 Out of curiosity, do you think Calvin Coolidge was a good president or a bad president, and should he be a role model? There's many conservatives love him in the States now. Calvin Coolidge, you know, I'm not a historian, I'm not an expert on this, but my understanding is he's a good president, you know, probably the best of the 20th century, maybe. You know, basically because he did very little. I have a certain sympathy to Bill Clinton because he did very little, that's not bad. You know, having sex in the White House is good because it distracts you from actually governing. But no, Coolidge handled, well, he was vice president at the time, but I can't forget who was the president during the, who was it? Harding, during the recession of 2021, and they handled it very well, and Coolidge generally handled it well. And it's really after Coolidge left office that the Federal Reserve went nuts and started inflating the economy in the late 1920s. So generally positive. So Europe is in terrible shape, the U.S. is in terrible shape economically. I had to come here to Canada tonight from the U.S. to hear this kind of common sense, and I applaud you, and thank you so much for bringing this to Canada. Do you speak in the U.S.? That's question one. Question two is, do they let you speak? Is that really question one in the U.S.? Question two is, what, clearly Canada has done something fascinating and something well, and it seems to be bipartisan. We've had fiscally responsible Liberals that have balanced the budget in this country, Paul Martin, Kretchen, Stephen Harper. You know, Conservatives Liberals seem to be doing a pretty good job here. What lessons, as you're paying attention to the banking system in Canada, the lessons and the way things have gone historically, economically in the last, let's say, decade, 15 years. What can Canada, arguably the brightest spot right now economically in the world, with maybe one or two other small exceptions, what can the rest of the world learn from Canada, and do you see what can each one of us in this room, after we leave here tonight, having been enriched by hearing you, do maybe through our social networking, Facebook, et cetera, to spread the word in the message. So first of all, like me on Facebook, and follow me on Twitter. And if you had, you would know that last year I probably gave about 100 talks like this, 80 plus of them in the United States, and only a few internationally, but I do speak internationally, but not as much as in the U.S. I'm going to get in trouble with Canadians, because I agree with you about Canada, which I know a lot of people here resent and don't like. Canada is a bright spot in the world out there, not because it's doing the right things, but because it's doing fewer bad things than the rest of the world. No, absolutely. So in the mid-1990s, Canada got into real trouble. It was running huge deficits. It had a huge amount of debt. The Canadian dollar was sinking, and there were real problems, and I don't know who the politician was. I don't know what happened, but the decisions made to cut government spending into rationalized budgets. And again, I'm not an expert in Canadian economics, but it seems that if you look at the percent of government spending per GDP, it went down, which is very unusual in the world out there. There's one other country that did the same thing. Anybody know who that is? Sweden. Socialists, Sweden. They went bust because socialism drove them bankrupt, and they started cutting government spending, cutting entitlement, cutting regulations, decreasing taxes. And they're doing okay. They're not doing great, but they're doing okay. And that happened about 15, 20 years ago as well, around the same time as they did in Canada. A little after Canada. Yeah. Yeah. And so I think that lesson, when economy gets into trouble, you don't increase government spending. You decrease it. The problem with the sequester is it's too small. If it was big, it would actually have a positive impact on the US economy. It's too small to have any kind of impact on the US economy. There are a lot of lessons about reducing government spending, reducing government involvement, reducing that Americans can learn from Canada. Now is Canada not enough? No. Does Canada over-regulate? Absolutely. Does Canada have taxes that are too high? Yes. Is Canada a healthcare system, a disaster? Yes. If you're sick, if you're healthy, it's great. Socialized medicine is wonderful for healthy people. It is. I lived under socialized medicine. It's a disaster, and that's why you have these buses that go down to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota together. They get real treatment. My father was a doctor under socialized medicine in Israel. You know, Israel has one of the best healthcare systems in the world. There's more doctors per capita than any country in the world. Why? Because there's 6 million Jews. So of course you have more doctors than anywhere else. And when my dad, with all those wonderful doctors, when my dad had a really sick patient who had the money, he would put him on a plane and fly him to the Mayo Clinic or the Cleveland Clinic or somewhere else. There's no healthcare system in the world better if you have money than the United States healthcare system. And I'm not talking about a lot of money. If you're middle class, there's no place in the world where you get better treatment than the United States. The myth about the United States healthcare system is shocking. Now, it's bad because it could be a thousand times better if it was privatized. But certainly it's, you know, Canada's the model for healthcare. So Canada's certainly a model for those. The other thing Canada is, is lucky. You're lucky because as energy prices went through the roof, you discovered you had a lot of oil in those oil sands, right? And energy has been a huge resource in terms of revenue for the Canadian government over the last 10 years. And because prices of oil went so high, it became economical to get that. So there's a bit of luck. But there's also smarts there because in America today we have tons of energy. And yet nobody will drill for it. Nobody will take it, right? So in spite of the fact that Canada is this environmentalist's leftist kind of general population, when it comes to actually making money and nobody cares about the environment, you go out and you take those sands and you turn them into oil, right? And you want to, in spite of the fact that Canadians are far more environmentally conscious than Americans are, you want to take that pipeline in all directions and get that oil into the world. So there's a certain pragmatic nature in Canada when it comes to natural resources that even in the United States we don't have. We've given up. And California has vast quantities of natural gas, huge. And they won't go after them because it's fracking and, you know, fracking is the new devil, right? So there's a lot positive to be said about Canada. And if anybody wants to know about Canadian banking system, White Superior to the American Banking System has been for 200 years, you can ask me. Yes. You know, in several of your novels, you've made the point that leadership in any culture, not only in art, but in literature, morality, politics, and economics, that this sort of leadership must be provided by what you call the professional intellectuals. I wonder if you could tell me just what you mean by the term professional intellectuals. Who are they, for example? The professional intellectuals are, in effect, the field agents of the army whose head or commander in chief is the philosopher. The philosopher, the man who defines the basic fundamental ideas of a culture is the man who determines history. And professional intellectuals are all those whose professions deal with the humanities, the studies of men as against the physical sciences. The professional intellectuals in all their various professions carry to the rest of the culture, to the rest of society, the philosophical premises, the ideas which have been defined by the philosopher. Therefore, they are the transmission belts. They are the ones who determine the goals, the values, and the direction of a culture. Is this true in any culture? Would it be true no matter where you found them? It is truly a civilized culture, but historically you must remember this. The new intellectual, or rather the intellectual, is a very recent phenomenon. There were no such phenomenon as a professional intellectual prior to the industrial revolution and the birth of capitalism. Prior to that, men could not make a living, could not make a profession of intellectual work. The mind, the intellect, reason had no value in those earlier cultures. It is only since the birth of capitalism in a free society that men, for the first time in history, acquired the chance to make a living by means of dealing with ideas. Reason became a practical issue for the first time. And the height of it was the 19th century. Today, this is the value which we are losing and it is the intellectuals who are returning. You think then that America's intellectual leadership has collapsed? Yes, collapsed and abdicated. How have the intellectuals failed to do the things that they ought to do? How have they not lived up to their responsibilities? By betraying the very premise that made their existence possible, by denying the intellect. For decades now, the intellectuals have been progressively preaching and abdicating the ideas that the intellect is impotent, that men can know nothing for certain. That reason is unreliable and, in effect, men have no power to know the facts of reality. These amounts to men who proclaim themselves intellectuals spend their time denying the validity of the intellect. That is a form of committing suicide. And today, when you see the rise of such openly mystical, anti-intellectual philosophies as Zen Buddhism or existentialism, doctrines which cannot really properly be called philosophies, this is the admission of intellectual bankruptcy on the part of those who accept it. If in a group of men, such a theory as Zen Buddhism which is a doctrine originating about the fifth century BC, if that becomes the latest word of the mind, it isn't I who condemns them. They have condemned themselves by their own actions. They have given up. They have declared their intellectual bankruptcy and have gone back to the mysticism of the Dark Ages.