Income Inequality

With John Nothdurft missing in action, Heartland Editor Justin Haskins joins Donny Kendal in episode #33 of the In The Tank Podcast. This weekly podcast features (as always) interviews, debates, and roundtable discussions that explore the work of think tanks across the country. The show is available for download as part of the Heartland Daily Podcast every Friday. Today’s podcast features work from the Manhattan Institute, the National Center for Policy Analysis, and the Heartland Institute.

It was fitting for The Heartland Institute’s President and CEO Joe Bast to feature Yaron Brook President of the Ayn Rand Institute, in a discussion of his new book, “Equal Is Unfair: America’s Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality.” Both organizations are fighting for the principles of freedom and liberty as set forth by our Founding Fathers.

If any of my predictions turn out to be true, I will claim bragging rights, but mostly what I intend to do is maintain my personal sense of hope, sensing that more people worldwide are discovering that others share their desire for less corruption and more freedom.

A new book by French economist Thomas Piketty on “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” has recently caused a major stir on the opinion pages of newspapers and magazines. Piketty has resurrected from the ash heap of history Karl Marx’s claim that capitalism inescapably leads to a worsening unequal distribution of wealth with dangerous consequences for human society.

Few French economists have achieved the kind of adulation Thomas Piketty has experienced recently from the media and the left. Within the context of the American political scene, Piketty’s dour predictions for the future of capitalism and his call for a “utopian” global wealth tax fit perfectly with the left’s frame of an inequality message.

The only way to permanently rid a society of a ‘gap’ in either wealth or income is by making everybody equally poor. If nobody has any more wealth than anybody else, then nobody can be ‘wealthy.’

At the end of 2013, after serving five years, Barack Obama is a complete failure as President, by his own standards, as reflected in his own words.

Income inequality will be the theme of Obama’s forthcoming State of the Union speech, but like everything else he says it will be a Big Lie.

Earlier this month, President Obama tried to change the subject from Obamacare by pitching some rhetoric on “equality” to rally his Far Left base. Not much thoughtful or helpful is…

President Obama’s speech yesterday on inequality is being lauded as one of the best of his life, by people who paid attention to it. It’s a sad speech to read, in some sense, since it contains within it the promise of a presidency that we never saw come to fruition – the sort of policy effort that might have been launched to bipartisan success in the first year of his presidency, instead of his effort on Obamacare.