I have been so focused on things cultish that I have missed a lot of cool stuff on your blog. When I saw your article on the Texas boom I thought, "Luke is more deliciously right-wing than I had imagined."
This brought to mind Don Luskin. He wrote a great blog called The Conspiracy To Keep You Poor and Stupid up until last year. He stopped in order to finish his new book I Am John Galt which he has written with Andrew Greta. He is a great guy. I relished his reports on the Conspiracy from his DC lobbyist mole friend "Mick Danger." He is often on Larry Kudlow and writes for a lot of bzns publications.
You can check out his blog I Am John Galt for more. Glenn Reynolds and Virginia Postrel did a show recently on PJTV on the Obama Libertarian Renaissance. Andrew Klavan and Bill Whittle also did a show. I was astounded to learn Bill has never read Ayn Rand. (Full disclosure: I haven't either. I am a non-fiction junkie. I only read novels when someone physically places a copy in my hands.)
IAJG is a great book, and I hope it stokes the libertarian renaissance. Don and Andrew pick about eight Rand characters and use them to reflect on contemporary heroes like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and above all John Allison of BT&T Bank, whom they identify with John Galt. Also parasites destroying the world the heroes create - Barney Frank slave of Fannie Mae, and the creepy Paul Krugman. Don lead the Krugman Truth Squad that pretty much crashed him. After Krugman called Don a stalker his wife and daughter got death threats.
I have a heroic sister who has worked at the Fed for years. I called her he other day and asked her what's up at work. She said, "Oh, we're busy destroying the banking system."
IAJG is such a moral book it is almost embarassing. But we need it when we have a government that is doing such destricutive things. The book is not just excellent story-telling and analysis. Above all it is a call to individual moral reform.
The question Don and Andrew pose is "In the light of these heroes and villains and the unfolding catastrophe that is all around us, who are you going to be - a John Galt who creates or a Wesley Mouch, who destroys the entire housing market?" Don writes: It's so simple. You want to know where socialism comes from? It comes from socialists.
This is chatty enough so I will end. I will mention one issue about the cult that presses on me: Why are Republican politicians like Sharron Angle, Mike Shurtleff, and others promoting Narconon and Applied Scholastics quackery for government funding?
While I have made headway on the Catholic front in the fight for great justice, the right-wing new media and the dextrosphere have been a stone wall. The only person who has written anything is David Frum. Coerced abortions, disconnected families, subversion of the government by front groups, government funding of quackery - these are all conservative issues.
I have been looking for Republicans who have criticized the cult for three years and found nothing. I was astounded to learn recently from Ben Domenech that Mitch Daniels had said that the cult is not a religion but a commercial enterprise aimed at making money. This was in 1995 or so when Mitch was with Eli Lilly, and Ben raised this precious info from the dead. The cult sued him for libel and lost. Too bad he isn't running we mighta coulda had our first SP President. Janet's book is great on illuminating the cult celebrity-politico complex.
PS: The most overt political anon ever undertaken by an anon was in Texas where anonymoushouston introduced a resolution for the Texas Republican platform that the state deal with the cult as a business and not a religion. It failed of course. But that was in 2008
