 So how do we get this so wrong if what I'm saying is right? Then how is it common sense? How is it conventional wisdom that the welfare state is a great achievement and so I want to say a few words about this before we wrap up So the first reason I think is what I call the collectivist premise and This is looking at the welfare of the group rather than the well-being of the individual and says What's good for quote society as a whole? How should we distribute society's resources in a fair way? I Think the better way The more rational way to think about political issues is to focus on the individual and I think if you think about what's good for the individual you come to a very different conclusion So the two essentials in my judgment of what makes us happy and successful life And I think this came through in all the talks today is Thought and effort this is Isaac Newton and Steve Jobs. It's thought and Effort the willingness to challenge conventional wisdom to think about what's true. What's right. What's good? And then the effort to execute and carry out your plans That's really what is going to make you happy Successful and achieve the things you want to achieve in life and therefore if we're thinking about what a good political system is It's one that encourages and protects your ability to exercise thought and effort and then to keep the results This is my daughter Olivia, she's about one and a half now More her more her I promise this will end at some point Okay, so Just to illustrate this point that the welfare state is interfering with thought and effort the core Activities that we need in order to live a happy successful life When my wife was pregnant, you know, we thought a lot about well How the heck are we gonna raise this little creature into something useful like what are we gonna do and You know, are we gonna encourage her to be independent? How are we gonna encourage her to you know to tackle life with all the vigor that it requires and so on But it also occurred to me at a certain point What if I were evil What if instead of wanting to raise her to be a happy independent adult I wanted to crush her little infant spirits and just completely turn her into a record dependent of a human being and I made a list So I wouldn't teach her to make good decisions. I would just tell her what to do and demand that she obey me. I Wouldn't make her work for anything. I'd just give her stuff make her an entitled brat Unless she was so evil as to go and try to get her own job and work for stuff in which case now. She's gonna get charged rent. I Would tell her hey forget property rights help yourself to other people's stuff and don't object if they help themselves to use and Then I would take out tons of loans in her name and go spend it on Vegas So That would be pretty rotten But that in effect is the whole essence of the what what the welfare state does what the welfare state does is it stops and punishes us from doing the right things and Rewards us for doing the wrong things the more rational productive independent-minded. We are the worst we are under the scenario and the more lazy dependent on Ambitious we are the better we are That's really the whole setup and let me give you one example to really drive this home. So My my dad and I have very different goals for retirement. He you know, he's been running two tech companies for now over a decade and He's he's looking forward to just you know a couple of decades playing golf traveling the world with mom. I Want to be doing this speaking and writing and so on as long as I can now given those different goals We would have very different approaches to preparing for retirement, right? We'd say vastly different sums We'd probably start saving at different times. We'd put it in different kinds of investments We'd make a lot of different decisions Yet the welfare state even if it worked the way that we're told it should work Right, even if it really was the government was setting aside your money into a 401k or something so that when you were tired You had an earned benefit Even then it would interfere with you making those kinds of assessments. It would say hey Watkins No, no, no, you've got to save 12.4 percent today rather than use it on things like starting a family or Starting a business or buying a home. No, you have to do what we say. You have to do with it That is the whole essence and the deeper meaning of the welfare state is it interferes with our ability to make those independent judgments And so I think if we think deeply about political issues, we need to think about our The need for the freedom to make the assessments about how we plan our lives including our old age We're taking a different look of something that we've been diving into in the last couple years now We have Don Watkins right here How social security is sabotaging the land of self-reliance bring it on home By the way, if you can do the math is longer than we've had social security since 1935 Now did the elderly starve in the streets and it turns out that amazingly no amazingly people figured out a way to live without handouts for over a hundred years and they It's pretty fantastic when you think about it They were very entrepreneurial in their whole approach to life And so I'm just gonna go through some of the mechanisms that they took in order to not as they say starve in the streets So first of all people worked It's kind of funny today where we think of like ah works a real burden But actually the people pushing for a welfare state complained for many years because the elderly those darn people refused to retire The fact is that they found their lives more meaningful more meaningful more valuable more enjoyable with work Than without it So the first reason I think is what I call the collectivist premise and This is looking at the welfare of the group rather than the well-being of the individual and says what's good for quote? society as a whole How should we distribute society's resources in a fair way? I think the better way The more rational way to think about political issues is to focus on the individual And I think if you think about what's good for the individual you come to a very different conclusion So the two essentials in my judgment of what makes us happy and successful life And I think this came through in all the talks today is Thought and effort this is Isaac Newton and Steve Jobs. It's