 I'm sure our next reflection doesn't mean an introduction, but I'm going to do it anyway. So, it's your own book. It's at the Chair of the A&M Institutes. We'll be speaking about the morality of entrepreneurship, which is a talk he's given a few years ago, and I think it's very relevant to our conference. At the same time, I'd like to talk about his latest book as well, Equal is Unfair. America's Miscounted Fight Against Equivalent Equality. And I'm showing the real key to making America a free or fair or a prosperous station is to protect and celebrate the pursuit of success. Very relevant to the idea of a more developed revolution that we're talking about throughout the rest of the conference. So with that, another review of your own book. Thank you. Actually, my latest book is not Equal is Unfair because it just came up with a new one about three weeks ago. It's called The Wolf Creators, The Model Case for Finance. So it's a book where I defend bankers, hedge fund guys, private equity, all the villains of the modern world. So I'll be talking about that on Monday for the Adam Smith Institute here in London. So you can look up the information about the talk on the Adam Smith Institute website. It says it's sold out. Just call them and say you want to come and tell them I said it's okay. At least we can try it, right? So one of the great injustices probably ever committed by mankind is the way we treat entrepreneurs and businessmen. I mean, think about what entrepreneurs have achieved. And you've all seen the graph of income per capita, wealth per capita from 10,000 years ago, right? For 10,000 years it goes like this. It's kind of flat. This is wealth per capita, income per capita, same thing. And it goes up a little bit, maybe during the moment. Then it goes down a little bit during the dark ages and generally. And then it goes like that, like that. And if you look about who does that, who makes that happen? I mean, at the end of the day, that wealth that's being created for the first time in human history, we can see what's being created. We went from zero sum where it's just static, nothing's happening, nobody's creating really anything. Everything's zero sum. If you're wealthy, it's because what? How do you become wealthy? You should know this in England. Heritage. Yeah, but how did the heritage start? Colonial. What's that? Colonial, even before colonials. There were aristocrats in England before colonial times. How did they get there money? The time insurance. What's that? All case, good timing. Good timing, merchants. Wow, you guys are so optimistic. They stole it. They were good at exploiting other people. They were good, they had more political savvy in sucking up to the king. They had more ability to round up peasants to be their serfs. But aristocrats are nothing but very sophisticated thieves throughout Europe because everything they engaged in was zero sum. There was no real creativity, there was no creation of wealth. It's one of the reasons I think Europeans are so skeptical about wealth and about wealth creation and about rich people. Much more so than Americans. Because you have this long heritage in which 95% of the population was basically being exploited by a small group of people. Humilated, relative to the time they asked some some money and other people's expense. And you've never really gotten over that. Whereas America started basically with nothing. Third-rate colony, that's why they got their independence. You guys didn't really fight, right? And yet within 140 years became what? The most powerful economy in the world. Why? How did that happen? How did England get the wealth that it got? How did life expectancy go through the roof? How did we attain all that during the 19th and then again during the 20th century? No change in human wealth for 10,000 years until the Industrial Revolution. And who makes the Industrial Revolution possible? It's businessman, it's engineers, it's scientists, it's entrepreneurs. So it's people taking the ideas of science and applying them to creating values for people to consume. That's what entrepreneurs do. They find new ways to create new values that we are willing or interested in consuming and willing to pay for them more than what it costs to entrepreneur to make it. So what entrepreneurs really do is they find profit opportunities. The genius of entrepreneurship is to find profit opportunities that didn't exist before. And by doing so, they create massive amounts of values of things that make our lives astronomically better. They raise the standard of living in everybody, at least everybody is willing to work in society. Everybody is willing to be engaged in the trade of value in society is better off because of the work of entrepreneurs and businessmen. Everything we have around us is a consequence ultimately of some wealth created at some point, building, making, creating from the same engine on. Here in England, in all of Europe, and today, of course in the Far East. So this graph where income and wealth don't change, stayed that way in Asia until when? They stayed. You know what level this is? What level did people live on for those 10,000 years? Yeah, subsistence, what is that? Poverty line. Poverty line, yeah, they wish they were today's poverty line. What was the income per capita 300 years ago? In Europe. Dollars. Yeah, it's under $3 a day. In today's dollars, like McDonald's would have wiped you out. Like a Big Mac would have wiped your income for the whole day. I mean think about what that really means because it's in today's dollars. See any one of you think about what you could do with $3. And you can do more today with $3 partially because there's so much available today. Back then there was nothing. So most people lived, they grew their food and ate it. That was it. Very little surplus, very little ability to trade, almost no ability to create wealth until this amazing revolution that happens in the late 18th century where wealth is suddenly created. The human mind is suddenly unleashed. For the first time, really, start whatever business we want, work whatever we want, create whatever you want, trade with whoever is willing to trade with us. And when we give people that kind of freedom, entrepreneurs, business people take advantage of that and create and produce and make and build. And yet when we look at our history and we look at who we honor and who we respect and who we admire in our history, who we build statues for, who we name streets after. It's not the people who create and build and make too. Who do we tend to honor? We love generals. We love politicians. No. Generals and politicians are important. But generals and politicians are not the people who created the 20th century. They're not the people who created the wealth that we all enjoy. They're not the people who made possible life expectancy of 84 or mid-80s that we enjoy today. They're not the people who brought us out of subsistence farming and to the point today where we live amazing life by any standard, by any historical standard. So that projection of wealth per capita or income per capita is a consequence of entrepreneurs and businessmen who we don't honor. We don't even know their names. We certainly don't call boulevards after them. In the United States, anybody know what in America we call those businessmen who in the 19th century built the country, made the country, created the wealth that everything that we enjoy today in America is based on? Robber barons. Robber barons. Robber barons. We call them the same name that was attributed to, justifiably, to the aristocrats in Europe pre-Industry Revolution. Robber barons. Barons, aristocrats, robber thief. Yes, they were robber barons. But they were the aristocratic class of Europe. They were not the industrialist class of America. So the Rockefellers and the Carnegie's and the Mellons and the J.P. Morgan's and you have in England, in every country that has developed, has the equivalent of those people. And in modern times, it would be the Bill Gates and the Jobs and the Ari Ellisons of the world, the people who actually create, build, make. So why is it? Why do we have so little respect for these people? Now, today, we kind of admire the high-tech entrepreneurs. We kind of think they're cool. But at the end of the day, they're not going to, we don't remember them as giants. Nobody's building statues of Steve Jobs. It ain't happening, right? There was a movie that tried to portray him as ugly as possible, right? We want to rip him down. There are no streets named after Steve Jobs, as much as we love Apple. So they're probably the most admired entrepreneur of the last 50 years of Steve Jobs. And a few weeks after he died, there were all these editorials about what a nasty person he was and how he didn't give charity, how Apple never gave charity while he was alive. So even the most admired of them, we have to have caveats in. So what is it to prevent them from really giving them their due, from fully respecting and admiring and celebrating the people who create the material world in which we live? What is entrepreneurship about? Why do people do it? Why do people become entrepreneurs? To make money, that's one obvious reason, right? If you're good at it, you make a lot of money. What's that? They're ideas into reality. Yeah, they want to put their ideas into reality. They have a passion, they have a love for the thing that they are doing. You know, Steve Jobs, you know, love making beautiful things. He loved creating. He loved building. So he went to work every day because he had a passion for this. And he wanted to make a lot of money. Partially because making a lot of money is a sign that you're doing what? A good job. Right? Making a lot of money means you're creating values. Making a lot of money means people value what you are doing. Because why would anybody pay, what are they, a new iPhone selling for? A thousand dollars. So why would anybody pay a thousand dollars for an iPhone? Because it's pretty, right? Because it's worth more than a thousand dollars to you. Otherwise you wouldn't pay a thousand dollars for it. So your life is better off having an iPhone than if you didn't have it. So the money is a sign that people really value the work that you do. That people really, in life, are getting better because of the work that you do. And plus, you know, it's fun to have a lot of money. For lots of reasons. So why did Steve Jobs become an entrepreneur? For whom did Steve Jobs become an entrepreneur? For himself. Steve Jobs was about Steve Jobs. Bill Gates is about, ooh, Gates. Larry Ellison is about Larry Ellison. What's his name at Uber? What's his name? Ryan, is it Ryan? What's that? Uber. Let's forget his first name. Travis. Travis is about Travis. Yeah, Travis is particularly about Travis. Travis is a character. Entrepreneurs go into the business because they love it. Because it fulfills them. And because they make a lot of money. It's about their selfish pursuit of their own values. Of their own dreams. Of what their life is about. It's why they're so passionate about it. I mean, I don't know how many of you are entrepreneurs. Have worked at startups. I mean, it's hard. It's unbelievable hours. It's unbelievable effort. You have to be really committed because you want to start your own business. And if you want to make a success out of it. And that commitment comes for the fact that they love what they're doing. That commitment comes because it's in their self-interest to do it. They're getting a reward for it whether it's monetary or spiritual. So entrepreneurs and business people generally are obviously self-interested. They're about themselves. He taught about being self-interested. Since we were this big. Yeah, that's bad. Really bad. I know what your mother's taught you. My mother taught me. Good Jewish mother. To be selfless. Think about this first. Think of yourself last. Eat lots. What's that? Eat lots. Eat lots? Yeah. What's that? You got to finish everything on your plate. Why? Not because it's good for you. Because they're starving children. They can't fill in the blank. I can date when you were born based on the country your mother used. My mother used Biafra. That's why you can tell I was growing up in the late 60s. In the early 70s. And there was Bangladesh. Biafra and Bangladesh. She's not going to use a motivation. You should eat your food because it's good for you. No. The whole idea is the whole idea of ethics, the whole idea of morality. The whole idea of what they want to teach you is what's good for them. And you're going to eat this because otherwise they will starve somehow. Never made any sense to me. One of those things your parents say and you go all right they're not as smart as I thought they were. But the whole notion of morality that we have taught, the whole notion of ethics is to be selfless, to sacrifice, to think of other people first. Not to think of yourself. Not to pursue your passion. Not to try to make as much money as you can. And the profit, the word profit, the concept of profit is deemed negatively in our culture. Because you are profiting, it's a selfish term. It's about an individual making money off of supposedly other people. Hey, you could have given the product away for free or you could have had a smaller margin. How dare Apple have 40% margins when they fall. Or 50%, whatever the margin is. That's just, what's the word? Greedy. So we're taught from very young suspicious of anything that smacks from selfishness, from self-interest. Indeed, what do we talk selfishness means? What does selfishness mean if you look it up in the dictionary? Yeah, so it's always about exploiting others. So the definition of self-interest should be something like taking care of yourself or placing one's own interest as primary. Placing one's own interest as primary at the expense of others. And it's at the expense of others. Where did that come from? Why at the expense of others? Why can't we keep it the first? To taking care of self or pursuing one's own interests. It's exploiting others that we've been really drilled into us. We've been told that there are two options in morality. Being selfless or being an SOB. Being selfless or exploiting other people. Those are the two options. And as a consequence, the whole way in which we think about businessmen and entrepreneurs is distorted and provoked. So, you know, I like to use Bill Gates as an example because people love to hate it. Bill Gates made 70, I don't know, $75 billion or something. I think he's the second richest man in the world these days because of Jeff Bezos. He's just, you know, he's now worth more than Bill Gates. Partially because Bill Gates doesn't work anymore. Imagine if Bill Gates was kept on working. So Bill Gates made 75, how do you make $75 billion? Some of you have heard this before. Why do you make 75 billion? I didn't come with a billion. I mean, this is a secret. How do you make a billion dollars? Create value, but not just any value. Lots of people create value. Yeah, but how do you do that? What does it take to create more than a billion dollars worth of value? How many people do you have to connect to make a billion dollars? Well, that means your problem origin is $1. How do you make a billion dollars? It's not hard, right? It should be easy. What's that? Innovate. I know a lot of innovators. A lot of good innovators who are not billionaires. Some of the greatest innovators in the world are not billionaires. To make a billion dollars, you have to create something that almost everybody wants. Everybody, I mean, hundreds of millions of people. Not only do they want it, they want it so badly that they're willing to pay you for it more than what it costs you to produce. And if you can take a profit and multiply that profit by hundreds of millions of people, or billions of people, and if you can repeat the process over and over and over again, you're going to make billions of dollars. Could it be how you can enrich your life by looking at the real entrepreneurship and showing that this particular device, that this particular device enriches your life in what you might not consider? Absolutely. I mean, all innovation does that. All innovation teaches us something about how we can use our lives, our time, our energy in ways that we didn't know before. I never wanted one of these. I didn't know what I'd do with it. Somebody had asked me, seems kind of silly, carrying it around all day. I have a computer at home. I'm connected to the internet at home in the office. It turns out I do. I remember cell phones. You guys were too young. But when the first real commercial cell phones came out, not the bricks, the little ones, and I said to my wife, we don't need this. This is stupid, right? We have a phone at home. We have a phone in the office. It's a 20-minute drive. It's like, if you don't have a phone for 20 minutes, how big of a deal is that? So we didn't get one. And then my wife had a... She was commuting. She was getting a master's degree. She was commuting. She was coming back late at night. And we said, okay, we'll get one phone for that drive late at night, just in case the car breaks down or something emergency happened. So as soon as we got that one phone, within three months, everybody in the family had a phone and we were talking constantly and using them all the time. And yeah, we learned that we needed something, that we had no clue we needed. The demand by production creates its own demand. Right? When people, when great entrepreneurs create something new, the demand comes. It's not that they're fulfilling a demand. There is no demand. There is no demand for cell phones before their cell phones. The demand is created when the cell phone arrives and we realize its value. It's a steep civil gaze. Made billions of dollars by changing the world. By making the world a better place. By improving the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Actually billions. I don't know that there's a human being on the planet that was not touched by something Microsoft did. It was so interconnected. It was so part of the world in which we lived. So even if you're poor and have never touched a computer, the aid that you're getting is logistically controlled and efficiently delivered to you at a low cost so you can get more of it by a product of Microsoft some way down the chain. Nobody on the planet was not touched and made better by Microsoft. And yet, we don't have statues. No roads named after Bill Gates. We don't think of him as this incredibly good person. Yeah, he's a my business friend that we study in business school. Now, when did Bill Gates become an okay guy? Kind of a good guy. Yeah, when he started saving children in Africa. He was saving children in Africa and Microsoft as well. But he had to leave Microsoft. He had to leave his job. He had to stop making money. He had to stop producing values. He had to stop being creative and put money in a foundation and start giving it away. Now why is that good and noble and being in Microsoft not? What's that? Because he's not earning any profit. So in Microsoft, yes, he was helping you but he was helping himself at the same time. So the helping you is tinged by self-interest and therefore is no good. Morally, it's not acceptable to make money off of helping other people but really help each other. It's through trade. Once he went to the foundation now he's not benefiting. Now he's just giving. Now it's much purer. It's much cleaner. There's no self-interest. He's not making a profit. Now he's a good guy. Now he's still not a saint. Why isn't he a saint yet? Because he's still got a lot of money. Well, you don't have to die to be a saint. But you don't really in terms of people's attitudes. Mother Teresa was a saint before she was a saint. But he still got money. He's still got a beautiful house. He seems to be enjoying the whole thing. Right? He's always like when he does interviews he seems to be into it. Right? Have you ever seen museums here in England where people don't see the paintings of saints? Have you ever seen a painting of a saint with a smile on their face? No, that defeats the purpose. You're not supposed to be happy as a saint. You're supposed to be suffering. The whole point of the morality that says your duty is to serve others you should be selfless is that you don't smile. Smiling is kind of a selfish activity. Smiling means you're having fun. Right? Augustine Comte the French philosopher of the mid-19th century coined the term altruism. Sad that if you think about the benefit that you're going to receive from helping other people it taints the act it's no longer moral. And if you're smiling you must be enjoying what you're doing. It can't be moral. It can't be good. So what would it take for Bill Gates to be a saint? How do we make him a saint? Make him sad. I like that. That's kind of gentle. He's done that. You guys know about the giving pledge? He's gone around to all American billionaires actually globally and guilted them into signing the giving pledge which says that you're going to give over 50% of all your wealth at some point during your life to charity. So he's already done that. Still not a saint. Still having too much fun. He'd have to give all his money away. He'd have to have something bad happen to him. And I think ideally but he'd have to do it willing because if somebody else did it to him then that wouldn't work. He'd have to give all his money away leave his house, move into a tent but what really would work is if he showed a little blood we want to see some blood what's that? Yeah, if he's made that choice. Yeah, no, I think if something happened to him they'd say well the morality comes from choices. Accidents don't make you maul. What makes you maul is the choices you make. All maul theories believe that almost all. So unless you're a Calvinist or a sort of sex and Protestant religion believe that you're predetermined. You go to hell or heaven so it doesn't matter what you do in life. I don't get that theory it's a little, it's too crazy for me. But no morality is about choices. So he has to make that choice and then he becomes a good guy. Now think about that. Think about the injustice involved in it. Here's a person who's worked hard and I don't know how much you've read about Bill Gates but he worked unbelievably hard. From when he was a teenager figuring out computers when they were early on to when he started Microsoft to figuring out all the issues that had to be involved how to create wealth, how to create value how to grow this business, how to make it prosper. He's applied his mind. He's had fun doing it. You get the sense where Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and many of those entrepreneurs, they love it. They get a kick out of it. And then all of that all of the benefit to mankind that they've created is worthless in our minds. In terms of morality, it's worth it. And they have to give it all up somehow to be worthy. And you see this in the old the people who were called Robert Barnes. J.P. Morgan died miserable filled with guilt for all the selfish stuff he'd done creating America building America and started giving away vast amounts of money and hope and he said this explicitly in the hope of buying himself into heaven. Carnegie, Rockefeller all of them were filled with guilt because they acted in their lives based on their self-interest but they were taught that what's noble is to be self-less they wanted to be Mother Teresa not really they knew Mother Teresa was the moral ideal that they should strike towards but they didn't want to do it they wanted to live their lives and what happens inside of you when you live one life but you think the ideal is a different life guilt feelings of guilt and most businessmen out there maybe not when they were too busy when they were young to feel guilty but as they age and they make the money and they're successful they start feeling guilty and guilt is as every Catholic or Jewish mother will tell you guilt is a fantastic way to manipulate and as politicians use it effectively you know if you don't raise your own taxes those kids over there, they're not going to get an education they're going to starve, they're going to die something bad is going to happen to you vote to raise your own taxes and we all go, oh yeah, absolutely that happened guilt is an incredibly powerful tool which is used against them constantly the giving pledge if you read it filled with the idea of guilt, there's the notion in America, I don't have to use it in the UK of giving back as if you took something as if there's a zero sum game here as if you didn't create this massive amount of wealth for everybody else you have to give back somehow you've already given and given and given and given and now they want more so we live with a moral code that is antagonistic to the very function of an entrepreneur that's antagonistic to the very function of business we don't respect them we don't ultimately admire them we condemn them we tax them to death Trump now is unleashing the new tax plan and we're going to lower everybody's taxes except anybody who's successful we can't lower their taxes so the top marginal rate is not moving there's actually talk about increasing it they're going to save a little bit of money but they're taking deductions away so they'll actually land up the top marginal tax rate will probably land up paying more, not less and if you cut corporate taxes one of the great myths about corporate taxes is if you cut corporate taxes it's not shareholders who benefit who benefits when you cut corporate taxes workers and consumers so corporate taxes are tax on employment and a sales tax on consumer goods so everybody who thinks that the Wall Street is going up right now because corporate taxes can come down there are two options one that's just not true, Wall Street is going up for other reasons second if it is true then Wall Street is going to be very disappointed when profits don't increase because profits don't go up when you cut capital gains corporate taxes prices go down and wages go up so it's a great thing to cut corporate taxes but it's not the rich who benefit so what's the solution the solution in my view is to rethink our approach to morality to rethink our approach to ethics to ask the question that Ayn Rand asks she asks why should you be selfless why should you care more for others than you do for yourself why is there happiness more important than your happiness the solution to our attitude towards entrepreneurs and ultimately our attitudes towards capitalism and our attitudes towards freedom depend on the morality that we hold on the more code that we believe in look we the free market people who believe in free markets we won the economic debate decades ago with Mises and Hayek we won it capitalism works business creates wealth entrepreneurs produce we have all the concrete evidence in the world for the success of capitalism for the success of free markets all you have to do is open your eyes to history and it's right there in front of you the value of businessmen and entrepreneurs to our lives is obvious every day as we consume use the stuff that they made possible from the iPhone to our fiduators to everything that we have to our apartments that were billed by contractors who are entrepreneurs as well but we don't think in those terms why because we're conditioned by our morality to not trust anything that has changed your self-interest we're conditioned by our morality to be suspicious of people that are making money we hate profit because our mall code tells us they hate profit there's no economic argument against profit no legitimate one and the ones that were made in the past have all been refuted so the only thing in my view that is holding back the success of free markets of capitalism of freedom in the world is an ancient decadent anti-life, anti-individualist morality because the options are not be moral and therefore take care of others and be altruistic and love the neighbor like yourself and you know you're your brother's keeper and everything else that's morality and then the alternative is cheating, stealing, SOB selfish bastard that's not the choices we have there's a third alternative which is what to be truly selfish and truly selfish means what what does it mean to be selfish it means taking care of yourself placing one's own war being as our primary concern without the karma at the expense of others to hold that because it turns out that when you act to exploit other people when you act like steal, cheat and do all that things you're not working in your own self-interest you're actually destroying your own self-interest you're destroying your self-esteem you're destroying your pride you're making it possible for yourself to achieve the real self-esteem that a person who's self-interested can achieve you cannot be happy exploiting other people you can ask me in the Q&A for examples if we have any time if I run over so let me try to wrap up and then we'll answer the questions to be self-interested is to take seriously one's own life it's to live the best life that you can live for yourself it's to target your own success your own happiness your own flourishing as a human being and what's the one thing that makes all that possible for human beings what entrepreneurs rely on to build their businesses to create these values what do we all rely on to live and thrive and succeed capital before capital, by the way where does the word capital come from what's that in that sense so capital comes from what? from the mind what's that the term capital no, that's capital the word capital predates capitalism is a word that mocks coin and I think there were actually people before mocks mocks were very popular but where does the word capital come from from a word in latin I think that means the human mind no? where does the word capital come from what's that what's that head which means what's in the head because it's not empty head what makes human life possible what makes human success possible whatever entrepreneur in the world relies on is what it's not capital it's not customers way before capital way before customers trade or money before money other people you have to have an idea you have to have a plan where does that come from your mind your mind every entrepreneur starts with an idea every entrepreneur starts with real tough, extensive thinking it's all about thinking it's all about using your mind to figure stuff out it's not Steve Jobs didn't need capital to create this he needed an idea he needed a vision and it's lots of ideas because it's not just the idea what this will look like or what this will do that how do you build it how do you create it where do you get the capital all this stuff requires thought all of human life requires thought it's a product of the human mind we don't generate this stuff from emotion it doesn't come from mystical revelation this comes from using your mind using your reason discovering truth discovering fact figuring it out laying out a plan and then executing the plan and even executing the plan communicating appropriately with others describing it to them but it relies on their mind because they're going to have to execute on this it's the human mind that lays at the heart of all human activity and it's the human mind that is at the core of what it means to be self-interested if you want to live a good life if you want to flourish as a human being if you want to be successful as a human being what you need to cultivate is your reasoning capability what you need to cultivate is not the ability to light, heat and steal it's the ability to create and produce based on those thoughts it's the ability to live based on your rational reasoning mind so it's not about being selfless or being an SOB it's about using your mind to live the most effective life that you can live for yourself and if we view morality as about that in a world that view morality is about virtue nobility are people who use their mind to create and to build and make stuff what would that make entrepreneurs? heroes, saints Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are saints in my moral code not because they give any money away but because they create the money because they create the values because they use their minds to make their lives better their lives exciting their lives interesting and we all benefited from that, cool but they not heroes because they made our lives better they're heroes because they made their lives better they actually lived they made something in their lives there are lots of people out there who are alive technically but are not living life is to be lived you got one shot at it and to do that it's the mind that must be cultivated so morality that holds the sanctity of the mind the sanctity of the individual that holds that to be moral is to pursue one's own rational long term self interest is a morality that admires and respects and holds a saintly what entrepreneurs and business people do and a morality like that if people actually held it then free markets is easy because it's the only kind of world you would want to live in when nobody was an authority over your mind when nobody told you oh you can't build that you have to get a permit who the hell are you to give me a permit who what, what have you got because some government assigned you to some committee you get to decide what I build and what I don't build nobody was self esteem who has a morality of self interest would allow for the kind of bureaucratic nonsense that we have today freedom is obvious once you have that self esteem once you want to live your life for yourself based on your own mind you don't accept authority so for freedom to be successful for entrepreneurs ultimately to flourish I believe what we need is a moral revolution I encourage you the virtue of selfishness I encourage you to study the morality of freedom the morality of capitalism the morality of entrepreneurship and I think the only person to really present the case for the morality of capitalism and morality of the individual is Ayn Rand so read Ayn Rand thank you all questions I have a question for the members of the audience it would be very interesting if you have read the history of cellular technology to realize just how long government intervention prevented cellular technology from taking both in the world we would have actually had mobile phones readily available a month or a half 40 years ago it had not been for explicit government Thomas Hazlett used to work for the FDC wrote an article I think for recent magazines to make it available to those allow me to offer a suggestion my friend Michael Clow has saved and the older I get the more I think it's valuable obvious means overlooked that it's precisely in many ways people overlook the extraordinary accomplishments of the human mind I relieved myself in one of these lovely facilities here I think it was a man named Thomas Crapper who said we take it for granted the extraordinary impact of being able to dispose of human waste in a nice fashion if you get in parts of the world I was going to say if you travel and rule with China you suddenly discover if you walked along this ramp and you saw a picture of Joseph Lister a man who invented basically far fewer people die most people don't have any knowledge of history and that is obvious means overlooked but that's absolutely right but what's tragic and what's not tragic criminal is that we don't teach it we don't even try so first of all the 19th century it's kind of brushed over quickly in history classes when I think it's the most important century in human history in human history is boring nothing happens really in a sense of material wealth nothing happens we died in our 30s during the rest of it and suddenly something amazing happens and we don't teach it that's stunning to me and then when we do teach you what do we teach oh there was child labor in the industrial revolution you Brits really abused your children what did children do before the industrial revolution working they didn't die in bed they died working every child worked on a farm from sunrise to sunset and they most of them over 50% died before they were aged 10 that was life and yet we're obsessed about the short period of time when they worked in factories and why did they stop working in factories because the government bailed them out why did they stop working in factories because the the laws were always passed after the phenomenon had already gone away so why yeah I mean I don't know how many of you have ever managed people but if you have imagine managing 12 year olds it's not it's not efficient it's not productive they're not good employees that's one reason the second reason is parents became rich enough to be able to feed their kids without the kids working no parent wants the kid to work if there's an alternative the reason children work is because they have to feed themselves so as soon as the parents got rich enough which is what the industrial revolution created just take the kids out of the factories and send them to school they sent them to school the 19th century is a period in which we ended slavery capitalism ended slavery it's a British and ultimately the Americans after pretty bloody civil war that ended slavery the most capitalist countries in the world it is but none of that is studied none of that is talked about it's the pollution and the child labor and all the nonsense that people want to focus on and now in China people obsess whenever I mention China ooh but they're so polluted and rageated who the hell cares a billion people have just come out of poverty we should be dancing in the streets a billion people are not poor anymore so there's a little pollution in there who the fuck cares I mean it's mind boggling to me when a little story about the pollution completely blights people to the real story in the world you know how many people today we talked about the three dollars a day how many people today in the world 30% of the population today in the world lives under three dollars a day used to be 95% what is it today it's under 10% it's 8 30 years ago what was 30 it's gone from 30 to 8 in 30 years that is stunning so much good stuff has happened to people over the last 30 years in India in China, in South Korea in Taiwan, in all over Asia in lots of Africa we should be celebrating oh no there's pollution in Beijing so yeah I mean we don't study it we don't have the right perspective somewhat without creating any value at all so that's in no small part because of due to the property system of property rights do you still have that kind of feudalism bubbling on underneath I don't believe property rights are feudalism so property rights are legitimate you supposedly or somebody supposedly earned the wealth that was required to buy that house and the reason you sold it for so much more than what you bought it at is because of the stupid housing policies that the British government has today and that London administers housing on average housing prices should never rise in a free market they never would because it's a consumer good as soon as you move into the house as soon as you buy a car its price drops as soon as you drive it after a lot of time with the house it's a consumer good it's deteriorating every day you live in it it's not rising in price but because we have constrained the supply of housing the supply of the existing stock of housing raises in prices it's all coming into mention why don't you outside of like the other side of the river why don't you build high raises all over London you know with condominiums given how much because the whole family and others who own a lot of the housing and a lot of the Russians who ever own a lot of expensive housing don't want you to lower the price of housing in London they want to keep it high and they want to keep it higher keep going right so there's huge special interests within the city of London to try to make sure that housing prices never come down because they're benefitting from it sorry just last time it doesn't that taint you were saying why the businesses get such a bad name no none of those none of those are businesses not I mean there's a certain element businesses lobby government and get favors from the government and they get a bad name right but let's take that apart let's deconstruct that for a second my favorite story about that is Microsoft I'll get to that in a second the only reason businesses lobby government and get favors is because government has power over them the injustice is the power over the business so if you have power over me I'm going to find a way to get on your good side and try to get favors from you because otherwise I don't know what you're going to do to me because you have power over me the evil is not the lobby the evil is the very fact that government has anything to give these businesses and I'll give you the Microsoft example it's such a classic and it's true story so in the 90s in the early 90s Microsoft spent exactly $0 on lobbying no lobbying no law firms in washington no building in washington no presidents in washington nothing they stayed away they were in seattle as far away they didn't have to be in washington and they were brought in front of the senate are in hatch who is a well known senator he's still in the senate you guys have to be in washington you have to start lobbying you got to get a law firm you should build a building in washington dc you have to have a presence here in other words you got to brighten me otherwise he didn't say otherwise but it was implied Microsoft says in the meeting they go we're not interested you leave us alone we'll leave you alone no change in their lobbying policy you're a trunk slayer knock on the door we're from the justice department and you're in violation of antitrust what was the violation what's that they were giving internet explorer away for free bundling whatever the hell that means right with windows and netscape didn't like that because netscape you guys are too young to remember this we're using our browsers so netscape was the big game in town I think it was 60-70 bucks to buy a browser to browse the internet Microsoft gave it away for free that was a violation of antitrust laws so what did Microsoft learn from that experience what do you think they went court for 10 years after that 10 years they had a government appointed bureaucrats sitting in the headquarters in Redmond, Washington of Microsoft signing off and every corporate decision Microsoft made how to have the bureaucrats sign off those 15 years were years of no innovation Microsoft used to be the biggest company in the world the most innovative exciting company in the world and it become nothing almost nothing what did they learn from lobby lobby lobby you better get in these people's faces so now they spend tens of millions of dollars a year lobby they have a magnificent building in Washington DC like equal distance from the White House and from Congress so that focus I don't blame Microsoft for lobby and by the way what did Google learn but Google watched this very early on and they said we don't never want to be Microsoft we don't never want the government to come after us so what did they do they started spreading money around from day one they paid off all the politicians in the US they forgot about Europe they forgot a lobby in Europe so Europe went after them but the evil is the power we give our politicians the evil is the power we give the bureaucrats not the business lobby they're just trying to defend themselves and yes once you start that process and you get lawyers involved you're always going to overstep your bounds and start accusing using government to oppress your competitors and all that happens and that's bad but that all gets set in motion because of the power we have given the government so I advocate a complete separation of economics from politics government should have no power over business and as a consequence business would have no interest in the government it's like in reality the reason I give the charity I help others and stuff is because it makes me feel better than in last those hierarchy of needs that's important to me but not just that I then know if I need to pay as a consultant they'll be able to help me so is there an issue with that yeah I mean I think she would because you're placing your feelings as a primary why do you feel that way is the question why do you feel good by helping other people now I'm not saying that's illegitimate but I'm saying you should have an explanation for it again she would say everything needs to be guided by reason so if I'm helping somebody and it makes me feel good is that feeling coming from some other morality that's been taught to me by my parents and my priests it feels good because I feel guilty about the wealth I've created and I'm giving it away in order to appease that guilt why am I feeling good is important because if the feelings are based on illegitimate evaluations feelings are not in a vacuum feelings come from past conclusions and thinking that we've done and feelings can sometimes be indicate that our thinking in the past is being wrong so if I feel good by giving something to somebody I shouldn't feel good about giving to then I should question you know what conclusions I came to to be clear Rand was not against charity what she said was when you give charity give to things that you believe in that of values to you that make you feel good because you understand why you're giving it so yeah she would say help a friend out absolutely because he's a friend not because he might help you in the future that's the kind of trading she would find strange no because he's a value to you his happiness is important to your happiness because he's a friend why would you give to a stranger well because maybe you have a lot of money and the stranger seems like a nice person and they might be productive in their lives and there's some benefit to you but you have to have a reason and you can certainly have reasons to be charitable but there's certain people who would never give money to because it would be against my self interest so Rand's not against kindness she's not against opening doors to old ladies for old ladies store she's not against charity she's certainly not against helping your friends all she's saying is make sure that it's rational and make sure that in the big picture it's in your self interest to do so not in a narrow sense of materialistic self-interested in a broad sense and not based on just your feelings based on understanding of where those feelings come from where your emotions come from and whether the legitimate emotions are not legitimate emotions the emotion itself is what it is it's the reasoning that created that emotion might be legitimate or illegitimate he's cutting me off thank you pleasure