The moral foundation of the welfare state is altruism: the doctrine that we have a duty to sacrifice for the needs of others. (See my interviews with Onkar Ghate and Peter Schwartz.) If you want to get a real sense of the meaning of this doctrine and its implications for human life, the best source is Ayn Rand. But Rand is often accused of caricaturing altruism.
One of the recurring themes in debates over the entitlement state is that most people are on the dole through no fault of their own, and that the only way they can succeed is if the rest of us are taxed to give them free education, free job training, free child care, subsidized transportation, and anything else the entitlement state's supporters come up with. Is that true?
In the past Arab regimes would pounce to vilify Israel’s efforts at defending itself from Palestinian aggression, but curiously, many have been quiet amid the Gaza war. One explanation, sketched in this New York Times piece is that the Arab states view the Islamists of Hamas (whose patron is Iran) as a major problem, a higher priority than their (unwarranted) enmity toward Israel. If so, that implies these regimes understand the Islamist threat better than many in the West.
Steve Simpson interviews Elan Journo on the Hamas-Israel War. Points covered, among others: the cause of the war, the cycle-of-violence myth, the nature of Israel’s enemies, the goals of Hamas, how to judge a country, and the conflict between the “laws of war” and self-defense.
I’ve argued that Israel’s goal in the Gaza war should be to eliminate the threat from Hamas (and allied Islamist groups). That means defeating the enemy, by uprooting its infrastructure and leadership, in order to make the Islamist cause of Hamas and its allies unrealizable (a point I make at length in my book). Difficult though that may be, it is a necessary goal.
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?
After years of terror — and thousands of rocket attacks — Israel is now waging a war of self-defense. But that war is, unfortunately, being undermined by the so-called international laws of war. So argues ARI fellow and director of policy research Elan Journo on Breitbart.com.
Refuting the propaganda about “massacres” of “defenseless” Palestinians in Gaza, William Saletan at Slate documents how by “the standards of war, Israel’s efforts to spare civilians have been exemplary.”
