 My name is Katharina Fistor and I teach at Columbia Law School in New York. Trying to amass the amounts of wealth that people have today without the legal protections, I would argue is impossible. Since we use the law, which is a social resource, right, the legal institutions, even something like property rights or contract, works because most people believe in the authority of the law and the legitimacy of the law. So if somebody loses a lawsuit and gets evicted from her home, we don't immediately get a revolution or something because we respect it even if we're on the losing side. That's really critical to understand. So if we use law in a massive way to code capital, to create private wealth, we're basically taking a social resource, our legal system that we also use to govern ourselves as a democracy and allowing some to take it to code private wealth and enforce this against the rest of the world. And I call the lawyers the masters of the code. They're not the masters of the system, but they know the code. They look at what the client wants to do, they look at the law, they're trying to put these two together and then they combine existing modules of the code of capital to protect the wealth of the client in front of them. They help create basically a comparative advantage vis-à-vis everybody else. You just, you take the branch of a plump tree and you graft it onto an apple trunk and you get a new fruit out of that. That's the process of coding, combining these different things to create something new, something that can create more private wealth over time. Here inequality is created from a social resource. The legal system is a social resource. We basically have agreed, this is the social contract idea, but even without an agreement, we have consolidated our means of coercion in the hands of a state. We're delegating law enforcement conflict resolution to a legal system, to an abstract legal system. If there's one skill that lawyers have developed, they have told their clients how to get around tax claims, because the tax man has always been the largest creditor, so just reducing that a little bit has always made a lot of sense. Then there's also, of course, a psychologically effect. If you give somebody the goose that lays the golden eggs and then you're trying to snatch away the eggs at the back end, you always have this uphill battle because the climate is ours, even if it's not. And what I'm basically saying is we're first giving them the goose. We're giving them all the tools to code capital and then something on top even because we exempt the capital coders from other rules. So I'm basically saying, well, let's just scale that back a little bit. Then we give them not a fat, big goose, but maybe a little chicken. And then we can still snatch away some eggs at the back end, but don't allow them to create these amounts of wealth at the front end. Economists have just a far too simplified version of the world. They don't realize that as we play, the rules of the game change. So the rules themselves become the center of the game, especially for assets such as patents, intellectual property rights, or financial assets that owe their very existence to these rules. They don't exist outside the game, right? When you go into a video game, the stuff is only in the video game. It's coded in software code. That's how our legal system works.