 Welcome our two guests, Yaron Brooke and David Bose to our English-speaking panel, Global Authoritarianism. We want to get your opinion on the current state of global authoritarianism in 2022 and what liberals across the world can do to counter it. We could focus on classic examples, specific countries. We could talk about authoritarianism within the Western world. We could talk about specific people, events you want to mention, or we could take a relatively more abstract path to discuss authoritarianism without mentioning specific cases. We want you to be free to answer the question of what to do against authoritarianism in the way you see fit. So why don't we get started with David, David Bose, who is the executive vice president of the Cato Institute and has published several books on libertarianism, among them, The Libertarian Mind, A Manifesto for Freedom and Libertarianism, A Primer. Please, David, the floor is yours. As we saw the issue with Deidre behind the scenes. Thank you. Thank you, glad to be here. Good afternoon to everybody on the program. Illiberalism and authoritarianism seem to be on the rise. Of course, most of history is characterized by authoritarianism and illiberalism, but a democratic wave that began in the 1970s and peaked around 1989 seems to have reversed lately. Nearly 75% of the world's people live in a country that faced a decline in freedom in 2020, and that trend continues. We don't have time here to list all the authoritarian or illiberal countries in the world. Russia and China are no surprise, although it's disappointing that what seemed like progress in both countries is now being reversed. Saudi Arabia and many Central Asian and African countries have been mired in authoritarianism for decades. Perhaps more worrisome is the rise of authoritarianism in countries like Turkey, Hungary, Venezuela, Mexico, the Philippines, maybe India. American libertarians have usually identified the left as the biggest threat to ordered liberty, especially since the defeat of fascist powers in 1945. But now we see rising illiberalism and authoritarianism on both right and left. But what is right or left? Is Putin right or left? A lot of American conservatives suddenly like Russia and Putin, but he's still running a state-directed economy. China is no longer Marxist, but it's still Leninist. I wonder sometimes if all illiberal regimes are essentially national socialist, that is an economy and society directed, controlled, and or owned by the state and those who control it. We used to talk about the struggle between capitalism and communism. That was an important struggle and it remains that. But there are other ways of looking at divisions in the world. The British journalist Michael Hanlon in 2013 suggested a morality gap among the nations. Those built on post-enlightenment human rights and the other half of the world that follows a different moral code, where might is right, all men were not created equal and there is a right and wrong form of sexual orientation. He wrote that quote, attitudes to homosexuality show the morality gap in sharpest relief across a swath of Northern Europe, much of the US and Canada, Latin America, Israel, and much of East Asia, there's growing tolerance and legal equality, but not everywhere and some parts of the world are actually regressing. Sadly, it's not just the rest of the world where retrograde attitudes can be found. Across the Western democracies, the percentage of people who say it is essential to live in a democracy has plummeted and it is especially low among younger generations. The proportion of Americans expressing approval for rule by the army has risen from one in 16 to one in six in the most recent survey. 32% said it would be better to have a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament and elections and 52% said that in an international survey. So what can liberals do about this? Well, first we can get our own houses in order. We need to clearly understand liberalism. We, when I say that, I mean we libertarians, most of us Americans and Westerners are liberals. Liberalism is a universal creed. We believe that all people are endowed with inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, not just some people. And that idea is incompatible with political ideas based on blood and soil or treating people differently based on race or religion or helping a would-be tyrant steal a presidential election to name one example at random. We need to deepen our understanding of liberalism, understand it better, defend it and teach it. Second, we should make our own countries the light of the world as Jesus said or a shining city on a hill as Ronald Reagan put it. And that is we should improve our own liberal institutions and commitments. In the United States, which I know best, we should welcome good citizens from around the world. We should be more tolerant of our neighbors even when they are different from us. We should work to rise above polarization, politicization and tribalism. We should make our economic policy less corporist, less welfareist, less statist, less interventionist in general. We should not back politicians who scapegoat some people, whether that's the Jews or the rich or the coastal elites or the billionaires. We should reject this kind of scapegoating and focus on the relationship between the individual and the state. We should pursue Thomas Jefferson's advice of peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations. Our governments can speak up for human rights in other countries, but they will be more effective if they do a better job of respecting human rights themselves at home and abroad. Third, human rights groups in the West and elsewhere should highlight abuses, embarrass criminal perpetrators and press for change. We can support groups like the Atlas Network and its partners that work for freedom and the rule of law around the world. We can cast a critical eye on Western companies that sell arms, surveillance technology and other tools of state power to authoritarian countries or tailor movies and other products to the demands of the Chinese Communist Party. You know, there've been some books recently on how Hollywood was very solicitous of the views of Germany in the 1930s. Germany was a big market for movies back then, the way China is now. And there's now evidence historians have looked at that shows Hollywood studios tweaking what a movie said so as not to annoy the government of Germany, which of course was the national socialist government of Adolf Hitler. Now, exactly where government ought to get involved in any such project is difficult for liberals, but we liberals, we people, we journalists, activists can say, this isn't the right thing to do. Don't help, I can remember, because I'm older than you are, Mark Hosen, some of your viewers, I can remember when I admired the Polaroid Company for pulling out of South Africa, when it discovered that its technology was being used to make passcards, to enforce apartheid. That was a noble thing to do. And companies should think about whether they're doing the same thing in various countries today. China is the most visible one, but there are countries that we don't pay really any attention to. And yet they are also repressive interventionist using internal passes, things like that. I don't have a silver bullet for defeating authoritarianism. War is not the answer. Sanctions we've found don't work very well. Cultural openness is a good thing, but it may be blocked in the countries where it is most needed and could be most useful. In the long run, I believe, as Thomas Jefferson wrote in his last letter, that all eyes are opening to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the pulpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred ready to ride them legitimately. But the process of spreading the knowledge of the rights of man is taking longer than I think Jefferson thought it would. Thank you. Thank you, David, for that introduction. I am very glad that we, that Deidre was able to solve the issue with the audio. I will introduce now, yes, let me just one second. Yeah, we can hear you perfectly and I hope you can hear us. Deidre McCloskey is the Distinguished Professor of the Merit of Economics, History, English and Communication at the University of Illinois in Chicago. And now also the Isaiah Berlin Chair and Liberal Thought at the Cato Institute. She has a PhD in economics from Harvard and has written so many books and papers, I couldn't possibly list them all, but the latest one is beyond positivism, behaviorism and neo-institutionalism in economics. I just wanna apologize to Deidre publicly because I can become hysterical while in preparation for events like this. I'm sorry if I'm sometimes too much, while asking for confirmations and reconformations, reconformations. So Deidre, the floor is yours. Well, you know, it's my fault. I'm accustomed to Zoom, but I'm not accustomed to much else. And how can I improve on my, what my colleague David has just said? It's like, I don't know, following Judy Garland in a concert or something. It's very hard to do, but I can perhaps as a historian, especially an economic historian, who has become increasingly concerned with the things that David has been concerned with all his life and increasingly alarmed, as I think we all are, by the new rise of authoritarianism in the world. We thought in 1945 we had taken care of one version. We thought in 1989 we had taken care of another version. And now they're both back, both on the so-called left and the so-called right, which has often been pointed out amount to the same thing. David mentioned the National Socialist Party in Germany from 1933 on, and that's right. They were both nationalists and socialists. Indeed, in the longer view of European history and world history, in the last three centuries, it seems to me there have been three big ideas that the chattering classes that includes all of us here have come up with. The first in the 18th century was liberalism. And I think it's a mistake to think that there were deep roots in Europe or in England of this liberalism. It came on quite suddenly. You can speak of John Locke. In France you can speak of Voltaire, but in its full flowering, it's an 18th century phenomenon. And I always cross myself when I mention Adam Smith, who's a fine example of this, but David quoted you, David, Jefferson and of course, Jefferson was conflicted to the end of his life. He held even his own children in slavery. So it was a new thing and it didn't have a long run up. There are some people who claim that, oh, there's some Western idea of individualism which is very deep and goes back to the Greeks and so forth and then some other people say, well, it's Christianity that was special about Europe and Christianity is where liberalism comes from. And I think in this very long scale, that's wrong. That's false. It could have arisen in Japan or China or the Ottoman Empire, but did not and by a series of accidents did arise, particularly in Northwestern Europe. I always emphasize the important role of Holland in all this before the English outbreak of liberalism. There was something like it in the low countries and especially in the northern parts of the low countries which we call Holland in the 16th and 17th and even somewhat earlier centuries. So that's the first idea in the last three centuries, liberalism. And as David says, it's what we need to defend. It's unfortunate that in the United States we call it libertarianism and that our friends on the progressive left have made off with the word liberal. I'm constantly instructing my friends on the left or I have lots of them to not call themselves liberals. They aren't. They're various kinds of, perhaps not exactly authoritarians although they delight in the authority of the state. In Latin America, as you know, the word liberal has come to mean policies in favor of the rich enforced by the army. The party of Bolsonaro in Brazil is the Partito Liberal. So there's something in the water of the Western hemisphere or perhaps in the air that makes us crazy when we come to the L word. But David and I and lots of others want us to get back to this rude idea as David emphasized of equality. I would observe that the key equality here is equality of permission, not equality of outcome that has been tried and it works in a small group of friends or in a family, but doesn't work at the large scale of the large community. And not even equality of opportunity. David is more intelligent than I am. How are we gonna make us equal? Should we pound nails into David's head until he's as stupid as I am? Is equality of opportunity is unattainable. You may have had excellent parents and your neighbor may have had bad parents. Well, how are we gonna fix that? Are we gonna move back to the system in Sparta, ancient Sparta and take the children away from their mothers when they're five or six and put them all in the same school so they all have the same opportunity? No, I don't think so. So liberalism is the great modern idea. The other two ideas of the three I mentioned are nationalism and socialism. And as I said, if you like that, if you like nationalism and you like socialism, maybe you like 1930s national socialism. And those two have been unmedicated disasters in the modern world. I mean, in combination, they're particularly bad, but Putin's Russia is as much socialist as it is nationalist. It's socialist in the point that the state, the government hands over large parts of the economy to its friends, but that's almost as socialist as detailed central planning in the old Soviet Union. So nationalism, this idea that I'm supposed to hate Central Americans coming to the coming to the other border of the United States, anxious to work for me or to help their children get through school or to evade the gangsters back in their own country that I should be aroused by populist, that is to say fascist or socialist politicians to hate other nationalities is an absurdity. And it's worth pointing out historically that again, it is very new that nationalism is early 19th century, socialism is mid 19th century, and these are new and no one thought that it was a good idea for the government to own the economy in the way the army now owns the Egyptian economy, for example. And no one in the great empires, like the Austro-Hungarian Empire, thought that it was strange that people who spoke Spanish and Dutch and Hungarian and Czech should all be in the same, same, same country, the Austro-Hungarian Emperor of the 19th century was not, well, it was certainly a free trade area. And in that sense was liberal. So in short, three ideas, the first one, which I advocate and so does David and I think everyone here is liberalism. And we should get back to not calling ourselves libertarians, we should call ourselves liberal and take up again this great project of Adam Smith and Mary Wollstonecraft and Frederick Douglass and John Stuart Mill. All right, Adreth, thank you so much for that introduction too. Now we get to our third panelist today, Yaron Brooke, who got his PhD in finance from the University of Texas at Austin and is currently the chairman of the board at the Ayn Rand Institute. He is also a known podcaster and has also co-authored a number of books. So Yaron, the floor is yours. All right, there we go. Thank you, Marcos. And if Deirdre had a challenge following David, I would have the challenge of following both David and Deirdre, which is- You'll be able to handle it, dear, I'm sure. A unique challenge, thank you, Deirdre, for the confidence. You know, one of the great... So first, I'll say I agree with everything that's been already said and I'd like to try to build on that. It is absolutely true that authoritarianism is on the rise in the world today. It's certainly on the rise in the countries where you would least expect it to be on the rise in places like the United States, Sweden, France, much of Western Europe is seeing a rise in authoritarian tendencies. And sadly, whereas, as I think David said, those tendencies in the past were primarily associated with the left, now they are clearly associated with both left and right. And there's a sense in which it's time to abandon the whole left and right spectrum. You know, the real political division is between, I believe, individualism and collectivism. And the right and the left today are collectivists, tribalists, they can nothing, not for the individual. Indeed, we, as liberals, are the only ones who seem to care about the individual. And we stand alone in that respect. We're not allies of the political left and the political right today. We stand separate from both and we need to make that clear. I think there's way too much association out there in the public with many of our positions as being associated with the right. And I think that does us damage. So while authoritarianism is indeed rising, the one positive that exists in the world that has always existed with regard to authoritarianism is that authoritarianism doesn't work. It's a failure. It's always a failure and it's a failure everywhere. And I think that failure has really come to the forefront over the last year in at least three different countries. And I'm sure we could think of more. First, Russia. You know, Putin is indeed the darling of many of the right. But Putin has a massive failure on every front. The Russian economy is socialist and as a consequence, as Adeidra said, and as a consequence, can't really attain significant material wealth even in good times, but certainly given the horror of war that they have initiated, the Russian economy is in decline and the verge of collapse, the standard of living in Russia is declining. No matter what GDP numbers or any other number might tell you, whatever revenue they're getting for oil and gas is going into buying weapons, not going into improving the quality of the standard of living of Russians right now. The war is a failure for Putin. It has been a failure. It is truly, I think, for anyone who values liberty and freedom. It is against the initiation of military force. It is heartening to see, I mean, horrible to see the destruction in Ukraine, but heartening to see the ability of the Ukrainians to fight for their own land, for their own life and for their own freedom and to defeat what was perceived by many to be a significant larger military force. So Putin is a failure militarily. And many Russians know this and one of the most important things happening in Russia today is the brain drain. The better people in Russia today are leaving. Tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands have left to Georgia, to Kazakhstan, some have left to the West if they could get jobs or if they could get visas. It would be amazing, imagine the world in which we offered open borders to any Russians who wanted to come to the United States or the Western Europe and to get a job. The talent we would be receiving and the benefits to individuals that we would be providing by just opening our borders like that would be terrific. But that is still a fantasy in our collectivistic nationalistic United States in Western Europe, sadly. So Russia is as an authoritarian state is now, I think, visible to anybody who has eyes who is not evading that it is a complete and utter failure. People can continue to admire Putin but that admiring somebody who is clearly destroying his own country and destroying the people around in his vicinity. If we look at Iran, I mean, one of the least reported stories and one of the most inspiring stories of the last few months has been this women and really girl, teenage girl revolution that is happening in Iran. The people of Iran have stood up to a failed authoritarian regime that oppresses them, kills them, murders them and impoverishes them and makes them poor. This is one of the most horrible regimes on planet Earth, a theocracy, a real example of what happens when you implement strict religious authoritarianism in a culture and what happens. And it's just horrific on the one hand and inspiring to see these girls marching against it, calling for not just for allowing them to dress the way they want, what a revolution, right? But also to allowing them to be free, to get rid of the theocracy, to get rid of this dictator, to actually liberate themselves politically, intellectually and materially in the way they live their lives. And they're real cracks now in the system. I am optimistic, cautiously optimistic that the Iranian system could collapse in the next few months, next few years and bring about real freedom. And this is a people's kind of revolution. These are young people realizing that their lives at stake, that they can make so much more of their lives. This is an individualistic revolution of individuals wanting to express themselves through clothing, through speech, through everything else and standing up to brutal authoritarians. I think one of the sad things about the current state of the world is that so little press is being devoted to what is going on in Iran. And then finally, a third example of this, I think, failure of authoritarianism and people standing up to it is what is happening in China. Yeah, there's a lot of horrific stuff going on in China that continues to go on in China. But I thought that the demonstrations, the protests against zero COVID were inspiring in China. And the idea that they took up pieces of paper, blank pieces of paper and put them up as the symbol to the fact that they didn't have free speech. So again, it was broader than just zero COVID. This was kind of a standing up against the authoritarian nature of their own government in a place where they could easily be killed. They could easily be jailed for a very long time. We know that China monitors everything. They have cameras everywhere. So they are monitoring these demonstrations. They're taking lists of who these people are. And yet they had the guts, they had the courage to stand up against this regime. And we're seeing now the regime actually folded surprisingly and has eliminated, at least for now, the zero COVID. They've eliminated the app that monitors where you go in China, that they used COVID as an excuse to use. They've disabled that app. As far as we can tell, so they've given up a lot. In addition, a flip side of that is that what's happened in China over the last three, four years is as authoritarianism has risen in the economic sphere, as they've clamped down more on entrepreneurs, as they've increased regulation and favored state-owned enterprise over the private sector, to the extent there is such a thing in China, the economy has slowed. And in addition, innovation has slowed and entrepreneurship has slowed. So again, authoritarianism doesn't work. And here is the challenge that we have, which should be an easy one, but seems to always be more and more, it seems to be much more difficult than one would expect. And that is what we need to do is offer an alternative. And I don't think we do. This is the challenge all of us have. We need to inspire young people. We need to inspire young people with an idealistic vision for the future. The nationalists and the communists, the socialists are very good at this. They know how to do it. But we have reality on our side. Their visions for the future always end up in bloodbaths. Their visions of the future always end up in authoritarian regimes in which the young are the biggest victims. The future, their future is stolen from them. It is up to us to reinvigorate that spirit of the Enlightenment, that spirit of the 18th century that Deirdre talked about. We illuminate that Enlightenment. We resurrect that Enlightenment. Bring it up to date. Show that the forces of nationalism and socialism that Deirdre talked about are nothing but reactionary forces against the Enlightenment. An attempt to re-enslave us under various collectivistic, tribal, pre-enlightenment regimes. The idea of liberty, the idea of freedom, the idea of individualism, the idea that individual is responsible for his own life in the deepest sense that that means is responsible for making decisions for his own life, for choosing his own values, for pursuing those values and for the consequence that that entails. On the upside, the happiness that that might bring him, the wealth that he might earn should be his. And on the downside, the failures that it entails. Freedom and failure go together. Failure is part of what freedom means, but failure is a healthy thing if one treats it as such. It's an opportunity to learn, an opportunity to grow, an opportunity to improve. Every entrepreneur I think out there understands this and knows this. What we need is entrepreneurs of life. People are willing to live their life as entrepreneurs live their businesses. So what we need is a vision, a vision of inspiration, a vision of progress, a vision of wealth, but a vision of freedom. And this is one of the reasons why I think we need abandon the left-right spectrum. It's uninteresting. It is uninspiring. But I do think individualism is inspiring. I think the idea of living one's life for one's own happiness, living one's life on one's own judgment, living one's life for one's own success and everything that entails, including the friendships and love and community that that entails are something beautiful and something we need to draw on and we need to inspire. So I think as always, the authoritarians win more by default than by their own merits. They win because we are not loud enough. We are not inspiring enough. We are not aggressive enough. So I think that the building is really on us to go out there and stop the authoritarian wave that is coming in the West, point to the many, many, many examples of many centuries of the failure of collectivism, the failure of socialism, nationalism or any new form it might take and the true beauty and true inspiration of free markets and of individualism. Thank you. Here, here. Thank you, Yaron, for that introduction as well. I have many questions, some more specific, some more general. I'll get started with, I'll pick up on what you were just talking about on the division between right and left and this is to all three of you because you were all discussing authoritarianism within liberal democratic countries and you seem to agree that that division between left and right is not super useful. Does that mean that you see current far right and far left threats as equally threatening to liberalism? What I've been saying recently is that in the long run, I think the collectivist left, particularly the socialist communist left is the greatest enemy of liberty. In the short run in the United States, the fact that there's still 47% of the country that would vote for a man who tried to steal a presidential election and summoned a mob to Washington to stop Congress from certifying his defeat is the biggest short-term threat to ordered liberty to Republican government. I think that candidate will fade but I'm afraid about what he's done to the American right. The right at least used to claim to believe in free enterprise limited government, the constitution, that was the message of Ronald Reagan and while I had plenty of criticisms and he didn't live it as well as he talked it, he did tell the right that that's what they stood for and he also got 60% of the vote. Then we had a candidate who got 46% of the vote but somehow won the election and he's kind of still got 46% which is probably not enough to win an election but I'm really troubled by the fact that there are people who don't think he has disqualified himself and we now have an American right where conservatives are making pilgrimages to Hungary to learn how a strong leader can take control of the government and wield it against his enemies just the way American leftists used to make pilgrimages to Russia and then Cuba and then China and back around 1980, I encountered a left-wing agitator who told me, well, no, no, no, we're not so excited about China and Cuba. We're interested in the experiments going on in Zimbabwe and Nicaragua and at the time, this was 1980, 84, I don't know, I didn't know enough about the experiments in Zimbabwe and Nicaragua to ridicule her but now we do and as Yaron was saying, it's a failure everywhere. So why do people still gravitate to that? Although to be fair, not many gravitate toward communist socialism. They think they're supporting Denmark or something like that and Denmark's very pleasant so that's a harder argument to make. Yeah, so my take is a little different than David and my concerns are a little different in terms of the long-term. I think the biggest long-term threat in the United States is the right and I think it's because I can't see America and this is particularly America, I think every country has a different dynamic. I think in America, I cannot see communism ever being successful. It's too antagonistic to the shallow interpretation of the founding principles of America. Whereas the right, I think, if it wraps itself around the flag and religion and maybe introduces some elements of environmentalism to appease some of the people on the left, as for example, Andre Vermeul from Harvard is doing with common good conservatism and introducing environmentalism into that, I think that is the winning ideology for authoritarian in the future. I think what the left does is it is so obnoxious. It is so anti-American. It is so hated by Americans that even the left rejects the wacky left. You see that in place in Francisco and you see that in place like Virginia in the recent election. So what they create is an environment in which people are looking for answers to critical race theory and looking for answers to just the nuttiness that defund the police and let's not prosecute shoplifters and property crime is not crime and all this nonsense. And the answer to that is the authoritarian right, unfortunately, they present themselves as being the answers. They wrap themselves around with a flag and again, they have a unifying system around religion. So there's a sense in which the left is fragmenting but reality is there's no light chaos and fragmentation. It ultimately gravitates to unity and I think the right is much more unifying than the left and they fall much more dangerous than the left. So I see that as the bigger threat long-term in the United States, short-term we're gonna, and in that sense, Donald Trump is a fragmenter. He's a destroyer. He doesn't stand for anything. It's not even that Donald Trump is a good fascist even. He latched onto fascism because he thought that's what would attract his followers and his instincts are authoritarian but he doesn't believe in anything. He doesn't actually argue for anything. I think a smart Donald Trump is what scares me. Somebody who believes in the things that Donald Trump argued for but actually can articulate them and argue for them is what's really dangerous. So my fear is actually more of the right than the left long-term. My honest, this theme of inspiring young people, I think that's crucial and the students for, students for liberty is a marvelous organization, founded I believe in Berlin or at least that's where its main office is. And it's got actually hundreds of units scattered around Brazil of all places and is strong in lots of other countries. So inspiring youth is where these new tendencies to the unprincipled, well principled or not, the left or the right are going to be met. I always find myself arguing that the left-right spectrum, which lots of people, even very sophisticated people seem to think exhausts what you need to know about politics that we liberals are not on it anywhere. Because as I think we agree, the left and the right and the middle for that matter along the spectrum want the state to be big and to run our lives in various ways. And we liberals since Adam Smith and so forth have, we float above this spectrum, but floating above doesn't have the passionate songs and slogans of the left and right on the spectrum. So I think we ought to be talking to country music composers and rock musicians and film makers and so forth to provide inspiration. You know, it's an interesting thing there. Yaron said authoritarianism doesn't work. And of course we know that there's a lot of things that are going to happen in the country and that authoritarianism doesn't work. And of course we know that. And yet I wonder if somehow liberalism doesn't inspire people the way tribalism does. I will organize, I will lead the people against our enemies. And as I said before, the enemy could be the Jews, it could be the billionaires, it could be the woke left, but it's always somebody and the populist authoritarian, the tribalist says, I'm leading the people. Those other people are not the people. They may be foreigners, immigrants, whatever. They may be not Christian or not Muslim or whatever the majority would be. Or a corporation. It may just be Heartland. And so that's why it seems like, the largest podcasts are left-wing crazies and right-wing crazies and that sort of thing. And yet liberalism has more or less conquered half the world. We do live, most of us, in a liberal world, very broadly defined. It can be Denmark and Sweden and even Hungary with the beginning of Orban's term was a liberal country. So somehow, despite these concerns that tribal appeals and rabble rousing and scapegoating work liberalism started in the Netherlands and has spread to cover half the world. So maybe we are doing something right or it could just be the fact that liberalism works despite our inability to really make that a cause. Well, if the only way you can keep your regime in power is with the army and the police. Maybe we've won. Because as I think we're all saying, this army and police, you know, as O'Brien, the party man in 1984 said, if you want a vision of the future, think of a boot on a human face forever. Now, as we're saying, this is not an attractive vision to most individuals. Yeah, and I think it works, which I think people all over the world can see. They can see partially because of globalization and the internet and the information age. So even people in Iran with a internet so-called blockade can get through VPNs and other technologies and see what's going on. And that appeals to their wanting to live an individualistic life. But it doesn't, I still think that in order to sustain it and to grow it and not having to live through this seesaw of authoritarianism as a threat constantly, we need to do a lot more both to ground it in a proper intellectual foundation. To bring back those ideas of enlightenment and better support them. Because I think they were probably weak and that's why so many organizations so much rose against it. Yeah, Deirdre. Yeah, it's, I think, as you're saying, it's very important to get the history right and to get people to understand the history. That's certainly- And to get the ideology right, to get the philosophy right, to get the underlying ideas right. But then on the philosophy, I wanna urge you to not keep saying the enlightenment because there were two parts, there were two halves of the enlightenment. There was the French half, which you can say was the reason half. And the trouble with that is that that leads straight to on top down central planning, comped and all that eventually. But the good part or the good part was the Scottish Enlightenment, which was the emphasis on the liberty half of enlightenment. After all, slaveholders were enlightened. The founding brothers of our country, large numbers of them were Virginia slaveholders, quite enlightened. Catherine the Great was enlightened. Frederick the Great, all the other greats, they were enlightened, but they were authoritarian. And their idea of enlightenment was to apply reason to the human project in a way that is terribly arrogant. Of course. I have to say. To assume that one in the state and revolution, Lenin said that his ambition was to make Russia into one huge factory. And his vision was that there would be a CEO at the top. But this is where we probably, I mean, I know we disagree a little bit. I mean, I don't think you can ultimately defend liberty without defending reason. No reason in your authoritarian, not reason in your authoritarian sense, but reason as a faculty of the individual. What makes individual, what make individualism legitimate is the fact that individual have the capacity to take care of themselves, have the capacity to make judgments for themselves, to make choices for themselves, to guide their life. How do they do that? Now based on emotion, they do that based on reason. And reason as a faculty of the individual, reason as a faculty for discovering the truth as an individual, not as a faculty to telling somebody else how to live their life, that is absurd because that undermines that other person's reason, right? It says he doesn't have reason, only I have it, right now I can run his life. As I think you agree that that's the danger. That's when reason sort of gets out of its liberal cage. But that's the perversion and that's the French Revolution. And I think all the sins come from Housseau who was of course really rejected reason. And the better Frenchman, you know, Voltaire and Diderot and Montesquieu, I think were far better advocates for this. So I think we have to defend, we have to defend reason individualism as a package, but the proper perspective on reason, just like we don't defend individualism as not caring about other people and living on a desert island by yourself. That's not a proper application of individualism. We have to think about the proper application of these concepts and I can't, I mean, if we don't have as individuals the capacity to reason and to discover truth and to live our lives based on our own judgment, then yeah, maybe authoritarianism works, right? That's Plato's argument. Yes, it certainly is. And it's a longstanding argument of authoritarians that you ordinary people, Hoipeloy, you can't take care of yourself. This is Carlisle, Thomas Carlisle said this about slavery. He said, oh, those darkies, they can't take care of themselves. So the abolition of slavery in the empire, in the British empire was a terrible thing according to him. I love it when debate is organic. This is a fantastic discussion. I wanna pick up on the US example because you are all either American or have lived in America for a long time and David was proposing earlier today that we make our own countries the beacon of freedom to showcase the benefits of living under liberalism. So regardless of what you see happening in the future or maybe in relation to that, let me ask all three of you, has the US become less of an example on freedom as time has gone by? Is it the opposite or maybe none? It's a mixed bag. Look, we were the great arsenal of democracy in the 1940s yet as both the fascists and the communists, especially the communists like to point out, we had full-blown segregation. Now we don't have full-blown segregation, but as both of my colleagues, we're observing there's this astonishing resurgence of blood and soil as David expressed it. So I don't know, we're an imperfect union, I must say. There are a lot of things we can point to and say, oh, look, the United States is worse on that or it's still bad. We have a war on drugs that's a billion people a year. That's crazy. We have unfortunately killed a lot of people around the world in our wars that are not drug wars, but overseas wars. We did treat black people badly for a long time and there's an argument about whether we still do that in some ways. We treated gay people and transgender people badly for a long time and we're still debating what is the proper solution to that. Our economy had stronger economic growth than it does now. And I just published the Cato Handbook for Policymakers with 77 chapters on how to fix all of these problems. Nevertheless, people all around the world wanna come to the United States and there's a reason for that. Very few Americans wanna go live somewhere else and when they do, it's usually they want to live in France because the cheese and the wine and the south of France, what great weather, there are reasons to live in other countries, but very few people are moving to China or Russia. Even Hungary, most of the Americans visit, they don't stay. I do wanna raise a question there, though. Deirdre complained that her friends on the left shouldn't call themselves liberals and in the Human Freedom Index that Cato publishes every year, the United States is in the top 20 freest countries in the world according to that list, which is good, but not good enough. But look at the countries that theoretically, according to the statistics, come out ahead of us. It is countries like New Zealand and Denmark and maybe Sweden is up there, I don't remember. I think it is. And they are the ideal welfare states. Now our argument in the Human Freedom Index, I think, is, yeah, yeah, their governments are too big. They have too many taxes and transfers. Their governments are not as regulatory as you might think. They have pre-open trade. They do have high levels of taxes and transfers, but maybe they have better criminal justice. Maybe they also have a lot fewer criminals. Maybe they have better protections for free speech in some ways. So people who want to be Denmark, should we reject them as liberals? It's a good question because that's the sort of gentle side of socialism and of statism. But I've lived in Sweden and in Holland. And it seems to me that it's not likely or probable or practical to think of a big complicated country like ours to be run like Sweden. That's one standard point. But a slightly non-standard point about both Sweden and Holland, which have large welfare states, is that entrepreneurship is encouraged pretty much. Most goods and services, at least those in the private market, which are a large part of the economy, although not as large as I'd like it, are set by supply and demand. And although in both Sweden and Holland, you're supposed to be modest when you're rich or move to Switzerland. It's not as if rich, successful entrepreneurs are hated. So I don't know, I think people thinking of Sweden as a socialist country are making something of a mistake. But you ask a very good question, David, what are we to do with the Northern European model? I mean, Germany is another example. I mean, I suspect that if we open borders between Sweden and the United States, the flow would be in one direction, not the other. In spite of how wonderful it is. Well, no, I'm not so sure of that. I said, you'd have to learn Swedish, which is irritating. And if you try to move to... Swedish entrepreneurs would be flocking to the United States. That's true. And certainly Danish and Sweden is relatively... But I think this is an issue, David, with I think the word liberal, is how broad do we want to make it? And it is a challenge. And the sense in which I believe that we need to be idealistic and we need to at least project something that is an ideal, I think we should reject that model. And I think it's a model for mediocrity. I think it's a model, it's not inspiring. It's not exciting. And I think freedom is. And I think we need to be principled about that. We need to be principled about what we mean by liberty. Re-distribution of wealth is wrong. And it's wrong in a Scandinavian model and it's wrong in an American model. And what we should be advocating for is an idealistic pure system. We're not gonna see it in our lifetime, but at least we can inspire people in that direction during our lifetime. Yeah, and I very much like the idea which was very prominent in the early 19th century in the United States, of us being the international example, the city on the hill. Now that was when half the country was fierce defenders of slavery. So we, I agree, I think it inspired many countries why so much of the world has become liberal, as David said, half the world is relatively free and much freer than it used to be. I think to a large extent, that is people trying to live up to certain standards that America put out there, certainly after World War II. But I think we're losing that and I think we've lost that significantly. I think we've lost that with 9-11. I think we lost it with the great financial crisis where we blame capitalism for it. So why should we be pro-capitalism when capitalism caused this? I think we even see that in China where people were, I think there was much more of a push to become more like America and over the last 10 years, that has faded significantly all over the world. So- Well, you know, there are these shocking cases like Turkey, which it had the army in the background all the time but was a functioning democracy but now it's not. In a very short period of time, which is a warning, I think, I'd be interested in your opinions on the same issue about Israel. Well, Israel just took a turn, an anti-liberal turn here with the latest election. It's horrible. This election is basically a complete appeasement of the ultra-orthodox, the worst elements in Israeli society. I mean, what's interesting about Israel is Israel has no left. There is no- Yeah, it hasn't got it anymore. It once did. It once did. It once was ruled by the forever. I grew up in a socialist Israel. But the left has gone both on security issues and on economic issues. There's no left. There's basically a center and a center-right. And on nationalistic issues, there's an extreme right. And that is what is winning. And of course, one of the political parties forming the coalition, one of its demands to join the coalition was no electricity in Israel on Saturdays. I mean, nobody's gonna give into that, but that's part of the demand. I would, now, this is a long time ago. I was in East Jerusalem with a friend who had fought in the paratrooper in East, and not as I said, East Berlin, I meant East Jerusalem, and had freed East Jerusalem for the Orthodox to come in and occupy it. But we were in the battlefield where he lost friends, right next to him, who died because he was on the Sabbath. These guys in black started shouting at him. In Yiddish, I need hardly add, not in Hebrew. He shouted back. And so he got in the car and they started stoning the car because he had come by car on the Sabbath. The guy who gave them, and they, of course, won't go into the army. No, no, that's part of the deal. They will not go into the army. And the men don't go look, the men go study. And they get subsidized by the state, and that's part of the deal is the state gives them welfare so they can study and not work. Moses Maimonides in the 13th century, or 12th anyway, then has this fierce passage against that. He says, a man who does not have a job and works as a tailor or something is a disgraced Judaism. This business of going off and praying all day at the shul. No, you can't do that, said he. Yeah, that's the section in Maimonides, they skip. Thinking about the question of, whether and how societies can change, my political science textbook in the early 70s said that Israel was the only one party democracy in the world, I guess. And of course, the one party was the labor party. It was indeed. It was in 1977 was the first election in which the labor party lost. And that was after the Yom Kippur War, which was quite a trauma. But I think from political, from in terms of societies changing, Turkey is an interesting example because the way a Tartuk turned Turkey into a more liberal society was by force. He didn't, not through education, not through conviction, not through ideology, but through force. He basically took out the religious leaders of society, the people, the old God and killed them all. And then basically imposed a form of democracy with the military overlooking it. And I think there's a lesson there that you can't bring people freedom by force. That is, that it has to be in the end chosen by people have to adopt it, they have to adopt it because they believe in it. This is where ideology is such an important factor in it. And that religion that was always in the background that was put down by force is bubbled to the surface with the current regime in Turkey and is dominated. So... Well, that's the problem in Chile. And then it's coming not from the right, as it is in Turkey, but from the left. That Chile's great success, I educated a lot of the economists, the Chicago boys personally. I mean, they were my students. But I didn't tell them in my classes in microeconomics to go put people in soccer stadiums and shoot them. But that it came that way has always been a kind of a potential tragedy. And now, although I think maybe Chile will just barely get through the gate and not go in this crazy way that its proposed constitution was saying. Yep. I like it that we are discussing countries other than the US now because I actually wanted to ask a question on China which has been discussed throughout this panel because China's economic miracle a few decades ago sort of abandoned some aspects of communism and showed how liberalization can bring prosperity to actually meet. But the country definitely did not abandon central planning is still under the dictatorship under the control of the Communist Party dictatorship. So my question is, is a bit more of economic freedom just as bad if people don't get political freedom in the process? But look, I understand, I think you understand this. They did abandon central planning. Yeah. And here's the key point. There's no Chinese model. You'll often hear from people, well authoritarianism, gee, in the economy, gee, that might be a great idea because look at the Chinese model. And the Chinese model, what was successful about it and to the extent it was successful was only because it adopted in the economy, liberalism. Now, as you say, it didn't adopt it in the polity or now under Xi in the society. As you were saying, dear, they have cameras on every corner. So, and the Communist Party of China is a lot smarter than the Communist Party of the old Soviet Union. Instead of making all the children of Communist Party members of this small, it's not that large, you know, this Communist Party, this elite, this aristocracy, they recruit the best students into the Communist Party. I've had students in China who were recruited by the Communist Party because they were blindingly intelligent. So they may not have the problem that the Soviet Union had had of an enormously expanding, essentially Russian style aristocracy. And I think, I think your question, Marcus, is, yeah, a little bit of freedom is always better than no freedom at all. So China had some freedom, a lot of freedom in the economic realm, certainly in parts of China. Different parts of China developed differently, partially because the amount of liberty was different. So Southern China close to Hong Kong, the Shanghai area developed much faster than the rest of China because there was no central planning. They completely let go and they led from an economic perspective, let freedom reign. And look what that little bit of freedom in the big scale of things we believe in complete freedom. So that little bit of freedom did. It brought a billion people out of poverty. It's created the largest middle class in the world. It's raised the standard of living, quality of life of people dramatically. And I still believe that that ultimately will lead to the Chinese people to demand more freedom. I think the more control you start gaining over your own life and you get the sense of efficaciousness in your own life, the more control you want. That is the more freedom you want, the less government you want. And I think it's just a matter of time in China before the Chinese people demand more freedom. It's gonna take a while and it'll probably be very bloody the process by which they liberate themselves. But I think that is the direction we'll ultimately be heading in. And I think it's tragic what's happened in the last six, seven years. I remember going to China all the way up to 2018, 2019. And until that time, you had a sense that things were getting freer. Things were moving in the right direction and people were embracing this idea of freedom. And this guy Xi, who's a real bastard, I mean, this guy came on board and he started tightening and tightening and tightening. And by 2019, it was scary to go to China. It was dangerous. It was clear that they did not want people like me at least there. And I think that has resulted in all the problems we're seeing coming out of China. So they reversed course. And hopefully we can reverse it again and expand Liberty in China. Because imagine what a truly free China would be like. What, how all of our lives would be better off if China were truly liberated. I don't know if you wanna say something, David, or I can move on to another question. I do think China has been a very disappointing story. It was moving in the right direction. And I said a few years ago, Dong Xiaoping should get the Milton Friedman Prize for advancing Liberty because he freed more people than anyone else in the history of the world. He also killed a lot of people on the way to the stage. So that would have been an argument against him. But there was a lot of change there and it was important. In 1988, I think Kato had the first conference on free market liberalism ever held in China. And young people were so enthusiastic. They followed Milton Friedman around like a guru. Nine years later in 1997, we probably had the second ever conference on free market liberalism in China. But things had already changed. There was a political tightening already. You could see that the students and professors didn't want to talk about a free society or a free political system. They still wanted to talk about economics and they really wanted to talk about business. How do you build a company? Is it better to have small companies or big companies? That sort of thing. And now, of course, particularly with Xi, things have gotten much tighter. And I don't know, Iran. I mean, there's a billion people there and so far they are putting up with it. There's a handful who protest and a handful of those get killed or disappeared. But he's taking away their freedoms and there doesn't seem to be much opposition. But if, as I think will happen, the economy grinds to a halt, that is economic growth grinds to a halt, I think then you may see more. Although, on the other hand, income, as Yulia pointed out, income's going down in Russia and they haven't yet revolted and it's going down in Turkey and they haven't yet revolted. When incomes go down in a democratic country, politicians often lose the next election. But it's harder to have that feedback and that's one of the reasons authoritarianism doesn't work because you don't get that kind of feedback. That's right. So they're all sort of misinformed about their popularity, among other things. I think that the Chinese people have accepted, in a sense, a trade-off. Sure they have. The first time I was in China talking to an engineer and asking him, if he didn't mind the fact that he didn't get to vote for his political leadership and his response was, as long as I'm richer next year than I am this year, voting is overrated. And at the time, this is 2004, I was thinking, I get to go back to the US to choose between George W. Bush and Kerry. Maybe voting is overrated. I'd rather have a higher standard of income next year. So, but I think once that trade-off disappears, that is once they're now becoming rich as individuals from year to year and yet they're not becoming freer either, I think there will be more resistance. I mean, we'll see history and history takes, it takes a while to develop. It doesn't always develop on the path that we expect it to. I think ultimately the Chinese will liberate themselves and rise up against the authoritarian. Yaren, you were talking earlier about how authoritarianism is a failure in terms of results. And David was talking about, for example, what businesses could do to counter global authoritarianism. And I wonder to all three of you, we have nine minutes left, whether there's a role for government in terms, or governments across the world in liberal democratic societies in terms of global authoritarianism. Should we demand that they intervene in order to help people in authoritarian regimes or should we leave autocrats alone because they will eventually fall or should we have another strategy? I don't think we should leave the autocrats alone at all. And I'm not, I'm an economist, but I don't believe we should trade with these countries either. I don't think we should give them any encouragement at all. I wouldn't mind it at all if we stop trade with China, for example. Well, now, do you wanna stop trade with China because it is a military threat or because it's authoritarian? And if it's because it's authoritarian, you also wanna stop trading with Saudi Arabia and Nigeria and the other half of the world? Yes, yes, I just think it's obnoxious. You'll hear this argument a lot, not in our groups, but you'll hear it a lot that, well, we can't really do anything about the Uyghurs or Hong Kong or the absence of free speech or whatever because gosh, we get TVs from China. Well, to hell with that, I think there are, but in any case, even if we don't go that far, I do think that support for the Ukrainians, for example, is highly desirable. Now, I understand my liberal friends who are isolationists. I can see their case, but that's a sort of a 19th century version, which I'm, and again, I'm conflicted, but I certainly support Ukraine. So I agree with much of what Dideris said. You know, I would take a slightly different approach in terms of all these countries. I think that if a country is an enemy of the United States, a military threat, as David said, I certainly don't think we should trade with them. I think that's ridiculous, trade is win-win. Why are we helping people who are clearly our enemies? That's a good point. I think when it comes to authoritarian regimes that are not our enemies, I don't think the government should get involved. I think then it's up to us as individuals to say, I don't wanna trade with a country that enslaves its own people, because at the end of the day, it's individuals who trade, not countries. Yeah, that's an actual point. I don't wanna buy Vietnamese goods while the Vietnamese government is oppressing their own people or however that plays out. So the government's role is only in protecting us from enemies, and in that capacity, it can ban trade with enemy countries, but other countries should be up to us as individuals to decide whether we trade or not. That's sound. So we have five minutes left. I have a final question to all three of you. Dietrich said earlier today that liberalism is a great modern idea. Yaron was saying we need a vision. So I wonder where exactly should we focus our efforts? Is it easier to convince people who currently like nationalism and socialism to switch to liberalism, or should we focus on new generations? Well, both. We should focus on. We should focus on the new generation. We should focus on the new generation. It's, you know, David and I at Cato, of course, wanna try to persuade people on 77 policy areas. I agree, but they aren't gonna change in their fundamental ideology when they're 40 or 50 years old. I think it's new people and people who are undecided. I think if a young person is committed already to socialism or two. Well, I was. Yeah, I was too. I was a socialist in my teen years, but. Me too. I think we focus on young people. We focus on young people. That's new people. You never know what to spark somebody to change their mind. You don't know what sentence you say in a speech. You don't know what book they read that might ignite them. I mean, my favorite audiences, what I call virgin audiences, that is audiences that have never heard anything like what I'm about to tell them, that have only been exposed to other ideas. Those are my favorite. I mean, it's one thing to talk to people who already agree with us. And that's fine because we need to become better at what we do. And young people need to have the intellectual ammunition to go out there into the world. But if we can go out there and find young people who have never heard our point of view, who have never heard these ideas of liberty, that's how I think we ultimately have an impact on the world. Yeah. I don't think we can centrally plan a movement. So I want to let a thousand flowers bloom. And to some extent, people should do what they're good at or what they're inspired to do. So I agree with Deirdre. I wish we had more songwriters and filmmakers. I wish we had novelists. Somebody said to me once, well, if you think there's all these things that are wrong, not to me actually, to a friend of mine, if you think there's all these things wrong with Ayn Rand, why don't you get somebody to write a book like Atlas Shrug who doesn't have these flaws you think she does? And the answer is, because you can't commission a work of genius. So those things happen. I do think there is a value to raising radical standards. Like the Marxists did, a promise of a better world and that ought to appeal to young people. I think there's also a value to being involved in politics or in policy. There are risks to all of these strategies. You can be so radical, nobody pays any attention to you. You can, if you're in Washington, there's always a temptation to temper and only ask for this much. We would like a 2% tax cut. That's not very inspiring. But all of these things I think are valuable and all of us should work to better craft the arguments and the research and the speeches and the songs and the books. And we're all always looking for the best book, the best next book that will reach a new audience. All three of us, I think, cannot be blamed for not doing that. Yeah. Any final thoughts before we have? Well, thank you. I have to say for this very interesting conversation with these two very much admired colleagues of mine. Thank you, Didera, and the same. Yes, thanks for giving us the opportunity to have this talk. And hopefully, this will have an impact in Latin America. Everything that you do has an impact on, the energy of many Latin Americans who are inspired by these ideas is invigorating. Yeah, this was great. Thank you, Marcos. Thank you, David. Thank you, Yaron. Thank you, Didera, for being here today.