Atlas Society
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Personal Life
Food Trucks Shrug!
May 6, 2013 -- At Farragut Park and other locations in Washington, D.C., food vendors have their trucks parked as usual at lunch time today but they are not serving the throngs of hungry customers. They are on strike against proposed D.C. regulations that would drive many of them out of business and limit consumer choice. Atlas is shrugging and The Atlas Society’s Edward Hudgins reports!
24/7: Making it in New York City
Photographer Daniella Zalcman spends a day with the street musicians and vendors of New York City. They might not be wearing suits or working at a computer, but they are taking an entrepreneurial approach to their life: being proactive, trading value for value, and persevering past obstacles in order to get one step closer to happiness.
The Major Virtues: Independence
“’Value’ is that which one acts to gain and keep,” wrote Ayn Rand, “’virtue’ is the action by which one gains and keeps it.” This six-session course focuses on the distinctive virtues highlighted by Objectivism: their basis in fact, their contrast with traditional moral ideals, and their role in a rational, value-seeking human life.
Values in Atlas Shrugged (Part 1: Career)
Atlas Summit 2012 -- The heroes of Atlas Shrugged are rational, productive businesspeople. In Ayn Rand's thought, a career represents the central value in one's life, the means by which one supports oneself independently and reshapes the world. In this talk, William R Thomas discusses the value of a career of productive work in the context of the Objectivist philosophy and the events in the novel. He will consider how Objectivist ethics apply to productive titans Hank Rearden and how they apply to ordinary workers like Eddie Willers.
Reach for the Stars
Atlas Summit 2012 -- In 1960s New York City, Ayn Rand taught Kerry O'Quinn the secrets of life at the Nathaniel Branden Institute. Since those golden days, Kerry has been teaching others how to enjoy the difficult struggles necessary to explore beyond our comfort zones and make distant dreams come true – learning, dreaming, planning and truly relishing the reaching. His ideas are inspiring, motivating and brutally practical.
Economic Warfare
Atlas Summit 2012 -- This nation was founded on the principle of wealth creation. The government is supposed to promote the creation of an environment conducive to the creation of wealth--not job creation, not bailouts, not subsidies, not expansion of the federal bureaucracy, and not providing lifetime support to those who choose not to take advantage of the innumerable opportunities that exist in this nation for them to create a better, more productive life for themselves. Instead of economic success, today we have economic warfare.
Atlas Summit 2012 -- In her book, The Virtue of Selfishness, Ayn Rand exhorted readers to put the word "selfishness" to its true and proper use: to describe the ethic of rational self-interest.