Every time I reread this it is just as relevant to whatever the current national situation is as it was when she wrote it. Follow up with her "The Wreckage of the Consensus" from a year later.

Khalling: Thanks for posting this. In 1965 I was in the audience at Ford Hall listening to this presentation live. You could hear a pin drop as Rand read the speech. It was preceded and followed by raucus applause. What a night! Thanks for bringing that memory back to me.

I can remember reading this powerful speech way back in '65. As I re-read it in 2016 I realize that it is more relevant now than it was even then. As a reader of science-fiction, I am disappointed that we are not on Mars, we don't have self propelled flying cars, there is no sign of a Star Trek world, and Ayn Rand is more needed today than 51 years ago.

By the way, my name is Marjorie Peters. I will change my screen name.

Hello, all. I'd like to introduce myself. I've been a lurker for a very long time, but would now like to join the discussion. I read Atlas Shrugged in 1960 and was immediately changed. Rand's ideas were a justification of what I had believed for most of my adult life, but I was too afraid and guilt-ridden to assert them and live by them. I still cared too much what others thought. In 1961, I attended Nathaniel Branden's taped lectures on Objectivism in Chicago and met some people I could actually exchange ideas with, one of them being my future husband. It was an exciting time. In 1963 I met Nathaniel Branden's business manager, the man who arranged for Ayn Rand's speech, "America's Persecuted Minority, Big Business," a Ford Hall Forum lecture, to be presented at McCormick Place in Chicago. I helped by manning the book table, and that is how I met Ayn Rand, and Nathaniel and Barbara Branden. I was only a fan, but it was exciting to meet them. I have studied and lived by Objectivism
all my life. After 55 years, all her ideas still hold true.

I'm happy to meet all of you, and I'm sure we will have many rewarding exchanges in the future.

I read it decades ago. I remember one quote (this
is from memory, and it may be from the sequel,"The Wreckage of the Consensus"): "Com-
romise does not satisy, but dissatisfies everybod-
y..." that a partial victory emboldens the side which pushes injustice, and "the partial victory
of an unjust claim discourages and paralyzes
the victim."

The part near 46 min where she talks about demographics of business people who bought into crony capitalism and the goal of preserving mediocrity reminds me of another book I read recently: Zero to One. This book says that the post-WWII prosperity led Boomers to the conclusion that success comes from following a clear career path and letting the rising tide lift all boats. The dot-com bust, Thiel says, led my generation to embrace this in the form of Lean business practices and reject notions of grand ideas that change the world in favor of incremental improvements.
[Below are my thoughts, not Thiel's]
The post WWII rising tide came to an end, and now people look for whom to blame. We have Trump selling the lie that it's outsiders and foreigners. We have Sanders selling the lie that it's billionaires. We have most people scared, like we're on a ship with no guiding navigational principals, that one of these people will enact tyranny of one group on the others. If we have no boundaries, centrism gives us stability, a reduced risk of the unstable system careening into one form of tyranny or another. As Rand says in this piece, we sometimes even get sanctimonious about our zealous centrism, wanting the cooler heads to listen to all sides and come to a compromise between all the various interest groups in society.

My questions for Rand: How do we get those boundaries on gov't back? How do we make the groups not feel like they're unilaterally disarming by calling for limited gov't? It's not their interests to do so if the other groups will continue using the gov't to further their own interests. Is President LBJ an unprincipled man, and our system depends on having people of principles in office? (I hope the answer is no.) Then what institutions should we have to enforce those boundaries?

The line about the problem of "statistics substituted for truth" caught my attention because it reminded me of the 2012 book The Signal and the Noise: Why Most Predictions Fail - But Some Don't. The books says we have so much data and number-crunching ability in the modern world that we sometimes substitute statistical analysis of data for logical models.

It's odd to hear something similar 50 years ago.

Thanks for the link. Chilling applicability

I have it and other NBI records of AR talks available. If interested, contact me at Pen Ultimate Rare Books. Michael
archangels@att.net

We are fortunate that we have a complete record of almost everything Any Rand thought about, I say almost because with her death she could not think anymore, but while she was alive think she did and commit it to paper so we have it. This is an example of how timeless her thoughts were, 1965, and like everything she committed to paper we have it so we can know if we read her writings what I believe tragically is taking place in our, if it still is our country.
khalling thank you for publishing this information.

Each time I listen to Ayn I am more impressed with what she saw. From what it appears we will finish the last step in becoming a facist country in the next election. Hope I'm wrong. Thanks for sharing this K.