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? Yaron Brook takes on these and related issues and argues that a genuinely laissez-faire capitalist society is, in fact, the only system of fairness, that is, justice.
Recorded March 5, 2014
A debate with Dr. Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute and Dr. James Galbraith of University of Texas at Austin’s Inequality Project.
There’s a new campaign slogan among Democratic politicians: “Abolish Billionaires.” Nobody can honestly deserve a billion dollars, they claim, so they want to impose radical new taxes on the super-wealthy. Indeed, people are arguing that the very existence of billionaires is some kind of moral outrage.
Wealthy people are being blamed today for all the world’s problems. Yet all of those problems are actually the result of the very ideas being preached by the same leaders and intellectuals who want to “abolish” the billionaires.
But instead of vilifying and hating billionaires, we should be thanking them for improving all of our lives on a massive scale with the products they offer for voluntary trade on a free market.
As Ayn Rand argued in her novel Atlas Shrugged, if anyone deserves thanks on Thanksgiving, it’s those productive Atlases who carry the whole world on their shoulders.
Join Keith Lockitch as he argues that the real moral travesty is the campaign to abolish billionaires.
Popular discussions of economics—with their focus on macroeconomic factors such as GDP, total unemployment, total jobs numbers, etc.—often reflect a collectivist mindset. This contributes to the America-versus-the-world tribalism inherent in today’s calls for tariffs and immigration restrictions. By contrast, the individualist approach embraces economic freedom and global trade.
This video was recorded at AynRandCon in Atlanta, Georgia, on November 3, 2018.