 All right, so we're going to do a panel that's very relevant to all European countries, so it's about individualism, tribalism in welfare states, and we have speakers you already know. So I think except Ben has not been introduced yet because you haven't spoken yet. You're on tomorrow morning. So Ben Bayer is a fellow at the Inland Institute and writes a lot of brilliant material for a new ideal. So yeah, please take it away guys. All right, thank you. Thank you, Annie. Thanks everybody. So this is I think what we're gonna do with this panel is we're gonna leave a lot of time and I mean it this time for questions. So any questions that you feel have gone unanswered so far or you you're eager to ask or you were in line and it didn't get to you, then feel free to ask the questions here. I know for laws there were a number of people who didn't get to ask and I think for some of the other sessions. So mostly we're going to be answering your questions. So start thinking about what you would like given everything you've heard today. What you would like to talk about or what you'd like us to talk about what you'd like to ask about and prepare the sprint over there to the to the microphone on the side. I think I mean I'll get it started and then we'll go to Ben and laws which gonna say a few things to kind of get the conversation started. But really this is gonna be up to you to ask ask good questions. So to get some good content out. I mean I want to talk a little bit about how I think and I mentioned this in my talk earlier how I think the welfare state reinforces tribalism and and creates fertile ground for tribalism and how capitalism actually reinforces individualism and encourages individualism and that you know, I think why why America stayed as good as it has been is because it adapted the welfare state relatively late in in the relatively late to Europe. So it only really adopted a systematic welfare state in the 1960s whereas Europe really in Germany it was started in the 19th century and the rest of Europe probably post-World War two really embraced full-on a welfare state. So think about what a welfare state does and even a regulatory state just government intervention government coercion in the economy and in our lives what that does it basically creates lots of zero-sum games it basically creates lots of zero-sum relationships where some people gain literally at the expense of others. Think about it in terms of in terms of regulations, you know we regulate we regulate some banks in one way we regulate other banks in a different way in the United States we have all kinds of banks small banks medium-sized banks big banks are all regulated differently and then we have investment banks and commercial banks and other banks or brokerage houses and they're all regulated differently and they're all in some sense competing with one another but they'll also have distinct business models and now if I regulate one of them in a way that allows them to compete with me if you regulate laws you know in a way that allows them to compete with my bank and it gives him advantages over my bank I have now an incentive to go to all the people in my industry and team up together and create a little coalition a little tribe if you will and go pound you know the table in front of politicians and threaten them and lobby them and give them money and bribe them and whatever to try to get the same favorable regulations that laws has for me and maybe even give me a little advantage over laws which give them laws the incentive to go out you know even the We might both be pro-lazef a capitalist guys, right? But what are we going to do the government's intruding on our freedoms and his incentive is now to go find a group of people who are in the same position he is and try to lobby government to now you know equalize the regulatory regimes or infringed on my rights and it's very difficult to find a particularly on the short run and incentive for both of us to team up and go and fight against regulations broadly completely because that alienates the politicians they they like the power they like the control and we might get screwed by what they're doing, right? So it creates this mentality of me I think in on-cost slide when he talked about tribalism he was us against them and regulations create this mentality of us against them right? they're regulated more or less than I am and now it's a competition and it's a competition of force because a competition of giving money to politicians to impose the use of force and coercion over the different parties and it's a competition that usually only works in one direction which is anti-freedom only works in the direction of more and more and more and more and of course the same thing happens in the welfare state you know my money is being taken from me it's given to a group over there I want to protect my money and they want to protect their benefits and now there's another group that once they saw those guys got benefits they want benefits they create a little group and Einwand really I mean she spends a lot of time in various essays describing the the the the politics of pull and and of course in Atlas Shrugged if you've read Atlas Shrugged much of what she describes in Atlas Shrugged is about all the various status groups you know fighting among each other for the spoils and this really creates these tribes and it's not a typical way of thinking about tribes they might not be unified by race so they might not be unified by any particular obvious characteristic but it creates on a tribe of what in the media is called special interest groups or pressure groups that are now have this incentive to just increase statism and and to to to manipulate the system in their favor at the expense of somebody else it's always at the expense of somebody because it's always a zero sum game it's not about creating it's not about building it's not about making it's not about it's about redistributing it's about taking from someone giving to others so there is this real cycle within the welfare state of getting worse and worse and then increase tribalism and then once in a while a political party might come into power because everybody's not fed up and they might liberalize things a little bit they make things a little bit better for a while reduce regulations reduce the welfare state reduce benefits but they don't eliminate anything and the cycle starts up from the beginning over again and everything starts growing again and growing and you see this in politics you see periods where the welfare state grows and it gets to a point where there's a crisis and I don't know Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher get elected and supposedly they're gonna they make small changes and things get better and then after a few years after you know things start growing again and expanding again and the same cycle being played out over and over and over again so contrast that with capitalism in capitalism you have a separation of state from individuals the individuals are responsible for themselves the relationship between individuals and companies is all a relationship of win-win voluntary trade-up based transactions there's no zero sum there's no exploitation there's no I'm benefiting at your expense and everybody is gaining and they're gaining as individuals and there's no there's no incentive there's no reason to form these course of groups the only groups you form are voluntary groups voluntary groups for a purpose and what is the purpose a business is a group right and the purpose is to create wealth a purpose is to voluntarily interact in a way that wealth is created that again benefits the different participants in it and it reinforces that if you act like Greg mentioned if you if you think for yourself if you you know as as as Lars mentioned if you're virtuous if you act then you gain you benefit and the people around you are trading with you benefit and that just says to you these values really work these virtues with these these ideas really work and you want to do more of it because it's working and it reinforces itself and even people like in Lars's organization who don't who haven't studied the ethics who didn't study the virtues they don't know in depth I mean we gave them lectures and stuff and some of them took it more seriously than others but even the people who didn't take it that seriously they notice that if they act in this way it actually is a reinforcing mechanism so they don't have to be philosophers in order to embrace these ideas because they are working they're actually producing the results and again there are no losers in other than the people who don't do a good job right and then it's but it's not a loss in the sense that it's somebody's gaining it's somebody's somebody's expense so the two systems reinforce each other and it's one of the one of the reasons that it's so hard to transition from welfare state to capitalism because the welfare state is so such a reinforcing mechanism and we've never really had capitalism right Invan's book is called capitalism the unknown ideal because we don't know it in a sense of the theory and we've never really implemented fully and as a consequence that we've never seen that reinforcement and to the extent that we see it like in America in spite of all the pressures it's worked pretty well I mean America's in decline but it survived 200 years because it started off with such a good beginning from that perspective from that perspective of individualism Ben? Yeah, thanks Yaron I wanted to follow up on what you just said but just I guess making some recommendations about readings from Ayn Rand that you could if you're interested in learning more about some of the concepts we've been discussing follow up on what she thinks about a lot of these kinds of things and the first I think to mention is just at the shrugged itself which as Yaron mentioned one of the things that it portrays is a future society in which advancing statism and mixed economy is rapidly deteriorating the economy and the society and one of the ways that the book is often described I think in the popular media is as a single a singular battle between entrepreneurs and government where it's a big government and it's a big oppressive government I think that's an oversimplified way of describing what's happening because in a deeper way what's being described is that the society is falling apart it's disintegrating yes there is a big government but the consequence of the various mixed economy policies that it's pursuing is that it is precisely splitting up society into these different warring pressure groups and interest groups and various tribes and so you get a very interesting picture of that and you also get by contrast and I can't say too much about this without spoiling the plot but at a certain stage in the novel you get a portrayal of what the opposite kind of society would look like and the kinds of harmonies of interests that are possible among people when they live as individualists and when they focus on trading value for value so that's one point but then we also should say something about Iran's nonfiction of which a lot is being displayed in the back one piece that's been mentioned several times today which is in many ways Iran's seminal essay on the topic of tribalism is global Balkanization that's in that's reprinted in this this book The Voice of Reason we'll probably still stay still say more about that later I also wanted to draw your attention to I think an underappreciated essay of hers that touches on the intersection between tribalism and the mixed economy in just the way that your own's been describing back in 1972 she gave a talk called a nation's unity and for an individualist you might be surprised to find that Iran thinks that there's something very important about a nation's unity but it's it's for the reason that your own's been mentioning that she thinks that when you when you respect the freedom of another person you treat them as a rational being there's a possibility of a harmony of interests and consequently the proper kind of national unity that doesn't involve a society disintegrating into warring tribes and the connection that your own is described whereby the mixed economy pits groups against each other and therefore leads to this kind of tribalism she has a extended analogy or rather an extended kind of little story that she tells about how this happens and I I thought I would just read for you quick passage from this because I think it it's prescient in a lot of ways she describes a kind of mixed economy situation which people are setting up little competing groups to compete for various kinds of privileges and welfare benefits and so forth and she portrays the situation of a somebody who doesn't fall into any of the ordinary interest groups they're not afro-american chicano-american italian-american jewish-american irish-american she says you you are just a mongrel-american a title of which you have been proud at one time but which is becoming dangerous if you lose your job there will be no preferential quota to help you get another and no way of knowing how many ethnic applicants will be pushed ahead of you there will be no preferential quota for your son's admission to college when the time comes and skipping a little further she talks about how this kind of person sort of left up by the system when you hear a seedy lecturer at a group meeting declare the Horatio Alger stories are a myth that a man cannot rise by individual effort and ability you applaud defiantly and belligerently you do not know exactly what they stand for but they talk of community action and mutual protection and they announce other groups you do not know clearly which ones or why and she goes on to say one day you discover that what you feel for men is hatred so she's describing I mean there's there's the obvious way in which people are pitted against each other in terms of these kind of ethnic interest groups but then the ones who are left out suddenly see themselves on the outs as well and start to form their own little identity politics group and I think that we're seeing a lot of that in in the various forms of kind of right wing white nationalist rhetoric happening in both Europe and America today and this unfortunately is not reprinted in any of her major collections but you can listen to the audio of it on Inran Campus and on Cargate and I also did a little webinar about this that you can find on the YouTube channel for the Inran Institute so let me let me stay on track with sort of the practical implementation here because in contrary to you two guys I actually grew up in a Scandinavian welfare society and I just want to give a little warning here also how quickly this can happen right because in 1960 which was three years before I was born Denmark was had a total tax pressure of 25% of GDP was the same as Switzerland that had a total tax pressure of 25% of GDP and it was less than the US that had a 28% and considerably less than the UK that had 33% total tax pressure on GDP 20 years later in 1980 Denmark had a overall tax pressure in excess of 50% and the other guys had kind of increased a little bit but nowhere near as dramatic as that so in 20 years we went from being one of the most liberal one of the most low taxation countries in the world really in the developed world to being the most heavily taxed country in the free world and what drove that well somebody in 1957 got the great idea of introducing a universal benefit which was a pension before that some people would get pensions and other people would save up themselves but in 1957 for the first time one decided that everybody should have a pension whether they needed it or not whether they wanted it or not and then that led to a whole range of other universal offerings that that a lot of people had thrown at them without really asking about them and that led to rapid deterioration in responsibility for your own life I'd say if you go back to the 20s or the 30s you know even very left-wing working class people very very reluctant to go down to to the public local office to ask for help for their families it was a matter of pride for them to to care for their own families to be able to put food on the table to to not really be be a burden on on anyone of course they were very left-wing that they would complain about the capitalist and the terrible conditions on the factories but they would take a personal pride in in actually offending for themselves and their families even in tough times whereas today I think because of of this change you know today it's completely uncontroversial to to simply abuse that system and take a lot of payments from the public sector because you you prefer to pursue your artistic career that nobody wants to buy your paintings it's not really your problem but so you take the government's money or you prefer to study a number of university studies without really finishing any of them and then you know you want to find the right place in life and and if you do want to study anthropology or Eskimos or something it's not your problem that that there's not enough jobs for people that are expert in Eskimos right and this this is just a very significant shift in values which which in our country has led to now it's a small country we've got 5.6 million inhabitants there and it has led to a fact that that out of the labor workforce out of 4 million grown up labor workforce taking out the kids and the pensioners 800,000 on some kind of pre-pension because they can't work because of this so they can't work because of that mental or physical problem and you have an enormous industry catering for people and convincing them that they are victims of society and hence they shouldn't have to work then we have a public sector with another 8,900,000 employees that are there and then there's a remaining 2.2 million people that work in the private sector so it's nearly 50-50 between the private sector and people that are either working in the public sector which you know is completely legitimate in many contexts but but still having to rely on the 2.2 million actually creating the wealth that can be taxed and distributed if you add to that then of course pensioners that is yet another million you have the situation in my country that 2.3 of the population is almost entirely dependent on the government for payouts and 1.3 is in the private sector approximately trying to to fend and pay for all this so this is very much you know the joke about two wolves and a sheep voting about who should be eaten for lunch the sheep is in a pretty poor condition in that particular bed and if you tell people both that they can vote their way to other people's money and there's nothing wrong with doing that even if you could potentially sustain yourself without other people's money then you're in a pretty bad place maybe even an an irreversible place I fear because what that then leads to is that you cannot really get elected to prime minister without catering for this large large contingent of people dependent on the government so you have no chance of being elected with a sort of a liberalistic point of view or cutting expenses in the public sector or reducing taxes that is just not the road to being in government or being prime minister in a country like that and that actually means that today I would say seven out of the eight, nine parties we sort of have going in and out of parliament seven out of them are really all social democratic parties it's very very difficult to tell the difference between them they almost think the same things that there is no alternative to this welfare state I personally was a little bit involved in the one party that tried to challenge this and while we're quite happy going from zero to 7.5% of the population there's still a long, long way before we get a chance to implement any sort of significant public sector reform and lower taxation so once you get to that point it's very very hard to reverse on a positive note though I would say it also seems like it tends to stop at a certain level it hasn't actually gotten an awful lot worse in monetary terms there's a lot more involvement and interference in your private life and all that but the tax pressure if anything it's possibly a little bit lower today probably in the late 40s and particularly our neighbour country Sweden has done quite significant reforms that have reduced their tax overall tax pressure by 3 or 4 percentage points so it does seem as if there's a point where you begin to be able to tell people that it just doesn't work to tax anymore and maybe one of the problems could be inefficiencies rather than lack of money in the public sector I think also OECD has pretty clearly identified that the efficiency of money used in the public sector is approximately 60% on average of the money deployed in the private sector so if you give half of your economy to the to the public sector and they then are 60% as efficient I mean you're throwing away a pretty big chunk of your GDP compared to what it could have been right apart from all the negative dynamic effects so just to round off then I also tried to live in a place that is European but actually has a slightly more rational approach to things i.e. Switzerland where I moved about nine years ago and where you have today a tax pressure of about 30% overall so it's also gone up a little bit since the 60s but where you have a public sector as far as I know about half a million are so considerably less than in Denmark and a significantly bigger population of about 8 million I would say we were 5.6 in Denmark and also what is quite amazing everything actually works you know if you if you if you have a need for something from the public sector it actually works you know if you if you need somebody to assist you you instantly get a time at the hospital or if you throw away a piece of paper and you call the police station to get a new copy they actually drive up to your front gate and deliver it to you rather than you having to queue up for four six hours right so so that's an interesting not that I'm endorsing it but I would say that's the closest thing we get to the gulf in Europe at least right there so and the really interesting thing is actually one of the reasons it works quite well there is that they collect nearly as much tax per inhabitant as you do in Denmark but the overall the overall wealth level because you have much more meta dynamics is actually that people produce much more keep much more for themselves and and in essence all the positive effects mean that that you have an altogether much much much better wealth functioning society got the best health rates some of the oldest oldest people survive to the old you have half the crime of what you have in most other European countries you have some of the world's leading universities there you have some of the world's biggest corporate HQs there so it's a really good example of how you can balance the two things without going sort of overboard in either direction and the final notice it's very direct democracy even in my little village yeah and they are very small the villages in Switzerland there's a two thousand six hundred or two thousand eight hundreds geminders little local authorities so that means an average of a few thousand people in each of them that means you know the mayor you can meet him in the street sometimes if you're unhappy you can tell him and people do if you want to vote about something he's proposed you have to collect five percent of the voters in that particular local authority which in would be a hundred 200 signatures and you get a full vote on on quite significant issues and if you win it unless it's something that's dictated by Bern which in which case you wouldn't get the vote but you can do the same on national level so you have very direct democracy very direct accountability which is probably why things are are kept better under control there than than most European countries you could say it's the exact opposite of the EU where you concentrate big power but so far away from the electorate and the people that actually affected by it that there's near zero accountability between the leadership of Europe and and the man on the street in any any given European countries so so if there is a model here that can work and sort of encompass both sides I think Switzerland is a is a better better better than most all right we're gonna take we're gonna take questions so uh from any of the sections or if uh if you're if you have any pretty much on anything so feel free but I thought the Danes are like the happiest people in the world actually we lost our position I think oh you did I think the swiss the swiss okay I also moved down there of course so maybe but so you you tilted but we're still we're still very happy and it's a little bit difficult to understand but but because we also have a lot of unhappiness as a way yeah a lot of of pills and drugs and depression stuff and so there's some something not quite adding up there but but at the end of the day Denmark is a fairly happy society but the interesting thing is that it seems to be that Scandinavians are of a relatively optimistic disposition you can you can track groups of Scandinavians that went to the US 100 150 years ago and they're well above average happy people there also without the welfare state amazingly right I hope it's appropriate to ask a very fundamental question to the concept objectivism there is another objectivist organization the Atlas Society and I think there are much others and they all call themselves objectivists and for me personally is the problem if I question the tenets of objectivism and examine it and come to the conclusion that there are some faults in it is it proper for me to call me objectivist or what is the I mean I think the answer is yes there's a problem I mean you might be right objectivism does not equal truth and you know it's important in this particularly with you guys you know you might discover that you disagree with an aspect of it you might think that you have a better definition or a better idea about a certain aspect of objectivism but it's not objectivism that is what's clear is that Ein Rand defined her philosophy to me this is an intellectual property rights issue she said my philosophy is everything I wrote and it's called objectivism if if you then make further developments you want to change stuff you want to then it's something else it's you will come up with a name but objectivism is what Ein Rand wrote and a few of the authorized stuff that she authorized that's just what she wanted that that was the her request and I think we should honor that request I think I think it's it's an issue of integrity to honor the request of a creator on how to address her ideas and if again if you think you found errors if you think you've got expansions or new virtues or whatever then call it what it is your understand you know your ideas or come up with a new name for it but it's it's not objectivism I'll add something to that which connects I think to something that came up at the very beginning of the conference that Tal raised that so there is this philosophy called objectivism it's Ein Rand's philosophy I agree with what your own says about that there are some people out there who because they disagree with one element or another of the philosophy will they are offering a new and improved version of objectivism and I disagree with that for the reason that your own said objectivism is what it is but sometimes I think that the motive for wanting to do that is because the people in question would very much like to have a tribe that they're a member of and they want to say that they're a member of the objectivist tribe even if they happen to disagree with part of it but they they don't know of any other tribe to belong to and and so this is why what Tal said at the beginning was very important that one not think of this philosophy that way and that when one comes to a conference like this one's interested in finding out what well here Inran has some ideas I want to find out what they are I want to see if I agree with them or not I might agree with some of them I might not agree with others I might learn something either way whether I end up agreeing with some of it or all of it and connecting to the broader theme of the value of individualism what what's important about being an individualist is not which tribe you associate with or whether you call yourself an objectivist it's it's whether you care about the truth and you you may decide objectivism is true you may not but if what you're concerned with is figuring out what's true in the world that's that's the most important thing and it shouldn't matter so much you know what label you want to call yourself and for that reason it's bizarre that some people want to appropriate a label just so they can expand the boundaries of the tribe arbitrarily so I think that I face I mean I I can take the example of me talking to my mother and telling her what ideas I have if I go to a conference like this what what is that about and what comes back is yeah but without a welfare state I couldn't put food on the table you couldn't go to university so you know that's just dreams how does one answer that I struggle I mean it's just not true I know how do you have to point out that it's just not true it's it's it's wrong and the country I mean this is and this is what I think is lost in the debate on the country without a welfare state we're all richer on a welfare state there's more food on the table without a welfare state there's more production there's more wealth there's more you know good stuff out there for us to consume and produce and create more opportunities more variety of jobs more spiritual values and and and if you look if you look at what life was before capitalism and if you look at what life is with capitalism and if you look at what life is in the more capitalist countries versus the one less capital you can see hints of that already but it's not it's it's exact opposite of how people think of it it you know in one way to illustrate that is every dollar of welfare has to be produced by somebody that is it it's it's it's a zero it's a zero sum and instead of that dollar going into producing more so there's more stuff if you will it's going to redistributing so that I hate the pie analogy the the economy or whatever it is is not growing it's just being stuff is being redistributed across it so it's it's the exact reverse of that and and look it's very hard to argue with mothers and I generally with just having had a lot of experience at doing this I don't recommend it it doesn't get you anyway you almost never succeed and it just creates family angst and just give up on it your mother's your mother she is what she is you're not going to change her focus on young people focus on young people who are who are more capable of change but I would say it's a it's a very relevant question also because again if you're in a fully fully committed welfare state like like some of the Scandinavian certainly Denmark the welfare state also protects itself from from actually being put to the test right for example in Denmark you cannot make a school for profit you know so so you cannot build a school where you where you where you actually make money on it which obviously keeps people's incentive to try to to make a more efficient school or a place where people might get better graduations etc that there's not a strong incentive you can actually make free schools you're just not allowed to make money on them so you can make a free school where the government has to pay I think it's 75 percent of the cost and you can contribute the last 25 percent and you can change the curriculum a little bit but you're not allowed to make money on it another example is the health sector there are very very few private hospitals in Denmark they are certainly not something you make life very easy for but because of the inefficiency of the public sector health service they cannot keep any longer to many of the promises they made about how long time you have to wait for a hip operation or a broken this or broken that and therefore they actually occasionally outsource now to bring down these very long sometimes year long waiting lists by outsourcing a little bit to the private hospitals that then delivers for example a hip operation at a approximately half the price of what it does in the public sector right but it's very hard and very difficult to even get to challenge that point of view that the welfare state delivers everything for you right and I'm just again warning that once it's really fully integrated it gets harder and harder rather than the other way around I mean today if you even the even the smallest thing you bring up why don't we try to outsource this little service or that little service you'll meet a massive massive resistance because people say oh but it could it could go wrong or what if they didn't do it well or and in fact there's so much so much so much stuff goes wrong in the public sector right but you know that doesn't actually solve the problem but but you just got to be aware that that your mom will will probably never never see assumption challenged because the welfare state will protect itself from being exposed as a as a pretty inefficient way of doing things I just want to add one thing going back to what Lars said in his previous comments about that in the 1920s and 30s a worker would put food on the table and feel the pride in the satisfaction of knowing that he took care of feeding himself and feeding his family and taking care of his life and that the welfare state denies him the ability to have that pride and in many respects the psychological damage the damage to self-esteem the damage to the pride of the individual is maybe the most damaging thing so the welfare state hurts the people who get the welfare it's damaging to the recipients in addition to damaging the people whose money is taken and I think that's an interesting case that I don't think we make enough of and it's a case that we can take to the recipients right to convince them that the welfare state is not in their interest interest and there's a lot of good stuff in your own book with Don Watkins on this topic the equal equals unfair book but just I wanted to make a quick comment about historical strategy for individualists in cases of political disagreement not just with one's mother but father and friends and peers generally speaking and that is and not to say that this is your issue but you often get a lot of questions like this at sessions like this where someone says I have an argument with so-and-so what do I say to answer them about this and I think it's important first to keep in mind there's on any kind of controversial political topic there's never any one thing you can say to change somebody's mind about anything there's almost never anything even very extended or discourse length that you can say to change their mind about anything and it's important to be at peace about that especially if you're an individualist who shouldn't care about the fact that people disagree with you just for that very reason and so it approach your communication with people with that in mind I'm not going to change their mind but maybe we can each learn something from each other in having a conversation about this question and ask them what their reasons for thinking this are ask them why they think that they can't survive without a welfare state when people were able to do it you know a hundred years ago or whatever and maybe you'll find out that there's a moral premise at work in the way they evaluate the facts of the last hundred years and then you can have a conversation about that but mind changing is something that happens only over the very long term especially if the other people are themselves rational and have to take time to think things over so I've asked the questioners to be brief and I'm going to ask you guys to read the same things about individualism and the welfare state in Europe we have something that you don't have in America the huge burden of history how can you convince people in Europe to get rid of the welfare state and to adopt American values when for them for them it means losing their identity their singularity cutting with their prestigious history and become only a copy of the dominant country so I don't view I don't know if this is on is this on now it's on I don't view what we ask him to do is to adopt America right it's to adopt individualism individualism that was advocated for by enlightenment thinkers here in Europe not that it matters it could have been on the moon who cares where good ideas come from right you want to you want to pursue good ideas you want to pursue life-enhancing ideas and the idea I mean this is exactly the kind of tribalism that Europeans have we're historically collectivist so we're gonna stay collectivist even if it makes us poor or even if it makes us unhappy or even if destroys our lives I mean that's exactly the kind of attitude that we're combating so it's not copy America it's be an individualist that is for your own life as an individual and again I'm not we're not trying to say France become I thought I heard a French accent France become capitalist it's much more you as an individual take your life seriously live as an individualist and if enough people do that I truly believe that the only alternative that they will ever want is freedom because what does it mean to be an individualist if then you can't make choices if then your choices are constrained by force by government right so you want the freedom to make those choices so I think it's wrong to think of it as American and therefore foreign it's tribal to think in that terms what are the right ideas what are the true ideas what are the ideas that will help me and help the people I love and care about live the best life that we can live hi do you think there is a relationship between Frederick Nietzsche philosophy and objectivism and if it if there isn't a relationship what do you think of Nietzsche it's a broad question well so there's there's at least a some historical relationship in that we know that Ayn Rand read Nietzsche she was heavily influenced by Nietzsche especially in her younger days and you see even the marks of his influence appearing as late as the fountain head though she subsequently I believe edited out some of those references there was a quote she was going to affix at one point but the way that she described her mature perspective on Nietzsche if I recall correctly was that because of the way in which he I mean he's famous as a critic of Judeo-Christian altruism and the morality of self-sacrifice and that and he even has she says very poetic ways of expressing this on opposition to that viewpoint at times which even sound somewhat individualistic but what she realized in as she as she grew as an intellectual was that Nietzsche's individualism quote unquote is was a really kind of a pseudo into individualism in so far as it wasn't informed by the kinds of ideas that you saw discussed earlier today in Dr. Gatte's lecture Dr. Samieri's lecture where what matters to an individualist is seeking out the truth and seeking out the objective truth because for Nietzsche it's it's a long story but he's a kind of irrationalist who thinks that there really isn't an objective truth to know and so it's not worth trying to know and he's also a determinist he thinks we're all pushed around by a force called the will to power which sounds at first like it's free will but it's not free will and I'll be talking more about the connection between free will and individualism tomorrow so there are superficial resemblances between Nietzsche and Rand and some you know actual historical influence but at the end of the day she's fundamentally a critic of the basic principles of his philosophy and Nietzsche has been influential today a lot on I think especially the the kind of alt-right some of Nico's was talking about some of this influence earlier today when he talked about the romantic anti-capitalist viewpoint a lot of that is coming out of Nietzsche Nietzsche had a tremendous amount of influence on post-modernist thinkers and that's feeding into various forms of identity politics today thank you hello my name is Özgür I would like to ask that as we listen that Denmark is a huge tax burden on business and also we know that France have a huge regulatory burden on business and when Macron tried to challenge that we also saw that what happened with the yellow-west protests my question is this why Atlas is not tracked in those societies I don't want to speak for France but but I'll speak for Denmark and I would say there are redeeming factors in Denmark let me hasten to add that I mean we have we have a very well-functioning label market very flexible label market far better than what you know in France and Germany where once you hire somebody you nearly might as well have married them because you're going to be stuck with them for a long time right where Denmark you have the payoff between having fairly generous social support to people that are unemployed is also that it's relatively easy to lay off people if you suffer a downturn in your business etc and I would say there are absolutely redeeming factors in Denmark seen from a business point of view I mean I ran a Saxo Bank out of Denmark our headquarters have been there it's possible there are other countries that would have been easier to do it but it's certainly possible and there's a number of very successful businesses having been built over the years there is kind of a devious understanding I think among politicians that you can only squeeze a lemon that much before the juice sort of stops flowing right and actually our former finance minister social democrat many years ago proposed some really heavy increases to company taxation etc and it was questioned you know wouldn't all the capitalists just leave and his comment was that they had calculated very accurately that this was not enough to make the capitalist leave right so they do think about not squeezing the lemon too hard there's a little bit of a new narrative that I don't like very much although Denmark by measure the Gini coefficient for example is a very equal society that's now spreading this narrative that it's a very unequal society it was pretty ridiculous when we're one of the most equal societies in the world but by and large there's a certain rationality to not overdo things and there's a very strong IT infrastructure you know we're probably the most digital country in the world which is convenient for modern business models so you know it's not all bad and that's important to add because I always get a lot of stick when I've been out abroad saying something negative at Denmark they get very angry with me so I own also stakes in multiple businesses in Denmark so it's by no means an impossible place to do business and I would probably prefer that to France to be honest but I'm not knowledgeable enough to say that in a hundred percent fair way but you should also add that Atlas is shrugging you left Denmark and I remember I remember being at a board at an advisory board meeting of one of your investment companies and there was a number of very successful Danish entrepreneurs who were advisors who were there and at some point I think the question we went through and introduced ourselves and every single one of the Danish the ones who were successful entrepreneurs every single one of them left lived either in London or in Switzerland not a single one of them lived actually in Denmark so to some extent of course they're shrugging hello I'd like to ask the question or maybe your opinion on the matter of globalism and welfare state because there are studies that show that even if the overall welfare of society increases thanks to the free trade at globalism there is a the poor part of the society gets worse than the richest part because of the low skill labor so they are actually harmed by the globalism and even from an economical point of view this shouldn't cause a problem because overall the welfare increases but nevertheless creates higher inequality and that creates social tensions and that's why we have populism and Donald Trump so how what what is your recipe to alleviate the social tensions coming from increased inequality so you know I don't have a full time to answer that question fully I encourage you to look up online my talks on equal is unfair or my book equal is unfair but let me just say this first yeah I mean competition will drive some wages down in the short run and but that's life right and if people can do something better then then you better you better take responsibility for your own life this goes back to individualism take responsibility for your own life figure out what you need to do to become more productive so that you can earn more money and don't think of yourself as one of the working class or one of the poor you are you and your responsibility is to you and you have to compete for a job we all have to compete for jobs and we have to be as good as we can be and we have to think ahead will robots take my job and how can I adjust and adapt and and so on so part of being an individualist is owning your life which means owning the risk and taking responsibility for that risk and taking responsibility for the future the rewards and the and the and the challenges so I don't like part of the tribalism is the macro these macro numbers the poor do this and the rich do this and the middle class go there I don't know any middle class or poor I know you and you and you and I know individuals and some are doing very well and some are not doing that well and the question is why and and at the end of the day freedom is the solution for those people who are willing to take full responsibility over themselves and and succeed I think the social unrest caused by inequality is primarily social unrest caused by people talking about inequality there was no I the social unrest that we're seeing right now is really a phenomena of over the last particularly 10 years of everybody writing that this is a bad thing that this is awful that you should be upset that you should be worried and nobody emphasizing all the good things for example that are happening that a poor person in in Denmark a poor person in the United States a poor person almost anywhere in the western world has an iPhone I mean I don't know how valuable is that to one's life and but you can't measure that economists can't put a number on it so I can I can put a number yeah do you want to hear it yeah because I think it's there's so much false information and propaganda and this inequality debate right first of all you normally split people up in like 10 percent 20 percent decent tiles of of of wealth right but and then you look oh the the the lowest 10 percent haven't increased their wages the last 10 years it's totally untrue it's totally new group of people that are down there in fact if you look at the specific individuals how they move from group to group the people that had by far the largest increase in in salaries in the past 10 years will almost invariably be the people in the lowest 10 percent because it's not the same people that is typically students temporarily unemployed that is that group so if you look at those numbers you'll find actually that they're upwardly mobile to an extreme degree and you'll also find in the top 10 percent richest actually a hell of a lot of those guys drop out because they had a good year where they the business was running very well or whatever so there's an enormous mobility inside these static pictures that we get shown that's one thing but the one thing I want to say about the iPhone because you always talk about the iPhone there's actually a meme circulating on Facebook at the moment where somebody said in 1985 I could actually if I bought enough machines I could have functionality that approximated what's in an iPhone right you buy a fax machine you buy a photo machine you could buy very fancy mainframe computer et cetera but it would take up pretty much the size of your hotel room and it would cost you approximately $35 million in those days right but then you would have more or less the same functionality as you have in an iPhone today so it was possible to estimate the value and this is the other thing we're forgetting in this debate maybe your nominal amount is not going up so much but what are you getting in return you know this thing I mean this thing that the Iran overshows this would have cost you $35 million bucks in 1985 now anybody nearly I would say even if you're in the poor group in western Europe you normally have an iPhone right you live longer you don't die from diseases you died after the 70s you have enormous access to entertainment on the same iPhone and so think about what you get for the money and it's just a completely forced premise for this whole inequality discussion there's lots of mobility you get lots more for your money in fact I would say the billionaire he could still have spent $35 million bucks and got that back in the day a little bit impractical and not easy to carry around but he could have done it so who has the most benefit of that clearly the person that doesn't have $35 million bucks right I just want to say something really quickly about the term globalism which you used to ask the question so one of one of the ways in which Einrand recommended we all be individualists and are thinking about the world is to not accept uncritically concepts that we hear tossed about in public discourse and and and she thought that there were a certain kind of concept which she called it a package deal where it would it would group things together that were that had a certain superficial similarity between the two of them but they were still deep down very different and I think that globalism is one of these package deals that she would have criticized it it it groups together on the one hand international free trade which for reasons we've discussed today and individualist should be pretty happy about but then also whole elaborate set of global governmental organizations and institutions the World Bank the IMF the UN which in fact does cause all kinds of economic dislocations around the world and the the effect of the term globalism the way that it's usually used is to end up impugning the benefits of free trade by guilt by association with with the detriments of these global governmental organizations and I urge people not to use that term globalism talk about international free trade talk about international governmental organizations but those are very different things even though they both happen to be something that happens around the world and that's just a superficial similarity thank you so for the last questions we have one minute for each otherwise we need to eliminate some of them can an objectivist be religious while maintaining the coherence of his beliefs and how many people do you guys personally know who are both religious and objectivist I don't know if I can do this in a minute but I don't think anyone let alone objectivists can maintain coherent beliefs while being religious now that's a controversial statement which I can't explain in 48 seconds but it it has a lot to do in Einran's view with the fact that first of all what are your grounds for believing in religious figures or entities a lot of people don't have evidence for their beliefs and at that point you've already you know kicked out concern with coherence or evidence or rationality now there are people who give arguments for a belief in God and we could have a conversation about whether those arguments work and whether they end up being consistent with the deepest premises of irrational philosophy but that is a that is a longer story and somewhat off-topic but you know we can talk about it offline I don't know if anybody wanted to add anything on it over here three seconds left I've been inspired by biographies of American industrialists especially that for many of them it was actually true that they accomplished a lot even in their 18s that really inspired me and what I'm observing right now is the age at which people are you know supposed to be mature and adults keeps going up like 25 and over and I think there is something really good for appreciating freedom when you know you create something really big with your mind in you know in your teen for example right as opposed to being in class returning to activism so what what are your thoughts what can we do to actually you know spend our young years most productively so what can you do to spend in terms of your I mean become an individualist right I mean really figure out what your values really are use your mind to engage with reality to figure out what kind of life you want to live and how to live it I think I think being young as a great up is the opportunity because you're setting the foundation for the rest of your life try to you know try to really educate yourself try to really study try to really figure out what's true and what's not what's right and what's wrong what kind of life you want to live and what kind of life you want to plan for the future and I think there are a lot of 18 years old and 20 years old that are doing a lot in business today I think people actually start far far earlier and then then they used to do and they know they always succeed but they get some experience and so I think actually young people are early starters in business right and you should never underestimate the value of being young I mean I would give you every cent in the bank to be 20 again if I had the chance so you know be happy that you're young and make the most of it and it's important as I think it was Ankar who stressed earlier today that individualists aren't atomists they're not people who just isolate themselves from the rest of the world and so one thing that a young person who's still an individualist can be looking for in the world is people to admire people to look up to heroes Ayn Rand had a a lot to say about the concept of hero worship and there's a lot to learn about what you might do with your life someday by looking around for people to emulate and that's a good plug for the mentorship speed mentoring session that's going to be happening in just a few minutes where you can talk to some of those people maybe Thank you Hello I would like to ask you about the relationship between objectivism and mental well-being specifically in light of raising writing statistics about depression anxiety suicide as well as specifically concerning people who simply can't take responsibility for their own lives and can't function like others in the western society Thank you I think there's a huge relationship between the growth of the welfare state the growth of tribalism the undercutting of as Ankar described this morning the undercutting of reason the irrationalism in the world with the rise of of mental health issues right now I don't I we have to be careful about the rise of mental health issues statistically because we measure mental health today very differently that we did 50 years ago so it's a clear exactly what's happening but okay let's accept that it's rising you can see that if you teach people that their mind is impotent if you teach people that reason cannot lead to the truth then what do I do right then what is left and and it drives reliance and emotion it drives much more failure failure in relationships between human beings failure in careers failure in other things which leads to depression which you can see leads to other mental health problems so I think that the that again committing ourselves to one's mind to the efficacy of one's own mind to one's own life you know if we could get that as a cultural movement I think it would change the extent to which mental health issues problem to a large extent thank you Hi my name is Shaval I'm from Israel and my question is directed to Yaron Brooke you talked a lot about how America is a country that was built on the ideas of individualism and that's the reason that it thrived and succeeded so much and you and me both know that Israel is a very tribal place you also said that in your talk earlier so just as you can give an example of America being an individualistic country and succeeding I can give an example of Israel being a tribal country and succeeding just as much if not better well that's a strong statement a very strong statement which I don't think is true I think Israel has this it's like it's like a lot of countries it's a mixed economy it's a mixed world I think it's got some deep tribal roots and it's got a real deep tribal nature to its culture but at the same time it in certain realms of life it really does cultivate individualism and I think I think it cultivates it in many different ways but I'd say one of the reasons and here's just a theory right one of the reasons I think Jews overwhelmingly represented an intellectual field is that one of the things that Israel and Judaism in a sense allows for is robust debate and discussion we disagree all the time right as a culture you know it's and we argue and did a table conversation in a Jewish household particularly in Israel is by yelling at one another I mean having these robust conversations but it really is about you know you having your own thoughts you never expected to just shut up and listen in so in that sense while definitely there's a tribal nature there's also an individual listic part of it one cannot even imagine how well Israel would do and how great Israel could be if that individualistic part was more emphasized I'll give you just one I mean look at the history of Israel I grew up in Israel when it was much more tribal much more socialist much more collectivist that it is today and it was poor it won wars but it was poor and since it's shifted a little bit not a huge amount but at least in politics it shifted away from socialism to more individual responsibly more you know innovation more encouraging of entrepreneurs you know lower taxes lower regulations all of that it's become much richer the more you emphasize the individualistic aspects of the society the better as an economy it will do but then you can conclude that the best option is a mixture of both tribalism and no I don't think you can because and this is what people say about socialism too look all these mixed economies like Switzerland and Denmark and they do fine right they do great and and they do great to the extent that they have freedom to the extent that they have capitalism Israel does great to the extent that it encourages individualism and the more you encourage and you can see this over time the more you encourage these certain ideas the better you do and the more you encourage the alternative ideas the worst you do so it's like it's a it's a it's a spectrum on which you're moving the more you move towards and just take economics for a second the more you move towards capitalism the richer more prosperous more successful economically you do the further way you move and yeah in the middle there's this mixture and economies bounce around and it's not bad in the middle that's one of the challenges we have in getting people over here it's bad it's really bad it's evil in the alternative you don't get in what is not possible and this is partially why our arguments for individualism and at the end of the day for freedom and for capitalism are not primarily GDP per capita it's also GDP per capita but it's primarily moral it's primarily about your individual freedom it's primarily about your your ability to make individual choices and that's why I want freedom right and yes GDP per capita will also increase but I want to be I have a right to be free as a human being thanks so we're cutting into a coffee break now so please keep it brief and if you think your question has already been answered please sit down hi so regarding older people and I've heard the term mental calcification can somebody tell me what exactly is that how can I prevent that happening to me I may be too calcified to know the answer to that question I mean I've actually used the terms it's probably my fault yeah I mean I happen to believe that you know when you're young you're open to new ideas in a way that as you get older you become less open to partially because you've thought about certain things in a particular way along a particular path and that is kind of established in your consciousness and it's very difficult now to shake that and to move away from that also because you get busy right you start a family you have a career you're busy doing all this stuff there's a certain period in life about 16 to 25 with a big chunk of what you're doing is figuring the world out you're open to new ideas you're trying to understand and and that's the point in which you can be it's easier to be radical it's easier to change now there are plenty of people who change later so the calcification is an exaggeration and the way to avoid it and I think we can't avoid it is to stay active it's to always question even if you think you are an objectivist I'm an objectivist I agree with Ayn Rand question that right doubt it challenge yourself debate somebody who disagrees with you and let them ask the toughest question possible keep you and apply your new ideas to a field that you've never applied them to before keep your mind active questioning and again remember that the primary orientation is to the truth not to some book even if the book happens to be out of shrugged the question is what is true I'll just add quickly to that it connects to the question that I we answered before about speaking with one's parents and people generally and not just because someone's necessarily old but the longer a person's lived the more they've strung together a worldview and it's highly integrated and they see the world through it and sometimes don't even realize that they have it and to unwire that would take a lot of mental work and it would hurt it would take a heroic effort sometimes to do it and that's one reason why it's important not to expect any one argument or even series of arguments that you make to change somebody's mind overnight and to give them space to think about things because it's a tough job to decalcify for the people who are willing to do it thank you hello everyone so my question is in line with these things but more specific like the learning curve of this philosophy or objectivism or things what we talk is very huge very high how do you think what methodology I should use to benefit from the things which I learned for example when I read Ayn Rand like six years or Fountainhead like six years before that was an intense reading of one week and it really so after that every time I think of they want a coffee break I think so there's a question about what's the most effective way to study a philosophy like objectivism yeah well it's important that you're not gonna get everything that you would want to get just by reading a novel for the first time or for reading any of the books the first time so it's important that there is I mean Ayn Rand has a systematic philosophy behind the scenes of all these novels and all the essays that she writes and well I'll just say one thing there's many things I could say but the Ayn Rand Institute offers a program of online learning called the Objectivist Academic Center it's a three-year program and we take you systematically through the philosophy we give you homework you get graded and it's a great way to set goals for yourself in terms of studying it and being held accountable for it and learning from people who've studied it for a lot longer and that's probably the top choice that I'd mentioned yeah but a lot of you are busy I saw you roll your eyes at three years but the essays there's tons of content there's a website YouTube channel with lots of content and keep thinking about it keep reading another essay and thinking about it and analyzing it integrating into your thinking and it could take you 10 years it could however long it takes to integrate the philosophy into your life it depends on why you want to integrate it in what way you're struggling with what you understand what you don't understand but it's it's just it's like studying anything else you have to study it Hello I have two short questions the first one is for Mr. Lars and the second one is for all of you the first question is Mr. Lars I googled your name half an hour ago and I found out that you were born in 1963 which means that in 1992 you were 29 years old can you tell us something more about the 29 years old Lars can you tell us something more about your beginnings your fears if you had them that time did somebody help you it sounds like a very very long story I wouldn't like to do it in a minute at least so maybe we should take it offline I think that's not the right time thanks and the second question is how come that the myth of Nordic socialism is still alive today so alive that Bernie Sanders put it into his campaign to be a president of the United States of America because people use concepts today in very very loose ways nobody defines their terms nobody knows what they're actually talking about and you know those who have defended capitalism don't define capitalism properly and defend it properly and we would attack socialism we are often too quick not to define what we mean by when we attack it so people hold these concepts as very very loose abstractions so if you redistribute a lot of wealth you're socialist somehow if you have high tax rates you're socialist somehow and nobody really thinks about what socialism actually means thank you Carl Svanberg is sitting right there and he's written a number of articles on this very topic so find him and ask him more let's say our prime minister was very upset when he was when he was called a socialist country so you know there's a little bit of disagreement on that but but I would say it is pretty socialist thank you and it's a rather philosophical one so on the first lecture we were talking about an idea that society's level doesn't define our identity it can be religion, nationality, gender, social background so if we get rid of all different labels society puts on us what will be left? what is the primary state of a human being who doesn't connect himself to any of social institutions and how is he defined and how does he know that all of decisions and values are not the same and it's not the same it's not the same it's not the same it's not the same it's not the same it's not the same it's not the same it's not the same it's not the same it's not the same and values are not response to his background but his pure free will and can objectivism survive for a long time if like God's fault is real place and there are no social problems around because will we have a space for like our self development? I'll just answer that really quickly I think because I think the answer is sort of easy that an individual is defined by their choices and those choices may involve certain groups that they join based on ideas that they adopt and may be defined by a lot of other things their career especially that's very important in objectivism I'll be talking more about the connection between free will and individualism tomorrow so that might be a good way to talk more about it yeah and I'd also say this idea about it's not an objectivism is primarily a positive philosophy it's a philosophy not about critiquing everybody else it's a philosophy about how to live a successful life for yourself and you saw you know Lars's talk was exactly that how to take the objectivist ethics and apply it in your business for example but in apply it in your life apply it in how you live and there's tons of work still to be done you know really chewing on that and fully understanding that but objectivism is not about a critique objectivism is primarily about how to live the best life you can live for you and in that sense yes it'll survive when the world is better because there'll be lots of stuff to do about making you the best that you can be thank you everybody yeah thank you