 Without further ado, it's my great pleasure to hand over to Dr. Brewer. Thank you. So thank you all, thank you all for coming out tonight. It's become somewhat of a tradition now for me around this time of year to visit Exeter. This is my fourth time here. Just in the name of full disclosure, and maybe to ease some tension, I will admit, although I've done so many, many times, I will admit to having been a socialist. And in my youth, I was a committed socialist. Until I was handed out the shrugged at age 16, and which turned my world upside down as probably an understatement of the impact it had on my life then, and really on the last 40 years since then, 40 years since I read out the shrugged at age 16. You know, for 250 years, about, we have been running an experiment, and by we, I mean the human race, has been running an experiment. We have tried numerous social systems. We have tried numerous political systems. We have tried numerous configurations. We have done so in a variety of different geographic locations. So this is not any particular place or any particular time. And in a sense, we have tested a whole array of options. We have tested communism. We have tested capitalism. We have tested a variety of mixtures in between. And we continue to test those mixtures in between. And what's astounding to me, and I think to many people on my side of the aisle, if there's anybody else with me on that side of the aisle, is that the results are indeed overwhelming. The results of this test for 250 years, because before 250 years, we all lived pretty much in the same kind of system, in the same kind of environment. We'll talk about a little bit about what life was like before then. Over the last 250 years, there has also been overwhelmingly one-sided. If you care about human well-being, if you care about individual flourishing, if you care about health, if you care about life longevity, if you care about wealth, production, productivity, technology, innovation, fill in the blank of what you count as human flourishing, then capitalism has been an overwhelming, unmitigated, uncompromised success story. And socialism in all its variants has been an unmitigated, systematic, consistent, utter failure. Indeed, worse than a failure. There is no question that more people have been murdered, more people have been killed, more people have been slaughtered, more people have been starved purposefully, and often not purposefully. As a result of socialism than of any ideology in human history. Indeed, the experiment of the Soviet Union was a stunning experiment of murder and slaughter. Somewhere over 100 million people were killed by the Soviet Union or left starved by the Soviet Union. And of course, that's just one part of the world. Mao Zedong's experimentation with communism led to the death of at least 60 million people, if not more. Over and over again socialism has produced nothing but salvation, destruction, and outright murder. On the other hand, capitalism, that evil doctrine that we all love to hate and love to condemn has produced the wealth we all enjoy today. It has produced the technology that makes a lot of this room function. It has produced the personal prosperity many of us in this room enjoy. It has produced almost all the wealth that exists in modern society today. Capitalism is the system of property rights, is the system of individual rights, is the system of liberty and freedom, a system in which the government leaves people alone, leaves people free to their own well-being, their own interests, their own values. The system of entrepreneurship and business has produced all the wonders that we have in our world today. Socialism, on the other hand. The system of central planning. The system of state ownership of the means of production to one degree or another. The system that views the individual not as an end in itself but as a means to an end. Again, it has produced nothing, not a little but nothing of value. And nothing has contributed nothing to human flourishing of human success and human life. Indeed, maybe the biggest mystery of modern times. And I think indeed the biggest mystery of modern times is how in spite of this history, in spite of the factual evidence, in spite of what has happened before the fall of the Berlin Wall, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but indeed for 250 years, what doesn't just have to look at modern history. How socialism is even an acceptable idea or an acceptable ideology in polite company astounds me. Many more than for example, Nazism would be an acceptable idea in polite company. It's not, thank God, it's not, well, the God that doesn't exist but thank whatever, that it's not. But indeed the communists and the socialists have managed to kill many more people. Many more people by orders of magnitude than the Nazis have yet we've accepted that anti-Semitism is evil and wrong and unacceptable. We've learned that from the history of the Second World War and yet we've learned nothing from the history of Mao Tse-tung, of Maoist China and of the Soviet Union. It is shocking that we even have to have this conversation. So I think that's a question we have to ask ourselves. Why? Why? And it's a question that keeps being repeated because we keep, not only young people in the UK seem to be passionately involved in a socialist agenda and big supporters of, what's his name, Jeremy Corbyn. In the United States, young people seem to be enamored by Bernie Sanders and his at least claim to be a socialist. But this is a worldwide phenomenon. There's a common example going on in Latin America that I find quite fascinating. A country, I'm sure you all know which, used to be the richest country on a per capita basis in Latin America. Oil reserves that exceed those of Saudi Arabia. And over the last 25 or so years that wealth, that progress has been systematically dismantled to the point where today that country is the poorest country in a pretty poor region already, Latin America, on a per capita basis in spite of the fact that the oil is still in the ground. It is a country that has been dismantled where the wealth has been dismantled in the name of socialism. Where farms have been converted from private property to communal farms. Where the oil fields have been converted from private exploration and extraction to state ownership, the state ownership of the means of production. And as a consequence, one of the richest, most fertile lands where food was exported out to other country today cannot feed its own people. To the point where infants are dying of malnutrition, people are eating their pets, they're no cats and dogs in Caracas. The zoos have been raided in order to eat the meat from the animals in the zoos. That's how desperate people are. Middle-class, young people are dumpster diving into the trash cans to find remnants of food. And then nobody cares. There's no outcry. There's no condemnation. All the celebrities and all the politicians, including Corbin and Bernie Sanders, who wave praise on Venezuela's previous dictator, Chavez, and the current authoritarian Mudaro, praise them to the hilt. Have stayed silent as people die in the streets of Caracas. Nobody seems, nobody seems to care. Why? Because they are starving in the name of socialism. That's probably a noble thing to do. At the same time, there is a country not far away from Venezuela, almost shares a border, which 30 years ago used to be the poorest country in Latin America. Far poorer than Venezuela. Literally the poorest country in a very poor region. And today, on a pro-capital basis, is the richest country in Latin America. And this country became rich because, somewhat by accident, its economy was handed over to some free market economists. God forbid. And they actually implemented some privatization and actually implemented some free market reforms, privatized natural resources, privatized farmland, did land reform, privatized the social security system of the country, gave people an option between staying in the state-run social security system or in the private-run social security system. Guess how many people switched to the private? 99%. And that country is chilly. And that country was striving economically, it's done phenomenally well over the last 25 years. And yet interestingly enough, and this is where, you know, you have to scratch your head and wonder what the world is coming to. Chile has twice now elected a socialist as president. And the socialist president is systematically unwinding, undoing all the things that made Chile rich. I just read, I think this week, that they are going to start major reforms of the incredibly successful privatized social security system. Thus attempting to destroy it. It's just nuts in my view. It's craziness what we are doing. 250 years ago, the reason I picked 250 years ago, anybody know, can we move this sign? I want the whiteboard. Anybody knows what the UN defines as extreme poverty? I think it'll less than $2 a day. Yeah, something that I say. It'll change $3 a day, so a little higher. But anything less than $3 a day is considered by the UN. Not an organization, I typically quote, but this is a good number. $3 a day is considered extreme poverty. What was the percentage of the human population? 250 years ago that lived on under $3 a day. I mean, in today's dollars, so no inflation adjusted, I mean inflation adjusted dollars. Today's dollars, in real dollars, in real inflation adjusted dollars. Think about what it means to live on $3 a day. You can still find people in this world, unfortunately, still living on $3 a day. So we know what it looks like. And it's not pretty. It's not pretty. And we can't. You know, living in our modern, relatively capitalist society, we can't imagine what living on $3 a day means. But what percentage of the population lived 250 years ago on $3 a day? In the West and globally. It's just a frauder number. Think it's 90%? Yeah, I think 90% is not a bad estimate. The actual number is closer to 95. Almost everybody. I mean a few aristocrats who managed to exploit people and steal money and, you know, have a little bit more than everybody else. They were up here. But everybody else, almost everybody else, 95% of the population, still here at global basis. But even in the West, relatively rich West, lived on under $3 a day. Indeed, if you look at all of human history, and we're going to do a little, you know, we're going to go minus 10,000 years. So 10,000 years ago, about the time of the agricultural revolution. And if you look, if there's a $3 a day, this is about what income per capita was. For 10,000 years, it did nothing. It went up a little bit under Rome, and they went down during the dark and middle ages, and went maybe up a little bit in the Renaissance. But it basically was flat for 10,000 years. We lived at approximately the same level. We basically farmed, ate the food we grew. We got up in the morning, worked all day, and went to sleep when the sun set because there was no lighting. You couldn't afford any kind of oil to actually light your place. You maybe could light a fire, but, you know, it stinks. So it's harder to light a fire indoors. So you basically, your entire life was worked at what was life expectancy during this period? Yeah, 40, it's about 39, but yeah, it's a good estimate, about 39 years old. Life was hard, brutal, short, nasty, you know, read your Hobbes. He was right about life in his period, in his time. And, you know, children, how many children, what percentage of children made it to age 10? Born alive to age 10? Yeah, less than 50% actually make it to age 10. Most of you would not have made it to age 10, and a lot of us, at least I, would be dead by now, and the rest of you would be middle-aged. That's what life was, 250 years ago, and 10,000 years ago. Doesn't matter. Life didn't change that much. And then something amazing happened. Miraculous, one would say. And that happened. That, we went from $3 a day to hundreds of dollars a day. And in Asia, it took a little bit longer. They stayed somewhere here, and then they moved like that. But what caused this? What made this happen? Anybody want to give a date to the inflection point? What is the inflection point about? 1700. 1700 is a little early, but not bad, because suddenly intellectually, the beginning of the Revolution, makes that possible, starts around 1700 and late 1600. The Industrial Revolution, 1830. Yeah, I'd say 1830 is probably a little late. So it's somewhere in between those dates. I like a particular date, and I know you'll laugh when I say it, because it's a nice number that you can remember. It's 1776. Not because it's the actual date this inflection point happens, but because it symbolizes why that happens. And that's three reasons why 1776. One, it's a publication in England of a very famous book. Anybody know which? Just yell it out. Don't do the hand thing. You're way too polite. Adam Smith. Adam Smith, Walter Nation, was published in 1776. Two, the commercialization, the first commercial use of a steam engine, was in 1776. And three, of course, the founding of the United States of America. And in almost all regards, the founding of the U.S. is the most important of the three. But all three accommodations of an intellectual legacy that starts in the late 1600s, continues with John Locke in the Scottish and French Enlightenment. And what is the Enlightenment about? What is the essential idea that the Enlightenment promotes and I think generates that curve upwards. The Enlightenment promotes basically two ideas. One is the derivative of the other. The first, the most important idea, is the efficacy of human reason. The ability of our reason to comprehend and to stand no reality as it is. It is a twin to the scientific revolution. They happen at the same time, not accidentally. Newton teaches us that we can explain the physical world by using our reason. That everybody, everybody can understand the motions of objects, the motions of planets, that the equations they explain are not that hard. If you don't know Newton's three laws, if you didn't understand them in physics class, it's more than likely that it's because you had a lousy professor or teacher because it's not that hard. Now, when people suddenly realize, up until then, remember, how did knowledge come about? How do we know anything? When did knowledge come about before kind of the Enlightenment? How did people believe knowledge came about? Yeah, from a book written thousands of years ago, from mystical revelation, from Plato's philosopher kings, from the Pope, from somewhere. But that knowledge was not accessible to them as individuals. They only got to them filtered through the philosopher kings, called them Christian philosopher kings or secular philosopher kings. It doesn't matter. Suddenly, in the Enlightenment, we learn that each one of us can know reality as it is. We start saying, well, if I know, if I can know all this stuff, then why can't I control my own life? Why can't I choose my own profession? Why can't I live the way I want to live? Why can't I be free to produce what I want to produce? To think what I want to think. To make of my life what I want to make of that life. And as a consequence, what we get is a movement for freedom, a movement for liberty. Which culminates in the Declaration of Independence of the United States as a declaration, the most important political document I believe in human history. They didn't live up to it, of course, slavery and so forth, but as a declaration, declaring that each individual has an inheritable right to his own life, his own liberty, and a pursuit of his own happiness, changes the world. And what it unleashes is the innovation, the profit-seeking, the happiness-seeking individuals all over the West where freedom is allowed. And the consequences, capitalism and the consequences a massive, massive increase in our quality standard of living, a doubling within about 100 years of life expectancy. Of course, now it goes up to 84 or in somewhere in the 80s. A dramatic increase in the quality of life, a dramatic improvement across the board in human flourishing. Ultimately, it leads to abolition of slavery, emancipation of women, and almost every positive social trend of the last 250 years. And there are very few positive social trends before 250 years. What the socialists want is to get rid of this. Because all of this is a product of the recognition of the value of the individual, his mind, and his own life. Because the second idea of the Enlightenment is the sanctity of the individual. That the individual is the moral unit. Before 1776, for all intents and purposes, when you'd ask people who their life belonged to, what would be their answer? Who does your life belong to? King or God. King or God or tribe or nation or state or race or fill in the blank with some collective. Before 1776, each one of us knew that our life belonged to someone else. We had no autonomy over our lives, not philosophically, intellectually, and not physically in the real world. The beauty of the Declaration of Independence is that it declares that our life belonged to us as individuals. That the king does not own you. That the state does not own you. That the parliamentarian does not own you. That the race does not own you. That nobody owns you. That you are an independent, sovereign being. That your happiness and your well-being is your only responsibility. And that the job of the state, the only job of the state is to protect you, is to make your life safe from the violence, from the coercion, from the fraud that might be committed on you by your neighbors or other states, terrorists or filling the black ticket. But other than protecting you, the state had no role. It was to leave you alone so that you could pursue the values you believed when necessary for your survival and your ultimate flourishing. Socialism seeks to replace that. It seeks to tell you, you know your life doesn't belong to you. It belongs to the collective. It belongs to the group. You were just a sacrificial animal for the sake of other people's well-being. No matter if you studied hard, worked hard, innovated, come up with great ideas, built a company, made hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe even billions of dollars. It's not yours. It's your duty. It's your responsibility from each according to his ability to each according to his means. It's the people who didn't build. It's the people who didn't create. It's the people who didn't make your moral responsibility as to them, not to yourself. Your moral responsibility is to give. And if you're not going to give, which most of us would not, then we empower the state to violently take it from you and give to others. You do not have a right to your property. Indeed, the whole notion of private property is bizarre according to socialism. Property is everybody's. No matter if you actually made this stuff, no matter if you were to build this stuff, no matter if you had the idea for it. It's not yours. It is owned by the collective, by the group. Your life does not belong to you. Your values do not belong to you. What you create and build does not belong to you. Your ideas do not belong to you. Socialism declares all of that belongs to the collective. It is a direct attack on individual sovereignty, on the idea of self-ownership, on the idea of the moral right of an individual to pursue their own values and their own happiness and their own well-being. And indeed, that is where its popularity comes from. The popularity of socialism is that it is not a new idea, that it doesn't challenge you to think any differently than our forefathers. Socialism is just a rehashing of an ancient moral code that has been with us for at least 2,000 years. It is a rehashing of a moral code that says that your moral responsibility in life is to serve others, is to live for the sake of others, is to sacrifice yourself for the sake of others. Indeed, the more needy they are, the more you should be sacrificing. That's not socialism. That's Christianity. That's most ancient moralities that came before the Industrial Revolution, before capitalism. Indeed, to this day we teach our kids that to be noble, to be good, to be virtuous, is to be selfless, is to sacrifice, is to give freely, willingly, and not to expect anything in return. That is real nobility. That is real goodness. That's what we teach. And if we teach that, then why expect any different than a socialist outcome? Aren't there challenges there? She asks a simple question. Why? Why is other people's happiness more important than mine? Why is other people's lives more important than mine? Why should I sacrifice other people and not live for myself? Why isn't my happiness, why shouldn't my happiness be the purpose of my life? Indeed, as a living being, we must choose values to survive, to flourish. It's what we are. We have one shot at this life. We have one life here. Shouldn't we live it? To make our own lives the best that they can be? You don't get a second chance. You don't get another one at this. Why not be happy? Why not be successful? Why not be prosperous? Why is life about the other rather than about you? Each one of you. And as long as you're not exploiting other people, and as long as you don't allow them to exploit you, this is what life should be about. It should be about the pursuit of happiness. Your individual happiness. So socialism wins because it's a secularization of a morality that's been with us for 2,000, 3,000 years. And we still haven't had the guts. We still haven't had the courage. We still haven't had the backbone to shrug it off and to learn from reality, from what works, from what actually achieves human flow. We need to reject the mysticism of socialism. We need to reject the morality of otherism that socialism embeds in us. And we need to embrace the new morality. And until we do, we will keep going up and down and up and down as we adopt more socialism and then the socialism crushes our wealth so we liberalize our economies and then we have more socialism and an endless cycle which we don't learn from, which is, again, what's stunning to me is the fact that we just don't learn from experience. And again, I think the reason is that our morality guides our interpretation of that experience. Socialism is evil by what standard? By the standard of human life. I believe that the good is that that supports, that promotes human life and human flourishing. The good is that which supports and promotes human life and human flourishing. By any measure, what has led to human life, human flourishing, is capitalism, freedom, liberty, individualism, leaving people alone to pursue their dreams. What is led, what socialism is led to is, again, destruction. Central planning doesn't work, has never worked, cannot work. Why can't central planning work? What is the essential flaw in central planning? Yeah, so you can't get enough information which is Hayek's reason. But why can't you get enough information? What is it that makes it impossible, not just that the computer's not fast enough or big enough, but literally metaphysically impossible to get enough information so that you can central plan? What makes that impossible? What makes it impossible is all of us are different. All of us have our own lives. All of us have our own values. All of us like different things and have different preferences and different wants and different needs and different desires and different passions. And there's no way to plan that. The beauty of capitalism is it leaves you free to follow those passions. And if their passions turn out to be not too productive, what happens to you? You fail. But if you're half smart, when you fail, you learn from the failure and you don't do it again. Failure is part of life. What central planning tries to do is try to tell you what those passions should be, what your life should be like, how you should behave, how much work you should create, what kind of products you should want. Again, it replaces your mind with the mind of the philosopher king, with the mind of Stalin, or Lenin, or Mao, or Chavez, or Moldau. And you can't replace your mind. Each one of your minds is unique. Each one of your minds is special. It's different. And even if we're all equally rational and equally smart, we are going to want different things with different people. It's beautiful. I mean, life would be horrible if we were all the same. Even if everybody was like me, it would still be horrible. What makes life interested is the division of labor, the division of values, the fact that we indeed are all different, that we all pursue different things. So, it's time to resurrect the spirit of the Enlightenment, of the period that led up to this massive increase in wealth, this massive increase in flourishing, this massive increase in prosperity. We need to resurrect those two ideas that were at the heart of the Enlightenment. The idea of reason as primary as a means of knowledge, of efficaciousness of reason, it actually use it to learn about reality. You can actually know the world around you. You do not need revelation. You do not need philosophicings of furious to tell you what life is really about. You get to decide that. As long as you use your mind, as long as you're rational, you will probably make good decisions. And we need to resurrect as a consequence of that, the idea of individualism, the idea of the sanctity of each one of our lives, of the values that we have, and reject the idea of sacrifice. Socialism is very good at sacrifice. It sacrificed probably somewhere between 100 and 200 million people for the sake of the proletarian. And the proletarian at the end of the day was still duet poor and produced nothing and created nothing. So not only is it unthinkable to sacrifice human beings for any goal, it's never right to do human sacrifice, but the goal wasn't even achieved. And yet we still find it up here. So I encourage you all, read on your end. She is, in my view, the thinker that brings back these enlightenment ideas, these enlightenment values, and study history. Because I think we study history, it really is hard to be a socialist though, maybe even impossible. Thank you all. They all seem to be open. Alright, we've got plenty of time for questions. Any kind? Sure. My question is, so you seem to talk mostly like status, kind of socialist, central planning, things like that. So are you in? Yes. Obviously there are a variety of ideologies out there, and I was wondering what you would then say to anarchist philosophies, which do pride themselves and value individuality and take care of the individual and don't murder people en masse. So what would you say to that? Well, it's always interesting when I give talks that the anarchists, either on the left or on the right, come after me because I'm not an anarchist. So I now percapitalist on one side and the anarcho-communists on the other side or anarcho-whatever on the other side come after me. I am not an anarchist-anarchy because I believe that anarchy is a recipe for violence. I think what anarchy, you need a system of justice. You need definitions of right and wrong in terms of when is it wrong for me to punch you and when is it okay for me to punch you? It's only okay for me to punch you first. So you need clear definition of what is self-defense, what is aggression, what is property, what's a violation of property, who the property belongs to so we know whose rights are being violated whose rights are not being violated. And I know leftist anarchists don't believe in any property, which I think that means everything is not owned by anybody, which is, you know, in so many regards to community disaster. But I think that anarchy, however you think about it, either from the so-called capitalist perspective or the so-called leftist perspective, ultimately always devolves into gang warfare. It's the only way left to resolve disputes is through violence. It is through the police force I hired versus the police force you hired or your friends versus my friends if we don't believe in police forces. But they're going to be disputes. They're always going to be disputes. Some of them are friendly, some of them are rational. We often sign contracts and we're all good people, but we disagree about what the contract means, maybe 10 years later. And some of them, because some people are just bad people, they're cooks out there, they're just bad people. And you need a mechanism to resolve it. So I believe government is a necessary good, not a necessary evil. I don't think society can actually exist in any kind of healthy way without a government. And then the question is what kind of government do we need? And I believe a government is limited, limited to one thing, only one thing. And that is the protection of the liberty, the freedom of the individual. That is only to arbitrate disputes and to protect us from the cooks and criminals and motorists and rapists and so on. So other than that, government has no rule. Now let me address some other variants of social sight. So there have been many attempts over the last, certainly over the last 100 years, really going back even further than that, to create all kinds of communal living. So in Israel, there was a lengthy experiment with something called the kibbutz, which was about as communal as you get. Right? All the land was jointly owned. At its peak, at the peak of the kibbutz, your children weren't even yours. So the children, you had the baby and the baby was taken to a nursery and it was raised with all the other children and you got to visit the nursery just as much as anybody else got to visit the nursery. You didn't get to work at the nursery because your kids were there. You rotate the job. So you didn't have any specialization. So you worked, let's say a month in the farm and a month in the kitchen and a month in the nursery. I mean, it's idealistic of a communal kind of setting as possible. There were no kitchens in people's apartments because the idea that you would cook for yourself was too individualistic. So you had a communal kitchen, which people rotated to and you could only eat your meals in a communal kitchen. Everybody had exactly the same size apartment. Everybody had exactly the same furniture. I mean, they truly tried to make this a utility. Of course, at the end of the day, it was voluntary. You could leave. So it wasn't, there was no destruction because they didn't have the power of the state. Luckily they had. It would mean a lot of that. So what was the result? We've got like 75 years of good history on this. The kibbutz was never economically sustainable. They always lost money from the beginning and they kept increasing the amount of money they were losing over time. So they could not feed themselves without heavy subsidies originally before the State of Israel was created from contributions from Jews like the Rothschilds in Europe who sent money so they wouldn't starve. And then later on once the State of Israel was created from the Israeli government that subsidized the kibbutz right until about 10, 15 years ago when the Israeli government started cutting the subsidies and of course as soon as they cut the subsidies, what happened to the kibbutz they privatized themselves. Today everybody has their own apartment. Everybody has a job. Everybody gets a salary. Oh, you couldn't even have money outside of the kibbutz. All the money was shared. So once you joined the kibbutz all your assets were put into a pool. Now of course that's all gone. So there is no kibbutzium anymore. They completely self-destructed. But even when they existed so that's kind of a materialistic wealth perspective. But what about the social relationship? Isn't it wonderful to sit every night and have dinner together and hold hands and sing kumbaya? No, it turns out, it turns out that the social environment within the kibbutzium were horrible. People envied one another constantly because some worked hard and some didn't. Some actually were productive and some were not. Some were good with children and some were not good with children. And yet they couldn't special out. So the people who worked hard resented the fact that they had exactly the same stuff as the people who were lazy. I used to watch them sneaking in at 11 o'clock the people who didn't want to work. They sneaked in. There was no consequences to not working. You still had the same food, the same apartment, the same television, the same treatment of your kids. No consequences for bad behavior except social consequences. So the social consequences were people stab each other's the back. They gossip constantly. You know, sex was used as power in order to humiliate people. It was a disaster. It was one of the most horrible social environments I've ever seen. The same is true of the many communes, the hippies in the 60s tried and there are lots of other experiments for both agricultural and other types of communes that have been tried over many, many, many, many decades. This is not something new, right? Socialism has been around for a long time. To some extent even predating marks. So a lot of people have experimented with the variance of this and it's never worked. It just doesn't work. Why? Because it goes against human nature. It goes against the idea that if I make something, if I produce something, if I create something, I want it to be mine. And I don't want to share it with somebody who hasn't done the work, who doesn't deserve it. Dessert is a really, really important thing for human beings. And what you deserve is a consequence of materiality from a material perspective what you produce. If you don't produce stuff, you don't deserve it. If you produce it, you deserve it. And, you know, we can try to pretend we're good socialists, but when it actually comes down to it, nobody actually wants to give when he's actually created stuff to people who are not creating anything. Unless, you know, there's a small number of people who really can't help themselves and we give them charity and help them out. But as a mandate, it just doesn't work. So, I mean, there are just no examples of these systems working. Even, and this is the other thing about capitalism and socialism. What I find fascinating is if you try a little bit of capitalism, that is, if you take a country and you give a little region in the country property rights, and you don't even have the whole rule of law and everything that capitalism embeds, but just give them property rights and respect for contracts, that part of the country will work like that. If you take a capitalist country and you take a little segment of it and you socialize it and you create communal farms and you do these things, it goes like that. So, it's to the extent you practice capitalism, you succeed to the extent that you practice socialism, you fail. The more socialist an economy is, the slower its growth, the slower its creativity, there's almost no innovation. And the more capitalist an economy is, so there's a direct correlation between wealth, innovation, productivity, human individual flourishing, success and the level of economic freedom you provide people. You know, look at somewhere like like Hong Kong, anybody been to Hong Kong? Nobody's been to Hong Kong? Alright, everybody, once in your life, you should go to Hong Kong. It's a stunning place. It's a stunningly beautiful, amazing place. Hong Kong 75 years ago had about a few tens of thousands of people on it. It was a fishing village in the middle of nowhere on a rock, no natural resources, nothing. I mean a port you could argue but there are lots of places that could be a good port. And the British came there and all they did, all the British did was establish the rule of law, respect property rights and contract and establish real contract law. And other than that, left people alone. No safety net, no social guarantees, no redistribution of wealth. Today there's a bit of a safety net but originally there was nothing. And today, how many people live on this rock? Seven and a half million. More skyscrapers than New York City. Capital GDP, which is a measure of economic well-being, higher than the United States on a purchasing power parity. So they really, the standard of living is higher than the United States. When it took America 250 years to produce, they did it 70 years because they had freedom. Because they had a little bit of capitalism. Capitalism works. Wherever you try. And people are pretty happy there. It's all like, they're climbing now because the Chinese are pressing them. They're taking away property rights. They're taking away freedom of speech. They're taking away, and the students are demonstrating for more democracy. But it's not that they, it's not, the problem there is not economic. The economy is doing great. And they are flourishing. So again, I just don't know where the examples are. Yeah. I can't serve for life. I can see why you call people like Corbyn or the modern socialists. Socialists. Because they seem to be, the antithesis of what socialism is about which is a concern about human flourishing. So for example, Jeremy Corbyn needs economic growth. He doesn't like it. He thinks we can't grow our economies at 6, 7 percent a year like China or even 100 or unlimited economic growth. And if you look back to the original socialist like Marx, what they love about capitalism is that it grew. It produced hundreds greater than the pyramids. Yes. Marx was totally infused. Marx was much smarter than a socialist in the socialist era. Yes, precisely. So the socialists today hate all the best parts of capitalism, which is a mistake. But the thing is that capitalism itself, I mean you talk about using one's reason, which is a core enlightened mind, enlightened idea I grant you and that you learn from your experience. But the thing about capitalism is that it grows and then it falls. It goes into regular crises and that experience has shown that capitalism doesn't work. At present you could even say capitalism is in a rot, in a crisis. We're not growing enough. So the challenge we face today, I think as if you would say socialist, is to harness our reason and knowledge of history to come up with an alternative to capitalism which uses human flourishing consistently. And what I think you're doing is giving up on human reason because you are actually accepting a system which you know by experience goes into crisis and you're saying we should just accept it and not look beyond it. So that's my accusation. No, that's good. And it's a relatively original question. So that's good. One of the reasons I just go back to some of the comments you make and I'll try to take them all. The reason I call Corbin a socialist is because he calls it himself and people refer to him as a socialist. I'm not in the business of deciding who is a true socialist and who is not. And because he exemplifies certain socialist characteristics like the nationalization of industries, the idea of putting the state as a central planner over industry which is a typical socialist policy. Now I understand why you don't think he's a socialist and that's fine and I'm willing to accept elements of that. Let me just say, and I have to say this, I don't believe Marx for one second believed in human flourishing and strove towards human flourishing. I don't think that was his agenda. I don't think he believed it. I think generally Marx was a hater, not a lover and not somebody who really embraced human flourishing if you read his letters with angles where they'd scribe which people they can eliminate and which people they're good. I mean he had that, he was one of the most racist, he angles in particular, but Marx of course endorsed all this, one of the most racist, horrible human beings I can even imagine to associate human flourishing is bizarre but I'll give you this. Marx projected a system that it caused optimistic about the future and I think many of today's left are not about the future and they're not about economic growth, they're not about human flourishing, they are essentially nihilist and I think that is a characteristic of modern leftist ideology is nihilism, it's a post-Nichyan kind of a real nihilistic approach to life and you can't accuse Marx at least in that sense of being a nihilist, I think the results of his ideology are nihilistic, but he at least projected an idea of one day we all come together as the Poleterian and live happy, successful, wonderful, prosperous, rich lives and nobody today on the modern left actually projects that. I don't agree with you about capitalism, completely, I think the evidence is quite to the contrary of what you suggest. Capitalism does not fail, there is no evidence that capitalism has failed and I will take you crisis after crisis after crisis and show you that capitalism has not failed and today the sluggish economy of the world is driven by one major factor and that is statism. The lack of innovation, the lack of progress, the lack of economic growth today is a complete result of the growth of the state of the fact that the state today that spending is consumption, it is wasteful, instead of that money being invested, that money returning to the hands of a capitalist, they can invest it, they can invest it in production, in job growth, in innovation, in creation, in building, so it's the exact rejection of the last 100 years of capitalism that has brought about the Great Depression, that brought about the 2008 crisis, that has brought about the slow economic growth we're experiencing today and in China, China is a great example because I know a lot of people on the left or I don't know if you can tell yourself on the left but a lot of people who want an alternative to capitalism look at China and say, look they're growing at these astounding rates and they're run by the Communist Party well, you have to go look and you have to go to China and actually look at where the growth has happened the growth and the success of China happens where the Chinese government doesn't pay any attention when the Chinese government has said go do whatever you want we're not going to look over there we're not going to worry about you that's where the economic growth in other words in areas where there's a lot of individual freedom individual innovation in other words for capitalism to flourish those are the areas that have generated astronomical growth growth that's been held back by the state owned enterprises and by the central planning of the Chinese government every area where the Chinese government has centrally planned has been a disaster every area of central government if China has embraced has not worked and I don't know how much you know of kind of the transition from 79 under Deng Cha Peng to today of Chinese economy but it's absolutely fascinating there's a wonderful little book called How China Became Capitalist now I don't like the title because I don't think China is capitalist but it's certainly not socialist it's got elements of both like all countries but where it grows are those elements of capitalism but it's a book by Nobel Prize winner in economics by the name of Wana Kos and a Chinese author whose name I can't remember Wana Kos was 101 years old when he wrote the books it's pretty astounding for that fact but it's a short book it's wonderful it's not the best written book in the world but it's got fantastic information how that transformation happened and I just give you one story about China became so successful growing food in the 1960s communal farms generated mass starvation people died in the tens of millions during the 1960s that's just an astounding fact and Mao Zedong knew this and basically did nothing partially because he believed that this was a weaning out process of the week and so on but also partially because this was a system they believed in communal farms and this is what it generated anyway, throughout post-1960s farming in China, farmers in China struggled and starved there was real hunger in those communal farms all over China it's one little community in China I forget the name of the village but there's a little village in central China they got together one day and they said, look this is not working we're dying so let's do this you will pretend that that piece of land over there is yours and this piece of land is mine and whatever you produce on that is yours and you get to keep the surplus and I'll get to keep the surplus here and they basically divided all the land of village communally owned into private or pseudo private lots that individuals now cultivated, maintained and got the surplus fund and guess what happened within a year they were producing massive surpluses suddenly there was plenty not only to feed the village but they were exporting to other villages and the Central Communist Party went down there and they said what the hell is going on here what have you done this is great, this is miraculous we want to do this and the farmers tried to hide it but ultimately it came out with they done and the immediate response of the communists was well, kill these people this is ridiculous they were basically capitalism and to Deng Cha Peng's credit another Cha Peng was a really bad guy but he did some good things here and there to Deng Cha Peng's credit he basically said no this works he was a complete pragmatist he said this works so leave it alone not only that if it works in this village let's see if it works in another three villages and they tried the same system in other three villages and guess what when you give people private ownership they produce and they create and they create surpluses so they worked over there and they said ok we'll convert all of China's farming or most of China's farming to this model and that's what they did even though to this day they don't own a private property they have what I call pseudo private property they pretend that they own the land the government still hasn't given the full rights over the land so capitalism works and I'm happy to explain the 2008 crisis and I'm happy to explain the Great Depression but the fact is that when markets are left alone they flourish and succeed even today if you look at where innovation happens where does innovation happen today what industry, innovation of all the industries out there where do you see 8, 9, 10, 12% growth in an industry which industry technology yeah, technology this industry right this industry happens to be the least regulated the least controlled the least government influence of all industries so it grows and it's left alone and yeah, is there a bubble? sure there's a bubble but the bubble is self-correcting and immediately it goes afterwards right there's a bubble in 99 and partially funded by the Federal Reserve a non-capitalist organization a very statist entity but after 2001 it grows again and we don't get innovation well, things like airplanes we basically fly the same airplane today as we did 50 years ago same engines the same basic body you know they make them bigger a little bit they use fiber whatever carbon fiber and stuff like that to make them lighter but it's the same basic design as it was 50 years ago why? because it's so heavily regulated and the one innovation we used to have in airplanes was what? what was the one airplane that broke them all? the Concorde we grounded that that's gone nobody I mean there's one company now building a supersonic jet we'll see if they let it fly and the same with the automobile the internal combustion automobile and the same with every industry with a state regulator to call what we have today capitalism is bizarre given the mountains of regulation the mountains of state control the fact that for years at Microsoft a government official used to sit to sign off on any deal they make or that today when JP Morgan opens the door at 9am in the morning 200 government employees go to work at JP Morgan to make sure that they follow all the regulations and do all the rules and sign off on every one of the decisions so many of industries today have been nationalized without saying they'd be nationalized basically the banking sector in the world is run by governments it's not run by private entrepreneurs so no, we know what the system is that produces human flourishing we know what the system is that produces human wealth and that is capitalism and it doesn't need altering we don't need a new system we just need to embrace it fully and consistently which we've never really done you mentioned Chile is a good example of economic growth but they obviously during the period of economic growth had quite a repressive dictator called Pinochet in power truly part of it so to what extent do you think the economic freedoms which you described in Chile can work without political freedoms so it is a sad it's sad that it happened to be Pinochet who embraced this although of course Pinochet is one of the few dictators in history to actually hold an election about continuing or not continuing and turning everything over to the democratic thing he should have been tried for the crimes that he committed he killed thousands of people and he's an evil man and he wasn't like he believed in capitalism either he was floundering after he took over and the Chilean economy was plummeting and it was doing no good and there was a group of economists in Chile who were trained in Chicago by Milton Friedman they were called the Chicago Boys and he basically said you guys try I don't know what's going to work something has to work and they took over the economy and they basically privatized everything and so on and it led to success the success continued after Pinochet was gone so well after Pinochet really until about 5-6 years ago Chile was on this constant path of continuous privatization and improvement and economic growth so it didn't require Pinochet because once he was gone it continued one wonders whether anybody would have embraced these ideas if they weren't in a sense forced that's probably why they're going away now and why they voted socialist because it never will you have something people believed in so I think capitalism works when people believe in it you have to have people believe if you don't believe in capitalism you won't get it if you believe in a mixed economy you're going to get a mixed economy if you believe in socialism you'll get socialism we get the politicians we deserve we get the politics we deserve when we start voting real free market politicians into power and we have it in a very very long time then we'll get free markets when we do we get when we elect people who are marginally more free markets we get upswings in economy which is not bad but it doesn't last because we don't really believe in it so we elect the opposite the next election so what has to happen is a fundamental intellectual shift in among the voters among you for this to be sustainable if it's going to be sustainable and I believe that to do it you need this moral revolution you need a change in that approach and ethics approach the morality approach the epistemology and the sense of the efficacy of reason which is in decline the post-monitor today tell us probably here at this university then reality is what? well we don't know reality is unknowable and reason is impotent and all you have is your emotions and because all you have is your emotions you better cling to the closest group that looks a lot like you and all we have are identity politics that's what we've devolved into tribalism what we used to have way back then we used to keep going back so when we were poor and life sucked big time but we keep wanting it out somehow because tribalism is the word of the day both on the right and on the left the right and the left have both devolved into racism and tribalism scary stuff these days yeah you speak a lot about human flourishing and I think it's interesting that you use GDP as perhaps a measure of human flourishing or state prosperity I wonder why you stood on from more of like a socio-legal perspective Martha Nussbaum who looks or kind of argues that GDP emits actually capturing development of individuals I think she goes as far as to point out the failings of GDP yeah I'm not a big fan of GDP either it's just the best that we have it's a measure of wealth it's not a measure of flourishing it's a measure of wealth but I also added life expectancy that's it that's you know if you die 39 life's not that good if you could die at 99 which a lot of people are doing these days and I meet these 90 year olds and they're doing really well right their mind is still there and they're physically active it's pretty astounding right and if you add the fact that at least the beginning of this you know so unbelievable flourishing in the arts think about Beethoven you know I love the musical Beethoven I don't know if you guys like him or not maybe the agent rap Beethoven is not that popular but I think Beethoven is one of the great artists of all of human history Beethoven is the first musician of serious music to actually make a living from his music he actually held concerts and sold tickets it was capitalism right beautiful capitalism Mozart remember could only make money by doing what by sucking up to the church and to the aristocrats Beethoven didn't have to do that anymore he could count on a middle class a growing middle class sell tickets to his concerts and people sat and listened to beautiful music for a long time that was impossible by that so it's not irrelevant that we have money to our flourishing remember that when we didn't have money all we did we couldn't read we didn't know how to nobody had an education we couldn't read because there was no light and during the day when there was light we had to work and if you didn't work what happened to you you die there's no well-being there's no agency that came in and saved you you die so it's only this wealth that is made possible that is made possible other measures of human flourishing you know my kids I told my kids they're about your age and I told my kids follow your passion do what you love doing unfortunately they followed my advice you know one of them is a musician and luckily we live in a relatively wealthy culture in which musicians can make a living barely they scrape on but he's making a living the other one writes comedy in Hollywood they pay zero until you make it into television and they start paying a lot but zero right but he works on the side and he works here and there and luckily we live in a rich enough society in which somebody can perform comedy three times a week or whatever and still survive there were very few comedians back there a court gesture to a few musicians here and there I mean wealth makes possible the ability to pursue one's passion the ability to do things that in a poor culture you cannot do you know in North Korea they're not a lot of entertainers unless they're paid by the government even in I don't know in Laos or in Burma they're not a lot of people who do that because there's customers nobody has the money to pay them in order to do it so I believe that by any real measure of human flourishing and I don't think Nassbaum has a real measure of human flourishing I think she's flungy but by any real measure of human flourishing we are so much better off post capitalism during capitalism than we were before and any compatible to a socialist state one would have so by every measure that I can think of at least you know I'm willing to accept other measures and GDP is not a good measure and the primary reason GDP is not a good measure is because GDP counts government consumption as if it's production so the GDP goes up during war which is ridiculous because war is when you destroy stuff and you bomb stuff and you knock down buildings it's not exactly pro-economy it's not exactly wealth enhancing but GDP goes up why because the government is spending money on tanks and on bombs and on fighter airplanes and all that stuff they don't enhance human well-being but overall if you take the scope of history GDP is correlated with wealth it's not accurate but it's correlated yes you mentioned that during the same period your state has been growing more and more do you think that that might be why people view capitalism as such because the state is basically the main organic tool in our society and the state is basically in competition with capitalism yes so I think that's right I think a big part of why people are still so sympathetic to socialism is because the state controls education more important than anything else it controls education it controls how you think it controls the history you learn it controls the economics you learn and you learn the lousy economics economics 101 at every university I've ever been at with maybe the exception of two or three in the world it's just garbage you learn a perfect competition model that's all of that all of that is garbage it's just not economics it's just bullshit and it shouldn't be an economics textbook but that's what you study because that's what the powers want you to study it's not that that's because of conspiracy it's just that it reinforces one of our ten years a great reinforcing mechanism for people not to innovate or not to create new things because they challenged the existing order and the existing order is the one that grants you ten years thank you