The Ayn Rand Center (ARC) is the public policy and outreach division of the Ayn Rand Institute, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. The Center’s mission is to advance individual rights (the rights of each person to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness) as the moral basis for a fully free, laissez-faire capitalist society. ARC is named after author and philosopher Ayn Rand (1905–1982), who is best known for her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and for her original philosophy Objectivism.
The Center is located inside the D.C. Beltway and promotes the philosophical case for individual rights and laissez-faire capitalism to the public policy and business communities, the media and the general public, and to policy-makers. Toward this end, the Center sponsors writing and research; produces articles, op-eds, and other media content; hosts forums, panel discussions, and debates; reaches out to businessmen, elected officials, and policymakers; and assists victims of governmental abuse in their efforts to defend themselves on moral grounds. The Center promotes the principle of individual rights as a fundamental truth that each individual has a moral right to act on his own judgment for his own sake, so long as he does not violate that same right of others. The use of the term “moral” here is not accidental. The Center sees this principle not only as a political matter, but also, and more fundamentally, as a moral matter, as a requirement of human life.