 Well, good evening everybody, and nice to see you here tonight. We at the Forum, we pride ourselves in bringing conservative opinions of different flavors, and tonight there'll be one from Yaron Brooke with the Anran Institute. Yaron has a fascinating background and a wide range of experiences. He was born in Israel, parents from South Africa, and became a citizen in 2003. And I don't know when the rest of us knew what we were going to be when we grew up, but in Yaron's case, he was given a copy of Atlas Shrugged when he was 16, and we know what happened after that. Yaron served as a first sergeant in the Israeli military intelligence and earned a bachelor's of science in civil engineering from the Technion. In 87, he moved to the U.S. and received his MBA and PhD in finance from the University of Texas, and for seven years he was an award-winning finance professor at Santa Clara University, which boasts a very famous alum. That's us, yes, Joel was a student of Yaron back when he was in Santa Clara. And in 2000, he left Santa Clara University to succeed Michael Berliner as president and executive director of the Anran Institute with offices in California and the D.C. area. So Yaron has had teaching and public lecturing events and conferences that all over the world. From the authorship point of view, he's a columnist for Forbes, has articles in Wall Street Journal, he was at USA Today, Investors Business Daily, and has a new book out, Equals Unfair, there'll be a signing opportunity after the Q&A today. So what you're also going to learn is that Yaron is not shy on a variety of topics. He can cover capitalism and business, rational selfishness, the environment and climate change, foreign policy and war, and the war against Islamic totalitarianism. But tonight, we're going to focus on economics and the politics of economics. Like I said, there will be a book signing after the Q&A, and I was told that Yaron welcomes all kinds of different questions during the Q&A, and that would include foreign policy and Orlando, which has happened, so we should know topics cannot be covered. This is not a safe zone. You can just say whatever you want. So back by demand again, happy to introduce Dr. Yaron Brooke. Well, thank you for having me back. Yeah, I guess we're in California, so I should warn you about triggers. You're probably going to be triggered tonight. I might say something that offends you. Grow up, I guess. You guys are pretty grown up. Two things that surprised me when I walked in, last time I was here, we didn't have a security with automatic rifle standing there. I mean, cool, but sad, sad, right? That we even need this, we even think about this kind of stuff. And this guy sitting up in the front thing is wearing a Hillary shirt, and I was like, what's going on here? And they haven't beaten him up or anything, and then I didn't read for prison, it took me a little while to see that. So yeah, so it is warm in here, so you'll have to excuse me. So how many of you, I'm curious, how many of you care about inequality? Think it's a real problem? No, don't be shy. I mean, how many of you think inequality is a problem? Well, I mean, very few of you, which puts you in the tiniest minority, I think, in the world. Indeed, the issue of inequality. Remember, inequality is the gap. Let's be very clear about what we mean. Inequality is the gap between the poor and the rich or the middle class and the rich, however you want to define it. Inequality has been declared by authorities all over the world as the most important issue of our time. Not terrorism, not the growth of the state, not rise of socialism or fascism or anything like that. Inequality, the gap, this gap, is the most important. Now, it's not just Obama. Obviously Obama has declared it the most important issue of our time, and you'd expect that, I guess, from Obama. But the Pope has declared this. Most of the Nobel Prize, a lot of it's in economics in America, have declared this, even some former economist like Paul Krugman. I view this as a really, really important, I always call him the former economist because he actually was an okay kind of economist like a long time ago. But ever since he started writing for The New York Times and gaining power, what did Lord Acton say about power? It corrupts, he's become less and less of an economist and more of a hack, a political hack, which is what he is today. And I hope this has been videotaped and somebody takes the segment and mails it to him because he deserves it. He deserves to hear it, I think he knows it. Deep down he knows, he's not an economist anymore. All of these guys, everybody out there has declared this is the most important issue we are facing. We had a book come out last year by Thomas Piketty. A French economist, you know it has to be good, right? A French economist, very well known, he's probably gonna get the Nobel Prize for this. So don't laugh, I mean this is serious stuff. And it came out and it's called Capital in the 21st Century. Now I actually, it was translated from French. I actually prefer the German translation, which is Das Kapital in the 21st Century. It's just a straight translation, right? And it's not accidental. For those of you who don't know, Das Kapital is the title of Karl Marx's book, written not that long ago, and this is an update, right? This is a far less interesting, far less profound update. Marx was really, really wrong, but at least he was smart. This is not that deep. And yet, and yet, everybody reviewed this book. It became the best seller in the United States. It's sold like hotcakes. It's still a best seller right now on Amazon. Every economist out there, everybody who had a column reviewed this book. Most the positive reviews, even people on the right, people who fundamentally seem to maybe disagree. We'll talk about the right in a minute. They all kind of said, well, but he's such a good economist and the data's so interesting. And there's this resistance to saying, there's no issue here. Nobody should care about inequality. Even the Republican candidates, even the most libertarian of them, Rand Paul, was asked about, well, what do you think about the problem of inequality? And his answer was, well, we are better at solving it. We're better at solving the problem of inequality. Now let's talk a little bit about this problem of inequality. I look around the room here and it seems to me like it, we've got a bunch of people here who are pretty unequal. In lots of different things, in pretty much everything. We all look different. I'm guessing we all have different talents and different skills and different abilities. We probably have different world levels of wealth right here in the room. Cool, imagine if we were all the same. What an awful, boring, horrible world it would be. Even if everybody's like me, it would be awful and boring and horrible, right? It would not be good. The fact that we're all different means we do different things. We specialize, we have different levels of ability. That's just life. It's because of our genes, it's because of our parents. Maybe it's some of it, God forbid, because of choices we made. I know choices are not, don't count anymore, right? It's nature or nurture. If you're radical, it's a mixture of nature and nature that determine everything about you. But maybe there's a third thing, like your own decision, free will, volition, what you decide to make of your own life. I think that's Trump's everything else. But that's not very PC these days to talk about that. We're all different, and that's great. So if we all start out different, clearly we all start out different. Why is it a surprise that we all end up differently? We're different in the middle, and we're different everywhere. We are metaphysically different. We are metaphysically unequal. There's nothing about us that's equal. Now you might say, wait a minute, you're on. Didn't the founding fathers and the Declaration of Independence, the most important political document ever written, didn't they all say, isn't there a little statement they're saying, all men are created equal? Yeah, but what kind of equality do they mean? Political equality. They mean we're all equally free. We're all equal in rights. Every human being, every human being on the planet has a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Property should be in there as well. Life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of every human being. Whether they government recognize it or not, every human being has that right. And even the founders screwed up on this slavery, right? And 600,000 Americans had to die to fix that one. But the principle, the principle that we are all equal in rights, equal in freedom, equal in liberty, equal before the law, that is a legitimate concept. But the founders understood that we're all equal and therefore our outcome, and even the opportunities we face, will never be equal. And the only way to make them equal is how. Is by violating our freedoms, it's by treating us unequal before the law, it's by taking from some and giving to others, it's by sacrificing one group of people for the sake of another group of people. One individual for the sake of another individual. And the whole idea of this country was to not do that. That every individual is sacred, every individual has a right to be free. No individual should be sacrificed for the sake of another individual. So, when the left talks about equality, or when the right talks about equality and apologizes for the inequality that exists today, they're talking about equality of outcome, even equality of opportunity. Opportunity is just a form of outcome, right? It's just a little lower on the chain, but it's a form of outcome. They're talking about violating the equality of rights, equality of liberty. And yet, this is huge, the rhetoric of inequality is prevalent anywhere, everywhere. Again, even those on the right seem to be apologetic about this issue. The left, for the last ten years or so, about ten books have been written about the issue of inequality. A year, ten a year. You know how many books have been written on the right? Like two in the last ten years. Three now. There's no answer. We have no answer. And what happens when one side writes ten books a year and the other side is silent? Guess who wins? The side who writes the books. The side who defines the terms. The side who repeats their mantra over and over and over again. And, you know, the left is very good at repeating lies over and over again until they become self-evident. Because, well, of course, that's true, because I've heard it on television 3,000 times. And nobody says the opposite. So what's going on here? What is behind? I want to talk about today with you guys, because you're already kind of on the right. I want to talk to you about why the left is doing this, why this issue of inequality is so important to them, because it's really important to them. And because it's important to them, it should be really, really important to you. Because you better fight it. Because what they're trying to do is undercut the very foundation of what this country is about. And this issue of inequality is a wedge issue. We can't apologize for it. We have to stand up against it. So I want to talk about that. And I talk about the second thing is why they're getting away with it. What are the assumptions that are underlying it that we have to challenge? So what are they trying to do? So America is a unique country. Really the only country in human history. Really the only country in human history that was founded on a moral principle. On the principle of individualism. On the principle of individual rights. On the idea that every individual has an inalienable right to live his life as he seeks fit. That you have a right. You should be free to pursue those values that are going to make your life the best life that it can be. That's what pursuit of happiness means. It means pursue values that will lead to your happiness. And the state, other people don't have a right to tell you how to do it. And force you to follow a different course of action. It's your life and nobody else. You own it. Before America, your life always belonged to whom? King, the tribal leader, the pope, somebody else. The collective, some other group, some other leader, somebody. America was the first time in human history where you said, No, my life belongs to me. Your life belongs to you. I don't have a right over your life and you don't have a right over mine. For the first time with individuals. And as a consequence of the freedom that was allowed in America. We're the first country in the world that has a term like making money. In America we make money. We don't take money. We don't steal money. We make money. What does that mean? It means we create wealth. We create wealth. The world's not a zero sum game. We build. Think about Europe 400 years ago. 400 years ago, how did you get rich in Europe? How did you become an aristocrat? You stole it. I mean born, okay, but how did your father become an aristocrat? How did his father, you stole it. It was a zero sum game. Yet surfs, basically slaves. They worked for you. You exploited them. You put barriers on the road. You took taxes, which were just, you know, highway robbery. That's what it was. All of the wealth in Europe was about redistribution. There was no wealth creation. There was no increase in wealth. If you look at per capita wealth or per capita income for 10,000 years until the Industrial Revolution it's flat. It's just a question of which group or which number of people have it and which don't. It's just redistribution. In America and in the Industrial Revolution and in the capitalism we start making money. We start creating wealth. So I can understand the Europeans have a certain inbred resistance to wealth because in their mind wealth means steel. Historically, now you'd think they'd be smart enough to figure out that isn't what it means anymore. But, you know, they're Europeans. So of course most of us are too, but we were the small ones. We left. We came here. So in America we never resented wealth. We never resented ability. Indeed, in survey after survey after survey until very recently Americans always when they're asked about inequality say, who cares? When they're asked about the wealthy they say, I want to be wealthy. I don't resent wealth. Europeans don't. Europeans are envious. Europeans don't like the fact that some people succeed and other people don't. Americans have never cared. Now that the left doesn't like. They want us to be like Europe. They want us to be envious because they want to redistribute wealth. They want the state to be involved to decide who gets what, where, when. There are real problems in America. I'm not saying there are no problems. I'm just saying inequality is not a problem. There's problems of poverty. There are too many poor people and they don't rise up fast enough from poverty. There's real problems in the middle class. This economy is not growing. And when the economy is not growing we all feel it. If we're in the middle class we feel it because we're stagnant. We don't go anywhere. And there's problems at the top. There are way too many cronies. Way too many cronies. People who get ahead by manipulating the system, by bribing the government, by buying themselves power. That's wrong. None of those have anything to do with the gap. They're problems. But the left wants us to focus on the gap. Why? Because their solutions to each one of the problems does what? Makes them worse. Their solution of poverty is raising them in a minimum wage. Guess who gets hurt when you raise them in a minimum wage? The poor people. The poorest of the poor. Teenage minorities are the ones who suffer the most when you raise them in a minimum wage. Their solution for a slow growth is what? Well, they don't really have any. I don't know if you've seen the prevalence of books and articles recently about the fact that the world is a new world. We should accept it. Growth is going to be slow forever. It just can't go any faster anymore. That's their solution for slow growth. Which is absurd and ridiculous. But that's what they want. And then what's their solution at the top? What's their solution to cronyism? Bigger government. And we know there's a correlation. Almost one-on-one. The bigger the government, the more cronyism there is. Simple. The more I control your life, the more you're going to fight back. And when you fight back, you're also going to start manipulating things in your own favor. The best example of this I always use is Microsoft. Microsoft's a great example for this. In the early 1990s, Microsoft spent exactly $0 on lobbying. $0 in Washington. No building. No lawyers. No lobbyists. Nothing. The mantra in Microsoft was, you leave us alone. We'll leave you alone. So they're brought in front of the Senate. And all in hatch. Good Republican, right? Gives them the speech about how they have to start lobbying. In South America, we would say he was giving them a speech to argue for bribes. But in America, we call it lobbying and we make it nicer, right? You've got to start lobbying. You've got to have lawyers here in DC. You've got to build a building in DC. You've got to have a presence in DC. Microsoft said, leave us alone. We'll leave you alone. They walked away. Guess what happened six months later? Knock on the door. We're from the Justice Department. And we're really upset that you're giving away Internet Explorer for free. People forget that that's what they went after Microsoft for initially, was giving Internet Explorer for free because Netscape in those days was charging for their browser. And this was, you know, my one line on antitrust. This is quick antitrust laws. You're always in violation. This is Zyn Rand's line. Not mine. You're always in violation, right? If you sell it cheaper than your competitors, then you're dumping, right? And that's bad, right? If you're selling it more expensive than your competitors, you obviously have a monopoly. Otherwise, how can you get away with it? And if you're selling it at exactly the same price as your competitors, collusion. So no matter what you do here in violation of antitrust laws, government loves that because then they get to decide who to go after and when to go after. Notice they go after Apple that spends very little money lobbying and they don't go after Google that spends a lot of money lobbying. No accident. No accident, right? So the solution to cronyism can be more of this. Can be more government. Can be more regulation, more controls, more government intervention. But that's what the left proposes. So in every one of these, they have no solutions or their solutions make the problem much, much worse. They don't want you to focus on the problems. They want you to focus on this gap. And they want you to focus on the gap because they want Americans to envy. They want Americans to resent, which gives the people in power, not the people who have economic power, the people who have political power, more power, more control, more say in how we live our lives, which is ultimately the goal. Now let's talk about this gap for a minute, right? 250 years ago. How many people were poor? 300 years ago. It's easier. 300 years ago. How many people were poor? How many people in the population was poor? I mean really poor. Like subsistence poor. Barely surviving. 90 plus percent. Everybody was poor. We were equal. Cool, right? That's good. That's good. I'm sure in North Korea they have equality day and they all celebrate regularly, right? They're all equally poor. And then what happened? Right? We were all poor. We were all like this, all the same, pretty much the same. And then something happened. Around 1776. Two things happened in 1776. Obviously declaration of independence. What's the second thing that happened significantly in 1776? Walt of Nations is written, published by Adam Smith. Walt of Nations. 1776. This happens. Everybody gets richer. Everybody in the West gets richer. Some people get richer faster. Some people get richer much faster. But everybody gets richer. So here we are equal and all poor. Here we are equal, but by those standards, all rich. Even the poor now are relatively rich as compared to those guys over there. Bad? How can that be bad? And again, just the manifestation of the fact that we are free and we are different. And when we're different and when we're free, we produce different stuff, different levels. So the two things that the left is trying, I mean, they're trying to cause us to worry about this gap. But how do they get to the American people? Two main ways. One is they tell us that there's this national pie. There's national wealth. Everybody talks about national wealth. American wealth. And then they say it's not distributed right. This national wealth, like, a small percentage of us have a lot of this pie. And the rest of us have a little bit of the pie. And we all say, well, that's not fair. Wait a minute. Somebody brings a pizza to a party. We expect it to be divided up equally, right? Or approximately equally. But no, it's not equally divided. Now what's the problem here? It's a problem. There's a problem here. Why is the pie example not a good example? There is no national pie. Sorry, there is no national wealth. There is no national income. There's your wealth, and your wealth, and your income, and your income. You have a pie, you have a pie, and you have a pie. Now, yes, mathematically, we can squish them all together and pretend mathematically there's a national pie. But America has no wealth. I have wealth, you have wealth, you have wealth. We happen to be Americans. Cool. Good for us, right? But America hasn't got any wealth. Okay, I have to comment here on Trump. Sorry. America doesn't trade with anybody. America doesn't trade. You trade, and you trade, and you trade. Walmart happens to be the main mechanism by which we trade. But America doesn't trade with anybody. You don't have trade between America and China. You have trade between Walmart and some Chinese company. And like in any trade, what happens in trade? I buy something from you. I like to use my iPhone. I buy this for $300. Because it's worth what to me? More than $300. I win, and Apple made a profit. So win-win. Trade is win-win when it's voluntary. And since two people are trading, they happen to be on the opposite sides of the ocean, all trade is is win-win. Nobody lost. They're no losers. They're no losers. Anyway, national pies don't exist. National trade doesn't exist. National GDP doesn't exist. Again, it's useful mathematically to add them up. But it's not a reality. It's not out there. You have a pie. You have a pie. I was on the show and on a TV show on this guy. I don't know. It's on Glenn Beck's thing, The Blaze. And he likes to drive around and have his guests in the car while he interviews them. And he goes to a fast food place and he buys stuff. And we earned a McDonald's and we bought a bunch of pies. And he had his pies and I bought my pies and he had his. And we squished them all together and pretended we had a collective pie. There is no such thing as a collective pie. We are not collectivists. The state does not own you. And therefore the state does not own your wealth. And therefore the state does not have a pie to distribute. You make a small pie. You have a small pie. You make a big pie. You have a big pie. None of my business. None of your business. None of anybody's business. None of the politician's business. None of the state's business. You bake your own pie. Some of us work really, really hard to bake big pies. Some of us work really, really hard and don't bake big pies. So what? I chose to be a teacher. I love doing this. It doesn't pay. Ask him. It hasn't paid me anything. This doesn't pay. I do this for love. I got a Ph.D. in finance. I could probably get a job on Wall Street. But love to me is more important than money. That's okay. I understand people who prefer money. We make choices. All kinds of choices that result in all kinds of pies. I have my pie. Somebody else has his pie. I love people with big pies. The only way to make a big pie, and they hear the analogy breaks down so I'm going to switch to money, the only way to make a lot of money is how? How do you make a lot of money? Yeah, you work hard. Absolutely. You got to have a great idea. You have to use your mind. You have to really focus and what? I know a lot of people who start companies and they work really hard and they have what they think is a great idea and they fail. So how do you make a lot of money? By creating value. For whom? For us? Every time I see a rich guy I say, cool, he must have done something that made my life better. I know Steve Jobs made my life better. A lot better. I know Bill Gates made my life better. A lot better. I know that entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley make my life better. Every day there's a new app, there's a new something that I'm buying that makes my life better. But that's true of my clothes manufacturers. Everybody who's ever made money in some way, some way down the road, they have made the world a better place by making money. The only way to make money is by making the world a better place in a free market, in a free society. Never apologize for making money. Never do community service and charity in order to release the guilt for making money. Don't feel the guilt. You didn't earn it. Making money is virtuous in and of itself. You're creating value. You're creating something. So the fact that somebody's got a big pie, thank you. Thank you for making whatever it is you make that is made, I'm sure, in some distant way, my life better. And I don't care where you live. You can live on the other side of the planet. If you're making money in a free market without cronyism, without force, without manipulation, you're making my life better. And that's a cool thing. So we got to get rid of this idea of a big pie, of a collectivistic pie that left is trying to get us to be collectivists. That European let them stew in that broth. We're individualists. We believe that wealth is created by individuals. And that brings me to the second trick they've put together, right? And this Obama has, well, Elizabeth Warren really came up with this idea, but Obama is famous for declaring it. There is no such thing as individual. You didn't build that. None of you built it, right? And this is really important. This is not a mistake that he made. This is not some trivial comment he made. This is a clear ideological path that they're trying to take us on, again towards collectivism. Elizabeth Warren said it first, and she articulated the whole case of why you didn't build that. It takes a village, right? Remember, Hillary's, it takes a village. Nancy Pelosi three, four days ago said that all the technology in this phone was invented by the government. And if you break it down, if you break it down, and you go back far enough, yeah, there was some research grant somewhere way back there that the government provided to somebody, but she's taking credit for this. Now just imagine, I do this with students all the time, because they get it, right? Imagine if a government designed this. What would it look like, right? I mean you laugh because it's obvious. No way this was made by a government, right? But this is what they're trying to say. They're trying to make everything about the collective. They're trying to say, you didn't build that. You had a great teacher. Yeah, we all had great teachers. That's great. I mean, I don't remember any of my great teachers, but maybe you do, right? If you had a great teacher, go thank her. Or her, or him, right? Go say thank you. That would be great. And if you're rich, and if you have a lot of money, write them a check. They would really enjoy that. Teachers don't make that much money. But to feel guilty because you had a great teacher, or now the wealth that you created is not yours because you had a great teacher, that's absurd. I mean, I, all of us, all of us owe civilization to Aristotle, Newton, John Locke, the founding fathers, what, we should feel guilty because we owe that? Sure, they were great minds, and we've all benefited from them. That's the way knowledge and civilization work. We stand on the shoulders of giants. That's, that is the way it is. To use that, to undercut your own individual achievement is absurd. But again, it's motivated by you don't count as an individual. Only the group counts. That's the agenda. Government build the roads that you drive on. Yeah, right. Government did build the roads they drive on. Unfortunately, they'd be much better if they were all private. But different, you know, just drive around the bay area and see, right? Imagine if that was private, the kind of competition that would arise to figure out a better solution than the traffic we have here. But think about who pays for those roads. Who pays for those roads? Yeah, the people who make the wealth. And the more wealth you pay, the more wealth you make, the more you pay. I mean, clearly, the top 10% are paying over 50% of the taxes, or some even much more than that, can't remember the exact number. Some ridiculous percentages. So they pay for it. And what comes first? Business or infrastructure? Oh, business, how can you afford the infrastructure without somebody making money that you can take from and build the infrastructure? Somebody has to create something that you can steal something from to build this stuff. You can't. I mean, where does the money come from? The money comes from creation, from value creation, from making stuff, making stuff, making money, right? We don't just redistribute, we make, we build, we create values. What was the other one? Oh, you had employees. Well, yeah, you have employees. Bill Gates had employees. He paid them. More millionaires than Microsoft than any company I think in history, right? We pay our employees in a fair trade, voluntary trade, win-win. So you made it, you created it, it's yours, be proud. Don't feel guilty, but they want to induce guilt. Guilt, as every Jewish and Catholic mother will tell you, is a great way to control people. Great way. I had a Jewish mother, I know. Can't fool me, right? Guilt is great. Don't do it, because when politicians use that guilt, it's to get you, it's to undercut your values. It's to undercut your freedom. So, I'm going to wrap up here. We got to fight this. This is the issue they have chosen to go to the barricades on in order to try to turn this country to Europe, in order to undercut the individualism of America. We don't care about inequality. I'm waiting for a presidential candidate to say, I don't care, I don't care. I love inequality. No, it's not that I don't care. I love inequality. Inequality means we're free. Places that are equal are places where we're not free. Freedom equals inequality. There's no inequality if we're not free, unless we're free. Freedom is what we should be fighting, not equality. Equality is an evil ideology. Equality of outcome is an evil ideology. Just think about all the regimes in history that have advocated for equality of outcome. And I'll give you this horrific image, right? This is the horrific image of one regime, the regime that probably took this more seriously, this idea of equality of outcome. It was a group of relatively smart people who went to Paris to get their education, studied under the great philosophers in Paris, Sartre and Camus and Diderot and all these postmodern existentialists. And they learned equality is a good thing. Equality is great. So they went back to their country and they managed to take control over their government. They said, okay, we're going to implement equality. So they looked around the country and they saw, well, that's a problem because some people live in the cities and some people live in the countryside. That's not equal, right? City life is much more comfortable than countryside life. So what do we do? We empty the cities. So they literally drove everybody out of the cities into the countryside. But then they looked around the countryside and they said, they're still not equal. Some people are good farmers. Some people are not. Some people are good at foraging food and some people are not good at foraging food. So they banned foraging. People were still unequal. Some people are smart. Some people could read. Some people had an education. Some people were more entrepreneurial. So what do you do? You shoot them. You shoot them. If you had glasses, that was a sign you were intelligent, supposedly. You got shot. You had a college education. You were shot. You showed any kind of initiative on the farm. You were shot. Now I'm not making this up. This is the killing fields of Cambodia. This is the Khmer Rouge. This happened not that long ago. This is just 50, 40, 50 years ago. This is in our recent history. This ideology of equality was put to full use. And the consequence was 40% of Cambodia's population was slaughtered, was murdered. In the name of equality. Equality is evil. We're for inequality. We love inequality. Why? Because we're for freedom. We love freedom. We're for individualism. We're for each individual owning his own life. We are for the principles on which this country was based. Each one of us has an inalienable right to his own life. His own liberty. His own property. And the pursuit of their own happiness. That's what we should be fighting for. The individual, his own freedom. And his freedom to be different. That's what makes this country great. Thank you all. It's a good question. So first question is, is it fair that one person gets a prize and others don't? Yeah. Okay. Come on. Okay, the next, the next prime, I, I, okay. Yes, it's fair. What does fair mean? Here's a good question. What does fair mean? Now the left is defined fair to mean equal. So today when people think about fair, they mean equal. But fair always used to mean getting what you deserve. It's about dessert. It's not about equality. And dessert is different. Some of us deserve more because we create more. Some of us deserve less because we create less. That's just the reality. What do you think about attempts to force jobs to stay in the U.S.? What do I think about the attempts to force jobs to stay in the U.S.? I'm against force. I think it's horrible the idea of forcing jobs to stay in the U.S. It lowers all of our standard of living. It lowers our standard of living. If somebody somewhere else in the world can make the same product that the same at the lower cost, great, then we get to spend less on that product. We have more stuff to buy, other things to invest or to save. And our standard of living goes up, not down. Now does somebody lose a job? Sure, but that's life. People lose most jobs that are lost in the United States are lost because of technology. Not because of the Chinese or anybody else. You know how many people worked in farming 100 years ago? What percentage of the American population worked in farming 100 years ago? Like over 80%. You know how many worked today in farming? Less than 1%. Less than 1%. Do we make more or less food today? Much more. Oh, but we lost farming jobs, oh my God. Okay, how many in manufacturing? We peaked in terms of manufacturing jobs in 1979. We have a lot less manufacturing jobs in the United States today than we did in 1979. Do we make more stuff in the United States or less stuff in the United States since 1979? Manufacturing stuff. Double. More than double what we made in 1979 with fewer people. Why? Technology, robots, computers, efficiency. That's great productivity increases. Reducing the amount of manual labor, you know, dull manual labor. And increase the amount of goods and lower prices and raises our quality of life. This is what the whole industrial revolution is about. It's about getting rid of manual jobs. Now, are there more jobs in the world today than there were 100 years ago? Yes, there are like five times more people in the world today than there were 100 years ago yet. Everybody has a job pretty much, right? Not everybody, okay. But many more people today have a job just in sheer numbers, not in percentage, in numbers than they did 100 years ago. Because there's lots of work to do. Because our needs, our desires, our wants have expanded and they will keep expanding as we get richer. So, yes, you lose, I mean, a lot of jobs were lost in the buggy industry when automobiles came. So what? So you shift, you change, you get re-trained, right? In China, China's about to lose millions and millions of jobs. Why? Robots is one reason. The second reason is Vietnam. They have even cheaper labor in Vietnam and Africa. When Africa gets free, when they get rid of these corrupt politicians, when they establish capitalism in Africa, there are hundreds of millions of people there who can do work, who are going to manufacture stuff. And that's going to be good for all of us. All of us are going to be better off when Africa is producing stuff. And the idea that, no, we have to produce everything in America is bad economics and it's bad intellectually and it's bad for us, our standard of living. Don't buy American. You should never look at the tag. You buy the best product at the cheapest price that makes you the happiest possible. That's what America's about. It's sort of a buy America. I mean, think of how our automobile industry has been forced to become better because of the Japanese. And maybe they would have been forced to become even better if Ronald Reagan had allowed Chrysler to go bankrupt in the 1980s. But we bailed out the automobile industry in the 1980s. They didn't learn their lessons. GM stayed corrupt. But what we want is, we believe in competition, right? Bring it on. Let's have competition globally. And if the Chinese want to subsidize their industries, who are they screwing really? Their own people. And we subsidize our industry all the time. And the other one is, I know I'm off topic, but what the hell? The other one is, I have to talk about currency manipulation because this drives me nuts, because I'm a bit of an economist, like I'm a finance guy, and people talk about China manipulating their currency, right? The Chinese manipulate their currency all the time. What do you think the Fed does? What is the European central bank doing with negative interest rates? What's the Japanese central bank doing with negative interest rates? What's the Fed doing with zero interest rates if not manipulating our currency? I don't know how many of you remember, this again goes back to the 80s, because I remember this, because you remember the big stock market crash in October of 1987? What did the Treasury Secretary of the United States say on television that weekend? We want the dollar to be weaker, and we're going to work to make the dollar weaker. That's part of why the stock market went down 25% in one day. We manipulate the currency just like everybody. Every central bank in the world manipulates its currency. Now, that's one problem, that's one thing that drives me nuts. But then they get the direction of the manipulation wrong. Everybody thinks the Chinese are keeping their currency really, really cheap, so they can sell us cheap goods? No. If the Chinese let their currency float tomorrow, their currency would collapse. They're keeping it high because they know that a cheap currency is bad for them. They won't be able to buy anything if their currency is really, really cheap. All of these commentators, including our presidential candidates, have got the direction of the manipulation wrong, which is just economics 101. The Chinese are holding their currency up, not down, because a strong dollar is good, and a strong yuan is good. In order to produce this stuff, they need to import oil, and they need to import natural gas, and they need to import raw iron, and they need to import all the stuff, and they need a currency to be able to buy that stuff. And if they keep it really, really low, they can't afford to buy the stuff to make us stuff. So, the whole way people think about economics, unfortunately, in this presidential election is screwed up. It's upside down. Yeah. Okay. Here's a softball for you. Yeah. Bill and Hillary did nothing to earn their wealth. How do you account for them? Just a short answer is way finer. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I've got a one-liner, right? The problem is that the Donald Trumps of the world handed them cash. Whoa. I mean, this is how cronyism works. The businessmen and Donald Trumps known to have given money to Hillary, businessmen give these politicians money. She gets $250,000 to give a speech at Goldman Sachs, right? I'm a much better speaker than she is. Nobody's paying me $250,000 because I have no favors to give. But she has favors to give, so she gets the money. It's all about cronyism. It's all corruption. It goes back to that idea of talking to Microsoft and telling them they had to lobby. This is what happens. Okay. We're going to make a big shift change here. Talk about international policy. What is the best way to stop and deal with Muslim takeover of the U.S. and the world? Easy question. No, actually, the sad reality of it, it is an easy question. We're afraid to say it, but it's easy. But let me first say, I have to challenge the premise. Islam is not taking over America. Islam will not take over the world. We are destroying America. It's not Islam. We will commit suicide way before they take us over. So let's put the threat in context. They can kill 50 people and another 50 people and another 50 people. They can even kill 3,000 people. But they're not going to destroy America. The people who are going to destroy America are us. We're going to do it. Europe, now, how do we stop them killing 50 people, 3,000 people? Because that's ridiculous that they're doing that. That's evil and it's wrong. How do we stop that? We crush them. We crush them. And them has to be clear. Them is not terrorism. It's not extremism. It's Islamism. It's radically slum and anybody who stands for radically slum. Now, this is not an Obama problem. This is not a Democratic problem. This is the fault of Republicans. This is George Bush's problem. Because after 9-11, George Bush told us Islam was a religion of peace. After 9-11, George Bush refused to name the enemy. He talked about extremism and terrorism. A war on terrorism. How do you do that? We're going into the jungles of Peru next to fight terrorism over there. That's ridiculous. By the way, that's why we have troops all over the world fighting. We put out a full page ad in the New York Times and the Washington Post. Three weeks after 9-11. We said this is a war against what I call Islamic totalitarianism. People who use Islam for their totalitarian ideology, they want to take over the world. You find anybody who adheres to this ideology and you destroy them. Now, it turns out there are only two countries in the world of any importance that adhere to this ideology. Two, that's it. They're not called Iraq, they're not even called Afghanistan. Two countries, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia, our best friend. George Bush was hugging the Prince of Saudi Arabia all over the place after 9-11, right? And we're still big pals with Saudi Arabia. You want to stop this? You destroy Iran and you destroy Saudi Arabia, or at least you threaten them with destruction so that they stop this and it goes away. You have to get rid of ISIS just like you had to go to Afghanistan because that's where Bin Laden was and you have to crush it. But look, the United States of America has the mightiest military force in human history. Nobody on the planet comes close. We have bombs and weapons that can blow up the entire world in minutes, unfortunately, right? We can wipe everything out and yet we're afraid to do anything. We go after the wrong people. We take out troops and we tie their hands behind their backs. We call it rules of engagement. We blindfold them and we send them into battle, not being allowed to shoot anybody. I mean, what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan is a travesty. It's a travesty. The idea that five, six thousand American kids died for nothing under rules of engagement that didn't allow them to fight for their lives is a travesty. This is easy to get rid of. You know, assign the Marines to take Riyadh, assign the Marines to destroy the Marines, the Air Force, whatever, destroy Tehran. If it gets to that, it's finished. There's nobody else out there. Every piece of funding for ISIS, every piece of funding. You know the preacher who was out there talking about they should kill homosexuals in Orlando about a week ago, right? There was an Islamic... He was that guy. Saudi Arabia does. Every radical mosque in the United States is funded by Saudi Arabia. Every radical preacher that goes into American prisons and talks to inmates and converts them to Islam is funded by Saudi Arabia. Every Middle East studies program in an American university is funded by Saudi Arabia. Every madras in Pakistan where they're being radicalized is funded by Saudi Arabia. This is not an issue of immigration. This is not an issue of a problem with Muslims in America. This is a problem of an enemy that is clear, identifiable. Right after 1911, I would have done something similar. I would have made a list. Every country ruled by radical Islam, every organization that is ruled by radical Islam and go up and wipe them up or at least threaten to wipe them out until they behave. And enlist the Israelis to help. I mean, we're happy to help. When we used to be able to fight, Israel can't fight anymore. Israel doesn't win wars anymore. Israel fights like we've learned from America. Gaza, we've lost three times in Lebanon. We've lost twice now. Because we drop leaflets like Americans do. We drop leaflets and warn people about bombs coming. The whole point of bombs is to kill people. My favorite general, two favorite generals, Patton and Sherman. Sherman said, war is hell. And I add to that, if you're not willing to make it hell, stay home. Make it hell for the other guy. Patton said, it's not your job to die for your country. It's to make the other son of a bitch die for his. And that's exactly how we should treat them. We're going to switch back to domestic. What are your thoughts on government monitoring of our driving habits? About what habits? And that would include speeding, your miles driven and charging us for how many miles we've driven. Well, I mean... Look, as long as the government has the roads, as long as they own the roads, they're going to have rules of the road. They're going to have stop signs and they get speeding. I mean, that's fine and that's the least of our problems. I don't think they should start monitoring how much we drive and charging us. I'd rather that, that's how you should privatize the roads. The way to privatize the roads is to charge us based on the roads we use and people can own roads and that's how you pay for it. But as long as government owns the roads, they're going to have rules of the road. I mean, that's just the reality of it. And I'm glad that they are stop signs and that they are lights. Although American drivers are pretty good. In Israel, you really need stop signs. I don't know if you've ever driven in Israel. I think this question is timely. I think there was a decision today. How did internet freedom lose out to net neutrality and did the left just have a better buzzword? Yeah, no, the left is winning. I mean, this is what we have to all realize. The left is winning. It's already won. If you think about where we are today versus where we are 100 years ago, if you think about how we fight wars today versus how we fought World War II, if you think about every category throughout, the left, the collectivistic left, the anti-individualism left is winning I don't think it's because they have better buzzwords. It's more the talk I gave here three years ago. They've got them all high ground. We give them them all high ground. They define the terms. It's not buzzwords, it's terms. So inequality is a good example. They've defined that inequality is a problem and now we argue with them about how to best solve the problem. Instead of telling them, it's not a problem. We don't care about inequality. We care about poor people, but we don't care about inequality. As soon as we give in to the terminology, as soon as we give in to them framing them all debate, we lose. And we do it all the time. We do it on every issue. And net neutrality is a good example of that. We've given them, somehow it's again equality, right? Equality of access. Why? Why shouldn't Netscape have priority, right? If they're willing to pay for it. It's not my cable, it's not your cable, but it's our cable. It's all, it's again, it's collective pie. The internet, oh, it belongs to all of us and we should all have equal access to it. Why? It doesn't belong to all of us. Some people actually invested the money and took the risk to put pipes in the ground to actually put fiber optics in the ground. Why don't they get to decide how much to charge people? But you know, we're losing on every, I mean really, we're losing on every front. When, bring that policy. When the leading Republican candidate, it's for raising the minimum wage, for tariffs on trade, for, you know, for a lot of statism, then we've lost. There is no representative of a free market. There is no representative of the founding fathers on anywhere close to being on the ticket today. We're losing everywhere. This is a strictly some more economic question. How do banks charging interest create wealth? Oh, huge amount of wealth. Banks charging interest. I've got a whole essay on this called the history, the mall, the mall defense of usury I think it is. I'm big on usury. I think usury is great. How do banks charging interest create wealth? Well, I want to start a business and I don't have enough capital and I want to start a small business so no, you know, it's not the kind of business that a venture capital would give me money for and they don't charge interest, right? I go to my local bank and they give me a loan and they're not going to give me a loan unless they can charge interest because it's their money. So they want to be paid for the risk for the fact that they don't get to use the money for that period of time and so on and it gives me an opportunity to start a business. Without interest, without usury, usury used to be the ancient word for interest, without usury there is no business. Nobody can buy a factory. Nobody can start a business. Nobody can employ people without somebody giving them the capital and people want to return on the capital they give. Sometimes it's in the form of equity return. Sometimes it's the form of interest return. It's the same thing. So banks are allowing us to use their capital to create wealth. That's how it's productive. It's, by the way, in my view, financial industry is the most productive industry in the economy. This is why finance guys make so much money. People like me. I gave that up though. Finance is the sponsor of the allocation of capital in the entire economy. They get to decide who the winners and losers are in a real sense because they put their money where their mouth is. They get to decide when the buggy industry is not worth investing in anymore and when they should be investing in automobiles. When the PC is not worth investing in and something else is coming about, that is financial markets. That's a stock market. That's bankers. That's why the fact that banks and financial industry is so heavily regulated is destroying this economy. The problem today with slow economic growth is Dodd-Frank. It's regulating our financial industries, constraining them so we don't have a free flow of capital to fund the kind of investments that create jobs and create economic activity in this country today. And you don't feel it so much in Silicon Valley because you've got your own pool of capital here that is separate, but the rest of the country feels it and they feel it bad. So Dodd-Frank right now is the thing constraining as well. You know that there are fewer publicly traded companies in the U.S. today than they were 15 years ago? And that's Sarbanes-Oxley. So it's regulations that are killing this economy and a lot of those regulations are the financial industry. What are your thoughts about open borders? So, now I'm really touching a nerve, right? I am for open borders when we're free, right? I don't think you just open borders tomorrow any more than I think you just completely privatize the roads tomorrow all at once. This is something you phase in over time. But people have a right to move. They have a right to move. The right to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness means people have a right to move. I moved. Now, I have to tell you that if I hadn't found a way to get into this country legally, I would have done it illegally. I really would have. That's how important my life is to me. I find the idea of anchor babies. I view it exact opposite of the way our politicians view it and the way probably most of you view it. If you're living in some poor Godforsaken place and you know that you're going to bring children into the world to continue living in some poor Godforsaken place and there is some land of opportunity out there and you have the guts to travel thousands of miles to risk your life so that your child will have a better life, I call that heroism. I call that heroic. Now, we might not like it, but that woman who comes here to have a baby so that baby can be free is heroic in my view. So I'm for immigration. I'm for more immigration. The problem in this country is they're not enough immigrants. Not too many, they're not enough. We just don't have the right mix, right, because we discriminate against people with knowledge and ability and so on. We need more immigrants, not fewer. We need a thriving economy. Remember, I mean, we used to have open borders. That's how this country was created, because we had capitalism. Capitalism creates more jobs than there are people, so we imported people to fill those jobs. That's how your ancestors got here. They came through Ellis Island with very little restrictions. They were checked to make sure they weren't carrying diseases. Today you were checked to make sure you don't have a criminal record in a terrorist background or any kind of threat, or if you want to ban Muslims, fine. If you're going to ban anybody, those are the people that ban, right? But if somebody can get a job, if somebody wants to work here, that's great. I love people who want to work. So the problem is the welfare state. Great, get rid of the welfare state. I'm all for getting rid of welfare. But this is the thing again in our political environment. Don't blame immigrants for the problems we've created. The problems in America today are not a consequence of immigration, right? And if there are problems of immigration, even those problems we created, because the biggest problem that I see with immigrants today is that we are teaching them not to assimilate. We're telling them that their culture is equal to our culture. It's not. We have the greatest culture in human history. We should say that we're much better than their culture. We should tell them that they should assimilate. They need to become Americans. So when I went to get my citizenship in 2003, in a massive hall, right? Massive thousands of people getting their citizenship altogether. First of all, you were offered a translator. That's ridiculous. You shouldn't be able to become a citizen unless you know English, right? Amen. That's your life. But then President Bush comes up on the screen, and I'm sorry, I really dislike President Bush. He comes up on the screen and he tells me that I should cherish my culture and I should make sure to teach my children all about my culture. And I go, I came here so my children didn't have to live in that culture. That's why I came here to embrace this culture. Stop telling me about that culture. Tell me what's great about America. Tell me that multiculturalism is evil. It's a horrible ideology. It's an ideology to bring down America and American culture. If we stood up, if we had self-esteem, if we believed in what this culture and what this country was about, they would assimilate just like in the 19th century, those poor, ignorant, pathetic Jews assimilated, those poor, ignorant, pathetic Poles, Irish, Italians, and everybody else assimilated. Because in those days, you came here to become an American and Americans expected you to become an American. It's our fault if they don't assimilate. Well said. This is a little bit of a commercial. One of our guests says, do you have a brochure that we leave on windshields? As a matter of fact, yes. In a few minutes, the book signing will start and there are the Anrand Institute forwarded some pamphlets and brochures. They're there on the left-hand side of the table, so that was there. We're running short on time, but I think a lot of people here, and you mentioned earlier your thoughts on Orlando. Well, I mean, this is a consequence of not dealing with the problem. This is not an immigration problem. The guy was born here. This is a problem of not dealing with what's since 9-11. How many years has it been now? 15 years, not facing the enemy, not naming the enemy finally. Obama's willing to say maybe it's got to do with radical Islam and Hillary's maybe willing to say it's got to do with radical Islam and finally, the Republicans are willing to say it. But remember, seven years of Bush, you wouldn't say... There was one week, I remember it, there was one week where he called him Islamophascist and then he got so much backlash that he retreated and he stopped doing it. But if we're afraid to call the enemy by its name and Islam has a lot to do with what they're doing, right? It's all about their interpretation of Islam. So it's Islamic terrorism. If we're afraid to say it, we lose. We lose, that's it. So we have to call it by its name. We have to call it for the evil that it is and we have to destroy the enemy where they live. We have to go there. Nobody fights for cause they know they're going to lose. What inspires these lone wolves? What inspires San Bernardino? What inspires these people is the idea that they're doing God's work, that they're going to go to heaven, but that the fundamentally that they are working in a cause that is victorious, they are willing. And this is why ISIS is so much worse than Al Qaeda, because ISIS controls territory. They have a government. They rule. They're successful. They've actually established a caliphate. It's a little caliphate, but it's a caliphate, right? So the view is, wow, we're succeeding. There's some progress here. We can win this. And Al Qaeda had the same thing because they view that the fact that they kicked out the Soviets from Afghanistan was why the Soviet Union collapsed. Bin Laden really believes this. He believed, believed that he caused, him and his Mujahideen caused the Soviet Union to collapse. He believed that if he attacked the United States, he could cause us to collapse. And we give them no reason to think that's not true, because we just sit here. They just killed 50 of our citizens. What have we done? Are we bombing them more in ISIS? Not even that. And bombing ISIS is not going to help. You have to go in there and clean shop. You have to clean them out. You have to crush them. You have to destroy them. There's no shortcuts here. This is war. And if we're not willing to fight the war, they will. They'll keep coming. They'll keep doing it. They'll keep sending people. They'll keep recruiting people who are already born here. They'll find people who convert to Islam so we won't even know they're Muslims and they'll do it. There's no end to this unless we go to war. But that means really committing to going to war, which we seem committed not to do. We seem really to vote anything but war. Don't mention war. I mean, even the Republicans are not talking about war. Nobody's talking about Saudi Arabia. Why aren't we talking about Saudi Arabia? Saudi Arabia is the number one issue we should be talking about. It's the most important country in the Middle East when it comes to this issue. Nobody talks about it. Maybe we'll end on a philosophical note. In regards to objectionism, do people have any natural obligations to society or to each other? So, objectivism is the philosophy that Ein Rand defined. And the question is, do people have natural obligations or inherent obligations? Yeah, to moral obligations to each other or to society. I mean, you don't have any obligations to society. What the hell is society? Society is just a bunch of people. So, you know, the group doesn't have a claim on you. You can only have obligations that you choose. And sure, I have an obligation towards other people, like my wife, my children. They have an obligation towards a stranger, not to violate his rights, to leave him alone if he wants to be left alone, and to trade with him otherwise. But no, I don't have any obligation to place my war being as less important than his. I'm against sacrifice. I'm against doing something that makes my life worse off. Long term. I'm for living. Making my life better, making your life better. I'm for win-win relationships. Sacrifices lose-win. One party loses, otherwise we wouldn't call it a sacrifice. I'm for win-win relationships. For people going out and engaging with one another on the basis of win-win, whether it's love, I believe love should be win-win. If it isn't, it won't last. Try it sometimes. Friendship is win-win. One party feels like it's losing. You're not going to maintain the friendship. Business should be win-win. Another problem I have with Donald Trump is I think he views business as win-lose. Out of the deal is about how to get the other guy not to win. No, we should win-win. Business is about winning it, about leaving something on the table so the other side knows they want to come back and do another deal with you. Human relationships should be about win-win. That's not an issue of obligation. The obligation is to your own life. You want to live in a society in which you're happy. You can pursue your happiness in which other people are prospering and happy. And that's healthy, positive, successful relationships are always based on the idea of both parties pursuing their own self-interest in a way that benefits both parties. And that's what life is about. Okay, thank you very much. A nice hand for Iran Brook, please.