Atlas shrugged at Star magazine

Apropos to "Jess' Butt Goes Flat!", Irving Kristol once wrote that capitalism had promised three things: affluence, individual liberty, and

"the promise that … the individual could satisfy his instinct for self-perfection -- for leading a virtuous life that satisfied his spirit (or, as one used to say, his soul) -- and that the free exercise of such individual virtue would aggregate into a just society…. It was only when the third promise, of a virtuous life and a just society, was subverted by the dynamics of capitalism itself, as it strove to fulfill the other two -- affluence and liberty -- that the bourgeois order came, in the minds of the young especially, to posses a questionable legitimacy."

(Emphasis mine). How naive a view of capitalism, it seems, would expect that the hoi-polloi would use their liberty to pursue individual versions of virtue, which would "aggregate into a just society."

I am reminded of Ayn Rand -- of the entire trajectory of her life, even. She suffered under communism, and came to America a great proponent of capitalism, but also with a bad case of hero-worship for any big, strong men she could lay eyes on, and in the end, wrote a "masterpiece" in which the heroine (Rand's obvious alter ego) beds the three most powerful men on earth and finally ends up second in command to the most powerful of them -- who, after rescuing her from a plane crash and nursing her back to health, charges her for the eggs he serves her for breakfast, because the best way to show love someone is to respect their ability to earn money (in this case, the future money she would surely earn and use to pay him back for the eggs).

Of course, no one in the book has children or disabled relatives or elderly parents to care for. There's no room for that in a system in which love means respect of another person's market power.

Ayn Rand died quite lonely and bitter. (Of course, Lenin laid the groundwork for the death of 50-100 million people, so bad novel-writing and a dysfunctional personal life are great improvements).

In sum, the free pursuit of money with the expectation that people will use money as a stepping-stone to a just society, pretty much just leads to people getting stuck on the money, and the state of Jessica Simpson's butt.