 I'm ready to start. My topic is on privatizing everything. My motto is, if it moves, privatize it. If it doesn't move, privatize it. And since everything either moves or doesn't move, privatize everything. Why would I want to privatize everything? Because if we want to have a market, we have to have private property. And if it's not privatized, either the government runs it or we have the tragedy of the commons, which I will talk about a little later on. The case for the market, vis-a-vis government is, well, in the market, it's acts between consenting adults. So on an ethical basis, we should prefer the market. And on an economic basis, we should also prefer the market because the market is more efficient. Let me give you an example of that. Later on, I'll talk about ocean privatization. And the key here is that on the oceans, you have the surface of the planet is 75% oceans and only accounts for 1% of the GDP, whereas the land is 99% or rather 75% and accounts for 25%. Did I get that right? The oceans have 75% of the surface, land is only 25, and yet the oceans only account for 1% of the GDP and land 99%. It's a similar situation with the USSR farms, collective-ized farms. There, the private farms had 3% of the land and the collective farms had 97%, whereas the 97% only accounted for 25% of the crops, whereas the 3% accounted for 25% of the crops. So you can sort of see that the market is more efficient. Also, when you have an election, a vote, every four years you have a vote, and in the market it's pretty much every day. So we have much more control over the people in charge in the market as consumers than we do as voters in the polity. Also, the focus is very narrow in the market and that's good. You can vote for a motorcycle or a violin or a red rubber ball or something, whereas in the political scheme, you can only vote for, you know, Tweedledum and Tweedledummer, and if you like the Republicans on policies 135 and 7 and the Democrats on 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10, you have no way of distinguishing. It's a package deal. You have to take the whole package. So that's very inefficient. Also, there's rational ignorance in the market. The low-information voter gets as much vote as the high-information voter and you have no incentive to really learn about these things so you don't make a wise decision. Whereas in the market, if you want to buy a motorcycle, you'll read consumer reports or ask your friends about their motorbike or whatever so there's much more intelligence going on. Now, what I'm going to do is privatization of roads, streets and highways. First, second, oceans, rivers, lakes, and third, space. Why am I picking such difficult cases? Because if we can make the case for privatization in the hard cases, then it's easier to make them in the easy cases where if we just say we should privatize the post office or parks or sanitation collection, these are easier cases and I think it's important that we do that too, but I like to stretch a little and go for the hard cases. Okay, the first one is roads. Why should we privatize highways? My main motivation for privatizing highways is that about 35,000 people a year die on the highways every year. To put this in perspective, how many people died in the tragedy of 9-11? Only about 3,000. How many people died in the aftermath of Katrina? Only about 1,900. Now, I don't say that this is unimportant. 3,000 people is 3,000 innocent people too many killed and the same with 1,900. But these are one-shot deals and relatively small numbers of people were killed. Whereas on the roads, every year some 35,000 people die and that's a tragedy. Truly, if we already had private roads and there were such fatalities, Obama would be holding hearings about greed and profit and this and that and the other and why are the roads such death traps? But since the government does it, nobody says boo about it. And also people die in dribs and drabs. Only two or three people here, five or six people there. Whereas if you get an airline falling, it's 300 people. On the other hand, when black people are killed by cops, it's only one or two at a time and everyone is outraged and why aren't we outraged about this? Well, I'm outraged about it. And I wrote a book. I think it came out in 2009. I forget when. Trying to make the case for privatizing roads and what I'm going to do is summarize this a little bit. My second motivation for this book is traffic congestion. It's very frustrating. I feel bad here, although I was once here during the Katrina semester and when they have the football games, traffic is amazing around here and you're much better walking than riding in a car because you can walk faster than the cars go. But in large cities, the traffic congestion is just horrible and that's a second reason for privatizing roads because if we had traffic privatizing roads, we'd have peak load pricing and the idea behind peak load pricing is if this is the traffic during the day and let's say this is time over here and this is quantity of traffic and here we have 9 a.m., noon, 6 p.m. Well, you have traffic congestion sort of like that, the morning rush hour and the evening rush hour and if you charge more for the use of the roads what you'll do is reduce it here and maybe increase it here and sort of level it out more and that's what they do in all sorts of places whether it's a movie theater or a play or a dinner versus lunch or a ski lodge or a summer activity when the thing is more popular you charge more and that reduces the oscillations whereas what the government does is it gives monthly tickets for a bridge or something and per trip, the per trip price is a little lower if you buy a monthly pass and if you buy a monthly pass when are you likely to use the highways during these peak loads so what the government does is it exacerbates the peak and then they tell us to carpool and they use HOV lanes and use a public bus and all that and these things would naturally occur if the prices were rising so that would be one reason for privatizing to get rid of the traffic congestion which also is serious because people get in the road rage when they can't move their car and you get fights and there might be some deaths there okay, how would it work? How would a private highway run? Well, people would just set up a highway and if you want to go from here to there you clear a path and you set up a highway and maybe you have toll booths in the old days and nowadays we have electronic universal product codes you can put them on the bottom of a car and as the car goes by you monitor where the car went and at the end of the month you get a bill or you pay a certain fee and then you get reduced how much money you allocated for this purpose the first private highways were in England in the 9th century in this country during the Revolutionary war times there were private highways but the government refused to uphold the law against people using the highways for free by not paying the toll and it was hard to run the highway when the government wouldn't support it okay, now I'm going to do a few objections objections to this thesis, modest proposal that we should privatize all highways streets, roads, avenues, sidewalks, what have you one objection is that the deaths are not due to government ownership rather they're due to driving while intoxicated speed, vehicle malfunction, driver error, texting all sorts of things like that Sam Peltzman, the University of Chicago Economist listed 25 reasons why there are these fatalities the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration listed 125 different reasons and my claim is that this is all nonsense the real reason for the deaths is not these things these are just proximate causes the ultimate cause is the management look, suppose that we were in a restaurant last night what was the restaurant? fates, okay suppose that restaurant goes broke and now we're MBAs and we're trying to figure out why did the restaurant go broke and we start listing things and we say well the service was lousy the place was dirty the location was bad location, location, location the cook didn't cook the chicken well and we start making lists like that would that be the real reason? no, the real reason is that the management the owner, the manager, the entrepreneur didn't pick a good location didn't hire someone with a broom didn't hire a better chef so the ultimate cause is the manager and who is the manager of the roads? well the government look, suppose I take a rifle and I shoot right through that wall and I kill the next person who walks past Magnolia Street I hope the New York Times isn't listening I'm not really going to do that I'm not against these people this is just a hypothetical and I shoot him and I kill him and now you all grab me I'm a murderer and I say not so fast there was the bullet that killed him I didn't do it I mean we wouldn't accept that as an excuse yes the bullet was the proximate cause but I'm the ultimate cause so it's the government that is guilty for doing these things here's how it might be safer you see right now there's one rule of the road that emanates from Washington DC and in most highways it's a minimum of 40 and I'm a maximum of 70 and a lot of people do 75 and they won't give you a ticket which is another whole problem about breaking the law and disrespectful law I mean if the speed limit is 70 and they let you do 75 or arbitrarily they stop you at 72 you never know what's going on so that's a problem but maybe the real cause of death is not so much speed but the variation in speed maybe the fact that some people do 55 and other people do 75 the standard deviation or the variance in speed is 20 miles an hour maybe 30 miles an hour in some cases maybe what we should do is have the right lane everyone has to do 50 and the middle lane everyone has to do 65 and the left lane everyone has to do 80 would that be better? nobody knows I don't know if it would be all I know is that competition brings about a better product the reason we have pretty good shirts and shoes and wristwatches is we have competition people are free to try different things and if it works other people I may like them and if it doesn't work they either have to stop or they go bankrupt and then they have to stop but we don't have that with roads what we have with roads is one size fits all and you can't experiment there are not even 50 different ways for each of the 50 states to do it the central government will not allow competition in this way will not allow experimentation and if you can't allow experimentation how can you improve? maybe the deal should be that if you drive 70 in the left hand lane that's a very very bad thing and they should give you a ticket why? because everyone wants to do 75 or the faster riders want to do 75 and if somebody is sitting in the left lane doing 68 they have to go around and maybe lane changing is what really causes that's not speed again we don't know I'm not an expert in road safety I'm hopefully an expert in economics and economics says that competition will bring about a better product and I'm just experimenting in my mind's eye with different ways of running roads and maybe some of them would be better than what we have now and if so then we would reduce that okay another criticism of my book or my article on this several articles on this was well government really isn't responsible for all the deaths because what I do is I estimate well how many deaths might there be if we had privatization and the way I did that I extrapolated from the fact that in the senate there are areas where the government and the private compete or both do the thing and the government does it at a much higher cost for example sanitation it costs three or four times as much to move a ton of garbage in the government sector as in the private sector similarly in the post office so what I did is I said well I picked the five to one ratio and I said that instead of having 35,000 deaths we'd have one fifth of that or 7,000 deaths right and therefore my critic said this is Larry White a famous economist of the Austrian school said well therefore the government really isn't responsible for 35,000 deaths it's only responsible for 28,000 deaths because even in the market there'd be 7,000 deaths and my argument is no no no the government is responsible for all the deaths even though if we privatize that we still have some deaths I mean you know riding around at 70 miles an hour you're gonna have some income poop hitting some other income poop and there'll be some deaths I'm not saying that we have nirvana that we have perfection in private enterprise it's just a vast reduction and the analogy I use is let's stipulate that Hitler killed 6 million Jews but he took them four years to do it or five years to do it and during that time say 100,000 Jews would have died of natural causes I'm just making these numbers up for illustrative purposes so is Hitler responsible for 6 million deaths or 5.9 million deaths well I say 6 million he killed 6 million even though 100,000 would have died in the four-year interim he's still responsible for the whole kit and caboodle and therefore I say that the government is still responsible for the whole kit and caboodle even though under private enterprise there would have been fewer deaths other things that I talk about in terms of safety is every time there's a death maybe there should be a cross or a Jewish star or the Muslim emblem whatever their emblem is to indicate that there were deaths here and that this is dangerous and I don't mean one this big I mean one 35 feet tall to indicate what's going on so I have a whole bunch of ideas that might save deaths and I don't know that anyone would work or not because we don't have a market and I'm saying we should have a market okay another objection I've already discussed would you have to pay every few feet put in a penny every foot every time you go 30 feet in front of someone's house and my idea here is that instead if there's a road you wouldn't and here are the houses it's not that you would divide the road in half and each house owner would own a little bit of the road and every time you go by you'd have to pay a fee rather there'd be one owner of the entire road Magnolia Street or the 85 highway 85 which runs past the Auburn and how would we privatize this well we'd say all the people on the houses on the side of the road let's say Magnolia Street has got I don't know a thousand people on both sides of the road well you just make up a new corporation and give each one of them a share in the road and now this trades on the stock market and you would have one road owner of Magnolia Street and they would decide maybe they would make it for free because most of the people that live on the side use it anyway and maybe not I mean Walmart allows parking for free so maybe it would be a lost leader in that sense because the people want to maybe the store owners want more traffic or what have you another objection is privacy suppose you want to go see your proctologist and you don't want other people to know or you want to have an affair you want to engage in I don't know adultery or something and you don't want your wife or your husband to know that you're going to see somebody and if the road can keep track of where you're going then your spouse will find out and everyone will know you're seeing a proctologist and this and that and the other well we have all sorts of ways of getting around that if people want privacy they can pay for it we have privacy that whole industry that tries to get you privacy and the main underminers of privacy are the government so if government weren't involved and if government were less we'd have less of a problem here another point is let's take this house suppose you live in that house and the road owner says yeah I'll let you out on the road but it'll cost a million dollars every time you come out on the road namely he's going to trap you in your house and you can't get in your house or out of your house well right now when you buy a house you buy title insurance what's title insurance? title insurance is an insurance company certifies that yes the guy who's selling you the house really owns it and if somebody else comes along and says whoa I'm the real owner of the house the insurance company will pay you off so you are assured by the insurance company that you have clear title to your house well under a regime of private roads you would have a thing called access insurance namely before you buy this house you would ask the road owner hey what's the deal will you let me out at a very cheap price or charge me no more than anyone else and the road owner would have an incentive to be reasonable because what the road owner wants is for people to have houses and factories and stores on his road I mean if it's a totally empty road that no one goes back and forth why have the road? unless you're in Alaska you have the highway to nowhere or the bridge to nowhere where the government made a road for three people and they spent millions of dollars on that well you wouldn't have that what you would have would be an incentive for people to encourage people to locate on their road and the way to encourage people to locate on their road would be to obligate themselves to not charge an arm and a leg every time you get on and off the road and anyway you know they now call it freeways it's because it's limited access they really should call it taxways because these roads are financed through taxes and the idea here is that we would pay less in fees than we now pay in taxes so don't think that if we privatize roads you'd end up paying more you might pay it explicitly but implicitly you're not being taxed an arm and a leg for the public roads okay another one is a natural monopoly that roads are somehow a natural monopoly in my lecture on and I trust I try to deal with that it's not based on the number of competitors it's based on legal entry look if there was this road over here the last thing this road over here wants is for somebody else to build a road over there parallel to it in a mile away because then they lose half their customers so they have an incentive to be nice even if they're the only one even if they're the only firm in the industry they'd have an incentive to be rational because the last thing they want to do is to be punitive and then discourage customers and then set up a profit opportunity for a competitor the last thing they want is for somebody else start thinking hey maybe we should build another road and avoid this road they don't want that one last thing and that's eminent domain would we need eminent domain this is a sticking point people say you know if you want to build a road from I don't know where are we we're in Auburn now and let's say we want to build a road to New Orleans where I live and there's the road and I don't know how many people have property between here and New Orleans it's I don't know about 300 miles away there must be 3,000, 10,000, 30,000 people that have you know an acre here or two acres there and what we want to do is buy up land maybe for six lanes with a little median maybe 150 feet wide 10 feet for a lane that's 60 feet for the the lanes going forward and back so let's say we want 100 feet wide and 300 miles long and let's say there are 30,000 people that have land that we want to go through and we want to buy their land so we can put our road through and now what you have is the holdout problem which is supposedly the reason that you need eminent domain okay so how I have a whole chapter on this in the book and I try to deal with the issue of do we need government at least to have eminent domain and eminent domain is theft I mean what the eminent domain means is the government comes in and seizes your house whether you like it or not and then pays you what it thinks your house is worth or your land is worth which is theft even if they pay you something for it so there are various ways around it first of all you don't have to build the road straight as the crow flies virtually straight you could build it this way you could build it that way you could build it this way you could build it that way there are more than one way to skin a cat if I can be permitted such a horrible aphorism so here you are in Auburn here you are in New Orleans and there are A B C D E F G 6 or 7 routes that you could take so if you get a holdout over here you just go to a different route is buy options what's an option an option is you go to a farm and say hey Farmer Jones I want to buy your land but I'm not sure I want to buy it but I might want to buy it and I'll tell you what how much would you sell me your land for and he says oh 10,000 an acre I say okay fine I will buy your land at 10,000 an acre all I need is a little thin strip but I'll buy an acre or two from you but I'm not sure I want to buy it and instead of paying you 10,000 an acre to buy it I'll pay you a thousand dollars to have an option to buy it at the agreed upon price of 10,000 an acre as long as I exercise this option within oh three years or whatever the time period is so you start buying options all over these things and whenever you make a clean sweep of getting options well that's your road another possibility is you announce that you want to build a road from plains and you tell people here are the six or seven routes that I might take A through G and you guys get together and as soon as you guys the first one to get everyone on route to agree wins the prize and I'll build your road there and I'll pay twice as much or three times as much as it would be in farmland but suppose you have a Cartman you know from Clark and you know what Cortman says screw you guys screw you guys screw you guys that's his main contribution to civilization screw you guys and suppose he doesn't just own this but he owns a piece of land like that he owns the land in that red area and he says screw you I'm not letting you build it because you know I'm just the you know pain in the rear end and I'm not letting you build it and what happened on this one this took me a year or two to really figure out how to do it and I discuss this with my son who was age 15 through 17 during the time we discussed this and we finally came up with well you can build a tunnel under or bridge over because we don't believe in the doctrine of ad column is that if you own a square mile of the earth you own a decreasing cone down toward the center of the earth and also an increasing cone upward which would make airplane travel difficult why because we're libertarians and we believe in homesteading and nobody homesteaded anything 300 feet below below their surface of the land and nobody homesteaded anything up in the air the airplanes homesteaded that right so they have a right to go there and we have a right to go under so slant drilling is okay so if you have two pieces of land and somebody wants to drill down and then under his neighbors land he can if he's the first one there but then the argument as well Cartman can start putting sticks down below him and putting fences up so we can't build a bridge and we can't build a tunnel and the key here is to understand now you have to understand American football and in football here are the goal lines and here's the 50-yard line and here is the end zone and it's if you're over here going this way it's sort of easy to move the ball because you have the whole field with which to move it but when you get over here and you're trying to get past the goal line it's very hard to do because you have only this area to work with everyone with me on this football business well it's the same thing here remember Cartman has got to defend I don't know how long that is call it 20 miles he's got to defend a goal line of 20 miles and all we have to do is get the football through him and the football is how big 100 feet wide so let him put all the sticks he wants he's got to do it for 15 or 20 miles wide and all we have to do is one there is sticks so this I think would obviate that threat ok so I'm now finished with Rhodes I think that to just summarize this we need private Rhodes to save lives and to deal with traffic congestion and I have many many more objections that I deal with in the book so if you're interested I think the book is free for electronics so you don't have to buy it you can just access it although they are selling it here ok the next thing I want to get into is oceans rivers and lakes and I tell you oceans rivers and lakes are more daunting than Rhodes why is it more daunting because of the water cycle right now the water is in the ocean and it evaporates up into the clouds and then it rains over the mountains and then it gets into a stream and the stream gets into a lake and then the lake gets into a river the Mississippi River and then it gets out into the Gulf of Mexico so it's sort of a cycle and you know if you're going to have ownership first of all you have to have scarcity to have ownership and a lot of the ocean is not yet scarce although it's getting scarce scarce means that we have rivalrousness namely if somebody is using it somebody else gets less use out of it because there is crowding well the Mississippi River is already pretty scarce there are a lot of boats there and there would be more boats if people were allowed to be on that river there are lakes that are scarce I want to read something to you from the Globe and Mail a Canadian newspaper which is sort of like the New York Times sort of a pingo newspaper and they are talking about in British Columbia how sound has no place for an LNG liquefied natural gas plant and what it says is wood fiber LNG limited has proposed the construction of a liquefied natural gas facility at the head of house sound which is a body of water a scenic fjord beloved by British Columbians especially those in Lower mainland opposition to the project to date has largely focused on whether the province should return industry to a waterway that is only recently and at great expense been cleaned up having finally staunched the flow of heavy metals from the Britannia copper mine do we really want to allow LNG tanker traffic in a fjord being repopulated with herring salmon orcas and humpback wells every municipality on the house sound has passed resolution opposing this proposal the project is under review by the BC British Columbia Environmental Assessment Office whose formal mandate is to give quote a full and fair consideration of all interests a full and fair consideration of all interests with no prices because there's no bidding is very much like central planning well not very much like central planning it is central planning and as Austrians we know that socialism and central planning is irrational because you don't have prices of raw materials so here you have this board the BC Environmental Assessment Office that is going to determine based on whatever criteria probably bribes or who knows maybe ideology as to whether you should allow it you see the point is the house sound can be used for swimming, boating, fishing tankers all sorts of things and ordinarily look this red dye that I've got in my tie could be used for all sorts of things ties or I don't know Coca-Cola bottles use red dye and tires maybe use red dye I mean red dye can be used in shirts and shoes and all sorts of things but how do we determine where the red dye is used by bidding various people bid for a red dye and we have a rational allocation of red dye or cloth or metal or plastic or wood or labor or anything we have a rational economy but when we have oceans that are non-owned or bodies of water that are non-owned and there's a dispute as to who should use it well you're at sea without a rudder it's very similar to what's happening with the bicycle lanes how much of the road should be used for bicycle lanes we don't know if there were private people the owner of the road would say well how much money can I make off the bicycle people, how much can I make off the car people and then they would allocate the space for bicycle lanes versus cars in some sort of economical way but without prices you can't do it so what you have is a vast tragedy of the commons so let me talk a little bit about what a tragedy of the commons is and before I do there's this woman Eleanor Ostrom who just won the Nobel Prize I think a year ago and her shtick is the tragedy of the commons is irrational she rejects the idea of tragedy of the commons and I've got two or three articles out attacking her for this so what is the tragedy of the commons the tragedy of the commons is that if something is owned in common we will overuse it because it costs us nothing to do now I want to illustrate this with the buffalo here's the buffalo and I'm going to make him look sad because he almost went extinct and here is a cow I'm going to make the cow look happy because the cow never went within a million miles of extinction aren't those pretty no applause for my okay okay thank you thank you I take great pride in my artistic abilities the reason the cow is happy is because he never went within a million miles of being extinct because the cow is only always owned privately the buffalo for a long time there was this movie dances with wolves did anyone see that movie it was a pretty good movie if you leave your brain at the outside because it's a pinko movie and you know they say buffalo when extinct is the white man or something like that whereas the Indians would never kill buffalo in masses which they did the idea is if you kill a cow today what is the cost to you of killing a cow today a cow tomorrow if you kill your cow today you don't have your cow tomorrow if you didn't hadn't killed the cow today you would have had a cow tomorrow so that's a pretty high cost if you kill a buffalo today what's the cost is it a buffalo tomorrow no the buffalo are running around like wild men and you wouldn't have had the buffalo anyway so you might as well kill the cow even if you kill the buffalo even if you only want to have use its tongue or use its liver or whatever so there was a mass killing of buffalo and it's only more recently when people were allowed to own buffalo that buffalo was saved and as far as I'm concerned elephants are just big buffalo with funny looking noses and the same with rhinos and all those other extinct species or endangered species in Africa if you want to save them you have to privatize them and then people will take care of them because they'll own them and we have private property in them okay so what's happening with the oceans it's a vast strategy of the commons and that's why you get this sort of thing that I was talking about before where the water is 75% of the earth's surface and it accounts for 1% of the GDP whereas the land is 25% of the surface and it accounts for virtually 99% of the GDP so one reason for privatizing the oceans is to get rid of the tragedy of the commons another reason is say the drought, the water shortage in California the way they are running the water situation is that it costs farmers $5 an acre foot an acre foot is an acre wide and a foot deep of water it's several millions of gallons whereas in the city they charge I don't know something like $700 an acre foot and there's no trade because the farmers don't really own it they just get to use it so if we had privatization of water there'd be no more droughts look the reason we have starvation in Africa is if you have bad crops in one country and good crops in the other country they don't allow markets to bring the crops from the good country to the bad country because this would be gouging and all sorts we can't allow free trade well it's the same thing whereas if Iowa has a good crop if Texas has a lousy crop there's no crisis we have an internal free trade zone of the United States so you never have any problems like that well it's the same thing with water if you have a drought in the US and Canada is up to its armpits in water and we had privatized water well there'd be shipments of water from Canada to California and there'd be no problem but we are with regard to water as they are in Africa with regard to food so that's another reason for privatizing the oceans rivers and lakes let's take another example take the case of Katrina now I live in New Orleans Katrina the storm Katrina well first of all if we really had private enterprise we wouldn't have any storms the bad weather is all due to the government's fault I'm serious about this because they take half the GDP and just waste it and not only do they waste it but they use that money to make the rest of the economy less efficient so imagine a case where they didn't take half the GDP and use a lot of that to make the rest of the economy less efficient and we were twice or three times as rich as we are now surely well maybe not for sure but almost for sure we would have made more inroads in weather control you know seeding the clouds in private enterprise and you know it would have rained when we wanted to rain you know in New Orleans they're always having parades and half the time they're getting rained out well we'd make sure that the rain only occurred say from two to four in the morning or something I mean we should run the weather the weather shouldn't run us so the storms probably wouldn't occur anyway and it's not due to global warming it's due to the government everything bad is due to the government bad breath everything the government's fault Katrina missed New Orleans 40 miles east it really got Mississippi why then were were 1900 people killed and you think that this is sort of puzzling because with a tornado you get about two minute warning but with a storm like Katrina they had a week or two weeks and on TV they'd say well here's where the the storm is and it's going at 15 miles an hour and it's going to get here on Thursday between two and three in the afternoon or something like that so people had noticed but somehow you know people people died anyway but the real cause of the the tragedy was the Army Corps of Engineers the what do you call it sorry not FEMA the levees the levees broke you know they say what is it make love not levees make levees not war I forget what the saying was the levees broke FEMA came in afterward which is a whole other issue which I'll get to in a second but the levees broke now look as an economist I don't mind that the levees broke because even if they were private you're going to have some accidents private doesn't mean perfection there's profit and loss in the private's economy so there will be mistakes made and sometimes if even if we had the Mississippi River Corporation running the levees sometimes the levee would break what really rankles me as an economist is that those guys are still in charge of the Mississippi River you see if a private company failed dismally look if McDonald's started poisoning people that would be it for McDonald's we'd go to Burger King or Wendy's or something that's why we have pretty good stuff because whenever somebody makes a big mistake they go broke where is Packard anymore where is Pan Am where are all these other companies that they're not extinct but they're bankrupt and the companies that took their place would simply have an advantage the thing that rankles the economist in me is that the Army Corps of Engineers can't go broke any more than the post office can go broke so if we had privatization of the river and somebody did a very bad job there'd be heads lopped off figuratively not literally but we'd have a new company running it so this would be another reason for privatizing bodies of water another motto of mine is that land is slow moving water water is fast moving land because land moves too you have mudslides and sometimes water is very stable when it's in an iceberg doesn't move at all so my idea here and all through the book I have a co-author on this book and our view was that we're trying to say that land and water are not that different we want to privatize land and we ought to want to privatize water I've only got a few more minutes so let me talk about privatizing space the book on oceans rivers and lakes I wish I could have included this stuff in that book but we just gave it to the publishers and they said no more changes so I'll have to use this for something else but now on to the space we want to privatize the moon we want to privatize Mars privatize asteroids privatize the the job of keeping asteroids off of us the asteroids supposedly got the dinosaurs we don't want them to get us and right now it's governments that's going to stop the asteroids from getting us and if a big asteroid hit us we'd be in trouble so all these things I think have to be privatized and I gave you the general case for privatization so let me now talk about why we should privatize Mars and the moon and maybe Venus or what have you the main reason I'm a humanist I make no apologies pretty soon that this will be I'll have to give a trigger warning because it's the means our animal friends or something like that I don't know this will be microaggression but I'm a humanist I like human beings I want human beings to prosper and what does it live long and prosper as they say in that TV show I'm pro-human sue me and I notice and I notice that humans are pretty vicious animals they kill each other like flies the reason I voted supported my man Barack Obama against McCain in 08 is I thought McCain was really going to drop a nuclear bomb on somebody I thought he was that rabbit not that I'm a big fan of Obama I mean Lord knows I think Obama is less likely to drop a bomb and more likely to be peaceful and I think foreign policy is very important so why do I want private people to be on the moon and Mars because if we all blow each other up on this earth and we have a colony on the moon and a colony on Mars at least some human beings will live it's a sobering thought that some maniacs you know can have I mean look at what the US is doing now with Russia they're saying they shouldn't mess with the Crimea they're all businesses of the US with Crimea I love Putin who's saying well Texas ought to secede you know he's likening Crimea to Texas look the war monger, the neocons they're itching for a war with Soviet Union or rather with Russia now and Russia's got nukes and we've got not we the US government has got nukes and you know they could really blow up the whole world hopefully they won't do it right away and we'll get some colonies on Mars and the moon so at least some human beings will live and I'm pro-human so that's the main reason other than the other reasons that I gave for privatizing anything that's the main focus that I want to put forth for your consideration for having privatization on the Mars and moon and you know maybe if a private company could put an atmosphere in Mars they're more likely to do it than the government and right now there's only one flag on the moon and that's a US government flag I'd like to see private companies doing that a minor reason for privatizing bodies of heavenly bodies is just the economics you know maybe the green cheese on the moon will have specialization and division of labor and we can have trade between the moon a very good book is by Heinlein the moon is a harsh mistress didn't anyone ever read that, very good book where they talk about a colony on the moon my time is up thanks for your attention