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ARI’s executive director Yaron Brook recently traveled through China to promote the publication of the Chinese translation of Free Market Revolution: How Ayn Rand’s Ideas Can End Big Government. Co-authored by Brook and Don Watkins in 2012, Free Market Revolution illustrates why Ayn Rand’s ideas are key to solving the economic and political ills of our time.
When Yaron Brook and I started working on our book Free Market Revolution, which offers Ayn Rand’s moral defense of capitalism, the idea that capitalism needed a moral defense was virtually unheard of. Today, it’s so common that I was able to participate in a contest for who could make the best moral case for free markets. (I suspect that most of the credit for popularizing this idea goes, not to us, but to AEI’s Arthur Brooks.)
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.
Last week, I sat down with Yaron Brook for a wide-ranging discussion of Dave Brat’s surprise victory over House Republican Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a Virginia primary election. We covered Brat’s views on Ayn Rand and free markets, Ayn Rand’s influence on politicians, and why thinkers on both the right and the left talk about her practically every day.
Stephen Moore, chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, published a hard-hitting op-ed in the Orange County Register over the weekend. It’s a timely follow-up to his viral 2009 Wall Street Journal column drawing parallels between the collapsing economy in Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged and the chaotic world of Washington politics at the height of the financial crisis.
In this episode of The Debt Dialogues, I talk to Ayn Rand Institute executive director Yaron Brook about the moral alternative to the welfare state: laissez-faire capitalism. Topics include how the welfare state harms recipients, why capitalism leads to prosperity and human flourishing, and Ayn Rand’s unique contribution to capitalist thought.
Washington Post writer Steven Pearlstein recently published a thoughtful piece on the morality of capitalism that has gotten a lot of attention. I have a lot to say about it, and I want to start with one of the more intriguing questions raised by Pearlstein.
Next year Obamacare will give more than thirty million Americans completely subsidized health care under Medicaid, or mostly subsidized health care under the state exchanges. As the demand for health care will dramatically increase and the supply of medical professionals able to service that demand will remain essentially unchanged, we can expect to experience things like longer wait times for surgery, having to drive further to visit a specialist and even the possibility that no doctor in drivable distance is accepting new patients.
