 Welcome back. Claims of corruption in politics here in the United States and everywhere the species politician operates grow louder and angrier every day. It gets to the point where it feels like corruption in politics must just be a fact of life. For the past couple of years the most talked about piece of computer hardware on the planet has been a laptop owned by US President Joe Biden's son Hunter, dropped off in a repair shop in Delaware in 2019 and never collected. It contains hundreds of thousands of emails and allegedly other content besides. My next guest is Israeli-American entrepreneur, writer and activist Yaron Brooke, chairman of the Ayn Rand Institute. He joins me now to consider whether political corruption is as endemic as COVID and if so what might be done about it. Thanks for joining us. Oh my pleasure thanks having me. Very much looking forward to this conversation. Does the Hunter Biden laptop contain evidence of corruption? I think so. I mean it seems it seems like it does. I don't know that we've seen everything. There's probably even more than what we're assuming but he's clearly sat on boards of companies in Ukraine that he had no business doing, that he added no value to and there's something going on in China with some money that he got. So yes I think there's suddenly evidence of that. My gut reaction very early on was why in Ukraine, why was Joe Biden's son Hunter Biden involved on the board of a company in Ukraine of all places? What was going on with that? Well look I think they find the opportunities where they are. I don't think it was targeted in particular. Ukraine is an incredibly corrupt place. So it's easy to smuggle somebody in who doesn't really belong and who has no value to add. But look this is not about the Bidens in particular. This is about American politics. This is everywhere in American politics. You know I talk about this a lot. You get these politicians going into office and they're almost always quite modest in terms of their income and wealth and somehow they come out at the other side and they're fabulously wealthy. I remember an acquaintance of mine was a very senior guy in the Republican Party. He was I think the leader of the Republicans in the House of Representatives and then he lost. And guess the first job he got right after? Within a month he got this job. It was a it was a on Wall Street job paying him well into six figures over a million dollars a year. Why? Because he knows finance really well. Because he brings some particular skill. Yes the skill of who he knows and the connections he has and how government works. This is how it works and politicians are becoming in America extremely wealthy. Look at the Obamas. Look at the Clintons. They weren't wealthy when they started. Hillary gets two hundred fifty thousand dollars to give a speech. Is that because before she went for president? I'm not sure she gets it today. Is that because she's a brilliant speaker and she has this amazing new knowledge to give us? No it's it's because people are buying influence. And we're undoubtedly seeing the rise of new dynasties are we not. You know how many Bushes how many how many Clintons. You know how many Trumps. You know it does feel as though there are new there are new lineages emerging that we will be. There's no question. I mean this is what happened when you have corruption and when there is this infinite pool almost of resources out there. And if that money is going to flow to people in power and they're going to share it with their kids and with their family then we're going to be creating dynasties. Just today I read that Kushner Trump's son-in-law just started a private equity fund. He has raised two and a half billion dollars for a fund. He wants to raise seven billion. He says two and a half billion. Two billion dollars of the two and a half billion comes from the Saudis. The Saudis he was very buddy buddy with throughout the Trump administration. He helped him get a huge arms deal. One wonders one wonders why are they investing in me as no experience in private equity is no experience in which trying to do. But the Saudis are willing to risk two billion dollars. Well because they bought influence. There's no question about it. If that's what it's about. If we're in if the reality is that modern day politicians particularly in the U.S. but I'm presuming elsewhere if they are just identified by Wall Street and elsewhere as the prime source of influence and the prime source of contacts. How do you break that chain. It's not easy. But the fact is that the more government is involved in economy the more government into fears and our fears. The more incentive there is for me to try to get them off my back and to do whatever I can to get them off my back. So the more we we have government grow and regulate and control the more crony is and we're going to get the more corruption we're going to get that's built into the system. When government is small when government is limited when government doesn't tell me how I should live it doesn't tell businesses how they should run. Then there's no incentive to spend millions or billions of dollars to try to influence them because they have no impact on me. So I think the best way to get rid of cronyism the only way really to get rid of cronyism and corruption is to bring government back to its initial at least in America what the founders intended it to be and they intended to be in a sense an agency of defense they intended it to be an agency that protects our rights instead it's become the number one infringer of our rights in the world. It never was intended to run a health care system. It never was intended to run a financial system. It never was intended to regulate every single type of business out there. It was intended to keep us to keep crooks and criminals and fraudsters and foreign invaders away from us to protect us from that and we have moved over the last 250 years we've moved further and further and further away from that original vision and as we move every step we take every time the government does more there's more corruption there's more cronyism there are more people who have to gain from having influence on the government so we need a shrink we need a shrink government power. Tom should we fear big government should we where do you stand on that do we is more government good or should we aim for the minimum of government? I don't quite buy into this sort of market fundamentalist ideology you know going back over 250 years to a constitution that was framed at a very different time in our history but equally you know I don't agree with state paternalism and I think that's really one of the great battles whether wherever you are on the political spectrum that you have today as I've said to you I think before Neil I don't really see the great battle in the 21st century more between left and right I see it as a battle between broadly between libertarians and authoritarians and I think where your politics sits will be usually somewhere between how you relate to either a more libertarian view of society or whether actually you buy into a kind of Chinese Communist Party view of the world which is as long as material goodies have been delivered to you and your total standard of living increases from each generation to the next you should just shut up be quiet and be happy with what you've been given. Where are you in that spectrum? Big government is usually bad government it seems to me and I'm married to an American at Texan you have to spend millions of dollars just to lose shouldn't there be a cap on how much these candidates can actually spend even at senate level? It's not an issue of how much they spend it's an issue of how big the government is and how much there is to win or lose but I agree money starts you know money talking at that ground level and then they start thinking well it's all about the money of the money but the fact is in many in many campaigns the the candidates with less money are the ones who win money and politics are complex relationships but the fact is that the more power we give politicians the more incentive the risk influence them and I agree about the spectrum I think left and right are bankrupt concepts I think we're basically individualism versus collectivism and you have collectivism of the right and you have collectivism of the left and our political parties today are collectivists of the right and left and then you have individualism which means freedom which means free market and what's sad is that nobody today on the political spectrum nobody today with political visibility is on the side of the individual is on the side of rights and just one last thing yeah this idea of the right the constitution the constitution I believe is based it's flawed it was written 250 years ago we could do better today but it's based on universally true principles it's based on the idea of of equality of rights it's based on the idea of the right to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness which I think are universal and timeless and if we could return to those principles we moved way away from them the world would be completely different and the glass would be fully full not just half full yeah you see this is where you see I go back to 1642 and an ordinance in the House of Commons that actually during the you know the heat of the Civil War which made the point that that the House of Commons is sovereign so you know we don't have a codified written constitution because we have the notion of popular national sovereignty and therefore the priorities of the people change over time and and of course you're seeing this now with the road versus way debate in America where something that you thought was settled in your American constitutional and socially progressive history like the the basic issue of women's reproductive rights is itself now being reopened and questioned again at a constitutional level America was born out of the Christian faith you know the the pilgrim fathers that went from Plymouth to America and I think that's got lost in the woods because the churches have retreated and there's a gap between parliament and the churches in this country as well as in America well we're going to disagree about that yeah there's a line that I see that a quote from you everyone has a moral right to pursue his own happiness that's clearly redolent of the constitution free from coercive interference by others yes would you say that to some extent that's an upsum of your solution to how we get government to back off and you know put the money down I mean I believe that that is a summation of not just my view of of the solution to the problems we face political solution but I think that is the vision of the Enlightenment that is the vision of the thinkers the the British and Scottish and French thinkers coming out of the 18th century that really created the modern world the idea was individual liberty and individual freedom trusting the individual allowing the individual to take responsibility for their own life to go out there and live and prosper based on on their own action or to fail failure is part of it but failure is just an impetus to get up and go try again so I think that very much this idea pursuit of happiness is at the core of what created America and I think it's at the core of what made Britain the United Kingdom what it is it launched an industrial revolution it launched an intellectual revolution and it made these two countries unique in human history so yes I think if we can return to the idea that the world of government is to protect our freedoms to protect us from coercion to allow us to go out there and live with a capital L then I think we solve all of our problems but it came from a religious base the Enlightenment the Enlightenment is exactly but the Enlightenment is the rejection of religion the whole point of the Enlightenment the 18th century is the rejection of the religion and the adoption of a secular basis for individual rights and that's how we're doomed yeah but when we lived when we lived in a religious society we were poor and miserable and life was horrible the fact is that life has improved dramatically under a secular secular society we're Christians I think where we can probably find agreement though is that whether it be based in the Judeo-Christian tradition yeah that's where it came from and we've lost that it is about the sanctity of the individual you know and that was something that's enshrined in the Judeo-Christian thinking but it's also in some of the in some of the Enlightenment thinking and tell me what it is if we have to cherish the individual do we know and and enable the individual to pursue their dreams freely yeah of course we do but you've also got to remember that individualism or rampant individualism that isn't checked by fellow human beings fellow citizens that's not getting to the argument whether it should be government and collectivist measures but that is the thing about human civilization you know we are not islands unto ourselves as individuals if we were just nakedly pursuing our own individual self-interest on every single occasion whether it's at the corporate level oil companies going off and dumping things in our oceans or individual people exploiting people in their community no man is a great profit from their misery which is you know what we're seeing right in front of us across the channel with this you know a porrant sort of business model this is what happens i think when you don't have some kind of government that is there collectively i mean after all government isn't separate from the people that's the point but that's a true democrat it's a few of individualism because individualism is not the idea of living on an island it's not the idea separate society because society is a massive other people a massive value to you the idea that individualists go around raping and pillaging is absurd indeed all the rapists and pillagers in the world and people initiate war are always collectivists right individualists cherish their life too much to actually go out and commit these these horrific actions uh that are that are being we don't need government to protect us we need government to protect us from really bad guys but once you take out bad guys even Adam Smith understood 250 years ago it's pretty good you know the baker bakes the bread because he's trying to make a living and he bakes the bread well why because that's what entails making a living and because he has pride in baking good bread and that's also a self-interested action so individualism doesn't lead to to all these horrific outcomes on the contrary individualism is the solution to them that all the bad things that happen in the world today happen in the name of a collectivistic ideal uh so i think the solution is more freedom not less more individualism not less a shrinking of government that allows us to pursue our values based on our minds you know we we treat other people as if they're too stupid to take care of themselves we treat the poor as if they don't know what they're doing and and they need to get we need to give them a check and we need to give them health care because we think they're subhuman but if we treated them as human beings with dignity and respect then we'd accept the fact that they can take responsibility for their own lives what we need is to create the space for jobs to be created so that they can go and work work is where you get kind of yeah and it's Proverbs 16 verse 9 man makes his plans God directs the steps you leave God out of it we're doomed man is not God well that's a fascinating debate i'm so i so enjoy a lot of disagreement of course this panel i could tell you yeah disagreement but that's trade isn't it that's interaction that's exchange exchange is where it's all about absolutely Yaron thank you so much thank you that's a conversation i hope that we can continue in days and months and ahead absolutely look forward to it thank you so much