“Earth Hour” Symbolizes the Renunciation of Industrial Civilization

Washington, DC, March 26, 2009–On Saturday, March 28, cities around the world will turn off their lights to observe “Earth Hour.” Iconic landmarks from the Sydney Opera House to Manhattan’s skyscrapers will be darkened to encourage reduced energy use and signal a commitment to fighting climate change.

But according to a recently released op-ed by Dr. Keith Lockitch, resident fellow of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, “The symbolic message that Earth Hour sends is deceptive and destructive.”

“Cutting off our carbon emissions would be a global catastrophe. Carbon-based energy is a life-and-death necessity in today’s world. A truly massive reduction in carbon emissions means a massive reduction in our energy use and would cause significant harm.

“The lights of our cities and monuments are a symbol of human achievement, of what mankind has accomplished in rising from the cave to the skyscraper. Earth Hour presents the disturbing spectacle of people celebrating those lights being extinguished. Its call for people to renounce energy and to rejoice at darkened skyscrapers makes its real meaning unmistakably clear: Earth Hour symbolizes the renunciation of industrial civilization.”

The Ayn Rand Institute Speaks Out on ‘Going Galt’

rvine, CA, March 18, 2009–In a recent appearance on PJTV, Yaron Brook, president and executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, addressed the current media sensation known as “going Galt,” in which productive individuals consider withdrawing their labor from society. The phrase is a reference to John Galt, the central character in Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, and a strike that he leads against an oppressive government, and the society that supports it.

“I would encourage people not to go on strike, in that sense,” says Brook. “It’s not time to go on strike, to leave and go to Galt’s Gulch. It’s time to fight. What I would call for is a moral revolution. Let’s get rid of the morality that says ‘your moral responsibility is toward your neighbor,’ that ‘you are your brother’s keeper.’ Ayn Rand presents us with a new morality, a morality of rational self-interest. There is a lot of fight left in us, and I think it’s too early to give up on this world.”

Atlas Shrugged Tops Amazon’s Bestseller List

Washington, D.C., March 18, 2009 – Earlier this year Ayn Rand’s prophetic novel Atlas Shrugged was selling at triple the rate it sold at in the beginning of 2008. Now the novel is soaring to even greater heights, and its trade paperback edition is currently in first place in the Classics category on Amazon.com’s best-seller list for sales in the United States. The 50th anniversary mass-market paperback edition of Atlas Shrugged ranks as #2 and the trade paperback Centennial edition ranks as #3. For several weeks Atlas Shrugged has been holding steady in the top 10 best-sellers in the broader United States Literature and Fiction category, and as of the writing of this release, different editions of the novel stand at #3, #5 and #6 in Amazon’s ranking.

In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, explained the parallels between Atlas Shrugged and today’s events.

“In Atlas Shrugged, Rand tells the story of the U.S. economy crumbling under the weight of crushing government interventions and regulations. Meanwhile, blaming greed and the free market, Washington responds with more controls that only deepen the crisis. Sound familiar?”

Brook also stressed the importance today of the book’s often overlooked message that capitalism cannot be properly defended without morally defending profit and self-interest: “. . . only an ethic of rational selfishness can justify the pursuit of profit that is the basis of capitalism–and that as long as self-interest is tainted by moral suspicion, the profit motive will continue to take the rap for every imaginable (or imagined) social ill and economic disaster. Just look how our present crisis has been attributed to the free market instead of government intervention–and how proposed solutions inevitably involve yet more government intervention to rein in the pursuit of self-interest.”

Those interested in understanding the morality of capitalism can learn more in Ayn Rand’s The Virtue of Selfishness–which, at #12 in the Classics category, is setting records of its own.

—————-

Yaron Brook is executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute. He is a contributing editor of The Objective Standard and his articles have been featured in major publications such as The Wall Street Journal, Forbes.com, USA Today, the Houston Chronicle, Chicago Sun-Times, Providence Journal and the Orange County Register. Dr. Brook is often interviewed on radio and is a frequent guest on a variety of national TV shows, having appeared on the new Fox Business Network, FOX News Channel, CNN, CNBC and C-SPAN. Dr. Brook, a former finance professor, lectures on Objectivism, capitalism, business, and foreign policy at college campuses, community groups and corporations across America and throughout the world.

To interview Dr. Brook or book him for your show, please contact media@aynrandcenter.org.

Is Rand Relevant?

By Yaron Brook (The Wall Street Journal, March 14, 2009)

Ayn Rand died more than a quarter of a century ago, yet her name appears regularly in discussions of our current economic turmoil. Pundits including Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santelli urge listeners to read her books, and her magnum opus, “Atlas Shrugged,” is selling at a faster rate today than at any time during its 51-year history.

There’s a reason. In “Atlas,” Rand tells the story of the U.S. economy crumbling under the weight of crushing government interventions and regulations. Meanwhile, blaming greed and the free market, Washington responds with more controls that only deepen the crisis. Sound familiar?

The novel’s eerily prophetic nature is no coincidence. “If you understand the dominant philosophy of a society,” Rand wrote elsewhere in “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal,” “you can predict its course.” Economic crises and runaway government power grabs don’t just happen by themselves; they are the product of the philosophical ideas prevalent in a society–particularly its dominant moral ideas.

Why do we accept the budget-busting costs of a welfare state? Because it implements the moral ideal of self-sacrifice to the needy. Why do so few protest the endless regulatory burdens placed on businessmen? Because businessmen are pursuing their self-interest, which we have been taught is dangerous and immoral. Why did the government go on a crusade to promote “affordable housing,” which meant forcing banks to make loans to unqualified home buyers? Because we believe people need to be homeowners, whether or not they can afford to pay for houses.

The message is always the same: “Selfishness is evil; sacrifice for the needs of others is good.” But Rand said this message is wrong–selfishness, rather than being evil, is a virtue. By this she did not mean exploiting others à la Bernie Madoff. Selfishness–that is, concern with one’s genuine, long-range interest–she wrote, required a man to think, to produce, and to prosper by trading with others voluntarily to mutual benefit.

Rand also noted that only an ethic of rational selfishness can justify the pursuit of profit that is the basis of capitalism–and that so long as self-interest is tainted by moral suspicion, the profit motive will continue to take the rap for every imaginable (or imagined) social ill and economic disaster. Just look how our present crisis has been attributed to the free market instead of government intervention–and how proposed solutions inevitably involve yet more government intervention to rein in the pursuit of self-interest.

Rand offered us a way out–to fight for a morality of rational self-interest, and for capitalism, the system which is its expression. And that is the source of her relevance today.

Dr. Brook is president and executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute.

——

Here is the link to the Op-Ed in The Wall Street Journal:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123698976776126461.html
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Anti-Smoking Paternalism: A Cancer on American Liberty

By Don Watkins

Newport Beach is considering banning smoking in a variety of new places, potentially including parks and outdoor dining areas. This is just the latest step in a widespread war on smoking by federal, state, and local governments–a campaign that includes massive taxes on cigarettes, advertising bans, and endless lawsuits against tobacco companies. This war is infecting America with a political disease far worse than any health risk caused by smoking; it is destroying our freedom to make our own judgments and choices.

According to the anti-smoking movement, restricting people’s freedom to smoke is justified by the necessity of combating the “epidemic” of smoking-related disease and death. Cigarettes, we are told, kill hundreds of thousands each year, and expose countless millions to secondhand smoke. Smoking, the anti-smoking movement says, in effect, is a plague, whose ravages can only be combated through drastic government action.

But smoking is not some infectious disease that must be quarantined and destroyed by the government. It’s a voluntary activity that every individual is free to abstain from (including by avoiding restaurants and other private establishments that permit smoking). And, contrary to those who regard any smoking as irrational on its face, cigarettes are a potential value that each individual must assess for himself. Of course, smoking can be harmful–in certain quantities, over a certain period of time, it can be habit forming and lead to disease or death. But many understandably regard the risks as minimal if one smokes relatively infrequently, and they see smoking as offering definite value, such as physical pleasure.

Are they right? Can it be a value to smoke cigarettes–and if so, in what quantity? This is the sort of judgment that properly belongs to every individual, based on his assessment of the evidence concerning smoking’s benefits and risks, and taking into account his particular circumstances (age, family history, etc.). If others believe the smoker is making a mistake, they are free to try to persuade him of their viewpoint. But they should not be free to dictate his decision, any more than they should be able to dictate his decision on whether and to what extent to drink alcohol or play poker. The fact that some individuals will smoke themselves into an early grave is no more justification for banning smoking than that the existence of alcoholics is grounds for prohibiting you from enjoying a drink at dinner.

Implicit in the war on smoking, however, is the view that the government must dictate the individual’s decisions with regard to smoking, because he is incapable of making them rationally. To the extent the anti-smoking movement succeeds in wielding the power of government coercion to impose on Americans its blanket opposition to smoking, it is entrenching paternalism: the view that individuals are incompetent to run their own lives, and thus require a nanny-state to control every aspect of those lives.

This state is well on its way: from trans-fat bans to bicycle helmet laws to prohibitions on gambling, the government is increasingly abridging our freedom on the grounds that we are not competent to make rational decisions in these areas–just as it has long done by paternalistically dictating how we plan for retirement (Social Security) or what medicines we may take (the FDA).

Indeed, one of the main arguments used to bolster the anti-smoking agenda is the claim that smokers impose “social costs” on non-smokers, such as smoking-related medical expenses–an argument that perversely uses an injustice created by paternalism to support its expansion. The only reason non-smokers today are forced to foot the medical bills of smokers is that our government has virtually taken over the field of medicine, in order to relieve us inept Americans of the freedom to manage our own health care, and bear the costs of our own choices.

But contrary to paternalism, we are not congenitally irrational misfits. We are thinking beings for whom it is both possible and necessary to rationally judge which courses of action will serve our interests. The consequences of ignoring this fact range from denying us legitimate pleasures to literally killing us: from the healthy 26-year-old unable to enjoy a trans-fatty food to the 75-year-old man unable to take an unapproved, experimental drug without which he will certainly die.

By employing government coercion to deprive us of the freedom to judge for ourselves what we inhale or consume, the anti-smoking movement has become an enemy, not an ally, in the quest for health and happiness.

Obama Whitewashes Iran

Obama Whitewashes Iran

By Elan Journo
 
In his address to the joint session of Congress, President Obama said that “We cannot shun the negotiating table” in conducting our foreign policy. He’s previously elaborated that “if countries like Iran are willing to unclench their fist, they will find an extended hand from us.” And Iran’s president Ahmedinijad tentatively welcomes “talks based on mutual respect and in a fair atmosphere.”
 
The shared idea, evidently, is that our conflict with Iran stems largely from a past failure to use so-called diplomacy to settle disputes. Alluding to George W. Bush’s supposedly tough policy, Obama has said he wants to restore “the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years” ago.
 
Really? Thirty years ago this November, followers of Ayatollah Khomeini, who spearheaded Iran’s Islamic revolution, stormed the U.S. embassy in Teheran and took the personnel hostage. President Carter gently admonished Iran, but ruled out military retaliation. Instead his advisors spent months dreaming up schemes to bribe Iran into releasing the hostages–while bending over backward to enable the regime to save face. In the end Khomeini’s Islamist theocracy collected a handsome payoff for its aggression, and concluded, rightly, that if attacked, America would crumple to its knees.
 
Was Obama thinking of the 1980s? In April 1983 Iran’s jihadist proxies in Lebanon rammed a truck bomb into the U.S. Embassy in Beirut; the Reagan administration responded by doing nothing. Months later, encouraged by Washington’s inaction, Teheran issued a kill order–via its ambassador in Syria–to its allied groups in Beirut. Early one morning, an Islamist suicide bomber set off a massive explosion at the barracks where U.S. marines were sleeping and killed 241 of them.
 
Reagan spouted hot air about not backing down–and soon after ordered the U.S. troops to bug out. The jihadists wanted America out, they slaughtered our troops, and we caved in and gave them what they wanted.
 
Osama bin Laden, like jihadists in Iran and elsewhere, viewed our response to the Beirut bombings as further proof that their ideologically driven war was a viable cause. And so, inspired by Iranian aggression, the anti-American jihad kept ramping up.
 
Maybe Obama meant the fabled halcyon days of the 1990s, when President Clinton tried to mend fences with Iran?
 
In 1996 a team of jihadists–financed and trained by Teheran–blew up the Khobar Towers building in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 American servicemen. Clinton’s administration learned that Iran was behind the attacks. But Washington brushed aside any notion of retaliating against Iran, in order to facilitate a “reconciliation” with that murderous regime. In an eerie parallel with today, Iran expressed its openness to U.S. groveling–an opportunity Clinton seized.
 
So, Clinton attended a speech by Iran’s leader at the U.N.; the administration also permitted the sale of much-needed aircraft parts to Iran, among other sweeteners. Granted the cover of respectability, Iran was emboldened to continue fomenting Islamist aggression and avidly pursue its then-embryonic nuclear program.
 
Obama’s appeasing diplomacy re-enacts the disastrous policy of the past. Our policymakers evaded Iran’s character as an enemy, and by rewarding its aggression with bribes and conciliation, they encouraged a spiral of further attacks. 
 
No. Bush was no exception to this trend. After 9/11 his administration invited Iran–the leading sponsor of Islamist terrorism–to join an anti-terrorism coalition(!). Talk of an axis of evil was quickly abandoned, and Washington backed the European scheme to bribe Iran to halt its nuclear program. By late last year, there was talk of opening a U.S. Special Interests Section (a step down from an embassy) in Iran. Meanwhile Bush’s welfare mission in Iraq negated U.S. security and left Iran untouched to grow more powerful and resolute.
 
A genuinely new, rational policy toward Iran would turn away from the last 30 years and begin by facing up to Teheran’s ongoing proxy war against us.

 

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Sales of "Atlas Shrugged" Soar in the Face of Economic Crisis

Sales of “Atlas Shrugged” Soar in the Face of Economic Crisis

Washington, D.C., February 23, 2009–Sales of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” have almost tripled over the first seven weeks of this year compared with sales for the same period in 2008. This continues a strong trend after bookstore sales reached an all-time annual high in 2008 of about 200,000 copies sold.

“Americans are flocking to buy and read ‘Atlas Shrugged’ because there are uncanny similarities between the plot-line of the book and the events of our day” said Yaron Brook, Executive Director at the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights. “Americans are rightfully concerned about the economic crisis and government’s increasing intervention and attempts to control the economy. Ayn Rand understood and identified the deeper causes of the crisis we’re facing, and she offered, in ‘Atlas Shrugged,’ a principled and practical solution consistent with American values.”

—————-
 
Yaron Brook is executive director of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights. Dr. Brook is often interviewed on radio and is a frequent guest on a variety of national TV shows, having appeared on the new Fox Business Network, FOX News Channel, CNN, CNBC and C-SPAN. Dr. Brook, a former finance professor, lectures on Objectivism, capitalism, business and foreign policy at college campuses, community groups and corporations across America and throughout the world.

To interview Dr. Brook or book him for your show, please contact media@aynrandcenter.org.

Read more…

Ayn Rand Center Launches New Blog: "Voices for Reason"

Washington, D.C., February 9, 2009—Today, the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights has launched its blog Voices for Reason, where its experts will provide daily commentary on breaking news from the perspective of Ayn Rand’s philosophy, Objectivism.

According to Debi Ghate, vice president of Academic programs, “Every weekday, we will post new commentary on current events on topics such as the financial crisis, environmentalism, foreign policy, free speech, and property rights. We will also explore the principled solutions Ayn Rand’s philosophy offers for tackling today’s political, economic and cultural problems.

“It is our goal to make Voices for Reason the go-to source for our unique perspective on the most important news of the day and the state of our culture. Our writers will share their insights, evaluating current events using Ayn Rand’s philosophy of reason, individualism, and laissez-faire capitalism as their guide.”

Voices for Reason will also carry announcements and updates from the Ayn Rand Center and the Ayn Rand Institute.

Let Bankruptcy Courts Take the Wheel

General Motors, having sucked up $9.4 billion of taxpayer cash since Christmas, now desperately craves the remaining $4 billion authorized by President Bush for disbursement in February.

And come March, once that new money has disappeared down the Detroit drain hole, renewed pleas for aid will undoubtedly land on President Obama’s desk. Will the new chief executive emulate Bush, bowing to the anti-bankruptcy sentiment fomented by Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, and others who advocate bailing out the Detroit automakers? Or will he let the bankruptcy courts take charge?

“There’s only one thing you can do in bankruptcy that you can’t do outside of bankruptcy–break your word, break your deals,” said Frank in a “60 Minutes” interview. “It allows you to say to the small businesses who have been catering lunches for you, ‘sorry, we’re not paying you.’ It allows you to go to the workers and say, ‘sorry, we’re not paying you.’”

Really? So bankruptcy is a get-out-of-jail-free card that allows treacherous companies to escape payment obligations they would otherwise have to honor? Sorry, Mr. Frank, but that’s a fantasy.

Plodding behemoths like General Motors are not even eligible for bankruptcy until they’ve become insolvent, which means they already can’t pay their bills and have no prospects for recovery. What bankruptcy does is treat the victims of those broken deals fairly–by preventing the bankrupt company from playing favorites among unpaid creditors, and by giving those creditors a big say in the distressed company’s future.

If an automaker can return to profitability by streamlining products, cutting staff, or closing plants, a bankruptcy judge can allow a reorganization. But a company that’s hopelessly floundering may have to be liquidated through an orderly sale of assets, with income paid to creditors according to their existing contract rights.

Yes, Mr. Frank, some creditors walk away from a bankruptcy empty-handed, or collect only pennies on each dollar of debt. Caterers, assembly-line workers, material suppliers, landlords–everyone who does business with a company in a market economy assumes a risk of nonpayment. But that needn’t spell disaster if creditors take steps in advance to confine the pain of bankruptcy within reasonable limits. Wise businessmen check on credit histories, set limits on outstanding balances, and register liens on hard assets. Even unions can protect their members, such as by having pension funds placed in trusts sheltered from bankruptcy proceedings.

Under bankruptcy, the risk of financial loss stays right where it belongs, on those who assumed the risk of non-payment by voluntarily dealing with a badly managed company. But in Barney Frank’s bailout universe, Congress can simply paper over the reality of business failure by shifting those losses to taxpayers, competitors, and consumers–in short, everyone who doesn’t deserve to pay.

This means that if GM’s caterers don’t get paid for the hors d’oeuvres served to CEO Rick Wagoner and his team of corporate bailout beggars, you and I must foot the bill. And if UAW members fear losing the staggeringly high wages and benefits they’ve extorted over decades using pro-union legal privileges, society must ride to their rescue.

But shifting the financial pain of business failure onto society at large is unjust. Most obviously, taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to prop up failing companies’ balance sheets. But other victims abound. Think of the profitable competitors with hard-earned credit standings, watching with justified resentment as badly managed rivals line up at the public trough.

Consumers, too, pay a price for bailouts. Bailed-out firms flood the market with inferior products–GM cars, anyone?–by continuing to own assets that would have gone to making more desirable products if market forces had ruled. Just picture today’s city streets if the horse and buggy industry had been bailed out a century ago.

Is General Motors to become a brain-dead patient in a Federal bailout ward, languishing on tax-funded life support beyond all hope of recovery? Not if Congress steps aside and lets the bankruptcy courts do justice through adjudication.

Big Government, not Big Media, Threatens Free Speech

Self-appointed consumer watchdogs–including Obama’s recent pick for FCC chair, Julius Genachowski–have long complained about media consolidation. So it was no surprise that when the FCC recently loosened restrictions barring companies from owning a newspaper and TV station in the same city, these critics went apoplectic and are now urging the House to follow the Senate in blocking the measure.

Media consolidation supposedly threatens free speech. A few conglomerates, critics warn, have seized control of our media outlets, enabling these companies to shove a single “corporate-friendly” perspective down our throats. As Senator Byron Dorgan put it, “The free flow of information in this country is not accommodated by having fewer and fewer voices determine what is out there. . . . You have five or six corporate interests that determine what Americans can see, hear, and read.”
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