 In Defense of Financial Markets, by Dr. Yaron Brooke, recorded live at SR Conferences, 1996. Throughout history, they have been viewed as evil, blood-sucking, money-grubbing parasites. In the Middle Ages, spiders, toads, and all creatures diabolical became metaphors for them. They were irretrievably damned. The image of them being dragged down to hell by the bag of money around their neck became a medieval cliché. From Shakespeare to Dostoevsky to modern literature and popular novels, they are portrayed as villains. Jesus threw them out of the temple. Popes condemned them. Presidents and congressional leaders mock them. For modern culture, they are the barbarians at the gate. They are considered useless, overpaid, paper-shuffling parasites. These are the users of the Middle Ages, the bankers of the 19th century, and the Wall Street financiers of today. This has often been our culture's view of the financier. Yet these are the men that have made possible commerce and industry throughout history that provided capital to inventors, industrialists, and entrepreneurs of the 19th century making the steel, railroad, automobile, and every other industry imaginable possible. These are the men that in the late 20th century provided billions of dollars in financing the computer, telecommunications, and biotechnology industries. Without the financiers, without the financial markets and institutions they work for, the material wealth that surrounds us today and the spiritual values that it makes possible would not exist. Without financial markets making capital accessible to new and existing businesses, our economy would stagnate and die. Our standard of living and wealth would decline. It is the existence, for example, of venture capital markets that allowed Steve Jobs to get out of the garage and introduce the first personal computer. It's the existence of the junk bond market that allowed MCI to challenge giant AT&T and make long distance a lot more affordable than it ever was. It is the ability of businessmen to access large quantities of capital with relevant efficiency that made the introduction of computers, fax machines, phones, cable TVs, and new drugs possible. It is access to this capital that allows successful businesses to grow and expand, increasing the productivity of labor and our standard of living. Alternatively, financial markets assist in the elimination of non-productive businesses by not providing these firms with capital needed to survive. Financial markets and institutions are continuously working to help restructure business in an effort to increase efficiency and productivity. Yet these markets and the individuals that work in them are continuously under attack. Financiers such as JP Morgan and Michael Milken have found themselves being persecuted by both intellectuals and the common man. They have stood naked before their accusers, unable to provide a defense. The goal of this course is to illustrate how important it is that these men and the institutions they represent get a principal defense. My purpose is to make real the productive role of financial markets and institutions to make real the heroic economic role of the financier. In doing so, we will identify the attack that is being launched against these men and institutions and the causes for this attack. As we will see, this attack is rooted in a bad philosophy and our only hope of defeating it is with a consistent rational philosophy, Objectivism. It is my goal to convince you of the importance of these institutions and the significance of the battle being waged against them. It is one battle among many in the war for the survival of our civilization. I hope to arm you with some of the knowledge necessary to help win this particular battle. Now, before we go on, I'd like to go over the structure of the course in terms of what we will be covering. Today, we will be covering section two, which is going to focus on the attack on financial markets and the first part of section three, the productive role of businessman and capitalist. Tomorrow, we will finish section three and go on to section four, which I hope to complete. Then we will take one concrete example, our financial markets and their productive role. We will take the stock market. Then we will take one particular role of the stock market. It's role in helping corporate restructuring. We will talk about takeovers, hostile takeovers, LBOs, the role of financiers in all of those. So we will go from a relatively abstract defense of financial markets to some very concrete examples as we go along. We will end the course with a defense, a philosophical defense of financial markets and a critique of some of the ways these markets are being, the attempts at defending them today by conservatives and libertarians. So let's start with the attack. What are financial markets attacked for? Now, I don't have to tell this audience that our culture is antagonistic in general towards businessman and particular towards financiers, especially successful ones. This is reflected in almost every art form in existence today. And it is reflected in the media. I mean, just open the New York Times on any given day and read an article about Wall Street and you will find a depiction of financiers that does not present them in a positive light. And we will see some concrete phenomena. Now, let's start with movies. How movies portray financiers? Well, I can think of the number of movies that have presented financiers that have been made over the last 15 years. Two that come to mind. One is Barbarians at the Gate. Many of you have seen of it. It's a depiction of the takeover, the LBO of R. J. Nabisco. The other one, Wall Street, a much more significant movie because of its aesthetic qualities. It is aesthetically a good movie. It is well acted. It is shot well. It is presented artistically. Let's look at what, in what light these movies have presented financiers and financial markets. So hopefully, how many of you have seen Wall Street? Okay, so almost all of you. How's finances presented in Wall Street? Greedy. Greedy. What else? Evil bastards. That's right. Unscrupulous. Emol. Completely emol. There is a dichotomy between productivity and financiers. I mean, for example, with the airline company, the union labor father of the kid, wanting to be productive and produce aircraft versus financier. So instead of being viewed as facility in finance, it's actually under mining. That's facility and productivity under mining. They make this very explicit. This is not a productive endeavor in the world of the movie Wall Street. Wall Street is get wealthy not by creating anything of value, but by buying and selling at the expense of others. And this is said explicitly in the movie. The rich get rich not by hard work and intelligence, but by exploiting the poor. Now, Wall Street is unique. It is one of the most Marxist movies I have ever seen. It is explicitly Marxist. There is one line that the father says that is, I was shocked when I heard it. I couldn't believe it. The father says at some point, he says, the only difference between the building of the pyramids in Egypt and the building of the Empire State Building is that when they built the Empire State Building, they were unions. Equating what? Voluntary labor with slavery. In other words, labors are the ones that make things. They have continuously taught history being exploited by the rich. There's no difference between a slave in Egypt and a guy on the assembly line. It's exactly the same thing. Only from, I mean this is direct from Marx. Money corrupts. Remember Bud? When he comes to the business originally, has some ideals, but as soon as the money starts getting a sense of the money, that's involved, it completely corrupts him, turns him completely immoral. Financiers are not productive. They are purely paper pushes. And something that this movie brings out, which I think we'll see a number of times illustrated throughout the course, parallel that is made between finance and warfare. Think of the terms used in the movie. Hostile takeover. Takeover defense. Trench warfare. This is all quote straight out of the movie. Blow them away. Rip their throats out. Right in the opening scene, there's talk of machine guns, even though it's not really relevant to anything. The one book that is recommended by Geico, to the young investment banker, is what? The Art of War. Business, but particularly finance, as warfare. Again, what is warfare? Warfare is destructive, not productive. Warfare is a zero sum game. There is no gain from warfare. There is no productive capacity that comes out of warfare. Warfare is purely destructive. And that parallel throughout the movie, and throughout many writings on finance, is made. That finance is destructive, it is not productive. Wall Street was a relatively successful movie. It did fairly well at the box office, and it has done fairly well at video stores. Now, let's look at some of the books that were written in the 1980s about finance. Now, this is not that there are 100 books out there and I've selected the ones with the worst titles. These are typical. So these are some titles of books from the 1980s. Den of Thieves, The Greed Syndrome, and Ethical Sickness in American Capitalism. The Predators' Ball, a license to steal the untold story of Michael Milken and the conspiracy to bulk the nation. Inside Job, the looting of America's SNLs. All of these books imply, tell a story about corruption, immorality, theft in financial circles in the United States. So Wall Street is a corrupt, inept, dangerous, destructive place. And there are very few titles. There are very few books that were written that have any other kind of view. And these, again, were all did very well during the 1980s. Now, to illustrate this point further, one of the best-selling novels in the 1980s, depicting Wall Street, depicting the culture of New York at the time, was The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolf. How many of you have read that? This scene will be familiar. The Vanities depicts a successful, extremely successful bond trader. He's referred to as the master of the universe. He's so good at what he does. Who's about to close a deal which is going to net him tens of millions of dollars. It's a bond deal. He's selling bonds. In this scene that I'm going to read you a bit out of, he is trying to explain to his young daughter what it is that he does. This scene illustrates, one, the inability of financiers to defend themselves, to tell in simple terms what it is that they actually do. And be the perception of our culture of what it is, or what it is that they do in its nature. So this is from The Bonfire of the Vanities. And this is Sherman trying to explain to his daughter what he does. A bond is a way of loaning people money. Let's say you want to build a road. And it's not a little road, but a big highway. Like the highway we took up to Maine last summer. Or you want to build a big hospital. Well, that requires a lot of money. More money that you could ever get by just going to a bank. So what you do is, you issue what are called bonds. You build roads and hospitals, daddy? That's what you do? Now both his father and mother started laughing. They're in the background. He gave them an openly reproachful looks, which only made them merry. Judy, his wife, was smiling with what appeared to be a sympathetic twinkle. No, I don't actually build them, sweetheart. I handle the bonds and the bonds are what make it possible. You help build them? Well, in a way, which ones? Which ones? You said roads and hospitals. Well, not any one specifically. The road to Maine? Now both his father and mother were giggling. They're infuriating giggle of people who are trying their best not to laugh right in your face. No, not the, I think you're in over your head, Sherman, said his mother. Now eventually, Judy, his wife comes into the rescue and comes to explain what bonds are. Daddy doesn't build roads or hospitals. He doesn't help build them. But he does handle the bonds for people who raise the money. Bonds? Yes. Just imagine that a bond is a slice of cake and you didn't bake the cake. And every time you hand somebody a slice of the cake, a tiny little bit comes off, like a little crumb, and you can keep that. Judy was smiling and so was Campbell the little girl who seemed to realize that this was a joke, a kind of fairy tale based on what her daddy did. Little crumbs, she said encouragingly. Yes, sir, Judy. Oh, you have to imagine little crumbs, but a lot of little crumbs. If you pass around enough slices of cake, then pretty soon you have enough crumbs to make a gigantic cake. Now what does this tell us about how finance is perceived? Parasitic, all you do is there's a finite cake. There's a cake that somebody else baked. All that finance does is it cuts up the pieces and distributes it and collects the crumbs that fall off the bottom. So not only doesn't it do anything to enlarge the cake, they actually make the cake smaller by taking the crumbs. Now remember the image of the cake because pie dividing. It's the same idea as we hear a lot in the popular press about how the pie is divided. The rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer and so on. And we'll see, we'll come back to this pie dividing idea. The cake dividing, the finance, all it does is it divides up cakes of other people's cakes. It does nothing to enlarge the cake itself. Visit O'Reilly Auto Parts today for our free check engine light help. O'Reilly Auto Parts, better parts, better prices every day. O, O, O, O'Reilly Auto Parts. So popular literature, the books written on the topic nonfiction, the movies that are made all have a common theme. They all present financiers as not productive, parasitical, usually immoral, many of them steal and lie and cheat, a horrible view of what the financier and finance are all about. Let's look a little bit because all of you have lots of experiences. Let's look a little bit at the popular media, newspapers and radio and TV. One of the things that the media has done historically and is doing right now is it presents an image of Wall Street versus Main Street, pitting them one against the other. Now, what do they mean when they say Main Street? What are they referring to? Every day they're talking about something in economic activity. What consumer, what were you going to say? Finance versus productive industrial activity. Yes, I think when they talk about Main Street, they're talking about manufacturing. They're talking about places where you build things with your hands. They're talking about the assembly plant where cars are built because they're talking about blue-collar labor. They pit Wall Street versus the factory flow where you can see the product being made, where people are working with their hands to make the product. The reason they are doing this is because manufacturing is very perceptual. It is very close to the common man. It is very close to the audience. It is something people understand. Now, the further away you get from the assembly line, the further away you get from working with your hands, from creating something through manual labor, the more negative is the presentation by the media. So we're going to skip a few levels and let's go to the CEOs. What are the CEOs presented by the media? Well, I'm going to use, as an example, the recent downsizing in a way companies have restructured, laid off many employees, maybe broken up some of the company into divisions and so on, like AT&T has been doing. How has the media treated the CEOs of these companies? Well, probably the best illustration of this was about two months ago a Newsweek cover story that had on its front page five photographs of five CEOs of companies. And as the title, corporate killers. Killers. New York Times, when it ran a week-long series on downsizing, the first article in the series was the title on the battlefields of business, millions of casualties. Again, notice the war terminology repeating itself. So CEOs are bad guys because they're responsible for laying off all these people for causing this unemployment for destroying people's lives. But who is behind the CEOs? Who is making the CEOs do this? There is a dark force out there. Well, shareholders, and who are the shareholders? If they want one term to capture it, it's Wall Street. Because CEOs are maximizing shareholder wealth. Wall Street is forcing them to do this. So the dark power behind downsizing, behind the actions of the CEOs are the financiers. All the providers of capital is Wall Street. The markets, financial markets. Wall Street makes the CEO do these horrible things. In a recent book by Alan Downs, a senior corporate consultant writes, again, notice the terminology. U.S. companies must answer to a troop of Wall Street warriors who are ever vigilant to attack any management that fails to deliver expected earnings. The preferred solution has been to cut operating expenses. Cut, gorge, rip off until the numbers look right. Troop, warriors, attack, cut, rip off, gorge. There's no doubt how he perceives the world of finance and the world of business. So the real demons behind the wave of downsizing that we're going through, supposedly going through right now is Wall Street. All the financiers are the financial markets. Now, is this just a historical anomaly? Is this just something that's going on right now? Or has this been something that has been going on throughout our history? I'm going to go back in American history about 100 years and take two brief examples. You could get hundreds of these. The first is J.P. Morgan. J.P. Morgan was probably the greatest banker that this country's ever seen. Greatest financier that this country's ever seen. He personally was responsible for putting together the major industrial companies of this country. From the steel industry, if you go industry by industry, almost each one of them. J.P. Morgan had a hand in putting them together, making show management did a good job providing the capital for their expansion. Yet, what is J.P. Morgan considered? Together with a lot of industrialists of his time. A robber band. J.P. Morgan was considered a robber band. And why was he vilified? Because he made money. J.P. Morgan was a very wealthy man. Twice, J.P. Morgan saved, single-handedly saved the U.S. government from bankruptcy. Yet, he was accused in the press for making money off the deal. He was never praised for coming to the assistance of the U.S. government. He was accused of making money from it. He should have done it for charity. So J.P. Morgan is one of the examples. Historical examples from about a hundred years back of a financier who was vilified and persecuted during his lifetime. Now, if we look back to the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Great Depression was blamed by the politicians and by the media on whom? On the bankers. The bankers were responsible. It was the bankers who caused the stock market to reach those extravagant heights in 1929. It was the bankers who caused the market to collapse. It was the bankers' responsibility for having all the banks closed during the 1930s. It was the bankers who weren't loaning money out to businesses to expand and to employ more people. The Great Depression was the bankers' fault. Now, when Congress was holding hearings to regulate the banking industry, now 1933, 1934 are the major banking regulation, banking and securities regulation this country has seen. They still exist to this day, most of those regulations. Before that, we had relative freedom in the banking sector. But since then, it's been completely regulated as we will see. So these are hearings where they are about to decide who should come to testify about banking regulation. And I want to quote from you from Congressman John Dingle in 1933. And this is a quote from Richard Salisman's book, The Collapse of Deposit and Insurance, The Case Revolution. I highly recommend the book if you want to understand the SNL crisis. It's The Collapse of Deposit and Insurance, The Case Revolution. So this is Congressman Dingle in voicing his opinion on whether bankers should be invited to testify about banking regulation. I believe that the myophic banker as an advisor should receive about as much consideration at the hands of the house as a brain jackass on the prairies of Missouri. They prove by the inability to maintain their own business that they have absolutely no right to advise the house as to what course we should follow. So here they are considering the most major banking regulation in the history of the United States, bankers excluded. Does that remind you of anything? What does it remind you of? Something recent, like three years ago. Is it Hillary Clinton's health care? Health care. They had all these committees about health care reform, hundreds of members in the committee. They would not listen to doctors. They were going to revamp a whole health care industry without taking any input from doctors. Historical power. These forces work in very similar ways. So during the Great Depression, not only were the bankers blamed for the Great Depression, but they were blamed to such an extent that you don't even want to talk to them about what went wrong, maybe what we can fix. If you take the perception of the regulator, these are things that we hope to, so that the industry will become better in the future. Or if you go quote from President Roosevelt at the time. And he's making here biblical references to magnify his point. The money changes have fled from the high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profits. The rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed. Through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence have admitted failure and have abdicated. Practices of unscrupulous money changes stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men. So Roosevelt is feeding on the Christian story of Jesus throwing the money changes from the temple using those images in order to project his view and his administration's view of financiers in general during the 1930s. We've taken them down from the temples. We've thrown them out. We don't need these guys because they don't do anything productive. What do we need people who just take crumbs off of cakes? All they do is divide up the pieces and they take some stuff. These are pure parasites. Now if you go back in history, if you look at all the conspiracy theories that people have come up with, both on the extreme right and on the extreme left, all of them, all of them involve bankers. Jewish bankers usually. But bankers are deemed to be those who want to take over the world, control everything. If you go, if you've listened to Dr. Picoff's radio show, you don't know how many wackos out there who believe in these conspiracy theories they are. But all of them, and they almost always mentioned Rockefeller, somebody like that, it always come back to a bank to touching on financial institutions and markets. They are deemed as this mysterious dark force that's behind the CEOs. But if you're a conspiracy theorist, they're not just behind the CEOs. They're behind governments. They're behind everything. And this goes way back. Now, when I teach my class in finance, I give them one assignment that proves to be the most difficult in the quarter. I ask my students, and I give them four weeks to do this assignment, I ask the students to find one positive portrayal of a successful financier in either literature or movies. And of course, when they, after three weeks, they've looked in the library and gone to the video store and they can't find anything and they come begging. I tell them to read Atlas Shrug, where they will find plenty on them. It just is very difficult to find. Now, there's some here and there, but they are the exception, a very small exception. Okay, so we've seen that financiers today and at least over the last 100 years have been presented or viewed as not productive. They are viewed as men of war, as destructive. Finance is viewed as a zero-sum game. There's no way to expand, but it's all the same cake. You don't grow the cake. You just live with the same cake. Finance is viewed as corrupt and financiers are viewed as forcing actions on other participants in the U.S. economy that are harmful to Americans, harmful to American workers, harmful to American entrepreneurs. I mean, the whole range they will use. Financiers are doing things that are bad for the country and they rally people around these cries and it has become a very, it is very common to hear. When I teach a class at Santa Clara University, I teach a class that's called Finance and Ethics. And when I tell that to people, what is the response? What do you think the response is? Isn't that a contradiction in terms? And these people are sincere. People that don't know a lot about it and that is the immediate automatic response because it is so ingrained in our culture that these things cannot be won. Any questions to this point? Okay, I'm going to shift to a more positive note. There's so much negative we can take at once. I want action. We're going big. Elegance. 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Yes, and I'll get back to that. I'll get back to that, because tomorrow we'll be talking about the causes and I'll bring up Christianity and we'll look back and see that that's been kind of ingrained. It's in Christianity going way, way back. So let's move to a more positive topic and look at the question of maybe the right. What is it that makes them wrong? Let's look at the productive nature of these financial markets and institutions. What makes them important? Why bother to defend them? Is it true that financiers are just parasites? Is it true that they don't create anything? Is finance a zero sum gain? So that's section 3 that we're moving on to. Now before I get to financiers themselves, before I get to financial activity itself, I'd like to cover something a little broader and that is the productive role of businessmen and capitalists which is a little broader than looking at the financiers specifically. Now it's important here to note that businessmen, capitalists, financiers have a productive role only in the division of labor economy, only in the division of labor society where there is no division of labor, there is no need for businessmen. You produce everything that you consume. There is no trade. There is no need for business. Manual labor is the source of all productivity in a society with no division of labor. You grow the things, you make whatever tools you need and that's it. So we are assuming a world of division of labor of specialization of trade. So let's look at the productive role. Now in looking at businessmen, I am going to divide the productive role, their productive role into three. You can be all three, you can be any two or you can be just one of them but these are the productive activities that businessmen are involved in. The first is as providers of capital. The second as managers and the third as entrepreneurs. Now let's look at them in that order. We'll start with providers of capital. Why is providing capital a productive activity? What is it that it does? Now think of manufacturing a car, an automobile. Let's say you've got a bunch of people who know how to build an engine, know how to make the body of a car, know how to paint it, know how to do all the different things that is required to build a car and they all get together and they say, okay, we want to start a car company, an auto company, we want to build cars. What's the first thing they're going to have to do? Well, they're going to have to buy a plant so they need some money to buy the plant, buy the land and then buy the plant, buy some equipment. Then they're going to have to design a car and designing a car can take anywhere from six months to, you know, if you're working on satin it might take 10 years until you have a final product that you can sell. During this period between now and five, 10 years from now when you actually have the product for sale, they're going to have to get salaries from somewhere. So they're going to have to either go without any salaries or it's unclear how they're going to do this. Before production even begins, capital is needed. Capital is needed to buy the land, to buy the factory and to employ the people to pay them salaries. Five years of salaries are paid, the product is put to market, then you start getting revenues, then money starts coming in. Now you start paying the employees from the revenues and the providers of capital take a percentage of profit, what's left is profit, as a return on their investment. But think of it, they are taking the risk that there will be a product one day, that it will sell and in the meantime they are financing the productive activity. These laborers who know how to build the engine, who know how to build the doors, who know how to put the car together could do absolutely nothing without the capital that makes it possible to build the factory and to employ them. They would have no income for that period of time. Even if somehow the factory appeared magically. This is an important point to remember when finance is pitted against Main Street, when it is financed that makes Main Street possible. These people will not have jobs if not for the capital being provided. So this is the point that is made in OPA of the harmony of interests between men. There is no conflict between manual labor and the capitalist. There is no conflict between manual labor and the providers of capital. So the providers of capital allow for the creation of companies and as a consequence allow for the creation of jobs. In order to do this they are willing to take on risk and they are willing to postpone the return on the investment. They have to look far into the future. Now that is one role one productive role that providers of capital are involved in. The other is let's say the existing relates to existing businesses. What we just talked about related to new businesses. The other relates to existing businesses. In a way providers of capital coordinate the division of labor between firms. Because remember not only do we have division of labor among individuals we also have division of labor among firms. The other is the and other is the and other is the and other is the and other is the and other is the and other is the providers of capital which companies will grow because they will provide them with capital and which companies will not because they won't provide them with capital. Hopefully you have seen other people's money. It is financial markets automobile industry, thus allowing the automobile industry to hire more people and grow, and the host buggy industry to maintain its current size and slowly shrink away into oblivion. But financial markets decide through their investments which industries would get capital therefore grow into the future and which industries will not. And in that way they coordinate the way in which industries are divided, which industries will do well in the future and which don't. They coordinate the division of labor between firms, between companies. They determine who gets capital and who doesn't. Okay. So that's the providers of capital. Now let's look at the second productive role of businessmen. That is of managers. What do managers do? What is their productive role in our economy? Well if you think of capital markets as coordinating the division of labor between firms, managers coordinate and organize the division of labor within the firm. They say you're an engineer, you design cars. You're a manual laborer, you put the door in like this. And it's better to put the door in before we put the glass in or after we put the glass in whatever the correct order is. This is the most efficient way to do it. So they organize the structure of the company within to make it efficient. They plan and manage the firm. They have the widest perspective, the long term view. They are the guiding force for the company. They manage the firm's resources, both human and natural resources. They decide when to expand, when to shrink. Again, they take the long term broad view of where the company is going. A view that can only be taken from the top. Can only be understood from the top. So that's the managers. I mean if you think about it, think about again the auto employees getting together deciding they want to build a car. Now who does what and when and how and in what order and so on. Somebody has to guide that process. And it's the manager who guides that process and that is his contribution to the productivity. But it's a vital contribution because a car will not get built unless he's there to organize it. I mean even if it's one of the workers says, here this is what we all have to do, he turns himself into a manager and he's being productive as a manager. Okay, let's look at the third. Businesses role as entrepreneur. Now the way I see an entrepreneur's role is as somebody who is out there discovering profit opportunities. Opportunities for a more efficient division of labor, or a more efficient use of capital, or more efficient use of resources, but he's out there discovering opportunities that did not exist before. Finding money making possibilities that he and his actual or potential competitors had not thought of beforehand. His main role is of discoveries of opportunities. So entrepreneurs do things like form new businesses, introduce new products, identify new markets, identify new resources for the firm, and find money making opportunities where nobody else had seen them before. Something incredible has arrived at Disney California Adventure Park. Vailing, I want action. We're going big. Elegance. And we're going fast. Speed. The Coaster is here and now open at Pixar Gear at Disney California Adventure Park. Bring your super family and your friends and come celebrate Friendship and Beyond at Pixar Fest before it ends September 3rd, only at Disneyland Resort. Attractions and entertainment subject to change without notice. And by doing this, they create new industries, create new fields. They make everything run more efficiently. If you think about what profits are, again, this is a point from Oprah, profits are the difference between what we make, the income that we receive, minus our expenses. If an entrepreneur, in his attempt to maximize profits, will find ways to either reduce our expenses or increase our income, by doing that, he is being productive. He is increasing the productivity of the firm. He is allowing the firm to make more money, to be more productive. So all of these, all of these functions of the businessman, the head of capital, as a manager, as an entrepreneur, they all involved in raising the productivity of manual labor. In doing so, they raise real wages and they raise our standard of living. They make either the goods we purchase cheaper or our salaries higher. In either case, our standard of living has increased. So they provide us with products that we didn't even imagine could be possible. Think of what we thought 20 years ago about what would be possible 20 years into the future. And we live in a world that is amazing in far as what we can do with computers and technology and so on. What I'd like to do is I'd like to go back to each one of these and see how it is, maybe in concrete terms, how it is that they increase the productivity of manual labor, the productivity of labor in each one of the cases. Providers of capital. How do providers of capital increase the productivity of labor? Make people more productive. Yeah. Okay. So part of it is the capital is used in order to modernize production equipment. Now less people, less labor is being used to make more products. If productivity means increasing things that are more valuable, producing things that are more valuable by directing capital from industry A to industry B, they can, that can result in goods or services that people value more being produced, instead of increasing productivity. Exactly. Think about a simple example. Let's say we've got an employee in the horse buggy industry. He's making horse buggies. And we've got Ford, who's just started an auto company. And the capital is now shifting to Ford so he can now employ this person who's working in the horse buggy industry. By having him employed in manufacturing cars, he has increased the productivity of that specific employee. That person who is doing maybe a very similar job in both places is a lot more productive building cars than he is in building horse buggies. Because automobiles are a lot more efficient, a lot more useful product, managers. How to managers. Let me take one more example that's from starting up a company. Let's look at how in a sense that they coordinate the division of labor between industries. Let's imagine a kind of a socialistic mechanism, egalitarian mechanism for distribution of capital. Let's say there's a part of capital. We have one big part. And we divide it equally among all industries versus we have financiers who only invest where they think they're going to make money. Which is going to give us the more productive outcome? Is it when the horse buggy industry gets the same amount of money as the car industry? When the mainframe computer industry gets the same amount of money as the personal computer industry, are we going to increase productivity that way? Or is it when the capital is looking for the most efficient, most profit-making opportunity and therefore shifts to cars, shifts to personal computers? So you can see that by that shift you're making those industries more productive. You're providing with more capital, they can do more things. You get economies of scale which lowers the cost. You get multiple effects just by that shift of capital from one industry to another industry. Now let's look at managers. How do they do this? Well, this is simpler. This is the example. Let's assume you have the guy in the assembly line designing the cars. And he's painstaking. He takes them hours. He knows something about designing cars, but he's no engineer. And it's taking years to design a new car. And you as a manager notice that this is going on. You say, listen, you're very good at building engines. Go build the engine. I'll hire a MIT grad and put him an engineer and let him design the cars. Is the manual labor who is designing the cars more productive in designing cars or in building engines? In building engines. Is the productivity of the plant in general increased by a more efficient division of labor within the plant? It has increased. Are cars going to be cheaper? Yes, they are because of these efficiencies that we've produced. But again, through this managerial activity, we have managed to reduce the cost of the product or increase the profitability of the product, thus increasing the productivity. Entrepreneurs. How does this apply to entrepreneurs? But you got an example? How would you play the same principle of increasing productivity, increasing the productivity of labor as a result of entrepreneurial activity? You discover a new process, let's say. You discover a new way to build cars, a completely new way that nobody had ever thought of before. And the only reason it's worth putting into place is what? If it could create either more cars for less money, either it's less expensive or more profitable. By doing that, you're either making better cars or cheaper cars. You've increased the productivity of making cars. You've increased the productivity of the man on the assembly line making those cars. And now cars are either better or cheaper for the consumer. What? Both. Yes, you're right. So all of these, all of these three, add to raising the productivity of labor and increasing our standard of living. Now, can you be more than one of them at the same time? Can you be a manager and an entrepreneur? Well, hopefully good managers are both. Bill Gates has to be continuously both an entrepreneur in his finding new ideas for software, new areas to integrate into his business, and a good manager in organizing Microsoft from within. Can you be a capital provider and a manager? Yes. An example of all three, for example, would be the guy who started up Netscape recently. He provided the capital. He provided managerial ability and entrepreneurship of building a new company with a completely new idea. You can be any combination of these. Now, just somebody in the previous class asked me for an example of a pure capital provider, an individual who's a capital provider. Now, of course, markets provide capital. Companies like Merrill Lynch, every bank, every bank, one of its roles is to provide capital. But if you take people like the Bass Brothers, I don't know how many of you have heard of them, they're billionaires. They provide, that's what they do with their money. They provide capital for businesses, either startups or sometimes mature businesses that have suddenly a growth opportunity in some area, somewhere where they can think they can make a lot of money. Or you have like this guy who started Netscape, where people like that in Silicon Valley, you have venture capitalists, what are called venture capitalists. These are people that solicit ideas from entrepreneurs. Send me your idea for what, for the product you want to create. Product you want to produce and I will provide the capital. So there's a lot of pure providers of capital. Stop by any of the 133 Los Angeles area O'Reilly Auto Parts stores where you'll find everyday low prices on the parts you need to keep your vehicle at its best. Our guaranteed low prices ensure you're always getting our best deal. In fact, we'll match any auto parts stores price on any like item. O'Reilly Auto Parts, better parts, better prices every day. So what's the problem with your car? A shutter. So when does it happen? Once a month, when I see my payment, I start shaking. Ah, well you got an interest rate issue. Yeah. Well, here's a pro tip. You may be able to refinance your auto loan with Westcom Credit Union. As a member owned financial co-op, Westcom offers great low rates. Wow, Westcom sounds like a smart move. Yeah, just like changing your oil. Westcom, the best bank for you, may not be a bank at all. Westcom is an equal opportunity lender and federally insured by NCUA. Certain terms may apply. By far the largest source of this type of capital actually doesn't get a lot of press, but it's in every city you have hundreds of successful doctors and businessmen who have wealth. And then they see a good, smart idea with a couple of people and they back them up and it happens all the time. But in a sense, yes, they do that directly through backing them up. Or they do it by investing, by putting their money in the bank. As we'll see when we talk about the productive or financial market specifically. Yeah. We also have industries that are successful in one process. We take that money and finance it subsidiary. Yes. Pure capital into that new subsidiary. Yes, and again, all those companies through their profits pay large dividends to their shareholders and their shareholders turn around and invest that money in new companies. So they are a lot of sources of capital out there. And we will see where that money is being generated from when we talk specifically about capital markets. Now, all of these, the entrepreneur, the manager, and the financier. What is unique about all of them is the use of their mind. These are men of the mind. It is men of the mind that make, that increase the productivity of the laborer. The mind has the dominant role in the productive activity. Count it to what we are told repeatedly by the artworks and the press and everybody else about what, who really produces what. Manual production, manual labor on the scale we see around us would be impossible without these men of the mind, without the businessmen, entrepreneurs, and capitalists. In that sense, this is just an illustration of Ayn Rand's principle of the pyramid of ability. You know that principle? Where the pyramid is really upside down. It is the few men of the mind that hold the whole world on their shoulders. It starts with the few and all the manual laborers in the world actually depend on the businessmen, on the inventors, on the entrepreneurs, on the financiers. It's a reversal of Marx. In Marx, the pyramid is such that the financiers, the businessmen, the capitalists, what are they? They're the exploiters of that lower level. They don't do anything, they don't produce anything, they just sit on their backs. Taking away their money, exploiting it. Ayn Rand reverses that and says, no. Whatever wealth the laborer has, it is due to these men. Now, next time, we've got about nine minutes. I think next time we will talk about the economic and productive or financial markets and institutions. Now, if there aren't any questions, I can start now, but I'd rather. I'd rather do that tomorrow. Any questions on what we've covered today? Yeah. A question about the quality of products improving, and that's one of the things entrepreneurs do. With all the regulations and the attack on the financial market tiers, it's interesting enough to think that the quality hasn't been going backwards, or has it been of products, that they are still continuing to be improved. Well, I think that's a tribute to the resilience of businessmen and financiers out there. That in spite of all their attacks against them, they continue to be productive. And they continue to be brilliant. And to find ways around the regulations, we'll see this throughout the course, they find ways around the regulations, they find ways to produce in spite of what people are saying and trying to force them into doing. The real contrast, though, which we can't make is between what is and what could have been. That we can leave only to the imagination, but it is clear that what we could have is a lot more than what we have. Further comment, although you can point to the increased ability that we have, or that entrepreneurs have provided the ability to make quality products, there is by far a way more garbage out there than there is good. I mean, there's a lot of products out there that aren't quality and a new full part. And that might reflect the influence that you're talking about, the fact that because there is this technology for the businessmen, there's a result in a lot of garbage out there. The products we have are not consistent in quality. And to the extent that they're not, I would say that as a consequence of regulation and taxes and attitudes in our culture towards businessmen and finance it. I didn't understand the strong statement that providers of capital determined, underlying determined, the division of labor between firms. I would have thought they're one of the determiners, meaning that, for example, an entrepreneur is another entrepreneurial activity in management activity or another entrepreneur is another entrepreneurial activity, and that's what I'm trying to determine. If I look at a business process, I might say, there's a certain inefficiency in firms of industry A and B dealing with each other, I can make money being a middleman, and I might become very successful at that. And by doing that, I might restructure the industry that an entire new sub-industry might develop, because I certainly need finance. And if I can show that there's profit to be made, a financer has to back me. But I wouldn't say it's the financier that is determining the structure, because that would imply almost a kind of central planning at the financier level, as if the financier has this grand scheme of how the industry should be organized. I think it's an interplay of risk-taking. It is an interplay of risk-taking, but the financier does not necessarily initiate the process. But the financier is a necessary step. And it is the movement of, for example, it is the buying and selling of certain stocks, or the buying of certain stocks and the selling of other stocks that is going to determine the allocation of capital between industries regardless of what entrepreneurs think. Now, it's the entrepreneurs that will lead some stocks to be bought and other stocks to be sold. So you sell the host buggy industry when you realize that entrepreneurs are establishing an automobile industry. But the allocation, once entrepreneurs are set in motion, once the ideas have been created, it's like saying, well, you need engineers to build the car. It's not managers who are really responsible without the engineer doesn't get built. Everybody has to work. Again, it's this idea that there are no conflicts. Everybody works in harmony. But each one is a necessary link in the chain. You can have progress without entrepreneurs. You can't have progress without capitalists. You can't have progress without good managers. So they're all necessary. But I agree. Maybe the statement was a little too strong. Yeah, the term has a sense of almost like centralized planning, like a group of financiers around saying, here's how the industry is structured. Well, as we'll see, it's a market process, which is an important point, yeah. The only point I was going to make, though, is I think they do influence, to some degree, in that people that provide capital are always looking for the best opportunity and the best return on their dollar. So they're going to look at the industries that seem to be leaders in the industry and say, especially when it comes to expansion, so they're going to provide that money for expansion, which is going to cause that company to grow, which will lead the rest of the market. And in a sense, they determine who will become an entrepreneur and who will have a good idea and go to sleep on it. They will never come to fruition. The capital markets are the ones that make entrepreneurs. Because you're only an entrepreneur if you act on the idea. If you just have the idea and it stays in your head, you're not an entrepreneur. And what makes the action possible is capital. Actual implementing your entrepreneurial idea requires capital. In that sense, I think they determine it. But of course, they don't come up with the idea. And it's not central planning, even. And that's one of the fallacies of socialism, of course. They say, look, this big market can allocate capital, well, we're smarter than all these millions of people, we'll just do it. Was that a hint? How do you explain the differences or the contradiction, almost, in people denouncing Wall Street and yet sending massive amounts of money in their 401Ks to the street in order to get on the bad way, other than an ability to. Let's get to that next time when I talk about the causes of the attack and about the more the productive or financial markets. But if I don't get to it, then ask that question next time, because it's an important one, yeah. Is it becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between Main Street and Wall Street, or at least to conceptualize Main Street as blue-collar workers, the more service-oriented and white-collar, professional-oriented, hour economy becomes? And is that going to change the perception? Well, I think that there are a lot of things that can potentially change the perception. I think as you'll see, I think that the problems are so deeply rooted in philosophy that just these demographic changes are not going to be enough. But you even notice that in the 80s, it was derogatory said about the 80s that there's a move from manufacturing to service. It's even service is somewhat demeaned, it's not a real job. There are other things that are going on. For example, which I find interesting, labor unions, the pension funds of labor unions are becoming dominant investors, it relates to your point. So the laborers are becoming capitalists, which might change their perspective, at least with regard to this point. But then I've got quotes from people running some of these funds that are scary, because you have the other side, what if they don't? What if they try and manipulate markets in order to reinforce their stupid beliefs? I don't think it's going to be enough. I think you're right in the sense that our markets are becoming so interwoven globally as well as within the United States, that the separation of manufacturing in Wall Street is becoming less clear. I don't think that's going to be enough. I don't think it's enough that people are going to see the 401k grow and grow and grow. Just wait until the next stock market crash. That's what I would say. And they'll come out in droves and criticize Wall Street for manipulating stocks and whatever. And forcing them to put their money into pension funds that invest in stocks or something like that. So what needs to be done is more philosophical, has to go to the root of the problem. We'll talk about that more next time and then the rest of the course. So I will see you tomorrow. And try and get here. I know it's hard after lunch to get up and get into class. But please try and get here in time. It's a little distracting otherwise. Thanks. This course continues with lecture two. Stop by any of the 133 Los Angeles area O'Reilly Auto Parts stores, where you'll find everyday low prices on the parts you need to keep your vehicle at its best. Our guaranteed low prices ensure you're always getting our best deal. 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