 Thank you very much for coming this evening. My name is Daniel Pryor and I'm the head of programs at the Adam Smith Institute and we're very pleased to welcome Dr Euron Brook for tonight's evening lecture. For those of you who aren't aware of what the Adam Smith Institute is or does, we are a free market think tank that has been around since the late 1970s and we advocate for various free market policies, try to convince governments to change their minds and in the long run try and change public opinion as well. And we're welcoming back Dr Brook to the ASI tonight. He's been here several times, 2009 the first time and then again 2014, 2016 and then delivering the annual EIN Rand lecture for us in 2017. So we have a long and really great relationship with Yaren as well as the EIN Rand Institute which you can find some of their literature downstairs on the table. Yaren has got a very long and very impressive bio which I will go through very very quickly. I won't try not to go too far. Chair of the Board at the EIN Rand Institute that's one of his key roles. You can also hear him weekly on the Yaren Brook show which I'm sure some if not many of you in this room already listened to. He's also the author of Free Market Revolution how EIN Rand's ideas can end big government which again I'm sure some or many of you in this room have already read. He's a columnist for various different outlets as well in international media and has various other positions including being a member of the Montpeleran Society. But tonight's talk will be on how equality holds you back. So we're going for something a little bit less divisive than the current Brexit debate something I'm sure everyone can agree on and no controversial subject matter. We can find a hook between equality and Brexit. Thank you very much Yaren. I thought it was a little heavy. Thank you. Do I need to use the mic? There's nobody downstairs. Okay good. Thank you for being here tonight and thank you for the Anna Smith Institute for inviting me again. It's always great to be here and to share my thoughts with you guys. So inequality the book you didn't mention was my book called Equal is Unfair. So if you like to talk tonight you can get it on Amazon in pretty much every format known to man. Inequality has become a major issue out there in the world. I know you Brits wouldn't realize that of course because Brexit's going on so no other issue. No other issue. Trump's that. But when Brexit is not at the headlines it was a long period in which it seemed that every issue that was in debate was every issue that was controversial was being blamed on what people perceive as the rising inequality in the West today. And famous book by Thomas Piketty that came out a few years ago called Das Kapital in the 21st century. That's his name in German. What Piketty does using loads of data and loads of numbers is show that inequality has increased dramatically over the last 30 years. Now there have been a lot of people who quibbled about the numbers and quibbled about the empirics and he might have cheated here and there a little bit in how we put the data set together and so on. But you know put all that aside let's assume he's right for the sake of tonight's arguments. Let's assume that it's true that inequality has actually increased over the last 30-35 years. Inequality meaning the difference in wealth or income between those who are at the bottom 20% or at the bottom 10% and those at the very top. Typically the top 10% or even more extremely so the top 1%. But that gap has grown over time. It's still my contention that the right response to that should be who cares. Who cares? Because the key question to ask ourselves is what does it mean to say that inequality has increased? What is the cause? What is driving this? But what does the gap represent? Is there an ideal gap? Is there some level at which the rich should be so rich and the poor should be so poor and there's some kind of ideal gap between the two? And of course when I debate these topics with people they always say well no there's no ideal gap we just want it smaller. Well how small? Well we'll know when we get there. Who will know? We will somehow democratically. The collective consciousness of everybody in this room will know when the gap is at the right level. But what they're all doing, what they're all doing is creating an ideal and the ideal is equality. What they all believe implicitly is that what is good, what is moral, what is virtuous is that we all be equal in income, equal in wealth. But the world doesn't work that way and the experiments we've had in trying to get everybody equal have not turned out too well. So while and you hear this often right, how many of you heard the you know from colleagues particularly if you're young at school and said communism is a wonderful ideal? It just doesn't work. It's so frustrating. We keep trying. It doesn't work. Socialism is this amazing thing that it just it just doesn't work. And so almost all the commentators at the end of the day their ideal is equality. It just doesn't work. We need a little bit of inequality whether they say to provide incentives for people to work harder. We need a little bit of inequality to you know to get those entrepreneurial juices going because we realize in the Soviet Union and Venezuela and North Korea there without those entrepreneurs wealth doesn't get created and you know we become all poor and people start dying and maybe that's not a good thing. Or maybe that's not a saleable thing. Maybe some of them think it's good. So we want this equality which we cannot attain and we can't say we want it because we know the consequences and everybody else knows the consequences. So what we're going to attack is the inequality and we're going to strive towards this equality without ever telling people what we're actually after. And Piketty goes to a large extent in his book he goes to puts a lot of energy into trying to convince us that he's not a communist. That he's not he's not really a Marxist. That he doesn't really want pure equality although he suggests it's a noble idea and they all suggest it's a noble idea. And yet what are we? Are we is there any sense in which people are indeed equal and think economic equality? Is there any sense in which people are equal? I mean how do you attain equality because look around the room. Look around the room. We're all pretty different very different and what happens if you take a group of different people people different you know different ideas different mole characters different work ethics different traits different different different abilities different interests take a bunch of people who are different and you leave them alone you set them free you tell them you do whatever you want just don't kill each other don't steal from one another what do you think happens you come back five years later they're going to be equal they started out different are they going to end up the same what's going to happen well some will produce more than others and therefore they'll have more than others maybe because they work harder and other people are lazy maybe because they have more skill than other people maybe because they chose the kind of activities the kind of professions that create more value to a large number of people and therefore have more monetary returns and others might have chosen careers professions that don't generate a lot of monetary returns people do that you know people consciously choose not to get rich like me right like teachers like you know we choose not to be rich because we like doing this we like doing this more than money so we're leading up money it's interesting that the that the uh my opponent's always obsessed with money the left is obsessed with money it is i mean mox is a materialist what matters is material stuff what matters is money but it's like mascapulists or many of us i mean yeah money is important money's cool but it's not the being an adult it's not how you measure human beings so a lot of us give up money in order to follow careers do things that we really love and really enjoy because we get great pleasure and enjoyment and spiritual values out of stuff so if you leave people who are different free what do you get you get inequality it's in our nature it's how we are it's what a division of labor economy generates because we produce a different values of different levels different qualities different quantities and we have different interests and different passions and different minds different characters so different people are going to be different so how do you make free people who are now unequal in economic terms how do you make them equal remember it's warm up here how do you make them equal real question i don't know if anybody showed my basketball example here's my basketball example he's got the answer i haven't even asked a question that's good yeah my basketball example is how do you make me and leban james equally basketball right i want to be able to get on a court a basketball court with leban james and be able to score a few baskets i don't know we're in the uk so i don't know if you know what basketball is never mind if you know who leban james is so i want to get on a football field with messy and be able to score you know me have a dribble around him right i mean there's no chance so how do you how do we make it happen how do we make me and leban james me and messy equal on the pitch break his legs break his legs you have to break his legs so you have to commit violence against one person in order to be about that equality because we're not the same we're metaphysically not equal we're metaphysically different so the only way to make the outcomes the same is to break one party's legs when it comes to basketball but what's the equivalent of breaking our legs in day-to-day activity at work our lives what do people do how do we how do they try to make a sequel they use force in order to do what take our money yeah take our money now i know breaking legs seems harsh and taxes seem normal we'll pay taxes but what are taxes what do taxes represent like i i used to live in california i got smart about it and left but i used to pay 55 percent my incoming taxes 55 right what does that 55 represent i mean you brits pay something close to that 55 percent of your life yeah it represents your time your effort your life i mean we just don't go to work we invest our being in work and our effort our minds our thoughts our energy goes into that work and then somebody randomly comes about because people voted for it and just yanks 55 percent of the stuff we made when we were at work and takes it away from us now i've often wondered what would i choose if you gave me this choice you can come once a year and break my legs or come once a year and take 55 percent of my income think about i don't know it seems like breaking legs is not that bad of a deal because yeah legs you can fix the 55 percent of the income is not coming back it's gone it's Washington DC and Sacramento it's forever gone right but it's the same thing it's using violence against us as individuals in order to achieve some kind of equality then why is that a goal why is that a good thing given that we're all different given that we're all produced different stuff and different different abilities and different quantities why should we all be at the end of the day the same equal in any kind of sense how is that right just more so the only way to achieve equality as the communists discovered as the socialists understand and as every government in the world knows is to commit violence against individuals is to use violence against them to destroy what they have created what they have built what they have made I smarted up now I live in Puerto Rico I pay four percent taxes now you're touching my legs but not everybody has their choice it's a it's a difficult choice to make and yet in the name of equality they tax us not quite to death because they need to keep us alive to keep going now there's a sense in which equality means something in the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson writes all men are created equal now Thomas Jefferson was a smart guy what did he mean by all men are created equal because well first put aside all the slave issue and women and all that stuff right let's assume he meant it right fully but are we right in what sense are we equal because we just talked about the fact that we're all really different and therefore the outcome is always going to be a different outcome so what sense are we equal what's that in rights in rights the only sense in which we're truly equal is in rights we're all born with sudden inalienable rights right our own life to liberty property pursuit of happiness and what do rights mean because that's a it's one of those words one of those words everybody uses nobody defines what do they mean it was a right me and people say we have a way to a job you have a right to health care you have a right to stuff yeah so it's you ever you have the freedom to act the freedom to act in pursuit of your life in pursuit of the values necessary for your life rights are freedoms freedoms of action and what does freedom mean like yeah freedom is one of those words it's great right you can go in front of a Marxist audience who's some freedom every hand in the room goes up and go in front of a fascist audience who's some freedom every hand goes up just a regular audience of just ordinary people who's from freedom every hand goes up like they can't all be talking about the same thing but nobody ever defines their terms so what does freedom mean what does the word actually mean in this context and it's important because the way the Marxist define freedom makes it unfree how do we define freedom or how do those of us who believe in freedom define freedom freedom from freedom to yeah freedom from but from what what is freedom freedom is the absence of something the absence of what yeah the absence of coercion freedom the definition of freedom is the absence of coercion it's the absence of force the absence of authority they can tell you how to force you what to think and how to live and how to act act. So rights represent the absence of coercion, the freedom to act free of coercion in ways further your life as an individual. So that's the sense we're equal. We're equal in rights. We're equal in freedom. We're equal, you know, you often hear the term equal before the law, a rights respecting law that treats us all the same. Those are the senses in which equality means something. Politically it means that we as individuals are free to live our lives as we see fit, free to pursue the rational values necessary for our own survival and existence and flourishing as individual human beings. That's what equality means and notice that the economic equality that they would argue for by necessity violates the idea of your inalienable rights. Because the only way to achieve equality of outcome is to use coercion is to take away your freedom in some important way. It's to treat you differently. I would even argue that the progressive taxes is not equality before the law because if you're rich you get greater penalties than if you're poor. How is that just and right? So the whole push towards equality of outcome is a push to reject the idea of equality of rights. It's to reject the idea that we have rights. To reject the idea of equality before the law, it's to reject the idea of the sanctity of the individual. It's the idea at the end of the day that it's okay to sacrifice some for the sake of others. So inequality is a feature of freedom. It's not a bug. It's a feature of freedom. It's a part of freedom. It's the outcome of freedom by necessity. And the only way, the only way to achieve any kind of equality or to move towards equality, because I never want to achieve equality, move towards equality, is to use violence against individuals. Now how do they justify this violence? Why is it okay to use violence against individuals in order to achieve this this idea? Well one is they capitalize on the idea that the individual doesn't matter. What matters is collectives and groups. The morality is all about the benefit to the group. All about maximizing some benefit to society. The good, the public good. And what is the public? What is society? What's the public society? Anybody ever see society? What's that? It's just a collection of individuals. Just a group of individuals. So the idea that this group of individuals is more important than the individual. Why? Now why would you, what's the reason for anybody advocating for something like this? It's a great way to control people. Great way to control people. You know we need a, you know the benefit of this group is the most important thing. And how are we gonna tell what's good for you guys? How do we know what's good for you? Or we need a leader to tell us, right, to channel the war being of the group. To channel the collective consciousness that somehow floating above you. And that leader will tell us, you know, he might, he might need the help of a witch doctor to commune with those spirits. Because you know we could vote, but then there's the minority that vote is not being represented. So it's best if we just directly channel the war being of the British people through some leader figure who can do that. And think about communism as a good example of this. How do we know what's good for the proletariat? Oh, we need a Lenin. We need a Stalin to be able to challenge, you know, and be able to, what did Lenin say after break a few eggs in order to make an online? You know, we need to be able to be able to say we need to sacrifice you guys for their sake. And some brave leader has to be willing to actually say it and actually do it. Since the collectivization, this idea that the collective is more important than the individual, is one of the ways in which they justify this idea of sacrificing some for the sake of others. So a morality that is based on the good of the people will always require somebody to define who the people are, what that morality demands, and it will always require the sacrifice of some for others. And the answer always to moral codes like that is why? It's just a simple why. Why are they more important than you guys? Why is one person more important than another? And there is no answer. The end of the day there is no answer other than what the witch doctor says. He's communing with the spirits and the spirits have told him that this group is better than that group but this individual is better than that individual. So morally it's always the case that the people pushing for equality justified in collectivistic terms, in terms that justify the sacrifice of individuals for the sake of others. What other justifications do they use? Well Obama probably gave one really memorable speech, my favorite Obama speech, was a speech because it was incredibly philosophical, maybe more philosophical than even he realized, but it was the you didn't build that speech. I don't know how many of you heard that speech or remember, but he gave a famous speech where he basically said to all you rich guys or you successful people, you didn't build that. You didn't succeed. Your life is not a product of you. You got help. You got help from all kinds of people, from school teachers, you know, from employees, maybe if you're running Microsoft, from taxpayers who built the infrastructure so you can drive to work every day. From all these other people and all these other influences in your life, you owe them and since you didn't actually create what is yours, well then we can take it away because society helped you all along the way. Who is the society exactly? You know, we don't need to define. Don't need to get too specific. So the idea is, and this is an idea that goes back, a lot of different thinkers, but it certainly goes back to, you know, John Rawls, if you're familiar with John Rawls, the Harvard philosopher, you know, you're not really responsible for your own success. You might think that you got good grades because you studied hard, but you don't really get good grades because you studied hard. You got good grades because you have good genes, or you have good grades because you had good parents, or you have good grades because you had a good teacher. That has nothing to do with you. And even the studying hard, what choice did you have to study hard if you listen to Sam Harris? You don't have any choice about studying hard. You study hard because your genes, you have study hard genes. Some of us don't have study hard genes. I had kind of studied genes, you know. So it's not yours. You are not responsible. And indeed, modern psychology is filled with this. It's your inner product of your genes, that's, you know, evolutionary psychology. Now, they can explain everything that you do in terms of so-called evolutionary terms, or your product of your environment. They can explain everything that you do in terms of how many times your mother puts you in, I don't know, the closet or something. You watch Edmore Boogman movies. It always lands up that the mother put the kid in a closet too many times. And that's it. Those are the two things. And then if you're really a radical in psychology, you might think it's a combination of the two of them. Some environment and some biology. What's missing? Yeah, you choices you make. What's missing is free will. It's a fact that we do make choices. That we do choose to think or not to think to do some things and not to do other things. We do choose our values. We do choose whether to take our environment seriously or not, whether to apply ourselves and genes are there and so is the environment. And but so we as individuals, and if there's no choice, if there really is no free will, if there is no moral agency, then who cares? Why are we even here? We're even having the discussion, right? We're just automatons, robots out there. But we all know that we have agency. We all know by introspection, we all can see in a sense that we are agents, that we make choices, that we shape our own soul in some significant or at least can whether we choose to or not as a different question. But notice that if you truly are just an automaton, if you just shaped by your shape by your environment or your genes, then in what sense do you own stuff? In what sense is stuff yours? What is yours even mean? It's just a clump of cells. You have no significance. And it's okay to get rid of you if you're in the way. Or if you're in the way of us taking your stuff to give to those people who didn't have as good an environment or didn't have as good of a genes. So the idea that you didn't build at all, if your success is really a product of all these people that helped you, I was asked, you know, all these people that helped me, I mean, I mean, there's anybody here not being helped by somebody in their lives, we've all been helped. And I hope you all said thank you when they helped you. And if of course, if they were your employees, what did you do? Yeah, you get to pay them, right? You pay them. And if you had a great teacher, when you were young, who really impacted your life, some of some of us have had I didn't at least I can't remember one. But I know a lot of people who remember a particular teacher that had this profound impact on their lives. Then yeah, you should do something about that. I encourage you all to go back, find a teacher and thank them. As adults, I think that I mean, as a teacher, I can tell you, there's nothing more meaningful than that. And if you were rich, if you made a lot of money, and you tripped some of that success to that teacher, right to a check. That would be really nice and active justice. But the assumption that you didn't own it, because you had a great teacher, I mean, a lot of your other students in that classroom had a great teacher, like in Bill Gates's classroom, there were a lot of kids who maybe had a great teacher, and yet there's only one Bill Gates. But if I say you didn't build that, if I say you're not responsible, because all these other factors, then it's okay for me to take your stuff. If I say society made your success possible, then maybe society owns your stuff and we can take it away. But it's all in the name of justifying the taking away. So at the end of the day, everything that they do is targeted at providing a justification for the violence that they inflict. And the whole equality scheme, if you will, is about inflicting violence. It's about redistributing wealth is about taking from some and giving to others, based on somebody's characterization of what is good and what is not. Wealth is individually created. You are responsible for your own life. Indeed, you're responsible for creating your own character and creating your own soul. I mean, that's a big responsibility. But you are responsible. You have the tools to do it. To the extent that you default on it, to the extent that you do it, to that extent you will have a good life or not. But you have free will, you have the capacity to make choices. And the people who build and create and make stuff. I mean, my attitude towards people like that is, thank you. It's profound gratitude. I mean, when I think of what the benefit I've gotten from the great scientists of the past or the great entrepreneurs of the past or the great entrepreneurs of the present, when I think of somebody like Jeff Bezos, right? I mean, I feel like, whoa, how cool is that that I live on the same planet with a Jeff Bezos, who's made my life so much better? Can you imagine life without Amazon? I can't, not anymore. And I lived before Amazon. Some of you didn't. I know what life was before Amazon and life so much better now with Amazon. So much better now with my favorite iPhone. I mean, Steve Jobs changed my life. In ways that few people I know personally changed it. So when I hear about billionaires, I think, whoa, I feel so much gratitude towards that. Because they've made my life dramatically better. The only exception to that and the only kind of I don't even like calling it inequality because it's not the inequality that's stationed. The only exception to that are people who make money by stealing, cheating, lying, people who use the government to manipulate the system, the cronies of the world. And there's some of those. And there's some of them out there that have made a lot of money and resentment towards them is completely justified. The solution to that is not to increase the amount of cronyism. The solution to that is not to increase the amount of redistribution of wealth. The solution to that is to eliminate the power the politicians have to grant the favors. So that the cronies stay poor. Because they can't manipulate anybody. Nobody can give them favors. Nobody can grant them anything. We live in a world today where the cronies are rising. Because we've given politicians so much power to distribute that people who can manipulate the politicians are becoming more important. So to the extent that we resent that, then we resent cronyism. Don't disguise it as an issue of inequality. It's not the gap that worries me. It's the fact that some people are getting ahead of getting money not by working, not by creating value, not by producing, but by redistributing wealth towards them by manipulating the system. But then that's a clear problem. Inequality is not the issue. It's not the gap. And lastly, you know, we should talk a little bit about what all these programs that are supposed to including redistribution of wealth, what they actually do to the people at the bottom. Because there are problems in the world just like this cronyism, which is a problem at the top. There are problems at the bottom as well in a sense of, at least in the United States, you can see less mobility, less people who start out poor become rich. There's just people who start out poor and become successful. And it's important to figure out why that is and what's going on. And they're clearly problems. But again, none of the problems have anything to do with inequality. So what are the things that are holding poor people back? What are the things that are holding people from succeeding in life? I'd say probably the number one cause is education. They get the worst education in the world. And who provides them with that really, really horrible education? Who provides poor people with education? The government. So the government gives them a lousy product. Is that surprising? I mean, what are the products that the government produce in quotes? Post office? You had a choice between the post office and FedEx or UPS, which would you choose? An important letter. You wanted to get the next day. Which one would you choose? The post office or FedEx UPS? We'd probably be UPS or FedEx. What was that? We privatized our post service. Oh, you privatized your post service? Yeah, but I mean, it would probably be something like FedEx because I've had once I used the Royal Mail and I thought it would be tracked overseas. And I found it... No tracking. No tracking. You have to go FedEx or UPS. They track it all the way. So in America, it's still run by the government. And if you have an important letter, you will always send it UPS or FedEx. And I ask audiences, you don't trust the post office and they go, no, we don't trust the post office. But you trust dropping your kid off. They quiver into the post office every morning. Every morning. It's called government education. There's a difference between the military and education. What's the difference? And there's a difference between the military in one side, education, the post office. You know, the other thing I ask people is, what do you think this would look like if the government designed it? A brick. A brick is nice. A brick with a little screen. Black and white. It doesn't work. What's the difference between the military and at the police? We generally trust the police. Maybe the court system and everything else. What's the difference between those things? Government's very effective. Competence. I was in the military. I wouldn't say that. What's that? I was going to say the government's quite effective at using force. Yeah, so what is what is true of military police and the judiciary? What is what unites them all? Yeah, force. They're guns. So the government is a gun. That's its nature. Everything it does is an issue of coercion. Try not following the regulation, not paying your taxes, not doing something the government said to do. And the gun shows up. Government is a gun. What are guns good at? What is the only reason we would ever want to use guns? Self-defense. Yeah, self-defense. Defend ourselves, right? So the government, which is a gun, should be used in self-defense. There's no self- defense in the classroom. Education is not an issue of coercion. The post office is not an issue of coercion. It's a service. It's just a service. Which responds to market competition, market incentives, and when you don't have those, what happens to quality? It sucks. So yes, Americans trust government schools. I'm trying to convince them not to. Because they're not good. Because that same principle that makes the military good makes education bad. Coercion makes the military good. Violence, guns, doesn't make schools good. Make schools bad. And yet we do. So if you were worried about poor people, first thing you have to worry about is education. And it's not an issue of money because, I'll give you a quick example. And again, I'm using American examples, but I think they're pretty applicable. In the United States and the city of Chicago, in the worst part of the city of Chicago, where the kids, where you'd have to say government schools and not really schools are more like, I don't know, a cross between a prison and a daycare center. The holding pens for the kids while the parents are at work. They don't get an education. So it allows the education. It costs the government $50,000 per child, per child. Across the street, same neighborhood, the Catholic church runs schools and it costs them $7,500 a child. Half price. Basically, the city of Chicago could shut down all its schools, pay the archdiocese to run the schools and save half the taxpayer's money. And the archdiocese does a much better job. Schools are much better. Now imagine if you had actual competition, not just archdiocese but you had actual private schools competing with one another. So it's not an issue of money. So if you care about the poor, the first thing you want to care about is education and how to improve it. And the only way to improve it is to privatize. Second thing, what holds down poor people? Well, most of the economic policies that we adopt in the name of reducing inequality actually hurt poor people. Maybe the classic one, the one that nobody opposes, the one that's in our face constantly, at least in the United States. I'm not sure what the status is here, but I think you have it as well. It's the minimum wage. I mean, that's just our economics 101 kind of example, right? Right now there's a lot of pressure to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour in the United States and $15 an hour. There's a whole group of low-income inner-city youth that got a lousy government education that will never, ever, ever have a job because they don't produce it, 15 bucks an hour. If somebody pays you, whatever they pay you, it's because to them you're worth a little bit more than that. You're producing it more than that. Nobody's going to pay you more than what you produce. Nobody's going to pay you more than what you produce. Nobody's going to lose on you. No employer's going to hire you and lose money the day they hire you and forever, because you can't produce at that level that they're paying you. So minimum wages, no matter what the set up, unless it's at zero, basically create hidden unemployment. They create unemployment about those who can afford the least to be unemployed. So that's an example of a law that's supposed to help the poor rise up and it actually keeps them down. And it keeps them down in the name of inequality, in the name of great equality, because they're raising the wages. They always ask $50, why not make it a hundred? We're a thousand. Make it a thousand bucks an hour. That way you'll get everybody equal, everybody will be rich. It'll be great. And you could go on and on. The regulations, the licensing laws, all the things that make it difficult to start a business. And I'm not talking about just a high-tech business, but just a nail salon or laundry mat or any kind of business that somebody would want to open. The more regulations, the more controls, the more restrictions you place on it, the more you're hurting young budding entrepreneurs, the more you're hurting people who want to try to rise up and try to improve their lives. So if you care about poor people, the solution is not equality, which destroys their opportunities by regulating, controlling and taxing and artificially, supposedly raising some wages at other people's expenses. But the solution is to free it all up. The solution is more freedom. The solution is to increase the amount of opportunities, not to try to make them equal. So the whole inequality debate is, in my view, a bogus debate. Inequality in and of itself means nothing. Matters, nothing. There's no economic theory that suggests that it's a problem in any kind of way, and if you're interested in economic theories around income inequality, ask me in the Q&A. It's just another excuse, as if they need it in another one, to sacrifice some for others, to redistribute wealth from some to others. It's just another excuse to do what is harmful, I believe, for everybody. There are no real beneficiaries of this. It's not like when you give people welfare, you're actually making their lives better. You actually institutionalize them into a mentality that says, I can't make it on my own. I need somebody else to pay to feed me, to house me. I need to live off of somebody else. So, you know, inequalities are non-issue. They're real issues, and the most important of them is freedom. Freedom for the individual to thrive, freedom for the individual to live, freedom of the individual to be successful or not, but to pursue his own values. What we should fight for is freedom. What we should fight for is the one equality that matters, and that's equality of rights, equality of freedoms. Thank you all. Can I agree to do a Q&A? Sure, of course. I don't even need to give a talk, is to have a Q&A. Any questions? I'll gladly start. Sure. You're kind of talking about nature and nurture and how they don't leave any room for free will. I was wondering if you thought that if nature and nurture, they did have any role, whether they should be thought about at all, or whether it's just free will that should be considered. Well, I think that, of course, we have a nature, right? So there's no question we have certain inclinations and certain abilities that are coded in our DNA. So nature plays a role, and of course your parents matter, right? It's going to affect you. It's going to affect your view of life, of the world, your optimism, pessimism, but I think that the most important factor is the choices you make. It's the overriding factor at the end of the day. So the others matter. You can't ignore them, they're part of existence, they're part of life, they're part of the world. If you're born in a concentration camp or if you're born in Sub-Saharan Africa right now, or you're born in the United States, it matters, right? So your environment matters. But I think we give short shrift to free will. You can override much of what is being given to you by nature or nature. I know people who have limited abilities, but they worked really, really hard, and they focus their mind, and they really, really make an effort, a cognitive effort to understand the world, to see the world, to integrate what they learn, and they do way better than what their IQ score is, the way you want to measure the genetic component. I don't think that's IQ, but genetic component of their intelligence. They way exceed that. And I know people who are born unbelievably smart, right? And the dumbest people you will ever meet. Because they haven't done anything with it. They haven't used it, they haven't used that mind. It's something that needs to be turned on. It doesn't turn on, just automatically, and it's just there available for us. We know that we can sometimes, we can either think about something, we can focus on mind, we can concentrate, we can make a choice to do that, or we can just drift. Sometimes we don't feel like thinking about stuff, and sometimes that's legitimate, because you're trying to rest or something, and you just let your mind just drift. And sometimes you've got a math problem in front of you, a relationship problem in front of you, a career problem in front of you, and you really focus your mind and you think it through, step by step. And those are two different states of mind. And the more you get your mind in focus, the more you think about problems, the more you try to solve problems by really being focused, the more in control of your own life you are. The more, and I know people who never really do that, who just drift all the time, that's a regular state. Now what happens when you drift is, then you're a product of your genes and your environment. So people who don't choose to take control over their own mind, over their own life, over their own soul, over their own character, over their own being are just left to the chance and just leave themselves open to being controlled by whatever the genes are dictating, and whatever the society or their other pressures in the environment dictate. Say it's true that a lot of people out there, maybe not in here, but a lot of people out there, are really just products of their genes in the environment, because they've never engaged their own free will. Free will requires effort, requires actually choosing. Rand, I mean, who view a free will is, it's the act of focusing your mind, it's the act in a sense of choosing to think. After you choose to think, it kind of runs its own course because the logic of it, right? But that choice is not self-evident, it's not something everybody does, it's not something we all do every single moment. But the more we do it, the more in control of our own destiny we are, the more in control who we are, our own character becomes. And people who don't do that are indeed products, and in that sense, if you just, you know, there's normative and positive, right? Normative is how we should be and positive is how we are. If you just take a positive view of mankind, yeah, a lot of people are just the product of the environment and their genes, but that's because they chose not to think. It's a default. So evolutionary psychology, to a large extent, to me, is the describing default behavior. Like, you know, God said, I don't know, those who are on YouTube might know him, he's an evolutionary psychologist, he does marketing. He's a big shot in marketing. And he uses all these evolutionary, evolutionary psychology things to understand marketing and how marketing affects us. And every time I hear him describe one of these, I go, but it doesn't affect me that way. And it's because I've chosen, you know, not to just, not to just let whatever the marketing messages we get just affect me, right? Because I think too much, I guess. So if you think, I've never seen the connection in America, I don't know, beer commercials always have goals and beacons. I've never understood the connection. And it's like, it bothers me, like, why are you doing this? Why, you know, it doesn't make me want to do beer. So, but it must work on somebody because they play this over and over again. And I guess there's some connection there that if you're not thinking, if you're just shaped by your environment or whatever, that you just go with. So it's, there really is a difference between people who think and people who don't. And I think even more important than our goal in establishing political freedom, because I think that this is a precondition to establishing political freedom is to get people to think and to get people to see the value of thinking for themselves and using their mind. So when I go and speak at schools, I like to get kids when they're young. Jesuits got, you know, the Jesuits always knew this, this power in getting them young. Because if you can teach them to do critical thinking, if you can challenge them to think a little bit to, to, then you know, the truth is the truth. And then free markets kind of all the political stuff, I think is easy. But if they're not thinking, and this is why a lot of free market people say, oh we got to do more emotional stuff. No. Because people are driven by emotions, you know, it's hopeless. That's why our constant logic standard is hopeless, because so many people out there are driven by emotions. You know, unless we get them thinking, unless we get critical thinking, unless we get people really willing to engage this. I was interested to hear what your thoughts were on the individual compared to the collective. Yeah. And how you think that applies to the corporate environment, and whether the corporate environment has maybe free markets, in my view have always been a great thing. But the increase in corporatism eventually has, does that potentially have a monopolistic end? Yeah, I mean there's a number of questions there, I think. Let me start, I think you're asking a question about the relationship between the individualism like teamwork, like in a corporate environment, you know, working for the corporation, and the corporation has goals and you're just a cog in the machine in some ways, right? And I think, I don't think there's a, I don't think there's necessarily attention there. So that's one question, and the corporatism is something different, but we'll get to that as well. I think there's no tension if you, so, and I wouldn't call that a collective, so I wouldn't call the corporation a collective. A corporation is a group, it's a group for a particular, there's a particular goal in mind, right? And we come together to achieve that particular goal, and we voluntarily come together to achieve that particular goal. There's no difference between a corporation and a sports team. You don't pay football by yourself, you play football in a team, and you want the team to win. That's, that's, it's not suppressing your individualism, it's an expression of the individualism to work together with other people to achieve a goal that you have voluntarily all agreed to achieve together, right? And I think a corporation is the same thing, it's like a team. You can leave it, you can join it. You, if you're going to be, if you're going to be successful, you need to buy into the goal, right? The mission, you know, the corporation is spelled forever on mission statements and values, and there's a reason for that, because to motivate people, to get them to be productive, they need to buy into that mission, they need to be committed to it. So I don't think there's any conflict between individualism and this kind of team effort. If the team is structured in a way that respects the individual, and if the individual exerts himself as an individual, say we've all been in meetings, right? Team, you know, team projects, group projects, and group projects will work really well when everybody's thinking, and we're trying to make each other better, and we're pushing each other and challenging each other, and where everybody's an independent thinker. And groups work really badly when one guy does all the thinking and everybody says, oh, okay, we'll just follow along, right? So I think corporations that are successful are ones that encourage individuals to think, individuals to act, individuals to show initiative, bad bosses are bosses that won't let you show initiative, that put you down, and they usually have a lot of turnover, and their teams are now very successful. So being an individualist does not exclude teaming up with somebody to achieve a common goal, and I don't think corporations necessarily violate that, I think they support that, I think it's a way to achieve something. I think corporatism is something different because it's anism, it's now, you know, the corporation is everything, and it's a BNN, or it's the new collectivism, right? It's the new collective. And I think like any other form of collectivism, that's dangerous, but the beauty of the market still is that corporations of voluntary organization still, right? So we can join them, or we can leave them, we can buy their products, or we can not buy their products, and it only becomes dangerous once they get close to power. And to the extent that corporations and governments team up together, that's when it becomes dangerous, because the government is what provides the guns, the close of power, and then it becomes dangerous. And I'm not worried today about corporations. I know there's a lot of worry about Google and Apple and Amazon and all these guys, but I mean, when I compare whatever sins they commit, and they do commit sins, they do stupid things just like individuals do, and they're affected by the politics, and they're affected by bad ideas, just like all the people are. But when I think of the value they create versus the danger that they represent, it's not even close in my mind. The people's complaints about YouTube and Twitter and Facebook as they're using them is stunning to me. I have a question on how much you value property rights. So Nozick argues that inequalities that we have today are due to violations of property rights of the past, and which essentially means that there's room for massive redistribution at the present, because property rights were violated in the past. You talked about this last and feudalism. Now it's more of a hypothetical question, but would you be in favor of redistributing wealth today, because there have been violations of property rights in the past? No, for lots of reasons. So you know, where do I start? I mean, one is there's no way to figure that out, right? There's no way to figure. So for example, in America today, there's a lot of talk about reparations to blacks for the sin of slavery. That's a sense, the historical absence of property rights that they had, right? So they use them. Now, I assume that redistribution would be money taken from me, among other people, to give to them. But I was never slave owner. You know, I'm originally from Jewish origin, right? So do I then go to Germans? And you know, where does it end? How about we go all the way back to the Egyptians? But they of course have nothing to give to me anymore. Yeah, so no. So I would say, I would say absolutely not. But beyond that, so that's one. One is you can't calculate it. But you can do hypotheticals divorced from reality. So I don't believe in that kind of philosophizing, right? I believe that things need to be realistic. Otherwise, what's the point? It's, you know, I don't believe in trolley examples in ethics. You know, I don't think that's philosophy. I think that's, you know, playing games. So the question is, realistically, there's no way to figure it out. Second, it's not clear that it has that much impact. Okay, so I was born of, you know, my ancestors lived in Shtetls in Eastern Europe, you know, Lithuania and whatever. Once in a while they were pogroms and they killed a bunch of them. How much of my wealth today is due to that? You know, none. I came to the U.S. pretty much with nothing. Did what I did, built up what I built up. It's all me. It has nothing to do with the pogroms and I'm not going to go after the Kozaks to redistribute wealth to me because it had no impact on my life. Not really. Had impact on my ancestors, but it, that, nothing, none of that has really been transmitted to me. And I'd say, with blacks in America, I think it's closer because if it was just slavery, I'd say, forget it. It's so far back. Nobody owned slaves, you know, you weren't slaves. But then there was Jim Crow laws, which really held them back, right? And that's into the 60s, but now we're already in, you know, the 21st century. So, you know, start taking post irresponsibility, right? So start, you know, what did you do? What did you actually do in your life? So how much of it is attributed, and never mind feudalism, right? So how much of the wealth you have today is a product of you and what's going on around you right now? And how much of it is a product of sins of the past? I'd say it's almost all you. And there are communities in which maybe that's not true. So, I wouldn't be object to if you take a country that's still feudal, relatively few, like certain South American countries where there's clearly, you can still see the violations of property rights and the exploitation to do one-time big-time land reform in a country like that, right? And so I'd be okay with doing it like that. But to go to America, to come to the UK after we've had about 200 years of relative freedom, and to do it even hypothetically seems wrong to me because you're taking away the responsibility of all the people who actually contribute to their own wealth creation along the way. So you're not as hard on property rights as no is it, for example? No, I am. I mean, my property rights, right now, your property rights, right now, I would never violate your property rights and I don't think you should ever violate mine and I'm against taxation for that reason. That's why I moved to Puerto Rico. I don't want them to take you 55% of my stuff, right? But to attribute my property rights to something that happened two centuries ago, I think is just wrong. For a philosophical reason? No, for philosophical reasons. The property I have today, I create it. I mean, think about the amount of property, property in terms of wealth. Not just land, but wealth that existed 300 years ago. Think about the amount of property that exists, the amount of property in terms of wealth that exists today. What do you think the proportion is? It's gazillion times more today than it was back then. So the idea that this gazillion more times wealth is attributable to sins that will kill violations of property rights that committed way back then is to me ridiculous. It just doesn't even mathematically, economically, doesn't add up. So I'm an adamant about property rights right now. What yours is yours, what's mine is mine. Keep it that way. Don't steal my stuff. I shouldn't steal your stuff. But to try to with no, you know, in the law we have something called, what do you call it? Limitation. Yeah. Well, you don't go back, right? Statues of limitations. Statues of limitations. I think statues of limitations have to apply here. After a certain amount of time a property right violation doesn't count anymore. Okay. A level of economic inequality where the rights and the freedom of coercion of the poorest people could be violated. No. I don't. Not at all. Not at all. And again, it's a hypothetical. I mean, you're sure you can create hypotheticals but they're not real. In reality, the question is not the inequality. The inequality isn't restraining people's freedom. What is restraining people's freedom is something that's restraining people's freedom, coercion. So the issue is freedom. So under freedom there is no level of inequality that matters one way or the other in any direction. So in other words, money can never be power or coercion. That's right. Money is not power or coercion. And you know when a Marxist says you can't be free on an empty stomach well what does freedom mean? You have to ask him what does freedom mean? And freedom means, and this is how they use freedom, freedom means getting what you desire. Freedom means getting what you desire. Then yeah, you know, there are a lot of things that are strained by freedom. But that's not what freedom means. Freedom means the absence of collision. It doesn't mean, you know, I want to fly. You're not free to fly. You can't violate the laws of nature. Or if you're hungry, you're hungry and solve the problem. But humanity's always been hungry. It's only recently that we stop being hungry. That doesn't make you unfree the fact that you're hungry. It just creates certain limitations and the options you have. But those are not created by force. They're created by the fact that physically you're hungry and therefore you can't do everything you could do if you were in a full stomach. So no, I don't think there's a fundamental difference between economic power, money, and political power. Political power is coercion. And why is money not coercion? Because I can't force you one way with money to do anything you don't want to do. I can't force you. I can seduce you, but seduction is not force. Okay. So just hypothetically, if I'm really poor and the only way I can pay my bills because I don't have a job is to take out a loan with a really high interest rate, for example. So that would cause me a lot of disdain. No. First of all, there's never only one option. You can go to what people have always done which has become a subsistence farmer. You can grow the vegetables and eat them. Which is what we've always done as human beings. You can go and get a loan at a very high interest rates. You can go find a better job. Theoretically, you can always limit the options. But in reality, the options are not limited. The options are limited by your willingness to imagine them. But if somebody is only willing to give you a loan at a high interest rate, a user's interest rate, right? There's a reason for that. You're probably not a good risk. You're probably not going to be able to pay their loan back. So they're taking a huge risk by giving you the money. There's nothing wrong with that. I'd actually say this. No, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it. I'm just saying... It's not coercion. ...that's completely rational. Wouldn't that in some way limit the freedom of the person who has to take that loan? No, it's limiting the set of opportunities that they have. But it's not limiting their freedom. Again, what does freedom mean? Again, freedom does not mean doing whatever you want to do. I feel like getting on a plane and flying to whatever, or I feel like having a meal at the best restaurant in town. That's not freedom. If that's what freedom means, then yes, money constrains you. If that's what freedom means, then the more money you have, the more freedom you have. But that's not what the word actually means. It's not what the concept actually means. And there's a fundamental difference. There has to be. In metaphysical reality, there's a fundamental difference between me putting a gun to you here and saying, these are the things you have to do. And me saying, nobody's going to force you. These are the choices you have. And maybe they're limited, maybe they're expansive, but they're choices. But I'm not putting a gun to your head. You know, the assumption of the free to eat at the restaurant is that once you accept that, then of course, the person cooking the meal is somehow duty bound to provide you with that meal. The person who's going to give you the job or whatever the options are is duty bound to provide you with it. You're placing the burden on them that they're somehow your servant or your slave because you have your freedom entitles you to their stuff. It can never be. You're using coercion against them. It's possible to reconcile your conception of free will with scientific materialism. What do you think you need some kind of other element to distinguish between the collection of atoms, which is the individual and the collection of atoms, which is slightly larger, which would be the collective. I'll give you an answer that won't satisfy you, but it's an answer more people should give to more issues. I don't know. I don't know. Science is young. It's about 250, 300 years old, 300 years old. You know, Newton was what, 300 years ago, 320 years ago. There's a lot of stuff we don't know, but I don't know. I don't know if the atoms as we recognize them today as everything there is in the universe. I have no idea. I know free will exist because I can observe it directly. Just like, you know, we don't understand gravity. We know it exists, but we don't, you know, we can just see it. Right? Things fall. And we can measure it. We can, but okay, but and before we can measure it before Newton, we still saw gravity. So every time we dropped an apple, it fell. Gravity existed. We could observe it and we knew it because we could observe it. And the same with free will. I know I have free will because I can observe it directly. I just, the observation is through introspection rather than through using our senses. But it's the same level. It's like to deny its existence because I don't understand it. To deny its existence because I don't have a scientific explanation for it is just wrong. The best thing to say is I don't know. And nobody knows. I mean, we barely understand life. We almost, you know, from a biological scientific perspective, life, right? Gold directed action, self-directed action. Consciousness, there's a difference between conscious beings and non-conscious beings. Awareness of existence, like an amoeba, has no awareness of its own. But a cat clearly has awareness of its own. Do we really understand that? Do we understand how it works? Not really. Computers, can computers become aware? And then, I don't think so because I think you need biology. I think you need life in order to have consciousness, right? But there's a whole idea of AI, you know, becoming aware and, you know, taking over the world. But I think it's tied to biology. It's tied to life. And then you have another layer called free will. Observable. But yeah, we don't understand it yet. And there's a huge amount of science that has to go from understanding life more fully, to understanding consciousness, to understanding what free will is. But, okay, we're a young species. There's a lot of work to be done. All right, let's go, yeah. What do you think is driving the increase in support for socialist ideas nowadays? That's, um... It's too kiddy's name. No, I don't think it's stupid. That's too easy. You know, I talk about this a lot in some of my other talks. Socialism is consistent with the moral values that we generally, as a culture, hold. We hold moral values that have to do with caring for others more than we care about ourselves. Sacrifice, selflessness, sharing. We teach our kids to share in the playground. Well, socialism is about sharing. It's about caring about others more than you care about yourself. It's about giving to those in need and fund those who have ability to those in need. Who's against that? Morally, we believe all those things are beautiful. And then we say, oh, but politically, we think it doesn't work. Nobody buys that. So I think we have a moral system that's inconsistent with the lives we live. We live generally self-interested lives that are focused on trading, win-win relationships. We don't share our car with our stranger. We don't share our stuff with anybody who wants to come around. And yet morally, that's what our morality requires us to do. Socialism is just a reminder that our morality is important. So socialism is more consistent with our moral code that we all live with, that we all grew up with, that our mothers taught us, that our preachers preach to us, that our philosophers teach us. So socialism is right. It's just it's moral. What we need, in my view, is to replace, not socialism. Socialism's easy. It's the place on moral code, the moral code of altruism. Not as just being nice to people, but as other people as a standard of your life with a moral code of what I then call rational self-interest, which says, no, my life is what matters. And I should live my life or myself in a rational, long-term way. And then capitalism is obvious, because it's the only political system that allows you, that leaves you free to pursue your own values for your own life. So socialism is attractive because of morality. And it keeps coming back, so people see it fail, so it goes out of fashion. And then they forget, or they buy into these ideas, that they didn't do it right. But it always feels good. It feels good because it's consistent with the moral code that we've been brought up with. And unless we challenge that moral code, socialism will keep winning. It'll keep coming back and keep chipping away at us. All right. My question concerns the impediments to enterprise represented by tariff and non-tariff barriers. It's a big issue in America at the moment. How's that going? And any day in this country, we're going to be consumed with the question of how we deal with tariffs after Brexit. The EU is terrified. They've said that they're terrified that we will become a Singapore off the coast of Europe, which they can't countenance. If the government comes to you and says, Yaron, please advise us. What should we do? I mean, I always dream. We'd be the wealth of nations. I mean, you don't have to come to me. I'm a little bit radical. Just go to Adam Smith, moderate in comparison. I mean, zero tariffs. Unilateral zero tariffs is the only just morally and economically sound policy. So I don't think it's the European Union that's afraid of you becoming Singapore. I think it's you being afraid of becoming Singapore. I think it's the Brits because, you know, I don't think there's a chance in hell you will become Singapore, unfortunately. But you're working on it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Adam Smith Institute is working on it, but it's, you know, and it's Adam Smith. So, you know, morally, you have no business intervening with my transaction with another human being as long as those transactions are voluntary, are voluntary. So I choose to transact with somebody in China. Why is it anybody's business, right? So countries don't trade. That's the first myth to get rid of. Countries don't trade. There's no trade between the European Union and Great Britain. There's trade between you and some French guy who sells you wine. And you choose to buy that wine. Why is the government stepping in and taxing that transaction? Any differently that it taxes a transaction if you buying, God forbid, English wine. So all it is is a discriminatory tax. And it's immoral because it's interfering the voluntary transaction between individuals through corporate entities. You know, I go to Walmart and I buy my stuff that's imported from China, but it's imported from some Chinese company that's, you know, it's individual straight. So, you know, the idea of trade deficit's a bad. I have a massive trade deficit with my grocery store. I go and I buy stuff and I give them money and they never use the money to hire me to come and speak. I mean, it's terrible. It's, I mean, if you boil these things down to what they really mean, that's what they really mean, right? That's what they really mean. Always think about how do individuals transact. Because that's all we are, individuals transacting. Countries are just abstractions. There's no such thing. And they don't trade. Individuals trade. So, the only rational policy is a zero tariff. And if the Chinese want to tax the Chinese guy for trading with me, then that's on the Chinese. And the Chinese guy should be pissed off at his government and try to get them to eliminate the tariff. But it's none of my government. My government's job is, in the world we live in today, is to get off my back, is to tax me and interfere in my voluntary transactions as little as possible. So if anybody asked me, zero unilateral, zero tariff is the best trade policy possible. Simply, do you think young people should go to university? Do I think young people should go to university? It depends. What you're going to study? If you're going to study gender studies, probably not. If you're going to study engineering, probably yes. Economics, it depends where. It really depends. I think it very much about, I don't think it's a mandate. I don't think everybody should go. I don't think it's true. That everybody shouldn't go. And it also depends on your character. It depends on which university. But I don't think there's one answer that fits everybody. We'll do these quickly, just to get everybody out. The Etochure explains how inequality, isn't that freedom is a good thing because of the economic process? No, I think freedom is a good thing because it is the only system appropriate for individual life. That is, I think what I value is the individual and his moral right to pursue his values as he sees fit, to use his rational mind, to use his productive ability to make his life as best that he can. And freedom is what he needs in order to be able to do it. So it's a requirement of human survival. If you think about what makes us human and what makes it possible to survive as humans, it's to use our mind. It's to use our reason. Reason, the enemy of reason is coercion. So if I want to make it possible for individuals to thrive, to do well in their lives, what I want to do is extract coercion from society. That, by definition, is freedom. Freedom is the absence of coercion. And I institute a government to do exactly that. The only reason I have a government is to be the monopoly over the use of retaliatory force, to extract force from society. To protect us, from force. So I start with the individual with the needs of a human being to thrive. It's just to use their mind. The enemy of that is coercion. I want to eliminate coercion. That's when you get freedom. No, it turns out, not surprisingly, that if you leave people free, they also produce more and standard living goes up and all of the good stuff. Yeah? You've talked a lot about an individual becoming the best that they can, to accumulate their much wealth as they can, and I like that. But what about inheritance? And is there some way in which that unfairly disadvantages are payable, or is there a way to use one of the inheritance? Yeah, I mean, my good inheritance is simple. It's my money. I get to do whatever the hell I want with it. I could, before I die, decide to burn it all. Should you be allowed to stop me? I'm going to do a big bonfire. Let's get all my money together and burn it all. No. I want to give it to my kids. Some kids, it's like burning it all. No. Cronism is when coercion is used from the government to give out favors. Now, is it bad for the kids? It could be. Yeah, it could be. But that's my decision, not your decision. And maybe my kids say, we don't want your money, because it's bad for us. Haven't met those kids yet. So, there are a lot of things that can happen, but the key point is a property rights point. It's my money. I get to do what I want with it. And it's not at somebody else's expense. It's not like my money should be somebody else's money, or my money is at somebody else's expense. And by giving it to the kids, what, we didn't give it to somebody who is unrelated? Why is giving it to them okay, right? So, my money, I get to do what I want, including put it in a will that I want to give it all to my kids, or to burn it, or to give it to a charity, or to give it to my cat, as some rich Americans have done. It's none of anybody's business. So, it's a purely populated issue. Right, we really are on time now. These last two. All right, go. What are your reasons for thinking that animals don't have rights? And if, in time, humans, majorities and certain countries decide that we do think that animals should have the right, namely, that rights to be free from human induced suffering, do you think that would be positive beyond just the fact that majorities wanted it? So, no, I wouldn't view it as positive, because animals don't have rights. So, you can't vote them having rights when they don't have them. Rights, again, are freedoms from coercion. And the reason coercion is a bad thing. Yeah, one more, and with that, alcohol is more important in terms of what I have to say. So, the reason coercion is bad is because of, because I need to reason in order to succeed in life, in order to live, in order to even exist as human beings. That's not true of animals. Animals don't have a reasoning capability. They don't, I mean, indeed, they live, most of them live by coercion. That is the way in which they live. They eat other animals. They force themselves onto other animals. The rights come out of a particular form of existence. And it doesn't apply to other animals. Now, it doesn't mean what you'd be called to animals. It doesn't mean what you'd make animals suffer for no reason. But it also means they have no legal rights. It means that morally, you can say, why make an animal suffer if it doesn't have to? Why treat something that's alive and life has value? In a way that is negative. So, you know, if somebody, somebody tortured animals, I wouldn't want to be different. But I don't think the government should get involved. Okay, last question. Mariana Massigarti, she works at UCL. She's written a book called The Entrepreneurial State where she shows that a lot of the products in your phone, so the internet, GPS, touch screen, were all funded by the government. And this, for example, is Huawei, which is state owned. So doesn't that go against your fees? I don't think Huawei is, I don't know if it's state owned 100%. I think it's the state owned part of it. No, for a number of reasons. Huawei doesn't really innovate. It copies and it does. And the innovation all happened in free societies. And the copying is done to a large extent because the state of China steals or forces companies to provide them with intellectual property that they can't create. And therefore they steal it. So they would have copied from the US government who... Yeah, so let's get, let me get to the US government. That's one, item number one was Huawei and China. Item number two is the fact, yeah. So a lot of the stuff in here was developed in internet and stuff like that was developed partially. And I emphasize partially by government funding. Yeah, I mean, when the government monopolizes a certain field like the funding of basic science, then it's going to turn out that it has indirectly funded everything, every innovation because they're the only ones funding basic science. Now why are they the only ones funding basic science? Why don't corporations fund basic science? No, they used to. The reason they don't fund basic science anymore is the government's doing it. So why should they, right? So it's called crowding out. It happens in economics all the time. If the government gets into a particular business, private enterprise leaves because the government's cost of capital is zero. Yeah. Just from the crowd in and out. So Singapore, for example, 80% of property in Singapore is their own. Yes, that's true. In China, 100% of property is state-owned, but they don't act like it's state-owned. So they basically have long-term leases on all the properties in Singapore. It's the same thing in Singapore. Those skyscrapers are built on leased property, 99-year leases or whatever. So there's pseudo, if you will, there's a pretence of private property then. What matters is the arrangements people create, and I don't have time to get into this, but read up on the first on the, no, I don't, right? Read up on the transition in China from collective farming to private farming and how what the Chinese, what these little villages did is create a pseudo-private property where they pretended you own this piece of land and I own that piece of land. You get all the economic benefits from this piece of land even though the government owns all the land. But as long as I can get the economic benefits from it, I treat it as if it's mine. And that's what matters. Now, if they really had private property, it would be better, but you can get a long way, as Singapore has, as China has, with the pretence, a certain perspective on private property without having the full right to it, which would be their ideal. Innovation in the United States is ultimately useless. So that basic science is useless without the private sector taking it and doing something productive with it. None of those government innovations were used in practical actual applications without the private sector. And before government invested in basic science, private entrepreneurs, private universities, private companies invested in basic science. But once the government crowds you out, then that's all the money there is. Now, I would hypothesize, since we're doing hypotheticals, right, that in a world with no government funding for basic science, in a world with no government ownership of any property, we would be like 100 years ahead of what we are today technologically, wealth-wise, progress-wise, and in every other aspect. Have you not just said that the government crowded out private finance? Yes. The already private finance came first, so why weren't we already there? Perhaps we could, uh... We were, if you look at human history, for 100,000 years, we went nowhere. We were flat. You look at wealth, you look at income, we were flat. And then suddenly we went like that. And if you look at economic growth in the 19th century in the U.K., in the United States, so much worse than Europe, we were there. We were growing at much faster rates than we are today. Much, much faster rates than we are today. Now, partially, that is, you start very low, but we had to create all the capital. China has it easy, because they can get capital from us, and knowledge from us, and everything from us. But we had to create it all from scratch, and yet we grew at phenomenal economic rates through World War I, because we left things primarily in the private sector. Now, none of that was perfect. I wish it had been perfect, but it wasn't, right? In America, where it's slavery, here, you had all kinds of weird laws. But to the extent that those markets were free, they were unbelievably successful, and to the extent that we regulate control, crowd out, do all that. Economic growth has flattened out, and is not very exciting these days. So, yes, government intervention reduces economic growth. Well, you said to thank a good teacher with a check. I'm afraid we haven't quite got one of those, but in under here, we do have an Adam Smith tie-in mail. Wonderful. I've got a great one. Thank you. Cheers.