Culture And Society

Happy Columbus Day!

Today we at ARI will unapologetically celebrate Columbus Day — and so should you. Why? Because Columbus Day celebrates the life-promoting core of Western Civilization; namely, reason and individualism.
ARI News

#OCON2017 Livestream June 15: Applying the Strikers’ Principles to Life in America Today

What specific principles lead the heroes of Atlas Shrugged to go on strike? And what does it look like for an individual or a movement to implement these principles today in a world that resembles that of the novel in some ways but not in others? What decisions do we face that are analogous to those faced by the protagonists, and what can we learn from the novel about which course is right and which wrong?
Culture And Society

Who Desires, and Who Thrives In, a Free Society? [Video]

“Give me liberty or give me death.” This inspiring slogan from the American revolutionary period is all the more impressive when we remember that the revolutionaries were not trying to flee a totalitarian dictatorship but were rebelling against one of the freest, most prosperous nations of their age. There is an important insight here — American revolutionaries demanded, in full, the political freedom expressed in the Declaration of Independence as a matter of principle. What was the principle these revolutionaries held so dear and why don’t Americans see it the same way today?

Further Reading

Ayn Rand | 1957
For the New Intellectual

The Moral Meaning of Capitalism

An industrialist who works for nothing but his own profit guiltlessly proclaims his refusal to be sacrificed for the “public good.”
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Ayn Rand | 1961
The Virtue of Selfishness

The Objectivist Ethics

What is morality? Why does man need it? — and how the answers to these questions give rise to an ethics of rational self-interest.
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