Yaron Brook

Without physical and spiritual support by these states, the Islamic Totalitarian cause would be a hopeless, discredited one, with few if any willing to kill in its name. Thus, the first order of business in a proper response to 9/11 would have been to end state support of Islamic Totalitarianism—including ending the Iranian regime that is its fatherland.

What specific military actions would have been required post-9/11 to end state support of Islamic Totalitarianism is a question for specialists in military strategy, but even a cursory look at history can tell us one thing for sure: It would have required the willingness to take devastating military action against enemy regimes—to oust their leaders and prominent supporters, to make examples of certain regimes or cities in order to win the surrender of others, and to inflict suffering on complicit civilian populations, who enable terrorist-supporting regimes to remain in power.

Brook has stated that he does not believe regulation has any role to play in protecting the environment and believes human-originated climate change to be a doomsday scenario propagated by environmentalists. He has indicated that as an ideological iteration it goes back decades, and that he believes global warming is "another in a line of failed scare stories," with preferential funding given to researchers promoting it. Drawing a comparison between the role played by low quality housing and infrastructure in the 2010 Haiti earthquake and the contrasting resilience of more developed countries, he suggests the solution to supposed environmental changes is laissez-faire capitalism and the resultant rise in standard of living.

Brook is an outspoken proponent of laissez-faire capitalism. In appearances on CNBC and in 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 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 promotes the Objectivist ethical position that rational selfishness is a moral virtue and that altruism is evil. In addition to teaching classes on his moral view of self-interest at ARI and as a guest lecturer at Brown University, Brook also defended the egoist position in a 2006 debate with former US Senator Robert Krueger at Texas State University, San Marcos.

In his 2006 speech "Democracy vs. Victory: Why the 'Forward Strategy of Freedom' Had to Fail" given at the Ford Hall Forum in Boston he said:

On December 17, 2004, Yaron Brook appeared on The O'Reilly Factor, Impact Segment, "Aftermath of Fallujah activities", the context was that an embedded journalist had reported about the shooting of previously disarmed Iraqi soldiers in Fallujah. During this interview he said:

In 1998, he co-founded a financial advisory firm with Robert Hendershott, BH Equity Research, where he continues today as managing director and chairman.

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.

Yaron Brook was born and raised in Israel. 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 abandon the socialism taught to him by his parents and 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. In 1987, he moved to the United States, where he received his Master of Business Administration in 1989 and PhD in finance in 1994 from the University of Texas at Austin.

Yaron Brook (Hebrew: ירון ברוק ‎; born May 23, 1961) is an Israeli-American entrepreneur, writer, and activist. He is an Objectivist and the current chairman of the board at the Ayn Rand Institute, where he was executive director from 2000 to 2017. He is also the co-founder of BH Equity Research and the author of several books, in which he analyzes a variety of topics from an Objectivist perspective.