 Yeah, dear Gülçin, dear Hans, dear colleagues, ladies and gentlemen, it's a great pleasure to be with you this morning. My talk is based on a little PowerPoint presentation. I hope you don't mind. My wife didn't like it. I said, no, as a professor, you need to be pedagogical, people need to take notes and be structured and so on. So we'll see. So the the topic is Private Philanthropy as a competitor of the welfare state. So it's it's it's a topic It's a little bit as an offspring of my books. We'll make a little commercial interruption now. So it's a book. It's just being published will be delivered next week. The Wirtschaft und das Unentgeltliche, the Economy and Gratuitous Goods, and an English version will be forthcoming at the end of the year, early next year, published by the Mises Institute under the title Abundance Generosity and the State. Okay, so it deals with all gratuitous goods, gratuitous goods being, of course, gifts on the one hand, but then also individual action dedicated to the development of a science or of an art, something which you devote yourself to a cause that is not yourself. As of us yourself who is who is the agent there, so you're deciding to do this but the object of the beneficiary is that it's not your own person, but something else than yourself and then in a wider sense also among gratuitous goods we have all the spontaneous benefits that result from human action both within the market and outside of the market. So in many ways we benefit from what others do without having to pay a single penny for for these benefits. For example in the word of example, right, we have examples, good examples delivered by others, bad examples delivered by others benefit us in so many ways. We take inspiration from good examples, we take warnings from bad examples, and we don't have to pay for these things. Then of course there are various positive externalities resulting from the market process with which economists are familiar and so on. So it's a very wide topic and it interlaces with traditional economics in various ways. Of course this book is based on Austrian economics, so the basic foundation, the praxeological foundation of these theoretical work has been laid by Ludwig von Misesen, I don't think this, and one of the subjects that I touch is indeed philanthropy. It's not the main focus, but it's one of the things that I touch. And of course the welfare state because the welfare state is coercive gratuitousness, so it's not true gratuitousness because it's based on the violation of property rights, right? If you play Robin Hood and you rob other people in order to give that money to others, to still others, well, that's not truly a gift, so that's not really a gratuitous good, but that's robbery, right? And of course you can say, well, but Robin Hood, he was just robbing the evil prince who had taken the money from taxpayers and so on. Well, even in that case it wouldn't be a gift, it would be a restitution. And if you take money away from a robber and give it to the people who will just do, that's not a gift. You don't give anything. Maybe you give your own activity, you dedicate yourself to justice, something like, okay, that's different, but the money, in any case, it's not a true gift. Well, Mises himself developed various elements of the economics of gratuitous goods. For example, his discussion of entrepreneurial action and of the creative genius. The creative genius is dedicated to a cause. He pursues something that is precisely not himself. He does not try to earn as much money as possible or to aggrandize his own image in the eyes of others. He is dedicated to writing the Ninth Symphony or to write sonnets and whatever, to art, to science, and he creates great things from which others benefit in various ways. But he's a little bit outside of the usual bond that you have in labor relations. If you have an employee, you pay him to do certain things. Well, these are things that reasonably can be done by work. Whereas writing the Ninth Symphony, you could not possibly commission such a work. In fact, you don't know it before you see it, before it's eventually there. So Mises recognized that this was outside of ordinary economics. And did various other things as well in his book. And what I do is to develop this much more detailed, systematize it and show that gratuitous goods are interwoven with the market economy and with self-centered actions, which of course, which I don't denigrate. So I think this is perfectly legitimate and good and beneficial to others in so many ways. So it's not a claim that we should now become all altruists and all completely only devoted to science and to the arts and so on. That's not the point, but it shows that that also exists. It plays an important part in human life and it is interwoven with the self-interested activities of the market that are so central and so fundamental in many ways and contributes to the overall picture that we should have of economy and society. Mises also inspired an important figure for us, important for us today in any case, whose name is Richard Cornwell. This man, so the picture was taken in the 1980s and 1990s. He was born in 1927. I think he died in 2011 or something like this. So he was a member of Mises' seminar as a young man. He came to New York in the late 1940s and then stayed in Mises' seminar for more than 10 years. I don't know exactly. He said he was in the seminar in the 1960s. So he knew Mises' thought very well. He worked for the William Fokker Fund in those days. His brother, I forgot the first name of the brother, his older brother was the director of the William Fokker Fund, which paid for a high-excelery at the University of Chicago, which funded travel expenditure of Mises' hike and various other Austrians, libertarians to the Montpelerin Society in Europe and so on, funded publication projects just such as Man's Economy and State and other books. So the Fokker Fund played a very important role and was then dissolved in the early 1960s. Richard Cornwell, in a distinct contrast to his brother, then deviated a bit from libertarianism and got disenchanted with libertarianism because he felt that, in case his perception was that libertarianism was too unilaterally concerned with promoting the market. And as far as he was concerned, he thought, well, we need to distinguish not only between the market and the state, so taking opposition to the state and promoting market activities, but we need also to appreciate for true value a third sector that exists next to the market and next to the state, which he proposed to call the independent sector. And this has been, in the past 20, 30 years, a very fashionable topic in the social sciences with lots of studies dedicated to analyzing, well, how do nonprofits operate, what are hybrid businesses, social enterprise and things like this, so where the objective would be not just to earn profits, but to pursue other objectives simultaneously. And of course, this is manifest also today in all these ESG investing initiatives. So the point is, yeah, we want to make a profit, but we also want to improve the world, to make the world a better place by pursuing ecological, social and government objectives, right? So Richard Connell was actually the first one to conceptualize this idea, so he was a forerunner, and in that respect is quite interesting for us. He himself took his inspiration from a well-known French author in the 19th century, namely Alexide Tocqueville. So Tocqueville traveled to the US in the early 19th century and then published in the 1830s and 1840 two volumes of a very famous book, La Démocratie en Amérique, Democracy in America. And here Tocqueville gave a fascinating characterization of American society in those days, which is still worthwhile to read, and is widely read still today. And most notably, he emphasized not the market economy as being characteristic of what America is all about, but associative life, clubs, voluntary, volunteerism, as we would say today. So Americans, in order to solve any social problems that they might confront, we need to build a road, we need to help the poor, we need to improve our environment in various ways, we need to clamp down on crime and so on. They were not turning first to market and paying people, or they would do this as well, but they would first of all establish an association and join forces in order to settle the problem, so community action. Now that was inspiration for Richard Cornwell, and I said, well, so this seems to be the key for renewing with this glorious past. We need to emphasize this third sector, this independent sector, civil society as we would often say today. So we need just, we need to stop focusing on the opposition between state and market, and say the market have come to dominate the scene only in the 20th century, but there was a glorious past in which the independent sector was prime, and state and market was small, and we should return to this glorious past. So this was his way of reclaiming the American dream. American dream of course being the idea that you only ask for life, liberty, and well, the liberty to pursue your own happiness, and the conviction that without having any guarantees from the state, from the church, or others, just by hard work in cooperation with others, and by saving and reinvesting your earnings, you will be able to lead a happy life and take care, gain, gain material, maybe not affluence, but comfortable life and be able to help your own family and care also for others. So that's the idea. Now of course as you know, today we are quite removed from this. I've looked up jokes about the American dream, in fact there are quite a few jokes out, because many people are disenchanted and believe the American dream is dead, right? So one of these jokes was, well, it is a dream because you have to sleep in order to believe it, and the other one was, yeah, Michael Jackson is the epitome of the American dream. Only in America a poor black boy could become a rich white woman. Now the American dream has come under fire not only because of Michael Jackson and other strange cases of this sort, but also because as we know that it is becoming increasingly difficult for younger generations to live this dream and to work their way out of poverty, and there are reasons for this that we'll discuss a bit later down the way. So it's not surprising that in our day, there are certain siren songs, right? Like this gentleman for example, so his book had the title, The Odessity of Hope, but the subtitle is, right? Thoughts on reclaiming the American dream. So it resonates with Cornwell's book from the 1960s. I'm pretty sure that he didn't know the book when he was writing it because, okay, I won't go into this. But in any case, what we know that this gentleman had a very different conception of reclaiming the American dream was very state-based, right? So we do this top-down, we set into place an army of social workers and I don't know, but we transform companies, commercial enterprise and so on by infiltrating them with ESG criteria and so on. So that's a very special way of reclaiming the American dream which was not Richard Cornwell's idea. Cornwell argued that the independent sector had come, had been neglected in the 20th century because for some reasons, which she doesn't really discuss, it failed to adopt modern technology. Technology does not merely mean computer and stuff like this but also commercial techniques and organizational techniques that have been developed in the business sector, so in the corporate world and so on. Cornwell thought that if private associations, clubs, non-governmental organizations and so on, were to adopt modern business techniques, they could play a greater role in solving the problems, social problems of America, poverty, inequalities and so on. They could play an important role in funding research and therefore solve problems related to cancer and whatever. So once these associations are equipped with modern technique, well they could enter into competition with government welfare agencies, housing department, labor department and so on, by proposing to Congress private solutions and then the members of Congress, well they could vote laws and presently they would invariably decide to entrust the solution of this and that problem to some government agency but if there is private, it's a private alternative, well then they might vote for different laws and say well we'll entrust this to a private work, to volunteering work. So that was his vision. Now how realistic is this Cornwellian way of reclaiming the American dream? In what follows I will present for criticisms, if you wish, by focusing first on the independent sector today, just make a little stock taking, what does the so-called independent sector, that what is not expressly business or state, look like today? What's the landscape? Has Cornwell's vision become true or has it improved the situation as compared to what it was in the 1960s? My second point will be to emphasize that one very fundamental weakness of this whole conception is a confusion between the legal form of any human form of cooperation and its economic nature. Then I'll emphasize the various ways in which governments compete and which make it finally very unlikely that any private organization and direct competition with government may succeed. And finally I'll discuss the impact of the government interventionism on philanthropy in general. So how does the independent sector look like today? So we have a whole landscape of well we have business organization, BO's, government organizations, GO's, then we have NGOs, non-government organizations, so that's the third sector, the independent sector. And I would say there are also a lot of PNGO's, pseudo non-government organizations, so organizations that look like they were independent of business and government, but truly are either extensions of the corporate world or are extensions of government. And unfortunately the latter are very important today. So I think we can distinguish between three main types of independent sector organizations, NGOs. We have on the one hand fiscal front organization, now that's my, it's not in the literature, this is my expression, right, fiscal front organizations. Then we have political front organizations. And then finally we have genuine associations, okay. Now the first two ones are PNGO's and only the third one is a genuine NGO, okay. Now the problem is that the first two dominate the scene and increasingly so and the third one is in decline, that's the fundamental fact. So fiscal front organizations, this concerns most notably foundations, Anglo-Saxon law, both in the U.S. and in the U.K. and everything that depends from the U.K. gives extremely lavish conditions for transmitting property through foundations. So you can run your business through a foundation in Holland, by the way, it's not much different. Holland is also great liberty for foundations, not taxed. There's no taxation of the income. They can even make profitable investments, stuff like this. They can transmit property to the next generation so it can be structured in such a way that only the family members run the foundation and so on. It's just a way to avoid any taxation of wealth and income. Now that's of course fine, right, from a libertarian point of view, there's not much to be said against this. That's good. In fact, the only thing they would say, well, I would wish that everybody would benefit from this, right. So as a matter of fact, the problem that we have here is that fiscal fronts serve essentially affluent people who can afford to pay the lawyers who structure this thing and watch any legal threats that might arise and help them in preserving their property, which is already a good thing. Now, to some estimates, in the U.S., this seems to be relatively speaking more important than in the U.K. So I've given you this quote from a gentleman who studied these things about 10 years ago, George McCully. And so he established a catalog for philanthropy for his native Massachusetts. And he found that 75% of tax-exempt entities are primarily self-serving, that is supported by, provided, providing benefits for their own members. And only 10% are indisputable. The private initiatives for public good focusing on quality of life and engaged in public fundraising. So the philanthropic marketplace and the remaining 15% are para philanthropic somewhere between the two. So that's the situation. And it's even pushed to an extreme in the case of very large philanthropy where we get, in fact, to the second sort of category, the political fund organization. So a very large philanthropy, so the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, Bertelsmann in Germany, and so on. So it's very large. So here, indeed, right, there's so much money involved that these people, I mean, they don't have to worry about caring for their own family members, right? So that's for the middle class million there, right? So people, we have 10, 20 billion, so something that's set about a foundation and provide for their own family members. And usually they're not interested in anything else. And I don't, again, I don't say that's bad. So that's perfectly fine. It's okay. But here, in the case of the mega foundation, of course, we, as we all know, they try to have and do have significant impact on the political life of the countries in which they're active. And so they're usually very strongly associated with governments in their place on which they've depended various ways in which they profit in various ways. So in the literature, this is then called philanthro capitalism, right? Capitalism driven by, organized by, oriented by very large foundations. I prefer to call this philanthro cronyism, because that's really what it is. It has been known for a very long time. It has been known in antiquity, in Greece, in Rome there. I'm not aware of any study, but the story in Paul Vain, he studied the case of Greece. And he called this, well, it has been called at the time, it can be translated liberally as do goodism, something like this, right? So they have the same conception as we have, right? So people who do good to the government, so very rich people in Athens and so on, they would assume out of their own purse, certain public activities, funding an army, repairing a canal or something like this. And this was their way of giving back, right? Giving back to the community. And in fact, it was sort of an exchange, because on the one hand they stood to benefit from various legal privileges that were at the foundation of the wealth, most notably lax monetary policy, existed already in Greece, but that's a different chapter, maybe a talk for another year, right? So it amassed enormous wealth, and on the other hand when it was expected, well, they give some something back. So we have here a characteristic feature of the do gooders throughout our ages, right? Some do gooders, of course. They have earned their money all on their own without any government monopoly or helping hand from the coercive state, but many of them have, right? And then they feel obliged, they have a bad conscience, they feel obliged to give back. And then in our day, they are very often advocates of higher taxation of incomes and wealth, right? Just so much. For example, I think Warren Buffett said things to this effect. And the most famous literary expression of his mind said, in modern times, this Carnegie's book published in 1899, I believe, the Gospel of wealth, let this think down, the Gospel of wealth, right? And so he explains, well, the wealthy man has obligations toward society and so on, and of course, wealth should be taxed, income should be taxed, and he should do good in various ways. Now, again, of course, I'm not opposed to people doing good to others and to themselves in various ways, but the point here is, right, we have excessive wealth with very large fortunes, which are often earned by government support, and which then in turn lead their beneficiaries to claim for even more government interventions. So that's philanthropic cronism. Next, we have the political front organizations. So here we have NGOs that are really P NGOs, pseudo non-governmental organizations. And again, we have a very long tradition in former times. One of the earliest forms in modern times was privateering, that is, pirate's private enterprise, recruited by the government for naval warfare, so the government issues them, I don't know, the legal expression, a letter saying whatever crimes you commit, if they are done for the benefit of the crown, that's okay. So the French privateers, their mission was to hijack British boats and Spanish boats, and the British had their privateers, so they were hijacking French boats and Spanish boats and so on, so there was a whole industry, right. And of course, we know this on our own day, right, so it's the famous or infamous Wagner operation, right, there are various similar commercial companies in the US, in France, and in other Western countries, which are conducting covered military operations for the benefit of the government, very often commissioned by the government, but which would not be legitimate if carried out by a public organization, right, so they really do the dirty work that nobody else, no public organization, no government organization could carry out. In banking, we have the same thing, I'll give you just a monetary policy, one example, central banks may usually not own shares of companies in their own country, for perfectly good reason, because if they were allowed to do this, then of course, you could from one day to another transform that country into a socialist commonwealth, right. The central bank is unlimited possibility to produce money, so they could buy all the shares on the stock market, and thereby transform the economy into a socialist economy, so that's not really what we want. Therefore, central banks may only typically buy debt instruments, promises of payments or debt, but not shares and property. Now, while this concerns essentially the shares of companies listed on the domestic market, it does not concern companies listed on the foreign markets, right, so nothing prevents the Federal Reserve from purchasing shares issued in Europe or in Asia, nothing prevents the central banks of the Euro system from purchasing American shares, shares of U.S. companies on some other markets, and in fact, as we know, by just looking at the balance sheets and occasional communicative slips, because sometimes they say things that should not have said, well, we know that there's some sort of consultation going on, right. So the Americans are buying European stocks in exchange for European buying American stocks and so on, same thought, right, so we have a privateering enterprise. Then of course, we have NGOs engaged in military intelligence and foreign policy interference, one very famous case, I mean, for those who know a little bit that literature, is the National Endowment for Democracy, which by all intents and purposes seems to be very clearly a CIN front organization, right, and what they do is, well, in all the countries in which they are active, in which they are allowed to operate, well, they prepare color revolutions, right, so takeovers of government by groups that are friendly or even directed by the Americans, by the U.S. government. So we have this, right, and of course we might ask, okay, so thinking back of Cornwell, where is the volunteering here, right, where are the volunteers, right, there are no volunteers, right, all these people working for fiscal fund organization, political fund organizations, they're all very richly remunerated, there is no volunteer work here at all involved, right, so where we do, and of course there's no competition because there's central coordination, where we do find still volunteers is in genuine organizations, so we have fear churches, fraternities, neighbor associations, right, sports clubs, professional organizations, rotary club lines, and things like this, okay, so here we have two volunteers still at work, and what do we observe here, well, what we observe is declining membership, both quantitative and qualitative, so qualitative, the typical metric that is used is how many people do you have that are only writing checks and how many people are actually doing the work, really show up to the meetings, show up to the activities and so on, and according to both metrics, membership is declining, right, yeah, so that's the situation, so clearly we can say, okay, whatever the merits of Richard Cornwell's reclaiming the American dreams is on theoretical grounds in practice, it didn't turn around the tendency, the tendency was continued towards the destruction of the genuine civil society, the true independence sector, and what we got since the 1960s is a whole plethora of fake, of pseudo non-governmental organizations, okay, the next point is the confusion between legal form and economic nature, so Cornwell proposes to emphasize this as far as non-state organizations are concerned, the huge difference between for-profit versus non-profit business versus civil society, market versus the independent sector and so on, right, and that distinction is questionable because the objective with which an organization is run is of course constrained by its legal form but it's not fully determined by the legal form, and for example, as we have just seen, you can run a foundation as a for-profit enterprise and that is today typically the case, right, it's, we've seen the quotation I gave you just before in Massachusetts, more than 75 percent of our foundations are extensions of a commercial enterprise, right, so you have a legal form which is a non-profit but in fact the people running it are operating like a for-profit, right, you can operate a think tank which is legally non-profit, you can operate it in a for-profit way and say well okay I have my revenue, these are the people who donate money to the thing, I have my cost expenditure, the people are writing papers for me, papers for me in the student seminars that are organized and so on, and then you try to maximize your revenue, try to maximize your profit, nothing prevents you from doing this, all right, or very few things prevent you from doing this, some constraints, right, so the spirit with which you run an organization has little to do with the legal setup, same thing as far as companies are concerned, I've seen companies in the past 10 years or so that legally were commercial enterprises but really it was just a collection of assets held by some wealthy man and they adjusted a quiet life and were enjoying whatever their villas and cars and jets and so on and had no intention of increasing the capital base of the company of gaining any revenue, that is possible, right, it's possible to do it, you have the legal form of a commercial enterprise but you don't act as you would expect an entrepreneur to act, and okay families, okay that's of course more extreme but of course you can run a family like a business, right, well oh yeah I have revenue, I've cost all these eaters at my table and so on and then I want to maximize revenue over the next few years, right, want to preserve my old age revenue, raising enough kids that make me independent of the welfare state and I don't know what, right, so it's wrong to identify legal form and economic objective, right, the two opposition remains the one between coercion and liberty between the political means and economic means as Franz Oppenheimer put it, coercion and freedom interventionism versus private property, here we have a categorical difference, the third point is a brief consideration about how governments compete, is it possible to compete with private associations against the welfare state, well first of all governments have one means that nobody else has by definition because governments are by definition the monopoly of organized violence in a country, right, all other organizations of a similar sort are criminal organizations by definition, which reminds me of another great joke, right, this young boy that after at the age of eight comes to see his father and the father is reading the newspaper and says daddy finally I know what I want to do in my life, father doesn't look up from the paper, so what is it, I'll make a Korean in organized crime, father still doesn't look up and said public or private and I said I mean so you have the mafia and so on, right, but these are combated with the organized, right, the legitimate forces of the state by the with the support of the entire population, right, so that's if you can mobilize violations of the the standard rules, private property, integrity of your own life, of your own body, we've seen it in the case of the COVID policies where in many countries many countries were on the verge of mandating vaccinations to the population, literally coming with the syringe and forcing people to get injections and so on, right, so that's what the state can do and no other organization can do this, now that gives certain competitive advantages, most notably it allows the government to hijack competitors or at least to crowd them out, right, it can hijack competitors, in the past if you just look through the main cases, right, theology is bringing churches, religious movement under state control, bring money under state control, bring the law under state control, security organizations, communications, education, utilities, even labor unions and of course the welfare state, now there are certain priorities but the priorities change historically, so historically we've observed the government's first focus on the most important things, the most fundamental things, in the case of theology it never worked fully out, at least not in the western world, but as far as money and the law, these were the first targets and they were very successfully hijacked already in antiquity, in fact we don't know any civilizations that have governments in which money and law are not controlled by the government and then the next in line, but it was really only next in line, is the security operators then later came a communication and so on, crowding out, of course the basic technique for crowding a competitor out is just to outlaw it, so in money, law, security and education, well money, law and security in all western countries, no other competitors are allowed, government doesn't compete with private money producers, with private, I mean there's some at the periphery, there's some legal services that are private in international arbitration and so on, also in security there are Wagner's and others which are sometimes from organizations, but you might have a security firm that just provides watchmen services, night watchmen for your company and other things, so you can crowd them out and of course what governments can do is to tax revenue and the capital invested in such competitors and it can subsidize state organizations, for example in France and in Germany the educational system goes down the drain so parents very often think of setting up their own schools, the problem is they have to fund out of taxpayer money that out of their own revenue they have to fund the state-run schools and have to pay additional money in order to set up their own schooling organizations if they have the possibility of legal liberty to set them up at all, so under these conditions of course the prospects of any genuinely private welfare competitors are dim, so we would expect them to operate at the margin there where the state doesn't reach and so on, but we can say that as soon as it becomes significant practically and therefore also politically governments will become interested in the thing because they want to gain the loyalty of the population, the loyalty of the population is gained by providing services that are obviously relevant, obviously important for the people, so if a private organization operates successfully in that field well it's likely to be taken over by the government. Finally we can say a few things about the impact of interventionism on philanthropy in general, by considering that genuine philanthropy involves donations of time and money and this is always based on genuine devotion as I've said in my introductory remarks, the gratuitousness of the of the service that is provided by by justice and so you cannot provide really a genuine donation by violating other people's rights, you need to work within the rights and obligations that are pre-established and you have to do it out of your own savings, savings of time, savings of money, that's genuine philanthropy, so in other words genuine philanthropy is always based on the ability and willingness to provide donations, now interventionism destroys both, okay, or tends to destroy both, it's never fully destroyed but it is diminished. First of all as we know interventionism impoverishes households, because what governments do is to reallocate the existing resources out of projects in which they would provide genuine improvements according to the judgment of the owners and into projects that the government likes, equality, ecology, social and governance and so on, so all these projects what they have in common is that nobody really feels they are important or make a contribution to creating additional value because if they made a contribution it would not be necessary to force anybody to adopt them, so whenever we have an ESG policy or a DEI policy diversity equity and inclusion imposed on an organization it's an invariable sign that the costs are going up without any corresponding increase in revenue, so government is impoverishing us through taxation, regulation and the non-productive use of the resources, then as we have seen government crowds our private welfare, the welfare state has crowded out welfare activities all over the Western world and the most dramatic example is the United Kingdom, there's an excellent book on the topic, oh what's it what's your author, the title is the welfare state we're in and the author is James Bartholomew, thank you, excellent book, so what James Bartholomew does is not only to describe the many ways in which the modern welfare state fails in housing, education, caring for the poor, caring for the unemployed and so on, it's just a disaster from R to A to Z, if you just look at the facts, but what he does also is to present the prehistory of the modern welfare state in Britain and here the UK has a very curious exemption to the general, namely the British parliament in 1836 I believe simply abolished virtually all welfare, public welfare institutions that they had been, before that been the Elizabethan, Elizabethan poor laws which obliged municipalities to take care of the poor and so on and then the British parliament just eliminated all of this and once sure, now the consequence was of course much hardship for the people who were immediately concerned so we had before some income coming from municipal welfare, the municipal welfare state and suddenly had nothing at all, but it's the same, there were two huge improvements that resulted from it on one hand while the incentives were now given for people that could no longer just rely on pocket money handed out by the municipalities they had to get a job, so all who could got a job and the second consequence that followed from this was the creation of a huge number of private welfare organizations, most notably the so-called poor societies, poor societies, I forgot the name, no, no, no, there was a special name of these organizations, local associations of people, so for example employees getting together in the same firm they're setting up an association to help out all those who would lose their job get sick and so on to pay into the same, yeah it was Mutual Aid but there was a special name, I forgot, but it fundamentally is a Mutual Aid, friendly societies, thank you very much, the friendly societies, so there were literally thousands of those friendly societies all over England and the UK by the late 19th century and under the impact of the welfare state well why should you pay money into such a because you have to pay already taxes and then the state provides the service anyway so they've all been crowded out and so the friendly societies, private hospitals, the glory of the British medical system and our friend here knows this better than all the rest of us was in the 19th century, British medicine was two levels, three levels above all the rest of the fray and British medicine was based on volunteerism all right so the the doctors went to the hospital which was funded out of private money in the morning they cared people for free and in the afternoon they had their private clients which paid them for money and so on so it's it's a splendid illustration of the fact how a market and volunteerism operate or may operate in a free society and I encourage all of you to read this book James Bartholomew the welfare state we're in then what interventionism also does is to foster materialism that is it destroys or at least greatly diminishes the willingness to dedicate your own resources to higher causes right and this occurs most notably by the destruction of the family itself a consequence of the welfare state intrusions of the government in marital contractual arrangements and so on right so we have huge divorce rates we have armies of single mothers raising fatherless children because they can because they get money from the government often they get money depending on the number of children that they have right so they're five children from five different fathers gives you a good a monthly revenue and then they have no incentive to care for the children because they don't get paid for the quality of the children but only for the quantity and so these are then the future unemployed people or criminals and and so on and the statistics are crystal clear in that respect corruption of intellectual life intellectual life in a free society is an activity of the leisure class right but now not necessarily aristocrats but people who have some money on their own they they have saved time and and also some money which allows them to pursue a scholarly activity or an artistic activity that's how it works in the free society in our society virtually all intellectuals are employed by the state such as myself so and of course that brings with it a certain bias right being employed by the state well to be likely to be employed by the state well you need to make certain concessions right both as far as beauty is concerned but also as far as truth is concerned you need to cultivate the the art of a double talk and double logic right there's a huge difference between the state and the mafia of course that's a satire and and so on and then finally also under the impact of monetary interventionism there is a destruction attentive towards the destruction of what we can call the saturation mechanism of capital accumulation in a free society capital is invested to the extent that well there's a remuneration because because after all that's a commercial endeavor right and so as more and more savings get accumulated well the return on investment tends to diminish as a situation effect as a consequence as the return on capital diminishes well there the opportunity costs for donations of time and of money diminish and so people then spend more time elsewhere non-commercial activities and they donate more money to philanthropic activities now the consequence of central banking is that is destroys the saturation mechanism because central banking allows for the leveraging of investments now that's it's a bit technical so I won't go into this but the bottom line is that as the central bank allows you to invest you make a lot of money even if the the return on capital diminishes because you get I wanted to show you I wanted to show you a few slides showing the evolution of monetary donations and the and time donations in in the US and okay I can show I cannot show you these slides here but what they what they show is that monetary donations to foundations in the US in the past 50 years have been flat as a percentage of GDP and as a percentage of net wealth okay now what is important here is that this statistic only shows the donations to foundations and as we have just seen as I've explained to you foundations are essentially extension of commercial endeavors okay so various other forms of donations or time donations in particular are not involved if we look at time donations so people spend their money there is we don't have a very long time series here but there is a database there's been running since 2003 run by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the US Census Bureau and what that shows is that the time consecrated for family members is declining but at a very low level so less than 4% of waking hours are in the US population in average dedicated to caring for family members less than 4% and the tendency is declining less than 2% are dedicated to caring for non-family members tendency also declining on the other hand time dedicated to sleeping is increasing so Americans are now thank you sir sleeping a few percent more of 24 hours so this is monetary donations like this is flat tendencies around 2% and here we have time donations so this is for the upper line here this is family members this is non-family members and we have here the use of time so this is sleeping right so Americans are sleeping ever more of the day right so more than it was almost 37% of 24 hours and of the rest of the time more and more time is dedicated to leisure activities sports and so on and that's exactly what we would expect right under the impact of the welfare state and of government interventionism in general right society becomes slowly transformed into an army of narcissistic egomaniacs who just care about themselves okay by and large that's the general tendency wonderful so I conclude in four points first for various reasons that I've presented today Cornwell's Richard Cornwell's way of reclaiming the American dream is naive superficial and wishful it just cannot work okay second the true opposition is not between state and market in that respect he is Cornwell is partially he's right but between state and voluntary interaction and voluntary interaction includes both commercial enterprise and non-commercial enterprise right so non-government organization and so on and both relate to each other in various ways which cannot be characterized in rigid categories third as we've seen the state tends to destroy the independent sector as Cornwell has called it or civil society is often called today in a similar way and for similar reasons as it destroys the market and fourth that's what I explain in more detail in my book the state tends to destroy civil society even more than the market because it attacks it at the root namely the ability and will to sacrifice resources for higher causes there is no for not selfish causes thank you for your attention