Category Archives: Ayn Rand

Portrait of Ayn Rand Courtesy of Ayn Rand Archives

Though she died in 1982, huge numbers of people still come to Ayn Rand through her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shruggedand their lives are changed as a result. No wonder. These novels assert the nobility of using your mind to reach your full potential.

So begins a brief but remarkable article by Dr. Eamonn Butler, Director of the Adam Smith Institute.He continues: Rands heroes are individualists who live by their own creative talentsexisting for no one else, nor asking others to exist for them. They stand by their own vision and truth: a vision built on their own values and a truth built on fact and reason, not on the false authority of others.

Butler not only observes that Rands heroes are fundamentally rational, independent thinkers, he also highlights her principle that minds cannot be forced to thinkand notes the power of this immense idea:

Creativity, and therefore human progress, depends on people being free to think and act in pursuit of their own values. That is a powerful case for liberty, values, mind, reason, creativity, entrepreneurship, capitalism, achievement, heroism, happiness, self-esteem and pride. And against the life-destroying consequences of coercion, extortion, regulation, self-sacrifice, altruism, wishful thinking and refusing to use ones mind.

That is an eloquent portrayal of Rands ideas regarding mans need of freedom and the consequent evil of coercion. Note on which side of this equation Butler places self-sacrifice, altruism, and the refusal to think. Spot on.

Butler also notes the increasing global popularity of Rands works, citing statistics about her book sales in various countries; Google searches for Ayn Rand (Sweden leads the world on this count); and various political figures from the United States, Sweden, Estonia, and Australia, who have been influenced by her ideas.

Read Butlers full article here.

Its great to see such a prominent thinker at such a renowned think tank recognizing the nature and importance of Rands ideas. I suspect that if Adam Smith and Ayn Rand were alive to see it, they would greatly appreciate this development.

Three cheers to Dr. Butler and the Adam Smith Institute for writing and publishing this importantarticle.

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Adam Smith Institute's Eamonn Butler Extols Ayn Rand - The Objective Standard

A-level specifications require students to know and understand the core ideas and principles of liberalism, socialism, conservatism and other political ideologies. Rand will be incorporated into the conservatism segment of the curriculum alongside other intellectual giants.

Rand's inclusion in the curriculum should hearten all those who believe in rich and diverse discourse regardless of political stripe. Its benefits will redound to the UK's students, and the nation as a whole.

About ARIThe Ayn Rand Institute is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation that promotes the works and philosophy of Ayn Rand, author ofAtlas ShruggedandThe Fountainhead. The Institute fosters a growing awareness, understanding and acceptance of Ayn Rand's philosophy, Objectivism, to create a culture whose guiding principles are reason, rational self-interest, individualism and laissez-faire capitalisma culture in which individuals are free to pursue their own happiness.

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To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ayn-rand-on-a-level-curriculum-in-united-kingdom-300432614.html

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Ayn Rand on A-Level Curriculum in United Kingdom - PR Newswire (press release)

The 2017 curriculum for A-Level Politics, which is taught in secondary and pre-university schools in the United Kingdom, will include Ayn Rand and her ideas, reports a press release from the Ayn Rand Institute:

A-level specifications require students to know and understand the core ideas and principles of liberalism, socialism, conservatism and other political ideologies. Rand will be incorporated into the conservatism segment of the curriculum alongside other intellectual giants.

The secondary and pre-university curriculum is for students aged sixteen to eighteenan ideal age range for students first encounter with Rands ideas. And the context in which the schools will present her ideas appears to be quite favorable as well.

According to the UK Department for Educations guidelines, Rands ideas are to be studied in conjunction with those of several important and highly influential thinkers. A-level specifications must require students to know and understand:

Liberalism

Conservatism

Socialism

Despite various misclassifications (e.g., Rand under conservatism, Rawls under liberalism), this is a good set of thinkers with which to contrast Rand. If the schools present both her and their ideas accurately, Rand will shine, and active-minded UK students will be beautifully enlightened in the process.

Although government has no legitimate business running schools, insofar as it does run schools, it should include Rands works in the curricula. Kudos to the United Kingdom for taking this big step forward.

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Ayn Rand Included on A-Level Curriculum in UK - The Objective Standard

US president Donald Trump loves Ayn Rand; her 1943 novel The Fountainhead is one of only three novels hes ever mentioned liking. Rand is also credited for inspiring many other Republicans political careers, and the Russian-American novelist has long enjoyed steady worshiphowever misguidedfrom the American right.

Now, whats sparked so much fascination among US conservatives is making its way into classrooms across the pond. This year, Ayn Rands works are appearing for the first time in A-Level Politics, a curriculum taught in secondary and pre-university schools in the UK.

British teens who plan to attend university typically take A-Level (officially known as the General Certificate of Education Advanced Level) courses in various subjects from ages 16 to 18, and then sit for examinations whose results are used by many schools as application assessments. While the most popular A-Level classes are in broad subjects such as literature and mathematics, the politics course is a favorite for students aspiring to go into business or government.

Adding Rand to the courses required reading list means that many of the UKs future leaders in those fields will now be exposed to Rands singular, and often controversial, philosophy known as objectivism. In the 1930s and 40s, Rand built up the idea of individualist moralityan idea that sets up selfishness as a virtue, and puts the rights of the individual at the center of the moral and political principles she believed should be embodied in societys laws and institutions. Rand believed people should be free to pursue their own happiness, and government had a minimal role to play in society; its not hard to see why conservative Americans feel such kinship with the novelist.

A-level students in the UK will now be called upon to know and understand the core tenets of Rands philosophy, along with those of other conservative thinkers like Thomas Hobbes and Edmund Burke. (The A-Level politics course also includes the study of liberalists like John Locke and John Stuart Mill, socialists like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, feminists like Simone de Beauvoir, and more.)

Students will get to grapple with a diverse worldview and build up their own respective intellectual muscles through this new curriculum, says Yaron Brook, chairman of the nonprofit group The Ayn Rand Institute. The group has been pushing for Rands incorporation into A-Level curriculums for some timebut given the renewed attention on Rand following the USs latest presidential election, the timing of the British governments decision to include Rands works in secondary education doesnt seem quite coincidence.

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Ayn Rand's objectivist philosophy is now required reading for British teens - Quartz

WASHINGTON America is at a crossroads, caught between Ayn Rand individualism and JFK patriotism.

At stake is the undermining or defining of nationhood, a critical concept that binds individuals to common purpose for common good.

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Ayn Rand individualism vs. JFK patriotism - Fort Bend Herald

MSNBC host Joy-Ann Reid reminded her viewers that House Speaker Paul Ryans (R-WI) proposed cuts to Medicaid services for children were something that he truly believes in and not just a concession to far-right Republicans.

During a Sunday morning segment on MSNBCs AM Joy, Scot Ross of One Wisconsin Now argued that recent failed health care reform negotiations showed that Ryan can be rolled by conservatives in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Look at what he was willing to compromise in this deal, Ross said. Taking away eyeglasses from children was one of the things he was willing to do in order to try and get this passed.

Reid, however, pointed out that Ryan cherished the chance to cut Medicaid.

I disagree with you that he was rolled on that, the MSNBC host told Ross. Because Paul Ryans ideology, this sort of Ayn Rand ideology, suggests to me that thats something he was fine with doing to get his tax cut.

Watch the video below from MSNBC, broadcast March 26, 2017.

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Joy Reid goes off on Ryan's Ayn Rand ideology: He is 'fine' taking eyeglasses from children to pass a bill - Raw Story

POWELL RIVER, B.C. Mar. 26, 2017 /Troy Media/ Does Donald Trump care about anything beyond using money as ametric of lifes achievements?

In between clearing brush and carting it to the burn pile, I just read an early Internet version of Jane Mayers March 27 New Yorker article entitled Trumps Money Man. Its a typical long, intensively researched, cleanly written New Yorker piece that lays out an argument that makes sense.

It traces key Trump campaign contributor Robert Mercers influence beyond the mere realm of money.

Mayer argues that Mercer, an extremely reclusive electrical engineer and math nerd who founded the Long Island algorithm-based hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, is a key inside influencer. She painstakingly documents his libertarian roots, his deep and narrow focus on money as the key measure of personal achievement, and his acute shyness (He can barely look you in the eye when he talks).

She quotes Trump saying that his longest conversation with him was two words. He apparently has a conspiratorial frame of mind, thinks climate change is overblown and, most importantly, has much influence over Trumps 36-year-old son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and Stephen Bannon, the lead White House strategist.

Mayer notes that finance billionaires like Mercer have no stake in society, unlike earlier American industrialists like Henry Ford, who actually built real things.

This raises an important consideration when thinking of Trumps orientation to civil society and citizens, given his corporate preference for branding real estate built by others and his desire to operate hotels owned by others. One can see a spark of Mercer, the hedge fund brander and operator, in this aspect of Trump. Neither man has spent any time supervising the manufactureof pickup trucks on an assembly line crewed by union members.

READ: Trudeaus economic policies suicidal in wake of Trump quake

Mercer and Trump now play pivotal roles (one with money, the other with power), in enabling the alt-right and white supremacist voices, climate change deniers, and diversity phobes to find a growing licence for their wares. They also empower ideological zealots like Bannon in his quest to destroy the administrative Deep State.

When the only metric that counts is the money you made, whats the value of government bureaucracy, universal health-care coverage, the arts and humanities, Meals on Wheels, Planned Parenthood, indeed any aspect of civil society, helping others, being kind or empathetic?

It would appear that in concert, Mercer, Kushner and Bannon, all of whom have Trumps ear whenever they seek it, have allied as Trumps Asperger whisperers. Theyve figured out how to move him beyond his singular deep focus himself to the much larger field of Ayn Rands core philosophy (read her 1943 novel The Fountainhead for a synopsis) of objectivism.

This philosophy is allied with an alt-right libertarian streak and a fear of what are now branded coastal elites their code for those well-educated and high-performing citizens who function well in diverse urban contexts, who identify most acutely as urbanites (in cities like New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles), and who find like-minded compatriots more easily in London, Paris or Berlin than, say, the small towns of the American midwest.

Simply put, the Asperger whispers fear an emerging interconnected world that shuns Caucasian supremacy, questions the acquisition of wealth for its own sake, values the arts and humanities as much as STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) thought, and craves connectivity more than individuality.

READ: When a U.S. president tried to pack the Supreme Court

Somehow, the indulgence of different cultures, languages and faiths is deeply threatening to objectivists, who think the primary purpose of government is promoting the means of personal wealth creation.

The Deep State is anathema to libertarians; they see bureaucrats as empathy whores. Artists and poets are inexplicable deplorables (to borrow a word) who deserve to starve in their garrets. The poor are losers.

Fundamentally, how a person defines their happiness is at the core of our political dilemma. For Trumpists, true happiness is attainable only through maximal control of your destiny, with minimal government regulation and judicial probity.

The biggest legitimate department of the objectivist state is its army, whose role is protection of the oligarchs core philosophy.

Objectively, there is no need for Meals on Wheels. Warheads on missiles make more sense.

Troy Media columnist Mike Robinson has been CEO of three Canadian NGOs: the Arctic Institute of North America, the Glenbow Museum and the Bill Reid Gallery. Mike is also included in Troy Medias Unlimited Access subscription plan.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all Troy Media columnists and contributors are the authors alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of Troy Media.

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Conspiracy theories, Donald Trump, USA

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To understand Trump read Ayn Rand | Troy Media - Troy Media

WASHINGTON The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread.

The novelist Anatole Frances mischievous observation came to mind when the Congressional Budget Office released its analysis of the Republican cut-taxes/gut-Medicaid bill and its defenders went into a continuous loop talking about freedom. Conservatives are fond of saying that freedom isnt free. This is entirely true, especially when it comes to health care.

Republicans speak of the wondrous things that will happen if they succeed in slaying the monster known as Obamacare.

House Speaker Paul Ryan offered this rush of animated words to conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt: You need to have an individual market where people care about what things cost, where people have real freedom, where those providers of health care services, be they insurers, doctors or hospitals and everybody in between, compete against each other for our business based on value, based on price, based on quality, based on outcome.

Left-wingers are often cast as dreamy utopians, but its Ryan and his allies who pretend they can create a capitalist paradise in health care something that not one wealthy capitalist country has ever done because the health care market is not like any other.

Older people, for example, are not an ideal market for private insurance companies. Thats why we have Medicare. Lower-income people cant afford to pay the full cost of a decent insurance policy. Thats why we have Medicaid, and why the Affordable Care Act subsidizes policies from private insurance companies.

Slash Medicaid and take away the subsidies and, presto, the ranks of the uninsured mushroom.

Defenders of this proposal try to argue that health care is radically different from coverage. They must think the American people are dunderheads.

Coverage is not the end, Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget, said on MSNBCs Morning Joe Tuesday. People dont get better with coverage. They get better with care.

Well, sure, but try taking your kids to get care from a pediatrician if you dont have insurance coverage.

Ryan urges people to read his bill. If you do, youll realize how many of its pages are devoted not to health care but to tax cuts. According to the CBO, the bill takes $1.2 trillion out of helping people get health care (including $880 billion from Medicaid) and then hands out about $600 billion of that in tax cuts, mostly for the well-to-do and various interest groups, the beleaguered tanning industry being my favorite. This could also be called the Make Inequality Worse Act of 2017.

In his youth, Ryan was a devotee of Ayn Rand, whose philosophy is nicely summarized by the title of her book The Virtue of Selfishness. She would be proud of her one-time disciple. She excoriated the draining, exploitation and destruction of those who are able to pay the costs of maintaining a civilized society, in favor of those who are unable or unwilling to pay the cost of maintaining their own existence.

In other words, government should never take money from the better-off to help lesser souls. In the glorious future created by Ryans bill, they will now be even freer to try maintaining their own existence without health insurance.

Read more here:

Ayn Rand would be proud of GOP approach to health care - The Herald-Times (subscription)

Health care is neither a right nor a privilege provided by the government according to House Speaker Paul Ryan.

In a Thursday interview with MSNBCs Chuck Todd, the Wisconsin Congressman explained that he believes the government doesnt owe it to anyone to pay for health care. Doing so enables the government to decide for Americans where how and when we get health car, he said.

He went on to explain that doing so gives the government too much power over peoples lives. Notably, Ryan sang a different tune during the 2012 Vice Presidential debate when he told the audience that he didnt believe unelected judges should decide health care decisions, Congress should. That was about abortions, however.

Todd attempted to interrupt Ryan, but Ryan persisted asked that Todd not cut him off. I love you, were buddies, but ya know, Ryan told Todd. He went on to say that what health care is, however, is a need but that the answer is not Obamacare.

We will be able to offer a better system with more access and lower coverage costs including people with pre-existing conditions, he claimed.

Todd wondered if he was painting himself into a corner, much in the same way Obamas claim if you like your doctor you can keep him did.

When it comes to those who dont buy health care and simply go to the emergency room, Ryan said that those people will be handled by high-risk pool plans like what he had in Wisconsin. Their plan had government-provided insurance for about 21,000 people who had medical conditions that prevented them from getting insurance on the individual market, according to the Lacrosse Tribune.

While it provided care for many, the plan was too expensive for many people. More than 500,000 were left uninsured, according to health policy programs director at the Population Health Institute UW-Madison Donna Friedsam. The plan also had a lifetime cap of $2 million and a six-month waiting period for coverage of pre-existing conditions.

It worked well for 21,000 people, Friedsam said. But it did not solve the problem of getting most of the people in our state connected to affordable coverage.

Watch the full interview with Ryan below:

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Paul Ryan channels his inner Ayn Rand: Health care is neither a right nor a privilege - Raw Story

Ayn Rand is dead. It's been 35 years since hundreds of mourners filed by her coffin (fittingly accompanied by a dollar-sign-shaped flower arrangement), but it has been only four months since she truly died as a force in American politics.

Yes, there was a flurry of articles identifying Rand lovers in the Trump administration, including Rex Tillerson and Mike Pompeo; yes, Ivanka Trump tweeted an inaccurate Rand quote in mid-February. But the effort to fix a recognizable right-wing ideology on President Donald Trump only obscures the more significant long-term trends that the election of 2016 laid bare. However much Trump seems like the Rand hero par excellence--a wealthy man with a fiery belief in, well, himself--his victory signals the exhaustion of the Republican Party's romance with Rand.

In electing Trump, the Republican base rejected laissez-faire economics in favor of economic nationalism. Full-fledged objectivism, the philosophy Rand invented, is an atheistic creed that calls for pure capitalism and a bare-bones government with no social spending on entitlement programs such as Social Security or Medicare. It's never appeared on the national political scene without significant dilution. But there was plenty of diluted Rand on offer throughout the primary season: Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Carly Fiorina and Ted Cruz all espoused traditional Republican nostrums about reducing the role of government to unleash American prosperity.

Yet none of this could match Trump's full-throated roar to build a wall or his protectionist plans for American trade. In the general election, Trump sought out new voters and independents using arguments traditionally associated with Democrats: deploying the power of the state to protect workers and guarantee their livelihoods, even at the cost of trade agreements and long-standing international alliances.

Trump's economic promises electrified rural working-class voters the same way Bernie Sanders excited urban socialists. Where Rand's influence has stood for years on the right for a hands-off approach to the economy, Trump's "America first" platform contradicts this premise by assuming that government policies can and should deliberately shape economic growth, up to and including punishing specific corporations. Likewise, his promise to craft trade policy in support of the American worker is the exact opposite of Rand's proclamation that "the essence of capitalism's foreign policy is free trade."

And there's little hope that Trump's closest confidants will reverse his decidedly anti-Randian course. The conservative Republicans who came to power with Trump in an almost accidental process may find they have to exchange certain ideals to stay close to him. True, Paul Ryan and Mike Pence have been able to breathe new life into Republican economic and social orthodoxies. For instance, in a nod to Pence's religious conservatism, Trump shows signs of reversing his earlier friendliness to gay rights. And his opposition to Obamacare dovetails with Ryan's long-held ambitions to shrink federal spending.

Even so, there is little evidence that either Pence or Ryan would have survived a Republican primary battle against Trump or fared well in a national election; their fortunes are dependent on Trump's. And the president won by showing that the Republican base and swing voters have moved on from the traditional conservatism of Reagan and Rand.

What is rising on the right is not Randian fear of government but something far darker. It used to be that bright young things like Stephen Miller, the controversial White House aide, came up on Rand. In the 1960s she inspired a rump movement of young conservatives determined to subvert the GOP establishment, drawing in future bigwigs such as Alan Greenspan. Her admirers were powerfully attracted to the insurgent presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater, whom Rand publicly supported. They swooned when she talked about the ethics of capitalism, delegitimizing programs like Medicare and Medicaid as immoral. They thrilled to her attack on the draft and other conservative pieties. At national conferences, they asked each other, "Who is John Galt?" (a reference to her novel Atlas Shrugged) and waved the black flag of anarchism, modified with a gold dollar sign.

Over time, most conservatives who stayed in politics outgrew these juvenile provocations or disavowed them. For example, Ryan moved swiftly to replace Rand with Thomas Aquinas when he was nominated in 2012 for vice president, claiming that the Catholic thinker was his primary inspiration (although it was copies of Atlas Shrugged, not Summa Theologiae, that he handed out to staffers). But former Randites retained her fiery hatred of government and planted it within the mainstream GOP. And it was Rand who had kindled their passions in the first place, making her the starting point for a generation of conservatives.

Now Rand is on the shelf, gathering dust with F.A. Hayek, Edmund Burke and other once-prominent conservative luminaries. It's no longer possible to provoke the elders by going on about John Galt. Indeed, many of the elders have by now used Randian references to name their yachts, investment companies and foundations.

Instead, young insurgent conservatives talk about "race realism," argue that manipulated crime statistics mask growing social disorder, and cast feminism as a plot against men. Instead of reading Rand, they take the "red pill," indulging in an emergent Internet counter-culture that reveals the principles of liberalism--rights, equality, tolerance--to be dangerous myths. Beyond Breitbart.com, ideological energy on the right now courses through tiny blogs and websites of the Dark Enlightenment, the latter-day equivalent of Rand's Objectivist Newsletter and the many libertarian 'zines she inspired.

Once upon a time, professors tut-tutted when Rand spoke to overflow crowds on college campuses, where she lambasted left and right alike and claimed, improbably, that big business was America's persecuted minority. She delighted in skewering liberal audience members and occasionally turned her scorn on questioners. But this was soft stuff compared with the insults handed out by Milo Yiannopoulos and the uproar that has greeted his appearances. Rand may have accused liberals of having a "lust for power," but she never would have called Holocaust humor a harmless search for "lulz," as Yiannopoulos gleefully does.

Indeed, the new ideas on the right have moved away from classical liberalism altogether. American conservatives have always had a mixed reaction to the Western philosophical tradition that emphasizes the sanctity of the individual. Religious conservatives in particular often struggle with Rand because her extreme embrace of individualism leaves little room for God, country, duty or faith. But Trump represents a victory for a form of conservatism that is openly illiberal and willing to junk entirely the traditional rhetoric of individualism and free markets for nationalism inflected with racism, misogyny and xenophobia.

Mixed in with Rand's vituperative attacks on government was a defense of the individual's rights in the face of a powerful state. This single-minded focus could yield surprising alignments, such as Rand's opposition to drug laws and her support of legal abortion. And although liberals have always loved to hate her, over the next four years, they may come to miss her defense of individual autonomy and liberty.

Ayn Rand is dead. Long live Ayn Rand!

Jennifer Burns is an associate professor of history at Stanford University and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Editorial on 03/12/2017

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Ayn Rand's policies losing power - arkansasonline.com