 Welcome to Korea. Welcome to Pan and Mike. Thank you. It's good to be here. Thanks for having me. Okay. Thank you. And please introduce yourself to our audience. Sure. My name is Iran Brooke. I was born and raised in Israel and am now the chairman of the Board of the Iron Man Institute. When I was 16, I read this amazing book called Atlas Shrugged. And at the time I was a socialist. I was a nationalist, a tribalist. And Iron Man changed my life. She really changed my views about the world. She changed my views about my own life and about politics and about the world out there. And really since the age of 16, I've been dedicated to studying how it is, learning about the philosophy and now teaching other people about her ideas and her philosophy. I brought a couple of books from my bookshelves. Yes. The Fountainhead. This book was translated into Korean. The Fountainhead. Another book is... Another book is Atlas Shrugged. This is another book of Iron Man. This book is also translated into Korean. It's a small booklet. This is not fiction. It's fiction. It's also fiction. Yes. It's a short story. Before we start, we couldn't jump over this amazing lady. She was Russian, American, and it seems that according to the book, she came to the United States and she looked over the city of Manhattan and she was attracted by the skyscrapers of Manhattan. She loved the skyscrapers of Manhattan. She loved the view of Manhattan. It symbolizes for her the freedom, the creativity, the productiveness that was capitalism, that was freedom. She was born in 1905 in St. Petersburg, Russia, and she witnessed the Russian Revolution and she lived under communism. She knew what communism was and what it did to people and she managed to escape in a very small window where she could, at a very young age of 21 years old, she came to America by herself and started with nothing, nothing, and became within 20 years one of the best-selling authors in American history. She had two best-selling books that you pointed out, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrug, and she became one of the most well-known and influential intellectuals. In America of that period, she influenced many, many people and, of course, changed the lives of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people who today advocate for her ideas or follow her philosophy. So we just talked about Ayn Rand and maybe we can move into the objectivism. Objectivism is quite a new concept or philosophy in Korea. So you may explain what it is to our audience. Sure, philosophy is Ayn Rand's philosophy. It's the ideas that are in The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrug, but she also wrote a lot of non-fiction philosophical works where she articulates her philosophical ideas and she begins with the idea that reality is what it is. It's not affected or it's not determined by our own consciousness. It's not determined by some mystical force. Reality is what it is. And we have the tool as human beings, we have the tool to identify that reality and that's our reason. So we are rational, we're a rational animal. The reason is our means of survival. It's not emotions, it's not revelation, it's reason. And then, of course, only individuals reason. And for her, the individual is the moral entity. So the purpose of morality is to guide the individual towards his own individual happiness. So the moral purpose of your life is your happiness, not the war being of other people. You're not supposed to sacrifice for other people, but also don't expect other people to sacrifice for you. And the only political system that allows individuals to pursue their happiness is capitalism, is the politics of freedom, of liberty. So the idea is that the role of the government is one. The role of the government is to protect our individual rights. It's to protect our freedoms, our freedoms of action. It's to protect our right to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. Not run the economy, not run education, not run science, not get involved in ideas. So government is there to protect us, police, a military and a judiciary, complete separation of government from economics. So she was the philosopher of capitalism, the philosopher of liberty. So I'd like to comment about two Korean men. One is an entrepreneur and the other is a politician. And one person is Jeong Ju Young. Jeong Ju Young is... All Koreans know Jeong Ju Young. He was from very poor farmers. His father was very poor, so he brought one cow. Cow is the biggest property of a poor family. But he sold it and he made some money and he moved into Seoul. And he started with a support work, uploading heavy physical work. But he started with nothing. But he built and created one of the best shipbuilding companies, Hyundai Industries and Hyundai Motors. Amazing man. So one example is Jeong Ju Young. I think that's a typical example of what happens when we're free. It's what happens when you have a free market. Opportunities abound. Everybody has lots of opportunities and some people take advantage of those people. Some people have the will, the hard work and the ability to take advantage of those people and rise up as high as they can get. Some of the richest people in all of human history, in America, Rockefeller and Carnegie, were people who were born very, very poor and through their own will and their own effort and their own thinking and their own ability, rose up and became some of the most successful richest people. And that is what capitalism, freedom, free markets about creating those opportunities for everybody who really applies themselves to be successful in life. Everything is open to you under freedom. It's when you control, it's when you regulate, it's when you subsidize, it's when you give favors to some at the expense of others that you hold people back. Another example I'd like to mention is Park Jung Ki. He was born in colonized Korea, colonized by Japan from a very poor family and he became the army general of the once colonized poor country and then he decided to involve in politics and he became the president of Korea and actually some people say his leadership was dictatorship but he governed our country for 18 years and then from through his time we started with, you know, per capita was $80, now $30,000, right? $30,000. So amazing country he made and one of the most industrialized country and maybe he had some wrongdoings but generally he achieved a lot. So what do you comment over this kind of man? Well, I mean I would say he brought a lot of economic freedom to Korea and that's incredibly important and yes, and the achievements of Korea over the last 50 years are amazing as a consequence of more liberty, more freedom, more free markets. It's too bad in a sense that he didn't go all the way. There was still too much control, too much central planning, too much favoring big business over entrepreneurs, too much subsidies and government kind of planning, five-year plans and things like that but it shows that even a little bit of freedom, even a little bit of capitalism, even a little bit of free markets create enormous amounts of wealth. What the lesson we need to learn is let's go all the way. Let's increase the amount of freedom, let's increase the amount of capitalism, let's increase the liberty that individuals have and let's get the government out of subsidizing, controlling, favoring certain industries over others and let the market really blossom. People like you mentioned before who become very, very successful, become billionaires, who make a lot of money, the only way to become a billionaire is by making the world around you a better place. It's the only way to become a billionaire is by creating jobs, it's by creating wealth and it's by creating products that people value and people want and people buy and it makes the lives of people better. So what we want to encourage is a world of entrepreneurs who create wealth and build industries, not the industry some central planner wants but the industries that the market will reward. Let's talk about the book. The title of the book is equal is unfair. So what do you try to say by this title? Well, I'm trying to say that economic equality, even what people perceive as equality of opportunity from an economic perspective, are bad ideas. They're wrong, they're evil morally and they're economically suicidal. The only way to achieve economic equality is to take from some and give to others. It's to constrain the hands of the able. It's to constrain the ability of the people who could produce the most in order to give to those who cannot. And that's wrong. What right do we take from some and give to others? By what right do we constrain those who want to act? So I believe that this whole striving towards equality leads to nothing but poverty, leads to nothing but destruction, leads to nothing but ultimately starvation. We've seen every regime in the world that has tried to establish equality of outcome of any sort, fail and destroy the lives of its own people. The only quality, the only quality that matters is equality of rights, equality of liberty, equality of freedom. We are all born free. We are all born free to live our lives based on our own judgment, based on our own mind, based on our rational values that we choose. And the government's job is to protect our ability to go and seek out those values. The government's job is to protect us from cooks and criminals and fraudsters and invaders and terrorists, but otherwise leave us alone. And when you leave free people alone, guess what happens? They become unequal. Is this book translated into Korean version? Not yet. I'm looking for a publisher if anybody wants to. I would be happy to see it in Korean. But if there's a society in the door, you say, you know, equality is unfair. This is about American. Well, not really. It's about any country. Any country. Because the idea is that whenever you leave people free in whatever country it is, you can see inequality in China today. Here in Korea, we have inequality. Every free country, to the extent that it's free, is going to generate inequality of outcome. Because some people, like the entrepreneur you mentioned earlier, produce huge amounts. Other people don't. Some of us choose to be teachers or commentators on television. And we're just going to make less money because we create less value. Objectively, we create less value for large numbers of people. To be a billionaire, you have to create large value for large numbers of people. Some people become billionaires. Some people become, you know, just okay. The point is that you don't penalize the successful because some people are not successful. You don't penalize the productive because some people are unproductive. Inequality is not a problem. It's not an economic problem and it's not a moral problem. Leave it alone. What we should strive towards is to maximize freedom, to maximize liberty, to maximize free markets, not to try to control who owns what and how much everybody has. Confederation of trade union in the biggest union of Korea and they are saying that just like this, some people are equal. Some people are more equal and say, you know, they say that the workers are not guilty, out of guilty innocent and they are, you know, breaking laws and whatever they want to make equal country, that's their agenda. So that's the agenda of the people and the government, this government, as you mentioned, we have a chance to have more free market but this government seems that more socialized than somewhat like, you know... But the more equal we have the more equal we achieve the poorer we become. So equality leads to poverty. The goal is the practical. When you violate morality by taking from some and giving to others you actually create a worse off economy and a worse off society so that labor unions are wrong. If they really cared about their members if labor unions really cared about the well-being of the people they represented then they would be advocates for capitalism because under capitalism workers do better than under any other system. Their standard of living goes up down, the quality of life of this improves their wages as their productivity increases as capital is invested their productivity increases and their wages go up. So the best policy for workers is capitalism. I think Marx and the labor unions they present capitalists industrialists CEOs managers as opposed in opposition to the workers. But that is not true. The interests are aligned. When capitalists do well workers do well. When businesses do well workers do well. And if you penalize businesses, if you penalize the capitalists if you penalize the managers the workers will do worse. Just look at Venezuela today. When we nationalize when we socialize when we collectivize we also bring about poverty destruction of wealth destruction of productive ability they can't get electricity in Venezuela they can't get food in Venezuela because they destroyed the capacity to create to produce to make stuff. So capitalism is good for the workers socialism is bad for the workers capitalism is good for anybody who is willing to work will be better off. 300 years ago we were all very equal in the world everybody was equally poor and then there was an industrial revolution and this is true in Korea after the Korean War everybody in Korea was equal everybody was equally poor was a very poor country and then you adopted some freedom and some people got rich faster than other people but everybody got rich in comparison to the poverty that existed before everybody is better off because of the freedoms that Korea has adopted because of industrialization and because of whatever whatever aspects of capitalism you have adopted in free markets so let's sum up this interview so people will finish would you like to have anything to say to our audience I would say that everybody should read Iron Man they should read Atlas Shrugged and Fountainhead it's in Korea you should try to read some of Iron Man's nonfiction essays some of her philosophical works Iron Man is probably the most inspiring writer that I've ever read and she inspires you as an individual to make the most of your life she's not just about politics she is about economics she's about how to make your life as an individual the best life that it can be how to live a successful flourishing life as an individual and the political system that makes that possible is capitalism because it leaves you alone so she is the greatest defender of capitalism not only because she says it works but because it's the only moral system it's the only moral system because it leaves you free to pursue your life to live for your happiness to live for your values so I encourage everybody to read her books to engage with her ideas and you know hopefully if enough people read her works we can fight for a freer world and a freer Korea the summarized interpretation we have discussed about objectivism and iron rand and Yaron Brooks and we talked about many subjects so now we finish our conversation and thank you and thank you for your time and sharing your views with our audience thank you and nice to stay here in Korea. I appreciate it. Thank you Thank you