Atlas Shrugged Triples in Sales

Irvine, CA, May 12, 2009 – Reports from trade sources indicate that consumer purchases of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged have tripled in the first four months of 2009 compared to the first four months of 2008.

According to Dr. Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, “The tripling in sales of Atlas Shrugged is remarkable, 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.”

As Dr. Brook pointed out, “Annual sales of Atlas Shrugged have been increasing for decades to a level not seen in Ayn Rand’s lifetime. Sales of the U.S. paperback editions averaged 74,000 copies a year in the 1980s, 95,000 copies a year in the 1990s and 139,000 copies a year in the current decade. After reaching an all-time high during the novel’s 50th anniversary in 2007, another new high was reached in 2008 and an even higher mark is expected for 2009.”

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

“As America faces a devastating economic crisis fundamentally caused by government policies, it is a hopeful sign for the future that increasing numbers of concerned Americans are turning to Atlas Shrugged and discovering Ayn Rand’s original morality of rational egoism and her uncompromising defense of laissez faire capitalism.”

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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Pakistan’s Surrender to the Taliban

Pakistan’s Surrender to the Taliban

Washington, D.C., April 23, 2009–In reaction to the Pakistani government’s decision to give Islamists the power to enforce sharia (Islamic law) in the north of the country, Elan Journo, fellow at the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, warned that all of Pakistan is at risk of falling under Islamic rule.

According to Mr. Journo, “Instead of living up to its stated goal of opposing the Islamists, by defeating them militarily, Islamabad has opted for the losing policy of appeasement–a policy that can only strengthen the jihadists.” If the current trend of appeasement continues to unfold, argued Mr. Journo, nuclear-armed Pakistan may soon “look a lot like Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.”

Just like other cases of appeasement, noted Mr. Journo, Pakistan’s surrender “was predicated on willfully ignoring crucial facts about the goals of the Islamists–goals that are well known. For the last three-odd decades, jihadists all over the world have been vocal in asserting their ultimate aim of expanding Allah’s dominion across the face of the earth. Not alongside other forms of government, but in place of them.

“By evading the Islamist movement’s nature,” concluded Mr. Journo, “Pakistan has handed it a signal victory–the Swat Valley today, plausibly the rest of Pakistan tomorrow.”

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How to End Piracy in the High Seas

How to End Piracy in the High Seas

Washington, D.C., April 20, 2009–In a dramatic rescue operation a week ago, U.S. Navy Seals succeeded in freeing Capt. Richard Phillips from captivity by Somali pirates.
 
According to Elan Journo, analyst at the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, even though the operation was successful, it did not teach the pirates the appropriate lesson, as evidenced by news of a pirate attack on another American-flagged ship, the Liberty Sun.
 
“The pirates have not been deterred,” said Mr. Journo, “because we have emboldened them for years through an entrenched policy of passivity and accommodation–and the freeing of Capt. Phillips was unfortunately just one halting step in a better direction.
 
“What we need–in response to piracy as well as other foreign threats–is an across-the-board reversal in U.S. policy. When, for example, it became clear more than a year ago that the waters off the coast of Somalia are a playground for pirates, the minimum that Washington should have done was to lay down an ultimatum to the pirates to leave Americans alone or else–and lived up to it.
 
“The substance of that warning: if any American vessel is captured by pirates, we will use military force to destroy every last pirate base in Somalia. When such a threat of retaliation is made fully credible, it can be sufficient to deter would-be aggressors. If any dare test us, then we must unapologetically respond with force.
 
“When America has once again earned a reputation as a power that none dare cross,” Mr. Journo concluded, “we won’t have to worry about pirates.”

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Obama Evades Government’s Role in the Crisis

Obama Evades Government’s Role in the Crisis

Washington, D.C., April 10, 2009–In an op-ed published this week by Canada’s Financial Post, Alex Epstein, analyst at the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, argued that “In calling for a massive increase in government control over the economy,” Obama “has evaded the mountain of evidence implicating the government.”
 
The primary cause of the current crisis, explained Mr. Epstein, was “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.” Through these entities, Epstein pointed out, “the government sought to ‘stimulate the economy’ and promote homeownership by artificially extending cheap credit to home-buyers.”
 
But, Mr. Epstein noted, Obama did not mention the Fed, Fannie, or Freddie even once, during his recent 52-minute speech to Congress. “Not once did he suggest that government manipulation of markets could have any possible role in the present crisis. He just went full steam ahead and called for more spending, more intervention, and more government housing programs as the solution.”
 
But the “fundamental solution to our problems,” said Epstein, is “to disentangle the government from the markets to prevent future manipulation.” To achieve that, Epstein concluded, we need to consider “pro-free-market remedies such as letting banks foreclose, letting prices reach market levels, letting bad banks fail, dismantling Fannie and Freddie, ending bailout promises, and getting rid of the Fed’s power to manipulate interest rates.”

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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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Supporters of Smoking Bans Are Ignoring a Crucial Danger

By Don Watkins (Santa Monica Daily Press, March 23, 2009)

Referring to my March 12 op-ed criticizing a proposal to further restrict smoking in Newport Beach, Jack Neworth accuses me of ignoring “the reason for smoking bans–the dangers of second-hand smoke.” But it’s the supporters of smoking bans who are ignoring a crucial danger: the danger of allowing the government to violate private property rights.

Is second-hand smoke obnoxious? Some of us think so–just as some of us think certain kinds of music are obnoxious. Can second-hand smoke pose certain risks? Perhaps–just as certain foods may put us in danger of developing various diseases. Property rights protect our ability to make these kinds of assessments, and thereby pursue our health and happiness. If you abhor second-hand smoke, for instance, you can refuse to allow smokers into your home or your restaurant.

But by the same token, you must recognize others’ right to allow smoking in their home or restaurant. That means if the owner of your favorite diner wants to let customers light up, you can voluntarily choose to tolerate the smoke, try to persuade the owner to change his policy, or take your business elsewhere–but you can’t force him to comply with your views. To be free to act on your own judgment, you have to leave others free to act on theirs.

While supporters of smoking bans may cheer today, they should keep in mind: there is no telling what voluntary activity a government that rejects property rights will ban tomorrow.

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.

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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.

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.

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