 Let him have it, Jane. Carl Popper, the philosopher once said, no rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want to adopt a rational attitude. And it's very clear that, on the one hand, Ayn Rand did have a rational attitude. She did not permit herself to define a word like selfishness according to her own preferences. She cited the dictionary, albeit erroneously. Now, Yarin is unfortunately enthralled to the cult of Ayn Rand's personality. If she lays down the law that selfishness is a virtue, we've got to stick to it no matter what. Doesn't matter if everybody else knows what the word really means, we've got to stick to it. Well, Yarin has talked about how we've been arguing for free markets for a long time, and where did that get us? Well, he probably knows that 30, 40 years ago, libertarians would have their meetings in phone booths, because there are usually only two or three of them in any city. Now, we are countless. Now, there are numerous libertarians. He probably knows that free markets since 1776 have played a huge role, despite what government has tried to do to lift the living standards of the broad masses of people. And I trust he recognizes that it's really just a desire to be in people's faces, to try to use a word that offends most people, and to use the kind of word that's meant as an insult and have put down with others. Because Yarin doesn't think that Adam Smith was truly retrograde in his views. I just quoted his book, Theory of Moral Sentiments, in which Adam Smith said that most people do have how selfish, so ever they are. There's compassion in all of us. So that's Adam Smith talking. His concept of the invisible end is an extremely valuable one, precisely because we must tough-mindedly recognize that there are selfish people in this world, totally self-interested, self-loving types. But if they want greedy people, and if they want to survive, then they have to provide us with products we want to buy. It's the selfish and the greedy prey on us, precisely via, by the way, the Bill Clinton's and the Hillary's and the rest of them, via government. So all of that is straightforward. Iron Rand could have echoed Milton Friedman. He was writing two years before and putting down Kennedy's views. He was coming out for freedom of self-actualization. Iron Rand could have stood up for any number of things. I cut her a lot of slack. She was a refugee from the Soviet Union. She experienced the horrors of Bolshevism. She wanted to be in our face about these matters. I deeply respect her. But there's no reason for Yaren, who carries her torch, to continue to alienate so many progressives, so many people who think that libertarians are uncaring with this silly word selfishness. Why doesn't, look, I have a quote from Mike, from that movie with Michael Douglas playing Gordon Gekko, greed is good. He writes, greed is good, greed for knowledge, greed for bettering yourselves, greed brings evolution. It's all very nice and persuasive. And I no doubt, if Iron Rand had written, greed is a virtue, and then she said, all greed really means is wanting a little bit more. It doesn't mean, of course, wanting more to access. It's not an ugly fashion. Yaren, unfortunately, might, again, be enthralled to our cult and go around calling greed a virtue. It's this silliness should stop. Yaren is indeed a force. Listen to some of his interviews when he talks about crony capitalism, when he talks about charity, about the safety net, all of those things are extremely valuable. He is an asset to our movement. And so are the vast majority of people who subscribe to Objectivism and to Iron Rand's view. I'm only asking them to quit the madness, quit talking in terms of these silly words that everybody knows are offensive, and quit trying to claim that they're good. You don't need that vocabulary to defend free markets and freedom. Thank you. All right, G, and I'll let you catch your breath for just a minute, because I want to put a question to you first. While the other questions come in, and Jim has begun to text me the questions that are coming in from the folks that are not with us. Aren't you and Yaron really on the same page? And isn't this just a semantic argument over the sounds of the word selfish? And doesn't it really have nothing to do with Iron Rand? Nothing to do with Iron Rand? Well, is greed, can I ask you a question, Judge? No, no, no, no, no. This is my courtroom, and I've put the question to you, professor. Iron Rand wrote a book called The Virtue of Selfishness. She put it out into the language. She defended The Virtue of Selfishness. She said, I want this word to be out there precisely because it gets people upset. This is the exact meaning of the word. Ever since she wrote that book in 1964, a good many decades ago, we've been hearing this selfish mantra over and over again from Yaron, so it's not and others. So it's hardly, hardly something that has nothing to do with Iron Rand. She put it out there, and she put it out there because she was a refugee from Bolshevism, and she hated, hated the state that would accuse her of being selfish because she didn't serve the state. We don't bear her scars. We don't have to continue this foolish satire. Yaron, respond please. Well, I think it's ridiculous to attribute everything you don't like about Iron Rand to experiences in the Soviet Union. But, you know, there's this tendency now to make everybody a product of their environment. Iron Rand was a genius. She knew exactly what she was doing when she suggested The Virtue of Selfish. She was trying to overturn a moral tradition. She was trying to question and challenge the longstanding primarily Christian, but secular as well, tradition of self-sacrifice and altruism. And she was arguing that if you believe in man, not forget economics, forget freedom, forget politics, if you believe in you as a human being, then what we need is a different morality, a different moral code. She was challenging Adam Smith's moral code. She believed, and I believe, and I know he thinks I'm just a mouthpiece, an unthinking, I guess, mouthpiece fine man, that was the suggestion. No one could suggest that you were unthinking. Well, I think she did. I caught you a force of nature in the course of freedom and free markets. But, no. And I believe that. But to me, freedom and free markets are secondary. To me, much more important is what individuals pursue in their own life, the kind of life you, as an individual, take on yourself. And most important to me is the kind of life I take on for myself. And what Iron Rand is trying to do is challenge us. Is say, this Christian morality of sacrifice and altruism is wrong. The morality that Adam Smith appell in the theory of moral sentiments is wrong. It's anti-life, it's anti-human, and ultimately it's anti-freedom and anti-capitalism. And she is presenting in that essay a new morality. And to the extent that we, as a free market movement, don't take that seriously, we will ultimately lose. This is a battle, the battle for liberty and freedom, that is won or lost in philosophy and morality, not in economics. And if we don't pick up the mantle, you don't like the word selfish, use self-interest, use egoist, but the idea of placing one's own life, one's own well-being, one's own flourishing at the center of one's life, as the goal of one's life, that is crucial to our victory political and economic. But more importantly again, it's crucial to you living a good life. And that's what you should care about. You should care about living a good life. All right, I know you want to catch your breath, but the questions have started to come in. I never want to catch my breath. So here's a very interesting question for Yaron. If a selfish person does a moral action, such as donating to a charity, because it makes him feel better, can we really call it selfishness? Wouldn't it just be the empathy of the inherent human condition? But you see, the question has already brought into the anti-morality that I believe. Giving to charity is not necessarily moral. It might be, it might not be. What makes it moral is is it rationally in your self-interest to give to charity? And I believe in some situations it is, and it's some situations it isn't. If it comes out of the money that you would feed your kids, it is downright evil to give to charity. If your kids are more important than your neighbor's kids, you know how many of you, if your kids are drowning and your neighbor kids are drowning, go for the neighbor's kids first. You selfish bastard, you love your children more than your neighbor's children. Okay. No, so the framework has to be, the framework of this new moral code is not is that what is your self-interest is moral. So charity is moral only if it's in your self-interest, if it's rationally supportive of your life in some way. And I believe charity can be, but isn't always. Bearing in mind that Professor Epstein's offspring is seated in the front row, he wants to address the choice of who to rescue. I'm kidding, you want to respond to this. Look, look, again, we could throw out a lot of different words for unrand and for yarring to defend. The word self-interest, by the way, is essentially in the dictionary. It's a milder version. He's a self-interested person, slightly milder than selfish. Look, we have a lot of self-actualization. The pursuit of happiness, all of the individuals pursuit of happiness is a virtue. Isn't that good enough for all of us, for Yaren? Self-actualization is a virtue. Individuals do matter. And that's partly because, partly because I believe that Yaren and I both share Adam Smith's view that we are all compassionate. Some of us very compassionate. Adam Smith even added that you find compassion even in the worst burgand. That simple vocabulary that the English language offers covers all the bases that Yaren is so concerned about. So we don't need to misuse and abuse and do violence to the English language by establishing these principles. With respect to his comment about charity, of course, there are a lot of charitable people in this audience. And you're concerned. It's a lot of hard work, because I've spoken to some of these people. I could mention Don Smith, who's in the front row, who's been at us. It's a lot of hard work to make sure that your money is going to a good cause. Hopefully Don Smith still thinks that the so-formed is a good cause. And Yaren and I have been a mind on manners. Keep flattering him. Well, I don't, so we don't know. But of course, Yaren is right insofar as that's concerned. But why does he have to throw verbal wreckage at statements that he's making? So, yeah, let me just quickly address this issue. Look, selfish is opposed to what? It's opposed to selfless. We have lived this selfless and they're selfish. So, and that's the choice. Because again, for 2,000 years we've been told that goodness lies in being selfless. I'm not selfless. I think being selfless is bad. It is wrong. And to count to that is the word selfish. And yeah, we can redefine, we can rewrite the dictionaries. That's a good thing to do. That's a good thing to do in some cases. And let me just burst one of the bubble the gene has. I don't think compassion is that important. I don't think compassion changes the world. Compassion's nice. Most of us are compassionate. Sometimes there's some people I'm not compassionate at all towards, at all. But compassionate is not a major virtue at all, in my view. One more question, hang on Gene, from the streamers, which is a good one because of your very eloquent reliance on words. Why do you rely so heavily on the dictionary definition which is tainted by 2,000 years of historical adoration of self-sacrifice? Your Iran did not text me that question. As far as you know. As far as I know. It came from your son's filtering out here. We're potentially granting that assumption about the dictionary, about the English language, about how Adam Smith, Jane Austen, and others use words. We are unfortunately, Yaren and I, and everybody in the audience, we are stuck. We have to deal with the cards that are played us. There are many, many words that, by the way, change their meaning over time, that have ambiguous definitions. But this word is not one of them. It's always meant to convey moral disapproval. So we are stuck with the English language. Why should the devil have the best tunes? We've got to use the devil's language. But also addressing Yaren's concern, by the way, I agree with him. And by the way, in that answer he gave about helping people in need, he made a very good point as well, which is echoing, by the way, Adam Smith, who said, I have never known, in the wealth of nations, when he's talking about the invisible hand, he says, I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It's absolutely true that the market, via the invisible hand, where greedy and selfish people are involved and where the idealists are involved, the market takes care of human needs overwhelmingly. And indeed, probably Yaren and I share the view that it seems to have been antitrust who forced Bill Gates out of his business. Bill Gates did far more for the world, with his operating system that pushed up the production possibility frontier of the world than he has done so far with his charity. Absolutely true. However, as Yaren himself said, there are people indeed who through no fault of their own. There are people who slip through the net, and he and I both believe in a social safety net done by compassionate people like Yaren and me. Now I'm going to address you as the founder of this feast. What is the procedure now for getting the audience to ask the questions? Well, you line up, there's a microphone there that people see. Are they going to turn the lights up so I can see them? Um, maybe not. Is there a question or there? Please do your question. Great question. All right, so while they're lining up, do you find problems dealing with university students who are repelled perhaps because of what their professors have told them by the use of the word selfish and cannot sell that concept to their colleagues? I don't think the word is ever the problem. Can you help young people sell the concept of selfishness without the sting often associated perhaps by culture with that word? Absolutely, because if you translate it into caring for self, if you translate it into flourishing as a human being, making your flourishing your primary moral goal in life, that the goal in life is the pursuit of happiness. What's more selfish than the pursuit of happiness? That is the essence of selfishness. Is the pursuit of happiness the essence of selfishness? No, the essence of selfishness as the word means, and as the word definitely denotes, is that it means somebody who pursues his own goals to the detriment of others, who rolls over the interests of others. But you see, Gene is not interested in the pursuit of happiness. This is the issue, right? Because Gene, every time returns to this moral obligation that he feels towards charity and towards helping the poor. Yes, the poor people, but there are a minor issue in a free market. I just said that. The issue of poor people is a minor trivial issue, and yet every conversation we keep coming back to, but we need a safety net. You know, safety net, yes, making it, there'll be a safety net. Who cares? It's less than one percent of the people. That is not the barrier to explaining capitalism. It's people taking seriously their own lives. You don't go for altruism and charity and do good and liberal and... No. And conservative. You might as well edit all. You don't like the conservatives either? No. Not today's conservatives. I wanna help people. I wanna do good for other people. What's so bad about that? Nothing. If you do it by your own choice and if it's not your primary aim in life and if you don't regard it as a moral virtue, on those conditions it's fine to help people if you want to. Why can't I think of it as a moral virtue? I mean, can I take some bows for myself for doing all these good things? Because that would be cannibalism. Because that would mean that you preach altruism, which means not merely kindness, but self-sacrifice. It means that you place the welfare of others above your own, that you live for others for the sake of helping them and that justifies your life. That's immoral, according to my morality.