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20 years ago, I came back from my internship at the Ayn Rand Institute's OCON conference excited to meet other Objectivists. This was a year before Facebook when IRC Chat was still the most popular venue for Objectivists to chat. So I decided to start my own Objectivism Forum - Objectivism (then ) Here is the post announcing the new site: After I graduated college in 2004, I handed off management to a series of admins and moderators, continuing to this day. I've continued to host the forum over that time, accumulating the following totals: 10,160 members 31,374 discussions 337,656 posts The site was most popular for the first few years, hosting events such as a live chat with Onkar Ghate, all sorts of features like The Objectivist Metablog, hosting for Ayn Rand clubs, event calendars, hosted email accounts, photo galleries, and much more. At live events, we would have hundreds of people participating and hundreds of posts per day. After Facebook became popular in 2009, traffic dropped off a lot, but as you can see, the site is still active today.

Bravo to 20 years of Objectivism Online! So much history here. Twenty years - a blink of the eye, or an eternity.

The purpose of government is (supposed to be) to protect individual rights. The only way to violate individual rights is by initiation or threat of force. Therefore, the government maintains a monopoly on force to ensure that it is only used in retaliation and only against those who initiate or threaten its use. As such, the only "mandates" from a proper government are negative obligations, e.g., don't murder people, don't defraud people, don't steal from people, don't extort stuff from people, etc. The government can enforce these without ever initiating force. Individual rights are not (supposed to be) subject to vote. Unlimited democracies usually end up tyrannical, as mob rule. As for vaccine mandates, the issue here is whether one has a right to one's own body. I would say so, and therefore I oppose vaccine mandates on the same grounds that I oppose the forced pregnancy and childbirth that result from abortion bans. A vaccine mandate is not the same thing as a vaccine itself, and it's possible to recommend a vaccine without supporting a mandate. I mean, I think everybody should read Atlas Shrugged to "inoculate" themselves against socialism and communism, but I absolutely don't believe that the reading of Atlas Shrugged should be mandated by law.