Yaron Brook Quotes
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The Federal Reserve dictated not only the interest rates at which banks could borrow from one another, as it does today, but also the interest rates that banks could pay on savings accounts.
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Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble,” cried New York Times columnist Paul Krugman in 2002.8 And that’s exactly what Greenspan did. Much of the new cash that flooded into the market as a result of his policies went into real estate, where small fluctuations in interest rates have a huge impact on prices.
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My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.
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They use their minds to create wealth—not by taking existing materials and turning them into more valuable goods, but by taking existing wealth and putting it toward more valuable uses. In short, financiers don’t create the products that enrich our lives—they help create (and nurture) all the businesses that create the products that enrich our lives.
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If we didn’t have finance, though? Forget the 1970s—try the 1270s. Economic progress emerges from the intelligent combination of capital and innovation. Remove capital from the equation—and the financial markets that accumulate and direct that capital into the hands of innovators—and the result is poverty and stagnation.
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The not-so-astonishing results: By late 2008, Fannie and Freddie were on the verge of collapse and were taken over by the government. Thus their implicit guarantee became explicit.
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In short, finance gives you the opportunity to dramatically increase your consumption by doing nothing—or, more precisely, by choosing not to consume everything you produce today, but instead providing the productive economy with savings that can be used to generate additional economic value with minimal effort on your part. For all of the demonization of financiers, this is as close to magic as you can get.
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Just as altruism tells an individual that however much he is sacrificing, his duty is to sacrifice more, the Progressives concluded that however much Americans were giving, morality required them to give more.
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To the extent America abandons Israel, it abandons itself.
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It doesn't promote your life to reduce unearned guilt... You should get rid of that guilt. It's unearned. You don't deserve it. So when we guilt businessmen into giving, it's not in their self-interest.
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On the individualist approach, society is not something above the individual to which he owes a duty - it is merely a group of individuals, each with his own dreams, goals and purposes.
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I don't care about the poor, I don't care about the middle class and I don't care about the rich. I care about good people who live virtuous lives, who engage in the world - who are rational, who take responsibility for their own lives. I care about virtue, good people. I know scoundrels in the upper, middle and lower class and I don't care about them. I want the irrational to suffer from their irrationality, I want the lazy to suffer from their laziness and the ones without virtue to suffer from that. Marx came up with the idea of dividing people into classes and now everyone buys into it, left, center and right. I want hardworking people to benefit from their virtues.
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Shortly after Medicare was passed, Americans were told it would cost $12 billion in 1990. Actual cost? $98 billion. Americans were also told that the cost of Medicaid would be less than $1 billion in 1992. Actual cost? $17 billion.
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Regulators are power-lusting mediocrities.
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As Representative Barney Frank put it: I believe that we, as the Federal Government, have probably done too little rather than too much to push [Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac] to meet the goals of affordable housing and to set reasonable goals. . . . The more people, in my judgment, exaggerate a threat of safety and soundness, the more people conjure up the possibility of serious financial losses to the Treasury, which I do not see . . . the more pressure there is there, then the less I think we see in terms of affordable housing.15
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Although critics of capitalism claim regulations were being gutted during the Bush years, the number of Register pages exploded—as did the amount spent by federal regulatory agencies and the number of people employed by those agencies.
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The only reason the government didn’t stop the financiers was because it approved of what they were doing: helping to lower the cost of homeownership.
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The US economy today is in really bad shape. Our economic growth is minimal, our regulatory burden is horrific, taxes are high, businessmen are not investing in growth, and consumers and government are loaded up with debt.
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It is ridiculous to assume you can tax the people that are working and give the money (to people) who are not working and somehow this creates economy activity. You are destroying as much by taking from those who are working and creating.
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Israel is our only true ally in the Mideast, and supporting it is the only moral thing for the United States to do.
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But while capitalism may be a convenient scapegoat, it did not cause any of these problems. Indeed, whatever one wishes to call the unruly mixture of freedom and government controls that made up our economic and political system during the last three decades, one cannot call it capitalism.
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Genuine rights don’t conflict—they enable us to live together without intractable conflicts.
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Why, if economic freedom has proven itself time and time again to be the engine of prosperity, do we keep moving toward Big Government? Why is a pro-freedom agenda so hard to come by and to defend? Why, no matter the rhetoric, no matter the mood of the electorate, no matter how much the weight of Big Government pulls down economic progress, do we get more regulations, more government spending, less economic freedom? The answer might surprise you. It has to do with something we don’t often talk about in explicit terms. It has to do with morality.
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Milken, counting on nothing except his judgment that “junk” bonds weren’t really junk and that the entrepreneurs and businesses he was helping were good, led the revolution that would liberate capital from the turgid old boy network so that it could eventually find its way to Silicon Valley.