Low taxes and drug legalisation are not merely uncontroversial positions among free market advocates, they’re pretty much the consensus. What is controversial, and in fact denied by most people, is the notion that such policies, or indeed any political views, are part of the philosophy we hold (whether explicitly or implicitly), and derive from our view on ethics, which in turn derives from our view of our nature and of reality.

The exception to this consensus is Objectivism, the philosophy identified by Ayn Rand, in which she shows how our fundamental view of life and the world in which we live it necessarily lead to how we think about politics, and where she presented an entire system based on acceptance of – and adherence to – the fact that our consciousness is a tool of perceiving reality and processing the evidence of our senses, not of shaping it.

This Sunday, at the Battle of Ideas in Barbican Centre in London, Dr. Yaron Brook, Executive Director of the Ayn Rand Institute, will apply this philosophy to three issues as a participant in three different panels. The first of these will be a midday panel on the war on drugs, titled The War On Drugs: Time For A Truce? He will then take part in an afternoon panel on Tax Wars And Inequality, and will close out the conference in an evening panel titled Is Utopian Thinking Dead? Attitudes To The Future. Tickets are available on the Barbican Centre website.

For those who want to explore Ayn Rand’s philosophy further, the Adam Smith Institute will hold its annual Ayn Rand Lecture on Tuesday in Mayfair. This year’s speaker is Julie Meyer of Ariadne Capital, who’ll be speaking on the topic of “Why Society Works Best When It’s Organised Around the Entrepreneur”.

On Wednesday, Yaron Brook will be speaking to the King’s College London Libertarian Society about his latest book, Equal Is Unfair.