 So thank you everybody for coming to the London Free Market Roadshow. I was very at the Market Roadshow, so first I will introduce Dr. Richard Zandrich, who is a member of the board of the Hyde Society, the Hyde Institute and the Austrian Economic Center. He will say a few words about the Free Market Roadshow and then we will move on to our first panel. Thank you very much and I'm also very excited after a difficult one and a half almost two years to be in front of a live audience. I spoke two weeks ago in Zurich but that was the first live event we've done in a in a long time. I'm here today representing Dr. Barbara Kohn, who unfortunately had a death in the family and could not attend. My name is Richard Zandrich. I'm a member of the board as said of the Austrian Economic Center and one of one of the first in the Free Market Roadshow. Now we started the Free Market Roadshow or its precursors just after the Iron Curtain came down from Vienna. The idea being that we would give a little aid in free markets to the ex-communist countries. Now it turns out they learned very quickly. We started out in Budapest and Prague and Ljubljana and now they're more free market than Austria is. But then unfortunately we had an economic crisis. You know after the after the wall came down we thought we had won and we had an economic crisis and then you know local speakers and international speakers on the on the various topics and then someone from the Institute. I mean you can't you can't do six weeks in person. So very glad we're here and doing it again live and let's start over for Free Markets. Thank you very much. Right so our first panel by the way George Grigoropoulos will be moderating both panels. We had issues with getting a moderator and George stepped in very last minute so thank you George. And yeah so as I mentioned the first panel is on tribalism versus trade and by the way we have plenty of time for this panel. It's going to be over an hour and a half so each speaker will speak and then we will have time for a very long Q&A so prepare your questions as the panel goes along and join me in welcoming George. Yeah so in your invites you would have seen that the moderator was supposed to be Sophie which is clearly not happened and if you are familiar with the Inner and Center UK's events our resident moderator is usually Nico Sotiracopoulos but he's not here unfortunately he's in Greece so you still get a Greek accent but slightly shorter less luxurious beard but and not as loud as him but hopefully as good. So the topic of the first panel is trade and tribalism. Tribalism and trade and when I was asked to moderate this talk I tried to think okay how do I introduce it what do these two things have in common apart from the first two letters of its word. So I thought well trade is usually a term we use to mean voluntary mutually voluntary transactions and there are many words that can say the same thing that convey the same message but typically when we use the word trade we mean international trade so trade between individuals or businesses that are in various jurisdictions various nations different different nations different continents and then with tribalism tribalism is a strange kind of concept because it does it is one of collectivism's manifestations it's how collectivism manifests itself in the way people understand the world in a way they perceive the path to getting knowledge and how they should act so for example a tribalist would not think as an individual and judge in order to determine what is true and what isn't they would look into the leader of the tribe or into what the common belief is among the tribe that they choose to belong to the group whatever it is and then they will adopt that position about the truth and I find that tribalism has been very poisonous in politics lately not only because people have been defaulting to group positions in order to define how they think and how they act but also it's being projected on everyone else so in a disagreement you will be called you will you will be told that oh you believe this because you are a woman you have this view of reality because you are a straight white man or because you are sort of you belong in some sort of tribe and it's almost not just the way people think but the way people think everyone else around them thinks as well what do these two things that the trade and tribalism have to do with each other well on one hand you could say that tribalism could be an obstacle to trade because people may choose to trade just among people of their tribe so you could have someone who says okay I am a feminist and therefore I'm only going to shop from from shops that are owned by women or I'm I'm black people's rights activists so I will only shop from shops that are owned by black people or a white supremacist so I will only shop from white people so you could have that but via super chat super chat questions will be prioritized to in person questions and then after the super chat questions we will go to questions from the audience so to introduce my fellow panelists to my left I have Eamon Butler Eamon is the co-founder and director of the Einarand Institute and he's a pro-leaf sorry you see I'm such an objectivist I always think about Einarand no Adam Smith Institute so yes co-founder of the Adam Smith Institute prolific author and to my right I have Daniel Hannon who is he serves in the UK Board of Trade so clearly he knows about how to plan trade and he's a vice vice chairman of the Conservative Party and he's responsible for international relations so again this is a topic that I guess you know this is a subject matter that tribalism impacts heavily on and he teaches at the University of Buckingham and at the University of Francisco Marokin and to my far right I have Jaron Brooke the actual actual director of the Einarand Institute he is also prolific author among other books he's written Equalism Fair in pursuit of wealth and free market revolution so please welcome our speakers and we'll go to the discussion thank you very much yeah that's it I got it thank you very much for that I thought I was being promoted for a moment there but there we are it's very good to be speaking to a live audience once again I think this is actually the first live group that I've spoken to in quite a long time and I think as far as I remember the only one before that that I had to speak to a live audience and all I had to say was not guilty but today I've got a few minutes at least and it's one of the great lies along with I'm from the government I'm here to help you when a speaker says I'll just be brief but I'll try to be brief and I've got my little stopwatch here so that should help me when we're talking about tribalism what does it mean well if you look at a dictionary definition it means behavior that stems from a long strong loyalty to a particular group and generally speaking those groups are united somehow by ethnicity culture and indeed proximity nearness proximity of course matters rather less today because it's a small world Boris Johnson said the other day that Britain and New Zealand are as closely aligned as to any two countries on the planet and yet they're at the other ends of the different ends of the world so proximity matters less and it matters less in trade as well with mass transportation huge bulk cargo ships and so on one can trade cheaply again with the far east or South America or anywhere else from here in Europe ethnicity though and and culture and values are still quite strong in people and you know we may wish that was not the case but it is the case and it's probably the case for very good biological reasons that is still strong and of course when it comes to dealing with other groups we do resort to thinking about our ethnicity and our culture and our values well an anthropologist will tell you that a tribe is technically and this is how it arose originally a group of families basically it's their groups of a few families but now there's a much larger concept of tribe I mean some say Europeans regard themselves as a tribe or Americans North Americans South Americans different tribe Middle East possibly with North Africa regard themselves as a sort of separate tribal they're seen as being separate tribe by others and Far East people who live in the Far East again they're somehow different but of course with any of those big groupings there are other tribal subsets for example the European Union the countries there are all different but there's a sort of you know tribal unity between them it doesn't necessarily stretch to the United Kingdom depends which side you're on in a certain debate but you know to the French for example we're all Anglo-Saxons well that's not really true because the UK itself is divided into different tribes you know England Scotland Wales Ireland and some of those have roots in in in language they the Gallic well Scots Gallic Irish Gaelic and Cornish as well as Welsh are all Gallic languages which somehow unite people in ways which aren't very visible but they still feel quite strongly about it and even England is divided I mean Yorkshire is a place unto itself it's full of Vikings you know whereas down in the south we're more Anglo Saxon stock it's just the way the country was settled so so there's some major tribal divisions and then within those there's lots of little ones when I'm looking at tribalism and trade I think there's a sort of harmful tribalism and possibly a fairly good tribalism harmful tribalism is when people band together basically to keep others out and this is very strong in in trade again depends which side debate you're on but I think the the EU for example has taken quite a hostile attitude to the United Kingdom there may be good reasons for that but it has done nevertheless and you feel it's a sort of tribal dispute that we're somehow different which indeed we are but that is the reason that is what is motivating it so there's a certain sort of tribalism at work there but that that is a negative tribalism which kills trade because you're trying to exclude other people you don't want to deal with them it produces a Mcantelist point of view read Adam Smith if you want to know about Mcantelism compare that with movements like Kenzock the idea that Canada and New Zealand Australia and the United Kingdom should all get together and we should have free movement and we should have free exchange of goods and and anything else yes it's tribal and it's tribal one has to say I mean it's it's it's it's passed partly because they're all white they're all rich they're all have a common history of their large largely white I should say but they are also all liberal they have a liberal history to them and they have liberal institutions and they are democratic so all of these things are very positive it makes them open to others and they're open to others precisely because they are liberal because they believe in freedom because they believe in trade and the idea of something like Kenzock is that you can create free trade within this sort of tribal group if you like it and then once you've got it there then you can spread it out you can show people hey this is great this really works this enriches us it makes us better off we're all happier because we can travel to various corners of the globe without letter hindrance and and then hopefully other people will come in and say well yeah yeah you know we can see the benefits now of having more free trade and more free movement so I think there's sort of good and bad tribalism it's difficult however to decry one sort of tribalism while you're actually doing another and you know we've seen the sort of visceral annoyance in France for example of the British American and Australian deal on nuclear submarines for example and defense the defense pact it's visceral it's really quite visceral this is tribalism at its worst but trade in general reduces tribalism because it spreads the different products of different countries different peoples around the world it spreads their culture their understanding you know look at all the only ethnic restaurants you can find within a hundred do I say yards or meters these days I don't know we're going back to the imperial of this of this very spot so the idea of that is it it should reduce the prospects for actual physical conflict so it's extremely important so I don't think we should deny the existence of tribalism the question is how can we actually get it to work positively to promote world trade and understanding and prosperity thank you well good afternoon everyone it's wonderful to see all of you rugged individualists gathered here collectively like a minute the first time I've been at a live event and it's a reminder that you can believe very strongly in personal autonomy without believing in some kind of atomized society some kind of enemy where nobody talks to anyone else a point that I keep patiently explaining to my lefty friends that no one outside their fevered imagination wants a world without social bonds a world without compulsion is a world where we're encouraged more genuinely more freely to come together in such configurations as we're doing now so welcome to you all here I I was born not in a cancer country but in Lima Peru and when I was growing up in the 70s Lima was a developer classic developing city ringed by shanty towns by slums see them stretching up on the slopes of every surrounding hill bariadas they were called less bariadas the Lima and we would have friends to come and stay with us from the UK from Europe from the US and they would do the usual tourist thing that people do when they come to brew they'd they spend a couple of days in Lima and then they go to Cusco Machu Picchu do the Inca trail they'd come back and almost always almost always you'd get the same question why why are people leaving these scenic pristine and Ian villages and coming to settle among the traffic fumes and the open sewers of the bariadas my friends that's a very first world question no Peruvian ever needed to ask why somebody would leave a village where there's no drinking water no electricity supply no school no clinic no job what was obvious to the people on the spot if not to their first world observers is that the lifestyle that they were swapping was not just an improvement in itself better to live with some work selling cigarettes or traffic lights or whatever than than backbreaking seven days a week in the fields but also that it was transitional transitional for the individual transitional for the place every industrializing country has gone through this process it's not a aesthetically pleasing process but it gets you from a world of long hours backbreaking labor and constant want to a world of super abundance Britain or England went through it first in a couple of countries in northwest Europe I think we were scarred particularly in this country by going through it first right when Peru goes through industrialization they've got a roadmap they know that other people have done it and that you come out of the tunnel on the other side we didn't know that which is why I think it's left ever since this extraordinary oppressive folk memory largely written by Engels and a little bit by Charles Dickens this idea of a bucolic sort of hobbit like population turned into factory slaves in the the fumes of Manchester or wherever it was and yet without that we wouldn't have the central factor of your life in mind which is the spare time that comes from abundance the most extraordinary leap forward we've ever taken but people can never see it and they certainly couldn't see it when visiting Peru actually I had occasion much later in life to spend some time in one of the baddest and I have to tell you honestly I have I have been in high unemployment black spots in Europe where there is a more palpable sense of despair than you found in those places there was a there was an industriousness and an optimism that you don't always find in some of the housing estates in rich countries and indeed people were right to see it as transitional the baddie others what we were politically correctly taught to euphemise as the Pueblos hobbiness are indeed now much more respectable places that the it's not just that the people have moved through them into more comfortable accommodation it's that over time the corrugated iron roofs have been replaced by something more solid and that the houses end up being connected to the electricity supply officially and all the rest of it things get better but it's not a pretty process and this is the point I want to stress the 19th century novelist Anthony Trollup once observed poverty to be scenic should be rural a great deal of our critique of industrialization and globalization is fundamentally aesthetic rather than economic I used to see this all the time with my children's homework you know that there was always particularly geography very left-wing subject geography and it was always telling the same story Theresa May was a geography wasn't she always telling the same story which is evil Western corporations are exploiting these poor women in Vietnam or wherever and making them stitch sneakers together for 50 cents a day right and they would never tell the story fully they'd never say what was the what was the wage of these employees before where were they coming from what was life like in the paddy fields and do they expect to be there forever is this not transitional for them can we at least do them the courtesy of allowing them agency of allowing them the dignity of thinking that they're capable of making rational decisions about how to optimize their situation instead of treating them as props in our solipsistic emotional dramas and if we really want to help I was you say this my kids when they look at all this stuff that I found about Nike or whatever if we want to help what's the best thing we can do buy more of their stuff right and importantly sell them more of our stuff so that their living standards improve so that wages rise and so that pressure follows for increased rights and improved working standards as I say every country has gone through this and it's a process of steady improvement but it doesn't look pretty and it runs up against instincts and intuitions that we evolved in tribes and this is why the two things are in opposition the great poet historian and Whig politician Lord Macaulay once said free trade one of the greatest benefits any government can bestow on a nation is in almost every country unpopular he said that in 1824 think of how much truer it is today which is bizarre because since 1824 the world has seen an extraordinary and unprecedented improvement in living standards Deirdre McCluskey calculated it as conservatively as a 3000% increase in living standards for the average human being right pretty much starting when he wrote those words at the beginning of the 19th century what drove that increase in living standards lots of things but one of them was a removal of barriers so that there was more specialization and exchange if I think of the changes just in my lifetime I was born in 1971 in 1971 it took the average British worker two months wages to afford a TV set now it's three days in 1971 a stationary car emitted more pollution than a car today moving at full speed in 1971 fewer than half of girls on the planet got more than primary education now it's pretty much a hundred percent outside a handful of holdouts like Afghanistan and not for reasons of poverty there have been extraordinary advances on any metric longevity literacy calorie intake height whatever and yet well meaning altruistic high-minded people are constantly protesting the system that has delivered thinking that somehow when they protest against trade deals and the market economy they are standing up for the poor why we evolved in kin groups right all of this is unnatural to us free trade runs up against instincts and intuitions that were honed over a million years of evolution as hunter-gatherers we have for example a very deep instinct to hoard food to see us through the winter now when you translate that into policy it comes out as protectionism the idea of depending on strangers to produce stuff that you can't see which is the basis of modern economy may have delivered these miracles of living standards it may have made possible the spaceships and the Starbucks and the cathedrals and all the rest of it but it offends our inner caveman if you say to people in this country do you know that we I mean pre-coronavirus do you know that we import 40% of our food that leaves people uneasy it leaves their paleolithic inner self their hunter-gatherer brain uneasy right because it offends that basic principle of self-sufficiency and of course we haven't been self-sufficient in food in this country since the 18th century it was the move away from self-sufficiency in food that made us rich right show me a really self-sufficient food country and I'll show you Guatemala or something right it's not the company that you want to be in I say this is someone as you heard who works occasionally Guatemala love Guatemala but they would love to industrialize and move into a services economy because they know that that will deliver higher living standards as a consequence of what we have just been through these past 18 months all of those paleolithic instincts and intuitions all of those false heuristics that we derive from the savannahs of Pleistocene Africa have been strengthened and exaggerated it's in the nature of a crisis that people are thrown back on their tribal core it's a book by a chap called Sebastian Junger American writer who is an analyst of of the power of of tribe and he makes the point that every natural disaster every war on the one hand strengthens collectivism right it it makes people see the benefits of solidarity common purpose and all the rest of it and it leaves them feeling nostalgic afterwards he interviews a number of people who survived the siege of Sarajevo and a constant in all of the interviews is that although obviously they didn't miss the siege right I mean don't don't don't misunderstand this is not that they wanted snipers back but they missed the emotional state that had accompanied it the sense that there were no strangers we're all family everyone knows what we're doing we're all pulling in the same direction why because that's how we live for a million years that's what we're designed for and the coronavirus I'm afraid has flicked those switches again in our brains and it's made life for free marketers and believers in limited government very difficult going forward and I'm afraid that the effects will last for years or decades the number of people who have said previously reliable free marketers who have said to me over the last year and a half surely had an even you even you must now see why we need to grow more of our own food in this country we're so vulnerable to these global disruptions seriously that's that's what you got from the coronavirus the one thing that worked beautifully and without a hitch with the global food markets by the way just as well right the the non-brits in this room might be and indeed some of the Brits in this room might be interested to learn that the the coronavirus struck at the height of the period that British farmers call the hungry gap like this the time of your so-called because we don't produce any food at that time there's a there's a slot between the end of March and the beginning of May when we've reached the end of the winter harvests not producing any more turnips or cabbages or potatoes we haven't yet reached the start of the main harvests had we not been able to buy what we wanted from around the world we would have starved or we'd have been living on rhubarb and asparagus and maybe a bit of nettle soup but fortunately everything worked beautifully which is a reminder again of the essentially counter intuitive nature of a lot of what we believe and certainly of the case for free trade it seems intuitive that growing your own food must make you more secure you need to explain to people why that isn't true why if you actually want food security the way to do it is to purchase your food from a wide variety of global suppliers because they won't all simultaneously be disrupted and we saw that stress tested beautifully last year having a sole supplier leaves you vulnerable to a local shock even if that supplier happens to be in your own territory right it's but but that is a point that doesn't come naturally it's a point that needs to be explained or at least illustrated with examples my favorite example on food being the two countries at the most extreme ends of the spectrum on the one hand the country that has elevated self-sufficiency to its supreme governing principle North Korea due to they call it everything that can be imported should be substituted if possible whereas at the other end of the scale I give you the country that imports every edible ounce doesn't grow any food doesn't produce any water depends on importer its electricity that works Singapore where would you rather live North Korea is the last place in the world to have man induced famines Singapore has the cheapest and most secure food supplies on the planet all of these arguments were hard enough to win two years ago now they are going to be much harder the elevation of the individual on which all of the doctrines of free trade and free commerce and indeed free enterprise ultimately depend do not come naturally we existed as a species without them for a very long time and it may well be that we look back at the last 200 years as a blip as an interglacial bit before the restoration of the norm I'm struck when I think not just of our our fairy stories our folk tales but even of our science fiction I think of Star Wars I'm getting full of emperors and princesses right on some deep level we think that this is the normal way of running things we are living in extraordinary times and in an extraordinary place we are luckier than we know happening to inhabit a polity where status has been displaced by contract where the individual has been elevated above the collective and this is why I want to finish with it with a point that goes beyond trade when I look at what Amon just touched on the growing doctrine of collective identity as taught in our schools and universities the idea that the only important thing about you or at least the most important thing about you is that you're female or white or whatever it is I don't respond by saying oh Haram from political correctness gone mad I see a threat to the entire world created by the Enlightenment because the elevation of the individual is counterintuitive it has to be taught Hanna aren't the Eichmann Chronicle said every generation Western civilization is invaded by barbarians we call them children what she means by that is you and I came into the world with basically the same mental and emotional apparatus that we would have done 5,000 years ago the reason we don't live the way we would have done 5,000 years ago is because we've benefited from a series of learned techniques what we mean by a cultivation and we have to be taught habituated in ideas that do not come naturally that are not innate for example the idea that someone you don't much like might still be telling the truth the idea that someone who is not in your tribe might have useful things to tell you the idea indeed that the truth is something that can be approached through experimentation through the empirical method through scientific inquiry rather than being something that is passed down by some sacerdotal class who have a monopoly of virtue none of these things come naturally all of them need to be constantly taught there was a row last month it was one of these delicious I'm looking forward to the Yarra inverses and our co-capitalist row coming because there's nothing there's nothing like what what Freud called the the narcissism of small differences but there was a there was a one of these intra right rows last month when do you know who I mean by David French the the anti-trump you know who he is right he wrote a piece actually a thoughtful piece with which I on balance disagreed about whether there were collective liabilities and he gave the example that the pig was that a pastor had been removed by his congregation somewhere in the US for being to woke and to probe BLM and so on and this was supposedly on Chris so so David began by making the provocative but it seems to me quite true point that saying that on all the grounds on which you could have attacked this pastor saying that what he was doing had no biblical basis was quite an odd one and he then ran through a series of examples in both the Old and New Testaments where tribe and blood guilt and vendetta and heredity are seen as defining right there was a particularly eerie story I'd forgotten this one from the second book of Samuel David is the king and there's a famine right goes on and on and on and he prays me says what's the problem and God says the problem was your predecessor and those of you who remember this they saw and David had not had been a peaceful transfer of power but nonetheless he had the collective guilt your predecessor broke a treaty to attack the Gideonites and you are being punished for his breaking of his word right David then goes to the Gideonites and he says okay what do I need to do to make this right what restitution do you want and this is really very disturbing to modern sensibilities the Gideonites say hand us over seven of Saul's grandchildren for execution which he does and the famine ends right now I'm pretty sure that that that David French's point was not that all white people carried some kind of collective guilt like that he was simply making the point that this is how most societies operated for most of history right read Joe Henry's work about the oddness of what he calls the weird people in the West that we are we are living in very peculiar places where we're not defined by ancestry where blood guilt and vendetta are not the normal form of ethics in 8th century Israel or 6th century Babylon wherever the book of Samuel was written it went without saying as it did in almost every society and still does in the remaining hunter-gatherer of places in the world today that of course you can take your revenge on people because of who they're related to right the idea to us the thing that makes that story offensive to us the idea that well hang on what it's all grandchildren done wrong what was it to do with them is a very peculiar modern one and it needs to be taught we need to civilize those barbarians who invade us in every generation and that is the job of schools and universities they are there to be temples of the Enlightenment instead of which they're doing the opposite they're not just failing to teach the counter cyclical idea of individual autonomy they are teaching the pro cyclical idea that in fact all that really matters is which group you are in and where you belong in this imagined pyramid of hierarchy and oppression and my problem I disagreed on balance with David French he was saying well you know do we have a if let's say black people in a in a US city are suffering from bad schools and poverty because of previous injustice because of residential segregation or redlining is there a collective liability and I would say no there is an individual case to help people as individuals right rather than by ancestry because once we start going down this road of saying what matters is from whom are you descended where does it I remember as a quite small boy I must be nine or ten my a friend of my parents was incredibly rude to this young couple who you don't need just met unbelievably so so much that my parents walked out and my mother afterwards said what did you have against those people you'd you'd never laid eyes on before you were obnoxious from the moment you went in and he said I had enough of French Canadians during the war right now now age nine I could spot what seemed to me a pretty big flaw in his morality right which is whatever he'd had whatever problems he had with French Canadians it wasn't that couple but that's because I had been taught in a particular as most of you have to think in a way that elevates the concept of the individual most societies in most times would have regarded him as reasonable and me as rather freakish for having that objection that's why I say it is so precious and that's why I am so alarmed when I see this doctrine of collectivism being elevated to an almost religious status being sacralized in our places of learning my daughter is reading French as a condition of being at her college she had to do a unconscious bias test now 200 years ago to go to Oxford you needed another test which was just as irrelevant to doing a language you had to it was called the test thank you had to you had to swear an oath denying the doctrine of transubstantiation literally in order to matriculate as an Oxford undergraduate you had to say I Daniel Hannon hereby swear that the blood and wine used in the Eucharist are not actually the body and blood of Christ they are only symbolic right what's that got to do with a French degree right exactly as much or as little as the unconscious bias test and if you can't see that my friends you're inside the matrix right they are both things that have been elevated randomly and sacralized because society happens to be looking through one prison but in between those two examples of intolerance flourished this extraordinary world where we were able to relate one with another as autonomous individuals without our relations being mediated through birth or caste or tradition there was a wonderful world where we were all valued for ourselves rather than being judged by accident of physiognomy there was a world where personal responsibility was elevated over tribal identity only now do we see that world receding the owl of Minerva wrote Hegel spreads its wings only with the gathering of the gloom but I'll tell you this we're gonna miss it when it's gone well thank you amen thank you Daniel so you just heard a fantastic description of the great abundance that we all live with today and I agree with every word of it I mean the world in which we live today from material perspective is truly astounding and those of us who have traveled a little bit in the world and have seen maybe places that don't share this abundance have an appreciation for how rich how good our lives really are in the world in which we live it where even what we would call poor people are as comparison to the poor in Cambodia the poor in some regions in Africa relatively well off in comparison where they and it's truly a tragedy that we here in the West have almost no appreciation for the wealth and prosperity that we have I think to understand why we have this prosperity is key why it is that we are being so successful at creating this abundance and what were the causes of it and why is it that other places in the world do not have it and again I agree with what's being said about this source of this is the enlightenment ideas the source of this is that great period in the 18th century that saw the ideas that it that we take for granted and indeed now we are teaching the opposite of at our schools at our universities and everywhere but what were the key concepts what were the key ideas that generated the prosperity that we have today what was the enlightenment really about and I think this relates to both the issue of tribalism and the issue of of trade or free trade because I agree with what Daniel just said you know what we have today is a massive achievement what we have today is an aberration historical aberration it's a stark aberration caused by extraordinary intellectual period in the history of mankind called the enlightenment that came out of a whole sequence of events but ultimately the philosophers the economists the social thinkers of that period are responsible for what we have today so what were they was the great achievement of the enlightenment I think of it as basically two fundamental ideas that were entrenched into Western civilization during the 18th century and the first I think and maybe the most important is the idea that reason is our means of knowledge it is the idea in that sense the the first enlightenment thinker you pick up is Isaac Newton right the idea that we can explain the world through science we can explain the world through a particular process that the world truth is not available to us through some kind of revelation whether religious or platonic it doesn't come only to philosopher kings who meditate and discover the world of forms it doesn't come from ancient books it doesn't come from wise men in Rome or the local church or the local synagogue but the truth comes from a particular way of looking at the world and a particular methodology a scientific method to discover what is real and what is not what is true and what is false and ultimately what is good and what is evil so the efficacy of reason is that great I think achievement of the enlightenment of the scientific revolution and after all what is the other name for the enlightenment it's the age of reason so this is not new this was recognized need an authority to tell you what is good and what is bad what is right or what is wrong what is true or what is false but you any individual could actually understand the rules of motion once Newton discovers them and explains them to you though we have the capacity to know reality to know the truth that is massively liberated people forget I spoke to talking to high school yesterday and they don't know that 250 years ago you couldn't choose your career you did what your father did you belong to a guild I don't know how many of you know the story of Leonardo da Vinci why why did Leonardo da Vinci get was able to do whatever he wanted he basically was an artist and an engineer and he did all these things his father was an otary he should have become an otary why wasn't he an otary because he was his father's bastard son he was born out of wedlock and therefore he's not allowed into the guild and therefore he was free to actually choose a career if he'd born from a legitimate marriage he would be stuck we would have never had Leonardo da Vinci but once you say we are once people recognize that they have reason that they have this capacity to think to understand to guide their own life then wait a minute why should I do what my father said why should I follow the tribe why should I follow the king why should I follow any of these authorities I have a mind I get to choose 250 years ago you didn't get a choose who you married but again if you have a mind I want to be able to make those choices I want to pursue the values that important to me you certainly didn't get to choose your political leaders same thing if I have a mind why can't I be involved in that decision so the second concept that comes out of this naturally out of this idea of reason the efficacious sense of reason is the idea of the sanctity of the individual the crucial importance of individual as the moral unit and as the important unit for making decisions decisions are not made by an authority decisions are made by us as individuals and you get a blossoming of the idea of individualism and you indeed get the creation of the first country in history based on the principle of individualism we have individual rights inalienable individual rights according to funny fathers of America now granted not applied consistently it took decades some would argue over century to apply it consistently certainly to apply to women it took about a century over century but it is those ideas those concepts and that political structure that made it possible for those ideas to ultimately be applied more consistently throughout the Western world and in a growing and growing to more and more parts of the world over time so the idea of individualism the idea of the sanctity of the individual the idea of the sanctity of individual choice and the importance of individual as a moral agent and that the purpose of government according to the founding of America was to guarantee those rights to secure those rights to protect those rights and otherwise leave you alone to make your own choices that idea is a massive achievement achievement of thousands of years of philosophy and it's achievement that broke in my view the chains of tribalism to the extent that it is understood then you are no longer determined by the color of your skin or the ethnic group that you were born into or the particular geography of the place you are born to the achievement is to rise as an individual to think for yourself to choose for yourself to associate with the people who you view as values whatever color skin they have whatever you know other characteristics that are unimportant to life they have but who might share your values and indeed it is this idea of individualism and this idea of a capacity and ability to think for ourselves that opened up the world that made it possible for us to engage with other cultures ultimately not in a position of authority not a position of enslavement but a position of equality in a position of trade and again took a century to get there but is these ideas that made that possible unfortunately really from the end of the enlightenment and we can debate when that exactly happens these ideas have been under attack primarily from the Germans surprisingly right from Khan to Hegel to Schopenhauer to Marx to the postmodernists the ideas of reason the efficaciousness of reason the ideas of individualism have been under constant pervasive attack the longing for the nobility of the Middle Ages the nobility of the little towns you know there's no accident and with Ziddi Peru they see these little villages and how quaint and how nice they are they don't have to they don't have to live in them that's why they see them so noble but this is not new you can find writers in the 19th century longing for the wonderful days of little villages and everybody's a farmer and everybody's you know children not making you know 50 percent of children dying before the age of 10 and all of that fun stuff that was involved that's expectancy at 39 and all the fun stuff that was involved in pre-industrial evolution life what happens to me you can't think for yourself you can't use your mind you can't choose for yourself your values don't matter others the leaders of the tribe whatever tribe happens to me will make the choices for you don't worry be happy and mindless because that's what it really is demanding of you mindlessness so we are fighting a fight that's against unthinking and unfortunately the unthinking is promoted by our university professors who are supposed to be the thinkers in the culture and is couched in you know very very articulate sophisticated often unintelligible language to explain so they look sophisticated but this is the same battle that the enlightenment fought against those that came before it's the same battle the liberals fought in the 19th century get the anti-liberal forces that were raid against them during the 19th century it's the same battle that we need to continue to be fighting there are no shortcuts there's nothing simple about this it's not enough just to explain the economic theory because it's deeper than that it does have roots in this idea around reason and what's capacity as an individual to actually exercise it it is rooted in the idea of whether we have as individuals rights or not I worry a little bit that we focus too much in favor of the tribes and look tribes don't think because there's no such thing as collective consciousness there's no such thing as collective thinking so tribe needs a leader and the leader does the thinking for you and you follow and you do what they say so I think the battle that we all face is a battle to save the enlightenment whatever good that exists in the world in which we live today is a product of that enlightenment and our job is to defend to defend what they discovered reason and individualism thank you I'm less rationalist I do think that blood is thicker than water and that countries with a common or individuals with a common history ethnicity and proximity that those are actually important things in the human mind now we may wish dearly that that wasn't the case but it is and it may well be the case for perfectly good evolutionary biological reasons you know it may be that being parts of groups is important to us in keeping us going as a species I don't know but all I'm saying is that it's it's very deep within us and therefore when you look at trade deals for example you know I wish we didn't need trade deals at all I wish that people just traded and that governments didn't get into the process at all to telling us what we can and can't buy from other people but you know who are the easiest people to do trades deals with well probably people who speak your language probably people who've got a common history or common roots probably people who identify with each other you know probably people who have if you like the same ethnicity the same worldviews the same values I think all of these things are actually quite important and you know that's why you I mean you do see quite a number of free trade agreements around the planet and they usually countries that speak the same language for example because I think language is very important in terms of how people actually think and and and that again is one of the reasons why people sort themselves into into different groups because they think differently because their language conditions the way they can think as President Bush put it there's no such word in as entrepreneurship in French and of course he's quite right the word entrepreneur in French means a sort of artisan it doesn't mean entrepreneur so you know it wasn't actually wrong so that does condition how people view the world and you know I think that's that's why our governments have started studying in that in the Kansas model because that's the easiest to do then we can add Singapore I wish we could add Hong Kong but that's you know gone and there there are you know other places which again you know because there's a shared sort of British history a parliamentary history and all the rest of it that just easier for us to do things with we're more homogeneous I disagree with one reason that Amy just gave and he something he said in his speech as well I don't think there is much ethnic homogeneity in Kansas in the Anglo sphere more widely one of the oddities of this debate is that everything is still conditioned by Brexit with it was our ultimate culture war so a lot of people who were sore about Brexit have now argued themselves into this bizarre place where they don't want any trade deals with anyone because they they want Brexit to fail and they they would rather the country be poor and that they be proved right and so they they and they and the argument that they use against Kansas it is exactly that they say oh you know this is just imperial nostalgia it's all these white countries seriously all these white countries who has the higher ethnic minority population would you say cancer called the European Union I'll tell you that the figures we have Australia doesn't keep figures but in the UK the non-white populations about between 12 and 13 percent slightly more in the US above 20 percent in Canada and New Zealand in the EU as a whole is about 6 percent right what we have in common is a way of looking at the world shaped by shared institutions that elevate the individual over the collective and that elevate the rules over the rulers and those institutions common law the political heritage that goes back through the American Revolution back through the English Civil War back to the Great Charter even back before that to the folk right of pre Norman common law those things habituate people to think in a particular way and they explain in very broad terms why Bermuda is not Haiti why Hong Kong is not China wasn't till very recently yeah why Singapore is not Indonesia why Israel isn't Syria come to that we don't we tend not to think of Israel as a form of British colony but of course it is also a common law state with the same if you like interoperability of regulations and a similar attitude to property rights and so on it's a model that works very well and it the reason that trade is a very natural solvent within that that grouping of countries is that it's the most natural thing in the world to trade when you have a common understanding geographical proximity matters less and less at the end of this lockdown we're all much more accustomed to holding important sensitive conversations over zoom or teams it's much easier than to do that with a country where or with a business where not only is it literally your language but it's the same legal system the same arbitration the same accountancy model all the rest of it and that's why I see if you like this pivot by the UK back towards a more maritime and less continental geo strategy simply as a return to normal you know we live through a highly unusual Cold War period when for good but but surprising and peculiar reasons we had to focus on the defense of Western Europe because it was you know the Red Army was mass beyond the elder that is no longer true and I think it inescapably you know Brexit may hasten it slightly but it was going to happen Russian is going to raise its eyes to more distant horizons again thank you and first of all I'd like to say despite my accent I am actually Austrian so may help with my questioning here but we've the tribalism debate is is very interesting and as somebody from from continental Europe I'd like to address you know where your rights come from and how it happens you have your rights come from your nationality or the place you live now in the UK first of all you were subject to European rules of think and then left but just before Brexit you had for instance in Scotland a referendum where they wanted to decide whether to stay within the UK or not and just after Brexit you had a lot of people who had the right to Irish nationality wanting to join due to their the ancestry wanting to rejoin the EU just by getting a new passport so I'd like you maybe to address those points in tribalism I actually got myself an Irish passport because my grandfather was Irish I didn't do it for any reasons of Brexit I have to say I did it because I had a feeling a familial feeling and that I thought it was only right that my children and grandchildren should be able to share in that nationality it really is as deep and visceral as that and you know that's why I continue to say these things are very deep and important to people and so it's not surprising that it really messes up trade yeah let me we're not surprising let me voice my disagreement I think for most people it is it is true that blood is thicker than water but I think that's unfortunate I think it's I think it's sad that that is the case and that at the end of the day what should be thicker is ideas and and you know I think that the reason why these trade agreements if they're focused on institutions and ideas that is what makes sense now maybe this is a consequence of the fact that my children fourth generation born on a different continent not just a different country and the fact that yeah when I go to Israel I kind of feel at home culturally but I'm so glad I left and that I live for a long time in the United States and today live in Puerto Rico and I feel at home wherever I go so so part of this is I think a personal thing but I think it is it is the ideas the character that who you are as an individual that what matters and not I think where you come from and in those kind of bonds I mean think about all the people who left Europe 150 years ago and went to America knowing they would never see their relatives again knowing they would never see the land from which they came again and they went because of ideas they went because they wanted a different future they went because they wanted opportunities they went because they wanted prosperity and abundance and they were ambitious you know I think that's the kind of attitude that the enlightenment shape of individuals pursuing their own self-interest and that's what made America special and I do think America special as compared to Europe you know I might I might take a different perspective slightly than my two friends here on brexit and I'm generally for brexit primarily because it gives the UK an option value I'm a finance guy I believe in option values to be freer you will see if they take the option right we'll see if they actually execute on the option if they turn out to be indeed freer than mainland Europe but in many respects I opposed brexit in a sense that there was no barriers to trade there was no barriers to capital there was no barriers to human mobility I think that's wonderful that all of that existed between the UK and the rest of Europe I wish it existed on a much more global scale particularly on the issue of trade I'd love to see trade and borders open up on a much larger scale than just the European Union it's the governance of Europe and the movement the movement towards more statism and authoritarianism and and leftism which I think brexit allowed the UK the option to escape we'll see if they take it I mean of course there were no barriers within Europe that's that's true or fewer barriers within Europe but but the price for that was more barriers around them and I mean if you were Slovakia or something that may be a trade-off that you would make because most of your trade is is or Belgium even for the UK which was always tied by history and geography to other continents and archipelagos by migration ethnicity by language and law it never made as much sense I'm but I'm going to try something which is difficult in front of a partly randian audience which is to make a defense of the nation-state because in in this imperfect Aristotelian sub-lunary world right the the alternative to the nation-state is not some imaginary either objectivist or a narco-capitalist or other libertarian paradise right do not for heaven's sake make the mistake that the socialists make of saying we reserve the right to be judged purely by some textbook theory and never by any real-world approximation of our ideas right so so in the in the world in which we exist I will argue strenuously that the nation-state is a more secure vessel for liberty than the alternatives the most illiberal authoritarian destructive ideologies fascism communism islamic fundamentalism indeed religious fundamentalism of any kind all presume to be bigger than the nation-state and they presume to knock down the evolved organic and natural loyalties that tend to secure personal freedom because they believe that they have a higher cause I was very struck it was a small detail but it really stuck in my mind is one of the first things I remember the signature act of the iranian revolution remember it was it was the siege of the u.s. embassy and it was only later that I thought what a weird thing that was I mean to attack a legation building you know if if the u.s. invaded venezuela tomorrow we could we could safely assume that the diplomatic personnel would be safely evacuated through neutral countries as happened during the second world war right when the forklums war was on there was never any danger to argentine diplomats here or to british diplomats there right what signal were you sending out when you decided to violate territorial sovereignty and national jurisdiction like that what you were saying is we don't recognize your rules we don't recognize your world order we answer to a higher cause we get to decide what what the law is and they they carried on as they'd begun you know attacking national sovereignty everywhere you know sponsoring militias in the in the Balkans in the in central asia even attacking a community center in Buenos Aires why Buenos Aires what what possible strategic value picture show that they could because they don't recognize the nation state and I think it is just worth making a practical case when during the second world war if you listen to the constant refrain in allied propaganda we are fighting for the cause of all nations they understood that to be a bullock against tyranny i'm really interested in something else do you mind if i ask a question i know i know time is short but i i'll put this i'll put this to our question but also to everyone else because he's always really astounded me why isn't austria given the policies of successive austrian government on tax on trade union rights on employment why isn't austria in a worse mess i think it's quite quite useful to challenge your prejudice right if you come as i do from a basically free market point of view austria has pretty much gone down the checklist doing everything not not terribly but doing a lot of things quite badly and yet low inflation low unemployment high growth high standard of living what are we missing well first of all um people get to choose which nation states they reside in and usually you're subject to the laws of the state where you reside you know there are exceptions like some countries tax their citizens worldwide like the u.s uh libya north korea um but the rest of us actually apply their laws where you reside and i ten years ago moved to switzerland because i kind of like what was going on there rather than you're right a state such as austria where you have the statists in control of 50 of the economy and you have a top marginal tax rate of way over 55 percent and all of those things that you're probably referring to uh on the other hand it is still a free market economy to a certain sense and it succeeds because of a lot of small individual uh companies that manage to work within and for the size of the austrian economy a country with eight million people you all probably have heard of uh swarovski or red bull or glock or any number of other countries and then when i was basically killing down the danube uh i stopped in a town that nobody had ever heard of and the local firm which employed practically everybody there had 99 percent of world market share in the production of synthetic cobalt blue when the snails gave it up they they make it out of petroleum but these hidden champions are are what make uh the country great so unfortunately more and more of these countries because of uh what you said more and more are leaving remember right that's the theme of atlas shrugged just to give up a plug there right it's the atlas to hold up these countries california is the same way right right as california survive and thrive you could even argue it's because certain individuals who companies who keep it all going um i'll just say i i'm not opposed to nation state it's a question of what kind of nation state you want and and uh and whether the nation state respects the individual rights of its citizens and of indeed u.s. where rights come from they don't come from the state they don't come from uh from uh euthnicity they are part of you as being human you have rights now uh so do states respect rights is there is i think the key question and the key question that actually ultimately drives all the other decisions whether they do or they don't know what spheres they do and they don't so i'm all four nation states free nation states that respect the individual rights of their citizens okay my next question is um around tribalism in trade it doesn't just manifest itself through tariffs and quotas and subsidies it could also be something like a campaign that says okay you we would like you to buy american if you're gonna buy a car buy an american car we're not gonna penalize you if you don't but uh we encourage you to do so and this has happened in history in many countries i remember there was one for uh greeks they really had to push us to buy greek products because they weren't very good um but i think it happens also in britain like you have british meat and all so do you think that uh tribalism manifested in this way is as destructive um if it has a similar effect in terms of people still make the same choices that they would have made if there were tariffs i explainly not as destructive because there isn't the same you know how do you judge the utility if if you want to to buy an inferior product but it makes you feel patriotic who am i to monetize the value of that you know but but the thinking behind it is crazy and it's worth just dwelling for a moment uh when jaren said you know everyone turned on a dime and bought this idea that america was getting poorer because it had a trade deficit again that is an intuitive plausible and utterly wrong idea almost any non-economist if if told that that a country has a that their country has a a persistent structural trade deficit is very alarmed by that idea and yet you can't really find any correlation between trade deficits and growth it it just no one i mean i have a really serious trade deficit with a number of the village pubs around where i live um you know the the the bell and dragon in king's clear the white heart in overt and the water ship down i buy from them way way more than i sell for them do you know what sometimes they engage in predatory pricing sometimes they engage in what is plainly defined as dumping they they give me stuff at below production price like when they say you have a free glass of wine with your meal on a monday or whatever who gets the better end of that deal right how on earth have we maneuvered ourselves into a place where we think that cheap is a bad thing where we think that buying goods at the most competitive price is somehow a swindle and is a is a cost to us and i i see this in parliament all the time almost always actually again because of this this old culture war of brexit and people now wanting all of the the trade deals to fail and there was an absolutely brilliant example a few weeks ago where we were debating food poverty and all these labor and lib dem spokesman were standing up saying this is terrible you know the the the richest 10 percent spend only 16 percent of their post housing income on on food and for the poorest 10 percent it's 76 percent and what can we do and then the next debate happened to be on the australia trade deal and exactly the same people without being aware of the contradiction said oh we've got to protect our country from being flooded by cheap food right and it's ultimately it's it's two things coming together in that case it's it's hostility to to to global britain and alternative to the u but it's also something that they know has much wider purchase which is this intuitive hankering for otaki the the assertions on which mercantilism stands all sound perfectly reasonable we have to protect our strategic industries we can't compete with slave wage economies we can't carry on with a permanent trade deficit we should grow more of our own food all of them all of them when translated into policy serve to make a country needlessly poor how about retaliatory measures again it's crazy i mean there was an economy i forget her name there was an economist in the 30s who said if the other guy wants to put rocks in his harbor you don't respond by putting rocks in your harbor and one one last question for yaron so do you think it's becoming harder to get rid of tribalism in epistemology because people are faced with more complicated questions and the the expertise that is required to get to to the truth is not widely available so then people would say okay i cannot do all that research by myself it will take me too much time it will be too hard i don't have i don't have the energy or you know will to take all the time to do this so what i'm going to do is i'm going to choose which authority i'm going to trust and then they choose that maybe making an assessment of the author on the authorities abilities maybe making an assessment of the authority's intentions so no i i don't think it's because rule is getting more complicated and it's harder to to make decisions for yourself we're very good at making those kind of decisions when we buy a computer when we when we do day-to-day activities even when we go to the doctor though i mean in the uk it's a little different but you know we get second opinions we uh we do some research online it's easier today to do research online much easier than it ever has been in human history i think it's in those areas where politics intervenes is where we tend to then say okay but who has this opinion i mean there's a there's a there's a trend in the u.s right now where patients will not go see if they're a democrat they won't go see a republican doctor and republicans won't go see a doctor who is a democrat they literally asked a doctor who they voted for and decide whether to go to the doctor or not based on that now that is sick there's something really really sick about that and of course there's a whole now i was just reading just last night i was reading this thing about uh the james bierd award i don't know if you're familiar with james bierd awards they give awards for for excellent chefs you know the best chefs and now the james bierd awards are going to have a component of not just the quality of your food but how socially conscious you are that is how socially just are you uh you are you privileged and to what extent does that privilege manifest itself i guess in your food i don't know so the award is now going to be it's not that there's going to be a separate award for social justice i mean you can imagine that okay no it's going to be interwound with the quality of your food so imagine now that that gets interwound with the quality of the surgery right you know recommend a surgeon to you not because he's good but because he happens to have the right intersectionality score right in in terms of social justice and uh so it's gotten to the point where everything now is politicized and this is a consequence of big government this is a consequence of the fact that government is in all of our lives why does government have a position on covid and government shouldn't have a position on covid government should do what government does protect us so it should be isolating people who test positive it should be making sure that if you test positive you don't affect other people and other than that leave us alone you know insurance companies and drug companies and doctors and hospitals and the private sector can handle distribution of vaccines far better than the government has just look at what walmart does or sorry amazon does every single day and look at how the US government distributed vaccines for covid where they trashed tens of thousands of doses because the wrong people were getting them based on some rigorous bureaucratic methodology and who should get them and who shouldn't imagine using the price mechanism to distribute vaccines i know even among free marketers that is a bit of a that is a bit of a difficulty but but it's not like only rich people would buy it it's like companies would buy it insurance companies will draw you to be vaccinated because they're ensuring you and it's it's your employer would want to buy them because they would want you to come back to work and there's a lot of people that would buy these vaccines and pay a lot of money for them and all of us would get vaccinated probably much faster so why is everything today politicized because the government is in everything why social media politicized because the government is involved in social media it's putting pressure on social media companies in every respect things get politicized when politics intervenes in them and because we live in a world with unlimited government it might be limited in scope in in size maybe but it's not limited in scope they'll do anything everything becomes politicized and everything becomes tribal and i don't trust your information because i don't trust your science because you are lefty so i don't you know people don't trust scientists because of their politicals political standing that's the that's why i see the tribalism i don't see tribalism when people decide between a apple and a del computer i mean other than the people like me who buy apple clearly where tribal will buy anything apple makes but that is a choice it's a complicated choice it's computers i don't know how computers work and it's somehow i managed to choose a computer and to choose a phone so it's not complexity it's politics thank you okay now we have a bit of a very little bit of time so we'll go straight to the super chat so we had one super chat from Hugh James thank you Hugh it doesn't say who the question is for so i'll put it there and you can choose if you would like to answer it do you think trump has set a status quo for american trade policy seems like biden is america first in all but name apart from immigration and climate i'll take this one yes i mean there's no question today in american politics the people who believe in free trade the believe in it people who believe in trade are silent so there's still some in congress in the senate in the house but they won't speak because they were public they tend to be republicans who are frayed or centrist democrats and and their numbers of shrinking but both democrat both the left and the right today in the united states are anti-trade and this notion that trump was just about trade with china and there's some justification and all of that is is nonsense i mean we've got tariffs on canada we've got tariffs on brazil we've got tariffs and certainly threats of tariffs on the european union we've got threats of tariffs on our allies not just our supposed enemies so the voices of the three traders have shrunk dramatically in american politics i don't think you get elected today in america if you advocate for free trade or you articulate any kind of free trade position can i add that it is particularly i'm delighted that this country is finally dropping the unscientific and needless checks on inward travelers the the united states is a long way from doing that and and what is even more bizarre about it is that the countries from which you are not allowed to travel to the u.s are those which happened to have high infection rates before the virus had reached the u.s right so it's like those bordeaux wine classifications that reflect the ranking as it was in 1855 and no one has bothered to change them so the the trump administration slapped these restrictions first on china then on iran then on the eu then on britain then on brazil india south africa right you cannot go to the u.s from those places but you can go via mexico where the the the infection rate is way higher the vaccine rate is way lower you can go from the seychelles that is currently the most infected place in the world from barbados you know from peru my native peru which has the highest death rate in the world because i'm sorry to say there is no hurry to fix it because biden has clocked what trump clocked before him which is that there is a substantial chunk of the population that doesn't mind the borders being closed as a general principle not as a response to the coronavirus but as a desirable end in itself and no one particularly wants to take that constituency on yeah yeah but there's a rationale there's a rationale you we can disagree about it right we could but but if you do not have the the virus in your country there is a rationale for a travel ban the rationale for the trump travel ban had expired by april of last year zero i mean this this three three new hampshire has been going on for i don't know 20 years i've been hearing about it as far as i know they have you know new hampshire has become a democratic state during that period not even not even move towards more free markets so i mean no it's a fantasy the it's a fantasy that the united states would let any state secede um it it it's not happening um if you want low taxes the only place on planet earth where us global income is not taxed there's only one place and that is Puerto Rico um sorry can i make one one more point about that i mean i think before even before 20 years ago ron paul was always talking about the the northern secessionists prior to the civil war there was a and there was an there was an abolitionist movement in the not a small one but i think it's historically interesting saying we should secede so that we are not sullied by the abomination of slavery so i suspect there were some secessionists in new england before but i i agree it's not going to happen and and and and the the u.s constitution always struck me as being having an odd lacuna it goes into great detail on whether you need two witnesses in the treason trial it doesn't mention whether you're allowed to leave i'll just make a separate point though i live in old hampshire which if you count it on the full county borders has the same population as new hampshire new hampshire unlike hampshire has its own legal system its own police force its own tax system its own welfare system short of secession it must always be a good thing to take decisions as closely as possible to the people that they affect and one thing i would love to do is to re-import our revolution and return to the idea of the dispersal and devolution and democratization of power i refuse to believe that people in england are uniquely incapable of local self-government and one thing that i think would would make government smaller and more accountable is bringing it closer to the electorate right thank you all very much i think we've exceeded our time so we're going to go to a quick break of 10 minutes and then we'll come back with the next panel thank you very much for the discussion