As the world celebrated a national day of giving, #GivingTuesday, on November 28, ARI launched its own campaign, #TradingTuesday, in honor of what Ayn Rand calls the “trader principle.” We encouraged fans of Rand to advance their values by contributing to ARI's Free Books to Teachers program. The program places Rand’s novels in the hands of students across the country.
Each year, the Ayn Rand Institute distributes hundreds of thousands of copies of Ayn Rand’s novels and nonfiction books to schools through our Free Books to Teachers program. Putting a book directly into the hands of students is a powerful way to expose them personally to Ayn Rand’s ideas. Most of these books are sent by mail to middle schools, high schools and colleges across the United States and Canada. So it’s a rare treat when we can deliver the books face-to-face.
Since 2012, the Tuesday following “Black Friday” has been publicized as “Giving Tuesday.” Touted as a remedy for the selfish commercialism of the holiday shopping season, the idea is that charitable contributions (“giving back”) will relieve the guilt you're expected to be feeling.
This is the audio version of Onkar Ghate’s November 6, 2017, post, “The Anti-Intellectuality of Donald Trump: Why Ayn Rand Would Have Despised a President Trump.”
While you’re waiting for your copy to arrive in the mail, check out this new YouTube playlist devoted exclusively to the themes found in In Pursuit of Wealth: The Moral Case for Finance, the new book edited by Yaron Brook and Don Watkins.
In my last blog post, I reported on how Greg Salmieri and I had done a special Atlas Project live broadcast from Atlanta, where we had both been attending the 2017 Ayn Rand Student Conference. The conference was exciting enough to warrant its own post.
In Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, there’s an unforgettable Thanksgiving scene at the mansion of Hank Rearden, a self-made millionaire industrialist whose achievements include the invention — after ten years of toil — of a revolutionary new metal, stronger, cheaper and more durable than steel. In addition to Rearden, seated at the table for Thanksgiving dinner are his mother, his wife Lillian, and his brother Philip, all of whom are wholly dependent on Rearden and his wealth.
In this wide-ranging episode of The Thinkery Podcast, Carl Benjamin (known on YouTube as “Sargon of Akkad”), interviews Yaron Brook. Among the many topics covered are: Why Adam Smith’s conventional morality undermines the case for capitalism; why Ayn Rand is not a “liberal” or a “conservative”; communism as the secularization of Christianity; the need for rational education; the essence of morality.
