An interesting read via Hot Air…..
Conservatives and ‘Atlas Shrugged’

There are plenty of sources to turn to in the resistance against a newly ascendant left-liberalism, from Ludwig von Mises to Milton Friedman to Thomas Sowell. But those authors don’t buck up the rightist reader in quite the same way that “Atlas Shrugged” does.

The utilitarian argument for free markets — that they’re the most efficient means of determining the value of scarce resources and allocating them — is a far cry from the sanctification of capitalism one finds in Randism.

From whom else besides Ayn Rand, for instance, can one find such a full-throated defense of so-called Big Business, which in a 1962 lecture she dubbed “America’s persecuted minority”? Indeed, Miss Rand’s writings are catnip for those who seek to deflect any and all blame for the current economic crisis away from the private sector. Like the airtight religious belief system that it essentially is, Randian capitalism can never stumble or fail — it can only be betrayed.
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Only in a novel can capitalist-individualists such as John Galt, the fugitive embodiment of Miss Rand’s ideas and ideals, de-link themselves so dramatically and completely from government and society — “stopping the motor of the world,” as she put it in “Atlas Shrugged.”

Mired in fantasy, intoxicated by legend, embittered in non-reality: This is no way for an opposition party to act.

At least not one that has any hope of relevance or vitality.