Today’s leading critics of economic inequality tell us that, unless we’re “privileged,” success is impossible, that the “have-nots” cannot rise through their own productive efforts, and that the desire for extraordinary success is greedy and immoral. In this talk, Don Watkins argues that these ideas are false and pernicious.
While we should always be clear on the meaning of the concepts we're using, this commitment to clarity is especially important with respect to concepts that the culture seeks to muddy. Today, argues Peter Schwartz, the primary muddiers are the advocates of altruism, and their targets are concepts of morality. This talk examines the obfuscations, including the “package-dealing,” generated by altruists, and analyzes the valid and invalid definitions of crucial moral concepts.
Two peoples. One piece of land. No wonder there’s a conflict, right? But what if this common perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is wrong? What if this view of the conflict obscures more than it explains? What if it distorts our understanding, rather than helps unravel the conflict?
When you look around the globe, the Islamist movement is far from defeated. On the contrary. The movement is strong materially, in its ability to inflict harm, to control territory, to subjugate people. And, what’s more significant: it is strong in its morale, exhibiting an astounding confidence.
More than fifty years after Ayn Rand described big business as “America’s persecuted minority,” businesspeople are still being subjected to widespread moral denunciation and regulatory oppression. But such continuing injustices do not warrant giving in to discouragement, observes Ayn Rand Institute senior fellow Onkar Ghate.
Universal health care, a system in which the government guarantees everyone a certain level of medical care, is considered by many an ideal. In countries that have it, medicine is said to be cheaper, of better quality and available to everyone. In this talk, I explain the alleged ideal of universal health care and then challenge it.
In this debate with William P. Marshall, Yaron Brook argues that the economic inequality that emerges under capitalism is fair and that the inequality alarmists are motivated by envy, not a genuine concern for “the poor.”
That innovative black Americans flourished in late 19th- and early 20th-century America is a little-known part of our heritage. This talk by Andrew Bernstein celebrates a number of great minds — including Madame C.J. Walker, the first self-made female millionaire in America; George Washington Carver, who revolutionized agricultural science; and others — that, under the freedom of the capitalist system, triumphed over bigotry to reach great intellectual achievements.
The safeguards provided by an objective legal system hinge on a proper understanding of what objective law is. In this lecture, Tara Smith, professor of philosophy at the University of Texas and holder of the BB&T Chair for the Study of Objectivism, will clarify objectivity itself — not in epistemological detail, but in application to everyday living — and then chart its requisites for a proper legal system. We will see how the function of government sets the terms for the just exercise of state power and how confusions about objectivity result in its corruption.
