“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.”

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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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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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.

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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The Right’s Pathetic Opposition to the Auto Bailout

Washington, D.C. – Republican opponents of the auto bailout are being accused of putting ideology ahead of the economy’s well-being. They are accused of having an ideological animus against bailouts.

“That criticism pays Republicans a compliment they don’t deserve,” said Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights. “The Republican opposition to the auto bailout was not a matter of principle, but of pragmatic nit-picking.

“A principled opposition to the auto bailout would have denounced as immoral any attempt to use taxpayer money to prop up failing companies. It would have insisted that such attempts at central planning are destructive and un-American. It would have said that the government’s proper function is not to engineer the economy, but to protect individual rights and otherwise leave the economy free. That is not what the Republicans claimed.

“In his floor statement opposing the bill, leading Republican senator Mitch McConnell’s ‘stinging’ criticism consisted of finding that the bill ‘does not’ lay out ‘an effective strategy for securing the long-term viability of these companies,’ that it did not give the proposed ‘Car Czar’ enough power, and–the ultimate deal-killer for Republicans–the bill would have adjusted auto worker wage rates at ‘too slow’ a pace.

“The tragic fact is that Republicans do not regard central planning as objectionable–they merely disagree with the Democrats’ central plan.”

Since When Does America Allow Czars?

Washington, D.C. – “Our Founding Fathers must be turning over in their graves hearing Americans, of all people, discussing the need for a ‘car czar’ and an ‘energy czar,’” said Alex Epstein, an analyst at the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights.

“The whole purpose of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution was to liberate individuals from czars, kings, and other dictators who violate individual rights and kill progress by shackling everyone to their ‘vision’ of how others should act.

“The new advocates of czarism claim that freedom has failed, and so we need some economic strongman to order everyone into line. But in fact, the energy and auto industries are suffering because they have been the victims of central planning and regulatory strangulation for decades. The solution to our problems is not to centralize government intervention from many czars to a few, but to remove it altogether. We must de-socialize the electric grids, liberate nuclear power, end bankrupting fuel economy mandates, and remove the many other government interventions that destroy freedom and progress.

“What we need is not a new set of czars, but freedom.”

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.”

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