Yaron Brook

Yaron Brook (ירון ברוק; born May 23, 1961 ) is an Israeli-American Objectivist writer who is the current chairman of the board at the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI), where he was executive director from 2000 to 2017. Prior to joining ARI, he was a finance professor at Santa Clara University, where he taught for seven years.

Biography
Yaron Brook was born in Jerusalem and raised in Haifa. His parents were Jewish socialists from South Africa. When he was sixteen, a friend lent him a copy of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, leading him to embrace Objectivism. After graduating from high school, he served as a first sergeant in Israeli military intelligence (1979–1982) and then earned a Bachelor of Science in civil engineering in 1986 from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa.

Career
Brook became an associate of leading Objectivist intellectuals, such as philosopher Leonard Peikoff, and in 1994, he co-founded Lyceum International, a company that organized Objectivist conferences and offered distance-learning courses. In 2000, he left Santa Clara University to succeed Michael Berliner as President and Executive Director of the Ayn Rand Institute, which was then located in Marina del Rey, California. In 2002, ARI relocated to Irvine, California.

Politics and economics
Brook is an outspoken proponent of laissez-faire capitalism. In appearances on CNBC and several articles and speeches, he has defended the rights of corporations and businessmen and upheld the virtues of capitalism. In a January 7, 2007, editorial in USA Today, he defended multimillion-dollar CEO pay packages against the attempt by the government to regulate them. In a 2010 interview, Brook called the efforts of Democrats to raise taxes on multi-millionaires "totally immoral." He criticized George W. Bush for signing the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which regulates corporate accounting practices. He has also argued that antitrust laws are "unjust and make no sense ethically or economically."

Brook is co-author, with Don Watkins, of the book Equal is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality. “What we care about is whether individuals are able to rise by merit—and the fact is that many of the policies the inequality critics say will improve mobility actually make rising by merit much harder,” they argue in the book.

Israel
On Zionism, Brook argued that "Zionism fused a valid concern—self-preservation amid a storm of hostility—with a toxic premise: ethnically based collectivism and religion."

Islam
In 2018, a public event featuring Brook and Carl Benjamin, a controversial YouTuber known as "Sargon of Akkad", as speakers was protested by masked activists. Brook has claimed that "Islamic ideology" is not compatible with the moral values of the contemporary Western world.

Other

 * Corporate governance: a study of director liability, firm performance and shareholder wealth, University of Texas, Austin, 1994 [thesis]
 * Shareholder wealth effects of directors' liability limitation provisions, Brook, Yaron; Rao, Ramesh K. S., Journal of Financial & Quantitative Analysis, vol. 3, 1994, 481–497
 * Terrorism in Israel, Yaron Brook, The Intellectual Activist, Vol. 10, No. 4, July 1996
 * The gains from takeover deregulation: Evidence from the end of interstate banking restrictions, Brook, Yaron; Hendershott, Robert; Darrell Lee, Journal of Finance the journal of the American Finance Association, {Malden, Mass. et al.: Blackwell}, vol. 6, 1998, 2185–2204
 * Do Firms Use Dividends to Signal Large Future Cash Flow Increases?, Brook, Yaron; Charlton, William T., Jr.; Hendershott, Robert J., Financial Management, (Tampa, Fla. : Financial Management Association International) vol. 3, 1998, 46–57
 * Corporate Governance and Recent Consolidation in the Banking Industry, Brook, Yaron; Hendershott, Robert J.; Lee, Darrell, Journal of Corporate Finance: contracting, governance and organization, (Santa Clara U; Kennesaw State U), vol. 2, 2000, pp. 141–164
 * Hype and Internet Stocks, Brook, Yaron; Hendershott, Robert J., The Journal of Investing, vol. 2, 53–64
 * "Just War Theory" vs. American Self-Defense, Yaron Brook, Alex Epstein, The Objective Standard, Vol. 1, No. 1, Spring 2006
 * "The 'Forward Strategy' For Failure, Yaron Brook, Elan Journo, The Objective Standard, Vol. 2, No. 1, Spring 2007
 * Brook's article on CEO compensation in USA Today