Government And Business

Get Ready for High-Tech Innovators To Be Demonized

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.”
Government And Business

“Is inequality fair?”

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?
Government And Business

Fair Pay Under Capitalism

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.
Culture And Society

Rachel Maddow Fails “Ayn Rand 101”

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.
Government And Business

The real reason J.K. Rowling deserves her billions

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.

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.”
View Article
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