Atlas Shrugged and the Tea Party Revolts

Atlas Shrugged and the Tea Party Revolts



ARC has lots of great resources such as the following suggested remarks:



For those who have an opportunity to speak at the Tea Party efforts, we offer the following as a guideline for remarks that you may wish to use. We are not suggesting that you read this, but rather that you take it as a presentation of essential ideas that you may wish to express.


On April 15, thousands of Americans will gather for modern day tea parties, proudly named after the Boston Tea Party of 1773. Like our revolutionary ancestors, we are protesting against growing government power, a government that increasingly oppresses its citizens instead of protecting them.


But what are we fighting for? Have we earned the right to call our protests by the same name the Founding Fathers used? Believe me, they understood exactly what they were fighting for. When those Bostonians boarded the cargo ship, Dartmouth, and hurled chests of tea into the ocean, they were not just mad about high taxes. In fact, the Tea Act that inspired the protest had actually lowered the tea tax on the colonies.


No, the colonists were driven by a certain view of the proper purpose of government, which the Tea Act repudiated. That view, which would reach its full expression in the Declaration of Independence, was that the role of government is to protect individual rights–to protect the sovereign individual’s right to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.


But over the past two centuries, the ideal of individual rights has all but disappeared from public discourse. In its absence has emerged today’s massive regulatory-welfare state, which taxes away nearly half our income, tells us what medicines we can take, what kind of light bulbs to buy, and is rapidly consolidating control over America’s banks, insurance companies, and industrial giants like General Motors.


What happened? Why did we abandon the American ideal? Above all, because the ideal lacked a moral defense.


To uphold the individual’s political right to pursue his own happiness, we must recognize the individual’s moral right to pursue his own happiness. But just try and say such a thing, and the voices will come from all sides–that’s selfish. “It’s selfish to want to plan for your own retirement–what about those who aren’t responsible enough to save? It’s selfish to oppose bailouts for struggling homebuyers–why should they have to move? It’s selfish to earn and keep a lot of money for yourself–what about those struggling to make ends meet?”


And it’s all true: the pursuit of happiness is selfish. That’s why you need the individual freedom of a capitalist system–to pursue your own interests, to act on your own judgment, to make your own life the best it can be. That’s why you need to crusade for individual rights, not just against the latest Washington power grab. To mount such a crusade requires more than protest slogans and picket signs. You must resolve to morally defend the individual’s right to live for his own sake, not as a servant of society. So long as you are willing to concede that self-interest and the profit motive are immoral, and that self-sacrifice for the “common good” is a moral ideal, you will continue to see freedom diminish and prosperity decline.


In my judgment the only philosopher to provide such a moral defense of capitalism is Ayn Rand, the author of Atlas Shrugged and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. So I’ll close with her words:


“The world crisis of today is a moral crisis–and nothing less than a moral revolution can resolve it: a moral revolution to sanction and complete the political achievement of the American revolution. . . . [You] must fight for capitalism, 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.”


Make sure to check out the ARC Tea Party Activism site.

Update: (April 18, 2009) For some links to Tea Party Reports see Diana’s list at Noodlefood.

Censorship and The Slide To Dictatorship

Onkar Ghate, a senior fellow at the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights on the Glenn Beck Program on Fox News today, Friday, February 20, 2009. Dr. Ghate discuss the erosion of our constitutional republic, and how we can end our slide toward dictatorship.


 
Related articles by Dr. Ghate on censorship include:
 
Censorship on Campus? Time to Privatize America’s Universities (September 10, 2002)
We must not be fooled by the professors’ cries about threats to their freedom of speech. Freedom is precisely what they don’t want. Their grumblings are simply smokescreens to prevent us from seeing that we are right in objecting to being forced to finance their loathsome ideas.
 
Thought Control: Government Should Not Have the Power to Legislate Morality (March 19, 2003)
The absolute moral principles at the foundation of a free society preclude the government from becoming policeman of morality.
 
Professor Ward Churchill, The First Amendment and Free Speech on Campus (February 15, 2005)
Only private universities can ensure that every citizen’s freedom of speech is respected.
 
Love Thy Enemy: The Twilight of Freedom of Speech (February 9, 2006)
Why does a Muslim have a moral right to his dogmas, but we don’t to our rational principles? Why, when journalists uphold free speech and Muslims respond with death threats, does the State Department single out the journalists for moral censure? Why the vicious double standard? Why admonish the good to mollify evil? The answer lies in the West’s conception of morality.
 

 

Free Speech For Me, But Not For Thee

Here’s a great op-ed in the WSJ by Bret Stephens, explaining the hypocrisy of “liberals” on the issue of free-speech:

For liberals, the issue is straightforward. If routine mockery of Christianity and abuse of its symbols, both in the U.S. and Europe, is protected speech, why shouldn’t the same standard apply to the mockery of Islam? And if the difference in these cases is that mockery of Islam has the tendency to lead to riots, death threats and murder, should committed Christians now seek a kind of parity with Islamists by resorting to violent tactics to express their sense of religious injury? The notion that liberals can have it both ways — champions of free speech on the one hand; defenders of multiculturalism’s assorted sensitivities on the other — was always intellectually flimsy. If liberals now want to speak for the “right” of this or that group not to be offended, the least they can do is stop calling themselves “liberals.”


In criticizing religious conservatives (what he calls “cultural conservatives”), he adds:



Western civilization is not simply the “Judeo-Christian tradition.” It is also the civilization of Socrates and Aristophanes, Hume and Voltaire, Copernicus and Darwin; of religious schismatics and nonbelievers. This is the civilization that is now required to define itself, oddly enough, by the case of a flamboyant Dutch politician with inconsistent ideas and a bouffant hairdo. If he can’t be defended, neither can Mr. Rushdie. Or Mr. Serrano. Liberals and conservatives alike, take note. [Geert Wilders Is a Test for Western Civilization, WSJ, February 17, 2009]

Why Israel Attacked the Gaza

The “news” we have heard about the Israeli military action in the Gaza strip has often focused on the deaths of “civilians.” This obfuscates the fact that the majority of casualties were Hamas warriors in civilian dress. When the Israelis retaliate, the press reports it as Israeli “aggression.” Every dead child then becomes a propaganda weapon for Hamas. The more dead civilians, the better it is for Hamas.
Here is a concrete example of how Hamas warriors intentionally position themselves in civilian buildings, incite the Israelis to respond, and then cash in for propaganda purposes. In a slip on Alarabiya-TV, an announcer states that a missile had just been launched from the basement of the press building: “Hamas fires Grad Missiles from foreign Press building in Gaza January 2009—Unintentional News from Alarabiya-TV.”


The press later reported the Israeli response, “IDF hits the foreign Press building,” without reporting the missile that triggered the retaliation by the Israeli Defense Forces.


The press building incident is a microcosm of the entire conflict. Hamas has launched thousands of missiles from densely populated areas against civilians in Israel. For Hamas, the entire population of the Gaza is an expendable resource to be used to create the propaganda needed to continue the war.


Thanks to Boaz Arad for bringing this to my attention.

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