“My fellow Americans,” Obama said at the close of last night’s State of the Union, “we too are a strong, tight-knit family,” It’s not unusual for politicians to invoke folksy metaphors of this kind, but in this case it just about sums up Obama’s worldview.
Since the video surfaced last month of Jonathan Gruber admitting that deceiving the American public was necessary to pass Obamacare, several more videos have been discovered of the Obamacare architect singing the same tune. The value in Gruber’s comments is that they expose the collectivist ideology underlying Obamacare.
For decades intellectuals have struggled to understand Nazi Germany. How could a country known as the “land of poets and philosophers” turn into a nation of killers? In The Cause of Hitler’s Germany — a republication of a portion of The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom in America, first published in 1982 — Objectivist philosopher Leonard Peikoff provides the answer.
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.”
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.
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.
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 interview Claremont Review of Books senior editor William Voegeli on the question: “Why do people support the welfare state?”
This is the introduction to my new book, which we’ll be releasing in early June. Stay tuned to this blog to learn how you can get your hands on it and help us promote it.
