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 Tara Smith, a professor of philosophy at the University of Texas, and author of Ayn Rand’s Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist, on the question: What is happiness and does the welfare state help or hinder our pursuit of happiness?
America’s antitrust laws are administered by a flourishing establishment of academics, regulators, lawyers, judges, and think-tank analysts whose mission in life is to torment businessmen. Want to see how they operate? Let’s start with an academic journal article by two antitrust scholars named John Connor and Robert Lande, and see where it leads.
Probably the most plausible argument for Social Security is that it has made Americans better off financially, lifting millions of seniors out of poverty, and providing all of us with the security of knowing that we will have a decent pension in old age. But none of that is true.
The European Union’s competition law is so broad, vague and oppressive that it makes America’s antitrust laws look clear by comparison. Well, not really — the American laws are horribly and incurably non-objective — but the EU’s law surely belongs in a separate ring of legal hell.
Dean Baker, a leading welfare statist and co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, recently offered up his theory for why a growing number of Americans are still living with Mom and Dad well into their twenties. His answer? Basically, too little government intervention and too little government spending.
In this episode of The Debt Dialogues, I contrast my own approach to the welfare state crisis with those who label it “generational theft,” and discuss why no one — not even the elderly — benefits from the welfare state.
On Independence Day, I recommend reading (or re-reading) the insightful essay by ARI’s senior fellow and chief content officer Onkar Ghate titled “Atlas Shrugged: America’s Second Declaration of Independence.”
Haven’t bought my new book on the welfare state, RooseveltCare: How Social Security Is Sabotaging the Land of Self-Reliance? Here’s a recent interview I did with Kerry Lutz and the Financial Survival Network on the book and the urgent necessity of abolishing Social Security.
If you spend any time reading free-market thinkers, you’ll inevitably encounter the argument that wealth redistribution is wrong because it is theft. See, for instance, this recent article by economist Dominick T. Armentano aptly titled “Redistribution Is Theft.”
