Chip Taylor

Facilitating self-sacrifice

Zach Wendling asks:

Have you ever wondered why the Ayn Rand Institute is a non-profit organization?

Heh. When I was taking classes for my masters degree, one of my classmates was the local chamber exec. Whenever he was pimping chamber membership to our classmates who worked for non-profits (we were in a public administration program), he would point out that "non-profit" is a tax classification, not a way of doing business.

So, on that account I think we can let the good Objectivists at ARI slide on the profitability issue.

There is something I can't let slide, though. The text at the Ayn Rand Institute to which Zach links says:

Spreading rational ideas has rewards that are wider than a financial return. This is why thousands of people give copies of Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead to people who they think might respond to Ayn Rand's art and philosophy. No one should imagine that passing on Ayn Rand's works or speaking out in favor of her ideas has to be justified by a direct financial return. This is precisely the kind of activity that the Ayn Rand Institute exists to do—on a larger, more comprehensive scale than is available to a single individual. How would one make a profit by: providing speakers to college campus Objectivist clubs, running high school essay contests on The Fountainhead and Anthem, teaching and mentoring graduate students pursuing their doctoral degrees, distributing free copies of Ayn Rand's work on epistemology to philosophy professors, publishing op-eds and letters to the editor, being interviewed on national TV and radio? Ayn Rand Institute acts as a paid agent for those who wish to spread Objectivist ideas. However, they may not have the time or expertise to do this work themselves, so they pay us to do it for them. They do this out of their own rational self-interest—not as alms, duty or sacrifice, but because they want to improve the culture in which they live.

But wait. Let's suppose I spend ten dollars to give away a copy of Atlas Shrugged. That may well improve the culture in which I live, but it is hard to imagine that my share of that improvement will exceed the ten dollars I spent on the book. In that case, I will have made an altruistic contribution to the common good. The Ayn Rand Institute is willing to facilitate that sort of irrational, self-sacrificial behavior? Ayn Rand must be spinning!