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 Romina Boccia, the Grover M. Hermann Fellow in Federal Budgetary Affairs at the Heritage Foundation, on Social Security and how it affects Millennials.
“In Europe, charters of liberty have been granted by power. America has set the example . . . of charters of power granted by liberty.”
James Madison wrote these words in 1792, five years after the Constitution began its journey toward ratification by the states. Today marks the 227th anniversary of that beginning — the signing of the Constitution by the 39 delegates to the Philadelphia convention. Madison’s statement is one of my favorites because it conveys, more than any other quote I can think of, the proper relationship between individuals and government, which is a key part of the profound moral significance of the Constitution and the government it created.
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 Dr. Gregory Salmieri, who teaches philosophy at Rutgers University and Stevens Institute of Technology, on the subject of justice.
The Wall Street Journal offers a good take down of the arguments for the Export-Import Bank, which the House just reauthorized for another 6 months. One irony in this debate, which the Journal notes: many on the left, including the Obama administration, Elizabeth Warren, and Nancy Pelosi, support the Ex-Im bank despite their real antipathy for business and their professed antipathy for “the rich” obtaining benefits at the expense of everyone else. As the Journal explains, “these liberals are friends of business only when government is allocating the favors.” That’s true, but the issue goes deeper than handing out favors.
POST byRituparna Basu | View All PostsSeptember 12, 2014
Last week I was a guest on The Rick Amato Show. We discussed the latest issues surrounding Obamacare, including newly discovered taxes in the law, whether Obamacare is here to stay and the real solution for solving America’s health care problems.
A few weeks back I asked for you to vote for my entry in the Think Freely Media’s 2014 Great Communicators Tournament, which asked entrants to make a moral argument for freedom.
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 Pulitzer Prize-winning political columnist George Will on American Progressivism. Topics covered include:
Michael Tanner: “[M]ore than one out of every three Americans live in households that are now on welfare. Looked at another way, America’s welfare state now has nearly three times the population of the largest actual state. . . . And none of these numbers include the middle-class social-welfare programs like Medicare and Social Security. Counting these programs, more than 153 million Americans, nearly half the population (49.5 percent), are living in households now dependent on government for a significant portion of their income.”
In the PJTV video I talked about yesterday, Bill Whittle and Andrew Klavan also criticize Rand for confusing selflessness and altruism. Selflessness doesn’t exist, Klavan says, because "everyone is acting for personal gain, even if that personal gain is joy" from helping others. Altruism then is simply doing good for others in order to gain joy, which Klavan stresses is a good thing.
In a recent video for PJTV, Bill Whittle and Andrew Klavan answer a question from a viewer: “Why is Ayn Rand nonsense?” To their credit, they largely reject the premise of the question, and while they are very critical of Rand (and annoyingly snarky about it), their criticisms are on the whole thoughtful if tremendously confused.
