Wealthcare | The New Republic
http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/wealthcare-0

Jonathan Chait, 09/14/09, The New Republic takes AR seriously in a long art (c. 5,000 words?), ostensibly a review of Burns and Heller's books. Lousy article, but Chait gets some imp things right: says AR is different in regarding redistribution wrong, not in practical terms, but moral terms. But stresses that the moral issue is the virtuous and productive being sacrificed to the lazy and immoral. Says she has been very influential among the right.

On Ayn Rand's legacy and the American right: "Ayn Rand's novels tend to strike their readers with the power of revelation, and they are read less like fiction and more like self-help literature, like spiritual guidance. Again and again, readers would write Rand to tell her that their encounter with her work felt like having their eyes open for the first time in their lives... The likes of Gale Norton, George Gilder, Charles Murray, and many others have cited Rand as an influence. Rand acolytes such as Alan Greenspan and Martin Anderson have held important positions in Republican politics. "What she did--through long discussions and lots of arguments into the night--was to make me think why capitalism is not only efficient and practical, but also moral," attested Greenspan. In 1987, The New York Times called Rand the "novelist laureate" of the Reagan administration. Reagan's nominee for commerce secretary, C. William Verity Jr., kept a passage from Atlas Shrugged on his desk."