 Well good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the final session of the Mises University for 2013. I want to first of all congratulate you and salute you for your excellent judgment in being here. If you don't already know, this is one of the best programs available for students anywhere in the world for any kind of learning, but certainly for learning Austrian economics, this program has no peer. And so you have you have attained a gold standard of sort, even if it's not one for the medium of exchange. So that's next year, we hope. But at all events I applaud you for being here. I have no doubt that you've learned a great deal because you've been able to listen to and talk to some of the world's best Austrian economic economists. And not to mention David Gordon, a polymath supremo. So you know something, I know something, David knows everything. And I'm not joking. So just the chance to come and sit at David's feet would be worth the trip without a doubt. But at all events here we are at the end of it. You're marvelously alert I must say. Back in the days when Murray Rothbard was the was the heart and soul of this annual meeting, students would stay up till three or four o'clock at night talking to Murray, which was just his regular schedule. And then the next morning at nine o'clock they'd have to somehow be in the next class. And it made it very difficult. Even young people after six or seven days of that were getting pretty weary. But it was worth it. And even now we miss Murray, terrifically. He was as I say the heart and soul of this enterprise and of Austrian economics in the United States. And he's left a tremendous legacy for us so we can occupy ourselves very fully for a long time just reading Murray's writings. And I myself am still making my way through them and getting good payoffs from doing it. And I trust you will too. My talk this time is as you can see called the state is too dangerous to tolerate. And this is a meeting in a group where we don't have a lot of lotatory things to say about the state. So perhaps by this time you'll consider what I have to say to be overkill. But I select that word judiciously because what I want to suggest to you is that the state is not only a nuisance, not only something that makes economic life less productive and inefficient than it should be and ought to be and would be but for the state's interventions. But I want to suggest to you that the state poses a mortal danger to all humanity. And that this is the best reason of all for being an anti-status for fighting against statism in every way you know how. And if I seem to be making some value judgments as I go along here I'm not going to apologize for them because they're they're not much more adventuresome than the the value judgment that I prefer life to death. And I would like to see other people live rather than be destroyed by the state. I'm going to draw on a paper that was published in the Journal of Libertarian Studies a few years ago called if men were angels. And some of what I'll say today you'll find there but you'll find quite a bit more development of some of these ideas there than I have time to present to you this afternoon. So if you if you're interested in anything I have to say here I recommend that you that you find this article it's available online like virtually everything that the Mises Institute has anything to do with so it's there for your for your perusal. I'm going to be dealing with the state more or less in the way that that Franz Oppenheimer taught us a century ago or so to think about the state. Oppenheimer distinguished the the economic means of getting goods and services that satisfy human needs and desires from the political means of getting wealth and that corresponds pretty much to the distinction between free choice and state force or as as it were the distinction between markets and states. So let me begin my talk by saying something about the state and social disorder and liberty. By the state I mean as Max Weber meant a territorial monopoly of law and order of legitimate force and violence that collects involuntary tribute from the inhabitants of a bounded area and makes rules that it enforces on the people in that area. Hardly anything is more common than the assumption that without a state a society will fall necessarily and immediately into violent disorder. Indeed anarchy a word we have from the Greek meaning without a ruler anarchy and chaos are often used as synonyms. The Random House Dictionary gives the following four definitions of anarchy and perhaps some of you have looked up anarchy in the dictionary before and found these. Some of them are fairly straightforward like the first one although that can be misleading as well but I'm particularly interested in the third one which describes anarchy as a theory that regards the absence of all direct in course of government as a political ideal and that proposes the cooperative and voluntary association of individuals and groups as the principal mode of organized society and to the extent that any one of us in the room here espouses anarchy it's in this sense that we espouse it. Suppose however that the situation described by the third definition we're not merely a theory or an ideal but a genuine possibility perhaps even a historically instantiated condition. Of course John Locke James Madison Mancer Olson and nearly everybody else have concluded from their theoretical deliberations that the stateless option cannot exist at least not for long because its deficiencies make it so manifestly inferior to life in a society under a state. In Federalist 51 Madison wrote these words very famous words and they're part of a little longer discussion that I deal with in the article I referred to but if anybody remembers anything from the Federalist papers at all there's a high likelihood that it that it may be this passage. If men were angels no government would be necessary and if angels were to govern men neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary and then Madison goes on to talk about how framing a government requires that we have a government to administer over men but we must somehow provide a means of controlling that government and this is the way in which political philosophers and political scientists have almost always thought about the issue for centuries. I set up a little table to to help me and others think about what's going on here and it looks like this if if men are angels and we can pass pretty briefly over that alternative it's okay with no state it's okay with a state it doesn't matter because even if there's a state the people who compose it and operated are angels and so they're certainly not going to do anything untoward. But in the realistic option on the second line men are not angels but for Madison and for almost all others the idea that we would have no state is simply inconceivable. They were the heirs of the kind of reasoning advanced by Thomas Hobbes and John Locke and and for these people and many others individuals would find it very desirable to form what we now call the state in order to effectively protect their natural rights and they would recognize that absent the state they would be incapable of protecting their natural rights and so they would probably be subject to all the horrors that Hobbes described as the state of nature and therefore the best conceivable situation in a world where men are not angels is that we have a state and allow it to rule over us in the way I described earlier. The alleged absence of significant historical examples of large stateless societies during the past several thousand years buttresses these theory laden conclusions just as the poor we have always with us so except among primitive peoples society and state are taken to have always coexisted. Now one need not spend much time however to find theoretical arguments some of them worked out in great detail and at considerable length for example in Rothbard's work and in David Friedman's work arguments about why and how a stateless society could work successfully. Moreover researchers have reduced historical examples of large stateless societies ranging from the ancient Harappan civilization of the Indus Valley from as far back as 3,300 BC running up for the next 2,000 years to about 1,300 BC a society that flourished for almost two millennia and flourished to a high degree for much of that period. Examples ranging from Harappa to Somalia during the past two decades and given the enormous literature that has accumulated on stateless societies in theory and in actual operation we may conclude that if nothing else such societies are conceivable and for a large compendium of literature on the entire subject I recommend the book published edited by Ed Stringham in 2007. From this literature I've been led to think in terms of what I call a more realistic model than Madison's. This one again many angels the state is irrelevant one way or the other but if men are not angels and there's no state we will have a bad situation. We would be fools to argue that if we simply got rid of the state we would produce heaven on earth. That's not the nature of the human raw material. Some of us are no damn good and that seems to be a condition that tries we may we can't change. So it's always going to be the case that in society or some individuals that are inclined to criminal actions and aggression against their fellows and that has to be dealt with somehow. So if we have no state to deal with it we will definitely have a bad situation. However I maintain that if we do have a state purportedly to deal with it we will have a worse situation. Although I admit that the outcome in a stateless society will be bad because not only are people not angels but many of them are irredeemably vicious in the extreme. I conjecture that the outcome in a society under a state will be worse indeed much worse because first the most vicious people in society will tend to gain control of the state and second by virtue of this control over the state's powerful engines of death and destruction they will wreak vastly more harm than they ever could have caused outside the state. It is unfortunate that some individuals commit crimes but it is stunningly worse when such criminally inclined individuals wield state powers. Lest anyone protest that the state's true function or duty or end is as Locke, Madison and countless others have argued to protect individual rights to life, liberty and property. The evidence of history clearly shows that as a rule real states do not behave according to that ideal. The notion that states actually function along such lines or that they strive to carry out such a duty or to achieve such an end resides in the realm of wishful thinking. Although some states in their own self-interest may at some times protect some residents of their territories other than the state's own functionaries, such protection is at best highly unreliable and all too often nothing but a solemn farce. Moreover it is invariably mixed with crimes against the very people the state purports to protect because the state cannot even exist without committing the crimes of extortion and robbery which states call taxation and as a rule of course this crime is but the nearest beginning of the state's assaults on the lives, liberties and property of the resident population. In the United States for example the state at one time or another during recent decades during recent decades we're not talking ancient history has confined millions of persons in dreadful steel cages because they had the temerity to engage in the wholly voluntary buying and selling or the mere possession of officially disapproved products. Compounding such state crimes that is crimes of kidnapping and unjust confinement with impudence, state officials brazenly claim credit for their assaults on the victims of their so-called war on drugs. State functionaries have yet to explain how their rampant unprovoked crimes comport with the arch type described and justified in Locke's second treatise of government. In vain do many of us yearn for relief from the state's duplicitous cruelty. Where is the state of nature when we really need it? Now I want to go on and talk about the precautionary principle and what I think so is a new application of it at least to my knowledge it's a new application. In pondering the suitability of my more realistic model we might we might well apply the precautionary principle which has been much discussed and nearly always misapplied in recent years in relation to environmental policy. This principle holds that if an action or policy might cause great irreparable harm then notwithstanding a lack of scientific consensus those who support the action or policy should shoulder the burden of proof before the action is taken or the policy implemented. In applying this principle to the state's establishment and operation the state's supporters would appear to stagger under a burden of proof that they cannot support with either logic or evidence. Everyone can see the immense harm the state causes day in and day out not to mention its periodic orgies of mass death and destruction. In the past century alone states caused hundreds of millions of deaths not to the combatants on both sides of the many wars they launched whose casualties loom very large but to quote unquote their own populations whom they have chosen to shoot, bomb, shell, hack, stab, beat, gas, starve, work to death and otherwise obliterate in ways too grotesque to contemplate calmly. J.R. Rummel who spent a lifetime compiling data on this so-called democide nonwar state killing now has a total of 262 democide victims in the 20th century, 262 million and if you go to his website for J.R. Rummel democide you can find a great deal of data on this matter all sufficiently horrifying data I might add and I believe even Rummel's numbers are understatements of the amount of true democide because many state actions such as the food and drug administration's actions that have caused hundreds of thousands of premature deaths are not included in Rummel's compilations only people that were violently killed outright but the state has enough imagination to find many indirect ways of killing people as well yet almost incomprehensibly people fear that without the state's supposedly indispensable protection society will lapse into disorder and people will suffer grave harm even an analyst as astute as Mansur Olsen who speaks frankly of quote governments and all the good and bad things they do in quote proceeds immediately to contrast quote the horrible anarchies that emerge in their absence although he gives no examples or even citations to support his characterization of anarchy but the state's harms in Olsen's words the bad things they do are here and now undeniable immense and horrifying whereas the harms alleged to be suffered without the state are specters of the mind and almost entirely conjectural anarchists did not try to carry out genocide against the Armenians in Turkey they did not deliberately starve to death millions of Ukrainians they did not create a system of death camps to kill millions of Jews Gypsies and Slavs in Europe they did not fire bombs scores of large German and Japanese cities and drop nuclear bombs on two of them they did not carry out a great leap forward that killed scores of millions of Chinese people they did not kill more than 500,000 members of the Indonesian Communist Party alleged party sympathizers and others they did not attempt to kill everybody with any appreciable education in Cambodia murdering one fourth of the country's population they did not kill as many as 200,000 Mayan peasants and others in Guatemala they did not kill more than 500,000 Tutsis and pro-peace Hutus in Rwanda they did not implement U.S. and allied trade sanctions that killed perhaps 500,000 Iraqi children they did not launch one aggressive U.S. war after another there's a great deal anarchists did not do but status did do states are clumsy and inept in many ways thank God but they are exceptionally good at wreaking death and destruction indeed if they were not they could not sustain themselves as states in a functional sense we may define the state as the organization with comparative advantage in deliberately violently killing people and in appropriating and destroying well what you see here human bodies piled on a rail car in Dresden this is only one of many such piles made after the British and American air forces decided in February of 1945 to fire bomb this old and beautiful city when the war was clearly already won these are some of the products of the German government at its death camp at Bergen-Belsen as depicted in 1945 after the allied troops had overrun the area there were so many such pits in Eastern Europe that you cannot even begin to imagine here are some of the lucky ones after the state had had its way with them at Auschwitz and that's the scene of what was left of the city of Hiroshima after the US government took pleasure in dropping an atomic bomb on this place that had little or no military value at a time when the war was absolutely conclusively won and here's a more recent scene in the Iraqi city of Fallujah unfortunately I could not find any of the photographs that depict in a visually compact way the full horror of what the US Armed Forces did in that city particularly by their use of white force phosphorus and other munitions that have horrifying effects on human beings and if you read about Fallujah you'll find that ever since these attacks babies have been born with horrifying deformities in that city and will probably continue to be born for many years to come the debate between status and anti-status is in my judgment not evenly matched defending the continued existence of the state despite having absolute certainty of a corresponding continuation of its intrinsic engagement and extortion robbery willful destruction of wealth assault kidnapping murder and countless other crimes requires that one imagine non-state chaos disorder and death on a scale that non-state actors seem completely incapable of causing that's what I just said I'd like to take a moment and let you read it nor to my knowledge do important historical examples attest to such large-scale non-state mayhem in general with regard to large-scale death and destruction no person group or private organization can even begin to compare to the state which is easily the greatest instrument of destruction known to man almost all non-state threats to life liberty and property appear to be relatively petty and therefore can be dealt with in general only states can pose truly massive threats and sooner or later the horrors with which they menace mankind inevitably come to pass the lesson of the precautionary principle is plain because people are vile and corruptible the state which holds by far the greatest potential for harm and tends to be captured by the worst of the worst is much too risky for anyone to justify its continued existence to tolerate it is not simply to play with fire but to chance the total destruction of the human race I want to say a few words now about some dynamic considerations that enter into this subject classic discussions of the state versus non-state societal outcomes usually involves static comparisons they ignore the changes that occur systematically with the passage of time for example a Hobbesian or Lockean account stipulates that in a state of nature which has no governing state a great deal of disorder prevails and adoption of a state brings about a more orderly condition analysts recognize that the people sacrifice some of their liberties when they adopt a state Hobbes goes so far as to suppose that the people sacrifice all their liberties to an omnipotent sovereign in exchange for his promise to protect their lives a ruler always assures his victims that their loss of liberties is the price they must pay for additional security order he purports to establish well might we question whether the ruler has either the intention or the capability to reduce the degree of social disorder plenty of evidence a test that state-ridden societies boil with disorder in the United States for example a country brimming with official protectors of every imaginable stripe the populace suffered in the year 2011 according to figures the government itself endorses which are certainly understatements almost 15,000 murders and non-negligent manslaughter's more than 83,000 forcible rapes 354,000 robberies 751,000 aggravated assaults and more than 9 million property crimes such as burglaries larcenies and thefts the governments of the United States have taken the people's liberties if you don't think so you need to spend more time reading us statutes at large in the code of federal regulations not to mention your state and local laws and ordinances so they've taken the liberties but where's the protective quid pro quo they broke the eggs of our liberties without a doubt but where's the bloody omelette of personal protection and social order where suppose we concluded if only for purposes of discussion that the initial establishment of the state reduces the degree of social disorder the obvious question however seldom asked by philosophers then becomes what happens next does the degree of social disorder remain constant everything we've discovered in theory and by observation flies in the face of such constancy in fact the likely progression over time is that under state domination social disorder tends to increase this tendency exists because the state attempts in countless ways to compel people to act against their perceived self-interest and people respond by resorting to all sorts of evasions black markets and officially defined crimes consider for example what happened when the state ordered people not to make sale possess or consume alcoholic beverages or certain narcotics namely black markets and crime galore including countless assaults and murders of course the state's orders to pay stipulated taxes or fees have given rise to a plethora of evasive measures some of them carrying violence against persons or the destruction of property in their train perhaps equally important the state's concentration of its police forces on tax collect collection enforcement of victimless crimes and other measures at odds with the people's perceived self-interest diverts those forces from making any more than a token attempt to protect people against such everyday crimes as murder rape robbery and fraud whose prevention the people actually value over time the social misallocation of the state's protective services grows as the state itself shifts more and more resources toward the enforcement of laws adverse to the people's genuine interests and as the people make moving targets of themselves in ways that augment the degree of social disorder if the degree of social disorder in a society under the state tends to increase then even if the initial establishment of the state did reduce disorder a time will come when the degree of social disorder will exceed that of a society with no state if so then momentarily taking for granted the myth of a social contract the initial bargain the people struck will eventually come to be seen as a pact with the devil a bargain that at best held advantages in the short term but proved to be a disappointing deal all around in the longer term more over whereas under a state social disorder 10 systematically to increase without the state social disorder 10 systematically to decrease this latter tendency reflects the progressive and mutually advantageous solution of social problems characteristic of a free spontaneous order we have had three centuries of instruction in the work into the spontaneous order of a free society stretching from Bernard de Mandeville Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith in the 18th century to Carl Minger in the 19th century to F.A. Hayek and Murray Rothbard in the 20th century to their numerous followers in the 21st century unlike the forest exchanges and coerced arrangements enforced by the state the protective and productive innovations of a spontaneous or order a non-state order can achieve acceptance only voluntarily which is to say only when all who participate in them expect them to produce net benefits consider for example a simple example of the householder who keeps a watchful eye on his neighbor's property when the owner is away just as the neighbor will watch his property when he is away and contrast the simple effective cooperative form of protection with the faux protection of the state's police officer who occupies himself at great public expense driving about aimlessly harassing citizens pointlessly and loitering in the donut shop the only shops kept open in a large sector of Boston when it was clamped down into virtual martial law recently you see the connection neighborliness spreads naturally and beneficially whereas state protection quote protection spreads cancerously and harmfully the one preserves liberties the other destroys them my foregoing argument expresses among other things what Thomas Jefferson stated more eloquently when he wrote the natural progress of things that is the natural progress in a society under a state is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground those are the dynamics we have to face here thus even though the mythical people entering into a social contract might have considered their sacrifice of liberties to the state at that time a price they were willing to pay they could scarcely have suspected that with the passage of time their remaining liberties would be paid one after another not withstanding the social order they initially received from the state in return would systematically diminish if a population acts to serve its common interests it will never choose the state in reaching this conclusion we need not deny the countless problems that will plague people living in a society without the state any anarchical society being people in normal proportions by vile and corruptible individuals will have crimes and miseries a plenty but everything that makes life without a state undesirable makes life with a state even more undesirable the idea that the antisocial tendencies that afflict people in every society can be cured or even ameliorated by giving a few persons great discretionary power over all the others is upon serious reflection seen to be a wildly mistaken notion perhaps it is needless to add that the structural checks and balances on which Madison relied to restrain the government's abuses have proven to be increasingly unavailing and bearing in mind the expansive claims and actions under the present u.s. regime these checks and balances are now almost wholly superseded by a form of executive caesarism in which the branches of government that were supposed to check and balance each other have instead coalesced into a mutually supportive design to plunder the people and reduce them to absolute domination by the state today however I have tried only to show how we may think more clearly about the choice between a society under the state and a society composed of genuinely self-governing individuals assuming that we really had such a choice the better option seems to me fairly obvious if you take anything away from my arguments and my evidence however I hope that it will be an appreciation of how highly warranted is an application of the precautionary principle in choosing between anarchy and the state fire has proven to be a magnificent aid to human beings but a fire that cannot be contained portends our utter destruction and the state is precisely such a fire thank you very much I've actually done the impossible I finished early and I'm very proud of myself it's a first but because I finished early I am prepared to accept questions if you would like to ask questions right I'm part of a concern that I have and philosophically I'm at the point where I can say if you disagree with Murray Rothbard you are probably wrong what where I'm at right now is that in the event something bad goes wrong historically people tend to either but these vicious people which you do correctly point out they do exist they either want to grant themselves power or give power to others and I'm at the point where I don't see a way out of at some point or another at a totalitarian state and how do we get through this within the anarchic society because basically just convert me and I'm terrified right now in case you didn't hear the question it's how do we get from here to there and I don't have an answer to that I I have an answer only in the sense that I think there are things that can be done that move us in that direction whether they will prove sufficient to get us where we need to be I don't know but I have no doubt whatsoever of the direction in which we need to move we are in this country in my view closer to complete totalitarianism than we have ever been before even during World War one during the madness of the sedition act and the vigilantism and countless crimes that were committed at that time even during the most extreme episodes of our history the state has never had the kind of power that it has now particularly the power of surveillance that it now possesses by virtue of the kind of technology we use for communication and by virtue of the state's measures which we now know basically scoop up everything we say to one another every transaction we make in the economy a host of things we do including where we are at every moment of the day and night this kind of information has never been available to the state ever anywhere in history that people have always had certain options of hiding of running away of escaping and those options are being closed off by the kind of power the state's information control now gives it so like you I'm terrified now I'm taking my own personal measures to do what I can in these circumstances to protect myself and my family and I would strongly suggest that each of you think along the same lines but meanwhile there are things we can do to to help move the entire situation away from the brink where we now stand and I believe that indeed what you've been doing here this week is a helpful part of those actions we need to learn and understand the situation we're in how we got here and particularly what kinds of beliefs sustain the system we now confront it's viable only because the great mass of people are either in favor of it or indifferent we can actually sway some of those people if we help them to understand what has happened and what the present condition is so it seems as if it's such a small thing to educate ourselves and try to educate others and yet is a doable thing and it's something that really not very many of us understand with the depth and subtlety that is required to fully meet objections to moving away from this brink people are frightened they're easily frightened they're afraid of in this case specters and my judgment there was never such an illusory threat in history unless you think that people were afraid of witches as the terrorist threat today it is almost entirely fictional the chances that a terrorist will hurt you or me are so tiny that they will hurt anybody in this country are so tiny that is virtually idiotic to worry about them much less to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into dealing with them and yet our fellow citizens out there are willing to either tolerate this kind of action by the state or actually to support it to root for it to to argue in favor of it we need to confront these people whenever we can and try to educate them that we can do we don't know how much success we'll have but unless we try we'll never find out how much success we can have the question do you think acts of civil disobedience like such as the libertarian activist Adam Kokash do you think those are worth the trouble anymore or do you think it's better just to try not to become disappeared I have some respect in regard for acts of civil disobedience I'm not gonna endorse Kokash there are times when people can show a lot of resolve and integrity by publicly just saying no and taking the consequences at the same time I don't encourage anyone to make himself a martyr you're up against fiends I think you're a damn fool actually if you sacrifice yourself your family or your friends merely to make a display of having confronted the state and it's evil so I would not recommend that I would recommend that you take productive actions that help to move you into a more protected sphere many of you are young and you're mobile as a result more mobile than you will be later when you have families and more established jobs and connections and so forth I would if I were in your position I would consider seriously getting out of this country not because I think any other country is a paradise by the way but because I think no other country has the means that the government of this country has to carry out these horrifying surveillance programs and other measures of state tyranny so I'm going to move I'd suggest you might consider moving somewhere else and don't be put off by the fact that other places are not not islands of laissez faire many many other countries in the world are perfectly awful from the standpoint of the kinds of governments they have but thank goodness those governments are poorer there's a microphone oh do you encourage people to actively participate in politics because if you cannot defeat them you might just join them and after you take over power you might be able to do something Gorbachev did to Soviet Union just dissolve ours no I don't recommend that the question is whether I recommend one involve himself in politics to sort of act from within and subvert the system that way and I don't recommend that because I think the odds of success are next to Neil and because I think in the process it's the more likely outcome is that you will be co-opted and sucked into becoming a cog in the great wheel everybody's subject to incentives and constraints so you know there's a long tradition say among among Christians to come out from among them and be separate I urge people to come out from among the state and be separate to the extent that you can obviously we live in a world pervaded by state actions so it's virtually impossible for anyone to completely divorce himself from the state and some of its effects but there's a matter of greater and less and so what I actually recommend is that people to the extent that they can remove themselves from politics not that they participate in it at all I personally loathe politics and have nothing to do with it whatsoever I run away screaming I don't even want to tell you how horrifying I find every aspect of politics because this is a family-oriented show I'm doing what you're suggesting making plans to leave so I'd like and I think you mentioned being afraid I think there's great power and great fear so you get to decide whether you want to be afraid at the end of the day I think and so I think there's a lot of potential in that I would say but I would like to ask you maybe you can offer some concrete advice from what your own plans are what you're doing now to somebody like me or to people like us who may be doing the same or similar things to what you're doing well I certainly don't pretend to have any expertise as an advisor in that regard and I generally don't like to give advice to young people at all if you'd like to read you'd like to read my biography you'll understand why but at any event I think there are things anyone can do that are sensible and probably helpful even if you never leave this country and as I was telling some of you yesterday in the Q&A we had I think it's a very good idea that when you're training and deciding on how you want to specialize the skills you want to learn when you're young that you acquire some skills that are mobile learn how to do something that you can do in many parts of the world about equally well now of course there are many kinds of employments and jobs and skills that are that are place specific either specific to a given firm or specific to a given country or whatever so there's a limit to how much can be done but nowadays particularly many of you are very knowledgeable about information technology you've grown up you younger people it's been a part of your lives all the time and so you're you're at ease with it and many of you are very expert with it that's great you can do that from virtually any place on earth all you need is an internet connection and and so that that's a good way to go but there are many other ways there's so many ways to be entrepreneurial that can be carried out in other parts of the world if you have any wealth to dispose of or have anything you you're investing right now I would recommend international diversification certainly don't put all your wealth in any kind of investment in the United States because it may later become impossible for you to move it across a national boundary and you'll be impoverished if you decide to leave and can't take your wealth with you so there there are ways to just think differently about your situation don't think about your situation as if you were going to be stuck necessarily within the boundaries of the United States because I think life is going to become very bad within those boundaries and even if you don't think today that there's a problem you consider serious you may later find that you do consider it to be serious serious enough that you want to flee and you'll be better off if that day comes should it come you are prepared to carry out some kind of escape and more successfully so that would be a kind of general piece of advice but I think many other people would offer that as well much Bob fear firing