Ayn Rand Institute Announces $2 Million Fundraising Campaign–the Atlas Shrugged Initiative

IRVINE, CA, July 24, 2009—The Ayn Rand Institute has announced a $2 million fundraising campaign—the Atlas Shrugged Initiative—in an unprecedented effort to increase readership of Ayn Rand’s best-known novel, Atlas Shrugged.

The impetus behind the Atlas Shrugged Initiative, explains ARI President and Executive Director Yaron Brook, is the fact that “At no time in history has there been greater public interest in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. And its message has never been more urgent.

“The torrent of destructive, statist policies emanating from Washington represents both a crisis—and an opportunity. Through the Atlas Shrugged Initiative, we intend to capitalize on the soaring grassroots interest in Ayn Rand and her ideas.”

Adds Dr. Brook, “The Atlas Shrugged Initiative is off to an outstanding start. A very generous benefactor has already offered to match every dollar donated to this Initiative—up to a total of $500,000—and as a result of early and substantial funding, the bookstore promotions that are a key component of the Initiative are already well underway.”

Key elements of the Atlas Shrugged Initiative include significant bookstore promotions of the novel; an expansion of ARI’s web-based efforts to spur readership of Atlas Shrugged; expansion of ARI’s long-running educational programs for high school and college students; and targeted outreach to pro-liberty, pro-capitalist activists around the nation.

Visit the Ayn Rand Institute’s Atlas Shrugged Initiative campaign page to learn more or to support this campaign.

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Health Care is Not a Right

Health Care Is Not a Right

Washington, D.C., July 27, 2009–President Obama’s push for universal health care rests on the premise that people have a right to medical care and medical insurance. “This is wrong,” said Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Center. “This notion of some sort of entitlement to health care is a distortion of the concept of a ‘right’ and is ultimately what’s behind all of the problems with today’s medical system.

“Philosopher Leonard Peikoff explained the basic point in a 1993 speech (view the video or PDF) given in the context of HillaryCare. It applies equally to Obama’s ‘reforms.’ Peikoff argued that ‘all legitimate rights have one thing in common: they are rights to action, not to rewards from other people. The American rights [to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness] impose no obligations on other people, merely the negative obligation to leave you alone. The system guarantees you the chance to work for what you want–not to be given it without effort by somebody else. . . . Under the American system you have a right to health care if you can pay for it, i.e., if you can earn it by your own action and effort. But nobody has the right to the services of any professional individual or group simply because he wants them and desperately needs them. The very fact that he needs these services so desperately is the proof that he had better respect the freedom, the integrity, and the rights of the people who provide them.”

For more information on the Ayn Rand Center’s position on health care, please visit our Web site.

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Record Number of Students Enter the Ayn Rand Institute’s "Anthem" Essay Contest

Irvine, CA, July 16, 2009–More than 16,000 high school students, a record number, have entered the Ayn Rand Institute’s annual “Anthem” essay contest, which will award the winners a total of $14,000 in prizes.

First published in 1938, “Anthem” is a heroic and inspiring story about the triumph of the individual’s independent spirit. “Anthem” depicts a collectivist dictatorship in a future in which the word “I” has vanished, and how a lone dissident discovers the lost word’s spiritual meaning.

Open to 8th, 9th and 10th graders, the “Anthem” essay contest requires contestants to write on one of several topics dealing with the characters and themes in the novel. The contest is designed to promote critical thinking and writing skills. Essays are judged on both style and content.

According to Marilee Dahl, ARI’s education manager, “Judges look for writing that is clear, articulate and logically organized. Winning essays must demonstrate an outstanding grasp of the philosophic meaning of ‘Anthem.’”

Since 1985 more than 200,000 high school students from around the world have entered ARI essay contests and received more than a half million dollars in cash awards.

The first prize winner for this year’s “Anthem” essay contest will take home $2,000; 5 second-prize winners will each receive $500; and 10 third-prize winners will each receive $200. In addition, 45 finalists will each get $50 and every one of the 175 semifinalists will get $30.

More information about this year’s competition can be found at http://aynrand.org/contests. To interview Ms. Marilee Dahl or to learn more about ARI’s educational programs, please contact media@aynrand.org.

Atlas Shrugged Selling in Record Numbers

Atlas Shrugged Selling in Record Numbers

Irvine, CA, July 13, 2009–Penguin USA, publisher of the four American editions of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, has reported that in the first half of 2009 it shipped well over 300,000 copies of Atlas Shrugged to distributors, bookstores, bookstore chains, online resellers, libraries, businesses and other institutions.

As Dr. Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, noted, “Considering that in the first half of 2008 Penguin shipped about 85,000 copies, the spectacular jump to 300,000 copies in the first half of 2009 represents an increase of almost 250 percent in gross sales of Atlas Shrugged!

Reports from industry sources indicate that more copies of Atlas Shrugged were sold in book stores and by online resellers in the first half of 2009 than in all of 2008, when a new all-time annual record was established with more than 200,000 copies of the novel sold in the United States.

“The spike in sales of Atlas Shrugged more than a half century after its initial publication is truly remarkable,” Dr. Brook pointed out. “Annual sales of Atlas Shrugged have been increasing for decades to a level not seen even in Ayn Rand’s lifetime. Sales of the U.S. paperback editions averaged around 70,000 copies a year in the 1980s, and doubled to about 140,000 copies a year in the current decade. And the pace of sales has been accelerating recently, reaching an all-time high during the novel’s 50th anniversary in 2007, surpassing this mark in 2008, and on course to set another record in 2009.”

Almost 7,000,000 copies of Atlas Shrugged have been sold since it was first published in 1957.

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Record Number of People Are Listening to Atlas Shrugged

Record Number of People Are Listening to Atlas Shrugged

Washington, D.C., June 22, 2009–The Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights and the media have been reporting on the surge in sales of Ayn Rand’s classic novel Atlas Shrugged over the last six months. Not surprisingly, sales of the Atlas Shrugged audio book are also making impressive gains.

According to Blackstone Audio, one of the publishers of the full text audio edition of Atlas Shrugged, 16,000 audio copies of the novel were sold in the first five months of 2009, compared to around 20,000 in all of 2008. “This is a huge increase,” noted Dr. Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights. “This year audio copies of Atlas Shrugged are selling at about twice the rate as last year.”

Reports from trade sources have indicated that book purchases of Atlas Shrugged have also spiked recently, having tripled in the first four months of 2009 compared to the first four months of 2008. “The tripling in sales of Atlas Shrugged is remarkable,” said Dr. Brook, “especially considering that in 2008 a new all-time record in annual sales of the novel was established with more than 200,000 copies sold in the United States.”

More than 6,500,000 copies of Atlas Shrugged have been sold to date.

“Given the striking similarities between the plot-line of the book and the events of our day, more Americans are reading and listening to Atlas Shrugged than ever before,” said Yaron Brook. “Hopefully, they will find in Atlas Shrugged the principled solutions to the problems we face today.”

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William F. Buckley vs. Ayn Rand: Ayn Rand’s Revenge

By Joseph McHugh
American Chronicle

I normally do not read or comment on gossipy biographies of famous people, especially written by their family members who may be a bit too bitter to be objective. But the just published memoir by William F. Buckley Jr.´s son Christopher about his parents´ deaths piqued my interest.

First a little background. Stories are myriad today about the renewed popularity of the novel “Atlas Shrugged” by novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand. With capitalism widely being declared dead or defunct it may seem strange to some people that masses of Americans are turning to this work of literature which celebrates laissez-faire capitalism, among other, more fundamental, themes.

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Supreme Court Abets the FCC’s War on Free Speech

The Supreme Court Abets the FCC’s War on Free Speech

Washington, D.C., April 28, 2009–Today the Supreme Court ruled in FCC v. Fox that the FCC can continue to fine broadcasters for “fleeting expletives.” According to Don Watkins, a writer for the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights:

“The Court failed to address the basic constitutional question in this case: are the non-objective ‘indecency’ laws that permit the FCC to dictate what Americans can say and hear on the airwaves consistent with the right to free speech? The answer to that is: absolutely not.

“The Supreme Court has defined ‘indecency’ as speech that ‘depicts or describes sexual or excretory activities and organs in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards.’ But which Americans count as part of the community? Why are they king? And how are broadcasters to divine the community’s supposedly shared standards?

“As the history of the government’s anti-indecency regime has shown, these questions are unanswerable. The only way for broadcasters to play it safe is to engage in self-censorship, cutting any material regulators might declare indecent.

“And once the government becomes the enforcer of ‘community standards,’ no speech is safe. How long until the courts start rubber-stamping the Bible Belt’s efforts to suppress the theory of evolution on the grounds that it many find it offensive, or that it supposedly corrupts young minds and undermines community values?

“The government must stop telling Americans what we can say and hear on the airwaves. Sadly, the Supreme Court failed to take this opportunity to protect our constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech.”

 

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Misrepresenting "How We Arrived at This Moment"

By Alex Epstein

What must be done to recover from this financial crisis? Barack Obama rightly stresses that we first must understand how today’s problems emerged. It is “only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we’ll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament.”

Unfortunately, Obama (along with most of the Washington establishment) has created only misunderstanding. In calling for a massive increase in government control over the economy, he has evaded the mountain of evidence implicating the government.

For example, Obama’s core explanation of all the destructive behavior leading up to today’s crisis is that the market was too free. But the market that led to today’s crisis was systematically manipulated by government. Fact: this decade saw drastic attempts by the government to control the housing and financial markets–via a Federal Reserve that cut interest rates to all-time lows, and via a gigantic increase in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s size and influence. Fact: through these entities, the government sought to “stimulate the economy” and promote homeownership (sound familiar?) by artificially extending cheap credit to home-buyers. Fact: most of the (very few) economists who actually predicted the financial crisis blame Fed policy or housing policy for inflating a bubble that was bound to collapse.
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Atlas Shrugged movie moves closer to reality

By Steven Zeitchik

Hollywood could soon be going Objectivist.

After decades in development hell, Ayn Rand’s capitalism-minded “Atlas Shrugged” is taking new steps toward the big screen — with one of the film world’s most prominent money men potentially at its center.

Ryan Kavanaugh’s Relativity Media is circling the Baldwin Entertainment project and could come aboard to finance with Lionsgate, which got involved several years ago.

Rand’s popular but polarizing book — it’s derided by many literary critics but has a huge public following — tells the story of Dagny Taggart, a railroad executive trying to keep her corporation competitive in the face of what she perceives as a lack of innovation and individual responsibility.
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National Service Is Un-American

Washington, D.C. – By a wide (79-19) margin, the Senate approved a bill, the Serve America Act, last week that will massively expand so-called community service programs. Boosters have gushed that “This legislation represents the best of America’s ideals,” but according to Elan Journo, fellow at the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, “the Serve America Act represents a repudiation of the best of America’s ideals.”

“What made America unique in history,” said Journo in the Voices for Reason blog, “was its foundational political-moral recognition that each individual has a right to live for his own sake and pursue his own happiness, and that he has no duty to subordinate his time or effort to any allegedly higher good-neither his neighbor, nor the community, nor the government.”

Mr. Journo warned us to “not believe that pushers of ‘national service’ want it to remain voluntary,” and recalled that “past initiatives of this kind made receiving a high school diploma contingent on fulfilling a service requirement. They’ve now succeeded in expanding the gambit. What’s the end game? Compulsory service as a requirement of maintaining citizenship? There’s now good reason to believe that could become a reality.”

To learn more about the Ayn Rand Center’s opposition to “national service” initiatives, read the following two articles, one released during the Clinton administration, the other released during G.W. Bush’s administration.

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