 Is government intervention, this is a $20 question, is government intervention always bad? Or I think it was a 20 pound problem. Tokyo is served by 16 private railway companies. They all use the different booking system. The government enforced them to standardize and the service is much smoother ever since. Yes, government intervention is always bad. That doesn't mean that you can't get a localized solution that is better when government intervenes. It depends what you mean by bad. Has this one booking system destroyed innovation in the future? Is it gonna make a 17th private railway company possible or will it hinder its ability? Is it a way for the 16 private companies to now basically be entrenched in a monopoly type system or a monopoly type system where competition is difficult? What about innovation in booking systems? How do we get that? So you can show that sometimes when the government intervenes, there is improvement locally, temporarily. What you don't have is a parallel universe where the government doesn't intervene and we see what happens over time and how the two systems evolve. And my guess is, it's not a guess, is that the system that didn't have the intervention will ultimately as a complete service evolve better than the system that did have the intervention. But it's more than that. It is an issue of principle. Once you accept the fact that the central planner might have insight into making a particular system better, a particular area better, then what is the limit? What is the boundary? How do we stop it? Even if it's true, then a particular situation that it's better. How do we stop the central planner from introducing more and more and more restrictions? By the way, I wonder, just as an aside, I just thought of this, why does Tokyo have 16 private railway companies? And I wonder if the 16 private railway companies try to merge so that there are only three, because I'm not sure you need 16. It seems like a lot of railway companies. If they try to merge where there are only three, I wonder if Japanese antitrust laws would prohibit that and restrict that and stop that. And I wonder if you had three rather than 16 in a truly free market. And you had competition over the best booking system if that wouldn't be better. I can understand why 16 different booking systems is bad. But you have to ask yourself if that's the case, why are there 16? And I would bet anything, anything, that that's a consequence of regulation. And this is the problem. Problem is that in mixed economies, what happens is the government regulates in particular way. Those regulations create market distortions. Those distortions that then the government comes in to solve them. Sometimes the solution seems good because relative to the dysfunction that existed before caused by government regulation, the fix has an improvement. And then people conclude, look, government involvement is better. It's an improvement. It's a good thing. We should do more of that. And you can see where that goes. But usually what happens is the government interference makes things worse. And then when things become worse and worse and worse, people look around and say, oh look, things have really gotten bad. Even worse than they used to be. We need more regulation, always. And more regulation. And every layer of regulation was supposed to fix the problem created by the previous layer of regulation. And you can't actually take the levels of regulation away one by one. Because if you take the top level off, you've got the problem that the previous layer created. So the only way to solve this layering of regulation problem is to get rid of all the layers of regulation at once, but that's hard. That's really, really hard. And generally the process of deregulation, of truly getting rid of regulation is not easy. It's not straightforward. It's not simple. The process of getting rid of regulation is complex and difficult. And that's why when people say, this person, this president deregulated, that president deregulated, you have a how and what happened and what regulations did they get rid of and how deep did it go? Superficially and sometimes deregulation can do more harm than good in the sense that it can cause problems which are then blamed on the deregulation which then bring about future administrations to regulate even more. You have to do it smart. Which is really, really rare. So government intervention is always bad unless there is a legitimate threat to the individual rights of citizens. Either an actual violation of rights or a threat that rights are going to be violated. That's when the government should intervene. So for example, a virus, an infectious disease is not, rights have not yet been violated, but you walking around with an infectious disease is a threat to other people. It's a threat to their life. It's a threat to their health. Now it's a complicated issue because how severe is the disease we don't, but that's when you need government to deal with threats, not to deal with inefficiencies. And again, markets do not necessarily produce the optimal result from the perspective of some kind of theoretical, mathematical, economic model. They don't necessarily produce the best results from the perspective of the experts in the field. I, you know, one example is beta versus VHS. Mostly we don't even know what those are, but those are two standards of video players. Beta was supposed to be significant, better, but VHS one, and the reason VHS one is because beta was badly marketed, wasn't as useful. VHS offered a much better networking effect. So it won. So sometimes the product that's seemingly at some level is better is not when you take a more holistic approach to the entire market. Markets work. What we need today, what I called a new intellectual would be any man or woman who is willing to think. Meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, wins or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of the spare cynicism and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist broad. All right, before we go on, reminder, please like the show. We've got 163 live listeners right now, 30 likes, that should be at least 100. I figure at least 100 of you actually like the show. Maybe they're like 60 of the Matthews out there who hate it. But at least the people who are liking it, I wanna see a thumbs up, there you go. Start liking it, I wanna see that go to 100. All it takes is a click of a thing, whether you're looking at this. And you know the likes matter. It's not an issue of my ego. 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