 I would like to introduce from the Einrand Institute, Dr. Yaron Brooke. Good morning. How's everybody doing? I guess my job is to wake you up. So, I've noticed a theme at the conference so far with the talks yesterday. And the theme seems to be American exceptionalism. The question on the table seems to be, what is America? What makes this country special? And maybe as a secondary question, are we special? Or are we just delusional? As you'll see, I think this relates directly to the question of inequality. I'll get to that. But let me tell you what I think about American exceptionalism. America is an exceptional country at its founding. America's foundation is a unique moment in human history. It is the first. And one could argue the only country that was ever founded on a moral ethical principle. America is about, it's about the weight of the individual to live his life as he sees fit. This is what our founding documents are about, about the inalienable weight that you have, that every human being has to live their own life by their own standards, based on their own pursuit of rational values. America's about the weight of every individual to think what he wants to think, to speak, what he wants to speak, even if it triggers people, even if it involves microaggressions. You might be, you might, you might be triggered a few times during my talk today. There's a safe space. I think we've organized a safe space. They're going to be teddy bears and some soft, you know, Nate Cole or something really to calm you down. This is what we are in America. We even have to talk about this ridiculous stuff, right? You have a right, an inalienable right to think whatever you want to think, say whatever you want to say, and in the most individualistic statement in human history, in a political document, you have an inalienable right to pursue what? Your own happiness, your happiness. America was founded on a principle, and that principle is the principle of individualism. We are an individualistic nation. We are a nation of individuals who take responsibility for their own lives, who pursue their own happiness, who live using their own minds to figure out what values are important to them and go out and get them. And when people emigrated to this country, they adopted those ideas. They took wagons and set out west all by themselves. Yes, they built communities. Great. I'm all for communities. I've nothing against communities. But we've always had communities. We come from tribes a long time ago. What makes America unique, what makes America special, is the spirit of individualism and the ideology of individualism. The Senate yesterday was absolutely right. The British didn't fight us very hard because we were a third-rate colony, and who cared? They were too busy with the French and the Spanish. That was 1776. By 1914, they needed our help to win World War I because by that point, we were the richest country on the planet. We were the strongest economically and ultimately militarily. How did we get from being a third-rate colony to being the mightiest country on the planet? How did we get there? We got there with individuals going out there and pursuing their life, starting businesses, creating wealth. The great travesty of modern America is the disrespect we have for the people who built this country because the people who built this country are not politicians. The people who built this country are not community leaders. The people who built this country were businessmen. They were farmers. They were people who went out there and created a life for themselves, built businesses, created wealth. This country became the richest country in the world because of Carnegie and Mellon and JP Morgan and Rockefeller. The great entrepreneurs of America who we today in one of the greatest injustices in human history call robber barons, robber barons, as if they stole something rather than creating, creating the wealth that we all take for granted today. America was created by entrepreneurs. That's what Americanism is about. It's about that individualistic spirit that makes it possible for people to go out there and build. And America today is still built by entrepreneurs. The best part of America today in spite of their politics is Silicon Valley, where people work hard and pursue great ideas and innovate and produce and create and build. It's too bad. America isn't Silicon Valley anymore because that's what it used to be. You know what the Silicon Valley of the 19th century was, the late 19th century, early 20th century? What state was the Silicon Valley of that period? Detroit, absolutely Michigan. Michigan was Silicon Valley. If you wanted to start a business, if you want to entrepreneur, and you wanted to go to the freest place and the place where you could find talented individuals, you went to Detroit, you went to Michigan. That's why Dow Chemical is there. That's why the auto companies are there. That's why so many successful American businesses come out of the Midwest because that was the place where the talent was, where the freedom was, where the innovation... Think of Detroit today. Think of what we've done to the free estate, to the place of entrepreneurship and where we are today. So one of the characteristics of individualism is that you're focused on your own success and your own ability. One of the things that have characterized Americans is we're incredibly ambitious for ourselves, but we don't historically measure our success based on other people. We try to be, as Americans, the best that we can be. Americans have never been envious. Americans have never resented the success of somebody else because we've always been focused on being successful ourselves. And when we see somebody else being successful, we admire that. We respect that. We go, I want to be like that. I don't hate it. I don't resent it. When we saw the vast wealth that some people accumulated, the response of most Americans, not of the progressives, but most Americans, was always, wow, that's great. And by the way, the way to make a lot of money is by making what? How do you make lots of money? This is the secret sauce, guys. You can all go now and become really, really rich. How do you make a lot of money? Yeah, create values that people discover usually after you've already made them that they really, really need and can't live without. As you know, I usually use my iPhone in presentations. I didn't know I needed this until it was created and then I can't live without it. That's how you make lots of money. Create something like this that every human being on the planet really, really, really feels like they have to have and they're willing to pay for it because they have to have it. So in other words, the only way to make money, the only way to become super rich is by making everybody else's lives better. Making money is about creating win-win relationships with everybody around you, with your employees, with your suppliers, and with your customers. That's how you make money. And Americans always understood this. They understood the win-win nature of making money. So they respected people who made money because if I see somebody who is a gazillionaire in a free market, I go, cool, he made my life better. I might not know exactly how, but the only way to get rich is to make people's lives better. So I respect that. I admire that. And that's what America was always about. So this issue of inequality has never been an issue of inequality in America. Nobody's ever cared. Indeed, when you do polls of Americans, up until recently, when people were asked if they felt like this issue of the gap between rich and middle class and poor was a problem, Americans overwhelmingly say, no, now that's changing. But they starkly, and again, this is a consequence of this notion of what it means to be in America. I'm focused on my life. You focus on yours. Go for it. Have fun. It's none of my business. That was the approach that was America. Now, this is very different in Europe. Europe is built on envy, on resentment of wealth. And there's historical reasons for this. Think about how you got rich in Europe a long, long time ago. Right? There were aristocrats, and then there was everybody else. And how did you become an aristocrat? Who were the people who became aristocrats? How? Yeah, taxes, which means what? They stole their money. Right? Aristocrats in Europe were the best thieves in the world. They were the true robber barons. That's why they're barons, right? Barons is a title of aristocracy. They were robbers. They exploited people. They did not engage in win-win relationships. They took, they had serfs. They owned you. That is the essential nature of wealth creation before the Industrial Revolution in Europe. So in Europe, when people look at wealth creators, not wealth creators, wealthy people, they think, ooh, they must have stolen it. Because that's kind of in their DNA. That's the history. And they resent it. And today, if you live in Europe, particularly in Scandinavia, and you're wealthy, you try not to show it. It's not acceptable to show it. You don't drive a nice car because it'll be keyed. And, you know, sometimes you get keyed in the U.S., but everybody understands that's a bad thing. In Scandinavia, it's acceptable because you're showing off your wealth and that's not acceptable. Europe is filled with envy. America, again, has always been different. Here, we came up with the idea, which is mentioned. If you read Atlas Shrugged, you remember the money speech, right? Iron Man makes a big deal out of the fact that Americans invented making money. We make money. We don't take. We don't redistribute. We don't steal. We make. We create wealth. We don't rob. We don't exploit. We create it out of nothing. That's the wealth we have around us. We created it. We made it. And if you make it again because of win-win relationships, what's the resent? It's great. So in Europe, they care a lot about inequality because they believe that inequality is a consequence of something bad. In America, we never used to care. But I've noticed in the last few years that this has become a real issue for the left. They keep attacking this issue of inequality. They keep making this a major problem in America. You couldn't open up... Still, you can't open up a newspaper today without finding a story how inequality is destroying fill-in-the-blank. Something. And there's all kinds of inequality now, right? There's wealth inequality. There's income inequality. But now I read in the Atlantic Magazine which is being cited a lot here at the conference. I read a story about now there's something called total inequality. It turns out there are lots of things that are unequal. It's shocking. You know, there's such a thing as marriage inequality. Peter New York Times, it must exist. It turns out. It turns out. This is shocking, right? It turns out that well-educated men marry well-educated women. And that poorly-educated men marry poorly-educated women. It just, on average, turns out this way. That's incredibly unequal. I mean, it's just not fair. And it's probably gonna mean something about the kids. They're not gonna be the same. They're not gonna have equality of kids. That's the level at which the left is dealing with this nonsense. They find inequality everywhere which is truly shocking, right? Because if you look around the room, we're all really the same. They're completely different. I mean, look around. We're completely different ways. Different abilities, different skills, different talents, different levels of energy, different commitments, different passions. That's what makes life great. Imagine if we were all the same. Even if everybody was like me, it would be really real and dull. And of course, that's not the case. Metaphysically, in reality, we're different. So surprise, surprise. When you take a bunch of different people and you set them free, what do you get? Different results. You get inequality. One of the great innovations that is America, again, going back to American exceptionalism, is the idea of equality. But it's interesting because the founders had a very different conception of equality. The equality they talk about in Declaration of Independence when they say all men are created equal. And of course, unfortunately, the founders violate that principle right off the bat with slavery, but we'll put that aside for now. We also have to remember that it's that statement that makes it possible that within 100 years, slavery is wiped out from the entire Western Hemisphere. There is no slavery because of the Declaration of Independence and the creation of America, in my view. But they had a contradiction. But they say all men are created equal. What do they mean? Because if you look around the room, we're not equal. So in what sense did the founders mean that we are equal? Opportunity. This is where conservatives lose me. What is opportunity? Do any two of your children have the same opportunities? And do you think they have the same opportunities as some kid born in the inner cities? And do you think it's ever going to be possible for them to have the same opportunities? And do you want them to have the same opportunities? I don't know about you, but I work damn hard to make sure that my kids have more opportunities than any of your kids. I want my kids to have the best opportunities possible. I don't really care about the opportunities your kids have. I care about my kids. There is no such thing as equal opportunities. Any more than there is such a thing as equal outcome. Opportunity is just another outcome. When you talk about equality of opportunity, which conservatives do all the time, you buy into the left's agenda. You buy into the left's agenda. There's only one sense in which America believes in its founding inequality. We have equality of rights. We have equality of liberty. We are all born equally free, no matter the color of your skin, no matter where you come from, no matter what your family history is. You have an equal right to be protected by the government from coercion. You have an equal right to go out there and pursue your life as you see fit. You are equal in freedom. Not an opportunity. Not an outcome. Not in how you look. Not in how much money you have, but in freedom. You have an equal right to be protected by the law. So equality before the law is the equality our founders mean. Now, in some sense, that creates equal opportunity if you understand opportunity to mean freedom. But that's not the modern sense in which we interpret opportunity. We interpreted today to mean, well, everybody's got to get the same education. Everybody's got to get the same, and we're going to subsidize it, and we're going to redistribute wealth in order to attain it. That's an outcome. And that's exactly the left agenda. So we're all equal in rights. We're all equal in freedom. That's the sense in which the founders understood equality. That's the sense that equality exists or should exist in America. But that's not the sense in which the left understands it. The left wants more equality of outcome. They will never admit to wanting pure equality of outcome because they know that experiment failed. Historically, they saw the Berlin Wall come down. So when I debate on this issue, I always ask them, so what's the exact level of inequality that's okay with you? Give me a number. And they always say, well, it's less than now, but more inequality than pure equality. And they never give you a number because they're afraid to. They have no number. We, democratically, would decide when the right point, and you know what that point is going to be. Every time you shrink inequality a little bit, they're going to want to shrink it more and they're going to want to shrink it more. There is no, because they're all ideal. The moral ideal is equality. And then they accept the fact that we can't achieve the ideal so they settle for some inequality. It's like, you know, people, hopefully nobody in this room, but you know people who say things like, you know, communism's a great ideal. It's just not practical. Now, let's be clear. Communism is an evil ideal. Evil in its idea and therefore is impractical. The idea that we should all be the same, the idea that each should get based on what he needs and from each taken based on your ability, that is an evil idea and it contradicts everything about America. That's what they hold is an ideal. And as long as that's an ideal, we will strive. They will continue to strive towards it. So they are trying to inculcate into America this idea that inequality is a problem. You know, they're blaming everything on it. So people are poor in America and mobility, it's true, there's a real problem of poverty in America. People are not able to rise up as fast as we would like. Mobility is stunted, it seems, right? Why? The left says inequality, inequality is at fault. The economy is not growing. Why is it not growing? Inequality is the problem. The rich, there's cronyism, there's some people who get rich not because of producing, not from win-win transactions but by stealing, right? By using government power in order to gain their wealth. Why is there cronyism? Because of inequality. All the problems we have today are caused by inequality. They claim and the solution is to all these problems is to reduce it. So, for example, one way to reduce inequality, they tell us, is by, I don't know, raising the minimum wage. There's a good way to decrease inequality, right? It's great, you give more money to poor people and they become wealthier. And then the gap shrinks and you solve two problems. You solve the problem of poverty and you solve the problem of inequality. How does that work? Anybody taking our Econ 101 class? I don't think you even have to. I think this is kind of common sense. What happens when you raise the price artificially of a good, any good in any market? What happens if you raise that price? What happens the demand for that good? It goes down. So if you raise wages artificially, what happens demand for that, for those people who own those wages? It goes down. Unemployment goes up. Who's unemployment? Anybody here going to be harmed? Well, some of you might be. If you own small businesses and you're paying, you have employees that you pay minimum wage, your business will be harmed. What about the employees? Any employees, who's going to be harmed among the employees? The young, the poorest of the poor. So what's fascinating about the left solution to all these problems is they all make things worse. They all make things worse. They don't make things better. They want to shrink inequality by making the lives of the poorest of the poor worse. Indeed, I could argue, I don't have time to, but I could argue that the reason there's no social, there's less mobility than that we like from poverty into middle-classhood. The reason for that is because of all the redistribution policies, the minimum wages, the licensing laws, the regulation of business, that it is statism. It is at the leftist policies that are hurting the poor. We don't want people to be born poor and not believe that they can rise up from poverty. We want people to believe this is part of the American dream. We want them to believe that they are free to rise up from poverty. To do that, what do we need? To make it possible for poor people to rise up from poverty, what do we need? Freedom. We need freedom. Who the licensing laws hurt? You know, in California, you need a license to shampoo hair. Who does that hurt? The young poor person who's trying to get the first job and shampooing hair is simple enough and now they have to go and pay $2,000 to get a license. Where do they have $2,000? And if you want to open a nail salon, you need a license, right, because all you guys need to be protected by the government from those evil nail salon operators who might give you fungus or something like that. I don't know. Who does that hurt? It's the young immigrant who's trying to start a business and trying to make a living for themselves and build something for themselves and create a business and you're hurting them at every level, a regulatory policy and welfare. When you hand people checks, what do you think that does? Does it encourage them to go on and find a job? No, it does the opposite. Minimum wages institutionalize people into unemployment because they never can get that foot on that first rung of the jobs ladder. And we don't have economic growth. We had a panel yesterday on economic growth, right? We know how to fix this. It's not hard. You know, reduce regulations, reduce taxes, get government out of our lives. Americans are still entrepreneurial. We can create jobs. This is not hard. Encourage businesses to invest. Encourage banks to give loans instead of holding $4 trillion of reserves at the Fed, right? It's not difficult. These things are not difficult. What do you need in order to create economic growth? One word starts with an F, freedom. And what's the problem of cronyism? There's real problem of cronyism. Let's not, I mean, this is the appeal of Boone Sanders, the logic stand, Donald Trump, because there is a sense in America today that some people are getting away with making money off of our backs by manipulating government that the system is rigged against us. But what's the solution to cronyism? Big government, bigger government. That's the solution, right? More regulations, more controls. Why do we have cronyism? Because government's in our lives and everything that we do. So we're gonna lobby to try to get them off our backs. And when we lobby to try to get them off our backs, it's very tempting, unfortunately, to lobby to get them on somebody else's back. My favorite story here is Microsoft. Microsoft in the early 90s. Do you know how much they spend on lobbying in Washington? Zero, nothing. No presence in D.C. No lawyers, no lobbyists, no building. And they were bought in front of the Senate, an iron hatch, a Republican, yelled at them. You gotta take Washington seriously. You gotta have representatives here. You gotta build a building in the beltway. You've gotta have a presence, a real presence in D.C. And you know what Microsoft's response was? If you leave us alone, we'll leave you alone. That's Silicon Valley at its best. That's American business at its best. That's American entrepreneurship at its best. Guess what happened a year later? Maybe every little less than a year. Who comes knocking on Microsoft's door? Antitrust division of the Justice Department. We're here because you guys, they offer a product for free. My Internet Explorer, I don't know if you remember this, but they were offering Internet Explorer bundled with the thing and that was a violation of antitrust. Ask me about antitrust in the Q&A. I've got a nice answer about antitrust. But they learned their lesson. Guess how much Microsoft spends today on lobbying in D.C.? Tens of millions of dollars a year. I don't know, if you ever visit D.C., it might be worth driving by and just looking at the Microsoft building. It's like equal distance from the White House and the Capitol. It's this beautiful glass building, right? They have a huge presence in D.C. They learned their lesson. So you want to get rid of cronyism? Shrink government. You want to get rid of cronyism? Eliminate regulations. Get them out of our lives. And you business people, you'd rather not go to Washington. You'd rather not lobby. You'd rather not hire lawyers. You'd rather be busy running your business. But they leave you no choice. So you want to get rid of cronyism? One word. Starts with an F. Freedom. Free us from the shackles of Washington. Free us from the shackles of regulators. So the left wants us to become envious. The left wants us to resent success. They want us to become Europeans. They don't hide their admiration for France and now with Bernie for Denmark and Sweden. These are the models that we should emulate. The left wants us to abandon what is exceptional about America, which is our individualism. Because think about what is the alternative to individualism. It's collectivism. And collectivism is where you place the group above the individual, where the group is the unit that you care about. And this relates to the issue that was asked yesterday about nationalism versus patriotism, which again I think I have a different view. What is nationalism? It's an ism. Nationalism means that you place the state above the individual. That the state is the measure of goodness. That the state is the measure of what's right and what's wrong. That the nation is what comes first. I can tell you that the day I knew I could not vote for John McCain was the day that he came out of the National Convention with the slogan, country first. America is not about nationalism. It's not about country first. It's about the freedoms of the individual first. The state is not there to be served. The state is our servant. The state is there to protect us. Yes, you go fight in wars for your country when your country is worth fighting for. This is the issue of patriotism. Patriotism is only a value when your country is a good country. I know a lot of patriots. German patriots during World War II, Japanese patriots during World War II. Not a good thing to be a patriot when the Nazis are ruling you. So patriotism is a value. Loving your country is a value when your country deserves your love. Nationalism is never good, is never right. Placing the nation, placing the state above the individual is anti-American. It's anti-American. America and the state is there to be our servant, to be our protector, to allow us as individuals to thrive. So what the Left wants, what the Left has always wanted, is to convert our individualism into collectivism. And in a collectivist society where the group matters, where you don't matter, you are taught then not to care about your own achievement and your own ability. You are taught then to care about other people. Your whole focus in life is other people. Everything is around what other people are doing. And that's where you get the envy and resentment that you get in Europe and that the inequality advocates want us to embrace. Because I'm watching you. I'm watching you guys because you're part of my group. And what you do reflects on me directly. We're together in this. Everybody's watching over everybody else. I don't know if it was mentioned in Israel, but I was born and raised in Israel and I immigrated to the United States. And one of the reasons I left Israel is exactly this. In America, you can choose who your friends are. You can choose whether to be nice to your neighbors or ignore them. Nobody cares. Nobody, people leave you alone unless you want a relationship and then Americans incredibly friendly. But they don't impose their friendliness on you. Israel is not like that. Now, I'm a huge fan of Israel's and you won't find a bigger defender of Israel. But I was born and raised there. Israel is one big family. A Jewish family. Everybody's in everybody else's lives. You cannot ignore your neighbor. Your neighbor wants to be in your life and is going to impose them in your life because Israel is... There's a tribal mentality. There's a collectivistic mentality. Everybody's in this together all the time, day in and day out. And that's what I left. That's what I enjoyed leaving. I love this country. Partially because you leave us alone. So the whole inequality debate is not an economic debate. There is no economic theory. No economic theory. Including Keynes. There's no economic theory that anybody's presented. Not even the former economist Paul Krugman has ever presented an economic theory. Some of you got that. He really is. He used to be a decent economist. He wrote a textbook on economics in which he says in the textbook on economics, he's got a whole chapter on the minimum wage where he says the minimum wage is stupid economics. No economist believes in it. It's a political issue. And of course, now in the New York Times he's the biggest advocate for the minimum wage. And trade is another issue where he actually got his Nobel Prize for writing on free trade, on the benefits of free trade. Now he's anti-free trade. So Paul Krugman used to be an economist. He's a political hack today. It's just a fact. But there is no economic theory. Stiglitz, none of these guys actually present an economic theory on why inequality is a bad thing. There's no evidence, including Piketty's big book. I don't know if you're familiar with this. There's no evidence that inequality is causing any of the problems that they claim it's causing. Again, there were problems in America. Poverty, lack of economic growth, cronyism, none of them have to do with a gap. They all are discrete problems that all have to do, in my view, with too much government, too much intervention, and arguably also a bad educational system that there's no accident, that that's also run by the government. So inequality is not an economic issue. There is no economic issue here. Inequality at the end of the day is an attempt by the left to change America, to make us resent success, to collectivize us, to make us reject individualism, to make us reject the idea of self-made individuals. And this is where I think President Obama's most important speech and the one he should go down in history for is that you didn't build that speech. To me, that's by far his most important speech because it sets forward the real agenda of the left, the real agenda of the whole inequality debate. And that is to convince you that you didn't build it. Whatever it is in your life, you are not responsible for it. It was government that helped you by building roads and infrastructure, which is bizarre to me, right? How did they get their money to build roads and infrastructure? By taxing businesses. Who comes first? Roads and infrastructure or business? Business has to come first. Otherwise, where do you get the funds to build the infrastructure, right? So, but you didn't build that. It was government that helped you, right? You didn't build it because you had help from your employees. Last I heard, in America, we still pay our employees for the help that they give us. Nobody denies that Microsoft was not just built by Bill Gates, but a lot of people were paid very well at Microsoft for helping Bill Gates build Microsoft, right? You didn't build that because you had some great teacher in your past. How many of you had a great teacher in your past? I didn't, but you guys did. That's great. At least I don't remember having one, anyway. So, this is my advice to all of you people who had a great teacher in your past. Go find them if they're still alive and thank them. And if you've got a lot of money, write them a check out of gratitude. That's great. I'm all for justice. If somebody's contributed a lot to your life, pay them back. That's wonderful. But is your success, is who you are today, 100% of consequence of that teacher? But you see they're driving at something deeper and this comes out of the work of philosopher John Rawls who was a Harvard philosopher. Maybe I think the most influential thinker turns out on American culture in the last 50 years. And John Rawls said that basically we're not responsible for any of our successes because we're all just lucky. By the way, Juan Buffett says the same thing. Juan Buffett says his wealth is a product of 100% luck. He had the right genes. He had the right parents and he was born into the right country in the right century. And all of that is true. All of that is true. But what's missing? Right, there's a huge debate in psychology. Are we a product about genes? Or are we a product of the environment? And if you're really, really radical in psychology, you think it's a mixture of the two. But what's missing? To me, I've always been, right, there's genes, there's environment, and there is you. Your free will. The choices you make. Free will exists. You can actually decide to get up and walk out of this room right now. Don't please, but you could. The most important thing that makes you who you are are the choices you make. The individual is responsible for his own soul, for his own being, for who he is, for his successes, for his failures. This is what this country is. This is what this country believes in. An individual responsibility, not in the superficial sense, but in the sense of you make yourself. You are responsible for your own character. You are responsible for your own success. Now, there's luck plays a role here. But you know what? It turns out, it turns out that the harder we work, the luckier we get. It's funny how that is, right? That's a li-trovino line, the golfer, right? It's true. You make your own luck. It's true. Some people are born with opportunities that other people lack. That's a fact. But it's what you do with those opportunities that matter. What you choose to do with those opportunities that matter. So deep, what they want to destroy is that knowledge that Americans have had, that we are self-made, that we can make ourselves. It's luck. You didn't build it. It's the community. It's the group. It's the collective. That's the agenda. This is not about politics. Politics is the outcome. This is about culture. This is about our souls. This is about who we are as individuals and ultimately who we are as a nation. So this conference, as always, is a great opportunity to revisit that question. Who are we as a nation? And I think we're the greatest nation that the world has ever seen. Not because we happen to be in a particular geographic area, not because of a particular ethnic composition that we have, but we are the greatest nation that has ever been because our founders had a profound understanding of human nature, our founders had a profound understanding of political philosophy, and our founders built a nation for the first time in history on an idea, the idea of individualism, the idea of the sanctity of the individual. So let's spend this weekend committing ourselves to never, ever giving up on that idea. Thank you all. I think we got a little bit of time for questions, which is always fun. So I and I trust is, in my view, the beginning. It's the first real legislation that starts to regulate business in America. It's passed in 1890 by a Republican, by a Republican administration. And it's a very tricky law. It's the ideal law for bureaucrats because basically, everybody is always in violation of antitrust. It's written in such a way that you're always in violation which gives a lot of power to regulators because they get to decide who to go after and who not to go after. So let me give you some examples. If you are making, if you can charge a very high price for your product, then that is very suspicious because economic theory tells us that the only way over a long period of time to have high profit margins is if you have what? A monopoly. So if you're charging too much, you must be monopolistic in your behavior. What about if you're charging too little? If you're the cheapest, cheapest product out there in the market, like Microsoft, giving out Internet Explorer for free. Are you in violation of antitrust then? Yeah, it's called dumping. Dumping, right? You're undercutting your competition. You're trying to gain unfair advantage by charging too little. And what happens if you charge exactly the same price as your competitors? It's called collusion. This is a beautiful law if you're in power. Now, I'm simplifying it, but look around. Look at the kind of cases that have been brought based on antitrust. Look at the benefits that it's produced. Look at the big cases. JD Rockefeller. What was his sin? Lowering prices every single year. Increasing quality every single year. Making gasoline so cheap ultimately that it was what was used in the internal combustion engine. By the way, he saved the whales because until kerosene became really, really cheap, what we were using was whale oil. The whaling industry was devastated by cheap kerosene. Alcoa. What was Alcoa's sin? Cheap aluminum. Efficiency of scale. What was IBM's sin? They dominated mainframe computers but the regulators missed digital and of course missed the PC revolution and they had to walk away from the antitrust case because it was clearly irrelevant by the time PCs came around. Those are the big cases but they're little cases every single day where American businessmen attacked by our regulators for doing business. Now, again, not every businessman does business well or does business right but you know what the best solution for collusion and for bad business practice is? Not fraud. Fraud, that's the role of government. It's the marketplace. The marketplace destroys colluders. There's a wonderful little book about Michigan entrepreneurs by Bruton Folsom. A wonderful little book who wrote the book called The Myth of the Robert Barons. I highly recommend the book The Myth of the Robert Barons. Anything by Folsom is brilliant and he's got a book on Michigan entrepreneurs and he shows how thou chemical destroyed the cartel of German chemical companies who were colluding on price. Just for that, it's worth reading. That's my mild opinion on antitrust. Worst law ever passed. You made a very provocative comment that we don't have equality of opportunity and you linked it to education. So I would guess that you would think more choices in education are a good thing and a way to equalize in a sense opportunity. So could you talk a little bit about school choice and how you answer the critics of school choice that by having choice we harm the kid in Chicago who goes to a public inner city public school? Oh my God. I mean if you're a kid in Chicago and go to an inner city public school my heart goes out to you. I can't think of a worse fate. Chicago inner city public schools are awful. Let me just give you a cost statistic because I think it's interesting. To send a kid to school in the city of Chicago cost the city of Chicago $16,000 a year. This is a Kato Institute number. $16,000 a year. All in administrators, bureaucrats, teachers, school, everything. $16,000. To send the same kid to a school across the street run by the Chicago Archdiocese cost $7,500. You could shut down every public school in the city of Chicago and the city of Chicago could pay for those kids to go to private school and return half the money to taxpayers. And on top of that the kids would get a far better education. So that gives you an indication but let me say something more fundamental before I get to education. I strongly believe that this country was founded on a principle that says that the only role of government and I emphasize only is to protect our individual rights. To protect our right to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness. It is not to provide us with goodies including education. Now I know Thomas Jefferson would probably disagree with me because he founded the University of Virginia but respectfully I disagree with Tom, right? So I don't believe the state has any role in education. I think it cripples our kids. The state, as George Washington said I think in his second inaugural address government is a gun. Government is coercion. Government is force. Force, guns, coercion have a place on the battlefield to protect us and we don't do enough of that. They do not have a role in our schools. Corrosion, an entity organized around coercion has no job tinkering with the brains of our kids. I like to ask audiences if you want to send a letter and make sure it gets its destination tomorrow how many of you are going to use the post office? Nobody. You all would use FedEx and right? UPS. And yet you're quite comfortable dropping your kids off at the post office every day to have them tinker with their education. It's the same mentality. It's the same bureaucracy. It's the same thing. You cannot do it well as a government. Government does well one thing only and that is protection and arbitration of disputes. So if you want great education in this country and I want great education in this country I want it to be 100% private and this is why I don't like the school choice terminology. I understand it's a step in that direction. I want the school sold in mass completely. Privatize them all. Now there's an issue certainly in the short run of how to fund education for poor kids. So I'm a huge advocate of a program that has passed the legislature and signed by the governor of Nevada called Education Saving Accounts. Now it's in the courts. So it's still being challenged but this is to me a true revolution. This is what we should all be really pounding at. This is important. The idea is this. The state of Nevada takes the amount of money they spend per child and public education. In the case of Nevada it's about $5,400. And if you don't want your kid to go to public school they put it into bank account for you tax free. I think it's 90% of the $5,400. You can use that money for private school, for homeschooling, for online education. You can roll it from one year to the next. You can roll it into a college saving account. All tax free. But education is your responsibility not the state's. And that way the government is still funding in a sense education but not controlling it. So you take away the issue of what are poor kids going to do. Well they're going to get the same amount of money but now they get to use in a private. Imagine if the city of Chicago did it. They gave every citizen $15,000 in their account. Those kids could go to really, really good schools and get a really, really good education. So I'm for eliminating all government involvement in education. You have to do the funding in the short term. I understand that. I'd like to see that go away ultimately. But in the short term you have to do that fine. But we've got to start moving to radical solutions. Little steps. Don't work. And the battle is not in the little stuff. The battles and the big stuff. We've got to be radical. We've got to demand real changes. The Republican Party too much has sold out time and time again by being moderate, by being compromising. I have to tell you my favorite government today is gridlock. I love gridlock. I don't want the Democrats and Republicans to get along because I know what that means. It means that Democrats winning. It always has meant that. Republicans are always the ones who compromise to the left. The Democrats never really significantly compromise to the right. Maybe with the exception of welfare reform under Clinton. So what we need, what this country needs is people to be really radical. It's to stand up for real principles and yes, then we'll compromise. But at least we'll know where we're heading. And let me just say this on this point. Use healthcare as an example. A long, long time ago the left decided that they wanted universal healthcare. They wanted socialized medicine in America. This goes back to the 40s, probably even the 30s. The progressives have always wanted it. And they said, we want universal healthcare. And we're willing to compromise our way to there. And they had no shame in saying what we want is one single-payer universal healthcare. And they got what they wanted, right? They got in the 60s, they got Medicare which sorry guys is socialized medicine for old people. It's what it is. It's single-payer socialized medicine. And then they got Medicaid which is socialized medicine for poor people. And then they got an increase in Medicare and Medicaid. And then they got Part D of Medicare which is the largest expansion of the welfare state under a Republican president, Republican House, Republican Senate. That was under George Bush. And now they've got Obamacare and Obamacare of course is set up to fail. And it's set up to blame the insurance industry so that they get single-payer. Was they one Republican? Has they been one Republican? Certainly since the 1960s that has said, what I want, I know I'm not going to get this but what I want is a hundred percent private medicine. I want there to be no Medicaid. I want there to be no Medicaid. I want them to be no government-involving medicine. I want private healthcare, pure, hundred percent. Now I know I'm not going to get there. I'm going to need to compromise to get there but that's my, that's my, you know, standard. That's what I'm shooting for. No. Nobody has said that. And that's why we don't have a standard. We don't know where we're going. And if we don't know where we're going, let me guarantee we will not get there. We will not get there. And what we'll do is we'll go where they know. They know exactly where they're going. They know exactly what they want. And that's why we tend to compromise in their direction. We need to be principled. We need to stand for what we believe in. And we need to be radical. But yes, people will laugh at us. Just as people laughed at the leftists who said they wanted socialized medicine 50, 60 years ago. Nobody took them seriously. Right? America, socialized medicine? That's ridiculous. That'll never happen here. Look, it's happening right before our eyes. Day one, we lost. The revolution precedes the political one. You have to talk up a little bit. The philosophical revolution comes first, then you get in politics. We see in Asia, we see a lot more freedom today than 50 years ago. What do we take away from that? Or what can we see there? Well, what you're seeing in Asia, what you saw in Asia starting in the late 1970s was a recognition of a failed model. When Deng Xiaoping came to power and Mao Zedong was dead and Deng Xiaoping comes to power in China, he looks around. He visits Japan and he sees Japan decades ahead of China. They both fought a World War II. They both came out of World War II devastated. And yet China was dirt poor and Japan was incredibly rich. And he looks for a model. And he goes and he interviews intellectuals and he looks for ideas. And he starts freeing up China. He starts experimenting. He starts, you know, a million flowers blossom or whatever was the term. But he lets experiments happen and when experiments work and they happen to be experiments in private property and they work as not to surprise of anybody, he doubles up on them and they succeed. And the same thing is happening at about the same time in South Korea, in Taiwan, in, you know, and of course in Hong Kong it's been going on, you know, for a long time. They discover the ideas that the West discovered 150 years earlier. They discovered capitalism. They discovered individual freedom and they slowly let their people experience that. It's also not an accident that this discovery is happening at the same time as Reagan and Thatcher are coming to power and being successful. And the Asians look, Thatcher was incredibly influential globally in terms of people looking for a model and seeing what she did. Thatcher, in my view, will go down in history is more important in a sense than Reagan because she changed England in a more significant way than Reagan changed America. Thatcher really changed the UK. I mean, I remember the UK in the 70s. Ugly place. And people were unhappy and miserable and angry and unpleasant. And you go to London today, it's not recognizable the change that's happened. People look to that and they saw a model and they wanted to emulate that model and they associate that model with freedom. I think the biggest tragedy that's happening right now, I'd say since the financial crisis, is that Asia is now looking at the West and saying that model's broken. Even the West doesn't buy the model. Capitalism doesn't work. Even Alan Greenspan says capitalism is flawed. So we have to be more cautious in how we progress into the future. So Ronald Reagan was right. America has always been a shiny city on a hill. We're not anymore because we don't shine and we don't pretend to shine. And our model is broken. It's not capitalism is broken. Our model of the mixed economy is broken. And they don't have a model to emulate. They don't have the ideas because we don't preach those ideas anymore. So I think they're struggling. What's the next step? Where do they go from here? So I still think that what happens in America makes a huge difference around the world because people look to us as an example. They look to see what works and what doesn't work here. So because Asia wasn't an ideal, it was somewhat of an ideological shift. They adopted elements of the individualism. But it's not a deep ideological shift. It's an example that they seek. Yeah. One of our speakers yesterday said the problem is not economic inequality. It's lack of economic opportunity. What do you have to say about the loss of living wage factory worker jobs? So let me say I agree that the problem is today, lack of economic opportunities. And what we need in this country is more jobs. And we know, again, we know how to create jobs. Free up businesses. Reduce taxes. But more importantly, reduce dramatically reduced government spending. Reform entitlements to shrink them dramatically. Stop sucking money out of the private economy. Let the private economy flourish. Jobs will be created. Capitalism, wherever it is tried, and the pure way it is tried, creates more jobs than there are people. That's true of Hong Kong. That's true of the United States. That's true of any way it's tried. So what we need is more freedom and we'll have more opportunities. Where those opportunities are going to be in terms of what jobs they are? I mean, only central planners know that. Not that long ago, 90% of Americans were farmers. Less than 1% of Americans today are farmers. Today, the United States manufactures twice the number of goods, things, than it did in the late 1970s with less than half the people. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I think it's a good thing. We are the strongest manufacturing country in the world. We manufacture huge quantities. Nobody tells you this. Huge quantities of stuff with fewer people. Why? Why? Because of China? Because of technology. Technology's made us more efficient. So we need fewer people. That's a good thing, not a bad thing. Manufacturing jobs are not the ideal job. We've created this mythology of the 1950s as being utopia. It wasn't. I don't know where the jobs are going to be, but I do know this. That every step in the technological progress of mankind has generated more jobs, not less. There are more jobs in the world today than ever in human history. There are more people. And they're working. And they're working creating stuff for all those people. The more people we have, the more jobs there will be, the more wealth there will be, the greater the standard of living there will be. If, if, we have one thing, starts with F, freedom. That's the essence. You want more economic opportunities? You need more economic freedom. That's the bottom line. And let the politicians figure out exactly how we get there, but demand that that be the standard, economic freedom. I think we're done. Thank you all.