 So, hello everyone. My name is Bata Shashelidze, I am president of New Economics School, Georgia. And we are honored to host today Dr. Jan Ombruk, our good friend from United States. He is chairman of board of Ironman Institute, friendly institute for our New Economics School. Who is going to talk about health and liberty? Because today's world is like having troubles to distinguish between health and liberty. And some people and most governments are thinking that we should suppress our liberties in order to preserve the health. But is it true? Is it necessary to suppress liberties to preserve health or vice versa? Maybe liberty will give us chance to overcome all difficulties, find good cure and deliver fastest solutions for those diseases, which we have now, or the present, or the past, or in future. So, Jan Ombruk, he was famous columnist. He was writing for Forbes and many other American famous newsletters, newspapers and other publications. And also, he right now more concentrates on his own shows, one-side YouTube show, then you can see him. I believe this overtalk will be in one moment in that place as well. But on the other side is blog radio show, which also available. You can see our screen right now. And just dial Ombruk in both places and you can find links to his previous talk and maybe in this talk too. So, now, what we are going to do is to just give floor to Jan Ombruk. He will speak, he will give us his insights and then we'll have chance to ask him questions. And reminding you that we are recording all this process and it will be in our Facebook page, so you can watch it later as well. So, Jaron, thank you very much for your presence here and please talk about your views, health and liberty. Great. Thank you, Bada. Thank you for inviting me and it's great to be here. I wish I was in Tbilisi. That would be more fun. It's always more fun to give talks to live people in a room and where I can see everybody's faces. But this is the second best and hopefully I can come visit you later this year or sometime next year if things go well, which I think they will. So, obviously this coronavirus has really shocked the world, both shocked the world in terms of how bad it's been. A lot of people have indeed died from this and we shouldn't minimize the human cost of this virus, particularly in places like Italy and Spain and the UK and France and New York City. But I think what's really been shocking to most of us, particularly those of us who believe in freedom and believe in liberty, is the response of governments and to some extent the response of citizens quite willing to let governments kind of dictate their life for them. With a few exceptions and I would say the few exceptions are all in Asia, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore probably. I would say most governments around the world have failed. Failed in the responsibility to keep us safe, failed in the responsibility to protect our rights and actually even failed on from the perspective of the virus itself. Failed in the way they have dealt with the virus. And most countries, the United States, certainly almost all of Europe, maybe with the exception of Sweden, have basically shut down, locked up people expected by law demanded that people stay home, shut down businesses and restricted our liberties in significant ways basically in almost all the United States, so in most of the United States and then in most of the rest of the world. This has been the way in which this virus has been dealt with. All of this has caused economic contraction. I don't know how things are in Georgia. I assume they're not good, but certainly in the United States and in Europe we have not seen an economic contraction as rapid as enlarged as this probably since Great Depression in the 1930s. So I don't think it'll be quite as prolonged, but in terms of just the depth and the speed, we have not seen this in what is it, 80 years now, since this is the 1930s. So the question arises, I think, for most of us who believe in freedom, believe in liberty. The question arises, what is the proper response? What is the proper role of government? What is the proper response to a health crisis that a virus like coronavirus or one day something even deadlier than coronavirus? Imagine a virus that is as contagious as corona, but is much deadlier than corona, 10 times, 20 times more deadly than coronavirus. That would be a real crisis. What should government do? What is a liberty perspective on a government action? And what would happen in a kind of a laissez-faire world if the government had stayed out of this completely? So first let's kind of examine the world as it is today. We have to recognize we do not live in laissez-faire. I mean, we all know this, right? We don't live in a capitalist world. We live in a world in which government is heavily involved in most aspects of our lives. And primarily in the one aspect of our life may be most important in this context, which is healthcare. Healthcare in almost every country in the world is, you know, socialized, is provided by the government in one form or another. It's either paid by the government as it is in almost all of Europe or it's actually provided by government. That is doctors, nurses, hospitals are all basically government employees, which is the case in the UK and in some other European countries. In the United States, we've got a mixture. We've got about 50% of the market, which is based on market principles, private healthcare, private insurance, and about 50% of the market, which is all government run and government dictated, which is Medicare and Medicaid and other parts of it. So the government controls healthcare. So already, I think we, as a culture, as a country, as an economy, at a disadvantage when it comes to healthcare emergencies like a virus, because the government is controlled, because the government dominates this industry so much. The industry is ill-prepared. As you would expect when government, you know, runs a particular industry, runs a particular sector of the economy. That sector is inefficient, unproductive. It is, and it does not plan for the long run. You know, people make fun. People make fun of capitalism. They say, oh, capitalism is all about quarterly earnings. It's all about the short term. Nobody in capitalism cares about the long run. But that's nuts. If you look at almost every long-term project and think about biotechnology or think about some, you know, long-term investments in technology, those happen in the private sector. Or if you think about even scientific investment, think about investment in science in the 19th century in the West, before government started funding these activities. Well, all of them were funded by the private sector. The private sector is the sector that doesn't have to worry about elections every four years. It actually explains, articulates to its investors its long-term vision. Think of a company like Uber that's never made money. Think about Amazon that for most of its life didn't make money. And yet, capital markets funded them. And yet they expanded and succeeded. So it is capitalism. It is private markets. It is entrepreneurs. It is the private sector that actually thinks long-term and plans long-term. Now, imagine a world in which insurance companies, health care generally is private, in which the government is not involved, in which hospitals realize that they need to prepare for emergencies. Otherwise, they won't be able to cope with increased demand on their product in times of emergencies. Imagine insurance companies that know that when a virus hits, claims against them will skyrocket unless they prepare, unless they're ready to deal with it, unless they find ways to mitigate, to reduce the cost of treatment by, let's say, identifying sick people, isolating sick people, doing the kind of things that would mitigate the costs of a pandemic, mitigate the number of people who actually land up in hospital. So, I can imagine and the beauty of markets, let me just say this, the beauty of markets is it's almost impossible to imagine how markets will respond. Markets always respond in ways that, below my mind, that are unexpected, surprising, that are innovative, that are in ways that I would have not expected, that I think almost everybody would have not expected. So imagine, but let's try to imagine how markets would respond to a pandemic. Well, first, markets, insurance companies, hospitals would think about this in advance. There would be experts, there are today, immunologists, who think about these things, who plan about these things. And then insurance companies would have a plan. How do they deal with the issue of a potential pandemic? Well, first, they would say, well, we want to make sure that we have a few things. We have testing capacity so that we can test people who are insured by us. And second, we want to make sure that we have capacity at our hospitals and hospitals that are likely to treat our patients. Maybe insurance companies would invest in, together with hospitals, in extra beds, in extra facilities, in extra ventilators, in extra PPE. PPE is the equipment that protects healthcare providers when they provide. Maybe they'd invest in the things that would lead to better treatment. Maybe they'd even have some investments in vaccine companies, ready to engage those companies when the time comes, when they are needed. Maybe they had investments in antiviral companies, anti, drug companies that have. So insurance companies would not pay a passive role, as they do in the US today, because they're so heavily regulated. They're basically an arm of the government, a public utility. Or in most of Europe, where there are no health insurance companies are very limited ones, because the government is the one providing so-called health insurance. Insurance companies would have an incentive to plan long term and to prepare for pandemics, to prepare for healthcare emergencies of all types. And they would actually think about it, the same is true of private hospitals, private clinics. They would have an incentive to have an emergency plan. And indeed, if you look in the United States at least, at the best private hospitals like Cleveland Clinic, the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, they had emergency plans for a pandemic. They said that if this gets out of hand, we have a plan. We have buildings that we could turn into hospitals very quickly. We have hotels that we've already got agreements with where we can use to isolate certain patients. They had plans. They knew what they were going to do. It's not every hospital that had a plan, partially because even in a competitive market, some people slack off on long term planning. But also because it's a question of the extent to which they were influenced by the government, they were influenced by the regulations, they influenced by the controls. Free people, profit seeking companies plan for the future. They plan worst case scenarios and they prepare for it. So a free market deals with pandemics by adjusting, by engaging those emergency plans that they put in place. Now on top of that, one of the things that is underappreciated is the extent to which the price system would help manage a pandemic. One of the things that we've heard in Europe and in the US is the fact that there were shortages of masks and of all kinds of equipment. Why were there shortages? Well, to a large extent, there were shortages because the price system was not allowed to function. Prices of goods were not allowed to increase. That's called price gouging and it's illegal in the United States in most of Europe. Why was there shortage of toilet paper in the US? I don't know if there was a shortage of toilet paper in Georgia, but in the US, there's a shortage of toilet paper because everybody bought all the toilet paper. Well, one of the reasons for that is because supermarkets, grocery stores, were not allowed to significantly raise prices in a time of emergency. And morally, it's thought to be not right. But imagine if they had, imagine if they'd raised prices as demand had gone up. Then A, demand would have shrunk, people would have bought less, and B, higher prices would have sent the signal to manufacturers, manufacture more. But if prices stay stable and there's a shortage, there's less of an incentive for producers to increase production. We know that prices serve as a signal. People who are willing to pay more for your good make more stuff. Imagine if there were two masks of ventilators, of tests, of PPE, of everything. Imagine if hospitals were competing to buy it, raising the prices and manufacturers went into overtime in order to produce it because they could make more money. That is the profit motive would have been an incentive to produce more. This is how supply and demand works. And yet we don't allow it when we cap prices. We don't allow it when we say, oh, it's immoral to raise prices during a pandemic. No, it's exactly the opposite. Raising prices during a pandemic sends the right signals both to suppliers and to consumers that get the products to where they're most needed, to where they're most valued, to where people are willing to pay the highest price. So markets work to allocate resources, and they work amazingly quickly and amazingly effectively when they're allowed to work. When we don't place limitations like price controls, we don't place limitations by shunning people who gouge when we don't raise prices, when we don't place limitations on international trade, and we can source our supplies from any vendor anywhere in the world at a zero tax without tariffs. If anything, this crisis has taught us that we need more global supply chains. We need more diversity of sources. We need more countries to trade with. If all the supply chain is all in one country, even your own, then what happens when you have to shut down all the factories because people don't want to go to work because they're afraid? It's much better if you have a widely diversified supply chain where you can buy the products where people are still working, where people are still able to go out. So markets deal with crises like this beautifully if they're allowed to work. And one of the great tragedies of this pandemic is that they were not allowed to work. And in the most important industry, the industry that is healthcare, we did not have a market to begin with because government is so involved. And this is true of particularly in places like Italy, Spain, France, the UK, where the National Health Service is completely 100% government control. So there is no market. There is no functioning market. Price signals. There is no long-term planning. There is no emergency capacity. There are none of the things that you would expect in a private sector because it's not a private sector. What you get is a government sector and governments we know fail dramatically in times of crisis, in times of emergency, in times of spikes in supply and demand. They just have no mechanism by which to cope. So let's see what is the role of a government in a time of crisis like this? Is there any role for a freedom-minded right, individual rights-respecting government, for a lots of capitalist government? Would there be a role in a crisis like this? Now, here I want to remind you of what the role of government is. Based on Ayn Rand and those of you interested in Ayn Rand's view of government, she's got a book called Capitalism, The Unknown Idea, where she talks about this. And I also recommend the virtue of selfishness. And of course, many of these books are available in Georgians. So you can ask Pata in terms of which books and where they're available. But the new school, the new economic school has copies of these books. So feel free to follow them or buy them and read them. But for Ayn Rand, the only role of government, the only role of government in all situations, is the protection of individual rights. It's the protect of freedoms. Because what are individual rights? Rights of freedoms of action. They're the freedom of you, your freedom to pursue your life, to pursue the values that you believe rationally unnecessary for your life, unnecessary for your happiness, unnecessary to pursue your values, the values you desire in order to live. So government is there to protect you from cooks and criminals and terrorists and foreign invaders and viruses. Now, in what way is a virus violating your rights? Obviously, a virus can't violate your rights. But a human being who is carrying a virus and who, you know, makes you sick is violating your rights, not purposefully. So it's not that he is being immoral, but if he doesn't know he's got the virus, if he knows he's got the virus and goes around spreading it, then he's being immoral. But if he's just got the virus, doesn't even know it and is spreading it, then he is violating your rights unknowingly, but he's still violating your rights. You are getting a disease you do not want. And if it's a life threatening disease, your life is threatened, your values are threatened by this other person. Now, what does that require government to do? I mean, it requires government to do primarily one thing and that is isolate the people who have the virus. So the only legitimate thing that government can do is people who test positive for the virus should be isolated. And if they don't voluntarily agree to be isolated and the virus is indeed a deadly virus, then it is legitimate for government to isolate those people. Now, what is a deadly virus? How deadly does it have to be? Those are issues that have to be hashed out. That's why, you know, the role of government in these cases is difficult. And that's why a lot of debate has to happen and why the various branches of government all need to be involved. This can't be just a prime minister or president unilaterally deciding. So what the government should be doing is testing, tracing and isolating. Now, I think the testing and tracing would be done by insurance companies and by the private sector already by hospitals, labs. And even the tracing I think would be done by insurance companies because they would have an incentive to do it. So the only role of government then really is to guarantee that people are isolating, that people who have the virus isolate. Government has no right, no ability, no moral authority, no political authority to isolate people who are healthy. It can't tell you to stay home because you might get the virus. If you have the virus, it can tell you to stay home because you're a threat. But if you're healthy, government has no business in your life. You're not a threat to anybody else. Now you can imagine, you know, Pat said, did you want to say something? Oh, you can imagine scenarios in which I don't know, there's a deadly virus and people are dropping like flies and it's really deadly and it's really quick and everything. Where for a limited period, the government isolates everybody as it tries to handle the virus in a particular geographic area. But that is like a super emergency that COVID-19 has nothing to do with that. And it would be limited, it would be during a particular period and the exit strategy would be clear and evident. That's not what happened here. So that's the role of government, it's to protect individual rights. That's it, nothing else. In this crisis, of course, government has violated all of this. It has shut us all down, healthy and sick. It has no criteria for when we exit that shutdown. Every government, you know, it's playing it by ear in a sense, it's doing it minute by minute, it changes its mind. There's no objective criteria. Government has failed in its responsibility to do any kind of testing, tracking, isolating, particularly in the United States, but certainly in most of Europe, Germany's been a little bit better. But again, it included shutdown people that are healthy. So governments in this case have violated rights on a massive scale. And the sad thing is, I think, that nobody seems to care. One of the sad things about this crisis is that people seem to just accept that it's the role of government to tell them how to live, that it's the role of government to basically run our lives, to tell us when we can open our businesses or not, which businesses we can go to or not. I know you guys have a curfew in Tbilisi from 9 o'clock. We have a curfew in Puerto Rico here from 7 p.m. every day. So the government is telling us whether we can live or not, when we can go outside or not, who we can interact with or not. And people accepting it. People just have given into it. And that to me is scary because governments can declare emergencies about a lot of different things. They could have a crime emergency and have curfews. They could have a traffic emergency where there are lots of traffic accidents and lots of people are dying. And they could declare that all kinds of things about how you drive and what you do and what you don't do and who can drive and when you can drive. People are this scared. People are this willing to succumb to government decrees and government. Then we are in big trouble. I think that one of the things we all need to do, those of us who care about freedom, is to use the opportunity of this crisis and as we return to normal, continue this in normal times. We need to redouble our efforts to convince people of the efficacy of markets that markets can't deal with these issues. Indeed, if we're going to get a vaccine, if we're going to get treatments, they're going to come from the private markets. They're going to come from the private sector. If we're going to ramp up manufacturing of vaccines to be able to vaccinate millions and millions of people, it's going to be the private sector. Even if the economy starts to open up and cases start dropping, it's going to be because people voluntarily choose to socially distance. It's going to be because people behave like adults. People act in ways to reduce risk and therefore reduce infections. These kind of emergencies can be dealt with voluntarily. They do not need the curse of power of the state. We need to make that case. We need to double our efforts to advocate for freedom, because if government learns from this that they can use emergencies to gain more power, as in a sense they have throughout history, whether it's war or whether it's disease, the powers that the government takes are very rarely completely given up. They almost always end the crisis more powerful than they did at the beginning of the crisis. We will have at the end of this crisis much more to fight about. We will have at the end of this crisis much more to advocate against. Governments will only feel more, I don't know, motivated to take more and more power from us and to try to control more and more of our lives. So this is tied to redouble our efforts. It's a time to better educate ourselves about the cause of liberty and the cause of freedom. And it's a time to gain confidence that a free market would have handled this pandemic much better than government has. Indeed, the only governments that seem to have handled this well are the governments in Asia, a few governments in Asia where they limited themselves to kind of the testing, tracing, isolating, and where they have let people voluntarily, I was just reading an article about Hong Kong where they've had very few mortalities. They've had constant inflow from people from China and they've managed to contain this and they managed to contain this primarily because of voluntary actions by individuals, not by government decrees. So we need to be re-emboldened in our fight for freedom, in our fight for liberty, in our fight against government controls and, you know, reinvigorate those efforts. So I challenge all of you to educate, to read more. If you're still isolated home, this is a great time to read more books, to do more webinars, to take more, to see more videos, and to educate yourself in the case for freedom and liberty primarily, I think, by reading Ayn Rand and by listening to her talks and lectures and so on. You can find a lot of that on YouTube. You can also find it on aynrand.org, a-y-n-r-a-n-d.org. All right, I will take any questions that we might have. I see the two here in the chat. Yeah, thank you very much, dear Yaron. There's one question in the chat section. Please check. Yeah, I'm looking. Okay, so I would like to know what your advice would be to the working class. How can we fight this crisis? What each person should do to improve their economic situation? I mean, this crisis is very, very difficult for people in the working class, or people who have lost their jobs in factories, or lost their jobs in restaurants, in shops, people in retail, you know, and government has just shut it all down without any really consideration. And now what has happened is government is writing to the rescue, and we've got stimulus plans all over the place, and the government is writing people directly checks, which makes us believe that the only way to deal with this is through government intervention. The only way to have dealt with this is by, you know, government bailing us out and saving us all. And this only reinforced the status tendencies in the culture anyway. Again, I think we need to remember that markets have solutions for these kind of things. In markets, you would have things like unemployment insurance. It would just be private. In markets, you would have insurance for businesses that included what's called business interruption. And that could include viruses. Small businesses would have insurance that would cover them from things like viruses. Insurance companies would be a lot, insurance markets would be a lot more flexible and viable. But look, shocks do happen. There are situations where you're going to lose a job. There are situations where small business will shut down. And there are situations where you won't be able to be insured for that. And the best advice in situations like that in a free market is to save money. Is every month to put a little bit of money aside so you can survive being unemployed two or three months. So you can survive in a free market without a government bailout. It's not popular these days to talk about personal responsibility. It's not popular to talk about saving because we believe the consumption is what drives the economy. But that's part of how we deal with these kind of situations. By the way, can we turn people's videos on because it would be nicer to see everybody's faces on the screen if they're willing to turn the videos on. It would be nice for me to see you guys. Thank you. So if you have video, put it on. Yeah. I mean, the other thing is in this crisis is you've got to constantly try to improve yourself and you got to constantly try to find jobs that are more secure, that are more where there's a lot more upward mobility where you can get to a position in life where you can do more to, I don't know, to protect yourself from downturns like this. So again, going back to savings, going back to getting a better job, going back to just putting yourself in a position where you are not dependent on government help when things go badly. Okay. During the pandemic in Georgia, banks decided to postpone loans for three months, the term of which expires in June. As you know, during this time, the economic situation worsen and many people lost their jobs, including me. What can be done and what would be the right steps with this situation by the banks? Well, I think the best thing there is for people to go into the bank on a case-by-case basis and try to renegotiate their loan, try to get an extension, maybe try to change your payments. The bank has an interest for you to pay the loan in the end. The bank has an interest for you to, you know, not to default. So I would say go into the bank and talk to your loan officer and see on a case-by-case basis whether you do that. The other alternative is to default. It's a go bankrupt. Look, that's the risk the bank takes when it gives you a loan. It's a risk you take. You prefer not to do it because once you go bankrupt, it's a black mark on your ability to get loans in the future. So it's not a good thing to have on your record, but it's not a disaster either. So it's certainly, you know, within a market solution and a moral solution, say, look, I just can't pay the loan. I don't have a job. I don't have income. I just can't do it. But hopefully the better alternative is to negotiate with a bank a better loan, better payment scheme, spread the loan over a longer period of time so that you and Anne can pay it. You win because you don't get a black marker bankruptcy on your record. And the bank wins because they get their money ultimately, even if it takes them longer to do it. And hopefully, Georgian banks are both flexible enough and have enough capital to be able to survive stretching out some of these loans over longer periods of time. You know, my expectation is that it's within their capabilities to do that. And my guess is, again, banks are such a regulated industry, such a controlled industry that my guess is the government is going to let them do that and give them a little backstop because the government doesn't want to see the banks fail. So in a private market, banks would have more capital, banks would go into a crisis like this with a lot more capital. The only reason banks are so leveraged and have so little capital is because they have a government guarantee because you have things like deposit insurance, because you have things like an implicit bailout of the banking system that every country has. Those are the reasons banks are so risky. No bank in a competitive market could afford to be as leveraged as banks are today. So again, in a free market, everything would look differently. There would be less lending because banks would have to hold more capital. All right, let's see. Unfortunately, there's some people who are willing to give up their individual rights for the sake of the common good, especially in the crisis. What do you think about it? Well, first of all, we have to start being better at arguing against the common good. There's no such thing as the common good or the public interest. Who is the common and what is the good? I mean, how many people do you have to have in order to have a public? How many people do you have to have in order to have a common? It doesn't mean anything. Good interest, public interest, good from common good, good and interest are things that apply to individuals. They cannot apply to a group independent of those individuals. The only thing you can say that is in the common good, and I put that in quotes, is to protect the rights of individuals so that individuals could choose what's good for them because you can't decide what's good for somebody else. You have no right to do it, but you can't. You can't get inside their head and figure out what's good for them and a good imposed on somebody, a good that is forced on somebody is not a good. To be good, it has to be chosen morally and politically. So, we have to, as advocates of liberty, argue from the perspective of the individual and reject the perspective of the collective, the common good, the public interest, social utility, social whatever, all concepts of collectivism is if floating above every group, there is some principle of goodness, that by the way, only some people see, call them, I don't know, philosopher kings, call them the political leaders, call them the intellectual elites or whatever. They know what's good for the people. They know what's good for the nation. They know what's good for the collective. And all we have to do is give them the power so they can do it. So, there is no such thing. Now, sometimes it makes sense to, for an individual to say, look, me going out right now is potentially dangerous to other people and ultimately to me as well. I care about other people. It's not that as individualists, we don't care about anybody. I don't want to see people get sick. I don't want to see people die. So, I'm going to stay at home for the next week. And it'll help me stay healthy because I won't be exposed to other people, but also just in case I've got the disease, I won't be infecting other people. So, it's better for others as well. That's fine. As long as it's not a sacrifice and it's not caused by government. So, you can take into account in being an individualist, in being a moral individualist, in thinking about your own rational self-interest, it's completely moral and rational to take into account your impact on other people. And not wanting to do harm to others. So, I think without government coercion, a lot of people would have stayed home. A lot of businesses would have shot. A lot of businesses would have asked employees to work from home because it's in our self-interest not to see a disease like this grow exponentially. It's in our interest to have some social distancing as individuals. So, you've got to tell people who are willing to give up their individual rights, that that's what that means. And what it means to give up your individual rights is, it means to give up your life. It means to give up your control over your own life. Individual rights are the protection we have to control our life. It's the idea that your life is yours to live as you see fit based on your principles, on your values, on your mind. And when you give that up, you're giving up your mind, you're giving up your principles, and ultimately what you're saying is your life is forfeit. You don't care about your life, you're willing to let other people dictate how your life should be. So, don't accept it. You know, fight those people, not fight physically, fight them intellectually. All right, let's see. Yogi asks another question. I hope that you know what is PARO, Spanish unemployment system, how we can work for this, how we can ask government to give back us your money and time of necessity. What Georgian economists do to start negotiating? I don't know what PARO is, so I'm not sure what the Spanish unemployment system is, but to the extent, I don't know how Georgia deals with unemployment, do you have an unemployment insurance type scheme in Georgia? So the government doesn't provide unemployment insurance, there's no unemployment at all. Okay, I think that's good. I don't think it's good for the government to do it. I mean, maybe there's a private sector solution where somebody could come up with a kind of unemployment insurance product, but the best thing for the government to do right now is not handout checks. The best thing for the government to do right now is things like cut taxes, restrict limitations of government formation, and get rid of any kind of restrictions that stop businesses from opening up. So the best thing the government can do right now is encourage entrepreneurship and the way you encourage entrepreneurship is by getting out of the way. So I know Georgia already has a lot of economic freedom relative to a lot of the rest of the world, but you could do better. It's still a lot you could do, both in terms of taxes and in terms of regulations. So the best that Georgia can do is again, freedom works if you're worried about your job, if you worried about your next job, if you worried about income, the best thing you could do right now is to advocate for your government to have more freedom, to open up the economy more, to regulate less, to allow people to open up businesses easier, make it as simple as possible to open up businesses. Okay, was policy of local government in Puerto Rico different than local government in California? It was in this, it was a little bit more stricter. It was very similar, but it was a little bit more stricter. There are no cofus, the cofus where you're not allowed to go out at all in California, but here in Puerto Rico, we had a cofus from 7 p.m. until 5 a.m. In California, they just closed businesses and they only allowed you to go out for walks with your dog and things like that, but you couldn't actually, so it was a little bit more open in California, but like everywhere else, you can cheat, right? So here in Puerto Rico, we weren't allowed to go to the beach, but a few times we managed to go onto a beach where the police were not there and we went swimming and had a good time. So we managed to subvert the restrictions in spite of what the government instituted. I think it's probably harder to do that in California, my guess is the police are more efficient in California than they are in Puerto Rico. So both in Puerto Rico and in California, it's been pretty strict. Puerto Rico has opened up now for most businesses, but they're still not for restaurants and stores and retail stores and malls. I think they will starting next week. I think the same in California, they're going to start opening up next week. So I think Puerto Rico and California, you know, step in step. If California opens up faster, I think my wife and I are going to fly to California and spend the summer in California. So we're going to go where there's more freedom right now. So we'll see. I've got a house in California. We might spend the summer there. What can you say about WHO? Was this organization helpful or the opposite? Well, it suddenly was, I think, not helpful in the beginning of the crisis. There's no question. It was brought way too into the story that was told by the Chinese. It provided, it became, it basically reinforced the Chinese misinformation. So there's strong evidence to suggest that the Chinese knew about human to human transmission of the virus in early January. And if you remember, there was a doctor who was warning about this on Chinese social media, and he was forced to go into the police and he had assigned a document retracting all the statements and apologizing to Chinese Communist Party about this. I mean, the tragedy is that ultimately he was a hero because he let the world know about this. Ultimately, he contracted the virus and died from it in early February. So he is one of the heroes of this crisis and one of the great tragedies. And several people have disappeared in China, who were some of the people who early on let people know about human to human transmission of the virus. So China, China was a villain here. There's no question. And the WHO was far too willing to accept China. One of the reasons Taiwan has done better than any other country. I mean, there are two reasons. One is, you know, the vice president of Taiwan is an expert on viruses and is an expert on ease of doctor. So they were right on top. But the second reason is the Taiwanese don't believe and don't trust the Chinese. Now, what's interesting is Taiwanese are now represented in a WHO. Taiwan is not a member of the United Nations. You know, the United States has no embassy in Taiwan, all because the Chinese, you know, don't like it. So the whole world is cowered before the Chinese. It's not just the WHO, right? Everybody says, Oh, the WHO is evil because they don't recognize Taiwan. Nobody recognizes Taiwan. It's pathetic. The whole world, a bunch of cowards when it comes to this. So the WHO was very much didn't listen to Taiwan. Taiwan was warning about this virus in early January. Taiwan took the right steps early on, did the testing, tracking and basically contained this virus very early and has done phenomenally well during this crisis and has taken, you know, less of an economic hit as a consequence than the rest of the world. So that is the model. But they're the one country the WHO didn't listen to and that's part of the tragedy. And of course, the United States didn't listen to them. Europe didn't listen to them. You know, nobody did. So it's the fault of a lot of people. Later on, you know, it's hard to tell how much the WHO was helpful or harmful. I think generally the advice they gave was good advice. I think generally they've got good people there. But obviously early on, which is the most important time, they were corrupted by influence from China. Now, in a free market, in a truly free world, it would be good to have an organization like the WHO but structured a little differently. Every country would have its disease control entity have a representative and it would be a good body to coordinate international effort because the fact is pandemics are international phenomena. They don't limit it to one country and it's good to share information across countries. So I think the WHO like organization could have a very helpful impact in a free world. But it would have to be truly independent of countries like China and not under their influence. Let's see. Thank you for giving this lecture. I got a question about the post COVID-19 world order in terms of finance. Do you think Wall Street and Swiss stocks can be replaced by Beijing since Alipay has become more popular and other services similar to that? Plus, how safe is that since we know about CCP and its dangers? So no, I don't think the Chinese stock market Shanghai Beijing and finance in China or the Yuan will replace the dollars in international currency. I think China is a lot weaker than people think it is. I think the world order post COVID China is going to be weaker, not stronger. I think the whole world will be weaker. But I think in relative terms, China is going to become weaker, not stronger. I don't think this is a shift in power. And yes, I would not trust putting my money in a Beijing bank or in a Shanghai bank. I mean, we're talking about authoritarian regime that could take your money like that, could control capital transfers, could prevent you from transferring your capital into dollars or into gold or into Euro or into something else. So I would never put my money in a bank in authoritarian country. I wouldn't put my money in Russia. I wouldn't put my money in China. I wouldn't put my money in any government. And I'm worried about even putting my money. This is why I think crypto has some value. I don't know what the value should be, but it has some value is I think people are even worried about putting their money in dollars because who knows what the American government is going to do or who know what the European Central Bank is going to do. So I would like to have a little bit of my money in gold because I think that's the one thing that preserves its value. The problem with crypto is that it depends on computers. And if some country shut down the computer systems or block them, then you can't access your crypto. Crypto still depends on technology. And I think technology depends on freedom. I don't think you have technology without freedom. So in an unfree world, I'd rather have a bag of silver or gold than I would cryptocurrency any day. I don't think we're getting there yet. I don't have my bags of silver and gold ready. But if I thought that world was coming, that's why I put my money. This is why I think China is weaker. Look, freedom is efficacious. Freedom leads to good things. Lack of freedom leads to bad things. The more China becomes authoritarian, the more it becomes controlling, the more it restricts opposition, and it is the weaker and poorer it will become. China over the last five years has clamped down on opposition, has become more authoritarian, has become more centrally planned. We know central planning doesn't work. So the economy is going to suffer. I think the economic numbers already are inflated. They shrunk by 6.9% in the first quarter of the year because of coronavirus. Their numbers are going to be a lot poorer moving forward because this regime in China right now is the most authoritarian regime they've had since Mao Zedong. And as a consequence, their economy will suffer. Look, the moral is the practical. Freedom works. Otherwise, what are we doing? If freedom led to poverty, then I'd be less interested in freedom, right? But it doesn't. It leads to prosperity. And it's because of all the virtues of freedom that we get prosperity, right? And lack of freedom leads to poverty. So I think over time, China is going to suffer. I think I wouldn't be surprised if China ultimately has a civil war, that there are real conflicts inside of China. There'll be another gentleman's square. There's going to be a real battle in China because it is still true that some people in China are going to want their freedom and they're not going to tolerate the ever-growing authoritarian state that is becoming China. And all of that is a good thing. And you know, it's bad in the sense that I wish China was moving towards more freedom, not against it. But I don't think, I think as they move against freedom, they will lose. Now, the rest of the world is moving away from freedom as well. So I don't think anybody's going to do particularly well, right? I think the United States is going to have basically 0 to 1 percent growth in its future. I think Europe is going to have 0 to 1 percent growth in the future. I hope Georgia sticks to a path of relative freedom of economic growth, of economic success. I think you guys have a good foundation on which to build on. But the rest of the world is going to suffer economically for a long time because the kind of things that they have done over the last few months are going to have big economic consequences. So, okay, so now I wouldn't replace Swiss banks with Chinese banks. Okay, Georgian government is also implementing an act where they can violate your universal and illegal human rights in terms that they can violate your economic freedom, possibly maintaining your property, freedom of movement, etc. They can do these even after the cofuse over after 22nd of May. So this act gives them a lot of power and privileges. What can be done about that? I mean, you got to fight it. You know, what can be done about it? The only thing you can do about it in a free world is to argue against it. It's to rally against it. It's to protest against it. It's to use the tools that you have in order to fight this. The primary tool we have is education, speaking out, writing articles. I remember last time I was in Tbilisi, there were protests in front of parliament. And, you know, things like that have an impact, right? You rally, you know, you rally the people against the government. You know, that those are the tools we have. And the primary tool again is the kind of work that the new economic school does, the kind of work that Pater and his colleagues do. It's education, education, education. What we need to do on a massive scale constantly without stop is educate people about the value of freedom, about the virtues of freedom, the value to their own life, about freedom is important, not for Georgia, but for you as an individual, why freedom is important for every single individual. That's the sense in which the common good has any meaning, right? The common good is just a collection of individuals. Well, what's good for the individual freedom? That's the only common good. The only common good is the protection of individual rights, the protection of freedoms. And we need to win that argument. Too often, on a global perspective, we fail to win that argument. We don't fight enough and we let the other side dominate. It's our job. And it's the reason why I do this and I won't let the virus kind of stop it. And the fact that I can't travel won't stop me from doing these kind of webinars is because this message needs to get across. All of our futures depend on it. The future of our children, the future of civilization depends on this message. I mean, one of the things that should motivate all of you is that you are really on the front lines of the battle for civilization. Without these ideas, without the ideas of liberty and freedom and markets and individual rights, civilization crumbles. So to the extent that you're fighting for this, you are fighting, you are the soldiers for civilization. And the battle is still a intellectual one, an educational one, not yet one with guns. Thank God. So thank whatever. So, you know, keep it up, keep speaking, keep sharing, keep engaging, keep studying, keep learning, you know, support people like Pata locally who are doing this kind of work that is really the work that, again, will save civilization or not. And you got to keep it up. So somebody's asking what changed, has the coronavirus changed your attitude to government? Not really. I mean, I always knew that government would screw this up. So I'm not surprised that it did. And it hasn't changed my attitude towards the role of government. It's still the same. I still think it has very, very little role to play. And the role it plays is limited to individual rights. The coronavirus has some impact on individual rights and articulated what that is before. But no, nothing changed. The only thing that's changed, I have to say, from the coronavirus is, and this is sad for me to say, is I have become more pessimistic because of the way people just folded, the way people just accept this. And on one side, on the other hand is, and maybe you get this in Georgia, but I don't know, but in America, the number of people who have accepted conspiracy theories about the virus that are completely irrational about the virus, right? It's one thing to be anti the way the governors respond. The governors respond terribly to this virus. But don't get seduced by stupid irrational conspiracy theories and therefore discredit your cause. We, because we're so radical, because we're so different, because we're fighting such a difficult battle, we have to be super rational. We have to make sure that we have the facts. We have to make sure we know what we're talking about. We cannot be associated with nuts, with crazy people who really nobody should pay attention to. And too often, I see these combined. So I'm a little bit more pessimistic because I thought people would resist what governments have done a little bit more. And I'm more pessimistic because I see how many people really quickly are willing to accept really irrational explanations because they're afraid, because of fear, and because of ignorance. So sometimes it's best to say, I don't know. No, thank you. He only has a question here on. So thank you. My question is, like you said that the people who have current who have coronavirus and we know that they should be separated. But what about the other diseases that we don't have any vaccines or medications, like tuberculosis, for example? I know in Georgia, if you have coronavirus, you're forced to be isolated by the police. But if you have tuberculosis, then you're not. And I know such system in other countries works at work as well. And where is the distinction? What is the distinction we can make here? So that's a difficult question. It's not obvious what the distinction is. And I think that people, this is why I believe that, as you guys know, I'm not an anarchist and I believe there is a rule for government. And this is one of the rules. One of the rules is the government has the good government. In the case of a good government, it has to think about what is the distinction between different diseases? What is clearly a violation of rights and what is not? Suddenly the flu, for example, the flu is very contagious. And it's debilitating, right? You get the flu, you're out for like a week, you get a fever and you, but it doesn't, you know, and it kills some people. Some older people die from the flu, right? So the question is, when does something cross from something we're just willing to live with to something where we have to isolate people? COVID, I think, is a borderline case because the mortality rate is bigger than the flu, but not, you know, horrific. But imagine Ebola, if Ebola was more contagious, well, literally 30, 40% people die, or Middle Eastern respiratory disease, the first SARS or MERS, you know, all of those were very deadly, right? Not as contagious, but imagine if they were. So I think government has to set a threshold. And so this is, and I'm going to use the American system of government to give you the illustration. I think it should be very, very hard for government to declare a state of emergency, all emergencies, war, virus, whatever, right? So in America, I think Congress should have to come together, House and Senate should each have to pass a state of emergency special law that grants the executive certain powers for the emergency and goes away after the emergency is gone, very explicit, very limited, very clear. And they would have to decide, okay, coronavirus is serious enough that we're declaring this, right? There would have to be discussion, debate, and they would have to pass it, maybe even have to pass it two thirds majority, make it really, really hard, right? Then I think in America, it should have to go to the Supreme Court to non political body. And they would have to say, yes, this emergency is so bad that it justifies this declaration of emergency and a non political body declares that and then only the executive would act on it. Then only the president could do something about it. So you have to create barriers so that this debate isn't deadly enough. Isn't it deadly? Do we have enough information? This is the other interesting thing about government. The less information you have, the less government should do, right? Government cannot use ever uncertainty to gain power. That is horrific. So government has the burden of proof on it to justify the emergency. So it has to convince the people in this case, Congress and so on, that this is so bad that they need special powers. So you've both at the state level, you know, the governors in America are acting like dictators. They have unilateral power. They can shut down lives of people shut down the economy. They don't need the legislatures approval. They don't need the courts approval. They can just unilaterally do this. Now one state has ruled the shutdown unconstitutional because the governor acted dictatorially. And that was Wisconsin. In the state of Wisconsin, the Supreme Court of the state said the governor cannot act unilaterally. The Congress in a sense of the state should have met, the legislators should have met and debated this and they didn't. So they did away with the whole thing. So you have to have a process. One of the things about objective law and a proper government is you have to have objective processes in the law. And that's what we don't have in any government today, sadly. So it's a tricky question. It's not clear when is the threshold and when isn't the threshold. You need to have real debate and talk up with experts and figure out what the standards really are. And I'm not an expert on this. I don't have the standard. Okay, one more question. Yeah, Giyogi has one more question. What do you think about proposals to expand International Monetary Fund lending by issuing more specific drawing rights? Look, I don't believe there should be an International Monetary Fund. I think the IMF has done unbelievable damage over the last 50 years, particularly to developing economies. Because what does the IMF do? It goes into countries and says, countries in crisis and says you want to help? Okay, we'll give you help. But you have to adopt all these Keynesian policies in order for us to help you. You have to raise taxes and you have to regulate and you have to do all these things. The IMF is not a force for good. It could have been that they go in and they say, okay, you want to help? You have to do all these free market things. I mean, okay. But that's not realistic for governmental funded institution like the IMF to do that. So I would get rid of the World Bank. I would get rid of the IMF. I would get rid of the United Nations. I would get rid of every international body that is not focused on expansion of freedom. The only reason to have an international body is to defend and expand freedom. And to coordinate between free countries in order to do that. Nothing else. Is the U.S. right to fear, I can't pronounce the company's name, Hawaii, the Chinese telecommunication. We know there's some connection between Huawei and CCP intelligence. We know that the U.S. government banned it. But what's your thought about this? I mean, this is tricky, right? I mean, we also know, I just give you an example, that the United States intelligence agencies use U.S. telecommunication companies, right? The NSA for a long time had a back door into Google, into Apple, into Verizon, into AT&T, into U.S. technology companies. And who knows what the NSA has back doors into right now. So let's not pretend that this is just a Chinese threat and that U.S. intelligence services don't do the same thing. Now, and abuse it, right? The NSA has abused it. We know that from Snowden. So I worry about any time the intelligence services had back doors. Now, do the Chinese have back doors into Huawei? Yes, I think they do. And it's likely that they do. And then the question is, what do you do about it? I think the way to deal with that is not by banning it. I think the way to deal with that is to develop counter measures. Now, I'm not enough of a techie enough to know how you do that. But for example, there's a lot of pressure in the United States today to do away with person-to-person encryption, like what you get on Apple, like what you get on WhatsApp, like what you get on Telegram, they want to do away with it. But that's the solution. If we can have point-to-point encryption, then it doesn't matter what the Chinese have back doors into. If we encrypt anything. So the solution to it is counter measures, rather than banning. Because once we ban them, they ban us. And there's no limit to what gets banned on and on and on. I think we need to develop sophisticated means by which to limit their ability to. It's like, what do you do about the fact that they are constantly, that hackers are constantly breaking into our stuff? There's very little governments can do about it because the hackers are using another state. We've got to build better security measures. We've got to protect our information, got to protect our rights, much, much better to do that and go after the people who do this to the extent that we can. But there's a limit to how much you can do it. So, you know, my sense is, and again, if there's no way to do it, if you come to the conclusion that Hawaii is basically an arm of the Chinese government, of the Chinese intelligence service, yeah, then ban them. Fine. But you've got to, that should be a last resort. You should have real evidence and the Buddha proof should be on you, that that is indeed the case. And there's no other mechanism to better deal with the fact that they might be spying on you. Yeah. And somebody says entering encryptions means there's no back doors. But I think you can enforce the end-to-end back, even if they have a back door, the end-to-end encryption can bypass the back door, right? So, the back door becomes ineffective. So, in a sense, you're blocking their back door. Again, I'm not an expert. So, I don't know. I'll leave it to the experts to discuss. So, it was one question before that about Green New Deal or something by Georgie. I'm looking for Georgie's question about Green New Deal. Um, do environmental benefits seem as a result of the global slowdown hinted to potential positive impacts of a Green New Deal? I mean, is it an environmental benefit that we're emitting less CO2? I mean, who's that good for? I mean, maybe it's good for some snails or it's good for, I don't know, some sort of fish somewhere, but it's not good for human beings. It's not good for human beings we're using less CO2 because the use of less CO2 means we're producing less, we're living less, we're consuming less, we're pursuing happiness less. So, my standard for the environment is there's only one environment I care about and that's human environment. And the human environment benefits from the use of CO2. So, if I see CO2 actually going down, I'm worried. It worries me because it means people are consuming and producing less. Now, it is true that if we could replace fossil fuels, let's say with nuclear, then you would see CO2 decline and our standard of living would still go up and we'd still, but that's not what people are proposing. That's not what the environmentalists want. And to me, that's what reveals the environmentalist true agenda. If their agenda was protecting human beings, then the environmentalist movement would be 100% behind nuclear. Nuclear is the safest, cleanest, possible energy. The fact that the environmentalist movement is anti-nuclear tells us that what they want is not a human environment. What they want is no humans or what they want is fewer humans. What they want is humans living at a much lower standard of living quality of life. What they really hate the environmentalists, particularly the intellectuals, is they hate capitalism. They hate your freedom to consume what you want. They hate your ability to travel where you want. They hate you being free to pursue your happiness. They're anti-freedom more than anything else. So to me, one of the greatest dangers in the world right now is that governments decide to stimulate the economy by going with a Green New Deal. That would be an unmitigated disaster from an economic perspective and from a freedom perspective because it would require massive amounts of printing money or taxing us, and printing money is taxing us. It's just an indirect tax. So it would require massive taxation and shutting down efficient productive means of energy for inefficient, unproductive means of energy. Look what's happened in Germany. Germany had this commitment to wind and solar. So they started to shift, shut down their nuclear power plants and shift to wind and solar. I mean, if you've ever been to Germany, it should make you laugh, the idea of solar energy in Germany. I mean, when the hell does the sun shine in Germany? So they shifted. They had massive shortages of energy. So what they had to do is they had to restart their old coal plants so that they can make up the energy they lost from shutting down the nuclear plants. So they shut down a clean energy source, nuclear, and re-engaged a polluting energy source, coal, because they shifted to so-called green energy. Green energy is completely inefficient, unproductive, unsustainable. It is the worst kind of energy. Windmills are horrible. And if you don't believe me, there's a new documentary out made by the environmentalist Michael Moore that shows that green energy is a complete disaster. It's on YouTube. You can find it. It's really good. Now, he does it from the perspective of even green energy is polluting. Don't use it because he wants, you see the real motivation there. The real motivation there is for human beings to stop consuming and to stop producing, for human beings to stop being free. That's what Michael Moore really wants. But in the process, he properly critiques the green movement for the horror of green energy. So don't buy into that stuff. It's really, really, really bad. And it's really anti-liberty and anti-human progress. Thank you very much. There's one more. Okay, one more. That one, yeah, because I need to run. You have another one. So maybe last question. Is there any common peculiarity between Georgia and the US in terms of dealing with COVID-19? I think they were very similar. I mean, I think shutdowns, shutting down restaurants, shutting down gatherings, shutting down businesses. I mean, my guess is people in Georgia cheated more than they did in the US because Georgians are a little bit more, you know, maybe, I would hope. But I think in terms of the government response, it was very similar. I don't know. Did you have a lot of testing in Georgia? Not that much. Not that much. We didn't in the US either. Only cases when some symptoms. Yes, same in the US. No massive testing. But even in the US, there was a shortage even for people with symptoms. So in early days, it took them a long time to get enough tests done. I will link that up to in Georgia. All those who have an infection, they are hospitalized. 100%. Everybody. So I mean, if, you know, if test detected that somebody is infected, hospitalized. Okay. It was no line for hospitalization. And in this case, we were doing much better than many other countries. That's good. Yeah. In the US, Very soon, depends on the symptoms. If you don't have symptoms, you don't know, of course. Yeah. No, it looks like it looks like Georgia's recovering. I think the United States is recovering. I think Europe is recovering. I think the outcome ultimately would be a lot less, not as bad as people, worse fears. I right now am cautiously optimistic about there not being a second wave. I think this will go away for the most part in the summer and the fall. There'll still be people, but there's enough testing going on right now that they can quickly get them and isolate them. So I don't think there'll be more economic shutdowns in the future. I think basically it's going to be over, you know, later this year, but we'll see. Hopefully, hopefully, the more optimistic scenario is the right one. Thank you very much. Maybe from the beginning, because it was a new infection, maybe people were scared, the government was not sure what to do. Now, even the clinical sector is more ready and maybe different reactions. So we can learn by doing, right? So that's for an optimistic scenario for development. At least in the Georgian case, we are opening step by step, even much quicker than it was in advance proposed. And Georgia is going to open even international tourists from the first of July. So welcome in that moment. And thank you very much for your contribution, your talk.