Yaron Brook
Yaron Brook is an Objectivist writer and speaker, best known as the public face of the Ayn Rand Institute through the 2000s and 2010s and as the host of a long-running daily interview and commentary programme on Objectivist responses to current events.
Brook was born in Israel and served in the Israel Defense Forces before emigrating to the United States, where he took a PhD in finance at the University of Texas at Austin and taught finance at Santa Clara University. He left academia for the Ayn Rand Institute, serving as its executive director from 2000 to 2017 and afterwards as chairman of its board of directors.
Role
Brook's significance in Objectivist circles is less as a theorist than as an advocate. Where Leonard Peikoff worked on the systematic exposition of the philosophy, Brook's work has consisted mainly of applying it in public to whatever is being argued about that week: financial regulation, foreign policy, immigration, inequality, taxation, and the moral standing of business.
That is the role the threads on this forum reflect. Members posted notices of his television appearances on CNBC, Fox Business, and elsewhere through the late 2000s, and the arguments about him here are arguments about applications rather than about fundamentals.
Books
Written with Don Watkins:
- Free Market Revolution: How Ayn Rand's Ideas Can End Big Government (2012)
- Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality (2016)
- In Pursuit of Wealth: The Moral Case for Finance (2017)
Equal Is Unfair is the one most discussed on this forum. Its argument is that economic inequality is the wrong thing to measure, that the morally relevant question is whether wealth was produced or extracted, and that policies aimed at reducing the spread do so by attacking the producers. See Capitalism and Egoism.
Positions that are argued about here
These are the specific applications that generate disagreement among Objectivists on this forum. Listing them is not endorsing them; they are recorded because the threads are about them.
- Immigration. Brook has argued for open or substantially open immigration on the grounds that the right to move and to trade is not conferred by nationality and that restricting it is a restriction on the rights of citizens to hire, sell to, and associate with whom they choose. This is contested by Objectivists who treat border control as a legitimate function of a government's protective role. See Immigration.
- Foreign policy. He has taken a strongly interventionist line on the threat from Islamic totalitarianism, arguing for military self-defence unconstrained by concern for the aggressor state's population. This is the subject of the forum's earliest substantive thread about him.
- Domestic politics. Brook has been publicly hostile to the populist right and to Donald Trump specifically, on the grounds that nationalism and protectionism are collectivist whatever the party. This is the position behind the forum's later and sharper threads.
See also
- Ayn Rand · Leonard Peikoff · What is Objectivism
- Capitalism · Immigration · Rights · Politics
- Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
Discussion
- Do you agree with Yaron Brook on open borders for the US?
- A challenge to Yaron Brook
- Yaron Brook to answer questions about his book "Equal is Unfair"
- Yaron Brook Debates Eminent Domain
- Biden is our only hope, says Yaron Brook
References
- Brook, Yaron, and Don Watkins. Free Market Revolution: How Ayn Rand's Ideas Can End Big Government. 2012.
- Brook, Yaron, and Don Watkins. Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality. 2016.
- Brook, Yaron, and Don Watkins. In Pursuit of Wealth: The Moral Case for Finance. 2017.
- Biographical details in this article follow the Ayn Rand Institute's published biography. Roles held are dated rather than described as current, because they change.