Someday I will be able to attend the Objectivist Summer Conference, OCON, but until then at least the Ayn Rand Institute posts videos of some of the presentations, such Andrew Bernstein’s talk about great black innovators in the United States, including the first self-made female millionaire in  history, Madame C.J. Walker. He discusses not only examples of the amazing successes achieved by black’s in the United States but also the obstacles they had to overcome to succeed.
Weaving
I recently came across a video posted by the Federalist Society of a talk given by ARI’s Onkar Ghate on selfishness. If you have read Ayn Rand or listened to other talks by Dr. Ghate or Yaron Brook, much of the information covered in this talk will be familiar, but I find it is often (always?) helpful to revisit ideas you are familiar with in order to achieve a better understanding of them.
In this case, this deeper understanding came when Onkar answered the first question in the Q&A
I have written a fair amount regarding property rights on this blog. For more than the last 100 years, the progressives and others on the political left have been whittling away at the very of idea of property rights. Today, far from having the freedom to use your property in ways that do not violate the rights of others, property owners often have to beg permission from some government
Recently Steve Simpson, Director of Legal Studies at the Ayn Rand Institute, gave a talk at Clemson University about free speech and the threats to it. He discusses not only the obvious attacks on free speech such as the attack on Charlie Hebdo but the less obvious, and to my mind more dangerous, threat posed by the failure to properly defend free speech in the wake of such attacks.
He brings special attention to what those that Salman Rushdie calls the “but brigade,” those people who
Yaron Brook talks capitalism in Warsaw.
Dr. Yaron Brook has been on something of a whirlwind speaking tour over the last week in Europe. One of the seven talks he gave over a six-day period was his Morality of Capitalism delivered in a beautiful venue in Warsaw, Poland to about 200 people.
For those who have watched Yaron’s talks in the past, this one covers familiar ground although I find that each time I listen to the material I notice something different that makes my understanding clearer and a bit more complete. As always,
If we stop changing the environment…we will die.
This is another great talk from Yaron Brook, this time from ELITE (Latin American School of Engineering, Technology and Business) in Bogota, Colombia. While much of the talk will be familiar to those who have watched videos of Dr. Brook’s talks in the past, this had a bit of a different slant as it had an emphasis on applying the rational principles of self-interest to entrepreneurial
In a talk (you can find another talk here) given on March 12, 2015 at the Steamboat Institute, Dr. Yaron Brook discusses why capitalism is the only moral system of government in front of what he describes as a “standing room only” crowd. His emphasis is not
In this video recorded on March 11, 2015 at the Steamboat Institute in Steamboat Springs, Colorado Yaron Brook gives another excellent talk, this time on free speech. He discusses a variety of aspects of this issue: What is it? Why is it so important? How is the government not only failing to protec this right but in many cases actively infringing on it.
The talk is about 70 minutes in total and includes a 30 minute question and answer period, which are always fun in Yaron’s talks. During
In this short video, approximately 45 minutes of introductory lecture and 30 minutes of Q&A, Leonard Peikoff provides a great, if brief, introduction to the fundamentals of Objectivism. He discusses the 5 branches of philosophy – metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics and esthetics – and how they form an integrated whole.
Dr. Peikoff presents a more complete discussion of Objectivism in a 32 hour lecture series, which can be found on the
I’ve gathered here the four videos that have been posted from the debate on Inequality between Yaron Brook and Paul Vaaler, hosted by the Snider Center for Enterprise and Markets at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business on February 7, 2015. This was an interesting debate that covers a fair number of topics within the general idea of inequality. I think I have the videos linked in proper order, though I am not sure it makes too much difference if they are