You’ve heard the stories. Charles Murray was attacked by a mob after giving a talk at Middlebury College. Not long after that, a riot broke out at U.C. Berkeley over a scheduled appearance by Milo Yiannopoulos. Berkeley’s student newspaper later published a series of essays justifying the violence as “self-defense.”
Paul Ryan has claimed that the American Health Care Act (also known as Ryancare), which is intended to replace the Affordable Care Act (also known as Obamacare), is a return to a “free market” in health care. And various commentators and politicians are suggesting that Ryan’s plan is inspired by Ayn Rand’s philosophy. For example, Rep. John Yarmuth, D-Ky., went on CNBC’s Squawk Box to say that “It’s not really a health-care bill. This is an ideological exercise to basically satisfy Paul Ryan’s Ayn Rand tendencies.”
The Volokh Conspiracy is one of the nation’s most widely read legal blogs. Under the Washington Post’s online umbrella, the site’s twenty-two contributors (all law professors or lawyers) tackle some of the most complex issues in the news, especially those with a distinct legal aspect that will benefit from expert analysis. Recently the site’s founder, Eugene Volokh, a constitutional law professor at UCLA and expert on freedom of speech, weighed in on the banned-book controversy, involving a book by ARI’s Elan Journo and Onkar Ghate, that erupted at a recent Federalist Society event at his university.
Myth: The Great Recession was caused by free-market policies that led to irrational risk taking on Wall Street. Reality: The Great Recession could not have happened without the vast web of government subsidies and controls that distorted financial markets.
A couple of weeks ago, ARI executive chairman Yaron Brook was interviewed on Wall Street Journal’s Opinion Journal on the merits of “Trumpian Nationalism.”
Yaron Brook, the executive chairman of the Ayn Rand Institute, was recently interviewed on Amy Peikoff’s show Don’t Let it Go regarding his views on the proper immigration policy.
Will Trump’s immigration ban protect us from Islamic totalitarianism? Is it based on facts or on irrational fears? Should we vet immigrants? In this episode of The Yaron Brook Show, Brook offers an objective analysis of Trump’s executive order on immigration.
Two weeks ago, some students and the administration at UCLA School of Law tried to ban my book Failing to Confront Islamic Totalitarianism from being displayed at a free-speech panel. (The event was co-sponsored by the Ayn Rand Institute and The Federalist Society; you can read a detailed account in my editorial at The Hill.) Appalled by that incident, I wondered whether this was typical of UCLA, whether the university would explain its actions, whether it cared at all about intellectual freedom.
Myth: Finance was deregulated during the 1980s and 1990s, laying the groundwork for the 2008 financial crisis. Reality: Although some financial regulations were rolled back during the late 20th century, the overall trend was toward increased government control.
