 The resolution, one more time. It's time to redistribute the wealth, here making his closing statement in support of the motion. Robert Rice. In 2015, a year before the last election, I was out in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Missouri, a lot of Rust Belt states, southern states doing research for a book. I was doing free-floating focus groups. And I kept on asking people, middle-class, working-class people, many of them hourly wage workers. Who do you support in the upcoming presidential race? And most of them came back to me and said something quite surprising. In the same sentence, they said, we like Bernie Sanders and we also like Donald Trump. Now I was amazed when I first heard that because I had never heard those two men, the names, in the same sentence. How could that possibly be? But what I discovered after listening to their stories, these middle-class, working class people in the Rust Belt and in the South, what I heard from them is we want somebody who's going to shake things up. We want somebody who's anti-establishment. We want somebody who's going to be on our side. In other words, what we have created in this country because of the enormous power of great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, because of the enormous power of big corporations, concentrated power in terms of their political ability to get what they need. People in this country believe the game is rigged and they are willing, again and again, whether they are on the left or the right, Democrats or Republicans, to support somebody who they believe is going to topple the power structure. That is a recipe for instability. So I also have a story. Last March, Kylie Jenner, the reality show and makeup mogul, at just 21 was declared a billionaire when she sold 51 percent of her cosmetics company for $600 million. So about a year later, as people looked a little bit more closely or the company was run by a public company that was a little bit more rigorous, it was revealed that while Ms. Jenner is indeed a very wealthy woman, she is not a billionaire. And I think this story reveals a couple things. One, we really don't know how wealthy a lot of people are. If you have an incentive to make your wealth look larger, you can. If you have an incentive to make it look smaller, like you have a tax liability, you also can do that. Kylie Jenner also shows we might have mixed feelings about the wealthiest people. The Kardashians are a divisive bunch of people. But you can't deny that the wealthiest people in America, a lot of them made their money in not a zero-sum way. They created value. They created jobs. They created products that we use every day. An economist, William Nordhaus, estimates that innovators only capture 2% of the economic value they create. So is there a scope for more equality, for improving the safety net, for expanding the equality of opportunity? I mean, absolutely. I think these are the hallmarks of a civilized society. But there are always trade-offs in costs to redistributing resources. And wealth redistribution tends to pose the most costs and offer the fewest benefits. If life under capitalism resembled the 100-meter sprint in the Olympic Games, of course it would be absurd to ask the fastest athletes to slow down or to stop them from going fast in support or in solidarity with the laggards. That would have been absolutely ridiculous, and nobody would want to watch this race. But life is no Olympic Games. It resembles more these days, the Roman arena, in which very well-armed gladiators are facing victims that are weaponless, victims who are defeated, not because they did not try hard enough or because they were not clever enough, but because they were unarmed, because of the asymmetry in the initial distribution of armor, of wealth. You see, for a while now, I think we know that, don't we? Hard work can no longer be relied upon to lift people from poverty. This is the tragedy of the last 30 years. But let's finish off positively. And let me convey to Larry my kind of socialism, the kind of ideal that fires me up. It will be a sporting parallel. But it's not going to be the Olympics. It's going to be the National Football League, your NFL, where in the interest, remember, in the interest of competition, not fairness, teams face a harsh salary cap, and the best players, the best young players, are forced to sign up for the weakest of teams. So by preventing the successful team from monopolizing the best players, the NFL's constraints liberate the true spirit of competition. This is the point about socialism, which is NFL, living together with markets, in sin, with harsh competition, which is what the NFL is, is, I think, a good model for the future. I think Giannis showed what this debate is about very powerfully in what he just said. By signing up for the resolution that put central focus on the redistribution aspect, he showed where he was. He thought the NFL, where their salary caps put on people, where the best players aren't allowed to go work for the best teams, where it's all centrally controlled, he held that out as a model for how our society should be organized. And that's the kind of direction you had when you make redistributing wealth the central theme of your policies, rather than creating a better society for the middle class, the central theme of your society. And that's not where I think we should go, and I think it's pretty dangerous. And here's a way of thinking about it. I asked myself the question, would it have been better if there were more people like Andrew Carnegie? There were more people for all his flaws, like John D. Rockefeller. Would we be a better, more flourishing society with more of that or with less of that? Would we be better if we had five more people who started in America like Steve Jobs? I think we'd have been better. So yes, let's raise taxes in the right way. Yes, let's have the right regulation, but let's not make tearing down the wealthy, the theme and organization of our economic policy.