Libertarian Women’s History Month: Ayn Rand, in memoriam

Ayn Rand (Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum) was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, on February 2, 1905, to a not particularly observant Jewish family. Her father was a pharmacist, as is one of the middle class Russian families being slowly ground into starvation in her first novel, We, The Living.  She passed away on March 6, 1982, thirty three years ago today.  Since her passing her influence has grown to a point that she is attacked daily by statist writers, and Congressmen, Senators, and Presidential candidates discuss her books.

At age six she taught herself to read and two years later discovered her first fictional hero in a French magazine for children, thus capturing the heroic vision which sustained her throughout her life. At the age of nine she decided to make fiction writing her career. Opposed to the mysticism and collectivism of Russian culture, she thought of herself as a European writer, especially after discovering Victor Hugo, the novelist she most admired.  Of her early life she wrote about enjoying European and American culture, including light opera and jazz.

While in high school, she was eyewitness to both the liberal Kerensky Revolution, which she supported, and then, the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, which she denounced from the outset. To escape the fighting, her family went to the Crimea, where she finished high school. The final Communist victory brought the confiscation of her father’s pharmacy and periods of near-starvation. When introduced to American history in her last year of high school, she immediately took the United States as her model of what a nation of free people could be.

When her family returned from the Crimea, she entered the University of Petrograd to study philosophy and history, where she was supposed to have been a favorite of a famous Platonist who did not otherwise approve of female students.. Graduating in 1924, she experienced the disintegration of free inquiry and the takeover of the university by communist thugs. Amidst the increasingly gray life, her one great pleasure was Western films and plays. Long an admirer of cinema, she entered the State Institute for Cinema Arts in 1924 to study screenwriting.

In late 1925 she obtained permission to leave Soviet Russia for a visit to relatives in the United States. Although she told Soviet authorities that her visit would be short, she was determined never to return to Russia. She arrived in New York City in February 1926. She spent the next six months with her relatives in Chicago, obtained an extension to her visa, and then left for Hollywood to pursue a career as a screenwriter.  She never saw her family again until near the end of her life, when one of her surviving sisters came across a copy of one of Rand’s novels in a cultural exhibit in Moscow on Russians abroad, and was able to visit her in the U.S.

On Ayn Rand’s second day in Hollywood, Cecil B. DeMille saw her standing at the gate of his studio, offered her a ride to the set of his movie The King of Kings, and gave her a job, first as an extra, then as a script reader. During the next week at the studio, she met an actor, Frank O’Connor, whom she married in 1929; they were married until his death fifty years later.

After struggling for several years at various non-writing jobs, including one in the wardrobe department at the RKO Radio Pictures, Inc., she sold her first screenplay, “Red Pawn,” to Universal Pictures in 1932 and saw her first stage play, Night of January 16th, produced in Hollywood and then on Broadway. Her first novel, We the Living, was completed in 1934 but was rejected by numerous publishers, until The Macmillan Company in the United States and Cassells and Company in England published the book in 1936. The most autobiographical of her novels, it was based on her years under Soviet tyranny.

She began writing The Fountainhead in 1935. In the character of the architect Howard Roark, she presented for the first time the kind of hero whose depiction was the chief goal of her writing: the ideal man, man as “he could be and ought to be.” The Fountainhead was rejected by twelve publishers but finally accepted by the Bobbs-Merrill Company. When published in 1943, it made history by becoming a best seller through word of mouth two years later, and gained for its author lasting recognition as a champion of individualism.

The Fountainhead polarized critics and received mixed reviews upon its release. The New York Times‘ review of the novel named Rand “a writer of great power” who writes “brilliantly, beautifully and bitterly,” and it stated that she had “written a hymn in praise of the individual… you will not be able to read this masterful book without thinking through some of the basic concepts of our time.” Benjamin DeCasseres, a columnist for the New York Journal-American, wrote of Roark as “an uncompromising individualist” and “one of the most inspiring characters in modern American literature.” Rand sent DeCasseres a letter thanking him for explaining the book’s individualistic themes when many other reviewers did not.There were other positive reviews, but Rand dismissed many of them as either not understanding her message or as being from unimportant publications. A number of negative reviews focused on the length of the novel, such as one that called it “a whale of a book” and another that said “anyone who is taken in by it deserves a stern lecture on paper-rationing.” 

The year 1943 also saw the publication of The God of the Machine by Isabel Paterson and The Discovery of Freedom by Rose Wilder Lane. Rand, Lane and Paterson have been referred to as the founding mothers of the American libertarian movement with the publication of these works.

Ayn Rand returned to Hollywood in late 1943 to write the screenplay for The Fountainhead, but wartime restrictions delayed production until 1948. Working part time as a screenwriter for Hal Wallis Productions, she began her major novel, Atlas Shrugged, in 1946. In 1951 she moved back to New York City and devoted herself full time to the completion of Atlas Shrugged.

Published in 1957, Atlas Shrugged was her greatest achievement and last work of fiction. In this novel she dramatized her unique philosophy in an intellectual mystery story that integrated ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, politics, economics and sex. Although she considered herself primarily a fiction writer, she realized that in order to create heroic fictional characters, she had to identify the philosophic principles which make such individuals possible.  Like her other novels, Atlas is full of very cinematic potential — panoramic views from skyscrapers and mountains, dramatic tensions between siblings, spouses, co-workers.  Her two major novels have been praised by actors like Anne Hathaway (The Devil Wears Prada, Les Miserables)  and Joe Mangienello (TrueBlood, Magic Mike) and Atlas was recently made into a trilogy generally viewed as being of at best of made-for-TV-movie quality, by a fan who would lose his rights to produce a film if he did not hurriedly produce one.

Thereafter, Ayn Rand wrote and lectured on her philosophy—Objectivism, which she characterized as “a philosophy for living on earth.” She published and edited her own periodicals from 1962 to 1976, her essays providing much of the material for six books on Objectivism and its application to the culture. Ayn Rand died on March 6, 1982, in her Manhattan apartment, after a long battle with lung cancer.

Rand is viewed variously as the foremother, midwife, or Alien style involuntary host of the libertarian movement.  Like most famous and successful people she attracted many admirers and fans, some younger and not as established, and they did not always see eye to eye, and often separated in anger over issues that to an outsider seem personal (and very human) but not purely about ideas.  Her associations with people who would go on to be active in the libertarian movement include: economist Murray Rothbard, with whom she had a diremption that was initially about either his wife’s (Joey Rothbard’s) refusal to give up Catholicism or his formulation of an individualist anarchist political philosophy; psychologist Nathaniel Branden and his ex-wife Barbara, who for a time ran a school devoted to popularizing Rand’s ideas; philosophy professor John Hospers, later to be the first presidential candidate of the Libertarian Party; and Joan Kennedy Taylor, one of the editors of the 70s-80s competitor to reason magazine, Libertarian Review.  Kennedy Taylor may be the most interesting of these (all now deceased), historically, for several reasons.  As an editor Taylor discovered Charles Murray and persuaded him to write Losing Ground and his other influential books.  Taylor also edited the Manhattan Young Republican Club’s magazine, Persuasion, in the 60s, and met with Rand, who told her the name for her politics, philosophical but only a political philosophy, not a complete philosophical world view like Objectivism, was “libertarianism.”  Rand later abjured the “L-word” and denounced libertarians for being hippies and anarchists, as Murray Rothbard’s competing vision gained popularity in the movement.*  

Today two competing groups promote her philosophy, the better funded and more apostolic Ayn Rand Institute (ARI), and the more libertarian friendly Atlas Society, which promotes what it calls “open Objectivism.”  Each group was founded by and has a number of philosophy (and other) PhDs, but to outsiders the differences seem somewhat attitudinal.  Both have summer conferences and publications and a presence in DC, but ARI scholars and activities are more numerous and include some new and exciting sub-projects, like that of Alex Epstein on industrial progress and the moral case for fossil fuels.

In addition, a major libertarian foundation, the Cato Institute, has a president, John Allison, who describes himself as an Objectivist, as does former New Mexico governor and sometime Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson.   Though all of these people and groups promote her work, my suspicion is that, as with the success of The Fountainhead, her works being passed around by word of mouth among friends may be a greater force, pulling these groups along in its wake. 

Every book by Ayn Rand published in her lifetime is still in print, and hundreds of thousands of copies are sold each year, so far totaling more than twenty five million. Several new volumes have been published posthumously. Her vision of man and her philosophy for living on earth have changed the lives of thousands of readers and launched a philosophic movement with a growing impact on American culture.

Biographical Information on Ayn Rand

• Letters of Ayn Rand (Edited by Michael Berliner)
• Ayn Rand and the World She Made (Anne C. Heller)
• It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand (Jerome Tuccille)
• Journals of Ayn Rand (Edited by David Harriman)
• Goddess of the Market (Jennifer Burns)
• Ayn Rand (2004) (A biography by Jeff Britting)
• “My Thirty Years with Ayn Rand” (By Leonard Peikoff in The Voice of Reason)
• Facets of Ayn Rand (Memoirs by Mary Ann Sures and Charles Sures. The book is available at The Ayn Rand Institute eStore)
• Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life (A documentary on DVD by Michael Paxton)
• Radicals for Capitalism (Brian Doherty)
• (I am often tempted to write my own supplemental history of libertarianism, focusing on famous people in their time of dotage, to be entitled, lovingly, Cranky Old Jews.)

Interstellar – Almost Stellar

Interstellar is really very good.  It quotes, visually and in plot elements, from Signs, Elysium, Contact, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Gravity (and NBC’s recently cancelled show Revolution), and no doubt many other films, much as last year’s Tom Cruise offering, Oblivion, reproduced action sequences and panoramas from Independence Day (the flight chase in the canyon, itself a redo of Luke Skywalker’s flight through the death star canyons in Star Wars), the original Planet of the Apes (a nearly totally eroded Statue of Liberty), Star Wars, etc.

I love syfy so it wouldn’t have taken much to get me to see this film, but then last week Anne Hathaway appeared to promote it on Ellen.  Ms. Degeneres, a nice enough gal and a great entertainer, but a robotic Democrat (her Veteran’s Day guest today is Bill Clinton) immediately said the premise of the film was that the earth had been destroyed by global warming, and Ms. Hathaway (who is simultaneously a sometime or former Obama supporter and an admirer of Ayn Rand) stopped Degeneres and corrected her – the climactic/biological crisis wiping out the earth has no specified cause she said – the movie leaves it open as to whether it is climate change, or something else, possibly not man made.

And that is correct.  Species, including human crops, are dying out one after another (wheat and Okra are gone, corn is about to go) due to a “blight” and the only thing said about it is that it depends on nitrogen.  Simultaneously, the soil, maybe because it is infected with this blight, and not its normal bacteria, is producing dust clouds that terrorize the dwindling human populations and lead to high rates of childhood respiratory problems and mortality.

Matthew McConaughey is a widowed father, Cooper, with a son and daughter (Murph) living in a farm house with his widower  father (John Lithgow).  It’s not exactly the Mel Gibson corn field farm house from Signs, but alien forces are at work in it, making things fall from the shelves in his daughter’s bedroom, which she interprets as ghosts.

(This post will contain spoilers, AFTER the video, so it is safe to read the part before.)

And this is one of the notable things about Interstellar:  it’s what Molly Haskell would call a women’s film, or 70 years ago would have been called a “weeper.”  It has some action, but no sex, and almost no violence.  (Spoiler alert!)  It’s a movie about a family, a father and daughter.  Ultimately it is a remake of The Wizard of Oz, where a wizard like interlocutor in the 5th dimension tries to tell Jessica Chastain (Dorothy) how to get (her father) back home, communicating to her from behind the curtain of her childhood bookshelf by means of manipulating gravity.

http://www.cbsnews.com/common/video/cbsnews_video.swf

It’s also about mis-communication and treachery and deceit.  And most of the deceit and treachery, libertarians will enjoy seeing, is from the government.  An Obama-like soft totalitarian government is trying to manage the decline, and perhaps extinction, of the human race.  The internet doesn’t seem to exist any longer.  The government allocates diminishing resources to what it thinks important: very few people are allowed to go to college (Cooper’s son is denied admission) and most are encouraged to become farmers.  All text books have been re-written to teach that the space program was a hoax and men never landed on the moon – it was simply a brilliant bit of Cold War psyops to make the Soviet Union bankrupt itself (apparently communist central planning alone didn’t do that) by wasting money trying to compete in a fantasy space race.  Pre-teen Murph gets in a fight and suspended from school when she brings her dad’s old text book to school that has a chapter on the lunar landing.

Her father’s model of the lunar lander (turns out Cooper was an pilot back when NASA existed) is one of the items the ghostly forces keep knocking of Murph’s bookshelf.  She starts trying to figure out what the poltergeist is telling her, scientifically recording its bumps in the night and trying to see if they are Morse or other code.  Eventually Cooper discovers that they are coordinates, and off he goes in his farm truck to find them (with little Murph stowed away against his orders).  They arrive at a NORAD base being used by the remnant of NASA (now apparently run by Straussians who treat the possibility of space travel as esoteric wisdom) to assemble a last ditch effort to create an interstellar ark to save the human race.  A scientist named Dr. Brand (Michael Caine) runs it, and was conveniently an old teacher of Cooper’s; Anne Hathaway is his daughter.  Plan B is to send a few people and thousands of frozen embryos (the women among them will get to carry), through a black hole some extraterrestrial intelligence has parked (shades of 2001) near Saturn. that leads to another galaxy with marginally habitable planets.  Plan A is to send a whole colony through on a giant space station (but this requires solving some advanced physics about black holes, quantum mechanics, and relativity, that is beyond current earth science).

Hathaway and McConaughey are part of a 4 person crew who undertake Plan B, and head off to the new galaxy.  During a long trip that is days in their time but decades of earth time (due to relativistic effects), they discover that the whole NASA project may have been a treacherous attempt to get them to go, shepherding the frozen eggs, even though no one believed they would ever be able to return; nor would any more human beings (including their families) ever be able to join them.  In tracking down a handful of scientists/astronauts who made the journey in a dozen small ships a decade earlier to find the most hospitable plant, they meet Matt Damon, alone on an icy world.  He’s sent back fake data claiming it as a good candidate for Earth 2.  Turns out he is a homicidal maniac who has decided he alone knows best how to shape humanity’s future.  A delicious turn given Damon’s real life statist politics.  And funny that the world they are escaping is run by programming its citizens with politically corrected history in the public schools, given Damon’s history of attacks on school choice.

The science and the deus ex machina used to wrap up the movie aren’t that important.  It’s still worth seeing if you decide to go to a film this Holiday afternoon.  And it’s kind of patriotic and anti-statist at the same time.

Ten Things About the New "Atlas Shrugged" movie – in lieu of an actual review

1.  It may or may not be better than part 2.  It’s definitely better than part 1.  Libertarians are basically panning it everywhere, not for its (in)fidelity to Rand’s book, but for the talents of the directors and producers.

2.  The production values are somewhere around the level of an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation or a B grade made for TV movie.  (Maybe that’s why so many trek actors, like Armin Shimmerman, have been sprinkled throughout this trilogy — they know how to act beside nothing but papier mache and glitter.)

(Shimmerman – are Ferengi interstellar Randians?)

3.  Rob Morrow (as Hank Reardon) and a number of well known TV character actors have bit parts or mid-level parts for which they are either bad casting or oddly brief cameos.


And who knew Hank Rearden was a hot Jewish boy?






(Morrow – I’d eat him with some horseradish!)

4.  Actor Kristoffer Polaha does a very respectable job as John Galt, as well as being both a moderately delicious hunk (though truth be told, aside from some pretty mountains, there isn’t a lot else for the gaze to settle on).  As long time Objectivisty libertarian Republican activist Ann Stone just emailed me “I was not crazy about this one at all…seemed stilted…the only positive was the hunk playing John Galt.”  So far all the gals and gay guys I have spoken to agree.

5.  The torture scene, where the worst of the fascist kakistocracy strip and electrocute Galt to try to force him to become the nation’s economic czar, features only a shirtless, not nude, Galt, unlike the book.  The special effects are also not good even for an old episode of TNG in this scene.  And though Polaha, married and the father of three, is 6’3″ and in better shape than me or most of the people reading this, by Hollywood standards he needs to lift some weights to have shirtless scene quality pecs.  Rearden is also not there to help rescue Galt, as he is in the novel.

6.  Funnily, Polaha does actually resemble a number of good looking libertarian boys, our better looking nerds, although he’s taller.  I think he and Gary Johnson’s son could be cousins.

7. Amazingly a number of people attending the group event screening I attended in Arlington, Virginia were libertarians who have never read Atlas Shrugged.  More amazingly they claimed to understand this movie without having read the book or in some cases having seen the first two installments.  I don’t think it is well written enough to stand alone, but if these other viewers can be trusted, I am wrong.

8.  Ron Paul, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Grover Norquist, among others, all appear, in some cases playing themselves and in some cases as extras.  It’s cute, but when someone does a real version of this someday, starring Anne Hathaway and Joe Mangeniello they should take these “product” placement gimmicks out.  (How come they didn’t get Kennedy to play Cheryl Taggart? I bet she would have been good at it for real.)

9.  It’s actually very touching and almost misty eyed making, mainly the scenes where Dagny and Galt navigate the fact that they want to be together but are on different sides of a war.

10.  The one thing the writers and directors did do well is condense The Speech and figure out how to film it.  Among all the overly long and loving panoramas of redwoods and mountains and the cheesy sets, this they did surprisingly well.

The Top 29 Hottest Libertarian Women – Summer 2014

Earlier this summer a website published a list of the hottest Libertarian men, and the hottest libertarian women.  Both lists contained no people of color and no people from outside the United States.  The women’s list had no one over 35.  Additionally, both lists, especially the men’s list, had nice people, smart people, cute people…but were a little low on HOT people.

Austin Peterson was the publisher.  I’m older than he is; I’ve actually dated both genders, which he may not have.  As Reagan said of Carter, we will forgive him his youth and inexperience.

I’m expanding the number to 29, for two reasons.  One is a bow to libertarian nerditude – 29 is a prime number.  Another is that as a prime number, 29 represents integrity, wholeness, and individualism — these people can’t be reduced to a sum of their parts or demographics.  It’s my own libertarian cultural appropriation of Kabbalah numerology or Pythogorean metaphysics.

Here is my correction.  (If you were on Austin’s list you are ineligible for this one; you are also ineligible if you are one of my drinking or brunch pals who I see more than once a month.  Many people in one or both of those groups could be on this list otherwise, of course.)

Since there are obviously so many, many, many hot libertarians, we are planning to do lists of hot couples, hot gays and lesbians, etc. etc., and new Winter 2014 hot men’s and women’s lists around December 15 – the Birthday of the Bill of Rights.

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#1 Emily Ekins

(As a gorgeous, blond and American libertarian woman, it is shocking that Ms. Ekins was left off the other list, which featured heavily the notable gorgeous blond American libertarian women.)

Ekins is the director of polling for Reason Foundation where she leads the Reason-Rupe public opinion research project, launched in 2011. Emily’s research focuses on public attitudes toward government, public policy, and how individuals make trade-offs with an emphasis on quantitative analysis. She is an active member of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) and the American Political Science Association (APSA). Emily is also working on her PhD thesis in political science at the University of California, Los Angeles. Emily’s professional experience includes quantitative analyses of the Tea Party movement for the Cato Institute, and conducting survey analyses and case writing for Dr. Peter Tufano at the Harvard Business School. She has discussed her research on Fox News, Fox Business, CNBC, The Blaze, and her research has appeared in The Washington Post, Politico, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Times. 

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#2 Dambisa Moyo

Dr. Dambisa Moyo  was awarded the Hayek Lifetime Achievement Award, named for the Nobel Prize winner and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Friedrich Hayek. Moyo was named by TIME Magazine as one of the world’s 100 most influential people.^[11]

In 2009 Moyo was also honoured by the World Economic Forum as one of its Young Global Leaders.^[12] In September 2009 Moyo was featured in Oprah Winfrey‘s power list of 20 remarkable visionaries.^[13] The Daily Beast selected Moyo as one of “150 Extraordinary Women Who Shake The World”.^[14]

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#3 Tanuja Paruchuri

Ms. Paruchuri, formerly of the DC metro area, is a diet and wellness entrepreneur and a Texas Libertarian Party candidate for U.S. Senate.

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#4 Willette Murphy Klausner

WILLETTE  KLAUSNER  is president/owner of Edgework Productions and WMK Productions.  Ms. Klausner has produced Three Mo’ Tenors since 2001. Ms Klausner is a co-producer ofRomeo and Juliet on Broadway starring Orlando Bloom and Condola Rashad and is a co-producer of the recent Broadway production of The Trip to Bountiful with Cicely Tyson, Cuba Gooding Jr., Vanessa Williams and Condola Rashad as well as co-producer of The Mountain Top starring Angela Bassett and Samuel Jackson.   Ms. Klausner is married to  Reason Foundation founder Manuel S. Klausner. They share a passion for food and wine and are co-founding members of the American Institute of Wine and Food.

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#5 Anne Hathaway

A fantastic actress in movies for young or old, Ms. Hathaway counts Ayn Rand as one of her favorite novelists.

Perhaps she and actor Joe Manganeillo can someday do a really good version of Atlas Shrugged together?






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#6 Joanna Andreasson

Ms. Andreasson does graphic design for clients including the Mercatus Center and reason magazine.

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#7 Stephanie Rugolo

Blogger and policy analyst Stephanie Rugolo is leaving the CATO Institute for an Arizona think tank.  You can follow her at The Rugolo Report blog, which she writes with her brother.

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#8 J. Buzz Webb

J. Buzz Webb is the founder of The Big Gay Dance Party at PorcFest, New England’s annual summer libertarian festival.

She’d make a hot gay guy, and she’s a hot butch gay woman.

Straight guys may not get her kevorka.  I think most women – gay, bi, and straight  (and some lesbians trapped in a male body) – do.

(Full disclosure:  Buzz has kissed me on the cheek.)

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#9 Amanda Anderson

Ms. Anderson is director of events at the Leadership Institute.  My Judd Weiss photo is pretty good; this one does not really capture her good looks fully.

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#10 Samantha Dezur

It’s official.  Ms. Dezur, a Hill lobbyist, once was in The Hill‘s list of 50 most beautiful Hill staffers.

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#11 Joanna Robinson

Who can resist a gal in riding gear?  (But where is her crop?)

She also owns a chain of massage spas.  Unfortunately, she is taken!



Ms. Robinson is on the board of directors of America’s Future Foundation, and brings debates and lectures to D.C. and other cities.

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#12 Marianne Rodriguez

A Hillsdale College graduate, she looks like this and she is always so nice!  Ms. Rodriguez works with the America’s Future Foundation, bringing debates and lectures to people in D.C.

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#13 Sara Scarlett

Born in Dubai, living in London, Ms. Scarlett, a former CATO intern, identifies as a voluntaryist.

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#14 Katie Hooks

Ms. Hooks is director of digital media at reason magazine.

She has a compelling edgy energy.  And a really hot boyfriend (not pictured here).

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#15  Virginia Postrel

Virginia Postrel is a contributing editor for The Atlantic and the author of The Substance of Style and The Future and Its Enemies. She writes the weblog Dynamist.com as well as a monthly column on “Commerce & Culture” for The Atlantic and regular columns forForbes. For six years she has been an economics columnist for The New York Timesbusiness section. Previously, she was the editor and associate editor of Reasonmagazine. She also founded Reason Online, the magazine’s website. She has been a media fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a reporter for Inc. andThe Wall Street Journal.





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#16 Christa Markwalder

According to Politico:  Christa Markwalder: This Switzerland liberal is actually a centrist, since Switzerland liberals are actually Libertarians.

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#17 Astrid Sarvis

Dr. Astrid Sarvis is a pediatric fellow in Washington, D.C. and the wife of Libertarian U.S. Senate candidate Robert Sarvis.  She campaigned actively for his 2013 Virginia gubernatorial race, where he won an unprecedented 7% of the vote as a Libertarian candidate.

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#18 Shikha Sood Dalmia

Our question for reason and Forbes writer Shikha Sood Dalmia is:  when are you writing a book?

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#19 Moira Bagley

Former communications director for Senator Rand Paul, Ms. Bagley recently married a FreedomWorks staffer and bought a nest on East Capitol Street.

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#20 Angela Keaton

AntiWar.com fundraiser Angela Keaton is the immediate past chair of OutRight Libertarians.

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#21 Camille Paglia

Where there is that much energy there must be heat.  It’s a law of physics.  I’d love to lock her in a room with Michael Moynihan and force him to interview her.

Why isn’t she on RedEye?

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#22 Abby McCloskey

Abby M. McCloskey is the program director of economic policy at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) where she disseminates the work of AEI’s economic policy team. McCloskey also studies and writes about various financial services policy issues. Immediately before joining AEI, McCloskey was director of research at the Financial Services Roundtable where she worked on financial regulatory reform, including Dodd-Frank and Basel III. McCloskey has also worked for the Mercatus Center. While at Mercatus, she created and hosted a video series on financial markets issues.

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#23 Michelle Minton

Ms. Minton is a fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and runs Human Achievement Happy Hour every year.

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#24 Roxanne J. Alvarez

• Ms. Alverez is the Manager of Business and Partnerships, Women, Girls, & Population at the United Nations Foundation.
• 

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#25 Veronique Pham Singh

New mom Veronique Pham Singh works in cybersecurity.

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#26 Hadley Heath Manning

Ms. Heath is a policy Analyst at Independent Women’s Forum

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#27  Amanda Billyrock

Ms. Billyrock speaks at many libertarian events.

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#28  Naomi Brockwell

• Ms. Brockwell is a Policy Associate at Bitcoin Center NYC, Program Officer at Moving Picture Institute and Creator at Bitcoin Girl

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#29 Magatte Wade

 This serial entrepreneur who raised $7 million to grow her first business and who Forbes magazine called one of the 20 youngest power women in Africa, was a recent speaker at Students for Liberty’s international conference.

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