 The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is The Iran Book Show. All right, everybody, welcome. Welcome to Iran Book Show on this Monday, January 22nd. Hopefully everybody's having a fantastic beginning of their week. And we are off and rolling. It's going to be a busy week for me. I will be in Michigan tomorrow for three talks, one tomorrow night, University of Michigan. And then I'll be at the charter school in Dearborn, Michigan, named after Ford. And then I will be at the Northwood University, up in Midlands. I don't know if any of you live close to Midlands, Michigan. And yeah, all the two talks in the evenings are open to the public. So please join us for those. And I don't know if any of those will be live-streamed. I'll try, but no guarantees. These are student-organized and stuff. And those are always very difficult to get live-streamed and everything else. But please show up. It should be a lot of fun. And we're talking about capitalism in both talks. And of course, Michigan is going to be cold. It's going to be cold. I have to take appropriate clothing. I'm not used to it. But yeah, I was in Denver the other day. And it was like minus 2 Fahrenheit. So I survived that. All right, then I go to Texas. And in Texas, I'll be doing a talk on Friday. Friday night, Israel's moral war. Israel's moral war on a campus, on a university campus. So it should be interesting to say the least. Texas will be warmer. I think the freeze is over. And it's starting to warm up. And that one will be live-streamed. So as soon as I have the live-stream link, I will get that up to you guys. But again, I'm hoping many of you come live. Because the live event will be, I think, will be exciting. It'll be great to have you there to support me. Great to say hello and everything else. So University of Texas at Austin on Friday evening. And you can find information about all the three talks that are available to the public. You can find them on my website, you're on bookshow.com. All right, let's jump in. I mean, Miele, it's great to talk about Miele. Because this morning, we talked about Trump. Want to throw up? Talk about Miele, it's like a whole different universe, a whole different world. I mean, he's not perfect. But wow, what a life, what a big difference he makes. So I thought what we talked about today, it's not so much Miele. Miele is an excuse, really. But what we should really talk about with regard to Miele is, how do you take a statist economy? How do you take an economy which the government isn't woven into every aspect of it? How do you take an economy in which the government controls, regulates, taxes, redistributes, subsidizes, and everything else? How do you take it, and how do you libelize it? How do you liberate such an economy? What are the steps one would take? What are the steps one should take? Now, obviously, Miele has already put a program together, at least step one, he has suggested in front of Congress. We talked about that a few weeks ago when he proposed it, the 300 items. And a lot of it is right in line with what I'm going to be saying today in terms of the way to approach it. But I think it is important to think this through and to think about the principles that you'd guide you. I'd say through many of the first phases, the first stages, of liberating an economy. And so that's what we're going to talk about. What are the steps? What are the stages? How do you get from what you are today to a free market? What are the things that the government should do in order to get us there, in order to maximize the speed by which we get to freedom, minimize, if you will, the pain. And it's not so much our mind, the pain. Sometimes pain is needed. But the pain likely results in increased opposition to your plans. So part of doing it right is to do it in a way that doesn't create political barriers to actually achieving the plan. So I think that's really, really important in the process. And what we should think about, and of course, I'm open to questions from you guys about this as well, is also how would you do this specifically in the United States, given our structure, our economy? I mean, Argentina has problems that are generalizable, that cut across any country, all countries running huge deficits and problem with inflation of central banks, although it's much worse, and problems of government spending and regulations and controls that cut across. But then, of course, it also has uniquely Argentinian problems, problems that don't exist in the United States. On the other hand, in the same issue with the United States, we have problems that much of the rest of the world doesn't have, or at least some countries in the rest of the world don't have. I think, anyway, we'll get to that. So that's what we want to talk about today. I'll remind you, you can, of course, shape the conversation by using the super chat and asking questions and getting us to talk about what you need to talk about, what you want me to talk about. You can also do a sticker just to support the show. Let's talk about what you do in order to liberate an economy. And the first thing to really ask is, what is an economy? What do we mean by an economy? What is important in an economy? What is an economy? And I'd say the core of an economy, the most important part of an economy, or really all of the economy, the economy is production and trade. That's what an economy is. It's the production and trade of goods and services. And consumption is one side of the trade. But the funny thing about how the world operates and how Keynesian economics has shaped the way policy makers really frame the debate around economics, it's almost like the only thing that matters is consumption. The only thing that matters is the consumer. Consumer sentiment, consumer willingness to spend, consumer prices that they face. It's all about the consumer. It's all about one side of the trade. And I think that's what you have to really have to break if you're going to reform a mixed economy, a status economy, a Keynesian driven economy, which is almost every economy in the West today. So if an economy is production, trade, that's what you need to focus on. You need to focus all your efforts on liberating production and liberating trade. Not one side of the trade, but the trade, the entire activity. So let's break that down. I think the most important thing to do when you're trying to free up an economy is to liberate the producers. Free up the productive created juices, if you will. Well, juices is wrong, right? Free up the productive and creative minds that people have. The productive and creative energy and will that people have, that entrepreneurs and businessmen have. The most important thing you can do is to liberate production. And to liberate production means the most important thing you can do is to get rid of regulations, controls, any kind of controls that limit or steer production. That means slashing regulation, cutting them left and right every way you can. Now, the process of cutting regulation has to be thought through so that you don't create crisis in the meantime, particularly in the financial sector. But in most other sectors, just get rid of them. Get rid of all the controls that dictate what people can invest in and what they can produce and what they can create. So just look at the airline industry before deregulation. Airline industry used to be controlled by the government. The routes, the prices, capacities were all dictated by government. This is before deregulation in the late 1970s. And then that was done away with. And what happened is a boom in flying. Prices dropped dramatically. Capacity increased substantially. Competition exploded. Capital investment exploded. Investment in customer facing. Consumers, at the end of the day, they need consumers, right? Exploded. And you got a dramatic increase in efficiency, productivity, and at the end of the day, in the number of miles that people fly. I mean, it's just the numbers astounding in terms of the growth. And this happens in every industry that is deregulated where the government steps away. And here I mean, any regulations that set price on a service are good. Any regulation that restricts investment or channels investment in a particular direction. I mean, look what's going on in energy. I mean, imagine if the market for energy was totally deregulated. That is, you can go negotiate to drill, to take out oil, to frack. If you want to build solar panels, and you can figure out how to do it well, find the land, build the solar panels, all of that. Stop all subsidies. Stop all tax credits. Even though that would mean some people, some companies, taxes would increase. That's fine in the short run. We'll talk about taxes later on. That's fine in the short run if taxes go up a little bit. But the benefits from getting the central plan is out of the business of guiding where capital goes through subsidies, tax credits, and everything else is such a huge benefit. It doesn't matter if taxes go up a little bit. So if I were president of the United States, the first bill I would propose to Congress, and you have to do this through Congress, as hard, difficult, crummy, awful as it is, you have to do it through Congress. But the first bill I would propose to Congress is a bill called Liberating American Business. And it would be a bill that basically took the regulatory regimes that we have today and basically instructed regulatory agencies to start cutting regulations at every level, in every industry, in every place, by some industries, I would say 25% a year. So within four years, zero regulations. Some industries, you can deregulate immediately. Take it as zero right now. Energy, for example. It's urgent. It doesn't have external fallout. You can't do that fast. Banking, you need four or five years in order to deregulate the whole thing. And you would put this massable in front of Congress that assign to the regulators the assignment of getting rid of themselves within four years by law. Same bill would have a separate provision, a second provision. And that is, get rid of all subsidies, all subsidies, and tax credits, all of them, gone. You don't want to, again, be manipulating on this tax credits. I would ultimately, maybe not in the first round, but ultimately want to get rid of all tax credits, both at the individual level and the corporate level. Let's make this just the corporate level at this point. Basically, you would convert the corporate tax to basically revenue minus expenses. It's just a question of what you can expense. Expense everything would be the easiest thing. Or just convert it to a very low-level revenue tax. But get rid of trying to favor any particular activity over another activity. That includes interest, dividends, all this stuff where the government is trying to manipulate, control, capital allocation. So Jim asks, why more can deregulate financial industry? I think, and I'm willing to be corrected on this, but I think that it's because finance is so important. And if you score finance, you can cause so much damage so quickly, more than in any other industry. Because every industry touches finance. Everything touches finance. Everything is denominated in dollars. How you deal with financial products, financial instruments, financial activity will dictate everything else. If you score up the banking system completely and credit collapses, every other industry suffers whether they deregulate it or not. That's reason number one. So it's the most important industry. Reason number two. Reason number two. Regulation of the financial industry is the most complex and convoluted of all the regulations. It is the most, I mean, it's nuts, the extent to which the regulations, how they all interplay with one another, and the kind of perverse incentives they all create. I always use the example of deposit insurance. Deposit insurance is a piece of regulation, piece of legislation, and in a sense, a kind of subsidy that the government provides, banks. Well, deposit insurance is put into place in 1933. It's part of the big financial regulation of the JFK. FDR administration. And what it basically does is it tells banks that if they fail, in other words, if they can't pay out their liabilities, then the government will step in through an FDIC fund, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation fund, to bail them out. They will bail out the depositors. And what this does, basically, is provide everybody in the system with an incentive to take on more and more and more and more risk, and to kind of compete to the bottom, compete for risk, compete to elevate risk. Because the upside is all yours, and the downside, as a bank manager, as a bank shareholder, and the downside is the governments or taxpayers. I mean, that's simplified. I mean, and that is caused, basically, fundamentally, deposit insurance is behind every one of the bank crises to one extent or another, to one way or another. It always manifests itself a little differently since the Great Depression. OK, so you've got deposit insurance. OK, but the problem with deposit insurance is that people take on risks. Risks go up and up, and then they fail, and then the government has to bail it out, and then more banks fail, and the government has to keep bailing them out. And not a healthy financial system, but consistent with the incentives you set up once you create deposit insurance. So let's do a war with deposit insurance. So once you have this deposit insurance, everybody knows risk goes up, so now what do you do? Well, you say, well, we can't let banks take on a lot of risk. So we have to start regulating everything else about a bank, the kind of loans they can make, the duration of those loans. We have to regulate interest rates. We have to regulate capital, how much capital they have. We have to regulate how much reserves they keep, so how liquid they could be, how much reserves they could have. All in order to prevent them from taking on more risk, and that motivation to take on more risk, created by a regulation called deposit insurance. So we got one regulation. It creates problems, so we got another set of regulations to control the problems that were created by the first regulation. But now with this regulation, these new set of regulations can create more problems. And they do, so we have to create another layer of regulations over here to control those set, and then there's another one over here. And banking is the one where you can see this most clearly. And for example, the big Dodd-Frank regulations of the post a great financial crisis, instead of going back and trying to understand what caused the great financial crisis, what the underlying causes, and fixing the system so the underlying causes would go away, we didn't. We patched it. We put another patch on top. And one of the things that other patch did is bring about the deposit crisis that happened in March, certain elements within Dodd-Frank. And Dodd-Frank will continue to cause crisis into the future. And right now, a patch that was put on the banking system during the deposit crisis in March now is fueling a certain type of borrowing that the banks have from the Federal Reserve that could create another crisis down the road. And this is how it works. Patch, patch, patch, patch, patch. Now, how do you unwind this? So for example, if you do away with all the regulations which you leave deposit insurance, well, then you're increasing risk and you're going to create distortions. So what you have to do is you have to slash through the entire world of bank regulations. You have to get to the point where you can get rid of deposit insurance fairly quickly. But that's not easy. It's not easy to do. And if you do it in the wrong order, you'll get bank collapses, crises, and so on. I think the two important things about liberating an industry like this, and it's true about much of liberating an economy, it has to be visible what you're doing. That is, you need to be transparent, completely transparent. They should be clear, this is what we're doing this month. This is what we're doing next month. Within a year, this is what's going to happen. Within four years, all the regulations are gone. For example, we're not going to do away with deposit insurance immediately, partially because we'd like a private insurance market maybe to try to develop. We'd like banks to start thinking about capital and change those capital requirements. We'd like the whole market, the whole industry to start adjusting to this new reality. So what the law would say is, in three years, on this day, the FDIC will be eliminated. Deposit insurance as the law of the land will be gone. Adjust. And then all the steps leading to that point will be articulated clearly, so both investors, the stock markets, capital providers, bankers, customers of bankers are all aware of what those steps are and where we are heading and how it is happening so that they can plan and think it through. So again, banking is unique in terms of its importance, the most important industry there is. And because of the complexity and distortion and perversion of regulation, I'll just say this, of all the industries in the United States, banking is the only one, I think, I think this is true, regulated from day one and more regulated in the United States than in many other countries. So from day one, I think I've used this example before in the show, but it's good to repeat Canada of all places. Not a place you would think of this. Had less regulated banking than the United States for most of the 19th and 20th centuries. And as a consequence, Canada's never had a banking crisis. Whereas the United States has had, I think, 14 by now. 13 or 14? No, well, depends how you count, but 13 or 14. Canada embraced central banking later than the United States. I think it took them until the 40s before they had a central bank. Whereas the United States, of course, got a central bank in 1917. Oh, sorry, what am I talking about? 1914, I got 17 then because we were talking about, some way we were talking about World War I. We're talking about Lenin today, 1917, the Russian Revolution. God, I can't even speak today. What's going on? All right, so a transparency, a plan, a transparent plan with dates and marks, exactly what's going to happen. So first bill would be getting rid of all subsidies, all tax credits, all type of credits, benefits, anything. All subsidies, and a plan to deregulate the entire economy within four years. You've got one deregulate. The other one that will probably take longer, again, because of the complexity. The other one that would take longer, and again, I'm open to people challenging this, but I think health care. Because of how involved the government has been for so long, how convoluted it has become because of that, the fact that, for example, Obamacare was another one of these patches on a patch, on a patch, on a patch. The fact that all these regulations have destroyed a whole industry called insurance, and that would have to revive. And again, with health care, you would have to have, here is the transparent sequence of events. The other complication with health care, which is less so with banking. Banking regulation has basically been nationalized. It was nationalized with the creation of Federal Reserve. And we'll get to the Federal Reserve in a minute, because that's going to be really, really important. It was nationalized. And health care is not. So health care, there's a lot, a lot of state regulations. Now, maybe there's a way under the Constitution to eliminate those state regulations while you're at it. To, in a sense, nationalize regulations of health care in order to get rid of them. So I don't know the details, but some of the things you would have to study in order to figure out whether you could do that. But health care strikes me, you would have to do it in stages and over a little bit longer time than many of the other regulations, which you could just eliminate. For example, the Department of Education at the federal level, education could be done in months. You close it apart from education. You shut down the student loan program. You should just shut it down. You say, OK, we're never issuing another student loan. And we're not guaranteeing any either. I mean, that would take, again, an act of Congress. We're not guaranteeing any loans. And we're shutting down the student loan program. Now, it would take some time to adjust. The universities would have to adjust tuition. Banks would have to start offering tuition loans. The market would have to be privatized. That doesn't strike me as difficult or would take a long time. In the past, banks have provided student loans. Universities could easily, I mean, not easily. Maybe it would be difficult, but they deserve it, adjust to a world in which the government is not subsidizing their students. Other industries that you might be interested in, you can present. OK, I think a separate bill, but maybe it's part of this. But a separate bill, we'll talk about this. The Federal Reserve has to be done away with. And now it's a question of, for multiple reasons, it needs to be done away with. One, the Federal Reserve is one of its big functions. Other than managing or corrupting our money, maybe the most important function of the Federal Reserve or the biggest function of the Federal Reserve is regulating. Regulating banks for national institutions more broadly. That has to stop. That has to be eliminated. So the regulatory aspect of the Federal Reserve has to be squashed. And again, that would be under this big plan of steps. The FDIC would go, the Office of the Comptroller of the Comunity. Do you know why there's an Office of the Comptroller of the Comunity, which is a national regulator of banks in addition to all the other regulators? It was an office established during the Civil War when the federal government, for the first time, issued currency. And it was supposed to manage the process of issuing and distributing the currency. And regulate that process. And then at the end of the Civil War, the government stopped issuing currency. But there was this office called the Office of the Comptroller of the Comunity. They don't want to shut it down. You can't shut down a government office. God forbid, that would be awful. So they kept them around and kept giving them different regulatory assignments related to finance and banking. And today, they're bigger than ever. So you need to shut down the FDIC. Shut down the Office of the Comptroller of the Comunity. You need to start the other one. You need to phase out the SEC, shut it down ultimately, or turn it into an agency like the FBI that only focuses on fraud, only focuses on actual deception and actual violation of rights. Actual violation of rights. And then the Federal Reserve has to be shut down and eliminated. And again, I tried to do that in four years. So one is the regulatory, you'd give a program. And the second is to privatize money. And this is, of course, more complicated, more difficult. But I don't think it's impossible. I think you could take it in two phases. Phase number one would be to go on a gold standard, a kind of a national gold standard. And again, I'm open to alternative suggestions, but go on a gold standard. Where basically the Fed would link the dollar to gold. So on a particular day, you would set up in advance two years from now, a year from now. It doesn't have to be two years. It could be a year from now. On January 1, 2026, 2025, January 1, 2025, the dollar will be linked to gold on the average price of the last three days of trading in gold in 2024. Last five days of gold trading in 2024. Something like that. And you would freeze the price of gold, in a sense, the price of the dollar in gold at that price. And now you're on a gold standard. And you would have to completely write the laws, but these are laws that existed way back when the Fed was established. The Fed cannot print money beyond what it holds as reserves in gold. And you could run that system for a short period of time. And during that period, you would start basically allocating the responsibility of holding that gold, of storing the gold, of keeping account of the gold, and therefore of keeping account of the money, of the paper money associated with that gold that is a claim against that gold to private banks. And you would basically convert the government dollar denominated into a bank denomination through gold. So the dollars would be exchangeable into gold anyway, American dollars. But banks would stop issuing, because the Federal Reserve would be gone, banks would stop issuing regular dollars. They would now be issuing claims on the gold that they had in their vault. Of all the processes of deregulation and all of this, that is not the most difficult. The challenge would be, first, to deregulate the banks so that they're in a position to do this, because to give them this assignment of basically becoming the issuers of private money, private claims on money, at least, while they're still heavily regulated by the government, I just don't think would create a hassle. So you'd have to do these in parallel and work out the details. But this is the focus. If you could just in four years of an administration just do this, rid of the regulations, get rid of the subsidies and the allocations, get rid of the Federal Reserve, you'd be heading to the moon in terms of production, productivity, creativity. You'd be heading to the moon in terms of quality of health care, in terms of innovation in health care, in terms of new tech, an application of new tech, capital creation, capital allocation. It would just, it's unimaginable. I really do think that it is unimaginable to people today. And I think it's unimaginable to me what that would be like, how vibrant, dynamic, explosive economic growth would be. So to me, that would be number one, liberate the producers, get out of the way of the producers. And by the way, a big chunk of this would be, and this is where you're going to get the most resistance. And this is where, by the way, Milay is getting the most resistance. One of the things you're going to have to do away with is the whole gamut of labor regulations. And this is trade, right? The relationship between employee and employee is a relationship of trade. We love to regulate trade. You've got to get rid of the minimum wage. You've got to get rid of all the different requirements and liabilities and affirmative action. And all of the millions now, again, here, part of the complexity is going to be that a lot of this estate is regulated by the states, not by the federal government. And the extent to which the federal government can impose itself on getting rid of those at the state level is that the fight you want to take on early on, hard to tell. But if we could liberate that, it's not even much more. The biggest problem the United States would face if we did all this would be a massive shortage of labor. We'd be creating and building so much. We'd be innovating so fast. We'd have so much out there. I mean, think about capital flowing once you get rid of the SEC's obstructive function. It's just hard to imagine. You'd really literally need a great science fiction to do this. All right, liberate the producers. And so that is the first thing you should do, the first thing you have to do. Second, and right, if you think of producers as health care as well, then that's part of it. So maybe it's a separate bill that liberates health care. Second is you have to liberate trade. And maybe employment law falls under this. You've got to get rid of all employment law. And you've got to change the way the courts function here. So you have to write law specifically, given the court's bad interpretation of a constitution. You have to specifically write how the courts cannot intervene in voluntary transactions that do not involve, I don't know, violating rights, exploitation, fraud, or whatever, exploitation, real exploitation, not pretend exploitation. You have to be very clear. Because a big part of the problem in the United States, and this is, of course, a whole other issue, again, that you have to solve at the state level, not just the federal level. And it actually would be interesting to do this exercise just to take a state and truly liberalize it, truly liberalize it. I'm not talking about Florida or Texas. I'm talking about true liberalization. You know, at the state level, get rid of all of licensing, get rid of all state regulations, get rid of all state controls of insurance markets. I mean, Florida touted as one of the first states in the union it is. And yet, it's super-regulated, right? I mean, in particular, take the insurance market, which is unbelievably regulated in Florida. And it's a disaster as a consequence of the state. Now, the state is the largest insurer against hurricanes in the state of Florida. Another reason not to get too excited about the census, right? Because he's only made this worse, hasn't made it better. So it would be great to take a state, one of the states, and really go all in on it. Really, you know, you can't touch the federal regulations. OK, they're there. But at the local level, get rid of everything. And then the, you know, and maybe that governor can then win the White House and do it on a federal level. Puerto Rico would be a good experiment. You can do it here in Puerto Rico. Want to be governor of Puerto Rico and get into government of Puerto Rico and then deregulate everything, everything that you can that the federal government doesn't impose on you, get rid of. I mean, this island would become Hong Kong of the Caribbean. It really would. Most of the damage government does is through its controls and regulations. OK, so get rid of all of that. So get out of the way in terms of trade. And here it's licensing laws. But of course, in the federal level, almost all licensing laws are state. So again, not sure what you could do, but you do as much as you can. Get rid of all these consumer protection, all the stuff that is laid out in terms of getting in the middle of me making a choice. I don't know. There are all kinds of federal laws that say, if an airline does X, Y, or Z, loses your bags, delayed flight, then they have to compensate. Why? Let the market solve that problem. Let the market solve it. All of those things that get in the way, get rid of them. This would also include, by the way, get rid of any kind of federal taxes, sales taxes. Get rid of all of them. And this is important because this again is a way in which capital is allocated. So for example, the bill should definitely include a provision that says all tariffs forever are going to be zero. Zero tariffs. And businesses can't complain because we've just liberated you. You can go compete. Zero tariffs across the board. Become a free trade haven. All right. What next? Next I would do taxes. Next I would do taxes. What do you do with taxes? You can't, given the United States, given Argentina, given debt, and given everything else, actually you have to do something before taxes. Sorry. You have to do something before taxes. Before taxes, you have to deal with entitlements. And of course, part of this you would deal with Medicare. You would have to deal under the whole health care deregulation. The biggest force for regulating health care is Medicare and Medicaid. You know how Republicans always say they should give block grants to the states? So the idea is that instead of the federal government writing checks to individual people, or instead of the federal government dictating to the states how the state should allocate its Medicaid. This is health care for the poor. How they should allocate Medicaid dollars, the Republicans always say, let's block granted, which means give a bunch of money to the states and then let them decide how to allocate it to poor people. And our general guidance without the specifics. And that's so frigging wrong. If you want to deal with Medicaid and Medicare and you want to phase it out long term, and here the phase out is not one year, it's not four years, it's probably a generation. It's probably 20 years, maybe 30 years. How do you do it? You block granted to the individual. What you do is you give an individual a voucher, whether they are poor individual or with an old individual. The people that Medicaid and Medicaid are supposed to take care of, you give them a voucher. And that voucher can only be used to buy health insurance. And they can take that voucher and they can buy whatever health insurance they want. Good health insurance, bad health insurance, whatever. And they can add to the voucher. They can add more money. They can buy something more expensive if they have more money to add to it. But they get a voucher to buy health insurance. And you get out of the business of providing health care. You get out of the business of paying hospitals. You get out of the business of drug price negotiation and buying drugs in bulk. You basically get completely out of the business of health care. And what you become is a redistributor of wealth. Fine, I help a charity to help the poor and the old. And then you start slowly over time as people get richer because the economy is free. You start eliminating or reducing the voucher, the price of the voucher. So if it begins at, I don't know, 1,000 bucks a year, then it's 950, then it's 900. And over 20, 30 years, the voucher's value goes down to zero. And in 30 years, the idea is everybody's expected to buy their own insurance. Everybody's expected to buy their own insurance. And that way, people still get, quote, the money they put into the system back. But they don't get an open check to spend as much money as they want in health care forever. They get market disciplined by being able to buy an insurance policy, be covered by their insurance policy, and whatever that insurance policy covers, it covers. But they have to buy it. They have to spend the voucher plus whatever money they want to put into it. So security. So security has to be privatized. How exactly would it be privatized? I'll leave that to another time. We can think about it again. My expectation is that Social Security would be phased out over 20 to 30 years so that people retiring today would basically get everything or most of everything they were promised. People retiring in 30 years would get nothing. And that that would be, again, spelled out in detail. Exactly what happens every year. So everybody could plan for it. Young people could save. Older people could maybe delay retirement because they know the amount of money they would be getting is shrinking. And so in 30 years, Social Security is gone. Medicare is gone. And you know exactly how much you owe. Because you've got this voucher. It doesn't increase. It's not dependent on the cost of health care. It's not dependent on advanced technology. It's not dependent on anything. A voucher that keeps going down in price every year. So you have to completely revise entitlements and make them basically ways in which we redistribute wealth. And that's it. Nothing more than that. We hope the poor. It's a charity. Taxes. I would say the first step of any tax reform has to be, and I think Ronald Reagan got this right in 1986, although he didn't execute on it, but he got the idea right. The first thing that has to happen is simplification. The tax code has to be simplified. So the first thing I would advocate for is a tax code with no deductions. No deductions for charity. No deductions for mortgages. No deductions for children. No deductions for anything, anything. You have X income. You pay 10%, 15%, 20%. Goes out. That's it. Postcard. Postcard, income, taxes, how much I've already paid, what I owe now, or what's owed me now. Yeah, we already talked about no tariffs. No tariffs has already been dealt. Now we're talking about income taxes. Income taxes in particular. They need to be unbelievably simple, ideally flat, but more important than the rate. More important than the rate and more important than how flat they are. They need to be simple. Again, we don't want the government motivating your choice of values. We don't want income taxes to determine where you live. We don't want income taxes to determine what you buy and what you don't buy. We don't want income taxes to determine what you invest in, whether you buy a home or rent a home, whether you give to charity or don't give to charity. Taxes to the extent that they are necessary for a while should be simple and non-devoid of incentives, devoid of motivations, devoid of trying to steer you to what the state think is the right behavior. So simplify. And then have a plan based on expectations of the government spending to do two things, set a level. If it's flat, set a level where income exceeds expenses for a certain number of years while the debt is paid down. And hopefully, spending is declining because you've basically privatized your security and you simplified Medicare and the economy is growing tremendously. So certainly, as a percent of GDP, the government spending should be declining significantly. Ultimately, a schedule of tax decreases but after government debt is being paid off. Finally, and I do think this is finally because I don't think this is the most urgent salient thing you can do, finally, I would say, and this can be done well after the first phases have been passed, after the producers have been unleashed, after intervention and trade is gone, after the subsidies and everything else, all the controls but also the favors granted to everybody else, you've got to deal with welfare. And here again, I think that the whole approach to welfare needs to be similar to the approach to Medicare needs to be similar to other approaches. It should be block grants to individuals. And welfare should be phased out and welfare can be phased out quickly. It should be the first thing to be phased out but as soon as the economy starts chugging and it should start chugging very quickly, it should start growing very quickly. As soon as that happens, you start doing away with welfare and phasing it out. So by the end of the second term, there's no welfare. Welfare is not that big of an expenditure at the federal level but it should be zero certainly by the end of the second term and it should be dramatically reduced even at the end of the first term. All right, so that would be the plan. There's still other things that have to be done and I think some of them done early. So for example, Robert mentions on the chat, he mentions antitrust. I mean, I would consider the abolition of antitrust to be part of that first anti-regulation that I talked about. Antitrust is an intervention in the marketplace, is a way of controlling and regulating. It should be on that list of getting rid of the alphabet regulatory agencies. Part of that would be getting rid of all those alphabet agencies that control trade, the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal, whatever. But also get rid of that part of the Justice Department that tries to control who buys who and approves, has approval power over mergers and acquisitions. All of that should be gone. That is the first thing that has to be done. Again, anything that interferes with production, that means antitrust, has to be gone early. Also gone early and relatively simple and should be very quick, is a complete redo of immigration. And I'd say the first phase, and it can be eliminated at any time, but the first phase would be to shift the entire immigration system to scrap every single immigration law in the books, including asylum seekers and all of that, to one simple immigration principle. If you have a job offer in the United States, welcome. That's it. We could talk about the details. Maybe it's a five-year visa renewed every five years. Maybe it leads to citizenship. Maybe it doesn't lead to citizenship. Maybe only your kids get citizenship, whatever. Those are details. Those don't matter at the end of the day. It doesn't matter that much whether you become a citizen of the United States or not. What matters is that you can be here, work and stay here for as long as you want to. That's the purpose. Legalize immigration. Anybody who wants to come to this country who can contact a employment agency and get a job offer, and there should be employment agencies all over the world, everywhere, on the Mexican border, everywhere, taking applications and trying to find matches. There shouldn't be a point system and education system. That's more central planning. That's the government deciding who's qualified and who's not. What jobs does the market need? It's not of the government's business. What jobs the market needs. The market will tell you what jobs it needs. The people, they hire. So anybody who has, anybody who has a job offer in their hands, in. And you get rid of, shouldn't be able to get rid of every single objection in the book. Get rid of the objection about welfare. Well, they're coming to get a job. They're gonna be on a job. I think you get rid of the objection with forgot a culture. They're coming to work in America. What's more culturally American than that? Don't allow them to vote for the rest of their lives. So you get rid of their vote for bad ideas. Although I find that interesting, by the way. It's really interesting right now. Sorry, tangent on immigration. I just read this piece, right? Venezuelan immigrants to the United States. A super colored right wing. They're right wing on economics. They're right wing on cultural issues. Indeed, immigrants out of Venezuela are going anywhere in Latin America in the United States. A right wing. They're not socialists. They've done socialism. Been there, done that. They don't want to have anything to do with socialists. They're more right wing than the Cubans. Do you think the Republican Party is welcoming a Venezuelan immigrants? No. No, they might be right wing, but they don't look like us. They're gonna change the demographic of the country. The ones coming through Mexico are just as right wing as the ones coming through anywhere else. It's like they don't select which border to cross based on their political affiliation. They're all asylum seekers. They're asylum seekers because they've had it with socialism itself. You can, you know, I'll post a link on a future show to the article. But nobody cares. You see, you don't care. It's always a rationalization. Not the Venezuelans, I know. You can show all the data and facts in the world to the anti-immigration crowd. It doesn't matter because they really don't want immigration, period. They don't want immigration. It's not about any particular issue. It's they don't want them. So immigration has to be there. It's a huge issue, particularly obviously right now. It should be right there in the first six months, first hundred days of a presidency, immigration and corporate reform, right? Get rid of all regulations. That's it, right? Yes. And you know somebody's completely utterly dishonest. You know somebody's dishonest. Completely, particularly after October 7th. How dishonest they are. Unthinking dishonest. And that's pretty low by an objective standard. When in talking about immigration, they bring up Israel. That is the lowest, most dishonest, most despicable and stupidest thing anybody ever brings up. Israel. Israel. As if it's the same thing. As if there's any similarity. But I'm not gonna get into that. I just wanna point out that there's no, there's no honest reason ever to compare the United States and Israel with regard to immigration. If you're doing it, you're basically, you know, lying to yourself, lying to yourself. And fundamentally, you can't think. If you really think you're not lying, then you just can't think, period. And I've talked enough about the differences between Israel and America. And if you can't see the differences of October 7th, nothing I say will ever change your mind because you're blind, you've blinded yourself, you've taken out a certain portion of your funnel cortex and made it irrelevant to actually thinking about the world and about reality. All right, what did I miss that we have to liberalize? I think we had the high points. That's the process I'd go through. That's the process I'd go through. I think Millay is basically on the right track. I'd like to see him, I mean, one of the things, as I said, that's really, really important is transparency. I would really like to see him present, present an actual plan for dollarizing the economy. I'd like to see, I'd like to see a lot more about deregulation and in Argentina's case, in particular, getting rid of tariffs and import and export taxation and you need to do that faster rather than slower. I think he's doing it too slowly in terms of that portion of it. But most of what he's doing is right. Of course, a lot of his proposals are already being held up. The courts are holding up the labor deregulation. The Congress is challenging much of the 300 pieces about privatization and all of that that he submitted. So he's already backed off of a number of things. For example, he is no longer asking for the privatization of the oil industry. By the way, one thing the United States doesn't have to worry too much about is privatization. Although the one thing you should privatize, and this again should be some way early on it definitely viewed as a revenue generator for the purpose of paying down the debt is I would sell off all government land, all of it, every single last piece of it, potentially leaving only military bases and military training grounds. Everything else should be sold, sold in mass. And that revenue should be dedicated exclusively to paying back the debt. And that would be a process that would probably take two, three years if we're gonna sell everything. I'd say just because you don't wanna piss people off too much right off the bat. Okay, we're not gonna sell the national parks in the first administration. We're gonna sell the national parks in the second administration. So we'll do that in term two. In term one, we'll sell all land that is not a national park. But it needs to be sold. And again, it's part of this complete restructuring. Other than that, there's not a lot that needs to be privatized. I mean, the much, much of veteran affairs could be privatized, the treatment of veterans. Probably the grid, I don't know how much of the grid is federal government, state government. Somebody said, what about education? Education is all regulated at the state level. As I said, I would get rid of all regulations pertaining to education. You're right, it deserves its own bill. Get rid of all regulations at the federal level. Get rid of the Department of Education. Get rid of, as I said, all funding of student loans. And then you're gonna face the constitutional question. And it's an interesting challenge to think about. How do you get rid of state regulation of education at the federal level? And I'm not sure how you do that. And this is why, again, maybe we should start at the state level, free up education completely. Take a state, again, like Florida, and start with student education saving accounts and make them very lucrative, very enticing. Private schools move into the state. They compete with public schools, they out-compete them. Slowly, public education becomes irrelevant. You start, you know, and all you're doing is paying these vouchers, again, tax credits. At the same time, well, credits, you basically give them an education saving account. It's not a tax credit. You give them education saving accounts. And then over time, you start lowering and lowering and lowering those to zero. And if you're also at the same time deregulating the state, getting rid of licensing laws at the state level, doing all of that at a fundamental level, then the state will become so rich. People will become so well off that education will be a breeze for them and you just get rid of whatever government support you're providing them to be able to afford that education. Of course, taxes come down. In a state like Florida, it doesn't have income tax. You start lowering the state sales tax, the corporate tax, all the other taxes that states inflict on their businesses. But how do you at the federal level inspire the states, either through the courts or just through example, to deregulate, to de-tax, to get out of their lives of their citizens? The whole issue of federalism and the relationship between the states and the federal government has to be reconceived and rethought. And ultimately, states don't have a right to violate individual rights any more than the federal government, but how do you actually implement that? How do you bring that forward? And can you do it? Can you do it? All these interesting ideas, yeah, reimagine because it has to be different than the founders conceived of it. It would have to be different than how it's being conceived today because the relationship between the federal government and state government is off. It's just not right. And it wasn't right at the founding. It was right at the founding. Slave you would have never been allowed. It resulted in a civil war and could result in civil wars in the future. So it has to be reimagined, rethought, reconceived in terms of, and in that sense, ultimately, to really get to a point where all of this now is not just something a president did and a Congress did, but is now permanent. You'd have to rewrite the constitution. You'd have to have a constitution convention and rewrite it. And of course, rewriting the constitution is something that you would have to be very cautious of and you would only do when you convinced the outcome was a good outcome and you could only be convinced of that once the culture had a complete change and a complete revolution. Think about everything I've proposed. Is any political candidate today other than Millay addressing any of these issues, thinking about any of these issues in the proper direction, in the proper direction? No, never mind the end result. None of them have that in mind, but can they even conceive of it being in the right direction? No. So, you know, the things that I just proposed you wouldn't be able to do unless, and Millay's not able to do it. Millay will do a tiny fraction of what I proposed. The fact is, as I said, Congress is stopping him. He's already withdrawn the privatization of the energy company, the state energy company. He's already agreed that some other companies will already partially be privatized. Other aspects of his laws, he's already, you know, moved away from. So, he can't because the culture hasn't changed because he doesn't govern over a culture that supports what he's doing. It just wanted to change, so it voted for him. He's only, you know, he's negotiating with Congress. He's doing what you have to do as a politician, which is negotiate. And you're not gonna get anywhere near as radical as I suggested. And you're not gonna get as radical reforms as Millay suggested in his campaign. You'll get far more moderate reforms. And that's why you wouldn't touch the Constitution until you had dramatic cultural change. But ultimately, to solidify any dramatic changes that you made, you would have to change the Constitution. Have to change the Constitution. You cannot leave the Constitution the way it is so open to interpretation, so easily misinterpreted. So easily turned into a status document. So anyway, that's what I would do. It's the direction Millay is heading, but he's far off from doing what is actually necessary. What he's doing is enough to solve Argentina's, many of Argentina's economic problems. What he's doing, if they let him get away with it again, there's gonna be a big strike and a big demonstrations in two days. If they let him get away with it, if the courts let him get away with it, if Congress lets him get away with it, if all of that happens, then you will get a significantly improved Argentinian economy. Are you gonna get a free market haven? No, it's just not happening. It's way too soon. The culture's not ready. The Argentinian culture's is not ready. The American culture's not ready. You're not gonna get any one of those bills that I proposed. Are you gonna get thoroughly completely passed in a Millay's Argentina or in America today? Let's see. Okay, a few reminders. Support the show. The show is funded through support by individuals like you. Thank you to all of you who contribute monthly on Patreon or on youronbrokeshow.com slash membership. I really, really appreciate all the monthly supporters. They're the ones that are steady. I know exactly what's coming in. Predictable, it makes it possible to do the show. Thank you also for all of the superchatters. We got quite a few on board today. Still a way to go though to get our goal and it is important that we get our goal in as many shows as possible so that we can keep doing these shows. So thank you for that. We have, Iron Man Institute is a sponsor of the show. Soon we're gonna have a second sponsor. I'll let you know about that when they sign on but I expect by the end of February, latest end of March, they will sign on as a monthly sponsor but for now we have the Iron Man Institute as a sponsor. Right now, they wanna remind you that if you want to attend the European Conference, the Iron Man Conference in Europe, in Amsterdam this year in early March, I will be speaking there. So we'll, on Cargate and a number of other people from the Iron Man Institute, you should go to ironman.org slash start here where you can fill in an application. We're offering many, right? Many scholarships. The scholarships cover your travel costs, your hotels, everything involved, your tuition and you can attend this conference. It's a conference will dig deep into a lot of Iron Man's philosophy and I promise you that trolls are not invited. They don't get scholarships. So it'll be a lot, a lot, it'll be free of trolls, how about that? All right, hopefully you'll join me. Don't forget, start here, ironman.org slash start here and you can get the application there and fill it in. All right, the deadline is end of January. Last day of January is the deadline. So please do it ASAP. It's gonna be a great, I think that a hundred students already signed up, already coming or a hundred scholarships that they're giving away. So it'll be a big conference, a lot of young people, a lot of people interested in objectivism, wanting to go deep dive into objectivism, a lot of good students from all over Europe and the United States. All right, let's see. Ryan says, we're going to the super chat questions. Ryan said, I listened to your show on Goggins. When I complete a big goal, I often think I'm glad it's done. I don't think I would go through that again. But a few months later, I will forget the hard part and want more. I did not hear it from you, thoughts. Yeah, no, absolutely. Look, the real thing you have to think about is whether you should really be thinking at the end of a major goal. I don't think I'll go through that again. Is that really consistent with your knowledge of the fact that in order to attain great goals, there is, there are challenges, there is struggle, there is pain to do it. I mean, what is it, no pain, no gain, something like that? But the focus is not on the pain. The focus is not on what Goggins calls the suck. The focus needs to be on the positive. The focus needs to be on the goal achieved, on the values achieved, and on what you're learning in the process about yourself, about the world, about how to achieve things. Sure, it's hard, but hard is part of what makes life interesting. If it was easy, a lot of these things you wouldn't want to do, you wouldn't get anything out of doing them. My problem with Goggins and with Jordan Peterson and others is they focus too much. They spend too much time and energy, but they want you to focus too much on the suck, on the pain, on the difficulty. But, you know, I don't, I can't remember doing that where I would say achieve the goal. It was hard, I don't think I'll ever do that again. I don't remember ever saying that to myself, right? It was hard, and the next time it's gonna be hard as well. And it'll be hard in different ways. And yeah, I probably want different challenges. I don't want to make it hard like that. I want to make it hard in a different kind of way. Yeah, certain things, that was hard. And I really don't want to do that again because I've learned what I got out of it. And next time, if it's gonna be hard, I want it to be different. So, you know, so I think that is completely consistent. All right, I forgot to mention, please like the show. We currently have 81 likes, 123 people watching live. We should be over 100 thumbs up. I mean, if you don't like the show, you can give it a thumbs down, that's fine. There are a number of people in the chat that should do that. Of course, the real thumbs down is them wasting their lives on a show they don't like of a person they have contempt for. That's a real thumbs down on their life, but then they suffer. So we don't have to give them a thumbs down. Life is giving them a thumbs down. But you, if you like the show, if you get any value from it, please consider doing a like. It doesn't cost you anything. It really helps the algorithm. It really helps YouTube promote the show. Interaction is valued by YouTube. That's nice, we're already up to 89, but we should be over 100. Hopefully in the next few minutes we'll get to over 100. Please do that thumbs up. Fairly simple. Also, let me just add, if you're not a subscriber to the show, please consider subscribing. There is a subscribe button there. That way you'll be let know every time I have new shows, new videos, new shorts, new stuff goes up, you will get an announcement, you will find out. So if you enjoy any of this, subscribe to the show and be notified. Thank you, Ryan. That was 50, 70 Canadian dollars. I really appreciate that. Thank you. If I missed something in terms of your question or didn't capture it, let me know, but there's no question. There is hardness, but you have to have the right mental attitude towards the hard, and that mental attitude needs to be positive. To live with, it sucks, but I gotta do it. It sucks, but I gotta do it. Everything sucks, but I gotta do it. And everything's hard and everything's painful and everything's, and even when I take a goal, it just means I need another goal and therefore it's gonna suck again. That attitude, that focus, that orientation towards the negative is ultimately demotivating. Ultimately, almost nobody can hold onto it. And I don't think even Goggins actually lives that way, but it's a selling pitch. It's the thing that differentiates himself from everybody else. Everybody else. So he emphasizes it. DWN logic. Thank you. What would be worse? Trump presidency with Dems in charge of the Senate and House or Biden with Dems in charge of the Senate and House? Oh, God. I mean, I think at the end of the day, probably Trump presidency with Dems in charge of the Senate and House, I think would be worse. But hard to tell, I mean, and the reality is that, and this is the danger with Trump, is that Trump, even when he won in 2016, managed to lose the Senate, which was unbelievable and give Georgia two Democratic senators. And that was all Trump's doing. Trump single-handedly managed to hand the Senate to the Democrats. So he is such a loser that, yeah, the fear is that just him running, even if Biden wins, Republicans lose both the Senate and the House. Let's hope that's not true. I mean, I do think 2024 is a year where the Republicans have a chance to take the Senate. Maybe they lose the House, but they have a chance to take the Senate. Republicans just need one House so they can veto whatever Biden does, and that would be ideal. So I'm for Biden, president, Republicans control the Senate. That would be my ideal, not ideal. My preference, God, ideal. Stringer Bell, 31, 314. Hello, Iran. I recently finished a found head audiobook. I can't imagine Ellsworth Tui as an individual in real life. Is he symbolic of the mixed economy with the regulations, protections, et cetera? I mean, you can't imagine Ellsworth Tui. I think that's true in the sense that Ellsworth Tui is aware of his own evil in a way that I don't think a real life character could be. But if you think about people like Paul Krugman, if you think about people like Tucker Carlson, they are Ellsworth Tui's. They're not Ellsworth Tui with the same kind of self-awareness and self-realization. But they are Tui's in every respect of their interest in destruction and tearing down and hatred. I see Ellsworth Tui in many of our intellectuals, not at all, but in many of our intellectuals. And it's that nihilistic, anti-individualistic bent that they have. Certainly Chomsky, what's his name? Finkestein, this guy who hates Israel. There's a whole string of them that are really, really horrific. And the equivalent of Ellsworth, except as I said, in regard to having any kind of self-awareness. That I think is science fiction. I think anybody with that level of self-awareness couldn't live with himself, right? Let's see. Oh, you asked another question. Is he symbolic? Well, I don't think he's symbolic of the mixed economy. He's symbolic, it's a tricky word. I mean, I think he's the epitome of the intellectual of a mixed economy. But he's ultimately an authoritarian fascist. I mean, that's what Ellsworth Tui ultimately wants. He wants control. He uses the mixed economy to gain control. And he manipulates the mixed economy. He manipulates the human mind, the mixture that exists within the human mind. So I don't know why he would, how would you call him symbolic of it? He's a reflection of it. He's a creator of it. He's an embrace of it. He's a manipulator and a user of it. Adam, make all cities private on the model of California private cities like my neighbor, Whirling Hills. Same for highways, schools, including universities and all government services, except courts, law enforcement. Yeah, again, most of that, almost all of that is at the state level. But I completely agree. Actually, there's a massive private city being planned for California. Probably the most exciting civil engineering project in the country right now is this project on the east of San Francisco where private entrepreneurs have pooled their resources, pooled their money. And over the last few years, they've been buying massive swaths of land, low-grade, I think, low-value agricultural land. And now they've announced that publicly they are going to go through this zoning and all the other crazy processes that exist in California to build a city that is gonna be completely private in terms of its roads, its infrastructure and everything about it. And this is all money coming, all private money from Silicon Valley, from entrepreneurs, from venture capitalists. And it is run as a private venture. Now, whether the state of California and whether the local authorities will approve all the zoning and all the things that are required in order to do that is, we will see. But it is the largest project like this that I know of, certainly in the United States, probably in the Western world. And it's exciting. It's pretty amazing. It's gonna be beautiful. Much of the city is gonna be mixed-use, but it's gonna have all kinds of stuff. And yeah, I mean, I think it's a thrilling project and a really, really exciting opportunity of a private school. And the highways will be built by the private developers and everything else. Now, exactly what role the state will have in this new city, I don't know. Exactly what the county and the state of California, how much they'll intervene is hard to tell. But this is clearly a positive development and exciting. But in terms of privatizing everything, absolutely. The challenge, of course, is going to be how do you do it at a state level when I'm assuming you only have control of the federal for now? This is why what is really needed is the rewriting of the constitution to define a clear separation of state from economics, state from education, state from health care, state from basically forced separations, right? State from religion and ideas more broadly, state from economics, state from education, and what is the fourth? Is a fourth state from science, state from science, that's a place where it intervenes a lot. I mean, separation of state from economics includes health care. So you'd want those explicitly in the constitution, not to be implied like it is in the constitution today. And then you'd want a clear system of federalism where it's clear what the states can and cannot do and in what sense they have independent governments and in what sense they do not, in what sense they have to abide by federal law. All of that needs to be worked out that is not in the existing constitution, not explicit enough, not in a way that can be protected over the long run. You need to make it a lot more explicit. All right, guys, I'll just remind you again, we do have a super chat going. Please consider supporting the show. It's to support through you guys and when you're here live is a big chunk of the monthly support for the show generally. So what does it constitute? Constitutes about, I don't know, 40%, 30 to 40% of the total. So it's really, really important we hit our targets so that I can hit, so we can hit the total monthly targets. By the way, I don't know, I'm curious if anybody's noticed a change. Here's a little competition. I should have done this as a poll. Is anybody notice a change in the picture? This is not for those listening audio only. Anybody notice a change in the picture? The first of many changes that are coming in terms of the lighting, in terms of what we're gonna do with the background and everything else. So I'm curious if anybody can see a change we've already made. All right, Honda, Honda. If we adopt a gold standard, wouldn't that drastically inflate gold's value beyond its aesthetic industrial application leading to an undue increase in mining? No, I mean, right now gold is not only used for mining. Gold is used by many people as a store value. Gold is used and valued, priced as a potential currency and certainly as a store value. So I don't think gold would go through the roof because suddenly it's being used for something else. Now you could estimate approximately how many dollars are out there in circulation in a sense in the US economy? How many grams of gold exist? Take the total number of dollars divided by the total grams of gold and come up with a price per gram. Now that's not how we would set the price because I think the market should set it and maybe gold would go up in value quickly significantly but so what, that's fine. However much it went up and went up but it's already not just priced as a aesthetic industrial product. It's already priced in some sense as a monetary as a monetary product. All right, all right. So we need a lot of 20, $50, $100 questions guys so in order to make a goal, we are a little way behind. So we've been doing well this year but don't stop, kept to keep going. All right, I've got now two, five and $10 questions. So if you've got questions, 20, 50, 100 those are the ones that we need at this point. We've got 130 people watching. I mean, I guess if everybody did like a sticker for three bucks, $299, $299, we would get the, we'll get the ultimately but really if you've never done a super chat this is an opportunity if you've, what else? You know, obviously a lot of you don't have a lot of money, $2.99. Hopefully you can afford, you can put that in. Just do a sticker, just press on that dollar sign below there on the chat and do a sticker to support the show at three bucks and we will ultimately get to our goal. All right, Andrew just did $19.99. I asked for $299, he did $19.99. That is really nice. Andrew of course, one of our long time and consistent supporters of the show. Usually a $20 a piece, a pop, that's great. What do you say to his motive to degrade standards of art, to devalue excellence with subordinate to his motive for power or the reverse? Hmm, interesting question. I think he is primarily a destroyer. So he's primarily somebody who wants to degrade, who wants to destroy, he wants to tear down. He's discovered that he can do that and gain power. The power and destruction, he can manipulate the kind of the destructive energy to gaining power over others. And indeed, what is the power useful to destroy and degrade and tear down? Because destroying, degrade and tear down, that's the ultimate, that's the real motivation. That's what the real drive is. That's what the real drive is. So I think that is the primary. It's hate, what drives them is hate. Hatred of life. All right, we got this going rolling now. So we've got Linda with $5 and Shrugs with three and Donna with $4.99. It's great, I asked for 2.99, but he does more than that. Wes earlier did a sticker for $50. Thank you, Wes, really, really appreciate that. And I know I missed some stickers. Jonathan Honing was up there in the beginning and a bunch of others, but let's see. So, oh, Steven did another $5. I mean, yeah, I mean, this'll chip away at what we need to do this. 2.99, Aunt Sam, first Super Chat ever. Thank you, thank you Aunt Sam. Really appreciate that. There's another 2.99 by PB. So yeah, I mean, it's fun. It's fun when you can participate and contribute and at these levels, everybody should be able to do something. First Super Chat, I particularly appreciate that. Thank you. All right, James, another one of our regulars. Jay just came in with $50. That makes it a lot easier to get to our target. A few more of those. We're there. James says, is the Palestinian population suffering through that public opinion is turning against Hamas? Or are they such genocide of mystics their philosophy has not been shaken? I think the population is at least at a margin turning against Hamas. I don't know the numbers. I don't know that anybody does. But you're seeing more and more and more online criticism of Hamas. You're seeing more social media posts in places like Telegram, anonymous, because they have to be careful not to piss Hamas off because Hamas will come after them. But you're seeing more and more Palestinians turn against them, particularly in Gaza. I think the people in the West Bank are removed from the pain. And look, the pain has to be visceral. It has to be real to shake you up to challenge your most fundamental beliefs. That's why Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that's why Dresden have to happen. So the people in Gaza are starting to realize that the pain that's been inflicted on them by the Israelis was caused by the Palestinians, the Hamas, and are turning against the Hamas. The West Bank, where they're not feeling the pain viscerally, even though they can see what Israel's doing, it's on TV every night, not yet. I still don't know the numbers, and it's gonna be hard to tell what the numbers are. Hamas clearly is worried about this. This is why they put out an 18-page apology to the Palestinian people in a sense today, trying to explain why they did what they did and how the Palestinian people will long-term benefit from this. And one of the things Israel needs to make sure happens is that whatever happens, the Palestinian people do not benefit in any way from what Hamas did. But of course, Israel's already caving. As of this afternoon, Rume had it, I think was Substantiated Rume, that Israel is offering a two-month ceasefire, two months in exchange for release of the hostages. And I'm sure it's not just two months, it's two months plus thousands of Palestinian terrorists released from Israeli prisons in order to get the hostages. Two months, in two months the world would have forgotten. In two months, I think even some of the Israeli population will have forgotten, in two months the restart of war will be almost impossible. So, I don't know, it's crazy, it's crazy. They still need to take over the very southern part of the Gaza Strip, they need to go into Rafah, they need to control the border between Egypt and Gaza. Until they do that, they can't guarantee that Hamas is still not getting more stuff being smuggled across the Egyptian border. They don't control Gaza, they can't destroy Hamas until they take that southern border and the fact that they have not and the fact that that's not what's on the table, but what's on the table is a ceasefire for two months. Yeah, I mean, this sellouts, this sellouts and I told you Netanyahu would sell Israel out in years. Michael says, do you think there are people in Malay's administration who watch your show? Oh, I don't know, I don't think so. I don't think so. There were people in the White House, in the Trump administration who watched my show, didn't help much, didn't change anybody's mind, but there were people in the Trump administration, some of the adults in the room, as they called themselves, who watched the show. But, and I don't think there will be any in Trump 2.0, in Trump's second term, there won't be any watching. I doubted in Malay's administration, there are certainly lots of people in Argentina who watch my show and a lot of people who might know Malay or might have seen Malay's, maybe watch the show, but I don't think anybody in the administration itself does. If they do, let me know, I'd love to. And I'm gonna be in Argentina as I told you in April and we'll try to meet Malay or at least try to meet some of his people with him there. Thank, did Ruhans support Russian revolution on Mensheviks side? She supported the initial revolution, but she always knew they were weak and they would fail. But I don't remember reading much of what she wrote about the Russian revolution. I mean, she was very low on Russia generally. She really had very little interest in Russia. Her real interest was getting out and once she discovered America, her real interest was America, that was it. Hunter Hunter says, you've mentioned an upcoming Objectivist Libertarian Conference in Argentina. I believe in April. Do you remember what it was called? Can't find it online. I don't think it's online yet, but I will be in Argentina in April speaking at a conference. It's not an Objectivist Libertarian Conference, it's an Objectivist Conference. It will be the Ironman Center Latin America is putting on a conference in Argentina. It's gonna have two conferences. One in Guatemala and then in Argentina. And, you know, the conference will be, I think it's something like the, it's the first weekend in April. So it's the 6th, 7th, 7th, 8th, something like that of April will be. I will be doing, I will be speaking in Guatemala. I'll then be speaking in Argentina and then I'm probably going to fly to Santiago and they've invited me to come and speak in Santiago to I think a number of different audiences in Santiago. So I'm looking forward to it. I'm looking forward to being in Argentina in particular, but Guatemala, Guatemala has a very new, very leftist president. But Guatemala, of course, has Universidad Francisco, Mara Quinn, the most free market university in the world. And so, and I have a lot of friends in Guatemala, including the guy who sculpted that sculpture. I showed you the other day. This one. He's got some amazing sculptures. I mean, I think he's the best sculptor working today, anyway. And so I look forward to being Guatemala. I look forward to being in Chile. Chile is always interesting and the evolution of Chile and the changes in Chile have been really, really fascinating. But Argentina is the most interesting because of what's going on there and the changes they're going through right now. Darius, before Federal Reserve and subsequent hundred years of regulations, were there still bank failures, recession, speculative bubbles and credit cycles, even under the gold standard? Yes, they were. There were a lot of them. And in particular, bank failures and bank runs and speculative bubbles and so on. And the reason for that, I'm multiple. One is, as I mentioned earlier, from day one, banks in the United States were regulated. From day one. So we've never had a free banking era, not if you take freedom seriously and you know what the word free means. Banks have always been regulated. One of the major forms of regulations were the fact that banks, until 1994, banks could not branch out of state. They could not buy other banks out of state. So banks have been heavily regulated from the beginning of the United States, from the very, very beginning. And the second reason is even under the gold standard, the United States government couldn't keep its hands off the money. They kept switching gold, silver, gold and silver and depreciating one against the other. And we never had a pure gold standard with a pure free banking system. And as a consequence, we got all these bank crises. Bank crisis in Canada, which had a much purer system, much more free market system, much more free banking system than we did. It didn't have. All right, Max Simasks, thank you, 399. Ask for 299, give 399. But then it dried up, then it stopped, no more. So just a reminder, 299, 299, just be, if you just go in and do 299, be great. To support the show, just to stick a less than a Starbucks coffee. And you can be part of the support that this show gets from its super chat. Don't forget, of course, you can also support the show monthly. Ragnar, Norwegian Kroner, thank you Ragnar, really appreciate that. Jay Korn, agree with your immigration or wherever I'm frustrated by the mismanagement, ports of entry should be used so that ill-violent don't answer, more on the right would agree if you shared this frustration. But I'm not that frustrated because I don't view the people coming across the border as threats. So I'm not, I mean, yes. But the way to, and of course the way to solve it is to legalize immigration. The solution is to legalize immigration. I've said on the show, I've said other places often, legalize immigration, make it super easy for people to emigrate through those ports of call. And then if somebody's sneaking in, shoot them under the assumption they're probably terrorists. That is not why, that is not why people on the right don't agree with me. People on the right, it's not an issue of immigrants coming in, so the violent, because violent people are entering, but the fact is violent crime in the United States is declining. Last two years, it's declined in the fastest rate ever. So what is this crisis? What is the fear? What is this angst? I agree, people shouldn't just be swarming across and then expecting welfare. Stop giving them welfare and legalize immigration. And then they'll come to the ports of call and it'll be easy and straightforward. But that's not what the people on the right want. They want to build a wall. They don't want immigrants. They hate immigrants. And they don't want legal immigrants either. Right now there's a deal in the Senate between Democrats and Republicans that would limit how many people come across the border. They would send everybody back, most people back that are caught and limit very relatively small numbers come in for asylum. They would increase the funding for asylum courts and do a lot of things that supposedly people want, but would also increase legal immigration. H-1B visas would increase there. And the Republicans are not going to approve it. They're not gonna approve it. So it's not, I mean, I get it, but there is no way, I want to be very clear, there is no way in the world that anything I say about immigration is going to be viewed positively by the right. It's just not. And whatever it is that I could say shoot them, it doesn't matter because I'm pro-immigration. I want more immigrants. I want to legalize more immigration. And yeah, I mean, it's I think immigration system is a disaster not because of the border crisis. Border crisis is not that significant of an event. It's just, it doesn't, it's not changing anything really. What's changing is them getting welfare in the United States. That's what's causing the problems in Chicago and New York is the welfare they receive. Not the fact that they're there. Let them work, then they're not. Anyway, I've said all this before. So I don't think there's any way the right is gonna like anything I say about immigration. You might like it if I add that element in, but there's no way for me to get the right on my side because they're not on my side, fundamentally not on my side. Ari, thank you, really appreciate it. So Ari did 999, you can do 999 or 299 or 399 or 2099 or right now 25099 would be perfect. That would be a really nice number. All right, we're almost done. Jake Cohn again, also using a story helps. Should the police keep an immigrant from competing with you? Where is your pride? When my pride was challenged, I was convinced. I agree completely, I agree completely. Stories like that do help, but I think you are unusual in being convinced because I've used that example a million times. I've used lots of stories. I mean, my favorite story is not just are you afraid of competing with immigrants and why are you afraid of competing with immigrants? But don't you find it, don't you find it inspiring? The courage of a young pregnant mother to travel hundreds of miles across the desert to risk her life and to enter a country she's never been to, she knows nothing, she might not even know the language yet. So the baby is born an American citizen so her child can live in a free country so if child can have a wonderful and magnificent future don't you find that admirable? Don't you find that inspiring? I do and I've used that many times in lectures and yes, I agree completely. Stories help. I don't think the other point helps because I don't think they're interested about ports of entry or not ports of entry. They just don't want immigrants but I do think stories help. But it depends on the audience. A lot of right-wing audiences are just not open to any argument, they're just as bad as the left when it comes to allowing people to speak. The only times I've ever been, I mean, no, I mean, there are only two issues on which I'd be shouted, you know, try to be silenced. You know, farm policy after 9-11 and immigration. Immigration by the right, farm policy by the left. You know, they don't want to hear it. Matt says, keep dismantling the trolls. It shows your moral certainty and courage to cast judgment without personal attacks, totally in line with your principles. I agree, thank you, Matt. I appreciate your support and your judgment. All right, let's see, thank you, Ari. Thank you, Kev. Yeah, Ari and Kev each did two bucks, $2 and $3. Really appreciate that. You know, we've chipped away. We've chipped away. There's a little bit more to chip but we've chipped quite a bit away. Michael, wokeness is a religion. It pretends to be compassionate but it's really about finding someone to hate. I don't know, I mean, I'm not sure that's right. It is a religion and it uses compassion just like Christianity uses compassion, it uses compassion just like the communist moves compassion. Part of it is finding somebody to hate and partially it's finding salvation and sacrifice and sacrificing yourself. Wokeness like other forms of this type of religion are primarily motivated by self-hatred. Of all the hatred, it is self-hatred more than anything else. David, hey, Iran, what is your view on meditating to reduce stress and going to the gym to improve mood and the more broad body, mind-body connection than many scientists tout? I'm not sure what the broad mind-body connection many scientists tout is but I do think there's a connection obviously. I think meditating is great. I mean, if you can do it and if you can use it to reduce stress and to help reduce tensions so that when you are focused, you can focus better. You can, you know, your focus is more intense and intentional, then yeah, I think for those of you who meditate, those of you who find it a value, it's terrific. I mean, I don't, I mean, I do breathing exercise to reduce stress and stuff, but I don't meditate. I find I can't really. I either just can't or I fall asleep but that middle state of where you're not asleep but in a meditative state, I've never managed to enter into that state. So I don't know what it's like but I'm all for doing it. In terms of gym, yeah, physical activity, I think does produce certain chemicals that do improve your mood. I don't think it's sustainable if there are reasons for you not to have a good mood. So I don't think the gym is what's gonna get you out of clinical depression or it's gonna change your attitude towards life if you have a negative one but I do think that it is a positive. It definitely generates a positive attitude and I think there is a broad sense in which what you think can impact and what you think and integrate can impact how your body is functioning. You know as athletes, if what you're thinking is gonna, and how you're thinking about it and the extent to what you're thinking about it is gonna affect your athletic performance. So there's a tight relationship between mind and body and in objectivism. We don't accept the duality of mind, body being two separate things. I mean, they're two integrated things, they're two aspects of the same unity and therefore they both are impacted by each other. So yeah, sleep helps, absolutely, Jennifer's right. Sleep is a big help as well. Both for recovery, for athletic performance, for stress reduction. All right, let's see. All right, we've got another three, Jeff 37, another $3. Yeah, it's probably gonna be difficult to get to what we need to get in the next five minutes. But whatever you guys can do is greatly appreciated. It's probably, yeah, we're almost at two hours and we've got basically very few questions left so we'll be calling it a night. Thoughts on Francis Hodgson Burnett's novel, The Secret Garden. What do you think is the best novel for young people? Treasure Island, The Jungle Book? Oh God, I mean, I read The Secret Garden but a long, long time ago. I don't remember it well enough to comment. I shouldn't. And I don't know what the best novel for young people is. I mean, Treasure Island, Three Musketeers, those are all great, anything. Any of the adventure novels of the 19th century are fabulous, any novels that project heroes, novels that deal with science, scientists are really good, but hard to find. But a lot of the heroes, Sherlock Holmes, there's just a lot of stuff, a lot of good novels. I do think Treasure Island's good, Jungle Book. I really enjoy Jungle Book. It's a Kipling, A Few Musketeers, of course, in the same vein. So yeah, I mean, some of Henlein's juveniles, Henlein's books written pre-61 are pretty good. Jules Verne, I really liked. I like the Westons of Karl Maye, although you can't find them in English, so this would have to be for somebody in Europe. Yeah, so there's a lot, but I don't have a best. And I don't remember, this was years and years ago. Frank says, will your Texas talk be canceled if protesters come? I don't know. I don't control any of that. It might be, it depends on security, it depends if there's police involved, it depends what the security's like, whether they'll clear out the audience or just rather cancel. It's very, very hard for me to tell how I've never had a problem at the University of Texas in Austin. I've spoken there many times. I've never had a problem. I've never needed security, so it's hard to tell what security will, how they behave in Texas. I know in other states or at other universities, although again, I haven't had security issues at all. Anyway, at a university in the US for many years. Robert, smooth travels, see you tomorrow night at University of Michigan. Thank you, Robert. Look forward to seeing you. Kev, how much would it cost to be allowed to refer to you as daddy? I don't think there's enough money in the world. I mean, it depends. Maybe if Richard were paying it, maybe I'd take it. Jeremy, man who raised me, migrated here, black, non-practicing Muslim, but I think non-assimilation and Islamists are the national security risk I can't accept. I agree, but again, evidence. Evidence, we believe in facts and evidence. We don't have any evidence that the Islamists have used our Southern border to come into the United States in significant numbers. There's never been a terrorist attack by an illegal immigrant to snuck in through the Southern border. They've been attempts through the Northern border, but they were not sticking in. They were coming in legally. 9-11, all legal. And I am, and I've said this, a proper war ban all Muslim immigrants, but suddenly screen Muslim immigrants really, really, really thoroughly when they come in. But to do that, you have to have ports of call. And to do that, you have to legalize immigration. I mean, all of this problem goes away once you legalize immigration. Non-assimilation, I think mostly is overstated. Immigrants assimilate this generation or the last few generations of immigrants have assimilated at about the same speed as 19th century, early 20th century immigrants. The difference is that American culture's not as good. Stay assimilated into a rotten culture. And the reason the American culture's not good has nothing to do, nothing to do with immigrants. Well, I mean, to the extent where all immigrants has to do with immigrants and has to do with German immigrants who brought in Conti and German philosophy into America and the progressive movement. But the assimilation problem is an American problem, not an immigration problem. It's us. We have to A, let them work. B, we have to be proud of our own culture and proud of our own country. C, we have to know what that country is and know what that culture is. We need to be able to define it. So I don't view assimilation as a problem beyond the broad problem of America. We have no respect for ourselves. Why do we expect immigrants to have respect? And in that sense, I think many immigrants have more respect for America than Americans do. So speaking as an immigrant, but good for you, good for your dad, good for your dad for coming here, for risking it all and coming here. And look at you, I mean, this is it. This is what America's about. And this is what we're losing out by making immigration fundamentally illegal, almost impossible to do legally. And therefore creating a massive incentive for illegal. I mean, when you make drugs very, very difficult to obtain, you create a black market in drugs. When you create, when you make immigration, very, very difficult, legal immigration, very, very difficult to do, you get a black market. Illegal immigration is just a black market, just like any black market. And you don't, you're not gonna crush a black market by force. The only way to destroy a black market is basically to legalize it. Particularly a black market where no rights are being violated. And with immigration and with drugs, no rights are being violated. By legalizing them, no drugs are being violated, right? All right, thank you guys. If anybody wants to do a final contribution, that would be great, but otherwise, I will say good night. I do not know when the next show will be on. That is the reality. Tomorrow for sure, no shows. I might, Wednesday, God, unlikely. I've got a school at noon and I've got Midlands, which is a two-hour drive and then a two-hour drive to the airport. So Tuesday, Wednesday, no shows. I'm hoping for a show on Thursday, but unlikely. Probably the next show is Friday, Friday during the day. So see you on Friday. I hope you have a great week. And I hope you don't miss me too much. Bye everybody. Oh, actually, I hope you do miss me a lot. Miss me a lot. I save up the money so the super chat, so you have money to ask questions in the super chat in later in the week. Talk to you then. Bye.