 Good evening everyone, welcome to the latest live episode of The Free Marketiers tonight in Johannesburg at 7 p.m South Africa time, 1 p.m Eastern in the US. I'm joined by a very special guest, someone whom I'm honored to speak to. This evening we are joined by Yaron Brooke. Yaron, how are you? I'm doing well. Thanks, Chris. It's good to be here. Yeah, thank you very much for joining us. Let's go with you, but that's the dream. Let's see what happens with COVID going forward. Maybe one day. For those of you who don't know Yaron, just a quick bit of background. He is a renowned best-selling author and world-class speaker. He was the executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute for 17 years. He remains chairman of the board of AI and is its primary spokesperson. He also serves on the board of the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism. He is a member of the Association of Private Enterprise Education and the Montpillaran Society. So Yaron, as objectivists should do, we should start with basics. Can you tell us a little bit about who Ayn Rand was, a bit about objectivism, and of course about the work of AI? Yeah, I mean, Ayn Rand of course was a best-selling author in the United States. She was a novelist first, you would like to say, and as you always said. I think a lot of your listeners are probably familiar with the books The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and if they're not familiar with them, they should go out and get them, they should go out and buy them. And both books became best-sellers. Fountainhead was published in 1945 and Atlas Shrugged in 1957. And what's unique about both books is that the books sell more today than when they were best-sellers back then, and that the books are very philosophical. That is, these are books that have been best-sellers that have sold millions of copies each and yet they are very ideological, very philosophical, have very philosophical themes and inspire many, many people to change their lives, to take their lives more seriously, to adopt a certain view of the world. Now after she published Atlas Shrugged, Iron Man shifted her focus to writing philosophy and writing commentary on the culture and on the world in which she lived and she did that in the 1960s and 1970s. She passed away in 1982 and you can get a lot of her non-fiction writings today, capitalism not known ideal, the virtue of selfishness. There's a provocative title but probably one of the more important books written in the 20th century. And philosophy who needs it. She was a big advocate that we all need a philosophy and I think she articulated the case for that better than anybody really that I know. So, Iron Man was a true advocate of capitalism, but as she said, her primary focus was not as a political system, her primary focus was on the individual and the morality for the individual. So, the government is there to protect rights, but why should we protect rights? We should protect rights because your life is your ultimate value and your happiness is the moral purpose of your life and the way to attain happiness and to attain success and to survive and to flourish as a human being is by using your mind by the use of reason. So, she advocated for reality, reason, egoism and morality and laissez-faire capitalism, real capitalism in politics. So, that's kind of a quick, very, very quick introduction to who Iron Man was. Just a little bit then on unpacking the term capitalism because that will take up the majority of our conversation applying it in the South African context. So, is it the idea sort of dog eat dog, the jungle as it were, the survival of the mightiest and the fittest kind of thing? I would say that's a majority conception of capitalism in South Africa. It is sadly and it's not just South Africa, I think it's a majority conception of capitalism in much of the world even in countries that have benefited enormously from capitalism. There's these massive misconceptions about what it is. No, capitalism is a system of freedom. Capitalism is a system that leaves individuals free, free of coercion, free of force, free of authority, free to pursue their own values based on their own mind in pursuit of their own happiness. So, it's the system that protects your actions, protects your ability to think, speak, act in pursuit of your values. In that sense, it's the freedom that protects individual rights, specifically your property rights as they, in the sense that capitalism, the way most people use it refers to not just politics and culture but also to, and society but also to economics. It's a protection of property rights where the state has no involvement in the economy, where the state owns no property, where the state just leaves you free and helps protect your freedom to pursue your life. That's what capitalism actually is. In the context of South Africa and you touched there on sort of property rights, we have other issues in the country around possibly introducing national health insurance, so effectively nationalizing people's medical aids and healthcare. Talk about nationalizing the Reserve Bank. You have issues around shouldn't the government just print more money and give people universal basic income? So, these policy ideas and the reason I'm bringing up these examples and you touched earlier again on RAND and the importance of philosophy. So, why the importance of a world view and an ideology? Aren't these policies simply, aren't they just brought about and people have to figure out what works? What's the importance of a world view and how one forms that world view or that philosophy? Well, because the world view will tell you what's important, will tell you what to focus on. I mean, it's true that if what you want is let's say for everybody to have medical insurance, but you don't care about the quality of their care and you don't care about whether how they earn that care, how they get that care. You don't care about the doctors and the nurses and you don't care about health innovation and you don't care about new drugs. All your focus is on everybody has insurance, then yeah, national health care and national health insurance provides everybody with insurance. But if you care about the individual, if you care about individual patients, if you will, getting the best care possible, if you care about doctors able to practice their profession to the best of their ability using their best judgment and benefiting from doing a great job and having the incentive to do a great job, not just a model incentive, but also the financial incentive to do a great job. If you care about those things, then national health care, nationalizing the insurance makes absolutely no sense. So it really depends on what you care about. I ran, I care about the individual. I care about the individual's ability to live the best life that he can based on his own judgment. So here's another point where philosophy matters. If you believe that individuals are too ignorant or too stupid or just too blind to take care of themselves, to make choices about their own lives, to figure out what's good for them or what's bad for them. If you think they're just incompetent in doing that, then you will tend to want to control and regulate and place the control and the regulations in the hands of quote the experts, the elites, to use Plato's term, Plato the philosopher, the philosopher kings, the people who are so smart and know everything and care about society deeply and therefore can guide all of us blind, ignorant people in what we should do, how we should behave, what kind of health care we should get, what kind of doctors we should see, what kind of professions we should pursue, what kind of education we should get and how much of our wealth it's appropriate for us to keep. They get to make decisions for the individual. But if you believe as Aristotle did and as I ran did and as I believe and I think you do, Chris, that individuals are competent to take care of themselves. They have the tool, reason to take care of themselves and that nobody can make choices for me. Nobody can decide what's right or what's wrong for me. Nobody has the context, the knowledge, the incentive to decide what's right for me and that individuals should be left free, free to make choices. Now some of us are going to make mistakes. I mean, not some of us, all of us will probably make mistakes. But the beauty of freedom is then we're free to learn from those mistakes. Some of us won't learn from those mistakes. Some of us will do really, really bad, stupid things. But why should the rest of us be sacrificed for the sake of the people who do really bad, stupid things and refuse to learn from their mistakes? So it's a question of do we trust individuals to think for themselves and to make choices for themselves? And then do we believe in justice? Do we believe that people should get what they deserve? That if they refuse to learn from their mistakes, they should suffer the consequences and we shouldn't shift the consequences that people who do choose to learn from their mistakes. So it's a very different view of humanity, a very different view of the individual, a very different view of the efficacy of the human mind. You know, I know Anne was very positive about the human capability. And you look at the world and what you see is truly stunning. What you see is when people are left free, when we trust their judgment, when we let them make their own choices, when we let them pursue their own values, they do pretty well. I mean, whether it's in Hong Kong before China took it over, or whether it's in the United States in the 19th century and to some extent all the way till today, whether it's in certain periods or certain times in Europe, whether you compare countries that leave people alone for the most part, I wish they'd leave them alone more, but for the most part, in Western Europe versus countries where they dictate everything, Eastern Europe, and you see the differences in wealth and happiness and success. And it's just striking why we don't learn from experience that human beings indeed do have the capacity to take care of themselves and to make choices for themselves. We don't need central planners telling us how and what we should do with every moment of our lives and with our healthcare choices. Let individuals as consumers and individuals as doctors and individuals as insurance companies negotiate the best deal we can all negotiate with one another. That will produce the best outcome it always has, but that relies on a philosophical view of the nature of man and our capabilities to make those kind of choices. So that's an example of how philosophy plays a crucial role here. In the South African context, we've got 42% unemployment on the expanded definition of 11 million people unemployed out of a population of about 58 million-ish. And the sort of solutions offered the whole time are more states, more welfare, nationalizing property and healthcare, that kind of thing. So I wanted to ask you about the South Africa, I mean, context is vital. So given South Africa's history of oppression, colonialism, apartheid, why is it not right or just to perhaps pursue some of those policies? Because some people got what they have now based on the color of their skin kind of thing. How does one deal with that sort of tension, I guess, as it were between welfareism versus free markets and people who say, well, apartheid was capitalism? Well, apartheid was not capitalism because if capitalism is the protection of individual rights, clearly a majority of South Africans' rights were not protected in the violated en masse by the government. A apartheid was no more capitalism than slavery was capitalism. Now, it's true that there were parts of the economy, if you will wait, that were kept relatively free. But as a system, it was anti-capitalist. Look, you can spend a lot of time trying to figure out and to try to redistribute wealth from the wealth created through injustice over apartheid to the people who an injustice was committed against them. But I think it's much more effective and much more just and ultimately much more rewarding for everybody. If instead of focusing on the injustices of the past, we focus on not committing injustices, moving into the future. Instead of trying to equate people, what we try to do is create as many opportunities for wealth creation for South Africans as possible. So Black South Africans were clearly horrifically treated by apartheid. The solution to that is not to treat white South Africans horrifically. The solution to that is to treat all South Africans equally before the law, to treat all South Africans by protecting their individual rights, to accept that they all have equal rights and therefore need protection. And then allow capitalism to do what some people call its magic. Because where does wealth comes from? Where do jobs come from? How do people lives actually improve? Wealthy does not dramatically improve people's lives. On the contrary, it provides them with an incentive not to work, not to better themselves, not to try harder. It provides them with an incentive, in a sense, it provides them with an institutionalization of poverty when you don't have welfare. People start businesses, they find jobs, they work hard, they gain productive ability, they rise up in business, they make more money over time, their lives improve, they gain the self-esteem associated with having a job and putting food on the table, not living off of somebody else, and they have the potential to thrive. And it's up to them what happens. And if you think about where do jobs come from? Jobs come from entrepreneurs, jobs come from businesses growing, jobs come from an economy that's thriving and growing, jobs come from wealth creation. So what you want to create is an economy, what you want to create is a society in which there is ongoing, active, sustained wealth creation, a society in which entrepreneurs are starting, building businesses in which businesses, small businesses are striving to be mid-sized businesses and then striving to be big businesses. And that's how you grow employment, that's how you grow wealth, that's how people rise up. People's earnings don't rise up because the government says they should rise up. People's earnings ultimately can only rise when they are more productive. But how do you become more productive? By through investment, through investment in capital, through investment in education, through investment in your own ability, in your own skill, through training, through practice, through knowledge. Well, what kind of society allows for that to happen and encourages it and sustains it? Again, that's capitalism. When people are free, they invest in themselves, they pursue their own interests. When the economy is free, capitalists pour money into making workers more productive because the more productive the worker is, the worker's wages go up, but the return on capital goes up at the same time. And under capitalism, under freedom, entrepreneurs are constantly thinking of new ideas, new businesses, new opportunities, new ways to make money. But all the new ways to make money are job creators. So the only way to get to a situation where unemployment is the equivalent of zero, the only way to get to society where wealth and standard of living and quality of life and incomes are constantly growing is to allow the maximum amount of economic freedom. And again, all you have to do if you're South African is to look around the world and see what works and what doesn't. How did Hong Kong become on a per capita GDP basis as rich as America in only 70 years? Well, because it adopted capitalist principles. How did even China go from Mao Zedong to a middle class of hundreds of millions of people? Because in spite of the authoritarianism, they embraced economic liberty in some parts of China and to some extent. And the beauty of capitalism is to the extent that you apply it, to the extent that you engage in freedom, to that extent, you succeed. China would be a lot richer today if it hadn't been so authoritarian and didn't have so much central planning. So if South Africa wants to get richer and wants to enable its citizens, black, white, and everybody else, to be successful, successful economically, successful from a personal perspective in terms of self-esteem and confidence and one's confidence and ability to feed one's own family and to feed one's self and to thrive as an individual. If South African government cares about a prosperity and quality of life and standard of living, then it should do much the opposite of what it's doing today. It should commit itself to private property. It should commit itself to protecting individual rights. It should commit itself to liberating, liberating the economy, eliminating regulations, eliminating controls, eliminating taxes, simplifying and basically getting the money, the government out of the way. And I know South Africans. South Africans are incredibly entrepreneurial. They're incredibly, have the capacity to be great innovators. They have the capacity to start their own businesses at whatever level and whatever size they can. And the South African economy would thrive, would boom. If only we got the bureaucrats, the regulators, the controllers out of the way, out of the way. We have a comment that we should get you in front of parliament. So that's another reason to get you to South Africa. I don't know when they'll allow you in, but we need to make that plan. Jaron, I wanted to ask you about- Well, you know, I still have a lot of family in South Africa. So I have real South African roots. Both my parents were born in South Africa. My mother was born in Durban and my father was born in Johannesburg. My grandfather was a rabbi in Johannesburg. And I still have family in Cape Town in Johannesburg in Durban. So yeah, I mean, I'd be happy to come and if we could somehow get me in front of parliament, that would be terrific. I don't know if you'll be allowed to leave after your speech, but that's another issue altogether. Yeah, I know some people. On capitalism and the virtues both morally and practically that you've talked about, a big concern is, but what about inequality? So some people have, because they've either taken from others or they've prevented others from creating wealth for themselves. I mean, I often try and explain to people, look for the source of the inequality. Is it because the state and the economy have become very mixed and only the big players can create wealth kind of thing. So just unpack a little bit about inequality. Is all inequality morally bad from your perspective? Well, the real question is why do we care about inequality? Because if the inequality is a consequence of people owning what they deserve, if the inequality is a consequence of justice, look, the fact is the Bill Gates changed the world in far more significant a way materially than I ever will. It is completely justified that he is however much richer he is than I am. Indeed, if you think about the amount of wealth that somebody like Bill Gates created in our world, we're talking about trillions of dollars, of which he benefited to the tune of maybe 100 billion. I have not changed the world by billions, maybe not even by millions, I don't know. So the impact that he has had is so profound. He got very, very rich. Why would anybody resent that? He didn't do it by stealing. He didn't do it by taking. The world is not a zero sum. So there's this idea out there that the world's a zero sum. So my gain is your loss. And that billionaires are billionaires by exploding other people. But that's nonsense. It's nonsense, which is unfortunately perpetuated by our economists, our intellectuals, our politicians constantly. The world is an ever-growing, ever-growing economy. Wealth is ever-growing. There's no limit. My gain is not your loss unless I'm a crook. But when I buy an iPhone for $1,000, did I lose $1,000? No. Why did I pay $1,000 for the iPhone? Because the iPhone is worth more than $1,000 to me. So almost by definition, I am better off for having given Apple $1,000. I won because this iPhone is worth much more than $1,000 to me, to my life, to my values, to what I want to do with it. Now, did Apple lose? No. Apple made a profit. Then who lost? Apple won. I won. So trade, the very essence of trade, voluntary transactions, is win-win. Both parties benefit. Both parties are better off. And when you scale that over millions and billions of transactions every day, everybody is winning. Everybody's better off. And that's what results in a rising standard of living, a rising quality of life, and rising quantities of wealth in our world. So if inequality, now by the way, note that when I bought my iPhone, I got $1,000 poorer by the mechanisms by which we measure inequality. I have $1,000 less in my bank account. And Apple got $1,000 richer. Is that bad inequality? Is it anything bad about it? I'll give you one other example. I like this example because I think it really gets to it. I'm sure in South Africa, most of you have read the Harry Potter books. Now, I don't know how many of you know this, but Harry Potter, those books are a major source of inequality in the world. Because while all of us spent hundreds of dollars, in my case, I think it was thousands of dollars because I had two kids. I had to buy them copies of every book and I had to buy myself and then I had to go see the movies with the kids and then we had to do Disneyland rides or whatever. Just no end to the amount of money I spent on Harry Potter. And so I lost a lot of money, went out of my bank account. So I got poorer. And J.K. Rowland's got, she became a billionaire. So J.K. Rowland's got richer. I got poorer. Inequality expanded dramatically. And this is true all over the world because all of you are buying Harry Potter and getting poorer. Now, if I ask you, is that a bad thing? I think most people would say, well, no, I mean, I loved Harry Potter. I enjoyed it. It was fun. I got to read it with my kids. That was an experience. Can't put money on that. And yeah, J.K. Rowland, she got rich because all of us had a good time. We all benefited spiritually from Harry Potter and she got rich. I mean, that sounds like a great deal. And it is, it's a win-win deal. It's a win-win transaction. That kind of inequality, I think is a beautiful thing because it represents our value choices. It represents people making a lot of money because they are making our lives better. J.K. Rowland and Bill Gates made the world a better place to live. And as a consequence of that, if you will, as a reward to that, they made billions of dollars. Good for them, right? The only form of inequality that's bad, but this is not what the people arguing about inequality argue against. But the only form of inequality is bad, is theft. It's zero sum. It's when I take your money. It's when I pull a gun out and steal it from you. But isn't that exactly what the government does to us all the time? Isn't that what the government is promoting? Isn't it the government who gives some business favors and penalizes other businessmen? Isn't it the government that redistributes wealth, that steals from some and gives to others? Isn't it cronyism, which necessitates the government being involved, that creates that kind of inequality? Isn't it the welfare state, in a sense, that creates inequality? So I think stealing is bad. I think using force, which is what the government does to grant favors, is bad. But that's the kind of inequality created by statism, by government intervention. The kind of inequality it's created by capitalism is beautiful. It's an amazing thing. It's good for us. And it's a sign of the fact that trade is a win-win. That is, all of us, a better off, all of us, a better off, under capitalism. And inequality is just a feature of that. I like to say that inequality is a feature of capitalism, not a bug. It's what happens when people are left free to pursue their interests and to create different levels. Some of us pursue things that are not that rewarding financially, like becoming intellectuals. And we do it because we love doing it. And not everything in life is about money. I'm sure Chris, you could have gone and worked in finance and made a lot more money, or in computers or something. So individual choices are responsible in a free market, to some extent, for the inequality. That's a good thing, not a bad thing. I studied philosophy. So either way, I'm in trouble, regardless of what I do. That was not the choice, right? That too was a choice. No, no, I'm going to blame it on, I'm going to blame it on Ayn Rand. I'm starting determined by reading Ayn Rand. So that is her fault. Two questions from the audience. And thank you all for being with us this evening before I get back to the other questions I have. So one question, isn't black economic empowerment that's probably the South African version of affirmative action? Isn't that a form of capitalism? Is it a form of capitalism or not? No, I mean, black economic empowerment was to get rid of apartheid. Black economic empowerment was to treat blacks as equals to whites. Black economic empowerment would be, so here's a good example. I mean, we talked before the show, we talked about the former mayor of Johannesburg. And I was excited when he was first elected because one of the things that he was doing, or that he said he would do, I don't know if he actually did it or not, was to grant property rights to blacks that lived in Soweto. And that is a beautiful thing. So one way to remedy some of the injustices that happen under apartheid would be to grant property rights to blacks over all the land that exists in South Africa that is not owned by anybody else. That is, in my view, all land should be privately owned. The state in South Africa owns vast, vast quantities of land. Well, give that land to black South Africans as a type of homestead act. If they've lived as squatters over land like in Soweto, give them title over that land, let them own that land. If they formed, quote, illegally some plot of land somewhere, give them title over that, let them own it because they deserve it because they're doing the work and they live on it. And if you do that, and there's a proven economist who's written about this, if you do that, his name is Hernando de Soto, if you do that, then you provide them with instant capital and you provide them with the ability therefore to go out and leverage that capital and make choices for their own. But the best thing for impoverished people is freedom, is no restrictions, not granting them favors, not doing things in their favor, but just treating them equally and giving them the freedom to go out, start businesses, not penalize them without, you know, South Africa should have, I don't know what the tax rates are in South Africa, but my guess is they're fairly high and fairly progressive. But you should have low, flat, simple taxes. You should have a regulatory code and a tax code that favor production, that favor entrepreneurship, that favor business, that favor innovation and that penalize work and productive activities as the least possible, the least possible. So that would empower Blacks in South Africa to go out and create wealth. Just don't put roadblocks in their ways as apartheid did or as the mixed economy, the statist economy in South Africa does today. There's so much from Rand herself that I wish we could highlight and talk about, but unfortunately I'm not Joe Rogan, I don't think I could do a three-hour conversation and also we have a curfew. So I can't get everything that I want to, but I wanted to ask you about just the sort of idea of punishing the successful for being successful, punishing virtue for virtue, for being virtuous, for sort of daring to stand above the crowd as it were and that concept and how that applies both through the lens of capitalism but also just to our lives in general. I'm sure we can apply this all around the world. I mean I think one of the most evil concepts out there is the concept of envy. It's hating somebody for their success. I ran to find it as hatred of the good for being the good. It's exactly the virtues that we resent them for and that is psychologically horrific for the person who is envious and economically and politically devastating when it becomes law. So things like antitrust laws in the United States or anti-monopoly laws around the world are exactly those kind of laws. They're laws that penalize people for being successful. Right now in the United States, Congress and antitrust is being used to go after Amazon and Google and Facebook and Apple. Why? Are consumers complaining? I mean the fact is we're getting stuff for free. We're not worse off because of these tech giants. We're far better off because of these tech giants. So what's the complaint? The complaint is they've been too successful. They've benefited all of us too much. And that is an anti-life standard. It's an anti-human standard. You know, I want to live in a world where ability is celebrated, where achievement is celebrated. Achievement in every aspect of life, including in business. Imagine if we'd taken, I don't know, the best South African rugby players and we, or cricket players, and we said, you know, you're too good. You're just too good. And so we're going to weight you down. We're going to put weights on your ankles. So we're going to break one of your legs. So we're going to do something to hamper your ability to be that good because we want the sport to be fair. We want the little guy to be able to compete. We don't want you to dominate the sport too much. I mean, everybody would be against that. Any sports fan would be. But that's what we do to businessmen. And businessmen, of course, benefit our lives even more than sports figures because they engage in these win-win transactions. And if they're so brilliant, so successful as to create a big company, that means they're benefiting our lives more than anybody else. So I think it is truly horrific and truly a sign of a decaying, dying culture when we start penalizing the most successful among us, when we start hating them and resenting them. And that is true in South Africa. That is true all over the world. You should be celebrating success. Now, if it's earned success in South Africa, unfortunately, a lot of the successful earn their success because of the context with the government, not because of their productive genius. So you have to make that separation. But if somebody has owned it because they're a better trader, a better producer, then that should be celebrated, embraced and promoted, not penalized. And again, I think we lose as human beings and we lose as economies and we lose as a culture when we start penalizing the evil among us. Just a note there on benefiting from others, because again, a common misconception is if we were more capitalist, it's just every man from self and the businessman will just build his business, he won't contribute and give back to society quote unquote. But in South Africa, the last 20 years, many productive people of all races have left because of the policies and ideas that the government has implemented. And I would argue that poor South Africans suffer the most that investment is gone. There aren't many job creating businesses like there would be the skills. A lot of municipalities, including Johannesburg are falling apart because they don't have the skills either in the public or private sectors. So just a little bit of unpacking on that idea of when people are successful, everyone else benefits and it's not trickle down. I mean, that's also, you know, that idea of, oh, while someone else owns five billion so they pay taxes so the government can give me welfare, I don't think it's that simple. It's absolutely not trickle down because it's a flood down, it's a waterfall, it's a Victoria Falls. And it's not because they pay taxes. Paying taxes is a waste, because paying taxes means that money is not put for productive activity, that money is going to the government to be wasted and thrown away. The trickle down or the flood down is a consequence of the fact that they invest that money. What do rich people do with their money? They invest it. Invested in what? Invested in business. They invested in creating jobs. They invested in new products. They invested in more opportunities to trade with people. Again, business doesn't succeed by taking from you. Business succeeds by trading with you. The only way for business to succeed is by making your life better. The only way for business to succeed is by making the world a better place to live. So, we want more business. We want more wealthy. We want more investment. And the way to do that is not to scare people to run away. The way to do that is not to tax them and take away the money they would spend on investment. The way to do that is to leave them free and to leave their money in their own control so that they can create, help create a more thriving, financially successful business environment that stimulates trade, entrepreneurship, and economic growth. Again, the foundations of a healthy economy or entrepreneurship, that's what creates jobs. It's business creation and business growth. It's the creating of those millionaires and billionaires that what sustains a great economy, and we need to create a political context in which those people not only not encouraged to leave, but they're encouraged to come back. They're encouraged to migrate to South Africa because South Africa is such a friendly place for wealth creators. And you don't have to give them special favors to do that. Just don't penalize them for their success. Don't give them goodies. Don't give them favors. Don't give them tax credits or anything like that. Just treat them like you treat everybody else. Don't penalize them. You run a question on the obligations of the state. I mean, whether the state should have obligations or not towards poorer citizens, and here you can also perhaps touch on charity and personal charity and how a more capitalist society would sort of handle that kind of thing. Yeah. I mean, the state's function is the protection of individual rights. The state's function is to serve as a monopoly over the use of force. Government is a gun. Everything the government does is coercive. Everything the government does, you have to obey. You have to abide. Otherwise a gun comes out, you go to jail. So the question is, is this institution of force good at? Can it be good at? Can an institution that specializes in coercion be good at education? Can an entity that specializes in coercion be good in healthcare areas where it is much better to free up the human mind, to innovate and compete and create new opportunities? And you could argue, does it make sense for this entity that is responsible or is as a monopoly over the use of force? Does it make sense for the entity of force to engage in welfare, to engage in support for the poorest among us? If it's so important to support the poor, why not leave it to individuals to do it? If as a culture we value it so much, why not leave it to voluntary institutions to engage in it? Why is coercion necessary? My view is coercion is always evil. The only time it's excusable to use force is in self-defense, to catch a crook, to put a crook in jail. But that crook is a crook because they engage in force. One should never initiate force, which should never initiate violence, which should never initiate coercion. So a people, a culture that believes that there are certain people who need help, there are certain people who should be helped. There's nothing to prevent the citizens in that culture from helping, from forming charities. The beauty of a charity is it's voluntary, it can be focused, you can support the charities you want and not support the charities you don't want. The ones that are efficient, you can have, you can have metrics that evaluate their efficiency and you can withdraw money from someone, give to others. What happens to the welfare state when it's super inefficient as it is in most countries? Well, we double down on it. Why shouldn't welfare be competitive? Who can attract the most money? Who can do the most good? Who can help the most people? Who can help the right kind of people? Does everybody deserve help? So while I think there are certain circumstances in which people need to be helped, I think very few people need to be helped under very unusual circumstances. I think most people can take care of themselves and if we freed up the economy, there'd be so many jobs, we wouldn't have any problem with creating zero unemployment. People would be able to work rather than accept welfare. But once in a while bad stuff happens, there's certainly a small tiny fraction of a percent of people who cannot work, the people who need our help. Okay, well, let's help them. And I think we would do a much better job helping them, much better job helping them through the mechanisms of charity that involve competition, much better than anything that the state does through welfare, through coercion, through the inefficiencies of the course of process. To expand our conversation a little bit, I mean, you can still touch on South Africa, of course, but in the description, I mentioned sort of a post-COVID South Africa. I think South Africa is going to have to deal with COVID for quite a while longer, just with vaccine rollout and other problems with the government, of course. But your sort of idea for the prospects for freedom in the world going forward, I mean, I think governments all around the world are going to be... None of them are really going to give up the powers that they've assumed now, some of them will to greater or less extent. Maybe just what you think, your prospects for the US going forward, you can touch on South Africa, or how you think things might develop, and you have to put money on what you predict, of course. I am very worried. I'm very worried about the state of the world, more broadly, South Africa, United States, Western Europe. I think coming out of COVID when we're in worse shape than I think we've been in a very, very long time. I think that the real danger is that we've learned the wrong lesson coming out of COVID. The lesson I think most people have learned is that government has all the answers. Government can solve all problems. Government is the solution. We've destroyed huge swaths of economies through lockdowns, and government has made it all feel good by printing money and handing out checks. There's no free lunch. There has to be a way in which we pay for that. And we're going to pay for it, I think in the West, with slow growth, with stagnation for possibly decades to come, maybe negative growth, but certainly no growth for a long time to come. And that's a tragedy, because imagine if an economy grows at 4% a year. That means average incomes grow 4% a year, which means in 10 years, average incomes grow up by 48%. That's almost half. So instead of making $20,000, you're making $30,000. Instead of making $60,000, you're making $90,000. That's a huge difference. Now, compare that to an economy that only grows at 1% a year over 10 years. It's grown at 12%. The difference between 12% and 48% is massive, massive. So I worry that because we now view government as the solution to everything, because we now believe that regulations and controls and government printing money and government redistributing wealth is the way to deal with every problem, that we are in the process of making things much worse in most economies in the world. Central planning, which for a long time was considered, oh, well, that doesn't work. We know that doesn't work. Central planning was out. No economist supported central planning. Central planning is sexy again. Because of COVID, we're now seeing it adopted and embraced by the conservatives in the United States. We're seeing more and more people in the Republican Party advocate for managed trade, industrial policy, and other forms of central planning. We're seeing it all over the world. In that sense, you could think of it as China won, and even there, the wrong interpretation of China won. The interpretation that says that China became relatively wealthy because of its centralized policies, because of its central planning, because of state-owned enterprises. The idea that that's what caused China to succeed has won out, and today we all want to be like China. I mean, whose idea was it to lock everybody down as a response to the COVID? Well, the idea was a Chinese idea. Remember what they did in Wuhan in February of last year? The West adopted that idea wholeheartedly, and as China's moving towards more statism and more and more state control over the economy, I fear that that is the direction Europe and the United States are heading as well, and I see that in South Africa as well. There's no model anymore. There's no trying to emulate capitalism because there are no capitalist countries left in the world anymore. So sorry to be so pessimistic, but it seems that's the direction. It seems things are heading. Yeah, thanks. I'm very glad I had you on the show now after that answer. As we head towards wrapping up, because again, despite all the connections, I'm sure you do have, I don't know if you can bail me out of the South African jail if I get caught breaking curfew. Just a question on, and this is a big one so you can answer it in a short manner if you can, but just your views on crypto versus fiat currency. I don't get crypto. I mean, I don't understand why crypto is not a fiat currency. It has no real value. It is not based on anything. It doesn't have any value beyond the willingness of people to use it, and it's adopted because people feel like they want to adopt it. It's true that the number of bitcoins in the world is limited, will be limited, but I'm not sure that is enough of a qualification to qualify as currency. So I mean, my general view is this, freedom will not come about because of technology, and indeed technology is a very powerful tool for the Theratarians out there to monitor and control us. It's true that Bitcoin provides some anonymity, some because it's not perfect, but that is not enough. That is not enough. The state can still control it. The state can still ban it to the extent that it allows you to evade the state. To that extent, the state will try to shut it down. It's not the panacea. It's not the solution. The battle we face today in South Africa and everywhere else, and this is why I think the work that you do, Chris, is so important. The battle we face today is an intellectual battle. It's a philosophical battle. It's an economic knowledge problem. It's a challenge to change the direction of this world, and to do that we have to fight, fight with better ideas, fight with the right ideas. And technology, Bitcoin, blockchain will not save us. They might buy us a little bit of time, but they won't save us. So it's still a philosophical challenge, which makes it hard, and there are no shortcuts, unfortunately. I don't know of any. So keep up the good work and keep fighting for free South Africa. Even more than that, not even, well, more than the economic argument and the moral argument. And we need to think our side in general doesn't make the right moral argument, but that's for me to fight with other libertarians and anarchists offline. They make the wrong moral argument. They do damage to the cause by advocating for ideas that are not ultimately consistent with liberty and consistent with freedom. And it's not just you fighting with the libertarians and particularly the anarchists. It's all of us. Because I think to a large extent, they often undermine the cause by arguing for things that are just wrong and wouldn't work and a morally questionable. I don't have to worry about getting deep platform by Big Tech. I'm going to get deep platform by other libertarians, but that's another matter for another day. And a sort of final question we had, and I'll give you time to sort of give your parting thoughts and just all that sort of stuff. But we had a question about whether Ubuntu is compatible with capitalism and Ubuntu, of course, an African sort of conception of morality and society. The importance of the common good. I mean, from my point of view, if something is at least based on an element of volunteerism, it goes some way. But if you elevate the common good above the individual good, I don't think it's consistent with capitalism. No. And anything that has to do with the common good, the public interest is inconsistent in the end with capitalism. Any kind of utilitarian argument for capitalism is inconsistent with capitalism. Capitalism is fundamentally individualistic. Capitalism relies on a morality of individualism. It relies on a morality of the individual's pursuit of his own happiness, of his own success, of his own flourishing. And this is the failure that conservatives and libertarians, this is why they failed, I think, is that they've not given Ayn Rand enough respect. They have not given her theory of morality enough credibility because to establish capitalism, to defend capitalism, to sustain capitalism, we need a morality of egoism. We need a morality of individualism. And that's Ayn Rand's great contribution among many contributions. And that's what I think needs to be adopted and embraced if we're going to be able to change the world and bring about a new era or maybe a first era of real capitalism that's sustainable. Jaron, I have to ask you if someone was just coming across Objectivism, Ayn Rand, these words now for the first time, and they're interested in exploring a bit more other than subscribing to your podcast, of course, and I'll link to that in the description below, which books by Ayn Rand would you recommend first? Would you recommend that someone jumps into Atlas Shrugged first? Well, I'd recommend starting with The Fountain Head and then Atlas Shrugged, The Fountain Head and Atlas Shrugged. And then following that, I would recommend books like The Virtue of Selfishness, Capitalism, Not No Ideal, any of her nonfiction philosophical works. But start with The Fountain and Atlas Shrugged, and I think that'll give you a good sense of what she has to offer and why I think she is the most important thinker in the entire Liberty movement and the most important thinker today in the 21st century in terms of saving the world from statism. I think that's the perfect note on which to end, I couldn't ask for any more. So Jaron, thank you once again for your time this evening joining us. Thank you, Chris.