On March 10, 2016, Onkar Ghate, senior fellow, and Carl Svanberg, research associate, spoke on the meaning and value of educational freedom at the North Carolina Alliance for Public Charter Schools’ 2016 Charter School Conference in Charlotte, NC.
If you leave people free, you’re going to get enormous economic inequality because different people produce different amounts of wealth. So how can the government make people equal? Only one way: use physical force to prop some people up and to pull other people down. But how is that fair?
Don Watkins and Yaron Brook’s new book Equal Is Unfair: America’s Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality will be available on March 29. But you can read the book’s first chapter, “Who Cares About Inequality?” right now.
On February 26, 2016, Yaron Brook participated in a Federalist Society panel on the relationship between capitalism and inequality. The panel was the first in the Federalist Society’s 2016 National Student Symposium, which was titled “Poverty, Inequality, and the Law.”
Economic inequality is often equated with “the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.” But inequality doesn’t refer to poverty — it refers to the gap between what different people earn. Why should we care about the gap? Inequality critics like Bernie Sanders have an answer. But is it a good one?
The critics of income inequality say that CEO pay is too high, and that the government should fight inequality by limiting executive compensation. Don Watkins, co-author with Yaron Brook of the book Equal Is Unfair: America’s Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality, argues that successful CEOs deserve their pay — and that the attempts to limit their pay are unjust.
Recently, I debated Professor Rick L. Hasen of UC Irvine School of Law at a Federalist Society event at Southwestern School of Law in LA. The subject was campaign finance law, and Professor Hasen took the opportunity to outline the case he makes in his new book, Plutocrats United: Campaign Money, the Supreme Court, and the Distortion of American Elections. From the title, you might guess that he is both not a fan of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision and that he thinks money in politics is leading to a kind of plutocracy, in which the wealthy end up influencing government far out of proportion to everyone else.
