 The point is, we treat people as individuals, we treat people as free, as rational beings, as owning their own mind, owning their own actions. We don't treat people as members of the collective, pawns of the state, and doing my bidding for some common good. It's not the framework. Now, of course, people want to know the concretes, and you hear it, you know, when it comes to drugs, and when it comes to finance, people have asymmetric information. Some people know a lot more about stuff than others. Yeah, that's right. It's a good thing, not a bad thing. That's a feature of specialization. When we specialize, we learn a lot more about a particular topic. And that's a good thing because we often learn more than is known. We expand knowledge, we innovate, we grow a field. That's the beauty of specialization. We can be phenomenally more productive when we specialize than when we're generalists. We know more. As an investment professional, I know more than the people investing with me, who are hiding me because of my specialized knowledge. But the assumption is, and the assumption is always that I will do something bad with the fact that I know more. The assumption is that I will use that asymmetry of information to exploit my customers. I will use that to defraud them. I will use it to be burny made of. And the assumption is always, we're all burny made of, just under the surface. We're all burny made of waiting to rise up and exploit other people, to do harm to other people. Where does that come from? This idea, they were all burny made of, it's like whack them all. You got to keep them bound because anytime they rise up, you got to knock them down because everywhere, everybody's a burny made of. And we need to figure out a top that just lowers everybody down and then they have to ask for a mission to rise. And only when we've cleared them of not being burny made of, or when we've established so many laws, so many controls, so many regulations, that they can't be burny made of because, of course, burny made of existed in a highly regulatory industry. I don't believe burny made of could have existed in a free market. Burny made of was not caught by all the regulations that existed. He was caught ultimately by a hedge fund guy who wrote these memos to SCC, explaining what burny made of was doing. Nothing happened, but he was caught ultimately by a son who told the regulators, told the cops what he was doing. But it's all the regulations, I believe. And if you ask me, I can give you the details that prevented the SCC, the cop in this case, from catching burny made of. So for years, he continued even though several people in the marketplace understood completely what he was doing. So what is it that assumes they were all burny made of? And we'll talk about what we do with the burny made of that actually exist. Well, in front of my legs, Christianity. Christianity teaches us that we're all sinners. We're all this close to doing something wrong. We're all, if we're left free, if we're left alone, we would all sin all the time. Indeed, everybody is a sinner. That's the whole idea of original sin. And somehow we hold it together and prevent ourselves from sinning because of the imposition of morality by the church. But even then, we're going to sin. And that's why we need the imposition of regulations by the state. So it is the doctrine of original sin that is responsible, to a large extent, for all the regulations that we have. Now, and this is not just original sin. It's more than just Christianity. It's altruism more broadly. Now Christianity is a mother source of all altruism and the one that has driven it into Western thought, Western civilization so thoroughly. But altruism, altruism says. Altruism makes the clear distinction between being good, which is being self-less. Being good means self-less. And being bad, which means selfish. Now what a businessman? A businessman's self-less? No. They must they be. There's only two alternatives. You either good, which means self-less, or you're lying, cheating, stealing, S-O-B. There is no alternative. So if you're being selfish, it's just a question of time before you become boony-made of. Selfishness necessitates lying, cheating, and stealing. And therefore, regulations are there to prevent you from doing what you will inevitably do, to prevent you from just being naturally in quotes selfish. Because that's what businessmen are. And businessmen are essentially crooks, maybe not yet. But if we let them leave them free, they will be crooks. It's just a question of time. Freedom leads to lying, cheating, and stealing. Self-interest leads to lying, cheating, and stealing. Man is depraved. The only thing holding him back is a morality of altruism. Any attempt, any attempt to any move towards selfishness, towards self-interest, towards profit is going to corrupt the soul. And all regulations are trying to do is prevent you from being corrupted, because we know it's going to happen. And prevent you from doing harm that we know is going to happen. So this is deeply, the cause of this is deeply philosophical. It has to do fundamentally with a distrust of human nature and human beings. And of course, we've talked about self-interest and why self-interest is not lying, cheating, and stealing. But what about the bad guys? What about the people who use this asymmetry information or to build shoddy buildings, to do pyramid schemes? They're always going to be bad guys. But how is it right to violate the rights of good guys? Because they're going to be some bad guys. Why not just go after the bad guys? Now, yes, people say, but the building has to collapse first before you discover the bad guy. Yes, to some extent, that's true. We can talk about why that wouldn't really happen. But yes, life involves risk. Life involves uncertainty. Bad stuff will happen under freedom. Now, I would argue a lot less than you expect. And a lot less than happens today. Indeed, in a free market, I think I'm convinced. There would be a lot fewer Bernie Madoffs than there are today. Now, there might be a period where there are a lot of them. But then the market would learn, figure out how to protect individuals from bad actors, self-regulate, self-control, and get rid of them. But it would be a learning process. It would be a market-driven process, a process driven by individual self-interest. And indeed, in a free market, the police, the police, whatever they're called, would have a single purpose. Just like in criminal law, I think if we made drugs legal, the police would have more time to focus on murder and on property crimes and actually catch the criminals. They wouldn't have to be diverted by all kinds of victimless crimes. I think the same thing is true, for example, in finance. If the SEC doesn't have to follow me, who is not violating anybody's rights, which they do. They monitor everything that I do. If they can just look for rights violators, if they can just focus on catching criminals, then they will catch them quickly, efficiently, get them off the books, clearly make it clear what the penalty for violating people's rights are, and create a massive disincentive for doing it. Indeed, I think regulations encourage bad guys, encourage fraud, encourage people to try to get around the system. Thank you for listening or watching the Iran Book Show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening. 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