Welcome to the Summer 2023 issue of The Objective Standard. I hope you enjoy the issue—and that you’ll join the six hundred or so people coming to Phoenix for 2023’s most life-enhancing conference!

If we want to understand and protect the values on which human life and liberty depend, we need clear understandings of the terms we use in thinking about them. Toward this end, it is helpful to understand the fallacy that Rand called “package-dealing” and the nature of what she called “anti-concepts.”

Adam Smith and Ayn Rand are widely considered to offer merely different flavors of pro-capitalist thought. But their differences are greater—and far more consequential—than their similarities.

William Kingdon Clifford was a 19th-century English mathematician and philosopher. In this essay, “The Ethics of Belief,” originally published in 1877, he argues that “it is wrong always, everywhere and for any one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.”

Living for Pleasure is a fun and much-needed introduction to the ideas of one of the world’s greatest philosophers. Epicurus’s teachings about reason, desire, and tranquility are as important now as they were twenty-three hundred years ago.

My debate with Stephen Hicks about whether Objectivism is a closed system or an open system has been posted on YouTube. Check it out—and if you find it clarifying, share it with people you think might appreciate it.

LevelUp 2023 is just a month away—and you don’t want to miss it. It’s a conference about philosophic ideas and practical tools for excelling in life and fighting for liberty.

If freedom-loving Brits are serious about the moral principles on which liberty depends, they must oppose the monarchy and advance a vision of a free British republic.