 Thank you, thank you for inviting me, thank you for having me be here. I apologize to everybody for not being able to give the talk in Portuguese, but I only know like three words, so it wouldn't be a very interesting speech. The Brazil I make, I create is a great theme because at the end of the day, what is Brazil? What is any group, what is any country, what is any society? If not just a bunch of individuals, it's a bunch of youths, there is no group, there is no Brazil. It's just you and you and you and you happen to be in a particular geographic area that we define as Brazil, but at the end of the day the only unit in society that exists is the individual, it's the individual. Throughout history, we've been taught that that's not true, that the individual doesn't matter, though what matters is the group, though what matters is the collective, what matters is the state, what matters is the tribe, what matters is fill in the blank, but the individual is nothing. Throughout history, we've been taught that what matters is how you choose to sacrifice yourself for this group, for the tribe, for the leader, for the collective, for the state, for Brazil, and where has that led us? Throughout history, societies that place the group, the collective, the state, the tribe above the individual have stayed poor, have stayed oppressed, have stayed primitive. Collectives, when the collective is placed as the primary, the consequence is poverty and deprivation. Many people were poor, I mean I mean really poor, like two dollars a day or less, two dollars a day or less, imagine living on two dollars a day or less. How many people were that poor three hundred years ago? What percentage of the population was that poor three hundred years ago? Anybody, what? Everybody, almost everybody. There were a few kings and aristocrats up here, but 95% of humanity, 95% of humanity lived on two dollars a day or less three hundred years ago. How many people today in the West live on two dollars a day or less in Europe, Western Europe, in the US, maybe even Japan? How many live that poor? Zero, nobody. How many in all the world, in the entire world, how many people today live on two dollars a day or less globally in the entire world today? Anybody want to guess? Ten percent? That's pretty good. Less than ten percent, it's about eight percent, eight percent. So three hundred years ago, almost everybody was poor, really poor. Today, only eight percent. What happened? What happened to change that? Because if you look at history, this two dollars a day number has been pretty consistent throughout human history. If you start ten thousand years ago, way over here, and you plot income per capita, it's been about two dollars a day forever. It went up a little bit during Rome, and then went down during the Dark Ages, and then went up a little bit in certain parts, and they went down, but it's been a two dollars a day forever, and then suddenly it went way up there. What happened? What happened? It's the first time in human history, with the exception maybe of Greece, ancient Greece, for the first time in human history, people started to value the individual, not the group. John Locke, the great, God, I was gonna say English philosopher, but then the English would get upset. Scottish philosopher, I think, I think that's right, talks about individual rights, individual freedoms. He talks about the fact that your life is, who does your life belong to? Who does your life belong to? Anybody have any doubts? It belongs to you. That was a new idea, because before that, your life belonged to the king, to the tribe, to the council, to the state, to God, to anybody except you. And suddenly, for the first time in history, the understanding that, oh no, my life is mine. It belongs to me. I get to decide how to live my life. I get to decide what to do. I mean, think about life 300 years ago. Did you decide what profession you would go into? What job you would do? No. It was dictated by your family, by the guild, by the king, by the tribe, by the group, by the collective. You didn't get to decide. Did you get to decide who to marry? No. It was decided by your family, or by the king, or by whoever. You didn't get to make choices about your life, because your life didn't matter. And suddenly, this new idea came into the West, and this idea that the individual matters. The sanctity of the individual's life. That what really matters is the individual, and that groups, collectives, states, are just collections of individuals. But that the starting point is the individual. And that the only role of the state is to protect you. It's to make it possible for you to make the choices you want to make about your life. Free of what? What's the one thing that prevents you from making choices in your life? Coercion. Free of coercion. That's it. The vision of the founding fathers of the United States, of John Locke, of much of the Enlightenment thinkers was a state that did one thing and one thing only. Protected you. Protected your right to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. The pursuit of your happiness. Not the states, not somebody else's, your own happiness. Unfortunately, we've come a long way from that idea. Today, in Brazil, in the United States, in Europe, both on the left and on the right of our political spectrum, what we have are collectivists everywhere who tell you, you must sacrifice for the greater good. Any time I meet somebody who tells me I should sacrifice for the greater good, I run. Because guess who's gonna decide what the greater good is? He is, not me. And guess who's gonna be sacrificed first? You are. Because you're a successful businessman. Because you're successful in something in life. So you have something to sacrifice. So they're coming for you. Whether it's on the left or on the right, it doesn't matter. The left wants you to sacrifice for the proletarian and the poor and whoever. And the right wants you to sacrifice for Brazil and for fellow in the blank. In California, in America now, it's for American jobs, whatever that means. I thought there were just jobs. They didn't know there were American jobs and Brazilian jobs. Nationalism, collectivism in all its different forms is on the rise. And the question I think the important question is why. And I think it's because, well, in this period, in the 18th century, we discovered this idea that the individual matters, the individual is sacred, that what's important is the individual. It conflicted. It clashed with our moral teaching, our ethical teaching. Because what does our ethics teach us? Our ethics teaches us that we should live for whom? What makes a moral person? What makes a good person? Noble, just? Who do we build statues for? People who take care of others? People who sacrifice for others? People who lay down their life for the group? Because morally, we have been taught that the standard of morality is the well-being of other people. You're a good person if you sacrifice for other people. And we've been taught also that if you think about yourself, that if you think about your own happiness, if you think about your own success, if you place your interests first, then what do we call that? Selfish. And selfish is a bad word, we're told, right? Because what does it mean they teach us? What does it mean to take care of yourself? It means to lie and to cheat and to steal and to be really a nasty human being. So we're taught by our preachers and our philosophers and our teachers and our mothers. Don't be selfish. Don't think of yourself. Think of others first. Sacrifice. Now our mothers don't really mean it because they want you to be successful. But that's not what they teach you. That's not what they say. When we build statues, we build it to the sacrifices. We build it to the people who don't think of themselves. We even say, oh, that was wonderful. He was so selfless. He placed the interest of the group above his own interests and we say, yes, that's wonderful. So what politically, we might think, yeah, we're for the individual. Morally, we don't want people to be about themselves. We want people, primarily, to take care of other people. We want the standard of morality to be the other. One of Inran's great genius. And I don't know how many of you read Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead, but those of you have not, you should. And I'm jealous because you get to read those books for the first time. I wish I could have that experience all over again. One of the great things about Inran is she asked great questions. A big part of life is asking great questions, asking the right questions. And Inran asks a very simple question. Why? Why should I sacrifice my life to you? Why is the group more important than me? Why is anybody more important than me? Why should I love my neighbor like I love myself? I can tell you now, I don't. I like myself much more than my neighbor. And so does every one of you. But I don't feel guilty about it. Some of you might. If your kids are drowning and the neighbor's kids are drowning, whose kids do you say first? Your own. Good. You should be proud of that. It means you love what is yours more than what is theirs. And that's right because it's yours. So she asks, you have one life, one life right here on earth. One chance to live. Why should your focus be on other people? And what is their focus supposed to be on other people? And what is their focus supposed to be on other people? And it just goes round and round and round and circles. And new benefits. And do we really produce the most? Do we really create the best when we're focused on others? So she asked, why? Why shouldn't we be focused on our own life? Why shouldn't morality, ethics, be the science, the science that teaches us how to be a good individual? How to live the best life you can live for yourself? How to pursue happiness? We get it. In the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America, it says you have a right to pursue happiness. But how do you do it? How do you get happiness? It's hard. So morality, ethics, should be about how to do that. It should be about how to live the best life you can live on this earth. And that's new. The only other philosopher who really puts it that way is Aristotle, going back to the Greeks. He says, the purpose of ethics is to teach us how to achieve eudaumonia. And the Greeks hate it when I say that because I'm mispronouncing it. Flourishing happiness, the most of a human life. That's what morality should teach. Not sacrifice, not duty, not helping others. There's nothing wrong with helping others, but not making that your moral focus. I'll give you a quick example of how this plays in our minds. Because what's interesting is that the people who advocate for this morality of otherism, of taking care of others, don't care whether you actually take care of others. What they really care about is that you don't take care of yourself. What they don't want you to do is be self-interested. They don't care about other people. Other people don't matter to them. I'll give you a great example. And you can extrapolate this example a million times. Everybody know who Bill Gates is? I was in a music festival in Belo Horizonte, Brazilian music. And these two Brazilians came up to me and said, you look like Bill Gates. Are you Bill Gates? I said, sure, why not? I'm Bill Gates. So Bill Gates, he makes, builds Microsoft, right? He makes, he makes about 70 billion dollars for himself. How do you make 70 billion dollars? How do you make 70 billion dollars? This is good, good lesson for entrepreneurs. You want to be billionaires, take notes, right? How do you do it? How do you make 70 billion dollars? You create a product that almost everybody in the world wants. Why do they want it? Because it's going to make their life better in some way, right? And how much are they willing to pay for it? More than it costs you to produce. So you make a profit. Is their lives better because they bought the product? They spent $100 on Word or Excel or MS-DOS in the old days. For those of you who remember MS-DOS, that awful operating system. They paid $100. Is their life better or worse? Did they sacrifice? If I pay $1,000, not yet, but when I buy the new iPhone, I'll pay $1,000 for an iPhone. Why am I paying it? Why am I paying $1,000 for an iPhone? Because I think it's worth more than $1,000 to me. It's going to make my life better by more than $1,000. I'm willing to give up $1,000 because I'm going to be better off by doing it, because this is worth more than $1,000 to me. When people bought Microsoft products, they did it because they thought, and I think it's a reality, that their lives would be better by buying those products. Who loses when I buy an iPhone? I'm better off. You know how much this is worth to me? Anybody want to put a number on how much this is worth to me? Or how much your phone is worth to you? Really, think about what you do with it. Think about all the time you spend on it. Think about all the stuff you do with it. How much is it worth to you? I promise I won't tell Apple, I won't tell Samsung, they won't raise the price. But how much is it worth? I mean, this is what tens of thousands of dollars to me. My ability to face time with my kids when I'm halfway around the world, my ability to do business from anywhere all the time, whenever, my ability to communicate, you know, to have a question and to answer it and Google instantaneously, this is worth tens of thousands of dollars to me. And I only paid a few hundred. What a deal. My life is so much better for this. And when people buy Microsoft, their life is so much better for having Microsoft. So Bill Gates made seventy billion dollars by making the world a better place to live. By enhancing the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Actually, he changed the lives of billions of people. Billions of people are better off because Bill Gates did Microsoft. How much moral credit does he get for helping all those billions of people? Because he helped them. He made their lives better. Moral credit. I'm not talking about economic, you know, financial, we admire him as an entrepreneur, but we build these statues for the great noble, virtuous Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft. Until, until, because recently, now he's a good guy, right? Recently he's a good guy. What happened? How did Bill Gates become a good guy? He left Microsoft. God forbid you make money helping people. And now he gives it away. So making money, creating wealth, making the world a better place. That's giving your money away. That's good. Now, where do you think Bill Gates helped more people at Microsoft or in his foundation? It's not even close. Microsoft. Microsoft, he helped billions of people. In foundation, he'll help, you know, it's nice. It's good. Fine. He's going to help a few tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands in Africa, whatever, right? Is it going to change the world? No. He changed the world in Microsoft. But in Microsoft, we don't like him. We like him in the foundation because he's not making money. Because he's not thinking about himself. Notice, we don't care how many people they help. What we care about whether they help themselves or not. If you make a profit, it's bad. If you're giving it away, it's good. Why? I help more people by making a profit. I noticed, and not to be critical or anything, I noticed in the presentation about Vade, not a word about how much money they make. But how much money they make is the best indication of how much value they provide, all of us. Businessmen should be proud of how much money they make. Because it's a sign of the value you've created. It's a sign of how much you've contributed to the lives of the people who buy your product. But we're not allowed to do that anymore. We're not allowed in this world to talk about how much money we make. No. Why? Because that's self-interested. And we're not allowed to be self-interested. You're supposed to take care of others. So Bill Gates gets no moral credit because he made money changing the world. When he doesn't make money changing the world, he gets some moral credit. Now I like to say, how do we make Bill Gates a saint? A saint. I mean really virtuous. Really moral. Sculptures and boulevards and buildings named after him. What would he have to do? What would he have to do? He'd have to give it all away. Move into a tent because he lives in a nice house. And if he could bleed a little bit, show us that he's suffering. Because our morality is anchored in the idea of suffering. Have you ever gone to a museum and seen paintings of saints? Ever seen one smiling? But really, morality and happiness go together. We don't believe you can be moral and happy at the same time. We believe that morality equals suffering. Why? Morality should be the other, exactly the other thing. It should be about living. How to live well. How to be happy. How to be successful. That's what morality should be about. And this is why it's so hard politically to advocate for individualism because it goes against these philosophical, ethical, moral ideas. Because we're afraid to be proud. Pride is a sin. Why? If you achieve something, if you made it, if you built it, why not be proud of your own achievement? Say again, I ran questions all of this and she challenges us. She says, shouldn't you care about yourself? And if you do, if you only care about yourself, I like to say I don't care about anybody. I only care about me. Right? It's like I used to do this exercise for my students when I taught them about corporate finance. I used to be a finance professor a long time ago. I teach them about corporate finance. I used to teach them, remember, you know, how you're supposed to run your businesses from stakeholders? And then there's a theory that says, no, you're supposed to run the business for the owners, the shareholders. And I'd say, if you run it for the owners, you don't care about the stakeholders. Right? All I want to do is maximize shareholder wealth. So I chain my employees to the machines and whip them three times a day. Anybody goes, no, no. And I say, why? They say, oh, because they won't work hard and they won't produce well. Oh, so if I care about my shareholders, I should tune my employees good. Okay. What about my suppliers? I don't pay the bills to help with the suppliers. I don't care about them. That's stakeholders. I only care about shareholders. No, no, they say because then they won't give you the goods on time and they won't provide. Well, oh, so I need to care about them because I care about myself. Yeah. So even if I only care about myself, I care about other people. Why? Because I trade with them because of a value because they provide and they create things that benefit my life. But my standard is my life, not other people's lives. It's my happiness. Not other people's happiness. And if I really care about myself, if you really are an individualist, if you really want to build your life and ultimately together as individuals build Brazil or whatever the goal is, what is the tool to building your life? What is the tool to making your life the best life that it can be? What is the tool to living? What's the thing that we need to embrace as human beings in order to live a good life? What makes us human? What makes life possible even at the very basic level of survival? How do we survive? Where does food come from? And don't say the supermarket. Too many people tell me that, which is cool, I think, that food comes from the supermarket, but not the answer I'm looking for, right? Where does food come from? Anybody here have the gene for agriculture? The gene. What do you need to do to do agriculture? You have to have what? Knowledge. You have to think. You have to figure it out. You know, some genius, I don't know, 100, what was it, 10,000 years ago we started agriculture? So probably 20,000 years ago, some genius figured out that if you drop a seed in the ground and you water it, a plant grows. And he figured out that it's all related. And we probably burnt him because that's what we do to our geniuses. We usually kill them because they're causing us to think differently and we can't have that, right? And then it took a bull gates to come and say, wait a minute, if that's true, maybe it can till the land and sow these seeds and actually create an industry. Call it agriculture. Somebody had to create it. Some entrepreneur, some businessman had to go and make agriculture, what it is today. And you continue to innovate constantly, making it more and more and more productive and feeding more and more and more people all around the world. You, businessman, do that. And you do it by using your mind, using your reason. How do we hunt? Ever try running down an animal and biting into it? No, because we're not equipped. If you look around the room, we're a very pathetic animal. Just look at you. Pathetic. You're weak. You're slow. You don't have claws. You don't have fangs. We can't do it. So how do we survive? When you put us in the Sabre II Tiger in a battle, how do we, how do we win? Because the Sabre II Tiger, the last Sabre II Tiger I saw was in a museum and we're building skyscrapers and bridges. So how did we survive? And they go extinct because they're more powerful, they're faster, they're stronger. What is it that makes it possible for human beings to survive? We have a brain, not just any brain. We have a brain that can create, can think out of the box, can innovate, can produce, can create agriculture, can create tools and weapons and strategy and we go hunting and then we build skyscrapers, which takes a lot of thought and innovation and creativity, products of human reason. So for Iron Rand, if you're going to be self-interested, if you're going to be truly selfish, then the thing you value the most is your mind, is your reason. The thing you cultivate the most is your ability to think clearly, to use your mind effectively because it's by doing that you create, you produce, you make, you change the world around you. You make your life what it is. You don't go like some by emotion, the heart does not lead you in positive directions necessarily. Whenever you get into trouble, whenever things don't work out really badly, it's almost always because you didn't think it through. It's almost always because you did what your emotions drove you to do. Emotions are great. I'm a pretty passionate guy. We live through our emotions, but emotions are not tools of cognition, they're not ways from making decisions about the world. Our reason is, our mind is. And we're not just automotons, it's popular today in modern philosophy or whatever the hell they call it, to say you have no free will, you're just a machine. Well, okay, if we're just a machine, I can leave now because I can't convince you of anything anyway. Everything's predetermined already. There's no choices, there's no values, there's no morality, there's nothing. No, we all have. We all know we have choices. We all know we make choices. The question is, how do you make them? And the way to make them, if you care about your life, is by using your mind. It's by thinking it through. It's by solving the puzzle, the problem with your brain, with your rational faculty, but at looking at facts, not accepting things just because somebody said so, but demanding proof, seeking evidence, dealing with facts and with reality as it is, not the way you want it to be, not the way you wish it was, not the way people tell you it is, but the way you see it, the way it is, finding the truth. So if you're really interested in your own happiness, the most important thing you could be is a truth seeker by using your mind, by using your reason. And if you think about it, if you think, I mean, I know that comes up with seven virtues. We don't have time to go all over all the virtues, but the first is reason, is rationality, is think, think, think, think. But what is thinking apply, right? So let's take a simple one. Should you be honest, right? People say, if you're selfish, you're going to lie, right? Because lying's, yeah, you can get your way with lying. Why wouldn't you lie? Why is lying bad? Anybody lied before? I don't want to know. Why is lying, is lying a good strategy for success in life? Actually, there's only one profession, only one profession in the whole world that I know of, where lying actually leads to success. No, don't be so nasty towards lawyers. No, there's only one profession in which lying is a requirement for success. Politics. And that's because the politics that we live in suck. Because if we had decent politics, we wouldn't tolerate the lies. We would kick them out of office for lying. We wouldn't impeach them, I don't know, for having sex in the, in the, in the Oval Office, like with Clinton, we'd impeach them for lying nonstop all the time, every single day. That's what we would kick them out of the office for. But what is lying? Lying is accepting falsehood. Lying is accepting non-fact. This thing we have here, this brain, this reasoning machine depends on facts, depends on truth. There's a saying in computer science, garbage in, garbage out. Same with your mind. You put in falsehood. You put in lies. What comes out the other side? Garbage. You're polluting the most valuable thing in the world. Your own brain, your own mind, your own rational ability by lying, by deceiving, by faking reality, accepting non-truth. I mean, I, I'm at an age, there are a few of you here who will identify with me. I can barely remember what I did last week. I can't remember where I was, which continent, never mind what city, right? Where I was last week. It's hard to remember what you did last week. Now imagine I lied about what I did last week. Now I have to remember two things. The truth and the lie. But it's actually not two things. Because I have to remember who I told the truth to and who I told the lie to. And why I told them the truth and why I told them the lie. Way too complicated. It's a disaster. And one lie leads to another lie. It's just a terrible strategy for living. And the same is true of cheating and stealing. Where do we get our confidence and our self-esteem in life? It's from producing. It's from creating values. If we steal the values, what is, what are we telling ourselves? You're telling yourself, I'm no good. I can't produce. I can't take care of myself. The only way I can take care of myself is stealing, is taking, using force, using muscle, the anti-mind to take what somebody else produced. It still needs to be produced. It still needs to be produced by the human mind. So if somebody's really selfish, somebody really takes cares about themselves, is really self-interested. You don't lie. You don't steal. You don't cheat. It's bad for you. All those things are bad for you. You think. You produce. You have a purpose in life. You have a career. You engage in that career passionately. You do what you love to do. You build. You get self-esteem from the fact that you're achieving things. Self-esteem comes from setting goals and attaining them. Reaching out for, for ambitious values and getting those values. That's where you get your happiness and your self-esteem and your confidence and your passion for living from. That requires you to be a rational, honest, focused on reality individual. And we can go on and on in terms of what rational self-interest means. As I said before, it means using your mind to navigate reality. Dealing with other people like Apple deals with me. Win-win relationships. Every relationship you want in your life should be a win-win relationship. Because what happens to a win-lose relationship? What happens if one party loses when you win? Let's say your wife or your husband. Does it stay win-lose? It quickly turns into lose-lose. In business. If you're doing business with somebody and they get the sense that this wasn't a good deal for like Donald Trump, right? Out of the deal. His whole perspective without a deal is screw the other guy. So if you screw the other guy, what happens? They don't do business with you again. Other people find out that you do deals like this and they won't do business with you. Win-win relationships are what are lasting relationships. And if you add the win-win relationships of business and entrepreneurs and free individuals, what you get is wealth, success, prosperity. What you get is the modern world. What happened 300 years ago was we liberated individuals to create, to produce, to make, and to trade with one another, to engage with one another, not through force and through coercion, but voluntarily through win-win transactions. And that's how we got rich. That's how the Western world got rich. And at the end of the day, the people who really made the Western world rich and made any country rich are people like you. People like you in this room. The entrepreneurs and the business people who take scientific knowledge and turn it into products, creations that enhance everybody's lives. Without entrepreneurs, without businessmen, none of the things we have around us would exist. Without the profit motive, without that win-win trading, none of the wealth we have around us would exist. They want you to feel ashamed about your profit. They want you to feel ashamed about your success. If you read Atlas Shrug for one reason, then read it because Atlas Shrug will make you proud of your success. Atlas Shrug will make you appreciate how you are the true heroes of the world. That the statues we build should be for you because you change the world more than any politician or general Mother Teresa. You are the true builders and creators and movers and shakers that build the modern world. So my message, go read Atlas Shrug, live the best life that you can for yourself, use your mind to do it, engage in trade relationship, win-win relationship with everybody around you, and be proud. Be proud of your own achievements and hopefully that will lead to a happy successful life. Thank you. So, I mean, I think the whole fake news thing in some respects is being, you know, is blown out of proportion in this sense. There's always been fake news, always. The authorities, the people in power have always had an interest in telling us lies about the world. We heard five lies, four lies, you know, just now. There are thousands of them that our professors and universities tell us. For the first time in human history, I'd say over the last 15 years, every person has an opportunity to fact check. You can go online and find alternatives. You can go online and research. You have access to all the knowledge, pretty much ever created in all of human history, right there for free online. So this is, in spite of our focus on fake news, this is the era of availability of knowledge to the masses, to everybody. And we, those of us who believe that, you know, we're advocating for the truth, our job is to put it out there, to make it accessible, to make it available, whether it's YouTube, whether it's Facebook, whether it's Twitter, we have to go out there and present this information, present the facts, present the truth. And I think it's, you know, I'll give you just an example of Ein Rand's ideas. Ein Rand, 20 years ago, was in America. That was it. Nobody else in the world knew who she was. She was non-existent. Today, she's more popular outside the United States than inside the United States. All because of the internet. People have discovered her because of all these channels that are available. That's true, I think, of Mises. Who knew in Brazil about Mises? Now it's what, more Mises, less Marx, what Maismir, I can't remember which is which. Anyway, you know, it's a big, so the internet is a friend. It's an amazing tool. And we need to leverage it in any way possible. I will add this caveat. To really know something. To really understand something you have to read. And you have to read real books. I mean, it could be digital, but real books. You have to read Mises. You have to read Rand. You're not going to learn what Rand had to teach or what Mises had to teach in a short video. So, while we have these great marketing tools on the internet, it's still going to require this next generation to actually read a book. I mean, I think it should be easy. If you take the three reasons why people are poor, right, they don't have the skills. They just can't do it. They can't produce. There are very few people who really can't produce in the world we have today. They are lazy. Yeah, there's a certain percentage of people who are lazy, but you're not talking to them anyway because if they're lazy, they're lazy and nothing you say will convince them. So, the real challenge is to convince them that the real reason they're poor is they're being held back purposefully. The government is preventing them from acting out productively to create wealth for themselves. It is, look, it should be easy to show that minimum wage laws keep people poor, that the welfare state keeps people poor, that licensing laws keep people poor, that the state has a vast interest in keeping people poor because that's how we get votes. If everybody was rich, nobody would vote for Lula, right? So, he has an interest in keeping people poor, and that's true of politicians throughout the world. So, it is the state through its various policies pretending to help them that keeps them down and you have to also address their self-interest. Do they want to be happy? Well, one way in which you achieve happiness is through work. You cannot be happy unless you produce something at whatever level you can. Even if you're poor, if you're putting food on your family's table, you feel proud, you get self-esteem, you feel bad about yourself. What the state does is it says, don't worry, don't work, at least in America. Here's a check. Here's a welfare payment. What are you doing to those people? You're destroying their lives. You're literally destroying their lives. Forget about taking money in the redistribution aspect. That's bad economics and it's bad ethics. But you are destroying the people who are getting the money's lives. You need to explain to the poor that it's not in their self-interest to get wealthy. It's not in their self-interest not to have a job. It's not in their self-interest to have all these regulations and constraints on capital and on business because the jobs of the future, the wealth of the future, comes from those business and those entrepreneurs in that capital. And so I find it amazing that there's a debate about Social Security. You've got a neighbor, not that far from here. You can drive there called Chile where they privatize their entire Social Security system and it works and it works great. Now even the Chileans now want to nationalize it again. I mean they're insane but we've got a system that works. Copy it. Right. I believe Social Security, you know so this is a state-run program where you supposedly save money. You put money in they take it out and they pay other people and they promise you one day when you retire you'll get money. So it's a state pension plan. I think it's immoral. I think it's wrong. I think it's economically stupid but it's immoral because again it's a redistribution of wealth. It's not that your money is put aside and invested. Right now they take your money and they give it to people who are old now. So what you're asking is to sacrifice the children and the grandchildren for the sake of the grandparents. Now my view of grandparents is they've lived a long time. They had lots of opportunities to save money. They should have saved their money and live off of that and if they want my help they should come and ask me for it. But they shouldn't take use the state to take my money by force in order to provide for them. What you create is a destruction of the incentive to save. Americans don't save money. So I think Social Security the government will take care of me and they forget that Social Security is very small and they're going to be poor if they rely on Social Security. If it even exists because there's a good chance that by the time my children retire that the US government will be bankrupt and won't be able to pay them their Social Security because my money would have been spent. Right. The money they paid in would have been spent. So Social Security is immoral both because it's a method it's a redistribution of wealth and because it disincentivizes people from saving and taking care of themselves. One of the things I think the most one of the most destructive things that government does is it creates a mentality of entitlement and laziness. Right. So you don't save. You don't think about the future. You don't worry about some things. I'll give you another example a completely different area. Financial regulation. We're told everybody should invest in stocks and don't worry because the government will protect you. How does that work? Stocks are really complicated. Not everybody should invest in stocks. You need knowledge to invest in stocks. But we've got the SEC and we've got this and we've got that regulatory agency and the government is protecting you. But that just creates ignorance and stupidity and laziness among people. They invest without thinking. They give money to Bernie Madoff without Bernie Madoff was a guy who made that big pyramid scheme in America. He lost 60 billion dollars for people and people, small people gave your money thinking oh the SEC is watching him. No. You've got to watch him. It's your money. You've got to be responsible for education. The state will educate my kids. I don't have to worry. Right. Yeah. You have to worry. You have to worry a lot because the state's doing it. Right. Instead of if you had private education, you would take responsibility for the education of your children seriously and you would think what school and schools would compete and they would try to convince you to bring their child to their school and you would do research. You know parents spend more time choosing what shoes to buy than what school to send their kids to. I think our priorities are a little upside down. We should be spending a lot of time on figuring out what schools to send our kids to. Who cares about shoes.