 inequalities become the issue of it. If you think about the president, he's been talking about inequality for months. Just last month, he said it is the defining issue of our generation. And of course, when politicians say something like that, you know that it's been building up in places like the University of Michigan and other universities for a long time. This has been a concerted effort, particularly on the left, to bring this idea of inequality as a problem, inequality as getting worse, as a major, major issue. Inequality is immoral, is wrong, is something offensive, something we should all rebel against. And this has been building momentum for years now, really for 40 years at the very least, but it seems to be manifesting itself politically in a way that it has never before. If you watched Obama's State of the Union, inequality is what is, is argument against inequality is really what shapes all this administration's policy. I mean, what's the point of Obama talking at the end of the day if not to reduce inequality? I mean, what really offends them about the common medical system is that some people get the best health care in the world. Most of us in America, if you have good insurance, you're getting the best health care in the world. When some rich guy in Europe gets sick, he doesn't go to the number one rated health care system by the UN in the world, which is France, like Belisconi, Prime Minister of Italy, really rich guy, right? He got sick. He didn't go to France, which is right across the border, it's right there, right? He flew to the Mayo Clinic, right? He came here, he came to Europe. My dad is a doctor in Israel, socialized medicine in Israel. When he had a patient who had the resources and it was really, really sick, and Israel has a great medical system, right? Because it has more doctors per capita than any place in the world. It's the Jewish state after all, right? My dad would fly the guy to the US, the Cleveland Clinic, the Mayo Clinic, lots of options. So, what really upsets the left is this idea that some people have this great health care system and then other people do not. Other people either haven't got insurance or don't get that service because they can't afford it, but that there's this discrepancy. That's what offends them. So what do we do? What does Obamacare do? It tries to equate it. And it doesn't bother anybody or it doesn't seem like it bothers anybody. Then in order to equate it, it means reducing the quality of health care that many of us are going to get. As long as it raises these guys a little bit and as a quality. What drives it as a quality? What drives the discussion about the minimum wage? Because what does the minimum wage do? And this is economics 101, right? This is not in dispute. And if you don't believe me, just read Paul Krugman's econ book, not his New York Times column, where he lies, but his econ textbook where he's trying to be an economist. Because when he's actually an economist, he tells you, if you have a minimum wage, you increase unemployment. And if you raise it unemployment increases because it's a price control. And when you control prices, right, in this case you control the price of labor, you get what? You get fewer jobs. You get fewer opportunities. Because there's only so many jobs I can offer you at ten bucks. At five bucks, there are many more jobs. Because even if you can only produce four dollars an hour, I'm not going to pay you, sir. I'm not going to lose money on you. So the only economically sound minimum wage is an minimum wage job, zero. So why have the minimum wage? Well, because aid makes people feel better. But it takes people learning a little, it takes people learning a lot, and it bumps the people to making a little bit above to get this equality thing. And the fact that some people are now dropping off will just pretend that it's not happening. And it's what they literally do. They pretend it's not happening. They come up with bizarre economic theories to explain why that doesn't happen. Even while they're normal, that's just not good. So what's driving much of the economy? Higher taxes on the rich? Why do we have a progressive income tax? And why does Obama want to raise taxes on the rich? Constantly. And he raised it much higher if he could. He had the House of Representative in the Senate in his king. He would raise much higher. What drives much of the left agenda is this idea, this myth, this striving towards equality. Now what's wrong with equality? We're talking about here equality and outcome. And I've debated professors about equality. And they all say, look, nobody believes everybody should be exactly equal. Then you ask them, how unequal should it be? They can't tell you. But they want it more because the goal, the platonic ideal, the thing that's striving towards is this true equality of outcome. And conservatives are not a lot better than that, right? Because conservatives don't talk about equality of outcome. But they only come back to equality of outcomes. Oh no, we don't believe in equality of outcome. That's communism. And you're supposed to know that's bad instinctively, right? What are they for? Equality of what? Opportunities. So they want to take out opportunities and they want to equate them. We're talking about that in a minute, right? But there's this notion that somehow equality is a good thing. It's a positive thing. It's a wonderful thing. And I have no idea where that comes from. Well, I know exactly where it comes from. But it doesn't make any sense. Because look around the world. I mean, none of us are equal to any of us on anything. We're all completely different. Equality is metaphysical, which means it's in reality. It's not something you can change. You can't make people equal. We've been born with different genes. We've been born to different parents. Some of us are tall. Some of us are short. Some of us are good looking. Some of us are ugly. You know, we're all kinds. I mean, isn't that cool? I actually like inequality, right? We're all exactly the same. We're kind of boring. So we are metaphysically different. To try to change, to try to eliminate inequality is like trying to eliminate gravity. Inequality, difference, is in reality. It's right there. It's how we are. It's not changeable. It's fighting against existence. And that can never be right. And this is true by the way of equality of opportunity. I mean, do we all have the same opportunities? We're all born again to different parents, different genes, no different people. Exposed to different things. I mean, that's just life. That's just life. So whenever somebody wants to do something, that goes against nature, against reality, I go, oh, something's wrong. It doesn't quite make sense, this attempt to force nature to behave differently than its nature. First of all, it can't work. And secondly, it doesn't make any sense. So what can they do? They can't eliminate completely. So they say, yeah, okay, it's metaphysical, but we can work to reduce the gap. We can make us more equal. We can take money from some people. And give it to others. And eliminate that equality. How do they justify that? Because taking money from some people, giving it to others, you know, if I did it, I'd go to jail. If the government doesn't, you know, if intellectuals do it in theory, then it's okay. But how do they justify it? Well, to justify it, they have a whole theory now about the fact that the wealth that you create is not really yours. And again, notice that Obama did this as well. Before he ever started talking about inequality as the defining issue of our time, he had to talk about something more fundamental. What did he say? You didn't build it. You didn't build it. You didn't build it. You didn't create the wealth that you have. You didn't earn the money that you've earned. Right? It's not yours. It belongs to that wonderful teacher you had, the people who built the roads, and all this other stuff. Because if I'm going to take money from one person and give it to another, I have to justify that. And the justification they come up with is it's not yours. It's ours. In the State of the Union, he didn't say that the wealthy earned more money than the middle class or than the poor. What he said, which is important, is that the rich take more money. Take from whom? How do you get wealth? How do you get rich? How did Bill Gates get rich? Well, he created software, right? He built software. Okay, lots of people built software. What did he have to do to get rich? He sold it to us, right? He sold it to us. So Bill Gates, I don't know, made $70 billion for himself by selling us something that cost, let's say, $100. So if you bought software from Microsoft for $100, how much does it worth to you? $100? More than $100. It was just worth exactly $100. Who'd bother, right? You wouldn't bother? You wouldn't change it, right? It's worth more than $100, so you're happy to give up the $100 to get it. And it turns out that if you really think about how much a piece of software is basic, let's say DOS was, or the operating system, or even your word processor, there are many, many, many multiples of $100. We'll leave you give up $100 and get something more valuable than $100 to you. So your life is better off, right? Microsoft made money. Bill Gates made money. He made money by making your life better by improving your life. Nobody lost. Everybody's better off. So you become wealthy by creating value, by making stuff. But it's by making something. You make it. And then by trading for it. You're not taking. When I give you the software, when Bill Gates gives you the software, it gets $100, what's he taking from you? He's given. Without Microsoft, we're a lot poorer. All of us are a lot poorer. The whole taking notion is the notion of a zero-sum world of a pie out there. And we have to grab a piece, and the rich grabbing bigger pieces and the poor grabbing little pieces, right? But it's a finite pie out of zero-sum world, according to this story. And, you know, there's some validity to this. If you lived in the 1600s, how did the rich get rich? By stealing, by taking. The world was a zero-sum game. The world was not created. Trade was not possible. But over the last 250 years, wealth has been created. The pie has grown bigger, much bigger. Dramatically bigger. I mean, how many people were poor 250 years ago? Percentage of the population. 99% is a good number, right? 1% were the risk of crafts, and 99% of the people were poor. How many people are poor today by the standard of 250 years ago? Nobody. Nobody in America. I mean, in Africa and in Asia, that people were poor just like 250 years ago. But in America, there's nobody in that world. Nobody. Nobody in America doesn't live better than aristocrat. 200 years. 100 years. I mean, everybody has running water, electricity, a cell phone, a car. Many, many poor in America have air conditioning. Look, why you need it here. I don't know. I mean, the standard of living of everybody has risen. Everybody has risen. So who took from home? So some world is such an obvious myth when you live in the 21st century. I mean, you could somehow excuse it 200 years ago. You cannot excuse it today. Who do we exploit this money for? When did this wealth come from? Who did you exploit? To get a Martians? Are Martians poorer now? Because we're richer, because that's the only people I can think of. That's the only explanation I have for this zero sum. There's nowhere to take it from. What the last 250 years of human history have proven is that the pie grows. We create the pie. We create bigger and bigger pies by using our minds, by applying them to the problems of production, by creating stuff. We make the pies bigger. And it's we make it. I make it. You make it. Every one of you makes whatever pie you make. And some people make big pies because they create enormous value that people are willing to pay for. And some of us make small pies because people are willing to pay me to come and speak. I buy small. But I have you as a small pie. So I always make choices to tell you to make small pies in a sense of material goods. But it's our pies. There's no collective pie that we take from. But note that they have to use this language because they want to use force. They want to take from some people and give to others. And they know that the first step in order to do that is delegitimize the poverty rights of the people they're taking from. Delegitimize the fact that they own the wealth that they've produced. So they have to undercut the idea that they've been producing. They have to collectivize wealth. Turn it into wealth as a societal thing. And now some smart people have to sit back and think. The philosopher kings have to sit back and think and say, okay, how much does Joe get? How much does Paul get? How much does Sarah get? And let's make a decision. That's how they're building up to this idea that they're going to redistribute wealth on a massive scale. So they're already doing what they want to do more of it. So you didn't build that as a really, really important piece of this puzzle that is wrong, morally wrong, intellectually wrong, wrong in reality, wrong in fact. Individuals do create stuff. At the end of the day, all there is is individuals. There is no collective. Each one of you thinks for himself or doesn't think for himself. But nobody thinks for you. You don't think together. There's no collective consciousness up here. Group think is not, there's no such thing as group think. I mean, when we, if you go in a meeting and everybody's kind of spurring each other on, sometimes people call that group think. That's just people spurring each other on to think. But everybody in the group still has to think for themselves. They're not thinking together. They're each person thinking for themselves. The entity in the reality that exists is the individual, not the group. Wealth is the individuals, not the groups. Creation happens at the individual level. Not the groups. It doesn't mean we don't change. There's no collective property. There's no collective mind. There's only the individual. So another way in which they try to undercut this idea of ownership, of, you know, of a moral legitimacy to owning something, is this notion that, yeah, you might have built it. Right? No gates. Okay, you created Microsoft. You did that. But there's nothing special about that. What allowed you to build Microsoft is luck. We're just lucky. I don't know how many of you have read the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Yeah, and he goes into this whole thing, right? Bill Gates just happened to be in the right place at the right time and had the right parents and he was born with the right genes in the right century and everything just fell together and then, boom, we got a person. Now, he does it more eloquently than I do. He's a great writer. And this is an ocean that comes out of John Wallace, the Harvard philosopher. And it's the notion that you don't deserve, yes, you built it, but you don't deserve it because you didn't do anything about it. You're just a machine. You're just determined by your genes. You're determined by your parents. You're determined by society. You're determined by the group. So anything you produce isn't yours. It doesn't belong to you. Now, I think by observation, you can see that this is nonsense. I mean, there were lots of people in Bill Gates's school. There were lots of people who had nice middle-class upbringing. There were lots of people like computer labs. He makes a big deal out of they had a computer lab in the school and other schools didn't have a computer lab. Bill Gates took advantage of those opportunities. Other people didn't. Bill Gates made choices. What this evades, what this whole line of reasoning evades is pretty well. It's the fact that what really shapes us is not just a bunch of genes. It's not just our parents, but it's the choices we make. It's what we do with the genes. It's what we do with the parents. I mean, it's insulting, partially, to some people who were born in poor families with abusive parents who become incredibly successful and overcome the odds because all you're saying is, well, they had good genes and it was just lucky. No, they made good choices. They worked hard. They are responsible for their success as individuals. So there's this whole black argument, right? Now, I'm not saying you're not lucky. Luck is there? Absolutely. Some people have born with good genes. Some people have born with bad genes. But that doesn't change the morality of anything. Some people have born in rich families. Some people have born in poor families. You can't say that that's good or bad morally, ethically. Is it moral to be born in a good family or to be born in a poor family? There's no. Morality has no aspect that's not bad. It just is. You're born to answer questions of what you do with it. Morality is only about the choices that you make. Not about the situation that you're born into or the genes that you happen to have. So in trying to establish this agenda towards equality those advocates have to do that. They have to deny reality. They have to deny the very nature of reality. And they have to argue for a war if you will on reality in order to achieve this mythological equality. They have to deny free will. They have to deny free will and claim that it's all just luck in order to morally justify taking from someone giving to others. They have to deny that you built it. They have to deny individualism. And they have to dot collectively. All of these are philosophical arguments. And the way to combat the argument against inequality is to argue for a philosophical base. We have to be, if you believe, that this fight against inequality or the fight for equality is a bad one. You have to be able to argue for individuals for free will and as a consequence for your moral right to your own property. Because at the end of the day equality, the fight for equality, the movement towards equality necessitates violating people's rights. Necessitates violence. Because I'd like to give this example some of you have heard it before. How do you make me and LeBron James, I'm switching to use my control. LeBron James equal in basketball. I've been told the young audience has thought of who Michael Jordan is. How do you make me and LeBron James equal in basketball? I mean, you haven't seen me play basketball, but let me just assure you that I'm not equal to LeBron James. I'm quite pathetic. I'm not equal to basketball. How do you make me equal in basketball? Yeah, you gotta break his legs. But even if you break his legs, I'm so bad at basketball. You'd have to break his arms as well. But that's what you have to do. Whenever you have a situation of inequality, which is my nature, we're all unequal, and you want to bring equality to pick, what you have to do is take the people who have more, take the people who are more talented, take the people who have achieved more and break their legs. Break their arms. You have to inflict violence on them. Taking somebody's money. Heck, money's not like breaking legs. Oh, isn't it? What does it mean to take somebody's money? What are you taking from them? Part of their life. You're taking part of their life. You're taking time. How do you make money? I work 40% of my time and I'm working for other people because they get the money. It's taken from me. 40% of my life, 40% of my effort is going to the government, which means it's being redistributed and all kinds of people that I have no choice about. I have no decision making. This stealing 40% of my life, 40% of my time is gone. My time is more valuable than my legs and arms. Break my legs, break my arms, break my legs. I'll take that. This stealing life. So, yeah, we all laugh when we talk about breaking arms and breaking legs because it's very visual. Nobody would ever do that. Nobody would ever break people's arms and legs. That's ridiculous, but that's what they do in order to establish equality. It's exactly what it is. Now you might be thinking, wait a minute. Isn't this country based on equality? Don't the founders talk about all created equal? What's that about? What kind of equality are the funny fathers talking about? Before the law, but more than that, where does the law come from? It's equality of rights in the only sense the only sense in which equality means anything in both is that equality of rights, equality of freedom if you think about the 18th century when the founders wrote this, this is a century in which in Europe at the same time there are aristocrats and there are peasants. There are people who are born into privilege and people who are born into servitude. Of course, right here in America, there were slaves and slave owners and one of the great tragedies of history is that the funny fathers don't apply this idea of equality of rights to everybody and that they were restricted to rights, right? That's a tragedy of history, but their intention is to apply it to everybody. So there aren't people born into privilege, born into servitude. There are no masters and slaves. The idea of equality is that we're all free. Our freedom should be protected equally by the government. When we're born, we're not born into some kind of unchosen obligations of chosen doonies. We are born to pursue our own happiness, right? It says you have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Everybody has it. We're equal in that. It doesn't mean we will pursue it. It doesn't mean we'll be successful. Nobody's guaranteeing anything. All they're saying is to pursue your life free from what? What does freedom mean? When we talk about freedom, we're free from what? Cursion. Free from force. Individual rights mean living life free of code. We have freedom to act in reality free of your neighbor's attempt to control putting guns to your head, to the back of your head. That's what individual rights mean. That's why you can't have a right to healthcare or food or to other stuff. You don't have a right to stuff because that stuff has to be taken from somebody. Cursion needs to be used together. You have a right to pursue. You have a right to act. You have a right to act on your own behalf to seek the values that are necessary for your own life. Free of intervention through force. So we're equal in rights. And we're equal before the law just as an application of the fact that we're equal in rights. That is the government who's responsible for protecting our individual rights, therefore must treat us all equally. Not as an aristocrat peasant. Not as rich man poor man. But what are the facts? What did you do? What is the punishment? Are you guilty? Are you innocent? Independent of all those arbitrary issues as they relate to the judgment. Again, the background is Europe where that's not the case. If you report you're a aristocrat you get a very different sentence if you wrote the same facts and you're a peasant. Quality before the law. The founders never meant anything about equality of opportunity or equality of outcome. They would have been horrified by the notion because there is no such thing. There is no such thing. And to achieve equality of opportunity in basketball, for example, to give me the opportunity to win, what do we have to do? Break his arms and legs which means we have to violate his rights. If we're breaking Le Bon James' arms and legs are we being treated equally? Do we have equal rights? No, he doesn't have rights anymore. When you try to establish equality of outcome you violate the principle of equality of rights because to establish that equality you have to violate. You have to take. You have to steal. You have to break. You have to repress. There's no other way to do it. There's no other way to do it. Establishing equality requires violating people's real equality, violating your rights. If I'm being taxed at a high rate and my money's being taken away from me and given to somebody who doesn't have any money do we have equal, are we being treated equally? No, I mean I'm being treated. I'm being cursed. He's being rewarded in quotes, short term, right? Stuff is being taken from me and given to him. That's not equality of rights. My rights are being violated and he's getting free stuff. So any attempt to bring about equality of outcome and equality of opportunity is an attempt to violate some people's rights, not an attempt, an actuality, not people's rights for the benefit of some other people. For the perceived benefit of some other people. I don't actually think it's a benefit. So political equality is only in a sense of freedom. Only in a sense of equality of freedom. That's it. And if you want a more dramatic example of what equality means there's one regime in history that is set out to achieve equality that was founded for the purpose of achieving absolute equality between people. Not just of income but equality. And this was a group of intellectuals trained in western Europe by a million powers that are so well-trained by some of the best egalitarian philosophers in Europe had to offer. And they studied and they bought into this notion of equality. They really became passionate about this. They came back to their country and they decided to implement it. They achieved political power and they said, we're going to implement this. So they looked around the country and they saw a lot of people some people living in cities and some people living in the countryside. It's a pretty poor country. They said, that's not fair. The people in the city seem to have more. It's cleaners. Their lives are easier and so on. And these people their work is more physical. So what are we going to do? We're going to empty the cities. They kicked everybody out of the city. You weren't allowed to live in a city. They emptied them out. Into the fields they went. But then they had a problem because even in the countryside once you emptied the cities some people were smart. Some people weren't so smart. Some people were strong. Some people were weak. So how do you equate that? How do you make all these people equal? Particularly if you want to do it fast. How do you do it? You kill them. You kill them. If you wore glasses they shot you. Because it was a sign of intelligence. If you could read, they shot you. If you had a college degree, they shot you. These are called the killing fields of Cambodia. And they killed two million people. Out of a population of five and a half million. They killed close to 40% of their own people. All in the name of equality. The only way to make all those poppies the same height is to chop down the ones that stick up. And when 40% of them stick up they chop down 40%. You can still go to Cambodia and you can see those killing fields that they did. And why they did it? They're very explicit. In the name of equality. It's always interesting they were well educated. They could read. They didn't shoot themselves. It's always it's about making you all equal. We're too good for this. For the treatment. So when I think about inequality when I think about equality when I think about a president or these intellectuals saying the virtues of equality I think Cambodia I think the Cameroon I think Pol Pot because that's what it's really about. We don't have them on the streets yet shooting people but that's what it leads to. That's the logic of the argument. That's what equality is about. Equality of outcome is the most evil idea in human history. It's about killing people because they have ability. It's about destroying people because they have talent. It's about taxing people because they created wealth. Because they're good we penalize them all. Because they're virtuous we attack them all. As compared to the system of inequality which is a system of freedom. A system where we create what we have. What we use our talents and skills to make our lives better. Now there's one form of inequality which I think is bad and wrong which we live in to some extent today. So if you steal other people's money to become richer then that's bad. That's wrong. That's unjust. That's what life was before capitalism. That's what life was before the industrial revolution. That's how aristocrats got rich. Free industrial revolution. Some people in the world we live in today will get rich that way as well. We call it cronyism. But that's exactly what cronyism is. If you're going to the government for handouts, where's that money coming from? From somebody else that they took it from. If you're going to the government to get your competitors silenced so that you can out-compete them that's using violence against your competitors and becoming successful because of them. And to the extent there's any legitimacy to the arguments out there about inequality it's this that should be stopped. This cronyism, this use of government government is forced. Government is coercion. This use of coercion to make yourself better. Richard, wealthy. That is fundamentally wrong. Fundamentally immoral. But that's not what these guys talking about inequality really care about. The Occupy of Wall Street didn't care about cronyism. Just to use a local example. They hated cronyism on Wall Street. They demonstrated against all those Wall Street CEOs getting that money from government. But they loved the bailouts of the auto companies. So they were selective. Some people getting rich off of the back of other people is okay. Other people it's not. So it's not cronyism that the people who are advocating against inequality are really attacking. What they're really attacking is capitalism. What they're really attacking is freedom. What they're really attacking is individualism. And the system of capitalism. The system of individualism. This is actually the system that's created all the wealth that we have on it. This inequality supposed evil of inequality has made the life of the poor the best that it's ever been in human history. It's made all of our lives better than it could ever be under any other system. Inequality is a symptom of a wonderful system. And therefore should be celebrated. When I see somebody much richer than me I don't say, oh my god, isn't that horrible. I go, good for him. And not just good for him, good for me. Because how did he become rich? By making my life better. That wasn't his intent. But that's the outcome. Bill Gates doesn't care about me. But the fact is by getting rich my life got better. Inequality should be celebrated. Only a system in which we believe that Bill Gates should live for me. That Bill Gates life is meaningless. That he needs to sacrifice himself to me. Would I envy him? I don't envy him. I admire him. I respect him. I think any wealthy person who's made it honestly I have nothing but admiration and respect for him. Because they made their life better. They made my life better. That's the kind of system that we should live in. That's the kind of system we should strike towards. And we should reject as evil in the movement towards equality celebrate the virtue of the system that produces inequality. Inequality should be celebrated. Thank you. How would you respond to an argument that states that sure, nobody wants the killing fields of Cambodia and nobody wants that, but maybe we should have some form of safety net or minimal wage over getting made so often that they're not being treated right that they try to take maybe a radical step towards something. Yeah, so this is basically the argument. Look, we don't want to steal a huge amount of money from you. We only want to steal a little bit. We don't want to shoot you. We just want to take a little bit of your life away. And to me, it's my life. You have no claim against me. You want my help, safety net? Maybe you're in trouble. You can come and I might help you. I might not. Depends on what's going on in my life. I'm not obliged to help you. So I reject the morality that says the idea in morality it says that we have a responsibility to help you. We might or might not depend on who they are. Depend on who we are. I'm not born with the responsibility to my brother. I'm not my brother's keeper. Safety net is just a curse of method to establish my brother's keeper. That we are our brother's keeper. And I'm not. I mean, I may choose to help my brother, but if I don't like my brother, I'm not going to. I never might be my neighbor or distant relative on the other side of the planet. So, I think a safety net is as you all, in principle, as the well-fishing, both involve coercion, both involve stealing, both involve taking and violating some people's rights for the benefit of other people. And look, I'm a big believer in slippery slopes. I know some people say, stupid shit about talking, once you give in, once you say a little bit of caution is okay, which is what a safety net is. Just a little bit. Just a really, really poor, and we'll only take from the very, very rich. Once you allow for a little bit of it's not the same only, but it's on the same direction and one necessitates the other long term. And the evidence is all around us, right? You know what the rate of income tax was when it was first instituted in the United States? One percent. It was seven percent, and who paid? It was one percent above a hundred grand. What's that? Yeah, 250,000, 70's population made that kind of money in those days. I think it's three percent of the people paid income tax. And at the time it was passing, they had to have a constitutional amendment to allow the income tax because it was deemed unconstitutional by Supreme Court after Supreme Court after Supreme Court. So they changed the constitution to allow for an income tax. So it started out, I don't remember, maybe it was three percent, maybe it was some low amount, very few people paid. That was 1913. It was implemented in 1914. The United States entered World War I in 1917. Three years later, what was the top margin of income tax rate? Seventy seven percent. Seventy seven percent. That's called, I don't know if that's a slippery slope, that's going to be a word for more slippery than slippery. What's that? That's a good idea. Once, for example, once you grant them the right to take an income tax, they're going to take a huge income tax. Once you allow for redistribution of wealth, they're going to do it en masse. There's no way to limit it because you've given up on the principle. And the principle is you cannot use coercion to take money from some people and give it to others. Not a little bit and not a lot. You just don't have a right to do that because coercion is bad. Coercion is equal. The government is supposed to protect us from coercion, not impose it. There's a different form and element of the argument. I have a lot of, used to be liberal, another progressive, whatever they are now, friends who say, Randall, if we stop paying all these people, they're going to burn our cities down and come and kill us in our beds and take everything that we have. Practicality in the sense of you can't go back from where we are. Now, we see that's a complete rationalization. But they don't believe it. They convince the self of that, but they don't believe it. They're trying to come up with a practical argument to appease their motion and to appease your arguments against it. The fact is that there's not a single example in human history of the poor rebelling against the free society. A society where there's freedom, where there's capitalism, and the poor rebel because they're poor. They don't do it in Hong Kong. And the opposite actually happens. What's interesting is the opposite, right? What happens to societies with huge inequality and freedom? People emigrate. Millions of people emigrate, right? When in the United States, we had this big inequality during the 19th century, millions of people came and the millions of people coming were doing poor, ignorant, incompetent with no professions, nothing. I mean, it's true, right? What does the Statue of Liberty say? Give me your huddled masses, right? That's okay. I mean, you don't want to talk like this about your ancestors. I'll talk about mine. The Jews who came to America. They've been stettles in Poland. They've never seen a city. They didn't know there was, you know, skyscrapers were like unimaginable to them. They didn't have skills. They didn't have knowledge. They didn't have education. They didn't have anything. All they wanted was a little bit of freedom and not to be killed by the Cossacks, right? So they wanted to be free. They came here. They worked hard. They valued education even though they weren't educated. So they sent their kids to school and within a generation or two, they went to class. To this day, even in America today, with social mobility, everybody tells us it's so constrained. Look at Asian families. They come here with nothing. Nothing. Whether they escaped in boat, in little dinky boats from Vietnam and when some camp and then were given political asylum in the United States, they had nothing. And then within a generation or two, their kids are at Stanford. They're engineers. They're doing phenomenally well because it's still true in this country. No matter what your background is, if you work hard, if you study, if you value education, you do very well. In spite of all the constraints and social mobility that people talk about, you know, it's interesting that I just read this. It turns out that Blacks from Nigeria, for whatever reason, are doing phenomenally well in the United States. They come here again with nothing. But for whatever reason, they are hardworking. They value education. And in spite of the fact that supposedly we're a racist society and don't allow for Blacks to be socially mobile, if you're from Nigeria and Black, no, it's what you do with your life. It's the responsibility you take to do with your life as you. And if you come to work, if you don't have an entitlementality, if you don't just expect to be given, then you can be successful. And there's plenty of evidence of exactly that happening in America even today with all the constraints that we have. So, you know, it's never happened. I don't know if any exact... In Hong Kong, millions of people are trying to get into Hong Kong all the time, even though there's no roof. It's a tiny little place. They've already got 7.5 million people there. How many of you have been to Hong Kong? Anybody have been to Hong Kong? An amazing place. Most skyscrapers in New York City, 7.5 million people live there. GDP per capita is equal to the United States right now. How many years ago? There's nothing. There's a fishing line. Why? Because they have political freedom. Because they allow inequality. And they have huge inequality. The poor in Hong Kong are very poor. And the rich in Hong Kong are very rich. And yet the poor from everywhere in the world would love to immigrate to Hong Kong. Why? Because this... Is that left for you? Yeah. Okay, a two-part question, but real quick. Charity, back before all these social safety nuts in the 1800s, could you expand on that? Show us kind of the vision of that. And also, do you have any idea... I know that Glenn Beck and some other people have some idea of setting up some kind of private charity or some sort of system now in this day and age? So this whole focus of charity, in my view, is completely misguided. Charity... I mean, I'm going to exaggerate a little bit for the purpose. It's insignificant. It's not that important. There are a few people actually needed if you really had a free market. Free markets create more jobs than there are people. 99% of people can work and therefore don't need charity. Charity is for the outliers, for the freak accidents, for the people really born in such bad conditions that they can't work or have accidents that make such that they can't work. But that is such a trivial number of people that you could solve that problem like that. The real problem is freedom. The real problem is lack of freedom. Lack of... and as a consequence, lack of work, lack of the discipline to work, lack of the mentality to go to work. The real problem is when you hand checks to people, you institutionalize them into a mentality of entitlements, into a mentality of anti-work, anti-office, anti-promise. So if we did away with the welfare state you'd probably have to do it over a couple of generations, right? Just to change so people can change. You know, I don't know what charity would look like. In the 19th century, charity was a very problem. There was a lot of it. There were hundreds of charitable institutions. But most of the way to deal with poverty had nothing to do with charity. It had to do with things like mutual aid societies with forms of insurance. You could buy insurance against unemployment, not that the state provided like we have today. Unemployment insurance. It's not insurance. It's unemployment redistribution of wealth. That's what it is. It's an unemployment welfare. There's no insurance there. You're not you don't pay unemployment insurance premiums based on the risk of becoming unemployed. There's no pool waiting for the unemployed. And when the pool gets depleted, when some states have small pools, when they get depleted they just tax people more and they reshuffle. It's just redistribution. It's to use even the term insurance with that. But there were real insurance policies. Insurance against poverty. Insurance against unemployment. So there were market mechanisms that dealt with the freak accidents. With the unusual. And family helped. And friends helped. Right? But to me, for conservatives, and this is what conservatives do because they feel guilty about the poor. I don't feel guilty. Right? You know, people are poor, people are poor, people are rich, people are poor in my life. You know, now I'm doing pretty well. Like to say, when I arrived here from Israel, I immigrated here in 1987. All my possessions were in two suitcases. Right? Everything my wife and I owned were in two suitcases. Today I can't go for a weekend in two suitcases with my wife. That's just shoes. Right? And if we had a move, it would be two semi-trades. Right? So, you know, poverty hopefully is something temporary that people go through, particularly when they're young, and they're overcoming. But, you know, people like Glenn Beck are riddled with guilt. And therefore charity becomes the most important thing they can talk about. To me, it's a trivial issue. If I wasn't built a charity or community service, why do these things? It's fine. Do it. I have nothing against it, but it's not important in life. What's important in life is making stuff, building stuff, building your own life, creating your own life, building wealth, creating jobs, you know, creating values. That's what life is really about. You want to help people on the side? Great. But that's not what life's about. That's not what's important. Hi. Thank you. How do you address inequality among nations and morality if there is morality behind first-year countries helping third-year countries? So, nations aren't equal. For very similar reasons, the individual is being unequal. But with nations, it has more to do with the illegal systems that they have. So it's very clear why some countries are poor. They're poor because they're not capitalism. They're poor because they're not free. They're poor because they don't have property rights. They're poor. All rich countries have to some extent or another recognized property rights. To some extent or another, they allow for capitalism. To some extent, they allow individual freedom to some extent. And you can see, China in the 1970s was dirt poor. There were billion poor people in China. I mean, you went over there, it was horrible. People looked the way they dressed. Everybody wore these great suits and they shuffled their feet. And it was poverty. And it jumped poverty everywhere. And they allowed a little bit of freedom. A little bit of private property. You could say it's pseudo-private property because they could take it away anytime. But a sense of private property. Some respect for foreign property and for individualism. And boom, it's like Shanghai. And wow, they look, they dress like us. The billboards are bigger than ours. The Coca-Cola billboards are much bigger than ours. The city's lit up. I mean, they're wealthy. There's still poor people in China. Hundreds of millions because they're such a huge population. But there are hundreds of millions of people in the middle class. So, the function of rich versus poor is completely a function of freedom versus unfreedom. And the culture that is required for freedom versus the culture of unfreedom. Lack of freedom. So you look, country after country after country, you take the list of all the countries in the world, and you look at the countries that are the poorest, they're all unfree. They all have no respect for property rights, no respect for the individual, and no capitalism, no markets, no free markets at all. Not even in a section of the country. So, if you care about them, I mean, everybody should care about them somewhat. They're human beings. You don't want to see human beings suffer. What is the best thing you can do to help them? Freedom. Yeah, I hope, well, freedom sounds a little aggressive, but it sounds expensive and money. But the best thing you can do is teach them. Get them to change their own political system. Bring them freedom. Teach them about the benefits of freedom. So, giving them money is not going to help. And, indeed, where does the money come from? It has to be stolen from somebody. Now, again, it is to give it a shout, I believe, but, you know, it's not a very effective mean. The most effective means to change, to be proved a lot of the poor in the world is to educate them in capital. It's to support free market capitalist ideas. One of the great tragedies is that Bill Gates doesn't get this. Because Bill Gates is in a position to change the world. He's got tens of billions of dollars sitting against foundation and he could use that money to go to Africa, if he really cares about Africa, and really fund an institutional effort to bring capitalism to Africa, to change their culture, to respect Papua. It doesn't take much. There's a wonderful book by Fernando de Soto, who is, I think, a Colombian economist. Colombia? Chile. Okay. South America, anyway. And he wrote a book called Capital Ideas. And he says, take a book country where you've got lots of these subsistence farmers. None of them own the land which they farm, because the land is owned by the state. So there's no property rights. He says all you need to do is give them ownership of the land. Give them a document and establish the rule of law that gives them a property right over the land. And you've created capital. Because, for example, now they can borrow off of that piece of paper and start a business. Or buy another piece of land. Or buy a tractor. Or buy something that improves productivity. All you have to do is establish property rights and you've increased the standard of living almost instantaneously of everybody involved. And here you have farmers who own the land by any legitimate moral sense, right? Because they farm it. They use it. Give it to them. Give them ownership. So those are the kind of things that if you really care about poverty in the world you want to establish. Just hand giving them handouts. A, most of that money gets taken by corrupt leaders. B, even if it gets to them it only solves their problem in the short run. It doesn't solve their problem in the long run. Most of them waste it. And again, you don't have them all obligation to do it. What he wants to do is work for him. But he should do it right. Another thing to remember, again, even about poor countries. And this is something that Bill Gates just wrote which is where he's right. The world's never been in a better condition than history. There have never been fewer poor people than there are today. There's a percentage of the population. We're all glum because America is sinking and everything. But if you think about the world I mean, you guys are too young to be worried. I am. I'm not too young to be worried. I'm too old not to be worried. But if you live anywhere else if you live outside of the west Western Europe, communism's gone. If you live in Africa, Africa's waking up. Many countries in Africa are establishing property rights of building markets. Standard livings in Africa are going up in many parts of Africa. If you're in Asia, wow, the last 50 years have brought out of poverty probably a billion people. A billion people. So in a sense of the world being of the world right, more people are doing well today than at any time in human history as a percentage. And that's something we don't appreciate. There's a lot of good stuff out there that we should stop and smell the flowers once in a while. And it's all because of evil capitalism. It is. It's all because of the wealth. It's all because of the capital. It's all because of property rights. It's all because of capitalism. And this is a system that's hated, despite almost every professor in this university. And every other university in the western world. And that's a mystery in and of itself. But it's, that's the reality. What's going to happen for us? Is America going to immediately embrace poverty, or are they going to lead the industry? What's going to happen with this? Well, I mean, it's not clear if you have to go to one or the other. I think we can muddle along for quite a while before we have a complete embrace of either one. I think we'll muddle along for a long time. I think we'll continuously head towards more coercion for the foreseeable future because I don't see a shift. It's not a political issue because the Republicans want to coerce you too. They just want to coerce different stuff. And they want to coerce you a little bit less of the economic stuff and a lot more when it comes to your bedroom right? So there's no political party out there that's anti-coercion. I mean, respectable real political party that's out there that's against coercion. And it's and there's no, more importantly there's no educational movement. There's no philosophical movement with exception of the people here in the whole universe. This is it. At least in Michigan. Who are against the philosophically, ideologically. And this has to become a massive movement for freedom to win. This has to become a student movement. I mean, I go to campuses and I tell students in their song here I tell you guys, you guys should be in the streets right? You guys should be demonstrating. You guys should be so ticked off and pissed off. You know in the 60s they had a draft and students went out into the streets and they demonstrated and they did things that I wouldn't justify and I don't think we're right. But they were upset. They got up and they yelled and they screamed and they, and ultimately the draft went away. You guys have a draft. They're not literally taking you and putting you in a military, but you today have so much debt on your shoulders. You owe so much money to your parents and grandparents that your futures if they really, if your parents and grandparents really expect to be paid everything that they think they've promised, then forget it guys you won't have a life. You have hundreds of, you don't know this, but you have hundreds of thousands of dollars of money that you owe right now to your parents and grandparents Medicare, Social Security, Obamacare, please sign up Obamacare so I can sign up too. Because I'm sick and old and I need you to sign up. Isn't that the commercial they're running on? That's the commercial. It's exactly what they're saying. If you're young and healthy, please sign up. We need you. Why do we need you? Because we're going to suck your blood. We're vampires. And there's some sick people who you need your blood and we need to put it in. This is exactly what they're doing. You should be ticked off. And us at this generation sits up up front. They call it the greatest generation up here in generation, the greatest generation. I mean, how ridiculous is that? So they've brought a war. Good for that. And they want it. The last generation win a war. That's pretty good. Other than that, other than that, all they've done is inflict debt and burdens on you guys. You should go be out in the street saying enough, we don't want to pay for your Medicaid. Because when we're, when you guys are 65, there won't be any. We can't guarantee it. And for every dollar people who take out Medicaid, you know who I'm talking about, right? For every dollar they put into the system, which has already been spent by the way, they will take out at least four. And who's going to pay for the extra three? Well, actually all four because one was spent. By that, by that generation they spent it. It's another stuff. You have to pay the four. How can that be right? How can that be just? Isn't that like a draft? You're just sucking the blood out of you. And you're just like, yeah, who cares? And when I get to, you know, as long as my parents get to pay my health insurance until I'm 26 I'm happy. I thought you guys wanted to be independent, right? I thought you wanted to leave home, break that billy-core cord. Right? So when does that collapse? When does it collapse? I don't know. It could collapse next year. It could collapse in 2015 when the Fed runs out of whatever they're smoking, right? No, because they have to be on something to be doing the stupid things that they do. It could run out next year. It could have a major economic collapse next year. Now, I don't think it's going to happen that soon because there's a lot of wealth in this country. And there's a lot of productive ability in this country. People still work hard. People are incredibly innovative. People are producing stuff. You go to Silicon Valley and it's the opposite of Detroit, right? There's construction. There's building. There's innovation. There's wealth creation. There's people working hard. They're coming up with amazing new ideas. As long as that keeps going, you can keep, you know, sucking their blood. There's a lot to suck. There's a lot to take. I want to be right out of the shrub. The point is there's a lot of diagnoses in the Netherlands up there. Lots of them. As long as they're agony and we don't work, you can suck the blood out of them, right? And pay for all these goods. And there are a lot of them up there. You know, California now has a surplus. A budget surplus. How did they get a budget surplus? By raising taxes on Silicon Valley. And with Facebook in public, the state of California got a billion dollars of income of taxes from capital gains from one company going back. So as long as there are people creating Facebooks, which I assume is a productive activity. The government, you know, will keep sucking them and keep doing it. So at some point it has to collapse. But it could take a long time. So, you know, you could have a major financial crisis next year, but even that wouldn't kill this country up. We're just too hardworking and too innovative and so on. This is probably a decade or two that's sustained. But, you see, the innovation is being reduced by regulation. So, we still innovate and so on, but then you get Dodd-Frank and Salmaid's Oxtie and all these new regulations. So now Apple, right? Apple has a bureaucrat at Apple by the governor, a court-appointed person who gets a sign-off on all the decisions of iTunes. Now, how innovative is Apple going to be? Are we pulling the winters? Yeah, the winters from Alistar and he gets to check up all the decisions on iTunes because they antitrust lawsuit. How long do you think Apple is going to stay innovative when they've got a bureaucrat signing off on what they do? So, those kind of things are going to kill the innovative machine and ultimately it will collapse. But it could take decades. You know, I don't know, there's a risk, right? Can we turn the boat around and start sailing towards freedom before the cliff? Like, I've used in the past a waterfall metaphor, right? Well, on a raft, on a river, heading towards a waterfall, right? And everybody on the graph as an awe, right, is rowing and all rowing towards a waterfall. That's the American people. Everybody's rowing towards disaster. We vote for them. We advocate for them. You know, that's where we're headed. What does it take to turn this thing around and start rowing in the opposite direction and actually move in the other direction? We only have enough time before we drop off the waterfall. But when we drop off the waterfall, the likelihood that we climb back up is very small. Because history suggests that once economic collapse happens, we look for a strongman. We want somebody to give us the answers and we go towards the totalitarianism, not towards freedom. So we better get it rowing in another direction before we get the waterfall. You know, I don't know what happens first. I certainly hope that we start moving towards freedom. How do we capture it? You know, we start moving towards freedom before we drop off the waterfall. And time is limited. I didn't get 20 years. I don't know if we have much more than that. I have a question about your institute when you have time. That's quite a dramatic turnaround we have to make. So what do we do? Do we all start moving it where we refuse to pay our taxes? I mean, the IRS can't put thousands of us in jail. Well, it can. History suggests history suggests it certainly can and will. What I think you should do is advocate for the truth. I mean, I'm serious about the students should be out on the streets. There should be a student movement. You know, against the redistribution of their wealth. There should be a student movement against large government and not just a student movement that sits around and studies ideas and meets books, which is great, all great. You need to go out there. You need to show yourself. You need to make the argument. I love the fact that you guys are suing the University of Michigan. That's exactly kind of stuff. You need to stand up and you need to make yourself heard and you need to give a voice. And if you do it, people will listen to you much more than if I do it. I'm like this, you know, crazy intellectual, loser, Iron Man advocate. But you're just young people who make screw. People get that anything. And there's got to be a substantial voice and it has to be your generation. Our generation's done. We don't have enough time. Your generation is going to fall off the cliff. 20 years from now, you know, I'll be okay. Put enough gold in the garden or whatever. And I'll be fine. You're the ones who won't happen because you won't have the opportunities I have. You know, I do this partially because I have kids. And you know, where are they 20 years from now? That's what it always means. You guys need to get angry. You guys need to get really pissed off. And stand up and that doesn't mean smashing windows, it doesn't mean occupying building. It means voicing your concerns. Don't do what the left did in the 60s. Do it like people who respect property rights and respect freedom and respect individualism, you know, but make your voices heard. Get out of here. That's what needs to be done. There's no alternative to education. There's no alternative to convincing people. Changing people's lives. And make the arguments right. That is, you know, one of the one of the reasons you know, I'm a pretty passionate guy as you can tell. They get passionate talks, right? And they're effective, I think, partially because they're passionate. Why am I passionate? And most female economists are boring. They are. Not to name names. Because I am morally offended by this stuff. It's not just a theoretical economic graph to me. This is about morality. This is about life and death. This is about good and evil. This is about, you know, the real life. And that's how you have to feel about it. Not a theoretical game of economics. But in morality, what's good and evil? And I'm standing for the good and I'm going to fight for the good. That's pretty passionate. So, and that's what some people need to do and they need to express that. It's the only way. I don't know any other way. Get your friends to read out a short. No, I'm saying quickly. It was at this university just yesterday where a philosophy professor, this was put on our group page, put my brand's name on the board and talked about her for a minute or so. Then crossed out her name, sat down and said she's a joke, basically. And we can't take our ideas seriously beyond childhood. It's a kind of advocacy you have to deal with everywhere. It's not unique to University of Michigan. Part of the way to discredit us is to do exactly that. It's not take the ideas seriously. Not to discuss them because if they discuss them, they're in trouble. So the easiest thing to say is that's just a joke. And to tell you, you're reading a book that's appropriate for 14 year old boys. You grow on it. Everybody grows on it. I didn't. But then, you know, I'm strange. So that's at hominem. That's not a serious intellectual debate. But that's the atmosphere of all universities. But again, the only way to stand up for that is for you guys to do good grades and then in a respectful way stand up against it. You know, argue against it, stand up against it, demonstrate against it, show that you really believe in something. And that you're not crazy hippies, right? You're not the 60s generation. You're serious. You talked about these people needing to do something. I equate that to when you talked about Africa. What's the problem in Africa? It's what the people are learning. It's the same thing here. It's what are the people learning in order to change a culture, in order to change a generation, that generation needs to be educated in the right way. This university, that university, that university over there are not teaching these principles. Well, that's right. How do you change that? Yeah, but if we try to take over all the universities and forget it, it's going to take too long. It's going to take hundreds of years. I mean, it took the left 100 years to take over the universities and that was relatively easy. Now that they're established, it'll take us more than 100 years to do it. So you have to have shortcuts. You know, getting your friends to read out a short cut is a short cut, right? Going out on the street advocating and making loud noises so that the kids around you maybe get educated is a short cut. I use the web. The web is a phenomenon of short cut. If we're going to succeed in a battle for freedom, it'll be because of technology. Because now we have a tool which is the web to educate people without their parents, without this teacher's knowledge, right? Because you all, everybody goes on the web all the time without anybody knowing what you're looking at, right? At a marginal cost of zero. I mean, never. You don't have to print books. You don't have to travel. You don't have to, there's no cost. You put educational content up on the web and people can consume it at a marginal cost of zero. It's just a question of getting enough people to consume it. So you have to spend some money on marketing. But that's it. So we have an opportunity and indeed the university as we know it today won't exist in 50 years. Because technology will make it obsolete. Particularly given what's being taught. So we need to become an alternative educational source. We need an undercut. For example, one thing the Institute does, the Iron Man Institute, is we offer Iron Man's books to any high school teacher who'll teach them, right, in the country. We ship 400,000 books. The teacher just thinks they're teaching literature. We know they're teaching a revolutionary philosophy that's undercutting everything the teacher believes in. That's how you get around the system. You get your material, hopefully into people's minds without having to go through the thought control police of the school board and so on. So there are all kinds of mechanisms to do that. But if we literally said so when do we have to take over the universities? It's too late. There's not enough time to do it. Because I do think we only have 20 years. I mean, the more people get into universities, the better. But we're not going to take them over. And it doesn't matter, you know, history is determined by the minority always. It's the minority. It's the focal minority. It's intelligent minority. It's a passionate minority. But minorities shape history. We live in a country that's politically correct and overwhelmingly left of where I believe the center is. Because the left was a tiny little minority 100 years ago and they made a lot of noise. They had them all high ground and they were passionate. They talked about philosophy and undercut the right at every opportunity. And they won. But they won a majority. They're still not a majority in this country. Your professors don't represent a majority of people in the country. Most countries, most parents are horrified when they learn what the kids are being taught. But, you know, so we're a minority. It doesn't bother me. We just need to be a more vocal minority. A more passionate minority. A more morally certain minority. And that's what I'm man gives us. One more question. One more. If there is one. I wanted to ask you about the institute. I corresponded for a while with Alan Gotthel and eventually was moved to make a donation to the Anthem Foundation to support his. It might be an insider question. Can you ask? No. I'd say something later if anybody wants to know what that's about. But, one of the things I asked Dr. Gotthel was, is there, in essence, and I ran the institute professor here somewhere close by? I sort of picture these guys as sort of apostles of the institute in some regards. There are grounds here that not enough professors to spread them across all 50 states. So there's nobody that I know in Michigan. But I give an example, because it's funny that you mentioned this. Yesterday I had a meeting with one of the most successful entrepreneurs in America taking five companies public. He's incredible, incredible young individual. Huge, generous, strong man. And we're sitting and he says, why don't you have somebody in the Chicago area who can teach me philosophy. He's very wealthy, he's a billionaire. He's got money. And I'll pay somebody to teach me just philosophy, the history of philosophy. I said, yeah. There's an objectives philosophy at Loyola University. I'm going to put that together and get it done. So there are people out there. It's just not in every state, and they're not enough. I mean, we need more. There is fertile ground here. Grand Valley State University is the place with a much different national atmosphere than there is here. Hillsdale College has its own private kind of thing going by. Look, there's opportunities everywhere. It's, you know, I travel all over and I speak all over. And there are opportunities everywhere and there are good people everywhere. And, you know, this is doable. Changing the world is doable. But it's going to take a lot of work and a lot of effort and it's going to take young people standing up. And there's a great voice. I want to do a commercial because I know that most of these people do not listen to WJR out of Detroit. But if you had the radio on during the Frank Beckman show, you would have heard Dr. Brook on the radio today. And he's a great voice for what we believe. Yep. No, I mean, there are good voices out there. I don't want to be so hopeless because we shouldn't be hopeless. There are good voices out there. And the more we give them kind of the the more we give them the philosophical foundation the better voices they will be and the greater success I think we can have.