ARI/ARC news — VOICES for REASON

Forbes.com has just published the latest column by Yaron Brook and me, part 2 on the subject of ObamaCare and the debate over preexisting conditions. In this installment, we describe how a free market in health insurance might deal with preexisting conditions.

Imagine a world without health insurance. You’re a young entrepreneur and you notice that a perennial problem people face is how to protect themselves against the risk of incurring costly and unexpected medical expenses. For most, the apparent option–save enough money to cover any medical bill–is impractical: what if they get sick before they save enough? Or what if the cost of treatment exceeds a person’s capacity to save?

You realize that wherever there’s a problem, there’s an opportunity. You could convince some of the people in your town to purchase from you insurance that pays out in the event of accident or serious illness. But starting such a company would require a lot of work, a lot of financial capital, and complex actuarial and business skills that take a long time to acquire. You would need to set  rates to make sure more money is coming in than is going out; process claims to separate the legitimate from the illegitimate ones; and grow your client base. The challenges are enormous, but if you succeed, the value you provide clients would be huge and the profit potential should be as well.

After some careful deliberation, you decide to launch the business. You launch the first health insurance company. Your idea quickly catches on, and soon other health insurance companies spring up in your town and beyond.

You can read the whole column here.

If you’re a college student or recent graduate interested in learning more about Ayn Rand’s novels and ideas, consider applying for a summer internship at the Ayn Rand Institute. This unique three-week educational experience takes place in ARI’s Southern California headquarters, and combines lecture courses on Rand’s books and ideas with a traditional internship in a professional workplace.

Interns come from a range of fields and viewpoints–many of them are fairly new to Ayn Rand–and the curriculum covers a significant portion of Rand’s corpus, both fiction and nonfiction. Outside of class, interns spend 2-3 hours each day assisting members of ARI’s Academic Division in their work, gaining valuable work experience to apply in their careers.

Watch the video to learn more, and note that the March 31 application deadline is only weeks away. Apply today at www.aynrand.org/internships!

WNYC has posted round two in the online debate between Yaron Brook of ARC and Miles Rapoport of Demos, on the proper role of government. That online exchange is a prelude to a live debate Thursday night on the same topic at NYU’s Skirball Center, kicking off the First Principles Debate Series.

For those who cannot make it to the Skirball Center, note that there will be a live video stream from the event.

ARC president Dr. Yaron Brook will be engaging in a lively debate on March 10 at the NYU Skirball Center in NYC.  He will debate Miles Rapoport, of the think tank Demos, on the question: “What is the Proper Role of Government?”  This debate is the first of a three-part series called “First Principles,” in which fundamental issues in politics will be discussed.

The debate will be moderated by Brian Lehrer of The Brian Lehrer Show from WNYC, a chapter of NPR.  To build up to the event, WNYC is publishing blog posts that illustrate the starkly different views of the two debaters on what the government should and should not do.

In the first blog post, for example, Mr. Rapoport contends that government should provide the “basic opportunities . . . every person [should] have access to in order to live a dignified life,” such as health care, education, and financial security in old age.  In contrast, Dr. Brook argues that a proper government would recognize “that each individual’s life morally belongs to him, and its sustenance and happiness are his [own] responsibility,” not the government’s.  In Dr. Brook’s view, government should be limited to “protect[ing] the rights of each individual against coercive interference with others.”

Check out their remarks in full here.

And stay tuned for more blog exchanges on this issue from Dr. Brook and Mr. Rapoport!

Also be sure to RSVP to the event if you are in NYC on March 10.  If you won’t be in town, watch the event live on ARC’s Facebook page!  (You won’t need an account)

Forbes.com has just published the latest column by Yaron Brook and me, on the subject of ObamaCare and the debate over preexisting conditions.

In his recent State of the Union, Obama named as the not-to-be-compromised central achievement of his health care bill that it put an end “to the days when insurance companies could deny someone coverage because of a preexisting condition.” ObamaCare does indeed make it illegal for insurance companies to refuse to cover people with preexisting medical conditions or to charge them higher prices.

Far from justifying an expansion of the state’s role in medicine, however, the issue of preexisting conditions illustrates how badly we need to disentangle government from American medicine.

You can read the whole column, the first in a series, here.

(Related discussion here.)

Forbes.com has just published the latest column by Yaron Brook and me, which looks at the role class warfare rhetoric is playing in the debate over taxing the rich.

The recent debate over the Bush tax cuts was filled with enough rich-bashing and envy-stoking to make Karl Marx blush, and while the left may have lost that battle, it just might be winning the war. A recent 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll finds that 61 percent of respondents advocate raising taxes on wealthy Americans as the “first step” in balancing the budget. (By contrast, only 7 percent advocate cutting the entitlement programs–Medicare and Social Security–that are chiefly responsible for the budget crisis.)

It doesn’t take an economist to see that our fiscal mess was not caused by rich people keeping “too much” of their wealth, but by the government spending too much of everyone’s wealth. So why have cries to soak the rich started to, well, sink in?

Americans, historically, have not been envious of wealth. The predominant attitude has been: let a person make as much money as he can, provided he earns it. The reason class warfare rhetoric has been effective of late is because the practitioners of class warfare have largely succeeded in painting the rich as unproductive parasites.

You can read the entire thing here.

Image: flickr

Forbes.com has just published the latest column by Yaron Brook and me, an analysis of Arthur Brooks’ recent book The Battle.

What’s the central message of The Battle? That the advocates of big government have offered a potent moral case that wealth redistribution promotes the happiness of society, and that the supporters of free markets need to articulate their own moral defense of capitalism in reply. Brooks’ argument, in short, is that wealth redistribution does not make people happy. The source of genuine happiness is earned success, i.e., “the creation of value” by the individual — and it is capitalism that fosters earned success. To defend capitalism in moral terms, he concludes, is to defend it as the system of the pursuit of happiness.

There are important elements of truth in this narrative, but there is also a gaping hole. What Brooks doesn’t acknowledge is that the pursuit of your own happiness is at odds with the near-universal view that we have a moral obligation to sacrifice ourselves to the needs of others — and that the basic reason we live in an ever-expanding welfare state is because, when faced with a choice between the individual’s pursuit of happiness and his duty to serve others’ needs, we almost always choose the latter.

You can read the entire piece here.

Following the news that Facebook founder and Time Person of the Year Mark Zuckerberg had signed the Gates/Buffett Giving Pledge, ARC put out a press release arguing that signing the Pledge was not a morally praiseworthy act–that businessmen like Zuckerberg deserve moral credit for creating wealth, not for giving it away.

Nick Baumann of Mother Jones recently linked to it, suggesting, tongue firmly in cheek, that it might be “the best PR ever,” and his comments are getting a fair amount of play around the web. Given all the attention, I would like to recommend that interested readers take a look at the full argument Yaron Brook and I laid out in our original piece on the Pledge.

By the way, I will be discussing the Giving Pledge with Baumann tonight on Thom Hartmann’s TV show The Big Picture.
[Cross-posted from forbes.com]

In our latest Forbes.com piece, ARC’s Yaron Brook and I examine the ObamaCare individual mandate:

A federal district judge has struck down ObamaCare’s individual mandate as unconstitutional in a case expected to go to the Supreme Court. Judge Hudson is to be commended on his decision, for not only is the mandate unconstitutional, it is also immoral.

You can read the whole thing here.

By the way, Forbes.com has a new format for our column. To follow our latest, just bookmark http://blogs.forbes.com/objectivist/.

In our latest Forbes.com column, Yaron Brook and I urge America’s most productive citizens not to sign Bill Gates and Warren Buffett’s Giving Pledge. From the column:

[Y]our wealth was not an undeserved gift. Every dollar in your bank account came from some individual who voluntarily gave it to you—who gave it to you in exchange for a product he judged to be more valuable than his dollar. You have no moral obligation to “give back,” because you didn’t take anything in the first place.

Whole thing here.

Image: flickr