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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.
The Myth: New Deal regulation of the financial system made the system safer. The Reality: New Deal regulation of the financial system failed to address the real source of the problems that led to the Great Depression and laid the foundation for future crises.
For months, various newspapers have been trying to associate Donald Trump and his administration with Ayn Rand and her philosophy. Learn Liberty just published Steve Simpson’s all-new essay titled “Crony-In-Chief: Donald Trump Epitomizes Ayn Rand's ‘Aristocracy of Pull,’” in which he not only sets the record straight, but he also offers a radical solution to “cronyism.”
The Myth: We tried free banking and the result was constant bank runs and panics. The Federal Reserve was created to make the system stable and it succeeded. The Reality: America’s recurrent panics were the product of financial control, and there is no evidence the Federal Reserve has made things better.
Now that Trump is in office there is talk that his administration will support repealing or revising Dodd-Frank — the government’s regulatory response to the financial crisis of 2008. The bill was sold as a way to protect ourselves from future crises by making the financial system more stable.
In the most recent episode of The Rubin Report, Don Watkins explains why a proper government is a necessary good, how government controls destroy progress and opportunity, why egalitarianism is a rationalization for envy, why the morality of need is incompatible with freedom and justice and why art is important in life.
On March 2, 2016 the U.S. Supreme Court heard a case challenging a Texas law regulating access to abortion. Unlike the kind of abortion laws that were struck down in Roe v. Wade, which outlawed abortion directly, this case challenges a law that indirectly restricts access to abortions by going after doctors and clinics.
The consensus among pundits about the Democratic presidential debate is that Hillary Clinton “won” in the sense that she came across as trustworthy, likable, and “presidential.” I’ll leave to readers to ponder the use of words like these to describe someone who has been dissembling about her emails for years now and who angrily dismissed a Congressional investigation into the cause of the Benghazi attacks with “What difference, at this point, does it make?”
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 Jared Meyer, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and co-author of Disinhereted: How Washington Is Betraying America’s Young on how the regulatory-welfare state is harming younger Americans. Topics covered include: the failure of the government education system, the true cost of government entitlements and regulatory barriers to opportunity.
Last Friday, Yaron broadcasted live from CPAC, the largest annual conference for conservatives in America. In addition to giving his take on all the happenings at the conference, Yaron interviewed the following guests: Ambassador John R. Bolton; Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform; Adam Mossoff of the Center for Protection of Intellectual Property; Peter Schwartz, author of the forthcoming In Defense of Selfishness; Larry Spiwak, president of the Phoenix Center and an expert on net neutrality.