Tag: Yaron Brook

Is Sweden a Socialist Utopia? @DrMaxham with @CarlSvanberg

The latest episode of the Yaron Brook Show has been hosted by Amanda Maxham, a speaker which I happen to know already from her speeches on GMO and past hosting of the same show, during the frequent travels of Yaron Brook.

Amanda was also a guest of Alex Epstein’s “Power Hour” podcast when Alex Epstein slightly changes course from energy to cover GMOs, one of Amanda’s topic of research, which she covered also in this paper, also referred to in the podcast object of this post.

Today’s show topic was the myth of socialist scandinavian countries such as Sweden and Denmark, which are mistakenly used by the left as proof that socialism works, and that it brings wealth and good lifestyles in the countries where socialism is applied by the ruling coalition.

The discussion is quite interesting, and focuses on the many memes which circulate on social media, falsely portraying a mythical socialist society where things work well.

Except that neither Sweden nor Denmark are socialist countries.

They are very much mixed economies, with a high social cost due to fairly high taxation, which has rendered being an entrepreneur in such countries almost a nightmare.

This is confirmed in many different ways by the guest of the show, Carl Svanberg, who is a Swede, so he knows a thing or five about his country, and about the many companies which have fled or shut down since the country turned more toward socialism in the 1980s.

IKEA was mentioned a number of times during the show, but I should add something which was probably not known to Amanda not Carl.

Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA, has lived here in Switzerland from 1976 until 2014, and at age 88 he decided to return back to Sweden. And IKEA’s holding company, Inter IKEA Holding SA, is based in Luxembourg, a famous tax haven in the center of Europe.

This is yet another proof of the fact that rich people “vote with their feet” and are able to have a better life in freer countries such as Switzerland, and can move the center of their assets in other countries where the fiscal burden is lower.

The final part of the show is also very much worth listening to, as it’s focused on Amanda’s strongest topic, genetic engineering.

If you like flowers, you have to listen to it. And if you like research on plant genetics and some history, you’re in for a treat.

Sometimes it’s not too bad to be missing Yaron during his travels!

 

@yaronbrook on poverty and @PovertyINC #PovertyINC

One of the podcasts I keep listening to regularly is “The Yaron Brook Show”, with subtitle “Radical for Capitalism”, a view that I very much share with the Executive Director of the Ayn Rand Institute.

In the latest episode of his show, he tackles the issue of poverty, and he does so by using the documentary “Poverty, Inc.” as a common thread throughout the whole 1-hour long show, very much worth listening to.

I have already watched “Poverty, Inc.” as I had discovered it thanks to an event at the Cato Institute in early April, and I immediately ordered the DVD which I received in May.

I really liked the movie, and the harsh critiques against the business of charities and NGOs worldwide, which today are a huge industry, in a lot cases fueled by a lot of taxpayers money. It is clear that in a lot of cases the political decisions taken by the states and companies active in charity are doing more harm than good in the longer term, and the movie does an excellent job at providing hard facts to support this view.

In fact, in most cases what charities and NGOs do, after an initial benefit provided following the event which causes the intervention (earthquake, famine, civil war, flooding), is to simply damage the local economy to a point where there is no way out other than keeping the leash with those who now provide the “welfare”.

Of course no charity or NGO will work against their own interest, and so their aim is NOT to solve the poverty issue, but rather to keep it the way it is, so their existence can be further justified moving forward in time, and thus many years after the earthquake in Haiti, you still have hundreds of NGOs active there, because the local economy has been destroyed precisely by the handouts given by charities and NGOs!

Talk about a conflict of interests there…

The movie is a must-see in my opinion, as it will open your eyes on one more bad thing caused by the action of those who just want to feel less guilt and keep writing checks and donating huge amounts of money, rather than really solving the poverty issue.

Poverty which, without anyone’s intervention, has already been decreasing rapidly in many parts of the world, thanks to Capitalism, as Yaron Brook reminded us all some time ago.

And this is why we should all be strongly push in favour of Capitalism, and not against it. Because it’s thru Capitalism that we can get rid of poverty.

Here is the movie trailer:

Yaron Brook @yaronbrook on PBS for “Equal is Unfair”

Yaron Brook was interviewed by PBS during his book launch tour for “Equal Is Unfair: America’s Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality”, which he coauthored with Don Watkins.

The book is very much worth reading, and will guide you thru the many fallacies of the different ways the left is using to attack capitalism and the free-market, attacks to which the right seems to be completely unable to respond to. Luckily Brook and Watkins give us all the required information to counter such attacks in the book.

This video interview is very clear and very much worth watching. 8’25” well spent, if you care about spreading the truth about why income inequality is NOT the issue that the left wants you to believe it is.

@yaronbrook and the best minimum wage explanation

I find myself mentioning Yaron Brook again on my blog again, this time to link a YouTube video which, though it’s precisely 4 years old, is still very much right and applicable today.

The topic being discussed is the minimum wage, which has once again become a topic mentioned a lot by the media due to continuous mentions of this issue by Bernie Sanders, the Senator from Vermont running for the Democratic nomination to the 2016 US Presidential elections, and also because very recently California and other states have once again increased the minimum wage to $15 an hour.

This very same topic has also been discussed at length in the most recent episode of the Yaron Brook show on AM 560 The Answer.

Yaron Brook’s view is very clear; the government has no rights to set prices on anything. Not on goods, not on bread, not on people’s hourly wages. It was tried many times, under communism, under socialism, under different kinds of collectivistic societies like the current one in the USA, and it never worked.

In fact, making the minimum wage higher does the exact opposite, as it prices OUT of the market those who can only work for fewer dollars an hour. They will remain unemployable and thus unemployed, and the state will subsidize them to remain in that pitiful condition.

The video is very much worth watching, and reflecting upon.

@yaronbrook great quote on poverty and inequality

I find myself more and more drawn to the ideas exposed by Yaron Brook, Executive Directory of The Ayn Rand Institute.

Yaron has a great show and podcast which can be found online at BlogTalkRadio. It is very much worth listening to if you want to hear a different point of view, that of someone very distant from both the conservative and liberal trite nonsense we keep hearing all the time. And I am not even counting the populists things that both Sanders and Trump keep telling over and over during this very painful campaign for the 2016 US Presidential elections, coming up in only 7 and a half months.

Yaron and his colleague Don Watkins, also working at the Ayn Rand Institute, are about to release a book I very much look forward to reading, titled “Equal Is Unfair: America’s Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality”, so as one can imagine his views are pretty clear on the fact that the inequality paranoia always put forward by the leftist does not resonate much at all with Brook and Watkins.

Yaron Brook was recently a guest on a panel at the 2016 National Student Symposium on Friday, February 26, 2016, at the University of Virginia School of Law. Out of the many things he said during the event, this statement of his, less than one minute in length, is very much worth listening to:

I think it’s worth nothing, maybe this is the most underreported story of the last 30 years, over the last 30 years, 1 billion people have come out of poverty according to the United Nations, not an organization I usually cite for statistics, 1 billion people around the world have come out of poverty, 1 billion people. We should be dancing in the streets instead of complaining about inequality. The reason nobody celebrates this is because not one of those 1 billion people came out of poverty because of government programs. They are out of poverty because of capitalism in places like India and to the extent that China has adopted it, in Taiwan, and South Korea. And that’s something, global inequality is actually shrinking because other countries are adopting the free market.

I totally, completely share the view exposed so clearly by Yaron Brook here.