to pick up a short, 70-page biography on Lincoln, written by James M. McPherson, whose Battle Cry of Freedom I’ve heard is an excellent book about the Civil War. Well, I just completed it tonight. It’s written chronologically, and somewhat encyclopedically: “Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky, about fifty miles south of Louisville.”

McPherson, however, has an agreeable style that doesn’t bore. He presents Lincoln as a respectable figure who, at least in his early politically career, was pragmatic. But when the most important decisions came—from Fort Sumter to emancipation and particularly when a war-weary North pressured him to compromise and bring “peace”—Lincoln stood his ground on the issue of abolition and reconstruction.

New Deal or Raw Deal? by Burton Folsom

I’ve read good things about this book, including a positive review by historian Eric Daniels in the Winter 2008 issue of The Objective Standard. Plus, I just watched the author, Burton Folsom, give a talk about his book on C-SPAN’s BookTV last Saturday, and I read and enjoyed his two other informative books, The Myth of the Robber Barons and Empire Builders.

The book’s basic premise is that far from improving the economy, FDR’s New Deal and its essentially socialist policies prolonged the Great Depression. I’m only a few chapters into it so far, but already I’ve come across some interesting passages about how the New Deal statists operated, particularly their threats to use for with those who showed resistance to their coercive policies.

Objectivism in One Lesson by Andrew Bernstein

The title of this book is a spin on that excellent volume on basic economics, Economics In One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt. I’m halfway through Andrew Bernstein’s book with the purpose of brushing up on the fundamentals of Objectivism, and curious about Bernstein’s presentation of the subject.

I’ve always thoroughly enjoyed his lectures (in person and on tape) and writings (particularly those that pertain to hero-worship), and the best part of this book so far are the examples he uses to ground the philosophy. These simple, understandable and, in many cases, totally new examples are also what I mainly enjoyed about Craig Biddle’s worthwhile Loving Life. Beyond that, I question why Bernstein omitted writing about the Objectivist aesthetics.

The Best Game Ever by Mark Bowden

Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down, takes a more in-depth look at the 1958 NFL Championship game between the Baltimore Colts and New York Giants, dubbed “The Greatest Game Ever Played.” I’m halfway through this book and loving it. Appropriate to the subject, Bowden writes simply and clearly, and starts by giving a broad overview of the historic game, as well as the general culture surrounding it. Leading up to the chapters on the title game itself, which I have not reached yet, Bowden constructs a context by exploring the history of the two teams. He starts with the Colts, focusing on wide receiver Raymond Berry and his relationship with quarterback Johnny Unitas. From there, he features the Giants, highlighting Sam Huff and his conversion into a linebacker by his defensive coach Tom Landry, who would later become the legendary head coach of the Dallas Cowboys.

While this game certainly had its excitement, in part because it was the first and still sole overtime championship game in NFL history, it is primarily considered “the greatest” because it put professional football on the map. From what I know about that famous game played at Yankee Stadium, it generated a huge television rating, and from there professional football eventually rose in popularity on a par with major league baseball.

Obit by Jim Sheeler

Award-winning obituary writer Jim Sheeler’s book of obituaries is more entertaining, and less encyclopedic, than your run-of-the-mill obituary since it adopts the form of a good short story, with compelling first paragraphs that usually make no mention of the date of the person’s death. Eventually, those dates come, but I like Sheeler’s style of first getting into what made the deceased interesting, rather than citing up from what made him or her interesting.

Why am I reading a book on obituaries? Because I occasionally write obits at work and I’m looking to improve on them. Plus, contrary to what some believe, obituaries are not primarily or even predominantly about death or how a individual died, but rather a celebration of his life—if they are so deserving. The subtitle for this book is “Inspiring stories for ordinary people who led extraordinary lives.” While it’s questionable just how “extraordinary” some of dead he writes about actually were, Sheeler demonstrates a knack for knowing what is, at least, intriguing and going with it.