By any rational standard of justice, Americans owe a profound debt of gratitude to businessmen past and present for their role in improving and extending human life. "The businessman," as Ayn Rand observed, "is the great liberator who…has released men from bondage to their physical needs, has released them from the terrible drudgery of an eighteen-hour workday of manual labor for their barest subsistence, has released them from famines, from pestilences, from the stagnant hopelessness and terror in which most of mankind had lived in all the pre-capitalist centuries—and in which most of it still lives, in non-capitalist countries." Business should be viewed as a heroic endeavor; productive businessmen should be lionized in movies, glamorized in the media, thanked at the dinner table. That the exact opposite is the case—that businessmen are subject to ever-more denunciations, taxes, lawsuits, regulations—is a moral atrocity. The following articles identify the intellectual foundations and economic consequences of the injustice perpetrated against productive businessmen—and explain what businessmen and all of us must do (and not do) to fight it. The Terror of "Animal Rights" February 5, 2004, Ayn Rand Institute The Cost of the "Ethical" Assault on Honest Businessmen Bush's Regulatory Crackdown on Business Has Harmed the Economy. July 7, 2003, Ayn Rand Institute Biotech vs. "Bioethics": The Technology of Life Meets the Morality of Death July 2003, The Intellectual Activist Unlimited Liability Businessmen are unjustly blamed and sued for nearly every problem in America today. December 5, 2002, Ayn Rand Institute Cutting Down the Tallest Poppy October 2002, The Intellectual Activist Paralyzing America's Producers The Government's Crackdown on American Businessmen Is Devastating Our Economy. October 21, 2002, Ayn Rand Institute, reprinted by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution An Open Letter to CEOs: Defend the Profit Motive--or Perish American Businessmen Are Destroying Themselves by Appeasing Their Enemies. August 21, 2002, Ayn Rand Institute, reprinted by The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Miami Herald, and The Providence Journal Pragmatism and Public Image August 2002, The Intellectual Activist Bush's "Most Important Principle" August 2002, The Intellectual Activist What Is Killing the Stock Market? Government Regulation July 23, 2002, Ayn Rand Institute << Back to top