 Thank you all very much. I hope you've gotten the decent lunch, and I hope you can provide some decent food for thought. In honor of the setting in the Federalist Society's traditions, I'm going to make my case largely in an historical way. The question on the table, as Yaron and I understand it, is a two-part one. What principles should inform governance role in the economy, and how far can and should government redress economic problems? I start with a simple principle which generally goes under the banner, not of egalitarianism writ large, but equal opportunity. It seems to me, if one's looking, not for the theoretical best possible world, but simply the ideal with respect to economic life that most animates American legal and constitutional culture, one is drawn to equal opportunity. My own account of equal opportunity, again, is an historical one drawing on a tradition which Professor Joey Fish, and many of you know, and I call the democracy of opportunity. It is not an ideal of perfect equal opportunity. For the simple reason that perfect equal opportunity is simply too hard or well-nigh impossible to attain, but a democracy of opportunity, as far as what government should be doing in respect of economic life and economic inequalities, means roughly the following. There should be, and government to its utmost, should strive to attain a broad middle class, not simply a formal, formally available middle class, but a realistically attainable middle class life in terms of the distribution of society's economic goods in exchange for, you know the refrain, hard work, contributions, engagement with the production and reproduction of social life through hard work. That's the heart of the matter. And the other principle with respect to a democracy of opportunity, in addition to looking to the middle, is to look at the top and to say, again, I think deep in the American brain that our elites, those who enjoy the greatest wealth in our society, the avenues to wealth and distinction in a fair and just American economy need to be open. Our elites cannot, our economic elite, political elite, they tend to march together, cannot be a essentially hereditary one. Just as the Constitution was framed to upend aristocracies of the old school, so from the very beginning, our American founders talked about a moneyed aristocracy or an oligarchy as a peril to the Constitutional Republic. That the kind of political economy we must have is one where, free from oligarchy, one in which not withstand the absence of any old-fashioned legal aristocracy, there can be an elite that essentially entretches itself and reproduces itself over time by the kinds of advantages it's able to enjoy in respect of access to the gateways to opportunity. So that in broad strokes is the kind of political economy and the kind of broad principles that should inform how government addresses economic inequalities. Often in the early Republic, that meant, surprisingly enough to many, initial endowments as economists today recall, that there was a fairly robust commitment to initial endowments of certain social goods, what you might call not redistribution, but a predistribution of certain things that seem broadly understood to be indispensable to a democracy of opportunity in the old days, in the early Republic, that was land, either land in the form of homesteads, or, as James Madison said, government can't spend too much energy taxing large estates in order to ensure that there be, indirectly, broad availability of cheap good land. Land is no longer the foundation, the material foundation for a middle class life and a measure of economic independence, and over time government, or this tradition of government's duties, has looked to other ways of a fair predistribution of certain basic social goods. One that's been almost uniformly agreed on is a decent education, and what that means over time has obviously changed from common schools that don't go more than four or five years to all the way through high school, and today we tend to think that a secure middle class life requires post-secondary education as well, and there's obviously much political and social ox about the accessibility of post-secondary education in the Americans with the economy today, but it seems to me that that too is one of the endowments that all Americans must have in order to have a fair chance, not an equal chance, but a fair chance at a middle class way of life. So, how much time do I have left? Who's timing? Four minutes, okay. So, I would underscore that what government can do involves both making sure that wage earning jobs are jobs that Americans can make a decent living, and then entrepreneurial opportunities as well are as wide open as a sort of industrial economy can make them. The latter project we often think of as an antitrust, anti-monopoly, that those kinds of laws that government administers and makes available to private litigants have to be aimed not simply as many economists these days would say at consumer price concerns as important as those are, but also at ensuring that not simply individuals but corporate actors don't monopolize opportunities in various growing sectors of the economy. To my thinking, antitrust has a kind of constitutional and fairness dimension to it, and certainly again historically that was the case. And in respect of wage earning jobs, I think in the real world, empirically it's proved to be the case that the kind of precipitous decline of unions has been one of the underlying causes for the remarkable diminution of wage earning jobs that have gained people a middle class way of life. To my thinking that needs to be repaired. There are many problems with unions as someone who knows well I'm the first to underline that, but I don't think that simple command control, minimum wage laws on government's part can do that much of the heavy lifting. So that's a fair description of my position. It's not outlandish, but neither is it obviously all that popular today, or we wouldn't have the present president. So I stand before you kind of old fashioned, but I wouldn't say unreconstructed, sort of New Deal liberal for the 21st century. Good. So just referring to the last comment, I just want to be clear that I am not here representing Donald Trump or have anything to do with that part of the political perspective. So I honestly take a very different perspective on the role of government and on politics. I find it troubling and somewhat strange that the role of government should be revolved around classes around what we should do with lower class and what we should do with middle class and what we should do with the upper class. And I find that quite disturbing in terms of the attempt to manipulate that kind of thing. Let's decide what a middle class is, what a broad middle class is, what a narrow middle class is. And a big chunk of the shrinkage of the middle class right now is a consequence of the way the statistics are done. A lot of those people are now richer and therefore not defined as middle class. Is that a good thing? Is that a bad thing? I think that's great, even if it means the middle class is strong. I take an individualistic perspective on this. I take the perspective of I'm interested in individual human flourishing. And I'm interested in the political system and the role of government that allows for individual human flourishing. And to me, it's unequivocal that individual human flourishing is a consequence politically, a political freedom of governments that respect as a primary individual rights, individual rights as understood, I think by the founders, as understood as individual freedom, as the freedom of the individual to pursue the values necessary for their own survival, for their own flourishing, for their own success, free of coercion, free of coercion from their neighbor and free of coercion from the government. Individuals left free and that the role of government, the role of government is to leave them alone and to protect them, to protect their freedom, to protect them from coercion from fraudsters, coercion from criminals, coercion from foreign invaders and terrorists, and to resolve disputes, to do what you guys do, right, to adjudicate disputes. But other than that, leave people alone. Now, it is interesting that this is also to the extent that this kind of political system is practiced, called a capitalism, free markets, is also to that extent that you actually get a middle class. That is, a middle class is not a creation of government. The middle class is indeed a creation of markets. It is a market phenomena. There was no middle class before capitalism. There was no middle class before the rise of capitalism in the late 18th century, early 19th century. It is a phenomena of the industrial revolution and everything that enterprise. And indeed, there was no middle class in China until China freed up its markets even a little bit. There was no middle class in South Korea until South Korea went a little bit at least towards capitalism, towards leaving individuals free to pursue the happiness. Not far enough, and I'll be the first to admit, my specific political system has never been tried fully, consistently. That doesn't worry me at all. The American political system was never tried before it was tried. So, we're still young as a human race. There's still a lot in our future, and I'm convinced that one day I will win. So, my whole approach to this is focused on individual freedom, on individual liberty, on leaving individual strength. And indeed, such a system is a system in which you get a lot of these results. A, you get a middle class. But B, what you get more importantly is that mobility. You get the ability of poor people to rise up much more than you did in the control economy, much more than you do today. Cronism, one of the real problems that we have today when we look at wealth is the idea that that wealth wasn't earned. It wasn't created. It was derived from political influence, from what we call cronyism, and that I think we will share as something that troubles us both. I would suggest that the only way to get rid of cronyism is to get rid of government power over the economy. The only way to get rid of influence of business over government is to get rid of the influence of government over business. The smaller government is, the less incentive I have to lobby. There's a famous Microsoft story before, in the mid-90s, Microsoft was invited in front of the Senate. Aaron Hatch was the residing senator, Republican from Utah, still is there. And he yelled, literally yelled, at Microsoft executives, you guys need to start lobbying. You need to build a building inside Washington, D.C., and you need to be involved in the political process. And Microsoft walked out of there saying, you know, you leave us alone, we'll leave you alone. And in those days, Microsoft spent exactly zero dollars on lobbying. Six months later, the justice abounder comes knocking. Antitrust violations for giving a product for free. I reject the idea that utter trust is a good thing. I think it's an awful thing. I think it's a political tool used selectively against companies that piss off politicians. It always has been that way. That's why it's so vaguely written so that almost any business activity, in some way or another, I mean, the wrong audience to get into the argument about antitrust. But from a philosophical perspective, it's a violation of the individual's liberty. If you're successful, cool, you should be, you should be, you know, held, not prosecuted for your success. So I guess I'm getting antitrust. For saying we're not going to be involved in politics, guess how much money they spent today on lobbying? Tens of millions of dollars a year, they have one of the nicest buildings in Washington, D.C., right equal distance between the White House and Congress, right? So you want to get rid of cronyism? I'm all for that. Get rid of the government's power over business and business will leave government alone. So my concern at the top is certainly cronyism. My concern with the middle class is not so much the size of the middle class. There's no optimal size. Who cares, right? My concern in the middle class is there's no economic growth today or there hasn't been economic growth or very much economic growth in the last 15 years, 16 years. And the reasons for that, and as an economist, the reason for that is pretty obvious, the size of government, the level of regulation, the level of taxation, all of that has restrained economic growth. Economic growth is easy to attain. And if you look at history, if you look at economic history, every country that reduces regulations, cut taxes, gets economic growth. That's easy. We have other reasons why we don't do those things, but they have nothing to do with the need for economic growth. So many of the redistributive programs done in the name of leveling inequality actually reduce economic growth. And then finally, I am concerned with poor people, right? I find this focus on the middle class a little strange. I care about poor people, particularly ambitious poor people who would like to rise up from poverty. And then the question is what kind of system allows poor people to rise up from poverty the easiest, the simplest, the smoothest. And again, it's a system of freedom. It's a system which has no regulations, which doesn't restrain the individuals into what they do. So you don't need a license to shampoo hair. You don't need a license to braid hair. You don't need a license to open a nail salon. You eliminate the barriers to entry for young employees and you don't have a minimum wage because all the minimum wage does is it drives people away from the workforce. So demand for low-skilled labor gets reduced. The incentive for automation increases. We can go into the minimum wage if you really want to, but the economics here are pretty settled. Although not based on some economists, but they really are pretty settled. So, you know, in every economic issue, what I perceive as the moral is consistent with the practical. That is freedom, focus on the individual, focus on liberty actually produces the best economic results and the kind of economic results that create a fight with dynamic economy. So because I wrote a book on inequality, just a word on inequality, the gap, the difference between the wealthy and the poor is irrelevant to any discussion. We've got problems with the top cronyism. We've got problems with economic growth and we've got problems with lack of mobility at the bottom. None of those have anything to do with the gap. The gap is an economic nothing. It's insignificant in spite of Thomas Piketty's big book. It doesn't mean anything. It has no moral significance because if people actually made the wealth, they created the wealth, then it's theirs. Morally it is theirs and if they create $70 billion of work to themselves, good for them. If they create $1 billion, good for them. If they create only a little bit like some professors and some teachers, that's good for us. It's ours. It's whatever it is that we create. That's what we have. Some morally and economically. The top is not a problem. And again, for the bottom to rise up, what we need is more freedom. That creates opportunity. That creates the fight with the economy that makes that mobility possible. Thank you. Good. So I think, not surprisingly, Aaron and I share the fundamental liberalism even though we take it very different directions. So it is not the good of any particular class that concerns me or the system of thought I would share with you. It's individual flourishing. I think there's little quarrel in terms of certain first principles. So maybe let me make three points. First of all, sort of in respect of how the framers, the kind of classical liberal and Republican traditions understood freedom. We also agree not only in individual flourishing, but on freedom as the sort of guiding principle. But freedom in the tradition that our Constitution, Declaration and fundamental traditions have emerged from freedom had two faces. It was the freedom from an overbearing government, but it was also the freedom to govern one's selves. And it was always the case that that latter freedom was understood to require a material foundation. That it was thin to a breaking point unless the individuals who were constituted as self-governing citizens of a Republican society had the wherewithal to stand up to their so-called betters. So the problem of freedom isn't just a freedom from an overbearing government. The problem is it's also a freedom from overbearing social actors as well. Which brings me to the second point. This tradition is not sort of hardwired to look kindly on overbearing centers of power for as long as the economic landscape only had the threat of landlords as the big overbearing powers. The answer was, as I sketched at the beginning of my talk, measures to make sure land was publicly distributed. But very swiftly, first banking and then other corporate actors emerged as other centers of power. So that the problem and the paradox of this liberal scheme that Ron and I have in problem is one to which antitrust I think was give or take an inevitable response. The paradox was as the nation became an industrial society. You saw growing concentrations of capital. It became legally and conceptually laughable, if Ron will forgive me, to think of US Steel as the sort of product of one gentleman's effort. It's no longer possible to think about the key economic actors in our society, whether it's Google or US Steel or Chevron or the other large corporations as somehow the rightful sort of results of individual efforts to which the major shareholders are entitled as a sort of first order moral matter. It has to be a more pragmatic approach when wealth takes the forms that it does in modern society. And so we have to deal with not one but two. Worries. One worry is that government becomes the vehicle for self-aggrandizement or oppression. But the other is that private actors and specifically corporations in our scheme of things become precisely the same thing. That's the central insight of legal realism. That the problem of coercion, which Ron and I agree is the central problem of one of the liberal thought, doesn't neatly fall under the rubric of what government can do to us so that if we shrink government, everything is okay. The problem is if we shrink government, we're left without any countervailing actor to ensure that corporations and large concentrations of wealth don't translate into exploitation and immiseration in the economic sphere and domination and coercion in the political sphere. And that is why as much as it would be a tidier and more elegant system if we could simply worry about shrinking government, we also have to worry about what we do with the fact that there is nothing hardwired in the capitalist economy to ensure that there will be sort of the kind of mobility and broad distribution of goods. That, you know, Ron and I think, all things equal is what you want. So we agree that, A, the middle class is the product of the capitalist revolution, there's no dispute there. The question is what you do when the middle class is no longer a broad sort of self-sufficient group of agrarians, but instead, the product of a whole system of really nearly collective actors and governmental involvement in economic life. There is no escaping that. Property, as the realists told us, contract all the great institutions of private economic life, which we both cherish, are themselves the creatures and constructs of government. There's no sort of escaping that. And the question is a pragmatic approach that is neither pro-nor-anti-government nor pro-nor-anti-private actor, but instead says, show me the results. So, I would say one of the great flaws in the founding of this country, and among the founders thinkers, thinking, was a lack of differentiation between two types of force, two types of power, economic power and political power. The founders had this and one of the consequences of the fact that they were fearful of economic power is the banking system that we inherited from them, which has been, for 240 years, pretty much a disaster. We've experienced 12 banking crises because Jefferson won the argument about banking concentration of banking power, whereas Canada, which had much free of banking system from the beginning, has had zero banking crisis during that period. There's a fundamental difference between economic power and political power, and the difference is the gun. Politics is about force. Politics is about coercion. Politics is a gun. If you talk about endowing people with some kind of starting wealth so they can start out with something, well, that has to be taken from someone, and the only way to take it is with coercion. If it was done voluntarily, I'd be all fine with it, but the fact is that the only way to give somebody something is to get it from somewhere, and the only way to get it is to cause somebody to give it. Political power is the power of coercion. I think we can all agree on that. Economic power is the opposite. The essential feature of economic power is voluntary action. It's voluntary exchange. When I buy a Microsoft product, it's because I want a Microsoft product, and I'm willing to pay $100 for Microsoft product because it's worth more than $100 to me, and by its very nature that trade is a win-win transaction, and indeed it is, yes, Microsoft made $70 billion for himself by having billions and trillions of transactions with billions of people that were all win-win where everybody is better off, right? And you can walk away from those transactions. I, since my days at UT, have been an Apple user. It's been hard. During the dark days, it was hard, and I resisted Microsoft, right? I didn't want a Microsoft product, and I succeeded. And others succeeded in other ways resisting Microsoft, because you can. There is a hard-wired system that corrects for the economic power that becomes exploitative. It's called a market, and it works. It works much better than any other system, and indeed it is what protects us most of the time. The marketplace corrects for if Microsoft gets too big and its products suck. It's called competition. When JD Rockefeller had 90% of all over fighting in the United States in the 1870s, the only reason he could sustain that was because every year, you can go back into records and find it, every year prices went down and quality went up. But at the time the antitrust was passed and they went after him, and they bulk-standed oil up, he had less, he had about 20% of the over-financing capacity in the United States. Why? Because of competition. You can only sustain 90% for a while, and even then the only reason he could sustain it for as long as he did was because he was so good at it. That's the beauty of markets which you cannot replicate by any other mechanism. So, economic force, economic power is a good. It's not coercive unless it mingles with political power. And yes, I'm all for finding ways to prevent business from gaining a gun from gaining political power. The only way to do that is to make politicians not have access to the world of business. So, in my constitution, I could ever rewrite a constitution, right? I would have a separation of state from economics. I don't think the state should have economic policy. I don't think the state should be involved in economics. One I owe, they should help define property rights and arbitrate disputes and leave us alone. Leave us alone. They don't need to regulate how we do business markets. Do it great. They don't need to tell us how much we should earn to none of their business. Because the only way to intervene in markets is by use of a gun. And a gun does not belong in voluntary human transactions unless there's fraud, unless a gun is being introduced by one of the actors. So, I am for 100% free market, a market in which people voluntarily can exchange and interact free of government coercion and free of coercion from their fellow citizens. So, we can talk, if you have questions, I'd love a question on education because this early endowment is important and we should talk about it. But, yeah, so I think I'll start. We'll take questions. I'll moderate the questions. So, does anybody have any questions for Dr. Krupp? This is a question for Dr. Krupp. Do you mention the degree for the minimum wage and how all the events are near that? They had to express some medicines to actually go into the realm. But my question is sort of broader. It speaks to the minimum wage issue, but more generally, given your economics and political theory, how do you deal with what amounts to the collective actions problem? So, for instance, as a people we might not want like Nike or anything, but when it comes down to it, we really want to buy a cheap pair of shoes. So, we have like competing desires with us and we need someone to tell us that we can't buy shoes. So, I don't have a competing desire. My only desire is a Nike, not enslaved people. Not with them, not used force. We talk about coercion, not coerced people. But I actually believe that sweatshops, if you want to use the term, in Indonesia and Malaysia, wherever they are, are wonderful things. Because they enable Indonesians to get a job instead of dying of starvation. Which is the alternative that they face? By the way, the same alternative that we face in the birth of capitalism, and that's why wages were so low, and that's why you had child labor. It's because there was no alternative. There was nothing else they could do. There was soap work. The alternative was either work, children work. They've always worked. They work in farms. Throughout human history, children have worked. The difference is throughout human history, children die before they reach 10. Half of them tend to die before they reach 10. Today they get to live because, well today we're rich enough to educate our kids. We want Indonesia to get rich enough or whatever the country is, Vietnam or whatever. Rich enough, so the parents, instead of sending their kids to work, instead of sending kids to school. That is a function of wealth, not a function of Nike. Nike has influence over the decision whether children work or not. The people who have an influence over that are parents. And the parents make that decision in the world, so laws that forbid child labor, this is a well documented, always happen. Once income of the lowest kind of the poorest people reaches a certain threshold, and as soon as that threshold reaches, parents are pulling their kids from the labor force and putting them to school, government then decides to be their so-called good guy and passes a law. Same thing happened in England, same thing happened in the United States, by the time the laws passed there were almost no children in the work force. So, my view is these countries need to go through certain stages and want to achieve wealth. I don't want to deny them those stages because otherwise what I'm doing is institutionalize them into poverty forever. And I think this is what happens with a lot of these policies, like minimum wage. We think we're doing something in your favor by raising the minimum wage to $50 an hour. But what we're actually doing is we're taking the worst up, the least educated, the people with the lowest skill level and saying you will never have a job. Because how do you get to produce $15 an hour? Let me tell you something about your employers. Your employers will make money off of you. They will pay you just a little bit less than what you're worth to them. And you will be willing to take it because it's worth more than your time, any other alternative that you have. It's a win-win transaction. That's true at the minimum wage as well. An employee can only produce $7 an hour. Let's say he's producing an 8 so I'm paying him $7. I'm never going to pay him $15. Ever paying $15. Unless I can raise costs. And if I can raise costs since everybody's here, then I'm just penalizing him and his family because of the people buying from me. So all of these policies, and I would say all of them I will take them one at a time if you want. All of these policies are supposed to help people like let's stop buying Nike because they have low-wage workers in Indonesia. Land up hooting the people that supposedly you care about. But I think we don't really care about them. What we care about is our middle-class conscience and feeling good about ourselves is what I think we mostly care about and we evade the consequences to the really poor people who need these jobs, who without these jobs would really be suffering. So it's one of the elegant if you listen to kind of libertarian economists like Aaron you'll hear again and again what English teachers call a trope of these measures totally hurt the people they supposedly are meant to help. And as a theoretical matter as a kind of theoretical description of a free market, sort of a global free market economy that makes a lot of sense. Aaron's story as simply a just-so story is I think unassailable. I think in the real world the the facts on the ground are a great deal more complex and run against many of the things that your own has asserted. So the impairments of minimum wage certainly in the U.S. are a much more complicated story. Wild increases in the minimum wage as much as the people who live on it would like them do suppress the number of jobs in a regional economy or a city's economy. But the ones which the just-so story of this will only hurt the people at the margin who you're trying to help simply isn't worn out by the facts. But that's a deeply empirical question. Let me put that on the table and say that it is likewise the case when one looks at the global economy that there are many other factors that go into the determinants of what the wage level is like amongst Nike subcontractors. They have to do with many other factors including the regulatory regimes and the law that obtains in the given jurisdiction where Nike is producing. It is not the case that the Bangladeshi child laborer short of slavery but nonetheless working 12 hours a day at 12 years old will necessarily be worse off if Bangladeshi's unions or legislatures and whatever global institutions attend to them manage to boost the wage. It all depends on a great empirical factor. But let's get to a more conceptual level. Keeping the gun and the economy separate is just not on. Why is it that the workers in the widget factory go to work for whatever is on offer when one's what's on offer is less than they want. Well, Yaron says it's until win-win. They still are better off than if they didn't have the job. But the other question is why don't they simply go in and make the widgets and share the profits? Why don't they sort of go into the plant and make the widgets themselves? The answer is because they don't own the plant. Well, how is it that the owner enjoys the right to refuse to let them in except on his or her terms? It's the gun. Who wields the gun? The state. There is no institution of private property nor any institution of contract. The building blocks of this world of win-win private and coercion free is all at the point of a gun. We can't have I don't say this as a critique but just a fact of the matter that coercion is as invigorated in any free market capitalist economy as any other kind of social order. It makes no difference. The important question is how much net liberty, how much human flourishing how much freedom and innovation you have with what particular arranger. But any arrangement is going to be at the end of the day at the point of a gun. So, as a theoretical matter, I can't imagine as much as I'd like to a sort of social economic order that isn't entangled with coercion and the problem of choosing what forms of coercion what kinds of rights and duties yield best human results. There's no other way around it. It's why we lawyers get to pay the big bucks. It's because you can't just have an economy and wish away or assume away the laws to constitute private property at the point of a gun. And that being so, finally the bargaining power that the Bangladeshi workers enjoy vis-a-vis the subcontractor is similarly not sort of just hardwired into some free market. It has to do with all the details that we lawyers love so much about what it means to be an employer or an employee in any given economic order and that will make a world of difference as to what share of the profits of the Nike factory the workers, the contractors the owners, the landlords the lessees, the managers all enjoy. You can have an efficient humming shoe factory with many different arrangements but how much the working people get is a function of the particular legal ones. It is also just blackly not the case that economies with the lowest taxes and the least regulation thrive the best, right? That is a dense empirical question as well which we can go into if anyone's interested but I'm here to just push back against Aaron's live empiricism. You can respond really quickly. The important point I want to respond to is the coercion point. As I said there are many ways to protect our rights. Somebody built a plant. Property rights are not granted to us by government. They are defined and protected by government. So the outline of the property is defined. Somebody built that plant. Somebody bought the machinery for the workers to walk in and take it over. It's theft as we've understood it for thousands of years. But before there were factors all the government here is doing is using its cursor power to defend the rights of the people who built it. The same thing would be the case if the employer changed his people to his machines and whipped them three times a day. That would be the equivalent of slavery. That would be a violation of their rights. And the government would have a role stepping in to defend the rights of the workers. The ability or its job is to use its cursor power in defense of individual rights. Not in violation of those. Not in order to take property from some and give it to others. But to protect the property that people have. The reason the workers can't just make the widgets is they didn't come up with the idea. They didn't raise the capital. See, they didn't take the risk. They weren't willing not to be paid until the widgets made a profit. Just think of a biotech company that might only be profitable after 10 to 15 years. And yet everybody gets paid. All the workers get paid. They have to be scientists and engineers if they get paid well. For 10, 15 years while the capitalists are sitting there wondering if you'll ever see a dime from it. Now I don't feel sorry for the capitalist. But that's the way democracy was. The scientists would never do that work if they weren't getting paid. Just like the workers in the widget factory were waiting for his return. So, yeah, they could steal it. But that's exactly the opposite of what law is supposed to be about. It's supposed to protect property. Not give us, but protect. Okay, let's take this to the questions. It's really a problem for the environment. I just got the proof that you bring it here. I was thinking how, I mean from my point of view, the coercion of the whole system is a violation and the whole issue is new law. And I would be in the case of, for instance, small-scale economies in which farmers, for instance, contribute to the whole economic system because of their overwork lack of regulations, lack of regulation. And if we impose and promote this proposal that you bring in which I've got the quality of the constitution and its whole set of principles should span aside from the economy where should small-scale need them? Where should what? What would happen to small farmers and small businessmen? I don't know. So, for example, I'll give you an example. Right now there's a thriving industry of small organic farmers and they specialize in close to market, right? These restaurants where you only eat stuff that's close by and there's people who want to consume that and good for them and that's why small farmers still exist in America, otherwise they wouldn't. Sorry. The thing is that coexist when a normalized world in which we are moving forward to a what economy? Structivism. Structivism in which we have crisis in the field of natural resources that have open barriers to its natural resources just in areas where that small populations are affected. So, if we have economy that can understand the constitution now, the whole political iteration is just because we have to predict some economy model then how? I'm not trying to predict the economy model I'm even willing to say I don't care about the economy model. I care about individual human flourishing and the standards, what are the requirements of individual human flourishing and in my view the standard for individual human flourishing on the political level they're moral standards which I'm not getting into but at the political level the only thing we need to be concerned about for the perspective of individual human flourishing for the political level is freedom. Freedom means the absence of coercion from government and absent from coercion from your neighbors, from other people so that you're free to pursue your life. You don't want to buy from Walmart? Don't buy from Walmart. You don't want to buy GMOs? Don't buy GMOs. You can do what you want with your life. This is the difference. You can't get together with your neighbors and decide how else I should live. You can't get together with your neighbors and decide that my business is too big and needs to be broken up. It's none of your business. It's my business. And this idea that big businesses like U.S. Steel somehow lose that now they don't. They become more complex. The number of contributors becomes larger. So U.S. Steel could not just it did not just depend on Carnegie but it depended on J.P. Morgan and depended on a bunch of other people. All got rewarded. All got paid. All got compensated. All played a role in it. Microsoft not only did Bill Gates become a Brazilian air but 11,000 people in Microsoft became millionaires. All of them shared in the prosperity that are these companies. So yeah, these companies are complex entities but because of the way they're constructed which is voluntarily people benefit from it and markets do have this wonderful hard wired mechanism. If you work at this widget factory and you don't like your wages well there's a sewing factory over here and you can produce more than what this guy's paying you. This guy will pay you more for it. If markets drive wages up not down it is a fallacy that has existed since at least Karl Marx that wages are driven down by markets it's exactly the opposite. When you free up markets wages are driven up. Why are they driven up? Because productivity is driven up and there is a direct correlation between productivity and wages and always has to be. I don't think because I don't quite understand what you're asking. If you're worried about small community suffering because big business comes in my perspective is the other is exact opposite. I think they benefit enormously if they have and this goes to the governance in other countries. If the governance in other countries is rights protecting governance. So to the extent that other countries have rights violating governance then that's what we should be upset about the multi-nationals coming in and offering jobs to the people. I'll take one more question. Hi. Your model depends on sort of a completely voluntary market but I'm wondering about sort of involuntary things like food and water that I need to purchase to live. How those factor in your thoughts? Well I mean you need them so you better use and notice and retain them. That is you don't have the fact that you need them does not present a model obligation on me or political obligation on me to provide it to you. So you need food, good go get a job and buy the food. So if you don't get a job it's not my obligation to feed you. But like say someone monopolizes 90% of the food industry and then raises the prices up then I will compete them out of business and this is let me give you an endless number of examples standard oil that didn't happen. Alcoa had 80% of all the aluminum production in the world at some point. Crisis went down quality went up every year and otherwise they knew they would be driven out of business. Microsoft got sued for antitrust violation because it was offering a product for free. That was a great sin. It was internet explorer at the time. We were paying I remember paying $70 for Netscape browser and it was for free and Microsoft was penalized for that. So the markets don't work that way. This idea that you can create a fictional world. You can do it on a blackboard in a classroom where they teach you the ridiculous model of perfect competition and monopolistic pricing. That is not reality. That's not how the world works. It's never been how the world works. What's perfect competition? Perfect competition is utterly boring. All products are the same. There's no innovation in such a model. So nobody controls 90% of the food. And if they did, competitors would rise up and demolish them. And sometimes those competitors would be far overseas if we had free markets. Freedom does not sustain those kind of science fiction stories. They don't happen. Theoretically or practically. One of the problems I'm guessing you were talking about maybe in the 19th century the problem with the land scarce or wasn't enough land for the homes. The whole western half of the United States almost would be in favor of privatizing all that land. If it's a problem. I don't necessarily think that that's a problem. But if you think that the land issues a problem, would you be in favor of privatizing all of it? Most Americans aren't farmers anymore. I don't mean just to farm. I don't mean just to farm. I don't mean just to do whatever they could sell it. I mean just so they could own it. Do whatever they want with it. I think you misunderstood what I was using land as what was at the time the most important basis on which to build a household, a family a life and contribute to the economy and make a living. So it was a basis for an independent livelihood because that was a moral good and a political good. And in that long 19th century, the federal lands were precisely used under a whole series of homestead acts to do the kind of work at once economic and political that I describe. In other words the federal lands were parceled out. Sometimes to big railroad as incentives to build or because of their cronies in Congress or the states but by and large at least the ideal, the aspirational sort of project was to give out the federal lands to settlers who would work hard and make a life on. And that's no longer as much as like Iran I'm a fan of small farms in the United States. I don't see that as a major part of reconstructing the American economy in a better way. So no, I think it's a major part but that's a lot of property out there that can be used for other things that's all I'm saying. I mean that's what I was just wondering. Mary, you know again I tend to see these questions as pretty complex in many sides. What to do with the federal lands and how much to privatize them would seem to me to be a harder question than it may be to you. There you are. Alright guys we're out of time. Thank you.