Ayn Rand's Birthday was first celebrated by Thomas Robert Stevens on February
2, 1983. The Objectivist Party, founded by Dr. Tom Stevens on February 2,
2008, invites everyone to actively participate in celebration of the life of
Ayn Rand on February 2nd, her birthday, by doing one or more of the
following:
1. Spend the day doing whatever makes YOU happy. Engage in purposeful,
meaningful and productive activities of which you can be proud.
2. Do
an Internet Search for "Ayn Rand" and read an article about her amazing
life.
3. Do an Internet Search for "Objectivism" and learn
something about her philosophy.
4. Commit to reading one fiction or
non-fiction book written by or about Ayn Rand.
5. Hold a meeting or
sponsor a forum about Ayn Rand or Objectivism at your school, on-line, or in
your community sometime around her birthday.
Free Trade Day is celebrated on May 8th, the birth date of Friedrich Hayek,
the Austrian economist who championed free trade.
Free Trade Day was
started by Dr. Tom Stevens, the founder of the Objectivist Party. It was
created so people can be made more aware of the importance of free trade to
an efficient economy, wealth creation and a better standard of living.
Celebrate Free Trade Day by doing one or more of the
following:
1. Read about Free Trade.
2. Read about Friedrich
Hayek and his economic theories.
3. Run a seminar, hold a meeting, or
sponsor a debate on the importance of "free trade" to enabling people to
realize their potential and survive through the use of reason.
Free trade can be contrasted with protectionism, which is the economic policy
of restricting trade between nations. Trade may be restricted by high
tariffs on imported or exported goods, restrictive quotas, a variety of
restrictive government regulations designed to discourage imports, and
anti-dumping laws designed to protect domestic industries from foreign
take-over or competition.
Free trade is a term in economics and
government that includes:
1. Trade of goods without taxes (including
tariffs) or other trade barriers (e.g., quotas on imports or subsidies for
producers)
2. Trade in services without taxes or other trade
barriers
3. The absence of trade-distorting policies (such as taxes,
subsidies, regulations or laws) that give some firms, households or factors
of production an advantage over others
4. Free access to markets
5. Free access to market information
6. Inability of firms
to distort markets through government-imposed monopoly or oligopoly power
7. The free movement of labor between and within countries
8.
The free movement of capital between and within countries
SPACE EXPLORATION DAY
JULY 20th
Space Exploration Day is celebrated on July 20th, the day in 1969 when Neil
Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin first set foot on the moon as part of the
Apollo 11 mission.
Space Exploration Day was founded by Dr. Tom
Stevens and was first celebrated on July 20, 1970. It was created to promote
the private, entrepreneurial development, exploration and colonization of
our solar system, galaxy, and universe.
Celebrate Space Exporation
Day by doing one or more of the following:
1. Hold an event on July
20th to celebrate Space Exploration Day (e.g. Dinner at Mars 2112).
2.
Research efforts to promote the space tourist industry.
3. Research
efforts to to promote the private, entrepreneurial development, exploration
and colonization of our solar system, galaxy, and universe.
4. Run a
seminar, hold a meeting, or sponsor a debate on the importance of the
private exploration of space.
Neil Armstrong said "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for
mankind," just before imprinting his boot in the lunar dust. Armstrong was
joined on the moon by fellow crewmember Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin. The third
astronaut, Michael Collins, orbited in the mission's command module.
Armstrong
and Aldrin spent only a few hours on the moon, walking about and setting up
some simple experiments. They left their footprints, a United States flag,
and a plaque that read, "Here men from the planet Earth first set foot on
the Moon -- July 1969 A.D. -- We came in peace for all mankind."
Only
12 people have walked on the moon, the last two in December 1972. Last year
U.S. President George W. Bush committed the country to a return to the moon
by 2015. The plan is to eventually use the moon as a stage in missions to
Mars and beyond.
SKYSCRAPER APPRECIATION DAY
August 10th
Skyscraper Appreciation Day is celebrated on August 10th, the birth date of
William Van Alen, the primary architect behind the construction of the
Chrysler Building, the most popular skyscraper in New York City.
Skyscraper
Appreciation Day was started in 2009 by Dr. Tom Stevens, the founder of the
Objectivist Party. It was created so people can appreciate the engineering
and architectural marvels we know as skyscrapers, which represent the
triumph of reason and of man's industrial nature.
Celebrate
Skyscraper Appreiciation Day by doing one or more of the following:
1.
Research the history of skyscrapers.
2. Visit an interesting
skyscraper near your home.
3. Select photos of your favorite
skyscrapers and post them to the "Photos" section of this Facebook
Group.
4. Visit "The Skyscraper Museum", a private, not-for-profit,
educational corporation devoted to the study of highrise buildings, which is
located in lower Manhattan. #
Ayn Rand loved skyscrapers. She loved them not only for their phallic
erectness, but because they symbolized exactly what she stood for and what
she thought was best about not only our country but our whole Western
civilization. She wrote a brilliant paean to one such building in The
Fountainhead:
"The building stood on the shore of the East River, a
structure rapt as raised arms. The rock crystal forms mounted in such
eloquent steps that the building did not seem stationary, but moving upward
in a continuous flow - until one realized that it was only the movement of
one’s glance and that one’s glance was forced to move in that
particular rhythm. The walls of pale gray limestone looked silver against
the sky, with the clean, dulled luster of metal, but a metal that had become
a warm, living substance, carved by the most cutting of all instruments - a
purposeful human will; the skyscrapers, the shapes of man’s
achievement on earth." (The Fountainhead, pgs. 300 & 327)
In an
article entitled "The Skyscraper: A Gesture To Reason, Freedom and Human
Life" (April 27, 2003) published in Capitalism Magazine, Joseph Kellard
wrote:
"The skyscraper's true symbolic gesture is captured best by
philosopher Leonard Peikoff, when he said of his associate Ayn Rand: 'New
York, the skyscrapers, everything that man had traversed from the time of
the cave to the time of this glorious and industrial civilization, that was
to [her the pinnacle of human achievement in physical terms.] It wasn't just
acquiring philosophy. It was acquiring ideas, acquiring science and then
remaking the earth accordingly. And she couldn't think of a more splendid
and exciting and beautiful place than that view that you get of the
skyscrapers when you don't see the details of each one, but the mass of
ingenuity and talent soaring for the sky.'"
Regarding New York's skyline, Ayn Rand said:
"I would give the
greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline... The sky
over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we
need?... When I see the city from my window - no, I don't feel how small I
am - but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would throw myself
into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body."
INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS DAY
August 29th
Individual Rights Day is celebrated on August 29th, the birth date of John
Locke, the philosopher who first prominently argued that a human being has a
basic property right based upon his status as a soveriegn human being and
that it is the government's role to protect that right and not to treat its
citizens as slaves.
Individual Rights Day was started by Dr. Tom
Stevens, the founder of the Objectivist Party. It was created so people can
contemplate the importance of this concept to man's right to life and to use
reason to ensure his own survival.
Celebrate Individual Rights Day
by doing one or more of the following:
1. Read about John Locke and
his political philosophy that respects man's sovereignty over his own
body.
2. Read about Ayn Rand and her basis for recognizing that every
man is born with "individual rights" that cannot be trampled upon by
government or by others.
3. Contrast the concept of "individual
rights" with those of "collective rights".
4. Run a seminar, hold a
meeting, or sponsor a debate on the importance of "individual rights" as the
basis for man's liberties and freedoms.
5. Join the Individual
Rights Day Facebook Group at #
John Locke stated in "The Second Treatise On Civil Government" - "Every man
has a property in his own person this no body has any right to but himself.
The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say are properly
his...The great and chief end therefore, of Mens uniting into Commonwealths,
and putting themselves under Government, is the Preservation of their
Property."
John Locke quotations on "Individual Rights":
“Reason...teaches
all Mankind, who would but consult it, that being all equal and independent,
no one ought to harm another in his Life, Health, Liberty, or Possessions.”
"Government can never have a Power to take to themselves the whole
or any part of the Subjects Property, without their own consent."
“’Tis
a Mistake to think this Fault [tyranny] is proper only to Monarchies; other
Forms of Government are liable to it, as well as that. For where-ever the
Power that is put in any hands for the Government of the People, and the
Preservation of their Properties, is applied to other ends, and made use of
to impoverish, harass, or subdue them to the Arbitrary and Irregular
Commands of those that have it: There it presently becomes Tyranny, whether
those that thus use it are one or many.”
"Whenever the
Legislators endeavor to take away, and destroy the Property of the People,
or to reduce them to Slavery under Arbitrary Power, they put themselves into
a state of War with the People, who are thereupon absolved from any farther
Obedience, and are left to the common Refuge...against Force and Violence.
Whensoever therefore the Legislative shall transgress this fundamental Rule
of Society; and either by Ambition, Fear, Folly or Corruption, endeavor to
grasp themselves, or put into the hands of any other an Absolute Power over
the Lives, Liberties, and Estates of the People; By this breach of Trust
they forfeit the Power, the People had put into their hands, for quite
contrary ends, and it devolves to the People, who have a Right to resume
their original Liberty.”
Ayn Rand quotations on "Individual
Rights":
"A 'right' is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a
man’s freedom of action in a social context. There is only one
fundamental right (all the others are its consequences or corollaries): a
man’s right to his own life. Life is a process of self-sustaining and
self-generated action; the right to life means the right to engage in
self-sustaining and self-generated action—which means: the freedom to
take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the
support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life.
(Such is the meaning of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness.)...Thus, for every individual, a right is the moral sanction of a
positive—of his freedom to act on his own judgment, for his own goals,
by his own voluntary, uncoerced choice. As to his neighbors, his rights
impose no obligations on them except of a negative kind: to abstain from
violating his rights."
"The right to life is the source of all rights—and
the right to property is their only implementation. Without property rights,
no other rights are possible. Since man has to sustain his life by his own
effort, the man who has no right to the product of his effort has no means
to sustain his life. The man who produces while others dispose of his
product, is a slave."
“Man holds these rights, not from the
Collective nor for the Collective, but against the Collective—as a
barrier which the Collective cannot cross...these rights are man’s
protection against all other men."
“The source of man’s
rights is not divine law or congressional law, but the law of identity. A is
A—and Man is Man. Rights are conditions of existence required by man’s
nature for his proper survival. If man is to live on earth, it is right for
him to use his mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is
right to work for his values and to keep the product of his work. If life on
earth is his purpose, he has a right to live as a rational being: nature
forbids him the irrational. Any group, any gang, any nation that attempts to
negate man’s rights, is wrong, which means: is evil, which means: is
anti-life."
"Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a
majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political
function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by
majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual)."
"The
concept of individual rights is so prodigious a feat of political thinking
that few men grasp it fully—and two hundred years have not been enough
for other countries to understand it. But this is the concept to which we
owe our lives—the concept which made it possible for us to bring into
reality everything of value that any of us did or will achieve or
experience."
