 One of the great mysteries in the world in which we live is the fact, the economic, historical, political fact, that free markets work and yet that everybody hates them. Free markets produce unbelievable amounts of wealth, prosperity, longevity, human well-being. Everywhere they're tried, to the extent that they are tried, they're incredibly successful. I'll go through some examples to try to at least illustrate the point. And yet nobody likes free markets. No country holds onto them. The trend over the last few decades easily is away from free markets, more regulations, more controls, more government regulations, certainly in the United States of America. A country that used to be very free, relatively capitalistic, had free markets. Today, it's not free at all. Generally, countries that have been free in the past, declined. We've got some South Americans here, so it's a good, we've got some great examples of this in Latin America. So I don't know how much you know about Latin America, but the country that used to be the poorest country in Latin America, anybody know what that was, what's the poorest country in Latin America today? Venezuela. Venezuela is the poorest country in Latin America today. On a per capita GDP basis, Venezuela is the poorest country. It's also the most socialist country in Latin America. What is the richest country in Latin America today? Chile. Chile is the richest country in Latin America today. 40 years ago, 30 years ago, what was the richest country in Latin America? Venezuela. What was the poorest country in Latin America 30, 40 years ago? Chile. Chile. What's the difference? Economic policy. Economic policy. Chile adopted markets by accident almost. In the early 1980s, it adopted economic liberalization. It freed up its markets. It protected private property, it respected contracts. It encouraged entrepreneurship and it basically left people alone and even privatized its social security. It privatized that and it became very quickly the richest country in Latin America. Venezuela went the opposite route. It nationalized. It moved away from free markets, it moved away from private property, it moved away from contracts. And it very, very quickly, in a matter of 20 years, became the poorest country in Latin America. So that's just one of, I think, hundreds of experiments that we have been running in the world over the last 200 years in terms of what economic political policies work, if the measure of work is prosperity, and what economic social policies don't work. You've got a living example right now on North versus South Korea. I don't know if anybody's been, I think some of you have been to Korea, but South Korea is a flourishing, wealthy, successful country. North Korea is basically dead, it's nothing dead. The best image to illustrate to them between North and South Korea is that satellite photo. I don't know how many of you have seen the satellite photo of the Korean peninsula at night. And the South is all lit up because there's electricity and people have homes and offices and street lights and it's all lit up. And the North is all dark, a little bit of lights near the Capitol, but generally all dark. The difference between authoritarianism, call it whatever you want to call it, right? And relative freedom. Relative free markets. South Korea is relative free. It flourishes. North Korea is oppressive. It's dead. There's nothing there. It is just popping. Of course you guys lived it, East-West Germany, sometimes I have to tell, remind people that the war was built to prevent people from fleeing communism, not the other way around, because young people still have the belief that communism is some utopia, some ideal, some wonderful thing. And you'd think that the last 70 years would have proved otherwise and yet communism is still around. We still have kids at the universities here, if I was giving a talk, if I was a radical leftist, so I was a radical leftist Marxist, and I was giving a talk here in Berlin, I would have an audience 10 times larger. Communism is popular, free markets are not, even though communism led to poverty, destruction and death, freedom, free markets have led to prosperity. So something's going on here, because the system that seems to allow for human success, for human wealth, for human flourishing, for prosperity economically is the system we hate the most. And systems that are oppressive to human beings that result in poverty and destruction tend to be systems that are popular, which is, to say, the least bizarre. It's a strange, but it is the reality with which we live. So one has to ask a question why. What is it about free markets? And I'm not using the term capitalism, because I think capitalism is a much more loaded term, but capitalism is not just freedom in markets, but capitalism is freedom in everything. Capitalism is a system where your individual rights are fully respected, particularly your property rights, where you're left free to pursue your values, free of coercion, free of force. Capitalism is a political, social, economic system. We've never really had capitalism, but what's really amazing is that the closer we got to capitalism, the more successful the economic system is, the political system is. The further away we get from capitalism, the more destructive it is. And again, everybody's against capitalism in spite of that. Everybody's against free markets in spite of that. So the question, I think the important question we have to ask ourselves as human beings, as people interested in ideas, as people interested in the world out there, is why. What is it about capitalism? What is it about free markets that people hate so much? Because there's something about it that we resent, that we resent so much that even though it's successful, even though it leads to prosperity, even though it leads to economic success, we still hate it. So we're willing to override that. So let me ask you, what free markets involve people with the spinning in markets, free of coercion, free of intervention, free of government, but why do people engage in markets? In other words, what's capitalist? What are free markets really about? What is the purpose of a free market? What is the purpose of any market? Even a market that you go down to, you know, down the street. What's the purpose of the market? What do people do in a market? Exchange goods, they value less for stuff, they value more. Yeah. So they exchange goods, generally they give away the stuff that they value less. They get something, they value more. That's trade. It's a win-win relationship. But before we even get there, why are they going to the marketplace to begin with? So, you know, if I'm my iPhone, right, it appears in all my videos that people laugh at us. They're familiar with it. So my, you know, why is Steve Jobs making these? Why did, why did Apple build them? Why did Steve Jobs initially invent them, think of them, produce them, create them, sell them. Who did he do it for? I mean, he deserves the need of a customer. Yeah, I mean, I didn't know I needed an iPhone before Steve Jobs taught me I needed an iPhone. The beauty of production is that the thing about great producers is they create demand. They don't satisfy demand. Demand isn't there until they actually create the product. And then the demand shows up because they're teaching you, one of the beauties of production is it teaches you the things you need. You don't know what you need. Steve Jobs knows what you need, but you, when he was alive, you didn't know what you need. Yeah, but why did he satisfy demand? What, because he cared about me? Did Steve Jobs build the iPhone for me? Yeah. Because? Because we can't do so much things with it. Because real benefit from? Yeah, with benefit. So did Steve Jobs build this so I could benefit from? No, for money. While he built it, certainly part of this was for money, right? And it's, you know, he made money off of this. Like the first iPhones had a profit margin over 50%. He made a lot of money off of iPhone. He could have sold it to me a lot cheaper if he cared about me. So Steve Jobs built this for money, profit, right? Now we all feel a little uncomfortable even thinking that, never mind saying it, which says something about the world in which we live. And we'll get to that. But it's not just about money. What else did Steve Jobs, why else did Steve Jobs build this? He looked for something that fulfilled himself. Yeah, he loved it. This is great. The consequence of creating something that was great for the public. Yeah, he had a vision. He wanted to create something new. He wanted to create something beautiful, right? I mean, this is a beautiful thing. He wanted to create something productive. He wanted to create something that people would love using. But who did he build this for? For himself. For Steve Jobs. So Steve Jobs could make money. So Steve Jobs could have fun. So Steve Jobs could be satisfied that he produced this amazing thing. Steve Jobs produced this. And at the end of the day, you go to work, not for your customers. Hopefully you like your work. You're going to work for you. You enjoy it. You like it. It fulfills something in you. It allows you to pursue certain values you're making and living. And at the end of the day, production, work is something we do for ourselves. And I remember the first iPhone I bought was in 2008, right? And this economy was spiraling into recession. Many of you are too young to remember 2008, but 2008 was a great recession. And this economy spiraling into recession. And I went out and I bought my iPhone because I wanted to make the world a better place. I wanted to help my fellow man. I want to make sure people had jobs and I'd be taught by the Keynesians that consumption drives the economy. So I wanted to help boost economy. Because I know that's why you guys go shopping. You guys shop because you want to help make sure that people are employed and have jobs and know. A lot of benefit. You go buy stuff for whose benefit? A lot of benefit. Your own benefit. You're going shopping because you want to go buy something that you believe will make your life better. See, Job sells his products because that's to make his life better. You're buying his products to make your life better. And this is not a unique crowd, any crowd in the world. If I ask people why they go out and buy their shoes or buy their clothes, they say because we're trying to make our lives better. So markets are places in which we go in pursuit of our own values, our own interests, our own well-being. Markets are places we go in pursuit of self-interest. Markets are all about self-interest. They're all about people pursuing self-interest. And this is not a new observation. Anna Smith in The Wolf of Nations, written a long time ago, wrote that the baker bakes the bread, not because he cares about you. He bakes the bread because he's trying to make a living. And hopefully he enjoys baking bread. And of course you don't buy the bread because you care about the baker. You buy the bread because you want to eat. You're better off buying the bread. He's better off baking the bread, win-win. But you're not doing it for the win-win, you're doing it for the you. Fundamentally, markets are about self-interest. Fundamentally, everything about markets are about pursuing your own values and your own terms. And you don't transact if the terms are not appropriate. Everything about capitalism smacks some self-interest. It's all about people being selfish. To use a term nobody likes. So, Anna Smith told us this 20 or something years ago, but Anna Smith said the same as everybody else says. Anna Smith said, yeah, it's all about being selfish. And selfishness is bad. We know selfishness is bad. We've all, I mean, our mothers taught us that. Our preachers teach us that. Our philosophers taught us that. Certainly German philosophers have taught us that. Selfishness, being self-interested, is bad. Pursuing your own self-interest as an end is bad. It's not moral. It's not virtuous. And Anna Smith says, that's okay. Because when you add up all the self-interested activities of all these different people, what you get as a sum is society's better off. So the sum of vices is a virtue. And let me tell you, nobody believes that. Capitalism's problem, the reason we hate capitalism, the reason most people hate capitalism, is because they know that capitalism equals self-interest. And they know because everybody teaches it that self-interest is evil, bad, or at the very best, a model. What is morality? We talk about morality, we talk about ethics. What is it to be ethical? What is it to be moral? What do we mean, Tom? To be altruistic. We're taught to be like that. To be altruistic. To think of others first. To live for the sake of others. The whole focus of morality is on how we treat other people. So benefiting other people, that is virtuous, right? Benefiting yourself, that is not virtuous. That's what we taught. So you would think that when you benefit other people, you would be considered a morally good person. Who is the greatest, who are the greatest beneficiaries of mankind? Who has benefited human beings? What profession has benefited human beings more than any other profession? At least materially. Inventors? Yeah, inventors are important, but inventors often, their inventors sits in their garage and nothing ever happens there. I would say investors. Investors, financiers? Yeah. So capitalists? Yeah, basically people will look for the good idea and give the sign. Look for the good idea? Certainly. I think that's a category within a quarter category that I'm talking about. I'd say business people. Of which, I agree with you, investors are actually the most important. And not just investors because we love it to capitalists, but bankers, the people we love to hate, we hate them more than anybody. I've got a book. It's called The Moral Case for Finance. And it has essays there about why banking is virtuous and why finance is the noblest profession because exactly for the reason you said. The inventor doesn't get out of his garage without capital. The inventor also doesn't get out of the garage without a CEO, without a business expertise, without the knowledge how to build a business. It's one thing to invent, something else to build a business around it. It's one thing to invent. And it's another thing to turn that invention into the type of thing that people want to use, that people can use. I mean, think about Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs was not an innovator. He didn't take care of his garage. That was Wozniak. We barely know Wozniak. We know Steve Jobs because he knew how to organize. He knew he had a vision. He knew and he knew how to market. He knew how to sell. You have to get it into the hands of consumers. But all their category, put that category from banker to innovator to CEO, businessman are the people who have taken us out of the mud, out of the hut, out of subsistence farming and brought us into wealth, into the world in which we live. Without them, none of this exists. Without their knowledge, their energy, their willingness to take risk, whether it's risk of capital, risk of their time, nothing exists. You don't even have labor without capital and without businessmen. Labor never comes together. It starts a business. It just doesn't happen. Somebody has to have that idea. You have to have an entrepreneur. You have to have the capital to pay the labor until the business become profitable. And yet, we all hate businessmen. I mean, we not maybe in this room, but generally the culture. Why? Again, because businessmen are pursuing their own profit. Worse than all of the financiers. Because the financiers are turning money into money. So you don't even see a product. They're behind the scenes. That's why they're always behind every conspiracy theory as well. Because they're the people that are unseen. A businessman who produces like Steve Jobs, who produces a product and hide behind the product and say, look, I'm doing something good for mankind. But a financier who sits behind that has a much harder time. It's a much more abstract role. Much more difficult to explain to people how productive a function he is actually pursuing. I mean, so think about this. The most, the people who benefited society the most. Other human beings the most. Our business people. We still hate them. So I don't know about this altruism stuff. They say what you should do is help other people. Well, Steve Jobs helped other people. Bill Gates helped other people. How did they help other people? We talked about this, right? I buy an iPhone for a thousand bucks. How much is this worth to me? Much more. I mean, this is worth tens of thousands of dollars to me. Don't tell Apple. But it's worth tens of thousands of dollars to me. Just in terms of the quality of life, improvements. I remember, you guys don't. But I remember what life was like before this. This has improved life dramatically. Particularly for somebody like me who travels a lot. This is a life-changing. When I moved from Israel to the United States in 1987, all my families in Israel never called them. They would never talk to my parents. Not because I didn't like them, but because it was too expensive. Long-distance phone calls were super expensive in those days. They couldn't afford it. I couldn't afford it. So we talked about giving two months. Now, I can talk to anybody, any way in the world, for as long as I want, by video, at a cost of zero. I have access to every piece of music I've ever produced at a cost of zero. I had maps navigate any city in the world without having to look at a map. Again, you guys don't remember driving a hockey and a map at the same time. It was very, very dangerous. I mean, the benefits of this are through the roof. I know you have a question. Can we leave it for the question period? Or do you want to? I just wanted to answer your question. Oh, which one? Pardon? Which question? Sorry. You just asked, Paulette Price, you're doing this video call stuff. I wanted to answer the question. Oh, okay. He wanted it. Yeah, okay. So, my life is better off by tens of thousands of dollars. Steve Jobs made some money off of this. Probably less than tens of thousands of dollars because they're on a cost of thousands, right? He's better off, I'm better off. Every time a businessman makes money in a free market, he is making the world a better place. The only way to become a billionaire is to make a lot of people's lives better. You cannot be a billionaire in a free market and not have made other people's lives better. Hundreds of millions of people's lives better. Sometimes millions of lives better. I would argue Bill Gates, by creating the PC revolution, changed the lives of billions of people on planet Earth. He's not a hero. He's not a model hero. We're not building statues. We're not naming roads. Like who's a model hero? If I say model hero, what name comes to mind? Mother Teresa. Mother Teresa. Hercules. Hercules. Okay. Not Hercules is a model hero, okay? Because he helps other people. He goes fight for them and all of them. But Mother Teresa is a great example. Mother Teresa comes to mind as a model hero. She's a saint after all. And, you know, there are a lot of statues of Mother Teresa out there. Why is she a hero? Because she helped a lot of people. She did so altruistically. Which means what? Without any self-interest. Yeah, without any gain to herself. On the contrary, she did it while suffering. She did it while not being happy. She did it clearly as a sacrifice. If she had been happy, holding parties, celebrating her successes, being, you know, and really helping people at the same time, she wouldn't have been a saint. What made her a saint is she was as poor as the people she was helping. She seemed like she was suffering. If you read her diary, she was in agony the whole time. That's what makes you a saint. Now, if you go to the museum in Berlin, there are probably some Renaissance paintings of some saints. Any of them happy? Any of them smiling? Any of them doing fun stuff? No, because the whole point of being a saint is not to help other people. The whole point of being a saint is to suffer. The whole point of morality, as we understand it, is not to help other people. If that was the standard, just helping other people, then our businessmen would be moral giants. The whole point of our morality is about individual suffering. It's about not being self-interested. In a sense, it's a negative. Don't pursue your self-interest. Don't be successful. Don't be happy. And if you can help other people while not being happy, while not being successful, so even somebody like Bill Gates, when he's an entrepreneur, and he's helping hundreds of millions of people, and we hate his guts. And when an American justice man goes after him to try to break up Microsoft, everybody's excited and everybody thinks that's great. When does Bill Gates become a little bit of a hero? For a little while, until COVID. For a little while. When he leaves Microsoft, God forbid you do anything productive. He leaves Microsoft and goes and starts a foundation and starts giving his money away. Giving money away, that's good. That we love. Charity. We love. Production, not so much. Charity, that's cool. How many people will be helping this charity? Probably does some good work. More or less than in his business. A lot less. The world does not change by charity. I can often tell people. You know, in America at least, this is more of an American story. In 1776 when America was founded, it was a third-rate colony. The British didn't care that much about it. That's why they didn't really fight. It was poor. It was meaningless. Within 130, 20, 30 years, it was the strongest military and economic force on planet Earth. By World War I, America was the top country in the world. How did that happen? How did that transition happen? Because of charity? Because of community service? Because of other traces of the world? No, because of business. Because of the Carnegie's and the Melons and the Rockefellers and the people who built America and made a lot of money doing it. And what do we call those people? In America? Rubber Barons. They're crooks. They're bad guys. We hate them. Why? Because they built America. They made the country. And every country has the same story. We resent the people who actually are responsible for the success. And that's all driven by this morality. The morality of altruism is anti-markets. In altruism it's anti, I would say, human nature. It's a morality you know, arguably comes from Christianity. It's a morality that worships. Sacrifice in worships. Pain in worships. Suffering. And yes, if you have some other people on the side, that's okay. But success, prosperity, happiness, wealth, account. Again, at best. Emole. But usually, emole. So why do people hate capitalism? Why do people hate free markets? They hate capitalism and free markets because capitalism and free markets are based on the emole system. They're based on self-interest. They're based on people pursuing their own well-being. Both in the production and the consumption side. But on every part of every part of a market, what you see is self-interest. And yes, people might be better off but they must be at catch. They must be something wrong because you can't have it without sacrifice. It's not moral. So there has to be something evil going on. So in my view, you know, we can continue to teach the value of free market economics. It's good. But we won the economics debate a long, long time ago in my view. I mean, the economic proficient doesn't know it but they're just spinning wheels. Like, we've had great economists, Hayek and Mises and Friedman and lots of others who've articulated the case of free markets as well as anybody can have shown that Marx and Keynes and the Neocainsians and all the rest of them are just wrong about economics. That's been done. There's not a lot of more work to do there. You can do another equation and show another stupid economist why he's wrong. But it's not going to lean anyway because most of the important work has already been done. We've got, we know the economic history. Anybody with eyes can see the economic history. And the sheer fact of the success of capitalism versus the failure of any other system. One of my favorite stories there is I don't know if any of you have been to Hong Kong. Sadly I used to say to your audiences you've got to go to Hong Kong at least once in your life because it's such an amazing city but sadly the Chinese have taken it over so I don't recommend going to Hong Kong anymore. But Hong Kong, like, at the end of World War II was a fishing village. There was nothing there. And it's a rock in the middle of nowhere. There's no natural resources. There's no gold. There's no oil. There's nothing. And yet before the Chinese took over Hong Kong, Hong Kong GDP per capita was higher than New York City. Sorry, higher than the United States. Hong Kong had more skyscrapers than New York City and it had seven and a half million people living on this rock. Where did they come from? They swam. They emigrated from every other country in Asia just to get there. Why? Because there was a free market. They could actually go out there and exhibit themselves and be entrepreneurs and be successful and they could it was all theirs. Taxes were very low. Regulations were very minimal. The welfare state was as minimal as you would get anyway. And this place took off. It created massive amounts of wealth. In a fair amount of time there was a lot of money. Massive amounts of wealth. In a very short period of time. What it took America to do in 250 years, they did in 75. So the evidence of the success of capitalism and markets is all around us. All people have to do is open their eyes. They don't care. They don't care about the economics. They don't care about the evidence. What people really care about is morality. What people really want to be is good. And they won't believe that capitalism is good because capitalism is self-interest. And this is why I think the debate this is why I think we lose the debate. I know a lot of free market guys libertarians, economists who try to somehow make the argument that free markets are altruistic. Because everybody benefits. Which is true. But they don't get what altruism is after. They don't understand the philosophical power of morality. And as a consequence I think we continue to fail and fail and fail and fail. And the world is moving away from capitalism. I mean the fact is that the only philosopher who has challenged the philosophy of altruism and presented an alternative to it because you could argue Nietzsche challenges altruism but doesn't really provide you with a mild code that's an alternative for a man. And this is I think why she is such an important figure and why she is so crucial I don't think it's possible to win the battle without her because she's the only one to actually provide an alternative to the conventional both religious and secular moral code that exists out there. I mean Iron Man asks the altruist one simple one word question. Why? Why should I sacrifice to you? Why is your life more important to me than my life? Why is your happiness more important to me than my happiness? Why? What's the purpose of my sacrificing to you? Where does it gain me? There's no after life. What credit do I get? For and the fundamental question is the fundamental purpose of morality is not to teach you how to sacrifice and die. The fundamental question of morality is how to teach you how to live successful at living when the only species on planet Earth who doesn't have the how to live encoded in our DNA we have to figure it out we have to use our mind to figure out how to live we have to figure out what's good for human beings and what's bad for human beings it's not encoded a means of survival a plant needs sunlight it needs water it doesn't have to think it doesn't have to conceptualize that it knows it, it's in the DNA so it reaches to the sun and its roots are going looking for water every species out there knows what to do and when the environment around it changes what happens? it usually dies because it can't change fast enough, evolution is too slow and human beings don't function that way we don't have the programming we don't know how to survive I mean at the very basic level we don't know how to survive like how many of you if I if I dropped you into the Amazon jungle you can't rely on your instincts to survive you would die in hours if you relied on your instincts to survive what would it require you to do to survive the Amazon jungle what would you have to do think, figure it out stop for a minute and say okay, I need to figure out shelter I need to figure out water water might not be that hard but I need to figure out what's going to kill me and what's not going to kill me what I can eat, what I can't eat how to protect myself from dangerous animals how to maybe create some traps to catch the animals none of that will come to you instinctively none of that is in your genetic code to survive have to figure it out even at the very basic material level never mind the most abstract spiritual, conceptual, philosophical level we need principles in order to survive and the purpose of morality is to teach us those principles the principles for self survival and ultimately to flourish what does it take for the guys that they can live to flourish as a human being I mean this is a project that I ran picks up, if you will, from Aristotle like Aristotle's philosophy Aristotle's ethics is all about identifying the virtues that lead man to be the best that he can be to live a life of eudaumonia in Greek of flourishing, of happiness however you want to define it fully, a full life so Randa is saying, yeah that's exactly what morality is so let's go out there and figure it out and the first thing she identifies is for human beings in order to live well the one thing they have to do the one thing that there's no choice about is to use their reason it's to think it's to use their mind it's to figure out how the world works and adapt the world to them adapt to the world this is the great fallacy in environmentalism on a different topic, right the great fallacy in environmentalism is the way human beings survive is by changing nature we chop down trees to build huts we blow up mountains to build to build skyscrapers we build air conditioning so we can live in the desert we change the environment to fit our needs that's what we are as a being that's how we survive so morality should be a code of values to teach you how to live, how to live well how to succeed, how to be happy how to serve your own interests how to be a good egoist if you will how to be appropriately selfish and it's very easy to show that the caricature of the person who's selfish lying, cheating, stealing, just a bad person when we think about selfish when we think about egoism when we think about self-interest we think about lying, cheating, stealing we think about bad people we do bad things and it's interesting that we think that's selfish but also making money is selfish by trading notice that if those two go in the same category we may stop mixing them up and now we think every businessman is the lying, cheating, stealing, thief what do you do what do you have to do to them what are you going to do to the businessman if they potentially might be a lying, cheating, stealing, thief what's that what are you going to hate them but what would you do actually, actually do take away their stuff well you're not going to take away their stuff control them you want to control them, you want to regulate them you want to look over their shoulder I like to use the example of I don't know if it's true in Germany but in America you walk into an elevator and on the wall in the elevator there's a little piece of paper and it says a government inspector has inspected this elevator it won't fall and kill you and I always go, cool, I'm so glad because if not for the government inspector, I know that that greedy horrible evil businessman would build elevators that dropped and killed me because I know the best way to make money in a free market is to kill your customers but note that is the assumption behind almost all regulations almost all regulations are based on the idea that without them those greedy evil selfish interested businessmen would do something bad to you and they don't care, of course because they're greedy selfish, they don't care about themselves so McDonald's would poison you their restaurants would poison you you'd eat bad meat and this idea of reputation or this idea that you know, somebody who runs a restaurant would be a decent human being and it's not particularly interested in hurting you and trying to make a living and all regulations almost every single piece of regulation we have out there is built is explained in terms of if we didn't have the regulation some greedy businessmen would do something bad and therefore we need the government to protect us cool, good for the elevator inspectors so happy but that's exactly this notion of self-interest is evil self-interest is necessarily about lying, stealing, cheating but lying, stealing, cheating is not selfish it's not in my self-interest to lie, for example I don't know how many of you have lied before and are not going to ask because they don't really want to know but lying sucks I think that's a technical word for it lying is not a good strategy to get ahead in life in anything and if you don't believe me try spending a couple of days lying to your girlfriend to your boyfriend, to your spouse not a good strategy you're not going to get very far with it and the worst person to lie to is whom? it's yourself it's yourself because if you rely on reason if you rely on thinking thinking depends on facts thinking depends on reality in fact, your thinking is going to be corrupted and if you're survival is going to be threatened I mean, I'm getting to the age where I can barely remember what I did last week if I lie about what I did last week, I have to remember two things instead of just one what I really did and what I lied the lie but it's not even two things I have to remember the truth and who I told the truth to and who I told the lie to why I told them the truth and them the lie it's so complicated I can't hold all that information and think about the mental energy that goes into categorizing that and keeping that afloat which could be spent on better things more productive things so no, lying is not a good strategy if you know people who lie a lot they're almost always reasonable, pathetic human beings the best example of this what is the only profession on earth where lying actually advances you in the profession in every profession, lying is a detriment people don't want to deal with you except one acting acting is not lying, acting is performing there's another profession where lying is kind of a requirement it's done every day and you actually get rewarded for doing it well politicians politics is all about lying I've met a lot of politicians in my life I've never met a happy one they're all pathetic miserable human beings just look at Bill Clinton and Hilary Clinton just look in their eyes and you can see it miserable thieves can't live with themselves lying, cheating, stealing is a terrible strategy for living it's disastrous, it's not self-interested it's self-destructive it's actually self-destructive it actually is destroying your own soul who you really are so Rand I think is the only one to defend capitalism morally because Rand is the only one who's willing to stand up and defend self-interest and say self-interest properly understood properly defined, properly articulated thought through, a philosophy of self-interest is the only morality that can then justify capitalism which is a system of self-interest indeed she said she was pro-capitalism because she was pro-egoism rational egoism and she was pro-rational egoism because ultimately she was pro-reason and they all flowed from one another but think about it this way if we had a culture of people trying to pursue their rational self-interest of people who are committed to making their life the best that it could be people who are convinced that they had the capacity the reason, the ability to think for themselves, to live for themselves to pursue their own happiness what kind of world do people like that want to live in where they want mother governments sitting on their shoulder telling them what they can and cannot do what they can and cannot eat where they can and cannot go no people like that, people with self-esteem people who love their life who make the most of their life and are convinced of their ability to do that and do not feel guilty about the fact that they're pursuing their own happiness in their own life they just want to be left free they just wouldn't be left alone to go out and do the things that they know they need to do in order to achieve their own happiness their own success, their own fortune they would demand freedom they would demand capitalism and with no guilt, with no shame with no, you know politicians, the ones who are sometimes a good policy and they're apologetic because they can't be proud of their free market position because they know it goes against fundamentally in the world so if we want a free market revolution what we really need and this is what makes the battle so much harder than most of you think what we really need is a Mao Revolution thank you short break short break break the energy thank you very much now we're going to go into the question round we can also start a debate you're all allowed to controversially articulate your opinions about the question Germany doesn't have a really free market especially compared to the US so I would like to know what do you think about the German approach like having the social market so to speak well, I think it's a myth that the United States has a free market it doesn't fit, but Germany's was I agree, I think it's terrible I think it's terrible I think it's destructive, it's destructive both economically, you could be so much better off, you could be so much wealthier, you could be so much more productive and it's destructive to the human soul how many entrepreneurs are discouraged from pursuing their dreams how many people who want to start businesses and are allowed to start their businesses want to pursue a particular path in life are not allowed to pursue that path in life I think in many respects everybody suffers maybe the poor suffer the most because the free market is the few poor people there are, if at all if there are any poor people because they become more and more productive as you have more and more entrepreneurship as you have a great and great free market so, you know the world is in a disastrous place because it ignores the benefits of free markets and Germany which has an incredibly productive workforce, hard working very intelligent and you're barely achieving what your potential has so you would argue that being wealthy or being materialistically good off is really the ultimate goal it's not the ultimate goal does it provide the highest utility for human beings I don't know what utility means for human beings, I think that whole terminology is bogus I'm not a utilitarian and I think it's a bad way of looking at things no, for some people money is very important for other people it's not, it's why some people become teachers like me I could have been a finance CEO in Wall Street could have made a lot more money we make choices about how we want but the beauty of free markets is you get to make the choice and you have a maximum of opportunities available to you and you get to choose your own values and material wealth is really really really important for everybody some level of it's why we care so much about poverty clearly we care about poverty white because we know that being poor is bad that is not having enough material wealth is not good you do not want to live in Venezuela right now to a large extent because they're very very very poor and they also happen to be very very unfree but both of those go together so the spiritual values of freedom are consistent with the material values of wealth and both are important and one leads to the other they're not independent of one another you have to be free to be rich and if you're rich you're not free you won't stay rich very long so but yes, you know again material wealth is important it's not trivial and it might not be the most important thing but it's what accompanies the most important thing which is morality, the most important thing is to be a good person but to be a good person a society that's built to facilitate good people is a society that leaves people free and therefore we're going to be rich it's cool thank you you mentioned that the mainstream philosophy basically is very uncomfortable with self-interest and the concept of selfishness I wonder why that is what's the underlying reason what is the reason for that I have my own theories on that I mean partially I don't know I mean the philosophy is ultimately shaped by the geniuses who are the great philosophers and it just hasn't been since Aristotle anybody who's picked up on this thread of self-interest and really made it something other than our humanity but I think the dominant theme the dominant reason why it has it's unquestioned is Christianity Christianity is a religion of altruism Buddhism I'm talking about the West what dominates is Christianity Buddhism is a different version Christianity is an embracing of suffering Christians walk around the neck around the neck with a cross what does the cross represent absolute suffering the worst kind of possible death possible and somebody else Jesus in this case suffering for your sins talk about an injustice right so not suffering for their own sins that I can accept but suffering for your sins so Christianity is through has basically made altruism the dominant moral code in the West it is a religion of suffering it is a religion that elevates suffering to a virtuous position it's not an accident that the saints are Christian saints in that sense I think it deviates even from Judaism but it is the dominant force in the West Christianity is shaped so much of Western thinking and Western culture over the last 2000 years so even non-religious westerners when it comes to ethics are completely Christian because they can't think out of the Christian box so maybe they've given up the metaphysics they've abandoned God but they haven't given up the morality which is the morality of Christianity we're all living under Christian code when it comes to morality today what is the best criticism of objectivism and this fair capitalism that you have heard so far I don't know because I think capitalism works it's the right system I don't know what the criticism could be I don't have any it's the right system it doesn't mean that everybody the functions within capitalism is going to be perfect but the systems it's not easy to implement it's not easy to understand how it should be implemented but I see no flaws for example relative to having them illegal what's better so it's not a good the fact that heroin the fact that people use heroin is not a good thing but to ban heroin from use is much worse than to make it legal if you think about coca cola producing heroin and putting the same marketing into that could you imagine it could have a personal society that wouldn't be worth the free market system in no case because again, look you're not going to get a society that is free without people taking the personal responsibility of what that freedom implies and part of what personal responsibility of freedom means is that for example when I moved to the US I don't know if you've ever been to the US but in the United States they have hundreds of different beer commercials all the beer commercials were the same basically young women in bikinis running around drinking beer and all the beer tasted exactly the same now I'm not a beer duker I know that's a sin in German even I'm not a beer duker but to me all the beer tasted the same and all the commercials had the now I always thought in a rational world where people use their minds even a little bit would anybody run these commercials and the answer's no they wouldn't have any effect I mean they didn't have an effect on me I just looked at them and said ok a bunch of I watched them from the bikinis not for the beer but it doesn't advertising doesn't work that way it's advertising is there to provide us with information we need to analyze that information we need to be responsible for all the actions and if Coca-Cola got behind heroin as if that would happen I mean that's another big step that you have to take that a marketing agency would be willing and interested in representing the heroin cartels maybe they would I doubt it and then we would all say because this marketing campaign says heroin is good I should take heroin I can't google heroin and find out how disastrous and horrific it is I mean I will say this if you legalize drugs one of the things that would happen is that there would be an entire industry that would arise that would counter the effects of a drug addiction I think more people would try drugs ok and then they would take whatever medicine or whatever gimmick the industry came up with to get rid of the addiction so what is there something inherently evil about trying drugs I don't think so it's a damage it does to you but you see if capitalism only can come about when people take responsibility for their own lives and take responsibility for their own thinking then those kind of people are not going to just en masse devote themselves to self-destruction hmm yeah I'm not sure how much people really hate capitalism and how much of it is like a player of words or a quick use of language for example there was a study where they asked American students like socialism or capitalism and those who like socialism were also asked what their thing socialism even was and they then came up with some sort of capitalism lied which is just fair up for some reason I mean people really hate losing what they have so if you are like an urban leftist who is somewhat wealthy and you like to enjoy much a lot then your favorite privately owned coffee shop you want to annihilate the coffee shop you want to have cheap and much a lot you want to have basic income so that you can always pay for much a lot so I think it's harder to argue against that it's very easy to argue against labor camps or against a mass poverty but how would you argue against capitalism lied well so let me first address this issue of words that it's there I don't think that's true and yes they don't understand what the words mean that's absolutely true but if you explain it to them if you tell them what capitalism is so for example they did serve in the US only like 20% like capitalism 40% like free markets 60% like free enterprise so everybody said well let's start using free enterprise instead of capitalism we win but then when you ask people what they mean by free enterprise it's capitalism lied it's socialism lied it's not capitalism because it means much more to them in terms of the content I agree with you it's very hard and this is why I think for example Ayn Rand resonates more in Eastern Europe and in Latin America than she does in Germany because in Germany life is comfortable it's mediocre it's not exceptional but it's mediocre and mediocre is not bad particularly when you think of most of the alternatives in human history have been really really bad we've barely survived we've been dirt poor we've been substances of farmers the kind of wealthy mediocrity that we live under today it's not bad at all I get a new iPhone every single year how cool is that so people can ignore where that comes from even the mediocrity depends on something depends on production depends on some economic freedom and therefore it's very very difficult to convince them to take a risk in their mind because they have more freedom because then they can get even more than what they have today they're pretty satisfiable with what they have today it's a huge challenge and this again goes back to morality in my view because a good morality tells you to be ambitious it tells you to strive in life it tells you not just to want a macchiato but to want everything the freedom can provide you psychologically, spiritually and materially trying to be the best not just mediocre but the best human being you can be and this is the challenge we have this is again why it's so hard because it's not about economics the economics are easy I can show you on a chart I can prove equations we can do the economic analysis to show the free market's work in terms of creating more wealth people don't care small ambition is wanting to have a great life and it would be nice if we had more variation between countries or more free countries and allow more immigration so that ambitious people could actually move to the places because I could have I moved to America for these reasons I was ambitious and I could have stated that I would have had a fine life and comfortable and everything and that's why I moved to the US and that's the kind of spirit we need to inculcate in people and that's why it's not just it's a psychological almost struggle that we're facing and Eastern Europe and South America they're still not quite as rich they're not quite as comfortable and that's why they're willing to consider more radical ideas because of that Thank you my question actually ties into what you just said basically summarized the main theme of your talk it's that everything changes on rationality and what I found over the years what I find extremely peculiar with the human condition is that me personally but a lot of people that I know can know perfectly well what I should do now and what the consequences are if I don't do it they're fully understanding rationally but yet I don't do it so what's your interpretation of that well I mean again people are not taught not encouraged to be rational not in a proper sense and they're not told why they should be rational that is that it's good for them because they're not supposed to say that you're not supposed to say that you're supposed to live for yourself and they have new things that are good for you so it's very much about education it's about educating individuals to be self interested to care about themselves and see rationality as a means to achieving that and you know that ignoring the rational ignoring the right path is self destructive and the self destruction matters again it goes back to being ambitious people wanting to live a good life and how do you inculcate that I don't know but you have to start young but do you agree that I mean I've studied objectives for 10 years I fully understand all this and I mean I find myself doing things that are purely rational and I know that I'm irrational or irrational so it takes work it takes effort but it's also like a biological component I mean Aristotle says we're the rational animal but we're still animal like we have the elliptic system we're driven to parts by we definitely have so the default for human beings I'm going to talk about this default for human beings is a perceptual level conception i.e. being rational, being abstract takes effort