The UT Ayn Rand Club is sponsoring an interesting talk tonight and asked if we would help them promote it a little. The title of the talk is “The Financial Crisis: Free Markets as the Only Moral and Practical Solution,” and the speaker Yaron Brook.
Facebook Event Link with Time and Location Details.
Event Description:
Virtually everyone today regards the financial crisis as a failure of the free market. In this talk, Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, will argue that in fact it is the un-free market that has failed. It was not capitalism that held interest rates below the rate of inflation, spurring massive amounts of borrowing and a housing boom. It was not capitalism that gave us Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which promoted subprime lending and helped fuel the boom. It was not capitalism that gave us deposit insurance and the “too big to fail” doctrine, which encouraged risky financial practices.
These, and many anti-capitalist measures like them, Dr. Brook will argue, laid the groundwork for the financial crisis. The only cure, according to Dr. Brook, is to set the market free. But to do that, Americans must embrace capitalism as a moral system–one that should be defended without guilt.
Bio: Yaron Brook is a prominent advocate for Objectivism, the philosophy of novelist Ayn Rand. As president of the Ayn Rand Institute, an educational organization based in Irvine, California, he is interviewed frequently in the media and has appeared regularly on the Fox Business Network to debate and discuss current economic and financial news from the Objectivist viewpoint.
Dr. Brook is a frequent guest on a variety of radio and TV shows, having appeared on Fox Business News, Fox News (The O’Reilly Factor, Your World with Neil Cavuto, At Large with Geraldo Rivera), CNN (Talkback Live and the Glenn Beck Program), CNBC (Closing Bell and On the Money), and C-SPAN.
A popular lecturer at corporations, universities, public forums, community and professional groups, Dr. Brook is known for his radical ideas and passionate speaking style. In “Capitalism Without Guilt: The Moral Case for Freedom,” and in numerous other talks, Dr. Brook has explained the moral foundations of capitalism and defended the rights of businessmen to act in a free market unfettered by government regulation. Dr. Brook has spoken twice at the prestigious Ford Hall Forum in Boston. In his October 2006 talk, he harshly criticized the Bush administration’s policy “Forward Strategy for Freedom,” in Iraq and presented his case for a proper war policy based on the principle of self-interest. In Dr. Brook’s second Ford Hall Forum talk, delivered in May 2008, he discussed Woodstock’s cultural legacy, focusing particularly on the rise of environmentalism and the religious Right.
In 2006 Dr. Brook took part in several panel discussions at American universities in which the controversial Danish cartoons of Muhammad were unveiled in defense of the right to free speech. In 2008 Dr. Brook participated in several additional panel discussions devoted to analyzing Islamic totalitarianism’s mounting threat to Western civilization.
As a writer, Dr. Brook has published articles in many newspapers and professional journals. His most recent articles on economic topics, “The Morality of Moneylending: A Short History” and “The Resurgence of Big Government,” were published in the The Objective Standard, a journal devoted to cultural and political issues. Dr. Brook has also contributed commentary to Forbes.com, and his articles have been featured in major newspapers such as USA Today, the Houston Chronicle, Chicago Sun-Times, Providence Journal, and the Orange County Register. Dr. Brook has written and coauthored three foreign policy articles for The Objective Standard: “‘Just War Theory’ vs. American Self-Defense,” “Neoconservative Foreign Policy: An Autopsy,” and “The ‘Forward Strategy’ for Failure.”
Dr. Brook was born and raised in Israel. He served as a first sergeant in Israeli military intelligence and earned a BSc in civil engineering from Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, in Haifa, Israel. In 1987 he moved to the United States, where he received his MBA and Ph.D. in finance from the University of Texas at Austin; he became an American citizen on May 28, 2003. For seven years he was an award-winning finance professor at Santa Clara University, and in 1998 he cofounded a financial advisory firm, BH Equity Research, of which he is presently managing director and chairman.
