ARI Press Release
May 14, 2013
Ayn Rand Hits a Million…Again!
Atlas Shrugged Author Sells 1,000,000 Books in 2012
IRVINE, Calif.—Thirty years after her death, novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand is still selling a lot of books, a million to be precise. The popular author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead has sold 1,000,000 copies of all of her titles in 2012.
2012 saw Atlas Shrugged sell 359,105 copies, its third highest total of all time, behind 2009 (#1) and 2011 (#2).
As the decades move along Rand has only gotten more popular. Atlas Shrugged was a bestseller in Rand’s day, but it’s selling more than ever in the 2010s. Annual purchases of Atlas Shrugged by decade averaged:
- 1980s — 74,300 per year
- 1990s — 95,300 per year
- 2000s — 167,028 per year
- 2010s — 303,523 per year
To date Rand’s books have sold a total of 29,500,000 copies. 2,962,876 of these have been requested from the Ayn Rand Institute by American school teachers.
Long after he had established himself as one of America’s leading businessmen, as well as history’s greatest steelmaker, Andrew Carnegie reflected that “We all live in the richest and freest country in the world, where no man is limited except by his own mental attitude and his own desires.”
At the time—a decade or so before the First World War—Carnegie’s attitude was nearly universal. In America, anyone could carve out a better life for himself if he worked hard. Today, Carnegie’s attitude is considered almost quaint….
Why you should NOT vote for Obama
This is a quickly-written, informal post.
First of all, I do not like Mitt Romney. I don’t politicians in general. But I think Obama is such a threat to this country that he has to be taken out of office. And in order to do this, one must unfortunately vote for Romney because that is the only real option. Romney is not as bad as Obama.
I understand that most of the people are tumblr are under 24 and know little outside of the what their teachers and mainstream media tell them, so I know this is going to be a shock. Here are some major reasons why you shouldn’t vote for Obama:
Obama passed Obamacare which is a major assault on freedom and a major step toward a massive welfare state that is moving us toward a dictatorship (where the government simply dictates what we can and cannot do, in all spheres of life). This new law is absolutely anti-American and totally against the concept of individual rights to property, liberty, life, and the pursuit of happiness. Now the government is going to force you to buy something against your will.
In addition, every country that has government health care has poor health care, long lines for procedures we can currently get done faster, and ultimately the government will have to ration out treatment and deny treatment to others. This is the same story, over and over. Google it.
Here are some other high lights: Fascist and Communist governments also think it is either job to take over health care (and everything else). Do you want to go down that road? Because we are seriously going down that road.
Another thing: all countries in Europe have advanced welfare states with government health care, and they are all going bankrupt. Do you want to go down that road?
He refuses to even say the word terrorist, much less make significant progress toward removing the threat from our Muslim enemies. Killing Osama Bin Laden doesn’t mean much in the wider context, because someone will just take his place, and there are still thousands of Muslims who seek the destruction of the US. Most important, the biggest threat to the US, nuclear Iran, is untouched by Obama.
He lied about Benghazi and blamed it on a film maker, which in and of itself is grounds for impeachment and losing this election. Instead of protecting free speech and telling the whole world that we have this right and their feelings be damned, his administration made up a story that the Muslim world attacked our embassies on 9/11/12 in response to a video on youtube, and he tried to get the person who made the video put in jail. This is the sort of stuff Fascists do—force people out of their homes and make up charges against them for doing nothing at all, or going against the regime’s agenda.
He helped the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which is one the major first Islamic terrorist organizations in modern history, which inspired and gave rise to Al Qaeda.
His administration set up Attack Watch to get American citizens to report “false information” being spread about his admin, which is laughably close to something you would see in a Communist or Fascist state. This is something you would see in 1984 or the USSR. This is not the job of the government.
Last but not least he insists that success is “blind luck” and in response to people starting their own businesses, he said “you didn’t build that”. You cannot get more anti-American, anti-individualism than that. He thinks that if you owe your success to the government which made the roads, the schools, etc., completely evading the fact that it is business that funded and made everything possible, and that it was THINKING that created wealth, fundamentally speaking.
I want to comment on one aspect of what President Obama said in Rolling Stone regarding Ayn Rand–specifically, that Rand is someone to take seriously only when you’re young and naive.
According to Obama, “Ayn Rand is one of those things that a lot of us, when we were 17 or 18 and feeling misunderstood, we’d pick up.” “Then,” he says, “we get older”—the implication being most people learn how the real world works and grow out of Rand’s purportedly childish ideas.
Is Rand’s appeal really limited to the youth? The birth of the Rand-inspired Tea Party in recent years—consisting of people of all ages fed up with government intrusion in their lives—would suggest not.
Then what exactly in a person does Rand appeal to? In an article published earlier this year, ARI senior fellow Onkar Ghate sought to answer that very question. He said:
If we actually consider the essence of what Rand advocates, the idea that her philosophy is childish over-simplification stands as condemnation not of her position but of the many adults from whom this accusation stems.
The key to Rand’s enduring popularity is that she appeals not to the immaturity but to the idealism of youth. This is why more than 29,000 students submitted entries this year to essay contests on her novels and, in the past five years alone, high school teachers have requested over 1.5 million copies of The Fountainhead, We the Living, Anthem and Atlas Shrugged to use in their classrooms. They know that students respond to her stories and heroes as to few other books.
“There is a fundamental conviction which some people never acquire,” Rand wrote in 1969, “some hold only in their youth, and a few hold to the end of their days—the conviction that ideas matter.” The nature of this conviction? “That ideas matter means that knowledge matters, that truth matters, that one’s mind matters. And the radiance of that certainty, in the process of growing up, is the best aspect of youth.”
For years, there were people who studiously ignored Ayn Rand. Things are changing. This year we’ve already seen VP nominee Paul Ryan talk about his admiration for Atlas Shrugged (albeit later distancing himself from Rand’s philosophy), but now President Obama tells Rolling Stone that “sure,” he’s read Ayn Rand. Leaving aside whether he understood what he claims to have read (more on that here, here, and here), it is worth dwelling on this fact: Here’s the President of the United States, putative leader of the free world, critiquing (what he takes to be) Rand’s philosophic outlook. I happen to think Obama’s take on her is wrong. Rand tackles — and provides original new answers to — crucial and timeless questions, such as what is the good? how should society be organized? what is government’s proper role? Her answers point toward a society that enshrines individual rights — as a moral ideal and a practical fact. It’s past time that Rand’s ideas get the hearing they deserve.
(Reuters) - Officials at the White House and State Department were advised two hours after attackers assaulted the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11 that an Islamic militant group had claimed credit for the attack, official emails show.
Are you going to vote for a band of liars?
