Alex Epstein has a BA in Philosophy from Duke University and is an analyst focusing on business issues at the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights. He was the editor and publisher of The Duke Review for two years. He is a contributing writer for The Objective Standard, a quarterly journal of culture and politics. His Op-Eds have appeared in such publications as the Detroit Free Press, Houston Chronicle, San Francisco Chronicle, Philadelphia Inquirer, Chicago Sun-Times, Atlanta Journal and Constitution, Arizona Republic, Canada's National Post, Indianapolis Star, Orange County Register, Tampa Tribune, and the Washington Times. Mr. Epstein has been interviewed on numerous nationally syndicated radio programs on business topics such as income inequality, media and internet regulation, oil industry profits, social security and the FDA.
In the name of fiscal responsibility, President Obama is promising a spending freeze–at the record-high spending level he reached in 2009. This is like an alcoholic promising to “freeze” his drinking at 20 beers a night.
We need to rise above fear, hesitation, and partisan politics–to give the government all the power it needs to solve all our problems.
That was the message of President Obama’s State of the Union address, which named dozens of problems in America and not once suggested that individual rights, liberty, or freedom were the solution.
From a quick reading of the speech, some statistics:
flickr: Darwin Bell
For years, Barney Frank has been the most prominent cheerleader of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac–the colossal failures that have cost taxpayers $110 billion to date. Frank has long denied any problems with the government sponsored entities designed to “promote home ownership” by making or guaranteeing loans the free-market wouldn’t.
“These two entities—Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,” he famously said, “are not facing any kind of financial crisis. The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.”
Frank also explicitly endorsed the reckless lending that proved Fannie and Freddie’s downfall: “I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation towards subsidized housing. . . .”
Last week, Barney Frank changed his mind: “The remedy here is…as I believe this committee will be recommending, abolishing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac…”
But don’t celebrate just yet. Frank didn’t call for a meaningful abolition–he called for “abolishing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in their current form and coming up with a whole new system of housing finance” (emphasis mine). Read the rest of this entry »
Conservatives—and, more broadly, many on the right—are horrified that ObamaCare is getting close to becoming a reality, and rightly so. Indeed, many have been horrified for months, as ominous proposal after ominous proposal has been put forward. Take the recent flirtation with a “Medicare buy-in.” Medicare has, by some estimates, $60 trillion in unfunded liabilities—and over half the Senate was willing to extend this fiscal train-wreck to cover everyone from 55 to 65. Or take the House and Senate requirement forcing insurers to sell policies to individuals with preexisting conditions for the same price as everyone else. This is like forcing a company to sell fire insurance to someone whose house has just burned down. Why would a young, healthy person buy health insurance and pay premiums for years when he can just buy it the first time he gets sick—with a $750 slap on the wrist (the penalty for not buying “mandatory” insurance)?
Such proposals make it easy to demonize liberals as the health-care villains. But conservatives must share in the blame for the likely passage of ObamaCare.
The scene: an ostensibly civilized White House gathering between President Barack Obama and executives from the nation’s largest financial institutions. The subject? According to President Obama:
My main message in today’s meeting was very simple: that America’s banks received extraordinary assistance from American taxpayers to rebuild their industry, and now that they’re back on their feet we expect an extraordinary commitment from them to help rebuild our economy . . .[this] starts with finding ways to help creditworthy small and medium-sized businesses get the loans that they need to open their doors, grow their operations and create new jobs . . . we expect them to explore every responsible way to help get our economy moving again.
A hallmark of dictatorship is the view that individuals, including market institutions, are incapable of making rational decisions for themselves, and thus must be compelled to act rationally by some higher authority. Obama’s latest meeting illustrates that he holds this view of banks, and that he is more than happy to be the higher authority that tells them when to lend and whom to lend to.
In Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, the economy is being strangled to death by government spending and controls. And yet its leading economic official, Wesley Mouch, prescribes more government intervention as the solution: “I need wider powers!” he yells repeatedly. Besides the yelling, President Barack Obama sounded an awful lot like Wesley Mouch at his recent “jobs summit,” which was intended to address our 10%+ unemployment.
Consider the context of the summit. The Bush and Obama administrations warned us that if we didn’t fall into line with their trillion-dollar bailouts and industry takeovers, we would be punished by unemployment over 10 percent. We fell into line. Unemployment is over 10 percent.
Ben Bernanke recently penned an op-ed in the Washington Post sounding the alarm that the powers of the Federal Reserve might be undercut by pending legislation, and thereby undermine its ability to prevent future financial crises.
The Fed played a major part in arresting the crisis, and we should be seeking to preserve, not degrade, the institution’s ability to foster financial stability and to promote economic recovery without inflation.
In Bernanke’s view of the Fed—the same view that is shared by most narratives of the financial crisis—the Fed was a force for good in minimizing the crisis, which was caused fundamentally by greedy, reckless financiers. The only criticism of the Fed in this narrative, is that it did not use its powers strongly enough. As Bernanke puts it:
The Federal Reserve, like other regulators around the world, did not do all that it could have to constrain excessive risk-taking in the financial sector in the period leading up to the crisis.
Thus, the Fed is a financial firefighter that simply needs more resources to put out fires set by financial arsonists in the free market—and Bernanke is Financial Firefighter in Chief.
Hardly.
For months, Republicans’ singular strategy in the health-care debate has been to attack Democrat plans as “a government takeover of health care.” There are at least three major problems with this strategy. 1) It fails to acknowledge that we already have a government takeover of health care, thanks to government policies dating back to the 1940s. 2) It fails to acknowledge the major, systemic problems caused by our current, government-controlled system, such as skyrocketing prices across the board. (For more on this, see Jeff Scialabba’s posts here, here, and here.) 3) It fails to offer a positive, truly free-market alternative.
In recent weeks, finally, the Republicans offered a positive health care proposal of their own. Read the rest of this entry »
Every day, Americans use about 3 gallons of oil a day. That’s almost one billion gallons total.
It’s hard to find anyone who thinks this is a good thing. Indeed, the overwhelming view heard in our culture is that our use of oil is an “addiction”. This term was popularized by former President–and oilman–George W. Bush in his 2006 speech.
Barack Obama is even more opposed to oil: “the age of oil must end in our time,” he has declared unequivocally. And: “the country that faced down the tyranny of fascism and communism is now called to challenge the tyranny of oil.” (Note: our President is comparing our use of oil to movements that killed a combined 100 million people.)
Today is the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, arguably the most famous event signaling the fall of Communism. In the days following November 9, 1989, the world saw residents of East Germany—a satellite state of the supposedly great and powerful Soviet empire—flee en masse to West Germany, revealing how hellish life under Communism truly was. The sight of Germans literally breaking down the wall is an inspirin
g one that should be remembered as a great landmark of the 20th century—as Yaron Brook and Onkar Ghate explain in this must-see interview.
As we celebrate an event that revealed to the world the oppression of Communism, it is important and instructive to note that for the seven decades of the Soviet Union’s existence, many journalists, authors, and intellectuals in the West evaded the atrocities of Communism, even as Communist states were racking up death tolls in the tens of millions.
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Economic power vs political power
In her 1961 Ford Hall Forum lecture "America's Persecuted Minority: Big Business," Ayn Rand makes a critical distinction between economic power and political power.
Economic power, she explains, "is the power to produce and to trade what one has produced." Since one cannot force others to buy one's good or services, economic power "can be achieved only by . . . the voluntary choice and agreement of all those who participate in the process of production and trade." Political power, on the other hand, is the fact that government "has the legal power to initiate the use of physical force against other individuals or groups and to compel them to act against their own voluntary choice." Thus the nature of economic power is voluntary, while the nature of political power is coercive.
Understanding the difference between economic power and political power--and the dire consequences of equating them--is necessary to a proper understanding of government. You can listen to the entire 1962 lecture, along with the Q&A that followed it, at the Ayn Rand Multimedia Library.
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