Help Joshua Lipana Fight Cancer—Update

A hearty “thank you!” to everyone who has contributed to help Joshua Lipana cover the costs of his cancer treatment. To date we’ve raised $13,642 (that’s $2,000 more than GoFundMe shows because one couple generously made a direct donation of $2,000 to Joshua’s PayPal account). But we still have a long way to go to reach our goal of $25,000.

Toward inspiring more donations, let me say a few words about Joshua and why helping him is, in fact, helping yourself.

Joshua is a warrior for liberty. He has dedicated his life to fighting for reason, egoism, and capitalism. And, in this regard, he is the most promising young man I have ever met. The reason is threefold: his ambitiousness, his intelligence, and his independence.

At the age of 18, Joshua emailed me saying, “Are you still looking for a paid blogger for TOS? If you are, I want the job and I’d like to apply. Plus, I'm from South East Asia. So you'll get a hard-worker for a fraction of the cost of an American writer. It's time to outsource, Mr. Biddle.”

Impressed with that bold email, I asked Joshua for samples of his writing, which he promptly forwarded. I was impressed with those too. So I hired him on a trial basis to do some blogging.

But I was in for even more pleasant surprises.

In addition to writing a steady stream of good blog posts, Joshua told me that he wanted to help with our social media and marketing efforts. And he had a lot of ideas at the ready. So I hired him to help in these areas as well, and our engagement numbers and website traffic immediately began to grow.

And there was more. Joshua proved not only ambitious and full of ideas, but also able to think at a highly abstract level. Talking with him was like talking with a 40-year-old seasoned businessman-intellectual. Of course he didn’t possess all the knowledge of an accomplished thinker of that age. But he was able to detect relationships, make integrations, and see implications at a level that few people ever reach.

And there was still more. I soon saw the most impressive and promising thing about Joshua: his independence. He was always eager to learn and even more eager to be corrected when wrong. But if I thought he was wrong and he thought he was right about something important, and if I couldn’t convince him that he was in error (and sometimes he wasn’t), then he would tenaciously stand his ground.

This is the essence of Joshua’s character. And this endeared him to me. Independence—the commitment to forming one’s own judgments based on one’s own observations and reasoning—is the single most important characteristic in an intellectual or a businessman or anyone else for that matter. Joshua had proven himself invaluable to TOS.

Joshua was now writing blog posts and articles well beyond his years; he was helping increase TOS’s reach and traffic; he was arguing with me via Skype practically every day about something or other; he had been promoted to Assistant Editor of TOS Blog; he was soaring. And then he was diagnosed with cancer.

Fortunately, the treatment regimen Joshua’s doctors have prescribed appears to be killing the cancer. After four rounds of chemo, the large tumor in his left lung has shrunk to less than half its original size. (The doctors recently preformed a bone marrow biopsy, but the results of that are not yet in.)

Unfortunately, the treatment is extremely expensive—the bills exceed $30,000 and continue to mount—and Joshua has no insurance.

Our goal in this fundraiser is to help defray the costs by raising $25,000, and we’re just over half way there.

Joshua needs our help. And to help this young man is to help ourselves. If the treatment works and Joshua is able to get back to work, he will be fighting for reason, egoism, and capitalism—and doing so very effectively—for many years to come. Let’s see to it that he’s not saddled with hospital bills when he’s ready to get back in the saddle.

If you haven’t yet donated, please make a donation today. If you have donated, please consider making an additional donation. And, in any event, please share this post with your friends on Facebook and Twitter. Every dollar counts.

Thank you,
Craig Biddle

P.S. If you’d like to donate directly to Joshua’s PayPal account, you can do so by sending money to joshualipana (atsign) yahoo (dot) com. If you’d prefer to mail a check, please make it out to “The Objective Standard,” write “Donation for Joshua” on the memo line, and mail the check to: The Objective Standard, P.O. Box 5274, Glen Allen, VA 23058.

About Craig Biddle

Craig is cofounder and editor of The Objective Standard, cofounder and director of education at Objective Standard Institute, and executive director of Prometheus Foundation. He is the author of Loving Life: The Morality of Self-Interest and the Facts that Support It; Rational Egoism: The Morality for Human Flourishing; and the forthcoming Moral Truths Your Parents, Preachers, and Teachers Don’t Want You to Know. He is currently working on his fourth book, “Thinking in Principles.”

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