The blog is named for her opus and I am a big fan. Ayn Rand is the most brilliant philosopher. Period. Her contribution to philosophy and the nature of knowledge is as significant as that of Einstein to science, Edison to technology, or any of the titans of progress.
It took centuries of intellectual, philosophical development to achieve political freedom. It was a long struggle, stretching from Aristotle to John Locke to the Founding Fathers. The system they established was not based on unlimited majority rule, but on its opposite: on individual rights, which were not to be alienated by majority vote or minority plotting. The individual was not left at the mercy of his neighbors or his leaders: the Constitutional system of checks and balances was scientifically devised to protect him from both. This was the great American achievement—and if concern for the actual welfare of other nations were our present leaders’ motive, this is what we should have been teaching the world. Ayn Rand
3 crucial lessons Ayn Rand can teach us today Yaron Brooks, Don Watkins, FOX News, Published February 02, 2013
Today is the birthday of Ayn Rand, author of the 1957 classic “Atlas Shrugged,” and one of history’s most celebrated champions of capitalism. Here are three of the crucial lessons Rand offers those of us who want to fight for a freer, more prosperous America.
1. Celebrate Business
Today business is the scapegoat for virtually every evil. Whatever the problem or crisis, “greedy” businessmen take the blame, and the solution is always held to be more controls, more regulations, more taxes. When the financial crisis hit in 2008, for instance, Republican leaders raced to blame “greedy” bankers, not government policy. President Obama has intensified this outlook.
According to Rand, this is one of history’s worst injustices. Businessmen are the ones who create the medicines, food preservatives, sanitation systems, irrigation systems, and millions of other innovations and labor-saving devices that have nearly tripled our lifespans and provided us with a standard of living unimaginable by our forefathers. As she explained in 1961, the businessman is the great liberator who, in the short span of a century and a half, has released men from bondage to their physical needs, has released them from the terrible drudgery of an eighteen-hour workday of manual labor for their barest subsistence, has released them from famines, from pestilences, from the stagnant hopelessness and terror in which most of mankind had lived in all the pre-capitalist centuries.
Capitalism is good, said Rand, because it protects each man’s ability to make the most of his own life—and government intervention, which strips such men of their wealth and their freedom, is morally wrong.
If we want to limit government, Rand warned, this is something we need to celebrate. To slam business is to attack a core part of what makes America great.
2. Don’t Apologize for the Profit Motive
Underneath the attack on business is an attack on the motive that drives businessmen: the desire for profits. The profit motive, we’re constantly told, leads businessmen to lie, cheat, and steal their way to a buck—or at minimum taints them morally.
Just recall the criticisms of Mitt Romney. Even his Republican challengers criticized him, not for passing RomneyCare, but for having been a profit-seeking businessman. But if the profit motive is dangerous and immoral, how can we tolerate the profit system?
Rand sets the record straight. A profit, she notes, is the insignia of production: you make a profit when you produce something of value, something that others want to buy because it makes human life better, longer, easier, more enjoyable.
Capitalism is fueled, not by the Al Capones or the Bernie Madoffs of this world who seek to get money by hook or by crook. It is fueled by individuals who make money by creating wealth. This is the actual nature of the profit motive: it is the desire to earn rewards through productive achievement.
That, says Rand, is the kind of attitude toward one’s work, toward one’s wealth, and toward other people that pervades a free market. Free markets drive out of business the short-sighted, unproductive moochers who don’t create value—and a capitalist government locks up predators such as Madoff when they try to defraud others.
Capitalism is good, said Rand, because it protects each man’s ability to make the most of his own life—and government intervention, which strips such men of their wealth and their freedom, is morally wrong.
3. Run from Anyone Trumpeting “The Public Good”
Today government grows at the expense of individuals: at the expense of their rights, their freedom, their wealth. The supporters of Big Government have always justified this by appealing to “the public good.” How have defenders of capitalism responded? Not by challenging the notion of “the public good.” Instead, we have accepted that notion and tried to persuade people that only capitalism can achieve it.
But the justification for capitalism, Rand stresses, is not that it serves “the public good” or “the public interest” or “the common welfare.” All of those slogans are dangerously vague: they can mean anything, and so they can be used to “justify” everything. The justification for capitalism is that it is the only system based on the individual’s inalienable right to pursue his own life, liberty, and happiness.
Society, Rand observes, is not an entity but a collection of sovereign individuals, and the essential political value they have in common is freedom.
Freedom, Rand stresses, means that individuals can exercise their rights free from coercion and compulsion. They can work to make a successful life for themselves, acting on their own independent judgment, keeping the fruits of their labor, and dealing with others through voluntary exchange to mutual advantage. The government’s role is to protect their freedom by barring the initiation of physical force. The economic system that emerges when government is limited and individual rights are secured is capitalism.
If you want to stop the growth of the state, you have to get rid of any ounce of the idea that individuals exist to serve some social purpose or goal. Capitalism is the system rooted in the conviction that each individual is an end in himself and has a right to exist for his own sake.
Ayn Rand’s Winning Formula: Capture the Moral High Ground
If you wanted to boil down what makes Rand so successful and what she can teach us today, it would be that she teaches the free market side to take the moral high ground.
We “must fight for capitalism,” Rand says, “not as a ‘practical’ issue, not as an economic issue, but, with the most righteous pride, as a moral issue. That is what capitalism deserves, and nothing less will save it.”
But how can a system driven by self-interest and the pursuit of personal profit be moral? That is the question Rand answers in her works, and it is the question we address in our book, the national bestseller “Free Market Revolution: How Ayn Rand’s Ideas Can End Big Government
.”
We can limit today’s unlimited government. But to do so we will need to mount an unapologetic moral defense of freedom. The first step is to arm ourselves with Ayn Rand’s unsurpassed stockpile of intellectual ammunition, and then to speak out for freedom.
From Atlas Shrugs: http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/
Iranian American Ex-mooslim – Amil Imani – Salutes Pamela Geller as Champion of Freedom
Iranian-American ex-Muslim, Amil Imani, salutes counterjihadist champion of liberty, Pamela Geller
Tragically, during these times of great peril, truth is sacrificed by the politically correct, the myopic self-serving in the liberally dominated media, and the ruling class. Against this backdrop, a woman of great courage and integrity labors tirelessly in speaking the truth and in the defense of liberty.
Amil Imani Pamela Geller’s work in objectively revealing the true nature of Islam makes her a valued champion and defender of human dignity with liberty for all, and in particular, for women as longstanding victims of Islamic misogyny.
Geller methodically sheds light on the dark nature of Islamic beliefs and the barbaric practices involving the abuse of women in all ways, such as honor killing, female genital mutilation, child sex trafficking, forced child brides, severe abuse of homosexuals, and much more under the Stone Age Sharia law. Her work upholds and defends the ideals of human rights.
Liberty-loving people of America and the world over owe a debt of gratitude to Pamela Geller for valiantly exposing the racist and supremacist nature of Islam, for fearlessly braving where others dare not tread. She is a standard-bearer for human freedom and dignity. What does she get in return? A vicious and dirty hate campaign from jihadist apologists, fraudsters like the Southern Poverty Law Center, assorted left wing whacko groups, and even some Jewish organizations like the ADL, who should know better, and many threats by the Allah-following fanatics, simply because she speaks the truth about Islam.
If telling the truth about Islam is Islam bashing, then she is guilty.
The fact is that the self-righteous Islamist villains, their leftist apologists, and their paid mercenaries, do not trouble themselves to prove her wrong. Why is it that they do not disprove her naked truth about Islam? Conveniently, true to form, they shower her with all kinds of unspeakable epithets. Some of the more “civil” Muslims play the victim card. These latter types let out a hue and cry that they and their religion are smeared and victimized by people like Pamela. They consider her criticisms of Islam as Islam bashing. They accuse her of being a divisive racist who enjoys slandering Islam. For good measure, they also label her Zionist, in the pay of Israel and Israeli lobbies. Who is bashing whom?
Human nature is also the culprit, in part. We humans are attracted to hate like flies are to honey. Hate is an easy sell. It is appealing and little effort is required to hate. Hate gathers up the person’s or the group’s frustrations, anxieties, fears, paranoia and many other negative emotions in one handy bundle and hurls it at a convenient target. History is replete with instances of hate energizing the masses into the commitment of small and large-scale atrocities.
Truth is not always welcome and can often be greatly disturbing. But truth is the best weapon against evil and falsehood. When Geller points out the horrifying teachings of the Quran, she does not make them up. She cites Surahs from the Muslim Holy Book; Surahs and words that exhort Muslims to carry out all kinds of evil deeds against non-Muslims.
The truth is, Pamela Geller, is a heroine of our era. Heroes appear when circumstances call upon them. Heroes are those extraordinary people who stand up against evil at great peril to themself.
Pamela Geller is a courageous and intrepid human rights activist who has risen to fight for the rights of women and children under the iron fist of Islamic savagery. All of this brings charges of “hate speech” from the extremists and apologists for extremism and persecution. She honestly, and rightfully so, deserves to be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. She has done more for her country and humanity than President Obama has ever done. Ironically, he gets to keep his Nobel Peace Prize and she receives a barrage of insults and nasty attacks. The world is upside down, so it appears.
In addition to her distinguished resume, “Pamela Geller has broken numerous important stories — notably the questionable and illegal foreign sources of some of the financing of the Obama campaign, the anti-Semitic posts on Obama’s website, Obama’s political organizing in public school classrooms, ACORN’s destruction of Republican voter registrations, and many more. She has also been a staunch leader of the nationwide campaign against the Ground Zero mosque.”
Western people with their heads firmly encased in the cocoon of liberalism—the idea of live and let live—fail to see that Islam is anathema to the notion. Muslim sects do not even grant each other a modicum of tolerance. Muslims kill other Muslims on a daily basis, all in the name of Islam. They vie with one another to convert the world to their form of Caliphate. They do all this while also taking advantage of non-Muslim naiveté and destroying the God-given gift of liberty.
“Western elites – government and media – are paralyzed by fear, afraid to speak out against the life-destroying aspects of Sharia law that Islamic jihadists want to impose on the rest of the world. The risk of offending Muslims is, in their calculus, apparently greater than the risk of national or civilizational suicide,” once said the late courageous Journalist, Oriana Fallaci.
Why does all this happen? In her speech Fallaci explained that it was to a great degree because “truth inspires fear.” When one hears the truth, one can only be silent or join the cause. It is a call to a personal revolution, an upheaval, a departure – perhaps forever – from a life of ease and comfort. So most will prefer not to hear the truth — in no small part because of the difficulty of living up to it. Yet the real heroes, she said, are ‘those who raise their voices against anathemas and persecution, while most succumb — and with their silence give their approval to the civil death of those who spoke out.”
Like Fallaci, Pamela Geller is also a voice of rare courage. “I am not as young and energetic as you are, I am hopelessly ill. I shall not last long,” said Fallaci in her latter days. And when she departed from us, she only hoped men and women of courage would rise up and would continue her legacy. One can only thank God people like Pamela Gellar have risen up and spoken the truth no matter how bitter that may be.
Pamela Geller has been sounding the alarm for a number of years about radical Islam and jihadists’ imminent deadly threats. While America is the last haven of hope where liberty can reign, the Islamic jihadists draw heavily from their treasury flush with oil extortion money to bribe politicians and hire mercenaries to further their evil objectives.
“Islamic supremacism is seeping into every aspect of American life. Islamic jihad groups aren’t solely concentrating on terror attacks (although another one of those could come at any moment), but on the creeping encroachment to introduce Islamic law into this country, step-by-step and bit-by-bit, until finally America wakes up to a country transformed into an Islamic state. We must fight back now to defend our nation and our civilization, states our Champion of liberty, Pamela Geller.”
As an ex-Muslim and a proud co-worker of the same cause as Geller’s, I salute this courageous defender of liberty and urge all freedom lovers to do the same and join her ranks to stem the tide of Islamic tyranny. I have experienced first-hand the pall that Islam casts on the life of the individual and society. From cradle to grave, Islam imposes its oppressive, intolerant, and deathly dogma without let up. This archaic primitive belief of over 1400 years ago has been and continues to be at war with valiant people who refuse to lend their necks to its yoke of slavery.
Pamela Geller is a true heroine. She stands for all that is dear to free people. She is a stark contrast to the masses of the politically correct, the apathetic, and the hired Islamic apologists.
I have tasted Islamic poison and imbibed from the chalice of liberty. Islam aims to reclaim me and force the rest of mankind into its bondage and rob us all of the treasure of liberty. I am with Patrick Henry and Pamela Geller: “give me liberty or give me death.”