 Good evening. Welcome. My name is Lynn Zinser and I want to welcome you to this nights of debate which is part of the Chicago, the Inran Center Chicago speaker series. The Inran Center for Individual Rights located in Alexandria is a public outreach and policy division of the Inran Institute. Chicago now has its own chapter of the Inran Institute here and if you'd like more information about the chapter then see me or contact events at Inran.org and we'll get information to you. The Chicago chapter has sponsors these talks and make them possible. However tonight's debate is also sponsored by the Brinson Foundation. Please join me in thanking all of these donors and sponsors for their generosity and their rational self-interest in funding this debate. We have two upcoming events for a change of pace on April 17th at this hotel. Tara Smith will be giving a talk on happiness. What is it? How can we find it? And focusing on three tools that will help us achieve happiness but which are often disparaged or vilified and ridiculed. Come for an evening that should be informative, provocative but not focused on politics. Then on May 3rd we will hosting a fundraising dinner with a special guest speaker Stephen Moore from the Wall Street Journal. For more information again contact events at Inran.org. Now for tonight's debate. I am pleased to introduce the moderator Eric Oliver. He's a professor of political science at the University of Chicago. He has written on a variety of topics as evidenced by hit three books. Fat Politics, The Real Story Behind America's Obesity Epidemic, Democracy and Suburbia and his most recent book, The Paradox of Integration, Race, Neighborhood and Civic Life in Multiethnic America. He will introduce the debaters and the format for tonight's event. Please welcome Dr. Oliver. Thank you all for coming out tonight and thank you for inviting me to moderate this debate. It's a pleasure to be invited as a professor of political science. I spend a lot of time talking with my students about this very subject tonight about what the role of government is and it's great to be able to take this discussion out of the academy and out into a public sphere here. It's also a pleasure to be here with our two speakers and preparing to moderate the debate I was able to read a little of both of their voluminous writings and it's great to see two very well-reasoned and articulate viewpoints that come from very very different perspectives and address a lot of the really most kind of pressing and fundamental issues in our society today and so we're in for a real treat as far as having two thoughtful perspectives that are going to be offered by very two very smart and articulate individuals. Interestingly, although both Iran and David come from very different perspectives, there is a lot of commonality to them and I think hopefully as we both explore their differences these commonalities will also become more apparent. I think both of them share a very strong commitment to kind of normative elements in their work and the role of values in American society. I think they both are very concerned about sort of promoting a good and just society and I think both of them have a real passion for public discourse and the free exchange of ideas. To introduce both of them on the far left here is David Callahan. David is a co-founder of Demos and edits the Demos blog on PolicyShop.net. He's the author of eight books including The Cheating Culture, Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Do Well, The Moral Center, How Progressives Can Unite America Around Their Shared Values, and Fortunes of Change, The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America and there are numerous other books as well. He's also contributed pieces to The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation and the American Prospect. David received his BA at Hampshire College and his PhD in politics at Princeton University. In between us is Yaron Brooke. Yaron is president of the Iron Rands Center for Individual Rights. He's a regular contributor to Forbes.com and has written for The Wall Street Journal, USA Today and Investors Business Daily. He is co-author of Neoconservativism, an obituary for an idea, and a contributor to Winning the Unwinnable War, America's self-crippled response to Islamic totalitarianism. Yaron received his MBA and PhD in finance from the University of Texas at Austin. He was formerly a professor at Santa Clara University and he is a co-founder of a financial advisory firm, BH Equity Research, of which he's presently managing director and chairman. So what I'd like to do for our debate this evening is we are addressing this topic the role of government, which is sufficiently huge and something that we as human beings have probably been debating and thinking about as long as we've had governments. And in order to try to provide some manageability to this topic with both its broad themes and its individual applicabilities, what I'd like to do is set forth a few questions to both of our speakers to start off the debate and probably for the next 30 minutes I will sort of be kind of structuring their conversation by asking them some specific questions. After that point I'd like to open up the floor to your questions and your comments and we will hopefully engage into a larger discussion. So let me start with Yaron. Yaron, you wrote and what I'd like to do is for both Yaron and David to start really on this general theme about what the role and the proper role and scope of government should be in society, particularly in regards to the economy. So under capitalism the government's sole purpose is to protect the individuals' rights to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness from violation by force or fraud. This means the government is limited to three basic functions, the military, the police, and the court system. In a truly free market there is no income tax, no alphabet agencies regulating every aspect of the economy, no handouts or business subsidies, no federal reserve. The government plays no more role in the economic lives of its citizens than it does in their sex lives. We now live in a very complicated industrialized economy, our post industrialized economy, and so my question for you is if this is your vision and given the society we live in, say I buy some tainted meat and get sick or my child is poisoned by lead in his toys or I'm swindled by a corrupt investment advisor, is my only option in this society that you would sort of see us live in to seek remedy in the courts? Is a truly capitalist society really then just a highly litigious society and is that really provide us with some level of inefficiency or might there be real inefficiencies to be had through government regulation? So let me get to the three examples you gave, tainted meat, bad toys, and swindled by an investor. I think the three are different and I'll get to that in a second. But let me start by setting this principle. While I think that the system that I advocate indeed is more efficient than what we have today, that this so-called litigious society, I think it would be a lot less than what we'd expect, but the so-called litigious society I believe is more efficient. That's not the case I'm trying to make. I want to put efficiency aside for a second. And what I'm advocating is for principle. So the principle here is, as you mentioned in the quote from me, is the issue of force. I don't believe that anybody has a right to pull a gun and take my stuff, your stuff, anybody's stuff. And I don't care if it's a group or an individual or a very large group. I don't care how much they voted. I don't care if the structure of the voting. They don't have a right to take my stuff against my will. And I don't care if that creates inefficiencies. I don't care if you don't like it. I don't care if most people don't like it. It's my stuff. Keep your hands off. So that to me is the principle. Now how does that all work out, right? So what happens? So I think that the tainted meat and the lead potentially are similar, but clearly the swindler is not. Swindler's a fraud. And in the example you read out, one of the things that I think government has a role in is catching crooks. So if the SEC has a legitimate function, it has only one, and that is to catch Bernie Madoff. So Bernie Madoff, the police should be looking for, and they should actually catch him instead of looking at my 13Ds and multiple other filings with them. They actually go after the crooks and catch him. So swindlers, there's a role for the government. The rest, yes, I think it is an issue of litigation after the fact. However I also believe that the market provides mechanism. The mechanisms that would make our meat much safer and cleaner than it is today. Make our toys much safer and better and healthier or however you want to describe it than they are today. I would much rather rely on the market, the profit motive of a variety of different entities and we could take each one of those examples and describe the different entities that would have a profit incentive to keep our meat. I mean Stull with McDonald's who is not going to make money by killing its customers. Just ask any businessman. You don't get far with that. But they have an incentive to hire companies that then do screenings and meat. There's a whole chain of private enterprise that could fit in to replicate what the government does. And that private enterprise does do it far, far better and more efficiently than does the government. And therefore I think the occurrences of these things drop dramatically. And when on a rare occasion something slips, then yes you have the legal system to figure out was they negligence or wasn't they negligence and who are the responsible parties. If I could just follow up briefly on this. One of the, as an economics professor you would know is one of the difficulties in a capitalist society and a capitalist economy has to do with information asymmetries. And as we get an increasingly complex economy where there's a greater distance between the producers of certain kinds of goods for example or even the producers of some kind of services and the consumption of those services, those information asymmetries may generally increase. Now if we rely on the market and we rely on market producers here, how do we deal with the function or the problems of these information asymmetries? Isn't there really a role for the state in helping to kind of reduce a lot of the inefficiencies that might come from those information asymmetries? So again my concern is not with efficiency. That is if the state intervenes in order to take care of those inefficiencies by violating my rights by taking something away from me, who's to say that reducing those inefficiencies even in a utilitarian setting is somehow better than the damage they've done to me by taking my money or taking away some money. So I dismiss that utilitarian argument and I argue that there's a principle here. Force is wrong. It's wrong because I think force cripples the mechanism by which human beings survive and thrive and succeed and that is our reasoning capacity. Our reasoning capacity requires free choices. It requires our ability to think through options. What force does is it limits those options. It destroys our ability to actually think through problems. It destroys that one faculty that our life ultimately depends on. So from a moral perspective, from an ethical perspective, it is wrong to force somebody to do something even if you think it's for his own good. It's wrong to use force on somebody even when it's going to make them better in some way. It's wrong to cripple their capacity to think for themselves and make those choices. But I also don't think it's less efficient. So okay, I agree. They're going to be information asymmetries. They exist today. There's money to be made in bridging those information asymmetries. That's the beauty of the market. If there's real demand for that information, if the information is really critical, you would get private entrepreneurs entering the market for those information services to provide them and compete and compete based on who provided the best information versus what we have today, which is a force-imposed monopoly where you cannot compete with those information providers and therefore the information provided is very mediocre. Just look at our rating agencies who have an oligopoly designated by government on providing information and you can't compete with them. You can't start a rating agency. I can't start an agency. We can't compete and even though they were wrong and wrong and wrong in Orange County and wrong on the mortgage-backed securities, there's no penalty. They haven't gone bankrupt. There's no penalty because everybody has to use them. You cannot use them. There's only three that the government has approved. So I would like to see a real competitive market in information. And I think that the market is healthy enough and broad enough and entrepreneurs are created enough to create such a market. Let me address one other thing that you've brought up twice in both the question. It's the issue of complexity because I find it fascinating. To me, the more complexity you have the less government you want. And this goes back to Hayek's argument about if it's really complex giving it to one bureaucrat or one regulator to figure it all out is impossible. He can never accumulate. That's the problem of knowledge. He can never accumulate the knowledge but it's not just pure knowledge. It's everybody's value estimation. Everybody's utility function if you will for their own life. Everybody's trade-offs that they're making. And now you want to aggregate all that to one guy who then has to decide which information is good and which information is bad and make decisions for people. The more complex a system the more you want to leave it into individuals to figure this out on their own and to create situations where innovation and competition lead to optimal results rather than trying to bureaucratize the context. That's a nice point because it segues into my comment for David. David recently you wrote one reason why more government and more prosperity can go hand in hand is because public spending can help prime growth through strategic investments that spur long-term national prosperity. Now to be sure too much of the wrong kind of government spending can slow economic growth. But what are the reasons why expanded public investments and education infrastructure and new technologies as Obama has called for would reduce national wealth in the long run. I can't think of any. So my question for you is well how would we deal with something like Salindra for example would that be an example of this. And more broadly why should we have any faith that political institutions are better at allocating resources than markets. Shouldn't the failure of a lot of centrally planned economies give us reason to be skeptical of government efforts to manage economic growth. Yeah well let me just say for starters it's great to be here and thank you for moderating this debate. A long time admirer of your work. It's a debate with Iran. Iran and I have debated a number of times before so we know each other well at this point. And I guess to start to answer your question and make a broad framing remark one of the problems I've had with Iran's arguments through the course of our debates is the way in which he is arguing with success is because over the past 60 years or so roughly since World War II a balance between government and the private sector has pretty much been the norm in the wealthiest parts of the world. We've had whether you look at the United States or Western Europe there's been very robust markets and also a strong role for government and a role which became dominant after World War II has actually been phenomenally successful. I mean the United States has become in the last 60 years the richest country in the history of the world with that model. Europe is the second wealthiest zone in the world and China which has a very strong role for government a role which has expanded in terms of its management of industrial policy. China is well on its way to becoming one of the wealthiest countries in the world too. I admire Iran for his strong principles and for his belief that it's all about the principles and the moral principle but the historical record is pretty clear that a mixed economy has produced high levels of wealth and to put that model at risk for the sake of a set of moral principles I think is highly risky and questionable and I would take real issue with the principles themselves. Iran says you know I don't want force I don't want anybody taking anything from me that is mine by force. My wealth that I have made through my business say I don't want government coming in and taking my wealth but the fact is that nobody makes money in business by themselves. We don't operate in some total vacuum we create wealth because we live in a society that is a complex and interdependent society. You can't make any money without roads and infrastructure and educated work force and court systems and all sorts of basic foundations that make it possible to create wealth so you can't make your wealth in a complex society with all these forces that support you and make that happen and say no it's all mine because that just doesn't reflect reality so I have a major problem with that idea that Iran often espouses in these discussions. As for your specific question about the role of public investment in spurring economic growth I mean that's one of the areas where the historic record in the United States is quite clear. I mean if you think about the role of public investment in kind of creating the modern middle class in the wake of World War II it's been huge. I mean we had the G.I. Bill which offered subsidized mortgages to millions of people who fought in World War II. That helped create this huge boom in the housing market and the creation of suburbia, the home mortgage interest deduction which helped spur home ownership. The suburbs were also opened up by massive investments in public transportation through the interstate highway system our workforce became a lot more educated thanks to the creation of the public university system you know the higher ed public university system which still three out of four students in this country go to was dramatic piece in terms of creating this more prosperous society and you know I could go on with other examples the investments in science and basic research and technology. I mean Silicon Valley a lot of that started out as government spending through the Navy and research and development there's so many examples of where government science and technological investment has been really pivotal there. Yes you know you do get the occasional cylindras or things that don't work out so well. There is a risk of crony capitalism the system can be kind of co-opted by special interests and you have efficiencies that way but you know there's lots of problems with the private sector as well. I mean lots of things that don't go so well and I'm willing to take some of those risks and I think we need efforts to manage those to keep them at bay but the in the grand scheme of things the historic record I think is clear that public investments pay off in terms of building prosperity certainly our global competitors understand that. I mean the Chinese you look at what they're doing in terms of public investment it is phenomenal they're building 8000 miles of high speed rail to link all of their major economic centers they have the most advanced airport systems airports in the world I mean they're building these major research universities they understand that the state has a strong role in promoting prosperity and they are our competitors right now and in the future. If I could follow up just briefly on that though if we look around the world today sure China seems to be booming although some people say that you know they have had a bubble in terms of infrastructure and infrastructure development and you know there's a question about how much of their economic growth has been just propped up by building thousands of miles of high speed rail network and if we look at Japan with its sort of stagnant economic performance over the past 15 years or the European crisis and the crisis around the euro and sort of sovereign but you know a lot of people would say well these are examples that where governments in these cases have been captured by special interest as you noted and it's the political capacity of certain groups to basically use government towards their own ends which ends up you know generating what might be in the long run really kind of catastrophic consequences for these advanced industrialized democracies. What would be your response to that in terms of is there something about the role of government in an advanced industrialized democracy that puts us at greater risk for special interest capture and you know maybe ultimately kind of long run dysfunction. Yeah I mean certainly with a democracy you have the that risk because of the nature of pluralism you have highly organized interest groups that can get their piece of the pie and then never let it go you know it's like those farm subsidies right that at one point made sense but then you know the farmers fight to the death to protect those subsidies or even something like the home mortgage interest deduction which I think at one point and you know really played a role in stimulating the rise of the middle class and housing but try to take that home mortgage interest deduction out and you're going to be up against the National Association of Realtors which is like a very very powerful interest group so certainly there's some sort of that kind of capture and cronyism. I think in general the United States has managed to play that balance pretty well. I mean we have had a lot of big successes with this public university system with modern infrastructure with the science and government's role in science so I think that we need stronger campaign finance rules, we need stronger controls of lobbyists and what have you to deal with that risk and in my view the risk is worth running for the prosperity that that kind of strategic role of government can play especially now when we're up against countries that have that model. Yoram would you like to briefly respond to David's comment? Sure you know I think this we're going to disagree here on history and what causes you know success in an economy. It's true that the last 60 years have been incredibly successful and I would say that is in spite of government policies, government growth so-called government investments. I don't consider them investments there's small benefits but on a net present value my guess is they're mostly negative. But let's look at the last 60 years. So post World War 2 government shrinks dramatically because we go for war footing massive amount of people join the workforce which is a great thing. The economy booms in the late 40's. I mean there's a bit of a recession in the late 40's but it booms into the 50's it does very well. Government then starts growing again in the 60's dramatically and what do we get? We get a period of 15 years, 16 years of basically stagnation if you take the mid 60's to the 1982 and you look at the most a lot of economic indicators across that period starting with the Dow Jones Industrial it's basically flat for 16 years because government has grown too big and it's gone out of control and the remedy to that is not even Reagan it's under Jimmy Carter massive deregulation the real deregulation that happens is Jimmy Carter he never gets credit for this but if you think about airlines trucking financial institutions, brokerage and if you look at the decline in capital gains rates that's all Jimmy Carter and then you get Ronald Reagan and they're continuing to deregulate and cutting taxes and yeah the economy does better under those conditions when you get government out of the equation the economy does very well but then of course the government grows again and it starts so-called investing and it starts manipulating and it starts maybe to buy more homes than we should and you get the end of Bill Clinton and the beginning of George Bush who is big government as big as any liberal is, no deregulation I challenge anybody to look at George Bush and find what he deregulated massive regulations, soybeans, oxley, new regulations across the board yes he cut taxes but other than that he was a big government guy and yes we get a big financial crisis and now we've entered if you look again at least in financial measures if you look at the last 15 years we've been flat so I would argue that yeah when we allow a little bit of freedom to the marketplace, when we deregulate, when we lower taxes, when we let people actually innovate and do their thing we get huge successes, standard of living goes up, wealth goes up, good stuff happens when government gets out of control bad things happen whether it's the 70s or whether it's today, I'd also say this just look at our educational system including higher education 75% of all masters and PhD degrees in the United States in the sciences and engineering are earned by foreigners Americans don't do masters and PhDs in sciences and engineering that to me is a black mark on our public educational system, the schools in California are going bankrupt the struggling students can't afford to attend them and the schools can't stay open anymore because they're run by a politicized process, not by an economic process and you could go on and on with the failures of the educational system instead of privatizing it all and bringing the kind of innovation and competition that we have in other markets to the education market and let me just make one point because David's made this many times and I can't remember if I responded or not, as point about about you don't do it alone, you don't do it alone, it's true you don't do it alone, you've got employees but you pay them you've got suppliers and you pay them yes, you drive on public roads today but in my world they wouldn't be private they wouldn't be public, they'd be private and there'd be a mechanism to pay for that as well and there'd be a mechanism to pay for the stuff you get yes, we don't do it alone but for everything that we get from other people in a capitalist society you trade so I want to shift human relationships from I've got a bigger gang than yours therefore I get to tell you how to live and what to do there's two human relationships that are based on trade in other words based on win-win relationships where people enter them voluntarily they are not cursed into it but it exchanges voluntary exchange so I'd like to move to a voluntary society from a society that uses force on some dictated by others based on it usually a majority David would you like to respond well I don't think that the experience of most people have who are running a business or doing something in our society is that there's a gun to their head I mean I think that for many people the system of these public goods and sharing some of the wealth that they create to help strengthen those public goods and those public systems doesn't feel coercive it feels like a sensible system and I think that's the reason why we have the system because we live in a democracy people have chosen this system you know it's funny Americans may not like or trust government in the abstract but they support individually pretty much all the things the government does by a pretty strong margin and particularly infrastructure and education to sort of very vital public goods that Iran would privatize have very strong support in the United States and have for a long time I mean people find that this makes sense to have those kinds of large systems be systems that we create as a society together and then maintain through our tax dollars and through us each making a contribution to make sure that they're robust the system has largely worked it's largely supported by Americans I think Iran would readily acknowledge that his view is pretty far outside the mainstream. Well on that I'd like to move to the topic of health care as we all know the Supreme Court right now is hearing oral arguments about the Affordable Care Act and what I'd like to hear from you David speaking of sort of public opinion when most Americans are polled about the Affordable Care Act most either there's a plurality in favor of rolling back the entire act and a majority in favor at least rolling back the individual mandate which is sort of at the core of the court case right now. How does that square then with your ideas of sort of kind of collective values and coming together with respect to this issue of health care if the majority of Americans really seem to not be in favor of kind of a collectivized solution to kind of health care problems. Well health care is actually a pretty good example of what I was just talking about of people not liking government in the abstract but liking it with the individual things that it does. It's true if you ask Americans do you like the Obamacare majority will say no but then if you ask them do you think it's a good thing that insurers can't discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions a large majority will say yes. If you ask them do you think it's a good thing that low income people who can't afford health care should get subsidies to buy health insurance a large majority will say yes. If you ask them do you think it's a good thing that the donut level and the Medicare prescription is being filled a large majority will say yeah people like all of the specific things that this health care does this bill this law does on the the individual mandate the mandate sounds very ominous you know government telling people what to do but in Massachusetts where they have it it's found very wide acceptance and one of the reasons that people come to like the individual mandate once it's been around longer and they get to understand it more is because what the individual mandate basically does is it says to the free riders in the system the people who don't buy health insurance because they don't think they're going to get sick they say hey you got to kick in you can't just go without health insurance and then when you get sick use Medicaid or go to the emergency room which drives up expenses for everybody I mean what happens we all pay for the free riders the people who are healthy and don't have health insurance don't buy health insurance when they get sick we all pay because we don't yet let's let people in this society die when they're sick they don't have insurance so we all pay what the mandate does is it says no you guys can't be a free rider you have to kick in pay what you can and when people understand that more they come to support it as they have in Massachusetts so I think that if you know if Romney did win the election and set out to overturn Obamacare my guess is people would suddenly the Republicans in Congress would suddenly get very skittish because they'd realize that most of the elements of the health care law the individual elements are strongly supported by Americans. You're on you're written about health care and you have said and I quote here that government imposed universal health care would solve America's health care problems it would in fact destroy American medicine and countless lives along with it the goal of universal health care euphemism for socialized medicine is both immoral and impractical it violates the rights of businessmen doctors and patients to act on their own judgment which in turn throttles their ability to produce a minister and produce the goods and services in question now the Europeans have had an experience with socialized medicine now for several decades they seem to enjoy great health they don't seem to have a destroyed medical system how would we how do we evaluate your comments in this right in light of sort of the experience of what seems to be a relatively successful European experience with so I would very much challenge the success of those systems and now they're popular they're popular in Europe the British love their health system you know and I agree with David Americans would take Obama care if stripped to its details I agree completely the problem with the European system and the Canadian system is that they're great systems from a practical perspective when you're healthy and most people are healthy most of the time it's when you're sick that it's a problem and the statistics are quite astounding in terms of the British healthcare system the French healthcare system the Scandinavian healthcare systems in terms of rationing in terms of waiting lines in terms of every measure when you're sick and particularly when you're sick of a disease that is likely to kill you like cancer or heart disease there is and this is unequivocal there is no better healthcare system in the world to be in when you're really really sick than the American healthcare system so surviving cancer by huge percentages is much greater in the United States than any other system surviving heart disease by huge numbers is better here than it is in any other healthcare system so even though we live less healthy lives than Europeans do we tend to be obese we tend to have all these other problems if we get sick we actually get far better treatment than they do and you know the best anecdotal evidence of this is when leaders of these other countries get sick where do they take them they bring them here my father was a doctor he's still a doctor in a socialized healthcare system in Israeli healthcare system and when he has a patient who can afford it and who is really really sick in Israel has more doctors per capita than any country in the world I mean it's a Jewish country after all where does he take them to the Mayo Clinic he doesn't treat them in Israel so when there's a disease then you bring them over here when Bill Esconi gets sick he doesn't go to France which suppose he has the best healthcare system in the world he doesn't go to the UK he comes to the US when the king of Saudi Arabia you could go on and on the point is that we have we have a segment of our healthcare system our healthcare system is broken I'm not going to pretend that our healthcare system is healthy it's not I just don't think we should emulate systems that are more broken than ours than public opinion I think we should look at facts and then we should look again at principle and you know the principle is freedom and the problem with the American healthcare system and the problem with the healthcare system of the world as a whole is there's not enough freedom there's not enough choices there's not enough innovation there's not enough market there's not enough real insurance and taking away the existing condition basically there is no insurance all insurance companies become third party administrators between the government and all of us so it's a sham to even call it insurance so you know let's move towards a better healthcare system which is one in which respect individuals and one in which we have real choices and one in which health insurance is as cheap as a cell phone bill and who can't afford a cell phone find me those people almost everybody has a cell phone health insurance does not have to be expensive health care does not have to be expensive if you get government out of it it's no accident that the two areas where we've seen the most price inflation our healthcare and education the areas that are dominated by government over 50 cents of every dollar spent on healthcare spent by government so I think the solution is and you could go through a whole plan it's not hard to do on how do you privatize the system and move away from a Canadian and English and the English system is breaking down and the German and other systems are going to break down as you see fewer and fewer young people and you've got a huge demographic problem in Europe fewer and fewer young people and more and more old people and the redistribution of wealth becomes so massive that they can't deal with it so those systems are heading towards even more decline but I wouldn't exchange our health system I mean I just had back surgery I saw eight different specialists to get an opinion the insurance company paid for all of them I had the best you know surgeons in a wonderful hospital incredible treatment when I needed an MRI I got an MRI that day my brother who had a very similar problem that I did had away four weeks from MRI even though his father's a doctor and I mean it's just you have to live in another country you have to live in one of these socialized medicine countries to realize how good you have it here again if you can afford it and I would argue that a lot of people can't afford health insurance in America today because of government not because of the private sector private sector would drive down costs not increase costs the last thing 75% of all medical innovation happens in the United States 75% we're a fraction of the world in terms of population but 75% if you bring socialized medicine to this country you kill medical innovation the reason you have the innovation here is because because doctors are free because we have freedom in medicine today and if you take that away not only do we suffer in this country but the world suffers because they benefit from the innovation we produce we export it they don't pay for it not really because it's ideas it's not stuff so you kill not only us you kill those socialized system that we're subsidizing all over the world Your Honor if I could follow up on this and this goes to a larger question about sort of freedom and values with respect to social services now you've described the welfare state as morally bankrupt and yet we see that popular support for spending things social security and Medicare incredibly high over 85% of the public strongly embraces these programs to what extent is their embrace of the programs an expression of their freedom if we think of the United States as a free state the similar question I would have for you in the kind of system for example we stay with health care and we imagine that you know we have just a free market of health care and some people just simply can't afford or don't get health coverage in some ways a lot of my researchers in the psychology department of the University of Chicago have been doing research on compassion it shows that we're really hardwired for compassion we had these things called mirror neurons where basically if you are suffering I will suffer by seeing your suffering when we start thinking about freedom and values with respect to the welfare state why wouldn't our embrace of sort of a collectivist solution for a lot of social problems be in fact an expression of kind of inherent values why isn't building Medicare or social security an expression of our freedom so this goes to the heart of I think a disagreement that David and I have and I have granted with most people not just with David and that is on the relationship between the individual and society and what that relationship is see I believe that individuals join into a society when they do so it is wrong for them to give up any freedom and there's no reason that they should give up any freedom that indeed what they gain by joining a society are all those benefits from trading with other people and benefiting from the brilliance and productivity and friendship and so on and love that they get gained from other people in a trade relationship but they don't give up anything by doing that they continuously trade and it's a win-win for everybody so that individualism is completely compatible with a social but it's a society of traders a society of people in that society exchanging with one another voluntarily the alternative view of society is that society is everything that the essence is society and the individual is you know a cog in a sense and now that's a dramatization nobody actually would say that right but it's okay for him to give up freedom it's okay for him to be forced to do stuff he doesn't want because there's this greater good there's this society and I think that is wrong it's evil anymore right it's just it's wrong and this is the founding principle of this country the founding principle of this country was that you own your life your life is yours you have a right to it to pursue it to do with it as you will and nobody has the right to obstruct that to prevent you to force you to do things against your will so to me that is the principle every other state including Europe today every other state is built around this foundation that society is everything and society gets to decide your fate as an individual you're nothing what matters is the group matters is society the founder's rejected that and created and that's what makes this country unique in that sense I'm an American exceptionalist if you will this country is unique in that it placed the individual first and I think that is the principle that has to guide us so it's wrong it's in my view yeah I think that they can think and do whatever they want including to mug me right so we understand when it's one-on-one that somebody does not have a right to so-called expresses freedom by mugging me we also know that he can't express his freedom by hiring the mafia to mug me but somehow it's okay if he gets together with the neighborhood and they vote and 51% of them want to mug me and it's okay but that's exactly what happens they don't physically come and punch me but if I don't play by the rules what do they do are they are stop signs of violation of my my rights stop signs would exist in if the roads were private so in a sense what the government is interceding to do something the market would do anyway so no I don't think it's a violation but I do think that having public roads is a violation of my rights yes because it's taken my money to build them in that sense stop signs are an extension of that but I'm not going to get too upset about a stop sign because that is something that would exist in a free market but for me to subsidize other people's health care for me to subsidize David Tieman for me to subsidize a whole myriad of things that the government forces me to do today or for me to change my investment behavior because the government decided that it doesn't want me to do what I do today I just heard bad news about how Dodd-Frank affects my investment business you know that's a mugging I now have to devote huge amount of my time away from the pursuit of my happiness to fulfilling a bureaucrats need my clients aren't complaining my clients are quite happy with the current arrangement I have to change it completely because somebody decided in Washington the way I do business is wrong is offensive to them they're fraud they're not accusing me of violating anybody's rights it's just they think my clients would be better off after a different arrangement they're not asking my clients if they're better off or not that's not the point it's not us choosing and making voluntary decision somebody is imposing their will on me that to me you can't gain freedom by taking somebody else's freedom that is the essence of immorality it's immoral to impose your will on others by force and that's what we do when we play society ahead of the individual and that's applicable to all of those programs that you described now David on values you've written Americans shouldn't leave their destiny in the hands of private market actors who are growing more powerful instead people should come together to protect the human values that we share and when I think about this I think about well what are some of the values that we share and we've talked about some of the values that are popular here but if we look and as a progressive I think you might be concerned about some of the values that Americans share Americans share a lot of very unprogressive values with respect to things like for example race relations for a long time we were horribly unprogressive on that with respect to gay marriage with respect to say for example abortion rights from a perspective are you concerned about coming together and sort of sharing values in terms of what values will kind of determine what's shared and you know hearing your Ron's comments I'm reminded of the quote that's often mis-distributed to Ben Franklin which is democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding on what to have for lunch and I'm wondering that about you know with respect to values you know who are the wolves of you know I think if we look at our mass society there are a lot of illiberal values that Americans share and if we are coming together to protect those values will we become a more illiberal kind of society yeah I mean this is certainly an area where you have to strike balance and I think this is one role that the Bill of Rights has played in our society which is when the founder set things up it was you know the purpose of the Bill of Rights was to make sure that there's certain sacrosanct individual rights that could not be violated no matter what the majority said so I'm not advocating that the majority you know should get to call the shots on anything and everything and I think that over time through the evolution of our understanding of rights a lot of illiberal values have been kind of struck down by the or pushed back by the courts such as say the prohibition against interracial marriage but I want to come back to this question about values about compassion and you know you talked about your the researchers who are looking at how compassion may be hardwired I do think that empathy for others is a very strong human emotion most of us feel it and one of the things these researchers are suggesting is that it's also that it's so strong in us because it was a you know necessary for survival that when you felt empathetic with others and when you cooperated with others you were more likely to survive and so that kind of cooperation and empathy are kind of key tools that people developed in order to survive so they're not going away as part of the human condition and I do think that a lot of the social safety net that we have developed is a result of that those feelings of empathy and compassion and it is a big reason why it enjoys such strong support among Americans you know whether social security people overwhelmingly support or you know even something like food stamps and so I think that that's just important to keep in mind that this is not stuff that has been sort of imposed by government you know government we're a democracy government is our tool to do things together that we can't do as individuals or that the markets can't do or that charity can't do and as a democracy we've chosen to express empathy and compassion for others through these social insurance systems you know could those systems be more efficiently run or better structured I'm sure some of them could no question about that but I also disagree with Iran that those systems are basic violation of human freedom in fact you know as I read that sort of recent history of America you know I think people have come to feel that they have a lot more individual freedom and rights in the society over the past 50 years I mean basically we see the rise of sort of the modern brand of individualism starting in the 60s people kind of telling the whether it's the church or other kinds of traditional institutions that you can't tell me what to do you know this country is a lot more free than it was for individuals to sort of lead their own lives than it was 50 years ago and that has coincided with a significant expansion of government so the idea that government always makes us less free I think it's just not worn out by the recent historical record I also have some remarks to make about healthcare but maybe you have a follow up well what I'd like to do is I would like to open this up for questions in a moment and while maybe people are thinking of their questions and I invite you to come up sort of one last topic and I would just pose this to both of you I've written a lot about obesity and the social construction of obesity as a health epidemic and one of the reasons probably the best evidence we have of why Americans have gained so much more weight over the past 30 years has really been the liberalization of our food economy if we think about the way that people ate in the 1960s we ate at three meals a day at very shared time in a very constrained way we had this very set menu for breakfast a certain very limited kind of menu for lunch and we had a kind of a very constrained menu and set time at dinner and what we've really seen over the past 30 years has been this explosion of individualism in our food consumption we now can eat just an amazing variety of foods and what's most importantly and I think the reason why we've gained so much weight is how much we're eating in between meals we're snacking quite a bit and we have our double mocha frappuccino while sitting in our car driving to work and all is great and not surprisingly we've gained a lot of weight and so my question to you you're on on this is does necessarily individual liberty always provide a good for us or are we always necessarily capable of kind of restraining our own impulses is the growth of obesity in fact indicative of some of kind of the hazards of increasing liberalization of certain dimensions of life look there are no guarantees that people will make the right choices in life and this is part of my point is I don't think anybody can make those choices for other people I think that the essence the essence of life is figuring out what's good for you rationally pursuing those values that are good for you I don't believe there's such a thing as shared values I mean we each have values they're commonalities between those values but they are our values each individual has to choose their values and pursue them and we make mistakes and we do things wrong but that a system that allows individuals choices is a far better system for those individuals even when they make bad choices than is a system that regiments those choices now let me give you an example with regard to food and I'm gonna make a hypothetical here which I don't know is true but that some people some scientists have advocated you know some people claim and I've read a couple of books that the reason we're obese is not because we meet too much meat but because we eat too much carbohydrates that we eat grains that are bad for you and I'm not advocate for this I don't necessarily believe this but there's a diet out there called paleo and it says that the way we evolved genetically was to be carnivores and grains are bad for us and we didn't evolve to eat them and all this stuff and true or false I don't know and yet we have a government approved food pyramid that encourages people to eat tons of grains and eat very little meat when it turns out we evolved for tons of meat and very little grains and now there's special interest groups right there's the dairy lobby and there's the grain lobby and there's all this lobbies that are now going to advocate for wow and they keep changing the food pyramid based on special interest groups or based on what they think is consensus science but science doesn't evolve through consensus it evolves through disagreement and they challenge each other and they research and they fight over this stuff but we're telling people eat this diet now in my view government has no role in telling people what to eat people should go out and figure it out and what if the scientists that the government is advocating wrong I don't know if this causes a beat but what if it does this is what happens when you get central planning right and so they're eating different we have 50 different cereals but what if all the 50 different cereals are bad for you you get choices between garbage and we're told you have to eat a cereal for breakfast that's good for you and it's subsidized that's true through farm subsidies that David was talking about and there's a lobby for it so I would like to see the government get out of this completely out of these kind of choices let individuals make choices with their doctor with their dietitian you know reading whatever or they just go and eat fast food that's their choice so in my view these are choices and you know in a sense you bring in part of your question about healthcare that this relates to and if they made bad choices they should have to pay for it so I think that insurance companies should be able to assess whether you're obese or not and have people should buy their own health insurance not through group policies through employers and if you are at a higher risk they should charge you a higher premium so that there's an incentive to then reduce your risk we don't provide that incentive whether at my workplace whether you're healthy or not healthy everybody pays the same amount today I was just telling my employees that my younger employees are today subsidizing my kids because Obamacare allows them to be insured under my policy until 26 so my younger employees are subsidizing them let people have individual healthcare insurance let them bear the costs of their mistakes you know and just one last point on compassion if people are so compassionate and I have no problem with compassion I think it's wonderful and I think the solution to people without insurance is that compassion through charity I don't think the government has to get involved I don't think it got involved pre-86 people used to go to emergency room they didn't just die every hospital had a charitable foundation that took care of them guess who lobbied for the 1986 law that made it illegal not to treat somebody who walked into the emergency room hospitals did because they didn't want to bother with charitable foundations they just wanted to redistribute government money in order to do it so then what's the big deal why do we need force I mean I want let people be compassionate I think it's wonderful that people are compassionate but let's make it voluntary you want to be compassionate about AIDS in Africa give money to AIDS in Africa you want to help people who don't have health insurance give money for charity that deals with that each one of us can make choices based on our values and how we want to distribute compassion and I'm not arguing here the compassion is hardwired because I'm skeptical about science but put that aside we are compassionate as human beings that's great that's part of who we are let's express that voluntarily let's just remember that often we're compassionate but we don't feel like we have the tools or resources to express our compassion and solve a problem because it's too big and I'll give you a concrete example you know few groups in America draw more compassion than the elderly right who are often old and you know they're frail and vulnerable and before the expansion of Social Security benefits in the late 60s and early 70s you know at the beginning in 1960 about 30% of elderly people lived in poverty now this in a country with a lot of churches and a lot of charities and a lot of compassion but that those institutions and that compassion was not enough to offset a huge problem of elderly poverty today 10% of under 10% of elderly people live in poverty because of Social Security and because of Medicare and for the elderly in this country that has meant a tremendous amount of freedom of individual you know old people in America have a level of freedom to do what they want to do and live their lives that was unimaginable in earlier generations before a strong social safety net and I just think we should keep that in mind that one of the things that social insurance systems do is they provide us with a buffer against bad things and they provide us with some basic necessities like income or healthcare that allow us to then lead our lives and do what we want and healthcare is a good example of that you know in our current system if you're at a job and you want to go off and start your own business or something you can't without losing your health insurance and a lot of people don't want to take that risk and they can't afford it in the private market you know in Europe which is supposedly anti-entrepreneurial Sweden and most of Western Europe has a lot higher percentage of people who are unemployed and working in their own small businesses than the United States does and one of the reasons for that is because of that those nationalized health systems that allow people to do what they want to do without worrying that they're going to lose their insurance and get sick and go bankrupt so I think that this move that we've seen towards universal healthcare is very important for freedom you know Iran talked about how great the healthcare system is in the United States compared to France or something even though most French love their healthcare system apparently it's horrible according to Iran well you know one of the reasons that we have such great care here at least for the people who have insurance is because we spend twice as much of our national wealth on healthcare as any other European country the United States spends 16 to 17 percent of GDP on healthcare compared to the European average which is like eight or nine percent so we're spending this huge amount of money and yet still 45 million people don't have any health insurance 18,000 people die a year by some estimates because they don't have health insurance we you know are ahead of the Europeans on some health indicators you know if you get cancer or something yeah it's better than being in the United States but for other things it's better to be in Europe we don't devote the resources we should to preventive healthcare which produces all sorts of problems a lot of uninsured people don't go to the doctor things to have things caught early and Iran's notion that healthcare insurance could be as cheap as your cell phone bill I'm sorry but I think that that is pure fantasy because the key driver of healthcare costs in the United States is technology it's new technology it's increasingly advanced technology and it's the public's appetite for that technology and that stuff is you don't get that for the cost of the cell phone bill we as a society need to decide how much of our national wealth do we want to spend on healthcare and I think that this is one of the places where government is really useful we need to come together as a democratic society and say you know hey do we want to just continue to let the market run this system and all have all this new technology and spend you know ever larger amount of the pie or do we want to set some limits and one of the things that the Europeans have done well is they've set limits and they have a balance you know under 10% of their national wealth goes to healthcare they achieve many good results the public's generally like it I think that that system works better than most part than what we have here at this time I'd like to invite comments from if you could introduce yourself too