Yaron Brook - Ayn Rand vs. Big Government

"People don't vote their pocketbooks, people vote what they think is right," says Yaron Brook, president of The Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights and author of Free Market Revolution: How Ayn Rand's Ideas Can End Big Government. "So we need a moral revolution in this country, and that's how we get a free market revolution."

At FreedomFest 2012, Reason's Matt Welch sat down with Brook to discuss what Obama has meant for sales of Atlas Shrugged, why big government hurts the poor, and how Ayn Rand inspired the Tea Party.

Camera by Tracy Oppenheimer and Alex Manning; edited by Jim Epstein.

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Transcript:

Matt Welch:

Hi, I'm Matt Welch for Reason TV. I'm in Las Vegas for Freedom Fest, and I am honored to be with Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute, who is the author of a new book Free Market Revolution: How Ayn Rand's Ideas Can End Big Government. Thank you very much for joining us. How can they end big government?

Yaron Brook:

Well, this is an ideological battle. It's fundamentally about ideas, and we try to show in the book is that it's not the traditional ideas that are gonna win this battle. Big government grows no matter if you have democrats no matter if you have republicans. Even if good republicans so-called, right? Even Ronald Reagan couldn't stop the growth government. What is needed is a fundamental intellectual revolution, and Ayn Rand identified it, and we identified, the core ideas that need to be challenged, are actually moral, ethical ideas. People don't vote their pocketbooks, people vote what they think is right. They wanna be good, they want to be good people. So we need a moral revolution in this country. And that's how we get a free market revolution.

Matt Welch:

Now, are you talking in terms of sort of moral defense of capitalism or is it moral defense of the smaller government, what are you talking about?

Yaron Brook:

It's really a moral defensive of individualism. And I think the the challenge we face in the world around us is that the traditional morality that we all grow up with, that we are all taught, that is preached by everybody in the culture, left right and center, is a morality that I believe is incompatible with individualism and therefore incompatible with limited government capitalism. It's a morality of you are your brother's keeper. It's a morality of your moral responsibly in life is to others. That is the primary responsibility. Therefore in a deep sense your life is now yours to live. Your life is ultimately owned by other people. Your responsibility is towards others, not towards yourself. We need to demolish that idea, we need to destroy that idea and replace it with Rand's view that your life is yours to live as you see fit, morally yours to live. And it's your moral responsibility to live your life, the best life that it can be. And if we are going to win the battle for limited government, we have to win the moral argument, and that's where I think we are losing.

Matt Welch:

Some of libertarianism's most potent kind of cultural attackers, thinking of people like Kurt Andersen who just had a piece in the New York Times with David Brooks. They will argue, with at least some merit on the underlying facts, that we have more individualism in this country than ever before. Individuals have more autonomy over their own lives, thanks to the internet and thanks a lot of other things. And that's the problem. We're all too individualistic we're too atomized society, and what we need to do is find a way to come together. How do you square your analysis, not just with their critique which one can disagree with, but also with the idea that it is true I think on some level that we do have more control over individual lives and have a more individualistic ethos perhaps in the way that we govern ourselves.

Yaron Brook:

Well there's a certain element of truth there. So it is true that because we're wealthier we have more choices. I mean, money does buy choices, money does in a sense buy happiness. Because it provides with choices. If you think about a subsistence farmer is not a lot of happiness to pursue there. All you do is work, and you barely survive. At the same time we've also constrained our freedoms dramatically, so those choices are consequences of wealth that came from freedom. What we're doing now is constraining that freedom so that we can't create that wealth, so we won't have these choices in the future. And at the same time they are certain choices we don't have that we used to have. It's very difficult to start a business in the United States today. Certainly a lot more difficult than it was a hundred years ago. That's a choice that's gone. There are fewer entrepreneurs today than we would have if we had no regulatory environment. Indeed, in my view we would be so much more wealthier today.

The other thing that they ignore is the question of what does freedom actually mean. You know, the question of freedom from what. Because you are free. What does it mean? And my view is freedom is freedom from coercion. Government is the biggest violator of our rights today, so while they've kept us free from coercion of our neighbor, they coerce us significantly, and that coercion is limiting our choices, limiting of freedom, limiting the amount of wealth, and the amount of technology, and the amount of good stuff that we can create. And just it has profound psychological impact, so this is not just a materialistic issue. This is an issue of self-esteem, this is an issue of spiritual values that we do not have. We can't attain that self-esteem because we can't do the things that we have the potential to do, because we're restricted by government to do it. And I think the biggest victims here are not the wealthy or the middle class so much as the ambitious poor. Poor people who are institutionalized into poverty because the of entitlement state. Poor people are institutionalize into poverty because of the regulatory state, because they cannot take control over their own lives. They can't go out there and make a living. You know, my favorite example of this is minimum wage. How many poor teenagers we are keeping out of the work force because of a minimum wage? And therefore they will never build up skills, they will never build up self-esteem, and therefore they will never be happy.

Matt Welch:
Seems at least to the casual observer that Ayn Rand has had much more use since let's say September of 2008. Are you optimistic about her growing influence? Are there reasons to believe that these ideas are taking more of a root than they were previously?

Yaron Brook:

Just to give you a number, since Obama was elected, Atlas Shrugged has sold 1.5 million copies. That is a big, big number. So yes, I think there are a lot of good signs out there. There is is a lot more taking Ayn Rand seriously, both from our opposition and from our friends. I think that the Tea Party movement is one of the most positive phenomena in modern American history. It is a movement that has come out of this emotion of enough's enough. We've been trampled on and off, stop it. They don't quite know yet what to do about it. They don't quite understand what freedom means and what it requires. They don't have the intellectual ammunition to win. But that's our role, out job is to bring them that intellectual ammunition. There's no question in my mind that Ayn Rand to large extent inspired their movement, and our victory, the free market movement's victory is gonna be when we can embrace Ayn Rand's ideas and when enough people out there in our culture embrace those ideas.

Matt Welch:

On that fundamental note, thank you very much Yaron Brook, we really appreciate it. For reason TV I am Matt Welch.