Business & Economics
How to Protect Yourself Against ObamaCare
Offers practical advice toward preserving your access to quality health care in this new era of “change.” Read the opening paragraphs (full article accessible to subscribers).
The Greatest Trade Ever: The Behind-the-Scenes Story of How John Paulson Defied Wall Street and Made Financial History, by Gregory Zuckerman
Read the opening paragraphs (full review accessible to subscribers).
Citizens United and the Battle for Free Speech in America
(accessible for free)
Analyzes the recent Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC, surveys the relevant history of campaign finance laws in relation to the Court’s decision, and discusses the significance of the ruling for the future of free speech. Read the article.
Government-Run Health Care vs. the Hippocratic Oath
Identifies and concretizes various ways in which government interference in health care precludes doctors from honoring their promise to use their best judgment in treating their patients. Read the opening paragraphs (full article accessible to subscribers).
The Virtue of Treating People Like Animals: Why Human Health Care Should Mirror Veterinary Health Care
Shows that although veterinary and human medicine are extremely similar in terms of quality of care, the freer market for the former makes it substantially more affordable and accessible than the latter. Read the opening paragraphs (full article accessible to subscribers).
Norman Borlaug: The Man Who Taught People To Feed Themselves
Tells the story of a little-known scientist whose independence, innovations, and passion for his work spawned an agricultural revolution that saved hundreds of millions of people from starvation. Read the opening paragraphs (full article accessible to subscribers).
Capitalism Unbound: The Incontestable Moral Case for Individual Rights,
by Andrew Bernstein
Read the opening paragraphs (full review accessible to subscribers).
Pharmacide: The Pharmaceutical Industry’s Self-Destructive Effort to Loot America
Provides an illuminating view of the pharmaceutical industry, showing that industry executives have advocated and continue to advocate rights-violating legislation through which the companies gain revenue taken coercively by the government from American taxpayers—and further showing that the pharmaceutical industry’s advocacy of such legislation is killing . . . the industry itself. Read the opening paragraphs (full article accessible to subscribers).
Antitrust with a Vengeance: The Obama Administration’s Anti-Business Cudgel
Zeros in on the arbitrary, rights-violating nature of antitrust law; surveys the Obama administration’s efforts to bolster antitrust enforcement; considers the unprincipled arguments put forth by today’s most vocal opponents of antitrust; and calls for Americans to take a principled, rights-based stand—not only against the administration’s reinvigorated antitrust assault, but against antitrust law as such. Read the opening paragraphs (full article accessible to subscribers).
What the “Affordable Health Care for America Act,” HR 3962, Actually Says (accessible for free)
Asks ten crucial questions regarding the proposed law; examines what the proposed legislation actually says with respect to these questions; and evaluates the bill accordingly, showing that, if passed, it would massively expand government power over the health-care industry, virtually eliminate the remnants of freedom left in this market, and thus increase the U.S. government’s violations of individual rights by orders of magnitude. Read the article.
The Israel Test, by George Gilder
Read the opening paragraphs (full article accessible to subscribers).
How the Freedom to Contract Protects Insurability (accessible for free)
Shows that, contrary to proposals being put forth by Republicans, a genuinely free market in health insurance is not only moral, in that it respects the rights of producers and consumers, but also practical, in that it enables businessmen to solve problems for profit—which leads to more and better products and services at lower prices for consumers. Read the article.
Objectively Speaking: Ayn Rand Interviewed, edited by Marlene Podritske and Peter Schwartz
Read the opening paragraphs (full review accessible to subscribers).
The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life, by Alice Schroeder
Read the opening paragraphs (full review accessible to subscribers).
The Garden of Invention: Luther Burbank and the Business of Breeding Plants, by Jane S. Smith
Read the opening paragraphs (full review accessible to subscribers).
An Interview with a “Capitalist Pig”
Jonathan Hoenig on Hedge Funds, the Economic Crisis, and the Future of America
Discusses the nature and value of hedge funds, the ill effects of economic regulations, and how to fight for free markets. Read the opening paragraphs (full article accessible to subscribers).
Energy at the Speed of Thought:
The Original Alternative Energy Market
Surveys the history of the U.S. energy industry, with special emphasis on oil as the lifeblood of the modern world and on freedom as the condition that enabled oilmen to make it flow. Read the opening paragraphs (full article accessible to subscribers).
A Brief History of U.S. Farm Policy and the
Need for Free-Market Agriculture
Shows how the USDA has grown from a small, seemingly innocuous bureau promoting agricultural research to today’s freedom-thwarting, rights-violating, market-crushing behemoth. Read the opening paragraphs (full article accessible to subscribers).
Fooling Some of the People All the Time Updated and Revised: A Long Short Story, by David Einhorn (accessible for free)
The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, by Marc Levinson
Read the opening paragraphs (full review accessible to subscribers).
Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, by David Allen
Read the opening paragraphs (full review accessible to subscribers).
Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and the World Today (accessible for free)
An Interview with Yaron Brook
Explains why, more than fifty years ago, Rand was able to project the kinds of crises we are seeing today. Read the interview.
America’s Unfree Market
Demonstrates the actual nature of the allegedly free market that delivered the current mayhem. Read the opening paragraphs (full article accessible to subscribers).
Altruism: The Moral Root of the Financial Crisis (accessible for free)
Zeros in on the fundamental cause of the problem, showing that widespread acceptance of the morality of self-sacrifice necessitated the kinds of laws, regulations, and decisions that have driven the financial markets into the gutter. Read the article.
Lest We Be Doomed to Repeat It
A Survey of Amity Shlaes’s History of the Great Depression
Provides an essentialized chronology of the era, focusing on the (ominously familiar sounding) policies of Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Read the opening paragraphs (full article accessible to subscribers).
Of Freedom and Fat: Why Anti-Obesity Laws Are Immoral
Discusses efforts at state and federal levels to put Americans on a collective diet by violating the rights of food producers, restaurateurs, and consumers.Read the opening paragraphs (full article accessible to subscribers).
Houston, We Have a (Zoning) Problem
Demonstrates that Houston’s absence of zoning laws is largely responsible for the city’s relative health and prosperity, and urges Houstonians to halt and reverse the encroachments on their property rights before they find themselves zoned. Read the opening paragraphs (full article accessible to subscribers).
Greenspan’s Bubbles: The Age of Ignorance at the Federal Reserve,
by William A. Fleckenstein with Frederick Sheehan
Read the opening paragraphs (full review accessible to subscribers).
Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions,
by Dan Ariely
Read the opening paragraphs (full review accessible to subscribers).
Concierge Medicine: A New System to Get the Best Healthcare, by Steven D. Knope, MD
Read the opening paragraphs (full review accessible to subscribers).
Capitalism and the Moral High Ground (accessible for free)
Concretizes the selfishness-enabling nature of capitalism and shows why this feature makes it the only moral social system on earth. Read the article.
Net Neutrality: Toward a Stupid Internet (accessible for free)
Focuses on the principle of property rights as it applies to the Internet in the face of increasing calls for government controls of this, as yet, relatively free market. Read the article.
Bubble Boy: Alan Greenspan’s Rejection of Reason and Morality
Exposes Greenspan as anything but a principled capitalist whose free-market ideas somehow failed. Read the opening paragraphs (full article accessible to subscribers).
The Assault on Energy Producers
Surveys various ways in which the government violates the rights of energy producers and thereby impedes our supply of energy and raises prices on everything in the marketplace. Read the opening paragraphs (full article accessible to subscribers).
New Deal or Raw Deal? How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America, by Burton Folsom Jr.
Read the opening paragraphs (full review accessible to subscribers).
Mandatory Health Insurance: Wrong for Massachusetts, Wrong for America (accessible for free)
Identifies the theory behind the Massachusetts mandatory health insurance program, exposes the program as a fiasco, explains why the theory had to fail in practice, and sheds light on the only genuine, rights-respecting means to affordable, accessible health care for Americans. Read the opening paragraphs (full article accessible to subscribers).
How the FDA Violates Rights and Hinders Health
Surveys the history, nature, and consequences of this behemoth government agency; shows that it is impractical and immoral; and indicates how, in the absence of the FDA, the free market could provide the highest possible level of drug safety and efficacy. Read the opening paragraphs (full article accessible to subscribers).
The Tyranny of the Market: Why You Can’t Always Get What You Want, by Joel Waldfogel
Read the opening paragraphs (full review accessible to subscribers).
Property Rights and the Crisis of the Electric Grid (accessible for free)
Surveys the history and achievements of America’s electricity entrepreneurs, shows how government interference in the transmission grid has hampered their enterprises from the outset to the present day, and indicates what America must do to liberate the grid and enable a new wave of entrepreneurs to supply this vital product commensurate with the country’s demand. Read the article.
Vindicating Capitalism: The Real History of the Standard Oil Company (accessible for free)
Examines the inception and rise of Standard Oil, demonstrates that the company’s immense success was the result not of so-called “anti-competitive” practices or “predatory pricing” but of its superior efficiency and productivity, and does long-overdo justice to one of the greatest producers of life-serving values in history: John D. Rockefeller. Read the article.
Moral Health Care vs. “Universal Health Care” (accessible for free)
Surveys the history of government interference in health insurance and medicine in America, specifying the rights violations and economic problems caused thereby; enumerates the failed attempts to solve those economic problems by means of further government interference; and shows that the only viable solution to the debacle at hand is to gradually and systematically transition to a rights-respecting, fully free market in these industries. Read the article.
Instrumentalism and the Disintegration of American Tort Law
Illustrates the utter insanity of today’s liability law, recounts the roots and original purpose of the law of torts, surveys the missing links and corrupt ideas that led to its destruction, and sheds light on the path to identifying a sound body of principles that will ground this field in the ultimate purpose of objective law: the protection of individual rights. Read the opening paragraphs (full article accessible to subscribers).
The Morality of Moneylending: A Short History (accessible for free)
Presents an essentialized history of usury, showing that, just as moneylenders are being damned and blamed for today’s “sub-prime mortgage crisis,” so they have been condemned and castigated for alleged wrongdoing from the beginning of Western civilization. Brook zeros in on the economic and moral premises that give rise to contempt for this profession; he identifies the moral-practical dichotomy inherent in these ideas; and he discusses a unified set of principles that must be understood and embraced if moneylending is to be seen as the noble business that it actually is. Read the article.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Subscribe to the journal for people of reason.
