• • • "Ayn Rand: America's Comeback Philosopher" by Craig Biddle 
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Egoism  |Individual Rights  |Paul Ryan  |Objectivist author  | If America is to “come back” to the recognition and protection of rights, Americans must discover and embrace [...] the scaffolding that grounds the principle of rights in perceptual fact and gives rise to the principle that the only proper purpose of government is to protect rights by banning force from social relationships. The philosophy that provides this scaffolding is Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism. To see why, let us look at Rand’s philosophy in contrast to the predominant philosophies of the day: religion, the basic philosophy of conservatism; and subjectivism, the basic philosophy of modern “liberalism.”      View blog reactions

• • Marketplace of Ideas: The Purpose of Government 
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Individual Rights  |Objectivist author  | The proper purpose of government is, as the Founding Fathers recognized, to protect people’s inalienable rights to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness. Government fulfills this vital function, as Ayn Rand put it, by banning the use of physical force from social relationships and by using force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use.      View blog reactions

• • • The Ground Zero mosque, the spread of Islam, and how America should deal with such efforts 
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Ayn Rand Center  |Objectivist author  | If the symbolic location of a building is taken as legitimate grounds for government action against such a project, what is to stop government from shutting down the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, which is four blocks from the White House and engaged in an effort to substantially change our culture and our laws in ways quite contrary to the agenda of the White House?      View blog reactions

• • Capitalism and the moral high ground 
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Altruism  |Capitalism  | As the philosopher Ayn Rand, the arch opponent of altruism, succinctly put it: “The basic principle of altruism is that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to thers is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue and value.”      View blog reactions

• • Charlotte Observer editorial opposes academic freedom regarding BB&T grants 
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Atlas Shrugged  | Response to an editorial opposed to course content requirements as a condition of grants to educational institutions.
Certain universities and professors have chosen to include Ayn Rand’s books in the reading material of their courses, and some of them have sought and received BB&T grants that are contingent on including her works. This voluntary meeting of minds is called academic freedom and moral responsibility: The academics are free to choose their course content and to accept or reject the grants—and BB&T is being morally responsible with respect to its donations by ensuring that its money is put toward curricula consonant with its values.      View blog reactions

• • • Hostile-to-reason academics fear Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Egoism  | On controversy over donations given to universities by BB&T that require the teaching of Atlas Shrugged.
If you are a successful businessman, why not join [CEO John] Allison and BB&T in this admirable practice? Read Atlas Shrugged and see what you think. If you think it should be included in the curricula of schools to which you donate money, start donating with the appropriate strings attached. In addition to promoting the values on which human life and happiness depend, you will help expose the irrationality of those academics who will publicly denounce you for being rationally principled. Reasons don’t get any better than these.      View blog reactions

• • Immigration and individual rights 
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Capitalism  | Today, productive, life-loving immigrants such as Isaac Asimov, Irving Berlin, Andrew Carnegie, Enrico Fermi, Andrew Grove, Itzhak Perlman, Wolfgang Puck, David Sarnoff, Nikola Tesla, Arturo Toscanini, Eddie Van Halen, and Ayn Rand would likely be turned away from the land of the free.      View blog reactions

• The Iranian regime: The Bush administration’s latest deadly evasion 
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The Virtue of Selfishness  | In order for the U.S. government to engage in a campaign of American self-defense, American citizens—those who elect and influence our country’s leadership—must demand it. And in order to demand such a campaign, Americans must come to understand and embrace the principle that acting in a self-interested manner—which means: using reason to identify, pursue, and defend the values on which their life, liberty, and happiness depend—is the essence of being moral. The observation-based, logical proof of this principle, for those willing to let the evidence decide the matter, can be found in Ayn Rand’s book The Virtue of Selfishness.      View blog reactions

•Notes on the coming election 
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No single election is as important as the underlying cause of the political nightmare in which we find ourselves today. That cause is bad philosophy, and the only way to counter it is by understanding, embracing, and spreading good philosophy. However you choose to vote in this election, study and spread Objectivism, donate to the Ayn Rand Institute, read The Objective Standard, and encourage your friends and family to do the same.      View blog reactions

•Relativism and religion vs. the lives of Americans 
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The reason why so many Americans have been and will continue to be slaughtered by and in pursuit of Islamic terrorists is that so many Americans accept the false alternative of relativism or religion. If Americans want to put an end to this gray, godly slaughter, we must reject that false alternative; we must repudiate both relativism and religion; we must discover and embrace a reality-based, rational, morally absolute, self-interested philosophy—namely: Objectivism.      View blog reactions

• • •Introducing The Objective Standard 
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The editor of a new periodical describes its philosophy and goals.
In a word, we advocate Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand, and apply its principles to the cultural and political issues of the day.      View blog reactions