 Thank you very much for attending our conference. Now I would like to introduce the chairman of the board of Einar Institute, the author of several books including Free Market Revolution and Equal is Unfair, a businessman and an entrepreneur, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Jaron Brooke. Thank you all and thank you all for coming and it's great to be in Poland once again. I think this is my fourth or fifth, I don't know, I've lost count I guess, but in Poland I think I have the third number of likes on Facebook, so number one is US, number two to anybody want to guess what number two is, Brazil, yeah you've heard me say that, Brazil and then Poland, so this is the third country in which I've loved the most, so thank you all and those of you who do not listen to my podcast or your own book show, you should and those of you who do listen to my podcast, thank you, I very much appreciate having fans all over the world and having people who listen all over the world and you know we're going to keep it going so anticipate a lot more podcasts to come. So we're going to talk today about equality and really I think equality of outcome, equality of income, equality of wealth, equality in any form of outcome is probably the most evil idea in all of human history. I cannot think of anything that has resulted in more deaths and greater destruction and in more ruined lives than the idea that we all should be equal because there's only one sense in which we truly are equal, which I think those who advocate for equality distort and pervert because there is one sense of equality that's meaningful and that is the sense in which the founding fathers of America talk about it when they declare in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal. In what sense are we all equal? The only sense in which we are all equal is that we are all equally free. We all have equally have a right to our life, liberty, property and pursuit of happiness. We are all human beings and therefore have a right to live our lives free of corrosion, free of force, have a right to live our lives in pursuit of the values we deem necessary for our survival and for our flourishing. Nobody has a right to corrosive, nobody has a right to force us, nobody has a right to choose our values for us. That is the only sense in which we are equal because in every other sense we're not. Just look around the room. We're different. All of us, every single person in this room is different from every single other person in this room. There are no two people here that are exactly alike even though these two guys look very much alike. I don't know if they're twins but they look very much alike. They're not alike. They're not the same human being. They don't share the same mind. They don't share the same stomach. One cannot eat for the other. One cannot think for the other. Each one of us has different talents, different abilities, a different personality, a different character, a different morally, with different interests, in our passions, in our pursuits. That's cool. That's indeed beautiful. I mean, if we were all the same, I don't know if you watched Star Trek, I remember you watched Star Trek with the Borg, where everybody is, no, that's boring. The idea that we're all different makes life interesting and of course the fact that we are all different allows for the division of labor in society and the division of labor in society is one of the things that makes us so rich. We have artists, cool, we have financiers, cool, we have programmers, we have entrepreneurs, we have doctors, we have nurses, and it can go on and on and on and on and on. And that's all really fantastic. We are not equal in any regard except in our rights, in our freedoms. So what is it that makes this idea of equality so appealing? Because right now, this idea of inequality, people are blaming every single human problem that exists today on planet Earth on inequality. Our economy is not growing fast enough because of inequality. The poor are not rising out of poverty fast enough because of inequality. Cronism is a consequence of inequality. The lack of growth in the middle class is a consequence of inequality. Terrorism is a consequence of inequality. Global warming, I think, has been attributed to inequality, although it doesn't look like it's warming based on how cold it is outside. I think you guys would actually benefit from a little bit of warming. I always say, if global warming is true, it's great because Canada becomes habitable. Finally, people can live in Canada. We've got at least one Canadian in the audience who knows what I'm talking about, because I don't understand how anybody can live in Canada. It's way too cold. That's why I'm here. There you go. It's still too cold. You've got to come to California. Equality has become the excuse for statists to control us, to regulate us, to restrict our liberties and our freedoms. Indeed, any attempt to reduce inequality necessitates a violation of our equal rights, necessitates a violation of the idea that we all equally free. Just to make us equal, you have to violate somebody's rights so-called in favor of somebody else. You have to take from some and give to others. And I'll illustrate that in a little while. So what makes this idea so appealing? Why are people so drawn to the idea of equality and so horrified by the idea of inequality? And I think it has to do with a number of different things, but really in the way we think about the world, in the way so many people out there in the world think about life and think about the world. And part of it is ignorance and the fact that they don't understand life and they don't understand how people benefit from one another. They don't understand capitalism and free market. Part of it is that they have a wrong view of morality and a wrong philosophical perspective on the world. So think about how people always explain this idea of inequality. They say inequality is immoral. It's not right. Why? Well, because there's this big pie. We call it social wealth or the country's wealth. This big pie represents all of Poland's wealth. And if there's a big pie, why should some people get a big piece and some people get a little piece? When you're hanging out with your friends and you go bring pizza and you buy a pizza, everybody expects to get an equal share of the pizza. And if somebody takes half the pizza right off the bed, you go, oh, wait a minute. That's not nice. That's not right. And people think about the economy and about our world as if we're hanging around in somebody's kitchen and somebody's brought in a big pizza. Now what's wrong with that analogy? What's wrong in thinking of the economy as a pizza or a pie? People talk about the pie, the social pie, and who gets a big piece of the pie? Who gets a little piece of the pie? What's wrong in thinking in those terms? Why isn't it a good way to think about the economy? Well, the first point is, there are a number of reasons why it's wrong. It's really wrong. The first point is, is the pie static in the economy? Is it just one pie that just sits there? And then we get it divided a little bit like this and a little bit like that? No. The fact is that in freedom, in free markets, the pie is ever shrinking, growing. It's ever growing. All activities as traders and producers make the pie grow constantly. Indeed, the trade that we engage in is value-growing, is win-win. Even though, if you're an economist, you know, economists, they like to measure things. Right? And what's the easiest thing to measure? Money. Dollars. So, when I buy an iPhone for 600 bucks, right, yeah, I always use my iPhone in my lectures. If I buy an iPhone for 600 bucks, how much was it worth to me? More than 300 bucks. You're listening. You're more than 600 bucks. That's right. Somebody's read Austin Economics, right? So it's worth more to me than the 600 bucks I gave. I'm better off for having the iPhone and not having 600 dollars. But if I'm Thomas Piketty, the great, in quotes, future Nobel Prize-winning economist, all I can measure are dollars. So when I look at my own wealth, what do I see when I buy my iPhone? I got proven. Because my bank account shows 600 dollars less. And Apple's bank account shows 600 dollars more. And inequality just grew. Apple got a bigger slice of the pie, and I got a smaller one. Because the fact that I got an iPhone is not measured anywhere. I'll give you an even better example of this. My favorite example. Now, I don't know if it works in Poland, you see. How many of you have read Harry Potter? Harry Potter? Oh, okay. Well, once you translate it to Polish, everybody's read it, right? Harry Potter, great. I love Harry Potter. The problem with Harry Potter is it's made me poor. I spent well over $2,000 in Harry Potter. Think of it. I have two boys, I have two sons. They were about the same age as Harry when the books came out, right? So every single book that came out, I had to buy two copies. The night it came out, because they both wanted to read it all night, right? So I had to buy two copies. And then I wanted to read it, so I bought the audio tapes, right? And we'd go on a road trip and we'd listen to it together. That was a family thing we did. So I had to buy three copies of Harry Potter's books every time they came out. But then there were the movies. And I don't think there were just seven movies, right? So seven times three is 21 books I had to buy. And then the movies, but there were like nine or 10 movies because they wanted to maximize the amount of money they made on them, so they cut them up into lots of different pieces, right? So then another 10 movies I had to go to. And then there's all the Disneyland rides and all the stuff. I spent over $2,000 in Harry Potter. And according to Thomas Piketty, I'm $2,000 poorer because of it. And J.K. Rawlins, the woman who wrote Harry Potter, is a billionaire. I mean, how disgusting is that? Like it's horrible. Like inequality's just exploded. I got poor by $2,000, and she got super rich. Because what can't he measure? Ever. Economists cannot measure this. What is it? The value I get and my children get from reading Harry Potter. And the value I get from my children enjoying something. You can't measure that. There's no dollar sign next to enjoyment. There's no dollar sign next to spiritual values. There's no dollar sign next to happiness or fun or however you want to define it. We can only put dollar signs next to money. So the whole debate about these pies assumes a fixed pie. It's all material. There's no actual value there. Just material value, anything you get in exchange. And it's not even material value. Because even though the iPhone, in some ways, is a material value, in other ways it's spiritual value because I can listen to music on it. I can watch TV on it. I can do all these other things on it. I don't even measure this material value. The pie is only dollars. It's only money. And life's not about money. Shocking from a capitalist, I know. But life's not about money. Life's about happiness and fulfillment and success and flourishing, which you need money for. And a lot of money helps. But the measure of one's happiness or the measure of one's fulfillment and flourishing is not how many dollars you have in a bank. And if anything, people who hold money instead of actually spending on things that they enjoy are probably not having as much fun. So there's no pie because the pie grows and the pie's not just money. The pie's also these spiritual values and we can't measure those things so we can't even analogize a pie. So that's one of the problems with pie. It just doesn't work. It doesn't reflect anything about reality. It doesn't tell us anything we didn't know before we used the analogy. This is why analogies and metaphors are very, very dangerous because they usually don't mean anything. But people like to simplify. But when we simplify, we usually lose what's interesting. And in this case, we lose everything that's interesting. But there's another problem with a pie. What assumption do we make when we talk about pies and pizzas? The assumption is that somehow this pie belongs to us. Poland has a pie. But the fact is that Poland doesn't own anything. Poland doesn't create any wealth. Poland doesn't pursue any values. You do. And you do. And you do. And you happen to be Poles and you happen to live and live in Poland. But Poland doesn't exist for all meaningful purposes. What exists are individuals. So yes, as an economist, I can take your pie and your pie and your pie and squish them all together and pretend it's a Polish pie. But it isn't. It's your pie and your pie and your pie. And I have no right to take your pies. What right do I have to your pies? The fact is that each one of us creates his own pie. And how do you get to decide how much of it you get to take? It's my pie. And if I get to keep it, there is no national income. There is no GDP. There is no national wealth. Those abstractions from the fact that you have wealth and you have wealth and you have wealth and you make income and you make income and you make income. These are bad, bad abstractions that are useful for economics. But they're also very confusing because suddenly we think, oh, I'm an American. My GDP is trillions of dollars, 15 trillion dollars. Isn't that cool? And then I get to vote on how much of the trillion dollars, 15 trillion dollars I get to keep. No, you don't. It's not your 15 trillion. If you only make 50,000 a year, that's yours. That's it. If I make a million dollars a year, that's mine. That's it. And you don't get any of mine and I shouldn't be able to get any of yours. And you don't get to score spies together and pretend that they're your pie. So the whole pie analogy is conditioned on collectivism. What is collectivism? Collectivism is the idea that the group is more important than the individual. Really define the group. The nation is more important than the individual or the tribe is more important than the individual or the proletarian is more important than the individual or the race is more important than the individual, or fill in the bank is more important than the individual. And that my friends is anti-liberty, anti-freedom, anti-everything that we should stand for. And that's why I reject all those isms, including the way we use nationalism. Because at the end of the day, nationalism is the idea that the nation is above the individual. And I say, no, nothing is above the individual. There's a nation. All right. Who cares? It's either a rights-protecting nation or a rights-violating nation. Since all nations today are rights-violating nations, some violate it a lot, some violate it a little. I don't want to live in a place where it's violated a little. Not a lot. That's it. I don't care where that is on the planet Earth. I don't care what the color of its skin or the people around me is. I don't care where they come from. I don't even care what language they talk, but they better speak English. Because that's it for me. I want my rights to be violated the least, ideally zero. But that's not happening in my lifetime. So the least is best. That's an individualistic perspective on the world. That is a rights-respecting perspective on the world. The group has no priority over the individual. And what happens when we place the group above the individual? What do we always demand of the individual to do? To sacrifice for the group. Oh, you have a big piece of the pie. You've got to sacrifice a piece of it for us. No. I don't believe in coercion. I don't believe in force. I don't believe in sacrifice. But note that the whole debate about inequality is contingent on sacrifice, contingent on force, contingent on coercion. The whole idea is you don't deserve the piece of pie that you make and we're going to steal some of it in the name of what? Nothing never in the name of me getting powerful or me getting rich at your expense. It's always in the name of the group, the collective, the states, the nation, the race, the tribe fill in the blank, right? Whatever it happens to be. Some higher cause than merely you individual. And I say there is no higher cause than you individual. And that is the great discovery that is west to west when we talk about western civilization. Western civilization is not about countries, it's not about nations, it's not about tribes, it's not about collectives. The innovation that is western civilization is the respect for the first time in history we attribute to the individual. We have elevated the individual above all those other groups. We have made the priority of the state only to protect that individual and do nothing else. That is the real achievement of the west. It comes from the recognition that each one of us as individuals has a mind and in our mind and our reason and our rationality are able to know reality, understand it, integrate it and therefore we can all take care of ourselves. We don't need mother government to take care of us. We don't need somebody else deciding how much pie I get. You get as much as you produce. And I said earlier that equality always requires violence and it does. I mean some of you might have heard me use this example, but you know I'm always upset about inequality in basketball. I want to be able to play as well as LeBron James. I think it's unfair that if I play LeBron James 101 basketball I will score zero points. It's just not fair, right? There's a basketball pie and how come I got a little bit of it and he got so much? So I want equality of basketball. How do we get equality of basketball? I want to be on the court with LeBron and have a chance of winning. I don't want to give it to you. You don't have to give it to me or win. I just want a chance. How do we do that? Train me? Get me really good at basketball? You think that'll help? Yeah, we have to cut off his legs. Usually it takes a little while to get to the extreme solution, right? Usually we just want to break his legs, but you know, Poland you go right for the heart of it. Just cut them off, all right? That's right. And if you've seen me play basketball you might want to break one of his arms as well, because you haven't seen me play basketball as much as I train. He could probably beat me without legs. I think he's taller than me without legs, but that's reality. If you want to make me and LeBron James the same in basketball, you have to penalize him in some horrific, horrific way to make us equal. Otherwise, we're not going to be equal. There's just no way. Now this applies to basketball, but it applies to every realm in which we want to make people equal. Right? So you want to make people equal financially. So in California you take 55% of all my earnings away from me. And some of it, because you're a bureaucracy and you're not very efficient at it, only some of it, you redistribute to other people. Some of it you put in your own pocket, and some of it maybe you use for actually legitimate reasons like protecting me, but I'm doubtful about how much of that you actually need, right? Maybe two of those 55% you do for legitimate and the rest you waste. Now what is taxes, what is 55% of my earnings represent? What does it represent? What is money? What is the money you earn represent for you? You're what? Yeah, your value added. That's like a very highfalutin way of talking about it, you know, your value added, sure. But what does it really represent, right? Time. Your time. You spend most of your life working, producing, creating, building something, making stuff. And the representation of that time and effort and production and energy is money. Money represents your productive energy. Money represents your time. Money represents your life. When they take 55% of your money, they're taking 55% of your energy. They're taking 55% of your life. They're taking 55% of your time. They are taking more than half of what you live for. That's evil. Evil. It's arguably worse than breaking somebody's legs. If I had to choose, if you gave me the choice, we can come around and break your legs once a year, or we can take 55% of your income once a year. I'm not sure which one I choose. I, well, my income, I'd probably choose the legs. I'd probably choose to have them broken. Because 55% of my time is more valuable than being able to walk. It's a lot of time. I work really hard. I work long hours every day, and they come and they just take it. Goddamn them. Right? It's wrong. My life is mine. My time is mine. The values I create are mine. The pie I bake is mine. You want half of it? No way. You want a little piece of it? Ask. You don't just get it because you have a bigger gun than I do. But that's what we do today. That's what our taxes are based on, the fact that they have a bigger gun, the fact that they can coerce us, the fact that they can force themselves on us. So this inequality debate goes to the heart of what liberty means, to the heart of what freedom means, to the heart of our values and what they represent. We are taught one of the ways in which they are trying to make the stealing of our goods okay for people is that they're trying to convince us what? That those values are not ours. President Obama made a famous speech during his presidency. We call it, you didn't build that speech. I don't know how many of you are familiar with this. He basically said, you didn't build it. Whatever you have, whatever businessmen, however much money you have, whatever property you might have, whatever wealth you might have, you didn't actually build it. You just got lucky. It was your genes, or it was your nice parents, or it was a teacher you had in high school, or you drove on government roads and you used government resources. So you didn't build that and what about your employees? They built it. You might have a piece of it, but it's not all yours, because your employees built it. And this is a huge push by the left right now to make personal responsibility zero or mitigated, to convince us that our life is composed of luck and nothing else, to convince us that every wealth creator is an exploiter, not a producer. And therefore, if you didn't build it, then it's okay for me to take it. If society is responsible for everything that you made, then what you made belongs to society. This is the way they want to legitimize the pie, the social pie. Now what's the answer to you didn't build it? I did. So it's true that some of us are born with good genes and some of us are born with bad genes, whatever that means. It's true that some people have nice parents and some people have horrible parents. All that is true. And there's the theories in psychology, different theories, right? Some theories say we are determined by our genes, everything that happens to us in life, all decisions we make, I'm sure there's some here in the room who are determinists, we are determined by the genes that we have. Or, alternatively, you might be determined by the environment, by social impact that you have, by whether your parents put you in the closet when you were five, right? If you're a good Freudian, that appeals to you. And then the radicals think, oh wow, no, it's not one of those, it's a mixture of both. There are genes and some environment, but you're basically determined by your genes and your environment. That's who you are. That's what makes each one of you. Now, Inran rejects that view of human psychology, rejects that view of character, rejects that view of who we are as human beings. Yes, genes have a role. They impact us. Yes, our parents and our environment has an impact on us. But what has an even bigger impact? More important than that. See, it's hard because we're not even trained to think this way. We do. The choices we make from when we're very small. The choices we make about to think are not to think. To look at reality or to look away from reality. To engage or not to engage, to be curious or not to be curious. To challenge our parents or not to challenge our parents. The choices each one of us makes shape who we are. There is such a thing as free will. And if you look inside of yourself, you will find it. It's no different than when we look outside of ourselves, we see reality. The reality internally is that we make choices. We are in control of our own lives and we are in control of our own character. We're in control of the values that we pick and choose. We are self-created beings if we choose to be. Because the alternative is to default on that. Not to think about it. Not to actually activate yourself. And then you drift and then you're determined by forces outside of you. But then let me guarantee you're not going to create many values. People who create values are self-made. Not self-made in the materialistic sense, self-made in the character sense. Steve Jobs was self-made. Bill Gates was self-made. Graham Walton was self-made. They made who they became. And because they made it, they own it. It's their pie. And yes, they had employees. Steve Jobs had great employers who designed this. Steve Jobs didn't design this. He ruled out a lot of designs and ultimately approved this one, but other people designed it. And how did they get compensated? They were slave labor and he whipped them three times a day. Every single one of them got to pay. Every single one of them got paid for their contribution. Many of them became millionaires of the original people who helped with the iPhone. Apple has produced many, many, many millionaires. Everybody, yeah, we all help each other get stuff done. And we all compensate each other for helping each other getting stuff done. It's called trading. We constantly trade win-win. You pay each other for the stuff that you produce and the stuff that you make. And yeah, how many of you had a great teacher who helped you have a better life? I didn't, but I know a lot of people do, right? I can't remember any of my teacher's names. I don't remember any one of them, right? If you did have a great teacher, then you should go and thank her. And if you make a huge amount of money right of a check, that would be justice. That would be nice. But you don't owe her. It's what you did with what she gave you. And it was her job to give it to you. And she was paid for that job. But if you think she did more above and beyond, go thank her. Go give her a check. But it doesn't make what you achieved with your life any less important, any less valuable the fact that you had a positive influence in your life. And the road, you know, all this government stuff that we use in order to go to work and in order to, all the infrastructure, yeah? Who pays for that? Where does it come from? The government? What comes first? Business or roads? Has to be business. Because where do they get the money to build the roads? They have to steal it from somebody. Have to take it from somebody, right? So you have to create wealth so the government can take it and go build a road or whatever the infrastructure happens to be, right? The only thing the government needs to do, the only thing that is necessary for us to be able to create wealth is the rule of law. Once we have a rule of law, once we have property rights, then we create wealth and anything beyond that that the government wants, it takes from us. But we have to first create the wealth. So the government should be thanking all the businessmen who created huge amounts of wealth that they took and then built highways with. It's not that our businessmen need to thank the government for the highways that they use, it's the other way around. So you did build it. We all build it. We build whatever we create and some of us are going to get very rich and some of us are not because some of us are going to produce huge value for other people and some of us are not. That's the reality of it. And it's fine because life is not about money. It's not. So I got a PhD in finance and I could have gone to work in Wall Street and actually have a hedge fund which I could have devoted all my attention to and all my energy to and today be much, much, much, much richer than I am. I have given up millions and I'm not kidding, millions, maybe tens of millions of dollars to do what I'm doing right now. And it's worth every last dime because this, I love making money. It's fun. Don't get me wrong. I enjoy that too. But this, this I get high from. I don't need cocaine. I don't need. I don't need alcohol as some of you know. I don't drink but this I wouldn't exchange for anything in the world. Teaching is what I live for, right, lecturing, speaking, engaging with other human beings, enlightening hopefully other people that I love and I'm willing to have a few million dollars less if I'm allowed or left alone to do it. Now if you all went on Patreon and supported me then maybe I could be rich and do this but that's unlikely so I'm just going to stay with what I have, right? So it's not about money. It's about the individual's pursuit of his rational values. It's about living a flourishing life. It's about making the most of your one shot on this earth. It's about living, really living and money whatever money is, is but it's about life and it's about being free to be able to live that life and free to be unequal because it's great to be unequal and we want to live in a society that allows us to be unequal that doesn't force us into equality. I want to end with maybe the worst example of an attempt to establish equality in all of modern history that I know of. So not that long ago actually, 40, 50 years ago, there was a group of intellectuals who went to Paris to study and they studied with all the great French philosophers, you know, Fouquan, Diderot and Sartre and those guys and they were taught that the greatest value in life is equality. They could have studied with Dom Tromsky, same thing, greatest value in life is equality. So they went back to their country and they managed to get a hold of political power and they said, great, we are now going to fulfill what our professors taught us. We are going to make this country equal, completely equal, but it's hard because people are not equal. So what do you do? Some people live in the cities, some people live in the countryside, so what do you do? You kick everybody out of the cities and you force them into the countryside because the cities give you a huge advantage if you live there. So you can't allow advantages, you can't allow inequality, so you push everybody into the countryside. This is a true story, empty the cities, okay, everybody's in the countryside, but you still got a problem because people are still not equal. Some people can read, some people are smart, some people have an education, some people are just good at finding food, foraging, you know, picking berries and finding nuts. So what do you do with those people? All these people that are smart, educated and are good at finding food compared to everybody else. What do you do with them? You kill them, you know, you kill them, you kill them. So anybody who had glasses was shot. Anybody who had a high school or college degree was shot. Anybody who was a good farmer or a good forager or anything was shot. They killed almost 40% of the people in their country, over 2 million people. It's called the killing fields of Cambodia. This is the Khmer Rouge. This is Pol Pot. These are the people Namchomsky loves and the Left loves because they believe in equality. But equality means death. Equality means destruction. Equality means no values. Equality means the end of civilization. That's equality of outcome. That's what it means. It's as bad or worse than what you had here in Poland and in the rest of the Soviet Union. That's what you have to think about when these bastards talk about inequality. When these economics professors talk about the evils of inequality. You have to think about what the alternative is. The alternative is the Khmer Rouge. The alternative is communism under Stalin. The alternative is death and destruction. So we, those of us who believe in liberty and freedom, should embrace inequality. We should rejoice in the fact that we're different. Rejoice in the fact that we produce different values. Rejoice in the fact that we produce different quantities of those values. Because every time you become a billionaire, and I hope that in this room we have future billionaires, every time you become a billionaire, you're making my life better. There's no other way to become a billionaire, but to make the lives of hundreds of millions of people better. Unless you're a really good thief. And I'm assuming production, right? So let's celebrate achievement. Let's celebrate wealth creation. Let's celebrate values. And maybe we can make Poland the model of what freedom looks like in the world. Thank you all. Thank you very much. I think that if any of you have any questions, I would suggest, because there are so many of you to just form a line, and I will be giving the microphone to each one of you. So just please step closer. One, two. No, no. Professor Brook. Well, thanks for your lecture, first of all. I used to live in the Netherlands, and one thing I'll hear very often from the Dutch, the Danes, the Swedes, is I see where my tax dollars go. Now, in Canada, I know Americans, you guys have this idea that we have this wonderful healthcare system. We don't. But I'll hear the Dutch and the Danes say the same thing. The Danes have a wonderful healthcare system. They see where their tax dollars go. They don't mind paying 50, 60% of their income because they know where it's going. So what's your response to that? I mean, I think that the Dutch and the Danes and the Swedes have given up on life is that's what they believe. They're not ambitious. They've settled. They don't strive towards real happiness and flourishing in fulfillment. They're kind of just there, and it's boring, and they're boring. I mean, concretely. I mean, concretely. They've given up on it. If they're settled, if they think they know where all their tax money is going, and they're fine with 60% of their life, just whoosh out the window, and they think that their healthcare systems are good, that's insane to me. I know what good healthcare system is, because if you have health insurance in the United States, you get a decent healthcare. Not great, but decent. Better than any place on the planet. But it's only decent because I can imagine what a really good healthcare system would look like if it was totally privatized. And how good it could be. So you've lost the imagination, and they've literally settled. And that's what you see in Europe. This is why I find Western Europe uninteresting. Poland's much more interesting. You guys are not settled. You're looking. You're still searching. You still want something. You're looking out of life. Western Europe, life's good. iPhone's coming out next month. I'm good. I'm fine. I'm happy. I don't need anything more. Right? And that's what you see in Netherlands. You're not going to good restaurants. And I've got my little bicycle, and I've got a job that I'm okay with, but I take like six weeks of vacation. They're not ambitious about life. They're not ambitious about living, and there's a consequence. I think it's a dying culture. I think Europe is dying. I think Western Europe in particular is dying. I think it's on its death throes right now. And it's a consequence of this kind of middle-class European apathy towards life. So, no, they don't know where the tax money is going. Second, the tax money is being wasted, but much more importantly, they're not fully experienced what life has to offer, which is sad. Thank you. It's individuals. I have a question. Often when I would discuss with my friends the issue of nationalism, they often bring up the argument that you have to care about your nation because other nations compete with you, and you can have a war, and you have to be always prepared. Therefore, you need to have some kind of nationalization. You need to take care of your nation. So what do you think about this view of this constant danger is? So I come from Israel, a country with two constant ages. It's around about 200 million people who want to kill us all, wipe us all out. And I still believe in liberty. That is, I still believe that the army should be voluntary, that you should only fight for your country if you believe in it, and that means that it is protecting your rights and that you are living a good life and that the government is serving you. Only then should you fight, otherwise leave. And a country that can't raise a volunteer army, or a country that cannot raise enough money to fight a war does not deserve to exist. There's no thing that says that this country has to exist or that country. There are all accidents of history. So I don't believe, I think this is a means by which to try to control us all. You all got to stay in Poland. You should all volunteer for the army and pay high taxes because Putin is coming. Putin is coming. Now Putin might be coming. But then it's incumbent on a Polish government to protect your rights, to give you freedom, to make you rich, to leave you free so you can become rich. And then, because you're so happy to be living Poland, you want to support Poland and you want to defend it against Putin and you volunteer to give your money or your time or your effort in order to protect Poland. But it's not your duty to a country first and then you get a little bit of freedom. It's the only reason they have a duty, I hate that word, but a duty to a country is because it's a country that protects your freedom. Your life comes first. Your values come first. And I know that's not easy to hear in Poland and Americans don't like it either these days. Everybody's a patriot. I'm not a patriot. I'm only a patriot to a country and a cause and a government that is protecting me, that is pro me. And it really stopped doing that. I'm not supportive of it. I'm not going to fight for that. I'm going to leave and go somewhere else. I don't believe, in my view, every one of you, your life is global. You could go anywhere. And your more responsibility to you is to go to the place that is going to make your life the best that it can be. It might be Poland, and it might not be Poland. I was born in Israel, but decided it wasn't the place for me. So I packed up and went to America. And there's a good chance that I could come to the conclusion that America's not the place for me. I'll go to New Zealand or something. Who knows? The point is that perspective is always your life, your values, your freedom, your liberty. That nation is only in a sense of all of us together is a mean, strong end. The end is you, me. The end is your happiness, your freedom, not the other way around. And that's the danger of nationalism when it places the nation above the individual instead of the nation as the servant of the individual. Government is our servant, and not we are its slaves. Thanks. So my question is sort of related to the previous one, but it touches more the economic area. So currently in Poland, what we observe on the right, at least Polish right, is that people tend to think that capitalism as a system maybe is fine, but we should redefine it. We should make it to, now I'm quoting, I don't believe in this. We should make it to serve the Polish causes. We should make it to serve finally the Poles. They say that Poland during the transformation period in 1989 and the following years opened too much for the foreign capital. This capital came penetrated Polish market and today when Polish economy is growing it is sucking the best juices. And Poles are like peasants only working as elements in this big machinery, but the best part goes abroad. And these guys who often identify themselves as the right wing guys, they say we need to do something, we need to, they call it repolonization. They want to repolonize big companies in the first place and further make different rules to help the Polish capitalist. So I see it as a new wave and I see also some of my colleagues to go into this trap. What are your insights about this phenomenon? I don't think this is uniquely Polish. I think Donald Trump would feel right at home at that point of view, as would many some of the Brexitas, although I support Brexite, I think there's an element of this kind of thinking in the Brexite phenomena. I see it all over the world. This is the rise of tribalism and the rise of the bad form of nationalism that we talked about. It's both economically ignorant, historically ignorant, and morally false, morally bad. It's a way to become poor. It's a way to drive capital out of Poland and it's a way to destroy the achievements that you have made economically over the last, since the world in Wall fell. I don't know what to say about it. It's so frustrating. Adam Smith wrote about 230 something years ago called The Wealth of Nations where he dismantled mercantilism completely. And we're all mercantilists now. And every single significant economist in the world since then, every single one, even on the left, has supported the free movement of goods, capital, and in some cases labor. Everyone, even Paul Krugma, who once upon a time was an economist, I call him Paul Krugma, the former economist, when he was an economist and he won an overpriced economics, you know what he wanted for? He wanted for paper, an academic paper defending free trade. This is not hard. Again, every economist shows us who the Germans are subsidizing and the Chinese are doing this. Who cares? If they want to screw up their economies, why do you have to screw up yours? Other people doing bad things doesn't mean you should do bad things. I mean you should do the opposite. Take advantage of it by all those subsidized goods that you can because they're cheap. And if capital wants to come and invest in Poland, cool. It's win, win. Now don't expect the capitalist form overseas to get profits. They deserve them. They invested. But you're getting something in return. That's the nature of trade. Win, win. So, I don't know. I mean, I get very pessimistic when I hear these questions because I know it's the reality and it's a reality globally and it's a reality everywhere. And again, it illustrates complete ignorance of economics, particularly the idea of win-win relationships in trade. And I hear it from Trump and I hear it from the Democrats. I hear it from now, you know, libertarians for Trump or whatever they call themselves. I hear it across the board. And globally, to me, this is the beginning, well, not the beginning, but the middle, of our long slide of the West away from freedom, away from liberty and away from possibility because this goes to the heart of what it makes to create wealth. Creating wealth requires openness. It requires trading. It requires open flow of goods and counter. And for people to start turning away from that is horrific. And, you know, they're finding the weirdest excuses for it. But it's not economics. There's no economics set and there's no theory there. It's just good old tribalism. It's just good old, you know, protecting your own things. Zero-sum game economics which we've lived through in the West. You know, if you ever see a graph, I'm sure you've all seen this graph of wealth over the last 10,000 years, right? 10,000 years ago, we were making about $2 a day. We stayed at $2 a day. And we stayed at $2 a day. And we kept staying at $2 a day because the whole game was a zero-sum game. And everybody, you know, the aristocrats got rich by stealing our money over the peasants' money and the peasants' state poor and that they changed in $2 a day until when? Until about 1776. So they are valid. And then we went like that. Why do we discover the value of trade? We discover the value of individual rights. We get away with the idea that the nation is primary and we place the individual as primary as reflected in the American Declaration of Independence. That's why we use 1776 as the date. And now we want to turn it all away. We want to go back to 10,000 years ago. We'll take it to 300 years ago. By the way, we were all poor back then. And that's where we want to go. And it just drives me nuts. So we check that. You know, stand for the principles of liturgy to get from Mises, go from Mises, but you have to, you know, to get the economics right. You know, just, you have the one from Mises who can say about this stuff. You will go nuts. I mean, I would be calm to figure out how he would respond. Thank you. What is your question? Yes, speaking about American uniqueness and... This one's... Okay, this one. Okay. Because I have a question more to you than to the lecture, but speaking about American uniqueness and the values that it stands for, that stands for individualism and the founding fathers have read intellectuals that were proponents of the natural law, like John Locke. But I have a question about history of ideas and how do you see that? Because you say that every religion, it's an enlightenment. And when we are enlightened, then we actually are, you know, putting individual first. But when you look at history of ideas, well, you had Aristotle first when it comes to natural law. But then there was also a late medieval period in St. Thomas Aquinas. And he was also... And he sort of introduced Aristotle to Western Europe. But it was way before enlightenment and he was a Catholic saint. So do you see any positive preludiums to enlightenment before? Or... Yeah, I mean, yes. I mean, there's no question that they... So we're talking about the period of the enlightenment which is like the 18th century. John Locke and Newton all the way to the founding of America, really. Very little good happened after that. Intellectually. But, yeah, I mean, the enlightenment doesn't come out of nowhere. It has roots. And it's ultimate roots are Aristotle. But Aristotle disappears from Western thought for, what, 1,300 years or something like that. And he's rediscovered by Aquinas. And Aquinas is a genius. Aquinas is a one-of-a-kind, you know, once in a thousand years kind of genius. And Aquinas is struggling because he's a Catholic. But he's also reading Aristotle. And Aristotle makes a lot of sense to Aquinas. And he's going, but how do I resolve this with Christianity? And he doesn't in the end really resolve it. But what he does is it gives respectability to the idea of the secular, the idea of human reason, the idea even of the pursuit of individual happiness on this earth. Because that's Aristotle, right? To achieve eudaumonia in this earth. To achieve human flourishing. Aquinas gives it respectability and embeds it into the Catholic church. Which means that from then on the Catholic church can't reject it. It struggles with it. And from that all the renaissance happens 200 years later. And then the renaissance are further discoveries of Aristotle and of Greek culture now. Now they see the sculptures and the plays and the architecture. And they go, whoa! What have we lost for 1200 years? Where were we? Do you know that they had indoor plumbing in Rome? It was indoor plumbing. They had faucets with pipes that have water. And then it was gone. It disappeared. They used to have tall buildings. And then we got to the point where in the west we couldn't build more than two stories during the middle and dark ages. And then we had to rediscover all that. So they're rediscovering all this stuff. And you remember that dome in Florence where they can't finish it because they don't know how to make a dome. Now the Romans had built domes bigger than the dome there but they didn't know how to do it. And they had to wait until a genius architect I forget his name. Brunelleschi came around and said, this is how you do it. But they didn't know how to do it. They couldn't figure it out. Even though the Romans had much bigger domes earlier. We lost knowledge. Huge quantities of knowledge. And we slowly rediscovered them. And then we started discovering science in spite of the Catholic Church who burnt at the stake people who disagreed with it or put Galileo under house arrest. And then finally we discovered science and now we can understand the world where you get an enlightenment. Only then can people say, aha, reason is efficacious. Reason can really tell us about the world. Aristotle makes sense. And then you get Locke and the French enlightenment and the Scottish enlightenment and the founding of America. And then just explosion of science that happens in the 18th and 19th century. Just an explosion. You think about the amount of knowledge we gained in those 200 years is it really so black and white because somebody could argue that Aquinas had the luxury to study Aristotle and write all these books because of Catholic Church. Yeah, the Catholic Church that made us all poor that destroyed civilization that destroyed the Roman Empire. Yes, that Catholic Church then allowed, thank God, Aquinas to actually have a little bit of spare time to study Aristotle. Yes, so after they decimated the rest of civilization and destroyed it yeah, okay, so they gave him a little bit of time. Good for them. No, I mean, no. The Catholic Church gets no credit. It gets huge negative credit. It is a force for destruction in human history. I'm sorry, I know you guys are Catholic but that is a fact. You know, Rome was doing fine and when it turned Christian it was the end of Rome. Now Rome was already pretty decadent before that so it was on decline already but you guys really nailed it in the heart and there's nothing good nothing good from a civilizational perspective happened in Catholic Europe between 400 when Rome falls and the Renaissance with the exception of Aquinas discovering what he discovered making possible the Renaissance. So it's the anti-Catholicism of Aquinas. It's the Greek pagan influences that saved the West. I'm a pagan Jewish atheist. Yeah, go ahead. Hello? Yeah, hi. I was going to ask for something else but if you allow me to just mention that the church I don't consider myself a Catholic but the church restored education in Europe after indeed this black period but which wasn't caused by the church directly but by more political causes and the decline of the Roman economy, right? Socialism was introduced already appeared in Roman Empire. We're going to disagree about this. Socialism has always existed in some sense but if you read Jesus' Sermon and the Mount and you don't recognize socialism almost in every sentence then I don't know what you're reading because the Sermon and the Mount is socialism. The Catholic Church has always had elements of socialism. Think about the monks live in their thing. It's purely like a kibbutz. They all live in the same little room. They have the same bed. They have the same everything. It's an attempt to equalize. Yeah, they restored education to some, to those who would continue the faith and those who would allow them to sustain their power over us. Catholicism has been about power. Religion is about power. It's about power over the individual. It always has been. It's why you have a pope. Only the pope communes God. He's the philosopher king. All of us have to wait for his announcements to know what to do with our lives. It is a hierarchical structure. It is demeaning to the individual. It is demeaning to the individual. And the fact is that you do not get an enlightenment. You do not get a renaissance. You do not get what is required for freedom when people take those sets of ideas seriously. Now, that's not to say that every single thing they've ever done is bad. Yes, you can find here and there some things that they said that are good. Yes, Jesus did say to seize on to seize and to to God on to God. Fine. Kind of implicit separation of church and state there maybe. But of course, he had to say it because if he didn't say it, it would have killed him earlier than they killed him because Caesar was in charge, right? I mean, one of the things to remember about Christianity that differentiates it from Islam and differentiates from Judaism is that Christianity is a religion born of weakness because it is born during the Roman Empire. Christians are weak. Christians are persecuted. Christians are hunted down and killed and they have to survive somehow. So the way they survive is like little communes, you know, the meek shall inherit the earth. Why? Because they are the meek. That's who the Christians were. They don't have any political power anyway, not in not in Jerusalem and not in Rome. And that's where Christianity comes from. That's why. Turn the other cheek. Who the hell wants to turn the other cheek? But if you're, if you're, if you don't have any power, if you don't have any guns then you turn the other cheek because otherwise you'll die if you try to rise up. You know love thy enemy. Nobody wants to love thy enemy. I mean, that's ridiculous to love thy enemy. But again, when you're weak politically you love your enemy. Now think about that in comparison to Islam. Islam is a religion of confidence. Islam is a religion of winning. And this is what gives them some of the confidence in why we're so weak, right? It's the prophet. Whereas the prophet in Christianity dies a horrible death for sins he didn't even commit. But for sins we committed somehow, right? He, he dies for that. Muhammad the Muslim prophet he is a great trader. He makes money. He has several wives. He loves sex. So he has money. He has sex. He achieves political power. He, he is a general. He commands an army that conquers half of Arabia. His is a story of success. You know, not the kind of success we believe in, but it's a story of success which gives their religion a certain level of confidence. They are traders. They are warriors. And they believe that the world is theirs to win because they've won it before. And Christians are relatively meek. And that's why that gives them the advantage right now. You know, hopefully not for very long, but right now, right? And Judaism used to be a religion of strength because we used to be the chosen people and we conquered lands and we killed everybody and we slaughtered left and right. And God loved us for slaughtering people. And, and then we lost. And we lost. And we lost. And we lost. And we lost. And we lost. And we lost. And then, and then, you know they try to wipe us out and they almost succeeded. And, you know, no longer confidence and, you know, Israel maybe is today confident, but Jews generally are not. So it's, each religion is to a large extent is shaped by its founding stories. And Christianity's founding stories, you can't divorce that from the historical context in which it comes. And you can't divorce any of the other religions. And you can't understand Islam if you don't understand its founding stories. And you can't understand Christianity or Judaism without understanding their founding stories. So anyway, I don't know. I don't know why I told you all that, but I think it's related to the question you asked. Thank you. Very, very interesting. I am not convinced, but that would be another debate, another topic. I managed to convince you about all the history of all religion in a matter of an answer of ten minutes, then there would be something wrong with you and me. So that would be possible. Yes, I would still... All I try to do is plant seeds and go think about it. That's my job. Yes, thank you. I'm not trying to convince anybody of anything. I won't take much time. Thank you. Thank you very much. And this will be the last question because I have to go and do my radio show. The last question is, are you coming next year? Am I coming next year? So my standard line on that is I go where I'm invited. And if you invite me, I will come. I like Poland. We get great audiences. I don't get this many people to come in America. And there's a reason for that. I don't get this many people to come in western Europe. And again, there's something about eastern Europe, whether it's here, whether it's Ukraine or whether it's Bulgaria or whether it's Georgia or whatever. There's something about you guys are searching. You guys are looking for truth. You're looking for answers and you're willing to be radical and you're willing to listen to somebody who's radical. If you're in Germany or in France, why bother, right? You know, and they don't believe in truth anyway. Truth, you know, can't destroy truth. So there's no truth anymore. So, yeah. So I let Poland and I'm sure I'll be back again some time next year. Thank you very much. My pleasure. My pleasure. Okay. So please stand just two, three minutes. We see each other at the after party in Club Hebride, Zvota, Gold Street, 7 slash 9. See you there tomorrow. We meet here at 10 a.m. But also, we have a book of Jaron Brook, which he can sign up for you. And we do it every time he comes here. And I know it works. I know it works well. We can do free market auction of this book and very nice t-shirt who is John Galt, right? From Atlas Shrugged. So, the starting price is, let's say, 30 Zvote, raising hand, raises it 10 Zvote more. Who would like to have such a book for 40? Hands up. 40. Okay, 40, 50. Do we have 60, 70, 80, 90, 100, 110, 120, 130, 140, 150. We have more. 160, someone signed book and t-shirt. 160 for the second time. 160 for the third time and thank you, Artur. You can come here for a signature. Thank you guys. See you tomorrow. Thank you.