 That in Brazil, the liberal voices are new, and the liberal voices are young. And you've got a young generation, so I've spent a lot of time with young people in Brazil. Now yes, the majority of young people have left us like they are, if you will. But you have a vibrant, large community of pro-free market young people, which is unusual. Mr. Brook, thank you for accepting our... It's my pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure to hear you. So, you know, I would like to begin asking you, how do you see the debate about liberalism in the whole world? And then we come to Brazil. Well, I think those of us who believe in free markets and those of us who believe in individual liberty, we're losing. It's the bottom line. You see that throughout the world. Europe is moving away from the classical liberal free market individual liberty perspective. You're seeing a rise of kind of authoritarian right. You're seeing a rise of an authoritarian left. And those of us who believe in actual freedom, in actual liberty, have no voice in Europe. You're seeing the same thing in the United States. You know, Donald Trump is far from kind of a classical liberal perspective, a free market perspective. He is a central planner, just a central planner of the right instead of a central planner on the left. And of course, what he has done is he's made the left even more radical, even more extreme, so that both are becoming more authoritarian. And then, you know, before the interview, we were talking about China. You're even seeing in China for many, many years, China was heading in the right direction, what I would consider towards greater freedom, towards more liberalization, towards more free markets, but also more free speech. I used to go there regularly and give speeches and I was never interfered with. Now we're seeing an authoritarian, the current president is very authoritarian, restrictions on speech, restrictions on books published, and restrictions now on economics as well. So we're seeing state-owned enterprises come to dominate the economy more rather than the free enterprise. And then you come to Latin America, you know, where you're seeing the same, you know, the same tensions here as well. You know, you've got Venezuela, obviously it's kind of a symbol of what happens when you take on a completely leftist view of the world. You've got Chile, which has been this amazing success story in Latin America, but nobody wants to copy them. We are trying to, but not successful. It's a challenge, but everybody's trying. You would think 30 years ago you would have copied them, or Argentina, and Argentina of course is heading in the wrong direction dramatically. So I think generally in the world one can say that the cause of individual liberty is losing the battle, and it's scary. It's a scary time. Where does people were hide all this time? Well, the ideas, the anti-liberal ideas are always there. And I would argue really, and this is what Ein-Rans... They were ashamed to speak loud? No, they've changed their minds, people changed their minds. And what has happened is that the ideas of individual freedom have not been defended properly, and have not been grounded properly, grounded philosophically, grounded in ideas. And they have been weak for, you know, for 200 years they've been weak. And they go up and down. So sometimes they're a little bit more popular, but they're never really popular. They never really see them fully implemented. So when somebody comes up, when they're problems, like I don't know, the mass immigration in Europe, or economic problems, or economic slowdown, and demagogues on the left and the right rise up, and they say, you know, it's that individual freedom. That's what's bad. We need more control. We need more planning. People always seem to, that seems to resonate with them. And until, I think it's incumbent on us, those of us who really believe in freedom, those of us who believe in individualism, those of us who believe in the human mind and reason. It's incumbent on us to be better at how we defend the case for capitalism, the case for freedom. I think we've been weak. I think we're not philosophical enough. We're not foundational enough. We're not radical enough. You know, the left has no problem being radical. And even the right has no problem being radical. But we on that, you know, we want a little bit of capitalism. We don't want to shake the boat too much. Well, I don't. I want capitalism. I want the privatization of everything. I want two free markets. And that's something we need to fight for, and we need to present, you know, young people want to believe in something. They want an ideal. They want something they can fight for. And socialism is very, very good. And so to some extent is conservatism in presenting them with an ideal worth fighting for. We're not. We need to romanticize capitalism and to provide a vision of what a capitalist liberal world looks like and get them excited about it. And that's, I think that's the only way we can, we can, we can change, we can change the direction of, that the world is really heading in. Well, Mr. Brook, let's talk about Brazil now, you know, and that we are coming now, maybe a little bit late in the liberalism world. So we are coming from the social democracy and we have this transition with the new president, Jair Bolsonaro, which is here for nine months now. And are we late for this debate? Can we, you know that Brazil has a very big state and we fight for privatization for years. And, but now it seems that the liberalism speech is gaining force here. Do you see that we can thrive in there? I mean, first it's never too late. It's never too late to be free. It's never too late to advocate for freedom. It's never too late to advocate and to implement privatization. It's never too late. So yes, I think there is, I'm optimistic about Brazil. I think you have a chance. You are suffering from the tension that is all over the West I think and that is the tension between conservatism and the true kind of classical liberal free market ideas. Conservatives want to conserve. They don't want to be radical. They don't want to change too much. They don't want to change too fast and they are wedded to control because conservatism by its very nature is a controlling philosophy. Mainly they want to control our spiritual values, right? Our social values. Because this is the difference between the left and the right, right? The left thinks everything is material, Marx. Marxism is materialism. And the spiritual is unimportant. So it's fine to be free in the spiritual because it's not important, but we want to control the material because that's important. The right thinks the material is not important. The spiritual is important. So they want to control the spiritual, all our social values and they're willing to let us do the stuff in the material. I believe that we should be free in both realms because both are important. I want to be free socially. I want to be free spiritually and I want to be free materially. I want to be free, period. That is, I want no coercion. I want people to stop telling me what I can and cannot do, what I can and cannot think, what I can and that's true in my bedroom and that's true in my boardroom. That's true in every realm of my life. So there is this tension between conservatism and these ideas and you see this tension in America. You saw this tension with Ronald Reagan. That's what we are facing now here in Brazil also. Ronald Reagan made a deal with the devil and the devil in Ronald Reagan's case was what's called in America in those days the moral majority. He made a deal with evangelical Christians and he brought them into the Republican Party and made them a big force in the Republican Party and the deal was, you let me do the stuff in economics, you let me deregulate, you let me cut taxes and I'll give you what you want, which is power. What they really want is power. And the Republican Party has been basically destroyed by the religious right in America, that the conservative religious right and the voices for, kind of the Ronald Reagan voice for the American exceptionalism, for liberty, for freedom, for capitalism, for individual rights. You know, maybe, maybe we are going, yes, maybe we are going to this path. I mean, I don't know because, on the other hand, the flip side of that is that in Brazil, the liberal voices are new and the liberal voices are young and you've got a young generation, so I've spent a lot of time with young people in Brazil. And now, yes, the majority of young people are leftist like they are, I view it, you have a vibrant, large community of pro-free market young people, which is unusual. You know, there's more free market young people in Brazil than they probably are in America. And, you know, there's an organization which I think is a good news for us. Which is good news for Brazil. It gives a good perspective. It gives you a future and it gives, and these are people who go out into the streets. If they don't get what they want, they are passionate, they're engaged, some of the young people who brought down your former president who supported justice being imposed on another former president. So these are people who engage in a debate and who believe in individual freedom. And to the extent that it's a young movement, I think that there's a positive future for Brazil. So right now you have this tension between conservatism and liberal, in a liberal view, which I think exists all over the West. And I think that the deal that the liberals get the economy and the conservatives get the rest is problematic, but better than nothing in a sense. And the question is how is this going to play out? And the hope is that those forces that are trying to liberalize the economy, privatize it, get the government off of our backs, get the government out of our lives in at least an economic realm, can be successful. And then once people realize that this is a good idea, then you can get a liberal voices that want the government to get off our backs on everything. And you move more towards a more liberty oriented future. But it's going to take time. These things don't happen overnight. And it's going to take fighting. It's going to take the people who believe in liberty to be persistent, to be principled, to not give in, to not compromise and to really fight. Again, we need to be fighters. Otherwise we'll get trampled all over. Let's talk about the business environment here in Brazil. You know that we have in one side, we have a big state. In the other side, we have a huge economy made by small and medium companies. We have large companies as well, but the fundamental is in small and medium companies. How do you think we can include or save or protect if they have to, if they should be saved? This kind of a business, because we have a transition to go from taking down the state and make the business environment more powerful. And we just had a huge recession here. So how to manage this unbalanced environment now? You have to be very careful not to try to manage it. It's going to be messy. It's going to be painful. There's no way around that. It already is. And it's going to be more. And what you need to do is liberalize, free up, get rid of regulations, get rid of controls, overwhelming in large numbers. And yes, some businesses are going to fail. Some people are going to lose income. That's just, that's what Schumpter called creative destruction. But that's what happens under freedom. But what will arise from that is going to be so much better. It's going to be so much more dynamic and innovative and exciting. And people's attitudes are going to change. Because today, you know, in Brazil, but in any country that's gone through the kind of statism, socialism, central planning, there's a certain passive mentality even among businessmen. You know, things are the same. They're not going to change because the regulator is protecting me, right? The state is protecting me. Yeah, that's what happens in Brazil. You're used to have the state to save us for everything. You're rid of that. And until you have that mental change where business becomes what it should be. A challenge. Exciting. That you have to actually engage. That you have to work hard. You have to think. You have to produce. You have to innovate. You have to compete. You have to cooperate. You have to do all the things that business do when they're free. We have to get away from this nanny state, from protection, from protectionist policies. And the more you wait to do it, the more we need to protect them. The harder it's going to be, the more painful it'll be. It's much easier. Expensiveer. Much more expensive it'll be. It's much easier to get over with. Do it quick. Do it fast. You know how ripping a bandaid? If you do it slowly, it really, really hurts. If you rip it off, it hurts a lot in a minute, but then it starts. Then at the healing, the pain goes away. So the faster you move towards capitalism, the better. If you would do a list of priorities, should we begin with fighting the bureaucracy, do privatizations, or eliminate some taxes? Is there any list, or should we go with everything at the same time? I think you have to prioritize. And I would prioritize. I would prioritize privatization, and cutting regulation, cutting subsidies. So I would prioritize... We're good at that. Giving subsidies. Yes, I know you're good at that. That's the cronyism. That's the corruption. That's all the bad stuff that leads to all the negative outcomes. The thing you have to work on is to separate government from business. All the corruption comes from government involvement in business. And now I'm a businessman. I'm trying to protect myself from the government. Well, a bribe here, a bribe there, or just schmoozing, or just being nice to them. There's all kinds of forms of corruption. Gets me favorable regulation versus bad regulation. Gets me favorable deals. You've got to sever that. I would... If you had to do one thing, I would zero out subsidies. So you would say, within 12 months, there are going to be no subsidies in the Brazilian economies, not the farmers, not the business owners, not the big business, not the little business, not a medium-sized business. Zero. And then at the same time, we are going to reduce regulations by 25% a year for the next four years of the presidency. 25% a year. And at the same time, we're going to privatize. But not privatize like some countries do. Where you privatize and regulate. And then you haven't done anything. So you've given the people a sense of private ownership, but the government still controls everything. All the important decisions are still the government. Privatize means privatize. It means the private sector gets to make all the decisions. So you've got to really privatize. And if you do those three things, then you get rid of bureaucracy because all those regulators don't have a job anymore. You get rid of them and you start shrinking government. Then you tackle taxes and you tackle maybe the welfare state and other things. Of course, the other side of this, which I think is really, really important, particularly in Brazil, because you have a problem with this, is the rule of law. Nothing matters if you don't have the rule of law. So there has to be a credible way to convey to the people that you have an independent judiciary that is truly independent of politics and that it's uncorruptible. Power institutions. So some judges have to be fired. Some judges have to be replaced and maybe raise their salaries. Maybe make it more lucrative to be a judge so that they're less tempted by bribery. But you have to establish the rule of law and then get the government out of the way as quickly as possible. And yes, it'll be painful. I'm not saying it's going to be easy. But now's the time in the first year of administration is the time to do the painful thing because as you get closer to re-election, the politicians become more and more sensitive to the vote. But you get the pain done in the first two years, then your benefits on the upswing once the election comes around. If you wait, no change will happen. Mr. Brooks, as you know, we are a poor country and we have one of the biggest inequality rate in the world. How can we deal with that? Making this huge change that you're proposing because, you know, a lot of people that don't have anything to do with the corruption or with the business system or with the regulated system, how can we protect these people? I'd say two things. One, forget about inequality. Inequality doesn't matter. What matters is poverty. Inequality doesn't matter. What the gap is doesn't matter. If everybody's doing better, I mean, it's irrelevant. It has no economic consequences and it should have no social consequences. Focus on the issue of poverty. And the way you solve the issue of poverty is make it easy to start businesses. Make it easy to grow businesses. Again, if you get the government out of the way, there will be huge job creation. That is the best way to solve the issue of poverty. It's to give people jobs. If you get rid of the cronyism, if you get rid of the corruption, then people will earn wealth only if they produce value. There won't be the sense, he's rich because he knows people in the government. Everybody will say, he's rich because he's producing something. He's creating a value. So the first thing to do is everything I said about separating the government from business. But the second thing to do is you've got to empower the poor in Brazil. And you empower the poor in Brazil to take away all the barriers to them creating jobs and getting jobs. But the second way to do it... I'm just cutting you, because what is the role of education? Because we... It's big, but it's the next step. It's very hard to start with education because if you start with education, you're starting through the government schools, and government schools can never be improved significantly. So the way to solve the education problem is to privatize it. That is hard, and that is difficult. The first thing you want to do is create economic opportunities. And one of the things I would do, and it's hard to do in Brazil, but I think it's necessary to do Brazil, is you've got to give poor people property rights. So you've got favelas all over Brazil. Give them the ownership over the land. For example, I mean, I was in... I walked into a favela in Rio and went all the way up, right? They have the best views in the world. There's no more beautiful city in the world than Rio de Janeiro. And the people in the favela on the top have the best views in the world. If they had property rights, if they owned the land, they would be rich, not poor. Because I... I mean, a lot of people would love to buy that land, would love to be there, and they would get the money, and they would go and start a business, they would go... So, Henanda de Soto, the Peruvian economist, has a whole book about how property rights are so crucial for poor people, because then they can leverage that property rights to create capital, which then they can start businesses with and they create economic activity with. Brazil has this amazing opportunity. You've got millions and millions, tens of millions of people who live in these favelas. They don't own the property. Nobody owns the property. It's state property. What have you got? You lose zero. You lose nothing by giving them that land, by giving them ownership and making them owners of something which creates self-esteem and creates capital. So, I think there are lots of opportunities to deal with poverty in Brazil that are not being taken advantage of, that unfortunately nobody's talking about for all kinds of political and philosophical reasons. And to really solve the problem, and of course, as an economy grows, look at China. China over the last 30, 40 years has brought almost a billion people out of poverty. How? Just freeing up business. Just they don't redistribute wealth. They don't have welfare. They just liberalize business. Brazil is in a much better situation than China is to do that. And they didn't invest in education. They're investing in education after fact. And education at the end of the day, the only way to solve that problem, and we have the same problem in America and I think all over the world, is to privatize it. You know, Mr. Brook, I used to think that I am a liberal, but here I'm far away from that because I don't know if it's a romantic way of, or there's some compaction because we see the poverty every day here in Brazil. It's hard for us to think or to, you know, take. But the passion, that passion about poor people that everybody has, that the left typically has, has done them harm, has brought them nothing. All this welfare, all this redistribution of wealth, everywhere in the world, has not brought people out of poverty. What brings people out of poverty is jobs, is work. And the only way to create jobs and work, and private property, is to privatize, privatize, privatize. And they will, you know, again, if we look at the places in the world that have brought people out of poverty, that where people have come out of poverty, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, it's through capitalism, not through empathy. It's through expecting people to work for a living and creating the environment in which jobs are created. That's what will create these opportunities. And then, once Brazil becomes a richer country, then you start thinking about education. But again, the way to think about education is through the private sector, not through the government sector. Look, I believe the problem we have as liberals is that we're not radical enough. It's time to become really radical. The other side, the conservatives and the liberals, they have no shame in where they want to take the world. I want to take the world to where the government is not involved in my life. It's there to do one thing and one thing only. That's to protect me, which the Brazilian government doesn't do very well at. So the Brazilian government took all its resources and just put them into police, justice, and I guess in military, although I'm not sure who your enemies are, so I'm not sure you need one, but you really need police and you really need judiciary. You need to be focused on those things and let the market solve all the other problems. I mean, this could be one of the richest countries in the world. You have the natural resources, you have the people, you have the ability. It's just a matter of not stepping on your own feet. It's not creating your own barriers, which is what the government is doing to us. We have to believe in that and not be afraid of it. So my last question is, who would you call a genuine liberal as a leader today in the world? Or do you have someone that you can point and say, this is a genuine liberal? No, unfortunately, there's nobody. Unfortunately, you know... It's not you. I'm not a leader, not a political leader. There's no political leadership today, unfortunately, in the world in terms of a genuine perspective on freedom and on free markets and on kind of a free world. In the past, like 10, 20 years ago? No, it's been a long time. It's been a long time. There might have been better people. Certainly, Margaret Thatcher did a lot in the UK, but even she, partially, I think because of all limitations, particularly because of the political context she was in, she couldn't go further and she didn't go further. But you know, the last real liberals probably have to go back to the 20s. You probably have to go 100 years to find political leaders who are really oriented towards individual liberty and individual freedom. They might have been in a country here, but there's no difference with it. But it's failed because we haven't set the foundations from an educational perspective. So I think my job, the job of people like me, is to educate people about the beauty of freedom, the potential of capitalism and of true individual liberty. And until we educate large numbers of people, and that's why I'm excited about young people in Brazil because I think they have that passion, they have that interest. I educate millions of people before we will see real change and Brazil might move a little bit towards more freedom right now, but it will not sustain itself unless all of the people watching the show and all of their friends join the cause and get passionate about it and are willing to really fight for it. Well, Mr. Brook, thank you very much for the interview. Very interesting views. It takes courage. We need courage these are times. Yes, it takes courage. So thank you very much.