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.

Ayn Rand Center Launches Blog: Voices for Reason

Washington, D.C., March 17, 2009 – The Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights has launched its blog, Voices for Reason. The Center’s experts post commentary every weekday on today’s most pressing issues from the perspective of Ayn Rand’s philosophy of reason, individualism and laissez-faire capitalism.

At Voices for Reason media professionals will find unique, thoughtful and controversial commentary on current events and the state of our culture, which can be found nowhere else. The blog covers the economic crisis, environmentalism, foreign policy, free speech and property rights, and provides journalists and the general public with the principled answers Ayn Rand’s philosophy offers to today’s political, economic and cultural problems.

Experts from the Ayn Rand Center are available for print, radio and TV interviews based on the commentary they publish.

To read our most recent commentary in Voices for Reason, go to http://blog.aynrandcenter.org/. To interview our experts, e-mail Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights (ARC) is a public policy research and outreach group. The Ayn Rand Center’s mission is to advance individual rights (the rights of each person to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness) as the moral basis for a fully free, laissez-faire capitalist society.

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.

 

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.

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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What to Resolve This New Year

By Alex Epstein (January 1, 2009)

Given the devastated state of many Americans’ finances, our New Year’s resolutions will take on greater significance this year. To “get out of debt” was often a casually stated goal to be set as midnight approached and forgotten soon after; today it is rightly recognized as a fundamental necessity of life.

Unfortunately, the New Year’s commitment to self-improvement is widely viewed with cynicism–in part because New Year’s resolutions go so notoriously unmet. After years of watching others–or themselves–excitedly commit to a new goal, only to abandon the quest by March, many come to conclude that New Year’s resolutions are an exercise in futility that should not be taken seriously. “The silly season is upon us,” writes a columnist for the Washington Post, “when people feel compelled to remake themselves with New Year’s resolutions.”
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Save the Big Three, Kill the U.S. Auto Market

Washington, D.C.– Advocates of a bailout for the Big Three claim that if we allow these giants to fail, it will destroy the U.S. auto industry. “In fact,” said Alex Epstein, an analyst at the Ayn Rand Institute, “it is the bailout, a veritable marriage between Detroit and Washington, that will destroy the U.S. auto industry.

“The Big Three have no right to demand that taxpayers risk money on them when private investors won’t. They do, however, have a right to demand the repeal of the policies that have helped destroy the auto industry. These include the labor laws that have forced them to acquiesce to economically catastrophic UAW demands, and fuel economy laws that have forced them to produce small cars that they can’t profit from given their labor costs. Indeed, the Big Three should have done this long ago–so that they would have been free to produce desirable cars at a profit in America, just as they do in scores of countries around the world.

“But instead of demanding their freedom and making a case to the market, the automakers are surrendering even more of their freedom to the government in exchange for taxpayer money. They have met Congress’s demand to commit to producing more small cars–even though it is small cars that have bankrupted the companies in the first place.

“By seeking handouts, not freedom, the auto industry is helping to destroy any remnant of a genuine auto market. In a real market, free companies would make money by producing the cars that free individuals judge best. In the new pseudo market, companies will make money by collecting taxpayer dollars in exchange for making whatever cars Washington tells them to. If this is what it means to save the U.S. auto industry, then the industry should die, and then real, freedom-seeking, profit-making companies might emerge.”

Don’t Bailout U.S. Automakers – Untie Them

Washington, D.C. –Politicians across the spectrum are calling for an auto bailout, arguing that we cannot allow such large companies to fail.

“If U.S. automakers cannot find a market fix for their problems, they must fail,” said Alex Epstein, an analyst at the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights. “They should go through bankruptcy proceedings so that creditors and owners can redeploy their assets as efficiently as possible.

“Every day these companies remain in existence in their current form, they are destroying shareholder wealth and wasting worker effort. To preserve these companies with a bailout would be obscenely unfair. Every dollar of a bailout would come at the expense of those who did nothing to cause the auto mess.

“There is one thing the government does owe the auto companies, however: freedom. For example, however the industry shakes out, automakers must be liberated from CAFE fuel economy laws that arbitrarily dictate what kind of cars they must sell, forcing them to sell millions of small cars that have no chance of profitability given consumer preferences. The auto industry must also be liberated from the Wagner Act, which gives unions the coercive negotiating power that railroaded the Big Three into their lavish, unprofitable wage and health plans. If a liberated Big Three can rejuvenate themselves, great; otherwise, a liberated next generation will be able to succeed where they failed.

“Economic freedom is what created the American automotive industry and made it the envy of the world. Economic freedom is the only thing that can bring it back.”

Mr. Epstein is an analyst at the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, focusing on business issues. Mr. Epstein’s op-eds and letters to the editor have appeared in such publications as the Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, Philadelphia Inquirer, Canada’s National Post, and the Washington Times. He is also a contributing writer for The Objective Standard, a quarterly journal of culture and politics. Mr. Epstein has been a guest on numerous nationally syndicated radio programs.

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