 My question is, so you seem to talk mostly like status, kind of socialist, central planning, things like that. So the union? Yes. Obviously there are a variety of ideologies out there, and I was wondering what you would then say to anarchist philosophies which do pride themselves and value individuality and take care of the individual and don't murder people en masse. So what would you say to that? Well it's always interesting when I give talks that the anarchists either on the left or on the right come after me because I'm not an anarchist, so I now per capitalist on one side and then I'll call communists on the other side or I'll call whatever on the other side come after me. I am not an advocate for anarchy because I believe that anarchy is a recipe for violence. I think when anarchy, you need a system of justice. You need definitions of right and wrong in terms of when is it wrong for me to punch you and when is it okay for me to punch you. It's only okay for me to punch you if you're trying to punch me, right, first. So you need clear definition of what is self-defense, what is aggression, what is property, what's a violation of property, who the property belongs to so we know whose rights are being violated, whose rights are not being violated. And I know leftist anarchists don't believe in any property which I think then means everything is not owned by anybody which is, you know, in so many regards to community disaster. But I think that anarchy, however you think about it, either from the so-called capitalist perspective or the so-called leftist perspective, ultimately always devolves into gang warfare. It's the, because the only way left to resolve disputes is through violence. It is through my police, the police force I hired versus the police force you hired or your friends versus my friends if we don't believe in police forces. But they're going to be disputes. They're always going to be disputes. Some of them are friendly, some of them are rational. We often sign contracts and we're all good people but we disagree about what the contract means maybe ten years later. And some of them because some people are just bad people, right, they're cooks out there, they're just bad people. And you need a mechanism to resolve it. So I believe government is a necessary good, not a necessary evil. I don't think society can actually exist in any kind of healthy way without a government. And then the question is what kind of government do we need? And I believe a government is limited, limited to one thing, only one thing. And that is the protection of the liberty, the freedom of the individual. That is only to arbitrate disputes and to protect us from the cooks and criminals and motorists and rapeists and so on. So other than that government has no rule. Now let me address some other variants of social aside. So there have been many attempts over the last, certainly over the last hundred years really going back even further than that, to create all kinds of communal living, right? So in Israel there was a lengthy experiment with something called the kibbutz, which was about as communal as you get, right? All the land was jointly owned. At its peak, at the peak of the kibbutz, your children weren't even yours. So the children, you had the baby and the baby was taken to a nursery and it was raised with all the other children. And you got to visit the nursery just as much as anybody else got to visit the nursery. You didn't get to work at the nursery because your kids were there. You rotate the job so you didn't have any specialization. So you worked, let's say, a month in the farm and a month in the kitchen and a month in the nursery. I mean it's idealistic of a communal kind of setting as possible. There were no kitchens in people's apartments because the idea that you would cook for yourself was too individualistic. So you had a communal kitchen, which people rotated to and you could only eat your meals in the communal kitchen. Everybody had exactly the same size of apartment. Everybody had exactly the same furniture. I mean they truly tried to make this. If you talk about it, of course, at the end of the day, it was voluntary. You could leave. So it wasn't, there was no, there was no destruction because they didn't have the power of the state, luckily they had. It would mean a lot of that. So what was the result? We've got like 75 years of good history on this, right? The Kibbutz was never economically sustainable. They always lost money from the beginning and they kept increasing the amount of money they were losing over time. So they could not feed themselves without heavy subsidies originally before the state of Israel was created. From contributions from Jews like the Rothschilds in Europe who sent money so they wouldn't starve. And then later on once the state of Israel was created from the Israeli government that subsidized the Kibbutz in Havel right until about 10, 15 years ago when the Israeli government started cutting the subsidies. And of course as soon as they kept the subsidies, what happened to the Kibbutz team? They privatized themselves. Today, everybody has their own apartment. Everybody has a job. Everybody gets a salary. Oh, you couldn't even have money outside of the Kibbutz. All the money was shared. So once you joined the Kibbutz, all your assets were put into a pool. Now of course that's all gone. So there is no Kibbutz anymore. They completely self-destructed. But even when they existed, so that's kind of a materialistic wealth perspective. But what about the social relationship? Isn't it wonderful to sit every night and have dinner together and hold hands and sing kumbaya? No, it turns out. It turns out that the social environment within the Kibbutz team were horrible. People envied one another constantly because some worked hard and some didn't. Some actually were productive and some were not. Some were good with children and some were not good with children. And yet they couldn't specialize. So the people who worked hard resented the fact that they had exactly the same stuff as the people who were lazy. I used to watch them sneaking in at 11 o'clock to people who didn't want to work. They sneaked in. It was no consequences to not working. You still had the same food, the same apartment, the same television, the same treatment of your kids. No consequences for their behavior, except social consequences. So the social consequences were people stab each other's the back. They gossip constantly. Sex was used as power in order to humiliate people. It was a disaster. It was one of the most horrible social environments I've ever seen. The same is true of the many communes, the hippies in the 60s tried. And there are lots of other experiments for both agricultural and other types of communes that have been tried over many, many, many, many decades. This is not something new. Socialism has been around for a long time. To some extent, even predating Marx. So a lot of people have experimented with the variance of this. And it's never worked. It just doesn't work. Why? Because it goes against human nature. It goes against the idea that if I make something, if I produce something, if I create something, I want it to be mine. And I don't want to share it with somebody who hasn't done the work, who doesn't deserve it. Dessert is a really, really important thing for human beings. And what you deserve is a consequence of materiality from a material perspective, what you produce. If you don't produce stuff, you don't deserve it. If you produce it, you deserve it. And we can try to pretend we're good socialists. But when it actually comes down to it, nobody actually wants to give what he's actually created stuff to people who are not creating anything. Unless there's a small number of people who really can't help themselves and we give them charity and help them out. But as a mandate, it just doesn't work. So I mean, they aren't just no examples of these systems working. Even, and this is the other thing about capitalism socialism, what I find fascinating is, if you try a little bit of capitalism, that is, if you take a country and you give a little region in the country property rights, and you don't even have the whole rule of law and everything that capitalism embeds, but just give them property rights and respect for contracts, that part of the country will work like that. If you take a capitalist country and you take a little segment of it and you socialize it and you create communal farms and you do these things, it goes like that. So it's to the extent you practice capitalism, you succeed, to the extent that you practice socialism, you fail. The more socialist an economy is, the slower its growth, the slower its creativity, there's almost no innovation. And the more capitalist an economy is, so there's a direct correlation between wealth, innovation, productivity, human, individual, flourishing, success, and the level of economic freedom you provide people. You know, look at somewhere like Hong Kong. Anybody been to Hong Kong? You've been to Hong Kong? All right, everybody, once in your life, you should go to Hong Kong. It's a stunning place. It's a stunningly beautiful, amazing place. Hong Kong 75 years ago had about a few tens of thousands of people on it. It was a fishing village in the middle of nowhere on a rock, no natural resources, nothing. I mean a port you could argue with, there are lots of places that could be a good port. And the British came in, all they did, all the British did was establish the rule of law, respect property rights, and contract, and establish real contract law. And other than that, left people alone, no safety net, no social guarantees, no redistribution of wealth. Today there's a bit of a safety net, but originally there was nothing. And today, how many people live on this rock? Seven and a half million. Most skyscrapers in New York City. For capital GDP, which is a measure of economic well-being, higher than the United States on a purchasing power parity. So they really, the standard of living is higher than the United States. When it took America 250 years to produce, they did it 70 years because they had freedom, because they had a little bit of capitalism. Capitalism works. Wherever you try, and people are pretty happy there. It's all like, they're climbing now because the Chinese are pressing them, they're taking away property rights, they're taking away freedom of speech, they're taking away, and the students are out demonstrating for more democracy. But it's not that they, the problem there is not economic, the economy's doing great. And they are flourishing. So again, I just don't know where the examples are. We mentioned producers, aside from those people who give us intellectual products. What about the businessman? You've talked about capitalism. I'd like to know his role in this. Well, the businessman also is as recent a product as the intellectual. Before the birth of capitalism, there were no professional businessmen, and there were no professional intellectuals. Both the mind and material production and trade were enslaved and ruled by the various combinations of Attila's and which doctor's, which means by a powerful government, by an absolutist type of government, whether it was the feudal absolutism or the absolute monarchies of Europe, of the past Renaissance period, in any case, the producers of material goods, the traders, and the producers of ideas, the teachers, philosophers, the early scientists, were men without official status, without a profession and the total mercy of the political rulers, which means that the mercy of rule by force. It is only since the industrial revolution, the birth of a pre-society, the society of capitalism, that there was a new class of men, which is the pre-producers of material goods, the businessmen, the industrialists. They, of course, are the producers, in a strict sense of the word, or should be, but they are the greatest victims of today's society. They're the ones who have been betrayed by modern intellectuals, and in this sense, both businessmen and intellectuals will commit suicide by destroying each other, and the fall belongs to the intellectuals. The businessman is the man who has to use his mind to deal with reality, study facts, to produce material goods. He is the man who serves as the transmission belt of the discoveries of science, and carries the product of science to all levels of society. He is the one who takes the invention of an theoretical scientist or of an inventor, transforms them into useful products, and putting them into mass production makes them available to all levels of society. The businessman is the man who has achieved the enormous, historically miraculous rise in the standard of living of mankind during the 19th century. He is the one who has lived up to the role of a producer, to the role of a rational, creative man, but the intellectuals have never given him credit for it, have regarded him as if he were an Attila, and being afraid of freedom themselves have been looking from the start of the Industrial Revolution for some form of an Attila to protect them, the intellectuals, against the free market of ideas. Well, you've been talking about the bankruptcy of our modern intellectuals, and I know that in your most recent book, this is really a manifesto to a group that you called the new intellectuals. Would you mind telling me just who they are, in your own words, and how they differ from the old style intellectuals? Well, since the old style, the presently existing intellectuals, have declared their own bankruptcy by abandoning the intellect, what we need today, what I call the new intellectual, would be any man or woman who is willing to think, meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, wins, or mystic revelations, any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of despair, cynicism, and impotence, and does not.