 So I want to know who to thank for bringing here. Wes. Thank you, Wes. My question is, I'm a big fan of Atlas Shrugged, big fan of capitalism. And I'm struggling to some extent to fully reconcile the idea that in the modern world, things happen very quickly and often with disproportionate impact. So on the one hand, I want less regulation. On the other hand, sometimes things happen awfully quick. They cycle very, very quickly these days with extreme adverse impact to people that sometimes don't have adequate representation. So that's kind of the idea on how do you reconcile that? Well, I mean, I don't think the issue here is speed and what the government does is not that it slows stuff down, it stops stuff, and it distorts. So give me an example. The best thing would be if you had an example. Deepwater Horizon, BP. Yeah. So Deepwater Horizon, you remember Deepwater Horizon, the big BP offshore rig that exploded and spilt all over the Gulf Coast. Now, you have to take a number of steps backwards when you see an event like that. You know, if you actually look at what BP was doing, it was the whole of BP's mentality, corporate mentality, was to meet minimal regulatory standards, because that was cool, right? As long as you met the minimum regulatory standards, some government official said, you were cool. So the reason it exploded to begin with was because they squeaked by regulation. They did their job. What if there's no government regulation who controls? So Exxon, for example, doesn't do that. Exxon has a policy of they have their own standards, which forexceed what the regulators demand, and they're safer, generally, at least with the drilling. What would happen in a free market if you didn't, and we'll get to the effects once the spell happens, because accidents will always happen. What happens if you don't have a regulatory body that inspects these things? Why would companies stay safe? What's the incentive to be safe? Yeah, in the long run, their own existence, and by the way, even that is distorted by regulation, because the government capped oil companies liabilities. Now it turns out that they withdrew the cap after the fact, but after the fact is after the fact. The incentive, by capping it, this creates huge moral hazard, because you take away that internal incentive that's a long term. If there's a spill, I get wiped out. But there's a short-term issue, right? Can we imagine a market solution for the short-term problem? Now, I can't right now figure it out what it would be for oil companies, but take drugs, right? Sort of, you know, entities, private entities that certify the drugs. Let's say we did away with the FDA, and we had private entities now that researched the drugs, that did the experiments, and let doctors know, and they competed with one another, and now they had an incentive to provide the correct information. Any time there is asymmetry in information that's important to bridge, there is a profit opportunity for somebody to enter and close that gap and make money doing it. So even if we can't imagine in every case what it's going to be, I can imagine it for drugs, not sure yet about the oil companies have to think about it, I'm confident somebody's going to do it because there's profit opportunity there, that's what entrepreneurs do. They find these profit opportunities and they close the gap, and generally, private regulation far exceeds and is better than government regulation. I'll give you an example. I listened to a lot of NPR, National Public Radio, and they have these shows on farming in California, and they talk about that with the farmers about food quality and food safety, particularly if there's an outbreak of something, they always talk about this, and it's fascinating to listen to the farmers because they say stuff NPR doesn't want them to say, given NPR's political bias. The farmers often discuss two types of regulation that are imposed on them. One is government, the FDA, and they're not worried about the government regulator, they're always passed. Who are they really worried about? Who regulates them that they're really worried about? The supermarkets, supermarkets have their own people that they send to the farms to inspect the food, and the supermarket has a financial interest in the food being good. So they're gonna be much tougher on the farmer than the FDA is gonna be on the farm. Because what'll happen if there's an outbreak? What happens to the guy from the FDA who inspected the food and he missed it? And a lot of people got sick. What's gonna happen to that person? What's that? Nothing. He's probably got tenure, some form of tenure, because he's a government employee. He's not gonna lose anything. He doesn't have any revenues associated with the fact that he's a FDA inspector. But notice that we trust the FDA inspector, this goes to my moral point, we trust the FDA inspector more than we trust the supermarket inspector. Why? Because the supermarket inspector's in this for the profit. And the FDA inspector's in it for the public good, the common interest. He's just doing it for all of you. Now, when I hear anybody tell me they're doing something for the common good, I run as fast as I can. Every human atrocity in human history was done in the so-called common good. There is no such thing as the common good. What's good for me is not necessarily what's good for you. But somebody doing it for the profit motive, that I understand. I know the incentive structure. And we've got a whole field of economics that does public choice and understands the incentives of regulators and why the perverse and so on. So I think markets deal with the speed better. Now what happens when the spill happens? Now you've got private property and you've got property rights and you've got a court system that handles these things. And do you have to put into place, does the government have to put into place emergency courts because there's such a massive number of claims? Sure, there are lots of ways to do it that I think are much healthier and much more productive than the way it's done, where the government goes to Exxon or whatever it is and squeezes them for money and then allocates the money the way they think and it never goes to court system. We've got a court system for a reason, to allocate damages. And yes, maybe it's a little slow to speed it up. So that's what the government could do. Put some money into speeding up the court system. My view of the financial crisis was let the banks fail and take a few billion dollars and establish huge numbers of bankruptcy courts specializing in banks and have them operating 24 hours a day to deal with all the bankruptcies of the banks and nothing would happen, right? Big deal. So banks would go bankrupt. Companies go bankrupt all the time. And if there's a lot of them, make sure that the courts are fully stacked so they can deal with them. But instead, we have top, you know, almost a trillion dollars where we hand checks to the banks to avoid them. God forbid they should go bankrupt.