 the topic of this panel discussion is never miss... what is it called? Never miss the opportunity of a good crisis. Never let a good crisis go to waste. Okay all right that's that's a topic I only found out yesterday about my role here so please be patient. So okay so this this basically is about what happened lately with COVID. COVID is considered a crisis and it does sound like this title could have been called The Road to Serfdom, the book that Hayek wrote about the tendency to identify situations where people may feel less secure or may feel like under threat and in those situations there's always some politician who steps up and says okay what we got to do is we got to restrict freedoms and what tends to happen is once if the problem is fixed and once the problem is fixed the freedoms are never reinstated or very rarely or if they are they're very slowly reinstated and COVID is not unique in that perspective you know you have an obesity crisis and what's the answer to it makes sugar more expensive. You have you know a credit crunch and what's the answer to fewer loans being given by the banks incentivize them to give more loans by basically doing exactly the same thing that caused the crisis in the first place and in doing so you're also regulating even further the financial sector. So it's not unique, COVID is not unique in that perspective but it does seem to happen significantly a lot more it has happened with COVID like the things that we have experienced I never thought I would experience in my life living in in a Western country. So to discuss this point and to see if there's any solution to ensure that this doesn't keep perpetuating this doesn't happen we have three panelists to my left we have Richard Zundrich who holds a PhD from the University of Vienna he's an independent financial advisor based in Switzerland and specializes in capital markets, wealth management and succession planning and venture capital. Before founding his company he worked in international corporate finance for a number of global banks and he is a long-standing board member of the Austrian Economic Center and the Hayek Institute the Austrian Economic Center is our co-organizer of this event today he is also no Hayek was his great uncle so maybe he can shed some light on what Hayek would have to say about this subject since he wrote a book on it. To my right I have Vera Kitsanova. Vera Kitsanova is a market urbanist working with Zaha Hadid architects while writing a dissertation about private urban development at King's College in London. Her research is focused on bridging the gap between urban planning theory and classical liberal discourse whereas experience includes working with Atlas Network, London School of Economics and multiple free market think tanks and in 2012 she became the first Russian libertarian to be elected into public office. I have to say out of all the panelists I've ever spoken to I admire Vera for her bravery. She's co-founder of the annual Moscow based Adam Smith forum now the largest free market educational conference in Eastern Europe and to my far right again I have Yaron Druk. Yaron is the chairman of the Einarand Institute and he also has authored quite a few books the most recent ones were in pursuit of wealth free market revolution and unequal is sorry equal is unfair or unequal is fair as you could say as well. So thank you thank you for joining me and we'll start from Richard. Richard? Well thank you very much. By ways of introduction I am not an academic I am a practitioner I spent my life in in banking and in consulting and my specialty was and is looking at the different laws in various countries and hopefully figuring out how my clients can become better off by in a legal way of of course exploiting the differences in laws between various countries. I became interested in our topics today because when I started out in banking I was educated at the University of Vienna in the 1970s and early 80s and you know it was mentioned before Austria had a very very left leaning government at the time and basically the University of Vienna was teaching Keynesianism and Austro Keynesianism and Austrian Prime Minister was saying you know I'd rather have a million more in debt than one person out of work more and things like that and at home I had all these books standing around written by this guy named Hayek who was my great uncle and I started reading some of them and all the other stuff that was there and it just somehow made so much more sense than what I was taught at at University and being as the rest of the family were all either in medicine or in chemistry and biology and so they were all in the natural sciences I decided you know this is what I have to do because I'm the only one practicing the the dark arts of economics so much by way of introduction never let a good crisis go to waste I mean it's always been mentioned you know these things come in waves this is not the first time it goes back way longer than that it was actually institutionalized in ancient Rome in the Republic in the Roman Republic they were usually governed by two people two consuls or all of their political offices there was always two guys around and they kind of canceled each other out and made sure that the other guy wasn't stealing and so on and so forth except in times of crisis in times of crisis the Romans had this smart idea says you know these two people can't agree and all these guys are going to be fighting around and nobody's gonna say go this way and so they invented the office of the dictator and this is where our word dictatorship comes from they appointed somebody when Rome was threatened from the outside you know when when in the Punic Wars you know when Hannibal was climbing over the Alps with his elephants you know they said you know we need one guy to tell us what to do and we'll appoint a dictator and he will lead the fight and have all these powers and you know we'll forget about the Republic for a while and but the key aspect the very key aspect of this whole office was he was appointed for a limited period of time and then he had to step down so you know you can be a dictator for three months for six months or until the crisis is over and you know you kick Hannibal back out of Italy you're good and then you have to stop and today somehow the first part becomes accepted and the second part does not now Hayek came from Austria where in his early life there were a lot of discussions in Vienna but you already had communism next door in Hungary after World War one and he wrote things about the economic cycles but everything goes in cycles not just the economy this goes up and down you know before World War one free trade was at its absolute high point of any period before a sense move free movement of people before World War one you know nobody cared you could you could move to another country you just walked in Ellis Island said fine I'm here and then people started out with a with protectionism after that everybody remembers from the road to serfdom addressed to the socialists in all parties you know the warnings about centralization and about government planning but a key warning that Hayek spoke about there is that politicians have a tendency in times of crisis to rule with emergency powers the road to serfdom came out during World War two and of course you needed to centralize because you were fighting the bad guys very interesting situation there you know Hayek moved to London 1930 and in the meantime was a British citizen no longer an Austrian citizen I have his passport here it's very interesting because when he taught at the end of his life in Salzburg he needed a visa and a work permit to work in the country he was born in speaking of tribalism but anyway he was in London and my grandfather his brother was in Vienna they were on two different sides of the war limited correspondence and they had different ideas but what he was warning against was the machine that was put in place during the war effort to infringe upon free market and free enterprise you know somebody was in England was making I don't know candlesticks made out of brass and you know out of brass you can make other stuff you can make bullet casings so the government decided you know you're gonna stop making candlesticks you're gonna start making bullet casings because we need them to fight the Germans which by the way speaking of tribalism everybody remembers that World War one the major parties England Germany and Russia these guys were first cousins the company the people running those countries I mean talk about tribalism lost my moment there so Hayek warned that these powers that the company the country was taking would continue after the war when peace broke out remember the Roman dictator he had to stop but we kept this in most countries after World War two the wartime economy continued to a certain degree there were nationalized companies owned by the government in the UK there were government monopolies Austria nationalized you know the whole steel and chemical industry because the Russians were gonna take it from private people you know just take it take the whole factories and take them to Russia and in order to prevent that Austria just nationalized the entire steel industry and the entire petrochemical industry you'd call it nowadays the thing is they never kind of gave it back that only happened much later and so we had a very central government run very Keynesianism a Keynesianistic episode throughout the 1950s 60s 70s I remember when I came to London in the 70s I grew up internationally I grew up in America I graduated from high school in Cairo it's some point in time in the 70s we moved to Brussels and we took the car we drove over to London why did we come to London everything was so cheap Soros had just ruined the pound and you know the currency that we had had in Europe was just so powerful we could buy all these cheap pounds and buy all this cool high street stuff that you guys had here and you know the in the United States at the time unemployment was 10% inflation was I don't know where and everybody was practicing these Keynesian ideas and then a couple of politicians who had read Hayek Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan came to power and then they reduced a lot of these powers that that the politicians had absurd assert during the war and in the period thereafter and then prosperity returned to the UK to the US to a lot of the world and then the iron curtain fell and we all thought we had won this was the great triumph of the the free market economy and liberal enlightenment ideas guess what it never stops it all runs in cycles and so during the 90s this all worked great I mean I was in back in during the 90s you could do no wrong I mean doesn't matter what stock you bought you bought everything was just going up and then you had a crash first you had the dot-com bubble burst and people started calling for more regulation of financial markets and then you had 9 11 we've just had the very unfortunate anniversary of that date but both of these were crises and both of them led to governments again calling for more regulations more regulation of the previously deregulated financial industry and all kinds of targeting of individual freedoms through legislation the Patriot Act the so-called Patriot Act which is still enforced today not only imposes a lot more stringent regulation on people in America but worldwide there is much more reporting there is much more legal spying on all of us since 9 11 and thereafter and then you had a couple of more financial crises and then you had a couple of more terror attacks and then you had a couple more wars and now we are all more and more being watched in our rights are slowly slowly slowly being chipped away when I was most of most of your age I would have could walk to the go to the airport walk to the plane get on the plane no security checks nothing go to go to my seat sit down let us have a beer fly off something that all of which you probably can't even or the younger ones among you can't even imagine so every good crisis leads to more centralization and what we have to work for is that we stop this from because I'll stop all of these measures that COVID has brought from becoming permanent because the government always thinks you know oh oh this was so easy we could just shut down the global economy for a couple of years we could just decree that people couldn't go to certain places we could because of COVID I had to fill out I don't know how many forms online I'm twice vaccinated I had to get a I had to get a test in Switzerland before I left and I had to pay for the test that I'm the two-day test when I got here even though I'm leaving tomorrow I mean I'll be leaving before the two days are up but I had to you know plump down my my 69 pounds anyway and then strangely human was talking about about languages you know the COVID test that I took in Switzerland the one I had to bring with me they accept English as a language they accept what French and they accept Spanish all the wonderful tribal countries that the UK guys like to spend their vacation they don't accept German I mean that's like a hundred million Europeans speak German a lot of them do trade with anything nope English French Spanish sorry plus all the information that I had to enter into the computer system just to be able to come here today to talk to you which I'm very glad I did by the way they would have never gotten before this crisis and my whole trip to come here cost me or rather the Institute almost twice as much as my trip three years ago because our COVID taxes and climate change taxes and and the various tests had almost doubled the price that I had to pay in order to be able to come here and talk to you I'm glad I did but I'll pass it on to the next speaker thank you very much I can hold it if you want thank you very much for inviting me here it's good to see finally see people face-to-face I used to organize the free market road show in Eastern Europe and particularly in Ukraine and it's now I'm speaking at one in London it's great to see that the Liberty movement is now global we have just had the anniversary as Richard already mentioned of a major tragedy the 9-11 terrorist attack and this reminded me of a related story which I think very well illustrates the way many people and including politicians and the self-proclaimed experts misunderstand how our cities work the story goes like this a week after the 9-11 terrorist attack two respected urban theorists declared essentially the death of a skyscraper that embodiment of urban density now I quote we are convinced they wrote that the age of skyscrapers is at an end it must now be considered an experimental building typology that has failed we predict that no new mega towers will be built and existing ones are destined to be dismantled sound specifically ironically while we're sitting in the middle of the city of London in reality as we know this never happened but now we see history repeating I'm talking about all these apocalyptic predictions in the media that we should prepare for the great exodus that the future belongs to the suburbia and that big cities are dying out and here's probably my most important message for today cities leave on like 20 years ago our deeply human desire to stick together prevailed over the fear of terrorism and it will hopefully sooner rather than later prevail over our fear of COVID but in the meantime unfortunately many urban policies are being guided by this fear and by panic consider this policy makers all across the world declare what they call a war on density they blame big dense cities for the spread of the virus here's an example and the coma the governor of New York wrote on Twitter that the density levels in New York are quote destructive and the city needs an immediate plan to reduce density well he's a politician coming up with plans is his daily job but sadly a lot of professional urbanists echo his fears and in my opinion this anti-density and in its core and anti-urban sentiments can be as harmful to our cities as the pandemic itself I'll explain why first of all if we don't succumb to panic and simply look at the data will find no correlation between urban density and transmission risk the World Bank last year analyzed data from Chinese cities and found no quite quite the opposite cities with the highest infection rates or in fact those with lower population densities Johns Hopkins University did a similar job in the US and again no correlation between density and infection rates but they found also found something even more unexpected apparently higher density is linked to lower death rates from COVID how is it possible well the truth is we still don't know everything about the virus the patterns house and spreads for example but we know a lot about the economy of cities and one reason why big cities are tackling the pandemic better than small ones is that simply they are richer they have better equipped hospitals better trained medical professionals and so on and this by the way is is the direct consequence of density it's the immense concentration of talent of capital of knowledge in one place that helps cities like London or New York grow richer and in fact cities like London see even stronger link between density and economic prosperity why because it's stronger for the service sector where it's all about face-to-face contact any guess how much of the London economy relies on the service sector the percent roughly yes London will be higher that's right 91% so imagine if Sadiq Khan declares a war on density like his New York colleague let's hope it's not happening because in this war 91% of us will be losers and urban density is not to blame for the virus as I've just explained and actually it can even serve as a cure to post-COVID recovery it's not just the economy that benefits from density it's the same goes the same is true for another kind of capital the social capital and I don't know who first came up with this idea of social distancing but that clearly was a misnomer physical distancing yes maybe but remaining socially close is essential crucial if we want to get back to normal sooner rather than later and one important distinction when I say density some of you imagine the city of London where we are all now but some probably imagine slums of Mumbai or Rio or similar cities and here's one very important distinction density is not the same as overcrowding we are not actually think about it we're not forced to live in cities there is enough space on earth for everyone for each and every one of us to live like a nomad but we choose not to we choose to live close to each other because we enjoy it because we enjoy the diversity the great choice of lifestyles the serendipity of random contacts all these things that we have in a big in big cities so that's why cities will live on but that doesn't mean that everything with our cities is great and perfect and rosy in the long run yes we have all the reasons to be optimistic but in the short run of course there's a lot to be fixed and I'm sure that many of you immediately thought oh yes housing and that's true excessive regulations planning restriction nimby is not in my backyard you know those are all suffocating our housing market and we market urbanists have been talking about it for years and years and last year at some point it felt like we had finally been heard when the UK government announced a big planning reform the biggest one since actually since 1947 and it was about liberalizing the supply liberalizing construction but as with everything the government is doing we should curb our optimism slightly and I'll explain why in a few minutes what's the key to a successful housing reform for London but essentially for any city anywhere it's to make the rules more flexible this will help people to adapt faster which is especially important in times of crisis where do we start then well there are low hanging fruits out there for instance in London is the green belt not many Londoners actually realize that this cherished green belt is not even green more large parts of it are essentially wasteland with no particular aesthetic or environmental quality and it covers just think about that hard to imagine it covers four times the entire built-up area of Greater London so if we only relax this one particular thing if we only relax the green belt rules we'll be able to build millions of new homes in a very short period of time relatively short five million to be precise as the one Adam Smith Institute's report calculated another good example would be making easier office to residential conversions many of us work from home now many of us got used to it in the last a year and a half so we don't need as much office space as we used to and the recent expansion of what's called permitted development rights which allow commercial building to be more easily converted to residential without planning application is a step in the right direction and the moment it's perfect for that that's just there those are just two of the many possible ways of delivering new homes relatively quickly but let's ask ourselves why is housing such a big problem in the first place well like any other markets the housing market is guided by supply and demand that's economic 101 so demand for the new homes have been growing for decades and decades what about the supply it must be catching up but it doesn't why because as I said the supply side developers are bounded by all those excessive and efficient regulations and I'll say something you probably don't expect to hear from a libertarian we need more affordable housing yes you heard it right affordable housing but the problem is the current definition of affordable housing is very misleading it's not affordable if it requires subsidy it's affordable if it's not affordable for our economy it's not a sustainable solution in an economic sense so for example micro flats can be considered affordable homes today there is we have a minimum the minimum flat size today that that flat that can be built cannot be smaller than 37 square meters and an average Londoner has a 33 square meters per person so it's not working in terms of providing everyone with a big space and removing this requirement would allow young people to jump finally jump on a property letter and yes I understand it's not an option for everyone but more freedom to adapt to changes and address very different needs of very different people and if the government chooses this strategy one of fewer regulation and less restate less red tape then the crisis won't be as deep as it could be and what are they actually doing that's a good question so they announced housing reform as I said is definitely a good start the government has pledged to cut the red tape so we can build 300,000 new homes a year sounds amazing right well there is another side of the coin as usual when Boris Johnson proclaimed his famous build build build he called the program the new deal for a reason like the original new deal introduced by Roosevelt in the last century this one is deeply Keynesian in its core so spending five billion of budget money on infrastructure to stimulate the economy that's a much more questionable aspect of the reform and one might eagerly say yes in my backyard but certainly not with my money and just two days ago we heard another bad news Michael gov our new housing secretary decided to put the reform on post whatsoever turns out it's not that popular among his core supporters but you know what's these are weird times we live in apparently liberalizing planning is more popular in red wall constituencies they are desperate to see the old factories and warehouses demolished and built over consider this how ironic it is people in the red wall wanted to demolish all the walls and again the keys flexibility if we want the reform to happen we must ourselves with flexible we must be ready for tactical alliances and look beyond parties and debates we know how to change the rules to make cities richer all we need is to come up with a politically feasible solutions and policy makers now are quite open to technocratic solutions so if we just frame our free market ideas in technocratic ways that might actually work and housing is a burning issue but cities of course are not all about housing they cities are also streets parks squares and bankments Sunday markets flower shows outdoor cinemas all these nice things and that's another field by the way where we see some changes brewing we have many of us have switched at least partially to remote working so we don't commute that much as we used to so we don't use that much cars so probably we don't need as much streets allocated to cars so we can expect our cities to become a walkable and that's good news walkable cities are healthier safer happier friendlier this is all clear but you know what they're also wealthier by the way so many case studies show that improving working infrastructure and can increase retail sales on the same street by up to 30 percent and we have a vivid example here in London everyone's familiar with the Oxford Circus you know this Tokyo style pedestrian crossing when it was created it led to the so the turnover in the nearby shops increased by 25% and of course we understand that all the business will not go online you cannot go to a restaurant on Amazon and high streets have been awfully terribly heard by the lockdowns the government is now threatening to save the high streets with introducing online sales tax and 800 million subsidy but there are better ways and improving walkability maybe one of them remember last summer the cool new vibe of the sopo when the streets were given to outdoor dining and just a couple of months ago we heard another news that Oxford Street might get pedestrian eyes by next year let's see how it go how it goes there are rumors of even more ambitious plans that large parts of central London can become entirely car free and what I like about it is that a few years ago we at Zahid architects proposed presented our walkable London project which was very ambitious and a lot of people praised it but everyone considered it was too utopian but things are changing and now the London City Hall is endorsing something that to me suspiciously resembles our own plan and of course of course that's important these developments might not be implemented in a top-down command and control way there are many examples all over the world from New York to Seoul of wonderful brilliant public spaces developed by the developed by private sector and here's the rule of thumb never trust the government to solve our problems cities will are changing rapidly but most changes are not coming from planners they are bottom up take that trendy discourse of smart cities the government's worldwide are meeting and discussing how to make city smart and the organizations like the World Bank are allocating huge amount of money on making city smart but in fact most technologies that makes our city smarter like online maps like ranking applications like mobility apps they are all the product of the private sector they are bottom-up solutions and architects by the way also can play a major role here things like micro flats were proposed by architects co-living modular housing another potential way to deliver the truly affordable housing they are all topic that are their whole topic discussed in the architecture community yes the pandemic has changed our society dramatically and once again it has shown how capable we are to adapt to changes by we I mean the individuals the private sector the private businesses and we are adapting fast but we can only do it within existing legal frames and expending these frames is something we should welcome and we should demand and planners as I said have a choice here they either can prevent people from adapting to changes and prolong the crisis or they can give us more space to innovate but interestingly some adaptations that we're already seeing at that we are part of do not require permission do you realize that in the last year year and a half most of us I think all of them have been blatantly and routinely violating the rules I'm not talking about wearing or not wearing masks but raise your hand those of you who at least partially switch to remote working yes and but you know there is the thing called the use-based zoning so you cannot just simply convert and home into an office or an officer into a home it's illegal but all of us have done this overnight breaking the rule threatening one of the most important pillar of the existing top-down planning system and a good thing is that people gradually realize that urban development is not a zero-sum game yes they always will be nimbies opposing any any changes to the city landscape but there is an alternative movement called imbi yes in my backyard and it's going strong in the UK and beyond we need to hear more voices like this we need to be part of this part of the solution to summarize each time that we have a problem planners claim that we must be entirely redesigned our cities and our societies at the whole to directly address the specific problem so as Richard mentioned solving the temporary problem with a permanent solution with a solution that will stick when the problem is gone and which will in many cases even deepen the problem deepen the crisis but the real goal of planning is to deal with the unpredictability so going back to Friedrich von Hayek he famously formulated what he called the knowledge problem that knowledge is dispersed in the society and no central planner however benevolent has the capacity to grasp it and this is exactly why we need freedom because we don't know the future and no one does what we know however is that the pandemic one day will be over but things like freedom the markets creativity are here with us to stay thank you so there's no question that we are really seeing that covert is being used as a excuse by governments all over the world to expand their power and it's not a power they're going to give away it's not a power that's going to go away very quickly as Richard has described it seems to never happen every crisis is used by the authorities to expand their power they give some of it back you don't have to do a PCR test anymore coming into the UK but you do have to do an antigen test you're still gonna have to do a test submit it to the authorities and who knows how long that'll last will we stop having to fill out those forms once we don't have to do tests or will they think it's a good idea to keep getting information about all of us on a regular basis when we travel around the world are borders going to really be open up some day who knows when in the United States we've seen this pattern really from the beginning of if you will free markets or freedom since since really the the establishment of freedom throughout the West it's it's cyclical in a sense but in a sense it is not the movement is always steady consistent towards statism towards greater rule for government it accelerates post-crisis then some of the during crisis then some of those freedoms are giving back to us but not all and then it can consistently increases once in a while you get a Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher it's rare it's unusual and some of the liberties are given back but not many maybe under that you're more than under Reagan but Reagan gave a great speech but did he make America free in any significant substantial sense not really if you look at government spending as a proxy for the involvement of government in the economy government spending grew dramatically on a Ronald Reagan so the state continues to grow crises are continued to be used right now if we go back and we can go back in America to civil war where Lincoln as great of a president as he was instituted the first income tax in American history the first draft in American history massive violations of individual rights most of that was was retracted after the civil war but not many of the institutions that were created I was just telling somebody we were talking about banking and regulations on banking and in the United States every bank in the US was regulated by five to seven different regulatory agencies actually mostly it's seven if you're publicly traded seven different institutions and one of these institutions is the is the office of the controller of the currency office of the control of the company this is an office that was created during the civil war during the civil war the United States government printed money for the first time so it printed in somebody had a marriage the process of printing the money and distributing the money there was no central bank so the office of the controller of the currency was created in order to do that when the civil war ended the United States stopped printing money money returned the printing of money returned to banks private banks did the office of the control of the currency go away no bureaucratic entities never go away they morph they change but they stick around and the office of the control of the currency still exists nobody knows exactly why but it's still one of the seven regulatory bodies that regulates pretty much every bank in the United States if you want me to name them you can ask me and this process goes on you know you see it in civil war you see it after the financial crisis 1908 in in the United States you got a federal reserve and you got an income tax the world war the Great Depression of course generated the New Deal and World War two supposedly proved the industrial planning was possible because so much of the U.S. economy was nationalized much of it reprivatized after World War two but much of that planning remained many of those offices and regulations and regulators stayed on and you can go on and on just recently of course we've got 9-11 9-11 of course generated massive amount of government spending the creation of the largest department or the largest restructuring of the American government to create the homeland security we've got the TSA we've got the NSA listening to all our calls we've got the Patriot Act the NSA is under that none of that has been taken back even though you would argue that much of the threat supposedly is gone they tell us right al Qaeda was defeated ISIS was defeated and yet I still have to take my shoes off at the airport remember that one guy who tried to smuggle a bomb in in his shoe and because of that globally in the entire world no matter whether you're two years old or 89 years old you have to take off your shoes at the stupid airport and that's not going away who's what politicians can have the guts to say it's okay not to take off your shoes right and you know shoes being representative for the whole TSA infrastructure I'm sure there's some countries where you don't have to take off your shoes but in America unless your TSA pre you have to take off your shoes these things a constant the financial crisis didn't result in less regulation given that it was caused by regulation you think that less regulation would be the solution no it resulted in more regulation a greater war for government more setting us up for the next financial crisis you know dot fang more government spending bigger government the same thing happened the same thing happened now with covert the response is going to be greater government more spending more intervention more controls soon we're gonna have to you know we might have regulations about housing density in particular cities because oh my god we might get a virus that might be one of the conclusions out of covert even though it's based on completely wrong science but that wouldn't be the first time right what do we do about this it seems endless government only grows and crises accelerate government growth and we're not done with crises we've had a lot of crises recently I don't think it's an accident I think about anything we can have more crises in the next ten years than in the past ten years what do we do about it is the response well it's the way the world goes what can you do I hope not the solution has to be found in trying to figure out what the reason for this is why is it that this happens why is it the government only grows why is it that every crisis leads to greater growth greater intervention greater violations of our freedom and there are many philosophical causes but at the political level the causes fundamentally that we don't have a conception of the limitation on government we don't have a view on the role of government I mean if there is a view on the world of government it is the government can do whatever it can get away with or whatever it can convince a majority of people that it can get away with there is no principle to guide okay I shouldn't intervene here I shouldn't intervene here there's no principle to say okay it's okay to impose a tax here it's not okay to oppose a tax there's no principle to engage in okay I shouldn't intervene in regulating the sector but I shouldn't intervene in regulating that sector it's whatever power dictates it's whatever the whim of the politician or the whim of the majority of the women the tribe of the women the political party dictates there's no theory there's no principle there's no limiting factor there's whatever you can sell to your voters and of course at times of crisis people panic people get upset and it's easy to sell them on I have the solution whether you do or you don't what we need is to return to conception of government as limited not small I don't know what size has to do with it but limited in scope what we need to reconceive of is what is the role of government why do we even have one what is the purpose and the idea is again coming out of the enlightenment is the idea that individuals have an alienable rights we have a right to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness property and that the role of government is to protect those rights and that's it and if the role of government is to protect those rights then this vast number of things the government does I'd say anywhere between 80 to 95 percent of what governments do depending on which particular government that don't fall into the category of protecting rights so instead of thinking about how do I buy votes how do I how do I piece my constituency how do I make this problem go away the standard the government should be is this an act does this act of mine the government protect rights or violate rights and if it violates rights it should never be done now for that you need a strong constitution for that you need a complete rethinking of political philosophy in a complete we thinking of how we approach government what we think about government why is government even involved in urban planning what's at any of their business whose rights are being protected why can individuals negotiate terms for how to use land why those terms dictated by a bureaucrat by a politician by a majority so what we need to rediscover is the concept of individual rights and a government this solely this that is responsible it's so responsibility is the protection of those rights and by definition that would start limiting what the government does instead of growing we start shrinking and we could shrink fast and there's no reason that we have such unlimited large you know interventionist governments around the world this doesn't have to continue in a cycle but the only way to stop is to find a limiting principle to government luckily John Locke and the founders of America founded for us we know what that limiting factor is and that is the concept of rights so what we need is a shift in political philosophy that's why it's not easy we're not gonna get it from the Johnson administration or the Trump administration or the Biden administration or any politician in life today our job is to fight for that principle not to fight for any particular politician our job is to fight for limited government not for a slight swing in a slightly different positive direction but put complete shift in the way people think about government and its role and its responsibilities and only then can we stop this endless use of crises crises created by government none of these crises would happen without government 9-11 was a creation not as a conspiracy was a creation by the American government in the sense that they could have stopped it they could have stopped it they could have stopped it years earlier by taking blood and seriously if they run if they did the responsibility properly they could have stopped it if the intelligence agencies did did just did their job if the FBI actually talked to the CIA if you read a little bit about 9-11 they had the terrorists weeks and months before targeted but because the FBI and the CIA didn't talk to each other they slipped through the cracks it was incompetent and the response to 9-11 was unnecessary we can get into what the right response would be in another time every you know financial crisis wasn't some crisis from above that landed on us who knows you know meteorite landed on we got a crisis no it's a man-made crisis you know regulations created that crisis tax policy created the crisis bad economic policy created that crisis and we double up on the bad economic policy so we need to stop quibbling about economics stop quibbling about this policy of that policy and we need a principle and we have the principle the principle is individual rights leave us alone let us govern our lives and you know what we need is a permission less society a society where we do we act we produce without asking permission from the authorities that that's the kind of society that leads to the shrinkage of government and in the reversal of the trend with which we live thank you before we begin with the questions Richard would like to speak once more so yeah of course this was clear something that I wanted to bring out is that of course from the previous tribalism to date we have in all of our country's varying forms of government in the US and also in the UK you have a two-party system well okay there are a couple of other parties but they're basically two parties run it which is due among others due to the electoral process in Austria and Germany when we had too many parties some people don't get in because we have to have a minimum of 5% of the vote in order to get in and everybody thought you know this would stop a small party system and for many many years Austria and Germany were also ruled mostly by two parties you had a smaller system however those two parties that were running things the conservatives and the socialists they kind of messed things up and then you had two things happen is a radicalization you used to have more liberal Republicans and you used to have more conservative Democrats and what happened here in the UK and in the US is they basically switched roles so all the conservative Democrats moved over and became Republicans and all of the more liberal in the American sense of the word Republicans to switch to the Democrats now in continental Europe that didn't happen so much basically new parties got founded and so rather than have you know bigger parties that became more right or more left what happened there was that you know party you had parties in Germany that are now to the left of the socialists and to the right of the conservatives and so in Germany what will happen is the election coming up in two weeks which will probably be of interest to some of you will result in a parliament not of three parties as it was for a very long time or four parties when the Greens came in for a very long time or five parties when the ex-communists in East Germany now calling themselves the left came in but in Germany you're gonna have a parliament of nine parties you're gonna have to have a coalition and that coalition is gonna be no matter what happens it's gonna be very weird you know what's very what's gonna be even weirder not as weird as in Israel I don't know if you know the the coalition right now that's governing Israel how we are that one is that is okay that that's a dinner conversation but you know what's even weirder the German electoral system didn't want let votes to be left over so you were either voted directly if somebody voted in his if some some candidate was in his county he was either voted directly and then he won a lost but a lot of these people won't get an absolute majority because with you know seven or eight parties you don't get an absolute majority in your own county so you come in over the party list over the so-called second vote okay I can live with nine parties being in the German Parliament what I can't live with is the German Parliament because of this voting system being expanded from 500 to over 900 people because all of these guys that came in over the party lists need a seat in Parliament the parliament is physically not big enough to house all of these so why are people voting for extremist parties why are people voting for more and more parties because they're fed up with the political system what happens in the political system you double the number of parliamentarians there are enough useless parliamentarians as it is you don't know you don't have to I mean I would I would change the voting system totally I would lower the number of people in Parliament for every person that doesn't go to vote if you know only 50% of the people vote then only fit you only get 50% of the seats in Parliament now how about that that would be an incentive now we have another system which people always claim is not going to work in the rest of the world which is Switzerland which is bottom-up most of the stuff happens on a village or a canton which is what Switzerland calls its states and the central government is usually fairly limited in power and it's a permanent coalition no they vote for low taxes we have tax competition I live that we have tax competition between the states I happen to live in the canton with the lowest taxes when I file my taxes the guy reading my taxes gives me tax advice and I ask him you know what are you doing he said you know don't you want your second car in your company and not privately I'm going why are you telling me this saying you know if I if I don't give you this advice you just gonna move to another canton they have tax competition there but why am I saying this you can have a referendum I think you're familiar with referendums around here if a hundred thousand people sign a note you have a referendum on a subject so tomorrow we're gonna have a referendum on the COVID laws the emergency COVID laws whether they will be allowed to continue or whether they should be stopped immediately we will also have a referendum proposed by different people on marriage for all and people but they each got a hundred thousand signatures and tomorrow I forgot what the fourth one there's a fourth one coming up I forgot about that it'll come to me but tomorrow these subjects will be decided I don't know how it's gonna end the COVID vote is too close to call the likelihood is higher taxes for for the upper class are probably gonna be turned down and the marriage for all is probably gonna be approved that's the tendency right now but you know anything can happen but these kind of ideas because what happens when one of these referendums is approved the outcome of that referendum has to be put into law by the government and it is constitutional law it becomes a part of the Swiss Constitution so this kind of a system I'm just going on to what has been said before yes change the political system give people more of a voice on a smaller basis and limit government if we don't like what government is doing you know hold a referendum you know idea just might catch on okay that is a very very good question and that is something that Hayek would have said the problem with gridlock which is what you're referring to which is what we have in the states well yeah and you can have gridlock with two parties if they just don't like each other because you know in previous times 90% 95% of laws would be passed unanimously people would talk or with a massive majority you know Democrats Republicans actually used to talk to each other the problem with gridlock I used to be a big proponent of you know if everybody's in their way they can't pass new laws and that's great the problem is a we already have too many laws already and b when the government or the parliament does not pass the law two things happen one the bureaucrats use existing laws and interpret them by way of you know ordinances and so on that don't require parliamentary approval and the second thing is what happens is everything goes to court and now in all of a sudden you have justices the Supreme Court or the or the various other high courts deciding what should actually be decided by lawmakers or the public so you don't get any improvement the only way you get improvement is by cutting it down and no matter what whether you look you like Trump or not the one thing he did do was that presidential decree that every time you bring out a new ordinance you have to cancel to that should be worldwide every time you bring out a new law you have to cancel to about 10 2 seems a little mild I mean we're gonna disagree a little bit I mean this idea of referendums becoming constitutional scares to be Jesus out of me I I'm I think the only solution here really the only solution here is a system of government that basically makes politicians with regard to economic issues and civil liberties and individual liberties impotent that is that makes them powerless that separates their ability to influence it majority should not be able to decide whether lesbians can inseminate or not I mean all they need is a guy who agrees and a contract why is it any of the majority's business to do that or a majority shouldn't be able to decide to raise somebody's taxes or any of these things the state and educate total separation of state and in health care total separation state and open planning total separation of all the state and our lives the only job of the state is to protect us and it's the only way because anything else yeah we're gonna have a few periods we'll have a few years where things are going our way we'll get a few laws passed we'll get we'll get the right coalition together and I shrink government a little bit it won't last it'll go in these phases and the phases always move in one direction that is the improvement is always smaller than the decline so long term the state only grows long term our right to only be violated more long term we're in deep deep crisis much bigger crisis than anything was seen today and and again you know there's a principle of individual rights that applies to the COVID situation it's not up to the majority decide I think what emergency should be or shouldn't be what we can account to you're from Australia yeah no you've got the accent at least not New Zealand New Zealand yeah yeah I mean there has to be something there has to be something that constraints government from locking you guys out right I mean Australia is now being locked up for what hundred Sydney or Melbourne to escape Australia you can't even leave Australia Australians can't leave Australia I mean free country supposedly I can't leave Australia so yes but not we didn't pretend it was free right we're pretending Australia is free Soviet Union build walls we knew they were they were not free now we're pretending these countries are free and you can't leave Melbourne I think a five mile radius or something you can't fly between states unless you have permission there's this tracking app now in Australia that I think it's in South South Australia is that right it's a tracking app that they will ping you randomly you have 15 minutes to take a photo of yourself and it's got a GPS that tells them exactly where you are and if you're not where you're supposed to be the police ascent sounds like an abusive relationship isn't it if a husband or a wife did that I would be in court right you would get a what's your what's the cold I don't know if you've ever if you've ever seen the movie Spartacus but there is a there's a if you've ever seen the movie Spartacus you know there's the the Romans are asking all the slaves at the end who is Spartacus right and everybody stands up I am Spartacus and there's a sense in which if everybody stands up if everybody locks their phones if everybody goes to their country house if everybody walks outside when you're supposed to be indoors they can't stop you they can't stop you if one or two people do dollar rescue but if everybody does it if it's true civil disobedience they can't stop you and yes so that's what we should be doing in the movie the Romans did but the Romans had endless power and there was a limited number of slaves hopefully our authorities have limited power and we are much more numbered than those slaves but yes yeah so yeah but we also pretend you said we pretend we pretend we live in a free market economy we pretend we live in all kinds of forms of democracy we pretend all of that it's just it's a matter of degrees right we have until seven so let's move to the Q&A please so first of all I really liked the starting point that you made about dictatorship and it's a historical origins have to mention I have a friend who's from Belarus and recently maybe she's watching actually now and recently I said how are lockdowns in Belarus do you have a lot of look said no we're already a dictatorship we don't we don't need that so so that was a good one but anyway I wanted to ask a question to the whole panel do you think that the term crisis is poorly defined in that for example you have two companies failing let's say and on and work on and as a result of that you had a new law passed Serbians actually kind of requirements that you know every single company now in the States has to comply with and it's caused so much burden and it's still there you had in your field of architecture I guess or similar you had the the Grafnell Tower you know the building that caught fire suddenly all the cladding all the cladding everywhere has to change or you had the dot-com bubble that you mentioned and then you know okay certain industry had a problem and in order to fix it we we planted the seeds of the housing bubble that happened later on so all of these things don't seem to me like they fit the definition of crisis and I would like to hear from you is there a threshold above which we can consider something in Christ crisis and legitimize some erosion of freedom or there's no such threshold and is not even there's no point to even define it well of course if you apply it to COVID or to 9-11 or to other crises where large numbers of people have died you can't really measure it however people don't compare and a lot of people will now consider me either a cynic or think we do not study the alternatives how many people died or were severely injured mentally through the lockdowns how many people will die because their company went broke or they were fired or all of those you can't compare that directly so I'll use another example when I when I was very young some nutcase decided that they could poison bottles of Tylenol you have Tylenol here it's a it's a pain reliever like aspirin basically and in the United States some guy wanted to get money from a from a Tylenol the company that made the product and the supermarkets and they took pills that look very similar to Tylenol and put them in the Tylenol bottles and a few people got sick from this poison that put in there how many of you know this story not very many that story is the reason that now when you open a bottle of mouthwash or a bottle of medicine or a tube of toothpaste or any number of bottles you need a knife because I can never get these things open where it says tear and I need to use force but you know all those plastic wrappers around your mouthwash bottles your toothpaste your whatever this is why all and anything that you consume now has to be sealed in such a way that basically you can't get it at it anymore worldwide because a couple of people died now is that worth it it's like the it's like the very similar to the shoe example you know one guy put put explosives in his shoe and then the rest of the world we're not even talking about this and I'm gonna frame it in a totally different way to show you we're talking about plastic straws at McDonald's can you imagine how much plastic was used in the past 40 years since this ordinance came to seal all of these things and you imagine McDonald's can't sell enough coax with plastic straws in them no way too bad he was so you have to make some kind of comparison even though that comparison sounds cynical at some point you have to do the math every time you you pass a new law in Austria they passed a law they raised the price of gasoline regular petrol however they didn't for some reason they didn't raise the tax on diesel because truckers trucks use diesel so they didn't want the transport industry to suffer suffer at that point in time 95% of all regular automobiles in Austria were petrol driven automobiles now over 70% of them are diesel-powered automobiles which not only changed things people voted with their feet or with their wallet and bought diesel cars then all of a sudden it turns out that diesel is not that a failure it blows all kinds of stuff into the air that is bad for your lungs so now you have to put filters in your diesel cars or you have to add basically urine so you have to piss in the tank of your diesel car in order to stop it from emitting stuff they did it's called blue tech if anybody everybody wants to look it up but basically it's urine yes seriously I can google it and because I'm on the Americans today they legalized marijuana in California which is you know a good thing and then a whole industry grew from legal marijuana and stock exchange quoted and they're all going through the roof and so on and so forth however they regulated it in such a way that it became very difficult to grow and sell marijuana and marijuana products in California so then COVID came and a lot of these California marijuana growers got into trouble so California passed a law to subsidize the California legal marijuana industry with a hundred million dollars I'm sorry if you can't make money selling pot in California you're doing something totally wrong yeah so I mean most of these crises and our crisis right they're completely created by the government almost felt the only crisis is war the only crisis that a government should care about that a government is engaged in is is a war all the other crisis are completely artificial they're made up they are you know COVID is a virus okay that's what we have doctors and hospitals and insurance companies and drug companies and so on to deal with the virus the government should it has a role in isolating people who test positive they're responsible for the protection of my right so if you test positive and you insist on you know coming over yeah the government has a job in stopping you that's it government has no job in COVID have no job with regard to gasoline versus diesel what if two people one of them has COVID the other one doesn't care decide to meet should the government stop them well if they could meet where only the two are affected no and look it's a question that has to be really thought out I don't have the answer to it it does COVID justify government intervention clearly Bola does if Ebola was contagious right and so what's the threshold how many people have to die how how contagious does it need to be there's a whole thinking that has to be done you know in terms of when is government why you know government doesn't intervene in the flu in the cold but it doesn't have been with with COVID now COVID's more deadly than the flu in the cold so okay but how much deadlier does it have to be before government intervenes these are real questions I don't have answers somebody has to think them through the one job of kind of political philosophers or or legislators should be to think about these things and come up with reasonable solutions and and maybe the cantons can compete about who has different solutions to these kind of issues these issues that are not clear cut murder is bad we all know that can't have a canton that says murders okay here right that's not acceptable but within like state rights in America you could have some variation across states in terms of how they respond to a pandemic depending on how they define when they should intervene on our but the intervention has to be focused it has to be focused on preventing those who have the disease from contain from from giving to others but if you don't have the disease if you test negative you're not a threat to anybody and it's not your job to prove that you're not a threat it's their job to prove that you are you know you're innocent until proven guilty according to our legal system so all these crises are created we've got a massive economic crisis we don't feel it because the government is putting it up huge amounts of money to cover it all up but there's a massive economic crisis I mean you walk across Oxford Street not the big stores the big stores are fine but if you walk a little bit on Oxford City you look at the little stores how many of them are closed how many of this shut it down all open a year and a half ago when I was in London now they're gone you walk through a solo as nice as so ho is how many stores are closed down in so a lot now there's also new stores opening up so entrepreneur spirit is still alive and walk but there's really economic pain out there that's been hidden by other government handouts and now they want to punish the online sales instead yes they want to punish the online sales which saved us it's the reason why we could sustain our our economic well-being through covert government has no business in any of this it needs to just get out of the way and again the only way to do that is to have a principle is to have a principle to guide when should government intervene when shouldn't government intervene and if your rights are not threatened government has no role government has no job and other than crime and the threat of war and violating contracts and things like that your rights are not being threatened by you know viruses yes potentially in extreme circumstances but 99% of the time as you're living around your rights are not being threatened so government has no business right skyscrapers where you should build skyscrapers I mean maybe we shouldn't I don't care I mean maybe maybe we should all live in low homes you decide I you know so it's it's there has to be a governing principle and when government intervenes or not otherwise we're lost thank you okay now we will go to first super chat question and then if we have time we'll go to audience so we have a question by the way if you want to be prioritized and during the audience you can send a super chat online so we have a question from mark goodkin thank you mark which I know nothing about this question so I'll leave it to the speakers can the speakers comment on the great reset I don't know what that is yeah I mean I've done what is the three shows in the great reset on my on the Iran book show so if you're interested in the great reset you can find it there and the great reset is the idea coming out of the World Economic Forum and it is an idea that covert is an opportunity to reset the global economy it is primarily driven by a leftist agenda although others have chimed in as well and jumped in on the span wagon and the idea is that you know government had just shown that they have a huge amount of power most status to have learned from covert the look government can do amazing things shut down a whole economy and you know people don't starve in the streets we can survive it it's okay right that's the danger of government's quote success is that they live well what other big projects can we engage in as governments and and can we completely reset the world economy away from capitalism explicitly away from capitalism or they like to say we don't want to end capitalism we want to reform capitalism which is you know a lot more socialism right that's that's the way they want to reform capitalism in particular the one big issue that they have learned from covert that they that the government can get involved in and the government can reset is climate change so you know if government can shut you it can keep you home because you might in fact other people the virus government can keep you home because you might drive your car and pollute the air and you know it makes you too government might be able to force you to do a lot of things that you wouldn't otherwise do so they view this as an opportunity to both embrace many policies pro climate is supposedly that help the climate supposedly I say because they don't that help the climate I don't even know what helping the climate is sorry I'm tired that that helped the cause of climate change that helped the climate climate doesn't need help and that's that helped their cars policies that in normal times we would not accept in normal times they thought we would rebel against but since we didn't rebel against covert since we didn't rebel against all the restrictions of covert they assuming now is the opportunity for them to step in and control our lives and regulate our lives in a in a in a much more substantial way all you have to do is do but put in Google the great reset it's not some conspiracy theory it's the chairman of the of the world economic farm talks about this he's got a he's got a perfect German accent to talk about it about resetting the world economy you know towards more statism and less capitalism and restricting our freedoms and saving the planet and all this stuff it's really dangerous stuff unfortunately a lot of their corporations in the world as Richard said they jump on this because it's an opportunity for them to reset the regulations to some extent in their favor to to figure this out so there's there's actually quite a bit of support for this it sounds good right we're fighting climate change but the agenda is much broader than climate change the agenda clearly is a complete restructuring of capitalism for example one of the top bullet points under the great reset is stakeholder so-called stakeholder capitalism that is eliminating the idea that shareholders matter that the corporation should be run for the benefit of shareholders which means the elimination of private property so I mean philosophically it's what it means but but it's a real change in the way business would be done in the West and it's getting it's getting a lot of support from a lot of powerful people just a small addition yes I think that to what Yaren said that this whole discourse this whole idea that you can restart the economy reset it put it on pause and then we launch it again is it's very dangerous because this reinforces this thinking about the economy as a machine which we can consciously guide and economy is not a machine it's a living organism you cannot put somebody's heart or lung on pause and another point about again the climate change and other things that many people are concerned about again there are a lot of solutions that are provided by the private sector by the capitalist but people who are fiercely campaigning in this field they say no it's just in principle it's wrong it should be the big government ideally the global government so anytime there's a capitalist offering something it should be something wrong with it it's just it's all right and speaking of cars the Richard mentioned you know that cities again I'm back to my own topic big cities are becoming cleaner the air is becoming cleaner not because of the restrictions so off on the use of the use of cars or this low emission zones they're getting cleaner because people are getting richer and then kind of for new cars which are emitting less and this is something that we don't see and something that's not on the surface because there are seen and consequences and then the government steps in and claims that it's there it's the result of their job that they impose some more regulations some more restrictions some more rules but there's just so many solutions that come from the private sector which which we don't see and which we should talk more about right we have only four minutes until sorry you would like to answer the great reset question okay the one thing is you you don't know how to measure it the great reset and you can't hold government responsible and the whole climate change thing is a shell game where they move it move it around I'll just give one example Germany raised taxes on gasoline again one of my hobbies and that made gasoline in Germany more expensive than gasoline in Austria and Switzerland so what happens people that are close enough to the border they drive over the border and they get gas in Austria or Switzerland normal thing right except when on a global basis we're counting co2 emissions because those co2 emissions caused by German drivers in German cars on German roads are counted as Austrian because they bought their gas in Austria and until we have full accountability of the government of what they do and how it's measured things are not going to change you know when if they have a tidal wave in in Japan and the German government has just decided you can run your atomic power plants another 25 years in Germany and then they have a tidal wave in Japan and then the German government says you have to shut them down in three years that gonna get a tidal wave in Germany yeah because they're gonna get a tidal wave in Germany that does not give planning security to anybody if they pass a law and we can discuss on what laws governments can pass or can't pass but if they pass a law it should kind of be continuous and make sense pass one law and then I know as a company as a private individual I have to abide by a law we are all trusted with this we get a driver's license or driving what do you call it here and government trusts us you know to do this when I come to this country I am trusted to drive on a different side of a road than I am used to with the same license the UK the UK accepts that I have a driver a valid driving license and therefore I just have to look up what laws apply here in the UK and you know they happen to drive on a different side of the road I'll do that and if I go to Germany I can go 120 miles an hour and nobody will stop me if I do that in West Virginia they all arrest me or shoot me or both but one easy law a driving license different ways of treating it in every country but we can still we can still make it work somehow just by individuals looking at what you have to do or don't have to do it's that simple unfortunately we won't have time for any audience questions so I'm really sorry about that because the room is booked until seven but you guys can go for dinner if you are members of the Inner and Center UK which you can't become by visiting ironcenter.co.uk slash memberships you don't take cash I think no no cash Bitcoin no Bitcoin I would I would love to join you for the dinner but I cannot because I haven't got my son but thank you all very much thanks for coming it was a pleasure thanks to the Iron Center UK and Razi for organizing it and thanks also to the Austrian Economic Center for co-organizing this event and our speakers and everyone that came