The other day I was on Kerry Lutz’s radio show discussing economic inequality and he asked me how to put the inequality alarmists on the defensive. Here was my quick take on that question.
You’ve probably heard this before: America is facing a serious debt crisis. Economists estimate that the unfunded liabilities for Social Security and Medicare amount to roughly $200 trillion. That’s about $400,000 per American.
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 Scott Winship, Manhattan Institute scholar, on inequality and economic growth.
Economist John Cochrane has a terrific op-ed on inequality in The Wall Street Journal in which he identifies money in politics as the chief target of the inequality warriors, as he calls the critics of income inequality. When you get past their bogus economic arguments, says Cochran, “most inequality warriors get down to the real problem they see: money in politics. They think money is corrupting politics, and they want to take away the money to purify the politics.”
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 John Cochrane, University of Chicago economist and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, on the campaign to limit economic inequality.
The other day I was thumbing through an interesting book, Pursuing Liberty: America Through the Eyes of the Newly Free, which contains interviews with eight American immigrants. It really captured what I think is one of the most notable and admirable characteristics of immigrants to this country: how many of them come expecting to work for a better life. They value freedom, not because it makes life easy, but because it makes success possible.
“If Ayn Rand were an up and coming author today,” Mark Cuban recently tweeted, “she wouldnt (sic) write about steel or railroads, it would be net neutrality.”
Wall Street executive Steven Rattner recently had a piece in the New York Times bemoaning rising inequality, and the fact that voters don’t seem to care about it. But we should care, argues Rattner: “Inflation-adjusted earnings of the bottom 90 percent of Americans fell between 2010 and 2013,” Rattner writes, “with those near the bottom dropping the most. Meanwhile, incomes in the top decile rose [by 2 percent].”
By now you’ve probably seen the video of Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber, in which he admits that deceiving the American public, whom he calls “stupid,” was necessary in order to pass the law. Since the video went viral, Gruber has tried to walk back his comments amid a hail of rebukes. But perhaps we should thank him: his comments in the video expose the ideology underlying Obamacare. Gruber put into words the collectivist mindset behind how Obamacare was passed and the law’s substance.
Over at The Huffington Post, ARI’s Distinguished Fellow and author of the upcoming In Defense of Selfishness: Why the Code of Self-Sacrifice Is Unjust and Destructive, Peter Schwartz argues that conservatives who oppose doctor-assisted suicide are, in fact, contradicting the actual right to life.
