 The test turned out to be flawed. Testing kits that were sent out into the field returned false results. The test had we withdrawn and we started and only a month and a half into this whole process did the CDC consider letting private labs, university hospitals, university labs develop their own tests. Indeed, universities that were developing tests in parallel were not allowed to deploy those tests by a bureaucracy at the FDA. They did not get the appropriate authorization to get these tests out into the field. So testing in the United States was delayed by a month and a half and then when it was done, it was again slow, there was much more than the 45 days in terms of the impact of the delays on the actual virus. One could argue that at least in places like New York by the time the testing was deployed, the idea of testing, tracing, isolating was impossible because the system was overloaded by positive cases. The earlier you catch a pandemic, the sooner you deal with it, the sooner you test, trace, isolate, the sooner it is all over. The United States and the Western world generally completely screwed this up. South Korea on the other hand, early in mid January, as soon as COVID was recognized as a viral problem, they invited private companies, private labs, university labs to submit their own tests. They rolled out testing quickly. They deployed it quickly and they got the virus under control very, very quickly in a highly densely populated area like South Korea. So when government deployed private sector as they did in South Korea in Taiwan, virus was held back, testing was efficient, the virus was contained and the number of deaths, the number of victims of COVID was significantly reduced. When government decided to go on their own as they did in the US and to some extent in Europe, it turned out to be a testing disaster and you see that across the entire Western world and many, many tens of thousands of deaths should be attributed to this failure, not just of the CDC to develop a test, it's not clear why they should have developed the test to begin with, but the CDC and the FDA's bureaucracy that prohibited private enterprise from deploying tests and getting this under control. Even today, when we already have, you know, according to government numbers over 400,000 people who have died as a result of COVID, even today, there is still no cheap, quick home test that I can put in my home, test every time before I go out to find out if I'm contagious or not, which is what a quick antigen test would do. Thus, if I test positive, I stay home. If I test negative, I go out. There's still no quick home test available. Not because the science is not there. Indeed, the science was there months and months and months ago. As early as May and June, there were companies that had developed such tests, saliva tests, you could just take home, swipe on the saliva and know whether you were contagious or not. The FDA refuses, continues to refuse to approve these tests for use. In one case, they approved one test that costs $5. It's a kit that costs $5 that you can take home and test. They place so many requirements on the sale of this kit, including that it has a sophisticated app and the communications set up and all of this that the kit ultimately costs $50 instead of five, thus reducing its use, reducing the number of people who want it, reducing the number of pharmacies that are selling it and making it useless. Again, the free market developed quick, cheap, easy home tests. The FDA prevented us from using them for a bunch of bureaucratic reasons, among them things like accuracy. Remember 400,000 people have died already. Imagine if these tests were only 50% accurate. Well, half the time that people would go out and in fact other people, yes, half of that would have still continued, but half would not. Half people would have stayed home. You would have reduced the infection rate. You would have reduced the, you would have lowered the curve, right? By 50%, but it doesn't matter. Nobody cares because we are so much in this mindset that it is the regulatory state. It is the rules. It is the bureaucracy that protects us from those evil corporations, those evil markets that would function in a free market. If the FDA focused only, only, if the regulatory state focused only not on regulation, but on actually just stopping fraud, on the purpose in my view of law, which is to protect our rights, to protect our individual rights, rights as conceived by John Locke, not as they have morphed into in modern times. But if the agencies like the FDA just were there to prevent fraud, to prevent people from selling us tests that didn't work at all. I think hundreds of thousands of people would be alive today that are dead because the market would have provided us with tools to deal with identifying those who have the disease and therefore would have reduced transmission dramatically. Now that's just testing. Let's move on now quickly to the issue of vaccines. I mean, one of the great amazing stories of the vaccine development done privately, by the way, by Moderna and by a small biotech startup in Germany that Pfizer teamed up with, is the fact that the vaccine was developed over a weekend. In January, when a Chinese researcher without the knowledge of his government, luckily for all of us, without the knowledge of his government, put up on a shared website, the genome of the COVID, of COVID, Moderna over the following weekend already developed a vaccine that would address the COVID, the COVID virus. They then took that to, you know, to the development center, to factories to produce it within a month. They actually had a vaccine at hand. They then did phase one tests to make sure that the vaccine was not harmful, do no harm. By late April, early May, there was a vaccine that was deemed safe and ready to launch. Now, in my view, in a free market, at that point, you would take that vaccine and you would offer it to people on a voluntary basis. Providing the information that tells them that, yes, there's a risk involved here. It hasn't been fully tested. It has its efficaciousness, whether it actually prevents a vaccine, we don't know. But imagine volunteers signing up slowly in May, in June, maybe by the summer as the vaccine is proving to be safe because people are not falling dead and actually efficacious, which it turned out to be much later on, maybe millions of people start taking the vaccine in the summer. And again, maybe instead of 400,000 dead, we only have 100,000 dead. But that is not allowed. We in a lot, the regulatory state does not allow me the right to negotiate with a biotech company about taking a vaccine that the bureaucrats have decided is inappropriate for me to take. You need double-blind studies. You need the whole rigmarole. Now, true, during this crisis, the government has been very good to speed up the process. So instead of taking years to go through FDA approval, it took only months, valuable months, months in which many of our grandparents and many people with preexisting conditions died because the regulators had a checkboxes and they had to go through the studies like they've always gone through studies, rather be open to alternative solutions. They denied us the choice. They denied us the option of taking the risk of taking the vaccine. Now, I've talked about the cost in lives, but think about the economy. Think about the fact that millions of people aren't employed today. Think about all the restaurants and businesses that have been destroyed because we did not deploy testing on time because we did not have a vaccine out in the summer. Think about the economic cost, the cost in life, that the regulatory state has cost us by slowing down and by making ineffectual our response to the virus. I'll even add that in spite of the speed at which the vaccine supposedly is now being released and we'll talk about distribution in a minute, one of the things that we're fighting is evolution because the longer we wait, the greater the chances that the vaccine evolves. We're already seeing a variance of the, sorry, not the vaccine, the virus evolves. We're already seeing mutations of the virus that we don't know the South African mutation might be resistant to a vaccine. So speed is essential. And instead of giving us the option as individuals to engage with the vaccine, the regulatory state says no. That is impossible. You have to have FDA approval. Now I won't get into all the other ways in which the FDA, in a sense kills us by not approving drugs, by taking very long to approve drugs, by not approving drugs for all kinds of marginal reasons. Again, denying us choice, denying us the ability to choose whether to take on risk or not, they decide what's risky, what's not risky, what's good for you, what's not good for you. Look at the vaccine distribution now. I mean, this is, it would be funny if it wasn't so tragic. The government has taken on responsibility as a central planner, as again, a regulatory agency to distribute vaccines. They've set up ethical rules in terms of who can and who cannot have vaccines. In New York, they're literally trashing vaccines because the penalties for giving a vaccine to somebody out of line, right? Not in the order dictated by the regulators is so high it's cheap but just to throw the vaccine out. So instead of rolling out the vaccines as quickly and as effectively as possible as the free market would do, we've got a bureaucratic, paper-filling, box-checking bureaucracy that is being created for the distribution and the distribution is going unbelievably slow. I mean, Joe Biden just promised 100 million vaccines in 100 days. Do the math. That's a million vaccines a day. That's a million shots a day, right? That means it would take a year to get everybody one shot, but you need two shots. That means the United States gets vaccinated in two years. That is the 100-day plan. That is pathetic. So think about how a free market would distribute this. Think about if you gave the responsibility as private companies would to distribute this, not to governors and state institutions, but if you gave the responsibility for distributing the vaccine to CVS, Walmart, FedEx and UPS. Does anybody have a doubt that we would have plenty of vaccines? It would be quick and it would be efficient and effective and everybody, all of us could get vaccines when we wanted. But think also about how they've structured who gets the vaccine first. I mean, yes, we can all agree and I think under free market system, health workers would get the vaccine first, hospitals would be massively incentivized to pay a premium to get the vaccines to vaccinate their workers. But think about the fact that in the UK, the first person to get a vaccine was a 91-year-old old lady. Why? It makes zero sense from an epidemiology from a common sense perspective to vaccinate very, very old people who don't have a lot of social interactions. If you wanna stop the spread of a virus, the people who should be vaccinated first, are the people who interact with other people the most. People who need to go and work. If companies were buying the vaccine and distributing them, they would be distributing them to the most valuable workers, the people who have to show up at work. Therefore, you would cut the spread of the virus. Instead of these bizarre codes, somewhere there's this stat about how long it takes to vaccinate one person to give an injection to one person in New York. Because of the amount number of forms one has to fill in, it's between 20 minutes and an hour. Now imagine you have to vaccinate millions of people and it takes you 20 minutes to an hour to give them an injection. Indeed, in the modern day that we live in today, why can't we self-inject? Given that there are these syringes that can make it easy for people to inject themselves. But no, you have to have certification and you have to fill in the forms. Anyway, just the bureaucratic state which is the regulatory state is, again, making it impossible for us to get vaccinated is slowing down the process and thus, again, killing people and destroying the economy all at the same time. Now this is not surprising. If you had asked me what would happen if we had a pandemic and the government was responsible for every aspect of the response to it, it would have been easy to predict that the disaster of 2020 and as we roll into 2021 continues would have happened. What is necessary for innovation and success in order to achieve, to get products to market and to get valuable products and then vaccine, after all, is a product, a test is a product. Well, first you need innovators. You need innovators to come up with great ideas and to figure out new ways of doing things. What does innovation require? What does production require? Well, what production and innovation require is the ability to think, to think freely, to think out of the box, to imagine solutions that maybe didn't exist before. What does that kind of thinking require? What kind of environment and atmosphere does that kind of thinking require? What requires freedom? It requires the lack of authority. It requires innovators, entrepreneurs, scientists be left alone to produce, to create, to think, to experiment, to fail. Indeed, the most innovative places in the world are by no accident the freest places in the world. The most innovative periods in human history are no accident the freest periods in human history. And the most innovative industries today in America, let's say, are no accident the freest industries. Do you know that airplanes today actually, every generation of Boeing plane is actually a little slower than the previous one. We've not had an innovation in flight since the Concorde was grounded because it's such a heavily regulated industry. We have almost had almost no innovation in automobile engines up until Tesla and Tesla evolved outside of the standard auto companies because it could escape the controls, the regulations that are imposed on the auto industry and have been imposed on the auto industry for so long. Of course it also got government subsidies but that's a whole other story. Innovation requires thinkers to be able to think outside the box which is exactly what regulation and bureaucracy cannot allow them to do. Authority, authority that believes that they have the truth and know exactly how things should be done does not permit innovation, progress and growth. And that's why our economies only started growing substantially. We only saw real innovation and progress post enlightenment when the human mind was freed, freed both of superstition but also freed of a rule of a king, a rule of an authority of the church that dictated what was permissible and was not permissible. And we have slowed in the rate of innovation, progress and growth in the 21st century because the regulatory state has expanded its realm and encroached in more and more and more industries and places. Regulation and government generally represents the opposite of what freedom of what, sorry, not freedom of what innovation requires. At least government the way we see it today. Government that protects individual rates is a government that does what? It is a government that protects us from force. It is a government that protects us from the imposition of somebody's will on us. And that's it, a proper government, a government limited to the rule of law where the law is focused on protecting our rights and otherwise leaves us free. Does not tell us what drugs we can and cannot use, what tests are good or no good. It catches the crooks, the fraudsters, the bad guys and leaves us to use our own judgment in deciding what to use and what not to use and how to live and how not to live. When government imposes regulations, most of them preemptively in advance under the assumption of harm, it destroys. And what it mostly destroys is, if you will, the unknown. The things that were not developed, the solutions that were not tried, the innovators and the entrepreneurs that did not start a business, create a new company, create a new product. So we don't see their costs. Unfortunately, in 2020, we saw the cost. And the cost has been horrific. The cost has been devastating. Now take that and expand it on every single realm in which the regulators in every single industry touch. Because I think that is the damage that is being done every day by the preempt of law, by the oppressive law, by the bureaucracy that is created by all these alphabet agencies that have been created over the last, what, 75, 80 years to regulate our behavior, to regulate business, to regulate and control markets. The consequences are unknown because we don't have a parallel universe where this isn't there. But the consequences are dire. And I think you can extrapolate from what happened last year to see that. Thank you. Thank you very much. All right, can you hear me? All right. So I gotta say upfront, I love the Federalist Society. And one reason I love the Federalist Society is almost always I am the person who is the most free market person in the conversation. And today I am the moderate. So there we go. This is nice. As you know, I study administrative law and I share a lot of the concerns about agency myopia, agencies that are, the idea that they are super scientific and they're always doing exactly what the science says, just as not empirically true. That said, it's not all the other false either. There are really smart people who are working really hard things and doing their best. But you can look at the history of regulation and there's all sorts of overreactions to things and things of that sort. So I'm sympathetic to a lot of what was said. I'm gonna push back, however, on a few points. That is my job as respondent today, is before we get to COVID in particular, just some general thoughts about theories of why regulation is okay and when it might be okay. And one of the main theories of why we need regulation is externalities. And a lot of the things that we're hearing about where innovation is stifled and all of that is no doubt true, but the pushback that you will hear is, but wait a minute, some of these things you're talking about, it's not just you who is affected. What you're doing is going to impose, possibly impose harm on others. So for instance, we heard about planes that we haven't had any real progress in planes. Now put aside people who voluntarily choose to fly in a potentially dangerous aircraft. That's, we can have a question about paternalism and all of that sort of thing, whatever. Dangerous planes are not just dangerous to the people on them. Dangerous planes are dangerous to other people as well. And I pulled up on Wikipedia here, list of aircraft accidents that have harmed people on the ground and there's lots of them. So maybe we should be a little bit concerned about somebody who says, you know what? I just want to start flying my own plane. I've come up with this new model. I want to get out there and do it because that might very actual harm other people who are just living their lives quietly and suddenly a plane comes from the sky and does massive damage to their property or even to their lives. You know, a lot of regulation that we see is thought of in terms of externalities. I do a lot of environmental law and that's one of the things that they'll say. They'll say, wait a minute, why are we regulating clean air? Because you don't have a right to make my asthma worse. Sure that you have, you know, a good idea and maybe it's make society great, but the benefits of society are dispersed and the harm to me is concentrated. And now I am suffering a lot. So you can make, you know, you can buy a Maserati and that doesn't seem right. So that is one of the theories that you're going to see and it's actually kind of hard to solve the externality problem because we disagreed about what's an externality and what's fair play and that's a problem. Another area where, you know, traditionally even the common law recognized regulation is for natural monopolies or common carriers. And I saw that just, I think earlier this week or if not last week, Richard Epstein who is a very smart, prominent libertarian and expert on the common law says, you know, about the, you know, Twitter and Facebook and some of the social media companies. Well, wait a minute. They're essentially act akin to a common carrier like status and thus there's grounds for regulating. They can't pick and choose who can use the services. And, you know, we can disagree about that and we can fight about whether, you know, imposing common carrier obligations on natural monopolies helps or hurts or, you know, maybe it discourages innovation. So it's not really a natural monopoly at all and so on. But historically that was one of the arguments. If you wanted to have an in and you are the only in the town and travelers want to go on the road, you got to let them in and you can't diverge. And if you have a mechanism like that then you need to have somebody to enforce it and you start to get a little bit of an apparatus and so on. Now this is gonna get a little bit more controversial but whatever. Another theory of this is in fact, regulation serves as almost a vouching mechanism. So enables people to travel. So, you know, you're driving with your family and you're hungry and you go to McDonald's because it's not great food but you know what you're gonna get. There's consistency. That's a private form of a vouching system. That's why we have franchises is you can at least trust the franchise. But sometimes you're driving and you're in a small town and there's no such franchise there. And you're hungry. And you say, well, you know what? I live in the United States and there's a pretty good chance that this restaurant that I'm showing into has a health inspector and I'm not going to get sick. And there it goes. Now I feel a little bit more comfortable eating. You couldn't theory have a franchise network for everything. So anytime you go to some new place or do a new product, there's somebody who vouches for it. But that doesn't always work very well at least historically. And we like the idea of having, you know, food inspectors. You and we even said like pure fraud prohibitors we agree with that that, wait a minute, we can't just have some huckster who sells things because you have some confidence when you go to the market that somebody has checked. And the tort system in theory could do that. But the problem is there are folks that are judgment proof and you don't make big decisions about purchasing something that affects your whole life. And it turns out that the person that is essentially judgment proof. So if you didn't have some sort of backstop the theory goes, you're gonna be really nervous about engaging in commerce with people you don't know. And the government can be a pretty good backstop to ensure things aren't fraudulent and things aren't gonna make you get salmonella and so on. And you could have the private market do it but then you're gonna have some inefficiencies there. There's gonna be gaps. Every time you purchase something you shouldn't have to see the other person's net worth decide whether they're judgment proof. And this is essential way to grease economic transactions to allow more trade. And then the last one I'm sure that we're gonna have a disagreement here. And that is democratic preferences. And sometimes people like certain things that are not free markets. The example that I have, so I grew up in Washington state and my grandparents lived in Idaho. So every summer we would drive from Washington to Idaho and you can't go there unless you cross through Oregon. And Oregon has this very peculiar rule that you can't pump your own gas. If you want gas in Oregon, there's somebody who comes out and puts the gas in your car. And even as a six year old I'm like this is the biggest waste because I've spent my whole life in Washington and I watch people put gas in all the time and there's not some marked difference between the people of Washington and the people of Oregon and their cognitive ability to use this complicated. No, it's anybody could do it. But here's the thing. Oregon has decided for whatever reason that they like that. Maybe it's aesthetics. Maybe it is a social safety net. They wanna help people have jobs, whatever. I'm not sure what it is, but it's not because they're ignorant because the people in Oregon also go to Washington. They see how it works. And nonetheless, they've kept it. Now there's theories about government failure. Maybe there's special interest groups that can organize better and keep the people from voting or maybe. But it's a really long time and it's a pretty easy thing. And most of the West Coast states have a lot of referenda. And nonetheless, they've decided to keep it. Other examples would be almost all places have bands on selling organs. You can imagine a world, a very efficient world where you don't need two kidneys. You can function perfectly well. There are poor people. There are rich people who really need a kidney. So how about we have the poor person sell the kidney to the rich person? The poor person is better off because now they have more money and they're still healthy. And the rich person doesn't have to go through no dialysis and all of this. And why not? That's a great world. And when I was in FedSoc as a student I saw presentations about that where people would come in and say, actually this is killing lots and lots of people not allowing us to happen. And I could be persuaded by that but there's a kind of a funny thing which is most of the time if you present that to voters voters are not necessarily going to sign up for that. And so when I hear regulatory state as an admin law person I usually worry about democracy deficit where people are doing stuff without the, without the, you know, the imprimatur of the people but some of these things in fact do have the imprimatur of the people. They vote for them. They want these things. And the idea that we are going to change it runs into real democratic problems to go to a little bit of what we're talking about with COVID, you know people constantly vote against price gouging. There's laws where they say no price gouging. As a matter of democratic legitimacy these are very strong people vote for them. They're crazy or at least often are very crazy because if you have a hurricane coming boy you want to get as much product into the market as you can as quick as you can and by artificially inflating that you can just do econ 101 you see the problems that creates but nonetheless people vote that way. And it's hard for us to say, well, you know so long as we are committed to democracy is another element of freedom that that's not okay. Now we can persuade each other and we can talk about that as a process point but at the end of the day sometimes they're just going to vote for these things and you say, well, how does that all of that fit in? So finally I want to talk a little bit about COVID in particular. I confess I don't know anything about this other than what I've experienced as a human being for the last year. I'm sympathetic to some of the what has been said it sure seems like there's a lot of, you know inefficiencies in how we've set things up and not a lot of logic and a lot of decision making but I could throw out some ideas that might explain some of these things. So one of the ideas that we heard is we should just have vaccines the private companies made them early people should opt in if they want a vaccine get a vaccine if you don't want a vaccine don't get a vaccine you're informed of the risk make the choice. And I think that somebody might very well say but you're running into the externality problem. People buy one of these things from some huckster they don't get it from Adirna or somebody they get it from some other folk they're not super smart about how this stuff works they buy it now they think that they are safe and then they go everywhere and spread the disease. So you need some sort of mechanism to prevent that and it's fraudulent so maybe we have FDA go after those folks but there's problems sometimes at the margins where we know who's the huckster and who's not and what if they say my vaccine works 70% of the time and you say, well, is that good enough? Is that fraud? Is it not fraud? Yeah, people who buy it and then they go off and now they start spreading disease maybe we want to have because of human fallibility maybe we need to have something higher because otherwise you're gonna have people who are spreading disease in good faith, they think they're doing right but they're just not. We also, again, this is, I'm not sure specific to COVID, not my field but there was a case 15 years ago in the DC circuit called Abigail Alliance and Abigail Alliance was you had folks that were terminally ill and they said, well, for me I should be able to take anything I want essentially because I'm going to die and if there's someone who says a product that maybe will help me, I should be able to do that. And the argument was I have a substantive due process right to do this. And FDA said, no, no, no, you can't certainly can't do that because if you do that you're going to destroy our ability to have test groups. We need to be able to know if it works or if it doesn't work and we understand this means that some folks that are terminal, they're going to die but even so if we don't do that the theory goes there's going to be more people die and people fight about that back and forth as a writer, is it wrong? That's an empirical question. I don't know the answer to that empirical question. I do know that it seems really harsh to the individual but if in fact it is true that that harshness will then preserve a whole bunch of other people's lives maybe that's something we leave for the democratic process. It's really hard for humans to assess certain types of risk. What do you do if they say I have a vaccine it's not as good as the modernative vaccine but it works 95% of the time and it's got a one out of a thousand risk of death or something. I don't know if such a thing exists. Humans are horrible at that type of math and we can come up with intermediaries that are actually quite good at math that can kind of tell you what's what but there's some concern especially in a pandemic that people are not thinking altogether rationally and there's a worry that maybe we need to have especially because we live in a world where everything else is regulated. So suddenly we deregulate part of it you don't quite yet know what to trust anymore you no longer have your proxies. So that's part of the concern and the last one I wanted to throw out there is I'm not sure what your view is on patents. Patents are I think part of what you think these innovators need you can't have a patent scheme without some sort of bureaucracy or courts or something but courts only work if you have at the end of the day the police to enforce the judgments. So even then I don't think it's a pure free market system in your world where we are making some sort of calculations about how many years the patent should be for this type of thing not that type of thing. So I don't know if there's your world is less bureaucracy but I don't think you can say there's no bureaucracy there's still gonna be bureaucracy unless you just wanna throw out patents too and if so then we have other sorts of problems. So anyway, those are my reactions I think that a lot of your points are really strong I might be over claiming on some of my pushback because I wanna make sure that we have both sides of the argument and again, I wish I was a better COVID. So anyway, that's what I got, thank you. Thanks, that's really all good points. James, how do you wanna proceed? I mean, do you wanna take questions? You want me to respond? We do have one question waiting in the chat and I'll just go ahead and let him and ask it. Sure. I apologize, I am not as good at Zoom as we were during the school Zoom would suggest. Christopher, do you wanna go ahead and ask your question? Yes, thank you. Chairman Brook, I just wanted to, well, thank you. I'm just, I was distracted a little bit by the paintings behind you. I imagine it's John Galt and Howard Rourke. No, no, that's Vermeer's Geographer and that's a contemporary painting, but no, Howard Rourke and John Galt on my walls. Okay, anyway, I was just, I was revealing a book I had on the shelf for a while and it was about objectivism and the chapter on government and it talked about consent of the government is a source of the government's power, but it doesn't mean the citizens can delegate power if they do not possess. The source of the government's power is rational consent based on an objective principle. And so kind of building off Professor Nielsen, the question is, well, if Americans, people consent to this heavy regulatory state, is it kind of, that's it, that's the system we live in and then if the people choose this heavily regulatory state, that's the government we get. How would you, do you have any kind of thoughts on that? So I think it was Franklin who said something like, when he was asked what did they do in the Constitutional Convention, he said a republic if you can keep it. And yeah, I mean, freedom if you can keep it. That is the fact is that if most people wanna turn away from freedom, then we will turn away from freedom. You can't write a constitution or a legal system that prevents an overwhelming majority of people from getting at the end of the day what they want, which is and still preserve, you know, any kind of voting mechanism. Now, granted that given that, you know, I wanna push back and I agree completely with Dr. Nielsen that we live in a democracy and these are democratic preferences, absolutely, they are. I reject that that's freedom. I think that that's oppression. I don't think democracy of that kind is oppression. And it's interesting that we're willing to tolerate democracy when it limits our economic freedoms. We're not willing to tolerate democracy when it limits our speech, for example. I mean, right now it would be interesting if we voted on hate speech. We would probably get a majority of Americans saying it should be banned. Luckily we have a First Amendment that is still respected by the courts and therefore we don't have hate speech laws in America. But economic freedom a long time ago, in a sense, it was granted to democracy to the side. So I don't like democracy in this sense. I'm all for voting. I think voting is important. But I think what the founders tried to do and didn't do it robustly enough, I wish they would have done more of it, is limit the scope of what we can vote on. I would have liked the provision in the constitution that separated economics from government. That is I would like to have just like we separate or tried to separate church from state, I'd like to separate economy from state so that the government cannot. So we can't vote to increase taxes, we can't vote to regulate this and not to regulate that, to provide jobs there and not to provide jobs there, to kind of redistribute wealth, to redistribute privileges, to redistribute all these things. I think democracies fail. I think that the founders understood that democracy in the sense of majority rule, not in the sense of voting. And the founders understood that, tried to protect us from it, but didn't do a good enough job because obviously what we have today, we're constantly devolving into more and more and more democratic processes where the majority gets to impose its will through pressure groups and lobbying and cronyism and all these other mechanisms, gets to impose its views on us. And where the idea of protecting the individual and protecting individual rights, which I think is the philosophical foundation for the declaration of the constitution, that idea is gone. It's gone from conservatism, it's gone from liberals, it's gone in the Supreme Court, that the idea of the individual having rights that are inalienable, that no majority can violate, is gone as soon as I cannot get a vaccine if I want one. And yes, I understand the utilitarian arguments that maybe I'll still be infected and we can't really trust you. So we, somebody through the democratic process ultimately decides, no, we get to decide when you can take the vaccine and when you can't. We have the ultimate formula of when we balance all these interests just right. And of course, we know through public choice theory and other forms that, how they make these decisions are, there are lots of different ways, things that they're weighing in that that affect when you can take the vaccine and when you can. Not just science, science is just one factor. But so yes, I'm opposed to democratic preferences. I don't think they should exist. The only thing I think should exist is individual preferences. And then democracy should apply to who is executing on the constitution that we have. But the constitution allows government to do very few things basically to protect us, to protect our rights, not to protect us, to protect our rights. And which means catch the frauds, to see yes, to the extent that we need a bureaucracy. If the SEC, all it did was try to catch Bernie Madoff, which they couldn't and they didn't, right? They had to have the sun informer. If that's all they did, then that would be fine. But they're so busy reading my 13Ds and 13Gs and the million other forms, I as an investor have to file with them and monitoring everything that we do and so on that they don't have time to catch people who commit fraud, even when somebody lets, even when the fraud is well known in the marketplace. So if all we had were agencies that protected us from fraud, we would have a very different politics and a very different kind of government structure. I'm not opposed to patents, just to clarify a few things. I'm pro patents and to the extent that patents need mechanisms to enforce them, they certainly need those mechanisms. I believe in a strong police and a strong military and a strong patent office and a strong fraud detection, whatever a unit of the FBI, whatever is needed there or if you want to turn the SEC into a fraud detection and financial markets and make those as strong as they need to be to prevent fraud, because fraud is a violation of my rights. Patents are property, just like we have a, God, the name is just slipped. Just so we have a place where we register land and there's in a sense of bureaucracy to make sure that our land rights are not infringed upon. I think there's an agency that we register intellectual property and it's responsible for not allowing violations of intellectual property. But that still limits government to that one responsibility, which is the protection of the right to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness. If we don't have any questions, I'm happy to run down externalities, natural monopolies and vouching, which I think is a great way to frame this. But I'm happy to answer questions too. That's an awesome, did you have something that you wanted to respond to me? It's a big question, okay? Yeah, if I could, if you have time, we'd love to hear that. Yeah, so there's no question. I mean, those are the arguments made for regulation, for government intervention more broadly in the economy. You know, externalities, of course we only focus on the negative externalities. The dominant externalities in our culture are positive. The dominant externalities of business are positive. And there's very little weighting of the positive externalities that we lose by protecting ourselves from the negative externalities. So the positive externality of, yes, taking some risk with some airplanes that might crash and kill some people versus the positive externalities of developing transportation that would be far faster and far more efficient, that's, nobody is weighing that. I have find it hard to believe that that is really a concern at these regulatory agencies. The whole motivation and whole incentive structure is to prevent the negative. Indeed, the Wright brothers, I mean, there was a lot of people crashed, a lot of people died, a lot of people crashed into other people's homes when airplanes were first developed. And there were some negative externalities as a consequence, but we developed air flights. And I think overall, we would say humanity is better off. And we didn't limit the freedom. We lived in a society that was willing to take certain risks. I think we lived in a better society in that sense, other things worse, but in that sense, the willingness to take risk, the understanding that progress required risk, I think was all a positive. But I also think that if you really think about how markets work, right, take airlines, who has a strong incentive to quote, regulate in the private sector airlines so that they're safe. Well, suddenly passengers want them to be safe. And maybe passengers would be, particularly really frequent flyers like myself in the old days before COVID, who flew hundreds of thousands of miles a year, would wanna know that their planes are getting on a safe. Maybe I'd be willing to pay for a service that actually went in and raided the airlines on safety and actually did the kind of work that we hope the FAA actually does. What about insurance companies? I mean, certainly insurance companies don't wanna have to pay out, not only for the people on the plane that might crash, but also for the people on the ground that you might credit into. Wouldn't insurance companies develop the capabilities of figuring out the riskiness of various airlines? Wouldn't there be a penalty in their insurance policy built in for more risky behavior versus less risky behavior? If you're trying out a new airplane and you're flying, maybe the airport where you take off would require you to have insurance on the plane and wouldn't, again, the insurance company demand some evidence that the plane was flight worthy. So I find that in almost all cases of these negative externalities, markets are far better, far more efficient, far more open to experimentation, but also the costs are born directly much more so by the people who benefit from being protected from the externality. So the whole point of externalities is in a free market, many of those externalities are internalized. Once they're discovered, right? We don't know that airplanes can cash and kill people until maybe it happens, but at some point we figure it out and we build the marketplace. There's a profit motive incentive to create mechanisms that eliminate those externalities and somebody pays for it. Usually the people who pay for it are the people who benefit. Insurance companies, for example. I think insurance generally is underrated and it's so heavily regulated, so it's a problem today, but it's underrated in terms of a mechanism to reduce so-called externalities to create. And by the way, for vouching to some extent as well. So I'm not convinced by externalities argument. I think again, I think it's also one of those arguments that are very slippery slopes. The government seems to find more and more and more externalities to regulate more and more and more things. Marketplaces are very, very good at these kind of things. And I think it's related to vouching too, because one of the amazing things about Uber and Lyft is that there's no vouching going on. In a sense, there's no external vouching. That is, there's no government authority that it says that Uber, particularly in the early days when it started, that Uber's safe and okay. Basically the safety and the reputation of Uber driver is the rating they get. That is customers are rating them as they use them. So when I order an Uber driver and if the Uber driver's rating is under four, I would cancel the trip instantaneously. Because something is fishy. And indeed Uber would fire that driver and never use them. So, and the same with restaurants with Yelp and you could imagine Yelp developing a whole group of people that goes into restaurants and does what food inspectors do because that would help them increase their market share because now they can not just tell you what other people rated the restaurant but also what their inspectors rated. So again, for vouching, again, there are so many effective and efficient market solutions particularly, maybe this was a good argument 30, 40 years ago but today with technology, there's so much of this vouching that we can do through apps instantaneously and through using kind of the crowd, if you will to secure these things that I just, again, the government is because it is a, organization that uses force, it uses blunt force, it is inefficient and effective and often commits awful outcomes. Finding natural monopolies, I mean, it really, I mean, this is a tougher one but I have to admit that I'm skeptical of the existence of natural monopolies. I think that when we walk into an industry and define it as a natural monopoly, we reduce and stop innovation and yes, they might be a very messy period in which the market discovers whether it's a monopoly or not and whether competition could rise or not and the competition might be messy and so on. But again, I do not want government involved. I think it does much more harm in a sense creates many more negative externalities when government intervenes. And I think this idea of defining Twitter and Facebook as natural monopolies, I mean, it just, I mean, horrifies me and scares me about what next and what else does the bureaucracy with all due respect to Richard Epstein, shame on him for suggesting it because I think it's very, very, very dangerous where we go if we start expanding the scope of what we define. These are platforms that were developed by individuals. These are platforms, yes, that allow for common carriage but even common carriage, but it's, you know, it's not, they're multiple competitors to Twitter including the telephone, by the way, which is really a competitor to Twitter. Messaging, messaging apps, Facebook, the idea that Twitter, Facebook have some kind of monopoly, there's competition constantly arising. Just 10 years ago, these entities didn't even exist. There's no reason to believe that they will exist 10 years from now. Competition might drive them out of the business completely. Twitter barely makes any money. That's unusual for a monopoly not to make any money. One of the characteristics of a monopoly is that they make massive profit margins. Twitter has barely makes anything. If not for Donald Trump, I doubt Twitter would have survived the last four years because it was literally on the verge of not being able to raise capital before Trump became the, you know, the Twitter celebrity that became and drove so much traffic to Twitter. I mean, it just is so full of, you know, who knows what we would have today if we had not defined electric utilities as public, as natural monopolies or any of this. So the water system or the water under the ground, if we treated it as a natural resource to be exploited and to be on the profit mode of who knows what alternatives the market would have created to all of those things. What we do know is where the market engages with any one of these products, we get better quality, lower prices and a whole variety of options. And where the state intervenes, we get, you know, high prices, low quality and very few options. And so I think again, that the history of the 20th century should be quite clear and where one would fall in terms of the regulatory state. Thank you very much. We don't want to take up all of your time if it's one o'clock. We really appreciate both of you coming and we'd love to have you in a non-COVID world, but we'd love to have you actually on campus. Well, you have a beautiful campus. I've spoken at BYU and it's a great place. So happy to come join you in person one day when the authorities allow it. Bye everybody. Thank you. Thank you very much.