Let me share something with you that’s a little personal. One of the greatest sources of joy in my life is my one-year-old daughter, and my wife and I are eager — that’s too weak a word, actually — to have another kid. But we simply cannot afford to.
In an Economist article called “The coming tech-lash,” columnist Adrian Wooldridge predicts that “one of the big developments of 2014 will be the growing peasants’ revolt against the sovereigns of cyberspace.” According to the article’s subhead, high-tech elites will “join bankers and oilmen in public demonology.”
In an online interview at City A.M., ARI executive director Yaron Brook commented on French economist Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the surprise international bestseller that laments economic inequality.
Steve Horwitz has a very interesting post about Ayn Rand over at Bleeding Heart Libertarians. He notes that Rand is often caricatured as an advocate of the rich and an enemy of the poor.
We’re told that the gap between the poor and the rich has widened. Many decry the “injustice” of income and wealth inequality. But is it actually a problem and are the proposed remedies truly just? What is a fair “distribution” of income and wealth? Is “equality” a valid concept?
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.
Either Maddow has not read Ayn Rand — in which case she should not be reporting on the content of Rand’s works as if she had — or she has read Rand but utterly failed to understand her. Either way, she owes her viewers a correction and an apology.
In his new book The Road to Freedom: How to Win the Fight for Free Enterprise, AEI President Arthur Brooks makes the point that the egalitarian supporters of wealth redistribution have no right to claim that they are the representatives of “fairness.”
The egalitarians equate fairness with equality, writes Brooks, and therefore conclude that income inequality is unfair. Solution? Take from those with high incomes and give to those with low incomes.