 We're actually really fortunate today in our inequality debate because we're trying to decide if it's inequality fair. I'm not sure who's taking which side on that because I'm not sure yet how we're going to define inequality. The two speakers today were very fortunate to have with us Dr. Jaron Brook, the Executive Director of the Anne Rann Institute, and is the co-author of Free Market Revolution and the upcoming book, Equal is Unfair, America's Misguided Fight Against Income and Inequality. That might be a clue. A former finance professor, Dr. Brook's commentary has been published in an academic as well as popular publications, and his op-ed is often appearing major news outlets like Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today. Frequently interviewed on national television and radio, and lectures regularly on capitalism, inequality, business ethics, and freedom of speech at college campuses, community groups, and corporations across America and throughout the world. Thank you so much for coming Dr. Brook. On my left, as he always is, we have Professor Bill Marshall who received his law degree at the University of Chicago. He's currently the Keenan Professor of Law here at UNC. Former Deputy White House Counsel and Deputy Assistant to the President of the United States during the Clinton administration. He also served as Solicitor General of the State of Ohio. He is published extensively on freedom of speech, freedom of religion, federal courts, presidential power, federalism, and judicial selection matters. He is a frequent speaker to the ACS and to the Federalist Society. He's brought in as the rarest of abuses, the person who can speak rationally to both sides without throwing things at them. Tonight we're going to hope to have a little bit of a discourse on inequality in America. We're going to have 10 minutes stop watching force. They got me because I'm the largest member of the faculty. So we'll have a 10 minutes for opening remarks, about five minutes each for rebuttal. Then we'll have the remainder of our time will be for a Q&A session. So don't have a burrito-enforced nap, wake up at the end of the day. You may address questions to either of both speakers. If it's the one speaker in particular, the other speaker will also have an opportunity to comment. We're going to try to get out of here about 6.15 or so, so we'll have the full out. And with no further ado, I'll start with Dr. Brook. I'm giving them freedom of the web. Thanks for inviting me here. So inequality obviously is a huge issue both in the political one, but also in the academic realm. It is maybe the most debated, discussed issue today in economics. Major books have come out on this topic. You might be aware of a book by Piketty, the French economist that came out last year. It was an instant bestseller. Nobody actually read the book, but it was an instant bestseller. Amazon, I don't know if you know this, but Amazon keeps track of how much of a given book you read. If you buy it on a Kindle and they publish the 10 least read books every period of time. Piketty's Capital was one of them, which made me pretty happy. But it's become a huge topic. It's hard to open the New York Times on any given day without inequality coming up in a major story as an explanation for all our troubles. I think there are two primary arguments that the inequality, the people who view inequality as a problem. And I'm talking here about income inequality, wealth inequality, inequality when it comes to material stuff, which is what seems to be on people's minds. There seem to be two issues that people raise about inequality. One is economic and one is ethical model. The economic argument is, and there's a lot of ideas, the middle class has not improved its stakes since 30 years ago. If you know anything about life in the 1970s, life is so much cooler today, if you're middle class than it was back then. By every dimension with regards to, again, the material stuff, that I think that's just not a real argument. And then there is the argument that people at the top, there's a significant number of people at the top who didn't earn it, who at the top because they've got political connections, who at the top because they finagled the system. There's a real issue of cronyism in America today, and that is an issue that's growing in America. So there are issues with regard to how people at the top are doing their issues and how people at the bottom are doing. None of those issues have anything to do with the gap between the two. Who cares about what the gap is? If there are issues of cronyism, let's talk about them, let's fix them. I'm against cronyism. If there are issues at the bottom, people don't have enough opportunities, they don't rise fast enough, let's look at it, let's study it, let's fix it. The problem is not the gap. Economic theory, and nobody has presented an economic theory that says that the gap is what slows economic growth and what makes it a problem. There are lots of problems. Let's deal with the problems, but let's not, you know, kind of escape dealing with the problems by looking at the gap. And by the way, and we can get into the details in a little bit, almost all the proposals that I've seen to shrink the gap would do harm to the people at the bottom and harm to the productive people at the top of the income distribution. That is, they would restrict opportunities even more to people of low income and they would create even more cronyism at the top. Want to know how and why there'll be time in the Q&A or in the battles to talk about all of them. Now then there's the issue of, so economically, in my view, there's no issue of inequality. There are lots of economic issues, but there's no issue of inequality in terms of how the economy functions. Again, there's no theory of inequality that says that it puts the economy in some way. It just doesn't. There's no relationship. So I think the real issue is not an issue of economics. The real issue here is an issue of things, what we view as just, as fair. It's an issue of ethics. And then the question is of course, how do we define fairness? And the definition of fairness seems to have shifted, I'd say, over the last, certainly over the last hundred years, but maybe even over the last just 30, 40 years. Fairness used to mean, like justice, justice and fairness are often used as synonyms. They used to mean getting what you deserve. Getting what you deserve. And in the marketplace, at work, what you deserve is what you can make. It's how productive you are. Getting compensated for the value you are creating in the marketplace. In the real world, some people create enormous amounts of value. Bill Gates has changed the world. All of our lives are different indeed. I don't know that there's a person on the planet whose life is not marginally better because of Microsoft. As a consequence, he's made a lot of money. A small business or a fast food employee is not changing the world. They're not creating that much value. They're creating very little value, somewhere around $7 to $8 an hour with the value. And that's why that's what they're getting compensated. That used to be considered fair. You get compensated by how much you produce, by how much you create in the marketplace. Now again, we're talking just about material stuff. That doesn't mean you're not a good person or a bad person. It doesn't mean one person is going to be happier than the other. They're not necessarily colluding with the money. But when it comes to economic distribution, it was always linked to dessert. And dessert means productivity. Somewhere along the line, over time, we've come to the conclusion that equality now means, I'm sorry, fairness now means equality. There's an implicit assumption that equality is some ideal, some wonderful thing out there. That if only we could achieve it, that would be some kind of utopia or nirvana. I don't know about you, but I kind of like inequality. I like the fact that we're all different. I like the fact that we're all different. I like the fact that we all do different things, have different skills, have different abilities, express them in different ways. And yes, some people get compensated for their skills disproportionately to what I get compensated for my skills. Because the marketplace values that more than they value me. Fine. The bond change makes a lot more money than I do. And that's cool, because I enjoy watching the bond change. And by the way, I would like equality of basketball. I'm big on the bond. I want to be able to go on the basketball court of the bond change and play with an equal opportunity to win. Right? Now if you know anything about my basketball skills, we do know, but you can assume, I don't have a chance, right? So how do we make the equality happen? How do we make the so-called fairness happen? How do you make the bond change equal to me in basketball? You have to handicap him in some way, right? Like breaking his legs. An arm might help me as well. But that's what equality always requires. It requires pulling down people with ability. Pulling down the most productive. Pulling down the people with skills so that we can all be able to let the lowest common denominator, which in the case of basketball, is me. There's no other way of achieving equality. It's about tearing people down. Penalizing people for success. Penalizing people for ability. And to me, that is unbelievably unjust, unfair, unwanted. So I believe that inequality is fair. It's just. It's right. It's wrong. And that the people who are alarmists about the inequality are primarily motivated by an interest in tearing down success. They're primarily motivated by something that I think is pretty ugly, which is envy. Thank you. Thanks ACS and several societies for putting this thought together. And really thanks to Iran for coming here and honoring us for being here. And I urge you all to watch his podcast. Obviously in 10 minutes, he could present anything he wanted to present. And it's really intellectual and very much fun to listen to what he has to say. I'm not going to give a positive vision of equality in that sense. I really don't have one as much as I have some disagreement with the way Iran just presented what he talked about. And first of all, let me say again, I want to celebrate this discussion that I told one of my other classes. My mom was a little Democrat. My dad was a conservative Republican. And as long as we could defend our people. He had a lot of other lawyers, by the way. So they were much more well informed than why they were prostitutes. But as long as we could defend whatever position we wanted, we took it to heart and she didn't feel like the other side was a bad person or whatever. And really it took many years until I realized how much smarter my mother was. But I also want us to think about these debates and these kinds of things. And we're going to learn from each other. I mean, I realize that for the same reason as Iran, since I probably agree with him on a lot more than he thinks that I might agree with him on. I'm not going to deal with the economics so much, but I will tell you some of the reasons why people are troubled about income inequality that I think we're facing. One is the civil unrest that creates. The CIA looks at income inequality as one of the basic things to look at and figure out if there's a danger of societal upheaval. And I think that's something to be concerned about. When the haves have so much and the have-nots have so little, there is a real danger of societal unrest. There isn't a morality claim here. I have a little bit of why do so many people or so few people have so much and so many have so few that I think one can defend it on. But I really want to talk a little bit about what Iran is saying is being so inconsistent with where a lot of the policy is not necessarily easy for it. But that seemed to be coming from that kind of view of the free market. Because what Iran really is talking about is rugged individualism. And the idea of rugged individualism as a way is what made this country what it is. And I agree. What a great thing. It's given us our optimism. It's given us our sense of innovation. Rugged individualism is really important to who we are, who we are as a nation. But it has its limits. In the case of the 1930s when the Supreme Court of Health, Social Security, talked about how when the country was founded you always had a new place you could go to to start all over. You don't have that anymore. And that's one of the reasons they actually held the Social Security talked about holding. We don't have that kind of opportunity to redefine ourselves and start all over. Not only that, we need a lot more to be able to succeed in this society. We need education. We need other kinds of benefits that society gives us. I think Obama misspoke when he said that nobody builds anything on their own. I think there misses some of the value of rugged individualism in there. But he's certainly right to say that those who make a lot of money in this country need our roads, need our communications, need our healthcare system, need our system of laws to make that possible. Bill Gates often says he owes back to the society. That's exactly what he's talking about. It's that the society gives the infrastructure for the entrepreneur and the parents talking about to succeed. And then we also see what happens when rugged individualism goes unchecked with the kind of abuses and very made-offs of this world that that creates and the need to stop rugged individualism, what we're going to call that, from going full. Now it seems to me what we need to think of, and this is what I want to get to figure out is that if you really took rugged individualism seriously, you wouldn't be talking about LeBron James, you'd be talking about Paris Hilton and Conrad, whatever they use, Hilton, who've taken an infinite amount of money and done nothing with it and still have it. And if you really took rugged individualism seriously, we have a 100% inherent tax. But what I hear on the other side is they call it the death tax and they say there's something to matter with it. No, I don't want to break LeBron James' knees, but when I play basketball with them, I don't want my knees to be broken because he started with so much more resources than I have. And that is the analogy in place. And the other thing to talk about, by the way, is healthcare. You want to talk about basic opportunity and the idea of equal opportunity. What could be more important than making sure that we have basic healthcare to rely on so that we all can compete? You know, even if we celebrate as we should, the idea that we are masters of our own things, we are not the masters of our own health. And when we cut off the idea that everybody should have access to healthcare, that is the largest attack on the idea of equal opportunity that I think is out there. How many of you know people who have to stop their own education to take care of aging parents? Or take care of friends or take care of spouses who are haunted? Or how many of you or how many people you know weren't able to succeed themselves because they got sick? If we really took this notion of rugged individualism seriously, which I think we should, we took that notion of what makes America great. What we should take seriously, and I believe you're wrong with referring to this too, is the idea of equal opportunity and what it means to create a level playing field. Not one in which we guarantee a quality of results. I agree that that's not what we're all about, and I agree that there are all kinds of problems with creating a system that's equal to quality of results. But there isn't one that talks about equality of opportunity. And that's what I think will really come to be short. And if you think that somebody who grows up in a public, in a rich subgroup of Connecticut, has the same kind of advantage and the same kind of ability to compete as somebody who grows up in McAllen, Texas, it's just not there. And if we are going to, I think that you're right, that when the Bill Gates of the World succeeds, it helps us all at some level. I don't believe in trickle-down economics is the only simplification. It's certainly true that the idea that some of us succeeds helps others, that we ought to at least provide the tools to allow everybody to succeed if they want to put that kind of work in, and not let the things that unfairly and beyond people's control stop them from succeeding from getting in the way. So that's the notion of a quality that I'm talking about, equal opportunity. And I think that's a different, you know, I think idea that works with rugged individualism. It's not inter-fatal to rugged individuals in accomplishing or creating the kind of society that you're on is talking about. Thank you. Speakers who finished within their lot of time, five minutes for a rebuttal. We both do the same quality. So just to sharpen the debate a little bit, because it's getting too nice here. Equal opportunity in my view is as false of a quality argument as equal. Because there is no such thing as equal opportunity. And you can't create it. It's again some utopian vision. The kid in the south side of Chicago is always going to have less opportunities than somebody born into a family that's already well connected and can send them off to University of Chicago or whatever. That's just the reality in which we live. We're not equal. Let's just accept that. We're not, and we're never going to be. The sense in which equality is important. And it's really in my view only one sense in which the term equality is relevant in the political realm. And that is the sense in which I think the founders meant it when they talk about all men who created equal in the Declaration of Independence. And that is all of us should be, the founders had a self of the contradiction here. But all men should be equal in rights, equal in liberties, equal before the law. We want everybody to have opportunities. They're never going to have equal opportunities. I actually want to maximize opportunities. My view is let's maximize opportunities for everybody. But to do that, we have to have a system that protects your right to your own life, your right to act in the pursuit of your own life. Now, when we try to establish systems that create equal opportunity, equal equal outcome, we by definition violate the principle of equality before the law. Because how are we going to create these equal opportunities? By taking for some and giving to others. There's no other way to do it. There are some people in order to raise other people. You're not treating them as equal. So it's not, it's not, you know, I want to get away from the terminology. I really don't believe in equality of any kind of outcome. It's equality of freedom, of liberty. Leave us alone, which is the working individualism we're talking about. It's really a political system that leaves individuals alone, that doesn't try to interfere, that doesn't try to give us more opportunities, more outcome, less opportunities, less outcome. Now let me address just quickly a few of the things. Civil disobedience. As far as I know in history, there's never been civil disobedience in a society which has had large differences where the perception was that the inequality was just. When it's, the perception is that the inequality of the gap is unjust like 18th century France, where the king, right, the aristocrats had all the wealth. Then you get civil disobedience. But in places like the United States, the 19th century, where there was a large inequality in Hong Kong to this day. I'm not talking about civil disobedience about democracy. I'm talking about civil disobedience about inequality. You don't get civil disobedience. I don't think civil disobedience, I think it's a rationalization. Now there is a perception today that that gap is unjust because of cronyism. We can discuss cronyism. I'd love to. That needs to be dealt with. But it's not the inequality again that's the problem. It's the cronyism that's the problem. Roads, communication that you didn't build that. Well, yeah, of course we all use roads that other people build, but you know what? For the most part, we all pay for them. Bill Gates didn't create myself, he had lots of employees. They all got paid. More millionaires were created in Microsoft than any company in human history because they got paid well for the contribution they provided. And you know what? His taxes, even the minimal amount of taxes that he paid, paid for those roads, paid for those schools, paid for those teachers. People, it's not like there's free stuff out there because there's nothing that's free. That's not what the freedman said, there's no free lunch. Somebody pays for it, it might be free to you, but somebody pays for it. And Bill Gates and the 1% paid disproportionately for the infrastructure. Because we are actually used for free, because many of us pay a lot less taxes. Less taxes than we would cost to actually provide that infrastructure. And you know, we can have a debate about whether that infrastructure should be private or public, which is a whole other topic. I'll stop there. Okay, I'm glad we aren't going to be nice. I was in a good place to go. No, let's deal with some of the problems that your ideas may have. He said that, yeah, nobody in the South Side of Chicago has ever done the same kind of opportunity with some going up in the Chicago suburbs. You know what? Can we create an exact opportunity? Brown is going to know it. I think we can create a form of some kind of opportunity. But let's take his argument seriously and say, okay, we are going to have a system where we know that people are going to be frozen into certain kind of economic strata and other people who are not. Well, it seems to me that is the kind of unjustness that does create social unrest. And if we say we don't really care about the fact that we know that there isn't going to be certain economic opportunities for people in Appalachia or people in the inner cities, that creates the problem of civil unrest. And by the way, I love your example of a 19th century because the response in 19th century in America was the creation of the income tax and the busting up of the large anti-trust thing. There was a political response to that kind of inequality. It didn't lead to civil unrest, but it didn't lead to people patting themselves on the back and saying, what a great system we have because the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. It led to legal redress of those particular kinds of concerns. And one of the areas of work where I think that, you know, I think he talks about the value of people of being established by the market. So I'll use the example in his initial remarks about Bill Gates made hundreds of millions of dollars and somebody making seven bucks working for him, working for him each time. And we can ask ourselves, is the free market really all that good in providing, in attaching work to what people do? Is it really true that a hedge fund manager is worth 200 times what a teacher in the south side of Chicago is making in trying to help folks? Is it really true that the market is giving us an accurate representation of the value that people post in society? Now, your answer is probably going to be, I don't know if that's true or not, he might say, or at least folks coming in, but the market does that and we shouldn't second guess the market because that's better than having government make those kinds of choices. Except it's not really true that the market makes all these kinds of choices. Because of the large issues of wealth, it's done by management and corporate structures. I mean, look what happened. After Wall Street brought us into that economic depression that we had in 2007-2008, they all got raises and they all got bonuses. And the reason why that happened is because ownership is so business from management right now that there is no market check on that except what works in a very consistent part of the economy in New York. So you can't convince me either on the grounds of looking at the value of people's worth to society or the grounds that the free market is actually making free choices to say that this kind of economic differential is fair. And yes, it's true at its last point that everybody pays taxes and so that's where the wealth is coming from. But one of the questions we have to ask is, is this a fair tax system? What is pointed out, heads of corporations, people making a lot of money, paying a less effective rate than the secretaries who are working for. There's something that's wrong. There's something that's wrong here. The market isn't working in the way that he's talking about. I read in Iran when I was a kid too, I love it. I mean it's great, that sort of image of freedom, I think is a valuable image. But it has to be tempered by a sense of reality and how it works in the world. And if everybody was an Anne Rand in this world, the society would fall apart in an instant. Thank you, everybody. So we're going to open the floor up to questions here. I am struck that some of these things seem to be questions about the appropriate level of abstraction and what principle it is we're coming to and that there might be responses where both of you would agree about the nature of the problem. For example, the cronyism issue would be coming at it from opposing ends of the political spectrum about what the correct response is and where the problem lies to begin with. So I'm really interested in a joint meeting between the American Communist Society and the Federalist to see what we think, whether or not government is the problem or the solution and whether or not we can fairly define the problem. So with that I will open it to the floor. Let's start here. For professional reasons, you said that you did not agree with the proposition that someone's value can be adequately assessed as their market value. Is their value to market? Well I've said that the current salary struggle doesn't necessarily select the value that people have. I guess my question is other than a market value, what objective gauge of one's value would you... Sure, I mean that's the problem. What Richard just said a minute ago is having government come up with a wage schedule isn't exactly going to be a perfect result even. I agree with that. The problem is it's not that it's government the solution or government the problem. The government is both the solution and the problem and private industry is both the solution and the problem. Private industry doesn't work to curb environmental harm because it's not in private industry's economic interest in doing that. We can't have a government wage system to do it but we can acknowledge the fact that maybe the wage system doesn't work effectively in doing everything that you're on saying when we come up with an idea of what taxation should look like for example. So I'm not in favor of some sort of utopian evaluation of the teacher working in the South Side of Chicago versus a hedgehog manager. But I am suggesting let's start with the proposition that we know that the wage system isn't necessarily reflecting the value to the society as a way to sort of evaluate this economic evaluation. So I guess partially I take this question of value to society. I don't know what that means. There is no society out there that we can value. The question is if I'm selling a product is am I providing a value to some people and how much money I make is going to reflect how much value I'm providing to those people and how many people I'm providing that value to. That's the only value there is. It's value between individuals. There's no algorithm out there to calculate social value and when we try to do those calculations it's very dangerous. And at the end of the day I think the wage system called the wage system is quite good. It's quite good at reflecting. The hedge fund managers make a lot of money because they have a lot of distortions in the market primarily created by government manipulation that need to be taken care of. So the allocation of capital is more efficient which all of us benefit from by the way and any day if you want to invite me back to debate hedge funds I'd be happy to do it. And last I looked except for one or two cases every CEO of Wall Street was fired after the financial crisis. Financial crisis that again I've done many debates on this was caused by government and yet no government not a single government regulator not a single government politician lost his job on the country. The two guys most responsible for it Dodd and Frank got a big bill named after them and are considered heroes and yet they are more responsible for the financial crisis than any CEO. So if we're talking about retribution the market is so much better at you know getting rid of people who do harm than his government government keeps them there forever for you know they get lifetime jobs. I was a doctor with a question for you. You said that you're willing to create an equal play to create opportunities that you have to take from someone to bring the same thing. To create inequality as we currently have it you have to take from someone to create that inequality. People lost something that important to be sustained. American ruggedness was not just what created America. America taking from other people to create that. So how do you reconcile that? So I don't accept your premise that is while I'm not going to say they weren't any justices in the recognition obviously they were. The world is not a sewer some game that is the wealth is not about taking from other people. We today in the world are far far far richer by I mean it's hard for you and all of us to imagine how much richer we are. Then we would 250 years ago as the whole world right we didn't take it from anybody. No aliens from which we stole it. Wealth is created and we are richer than people who are richer today didn't take it from other people. They created new wealth that didn't exist before. Now are there any justices in the past? Yes slavery certainly was not to American Indians but that doesn't explain the wealth that we have today. If anything that retarded wealth it didn't increase wealth that retarded wealth. There's a reason why the north was richer than the south and won the Civil War because it didn't have slavery. Not having slavery encourages freedom, encourages people to work harder, encourages production. It became more industrial and therefore it became richer and that's why it won the war. Other than it of course it was rights which what would hope the rights like when it's always it doesn't always happen that way. So I don't buy into the zero sum game that you're hypothesizing. Wealth is not an issue of redistribution. Wealth is something to be created at least under freedom. Now pre-freedom, pre-capitalism, pre-industrial revolution we had a zero sum of wealth. I don't know if you've ever seen these wonderful income and wealth graphs that go back 10,000 years. And they measure human wealth, human income 10,000 years today and the graph is basically flat. It goes up a little bit, down a little bit and then it's 17-something, it goes like that. It goes suddenly through the roof and in Asia that doesn't happen. In Asia it stays flat and somewhere around 1970 something it goes like that. And what happens is when you institute freedom, when you institute capitalism, the ugly word that so many people fear, wealth suddenly explodes. Not because it's taken from somebody but because it's created. I just read a story, the World Bank just today came out with a statistic. For the first time in human history less than 10% of the planet, of the human beings on the planet lived below what is defined as extreme poverty. That is to be celebrated, that should be a headline in every newspaper because it won't because nobody wants to talk about it. Because India and China and other places in Asia and some places even in Africa have adopted elements of capitalism and suddenly they're richer for it. So they haven't taken anything from something they've created out of nothing. Of course they've taken something away from it. Obviously when you use labor you don't have to say there's complete exploitation but you're not doing it by yourself. You need people there that you're using as a labor force to be able to build what it is that you want to build. And there is, I think that's what Bill Gates talks about, partly talks about giving it back. It's because of the structure of the society, because of the availability of the workforce and the use of that workforce that you've been able to amass that wealth in the first place. So taking some of that back is just a reflection of the fact that it's not as individualistic like to assume that it is. I think the myth of rugged individualism is an important myth and movement but it's not like anybody did it on their own. They needed to have, and I think that's your point, they needed to have other kinds of resource. They need to be able to use the society, what was there, to be able to particularly build out them. I don't think we ought to build an economic structure on that alone. I think we ought to recognize the value of individual and entrepreneurship but we certainly should recognize that that's a part of it when we're thinking of this overall question of income inequality. So Mr. Books, you say that equality of opportunity is not necessarily a good thing but I believe that the opportunity cost, if you look at the body of the proportion, so the more people are that poor kid from the south side of Chicago than our Bill Gates, if we assume that smart people don't just come from rich people, you know, the services that a productive person gives back to society, you say that it's measured in what they can create. If you don't have a quality of opportunity, how then would you say that they're able to put back into society? Also, I think that your point about Bill Gates is actually very interesting in this respect since that Bill Gates, his company, was convicted of antitrust measures and you say that you're against currentism and yet Bill Gates was a private school kid that ended up using monopolistic tactics to make his wealth. So there's two questions, let me try to separate them out. I'm eager to answer the antitrust one, but I mean the law schools have to be careful. So let me ask the first one first. Look, counted the way it was presented, I don't believe in static economic classes by any means. I actually believe strong, and I think the evidence is on my side, that if you take away the rhetoric of equal opportunity and you take away the rhetoric of equality of outcome, you take away equality out of the picture, you're giving more opportunities to poor kids than you would otherwise. So all of the policy proposals of the people who advocate for equality, whatever kind of equality you want, actually institutionalize people into poverty more than my proposals. No system in human history, as is illustrated by what's going on in Asia right now, no system in human history has provided more opportunities to rise up from poverty than a system of freedom where the government doesn't intervene in our business lives, where the government leaves us alone, where the government doesn't try to establish equality of opportunity. You want equality of opportunity? And I'm going to say something that's like a thousand times more radical than anything I've said so far, so be ready. Get rid of public education because public education doesn't give equality of opportunity. What it does is institutionalizes bad education for poor kids. Look at the South Side of Chicago. Go look at the schools in the South Side of Chicago. It is one of the great travesties of this country that we have such awful, horrific educational institutions in the poorest neighborhoods where they can least afford to get a bad education. Now, if you privatize the education and you get competition for those kids and you've got corporations looking for those smart kids in the inner cities, giving scholarships to those kids, starting schools in those kids, which have no doubt would happen, the quality of education in the inner cities would go up astronomically. It's unimaginable how good of an education they would give. So my view is when the government gets out of the way, when you have freedom, you maximize opportunities. I'm not for equality of opportunities. I think that's too shallow. I want to maximize opportunities. I want kids to have as many opportunities as possible. I'll give you one other example and then we'll go into interest. Minimum wage. There is no worse law on the books of this country than the minimum wage and it's so enthusiastically embraced now we're raising. This is a law whose sole purpose is to make inner city kids unemployable. Now nobody will admit that, but that's why it was instituted by racist white union bosses who didn't want competition from minorities because it prices them out. The whole point of minimum wage is when you take a price and you artificially raise it and you set it as a minimum price, demand for that product goes down no matter what product is. When you do that to labor, demand for that labor goes down. So what happens when you raise the minimum wage, demand for unskilled labor goes down. And this is like the law of gravity. This is not debatable. This is not up for empirical evidence. This is a law of economics equivalent to the law of gravity. So when you raise the minimum wage to $15, what you're doing is you're telling a inner city kid you'll never have a job. Because you're not going to be producing at $15 an hour unless you start at $5, $6, $7 and work yourself up. But you can't start at $5, $6, $7. Now you, I'm assuming most of you are wealthy kids, not all of you, but some of you are wealthy kids. The wealthy kids among us. You can go do an internship. How much do you get paid for the internship? Zero. My son does comedy in Hollywood, right? He's a comedy writer. You know how much he gets paid? Zero. Nobody's insisting on minimum wage for internships and comedy writers. No, because those tend to be middle-class kids. No, we want to have a minimum because we know that if we'd sit at a minimum wage the internships would go away. And we don't want that. But we're willing to take away jobs from inner city kids. That to me, nothing makes me more angry than that. Because I care about those kids. And I care about the next really smart kid who could own a franchise, who could build a franchise, could build a business. But if they never get that first job, they'll never have a life. The first job is so crucial. Antitrust. Before we go to antitrust. Response, and then we'll come back to antitrust. Very little talk about getting rid of the minimum wage laws in public education. What's that response? No material. That's a bad one. Yeah, right. But on a couple of counts, a minimum wage, a minimum wage for example, what's the reason why minimum wage was built in? Because I'm not an economist. You've got to be able to kick my butt when you're crossing it. You're the one. But there are economic reasons for including the fact that you, when there could be a race to the bottom when you have more employees than you have jobs available, and that can depress. And so part of the idea of minimum wage is to fight against a depressed wage structure. There are some laws which I think are better, which work to exempt students from some of these things, and that can be a fix on minimum wage laws to deal with some of the issues that you're talking about without throwing the baby out of the bathroom. With respect to public education and competition, one of the problems with respect to that is, you're going to have to fund that in a really high rate. So whether you're paying, well, who's going to be paying for the tuition for the kids, for the families that don't have any money to pay for tuition? You're going to have the government? Can I give a simple example? Can I give a simple example? In the city of Chicago to send a kid to a public school in the city of Chicago cuts the city of Chicago $16,000 a year. You can check this out online. For the Catholic diocese, and I'm not a big component of Catholic schools because I'm not religious, but from Catholic diocese it costs $7,500 a year. Yeah, and I think there are a lot of schools. And if you had innovation, and if you had competition, you had entrepreneurs going to education instead of into the next stupid little app for the iPhone, the cost would drive down and you would make them more affordable and cost go down, quality goes up. But we'll see how well the charter school system is working. It's that mixed report so far. What it does do, and what the voucher system does do, is bleed the public school system so that the resources aren't placed into the public school system that need to be there. And we've had a bleeding of public education. I think there's some, obviously some good points to be made about the inefficiency of public education. But public education has also provided the basic cornerstone of how we got to where we got in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. And we haven't funded it. We haven't created the system that makes it work. But even if we go to a system that you're talking about, you're still going to have to tax folks to pay for whatever voucher system or whatever system that you're going to create. That is going to be an attack in the way you phrase it on equality because we're going to have to tax those who are making more money to make that system viable in any real sense than to give these folks any kind of opportunity. I'm going to artificially depress the marketing questions about antitrust in the false equality.