 I guess I'll give people another minute. While you're sitting here, you can enjoy this little state bingo. I showed this last year, and the idea here is you're supposed to put a marker down whenever you hear one of these statements out of the mouth of a, well, the sadist. I feel charitable when I pay taxes. Do you feel charitable when you pay taxes? I don't feel charitable. I like the one on the lower right, but Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman said, the one right below that, they lean to listen to our phone conversations to keep us safe. Right. Yeah. There should not be a freeze. This is tragedy of the comments, just waiting right there. You're entitled to that free space. I'm entitled to the free space. All right. Ain't no such thing as a free space or a lunch or something. Let's dive right in here. I want to talk a little bit about, I think I've got eight or 10 of these common objections to capitalism that you've heard before, and if you've taken typical high school history or the kind of semester or so of economics they might give you in high school, you might have heard some of these things, and certainly if you get to college and you take some certain other social sciences, which we'll go unmentioned, you might hear some of these from them as well. And you see these pictures, the eight-year-old kids in the Welsh coal mines, and the kids in the textile factories that are working, and Tom Woods likes to say this, cigar chomping, top hat wearing. You know, the guy that you see on the monopoly cards, the looking with the monocle right, that looks like he's exploiting somebody just by getting dressed in the morning. So I'd like to address some of this. Let me just quote here from Mises in his book, Economic Policy, which is available in the bookstore, I think, and also in PDF form on the Mises website. It's one of my favorite books by Mises. It's very accessible. If you're looking for a book to give to someone who's never read Mises before, this is a good candidate for that because it doesn't require economics background. I mean, if you hand them human action, they're gonna say, wait a minute, I'm not sure I want to, and then man economy and states. I mean, people are looking at the thickness of this thing in there. So I think economic policy is one of the best introductions to these kinds of ideas. And he says, in that book, you know that the population of this planet is now 10 times greater than it was in the ages preceding capitalism. You know that all men today enjoy a higher standard of living than your ancestors did before the age of capitalism. But how do you know that you are the one out of 10 who would have lived in the absence of capitalism? The mere fact that you were living today is proof that capitalism has exceeded whether or not you consider your own life very valuable. And he goes on to say that it's not the poor who were supporting Marx financially and who were initially in favor of some of his ideas. He said that it wasn't the workers, it was the landed gentry in England who didn't like the fact that their workers were getting a better deal in the factories than they were on the estates. And so the landed gentry had this motivation, this interest in portraying industrialization as one of the worst possible things that could happen to workers. So that the workers would not go to the cities so that the workers would stay and continue to provide them with cheap labor. But the advent of these alternatives to farm labor, which has always been more dangerous than factory work, mortality rates in agriculture even today are higher than in factory work. I think about today, I mean, the machines are moving around in the fields, they're not bolted to the factory floor, there's inherent danger in agricultural work. The most serious injury I ever incurred was working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture as a college student in the summers. I went to go work for this organization before I really understood where it came from and what it did. And I was using machete every day and that was not good for me, which is one of those things that motivates you to continue in your higher education. Now Mises says, from our viewpoint, the worker standard of living under this early industrialization was absolutely shocking. But he says it's not because these newly developed capitalistic industries were harming the workers, he says it's because they had already been existing at he calls it a virtually subhuman level. And when they were going into the cities and living in these packed buildings, 10 people to a room or something and they didn't have access to clean water and they were working long hours and their bosses were mean to them. And well, this nevertheless was an improvement on the whole over what they had had in their previous occupations. And Mises says the evidence of this that they were actually better off in the early days of the Industrial Revolution is that the population of England exploded during the same time period because children who would have died in previous times had a high enough, the families had a high enough standard of living that they would survive and grow to have children of their own. So the population explosion by itself, I think is evidence of the improvement. Today and Tom Woods mentioned some of this yesterday afternoon but he says, sorry, this is Matt Ridley now from his book The Rational Optimist. He's not an Austrian, very interesting statistics on what's happened to our standard of living. And Ridley says today of Americans officially designated as poor, 99% have electricity running water, flush toilets and a refrigerator, 95% have a television, 88% a telephone, 71% a car and 70% air conditioning. Cornelius Vanderbilt had none of these. And if you look at the argument that capitalism is unjust because it creates wealth faster for some groups than it creates for others, we can also address this as well. This is from the Frazier Institute's Economic Freedom Index. And if you look at the share, income share of the poorest 10%, and you compare that across nations, according to how economically free those nations are, we see that the share of income earned by the poorest 10% is approximately the same regardless of economic freedom. You can see the quartiles here. The blue is the most free quartile. The red is the least free quartile. And we see about two and some change percent that the poorest 10% receive out of the total income. Now, that being said, if you look at the income levels of the poorest 10%, there is a dramatic difference. And you see the poorest 10% in the most free nations have a per capita income of over $11,000 compared to the least free countries where it's about a 10th of that. So if you're going to be in the poorest 10%, it's far better to be in the poorest 10% and economically free, that is using the term rather roughly a capitalistic country. I understand by the way that there are some objections to the use of the term capitalism as opposed to free markets. I'm using the term because that's the term Mises used and we understand that those who are owners of capital are not necessarily advocates of free markets. We understand that those who own capital can sometimes engage in rent seeking activities and they can try to use the state. In other words, as a kind of a thug to destroy their competition by coercion and artificial restrictions on entry into a business. So I'm using the term capitalism simply because most of us understand what we mean by that. So we get this kind of argument that capitalism is unjust, that there's a wealth distribution problem, that there's some people are getting rich faster than other people and this is absolutely off base. The amount of wealth created in free market regimes or environments is vastly superior to the amount of wealth being created or you might say destroyed in anti-capitalistic regimes. Again to quote from Mises and this is from his book The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality. Mises says that men cooperating under the system of the division of labor have created all the wealth which the daydreamers consider as a free gift of nature. Most of the anti-capitalists are looking at wealth as some sort of fixed quantity so that the main problem we have to deal with is a matter of distribution. Who should get this fixed quantity, this fixed pie? So Mises says with regard to the distribution of this wealth it is nonsensical to refer to an allegedly divine or natural principle of justice. What matters is not the allocation of portions out of a fund presented to man by nature. The problem is rather to further those social institutions which enable people to continue and to enlarge the production of all those things which they need. He says the source of the wealth we enjoy is due to this expansion of markets in the world. Payek wrote that once the rise and the position of the lower classes gather speed catering to the rich ceases to be the main source of great gain and gives place to efforts directed towards the needs of the masses. Those forces which at first make inequality self accentuating thus later tend to diminish it. Now there are several things that have contributed to inequality worldwide and within nations. One of these is an increased specialization and international division of labor leading to a kind of a superstar effect as some have called it which means if I'm very, very good at something I can now sell my product not only within my immediate area not only within my state, not only within my nation but globally perhaps depending on the lower costs of transactions and trade worldwide. So now with a larger market I can be even more successful than I have been before. So that is the superstar effect and increased specialization. This is a good thing that we have increased specialization and increased division of labor. Another possible reason for inequality would be an increased immigration. Immigrants into a country typically come in at a very low level of income. Now their mobility is quite good. They move up especially if you look across generations but that is if you have a lot of immigration that can be a source of any observed inequality. Is it a social problem that or is it just a statistical kind of artifact that you're introducing individuals into your country who happen to expand the lower ranks of income first before they begin to integrate into the economy and become more productive. Also high earners tend to marry each other more than they once did. This may be due to better information about potential marriage prospects but when you look at household incomes and you recognize that you now have people that the wealthy tend to marry the wealthy and the poor tend to marry the poor and the middle class tends to marry the middle class that's gonna tend to reinforce inequality. I'm not sure what the anti-capitalists would prefer that we do about this. I mean maybe they'd prefer that we have some kind of assigned spouse hard enough when you're picking your own that I'm not sure that that would work very well. Now on the other hand, we see some things that are tending to diminish inequality. For one thing IQ score spreads are shrinking not because the high IQs are getting dumber but because we're seeing low IQ scores rising matter of speculation as to why that might be happening. Another is if you look at health and nutrition particularly in the early years of life we're seeing that there's a narrowing of the gaps and one of the kind of proxies for this might be height. Well fed youth tend to grow a little taller than poorly fed youth and so if you're looking at developing countries and you look at industrialized countries you start to see a difference in height. British aristocrats were six inches taller than average in 1800 and today they're less than two inches taller than average. There's been a narrowing and part of that's not nutrition is genetics and so forth but there's evidently something happening here. Now one of the other arguments that we see from the anti-capitalists is that capitalism doesn't make you happy and one of the authors I mentioned on this is a guy named Cameron Mofeed M-O-F-I-D who wrote an article called Global Capitalism in Crisis. And he said that Western wealth creation has created depression and neuroses and anxiety. He says, this is evidence that you can make a lot of money but it doesn't make you happy. Well there's been some work on this and it's of course very, very difficult trying to measure how satisfied somebody is with their life but a lot of the things that markets tend to produce the free market tends to produce would be well your child is less likely to die before the age of five. I'm happy that all of my children have survived to their teenage years. I'll refrain from making comments about teenagers. But I don't really, I mean normally when you have a child that's not for most of us in the United States in another wealthy industrialized market leaning countries that's not a huge worry. Maternal mortality is much lower. Used to be a huge cause of death in this country for women that the women would die in childbirth. And we don't, we do see that but it's far rarer than it once was. And now we see that the primary causes of death among young people are things like accidents, suicides and other things that are not related to the communicable diseases and the childbirth and infant mortality that we saw many years ago. Now this is a chart that I believe contains data from a while back. It's about 2003 GDP per capita across nations and you can see on the vertical axis there that's the mean life satisfaction. Again, we take that with grain of salt. We're not sure how people measure life satisfaction. It's a subjective thing. But self-reported life satisfaction. And then on the horizontal axis we've got per capita income. And the diameter of the circles on the graph indicate the populations of the countries here. So you see a couple of large bubbles there down the lower left-hand side of the diagram would be India and China. USA is on the upper right there. And you can see a positive correlation there between self-reported life satisfaction and income. The Danes are evidently extremely happy and satisfied with themselves and they have not the highest but they have a reasonably high income. And then on the low end you have some nations in sub-Saharan Africa which are both poor and according to their own reports not terribly satisfied with life either. There does appear to be a connection. Now this is in opposition to a 1974 study that was quoted endlessly, a study by Richard Easterlin which said that people are not happier as they get wealthier. And yet there are more recent studies that indicate that that's just not true. Two studies in 2008 showed that rich people tend to be happier than poor people. Rich countries have happier people than poor countries. People get happier as they get richer. I mean however many different ways you wanna put this they there does seem to be a connection. Now we can point to celebrities who have gobs of money and then they commit suicide or something and we can say well see the wealth didn't make them happy. True, but if you look at groups of people we don't tend to see that wealth is leading people to depression. Mises says in colloquial speech we call a man happy who has succeeded in attaining his ends. A more adequate description of his state would be that he is happier than he was before. There is however no valid objection to a usage that defines human actions as the striving for happiness. The more free you are then to pursue your own ends the more happy you will tend to be on the whole. Now what about this argument that capitalism puts economics before people? I wanna spend some time on this. There are a lot of people who will argue that capitalism or markets are very effective at creating a lot of stuff but they do so in a way that rewards firms that don't look out for the well-being of their customers or their employees or their suppliers and therefore we need to have intervention by the government to try to prevent firms from exploiting their workers or their customers. Now I mentioned some of this in my earlier talk this week on product regulation, product safety and I won't revisit a lot of that. In fact, I was not the only one this week who talked about that. I think one of the talks yesterday touched on product safety issues. But let me mention something that I ran across recently on a site that I had not heard of before until recently maybe some of you have. Apparently a group that's got something out for libertarians, pando.com, and they have an article responding to a fee that Uber had started to impose on their customers. Now if you don't know what Uber is, well I understand I didn't know what Uber was either until a few weeks ago. And Uber is a kind of a system that allows an individual to connect with somebody who's got a car and they're willing to give somebody a ride for a small amount of money. You think well that sounds like a taxi. Yeah, it is sort of like a taxi except that it's not licensed. It doesn't have a medallion on the hood. It doesn't have these regulations imposed by the state which has gotten Uber into some hot water in some places. I understand Seoul, South Korea has recently banned Uber and there's some other cities where Uber has been hit with various restrictions because the taxi drivers don't like the fact that they've got this competition. Well, so anyway, and there's some other apps that I talked about earlier in the week that are like this that are simply allowing people to exchange with each other with lower costs. So pando says the response of UberX users in the days ahead will be telling, the response to this $1 fee they were tacking on for safety, Uber, the pando.com author was saying, well, this is just another way to gouge the consumer. They say it's entirely possible that people will recoil at Uber's deployment of the well-worn libertarian strategy of forwarding the cost of compliance with regulation on to customers. This is a libertarian plot apparently that when a firm incurs a higher cost, the price of their product rises, which is exactly what was happening. I mean, Uber was having to adopt some additional insurance and some other means that were costly to make sure that when you got into a car with someone and they were gonna drive you somewhere that you felt safe and that you were in fact safe, not just creating a feeling, but that you were assured that your interests were being taken care of. Now, what I find odd here is that if the government tax a regulation onto a firm, apparently this author would say that this cost is not passed on to the customer. So the government can regulate, regulate, regulate, the firms feel heavier and heavier costs and they keep the price the same. Is that what happens? So here we have a firm that is trying to find a balance between the optimal level of safety and the various means they can undertake to ensure that safety and the price that people are willing and able to pay. Now, I would like to be able to say that this kind of attack on markets is limited to people like this pando.com website and people who are self-proclaimed Marxists or I don't know what Pando says. They may say they're Marxists, they may not. I don't know. But I'd like to be able to say that. But sometimes you hear some startling things out of the mouths of people who have a reputation of being pro-market, pro-freedom. For example, I was listening the other day, this is actually July 7th to be specific in case you wanna look it up. I was listening to a podcast by Russ Roberts interviewing Michael Munger. I think Russ Roberts has at least libertarian leanings. He might even call himself a libertarian, I'm not sure. And he was interviewing Mike Munger about Uber and some other things, similar kinds of apps. And Munger inserts in his conversation on this, which I thought was generally very edifying. He inserts into this conversation the thought that perhaps taxi drivers might be entitled some compensation for the loss of their monopoly rents. So since I think World War II, taxis in New York City and some other cities around the country had to have a license evidenced by this bronze medallion on the hood and that license gives them the ability to pick up a passenger who is standing on the sidewalk with his hand raised like this. And if you're a private person in a car, you're not supposed to do that. Now, limo services are another matter and that you can call a limo, they show up in the limo. It's not necessarily what you think of as a stereotypical limo, but you can call somebody, they can show up and pick you up and take you somewhere. But taxis have been limited to several thousand in the city of New York and also in Chicago. So Munger's saying, well, maybe it's the thinkable thought that taxi drivers should be compensated because they're the very high price licenses and these things sell for six figures and seven figures on the market. And there are people who own, not the drivers, but there are people who own multiple taxicab medallions and lease them out. And these things have value because the government has kept the competition out. Occasionally, the government will release some more medallions, auction off some more medallions which lowers the equilibrium price of these things. Now, Munger says, well, how is a monopoly over taxi services different from a monopoly over the use of his land? Which is what a land title grants you. If you have a piece of property, the government will support your right to that land, mostly by saying you can keep other people off, mostly. And that you might even have a piece of paper that says title on it that says this is evidence that this particular piece of property belongs to you, no one else can use it without your permission. And the value of that land title is, well, it's there because you have the right to prohibit other entry onto that property. Now, I would argue that my land title does not provide me with a right to the value of my land. I have a little posted stamp lot near Greenville, South Carolina. I have an idea what the market value is, but if somehow somebody came up with a way to add significantly to the housing supply in my area and the equilibrium price of my property drops, I have no claim. I can't sue, I can't go to the government and say, well, the market value of my property dropped. I have no right to the value of my land. I have no right to prevent others from creating substitutes. Kind of hard to think of creating substitutes for land, but there really are. I mean, not just what the Dutch have done with creating land out into their inner basin in Holland, but when you create multiple story buildings, you're really multiplying land when you do that. So I have no right to prevent others from creating substitutes for my property. So a legitimate monopoly right over land would be one that is gained when I homestead the land or when I purchase it from someone who has legitimate rights to the land. An illegitimate monopoly right is using a thug to prevent others from using their property to create a substitute for my property. It's illegitimate because I have no right to the property of others. I have no right to somebody's Honda they want to use to drive people around. And I have no right to the valuation that others place on my property. If other people say, well, I don't value your taxi services as much anymore because there's some other people over here providing a service that I think is roughly equivalent and I choose to use them instead of your services. And unless you lower your price, I'm just not going to do business with you anymore. Do I have the right to prevent someone from saying that or doing that? So it's surprising sometimes the traps that people will fall into when they start to think, well, you know, monopoly right to monopoly right, right? Taxicab and Dallion, right to my land. Meh, pretty much the same thing. It's that one of them involves a thug and the other one does not. One of them involves artificial restrictions on other people's property and the other does not. All right, what about this argument? The capitalism is aesthetically obnoxious and environmentally irresponsible and you've heard these kinds of things before, urban sprawl and look at all the awful things that are happening because of the expansion of businesses into otherwise pristine environments. Mises says, only romantic prepossession can induce an observer to ignore the fact that more and more citizens of the capitalistic countries live in an environment which cannot be simply dismissed as ugly. Now, I have had a few things to say about this in print. One appeared in the FI magazine, I think it was called The Freeman at the time and I said in the article, I said, I enjoy a pristine environment. I like to go hiking, I enjoy the marshes in South Carolina going out in a kayak or a boat in the marshes. I enjoy forests, I enjoy mountains, I enjoy the outdoors. I don't think that burger joints and strip malls are more attractive than those things. And though I don't see some kind of approaching real estate apocalypse, I do understand the desire to see a part of nature that's not, doesn't have structures on it or signs or billboards. And a lot of Americans seem to have similar desires which is why housing developments that maintain more open space and larger lots and tree, forests and other natural environments tend to obtain a higher price. Most of us who don't have the funds to afford those things have to be satisfied with a small rectangle of crowded public access beach or a high density high rise or a condo that's surrounded by a parking lot instead of marshes. Now that's, there are several ways to deal with this. This objection to the urban sprawl, one is to try to convince people not to go to the beach and inhabit those condos and those high rises and then if there's not the demand, there's not gonna be the supply and you'll have more open space. Another approach would be for people who prefer undeveloped land to buy the land from people who own it and then restrict development. That's the method preferred by groups like the nature conservancy which will acquire property and then they'll have restrictions on the use of that property according to the desires of the person who donated the land. Alternatively, the government could prevent people from exercising their preferences by restricting development in several ways and they could completely ban development as with national seashores and that kind of thing. They could have a partial restriction on the property but that approach is no less expensive than private purchases of land to hold the land in reserve. It's passed on in various ways to taxpayers and the consumers of coastline and invariably those restrictions reduce the availability of things we like, housing, access to natural attractions, shops and so on. Furthermore, I don't think that you can blame urban sprawl entirely on people who are seeking profits. And I say that because if you look at the typical development you see a state-owned road or highway, you can't see but you know that there are water lines and sewer lines, there's power lines that are sometimes kind of a quite quasi state firm, state-run firm or heavily regulated public utility. So the government runs these roads into virgin territory, runs water lines and sewer lines into virgin territory at the expense of the taxpayer and then makes this land then more attractive to people who would like to build houses and shops and Burger Kings and everything else on it. Who's to blame then for this expansion out into wilderness? If you have a discussion with somebody about this, I hope you'll recognize that there's no real way to determine what land use would look like in a libertarian society. There's no real way to tell. We've got things working in opposite directions. We've got governments on one hand encouraging land development with their extension of infrastructure and sometimes taxpayer tax regimes. And then you've got on the other hand, governments that are restricting development with various regulations. What would things be like if government stepped out of the infrastructure business and if government stepped out of the land regulation business, what would land use look like? And I really can't tell you. It'd be difficult to say. And I think we have to be careful not to say, well, in a libertarian society, everything would be the way I want it to be or the way you want it to be. We'd probably see a great variety. I like variety. Oh, and then we get this. In the countries where you see a heavier degree of government involvement in land use decisions, you get this. Now, I understand that beauty is subjective. You might think this is beautiful. I may be imposing my idea of beauty and attractiveness on you, but I'm looking at this and I'm thinking probably a lot of people with a degree that's not terribly attractive. Well, then you get this, you know, occasional disasters, environmental disasters like a few years ago, the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Matthew Novak wrote a really helpful article on Mises Daily in 2010, June 23rd, if you want to look that up. He said, basically, part of the blame for this crisis has to rest on the way that the government structured incentives for companies like BP. He said, the government specifically passed laws that gave the oil companies incentives to drill far offshore, that is, in deeper water where the risk is presumably higher. It's easier to drill in 200 feet of water than it is to drill in 2,000 feet of water. Well, so that's what he says. Not only the ease of drilling, but the cost of dealing with any accidents or problems that do occur are necessarily greater in deeper water. And if you look at what's happened over time, this table shows you the share of Gulf of Mexico, federal, outer, continental shelf, natural gas, and oil production from depths greater than 200 meters, which I don't know that much about diving, but I think 200 meters is about the maximum for scuba diving, if you wanted to go repair something underwater. This is from 1995 through 2003. You see federal Gulf of Mexico production share from depths greater than 200 meters in percent, and you see that percentage is increasing. The reason for this has to do with changes in the tax regime. There was something like a five times increase during this period in the amount of oil that companies could pump royalty-free in deep water. Now, suppose the government said, we're not laying claim to these underwater reserves of oil and gas. Whoever wants to go out and homestead the oil and gas reserves, go to it. Then you wouldn't have that disparate tax regime that is encouraging the drillers to drill in deeper water, where it is inherently more dangerous. So with the difference in taxes, there was an incentive and therefore a 250% increase in the percentage of oil coming from deeper water regions of the Gulf. Also, there's the matter of liability. A secondary contributor according to Shugart is a federal law limiting liability for damages caused by offshore oil spills. The $75 million limit can be waived in cases of proven gross negligence. Might have been in the case of BP, but BP probably would have been far more cautious from the beginning if it knew that a blowout could cost them billions of dollars rather than millions of dollars. Now, in fact, after the fact, I think they were fine much, much, much more than that. But when you've got some kind of legal cap on how much you can be liable for, and I think this also applies to nuclear power plants, when you've got a legal cap on how much you can be forced to pay, then you're gonna be a little less careful than you would have been otherwise. Well, I'm running out of time, so I'll move through this fairly quickly, but there's also the argument that corporate scandals show that capitalism doesn't work because if government doesn't have scandals, I just find this amazingly one-sided. I mean, you get war and you get government-induced famine which is responsible for most famine and genocide and corporate welfare and political scandal and bribery and corruption and police brutality and deadly regulation and fascism and all the rest. Then there's this argument that capitalism is racist and sexist, I will spend a minute on this. In a free society, people are allowed to have whatever tastes and preferences they like. Just don't aggress against other people. But if you ignore productivity differences in order to favor one group or for that matter, if you ignore productivity similarities and favor one group over another, simply because you've got some kind of bias that has nothing to do with productivity. So you prefer to hire persons of type X rather than people of type Y than you're going to suffer in the marketplace if there's no connection to productivity and if there's no connection to the preferences of your consumers. Government intervention can shield people from those costs of acting in that way. And we can see several examples of this. Jeff Jacobi in a blog post on Cafe Hayek wrote that in the case of street car and bus segregation, he says, the owners of municipal transportation systems actively resisted segregation. They did so not out of some lofty commitment to racial equality or integration, but for economic reasons. Segregation hurt their bottom line. It drove up their expenses by requiring them as the manager of Houston's street car company complained to city counselors in 1904 to haul around a good deal of empty space that is assigned to the colored people and not available to both races, end quote. In many cities, segregation also provoked blacks to boycott street cars cutting sharply into the company's profits. One study produced, published by Jennifer Roback in the Journal of Economic History, showed that in one southern city after another, private transit companies tried to scuttle segregation laws or simply ignored them. So in Jacksonville, Florida in 1901, there was an ordinance that required black passengers to be segregated. It went unenforced until 1905 when the state legislature mandated segregation statewide. The new statute was passed by the legislature much against the will of the street car companies, according to one newspaper at the time. In fact, so well-known, Roback says, was the company's hostility to segregation that when a group of black citizens challenged the law in court, their attorney felt compelled to deny being in cahoots with the railroad lines in Jacksonville. Now, George Leif talking about Jim Crow laws in southern states points out that these were laws, for those of you that are not familiar, these are the laws that said that certain jobs in industry could only be done by white workers. Now, if the industrialists were intent upon discriminating, Leif says, why did we need a law to make that happen? And Leif says the answer is that to preserve the status of the white worker, there had to be a legal restraint on employers. In the absence of the law competition from non-discriminating employers would have urged all to hire and promote blacks and whites on the basis of economic value and not upon race. One of the reasons for the adoption of the policy of apartheid in the 1930s was that white workers were incensed that so many blacks were being hired and were competing with them on the basis of pay. So they persuaded the government to restrict the better paying jobs to whites. Case after case after case. Now, this is not to say that people don't have preferences that you might call racist, but it does indicate that if you want to act upon those preferences, you're gonna have government on your side in a lot of ways. At least that's what the history seems to indicate and there are several other examples of this kind of thing. Very quickly, we've seen this and we talk about the Austrian business cycle theory repeatedly over the course of the week. There's several books that are great on this. This is just a small selection, but the idea that capitalism is prone to bubbles and panics, I think that that can be very adequately addressed with Austrian business cycle theory. There's also this argument that capitalism won't pursue important projects, space exploration or big things like hydroelectric dams. Well, there are a lot of calculation problems involved here. What's an important project? I did a short article on the Space Shuttle program, which mercifully ended some time ago. And you get a wide separation between what was promised and what actually happened. The projections in advance of the Space Shuttle program in the 70s was that they would have $118 per pound to get something into orbit. And what actually in fact happened is that the cost ended up being something like $27,000 per pound into orbit. They were saying, well, we'll be able to fly these things every several weeks because see, the turnaround's gonna be so fast and we'll be able to get these things back up into space and it'll just be up and down all the time with these shuttle flights. And what they actually found was that the overhauls between the flights cost around $1.5 billion in required months. And clearly from two tragedies that occurred in the Shuttle program, those overhauls were evidently missing some things. And then of course you get this last, this argument that capitalism leads to the production of objectionable goods and services. Walter Bloch's book, Defending the Undefendable has recently come out with a second edition of this. So that's a great resource in that regard. And just to end here with a mention of Mises in that book that I quoted from earlier, Economic Policy, he said, certainly there are people who smoke too much. He's writing this in the 50s, by the way, the Mad Men days. I watched Mad Men a little bit and everybody's just smoking. I actually had a New Year's resolution one year that I was gonna start smoking and never followed through on it. Not really, I just said that to needle my leftist friends. Mises said, certainly there are many people who smoke too much and who smoke in spite of the fact that it would be better for them not to smoke. This raises a question which goes far beyond economic discussion that shows what freedom really means. He says, certainly the capitalistic system can be abused and is abused by some people. It is certainly possible to do things which ought not to be done in a moral sense. But a disapproving person always has a way to attempt to change the minds of his fellow citizens. He can try to persuade them, to convince them, but he may not try to force them by the use of power of government police power. All right, well I'll stop there and I think I've got four or five minutes for questions if you have any. Yes, wow. Well, okay, and for the benefit of the audio, you're saying that the taxi drivers make, you say in New York City make about 30,000 a year if they work more than 40 hours a week and Uber drivers make 90? Median of 90,000 a year if they drive more than 40 hours a week. So full time. Yeah, that even makes that headline from pando.com even more ridiculous. They're calling this Uber exploitation and well, they're paying three times. I didn't know this. They're paying three times what taxi drivers are making. I mean, they should be celebrating this, right? Aren't they about the worker and the poor downtrodden underpaid exploited taxi driver? And now these drivers are getting $90,000 a year but because they don't have a bronze medallion on their hood, they're evil. Yes. So you give an example of someone who wanted to buy a new car. Well, yeah, I don't think, like I said in one of my earlier talks this week, I don't think you can be like Christopher Columbus just, you know, beach your rowboat on the shore and plant your flag and say all the coastline all the way to the North Pole that way and the South Pole that way is mine or King whoever's and I can't do that. I mean, I'd have to actually, in the Lockean sense, mix my labor with the land and I'm not sure exactly how that would look and I'm not sure what the exact institutional arrangements would be but currently the system is that the government says that the, I've forgotten the term now for it but there's a certain space of coastline, a beach itself that is, I think they call it the entail, I can't remember but that's, you can't own that or at least the government is the only owner possible. Yes, right next to you. Yes. Persistent. Yeah. Yeah, so again, for the audio you're saying a lot of this is really easy to find the evidence against these kinds of objections to markets. Why do you think that there's such a persistence of these ideas, these anti-capitalistic ideas? And I think that even though the evidence against this is easy to find for you, for me, it's not always obvious to a lot of people. They've been told stories from the time they were in kindergarten and the public schools of this country and others have repeated these mythologies about how the world works. And I asked my students when they come into my classes to take a principles class, they haven't had economics before at least not since high school and I say, well, what were you told about the causes of the Great Depression? What do you believe about it? And they'll say, well, I think that the Great Depression was caused because people speculated too much in the markets and that they borrowed to buy stocks and the stock market got out of control and then the stock market crashed because too many people were greedy. And I mean, you get the same kind of repeat on the most recent recession in the United States, which Tom Woods aptly dispensed with in his book Meltdown, but you still see people that believe these things. And again, I think it's because they have not, they've not even considered, they've not gone looking. I read somewhere many years ago that the average American reads less than one book a year. And then just recently, and I heard this at a talk, so I don't have the source on this, that there was a study, country by country study, of a tension span. And the average American adult had an attention span of eight seconds. For comparison, I don't know how they figured this out, but for comparison they said that the average goldfish had an attention span of nine seconds. So what are we up against here? I mean, now I didn't hear the rest of it because I lost my, I didn't pay attention. Not really, but I've got time for one more. Yes, optimist. Yeah, well, even if the government's, let's say that you're saying, well, how do you know that the increased number of cell phones and so forth is due to markets and not to government simply handing this out. And government can change the distribution of the wealth. They can extract wealth from one person and buy a cell phone with it and hand it to somebody else. So they can change the distribution of wealth, but they can't create it. So if you wanna have, I mean, governments that hand out a lot of stuff like cell phones or refrigerators or whatever else, governments that hand out a lot of stuff have to get the wealth from somewhere. And the only way to do that is by sucking that wealth out of the productive part of society. So there has to be, I mean, even in a society where you get this kind of welfare state, the welfare state can only hand out the largesse if it's got some kind of market system over here that's being very productive, they can extract that wealth from. So I would say, yeah, you can find governments that, well, I mean, again, if you look at the, if you look at just the index of economic freedom, you see also that there's a high correlation between the level of economic freedom and the prevalence of these kinds of things, the availability of refrigeration and air conditioning and telecommunications, et cetera. All right, I am really actually a minute over, so I will stop here and thank you for your attention.