 The radical. Fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is The Iran Book Show. All right everybody, welcome to Iran Book Show on this Thursday night over here in Puerto Rico. Hope everybody's having, it's not Thursday, let's say Thursday, Tuesday, Tuesday. I don't know. It's been a long day. Second show today and lots of work in between being a long day. Anyway, I'm excited you're all here and join me. I appreciate it, second time today. So thanks for coming. Today's going to be the first show in what I envision to be a series of shows. We'll call it, I'm going to call it Capitalism 101, at least for now. It's not meant to be a course on capitalism. It's not meant to be a systematic presentation of capitalism, but this would be the umbrella, I guess, under which I discuss different issues as they relate to capitalism. I don't envision it having necessarily any particular order. As things come up, as issue comes up, I will be discussing them. For example, we could discuss immigration under the context of capitalism. We could discuss the political and economic implications of immigration. We could discuss trade under Capitalism 101. We could discuss what was the other one. I'm going to do a show soon on central planning in China. That would be perfect for a Capitalism 101 kind of episode. So I'm hoping to do all the economic things that I talk about that are relevant, all the political economy, what others call it political economy, the intersection of politics and economics will be under the Capitalism 101 banner. We'll see, we'll play around with it. We'll see what works and what doesn't work and we'll try to figure out what belongs and what doesn't belong and I'm sure I'll get feedback from you guys in terms of what you like and what you don't like and everything else. I do encourage everybody out there to read this book. I don't know if in the light you can actually see what it says, but it is Capitalism Not Known Ideal by Ein Rand. This is, yeah, this is it. Particularly the first essay, What is Capitalism? We will cover some of the material from what is Capitalism today. We'll probably cover other material from the book, from that chapter, from the chapter on what is Capitalism in future shows. And yeah, and we will cover material from the other chapters as well. What is Capitalism, I think, is one of the most important essays Ein Rand wrote. It is a very philosophical essay. It's not what you'd expect at all, I think. I keep, every time I read it, I am blown away by how different and new and interesting and how I get different things out of it. I don't know how many times I've read it already. Many times. It always, anyway, so it's fascinating. There's some really, I mean, Rand really grounds Capitalism and Epistemology in this essay much more so than I think any other presentation of Capitalism you'll find anywhere. And so I highly encourage Capitalism, not an idea by Ein Rand, read that book if you're interested in the topic of Capitalism. Also, I hope you will share these episodes. I see a lot of tweets out there misrepresenting Capitalism, distorting Capitalism, provoking Capitalism and so on. It will be great to start using these kind of episodes to counter that. Hey, if you're really interested in, because it's not that you're writing in order to get the author of some of the nonsense about Capitalism, because often they are not reachable. But the people who might be reading the author, and if you write a comment and you refer to something like this, we might catch some people who might be open to new ideas. So this is content that certainly I hope will be shared on social media and distributed out there. I know this is not sexy, and it's not, we're not talking about politics or Donald Trump, and we're not talking about, we're not talking about, and who take masculinity or CRT or any of that kind of fun stuff. So viewership by necessity, I think for these shows will be lower, so be it. As Casey Dick says, Capitalism is sexy, and if they don't want to come and see and listen to Sean Capitalism, that's their problem, right? I mean, they're missing out, they're missing out big time. So to help get this a bigger audience, it would be great if you guys, if you guys really shared shows like this and got the word out there. Anyway, this will be a new banner, a new series. If any of you want to sponsor a particular show within the series, or the series as a whole, a show to sponsor a show, and to choose a topic for a show, you could choose a topic related to Capitalism 101, it's $1,000. I'm going to do a sponsored show soon. I think on Saturday, I'll get you the topic soon. But yes, feel free to sponsor a show, $1,000, and I will talk about the topic you want me to talk about. It could be Capitalism, it could be anything actually. All right, so let's talk about Capitalism and what it is and how kind of we differentiate our understanding of Capitalism from really pretty much everybody out there in the world. And I want to start with the fact that I get a lot of heat, and I'm sure a lot of you do, and a lot of people out there get a lot of heat, even from Objectivists, certainly from Libertarians. Over the term Capitalism itself, why are you using the term Capitalism, Iran? What's the point? You're just alienating people, you're just pissing people off, and after all, they tell us, Capitalism was a term coined by Karl Marx. Of course, it wasn't coined by Karl Marx, it was coined quite about 30 years earlier by other socialists, but it was suddenly popularized. It's a term popularized by Karl Marx. So why are we using it? Why use the term popularized by Karl Marx? Well, it is a term that people have taken and distorted and provoked it, and that it has such bad rap in the world today. I mean, indeed, Arthur Brooks, when he ran the American Enterprise Institute, stopped using the war-tech Capitalism and started using free Enterprise, because they did a poll and they discovered that Americans don't particularly like Capitalism. They like free markets better, but they actually like free Enterprise really a lot. So you get over 50% approval rating positive thumbs up for free Enterprise, whereas Capitalism gets like 30% thumbs up. So they switched everything to talking about free Enterprise. So what is it about Capitalism? Why did I use the term Capitalism? I mean, some extent I used the term Capitalism because Karl Marx used it, and this is why. Karl Marx was looking out into the world and he was observing something. He was observing a certain phenomenon going on in the world. Wealth was being created. Companies were being created. The employee-employee of voluntary transaction was becoming dominant form of work. Capital was being raised and being invested. Private property generally was being protected. Free trade was indeed everywhere. Free trade was dominant. This is Karl Marx wrote this in 1864, I think, and this is after the Corn Laws were repealed and basically ushered in an era of real free trade, zero-tariff free trade. So what Karl Marx was actually observing, put aside how he interpreted it and how he understood it, but what he's actually observing, is a period in which individuals were basically left alone, left free to use their mind, to choose their profession, to choose their values, to choose their pursuits, free of intervention, and that generally the government made an effort, at least, to protect the property and the lives of the people involved. So this is a system in which entrepreneurs invested, created, built, made, wealth was created. This is a period in which there was a real rule of law, but rule of law based on the idea of rights, the idea of freedoms, freedoms of action. We'll get to the definition of rights. And what he was observing ultimately, what Karl Marx was observing was, in terms of the material or being, is that people applying their mind to the challenges associated with human survival, to the challenges associated with human flourishing, the challenges associated with bettering human life. And what he saw was human beings being free to apply their wits, to apply their mind, to apply their reason to solve these problems. What he was seeing was indeed, to a large extent, what we understand to be capitalism. A system in which people are free to use their minds in pursuit of their values, in pursuit of wealth in this case, in pursuit of a flourishing life. And where the government is there to protect their property rights, to protect their property, to have accumulated, to protect their lives, to protect them from thieves and crooks and criminals, to help them arbitrate disputes when they have disputes among each other, but otherwise leave them alone. And that was the world. And yes, Karl Marx put that into a framework of exploitation, a framework of master-slave, if you will, a framework of really, you know, a framework of tribalism and collectivism. But fundamentally, what he was observing was individuals going about their business, creating, building, making, doing stuff. What he was observing was my understanding of capitalism, as inconsistently as it might have been practiced at that time. And the system succeeded enormously. If by success one means the human prosperity, human achievement, human being's ability to prosper and achieve and succeed in life, then the system that Karl Marx observed was a system that was incredibly successful in raising standard of living, in allowing individuals to attain enormous wealth and enormous success. So what Karl Marx observed and coined capitalism was a real phenomenon. He misunderstood its origins. And to this day, almost everybody misunderstands their origins. It's truly amazing how people talk about economic freedom, people talk about economics, people talk about capitalism. Human beings are a resource to be allocated. You know, the whole point of economics is to allocate resources. It's to figure out who should have what, redistribute the products of, quote, society. I mean, the big flaw is the collectivism and the lack of understanding of the topic being studied in economics. And to this day, capitalism is viewed as yes. It's the most efficient allocator of resources. Yes, it's the system that is best to produce wealth for society. Yes, capitalism is the best to allocate human resources to the human resources. And where does this wealth come from? It just comes. It just springs out of nowhere for almost all economists. You know, factories just come out of nowhere. Technology just comes out of nowhere. It's just a given. It's just part of the process. And capitalism and the system, you know, where that is, I guess, protected they view, but they like it only because, hey, it turns out that if you leave people alone, given all these resources, and this stuff happens and it all gets produced, the spontaneous order and the invisible overhand make it happen. But capitalism is not that. Again, everybody, in a sense, has accepted the framing of capitalism in collectivistic terms and even in the terms of exploitation that Karl Marx attributed to him. While the evidence he was seeing, the phenomena out there existed, his interpretation of it is completely wrong. Today, you know, 160 years later, the interpretation of almost all intellectuals out there of this phenomena is wrong, misleading, perverted, distorted. And it all stems from the fact that the one thing that they're not looking at is the one thing that makes capitalism work is man. They're not looking at the individual. And they're not asking the important questions. To understand capitalism, we have to understand individual human beings. We have to understand what makes us tick or what makes us survive. What makes production at any level possible? What is it that makes us human and makes it possible for us to produce? And this is rangenius because nobody else quite sees it this way. Nobody, I mean, even the best among the Austrian economists, slip into collectivist interpretations, collectivist justifications, collectivist explanations of what capitalism is. But I never understood the capitalism or that, I never understood that man. Man is a being of reason. Man is a rational animal. Indeed, that man's means of survival, the way in which you survive, is by using his mind. Using his mind to solve the problems of survival because he's not indeed programmed to build factories. Factories don't just happen. You just leave people free and have factories just show up, which is the way some libertarians think of it. Or you allow people to exploit one another and factories just show up, which is the way the Marxists think of it. But human survival at every level, at every step, requires some people at least to use their mind to think. And even the people who don't want to think, even the people who avoid and ignore thinking live by imitating the thinkers, live by exploiting often the thinkers. But somebody has to be thinking. Somebody has to be solving problems. Somebody has to discover how to build a bow and arrow. Somebody has to discover how to trap an animal. Somebody has to figure out, figure out agriculture. I mean, scientifically that the seed and water and the right soil produce a plant, the causal relationship between them. And then the entrepreneur has to then take this and scale this into agriculture. Take that scientific knowledge and actually produce something of scale. Daniel puts up a picture of beer. Yeah, somebody has to figure out how to make beer and how to repeat it and how to make it better. And ideally how to make it at scale and be able to distribute it and sell it in scale. Somebody has to figure that out. And that somebody is an individual, that somebody is a human being. That somebody is a human being using his reason, solving problems, learning about the world, integrating new knowledge and building around it. Reason is our means of survival. Reason is the way in which we survive and thrive and it's the way in which wealth is created. There is no wealth doesn't create spontaneously. The wealth doesn't get created by some invisible hand. Wealth gets created as a product of the human mind set to solve the problems of human existence, the problems of human survival. So, human beings survive by use of their mind. Well, the enemy of the mind, the thing that cripples the minds, the thing that paralyzes the mind is force. It's a gun. It's coercion. It's violence. Just, you know, look at the periods in history in which human beings were told, don't look there, don't do that or you'll burn at the stake. So the human mind in order to achieve its full potential, but in order to discover new phenomena, new processes, to have new ideas, to put those ideas into motion, the human mind, human individual must have freedom. Freedom is essential for human flourishing. It's essential for human survival as a thriving species. So we need to extract force from human society in order for individuals to be able to use their mind to solve problems, to create new things, to invent new things, new processes, new industries, to invent iPhones. They need to be free. They need to be free of dogma. They need to be free of authority. They need to be free of coercion and force. And we have a concept that recognizes that. That's a concept of individual rights. Individual rights are moral principle, defining and sanctioning a man's freedom of action in a social context. When other people are involved, force, violence, coercion is a possibility. We need to be able to act knowing that that won't be applied to us, that we can apply it to others, and that there's an institution that is there to enforce that and to enforce it objectively. So once we get into a social context in which there are other people, there is this idea we all have individual rights. And that means that we all cannot use coercion in dealing with one another, and that there's an institution called the government that is there to protect it, to protect us from the use of force. And ultimately, that, in essential terms, was what Karl Marx was observing in England in the early mid-19th century. What he was observing was a society in which people were basically free, where individual rights were at least, or to the greatest extent in human history, with possible exception of America across the pond, where people's rights were being protected. And the consequence of that is what he saw with his eyes. The consequence of that, even Marx couldn't ignore, rising standard of living, rising prosperity, incredible wealth creation, industrialization, longer life expectancy, just a better life. Now he didn't understand the source of any of that. He just saw it. He just assumed that this was just happening and it was a cause by capital being invested. That's why he called it the capitalism. But it in a sense had nothing to do with capitalism. It had everything to do with liberty, with freedom. No longer did you need permission from some government agency, or from a king, or from some parliamentary authority to start a business to invent a new kind of pump. All you need to do is to convince other people to invest capital in you, that's where capital comes in, so that you can build it to turn it into a grand business. But what Karl Marx was observing was what Deirdre McCluskey and others have called the permissionless society. A society in which people didn't have to ask permission. They went and did. Which in other words is just a society in which people are free. In which people are free to exercise their rights. And in which the government is protecting them. You can't steal from them. You can't take their lives. Sometimes the government is protecting their private property. And the consequence of that are the consequence of the 19th century. So what is capitalism? Capitalism is a system that leaves individual human beings free to use their mind in pursuit of their own values or more formally. Capitalism is the social system, social, political, economic system. It's based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all private property is privately owned. That's Ayn Rand's formal definition. And it means, capitalism means, the banishment of all physical force from human relationships. The exact opposite of Karl Marx's idea of exploitation. It's the idea of exploitation can only be done by force and it's the idea of the negation of force. The elimination of force. And where, and since rights can only be violated by means of force, if you protect rights, you're banishing force, which is what capitalism does. And where the only function of government, the only function of government in a capitalist society is the task of protecting one's rights, of banishing that force we talked about. The task of protecting man from physical force and the government in that sense acts as one's agent in self-defense. Using force in retaliation and only in retaliation. And placing that retaliatory use of force under objective control. And Chad will get to your question in a little bit, but objective control is key to answering your question. In such a society, the government has no role in the economy. The government has no role in the activities of men. It has no role in the economy, in education, in science. There's no role in ideas. It is there to protect rights and otherwise leave you free. That's what capitalism means. And so while we came close to capitalism in the 19th century, what Marx was observing in the United States and the United Kingdom, we are far, far, far removed from even that world in terms of the world of government. Never mind an ideal world of capitalism. So I absolutely think we should continue to use the word capitalism because I think it describes accurately the world that Karl Marx was trying to describe. He did it badly in terms of explanation. The term is used stuck to describe that world. What we need to do is take the world which he was observing and give it its proper definition. Grounded in the nature of man as a rational being. Grounded on an individualistic basis as the system that leaves human beings free to use their mind in pursuit of their own happiness, which is the moral foundation of capitalism. And recognize that in its pure form, and it's really the only form we're talking about in its pure form, government has no role other than protecting rights and therefore no role in the economy other than protecting property rights. That's what capitalism is. And we don't have capitalism today. We saw, you know, glimpses of capitalism in the 19th century. We saw glimpses of capitalism in places like Hong Kong. In many ways, in, you know, it's certainly pre 1864 when Karl used the term capitalism. England was more capitalist in America if only because England did not have slavery in the United States did. I think post 64 post civil war, the United States became a greater model for capitalism. But even then, you know, women did not have really their rights protected. Blacks still had to live under Jim Crow laws. So we've never really had full fledged freedom in this country. But we've come close, we've glimpsed it. And every time you glimpse it, the little bit you see is amazing. And importantly, we understand or should understand why it's right, why it's just why it works. It works because it's the only system that recognizes that our wealth, our progress, all achievement ultimately comes from the same source. It comes from the human mind. And again, that the human mind as such needs freedom in order to achieve all this. And therefore capitalism is the system that liberates the human mind and therefore makes possible the progress that we see. You know, one of my objections to the way a lot of libertarians talk about capitalism is that this individualistic perspective is missing. I mean, three examples of this are the invisible hand, which takes the self-interested interests of the Baker and everybody who participates in the capitalist economy. But somehow all of these people doing the self-interested thing, which Adam Smith believes is fundamentally immoral, it's the invisible hand. It's something we can't really fully explain. The aggregation of all this self-interest somehow produces something good. But that good is only in the aggregate. That good is only good for society. And therefore you get this collectivistic perspective on a defense of the wealth of nations. Rather than recognizing that the whole point of capitalism, the whole point of capitalism is to allow the individual to pursue his own self-interest. Is to make it possible for the individual to pursue his rational self-interest by freeing up his mind, by allowing him to think, invent, imagine, and act based on his judgment. So that's the invisible hand. I mean, Hayek talks about spontaneous order and things just happen. Institutions just get created. Technology just happens. But when you read the history of technology, as, you know, for example, I read this book about chips, about semiconductors. What you discover is behind every innovation, behind every decision, behind every factory, behind every little change that made a product better, more efficient, more productive, more profitable. There was a mind. There was an idea. There was somebody pushing. I mean, why is TCMC in Taiwan? Because the founder of TCMC, whose name now escapes me, which is ridiculous, Chinese, emigrated to the United States, worked a Texas instrument, rose to the highest ranks. I think he was number two at Texas Instruments, proposed creating a fab, a kind of production facility as TCMC ultimately had. You don't design the chips. You just make them. Other people design them. And he was turned out. But the idea was his. Without that idea, there is no TCMC. Without him, there is no TCMC. The world's most advanced producer and largest producer of microprocessors, behind every single idea. The idea of using was it ultra, you know, something ultraviolet light, special ultraviolet light to create the next generation machines was a product of an R&D guy at Intel, who had to convince the CEO of Intel to invest a hundred million dollars in it and he succeeded. And only because of those decisions that that ever get going and ultimately landed up in Holland and produced by ASML. Yes, it's Morris Wang, sorry, Morris Wang. That's the guy at TCMC. It's always an individual. It's always an idea. Extreme ultraviolet EM radiation. Thank you, Frederick. Yeah, it's Chang, not Wang. I thought so. It's Morris Chang. And then, you know, TI didn't follow up in his idea, so he was free to move to Taiwan and do it there and raise the capital himself. Now, it turned out that the Taiwanese government helped him quite a bit. But without his idea, nothing happens. Without Morris Chang, there is no TCMC. So there is no spontaneous order. Order is not spontaneous. The world that we have around us, the economic world, the technology world, the any industry you look at, any economic phenomena you look at is driven by driven individuals. Driven by driven individuals who pursue their ideas, who convince capitalists or capitalists to invest in them. Build industries, build factories, build technologies, figure out how to sell them, figure out how to market them, educate people about their value and virtue, and therefore encourage them to buy them. And that doesn't really play a fundamental role in a world driven by spontaneous order. Those people don't always exist, for example. They depend on a particular culture. They depend on a particular political system. They depend on a particular character. They depend on a particular kind of morality. It's why when you just made Russia free in some sense after the fall of communism, you didn't get the rise of industry and technology and innovation and progress. You got the rise of a mafia class. Now, part of that was a default of government. But part of it was because it was a different culture. Different culture. And then there's the eye pencil. You probably all read the story of eye pencil or seen the video of eye pencil, which are a pretty great story. And it shows how a simple pencil requires knowledge, which nobody really has. I mean, going all the way to, you have to know how to chop down a tree, you have to know how to extract the what do you call it, the graphite. You have to know how to mold it. You have to know how to place it within the piece of wood in which the pencil, which is the pencil. I mean, the amount of knowledge required to build any one pencil is staggering and no human being actually has the full knowledge. No human being can actually go from chopping down the tree, mining the graphite, and all the way to producing a pencil. Nobody has that. All those pieces of knowledge to go into everything, including how to build a ship that transports the lumber. Nobody has that. And the whole point is, look, if you leave people free, pencils get created even though nobody knows how to create a pencil. And that's just, I mean, it's right in a sense, but it's not the essential. It's not the interesting part. It's not what's important. There are no pencils without entrepreneurs. There are no pencils without inventors. There are no pencils without planners. This is the whole thing about central planning. Planning is bad, you know, coming out of Hayek. No, planning is good. When it's done privately, voluntarily, based on freedom, based on individuals pursuing their mind, their ideas. I mean, Steve Jobs planned, CEOs of companies plan, and they get feedback about whether the plan is good or bad or sometimes they're mistaken. And, you know, Hayek says, oh, price mechanisms, prices, give us all the information we need. Well, but there's no price of an iPhone before there's an iPhone. So, yes, we can improve the iPhone and we can figure out what the right price is, given demand, supply and demand, but until we actually produce an iPhone, until we imagine an iPhone and create an iPhone and build an iPhone and market an iPhone or sell an iPhone, there are no prices. Now, the parts of the iPhone have prices, but even the parts of the iPhone only have a price because you plan on building a thousand, hundred thousand, hundred million iPhones. And therefore, you're ordering these parts, but they were being assembled in a way that nobody's ever assembled them before. Entrepreneurs, thinkers, minds, that's what capitalism is about. It's about the human mind. It's about the human mind free to produce, free to create, free to build, free from coercion, force, authority. That's capitalism. It doesn't just happen. The wealth creation doesn't just happen. The wealth creation is a creation of individuals. All right, so that is capitalism. It's a system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights in which all properties privately owned. And property rights are important because in order to survive, man must work. Man must change his environment. Man must create values in the world out there. And in order for him to survive and in order for him to be motivated and in order for him to thrive, he must be able to keep those values and then to choose. Voluntarily to trade for other values with them. Property rights are consequence of the need, the essential need, the metaphysical need of human beings to work in order to survive. You cannot survive without creating value in the world. You don't create value. You don't survive. And if you do survive, you're surviving because somebody else created value and is feeding you. You're surviving as a parasite. You're surviving as a leech. So capitalism is a system that recognizes the need of man to use his mind, to produce values, and it's a system to protect his ability to do that, to protect him from the enemy of the human mind, from the enemy, which is force. Alright, so that is kind of the context. That is the political, philosophical context for what capitalism is and the centrality of the human mind in that system and the centrality of freedom as a consequence of that, the centrality of freedom and freedom in a sense conceptualized as individual rights. Individual rights are that recognition of that freedom of human beings, individual rights. So we will use that context, that perspective on capitalism as we go through capitalism 101 and we do different shows and different aspects and different applications and different ways of understanding the world from the perspective of capitalism. Alright, we have a few questions, not many. We have our goal of $650, of which we are, you know, very short. So we still have $500 to go in order to get our $650 goal. Well, these shows do have fewer people because I'm not talking about the sexy topics people want to show up for. So it's going to be more of a challenge to get to $650 with fewer people, but hopefully you guys are up for that challenge. And, you know, we have, you use the opportunity to ask lots of questions about lots of applications and lots of issues and lots of conflicts and lots of whatever related to capitalism. But feel free then to use the super chat for questions. Let's start with Ashton, who seems to come and go disappear for a couple of months then shows up and then disappears again. So hi Ashton, it's good to have you back. Ashton says, for $50, thank you Ashton. In an interview in 1959 with Mike Wallace, Einrand said, quote, the currency of love is virtue. You love people not for what you do for them, or what they do for you, you love them for your values, for their values and their virtues. What does she mean by values and virtues? Well, what she means by values and virtues is, you know, values is that what you act to gain or keep. But here she means moral values. So the things that you act to gain or keep that are fundamental to being a human being, that are fundamental to being a successful human being, to being, you know, it's the things that you strive to achieve in life, the things that are most important to you in your life. And love is a response to those values. It's the response to the things that the other person wants in life, wants to achieve, wants to succeed, wants to gain. Values are the means by which you gain them. So for Rand, the means to achieving your values are, for example, rationality, using your mind, being an independent thinker, being honest. But if you fall in love, for example, with a lying conman, then it's the opposite of the virtues as Einrand sees them. And it says something about who and what you are. So you love people not for what they do for you or what they, you know, for what you do for them. You love them for their values and virtues. You love them for their character, for who they are. For what they pursue, for what they signify in the world, for the kind of, the things that they strive to achieve, and the ways in which they achieve them. For example, you don't love the scoundrel. You don't love the conman. Because even though, you know, they might be striving to achieve wealth, the way in which they're achieving wealth, i.e. their virtues, is corrupt. It's bad. It's offensive. And therefore, you can't love them. So you're looking for people who, you know, to love. Love is a response to people, love is a response to people who value the right things that have purpose in life, that strive to achieve something in life. But they do it in the right way. Do it consistent with a rational method. They do it consistent with true moral virtues. So, you know, you judge people based on the values and the things that they want to achieve and based on the virtues, the way in which they achieve them. So in objectivism, you know, the most important values are reason, purpose and self-esteem. I mean, would you love somebody with no self-esteem? And self-esteem is something you need to attain. Self-esteem is not something you're born with, not something you just have. Not something you'd purchase off the shelf. Self-esteem is something you need to act to achieve and you achieve it through your virtues. Virtues are the moral principles. The moral principles that you act, the actions, the moral actions that you take in order to achieve, for example, self-esteem. Ashton, let me know if you have a follow-up to that or if that makes sense, that makes sense to you or not. It is, it's challenging because it sets a very high bar. If you're a person with strong values and a strong sense of morality, it sets a very high bar for who you're going to fall in love with. But that's a good thing, not a bad thing. Not a waste of time. Alright, Chad asks, pre-society, a murderer morally deserves death. Within a political context, he deserves morally a life sentence. What is the delta in context such that we can move from first statement to the second true statement? I think the delta is something I ran, talks about, let me just find it, and that is this idea of objective control. What is important in a free society is that the laws are executed in a way that is clearly objective. And that there is a process to determine fault, to determine, for example, a murder, who the murder is. And that there's a recognition that that process is not 100% for proof. That one can achieve certainty, but certainty is contextual. It very much depends on what information is available to us. And that there's always a possibility, often very remote, that we are wrong, that there is a mistake. And therefore the death, the death, since it is irreversible, is something we don't use as a penalty given the possibility of error. And it's the objective recognition that error is possible. So you can say that in any society, a murderer morally deserves death. If there is no shred of possibility that he's not the murderer, then he morally deserves death. But given that we have a particular legal system that has particular rules of evidence, rules of deciding who is guilty and who is not. What has to take into account the possibility that such a system will come up with a wrong result, and therefore the penalty for such a person is a life sentence rather than death, which is irreversible. And it is that necessity for objective control that I think a lot of anarchists don't understand, because they reject objectivity to a large extent. People say, if I have a gun, I don't need the government because I can protect my own property. First of all, that's just not true because other people might have bigger guns or have more guns than you do, and therefore they will take you out. But the other thing is, if some kid trespasses on your property by accident and you think they're, I don't know, you decide to shoot them, we need some process. We need some process by which we can decide whether your response was justified or not, whether it was just or not. We need some objective process, call it the law. And that's the role of government, the role of government is to create such a process and to enforce such a process, to figure out were you justified or weren't you justified. Let's say somebody steals something from you and you run down the guy you think who did it. Well, how do you know, how can you be certain that they did it? What evidence do you have that they did it? People can be very confused. People can be wrong all the time, particularly in times of stress and when violence is afflicted against them or in times of great mayhem. The role of government is to, okay, what evidence do we have? What do we know? What don't we know? Can we prove beyond a reasonable doubt that this person actually did it? That is civilization. That is why government is necessary for civilization. Because it's necessary to impose that kind of objective control, that take a breath, let's see if this is just, this is right, this is normal, this is legitimate. And there's a sense in which, you know, capitalism is the system in which we bring that objectivity to a society. We leave people free. But we have that institution of the rule of law to arbitrate disputes that are going to come out. But otherwise, leave people free. All right. Thank you, Gene. Let's see. You know, if everybody does, if everybody on the Super Chat did $5 right now, we would get our goal. But it would require everybody on the Super Chat to do $5. Otherwise, it's going to be very difficult to get to that goal. So we are a little behind. All right, Applejack, thanks. Thank you for the topic. You always say markets work, and it is so true, but people have not been educated to conceptualize markets as they so beautifully work. Yes, I mean, I think markets work. I say that a lot. But what are markets? Markets are just individuals trading with one another. Markets are just people, places in which individuals, given their values, given their incentives and given their ability to think and so problems interacting with other individuals to help deal with the issues as they arise and to trade value for values, create values. Fundamentally, what are markets? The places in which values are created and traded. Created and traded. Thank you, Daniel. That's the first one. The first one to do the $5. If everybody did the $5, we would make the goal today. So chime in. 95 people watching live right now. $5 from each and we're done. So markets work because we're leaving individuals' minds free to produce and to trade in win-win transactions in which everybody participating is better off. Okay, James says, what country of the four has the most capitalism? UK plus Channel Island, Singapore, Monaco, United Arab Emirates. Can you go into the detail of how you compare these capitalist places? Why don't consider any of them capitalist? So let's be really clear about that. Not one of them is capitalist because not one of them has basically a rule of law guided by the principle of individual rights, guided by the principle of, you know, freedom. The UK is a mixed economy in which there's some freedom and there's a lot of regulations, a lot of controls, a lot of taxes, a lot of government intervention. And therefore people are not free to use their minds. They're not free to produce and create and trade. They are at the authority of the regulatory government agencies as they might be. There is no protection of individual rights today in the UK, not on a consistent, systematic basis. It's a mixed economy. It's half controlled and a little bit, a little bit freedom. The same is true of Singapore. Singapore is still a regulated economy. There's still some central planning going on. There's still some things that get tax benefits and other things that don't. There's still some attempt to manipulate the system in Singapore and maybe has a little bit less manipulation in economic realm, although it has quite a bit. For example, almost nobody in Singapore owns their own house, their own home. Almost all the residential real estate is owned by the state and basically you're renting it from them. That's not capitalism. So while there's certain freedoms that exist in Singapore that don't exist in the UK and elsewhere, less regulated financial markets, for example. It's also true that you have to be careful if you're chewing gum in public in Singapore. You haven't violated anybody's rights. You don't have to worry about that in the UK, so in some respects the UK is freer, but most are fundamentally mixed economies. Monaco is too small to really seriously consider. Monaco is a place in which people come who create wealth elsewhere, produce wealth elsewhere, spend their wealth elsewhere, but live in Monaco for tax reasons. Monaco is not a real country and it's certainly not capitalist. It's a little island, I mean it's not an island, it's on land, but it's a little island in a sea of European statism where taxes are good, but almost nothing else is. Almost nothing else matters because the only reason people are theirs for taxes. The UAE violates the rights of women constantly, violates the rights of workers constantly. It is a place where there are no individual rights. It's a place where there's elements, significant elements of a theocracy. There are certain whole areas of life where you cannot think for yourself. UAE is not a capitalist country. It is the least capitalist of all of these, even if if you're rich, it's the place where you could probably do the most different things with your money without the authorities caring much about it. As long as, I don't know, you didn't bring a blasphemous book into the country through the airport. But if capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, none of these countries are capitalist because none of those have even a semblance of the recognition of individual rights. At least the UK recognizes this is such a concept. Others don't even do that. They're all mixed economies. Some elements of freedom and a lot of elements of lack of freedom. Capitalism means freedom. It doesn't mean what we have today. Anywhere. Alright, a lot of people have stepped up. RDF, thank you for the $5. Nick Bruno, the 20 to cover for four people. MP creates $5. Thank you MP creates really appreciate that. Yeah, he Lee 25 $5. Thank you. Maryland $3. Apollo Zeus $5. Frederick Olson 13 sec. And I forget what sec is. It's Swedish Krona, something like that. So thank you. It gets us a little closer. We're still now. Now, if everybody in the chat did $4, we'd be good $4. We'd make it so we still have a way to go. We need everybody in the chat who hasn't given money yet to give $4. And we would get our goal. And as Jennifer doing five, Thomas just did 20. So that saved a few people. But don't don't don't assume it's you. He didn't do it for you. He did it for himself. So you still you still owe $4. Anyway, having a little bit of fun here. Alright, thank you, James Thomas says, but who will think of the poor. Nobody. That's the point. Nobody will think of the poor. The only people who should think of the poor are individual people who are poor. And what they should really think about is how not to be poor. And there's no virtue and there's no beauty and there's no goodness in being poor. The poor's job, if you will, is to not be poor. It's to think about how they can get out of poverty. To think about how they can improve their lot. And capitalism is the only system that systematically allows them to do that. John, thank you for the $5. Roosevelt, thank you for the 20. Zach, thanks for the five. So who thinks about the poor? The poor are the only people should think about them. Now, you know, if people have emergencies and people have bad luck and bad stuff happens and people need help and they can't help themselves and so on. Then yeah, you could have charities who think about the poor. But you know, they specialize in thinking about the poor and you know, it would be under particular circumstances. Marilyn, thank you for, Marilyn completes to the $5. Colt, thank you for the $4. Zach, thank you for the $5. Appreciate it. And Paulo Zeus, thank you for the $5. We did MP Create, we did Daniel, we did Daniel as well. And thank you, Ryan, for the support. All right, the rest are asking questions. That's good. So, yeah, what about the poor? What about the poor? What about the poor? You know, capitalism is the only system which the poor have an opportunity to better themselves, have an opportunity to go out there and work, have an opportunity to go out there and invent, have an opportunity to start a business, have an opportunity to bootstrap themselves out of poverty. And indeed, it's the only system in which poverty gets eradicated, at least absolute poverty gets eradicated. And relative poverty, I guess will always exist. But you know, you've done this experiment, if we could grow the economy at like 6% a year, 5% a year, it doesn't take very many years in which we grow this, a generation maybe. And nobody's poor, not by any reasonable standard of poverty. Thanks, Thomas. Fender Hopper. Are there two different ways the culture uses the word capitalism? I advocate for separation of state and economics, and the trade defense about someone told me, I'm not a capitalist because I don't own capital. No. Capitalism is an ism. It is an ideology. There's a theory. It is an intellectual perspective on the world. It is a theory of social organization. You know, you could argue that you're not a capitalist because capitalists are people with capital who invest at capital. You're not suddenly not a venture capitalist, you're not a private equity capitalist, but you're not a capitalist. But capitalism is an ism. It's a theory about social organization, particular theory about social organization, the one we talked about today. Joe says, since capitalism presupposes a certain view of the nature of man and his papa morality, to what extent is there any utility in discussing it to the average person? How much does one need to know to see it is right? I think there is. First of all, I don't think this idea of papa morality and the nature of man is beyond the grasp of an average person. I don't think it requires, I mean, it requires to discover that and to think of it to be somebody who originates that you have to be an all-time genius, but to actually grasp it once it's explained, I don't think you have to be. And if you're motivated to grasp it by explanations on how it works, and I am one who does not believe you can present the theoretical philosophical argument about the nature of man and so on without also explaining the practical arguments of how it leads to human flourishing and human success and human prosperity. But if average man should be interested in this idea of flourishing and prosperity and therefore motivated to then understand what it is that leads to this and what is this theory and what is the system. So I think to the average person, arguing that it works and then explaining why it works because of the nature of man and papa morality, that is the killer combination. That's what has to be done. So you cannot divorce the practical from the moral. If you're going to argue the moral, you're going to argue the practical. And if you're going to argue the practical, you argue the moral. You have to argue them both all the time. And there's a sense in which we understand by arguing one, you are arguing the other. But we have to show that to people in real terms, in real terms. All right. We have $300 to raise. So we have about 100 people watching. So $3 a person, but I have a feeling not everybody's going to chip in. So what we really need is, I don't know, six people to do $550 each or three people to do $100 each or one person to do $300. That'll be good too. So any combination like that will work. Of course, we can also do 15 people do $20 each. That'll work. That'll just keep us up, keep us here for a long time, but that's okay. We've only gone for an hour and 10. We still can go for quite a while. So think of questions. Use the $20 option or the $50 or the $100 or the $300 option. And let's get going. Yes, I know many of you are tapped out. I'm not asking you to do more than you can do or more than you should do or more than it's a value to you to do. All right, let's see. Thomas, second question. He is tapped out. He's done a lot. Okay, real question. Are there ever circumstances where the government has a right to shut down society in order to protect public health? If there was a virus or contagion much worse than COVID, is public health even valid? No, there's no such thing as public health. There's no such concept as public health. But the question needs to be reframed. Is there a context in which the government would be okay to shut down society in order to protect individual rights? And I would say, yeah, I can think of such circumstances. They'd be short. They'd be clear. They'd be objectively definable. And the end to them would be objectively definable. For example, I've given this example in the past. Let's say there's terrorists have, you know, attacking New York. And we know there's somewhere in Brooklyn, there's been shooting over here. There might be shooting over there. We tell people, we are hunting down the terrorists. We're going to have troops in the streets. We don't want you to, you know, you're going to be in the way if you get there. You're putting your life in danger in addition. But our soldiers might shoot you because it's going to create confusion. We're locking down. Stay in your home. Stay in your home while we hunt down the terrorists. As soon as the terrorist threat is done, it's over. Now you can do that. You can do that in a neighborhood. You can do that in a small town. You can do that in a particular geographic area. You can do that, for example. If I say the terrorists in New York, you can't shut down people in Boston. You can't shut down people in Ohio. It has to be local, necessary for the protection of individual rights. That is for the purpose of eradicating the threat. And it should be objective as to when the threat is gone. Let's say Ebola, which is a virus that kills almost everybody who gets it. Let's say it was easy to contract. It's not. It's very hard to contract. But let's say it's easy to contract and it's in New York. And people are out and about and they're getting it. You could say, look, here's the threat. Here's the threat for this. What we need to do is we need to find people that have it so that we can protect you. The only way for us to find people that have it is for everybody to stay home for the next six hours and report to us if you have symptoms. We'll come, we'll test you, and we'll do this quickly, efficiently, and we'll let you go as soon as we quarantine the people who actually have the virus. But in order to identify those people, we just need everybody to behave in this particular way for these few hours. I think in a case of life and death, where the stakes are that high and where there's no other alternative if you're going to identify and if you're going to identify the people who are the threat to the individual rights. For example, in terrorist attacks, then you know the people in the street are the bad guys. In the virus thing, you want to be able to segregate people that are not infecting each other while you work frantically to identify all the people who have the virus so you can isolate them and keep them away from everybody else. So that the goal is to get everybody back out, back into acting, back into regular life as quickly and as effectively as possible. It cannot be long, it cannot be expansive, and it has to be kind of life or death, and again, short, quick. So I think it's, you know, in the case of a virus, very, very rare that lockdowns are the solution in a free society, in a free society. There are reasons why lockdowns might have been the only option in New York for three weeks in March, and that's because the government did nothing set on its hands, the hospitals were all prepared, the hospitals that government owned, and therefore they don't have enough beds and not, again, all prepared, because we have a mixed economy and the hospitals are going to be overrun. And so, you know, you can imagine a situation in a mixed economy where that is perceived to be the only solution, but the blame for that is the mixed economy. Under freedom there is, you'd never lock people up for three weeks, that is completely, irrationally, moral and unacceptable. And the way lockdowns were used in the United States was completely irrationally moral and unacceptable. They want, you know, to the extent that maybe they would, maybe they were justified in the first few days in New York. They were extended ad infinitum, and then they were extended all over the place, in place that had no hospital problems, in places that had no, you know, real challenges in places that, and for disease, that was not a killer, not a killer on the scale of, let's say, an Ebola or something like that. The scale that justifies anything like this. So no, I'm against lockdowns, except under unbelievably extraordinary circumstances. But again, in a mixed economy, the government is going to do stuff like that, and the only way to avoid it is to get out of a mixed economy. The government is going to do that because it has screwed up our ability to respond to such occurrences. It monopolizes so much of the mechanisms needed to deal with an actual virus. Alright, Justin, let's see. I'm told my esteemed leftist mates, by my esteemed leftist mates, that a free market is a simplistic concept that requires faith much like a religion. Faith in what? Faith in what? All a free market requires is to leave people alone. I mean, I assume they mean that in a free market, you know, restaurants would poison their customers. Well, it doesn't require faith to understand that that is not a sustainable activity. And then indeed, if it happens, those restaurants are going to be, if it happens purposefully, or through negligence, those restaurants are going to be sued, and if it's done on purpose, then they'd be in jail. So, you know, freedom is not, capitalism is not people doing whatever the hell they want. It's people doing things on the basis of the rule of law. So is it faith to say that, I don't know, that people won't cheat each other? Well, if they cheat, literally cheat, they will go to jail. And if they commit negligence, they will be sued. And the beauty of a marketplace, and you could see it every day, is that they are remedies for any problem that arises. And we can see them. It's not a matter of faith. You can see it with your eyes. Now, Frederick says, faith in the invisible hand. Yes. If you present capitalism as there's an inevitable hand, it all works. Don't worry. It'll be good. That's faith. But if we understand what makes it work, entrepreneurs, the mind, trade being win-win, the ability of the legal system to deal with cases in which trade is not win-win, that's capitalism. And that, there's no faith there. That's all based on experience. It's based on knowledge. It's based on understanding of human nature. And it's based on a standard of how the legal system works and how markets work. So it's not. It's an issue of knowledge, not of faith. John asks, is stakeholder capitalism a type of capitalism? No, there are no types of capitalism. There's capitalism and there's not capitalism. There's capitalism and there's socialism and there's a mixed economy and there's deviations for capitalism. Stakeholder, quote, capitalism, is a deviation from capitalism. It's anti-capitalism. And it can only exist in a mixed economy. You can advocate for stakeholder capitalism or stakeholder theory in a capitalist world, but in a capitalist world, you will lose. But there is no conscious capitalism, benevolent capitalism, I don't know, touchy-feely capitalism, state capitalism. What are the deviations? I mean, there's a million things that people want to modify capitalism. No, there's capitalism as defined. And then there's all the ways in which systems are not capitalist or have elements of that freedom, have elements of property rights, have some property rights, some protections, some government protection of individual rights. And then there are mixed economies. They have some elements of capitalism and a lot of elements that are not capitalism. Thanks, John. Justin, thank you, 100 Australian dollars, really appreciate that. So the nature of man being compatible with capitalism argument is often thrown back in my face with something like, but aren't human creatures, aren't humans creatures of reason? We can overcome the limits of natural proclivities. How can we best counter this argument? Well, yes, human beings are creatures of reason. That's exactly the point. And we overcome, we can overcome proclivities. But whatever it is we want to overcome and whatever it is we want to use reason in order to improve our lives, to survive and to thrive in the world, reason requires freedom. Reason does not work under force, under coercion, under authority. And therefore, given that humans are creatures of reason, humans need freedom. And that's what capitalism is. Capitalism is a system that leaves the human mind free. It's the system that recognizes man as the being of reason, the being of that uses his mind, but also identifies that the mind and force don't go together. So I hope I understood the question. So we can overcome all kinds of proclivities, a proclivity to die of starvation, but to do that we must liberate the human mind and that's what capitalism does. Michael asked, is credentialism a product of second-handedness? When I send people out accepting videos and they look him up and say, oh, he only has a bachelor's degree in philosophy and completely ignore his arguments. Yeah, it is. Now it's not irrelevant once credentials. It depends on the context. If I go see a doctor, I want to make sure that he's got a medical doctorate. I want to make sure I'd like him to have gone to what I think is a good university and maybe interned at a good hospital. Credentials are not irrelevant as indications, as signals. But that cannot be the only thing that one looks at. One has to look at actual arguments. One has to look at actual evidence. When it comes to something like philosophy, something like energy, something broad like that, then the question is how many credentials do you need? What knowledge do you need and is that knowledge available for somebody without a credential? In healthcare, I'm skeptical of people who don't have those credentials. Because of the amount of knowledge that is necessary, the amount of specialized knowledge that is necessary in order to be a good doctor, the amount of knowledge that is not available to everybody. At the same time, if a doctor says you should take this pill, I don't just accept it blindly because he's got a certificate from Harvard. I go and I do my research and I look it up and even though I'm not a doctor, I cross-reference what he says to make sure that it makes sense to me. So there's nothing wrong with credentials. There's nothing wrong with checking credentials. But that can be the only thing you do and it depends on the context. The context in which credentials are more important. The context in which credentials are less important. Neb asks, follow on to capitalism's failing in Russia. Is America uniquely positioned to subscribe to capitalism because immigrants largely opted into it? Interesting. Yes, but I don't think that's a fundamental. The fundamental reason that America is uniquely positioned to subscribe to capitalism is the founding documents of the country. The United States of America was founded on the principle of individual rights in a sense it was founded on the principle of capitalism. Its founding documents institutionalized capitalism. They institutionalized the idea that the role of the government is the protection of individual rights and they have a, the founding documents at least have a pretty good idea of what individual rights actually are. So the United States is built on a foundation of capitalism, of the enlightenment which resulted in capitalism with a real identification of individual rights and the role of government. It's protecting those rights and the structure of government is built in order to protect the rights. And then the people who came here were people motivated by the idea of living under freedom and therefore are likely to try to preserve that freedom. Although it cannot be preserved unless the ideas behind the declaration, behind the constitution, the ideas, the intellectual ideas defending capitalism are not defended and protected even to those immigrants. It's not enough just to have a sense that, yes, I want more freedom. You have to understand where that freedom comes from, why you want more freedom, why it's important to have freedom. All of those things are crucial. Thank you, Nip. Whoops, did that again. Let's see, Alan says he has no question. Thank you, Alan. Let's go back and see, okay, we've got about 100 people watching live again with 152 remaining dollars. So we need a buck 50 from everybody watching, but some of you have already given money. So let's say two bucks each from everybody who hasn't given any money yet, I think we'll make it. Two dollars each from everybody who hasn't given any money yet. And of course, if you want to give 20, 50, 100, that'll make it faster. All right, Michael asks, are there more objectivists from the American South or from the coasts? I met a lot of Southern objectivists, particularly from Texas. I'm wondering if Southern is more of that sense of life to begin with. No, I mean, I think you have a lot of Southern objectivists or Texas objectivists, because people have moved to Texas recently, but I think they were objectivists before they moved. I think there was clearly over time many, many more objectivists in California and in New York than there were in Texas. It's only recently, I'd say the last two, three years, that so many objectivists have moved to Austin, Texas, or to Texas more broadly. And even today, I still think there are probably many more objectivists in California and New York than there are in Texas. I don't think there's anything special about Texas that produces objectivists quite to the contrary. I think objectivism is much more likely to thrive and much more likely to take root among young people raised in a relatively secular culture like California than to take root in a religious culture like Texas. All right, we've got, I don't know, five more questions. Thank you, Daniel. We really appreciate it. So we've got six more questions, $140 to go. Can you speak on the West's conflicts of interest in the Middle East and highlight Israel? Thank you for today. What are the West's conflicts of interest in the Middle East? I'm not sure what that even means. I know what the West's or what the West's interest should be in the Middle East, but I don't know what conflict of interest you would be referring for. I mean, the West's interests in the Middle East are basically two, oil and self-defense. And with regard to the Middle East, the interest of the West, or in this case we'll call it America's interest, in the Middle East are securing the flow of oil out of the Middle East to where it's needed in the West and in the United States and in other places around the world. That's one strong interest the West has, and the second strong interest is self-defense, the fact that there are elements in the Middle East that would like to destroy the U.S., that would like to kill, that would like to violate the individual rights of Americans, or of Westerners if you want a broader perspective, and we need to act in order to stop them from being violent against us. So eradicate terrorism, eradicate regimes that might use nuclear weapons against the United States or against the West. That's it. Israel's role in that is in an ally on both fronts. It's an ally in helping preserve the shipping lanes and helping preserve the trading routes out of the Middle East into the West. And it's an ally in protecting the United States from people who would harm the United States. And it happens that the same people would harm Israel. So Israel's enemies are for the most part the United States as enemies. So I think that's kind of how I would look at it, but if you're really asking something different then feel free to follow up with another question and I'll see if I can do a better job answering it. Alright, Richard. What is the objective philosophical basis for marketing in business? It often appeals to people's emotion to convince them of a product's value. Yeah, but that is the objective basis for marketing in business. It's to educate people about the value of a product. And there's nothing wrong with using some emotion in the process of educating. Educating is about letting people know about new information and doing it in a way that will stimulate or respond to them, stimulate their attention, which you could call emotion, entertainment, whatever. So I think that the role of marketing in business is to create and to increase and to promote a market for the goods that you are selling. You have to teach people about what you've got available, what you've got to sell, and you've got to help them understand why it is a value to them. And you've got to use the tools including emotional tools or aesthetic tools in order to convey that to them. So they get them interested in the product. That's the role. But fundamentally it's about educating people about the value that these products have. But educating is not necessarily sitting in a classroom, teacher with a blackboard. You can educate through entertainment. You can educate through amusing stories. You can educate through a lot of different things, different ways, through different campaigns, visual, audio, and so on. All right, we're at $120 shorts, just $120 from everybody listening. We're getting there slowly, systematically, but we are getting there. We'll see how far we get. All right, Michael says, what was the motivation of colonialization and imperialism? Did they not know it was going to make the host nation's poorer? No, I don't think they understood what they were exactly doing. Colonialization and imperialism were not exactly ideas where people sat down and said, huh, let's colonize the world and let's do this and let's do that. It kind of happened. It had its own evolution. It had its own reasons for which it happened and a lot of it had to do with trade. A lot of it happened, you know, have to do with trade and it wasn't. And it's not even, you know, and I don't think they understood that it would make them poorer because they didn't understand economics. They didn't understand the value of trade. They didn't understand. They were looking at lists. They were looking at lists. And they had a lot of false theories of economics. They had a lot of false theories of trade. They had a lot of false theories of culture and philosophy. And, you know, a lot of the imperialism was we want more trade routes. We want to get into these places. Oh, but they're resisting us getting into these places in order to facilitate trade. We're doing them a favor by being in their army and smoothing out the trade routes. And that's, oh, and now the company can't manage this property anymore. So we need to bring in proper British governance. And you see that colonialization and imperialism often just they just happen by a slow process of without a thoughtful plan to take over and to, you know, to do this to the world. It's more that, you know, slow steps that land up in this place. And they didn't realize that it was bad for the host countries, for their host nations. They had no concept of it. I think to this day, most don't understand that. All right, John says, of stock markets and speculators in the capitalist market, what about them? This is referring to a previous question. Or is this, do you want me to just riff on stock markets and speculators? Look, stock markets and speculators, again, it's about freedom. So capitalism in a capitalist market, you know, stock markets are a way in which people raise capital. It's a way in which capital is allocated by the fidual decision makers to particular industries, particular companies, particular efforts. It is done through the trader principle and the idea that everybody is benefiting. It's a win-win. Speculators are constantly trying to assess the value of companies, the value of particular financial instruments. They're buying and selling with the idea that, you know, the value of the underlying products or assets is changing. By speculating and by learning more about the industry, by gaining more information, by learning more. They are embedding the price of the good or the asset or whatever it is with more information because no more is it worth 100 or is it worth 110? Well, you've just discovered something that makes it worth 110. So you go by, by buying, you drive the price up, you're bringing your information into the marketplace and you're hoping to make the market more efficient in terms of its value. But to do justice to the whole stock market and speculating, I encourage you to look at my book, The Mall Case of Finance. The Mall Case of Finance, where I talk about stock market and speculating and all of this stuff in the book and its role. I've also got a course, a number of courses on financial markets. So if you look in YouTube or in the podcasting app for your own courses, I think there's a playlist and you can find my course on financial markets and I talk a lot about that. But in a free market, financial markets would be richer, more diverse, more interesting in ways that I don't think we can even imagine than they are today in a mixed economy with regulations and constraints and all kinds of restrictions. It's hard to imagine how they would evolve under pure freedom. All right, we are $100 short. If anybody wants to jump in and get us to the target, you will gain my appreciation. All right, Frank, we've got 105 people watching, so let's send a buck, a person. Frank asks, your talk of reason and individual rights is great, but it falls on deaf ears of men like Richard Wolff. Well, of course, nobody's trying to convince Richard Wolff who believes that capitalism kills workers, said, well, I mean, he doesn't believe that. You know, he's convinced himself of that. He's evading the reality in order to hold on to that. He's not a person we're trying to convince. You're not debating him in order to try to convince him. You're trying to get kids thinking differently about capitalism. He's a lost case. He has been a lost case for most of his life. Michael says, why do you say objectivism is harder than calculus? Well, because I think that objectivism is to really fully understand it philosophically and to understand the ways in which it stands in opposition to the philosophy of the world out there and to philosophers now for several millennium. That's hard. It's hard to comprehend it. It's hard to fully understand it. Fully understanding objectivism requires real effort to integrate, which is not simple. By the way, I think calculus is easy. Well, I thought calculus was easy. I always thought calculus was kind of fun and pretty easy. So you want hard, look at probability theory, that's hard. Calculus is pretty simple. Objectivism requires the kind of effort, the kind of focus, the kind of integration, the kind of understanding, the kind of scope to really fully understand it, that I don't think any field in mathematics that would be easy as a comparison. Michael says, are assisted suicide programs being expanded beyond welfare states because welfare states are going broke? No, I don't think so. I know that's the conspiracy. I know that's what the conservatives would like you to believe because they were opposed to them on principle. So they create a mythology around it. But no, assisted suicide programs are being expanded because there's a demand for it. There's a real demand for it. And there's a strong moral argument that I think even people out there in the world understand that suffering is bad. Non-Christians understand suffering is bad. And if suffering is all you have in life and all you have looking forward in life, then there's a real reason why you would want to end your life. So no, the 10,000 people who committed suicide have not saved the Canadian system that much to justify it. And there's probably a lot of paperwork and a lot of bureaucracy associated with assisted suicide that probably doesn't make it that much cheaper. You know, if Social Life Medicine just cared about costs, they would encourage everybody to smoke because then everybody would die young. They wouldn't collect Social Security and they wouldn't have to be treated or they would stop treating certain cancers because it's too expensive. And they do. That's how Social Life Medicine deals with the fact that they're going bankrupt is they create lines. They create ways in which people don't use the system because they never get to use it because they're waiting in line for it to be resolved. All right. Thank you. We will, we're $100 short exactly. We will do more shows on the Capitalism 101. The future shows will be less theoretical, more practical application to a particular field, show how capitalism deals with particular issues, how mixed economy deals with them, how we deal with them today, show the results or talk about the results, you know, talk about solutions to different problems from the capitalist perspective, show how economics works in a sense of working through particular economic and political economy issues. As I said, we'll talk about, we're going to talk about soon about immigration, we'll talk about from an economic perspective, we'll talk about central planning. I want to talk about China in particular, because so many people, particularly on the left, but even on the right, have China envy, they think that China has done so well because of its central planning. And we want to debunk that and show that, no, if you want really economic growth, what you need is more freedom, not less. And China's central planning has been a failure. So we'll go over some of the facts around that. All right. Don't forget, I like to show before you leave, we should have more than 100 likes back there. If you have $95 and you'd like to support the show, please do so in the next five seconds or, well, a little bit more than five seconds, but the next couple of minutes. And finally, don't forget there's a show tomorrow morning. It'll probably be 11 a.m. East Coast time. And we will be talking about news, events, what's going on in the world. That is the Iran's news update five days a week. All right, everybody, I hope you enjoyed the show. Hope it's a value to you. I hope you enjoy the series of talks. Thank you to all the superchatters. Really appreciated value for value. I appreciate that you value what I do. And so thank you for being there. Thank you for the support. And I will see you all. Oh, and those of you would like to support the show on a regular basis, and I'll worry about the super chat. That's the best way to support the show with a monthly, monthly supports on Patreon. Subscribe, star PayPal, your on bookshow.com slash subscribe. And yeah, thank you for all the people out there who make this show possible and who show me show me the love show me the value for value. See you all.