Tuesday, January 16, 2018

Resolution

Selfishness is a virtue.

For the affirmative:

Yaron Brook is the executive chairman of the Ayn Rand Institute and can be heard weekly on The Yaron Brook Show, which airs live on the BlogTalkRadio podcast and on TheBlaze Radio. His books, co-authored with Don Watkins, include Free Market Revolution: How Ayn Rand's Ideas Can End Big Government, and Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality.  Brook was a columnist at Forbes.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Investor’s Business Daily. Born and raised in Israel, he became an American citizen in 2003. He earned a BSc in civil engineering from Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel, and received his MBA and PhD in finance from the University of Texas at Austin.

For the negative:

Gene Epstein has recently stepped down from a 26-year stint as Economics and Books Editor of Barron's, with plans to write long-form articles and books, and to continue as director and moderator of the Soho Forum. His books include Econospinning: How to Read between the Lines when the Media Manipulate the Numbers. He has taught economics at the City University of New York and St. John’s University, and worked as a senior economist for the New York Stock Exchange. He's appeared on podcasts that include Russ Roberts’ “EconTalk,"  "The Tom Woods Show,” and the Reason podcast, and has delivered lectures in venues that include the International House in Tokyo; Loyola University in Baltimore; Universidad Francisco Marroquin in Guatemala City; the Romanian-American University in Bucharest; and the American Center in Moscow. He was a debater at the Soho Forum this past June on the subject of Adam Smith.