 I'm going to talk about privatization. My motto is, if it moves, privatize it. If it doesn't move, privatize it. Since everything either moves or doesn't move, privatize everything, no government. What is the case for privatization? The case are two, ethical and economic. The ethical case for privatization is that it's compatible with the non-aggression principle. If things are private, then we can buy and sell, rent, lend, whatever. And there's no violation of rights. Whereas if it's done through the government, then there necessarily is a right of rights violation because the government is, per se, an invasive organization because it taxes us and it doesn't have our permission to do so. None of us have signed a contract with the government. Therefore, when it's not private, namely when it's in the public sphere, then there are problems of ethics because there's compulsion. Later, I'll get into the third possibility between government and private, and that's non-ownership. But I'll get into that when I do oceans. OK, so the ethical case, I think, is clear. The case for economics, the economic case for privatization will be wealthier if things are private than if they're not. The reason we have pretty good wristwatches and ties and shirts and shoes and cars and things like that is because if somebody doesn't do a good job, they can go broke and they have to exit and do something else. Whereas in the government, if they don't do a good job, like in the post office, they just keep on going and going. So that's one advantage. Another advantage is the advantage that Mises puts in that if you have, to the extent that you have government, you don't have a rational economic system of prices that reflect scarcity. HIAC tells us that information emanates from free prices. And if you don't have free prices, the information that prices give you is not indicative of scarcity or desires or anything like that. And the third one is incentives. If we have something done by government, we have less incentive to produce because you can't fail. Another one is we as consumers have more control over producers than we as citizens have control over our politicians. We get to vote for our politicians once every four years. We get to vote for a dollar vote for our suppliers of goods and services every time we buy or sell something. So it could be every second or every day or whatever. Another reason is that in the market, you don't have to have a package deal. In the market, you could buy a violin and a motorcycle and a sailboat. In the case of the government, it's a package deal. If there are two parties and you like policies, one, three, five and seven of one party and two, four, six and eight of the other, you got to pick one or the other. You just can't get one from column A and one from column B. You can't pick what you want. Whereas in the market, you can go and pick this. You can pick that. You can satisfy yourself. There's no package deal imposed upon you. Now there are package deals. I was in a Chinese restaurant the other night and sometimes they'll offer you a certain meal and you have to have this soup and that main course and this dessert or whatever. But in most cases, you can choose what you want. You can have one on column A and one on column B. Another reason is rational ignorance. In voting, every idiot gets a vote. Whether he knows anything about it or not. Let's say you want to go buy a motorcycle. Well, you'll ask your friends. You'll go to good housekeeping, seal of approval. You'll consume reports, whatever. You'll become more knowledgeable about the motorcycle or the violin or whatever it is you're gonna buy. Whereas in voting, you don't have to study up on anything. You can just vote. So we're gonna get more sense in the market, more economic sense in the market than we are gonna get in the public sphere. And then there's the beauty. And I'm not kidding about this. I think the market is a beautiful thing. More beautiful than even Mozart. And I see nobody better than Mozart or Bach. More beautiful than a baby, smaller than the most beautiful woman in the universe. The market is a beautiful thing. The fact that potentially seven billion of us can cooperate without any central direction is just a glorious, gorgeous thing. Whereas central planning, yeah, not that beautiful. Okay, I favor privatization of everything. And there are choices as that I can make as to what should we privatize? And there are easy cases. Let's privatize the post office. I'm in favor of that. I think it's good. We should privatize the post office. We should privatize other government enterprises. I don't know. A steel mill, if in your country the steel mill is run by the government, we should privatize it. And those are sort of easy. The cases that I've picked are a little more difficult. And I'm going to try to run through three cases. The first one is to privatize the roads and the highways. And as it happens, I've written a book on this. So please, if I don't cover everything, go get the book. It's nice and heavy. You can bat people around with it. The second one is privatizing rivers, lakes, oceans, bodies of water, aquifers, and I have a book on that called Water Capitalism. The third one would be privatizing the space race. I have a book on that, but it's not published yet. So if anyone knows a publisher who's interested in this, let me know. I need a publisher while I'm doing commercial advertisements. Come study with me at Loyola University. I'm not the only one who's a free market person, but all four of my colleagues in the econ department are Austro-Libutarians. And we've got a few people teaching business ethics and in the law school. Yes, we have our commie pinkos too, but at least we've got people who oppose them. Whereas in most schools there are no professors of that ilk. Okay, one argument against privatizing anything is what about the poor? How will the poor afford something? And one answer I give is when I used to watch the Olympics in the 80s and in the 90s in the 70s under USSR, under USSR, whenever anyone would wear a gold medal, they would interview them. And typically the people who win gold medals are 22 year old people. And in the Soviet interviews, they'd always be a kid sitting in an apartment and has a little red car. And I was wondering why always? Whereas when they interview Americans, they're not always sitting in an apartment and they only always have a little red car. And I finally figured it out that in the Soviet Union, if you're trying to, the only way to get a little red car in an apartment is to win a gold medal in the Olympics, which indicates what's going on there. Whereas here, you work in McDonald's, you can get a little red car and you can get a little apartment. So if you're really worried about the poor, free enterprise is the best policy, privatization is the best policy to cure poverty. Adam Smith wrote a book, he wasn't a pure perfect libertarian, but he was pretty good. And he said that the wealth of nations comes from free enterprise and private property. I'm involved in the Fraser Institute, calculation of economic freedom of the various countries. And you'll never guess what. The freer the country, the richer they are per capita. So if you're really worried about the poor, the answer is not to have central planning and the answer is to have free enterprise. Why did I get involved in roads? Well, there are several reasons. First of all, or one of the reasons is when you're trying to convert people to the free enterprise philosophy, the first thing, or among the first things they're gonna say is, well, if you don't have government, who's gonna build the roads? And they start thinking, well, without roads, it would be pretty rough to get around. And only the government can build roads. Well, that's not true. The first roads, the Turnpike roads were all private roads. Somebody would get up on his hind legs and make a dirt path from A to B and then would charge a little toll. And if you had a horse and a rider, it would be a certain price. If you had a wagon, it would be a little bit more. If you had a wagon with two horses, it would be a little bit more. If you even, they even charge prices based on the width of the wheel. If the wheel was very skinny, think Icegate, they would charge you more because you're gonna put ruts in the road. Whereas if the wheel was a little wider, they charge you less because you're flattening out the ruts. So there was a sophisticated, well, for the 18th century, and my research goes back to England in, I don't know, the 5th or the 6th century, something like that, they had private roads. So there's no requirement, no necessity that God said that roads have to be government. They can be private too. So one reason for this roads analysis is to answer the question of who will build the roads? And the answer is private enterprise. Another one is, do you know how many people die on the roads every year? It's something like 35,000 a year. Now just to put that in context, in 9-11, only, as thinking lousy, 3,000 people died. Now I shouldn't say that because the New York Times is gonna say, well, Block favors 3,000 people dying in 9-11, I don't. But it was only 3,000. In Katrina, only 1,900 people died. Every time a little girl gets stuck in a well, everybody worries and tries to rescue her out of that well. And here, 35,000 people a year die. Probably there's no one in this room that doesn't know someone who knows someone and you don't have to have six degrees of separation, just a degree or two, where somebody was killed. And many, many more people are seriously injured, injured enough to go to the hospital. So I'm thinking, they say that there's nothing as inevitable as death and taxes. Well, here we have fatalities on the highway. That's a horrible thing. We shouldn't have it. So my question was, well, could free enterprise do better? Now the obvious answer, the obvious objection to what I'm saying is, well, the reason people die on the roads, and then they give you long lists of things, speeding, vehicle malfunction, driving under the influence, texting, driver error. Sam Peltzman, a Chicago economist, which means semi-Demi quasi-free market, listed 25 different reasons like this for explaining the deaths. The NHSTA, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration listed 200 different causes of deaths, all of which are irrelevant. They're all proximate causes. They're not ultimate causes. Look, suppose I take a gun and I shoot out there and I kill somebody. And you all grab me and I say, ta-ta-ta, I didn't kill anyone. It was the bullet that did it. You would look at me as if I was a little weird. But it's true, the bullet was the proximate cause. I was just the ultimate cause. I had hardly anything to do with it. I just went like that with my finger, pulled the trigger, take another case. A restaurant goes broke. And we are called in as a business analyst and we're trying to figure out why did the restaurant went broke? And we start listing things, all proximate causes. We say, well, the cook didn't cook well, nobody cleaned the place, the service was lousy, location, location, location. They located on a cul-de-sac. And we start listing all sorts of explanations as to why the restaurant went broke. What did we do wrong? What we did wrong is we listed the proximate causes. Yes, those are the proximate causes. But what's the ultimate cause? The ultimate cause is the manager. The manager didn't hire a good cook. The manager didn't give someone a broom to sweep up the place. The manager didn't locate the place in the right area. It's the manager, manager, manager. So, who's the manager of the road? I'll give you a hint, it begins with a G. Government, government is the manager of the roads. So what I'm trying to say is that if we had private roads, perhaps we'd have more safety. Well, how could this be? Well, one way, it could be. Well, let's take speeding. Maybe it's not really speeding. Maybe it's the variance in speed. Maybe what we should really have is here's a three-lane highway. And instead of having a minimum of 40 miles an hour and a maximum of 70 miles an hour, and you know that if you do 70 on one of these highways, everyone will go right by you. So the actual speed is somewhere between 40 for slow pokes and maybe 75 or 78. The variance is gigantic. Maybe it would be better if in this lane, everyone had to do 50, and in this lane, everyone had to do 65, and in that lane, everyone had to do 80. Would this be better? I don't know. I'm not a road theoretician. I'm just an economist trying to apply the lessons that Murray Rothbard and Ludwig von Mises taught us all. And I'm trying to apply it to an area that they didn't apply it to. I don't know. But I do know this. That if on my road, I did this, and on your road, you did 55, 65, and 75, and your road did better than mine, I would learn from you. And maybe I'd switch to that. Do you see the point? See, in every other field of endeavor, different entrepreneurs can do different things. I can make a bicycle this way, you make a bicycle that way, and we see which one satisfies the customers most. Whereas in roads, you get one road of highway for everybody, and everybody's gotta follow it, and we can't do any experimentation. Now, there has to be a limit to experimentation. I mean, I can't have everyone drive on the right side of my road and you, the left side of your road. Sweden switched from one to the other, and it took them a year of notification. So there's a limitation as to how different it can be. For example, if we said that this is five miles an hour and this is 200 miles an hour and this is 80 miles an hour, well, you know, common sense says that wouldn't work, that's silly. But within a certain range, we can sort of deal with these things. Another thing I would do if I own a road is if the minimum speed is 40 and the maximum is 70, and you get somebody doing 55 in the left lane and everybody has to go around them, right? You've seen that? Maybe it's lane switching, not speed. Again, this is sort of commonsensical-ish. I don't know that it's lane speeding because we don't have any empirical evidence and this is not a matter of praxeology. It's a matter of empirical experimentation and we have no empirical experimentation. Every road has to do the same thing. Well, on my road, if anyone did that and made everyone pass them, I would, you know, stamp down on that. And maybe I'd have different rules if you were drinking or drugging or whatever it was, you know, maybe take away your car or, who knows. The point is, as Uncle Mao said, let a thousand flowers bloom. Let many different road owners do different things and let's see. Another one, another pet peeve of mine is here's a two-lane highway and you see this truck here and you see this truck here and you know this truck is gonna go past that truck and it's gonna take them 15 minutes to pass. So what you do is you speed up to about 300 miles an hour because you don't wanna sit behind these racing trucks racing at 62 miles an hour. Well, what I would do is I would say, look, truckers, you know, get with it, boys, you know, you just can't go side by side for 15 minutes. People wanna get by. So these are just some of the hints that I use to try to say that if we had a little privatization, we'd have a little experimentation that different people make steel this formula, make steel that formula, different people make rayon this way, rayon that way. Well, why can't we apply something that we take for granted in every other field? You're all sitting in chairs and desks. Well, there are many people that make those chairs and desks and they make them in slightly different ways, different colors, different this, different that, different comfort levels, and some of them make profits and others of them don't and we learn the best way to make a chair and a table. That's a very pedestrian area that nobody really thinks about, but we can apply it to a very important area. Okay, so that's the way that we could reduce deaths. And there are many, many other ways. For example, every time there's a death on my highway, I'm gonna put a cross or a Jewish star or one of those Arabic things, a big one. Right there, 30 feet high, 50 feet high, to indicate that this is a dangerous area. Will that work? I don't know, but I would try it on my road if I ever got to own a road and you people would try something different on your road and that way we would learn which way is better. On my road, I would allow chicken races. You know what a chicken race is? See who chickens out? From two to four in the morning, and I would sell tickets. And we would, what do you call it, prune the herd? Namely people that like to do that, let them do it. Let them, you know, the Roman gladiators have got nothing on us. I mean, that way we'd get rid of some of these maniacs. Another point, here I got into it with Larry White. I said that 40,000 deaths or 35,000 deaths. And then I estimated, well, how many deaths would there be on private roads? And it wouldn't be zero unless you have a speed limit of two miles an hour in which case there'd be deaths from people not being able to get to the hospital. So, and not being able to get food to each other and stuff like that. So there would be deaths and what I did is I extrapolated. I said, well, in sanitation removal we have private sanitation and public sanitation and they cost different per ton of garbage removed. And the private is $100 a ton and the public would be 300 ton. It's something like two, three, four, five times as much. So I said, let's make it four times as much. So if there were 40,000 deaths on the public highways I estimated there'd be 10,000 deaths privately. Just right off the top of my head, made up numbers just hypothetical. So Larry White then criticized me and he says, well, that means that the government is only responsible for 30,000 deaths a year, not 40 because there would have been 10 anyway. And my refutation of that is look, let's stipulate Hitler killed 6 million Jews. But he took four years to do it and some of the Jews were elderly and they would have died anyway. So let's say 100,000 of them would have died. So was Hitler responsible for killing 5.9 million or 6 million? 6 million, dag nabbit, he killed 6 million even though 100,000 might have died. So the government kills 40,000 even though under private enterprise there'd only be 10,000 by stipulation. Okay, now most of what this book is concerned is with objections, objections to the thesis. One objection to the thesis is, well, if you had private roads then here's a road and here are houses and there's the middle of the road and as you go by, by the way, I don't like to brag but Rembrandt has got nothing on me. You can see the beauty of these drawings here. So what you'd have to do is put in a penny here and a penny there and a penny there, namely in front of every house you'd have to put money in which would slow traffic even worse than it is now. Well, that's crazy. I mean, if we were going to privatize roads we'd never privatize them that way that each house owns that much of the road in front of them, right, that's crazy. What we would do is say, okay, here's a street, Broadway or Elm Street or whatever and there are 100 people and now we give shares of stock to all 100 assuming that they have equal frontage and now the company, the Elm Street private company owns the whole road and it collects money and when I started writing this stuff in the 70s I was doing a lot of research in what do you call it, grocery journals and pharmacy journals and people were saying, well, why are you doing that? And the reason was the pharmacies and the groceries were the first one to use those little black bars, the code that's on most things now, barcodes. So what I was saying, you could put that on the underbody of a car and you'd get a bill at the end of the month or you'd put in some money and they would take it out. In other words, you wouldn't have to stop and put money in. They do a little bit of that, like the George Washington Bridge will only charge in one direction, not both directions, they'll charge double. Well, we can do better, that's the government. We can even do better, we can do it for streets as well. A third reason for this privatization is congestion. Now, I don't know, the congestion here, I was once here during Katrina's semester for the whole semester and they had football here and when they had football, there were seven million people living in Auburn, I'm exaggerating a little bit and the traffic goes really, really slow, very, very slowly. In the big cities, I'm in New Orleans, I've been in New York, I've been in a lot of big cities. The fastest way to get around is by bicycle or skates or something because cars that are capable of doing 70, 80 miles an hour safely are doing five miles an hour or something like that. So the third minor reason for privatizing is traffic congestion. So what I'm now getting into is a thing called peak load pricing, peak load pricing. And the way to indicate that is what we do is we look at, here is six in the morning and here is nine in the morning and here is noon and here is six p.m. and here is 10 p.m. And here is three a.m. And now we plot what the traffic looks like and there'll be peaks. For example, it'll be pretty low at six and then it'll get up to nine and then it'll get a little bit less during the day and then you'll have the evening rush hour and then down here at three a.m. it'll be very little. Well, peak load pricing, look, if you go to the ski resort in Denver they charge a lot more in the winter than in the summer. They do charge a little in the summer because people go and they look on those ski lifts and stuff but in the winter, people really go. So they charge more in the winter and if you charge more, the price falls. And if you charge very little, sorry, if you charge a lot at the peaks you flatten out the peaks, got it? And if you charge very little at the times when it's not being used, you reduce the oscillations. So the market has oscillations like this and after the, rather the, without pricing the oscillations are gigantic. With pricing, peak load pricing, they push down the oscillations, they make it flatter so we can use a given amount of roads more economically. Make sense? Well, under private enterprise, everyone does that. In Florida, they charge more in the winter. I used to work at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts and the leaves turn in October, November, it's very beautiful so they charge more then than at other times. Guess what the government does? The government engages in anti-peak load pricing. Namely, they exacerbate the oscillations. How does that work? Well, if you buy a ticket to cross the bridge, a monthly ticket, it's cheaper per trip, right? Well, who's gonna be using the bridge or the tunnel every day to go to work? People during the rush hour, people not during the rush hour. Obviously during the rush hour. So you're giving them a cheaper price. So you're exacerbating the problem. And this problem is another cause of road fatalities, road rage. When you got a lot of people cooped up like rats in a sinking ship or something, they start fighting and killing each other. There are cases, actual cases of that. So what the government is doing is screwing up the works. And what do they do? They have HOVs, high accuracy vehicle lanes for three people. My daughter-in-law has twin boys of two and a half. Three people. She scoots around. Whereas somebody, Bill Gates, would have to sit in the middle of traffic. It's just crazy. On my road, I would do it by how much you're gonna pay me to get into that HOV lane. So that's another reason for privatization. Privacy. People say, well, if you charge people, then suppose I wanna go to my proctologist or my mistress, and I don't want anyone to know. We can't have that. So the answer is, look, we have credit cards now. We have, markets can give privacy in all sorts of ways. So we don't have to really worry about anything like that. They have our vase, as our friends the Germans would say. Okay, one more thing on the roads. The blockade. Here we are. Here's four roads. They're surrounding your house. And here's, where's my, I can't find it. I wanted to show you how colorful I am. Here it is. See how colorful I am. You own that house there. And what happens, you're sitting in your house and you try to venture out onto the road and they say, well, that'll be a million dollars. Get it, namely the blockade, they're gonna blockade you because your house, your block is surrounded by four roads. Can't get out. Well, right now when you buy a house you get title insurance. What's title insurance? Title insurance means you get an insurance company to verify that the guy who's selling you the house is the real owner and somebody else doesn't show up later and say, hey, that's my house. Well, here you would get access insurance. You would, before you bought that house you would go to these road owners here and you'd say, hey, what's the deal? Will you let me out? And they have an incentive to let you out because if you're a road owner you want houses and factories and stores on your road. So you have to compete for houses and factories and stores and you'll offer people who build on your road a deal and you'll say, look, I'll never charge you more than I charge anyone else or I won't do this or, in other words, that's the way to solve that problem of the blockade. Another problem is the natural monopoly. People say, well, there's a natural monopoly. We wanna now build a road from, where are we? We're in Atlanta. I'll put us over here in Atlanta. And we wanna build a road to Dallas. How many people own land between Atlanta and Dallas? Half a million, 100,000, who knows? A lot of people. And this is called the problem of the holdout. Now my favorite holdout is Cartman from South Park. He's my hero when I grow up. I wanna be like Cartman. And what does Cartman always say? Screw you guys, screw you guys, screw you guys. So I wanna build a road from Atlanta to Dallas and guess what? Cartman's house is right there and Cartman says, you can't build a road on my house. So, what do we do? How do we solve this problem? Now the way the government solves it is with eminent domain. And I got into a debate with Richard Epstein, another Chicago law professor, and he was saying, well, you need eminent domain in order to have roads. Otherwise you'll have the holdout problem. And I was saying, well, there's more ways to skin a cat than this way, for example. You don't have to build it on A, you can build it on B, you can build it on C, you can build it on path D, path E. Namely, you don't have to build it through Cartman's farm. You can go around it. Or you could advertise that I'm building a road from Atlanta to Dallas. And the first of these five routes that gets everyone to agree, I'll build it that way. And if you build a road that way, you'll enhance the value of the farmland. You can also buy options. You know what an option is? An option means, I want Mr. Farmer Jones, I wanna buy your land at 10,000 an acre. But I'm not sure I wanna buy it, because whether I wanna buy it or not depends upon whether I can buy other people along that path. If I can, then I'll buy your land. If I can't, I won't. But I'll tell you what I'll do. Instead of giving you 10,000 an acre, I'll give you 100 an acre, such that in the next five years, I can exercise at any time I want that you have to sell me your land at the agreed upon price of 10,000 an acre. And I start buying options, which are very cheap, and I buy options here and there and there. And if I can get it all the way through, then I win. However, Cartman owns this land. Now what do we do? This is a problem. And what we do, when my son was 15, he came here 15, 16, and 17. And the two of us discussed nothing but this problem for about three years. I have a weird family. What do we do about this? And what we concocted is you build over or under Cartman's land. Because we don't believe the theory. What's the name of this? Ad Column, thanks. I need all the help I can get. The Ad Column theory. The Ad Column theory says that if you own a square mile on the surface of the earth, you own down into the center of the earth and up into the heavens. Got it? You own a square mile of land, then therefore think of an ice cream cone, you own down into the core of the earth and up into the heavens. Well, according to the Ad Column doctrine, you can't do that because if Cartman owns the green area, he owns down to the center of the earth and up into the heavens. Down into the center of the earth, I can't build a tunnel under him. Up into the heavens, I can't build a bridge over him so I'm stuck. But happily, we libertarians don't believe in the Ad Column doctrine. We happily, it was lucky for a while I was in trouble, but we remembered. Namely, we believe in homesteading as Adam Braided by John Locke and Murray Rothbard and Hans Hoppe and other libertarian theoreticians. So Cartman doesn't own down into the core of the earth. Then the next thing, we're putting this in Cartman, thinking in terms of Cartman, what could he do? Well, he knows we're gonna build a tunnel under him. What he'll do is he'll start putting sticks down there. Long, thin sticks. And now I have to show my football field. In football, here's the end zones, end zones, end zone. Where is it easier to move the ball this way? Right here or right here? At point A or at point B? Much easier to move the ball at point A because now you have the whole football field to throw a pass, whereas if you were at point B, you're 10 yards away from the goal line, they can have a goal line stand. It's really hard to get through. Got it? The point is, the easier it is to get through, the harder it is for Cartman. Now look, Cartman has to defend a goal line of, let's call this 15 miles. Got it? 15 miles from north to south. All I have to do is get a football. Now, how wide is my football? My football is, say, three lanes wide. Each lane is 10 feet, that's 60 feet. I want a little grass in between, another 40 feet. All I have to do is get 100 feet. He has to defend 15 miles. So who's gonna win that one? Namely, you know, Cartman can dig sticks down there or upward and we just go over him or under him. So we don't need eminent domain. We don't have to compromise with government. What happened is, after my son and I discussed this, I wrote it up and then I had the problem of, what do I do, thank him? It was really both of our ideas, batting it back and forth and I decided to make him a co-author. And he said, no, you can't do that. No one will believe it. That he was a 16-year-old kid. I said, but is it true? He said, well, of course it's true. So I believe in bending over backwards to give credit to possible co-authors. And the reason that this article went into the book, it's one of the articles in the book, the reason it has a lot of legs is because Gordon Tullock, a very famous economist who almost won the Nobel Prize, who probably deserved it as much as Jim Buchanan, he criticized this article and I wrote a response to him. He said, no, this doesn't work. So that's sort of a famous article. Okay, now let me talk a little bit about water capitalism or privatizing oceans, rivers, lakes. I wanted to put mud puddles too in the title, but somehow the publisher didn't want mud puddles. What do they know? So what's going on here? Why should we privatize oceans? Well, one reason why it's hard to see how we can is because everything's connected to everything. The river runs into the ocean, the evaporation goes from the ocean into the cloud and then goes from the cloud into the mountains and there's sort of a circulating thing and where do you break this chain so that you can have privatization? Who can own the Mississippi River or who can own the Gulf of Mexico or anything like that? Well, my motto here is land is fast-moving water. No, water is fast-moving land. Land is slow-moving water. Namely, there's a continuum. It's not just that land sits there and water moves. Land moves too, mudslides. Water sits still, ice, right? So there's a continuum. It's not that, yes, okay, we can have private property on land, but water, come on, give me a break. We can't. So I'm saying that the two are not that disconnected. I have here, I don't know if you can see this. It's part of my notes. In the USSR, the land under private ownership was 3%. The land under public ownership was 97% and the crops on the private 3% was 25% and on the collective farms, it was 75%, a gigantic difference. And we have something similar to that on the oceans. Namely, the land is about 25% of the earth's surface. The water is about 75% of the earth's surface, yes? Everyone with me? And on the land, 99% of the GDP is created. And on the water, just fishing and transportation, 1%. These are estimates. It's hard to get good data on this. So you got a gigantic divergence between land and crops on the Soviet and even more so on the water. Now it's a little unfair because there are a lot of more people on the land than on the water, but all is fair in love war and privatization. So I'm pushing that even though it's a little unfair. What the heck? Millions of years ago or maybe hundreds of thousands of years ago, I'm not sure of the timing. We didn't farm, we just hunted, right? We picked berries, we hunted for berries. We picked whatever and we hunted animals. Where are we with regards to the ocean? We're back in the hunting and gathering stage with the exception of fish farms. There was this wonderful bet between Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon. Julian Simon was our boy. Paul Ehrlich was the bad guy, the left-wing environmentalist. They had a bet as to whether we're running out of resources or not. And the bet was if the price rose, relative price rose, we are running out and not, if it fell, we're not. And Julian Simon won the bet. And then Paul Ehrlich said, I'll make you another bet. Fish, price of fish is gonna rise. And then Simon said, well, let's count not just ocean fish but farm fish too. And guess what Paul Ehrlich said? Forget about the bet. Because we can be up to our armpits and fish from fish farms. We don't have to worry about that because that's private. But oceans, we're running out of resources. We have the tragedy of the commons. Now the best way I like to illustrate the tragedy of the commons with the buffalo and the cow. The cow never came with a million miles of extinction. And I'm gonna draw a cow here and I'm gonna give him a smiley face because those are his horns. Because he's not becoming extinct. And here's a buffalo and the buffalo is gonna be unhappy because he has, he's going extinct. But they're the same animal. Well, I mean, a biologist is gonna tear his hair out when an economist says they're the same animal. Different genus, different species, who knows. But for me, they're the same animal. They're big and smelly and fat. And if you run into one, you're in trouble, you know. They're the same animal. Well, look an elephant is just a cow with a funny looking nose, right? I mean, this is a blocky in biology here. Don't tell your biology teacher I said this. But it's the same thing with fish and whales. My favorite story on this is the Star Trek one where our boys in the 22nd century were getting the crap kicked out of them by the boys in the 25th century who were much more powerful. Remember that movie? I'm not making this up. And the 26th century guys were bombing the 22nd century guys and they finally found out why there were no whales. So the guys in the 22nd century, Spock and those guys had to come back to our century San Francisco and they captured a whale and brought it back to the 22nd century. So the guys in the 26th century left them alone. I'm not making this up, really. It sounds a little weird, but it's true. Well, why are we running out of whales? Because of the tragedy of the commons. The whale is just a cow with fins or something like that. We don't have private ownership. We don't have private ownership of whales. Well, people, well, the objection is, well, the whales have to go here and there. Look, we don't want fish freedom. We want human freedom. The hell with the fish freedom? Look, we have electronic fences. You know, the way they first started before they had barbed wire, they branded cows. Well, we now have the ability to stick in an electronic homing device into a whale and say that that's my whale. Would there be poaching? Yeah, there's always poaching. There was cow poaching and there'll be whale poaching. But still, we're moving a little bit toward private ownership, a little bit away from hunting and gathering toward farming. Much better would be, I own this part of the ocean and I'm setting up electronic fences. Look, we can do that with elephants. We can have thick or electronic fences for elephants. We can do it for whales. The big problem is salmon because the salmon go to a little stream and then they go down the big stream and go to the ocean. I've got a whole chapter on the salmon that's... Well, you know, it's an objection. So, you know, you gotta smack those objectors. There's this woman, what's her name? Eleanor Ostrom, who is pure evil. She won the Nobel Prize. The first woman to win a Nobel Prize in economics and she had a PhD in political science, I think. And what she said is that the tragedy of commons is nonsense. There's this buddy of mine, a fellow student of Murray Rockboard called Bob Smith, R.J. Smith, and she cited him and said, well, the tragedy of commons is no good. It's a fallacious doctrine. And then she had all sorts of examples of fish in Korea and I don't know, meadow in Switzerland. And she said, there was no problem with the tragedy of the commons. And I have two articles, one co-authored with a young man on this and she confused non-ownership with a partnership. Look, take this meadow somewhere in Switzerland and you have 10 guys and they all have their cows and everything is fine. Suppose I brought my cows there. They're not gonna let me in. So it's not a commons. A commons means anyone can come in. It was rather a partnership of these 10 people. Look, there are law companies, law practices that have 500 partners. If I go into their library and start taking out books, they're gonna say, what are you doing? What are you, crazy? So it's a partnership, it's not a commons. Just because 500 lawyers can get to that library doesn't mean I can. Katrina killed 1,900 people. Katrina missed New Orleans by 40 miles. It was the Army Corps of Engineers that had a levy fall. And guess what? You'll never guess. The Army Corps of Engineers is still in business. Imagine any company, any private company that due to its efforts 1,900 people died. It would be gone. It's still in business. Now, we as human beings can be unhappy that 1,900 people died. But as economists, what really sticks in our craw is they're still in business. Whereas if the Mississippi River were owned by the Mississippi River Corporation and killed 1,900 people, new management would take over. We'd have a better Mississippi River. The last one is the space race. Why should we privatize a space race? Why should we have a space race? During the Cold War, things were pretty good. We could talk to the Russians without being accused of being whatever, traders. Now, you can't even talk to the Russians. God forbid there's gonna be a war between the United States and Russia. We're gonna have a thermonuclear exchange. Wouldn't it be great to have some people of the human race on Mars or on the moon? So at least some of us would survive. I mean, I hate to tell you but I'm pro-human. That's a confession but I like human beings. Some of my best friends are human beings. Not all of them but some of them. So we wanna have a rational space race. Now, thank goodness for Elon Musk who was able to have the rocket re-entry. In other words, the way rockets go up is two or three stages and the lower stages just lost and he found a way to keep those stages and reuse them. On the other hand, he gets a lot of subsidies from government. So is he a good guy or a bad guy? It's unclear. Well, it's a complicated thing because one of my articles, I favored Ron Paul taking subsidies from government because better, he have the money than thieves. The government and I favor using public streets and using the US currency and voting and stuff like that. So the question is, is Elon Musk a good guy or a bad guy? So in this book, what we did is we analyzed all of his speeches to see if he was a Ragnar Danish Coal kind of guy or a Ron Paul and we decided that he wasn't. So he shouldn't be taking government subsidies. But that's a very, very brief thing. Sorry, not this book. This is the Oceans book, the book that I haven't published yet. I'm out of time, so thanks for your attention.