 Hello everyone and welcome to tonight's Soho Forum debate. I am Jane Menten, the head of operations for the Soho Forum. Tonight's resolution reads, Capitalism has been a key factor in leaving the United States unprepared to address the COVID-19 pandemic. This is an Oxford style debate in which the audience initially votes yes, no, or undecided on the resolution and then again when the debate is over. Whoever moves the vote in his favor is declared the winner. Go to sohovote.com to cast your initial vote. You can use the Sheen Center Wi-Fi instructions for which should be displayed on the screen behind me, or you can use your cell data. The most important thing is that you have to vote both before and after the debate in order for your vote to count in the final tally. And we want every vote to count so go to sohovote.com now. We will be closing the initial vote as soon as we start the opening statements and we will finish and we will open the final vote as soon as we finish the concluding statements and we'll end the debate by declaring the winner and giving out the famous Soho Forum Tootsie Roll. So go to sohovote.com to cast your vote and now to make a couple of announcements I give you Gene Epstein, the director of the Soho Forum. Thank you Jane and welcome to you all, a special welcome as well to the multitudes who are also listening and watching this on live stream. You too can vote yes, no, or undecided on the resolution. Capitalism has been a key factor in leaving the United States unprepared to address the COVID-19 pandemic. And no reason why I'm laughing. I'm just amused at the evening and apart from that we want to thank the Reason Foundation for doing all that it does to process our accounts and to publish our debates on video and on podcasts. This one will of course be published as well as part of tonight's freebies. The latest issue of Reason Magazine is on many of your chairs. I recommend it highly as well. As you know, the Soho Forum has a two-fold mission. First of course to have debates of interest to the larger community, not just to libertarians we hope, but the second mission is to have a party so that everyone can meet and greet the debaters. And one of our debaters tonight for sure, Jonah Sarah, will be coming to the party and he will be doing book signing and possibly selling this book. He hasn't decided. He might be giving it away. He's mulling over that decision even as we speak. But there are copies of his book at our home at 55 Great Jones Street. Most of you know how to find it. It's just two blocks up town. Follow the crowds. Follow me. My wife is doing an art exhibit in Uzbekistan, so unfortunately she won't be available this evening, but we do have others filling in for her, preparing delicious food, wine, and beer so that we can eat, drink, and be merry and talk about whatever occurs to us. In addition, there will be another Bastiat Society meeting, the So Bastiat Society meeting, which we have occasionally, which I will host in my home on Saturday. You'll be getting a special notice about that tomorrow morning if you'd like to come Saturday afternoon where we can talk about different debates and where we can brainstorm about future debates. I will be hosting it. Popcorn will be served, and probably the leftover beer in one will be available, but bring your own drink if there's something else you really prefer. So that's Saturday afternoon. And since the resolution that reads capitalism has been a key factor in leaving the United States unprepared to address the COVID-19 pandemic, since that resolution is the resolution for which I am taking the negative, I must recuse myself from being moderator this evening and turn the evening back to the woman behind me, Jane Menten. Jane, please take the podium. Thank you, Jean. Sorry to have been standing over your shoulder. This is my first time acting as moderator. I'm so excited to be up here, and I'm very glad that I don't have to do the actual debating. So to do that, I will, Jean announced himself as taking the negative, and for the affirmative, we have Joe Nocera. Joe is a columnist at the Free Press, and the author of The Big Fail, What the Pandemic Revealed About Who America Protects and Who It Leaves Behind. Joe, please come to the stage. Again, tonight's resolution reads capitalism has been a key factor in leaving the United States unprepared to address the COVID-19 pandemic, and I hope you have all cast your initial vote at sohovote.com, because we are now going to close the voting and begin the initial statements. So, Brett, please close the voting. Joe, you have 17.5 minutes to make your case for the affirmative. Joe, please take the podium. Scientific behind 17. It's not 18. It's not 15. It's not 20. 17.5. You know what? I'd much rather do that, to be honest. Okay, how's that? Is that better? Is that better, Jean? Can everybody hear me? So, I was looking up stuff about the soho forum, having never been here before, although I am a fan of Reason Magazine, and I saw anyone who follows the debates of the Libertarian Soho Forum knows that even in the democratic stronghold of New York City, it's possible to shift public opinion from radical progressive orthodoxy so long as viewpoint diversity is maintained. So, first of all, I hope that I am not viewed as the representative of radical progressive orthodoxy because, among other things, I write for the free press. And I might, I just want to say for the record, I know my time is going down. I'm not worried. I'm not only a brand ambassador for the free press, but at my age of 71, my eyes are not so great, and so I have a lot of problem with these lights. But that's my problem. So, let me begin by saying I am a capitalist. I'm not opposed to capitalism. In fact, I was in the room when the 80s began, and the 80s was one of the go-go eras of capitalism. I was in the room because I was writing a story, and I was watching our guy named T. Boone Pickens make his first takeover play. And this was the beginning of an era that became known as shareholder value, which eventually became known as maximizing shareholder value. And some of the people who tried to do that were called shareholder activists instead of green mailers. And my argument revolves around several ideas, one of which is that the desire for maximizing shareholder value left the country vulnerable in a bunch of ways that wound up really hurting us when we got to COVID. It was not so much that it was almost as if the light bulb went on and things that we hadn't really thought about, things that we had started to take for granted in a capitalist society, suddenly started to think, you know, is this really right? Does this really make sense? So the number one thing on my list, the first thing that comes to mind when I think about this is globalization. And I think globalization did two things that were harmful in terms of COVID. The first is that the country did so much outsourcing and in the effort that we left ourselves without any resilience. Now, we're seeing that today in all sorts of products, but the canary in the coal mine really was PPE, the products that were supposed to help hospital workers and even the rest of us deal with COVID, hospital gowns, you couldn't find them, masks, you couldn't get them, good ones anyway. The one that really matters at the beginning of COVID was the N95. Now, a lot of people believe masks don't work, I'm sort of neutral on the subject, but I do know that N95s do work. They are, excuse me, 3M invented them. They are very hard to wear. That's why mostly hospital workers wear them. Once COVID hit and everybody in a hospital needed them, they couldn't get them. They were all made in China. The Chinese were saying, I don't care if I have a contract with McKesson, my people have COVID. We're keeping this. We're doing it ourselves. The hell with your contract. This was not a good thing. The second thing that happened was, and this is talk about the downside of capitalism, a black market cropped up. Now, Gene's going to say that's a good thing to have a black market crop up because that's what takes the place of normal capitalism when things are in short supply. But this capital market, this black market included people getting beat up, products being, people being ripped off left and right, lots of people thinking they were going to get rich, finding masks, finding tests, finding all sorts of things. It was a terrible, terrible mess. In the end, a lot of people lost money and nobody had the materials. The second area where globalization I think really affected America is that it was promoted avidly by the elites. You couldn't find anybody in Washington, DC who wore a tie to work every day who didn't say that globalization wasn't the greatest thing since sliced bread. It cut costs. You could have just in time inventory. Your labor costs went down. Your profits went up. Your CEO could make $15 million instead of $5 million. Isn't that wonderful? But a lot of people lost their jobs. At the time, you remember this, they said, oh, well, yeah, okay, Flint, Michigan, they lost their jobs. But think about all those people who are getting jobs somewhere that it's a net plus for the economy. But what it wound up doing was causing ultimately millions of Americans to hate the elites, to distrust the elites, to believe that the elites were not on their side. Then you get to COVID. Then you get to the vaccines. The vaccines were one of the miracles of the COVID era put together in less than a year in a joint venture between government and private industry. It really worked. And all these people said, I'm not going to take that. You elites are trying to shove it down my throat. You're telling me we have to have this. I'm not going to do that. And so as a result, in my opinion, I know not everybody believes this, people died as a result. People died because they wouldn't take the vaccine. People got really sick because they wouldn't take the vaccine. So that's globalization. The second area that I want to talk about is private equity. Or, as I like to say, those private equity bastards. Private equity began in the 70s and 80s with this idea that they would take over fat companies that needed to be trimmed down, that needed to be fixed, that were troubled. And they would bring in their private equity expertise, and they turn around, and they bring them back into the public markets, and everybody would get rich, especially the private equity guys. Then in the early 2000s, they discovered nursing homes. Now, what does private equity have that nursing homes need? The answer is nothing. Nothing. And by then, by the way, most private equity firms, they'd stop saying, we're going to make your companies better. They're just saying, we're going to feed, we're going to make money for our investors. So they would buy a nursing home, or a nursing home chain. And the first thing they would do is sell the land out from under the nursing home to a REIT, a company that bought basically a nursing home land, a nursing home property, I should say. So now the nursing home has to pay rent on a building it once owned. Now, in order to make money with a nursing home, they then have to start laying off staff, or they have to start cutting back in other ways, or they have to start building different kinds of suppliers, pharmacies, doctors, this and that for which they can overcharge. Because they have a kept audience that people can't have no choice. So then we get to COVID. What percentage of people who died of COVID were nursing homes? It's about one-fifth. It's an astonishing number. It's over 200,000. Now, were they all owned by private equity? No, but the private equity model is what everybody in the nursing home industry followed. And so the damage that private equity did in COVID, because of their ownership of nursing homes, was, I think, enormous. By the way, the one nursing home in the country that really did well in COVID was in San Francisco. You know why? Because the city owned the nursing home. They had enough nurses. They had a good plan. They knew how to deal with people in distress because they dealt with AIDS. It was a 700 person facility. And at this moment, to this day, only 13 people have died in that facility. The third aspect of this is, I went back to, I'm going to go back to maximizing shareholder value. Should hospitals be for profit? I think that's a question that COVID really raised for many, many people. The hospital industry was not a for-profit industry until the 1960s when Dr. Frist, of course, his name escapes me at the moment, but my book, I haven't read my own book in a long time, when he started what became HCA, which is the largest now, the largest hospital chain in the country. And his idea was by starting a corporation, by making it a public corporation, it would be a way to make medicine more efficient, to make it better, to make it help people. It's done just the opposite. It's done just the opposite. Health care costs are out of control. And part of the reason is that hospitals are trying to maximize profits and they're trying to make more every quarter, every year. And the only way to do that is to charge more or it's a problem. Now, the second problem is that hospitals, the wealthy hospitals don't want to deal with poor people, people on Medicaid. And so that's why you saw during COVID, some hospitals, the have not hospitals, they call them, the have not hospitals would have people in refrigerated, bodies in refrigerated trucks, because they had so many people who were dying, they didn't know what to do with. You didn't see anybody at Mount Sinai in a refrigerated truck, anybody's, you didn't. Because they didn't get the kind of client who was most susceptible to having COVID, people living in multi-generation homes, people who had to go to work so that we in the Zoom class could sit home and feel a smug about being able to shelter in place. Aren't we nice? Aren't we wonderful? Actually, that's another aspect of this. COVID exacerbated, at least temporarily, income inequality. The wealthiest people in the country became much wealthier because they ran companies that were online and that you could order, you could order online and you could stay at home and you could use Zoom. Zoom is a wonderful company and I'm happy it existed, for my own personal sake. But as one scientist told me, if Zoom hadn't existed, if Zoom hadn't existed, there would not have been any lockdowns because the elites wouldn't have put up with it. And that's another aspect of the elite. The elites were able to do Zoom and the meatpackers went to work and got sick because that's what was happening in our capitalist society. Now, COVID is somewhat in the in arrears now. And my contention is that these problems that began years ago and that became visible and obvious during COVID, you know, they haven't gone away. The difference today is that people are noticing, people are noticing. And in particular, for instance, just yesterday, there was a hearing in Boston run by Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren about the fact that a failing hospital chain in the Massachusetts area was had been raped and pillaged. That's how I like to put it. Had been raped and pillaged by a private equity firm called Service, which had taken $800 million out of the hospital, given it to their investors and the hospital was about to go under. Now, which is more important? Is it more important for those investors to get that $800 million or is it more important for this hospital chain to stay in business and to be able to offer good medicine to people in need? To me, the answer is obvious. And if I had a clever ending, I would use it right now. But instead, I'm going to turn it over to my opponent with how many minutes to spare? With two minutes to spare. Thank you very much. Oh, thank you, Joe. Jean, you have 17.5 minutes to make your case for the negative. Jean, please take the podium. Well, thanks. And Jonah Sarah has helped spread the word about what his book calls the big fail, the disastrous failure of the US to deal properly with the COVID pandemic. The disagreement between us turns on Joe's view that much of the blame lies with capitalism. My main argument will be just the opposite, that if the US only had more capitalism, the country would have been better prepared to address the pandemic. In his book, Joe refers to capitalism as, quote, capitalism as it's now practiced in the US. There is a lot of capitalism in the US. But while one of the dominant practices can be confused with capitalism, it's very nearly the opposite. This is crony capitalism, the unholy alliance between government and business that I often refer to as capitalism. Joe's error is to confuse capitalism with capitalism. Capitalism is a system of profit and loss. Profits encourage risk taking and reward useful resource allocations. Losses encourage prudence and penalize wasteful allocations. Financial loss is as important to the proper functioning of capitalism as financial profit. But when the system of capitalism fully achieves its goals, financial loss is virtually eliminated and our capitalism starts resembling conventional socialism. Now apply this to a notorious case. When Senator Rand Paul got the CEO of the drug company Moderna to admit that Moderna had paid staff members of the government's NIH $400 million in royalties, he asked the CEO a simple question, quote, do you believe it creates a conflict of interest for the government employees who are making money off of the vaccine to also be dictating the policy about how many times we take the vaccine, unquote. The CEO ducked the question. But we were looking at crony capitalism in pretty pure form. Government officials were getting bribed to protect a company from losses and to boost its profits. Also, under any civilized rule of law, if an entity does you harm, you can bring a lawsuit for damages done to you. But when big pharma brought out the COVID vaccines, the government shielded the companies from loss by protecting them from financial liability if the vaccines did do harm. Another case of crony capitalism in action. If a company is shielded from the risk of lawsuits, if its product does harm, it's bound to be more lax in trying to minimize the risk of harm when developing the product. When the vaccines were introduced, we were assured by the president's chief medical advisor, Anthony Fauci that quote, when people are vaccinated, they can feel safe that they are not going to get infected, unquote. By CDC director Rochelle Walensky that quote, vaccinated people do not carry the virus and they don't get sick, unquote. And by President Joe Biden himself that quote, you're not going to get COVID if you have these vaccines, unquote. But preventing infection and transmission of the disease, what vaccines are supposed to do was precisely what the vaccines fail to do. While Joe doesn't mention it in his book, Israel provided the most dramatic example of the vaccines failure to do its basic job. Israel was publicly celebrated by big pharma for its aggressive rollout of a COVID vaccine. After what seemed to be initial success, however, Israel suffered a staggering outbreak of cases. The main takeaway seemed to be that vaccines do provide protection for a brief period, which then quickly disappears. In a well-deserved irony, Anthony Fauci tested positive for COVID repeatedly despite four vaccination doses. Perhaps the ultimate in chronic capitalism is when the government mandates us to use a company's products. What firm wouldn't love that prospect? Governments across the country mandated us to put a substance in our bodies. The appalling infringement on individual liberty destroyed the lives and careers of those who refused to knuckle under. Unlike Joe, I believe the jury is still out on whether, given the way they were administered, the vaccines did more good than harm or more harm than good. But Dr. J. Batticharia, who gets a high rating from Joe, leans to the view that the JABS did help the vulnerable. But even he has agreed that no systematic study has been done to resolve this question. Those in charge of funding research are hardly eager for research into this politically charged issue. The findings might prove embarrassing to those who mandated vaccine use. But I hope Joe and I don't get bogged down on this question. The decision to get vaccinated could have been totally voluntary, and many of the evils of chronic capitalism I've just mentioned could have been avoided. Joe joins me in condemning the lockdowns, which propelled the unemployment rate to an 80-year high of 14.8%. That brings up the crucial role in underwriting the lockdowns played by that major chronic capitalist institution known as the Federal Reserve. Joe himself explains just how the Federal Reserve is an instrument of chronic capitalism. In his book, he writes that through its actions, the Fed quote, created staggering wealth and profits for financial elites and quote, dramatically increased wealth inequality. Since the central bank has the unique ability to create vast sums of money out of thin air, it's hardly surprising that those in charge tend to bestow that money on their cronies. Speaking of the Fed's power to create money, the central bank played a crucial role in providing the indispensable financing for the lockdowns. The U.S. Treasury can raise money in two ways, through taxes or through borrowing against future taxes. But there is a third main way. Creating the money, it spends out of thin air, a practice that governments started many centuries ago. The Federal Reserve system follows a more subtle two-step process. First, the government creates bonds, then it uses the Federal Reserve to create the money to buy those bonds. Now let's apply this to the lockdowns. When the government shut down much of the economy, its revenues were faltering, and at the same time, it needed to flood the country with cash. As a result, the U.S. Treasury ran deficits that made all previous deficits look stingy by comparison. In 2020, the deficit jumped to an off-the-charts 3.1 trillion, followed by a staggering 2.8 trillion in 2021. It's virtually inconceivable that Treasury mandarins would have tried to borrow nearly $6 trillion in so short a time in the credit markets. But they didn't have to. The debt was mainly acquired by the Federal Reserve. So in classic fashion, first the government created bonds, then it created money. As a result, the conventional measure of money soared much further and faster than it had during the double-digit price inflation of the 1970s, sparking the price inflation that has wreaked havoc on consumers. Now let's assume, whether or not we still have a central bank, that our federal government runs its fiscal affairs the way many folks imagine, that it's strictly limited to raise money by taxing or borrowing in the credit markets against future taxes. Let's then indulge in a plausible counterfactual. The government would no longer have the trillions readily available to bestow on the elites to get them to like the lockdowns. As mentioned, they would recognize the obvious fact that so many trillions could not be borrowed in so short a time in the credit markets. The lockdowns might not have been an option. So it wasn't capitalism, but America's dominant crony capitalist institution, the Federal Reserve, that played an essential role in making the lockdowns possible, leaving the country unprepared to face the pandemic in proper fashion. How else could the government have been better prepared to deal with the pandemic? It might have resorted to a time-honored strategy for dealing with pandemics called focused protection. As set forth in what was labeled the Great Barrington Declaration of October 2020, it was co-authored by three epidemiologists from elite universities. As Joe approvingly summarizes it, focused protection essentially involved protecting the vulnerable, principally the elderly, and quote, allowing those less at risk to go about their lives. Unquote. Joe reports that the meetup to draft the Great Barrington Declaration was organized by the American Institute for Economic Research based in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. The AIER's purpose, Joe further reports, quoting from its website, is to quote, support the fundamental values of personal freedom, free markets, private property, sound money, and private governance. Joe then adds, quote, not surprisingly, AIER's writers and economists opposed lockdowns from the start. Unquote. Here I want to emphasize my agreement with Joe. I venture to suggest that it is indeed not surprising that a free market think tank played a crucial role in raising national awareness of the strategy of focused protection. Free market thinkers recognize the trade-offs we all face in a world of scarcity. Focus protection was not the zero COVID fantasy nurtured by the lockdowners. It recognized the stark reality that huge loss of life was unavoidable. As free market economist Don Boudreau has written, focus protection involved, quote, reallocating resources from where they have low impact to where they have higher impact. How would the government of finance focus protection without money creation by the Federal Reserve? Well, first, it would cost far less compared to the staggering cost of decimating the economy via the lockdowns. The government could have legitimately done some borrowing in the credit markets and even perish the thought have temporarily cut back on other spending in order to finance focus protection. Local government, religious institutions, and other nonprofits might have gotten far more proactive in calling for young volunteers to help the vulnerable and billions could have been raised through private charity to help finance focus protection of nursing homes. And at the risk of offending some of my free market friends, it might even have raised additional funds through a temporary surtax. Among other benefits, the ravages of price inflation caused by the Fed would have been avoided, along with all other staggering costs to life and well being of the lockdowns. And as part of focus protection, those who wanted to get vaccinated could have done so voluntarily. The framers of the Great Barrington Declaration pointed out that the strategy of focus protection had been, quote, all ready outlined in the preparedness plans that different countries had developed over past decades, unquote. So it might have been a logical default strategy had the Federal Reserve's printing press not been available. Joe impunes the trend toward globalization as partly responsible for America's lack of preparedness. As I mentioned, there is still a large degree of capitalism in the U.S., and Joe is certainly right that capitalism does tend to lead to globalization. The best measure is simply to take imports as a percentage of gross domestic product. In 1970, 5.2 percent of U.S. GDP consisted of imports, and by 2019, that had grown to 14.9 percent, which meant another 9.7 percentage points of U.S. GDP gone global. Now take another country with an even worse problem in this regard. This country devoted 22.3 percent of its GDP to imports, and by 2019, the share had jumped to 43.6 percent, thus adding a much larger 21.3 percentage points of its GDP to globalization. So if Joe is right, that country must have had even more trouble coping with the pandemic. But the country I've been describing is Sweden, Sweden, where mask wearing was at a minimal, and which also had to cope with the mask being made in China, and which had the most laissez-faire approach to the pandemic, which Joe himself agrees coped far better than the U.S. So globalization can hardly matter much if you do far more to deal properly with the pandemic. Finally, Joe gets us mired in the private sectors influence on hospitals and nursing homes, but fails to disentangle it from the dominance of crony capitalism. For example, he decries the lack of competition among hospitals but makes no mention of the way government shields the established hospitals from competition to what is known as certificate of need laws. The biggest scandal of the nursing homes was the way Governor Andrew Cuomo forced them to accept infected patients resulting in the deaths of thousands. And the best solution for them is found in the Great Barrington Declaration, from which Joe commendably quotes, quote, nursing homes should use staff with acquired immunity and perform frequent testing of other staff and all visitors. All that would have been doable with a major reduction in crony capitalism and greater turn toward real capitalism. Thanks. Thank you, Jean. We now have 7.5 minutes for rebuttals. Joe, please take the podium for your rebuttal or not. Okay, this is going to be hard for you to vote on. And the reason is because Jean has just given you the reasons why capitalism was terrible for COVID. I mean, that's what he did. He just ripped through the fed. He did, blah, blah, blah, Moderna, blah, blah, and I'm going to now defend some capitalistic practices or what he wouldn't describe them as capitalistic, but let's talk about Moderna. I like talking about Moderna. So, Jean says that the government officials were bribed by Moderna. Let's think about what really happened here. Moderna is a greedy company. They don't like to give out credit. They don't like to give out money. Scientists for the government made crucial discoveries that helped lead to the vaccine and then basically had to sue Moderna to get the credit and get some royalties. That doesn't sound like bribery to me. That sounds like, you know, somebody thing, I deserve some credit and I should get some money. And if I have to sue to do it, I'll sue. Secondly, whatever you think about vaccines, their creation was, there is a lot of crony capitalism around. But when you think about the vaccines, you know, the government was in this situation where they said, we need to do this quickly. We need to do this faster than anybody has ever done this in history. And so we're going to have a competition. We're going to give money to, you know, eight different companies or joint ventures. And we're going to see which one of them can come up with a vaccine first. And the ones that come up with a vaccine first, we will help fund to distribute them. They went so far as to help Moderna build manufacturing plants. Now, to me, that's a good thing. If you're in an emergency and you're trying to come up with an emergency medicine, this is what you want. And they did come up with it. And I mean, they oversold the hell out of it, which is really terrible. Oh, boy. Oh, but there's other business, government. So this thing about government shielded by loss from government, right? Excuse me. I'm sorry. Hold on. The government shielding the companies from loss. Let's talk about that for a second. See, the problem with Gene is he thinks about capitalism as it should be in its purest form, the way Milton Friedman would want it, the way Adam Smith would want it. I'm talking about capitalism as it actually works in the real world. So why did Pfizer and all these other companies want to be shielded from loss for vaccines? The answer is because they had come up with a vaccine for Ebola, thinking that would be a huge thing. It wasn't. So anybody who made a vaccine lost a lot of money. Same thing for various other, excuse me, influenza viruses. They came and they went and they were no big deal and vaccine makers lost money. So vaccine makers basically said, I don't know whether this is going to be a big deal or not. If I'm going to get into this, if I'm going to spend billions of my own money, I need some guarantee. I need to know that it's not going to cost me billions of dollars. Otherwise, I won't do it. That's how capitalism, that's how it works in the real world. That's how it works because they want to make money. And so to me, being shielded from loss by the government was not a bad thing. It was a good thing. The bad thing as long as we're talking about vaccines is that when they became available, Fauci and everybody else oversold the hell out of it. They should have said we don't know whether it transmits or not because they hadn't tested for that. That was not part of the phase two, phase three testing. They hadn't tested for it. What they should have said was it will reduce death and disease, death and illness. And that's what it did. It reduced death and illness. But it didn't reduce transmission. Everybody got transmission when... What was the name of that one that came after Delta? Omicron. Everybody got it. I got it. I didn't even know I had it. I agree with Gene that... What did you call it? Crappy... What do you call it? There's a lot of capitalism around. Yeah, sure. Okay, fine. There is. My point was that is the kind of capitalism that causes problems. The purity of his capitalism doesn't exist. It doesn't exist. At least not in the United States. So to say that that kind of capitalism was a net plus for COVID or didn't have any effect on COVID is silly. Because... Did I say this before? It doesn't exist. And I think I've got another minute or so but, you know, I don't really need another minute or so because I think I've made my point. Thank you, Joe. Gene, you have 7.5 minutes for your rebuttal. Please take the podium, Gene. Well, you're speaking to the utopian Gene Epstein. And I only want to remind Joe that, as I said, there really is a lot of capitalism in the U.S. It is a very common error to define capitalism as a system of profit. Look all around you. Companies go bankrupt all the time. Most startups fail after a few years. The companies that were dominant 20 years ago, many of them are now non-existent or on their knees. And so really I'm not asking for utopia. I'm only asking for the system of profit and loss with which many companies in this country do have to cope by and large. And therefore, I would want to ask Joe that when Rand Paul said the same people who got royalties were dictating policy or when Joe says that Fauci, the scientist, Aroshel Walensky, were claiming that the vaccines did what vaccines were supposed to do, protect you against infection. And they did this without any basis whatsoever in science. Joe isn't appalled the way I am because he's very tolerant of crony capitalism. Clearly, Fauci, when asked a number of times by Rand Paul, do you get money from these companies, he fumbled. He said, oh, I don't think so. Clearly, he does. Clearly, he profits. This is the corruption of crony capitalism. And it is appalling, appalling that a sophisticated scientist can make a claim about a vaccine for which there is absolutely no basis whatsoever, that Aroshel Walensky can make the same claim. That's when we had the appalling manifestations of crony capitalism. The thing that Joe doesn't seem to like, but I want to remind him again that we do have profit and loss in this system, and we could have had it in this case. Joe seems to have implied earlier that it was too bad that people resisted the band-aids. Well, again, Joe, if the vaccine did what you claim it did, and I said, I don't want to get bogged down in that. How do governments mandate its use? And the reason why they did it, obviously, is that by and large, they were tools of crony capitalism. So the ugliness of crony capitalism became manifest. And now, of course, Joe has completely ducked, I guess, my more subtle point, because I guess I sound like a radical libertarian when I talk about the Federal Reserve, but I want to stipulate again, because I don't want to push us to the edge of radicalism. This evening, I only want to say that it's possible to have a Federal Reserve, a central bank, without $6 trillion or nearly $6 trillion in deficits being financed by this institution that Joe himself condemns, that clearly is also an instrument of crony capitalism. So that's the point. That's what we've got. But I want to remind Joe that I'm not a starry-eyed utopian. I'm not asking for the libertarian revolution to happen tomorrow. I'm only asking that, that had we had an economy that behaves like much of the economy in this country does behave, a system of profit and loss where responsible capitalists do have to act prudently, where they do get punished if they misallocate capital, I only want to say that had we had that system applying to the dominant levers of that government exercise during the pandemic, we would have had a much better result. And I guess perhaps I have just a little bit more time. I guess it's okay with Joe that they get protected from lawsuits. I won't argue that one. But I'm astonished that Joe thinks it's really okay or seems to imply, I hope I can be corrected on this, hope seems to imply that a vaccine that does not do what the smallpox vaccine or the polio vaccine is supposed to do, but is promised to do that by our president and by bona fide scientists who are basically shooting the breeze, who are basically spreading propaganda because they are so neck deep in crony capitalist corruption that if it can't do that, then how the heck can you allow government to make it mandatory? Whether you would want to make it mandatory under any circumstances would be a question. But if all of it does is, according to Joe, save your life, I would say again, we need more study of that. But if it does save your life, then just say, well, your life can be saved by this. So we recommend that you take it. We are not a totalitarian crony capitalist society. We just recommend it. We don't force it on you. And I'll forego my two minutes remaining. Thank you. Thank you, Jean. We will now open the floor for 30 minutes of Q&A. And as you're lining up to ask your questions, I just want to remind everyone to please make sure that you state your question as a question and try to do so in under a minute. Both debaters are also invited to ask each other a question at any time. And I will have moderators prerogative to jump in with the question, should one occur to me. So debaters, would you either like to pose a question to the other about the arguments that you've made thus far? Or would you like to open the floor to questions? I don't know what the hell, Fauci and the president and all. Is this a question, Joe? Yes, it is. Yes, it is. It's a question. It's a question. Begins with, I don't know what the hell. It's a great question. I don't know what the hell that has to do with crony capitalism. They were idiots. Why can't you just say they were idiots? You're wrong. But in crony capitalism, they were public health officials who thought they knew something they didn't know. Okay. I think there's no question rock there, Joe, but I'll accept that question. I will say that it's very clear, certainly we know from the grilling that Fauci obviously had to be subjected in itself to when asked by Rand Paul, do you take money from these companies? And he said, that's none of your business. Did you take money? I don't recall. And now you're calling this guy, who's the chief medical advisor to the U.S., you're excusing him on the ground that he's an idiot? Well, okay. I happen to think that he's probably a pretty smart, corrupt, smarmy scumbag, not an idiot. And I think you are being very naive to simply say, ah, well, god damn it, you know, he's got this big job and he's an idiot. The country's run by idiots and so what? What's the big deal? You seem to be unduly tolerant of the corruptions of crony capitalism. Fauci was being bribed to say what he said. That's just bullshit. Okay. All right. Well, then let's leave it at that, whether it's bullshit or not. Yeah. I think there are many reasons why he said what he said, but I don't think bribery is among them. Money was not part of it. Do you think he's taking money from the companies? No, I don't. You don't? Well, well, I can only... I don't know. The difference between you and me is I don't know. You don't know either, but you're willing to say it's true. I can only tell you... Perhaps we should take a question from the audience. Something is a matter of record. He was asked continuously by Rand Paul, have you taken money from these companies? He could have said, no, I have not. He never said that. If he didn't take money from these companies, this man, I guess he's too much of an idiot to know how to answer the question, according to you, Joe, but he never said, no, I have not. The best answer he ever gave is, I don't recall. I'm not sure. And by the way, it's none of your business. That's what he said. Why didn't he say, no, I have not, if you don't think he has? I think we should go to the questions. To me? I'm sorry. We'll take a question from someone at the microphone, please. Okay. Well, I have the microphone. I've been designated to run the microphone here, but I'm going to ask the first question, just one, which is for Mr. Nocera. You said two of the problems of capitalism that caused the COVID problem, two of them were globalization and private equity, but aren't globalization and private equity just phenomena of individuals making decisions on their own? People buy from foreign countries because it's better or cheaper. People invest in companies to try to make money. So what are you suggesting could have been done about them, prohibit them? Well, I actually do think private equity should be prohibited from being in the health industry. Yes, I do believe that. I don't think it's proper. There are some industries that are not meant to be for profit. And I think hospitals are one of them. On the other question, the question of globalization, no, I don't think you don't import or export, but I do believe that there should have been some thought given to resilience, that the country would have the ability to have backup or to have in place the means to come up with important things that the country really, really needs in a time of crisis. That doesn't seem to be asking too much. May I comment? Of course, briefly again, imports is a percentage of GDP. The key touchstone of globalization. You know what one of the least globalized countries in the world is? The United States. And of course, obviously, the reason why is because it's such a large economy. It's far less globalized than Sweden or Germany or any of those other countries. Their percentage of imports as a share of GDP is far, far larger. It simply was not a decisive factor in the success of Sweden. The masks were also there. And of course, ironically, in Sweden, they weren't even wearing masks. In Germany, they were in the end 19 masks, and they had a lot of problems. But the idea of harping on globalization as though it's a problem, then that must mean that Sweden must really have suffered. And all those other countries that are far more globalized must have suffered. And of course, that's absurd. They did not. Globalization was not a factor for that obvious reason that I've just explained. Next question. Thank you. I have a question to Jean Epstein. I think most part of this debate could be easily avoided if in the name there would be a free market instead of capitalism. No? You don't think so? I'm sorry. Could you just chew your conscience a little bit better? So I'm just saying wouldn't be most part of this debate avoided if in the name of this debate? Yes. There would be free market instead of capitalism. Instead of capitalism, there would be free market. A free market. Well, what in your view? Let me elaborate. All I spoke about was the narrow issue of profit and loss. Under chronic capitalism you have markets. I'm not clear what's it doing in free markets and capitalism? Don't you think that if we ask most people in the United States, most of them mean exactly what John Nasera means under capitalism and it is chronic capitalism? Why we are even using this word? The tragedy is indeed that if I asked most people whether capitalism is essentially defined as a system of profit, they would say yes. They would be dead wrong. Capitalism is a system of profit and loss. Losses are at least as important as profits to the proper functioning of capitalism. So you're correct, but that's very tragic about the ignorance of most people. Unfortunately, my brilliant friend Joe is promulgating that ignorance. Joe, would you like to defend yourself? I don't have anything to say about that, except all you people clapping. I mean, come on. He's holding down the floor. It's his show. It's his cello forum. You're going to vote for him. Look, Joe, they clap for you a couple of times. All right, next question. Actually, on the same theme, my question is for Gene. When you say chronic capitalism, how does that relate to is that synonymous with fascism? Is it synonymous with socialism? What's the difference between chronic capitalism, fascism, and socialism? All right, okay. The Talmudic scholars step in now, all right. Oh, guys, there is a lot of overlap, obviously. Certainly, you can make the... That's where I said that if you have chronic capitalism that is extreme, where companies are essentially protected from loss, essentially like the military industrial complex, where it's very doubtful that any of the major companies that provide the Pentagon with its armaments could ever go out of business. They'll be rescued. So they're basically like socialist companies in that sense. But of course, they are making provinces a little different. So there are analogies, and there are overlaps. Certainly, the national socialism under Hitler was similar, but I wouldn't want to make too much of that. But indeed, I think it is useful to realize that if you have a system where the government says to a company, you cannot lose, you're never going to go out of business because we're going to protect you, then that does indeed flirt. It does indeed become very analogous to functioning conventional socialism or conventional national socialism like fascism. It's worth pointing out that in 2008, we had something called the too big to fail banks. And this is a classic example of this where they privatized the profits and they socialized the losses. Precisely. Joe and I agree that there was a brilliant remark on Joe's part. Please clap. Almost four years after I stood there virtually talking about the science behind... Can you hear me or not? Talking about the science or the lack of science behind the policies. Today, much of the discussion was about whether vaccines work and for whom who should take vaccines. What other forms of protection we need? Do we need targeted protection or global protection? And I hear that. The question is, where's the evidence that capitalism is either good or bad? I haven't heard any evidence here. Capitalism is not good or bad in what respect? I'm sorry, what? Repeat. Whether capitalism played a role in our failed response to COVID. Well, that's been Joe's contention that capitalism played a role in our failed response to COVID. And by the way, I guess one small aspect of what he said, I do agree with that capitalism obviously developed Zoom. We really unfortunately can't do without Zoom and certainly the existence of Zoom probably facilitated the lockdowns. But I'm not clear where you feel mysterious. Joe claims that capitalism was a key part of the problem. And I'm saying that crappalism was the key part of the problem. So what, excuse me? Could you clarify your question? Did I misunderstand something? The question is, is crappalism or capitalism, in which way did it influence the epidemic? I haven't heard that. Well, I'm saying, for example, that the reason why I maintain that Fauci who never said no, I take no money from these companies and government, they were in the pockets of the crony capitalist. And that's why they imposed mandates. So that's where crappalism was at all. Gene, I think you need to let Joe answer this question too, because it's really to him to explain why capitalism stood in the way or prevented us from having a good response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Capitalism stood in the way? Had a couple of them stand in the way? Why it was capitalism that prevented us from having a good response to the COVID-19? Well, I said exactly the opposite. It's Joe who said, ask the question of Joe. My question was, for both of you, where is the evidence for what you are claiming that capitalism played a role, either good or a bad role? Wait, let's let Joe take it. Do you think Fauci was in the pay of the companies, of the drug companies? You can talk. You deal with the German gentlemen, please, go ahead. He's a friend of mine, actually. I think my view has consistently been that, by and large, the rise of private equity was very harmful to the nursing home industry, where 200,000 plus people died, many of which didn't have to die. My thesis is also that the rise of have hospitals versus have not hospitals caused considerable death because poor people who were more likely to get serious COVID, especially in the beginning, wound up in these terrible hospitals where they were dying in the aisles and that globalization deprived us of the resilience that we might have needed to get just even masks on doctors and nurses, never mind the populace. By the way, I also think, unlike Jean, that capitalism really worked in terms of creating the vaccine. What happened afterwards, to me, has nothing to do with capitalism. It's just a bunch of public health people who were pushing an agenda because that's what they did. That's my answer. It may be unsatisfactory to you, but that's my answer. He still looks puzzled, but I can't help you. This question is about capital accumulation. We saw what happened in the pandemic, countries that were capitalists and had excess capital like Australia, like the United States, were able to provide for their people and they were able to buy vaccines and get their people vaccinated. Other countries were not able to do that. Could you make an argument that because of our capitalistic system, we had excess capital which allowed us to skip the line by the expensive Pfizer and provide it to our people while other countries had to work with Sputnik and Cenovax? It's actually worse than that. Not only is everything you said correct, but several organizations were brought to life to do exactly that, bring vaccines to the have not countries, to poorer countries. They largely failed because of patent problems and so on, but the other thing is we were giving booster shots to millions of people who didn't need booster shots and for whom those vaccines would have been so much better used in Africa or other countries that didn't have access to vaccines. It's really a crime what happened here. And then there's tons of vaccines that got thrown away because they expired. Again, if the United States and some of the countries in the West had been willing to send those vaccines to countries that needed it, I think that would have saved some lives. Comment from you, Joe. Two comments. It's the old question of where's the outrage? I would ask of Joe, where's the outrage that people are being forced through mandates by government to put a substance in their bodies whether they like it or not? Where's the outrage? That's part of the reason why what you said happened because of the mandates of government and you give us some hand waving about what was motivating them and clearly crony capitalism is part of it. Secondly, of course, obviously the richer countries of the world were better equipped to cope and the lockdowns which I maintain were underwritten by the Federal Reserve were part of the reason why the poor countries suffered so badly. That's all. Next question. As you both agree that crony capitalism is a large problem, how would you each prevent it? Joe, would you prevent it? Well, you know, I'd let a bank fail. You know, I would be more, I mean, I just, I would, I don't know, I hadn't really thought about it. But he has, he's thought about it. He's definitely thought about it. Gene, would you like to comment? Let him roll, let him roll. Joseph Powell, he's a sweet guy. And anyway, well, look, it's, it's, I would only begin. You know, what's interesting is that Michael Munger, I think is the guy who was on Econ Talk, and he said, Oh, we will never get rid of crony capitalism. You know, we can't, it's just part of our system. But one would hope, one would hope that, but that through simply explaining to people that, or explaining to the average business person who, who was twice as smart as the people of the Federal Reserve, that this is a system of profit and loss. We don't subsidize capitalists. We don't, we don't, we don't, it's obvious, it's obvious that the reason why Obama bailed out General Motors is, was to buy votes in Michigan. So we try to point that out, that, that, that, that this is, that under Obama, we had the ugliness of company, of General Motors, which is supposed to be this all powerful company is getting a bailout when all of the, all of the small companies of the, of the economy are going under. And so it's hopefully not that difficult to explain to the, to the ordinary people. Ordinary businessmen understand that a lot better than the sophisticated economists. So we start with that simple lesson and hope that people rebel against the corruption of crony capitalism. Next question. If you look at the statement, capitalism has been a key factor. Key factor in leaving the United States unprepared. First, I'm assuming that capitalism is a big factor in the U.S. If you look at countries that where capitalism plays a less large factor, how better or worse were they prepared for the pandemic? Jean, would you like to comment? Or Joe, would you like to comment? I really just focused on the U.S. I have to take him at his word about, about Sweden. About in what respect? About what, what, what, you wrote, you, you wrote favorably about Sweden. No, I, you're forgetting your book. Other countries did it differently. I mean, Germany, you know, Germany paid people a ton of money to stay home, much more than the U.S. did. You know, they're more or less a capitalist society, more or less. England panicked and had lockdowns. They had a situation very much like we had, you know, lockdowns and then no lockdowns and then, you know, anti-lockdowns and, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So I mean, everybody did it differently. And it wasn't necessarily related to their capitalist impulse or not, not their capitalist impulse. I happen to believe that trends in capitalism that had built up over 30 or 40 years had played a role in our COVID response. That's my belief. But, you know, maybe if I lived in Germany, I would have a different thesis about how the Germans did it. I just don't know. Well, I'm not sure what Joe means when he says that he's got to take my word about Sweden. Almost by definition, by the way, very, relatively small economies are much more globalized than large economies like the U.S. That's why the U.S. is one of the least globalized economies. Sweden, of course, is far more globalized for obvious reasons. It's got a population of 8 million. It's a tiny economy. It's a population the size of New York City. So, of course, that's the reason why it's much more globalized. But in addition, try to address your question more directly. The obvious touchstone of capitalism is, do you have a stock market? Well, Sweden does. And the obvious touchstone of capitalism, I would suggest to you, has a lot to do with the five indexes of economic freedom. And the only way in which Sweden is less capitalist than the U.S. is that it's got a bigger welfare state. But in every other respect, respect for property rights, which is key in rule of law, Sweden is more capitalist. Sweden is, you know, I mean, the old line has been trotted out that in proportion to population, Sweden has more billionaires than the U.S. does. So, therefore, Sweden pursued, I believe, what can fairly be called a more less-say-fair approach. And that's the whole point that the spirit of focus protection and the spirit of what Sweden did is more in keeping with the capitalist view of the way you run things than what we did in the U.S. Next question. Hi. Okay. My question's for Jean, but, Joe, you can feel free to also give her two cents. Thanks. So, my question relates to deficit spending. So, deficit spending. So, COVID-19 was an emergency, right? And the government undertook borrowing in order to muster resources for the pandemic, right? I was just curious, would there ever be in your mind an instance where that's justified? So, like, for me, I thought about, like, World War II, right? The government ran up a deficit. It had an emergency. It needed to mobilize resources. It needed people to, you know, it needed to get money to fix the solution, right? And in this case, the government did the same thing. So, my question was along those lines of the government did go into deficit spending, but, you know, it was an emergency. Is this, like, not the right thing to do? Should the government have just said, okay, well, you guys solve it? Well, good question. What I've tried to do is try to circumscribe my radical libertarianism and not go beyond the argument, not necessarily get into an argument about the vaccines. All I said was that they should not have been mandated, they should have been voluntary. Similarly, with respect to the World War II card that you want to play, then, of course, let me put a final point on what you just said. Essentially, of course, the history of money is that the kings needed to fight their wars, and so they printed money. They didn't want to tax or borrow, they printed money to fight their wars. And if you want to argue that World War II was a special case, and it just had to print the money in order to fight the Nazis and the Japanese, please have a heart. Let's not get into that very complicated issue. My argument in this case is actually very different. There would have been a much greater likelihood that had the U.S. government been forced to simply play by the rules and not tap the Federal Reserve for the five to six trillion bucks, it would have had to probably had to resort to some version of the time-honored focus protection that was already the idea of a standard approach. So I would make the argument that it would have been very fortunate, in this case, at least, setting aside your large World War II question, which could take all evening to discuss, setting aside that question. My only point is that it's much more, it's actually plausible that it would have been forced to resort to the much better plan of focus protection, which is promoted by free market advocates. I think it was absolutely right to pour money into the economy. People were getting thrown out, people didn't have jobs, restaurants, small businesses were closing left and right. I mean, what are you going to do? Are you going to just say, okay, too bad, there's no work, there's no economy, you're on your own. To me, that's wrong. And I think the extra $600 for unemployment insurance and all the other measures that the government took in fiscal policy, primarily, the Fed, I'm not a fan of the Fed, and I might point out that my co-author, Bethany McLean, wrote all the Fed chapters, and God, I wish she was here tonight, but she's not. But anyway, my opinion is, this is my liberal side coming out. I think the government did the right thing. I think this will be our last question. Wow, that's a lot of pressure. All right, so like I'm sure many of you, I lived here in New York City during the pandemic. And I ran a small business, I sell on Amazon, and I saw my business literally explode because people were stuck at home. And I was selling online. So like for me, like the question tonight was like such an obvious answer. It was my sons here, my wife and two kids, we were all at home, all using the internet. And I mean, first of all, like the fact that four of us could use Zoom simultaneously at the same time was amazing. And your question. Sorry, sorry. So I really don't understand how someone could say like capitalism was harmful to the pandemic because capitalism made us survive the pandemic. Capitalism was like, like I said, I was selling online. Everyone needed capitalism. It made you survive the pandemic. No, but it no, no, no, no, no. How did you get? How did you get food? How did you get food? How did you get? We'll have to address. I'm going to leave. I'm going to leave. I could shelter in place. They were meat packers who were getting sick so I could have meat. Yeah, sure. Because everyone was ordering online and like it's exploded even since then. Like it's so like I mean, we're happy for you, but but that doesn't mean that. No, and I'm not saying like, I'm talking about people dying. I'm not. Okay, I'm sorry. May I just make a brief comment? And again, capitalism helped allow you to survive what Joe didn't mention. The government's lockdowns that pushed unemployment rates to an 80 year high. There was no reason to decimate the economy that that's what government did. And the reason why government had to print six trillion dollars is because it locked down the it destroyed the economy. It by the way, destroyed the venue with a sole forum use to operate. It destroyed businesses. It destroyed the lives of that's the government's lockdowns that did this. Jean, you'll have to finish this up and your money and now I'll shut up. Okay, we will now have five minutes each for concluding statements. Joe, you get to go first so you can take the podium or from your seat. Is there like a time limit on this? I miss Joe. I don't have much else to say. I feel like we've hatched it all out. I we disagree in some areas. We disagree. We agree on some other areas. And, you know, I I believe what you haven't changed my mind. I think there are a lot of people who died because of capitalism's flaws. And I also believe that the government did a lot of stupid things that weren't necessarily connected to what I was talking about, which was, you know, the the flaws and capitalism that harmed us during COVID. I don't disagree with anything. I don't disagree with the lockdown. Lockdowns were terrible. Half my books about the stupidity of lockdowns. I believe that Jay Bachateria and his colleagues Martin Koldoff and Sonia, yeah, I'm sorry about that. If you're if you're watching, I'm sorry. I think they did a I did they think they did a great and brave thing with the Great Barrington Declaration. You know, but but none of that changes the fact that, you know, people in nursing homes died. It didn't necessarily have to die. The people in hospitals died. It didn't necessarily have to die that doctors and nurses were deprived of important protections because they didn't have because all the stuff was in China because the country lacks resilience, lacked resilience and still lacks resilience. And, you know, today, all our semiconductors are made in Taiwan. All our big, big, big high end semiconductors are made in Taiwan. If China were to ever invade Taiwan, we wouldn't have any semiconductors, but nobody cares, right? We have no resilience. So my point does extend beyond COVID. But much to my surprise, I just had about three minutes to say that I didn't expect. Five minutes for your summation. Jean, take it away. Well, to again, summary is just there to just review the main elements of my argument. And of course, the core of my argument is that Joe himself has written in his own book about the corruption of the central bank. And I'm not here to get into the larger issue about whether we need a central bank. I'm only here to get into the larger point that as the people that Joe just endorsed kept pointing out, there was nothing original about their focus protection argument. It was already the standard preparedness idea that that's how you go about it. There didn't have to be lockdowns. We didn't have to decimate the economy. And the core of my argument is that in keeping with what the gentleman asked about World War Two, because he followed my point, he was right. The government in order to prosecute World War Two, as indeed to prosecute World War One and kings prior to that, they prosecute wars by printing money. And this war on the economy, this destruction of the economy, destruction of the lives of people and then the passing of trillions of dollars to the wealthy all occurred because of this crony capitalist institution known as the Federal Reserve. When Joe talked about rescuing those banks, those banks are essentially on life support from the Federal Reserve. That's the essential system we have. I'm not necessarily arguing for this evening, because that would take another couple of hours whether we need a Federal Reserve. I'm only saying that had we simply declared that the government must only raise its money through conventional means, borrowing, cutting back on spending in other ways, doing it the right way, then according to the conventional way that most people believe the government does, we likely would have had a much more effective approach to the pandemic because focus protection was not a novel idea. Again, Joe is confusing the necessity to print all this money because he takes for granted that the lockdowns were necessary, that most people should not have gone about their business. Joe lords Jay Battacheria, and of course Jay Battacheria was the guy who did the infection fatality rate research showing initially that the idea that COVID was that dangerous to life was actually way exaggerated. He did an analysis of how many people actually had COVID and he found that the denominator was much larger than anybody thought. It wasn't that deadly, but he was ignored. And again, I can only say and only repeat that if Anthony Fauci did not take money from the substantial money from the drug companies, then he would have told Rand Paul, no, I did not. No, I do not. And when Rand Paul asked, do you think it's okay for people who take money, Joe said, well, they should have taken the money, okay. But that wasn't the point. The point was that they were also dictating policy. So the chronic corruption was staring us in the face. And again, the globalization point is silly. It's silly because the US economy is one of the least globalized in the world. So again, I maintain that once we try it once we introduce the concept of capitalism versus capitalism, once we recognize that had they been more capitalism on the level of the Federal Reserve, more capitalism on the level of dealing with the vaccines, then we would have coped much better with the pandemic than we did. Thank you. Thank you both so much for this great discussion. We will now open the final vote. As a reminder, the resolution read capitalism has been a key factor in leaving the United States unprepared to address the COVID-19 pandemic. So go to sohovote.com to cast your final vote. And while you're voting, I just want to remind you that we are doing Abashiat Society Salon this coming Saturday, April 6, 2.30 p.m. at Gene's apartment. And that will be your opportunity to put Gene in the hot seat, go into more detail on all the arguments you heard tonight. Maybe he will fully explain his argument World War II. You'll have to let me know. This is also going to be an opportunity to brainstorm debate topics for future Soho forums. So we put a QR code up on the screen so that you can easily go to that ticket page if you want to buy a ticket. Also, in an unusually short turnaround time, our next debate is coming up in a mere 19 days. And the resolution for that debate, it's also COVID related. It's government imposed restrictions during the COVID pandemic were prudent and essential. Brent Orill will take the affirmative on that resolution and Tom Woods of the Tom Woods podcast will take the negative. And in May, we are moving on from the COVID pandemic to the possibility of World War III. And on May 20, we're debating the resolution. The United States should strike Iran's nuclear facilities. Alan Dershowitz will take the affirmative and Glenn Greenwald will take the negative on that resolution. And we're going to host that event at the 700 seat symphony space theater on 95th and Broadway. But we are expecting it to sell out. So I would get your tickets to that one very soon. And where are we on the final vote? Do we have the numbers, Brett? It looks like the numbers are ready. I have I could keep talking. So let me know if you need a little bit more time. Okay, I'll keep going party with the party tonight. Because Joe's coming. Oh, Joe's coming to the party tonight. But I was going to talk about pork fest in June. We're going up to New Hampshire for pork fest. And Gene is going to do at least one debate up there and definitely an economics talk. And then in July, we are returning to the COVID-19 pandemic for a debate on COVID's origins. This debate has not been announced on our website yet. You're getting the inside scoop. But Matt Ridley will take the affirmative and Stephen Goldstein the negative on the resolution. It is likely that the SARS-CoV virus originated in the Wuhan lab in China. Okay, Brett, are we ready now? Okay, great. I have it, Gene. Oh, sorry. Okay, so drum roll please. Here it is. The Soho forum prize, the great Tootsie roll. Okay, so capitalism has been a key factor in leaving the United States unprepared to address the COVID-19 pandemic. At the start of the debate, the yes vote had 18%, and it went to 24.5.6% for a change of 6.56 points. And the no went from 49.18% to 59.02% for a change of 9.8 points. So Gene, you get the Tootsie roll. Are you ready? I'm going to throw it. Okay, we almost caught it that time. And now come eat, drink, be merry at Gene's apartment. It's just two blocks north, 55 Great Jones Street, and we will see you there.