 It's great to welcome back to the program, Yaron Brooke, who's the chairman of the Ein Rand Institute host of the Yaron Brooke show. This is the second in a series of discussions that we're producing in partnership with the Ein Rand Institute. We have already talked a little bit about Ein Rand, a bit about objectivism and the conversation started to get into some of the real world considerations, the economic and government systems that might stem from Ein Rand's philosophy. And I think it makes sense at this point, Yaron, to get into capitalism. And because so much about our discussion has been about ethics and morality, really to talk a little bit about the morality of capitalism. But in order to do that, I think we first have to talk a little bit about how we define what is moral. What is a moral system? How would we evaluate that? What would Ein Rand say about defining the morality of a system? So again, let's start with individual morality. Individual morality is the morality where your life, your life is the standard and where your moral purpose is your own happiness. So our moral political economic system would be a system that allowed you to do that, left you free in a sense to be able to achieve your own happiness. Now for Ein Rand, achieving one's happiness requires the use of reason. We talked about this last time. It's a life guided by one's reason. It's a rational life. It's a thinking man's life, right? It's one that relies on facts. So one of the things, so the question then becomes, if I want to live a life guided by my reason with the goal of my own happiness is my purpose. What kind of world when I get into a society with other people, what kind of conditions do I need in order to sustain that kind of life? So the question is, what would threaten? What is it about other people that might threaten my ability to achieve happiness, to achieve, to follow my reason? What is the enemy of reason? Well, the enemy of reason according to Rand, and I would agree, is force, coercion, an authority that dictates to us this is the truth and you can't change it. Think about Galileo. Galileo can think about his new theory, but as soon as he presents it and it's rejected and he's put in house arrest, well, I mean, he's not developing it. He's not broadening it. It seriously limits the scope of his thinking because he knows that if he pushes the envelope a little bit, they're going to shoot him. Well, they can't shoot him. In those days, they'll burn him at the stake. The ultimate enemy of human reason and human rationality is force, coercion, authority. So that's the one thing we have to extract from human interaction. We have to leave individuals free to think what they want and to act on those thoughts and as long as they're not using coercion on others, leave them free. And that's the concept that defines that as a concept that John Locke comes up with, which is the idea of individual rights. It's a moral idea that basically says individuals need to be free to pursue the values that they need in order to achieve, to succeed in their life, to achieve their happiness. They need to be left free from coercion and force. And rights are a moral concept that defines our relationship in a social context that says force is out. You cannot relate to one another using coercion. So that sounds like it makes a lot of sense in many ways. And the only thing I want to interject here as we start to explore this is when we talk about force, we could imagine force coming in the form of, you know, from an oppressive government in Stalinist communism, we could imagine force coming in a different form from a corporate autocracy in which the desires of the average individual person are effectively irrelevant because they don't have the corporate or financial power of large corporations. I mean, if we're properly and widely enough defining force, I think we'll get a lot of agreement on what you've said so far. Well, I don't think you can widely define force in the way you just did. Well, we have to we have to have a clear definition of force is force. It is it is inflicting violence on somebody else. It is physically penalizing somebody else for their views, for their actions, for what they've done. And of course, force is appropriate. If there's a murder out there, you want to physically remove him from the scene, put him in jail, you know, use force to defend yourself. There are appropriate uses of force, but force is not me you know, convincing you or, you know, intellectually manipulating you or some, I believe every individual has free will. As long as we interact with one another on a voluntary basis, force has no place in the direction. Let's let's put corporate force or how you define corporate. Now, I think that's the problem. I think we're going to disagree there. We're just a second. We're going to. OK. I mean, I'm happy to go back to it. But let me let me just let me just let's get to capitalism. Let's define capitalism and then I'm happy to go wherever you want to go. That's fine. I'll just mention that my 15 second interlude is I think that if we are already a priori defining force in this narrow away, we are already preempting one of the most important parts of the conversation, but we can come back to it if that's the way it's easy to come back to. OK. Well, but yes, I am. I in Rand is defining force in this in this you would think narrow way, but this is the way force has been defined for a long time. And this is this is not a pretty this is not an unconventional view of force. It's only in the in the modern world. That's right. It's outdated in the modern world, I would argue. We define force to to to to include certain voluntary transactions that people engage with in. But so if we define force in those terms, then Rand would say we create an institution called government and the purpose of the purpose of government, the only purpose of government because the only threat to individuals and the only threat to reason is force. The purpose of government, the only role of government, therefore, is to extract force from society, to protect us from the use of force by other people domestically and or internationally, to arbitrate disputes between us, so we don't revert to force. We don't go out dueling in the streets. So the only purpose of government, according to Rand, is to create an environment in which rational individuals can pursue their values to pursue their life in pursuit of their own happiness, right? That is it. And anything else that the government does it by definition violates rights because government is an agency of force. Government is an agency of coercion of authority. So we can we can move into how that relates to a capitalist system. I mean, I think that this is the problem with if you define the terms in this way, when you when you control the inputs, you lead to a seemingly rational output, which I can tell we are going in the direction of being a relatively free market capitalist system. We're absolutely absolutely free. OK, so you're going in for that. What I think the problem is is that it is an improper set of inputs because when you look at the world as it is, not as it might be in this, you know, the framed way that you're putting together, you see something like, for example, business regulation. That is by the debt, by the sort of framework you've established. Regulating a business is you're preventing the business from doing what it is that it has determined it wants to do. I mean, I think we get how that's a problem. But the idea that we hear from some in the libertarian right that businesses have an incentive to regulate themselves because the PR will be so bad if anybody gets hurt from what they do. It just doesn't happen. It is I consider it a form of force that businesses when they are under regulated, do things that are bad physically for people. I mean, it's not just a bad for people's emotion. It's physically bad for people. I consider those forms of force that necessitate a certain degree of government involvement. So I know, and this is where we're going to disagree. Yes. And and a disagreement, I think Hawkins back to some of the issues in morality, but let me be clear. First of all, I don't like the idea of libertarian right, because I don't know what that means and the whole right left spectrum. I don't want anything to do with it. Right. So let's get rid of that. But I'm for no regulation or for, you know, regulations. We could argue about very, very particular cases where corporations or businesses in what they're doing inflicting so much risk that that it is a violation of somebody's rights. But generally, I'm for no regulation. Not because because I believe that markets can solve these problems far better. But because there's no right to regulate, right? The point is this, as long as a corporation has not inflicted physical harm on you, you have no claim against the corporation. If it inflicts physical harm against you, that is when, yes, governments should step in just like if I inflict physical harm on you, then the government should step in. But the government cannot preempt, say, you on, you've got that funny look in your eye. You're going to punch David any minute now, so we're going to restrain you in advance. That is inappropriate law. And that's how you get authoritarianism. Well, hold on a second, but I don't think that that's how it. So so you're that's exactly what it is. Let me give you a different example. You have a government that says, listen, the the the industry of producing large plastic, you know, large plastic manufacturing. OK, go ahead. Can we put environmentalism in the side? OK, forget about it. Forget about that one for a minute, because it's complicated. Fine. Let's do a different example. Let's do food or something like that. Well, insurance, car insurance, for example. I mean, let's make it something a little more mundane. The government says if you because car insurance ties into so many different things that influence, you know, public roadways and accommodations, people's health, private products, which are vehicles, which are manufactured. We if you want to be in the business of auto insurance, that's fine. But there's a certain set of rules that you're going to have to abide by with regard to whatever, right? Premiums and the ways in which insurance can be sold and all these different things. Nobody is forcing an entrepreneur. Hold on a second. Let me at least get the frame of the question. Nobody is forcing anybody to be in the auto insurance industry. Nobody is coming in and saying, I need you to do this. And here's exactly what I'm going to do to you. It's there's all sorts of businesses you can participate in. Here's one we've identified where there will be some rules you have to play by period. But there is enormous force being affected here. Let's say I'm an entrepreneur. Yeah. I have a new idea on how to deliver auto insurance that breaks the rules, which almost every new idea does. That's the nature of new ideas. Uber breaks the rules. Every new innovation breaks the rules in some way. And I want to offer this insurance. And there are people who are willing to buy it. There are people who are willing to reinsure it or whatever. Everybody I deal with, I'm dealing with honestly. I haven't committed far to having done deceptive advertising or anything like I'm dealing with it. Honestly, I'm providing a product that people are voluntarily buying. And when the accident happened, I'm paying up. So I'm doing everything by the book, but I'm, you know, it's online. Or if it's it's it's virtual or something new is being attempted here. Or the way I do the premiums violates the regulation. Now you're coming and physically, physically shutting my business down. And if you're so inclined, you're physically dragging me off to jail. If I don't pay the fines that you have physically extracted from me, there is clearly physical force here because you're limiting. See, I want a world in which the possibilities for innovation and creation and applying the human mind to new ideas is unlimited because it is unlimited. Why do you think, though, that that degree of a total lack of regulation? You know, there's a lot of people who like to say communism has never worked. That degree of lack of regulation has also not worked because it's chaos. No, it's not chaos because it's not chaos at all. It actually gets a much better, more ordered society than you get. Otherwise, I mean, you get, you get semblances of that in Silicon Valley where nobody has had the time yet to put the rules in place of people actually free to innovate, to think outside the box, to create new stuff. You got that in industry in terms of innovation in the 19th century, where imagine if regulators had decided that kerosene was wrong and lighting was therefore wrongly regulated and placed rules and restrictions around lighting. And therefore, when Thomas Edison came up with the electric light, that was outside of those rules and he couldn't do it because it was it was not appropriate. We were doing kerosene right now. So no, it's it's not chaos at all. The market is an amazingly beautiful thing. I mean, one of the amazing things about capitalism is when you when you find places that have a little bit of it. And granted, you can't find anywhere that has all of it. But when you find places that have a little bit of it, they're amazingly ordered and amazingly productive and amazingly, you know, flourishing. So but why is it that we're not seeing it at any kind of larger scale? Well, because we don't trust people. So this goes this goes to the question of, you know, I wanted to go to food because because that's the typical one, you know, if not for food regulators, if not for the FDA, you know, McDonald's would be poisoning us because, you know, McDonald's knows that the best way to make money is to kill his customers or to poison its customs. I mean, it's the idea that human beings are not rational, that human beings don't follow reason. That idea leads us and indeed that self interest, the idea of pursuing profit is evil and bad. No, but I see. I think the problem I have with that example is that lead us to distrust businessman and therefore to project onto them the worst kind of behavior and then to assume then that some government entity could stop them from behaving in that way. But the thing is that's a cartoon. We need to make if we're going to do the McDonald's example, if we need to do if we're going to do the McDonald's example, we need to do it in a more sensible or as you would like to say, a rational way, because the view of McDonald's of an unregulated McDonald's would not be let's put out food so unhealthy that it kills our customers and we go out of business. Oh, that's that's a straw man. It's a red herring of sorts. The way McDonald's would operate it. Hold on. The way McDonald's would operate is let's put out food that maximizes our revenue, which is done not by poisoning people to death in five years, but just by having really low quality food where when someone 65, they end up obese and with heart disease and it's not really clear that it's because of McDonald's and we could never be held liable for that. But we make a lot of profit over the 40 years that that person comes and buys from us. That is not let's kill our customers. Yeah. So instead of instead, let's have, well, it is let's kill our customers because at the end, that's what you're arguing. You're just arguing for subtly killing them over a long period of time. It's not just McDonald's. It's all food that one has consumed over their life. But think about it. You know, the alternative, of course, we have an alternative is we get a government health pyramid. We get a government pyramid that tells us what we should buy. And as a consequence, we've been telling people about unhealthy food. That's true. Let's assume this is true grains and having them eat massive amounts of grains and sugar for generations. We get an obesity crisis. So the food pyramid was wrong. That's what's true. It's just vicious of a generalized theory that somebody from the top is going to dictate to all of us in terms of what is healthy food. And that's why I love a marketplace where different foods are proposed. But let's take your example where they're poisoning us slowly. For lack of a better term, which is what people think McDonald's is doing anyway, right? Because eat is bad for you. I actually think it's the bun that's killing you. But put that aside, right? I mean, imagine if that were true and imagine that there is some knowledge about this, not that they're doing it, but there's some objective knowledge about nutrition that we know what's good for us and we know what's bad for us. Yes. So let's say McDonald's is selling us this stuff that over the next 50 years is going to cause us cancer and we might die. Now, there is a massive incentive for people to, for those who know nutrition, to look at McDonald's food, test it, evaluate it, and provide information about the quality of that food. And then allow individuals to make decisions about whether they want to be poisoned over 50 years or not. And people make those decisions. I still see people smoking, right? So people make decisions. Well, smoking, smoking is addictive and I think it's different. I don't know that I would use that as an analogy here. I think the analogy for McDonald's is the imbalance in market power that McDonald's has to suppress and to fund counter studies that say, you know, it's all inconclusive. I think that's a better analogy. Massive amount of market power is in the hands of consumers, not in the hands of McDonald's. And if you think that, you know, if an agency, a private agency, which I think is what would evolve in a truly free market, and competing private agencies, if those private agencies declared certain types of food unhealthy, and there would be some disagreement because it's not clear what's healthy and what's not, I think that's a much, much healthier environment. I mean, you know, I listed NPR a lot, which might surprise some people, but they used to do these shows on farmers in California. And one of the things that came out of those shows, I don't think NPR intended it, is that there are two types of inspectors that come and inspect the food in the farm, in California at least. One is the FDA inspector, the government inspector that comes to inspect the food. And the other one is the inspector that is basically a consultant that comes in that's been hired by the supermarket chains. Guess who's tougher? I'm sure in this example you framed up, it's not the government regulator. Not the government regulator. So why? Because the government has nothing to lose by poisoning all of us. I mean, it doesn't. It just doesn't have anything to lose. And indeed the inspector's not going to lose his job if there's E. coli in the lettuce and he didn't discover it. But you know what? The supermarket has a lot to lose if they landed up poisoning us. The supermarket has a lot, and the supermarket will fire the inspector if he missed something. So in my view, the market not only from a moral perspective should be the only guarantor of the safety because governments shouldn't be using force against somebody who hasn't yet committed a crime. But also practically, my view is unequivocally that the market would produce a much better result in terms of higher quality food, much healthier food, and it is the centralization of power, which is what is really leading to bad outcome in terms of food, in terms of health, and in terms of a lot of these other things. But why isn't it happening then? I mean, regardless of whatever standards exist now from the FDA, why aren't these corporations putting in higher requirements and preventing all of the issues that end up happening? I mean, it's like they could do it now. Nothing's happening. Some of them do. I mean, this is again the beauty of a relatively free market. And look, there is no free market today, right? So there's no capitalism today. We both know these markets are heavily regulated. Maybe you want to regulate them more. I would like to get rid of all the regulations, but they're heavily regulated today. For example, if I want to compete with the FDA, there's no market for that, or there's a very limited market for that. You don't get the kind of outcomes that you would get in a true free market. And in my view, we're all much, much poorer both spiritually and materially because of that. We don't see the unseen, which is what's really interesting in economics, kind of what could have happened, what is the alternative. So that's one reason we don't see it. But the second is, the beauty of the market today is the options that you have. You don't have to go to McDonald's. They are like 500 different little places that sell a variety of different hamburgers. Some of them are grass-fed and some of them are Kobe beef, where the beef is massaged every day. And some of them are not even meat. They're vegan because they grow them in labs or they're created out of vegetables. I mean, the amount of variety. So whatever your view of health is, you can find a niche and usually, for the most part, at a reasonable cost of every variety of type of food that you want versus if we had more regulation and when we forced everybody to be at the same, you would have less variety, less choices. And if you happen to disagree with the FDA's recommendation about what's healthy, you'd be stuck with what they recommend because that would be what was forced down all of our throats. So I want to shift a little bit to a different aspect of capitalism, but I completely reject the notion that regulation necessarily reduces the broad-based type of choice that you're talking about. We're talking about very specific types of regulation. I don't think we're going to agree, but here's the thing. So a lot of this focus, a lot of this focus has been on markets, but I want to talk about a different side of capitalism because I, as a social Democrat who is, who is a, that's a form of capitalism, I'm very interested in. I do not think that the immorality of capitalism is in, for example, making money off of surplus labor value from workers. Okay. I'm okay in principle. I don't even buy that terminology. That terminology is completely bogus. Apply the terminology you want. But what I'm talking about is the idea of an entrepreneur or a capitalist investing in the equipment, taking the risk, getting the insurance that's required, which I'm fine with, so that they can earn a profit. I don't have a problem with that. The problem I have is in 2019, we are way past the point of capitalism being able to generate enough wealth for everybody on the planet to have a reasonable standard of living. I'm not talking about everybody has the same standard and I'll frame it up and you'll have more than enough time to respond. My concern is I think that at this point, capitalism should not perpetuate more inequality. Capitalism has no reason to allow people to go hungry, many of whom still do and die of hunger on our planet. And that is where I find the system to be practiced in an immoral way. I don't think the system fundamentally is immoral. So that to me is really bizarre, right? Because there is no limit how much wealth can be created. There is no limit to how good life can be for every, every one of you. That's not true. We are on a planet of limited physical resources. There is some limit to the wealth that can be created. That is true. I don't believe in limited resources. We'll get, we can get to that. Okay. But let me, let me just address this. 8 billion people, how do we, there's no limit how much wealth can be created. Even if the planet has limited resources, we haven't even touched the beginning of exploiting those resources. There's so many still this, it's a massive argument. There's a massive ball of resources. We've touched a little bit of it. And there's a ton of resources still available to us. But 8 billion people, 30 years ago, about 30% of the world population lived on $2 a day or less, according to the United Nations. I knew you were going to do this. I knew you were going to do this, but I'll let you do it. Yeah. This is fact. Okay. Right. This is fact. Right. Today, that number is 8%. And if you look at where that decline has happened, where people have exited extreme poverty, it's in places like China and India and much of Southeast Asia. Yes. Places that have adopted elements a little bit, not nowhere near as much as I would like. Elements, little bits of capitalism. And the middle class in those countries has grown by hundreds of millions of people, which suggests to me, there's tons of wealth to be created. And I expect the same thing to happen in Africa. One of the things that I believe is so tragic is that a lot of the policies that I find on the left in, well, we don't want to use left. Yeah, you said we weren't using those terms. Yes, I don't like those terms. We find on the democratic socialist side, it would actually prohibit Africa from becoming middle class, which I think is unbelievably tragic. But I believe that hundreds of millions, every human being on the planet, should be and could be living at the standard of living of an American middle class family if we adopted capitalism. And I don't consider social democrats capitalist. Why not? It's all mixed economies. They're elements of capitalism, elements of socialism. And we shuffle around the mixture. I want capitalism, you know? So when I talk about capitalism, I talk about the pure form of capitalism. If we actually adopted that, billions of people would, right, would they've already escaped poverty would now escape being poor at all and become middle class. So I think that argument maybe doesn't really get at what I'm pointing to. I mean, listen, the argument is often when you say, look at the number of people that have been brought out of abject poverty as defined in this particular way over the last 30. Okay. Find it any way we want. Hold on. Hold on a second, though. But this is, there's another argument that's similar, which is, hey, you know what? Who's complaining about poverty in the US? Everybody in the United States who is in the, you know, other than the bottom point, 5% is living better than the average person did in ancient Rome. Who cares? Who cares? I mean, it is not today's standard. The whole point is we are in a different place today. Why are we comparing ourselves either to countries that we don't want to be like or to other times? What we need to deal with is the reality today. Nobody needs to go hungry today. I agree with you. Absolutely. Everybody, nobody on planet Earth today should go hungry. And the solution to that is not, it is the same solution that has brought billions of people out of adjunct poverty. That is that solution on steroids, that it's actually adopting capitalism fully, would bring every human being, almost every human being on planet. Some people would still starve. And some people, you know, I'm going to make a very controversial statement. Some people deserve to be to starve, but very few. I don't think so. Very few. You know, the white beating drunk does not deserve to thrive. But the point is that almost everybody should not be, nobody should be starving on planet Earth today. And indeed, if they apply the right politics, they apply the right economics, they apply the right philosophy, nobody on this planet would be starving. But you're making it more complex than it actually needs to be. I would, first of all, challenge the notion that it is the free market capitalist elements that have even done what it is you claim they've done in lifting people out of poverty. I think it's the social Democrat part of it. But that's maybe a different conversation. But I would, I would even go further. In China and you don't see any social democracy in India and China. I would I would have stayed in India. There's no welfare state in China. And if you look at those parts of China and those parts of India where the wealth has been created, where people have come out of poverty or Thailand or Taiwan or South Korea or Hong Kong or Singapore, it's those places where they have let markets work and left them alone. With regard to the hunger issue specifically, you're mentioning all of these things that, you know, need to happen, including changing to this strictly free market capitalist system. We could just solve it right now, just as a political decision. I mean, we throw out anywhere between 25 and 50 percent of the food that that is grown. If you consider everything from the fields through stuff sitting and going bad in different places, there is just not a political will to solve the problem. I don't think we need to totally restructure in the way you're suggesting. It's a few tweaks to the system we have. That's completely untrue. If you look at the number of the hundreds of millions that are going starving them out of food, the necessary to ship it, that's just untrue. We'll focus on the U.S. to begin with. Of course, it would require massive amounts of coercion. It would require massive amounts of force that have a cost in and of itself. And that, in my view, are completely immoral. And one, and your goal of eradicating poverty does not justify using force against individuals. Well, we're talking about hunger now. So we're talking about hunger. And we're talking about we could do the U.S. or not. I mean, how would go? If my neighbor's hungry, he has two choices. You can come to me and ask for help. And most cases, I'd be happy to help him. Or he can pull out a gun and take my stuff. He has no right to pull out the gun and take my stuff. And democracy doesn't make it legitimate for him to take the gun and take my stuff. Sure. So voluntarily, we can all voluntarily solve this problem. It's obviously not the highest priority we all have in our own lives. And therefore, we're not solving it voluntarily. And add to that. Foreign aid, foreign aid, this kind of aid to poor countries, has never brought anybody out of poverty. Okay. So that I agree with. I talk a lot, yeah. What we need to do in Africa is bring them the ideas that will allow them to bring themselves out of poverty. What we need to do is for them to adopt the ideas, and this is awful, advocating for that. Instead of doing all the foreign aid and charity and all these other projects that I think have marginal, often negative impact, let's bring the political philosophy, the political philosophy, the enlightenment. Let's bring those ideas to Africa and to the parts of Asia that are still suffering. And I think what you'll see is the eradication of poverty without any of us having to ship food to another country. Because the problem in the world you're right is not a lack of food. There's no lack of food in the world right now. Yeah, I think we would agree, and I've talked before about how if you find a place that's so poor, people don't have shoes. And you just start sending them shoes that are manufactured in China by an American company. People will have shoes until those shoes wear out, but they don't have any footwear industry and they're not actually solving an element of the problem. But where I think you and I separate is I think that helping them build the industry is only one part of it. It's not that utopian solution. It's building the industry with an understanding that we are going to use this industry the way places like Norway and Sweden do to make sure no one falls too, too low. And that's the total package solution. It's not just here's free market capitalism. Have at it folks. I'm not for building the industry. I'm not for doing that. I'm for building the infrastructure that actually matters. And the industry is not what actually matters. The industry that these countries need is the political, the political infrastructure. They need rule of law. They need the protection of individual rights. They need the extraction of force from their societies. They need the governments to stop being as corrupt and as klepto, you know, as, as, as, uh, you know, kleptocratic, kleptocratic. That's the word I was struggling with. Kleptocratic as they are. They need the infrastructure of ideas. They need to respect reason. You know, think about the problems in Africa right now. We're trying to eradicate things like Ebola, where their conspiracy theory is constantly preventing the, the eradication. It's not that hard to, to fight Ebola. The hardship is when people don't want to take the vaccines or won't take that. It's, it's the, it's ideas that change the world. It's ideas that actually bring people out of poverty. And one of those ideas has to do not with us building them industry, but with them creating the infrastructure to allow them to decide what industries to build and then to trade as equals with all, with the rest of the world. And this is why I'm pro free trade. This is why I would like to see zero tariffs globally, and suddenly unilaterally. So it's, it's, it's not that I think we owe them anything. It's that if they want, if we want to bring them out of poverty, the only way to do it, the only way to do it is to get them on the right, on the path of the right philosophical ideas. So I think that the, the evidence shows, and I'll tell you what I think that evidence is, that you're basically half right on this. And there's a lot of really good people that have done a lot of work on this, including Angus Deaton, I think has, and I'm thinking of others. There are a few factors that determine, seem to determine whether a country can, as we're sort of, we're kind of talking about like a getting going on their own sort of, you know, it's hard to define it exactly, but I think we all know what we're talking about it. And those factors are not whether there's a really free market. That actually does not seem to be the factor. The factors seem to be, and this is, this is the data that I've reviewed, and you can tell me where I'm wrong. Number one, the level of government corruption. That is important. You mentioned that one, and I completely agree with you. Number two, confidence that laws will be enforced. Well, okay. Rule of law, but, and that this applies to regulation as well. We're not talking just about criminal law here. We're talking about regulations, bureaucratic nightmares that exist in many places where it's hard, you know, okay, so that, that, that. And then number three is also generally speaking, what we would call a business environment, which is one that probably is goes to what you're saying. So I think that you are right on some of these elements, but you're ignoring some of the others. So first of all, I'm not ignoring any of those. I said corruption. I said rule of law. And I think the primary rule of law, and again, we could, we could take some cases and we can, we can test this out. The primary thing about rule of law is the protection of contracts and the protection of property rights. If you protect contracts and property rights, think about Hong Kong. Hong Kong used to be a fishing village. And when the British came there, particularly after World War II, all they did was rule of law. You know, there was no voting even. You get, if the property is yours, it's yours. If contracts, we respect contracts, we adjudicate disputes, that's it. No safety net, and no corruption, by the way. So the British imposed no corruption, but there was the rule of law. And millions of people swam there. They did whatever they could to get to Hong Kong. And in less than 70 years, they are now a per capita GDP higher than the United States. So it's very, very doable to get rich quickly when you just do these simple things, which are all based on this idea of freedom. That is you protect people's property rights, you protect their voluntary contracts, and otherwise, and no corruption, and so on. And otherwise, you leave them free. And if you look at Africa right now, the two countries that are doing the best, Botswana and Rwanda. And Rwanda, think about what happened in Rwanda, not that long ago, the massive genocide, the horrific genocide. And what the president of Rwanda has done is he instituted a regime that generally, not perfectly, far from perfectly, in my standard, instituted property rights and the rule of law, minimized corruption. And that economy, I think, is the fastest growing in the world. Botswana has done similar things every way in the world where you basically adopt these few principles. And I agree with much of what you said. These few principles, they explode in terms of economic growth. I just think you're being a little bit convenient in the examples you're giving because you're, so I'll give a couple of examples. With the Africa examples, you're ignoring Nigeria, which has a very different status quo with regard to free marketeering and is rapidly becoming one of the largest economies on this planet. Number one, when you give the Hong Kong example, when you consistently look at the places that actually score simultaneously high for a good business environment, but have lower inequality and more regulation. I mean, you know the places I'm talking about. We're talking about Scandinavia and Denmark, et cetera, which we're missing from your list of Hong Kong doing so great. Well, because partially I was taking as an example of that ramping up on the status quo. I'm happy to talk about Scandinavia. I'm looking forward to it. I don't know if we have time today. Probably not. Probably not. But let's make sure that next time we talk about Scandinavia, because I think it's an important example that obviously your side uses all the time. I may use it a little differently than some others, but I'm glad to talk about it next time. What was the other example you gave? Oh, Nigeria. Look, Nigeria is a country that does not have property rights, not a respect for property rights. To the extent that it is one of the biggest economies, it's far from being one of the biggest economies in the world, but to the extent that it has a large economy, it's all driven by the fact that it has oil. But it is also driven by the fact that it has a relatively educated population, at least in the capital, not so much in the periphery. But it is still a country that has no semblance of capitalism, really zero. It is still very corrupt. And what is really lacking in Nigeria is this idea of a rule of law and the protection of contracts and property rights. And when we get, if Nigeria ever adopts property rights and contract law and really privatizes much of its territory, Nigeria could indeed become one of the richest country in the world, because it certainly has the natural resources for it, not the natural resources and necessary for wealth, as the example of Hong Kong illustrates. So this, I think, will probably feed us pretty well into conversation number three, where we get into welfare programs and the different ways in which countries manage it. I think that will afford us an opportunity to certainly talk about the Scandinavian countries. So on that note, I will remind you that we've been speaking with Yaron Brooke, who's chairman of the Ein Rand Institute and host of the Yaron Brooke show. This has been the second conversation out of four that we'll be having with Yaron.