Eduardo Porter has a piece in The New York Times blaming Wall Street for the fact that the average American is allegedly going to run out of money in retirement. According to Porter, the average working family nearing retirement has just $104,000 in retirement savings — obviously not enough to keep someone afloat for twenty or thirty years. I’m not convinced that we are in fact facing a “retirement crisis.” But I want to set that aside. What’s interesting is who Porter blames for this problem.
Now I’ve heard everything. We read about income gaps, and wealth gaps, and racial gaps, and gender gaps. But now The Atlantic warns us about the ominously growing “unplanned birth” gap. Poorer women have always had more unplanned children than affluent women, but it turns out that the gap has been widening since the mid-1990s, leading the article’s author, Gillian White, to wonder if this is an outcome of economic inequality.
After the slaughter at Charlie Hebdo in Paris and the lethal shootings at a free speech event in Copenhagen, some Western intellectuals are now raising the question whether we, in the West, are guilty of abusing our free speech.
In today’s culture there is a tendency to associate capitalism with religion. That association stems from generations of conservatives suggesting that what makes America free, great, and exceptional is faith. So it’s hardly a surprise that many Americans who revere science oppose capitalism.
We at the Ayn Rand Institute regard free speech as essential to a free society; you can’t have one without the other. That’s why we have a long and proud history of taking an uncompromising and unequivocal stand for free speech.
The Debt Dialogues is a weekly podcast that aims to educate young people about the welfare state and how it will affect their future. In this episode, I interview Steven Horwitz, Charles A. Dana Professor of Economics and department chair at St. Lawrence University, on his new paper “Inequality, Mobility, and Being Poor in America.”
The Debt Dialogues is a weekly podcast that aims to educate young people about the welfare state and how it will affect their future. In this episode, I interview Phillip Magness, a policy historian and Academic Program Director at the Institute for Humane Studies, on the empirical problems with Thomas Piketty’s book on inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
Cronyism is on everyone’s lips these days. The conventional view is that wealthy “special interests” — typically businesses — use their resources to influence elections and “game the system.” The result is special favors for them at the expense of everyone else. Ours is a government not of, by, and for the people, this view holds, but of, by, and for the “special interests.” Our system is not capitalism, they claim, but “crony-capitalism.”
“My fellow Americans,” Obama said at the close of last night’s State of the Union, “we too are a strong, tight-knit family,” It’s not unusual for politicians to invoke folksy metaphors of this kind, but in this case it just about sums up Obama’s worldview.
The aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attack has brought an encouraging reaction. You can see it on the streets of Paris and other cities. Last week, tens of thousands of people joined vigils in solidarity for the murdered journalists. Upwards of a million Parisians took the streets on Sunday. “Je Suis Charlie” read the signs. Online the corresponding hashtag has swept across social media. Some news outlets — more than I expected — have reprinted Charlie Hebdo cartoons. But what's more, the outlets that have refused to publish the images (or pixelated them) have been deservedly bashed. They shame themselves by cowering.
