 Thank you, everyone, for coming here today to his talk at the New York School of Dissociology, and his civil liberties. It's our pleasure today to invite Dr. Yaron Brooke, who's Executive Director of the In-Run Institute, who's playing over from the US to come speak to you today on the topic of the morality of capitalism. Thank you. Thank you, and thank you for putting on the event. Thank you both for making this happen and for all of you for coming today. So we want to talk about capitalism, and so let me define the way I use the term, because I'm going to say the word a lot today. And I want to make clear that we're all talking about the same thing, because I'm pretty sure we're not just right off the bat. So let me be clear on what I mean by capitalism. When I talk about capitalism, I mean free markets. And when we say free markets, what do we mean? Free of what? Free of what? Free of government regulations, free of government controls, free of government manipulation. So free market, when I talk about free market, when I talk about capitalism, I mean really free markets. Markets that do not have government intervention in them. Markets that do not have regulations. Markets that do not have government controls. Governments that define property rights, they make sure they know fraudsters, they know crooks, they know cheats, they know people stealing your money, and they leave markets alone. So that's what I think capitalism means. That's what the word, the term, the concept means. So let me ask you this. Do we have capitalism today? You're not sure? No. Not by that definition, right? What we have today is a mixture. We have some capitalism in a sense, some freedom. It's not that government controls everything. It's not that government regulates every single aspect of a business or every single activity that we engage in. So we have some freedom, and we have some regulations. Some industries have a lot of controls and regulations and a little bit of freedom. Some businesses have lots of freedom and a little bit of regulations and controls. But there's no business, and I'll talk mainly about the United States because that's the market, that's the economy I know. But no industry in the United States is completely free. There are few that are completely government, post office, for example. But there are no industries that are completely free that are laissez-faire, that are truly capitalist. So capitalism is free markets. And what I want to argue today to start off is that to the extent markets are left free, to the extent markets have been left free in history, they're incredibly successful. They create wealth. They produce goods. They raise standard of livings. They benefit people tremendously. Indeed, no economic system, no economic system in human history has benefited mankind more than capitalism. None of them come even close. For the last 250 years, we've been running a social-political economic experiment. For 250 years, we have experimented with a bunch of different systems. We've experimented with pretty close to capitalism, free markets, really unregulated markets. We've never had it 100%, but we've come close in particular places, in particular times. And we've experimented with 100% statism, communism, fascism, where the state controls everything. And then we've experimented with all kinds of mixtures in between, some freedom, some control a little bit, a lot, all kinds of mixtures all through. And I'd argue, and I know a lot of your economics professors would disagree, I would argue, that the overwhelming evidence, the overwhelming evidence out there is that the more capitalism you have, the more freedom you allow markets, the less government controls, regulations, taxes, manipulation, the greater the standard of living, the better off people are, the more wealth is produced, the more innovation happens, the better life is. And you can take some historical examples. People love to talk about the latest issue. I don't know about the UK, but the issue in the United States right now that everybody's abuzz about is inequality. Everybody's really welled up about inequality. There's this French economist that just wrote a book, and it's been hailed. There's the masterpiece of all time, one of the greatest books in economics. I'm in the middle of it, so I won't completely tell you what I think about it until I finish, but it's not fair. He's not after a good start, let me put it that way. For my perspective, take inequality. What was inequality like 250 years ago? Before capitalism, before there were any really free markets, before the Industrial Revolution, before Adam Smith. What was the inequality like? Structure, so was there a lot of inequality? In some sense, you could say yes, there was massive inequality. Because the very rich, there were very few of them by the way, the aristocrats, lived the kind of life that the very poor could not imagine. How many people were poor? Just give it in, put it in perspective. How many people were poor? 250, 300 years ago. A percentage, there's a percentage of the population. 5%? Almost 100, quite a lot. Yeah, almost 100, like 96%, 97%. Almost everybody on the planet was poor. And it always being poor. Most people 300 years ago worked from sunrise to sunset to feed themselves with nothing left over, no vacations. Vacations are product of capitalism. No restaurants, we can talk about trade unions, I promise. They have, yeah, we'll talk about it. Otherwise, I'll get distracted. No vacations, no restaurants, no extra wealth, no education. Nobody had time to be educated. Nobody could afford to get educated. What was the life expectancy about? About 36, under 40. So most of you are almost, you know, you're hitting middle age, right, in that world. I mean, it's hard to imagine. Because life expectancy, for example, today, even in poor countries, is very high, or relatively high. Not as high as ours, but relatively high. Because they benefit enormously from the advancement the West has made in health, in understanding disease, and therefore life expectancy has risen there. But it's still true that in very poor countries today, people don't take vacations. They don't go to restaurants. They live from sunrise to sunset, working hard, making enough money, making enough product to feed themselves, and that's it. And this is true of all of human history. I don't have a, we have a marker. Oh, I can use a marker. This is cool. So this is human history. This is time. This is wealth per capita. So wealth per person. This is 10,000 years ago. It doesn't matter exactly when, but at the beginning. This is what the graph looks like. What it looks like. Wealth barely increased. It went up and down a little bit. There were better periods and worse periods. But basically, on average, stayed flat for 10,000 years until it goes like that. What is that year? Anybody want to guess on the year? There is no one year. But it would be a good year to put on there. 1750s. 1756. Yeah, 1750s, a nice round year. I like 1776. They're all somewhat arbitrary. Because two things happened in 1776. What happened to 1776? One, the United States has found it. What's the second thing that happened in 1776? The World of Nations. The World of Nations is published by Adam Smith, the first book, really articulating the case of capitalism. Really articulating the case for free markets. That is capitalism. That is free markets. And indeed, the 19th century, that post-1776 period, is a period where we came the closest to a pure form of capitalism in human history. And we did the best. We started with nothing. And even economic growth was astounding. Nobody had ever seen anything like it. And nobody has ever seen anything like it. And yet, we in the West, for at least 100 years now, have been systematically chipping away at the system. We've systematically been taking it apart. We've systematically been increasing government regulations, government controls, government taxation, government manipulation over the markets. So we took this system that was incredible in terms of raising all of us from poverty. We were all, I mean, I don't know. There might be some aristocratic families here. We are at Oxford after all. But for the most part, all of us were poor and middle-aged by this point. I would be dead quite a while ago. And bringing us to where we are today, and yet, at an accelerating pace, I would argue, we're abandoning the system. We're turning our back to it. We're evading it. And it's not just that we can look at the 19th century. Again, we've been doing this experiment all over the world. So take Hong Kong. Anybody be into Hong Kong? We've got a few. Everybody should go to Hong Kong at least once in their life. Hong Kong, 75 years ago, was a fishing village. There was nothing there. And today, the 7 and 1 half million people live in this place in the middle of nowhere in the center. No natural resources. There's nothing there. What did the British bring to Hong Kong that made it a place that 7 and 1 half million people wanted to come to? What did they bring there? They bought trade. Probably rights and will of law. Yeah, what they really bought is property rights and will of law, which is the underpinnings of trade. Trade is made possible by the fact that you know whose property it is, and you know what transaction will be followed through. And you know you have a court system that's going to obitrate any dispute that happens. But it's property rights that they bought. No safety net. I mean, there's a small safety net in Hong Kong. No welfare, no socialized medicine, none of this stuff that we all take for granted. And yet, it went from a fishing village to a population of 7 and 1 half million in 75 years. Those 7 and 1 half million people have an average per capita wealth or income that is equivalent to that of the United States. So they're, on average, wealthy. They're more skyscrapers in Hong Kong than New York City. It's a vibrant, energetic, productive, creative, amazing place. And all they had was property loans. All they had was capitalism. That's all they had, markets. Leave them alone. Let them go. And people came on rafts. People did anything they could to try to escape whatever regimes they had in Asia to get to this place. And the experiment is particularly striking, because right next to Hong Kong, there's this amazing country called China, which used to be an empire filled with natural resources history and culture and everything, right? And during the same period, Hong Kong went from zero to 7 and 1 half million in all this wealth. China starved 60 million people. They starved because they couldn't produce enough food for themselves, because they were experimenting, while the experimenting capitalism was going on over here, they were experimenting in socialism. And we're going to start reality of what works and what doesn't. And when China stops experimenting in socialism and applies capitalism a little bit in a few select places, what happens in those places? They boom. They explode with economic growth. I mean, if you ever go to Southeast China or to Shanghai and you see the kind of wealth that's been created, that's created by freedom, by government getting out of the way. In the areas where Chinese government is still in the business of business, in the economy, heavily in the economy, those areas have not gone. Anyway, or anyway new as far as far as those areas where they basically left them alone. So, my point is this experiment's being played out in history. The evidence is unequivocal. The more economic freedom you allow, the better the results, the more wealth, the greater the state of living. Life is much better. And yet, we reject the system. We're turning away from it. We don't want capitalism. We don't want free markets. We blame everything on it. You know, financial crisis. What caused the financial crisis? What does everybody say caused the financial crisis? Criminal behavior on Wall Street. Criminal behavior on Wall Street? You know, why was it allowed? Because they know not enough regulations because there were too much free markets on Wall Street, right? Too much freedom, too much capitalism. The headlines in the papers were all capitalism failed. But they were, but the very assumption there is bizarre. Because what is the most regulated industry in America? Well, you guys don't know the United States, but it's, I think it's actually better here than it is in the US. But what is the most regulated industry in the entire country of the United States? Banking and finance. Every bank in the United States is regulated by five different regulatory agencies. There's not an action that a bank takes. There's not a product that they sell that is not approved by the government, by government bureaucrat, by government regulator. The leverage ratio the banks have was approved. The products that they have were approved. The type of trades that they did were approved. This is the most controlled market. Or take mortgages that failed, right? Everybody, the mortgages in America failed dramatically. But who was the dominant player in the mortgage space in America? Entities called Freddie and Fannie. I'm not gonna bore you with all the details. But Freddie and Fannie are what? Are they private enterprise? Government entities. Supported by the government. Backstabbed by the government. The mandate for their activity is given by the government. The product is regulated by the government. Everything about mortgages is controlled by the government. I have a big mortgage. Because they give me a tax deduction. So I'm a finance guy, right? If somebody pays me to borrow money, I'm gonna borrow money, right? My mortgage is three and three, I think it's, it's under 4%. And then it gets a tax deduction on that. So I'm paying two point something on a million dollar mortgage, right? I couldn't pay a million dollars. I don't have a million bucks. But I can pay two point something, right? I'll take that any day. You wanna lend me money at two point something percent? I'll take all your money, right? If I'm a finance guy and I can't do better at two point something, then, you know, they should take away my degree. Interest rates will hold out officially low. Nothing about this crisis. Nothing about this crisis. Had anything to do with the behavior of bankers on Wall Street. Had anything to do with financial free markets. Because there are no financial free markets. Bankers on Wall Street were greedy in 2006 and 2007. That is absolutely true. I dare you to find a year in the history of Wall Street that they were not greedy. The job of bankers is to be greedy. It's to make money for their clients. That's it. That's their job. The question is why did they greed in 2006 or 2007 lead to the crisis in 2008? And they greed in 94, 95, not lead to a crisis. Government, government everywhere. Now, you don't have to accept my thesis about the financial crisis. I still haven't proven it. And that will take a long time. There's a course online that I gave. Six hours where I dissect the crisis in all the detail. It's available. It's out there. You can critique it. You can do whatever you want with it. My point is this. Right after the crisis happened, we all knew exactly what was what caused it. Before any economist did any research, looked at any numbers, looked at the real causes. Everybody knew what it failed was. Capitalism. What it failed were free markets. What it failed were greedy Wall Street bankers. It's an instinct we have. We hate capitalism. We blame it for every evil in the world. And we can't find any evils that it actually created. We invent some. Because deep down, we don't like capitalism. It's made for, it's made for everything. I mean, the Great Depression. What was the Great Depression blamed on? Greedy Wall Street, right? I don't know how many of you are economic historians. But there are very few economists. I mean, real economists today who believe that. Most economists today will tell you that the Great Depression was caused by mistakes of central bankers, by milling the Federal Reserve, and the Bank of England doing stuff with a gold standard that messed it up. And then really, really bad fiscal policies in the United States that created trade barriers, raised income taxes, did everything opposite what they should have done that caused the Great Depression. Yeah, bankers were greedy. They were always greedy. That wasn't what's caused it. Doesn't matter. We're still gonna build the next crisis on capitalism. Even when we've proved the previous one wasn't caused by it, we're still gonna build the next one for it. Because something deep down inside of us resents markets, resents free markets, resents the whole process of capitalism. Because deep down, what is capitalism about? What's capitalism about? Three, making sure it's self-interest. Exploitation. Some good Marxists here in the room. That's good. Why does Steve Jobs build these? Why did he build them? To make money. To make money. He built those to make money. He profit margins on Apple iPhones when they first came out was 60%. If Steve Jobs cared about me, he would have sold these a lot cheaper. If he cared about you, he would have sold them. So he built these to make money. Now, is that the only reason Steve Jobs built these? So the only reason was money. Yep. No, I mean, yeah, it's not just money. What else? They're pretty handy. What's that? They're handy. They are? Handy. But why does Steve Jobs care that they're handy? Well, why did he build this? What was his motivation? Other than money. Money clearly was one of these. Creative. Yeah, creative. He loved this stuff. He had fun doing it. He loved taking his vision for something beautiful, for something that works, for something that could change the world. And he wanted to bring it out there into the world. But whose vision was it? My vision? It wouldn't have looked like this. It was Steve Jobs. This is about Steve Jobs. So his motivation was whose interest? His own. Steve Jobs is self-interested when he makes this stuff. He's being selfish. He's trying to make a lot of money. He is trying to design something he loves. He's trying to design something in his image. It's, this thing is all about Steve Jobs. And when I went and bought one of these, 2008, economy is spiraling out of control. Recession is about to hit. I went and bought one because I wanted to stimulate the U.S. economy. Because I know that that's why you guys go to the mall. You guys go shopping because you care about your fellow man and you want to make sure there are jobs out there and you want to make sure people are employed. Why do you go shopping? Why did I buy this? Because it makes my life better. Because I think it's going to increase my productivity because it's cool. Because it makes me look good because a thousand different things but all related to own. To you. That's why you go shopping. You go shopping for you. The marketplace is a place in which we go to engage in self-interest. In which we pursue self-interest. The producer is producing because he wants to make money. He wants to have fun producing the stuff that he's producing. The consumer consumes because he wants the stuff for his own well-being. The marketplace is all about self-interested action. And this is not new. This, you know, we talked about Adam Smith, 1776, the Waltz of Nations. Adam Smith writes. He says the baker doesn't bake the bread because he cares about you. He doesn't know you, he doesn't want to know you, he doesn't care. He bakes the bread because he's trying to feed his family. He wants to feed himself. This is what he does. This is how he makes a living. He's completely self-interested. And the grocery store that sells you the bread, again, doesn't care about you. They sell it for their self-interest. They're trying to make money. Capitalism is the system of self-interest. Capitalism is the system of the pursuit of self-interest. On the producer side, on the consumer side, everybody in the chain of production, everybody in the chain of consumption is out there for themselves. And that's why we don't trust it. That's why we don't believe in it. That's why we hate it. That's why we're turning our backs on it. It's not an issue of whether it works or not. It works. It's always worked. We can fudge the numbers all you want. But the fudging the numbers is because you hate capitalism, not because the numbers are not right. And we hate capitalism because it's about self-interest. And since we're this big, what have we been taught about self-interest? It's bad. I mean, I grew up in a good Jewish household, my Jewish mother told me, to think of yourself. Last, think of other people. First, be selfless. The whole idea of morality, the whole idea of ethics is selflessness, right? When we say about somebody, he's acting selflessly. That's a good thing. That's cool, right? We like this person because they're acting selflessly. But that's the opposite of capitalism. It's the opposite of markets. That's the opposite of how producers and consumers behave. We set up an ethical system that says that selflessness, sacrifice, giving, those are noble. Those are good. Those are wonderful. Creating, eh. Morally, self-interested, borderline bad, certainly not good. There's nothing noble. There's nothing virtuous. There's nothing heroic about making money, right? That's what we're taught, because that's self-interest. And it's not about helping people because let's take an example, right? Let's take Bill Gates, but he know Bill Gates, Microsoft. He made $70 billion, $70 billion. I mean, it's hard even to imagine a wealth for himself. How did he do it? How do you make $70 billion by doing what? Really, what did Microsoft do to make that kind of money? Making stuff people want. Yeah, making stuff and selling it to people. And did he sell it to a lot of people? Yeah, a huge number of people. That's how he made $70 billion, right? And he sold it, let's say he sold it for about $100. Most Microsoft products cost about $100, right? When you bought a Microsoft product for $100, how much was the product worth to you? More than that. Good, because usually people say $100, and if it was worth $100, you wouldn't have bought it. You'd be indifferent. Yeah, he's heard this talk before, it's not like that. Trade, when we trade, when you buy an automobile for 20,000 bucks, it's worth more than 20,000. That's why you will need to give up the money and take the automobile. What's it worth to the seller? What's it worth to the guy who sold it to you, 20,000 bucks? Less. Less, that's why you will need to give it up for 20,000. He's making a profit. So who lost when you transacted? No one. No one, and who gained? Everybody. Trade is a win-win transaction. Buyer and seller, win. You walk into a trade, you don't buy something, even bread. How much does bread cost in the UK? A pound? Half a buck? 50 bucks? 50 bucks, fine. When you buy bread for 50 pence, it means that the bread is worth more than 50 to you. Otherwise, you wouldn't do it. You'd buy something else. And the grocery store's making money on the 50 cents. They're making a nice profit off of it. This is even true of your labor. This is the one that people hate. When you get paid, I don't know, 25,000 pounds a year to do some job, how much is that time, how much is your time worth to you? How much is your time worth to you? What's that? It's priceless. It's gonna be hard to find a job if that was true. How much is your time worth to you? How much is your time worth to you if you're willing to take a job for 25,000 pounds? Less than 25,000 pounds. Because otherwise, you'd do something different. So you can complain all you want on how much you get paid, but the fact of reality is, you're taking a job because that's the best use of your time. Well, no, it's just that you want to stay alive. Yeah, that's fine. No, you could go. You could go in a subsistence farm, just like your ancestors did. They didn't go and take a job. And you could take a subsistence farm and grow the potatoes that you eat and grow the food that you eat and you don't have to do it. The fact is that you have chosen a particular life and you've chosen to take that salary instead of all the other options that are available to you and it's only your lack of imagination that is restricting your options to if I don't take this job, I'm gonna die. There are very few people in the world who have that as the option. But the fact is that, yes, 25,000 pounds a year is better than dying. Therefore, it's better to spend it on 25,000. It's better your time is worth still less than 25,000. How much is it worth to your employer? How much is your job if they're paying you 25,000? How much is your time worth to your employer? More, they're making a profit off of you. Nobody is ever gonna hire you unless they can make a profit off of you. They're hiring you to increase their bottom line. You better hope you're worth more to them. Exactly. If you're not worth more to them, you won't last in the job. Again, who loses? It's a win-win. It's a trade. Maybe I should have used 60,000 pounds and you would have felt more comfortable about this through winter. But you took the 25,000 pound job, I'm assuming that. So, Bill Gates made $70 billion by trading with people, by making everybody traded with better off. And it's more than that. How many people on the planet do you think were made better off because of Microsoft? Pretty much everyone. I mean, there's almost no human being on the planet that was not touched by Microsoft in some way. Think of the technology which was made possible by the fact that we standardized. The fact that PCs became ubiquitous. Fact that the operating system was standardized across all these platforms. I don't know if we'd have the internet and a lot of what we have today, technology-wise. If not for the genius of what Microsoft did. Bill Gates helped almost every human being on the entire planet made their lives better by making $70 billion for himself. How much more credit did Bill Gates get for helping all those people? Probably around five, six billion people he helped. Did he get any ethical credit? Do we think of Bill Gates as a moral guy because he made $70 billion? No. He gets zero moral credit. He actually gets negative moral credit. Because how dare he make money? Because then we know this because Bill Gates suddenly became a good guy at some point. When did he become a good guy? When he started giving it away. When he started giving it away. Now he's a good guy. How many people will Bill Gates help through his philanthropy? What's that? 20 people in Cambridge? Too many in Cambridge. He gives all that money in Cambridge? And not to Oxford is that the problem. How many people will Gates help? 1,000, 10,000, maybe 100,000. Maybe a million people will be helped by the foundation that Bill Gates has set up to help people through his charity. Great. But how much more credit does he get? Huge amounts of moral credit. Why? Because he saves one's life. You don't think having technology saves more lives than giving a few, a malaria nets? They're not mutually exclusive either. I'm not saying they're mutually exclusive. All I'm saying is why for one form of help you get zero actually negative moral credit? And for the other form of help it gets massive moral credit. And the reason, as they do with saving lives it has to do with the fact that when he gives it away he is not benefiting. He's more perceived as being selfless. It's charity. It's not for profit. Now he's still not considered a really good guy, right? He's not gonna go down in history as this wonderful, heroic, noble, moral person. What would he have to do to do that? What would he have to do to become a saint? Tell me, put aside the Catholic issue. But what would he have to do to become the equivalent of a saint? You'd have to give away all this money, like move into a tent and bleed a little bit. If he could bleed a little bit and show us some pain. We would idealize him. We would put him up in a pedestal. There would be sculptures built for him. Generations, for generations. I mean, we laugh, but in my view this is really tragic because it's absurd. I mean, there's nothing wrong with philanthropy when done right. But philanthropy doesn't change the world. Philanthropy doesn't create wealth. Philanthropy doesn't give you that. I like to tell Americans, 1776 we won the War of Independence because you guys didn't think we were important enough to trouble yourselves. You were the mightiest military empire at the time. You had other concerns. We were like a third-rate colony, who cared? By 1914, you couldn't win a stupid war without us. We were the strongest economic military power in the planet. We went from 1776 to 1914 not because of philanthropy, charity, and community service, but because of greedy businessmen making money, because of business to created products, because of Bill Gates-like people when he was at Microsoft, not because of Bill Gates when he does philanthropy. We should view these people who built, who created. They should be the heroes. They made the life that we take for grand impossible. Without capitalism, without free market, without businessmen, without profit-seeking, none of this is possible. Oh yeah, and then you have a lot of money. You can do philanthropy, sure. It's not mutually exclusive. That's true. But let's put it in proportion. It's not that important. Not in the big picture, in the historical picture of things. The big picture is we went from 99% of the population poor to on the standards of poverty for 300 years ago, not a single person in the UK is poor. Everybody has running water. Everybody has electricity. 90% of poor in America have cell phones, air conditioning, refrigerators, televisions. That's not poor by the standard of 300 years ago. So we went from everybody being poor. I would rather be lower middle class today than rich 50 years ago. Somebody rich 50 years ago didn't have one of these, or the internet, or a gazillion other stuff that we have that we just take for grand. It just comes into existence and we enjoy it. And then we bash the system that brought it into existence. It's not accident, by the way, that this is amazing innovation. And it continues to innovate. And yet this is the least regulated market in the United States. Technology is the one area we don't regulate, or we regulate very little. Imagine if a government committee was gonna build one of these, what it would look like. I mean, even those a little sympathetic to government are laughing because you know, you know exactly what it would look like. I mean, it would never happen. It would never happen. The one area where we get progress, innovation, wealth creation, is the one area that we leave free. How much progress and innovation do we get in automobiles? We basically drive the same internal combustion engine today as we did 50, 60, 70 years ago. Heavily regulated industry. How much innovation do you get in airplanes? I mean, they're more comfortable, the little list bumpy, but the 787 Boeing's latest wonderful plane is basically the same technology as it's 707 was 50 years ago. We had one innovation in aircraft in the last 50 years. What was that? It was called the Concorde and we killed it. We didn't allow it to be successful. Not because the market didn't like it, but because regulators didn't like it, because government didn't like it, made too much noise for some people, but they didn't even give it a chance to quieten itself down. So here we are, we have a system, a model system, an ethical point of view that says building stuff, creating stuff, taking care of yourself, taking care of the people that you love, creating millions of jobs. Bill Gates created millions of jobs. Thousands of millionaires. That is worthless from a moral perspective. Giving it away, the wealth, by the way, that you created by being a profit seeking, greedy businessman. Giving it away, that's noble, that's good, that's virtuous, that's wonderful. That is sick, in my view. That's sick. It's completely reversed and it's completely sick. It's the people responsible for that are bad guys, for their all the wealth, they're bad guys. That's crazy. To me, the problem is not economic understanding. We know how capitalism works. We know it works. We know why it works. We understand the incentive structure it builds. We understand what property rights actually do. We've had great economists explain this to us. There's no mystery about economics in spite of some of the pseudo-economists who teach here and in other universities around the world, economics. We know this stuff. What we really find offensive about free markets has nothing to do with science and everything to do with morality. Everything to do with ethics. Now, ethics are simply incompatible with freedom, incompatible with capitalism. Because what is an ethic that says creating sucks, but giving is wonderful. Creating is amoral or immoral, but sharing is the essence of virtue. What is the political system consistent with sharing and giving and being selfless? That's socialism in one form or another. That's what socialism demands from me. Just socialism tells you that we know, we, the leaders know that you are too greedy to share, you're too selfish to share with other people, to give. So we're gonna force you to do it. We're gonna help you up. We're gonna make you more moral by doing that. Indeed, that's what happens in the West today. What happens when you live a certain life? Most businessmen live this life of building, of creating, of being self-interested, right? Profit-seeking. But they think that morality means they should be selfless. What happens inside you when you live one way but your ideals are somewhere else? What's the emotion that that generates? Guilt. Guilt. And guilt is one of the most powerful weapons to control people. You wanna control people, make them feel guilty. I mean, just ask any Jewish or Catholic mother that'll tell you it works wonders. And it works. So how do you think rich people feel about paying more taxes? Up or down? So if you had a referendum among rich people and said, we want you to pay more taxes, you vote for it or you vote against it, how do you think, anonymous. They don't even, you know, it's not that they have to wave their hands, it's not about social pressure. How do you think they vote? Against it. Against it? We respect the economic interest to be against it. We want lower taxes, right? It turns out that's not what happens. We just had an election in the United States where voting for Obama meant that if you were rich, your taxes would go up. He promised it, he said he would do it and indeed he did do it. And he had eight of the 10 richest counties in the United States voted for Obama. In the California, we just had a referendum. Everybody got to vote. About raising taxes on the rich. 30% from 10 to 13, which is a lot when you consider that that's on top of a federal income tax, right? How did the rich vote? There was a tax on them, they were gonna pay more. Vote for it. Places like Silicon Valley, where they make a lot of money and they're gonna be penalized by this tax, all voted overwhelmingly for raising their own taxes. Because they feel guilty because they're all about making money, they're all about producing stuff, they're all about creating stuff and innovating, they're all greedy, they're all selfish. And that's not where the morality is, morality says you have to take care of other people, you have to give, you have to do all this stuff and they know they're not doing it so they need the government force them into doing more. What's wrong with that? So they're using taxes as a way to appease their guilt. I'll get to Q and A, I promise. Now again, I believe this is why we've turned away from capitalism. We've turned away from capitalism because we don't trust it, we don't believe in it. And there's another aspect of this idea of selfish. So we're told that there are two possibilities in ethics. You can be selfless and therefore good and noble and wonderful and a moral person. Or you can be selfish and what does selfish mean? What does selfish mean? It doesn't mean create and produce and make and all this stuff. What does it actually mean when we call somebody selfish? Pointed somebody in a school yard and say he's selfish, what do we mean by that? It doesn't give to others, but it's more than that, right? It's not just he doesn't give to others, what does he do? Yeah, he damages others, he exploits them, he takes advantage of them, he lies, steals and cheats, right? So you present it with two options in life. You can be selfless or you can be a crook. You can be a bastard, you can be a SOB, right? Those are two options in life. And everybody's gonna wanna be a good guy. Everybody's gonna wanna be selfless. Nobody actually does it, that's why the guilt comes in. But we all wanna think that that's nobility and that's good because we all know that being a crook is bad. I think there's a third option. And this is Ayn Rand's contribution, I think, to the debate. I think there's a third option which means to be self-interested because I don't think lying, stealing and cheating are self-interested. I think lying and stealing and cheating are the stupidest strategies ever for biological entity to sustain itself. They don't work, they don't lead to happiness. They usually get caught and you go to jail. When you go, some of you are business students, if you're doing a business, how long do you think you'll remain in business? Nobody's gonna trust you if you start lying and cheating. They catch you once, that's all it takes. And you're out. Try doing it with your wife or your spouse. Doesn't work. Lying and stealing are not good strategies for life. Producing, building, creating, those are good strategies for life. We need to separate them. I consider lying, stealing, cheating, self-destructive behaviors. So you've got self-less, you've got self-destructive and now you've got real self-interest. And what is a really self-interested person do? What does self-interest require? We as human beings, as the species of homo sapiens, what do we need to do to be successful in life? What is it that makes it possible for us to survive as human beings? What makes possible everything you see in this room, from the clock to the walls, to the carpeting, to the iPhone, to the clothes you wear? Where do those come from? Thoughts and creativity, because look around the room, we're pretty pathetic animals. We're weak, we're slow, we have no claws, we have no fangs. Try running down a bison and biting into it. Or standing up to a sabre-tooth tiger. I mean, in the game of nature out there, from a physical perspective, we are losers. We are species that shouldn't exist. And yet we do. What makes it possible for us not just to exist, to thrive, it's our minds. It's our reason. It's our ability to figure stuff out. It's our ability to observe reality, to understand it, and use it, change it, manipulate it, and create stuff. No other animal creates stuff. We build stuff. That's what's uniquely human. That's what being self-interested really means. Being self-interested means to be rational, to use your mind, to figure stuff out, to be creative, to be productive, to build, to create. That's what it means. And what we need, what we need is, if we care about freedom, if we care about wealth, if we care about prosperity, if we care about living, what we need is a moral code that supports individual human life, that supports self-interest, that says, here are the values you should pursue if you're gonna be self-interested, if you're gonna live a flourishing life. Oh, reason, use your mind. Value number one, be productive, take care of yourself. Produce. So you can take care of, as Adam Smith said, yourself and your family, the people you love. That's really crucial, because when you deny a human being the ability to take care of themselves, you deny them the ability to have self-esteem, to know that they're worthy. We need that feeling of, yeah, I can survive out there among the sabertooth tigers and the bison. I can get them. I can put food on my family's table. When you deny that to people, you deny them the ability to have self-esteem, which is a prerequisite for being happy. And this is why I believe the welfare state, a little bit more controversy, the welfare state, the biggest victims of the welfare state are the people who receive the money, because you're institutionalizing them into poverty. You're institutionalizing them into not having a job, into never knowing that they can take care of themselves. They will always believe that the only way they can take care of themselves is by leaching off of other people. When you have a minimum wage, take a minimum wage, I love minimum wages because it's so controversial and yet it's so freaking simple. When you have, you guys, some of you have economics, hopefully, when you set an artificial price on something and you set it high, what happens to demand for that price? So you artificially raise a price. What happens to demand for that thing, bread, computers, automobiles, anything? What happens? Economics 101. What happens? Demand falls for that good. When you raise the cost of labor, what happens to demand for labor? It falls. Remember, they need to make a profit off of you. When you raise the cost of labor, demand for labor falls, just like when you raise the cost of bread, demand for bread falls. This is 101, very simple. And who makes minimum wage? Who makes minimum wage? What kind of people make minimum wage? Young, unskilled, poor people make minimum wage. A lot of teenagers make minimum wage or work for middle-class families. But the people who really matter here are the poor, unskilled young people who make seven bucks in America, at seven bucks, 25 cents, minimum wage. You raise it, demand for whom drops? You demand for young, unskilled labor. What happens? Unemployment among young, unskilled labor goes up. This is not, you know, relativity theory. This is simple economics. I need everybody supposed to make minimum wage. Even though the people it's gonna hurt, a who, a young kids who now will never work in their life because they never got that first job. Because how long do you make minimum wage? When you get a minimum wage stuff, how long, typically, do you keep that wage? If you're, you know, a little bit hard-working, very little time, you almost always get a wage. Because your productivity increases, you learn a skill, you learn something new. You now know how to shop for time and you know how to deal with customers in you. And now you're more valuable, so they give you more money. And somebody making minimum wage is no, there's no boundary to how much you can make ultimately. But if you don't start, if you don't have that first job, you'll never get another job. You'll never jump from to 20 bucks an hour if you're never gonna get that first job at seven bucks an hour. So who is the victim of the minimum wage? It's the low-skilled, poor, young kid who's never in his life gonna get a job. And as a consequence, he's never in his life gonna get the self-esteem that comes from knowing you can care for your family, and never gonna be happy, never gonna be successful as a human being. And it's all, I'd say, well-meaning, but I don't actually believe they are. It's all middle-class, smug, intellectuals sitting in their nice classrooms who invent this kind of stuff like minimum wage. And it makes them feel good because they pretend to themselves that people are better off, but the people that really need the money are not better off, they're worse off. You know who's better off? Who loves minimum wages? Unions, in America, at least, because their salaries are often linked to the minimum wage. So when the minimum wage goes up, their salaries go up, even though they're making five times the minimum wage, or 10 times the minimum wage. And those people making the minimum wage who are slightly more qualified, and therefore paying them 10 bucks is kind of okay as you lay off everybody who's not that skilled, who's not that qualified. And of course, the other people who love the minimum wage are people who automate, right? Because it's wonderful to walk into McDonald's and see human being there taking an order from you, but I will bet you, I would bet you that if you increase the minimum wage, the day will come much faster, it's gonna come anyway, but it'll come much faster when you walk into McDonald's and there's an iPad and you order on the iPad. And then those jobs are gone completely, because at seven bucks an hour, I can afford to keep people doing it. At 10 bucks an hour, I can't afford the people anymore, I'd rather have an iPad. They've got those machines in France. Yes, and they're coming to the US, they even have a machine now that'll take a hamburger, mix it, put it in a patty, put the mayonnaise and the lettuce and everything and dish it to you out the other side. They can do the whole process and McDonald's automated. It's expensive, so they're not doing it. But if you raise the cost of labor enough, they will. It's very simple. And those jobs will be gone and everybody will complain about youth unemployment and scratch their heads. How did it happen? Well, we know exactly how it happened. We caused it. So, and I'll try to end. I can go on forever. What we need in my view, if we wanna save markets, is a new morality. A morality focused on self-interest. I think self-interest is wonderful. I think you should all live for yourselves. I think living for yourself means what Aristotle meant. It means finding those virtues that lead to your flourishing, to your success as a human being with the full scope of everything involved as being a human being. It means being nice to other people because other people are valued to you. It means trading with other people in both material and spiritual realms because trade is win-win. Why would we want to abandon trade, which is win-win and self-interested for the sake of sacrifice, which is, by definition, win. Win what? Lose. Actually, lose when you lose and they win, right? That's because if it was win-win, it wouldn't be a sacrifice. It would be a trade. The whole idea of a sacrifice is to lose. That's why Bill Gates has to show some blood. But isn't win-win better than win-lose? By the way, win-lose transactions usually turn into, in human relationships at least, lose-lose very quickly, right? Try consistently with your spouse having a win-lose relationship. And it doesn't matter who loses and who wins. It doesn't matter in that sense. It's gonna turn into lose-lose very quickly. Win-win is great. Win-win is what morality is about. Win-win is focused on self-interest, though. So I say abandon the morality that has held us, that has crippled us, in my view, for 2,000 years. We need to send it off into history. And we need a new moral code. A moral code of self-interest, a moral code that's consistent with capitalism. And people who are self-interested, truly self-interested, truly understand about rational, long-term self-interest, they wanna be left free. I mean, if I wanna live the best life that I can live, I don't want mother governments sitting on my shoulder telling me what to drink and what to smoke and how to run my bank and how to run my business and all this other garbage. I wanna try stuff out. And I'm gonna fail. And if I'm smart, I'll learn from that failure and do better next time. So, in any other wealth that we have, I encourage you at least to think about ethics, about morality. Because I think that's what drives history. I don't think people vote the pocketbook. I think people vote what's right and what's wrong. And I think we need to redefine what that means. We need a moral code consistent with capitalism, which means a moral code of self-interest. Thank you all. Questions? And he's been like almost jumping out of a seat the whole time. I'll give him a first shot. Okay, thank you for outlining your dystopia that you've done for the last hour. But it seems to me that your moral argument is entirely consequentialist, that if we allow people to pursue their self-interest, somehow everyone will be better off. No, I don't care about everybody. I mean, let me be very clear. My argument's not consequentialist. My argument is if I pursue my self-interest, I'm gonna be better off. I think if you do it right, you'll be better off. But you might, you know, you might not do it right. You might suffer. And some people will choose not to be self-interested, not to do it right, and they'll be worse off. If we just look at history, when the capitalist has pursued his self-interest, and there hasn't been a minimum threshold, we're saying to someone, you're not worth a certain amount in one. You're worth $2 an hour. But if we don't pay you enough, we don't care about how you survive what we need to survive. So the whole point of the minimum wage is not just about restricting neighbor supplies, you seem to think it is. It's about assigning it to someone. You know, you're not worth nothing to the capitalist as most capitalists would see their workforces expendable individually. They can just get rid of them higher when and as how they please. And also on this, you know, on the tax system, you seem to think that the more Steve Jobs accumulates in terms of his personal wealth, the more somehow he is benefiting society. However, there comes a point where the wealth you're accumulating is no longer productive wealth. Surely you would agree with that. No, that's ridiculous. No, it's not ridiculous. It's like, it's anti-economic. Steve Jobs going from $60 billion to $70 billion is just purely that 10 extra, 10 extra, that extra $10 billion is purely for his self-gain. It's not going to expand anything else. So he can use that productive wealth. I get that. He can use that productive wealth to reinvest in teacolry to help people because we're human beings. He doesn't keep it up. We don't live as atomized wealth. So let me address this. You brought up two issues. Let me address those two issues and we can bring up other issues. Right, two issues. Let me start with Steve Jobs, because I remember it. I mean, there are two issues here. One, how does he make the extra billion dollars? By helping you guys, by selling you a product that you want more than what he's charging you for it. So you're better off and he's better off. So that's productive. He's made the world a better place and he's got another $10 billion. Now what does he do with that extra $10 billion? Right, he's $50 billion. Because of that he uses productivity, invests it, he does this. But the extra $10 billion he puts in mattress? No, what does he do with it? What does he do with it? He buys a yacht. Oh, okay, he buys a yacht. Somebody built a yacht? He puts it in the bank. He puts it in the bank. What does the bank do with it? Lend it to people. Lend it to people? Yeah, I mean, the bank lends it to people. Steve Jobs doesn't put it in a checking account. So it's not fraction of a zoo because he doesn't need a checking account because of the $10 billion. He puts it in a saving account, which is lent out not as fraction of a zoo, but as a legitimate lending right? So it's being used productively. No matter what he does with it, if he consumes it, it's going to pay for the people who made the stuff that he's consuming. But even better, if he invests it, it's going to create massive economic activity. The worst thing he can do with it from a purely economic perspective, from the perspective of people's well-being, the worst thing he can do it is give it away. But if you put it in the Swiss bank account, it's not being used productively. What does Swiss banks do with the money? I mean, this is amazing to me. What does Swiss banks do with their money? Why are we complaining about the banking industry today? I don't know, but let's, let's, let's... Why are they not lending? Why are they not lending? If you ever talk to a bank and ask them why you're not lending, do you know why they're not lending today? Because bankers are greedy, so they don't want to make money. How do banks make money? They make money by giving you 2% and lending the money out to 6%, 8%, 10%. They make money. So bankers want to lend money. So why are they not lending money right now? There are two reasons. Because what? No one trusts them. I don't care. I don't have to trust you to borrow money from you. You have to trust me. The fact that people don't trust banks don't prevent me from going asking them for money. I owe you. Usually you need to trust me. Why do people, why are banks not lending money? There are only two reasons. One, regulators won't let them. And you just talk to bankers. Regulators won't let them because regulators are concerned about safety. And the more banks lend, the higher the risk. And regulators don't want that. You talk to bankers in America, I do a lot of that. I invest in banks. And bankers are being told by regulators don't lend. That's reason one and one. What's the second reason? People don't want to borrow. Why don't people want to borrow? Because the economy sucks. So I don't want to expand my business. I want to go out there and do a bunch of stuff because there's too much. I'm certain you by the way created completely by government. Now where bankers putting their money, at least in the US, they're putting it at the Federal Reserve. Now why are they doing that? Because that's kind of interesting. Because the Federal Reserve is paying them interest on their money. They never used to. So the United States banking system has close to $2 trillion of bank money sitting under reserves at the Fed getting a small interest on that money. It used to be zero, so you just have no incentive to put it because the Fed doesn't want you to lend money. They will need to give you an interest not to lend money. Bankers want to lend. It's how they make money. In a free market, a market not controlled by regulated, there's tons of lending going on. No money sits in the bank because when it sits in the bank, the banker can't make any money off of it. Think greed. To understand business, you always need to think what's in it for him. That's why I love business because I understand selfishness. You want to sell me something? I understand exactly what your motivation is. You want to get the highest price possible and you want to sell me this good and I want to get the lowest price possible and I want to get that good and we can negotiate now. We understand each other. When you come to me and say, I'm here for the common good, I'm here to help all of you guys. I have no idea what you're talking about. That is complete gibberish to me. No, every dollar Steve Jobs is as productive as his previous dollar. Money doesn't sit in the mattress. Keynes was wrong. I know he's British, but he was wrong. He was at the LSE, he wasn't at Oxford. Maybe that was the problem, right? He was wrong. The problem markets is not some ridiculous liquidity trap where people don't invest. Hike was also at the LSE. Yeah, I know. Was he wrong in quantity? No, hike was mostly right. Many things were wrong. Hike was wrong in many things, but it is critique of Keynes. I was joking about the LSE. It is critique of Keynes. He was absolutely right. Your second boy was, oh, about how people are valued. Some people are only worth $2 an hour. It's all they can produce. If you pay them $3 an hour, you lose money on them because they're just, for whatever reason, whether it's because they don't want to work hard because they're lazy or because they're incapable. They can't do more than $2 an hour. When you put the minimum wage at three, you basically guarantee that they will get zero. And that's okay if that's what you want. I mean, I think it's horrible. I think somebody making $2 an hour is much better than somebody making zero and living off the stage. At least if you're making $2 an hour, you know you're working. You know you're contributing to your own life. And you're learning a skill which would one day allow you to make gazillions of dollars. Most of the multi-gazillionaires, at least in the 19th century, started out in a lot less than what minimum wage is today. And they built fortunes. But you want to deny somebody a job for life because you think it's inhumane to give them $2 an hour. I mean, people in other countries work for a dollar a day. And it's not fair. It's wonderful. They shouldn't be. They live in abject poverty because they're not paid anything. That's right. And what you want to do is kill them. What you want to do, and I'm completely serious about this, those of us in the, again, this is middle class, European and American, comfortable living. You don't have to worry about what your next meal will come from. You look at these poor kids in Indonesia and you want them dead because that's what you do. If Nike moves away from Indonesia, those kids starve. And you can't understand that because the option is starvation or working for a buck a day. And I take working for a buck a day over starvation any day. And those kids will start at a buck a day and one day they'll make more than that. They'll waste the middle class. Those kids are on a buck a day because the people who are employing them refuse to pay them any more despite being able to afford to, despite being able to pay them. But don't you understand that their life is better off for a buck a day than it would be if it was zero a day? Yeah, but why can't we improve their lives further by compelling the employer because they're not that productive? That's the story. And as they become more productive and you could see this everywhere on the world including in the UK through the industrial revolution as workers became more productive, their wages rose. And we started out in the UK at less than a buck a day. At a lot less than a buck a day. And by the end of the 19th century there was suddenly a middle class. Where did the middle class come from? From increases in productivity, not from unions. Unions hurt the middle class. They don't help the middle class. Yes? This is sort of a co-ed thought that needs, I need you to flesh out your idea of what we consider self-interest. It seems sort of a pretty bad observation. It looks like you're just contradicting yourself. You seem like you actually care about the common good and you seem like a bleeding heart communitarian. Like why, if you're a finance guy and you care about the bottom line and about maximizing value, coming here and talking to some schmucks in Oxford seems like an opportunity cost, right? And promoting the reality to the rest of the world saying here's a system that's under threat and we think it's taking us from abject poverty. If it's just about you and how you fare and say you're middle-aged and you've got a few decades left, who gives a damn, right? It seems like you actually care what other people think that your highest priority value is about the common good of humanity. It's not really about self-interest at all. It's in a higher order that you want to promote that are immutable. Yes, so maybe your conception of self-interest is a little narrow. So yes, that's absolutely true. I got a PhD in finance. I could have gone to Wall Street. Many of my colleagues went to Wall Street. I don't want to go to Wall Street. I love teaching. My self-interest is to teach. Self-interest is not about money. I mean, I know that's a shock because we're taught by the materialists of the world including Marx that all you care about, all you should care about is money, including the poor, right? How much they make is all that's important. How they make it, the pride they get from making it, all of that doesn't matter. It's just about money. It's not about money. It's about life. I care about the quality of my life. Money is a piece of it. I wouldn't do what I'm doing right now for free. They pay me very well at the Invent Institute. Let me guarantee that so nobody has a problem. I drive a very nice car and I live in a, I have a million dollar mortgage. A bank gave me that and I started with nothing. So I'm one of those who didn't have anything when they started out. I love what I do. I get enormous satisfaction out of teaching people. Out of seeing the light go on. Out of changing their minds. I care about the world. I care about the world, why? Because I live in it. If I didn't live in it, I don't care. I'll give you an example just to shock you. I don't care about future generations. I really don't care. I can think about my kids one generation out. I can think maybe about my grandkids. But beyond that, they could go to hell as far as I'm concerned. I mean, I just don't care. I provide a new moral system and who gives a hell what happens to one system of production over another. Especially if you think I've got 40 years, I've got a final rise and it's pretty narrow. And why, the big opportunity cost, even if not in material terms, who cares about promoting something that's going to benefit people that are... Because I suffer from the lack of freedom today every day. It has a huge opportunity cost. The opportunity cost of a lack of freedom is ruining my life. I mean, the apps on this should be 1,000 times better. I mean, that's kind of a joke, but I'm serious. Right, think about... I mean, I think about what could be, and again, not just materially, but spiritually, if the NSA wasn't listening to me right now, if I didn't think my life was being monitored by the government constantly, if every aspect of what I did wasn't regulated, if banking industry was unregulated and free, the kind of creativity that would generate, take an example from something real, my kids had to go to public schools, government schools. I mean, they got an awful education. And that impacted my life very directly. I don't want them to get an awful education. I want them to get a good education. I want private schools. I want my grandkids to live in a world where private schools have no public education. I'm against public education, if you have any wisdom. Well, Hans, if you can't afford that positive... Then you have to ask somebody to help you out to fund it. Well, what happens if they choose not to do so? Then you don't get an education. And what kind of world is that? I don't know. It's awful. Well, maybe... That's why we have common good. That's why we don't deny 18 million people in America or 40 million health insurance. Nobody denies 40 million people in America health insurance except the government that makes it so expensive that 40 million can't afford it because the government is regulating insurance companies so that the cost is so high. If the government stopped regulating insurance companies, indeed, in states where insurance is relatively unregulated, health insurance costs less than a cell phone bill. And most of those 40 million have cell phones. They chose cell phones over health insurance in those states. So it's not private markets that deny people health insurance anymore than private markets will deny people education. There's a wonderful book written by a British scholar and I'm not, I don't remember, it's a school affiliation, so I won't insult anybody. You can also. Is it Newcastle? Yeah. What's his name? James Tully. James Tully. Wonderful book by James Tully called, he reached my mind. A beautiful treat. I recommend it to anybody who's concerned about poor people getting education. What he discovers is in the slums of Nigeria, in the slums of Bombay, private schools flourishing everywhere and parents sending their kids to school. Tuition is low. Why is tuition low? Because it's in the slums, right? And the school, it doesn't have a basketball court and indoor swimming pool. But the kids get a better education than they do in the public schools because the parents are there to monitor the teachers because the teachers care because they're living in the slums and these are the kids around them. But going back to your question, my best conception of self-interest is my flourishing. For me to flourish, I need to be free and you need to be free. I don't live in a desert island. I live with you. I care about your freedom because you're human beings, because I trade with you. The freer you are, the richer you are, the more value the trade between us will be. So my conception of self-interest is not living on a desert island. My conception of self-interest is not hating you. It's carrying you to the extent that I value you. Some people I like a lot. My wife, my kids, I love them. Some people I like a little bit. Some people, you know, I generally just like. They're people I hate and if they were drowning, I would jump in to save. I wouldn't. My wife, I would. Somebody in that middle church depends on how much risk it would entail for me, right? So the standard is my life. The standard is my values. But again, let's get away from money because it's not about money. Money's one aspect of it. It's about, you know, being a complete human being. One of the great things about the Industrial Revolution is they created enough wealth so that we could enjoy art. How many people, how many people in human history, with exception maybe of Greek civilization, enjoy art? I mean, we're exposed to art, enjoyed it, participated in it. Like how many people got to hear Mozart play the piano and hear Mozart compositions while he was alive? There are many other kinds of arts besides Mozart. There were always street artists everywhere. I mean, art flourished in old times. Okay, so now I'm really going to get into trouble. What's that? Hire art or whatever you want to call it. So not, let's take Mozart, right? How many of us can hear Mozart? I mean- But Shakespeare started as a touring little no one. And he wasn't hire art until we became- No, no, no, I understand. Let me finish the, I'm not contradicting what you're saying. I'm saying that Mozart could only exist because a bunch of rich guys paid him, I mean they had to be aristocrats, paid him to play and he played only for them. When did massive concerts come about where huge numbers of people could come and listen to Mozart? When people didn't have money to go buy tickets and do that. When we could buy CDs and enough wealth was created so we could get CDs and listen to this hire art. I mean, how many people saw Shakespeare? How many people could afford to go to the theater to see Shakespeare? I'm talking about seeing Shakespeare. How many people in the 17th century saw a play by Shakespeare? Very few. Very few. Go back and check. I mean, in London maybe more, but generally there wasn't enough, this is a matter, as we grow wealthier, we have more leisure time and more resources to go and enjoy things like art. Which when we have to wake up when the sun rises and go to sleep when it sets just to make a living, we don't have time, we don't have headphones and listen while we're toiling in the soil. People, I mean, yes they sang and they created their own art. But they did have exposure to all, you have exposure today to every work of art developed throughout human, almost every work of art, developed throughout human history, at a cost of nothing. I mean, that's pretty amazing. Yep. How amazing do you think donation, prostitution, drugs, especially the drugs case, if you want them to go that far, then surely if I then get addicted through heroin, I'm no longer capable of making rational decisions so I can't really then choose to make rational, benefitable transactions, but I'm guessing you'd probably support Mill's harm principle. Support what? Mill's harm principle, do you know? That I should be free to do what I want as long as it doesn't injure people's freedom. Yeah, I mean, my view is this, it's not my job to run your life. It's not my job to make sure that you can make rational decisions. My job, my job, my job is to leave you free to make those for yourself. If you take heroin, it's your problem. Now, I'll tell you this, anybody know Gary Becker? Yeah, Becker, a Nobel Prize winning economist who died a week and a half ago, or last week, very recently. And I heard Gary Becker give a talk about drug addiction, which I thought was fascinating, because Gary always looked at things as an economist, not a moralist, he didn't care about morality, or he didn't talk about morality. He looked at it as an economist, and he said, you know what would happen if you legalized heroin? A whole industry was arised to get people off it. You know how we have patches and we have gum and we have electronic cigarettes to get us off of cigarettes? Those are not creations of government. Those are not rehabilitation programs that were funded by the state. Those are private businesses trying to make money off of your bad habit, which is smoking, right? Imagine what would happen if people did get addicted to heroin. More people would get addicted to heroin maybe when we made it legal, but they'd also be cheaper, easier, innovative ways to get off of being addicted to heroin. But that's just a side story, because I always thought that was cute of getting back into thinking that way. And if you lose your ability to be rational. You lose your ability to be rational, but you chose to lose your ability to be rational, so it's your problem, not mine. Issue is one small, stupidness that can lead to subjugation, like... So what is the most important thing I said before in terms of if you want to be selfish? What did I say before? What's the most important thing you do if you're gonna be selfish? It's think. Yeah. Think. In my view, it's to be rational, to figure stuff out. Okay, so I haven't taken the heroin yet. It's right here. I know if I take it, I'm gonna get a cool high. It's gonna feel good, right? But I know that it's one small step, and I'm dead, or my life is ruined. Rationality. Rationality means what? It means I don't take the heroin. And if I choose to do it, that's sad. But everyone has lapses, right? So you're one, one, two. But who are you? Who are you to decide what my lapses should be, and how much they should be, and when they should be, and what they should be? And heroin, okay, heroin, we can all decide as bad for you. But what about pot? What about marijuana? What about a hundred different things that might be in the borderline? You have to have a principle, and the principle in my view is you are responsible for your life, not me. You get to decide whether to take the heroin or not. You better know the consequences of what you're doing when you're taking it, and everybody does. Nobody is under the illusion that taking the heroin has no bad consequences. So you pay for them. So you pay for them, right? That's the problem. Well, then if you really care about those people, go and educate them. But what about your children? So like, if your children get addicted to heroin- So what should I do? If they're 16, yes. If they're 19, how can I? These are the valid arguments because you can get hold of heroin now if you really want to get hold of heroin. Yeah, of course you can. I mean, there's no, I mean, if heroin was legal, right? Then it would be more available. But, okay. So 16-year-olds, I would stop them as a parent from getting them. And I think the state has a role with children and it would stop them from 16-year-olds from getting it. But I think once you become an adult, you get to make the decision for yourself. And I would try to convince my kids not to take the heroin. But as you said, they could take it today. It's not like the fact that it's illegal makes it impossible. You're all young, you're creative. I'm sure if you wanted heroin, you could get it even today. And my point is it's not the whole of the state to tell me what I can and cannot take, what I shouldn't should consume. Do you think government can play a role in stopping people from pursuing their own self-interest in a way that harms others? Yes, if we define harm carefully. So you have a right to pursue your self-interest as long as you're not using coercion on other people. As long as you're not stealing from them as long as you're not defrauding them, as long as you're not shooting them, you are not harming them. So harm if defined as physical harm, physical violence to them, the state has a role in stopping you from doing that. But other than that, the state has no role. Could you define it in terms of creating a win-win situation? No, because not everything in life is win-win in spite of what I said before. And I'll give you an example. You're running a business, you're losing money for whatever reason, right? You're losing money now full to your own and so you have to lay off half your workers. They're not winning by you laying off. Now you can make the argument long term they're better off because they'll find a different job and da-da-da, but they're losing. You're laying them off right now, they're losing. It's not a win-win transactions. You're winning, they're losing. And that happens in life. I'm not saying every transaction in life is win-win. So are you harming them? In a sense, you're harming them. But that's not the same as using physical force against them, it's not the same. The one thing I view as the enemy, if you will, is evil, is what the state should actually get involved in. The only reason I believe a state should exist is to prevent coercion. Corrosion and force are the enemy. They're the enemy of reason, they're the enemy of life, they're the enemy of making choices in life. What about tricking people or not giving them the information that they make a different choice that they know? It depends, but tricking people is often fraud. So it's often what we mean by fraud. It's not always, but it sometimes is. It depends on what exactly you mean by tricking people. You don't know people, all the information, we're certainly all in the relative information. If you lie to them, if you're tricking them through lying, then you're committing fraud and you should be prosecuted in the court of law for that. Yeah, he's eager. I tried to ask a couple of questions because I think there's an understanding. You talked about self-interest, but you haven't talked about self. So I think in reality there's some confusion in what itself and what is self-interest. And there is this argument that many believe that there is no self as a natural self cut off from the environment. And that, well, we grow up, we sense the environment, we learn through trial and error, we learn from the others. So in effect, many people feel that their self is the others. So the problem that you mentioned that we feel a guilt when we pursue our self-interest may be rooted in our misunderstanding of what is our true self. And we feel guilt with our association from them, whatever, from our relationship with others. I'll tell you something, you talk about your mother, my grandmother, who's also a Jew, I'm a Greek, okay? The first present gift to me when I went to the university was a ticket to go to Israel to be in the kibbutz. Because that was kind of, you know, you have to have the community, you have to do something, whatever. So I was forced to do that in a way, and I enjoyed it, really. I'm sure you did, because you got a leave. Yeah, of course, of course. Now, believe me, a kibbutz was a disaster. Nobody enjoyed it long-term. It was a horrible place to live. This is not my question, though. I'm only making, I only made this point about self to possibly help the, I don't know. I disagree with the question about it. I'll mention it. But my question is that most people, like, they're good at adapting to the environment. They're not creative. They're just happy to go along and be happy and not mess around and not being creative, really. So they're like animals, in a way. Because the animal, it's like, you know, you fit in an environment, try to adapt, try to survive. It's all right. The creative people, because it was about art, the artists, in a way, are those who try to go against their nature, and try to create, to bring nature down to there and tensionality, in a way. And this is a problem that all of us, who are fans of Iron Man, find that this is a theory, not for the many, but it's doomed, like, to be what is considered to be, like, for the elites or something. So, in a way, we feel like that we were doomed to be the minority, in a way. So, let me first say something about self, because I disagree with you. I think self is you. No, I don't agree with it, I'm just... Okay, Sine, oh, I thought you were emphasizing that. No, I think self is you. This is self. It's your body, your mind, your consciousness. There is no group consciousness here. There's no such thing as group think. You can't think for other people. You can help other people think, but the thoughts are in here. You can challenge people, you can stimulate people, but you can't think for them, and there's no collective. I mean, common good, we talked about, there's no such thing as a common good. There's my good, and your good, and his good. And yeah, if you respect one another, we can create a system where we're all better off. But common good independent of the good of the individual doesn't exist. There's no common consciousness. There's no, there's no, in that sense, collective. There's only individuals. Yeah, we can group people up and call it a collective. But what's there, perceptually, what's there in reality, are individuals. What's here is a self. You know, I don't know if these ideas can ever be mainstream. I don't believe that most people are just animals. I think human beings have a unique skill. All other animals adapt to their environment or die. That's what evolution's all about, right? Human beings don't do that. Human beings change their environment. It's too hot, what do we do? Aconditioning. Aconditioning, right? It's too cold, we take fire and we burn it. We want shelter, we don't go hide in caves, right? We do for a while. But we chop the stones down and we build huts and homes. And I think we all have the capability of doing that. What's the capability? It's our reason. Most people don't choose to exercise. But we also provide them with a way out for it. At the end of the day, civilization and the progress of society is determined, I think, by the intellectuals, by the intellectual leaders. Today, the intellectual leadership is dominated by the left, so the world is leftist. You don't need everybody to agree with you. What you need are the intellectuals to agree with you. Yeah, that's why you come to Oxford. Following up on the earlier questions, do you think that it's immoral to be a soldier or do you think that there is a moral way of valuing something other than you're in kind of continuous existence? So it depends on what you're fighting for. So I think it's immoral to be a soldier for a lousy country. I think it's immoral to be a soldier for a country that violates your rights. But I think if you live in a country that's free, that is threatened, where there is an existential threat to that freedom, then I think risking your life to sustain that freedom, your freedom and your kid's freedom and the people you love's freedom, then it's worth being a soldier and risking your life for it. Then it's moral to do. But if in a country that you don't care about or that isn't free or that is oppressing you and the threat outside is not really real, then being a soldier for what? What is the self-interested motivation to be a soldier? But how can you continue your... If you're dead, you can't. That's true. But the purpose of being a soldier is not to die. The purpose of being a soldier is you're willing to risk your life, which you do in lots of different ways on a smaller scale in other situations. Like I gave the river example, somebody's drowning, right? You're not willing to risk your life if it's a... I mean, I'm not willing to risk my life. It's a complete stranger. I mean, really risk my life, right? If it's somebody I hate, I certainly am not gonna risk my life. If it's somebody I love, I will risk my life. If the existential threat that you're facing externally is such that it's threatening, it's the equivalent of your kid's drowning, then you're gonna fight, which means risking your life. So it's rational to go to war when your life is at stake, when your value is at stake, when the things that are most important to you are at stake. And it's not that you're putting something above your life, it's that you're taking your life seriously. That you're saying, I wanna live out of freedom, and I'd rather not live if it's unfree. I'd rather not live if my wife, is drowning, and I didn't try to save her. I don't wanna live without her. I love her. That's what love means. That you wanna live with somebody. That there's such a high value that you can't conceive of life without her. You're on, yes? I should just call another two questions of what you like. I don't know what you guys want to do. I can go on on. We still want to go up to the farm, get our confidence on. So yeah, we can do that. So that's a couple of questions, yeah. Oh, I think it's just wonderful. I think, I'd say the opposite. I think some people should pay to have an internship. Because you're getting something, again, get away from the idea that everything's about money. It's not about money. What is the compensation you're getting for an internship? Training. How many of you, I mean, you pay to go to school, right? You pay to be here to learn stuff. By working in certain environments, you learn stuff, that stuff is worth money. So the fact that you're not paying is great because you're learning skills that you won't learn at Oxford. So I think the internships are fantastic. Once you do the internship, and you can make, usually, when you do an internship, the next job you get is not minimum wage. It's much higher. Why? Because you learn skills at things like the internship and places like Oxford that make you worth more to your employer than the minimum wage. And that's the value of the internship. It raises your market value, post-intention. And this is my point about $2 an hour. The employee gaining $2 an hour is not just getting $2 an hour. They're getting $2 an hour, plus training. And that training might be worth $50 an hour. It depends on what they do with it afterwards. So life is not just about exchange of money. Yeah, he's been patient. I think a lot of people would identify their self-interest as living in a society where people aren't just treated as commodities, where people have more respect than is then just dependent upon their economic work. How do you respond to that? Well, what did I just say? I said it's not just about money. You guys refused to listen to what I said. No, you said it's not about money. And then you said they have internships so that they're worth more to their employer than their financial aid. Yeah, because that's financially. There's a financial aspect of life. And there's a non-financial aspect of it. It turns out that we care about the financial aspect of life and we want to make ourselves more worthy. Now, but let's think of it a little differently. Because you guys want, you guys think it's not in your self-interest, let's say, to have people work at $2 an hour. It's not in your self-interest, right? Fine. I mean, I don't see a problem with that. You can start a business or foundation or whatever voluntary system you want and pay everybody gazillions of dollars. The question is this. Do you have a right to impose your values on me? Do you have a right to pull out a gun and tell me how to live my life? I want, let me finish, I want to pay people $2 an hour. I don't force them. I don't chain them to their machines. I don't put a gun to their head and make them come to work for me. If they don't want to work for me, if they want to work for you because you're paying $20 an hour, they could all go and work for you. But I want to pay them $3 an hour. Where do you get the right? Where do you get the right? What makes you superior to me? That you can pull a gun out and force me to pay them more money than I want to pay them. Because I don't distinguish between the coercion. If someone has to get a job to feed them. He doesn't. You've offered them a higher paying job. You care. All of you care. I don't care. So offer them something different. If enough people agree with you, then it's very easy. You guys would all get around. You'd organize a co-op and you'd compete me out of existence. But you don't have a right to course me into paying something that I don't want to pay. Into consuming something I don't want to consume. It goes back to any of these questions. All these questions at the end of the day are questions of coercion. Let's say somebody's sick. My neighbor's sick. And they don't have the money for the operation. And they're gonna die if they don't get the operation. They don't have the money. They have two options in life and only two options in life. They can come to me and ask for my help. And I might help them and I might not. Because I might be spending the money on my kids that day. Who are more important to me than my neighbor. Or they can pull a gun out and steal my money. Those are the only two options that exist. Now you want to pretend that because they go to the neighborhood association and vote to take my money, it's any less stealing. But it's not. It's still stealing. It's stealing through a mechanism we call democracy. But it's still stealing. Stealing is wrong. Pulling a gun out and forcing me to do things that I don't want to do is called slavery. You want to enslave me. You want to enslave me. You want to enslave people by paying them less than a minimum wage because they can't get jobs anywhere else because of how the system works. No, because they're not qualified to get other jobs. I'm doing them a favor by employing them. It's a trade. Their time is worth less than $3 an hour. That's why they're willing to accept, voluntarily willing to accept. Let me just say this. What's a monopoly? There are no monopolies in capitalism. There's no example in the history of capitalism of a single monopoly. And I challenge any economic historian to find me one of a monopoly behaving like a monopolist. They don't exist. The state itself. The state is the only monopoly. And the state is the only thing that makes other monopolies possible because they grant them a gun. Only a gun allows you to monopolize something. Everybody else has competition. It's all competition. The post office in the United States is a monopoly. You try delivering first class mail from house A to house B. You go to jail. But if you don't like FedEx, you start another business and compete with FedEx. Nobody could put you in jail for that. You guys, again, this is all, this is voluntary. And let me say this economically. Capitalism, when it's allowed to work, creates many, many, many more jobs than there are people. That is the nature of capitalism. This is why not only the people who are taking the three bucks an hour happy to take the three bucks an hour. But people from all over the world come to the place where you're giving three bucks an hour. Take the United States in the 19th century, which is as close to capitalism as we've ever gotten. Everybody came there. Millions and millions and millions of people came to the United States and they were offering a lot less than seven bucks 25 an hour, even in real terms, if you take real dollars, a lot less. But millions of people came. Why did they come? Because whatever it was that capitalism was paying them was far superior to the options that they had. And you say, oh, but we could have had socialism, we could have taken all the wealth and redistributed it. But then you wouldn't have any wealth. There was no wealth to redistribute. There was no wealth to redistribute. All the wealth that we are now redistributing in the West was created by capitalism. And we're spending it now. We're redistributing it now. But that have run out. I mean, socialists are good at redistributing other people's money. But at some point, that other people's money runs out. What do you do then? You have to have to return to capitalism. This is what they do, this is what Lenin did, right? And the communism. You get people a little bit of freedoms. They create a little bit more wealth and you steal it from them and redistribute it again. That's evil. That's an evil system. A system where you pull a gun and tell me how much to pay my employees is evil. And it denies, again, the victim here. It's not just me. It's the employees who are the victims. Because today in France, you have 25% youth unemployment. If you under 30 in France, it's almost impossible to find a job. That's because of a high minimum wage. Nothing else. In America, in a city youth, unemployment is 25%. Minorities say, Hispanics and blacks. Nobody care, you middle class. We don't care about them, right? Let them rot. That's what we're saying when we say raise the minimum wage. Because then we're saying we're going to take minimum, we're going to say unemployment for young black kids from 25% to 30%, but we're a white middle class. We don't care about black kids. And then we accuse capitalists like me of being the racist. That's a joke in the whole thing. The real racists are the socialists who want to cripple these people. I want to give them opportunities. And they'll have opportunities if I pay them $3 an hour, which they won't have if they get $0 an hour, which is what you want to give them. Have you had enough? I don't know if you've had enough. If I were to just jump in quickly and say, yeah, if your feet are gone, I won't be insulted. I know it's really late. Yeah, it's getting a bit late, guys. Darren and the Aaron Institute have been very kind to give us a little bit of the drinks budget upstairs. Basically, why don't we actually wear the common here? And it's in my self-interest, but please don't worry. We're going to go out and say, yeah, there's some drinks. Drinks on the Aaron. Afterwards, the people at King Class will do stick around. OK, so we'll make this the last question, then we'll go get some drinks and you can ask me the questions. You want to be asked, too. OK, so we'll make these two change. Can you ask me any time? I was going to ask, can free markets solve something like climate change? Yes. And what would it look like? I don't know how flippant you want me to be. They could allow us to continue along the way conditioning. And I'm serious. I'm not kidding. Look, what is the problem with climate change? What is the problem we're trying to solve? And let's assume now, now we're going to get into an argument where the climate change is happening is not happening, because I'm not a scientist. So I don't enter into that debate, although I'm skeptical. Let's put it that way. But let's assume it's happening. Because I want to, OK, so it's happening. What is the solution that is proposed? What's the solution they're proposing? Cut out emissions. Yeah, stop using oil, natural gas, and coal. OK, well, let's stop living. Let's all take a gun and put a bullet in our brain. Because that'll be fast. If we stop using oil, natural gas, and coal, we'll die slow. Everything we have, everything we have in Western civilization, in civilization period, is dependent on carbon fuels. And you can't replace them with wind and solar energy would go great in the Great Britain. I mean, it's wonderful. Sunshine's here every day. So there are no alternatives. There is no such thing as alternative energy. That's a myth. The only alternative energy is nuclear energy. And everybody's opposed to global warming. It's also opposed to nuclear. So there's no solution. The solution is to kill ourselves, which is what I think some of them want. My solution is this. If it's a real problem, well, what are the issues? Let's assume some catastrophic idea. It's going to get super hot in the world. And we're going to boil to death. Well, can we make it cooler without giving up civilization? Can we make it cooler? Well, how about, I'm just making this up. I'm not a scientist. We put some ash in the atmosphere that blocks the sun. I don't know. I mean, the point is let's think about technologies. Let's think about things we can do to the environment that changes it, that makes the consequence less, rather than solutions that cripple us and destroy our way of life. The other issue is this. Put aside the catastrophic. But does this doesn't, would the state need to put that? No, I think what private company would just selflessly fix the atmosphere? Well, I mean, again, what does it mean to be self-interested? It means that we can all get together. Companies could get together and say, look, our business is going to be destroyed if we all boil to death. We have a selfish interest in saving civilization. And here's what we're going to ask people to put some resources together voluntarily and solve this problem. I don't think that would be hard. The problem is we don't believe we're going to boil to death because we're not. So let's think of less catastrophic scenarios. Sea levels rise. I wonder if we've had a problem like that in human history. Ah, Amsterdam. Maybe we both dykes. Amsterdam is under sea level, if you don't know. They have dykes to protect them from rising sea levels. Maybe we raise the dykes. Maybe we build dykes. I don't know. Or maybe Florida floods. And people have to move because of weather. That's never happened in human history, right? See, I worry about the coming ice age, which is going to happen. We know there's cycles of climate. One day there'll be an ice age. And what are you Brits going to do? I mean, this place will be one big glacier. That's much worse than global warming. And that's nature. That's our man-made, right? We've had ice ages. We will have ice ages in the future. I mean, we need to be creative in terms of technology. And we need to think about this. But the solution cannot be. It cannot be stop living, which is what the solution presented to us today is. That's the equivalent, reducing CO2. I mean, by the way, here's the other side. And I know I'm going to be accused about caring about people again. But think about people in Africa who don't have industrialization, who have low quality of life, very low standard of living, and very low life expectancy. Because they've never industrialized. They don't have capitalism. What do they need in order to raise their standard of living? Electricity. Most people in Africa do not have electricity. To produce the electricity to electrify Africa, and to create industry, and create jobs, and create prosperity in Africa, how much more CO2 are we going to have to burn? A lot. So if we cap CO2, you're basically crippling Africa to be poor and despotic forever. And that's sad. I want Africans to prosper. Because I'll have more trading partners than I become richer, because traders win-win. The more people that are on the planet, the better off I am. The richer they are, the better off I am. I love wealthy people, because it means they produce values that I can benefit from. Yeah, last question. You get to really punch me in the ear. Thanks, Dr. Rube, by the way, for your time. A lot of what you said didn't make sense to me. But the stopping point comes when, so you do believe in property rights, for example, because Hong Kong, you mentioned the Hong Kong example. Absolutely. But see, the property rights thing is the concept that real prisoners of honor, right? I mean, it's easy enough for me and you to argue. No, but we are. I mean, I could have been born to African parents in the middle of Africa with no access to all these beautiful facilities. And we have the luxury of debating this here. Now, yes, my productive value has been built not by myself, but by my parents' investment in myself. So that kid in Africa didn't have that. Now, if you institutionalize property rights and just stop there, then yes, we build all the wealth. And then you institutionalize the property rights, which give me the right to keep my wealth. And say, if that kid in Africa comes on stands on my land, he can be sure for it. He can go, but, but, but. Then you spoke also about how you say something about Africans and wealth or whatnot. I mean, you know that graph also seems to correlate quite strongly with a lot of slavery. No, it doesn't. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Let's look east in your training company. The history of that company starts very close to that line. No, it actually doesn't. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I can enjoy the history of slavery. There was slavery here. There was slavery here. There was slavery here. There was slavery here. There was slavery, slavery, slavery. Let me finish. Let me finish. When did slavery end? Wait, there. And let me finish. Who ended it? The British Navy. The Navy of the country, most industrializing, most abducting capitalism. Slavery ended because of capitalism, and slavery in America ended here. And who ended it? After. The capitalist north against the agrarian primitive south. Capitalism is what kills the only period in human history. The only period in human history that is devout of slavery is the period of capitalism. Sure. Only after the profits generated by slavery have been capitalized in the West and then you build property rights to protect those profits. No, no, no, no, I'm not saying that we should have. One second, one second. I'm not saying we shouldn't have capitalism, right? I'm saying what's wrong. I agree with most of the things you say. Can I get your question? I can. Let me ask you. No, no, no, I don't think I mean. I'm waiting. I'm just sitting inside it just to see what I'm saying. I love this. That, yes. See, this is more fun than making money. It's all good and well for us to debate this here. What I'm saying is philosophically, flip the economics of it. Philosophically, me and that kid in Africa could have changed lives, right? All I'm saying is, if we're institutionalizing property rights, it's also fair to institutionalize some mechanism by which we should socially redistribute those, because I have a first move advantage over that kid. He can't switch lives with me, right? Yeah, I guess, yeah, I got it. OK, so let me address that. It's a great question, and it's a great, it's a perfect issue. Let me just say about slavery. I completely disagree. Slavery is a net detriment to the slave owner in terms of economic prosperity. Because the slave is not very productive. He's not very productive because he's a slave. Slaves are not productive. It's much more economically beneficial to hire somebody than to force somebody into slavery. From a purely economic perspective, there are other reasons for slavery. There's nothing to do with economics. Now, more can tell thinking that believes in tariffs and restrictions believe that slavery was good for the economy. But it's not. And you can see this in America. The South had slaves, the North didn't. Who was richer? By a long shot, the North was. Much richer. Slavery is a net negative for a purely wealth economic percent. That's not the reason to be against slavery. The reason to be against slavery is the violation of individual rights. But anyway, that's a purely economic point. Think about it. But that's true. Let's take Africa and these kids in Africa. And it's true. You were born into a certain environment. And he was not. But that's the fact. You are where you are and he is where he is. The fact that you have something doesn't give him a claim against what you have. He was born where he was. You are where you are. You both do the best, hopefully, if you're selfish, to do the best with what you have. But let's talk about property rights in Africa because it's really interesting. You're making an assumption that property rights are finite, that there's only so much property. Which is true in a superficial material sense in terms of just land. There's only so much land if we don't count all the planets out there, which we should because of their potential property one day if we're allowed to go there. But think about, I have a solution, for example, for Africa. And it's on my solution. I'll give credit in a second. That would make Africans, I think, far better off like that. You won't have to, you know, it's just a legal construct. Give them property rights. They live on land. They cultivate land. They have a home on land. But they don't own the land. Because there's no recognition of property rights in Africa. This is an idea of Hernando de Soto, who is a Peruvian economist, a wonderful book called Capital Ideas. And what he says is this, if you take poor people who don't own anything because they live on the state's land and they cultivate the state's property and you give them that property, suddenly they're capitalists. They own capital. I'll give you an example where this works so beautifully that it's shocking to me nobody's done this yet. I visited Rio de Janeiro. I don't know. Do you guys know Rio de Janeiro? In Brazil. It's the most beautiful, geographically the most beautiful city in the world. I've never seen anything like it. But what's fascinating about Rio is that the rich people in the middle class live low down, kind of by the ocean, and they have no view. They don't see the beauty of the city. The poor people in the favelas live on the hillside. And they have the most magnificent views in the entire world. But they're dead poor. I mean, they live in these shanties. It's a favela. And they're squatters. This was all government land. And they squattered there because it was available. And they went there and squatted. Millions of people live in favelas. You could turn many of these people into wealthy, wealthy people by giving them title over their land. Because who would buy from them immediately? The wealthy people who would want to move away from the crummy place they live right now and up into the hills where they have a beautiful view. Resorts would buy, hotels would buy. Instantly, you would create wealth where wealth doesn't exist. By creating private property, CC, my view is private property, first of all, I believe in intellectual property as well, so that it's infinite. There's no limit to how much private property there is. But even the problem in the world today is not that you own too much property. It's that the state owns too much property. The state shouldn't own any property. In Africa, if Africa was privatized, if every inch of Africa was turned into private property for the inhabitants of Africa, which you could do tomorrow, they would suddenly be rich. Those people work his hard. I get compensated. I want to be able to spend. And maybe I'll take some of that money and put it into school in Africa. Maybe not. It's none of your business. No, we can continue upstairs. Thank you all.