Government And Business

The Debt Dialogues [Episode 44]: Peter Schwartz on Paternalism

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 ARI distinguished fellow Peter Schwartz on paternalism, altruism, and the welfare state. Topics include: The key flaw in paternalist arguments for the welfare state; the relationship between paternalism and altruism; what’s wrong with studies that allegedly prove that human beings are inherently irrational.
Government And Business

The Debt Dialogues [Episode 43]: Peter Ferrara on Entitlement Reform

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 Peter Ferrara, senior fellow for entitlement and budget policy at The Heartland Institute, on how to address the entitlement crisis. Topics include: why Social Security and Medicare are not sustainable; the importance of coming up with concrete proposals for reining in entitlements; Peter Ferrera’s proposals for reforming Social Security and the health care system.
Government And Business

The Debt Dialogues [Episode 42]: John Tamny on Inequality and CEO Pay

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 John Tamny, editor of RealClearMarkets, on his new book Popular Economics: What the Rolling Stones, Downton Abbey, and LeBron James Can Teach You About Economics. Topics covered include: why Tamny thinks we should celebrate economic inequality; why great CEOs are actually underpaid; how the death tax harms even those who don’t have to pay it; effective communication of free-market ideas.
Government And Business

The Debt Dialogues [Episode 41]: Jared Meyer on Washington’s War on the Young

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.
Government And Business

The Debt Dialogues [Episode 39]: Steven Horwitz on Inequality, Mobility and Being Poor in America

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 Steven Horwitz, Charles A. Dana Professor of Economics and department chair at St. Lawrence University, on his new paper “Inequality, Mobility, and Being Poor in America.”
Government And Business

The Debt Dialogues [Episode 38]: Phillip Magness on Thomas Piketty’s Empirical Claims

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 Phillip Magness, a policy historian and Academic Program Director at the Institute for Humane Studies, on the empirical problems with Thomas Piketty’s book on inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
Government And Business

The Debt Dialogues [Episode 37]: Daniel Mitchell on the OECD Inequality Study

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 Cato senior fellow Daniel J. Mitchell on the OECD’s recent study claiming that inequality harms economic growth, and that redistributive policies to fight inequality don’t.

Further Reading

Ayn Rand | 1957
For the New Intellectual

The Moral Meaning of Capitalism

An industrialist who works for nothing but his own profit guiltlessly proclaims his refusal to be sacrificed for the “public good.”
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Ayn Rand | 1961
The Virtue of Selfishness

The Objectivist Ethics

What is morality? Why does man need it? — and how the answers to these questions give rise to an ethics of rational self-interest.
View Article