 Welcome, I'm Doris Wise-Montrose, President of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors. Thank you for joining us tonight. Some may be wondering what capitalism has to do with anti-Semitism. Hitler explained that for us. We are socialists. We are enemies of today's capitalist economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance. And we are determined to destroy this system under all conditions. Hitler told a party leader in 1934, the economic system of our day is the creation of the Jews. This continues today as Joe Carter writes in his short post, Anti-Capitalism and Anti-Semitism. I'm not agreeing with the claim that Occupy Wall Street is somehow shot through with anti-Semitism. The movement seems incapable of rallying around any idea, much less one as nefarious as anti-Semitism, but let's not be naive. Wherever you find a group that is railing against capitalism, it won't be long before you attract types who want to blame Jews. Tyler Cowan from Socialist Roots of Modern Anti-Semitism. Capitalism and the market economy encourage racial, ethnic and religious tolerance while supporting a plurality of diverse lifestyles and customs. Heavily regulated or socialist economies in contrast tend to breed intolerance and ethnic persecution. We are privileged tonight to have Yaron Brooke, Executive Director of the Einrand Institute, who has graciously agreed to discuss this issue in conjunction with his newest book, Free Market Revolution, How Einrand Ideas Can End Big Government. As you will recall, Hitler was also a big fan of big government. Of the many glowing reviews this book has received, retired chairman and CEO B&T Corporation, John A. Allison's review, resonates with me. The most important issue in our society today is the morality of capitalism. Free Market Revolution lays bare how capitalism is the only economic system consistent with man's nature as a thinking being who must act in his long-term rational self-interest to survive and prosper. This is an important book which integrates philosophical ideas with their real-world consequences. The book will be available after the event for purchase and for signing. Dr. Yaron Brooke is the Executive Director of the Einrand Institute. He is a columnist at Forbes and his articles have been featured in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Investors Business Daily, and many other publications. He is a frequent guest on national radio and television programs and is a co-author of Neo-Conservatism, an obituary for an idea and a contributing author to winning the unwinnable war, America's self-crippled response to Islamic totalitarianism. Dr. Brooke is a co-author with ARI fellow Don Watkins of the National Best Seller Free Market Revolution, how Einrand's ideas can end big government. A former finance professor, he speaks internationally on such topics as the causes of the financial crisis, the morality of capitalism, ending the growth of the state and U.S. foreign policy. Dr. Brooke was born and raised in Israel. He served as a first sergeant of Israel Military Intelligence and earned a B.S.C. in civil engineering from Technion Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa. In 1987, he moved to the United States, where he received his MBA and Ph.D. in finance from the University of Texas at Austin. He became an American citizen in 2003. For seven years, he was an award-winning finance professor at Santa Clara University, and in 1998 he co-founded a financial advisory firm, BH Equity Research, of which he is presently managing director and chairman. And now, kindly turn off your cell phones and other electronic devices, and it is with great pleasure that I introduce Dr. Yaron Brooke. Thank you, Doris. Thank you all for coming tonight. I know LA has lots of distractions, so it's a challenge to get an audience in Los Angeles. So I want to read you a quote, and I want you to think about who said this. I need to take my glasses off of this. What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. Later in the same essay, the Bill of Exchange is the real God of the Jew. The miracle nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general. Anybody want to take a stab? Wow, this is like the best red audience I've ever met. I've never had anybody guess that. That is Karl Marx. A Jew. Karl Marx was a Jew. Karl Marx linked Judaism with self-interest, greed, capitalism, banking, merchant, trading. For Karl Marx, the Jew was the symbol of capitalism. He writes in this essay, the essay is called On the Jewish Question. This is an essay on the Jewish question. And it's an essay where he's discussing the emancipation of the Jews in Germany. Should the Jews be emancipated in Germany? This is 1843. And he says, basically the Jews have taken over all of society. The Christians have become Jews. And what he means by that, the Christians have become capitalists. What we need, he says, is to emancipate society from Judaism. In other words, they emancipate society from capitalism. Only then can we emancipate the Jew in a sense from himself. So what Karl Marx does is he connects capitalism and Judaism. And that connection is with us every day today. Now Karl Marx was not original here. This doesn't start with Karl Marx. If you go back and read Martin Luther, Martin Luther talks about the Jew in terms of money, in terms of trade, in terms of greed. And trade is not a virtue for Martin Luther. In terms of banking, in terms of usury, in terms of interest. All in his perspective, negative. But it goes back even further than that. It goes back. When Dante writes the Inferno, Dante's Inferno, right? He places the money lender in the seventh rung of hell with a bag of money wrapped around his throat dragging him down to hell. And almost any illustration you see, artwork of Dante's Inferno, that money lender being dragged down to hell is not just... it's not Aryan features that characterize his face. Clearly Jewish features. So even Dante going way back. And of course one of Shakespeare's most famous plays, right? The Murchin of Venice. As Shilach, the Jewish money lender. As it's clear villain. Now, you know, sometimes you can play, you can act Shilach as being sympathetic. But Shakespeare means him to be a villain. He is the bad guy filled with resentment. And daring to do what? What is Shilach's real sin? As his Christian, you know, merchant accuses him. He dares to charge interest on the loans that he gives Christian. Now, I think this connection between anti-Semitism and money, anti-Semitism and capitalism, anti-Semitism and the banker is very deeply rooted. I believe that one of the main causes, there are many causes of anti-Semitism, but one of the main causes of anti-Semitism, go back deep into the Middle Ages into when Christians were banned from doing any banking. Christians were banned from doing any money lending. Christians were banned from charging interest on money. Why were they banned? Well, there's a statement in the Old Testament where God tells the Jews, now shall not charge interest on debt from your brothers. So you're not allowed to charge any interest on loans that you give to your brothers. Now the Jews of those times took brother to mean what? What did Jews take brother to mean? Other Jews. So Jews said, yeah, we can't charge interest of other Jews, but we can charge interest of the Goim. They're not Jews. Anybody who's not a Jew, we can charge interest. So the Jews view this as a practical, legitimate, authorized by God profession to give interest to charge interest on loans. Christians, though, when they hear brother, what do they mean? Christianity is a universal religion. Judaism is not. Judaism does not apply to everybody. It applies only to the chosen people. Christianity is a universal religion. So brother means everybody, Christian or not. So the Christian is banned from charging interest. The Christian is banned from being a banker. That profession is banned by the Catholic Church during... I mean the Catholic Church only recognized the legitimacy of charging interest on a bank loan in the late 19th century. Up until then, it was considered a mortal sin. Now, as some of you might know, they did it all the time. The monks were some of the biggest bankers of all time. But just like Islamic banking, which doesn't allow charging interest, they found cute little gimmicks to get around calling it interest while still charging it. So who are the money lenders of the Middle Ages? Almost uniformly, the bankers, the money lenders of the Middle Ages are Jews. Which means a Christian who needs money, who needs funding, we know... I mean, most of you probably are in business. You know that to run a business, to be active commercially, you need to borrow money sometimes. And that is an important instrument in facilitating trade. And as the Western world starts recovering during the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance from the fall of Rome, economic activity starts happening and people start needing funds. They can't go to their brother Christians to get it. They have to go to the Jew. So the Jew immediately is labeled as committing a mortal sin, seventh one of hell and seventh one of hell. Really, really bad stuff. And the Christian is in inferior position because he owes the Jew money now and it needs to pay him interest. Which again, according to the Christian, should not exist. It shouldn't happen. The psychological resentment building up, right, and the Jew is wealthy. I don't know how many of you have read Ivanhoe. And the hero in Ivanhoe is a Jewish moneylender and his daughter who lends money to the king to fund wars and everything. I mean, if you look at that period of time, the Jews dominate the financial industry and not surprising, they continue to dominate the financial industry to some extent to this day. So all grievances towards finance, all grievances towards bankers, all grievances towards the economic activity that is the financial world is associated with Jews and therefore leads to this deep resentment of the Jew. And this is Karl Marx is capitalizing on almost, you know, 1500 years, if not 2000 years of deep, deep resentment towards this idea. So you've got a Christian world that resents Jews and moneylenders and because they're the bankers. And you know, why is it? What is it about moneylending? What is it about banking that is so offensive to people? And because this is Christian, particularly in the model world. I tell audiences all the time when I talk about the financial crisis and so on, people always, for 2000 years, every financial and economic crisis we've ever had, who do we blame? Before we even hear any economic facts, before we collected the data, before we know anything about what actually happened, who do we blame? I mean, who did the New York Times blame? Who did the Europeans blame? Who did everybody blame? In 2008, 2009, immediately when the financial crisis, nobody's actually looked at the data, investigated. We knew who was to blame, right? It was bankers. Now they didn't say Jewish bankers because that's not politically correct. But it's Goldman Sachs, right? It's Jewish bankers implicitly. But that's not new to this financial crisis. Who caused the Great Depression? Legit question. Who caused the Great Depression? Not people who know. Who caused the Great Depression? I mean, what are we taught in high school? What was the instinctual response in 1930 to who caused the Great Depression? 1931, 1932. Stock market. It was the Wall Street. It was bankers. Who caused the Great Depression? We know this. And in 1933, 1944, we read huge amounts of regulation on bankers because we blame the Great Depression on bankers. Just like Dodd-Frank was the solution, in quotes, to the financial crisis. Now no serious economist today, no serious economist today, and I don't count Paul Krugman in that statement. No serious economist today believes that the Great Depression was caused by Wall Street. Most serious economists today, most economists today realize that the Great Depression was caused by the Federal Reserve and then followed on by really bad policies by Hoover and then really disastrous policies by FDR that deepened the recession and made it much worse and turned it into a Great Depression that lasted until 1945. And you can ask me about Great Depression if you want in the Q&A. No serious economist, no serious economist, 10 years from now, will look back at this financial crisis that was caused by bankers. And you can ask me if you want what did cause the financial crisis. Sure, but the story is that there was greed on Wall Street in 2006 and 2007. It was greedy Wall Street bankers that caused the financial crisis. And I ask a simple question. Was greed invented in 06? I mean, all Wall Street bankers are always greedy. If greed means they wanted more money, isn't that always been the case? That's what bankers are about, right? They're about doing what? Making money. They're about making money, right? So nothing new happened in 06 and 07 that changed on Wall Street. So you have to look at why it is that in 06 and 07, them trying to make money caused the financial crisis and it has nothing to do, it has much more to do with the Federal Reserve and bank regulations and a whole slew of things. There are a lot of reasons why the financial crisis happened. Respective. The government basically said you guys have the wrong thing that these people were too poor. Yeah. You know, I've got an eight-hour course on the causes of the financial crisis. It's online for free if anybody's really interested because you can go on and on on that. So, anti-Semitism in my view or the major cause of anti-Semitism in my view is linked to the fact that Jews were bankers. Bankers are always hated because bankers are about what? Because again, great depression caused by them or blamed on them. The financial crisis right now is blamed on them. Every financial crisis in the last 2,000 years has been blamed on bankers. Why? Why do we hate bankers and therefore by extension why do we hate Jews so much? What is it about banking? What is it about finance? What is it about charging interest on money that is so despicable? That is so horrific that A, we regulate them to death, right? And B, we blame everything on them and we extend this to the whole issue of anti-Semitism, right? And you could read reams of this stuff connecting bankers and Jews. To this day, the conspiracy theorists believe that Jewish bankers control the world. You can find all this online. And you know, no, I'm kidding. What is it about bankers we hate so much? What do bankers do? What is the purpose of their business? To make money. What is the purpose of all business under capitalism? To make money. For whom? For yourself, right? No, it's not just about money because a lot of you are in business and you don't only care about money. What else do you care about? I mean, you enjoy it. You enjoy it. You enjoy the creative process. You enjoy the challenge. You know, but it's about whom? It's about you. And when we as consumers, and this relates to the whole issue of the hatred of capitalism, when we as consumers go out into the marketplace to buy stuff, you know, to consume, who do we care about? So I don't know how many of you, but when I go to the mall to buy stuff, I'm doing it out of a sense of caring for my fellow man because I want to make sure people have jobs. I consume to stimulate the economy and to make sure the clerks have jobs and Hugo Boss does well and so on. I mean, why do you go to the mall? Self-interest. Self-interest. So what is the marketplace about? The marketplace. From the Turkish marketplace where you can see them haggling all the way to Saks Fifth Avenue, what is every form of marketplace in between those two? What is it about? It's about people pursuing their self-interest. People selling because they want to make money because they enjoy producing stuff and people buying because they want to make their life better. Capitalism, banking, marketplace is all about self-interest. It's about making money. And when I say banking is about making money, we feel uncomfortable. When I say going to the mall because I want to make, you know, I want to make, it's all about self-interest, I want to make my life better. It's uncomfortable. And that's weird that it's uncomfortable. But that's the key. We being taught that self-interest, that pursuing one's self-interest somehow is tainted. This is somehow bad. I mean, notice what Mark says about Jews. What characterizes the Jew before he gets the money? Self-interest. Self-interest is a bad word. Self-interest is a bad word. Nobody was taught when I was growing up, my mother, good Jewish mother, and she taught me, think of yourself last. Think of others first. Be self-less. Now, she didn't mean it. Nobody does. Nobody wants a child to think of themselves last. Nobody means it, right? But that's what we being taught is right. That's what's just. That's what's noble. That's what morality means. And we live split lives. We live a life where we pursue our selfish, self-interested ends. And we don't live the life of being self-less. And what does that cause? Guilt. We feel guilty because we should be self-less. But we're not. Our mother taught us to be self-less. But she didn't really mean it. So we're not. I mean, I go to these award dinners for businessmen. And Lifetime Achievement Awards, right? And there's a room full of businessmen, and they read these long bios. You guys might have been at these dinners and maybe received some of these awards. And 10-minute bio, right? Long bio. And they'll read the bio, and they'll spend about a minute to two minutes on your business achievements. And eight minutes on your community service and charity. Now, with all due respect to community service and charity, where have you touched the world more? In your business? Or in your community service and charity? What builds a country? What raises people out of poverty? Charity? Or business? Business. You'll touch many more lives in your business. You'll improve many more lives in your business. I'm not against charity and community service, but that should be a minute, maybe 30 seconds. And the rest should be about your business success. You took care of yourself. You took care of your family. You built something to be proud of. You had employees. You had suppliers. You had customers. All of their lives are better off because you existed, because you were in business. And yet you get zero moral credit for that. Of course, that's where you made your money so you could be charitable. But we value the charity, not the making. The making is selfish. It's self-interested. That doesn't count. The best example of this is Bill Gates. Bill Gates made for himself, I don't know, $70 billion for himself. That's how much money he made at Microsoft. Now what did he do with Microsoft? What did Microsoft do? Did it help people? Is there anybody on the planet who wasn't helped by Microsoft? Probably not. He's probably helped billions of people. Life is marginally better off because Microsoft existed. All of us have been touched by Microsoft. We all use a product by Microsoft. If we don't use a Microsoft product, we've used a product that's influenced by Microsoft because they were the innovators. We're all better off because of Microsoft. Does Bill Gates get any moral credit for helping us? No, because he's just a businessman. And he made money helping us. So helping us, 7 billion people. But he made money at it, that doesn't get any moral credit. Actually it gets negative moral credit. He's actually a bad guy. What a greedy bastard. He's got $70 billion. Now the fact that he probably created tens of trillions of dollars of wealth for all of us, that's irrelevant because he made $70 billion. When does Bill Gates become a good guy? When he starts a foundation, now he'd have to leave Microsoft and he goes to another foundation to give him money away. Now he's a good guy. The fact that he created it, that doesn't count. That doesn't give him anything. The fact that he's giving away, that's moral, that's noble, that's good. But it's worse than that because where do you think he'll help more people? I'm sure the foundation does wonderful things. It saves kids from malaria in Africa and so on. But in this foundation he'll maybe help thousands of people, maybe tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people. But Microsoft helped hundreds of millions of people. Yet he gets negative credit for that and for his foundation he gets positive credit. And how would we get Bill Gates to be a moral hero? One of the problems right now with Bill Gates is he looks like he's having fun running this foundation. But if he gave it all away, moved into a tent and could show a little blood, then we'd say, wow, that's noble. That is real sacrifice. Now there's a good guy. We live in a culture, and we've been living in a culture for 2,000 years, that resents money-making because it resents self-interest. It resents Jews because they're perceived to be money-making and self-interested. It's that culture that resents the making, the creating, the building and glorifies the giving, the charity. I mean, charity is an insignificant part of the world. I mean, that's a fact. I mean, in 1776 the United States was a third-rate colony pretty poor, insignificant, so insignificant the British didn't really send their big army to fight us. They were too busy with big countries like France and so on. By 1914 we were the mightiest industrial military power in the world. 150 years. What did that? What created that? Charity and community service, right? In 1776 95% of the population of the world was dirt poor. 95 is too generous. 99% of the population of the world was dirt poor, subsistence farming, life expectancy of under 40 years old. Nothing. No running water. No electricity. Nothing. You worked from morning to night. People think capitalism invented child labor. What did children do before capitalism? They worked on the farm. If they lived, most of them died before the age of 10. From sunrise to sunset. By 1914 life expectancy had much more than doubled. By 1914 at least in the west by the standards of 1776 nobody was poor. Almost everybody had running water. Many, many people had electricity. There were sewage systems. People started having automobiles. Henry Ford was just about to revolutionize automobiles because everybody could have one. What did that? What allowed 99% of the people to rise out of poverty? Community service and charity? No, capitalism. Greedy, self-interested business. That's what we should be proud of yet we're ashamed of it. We're embarrassed of it. So what we have today is an ethic inconsistent with being a banker, with being a capitalist, with being in business, with being self-interested, with being, according to Marx, a Jew. In my view, a perverse ethic. A perverse ethic. Why should I think of myself last? I would ask my mother around age 16 when the homeless kicked in and I was going to challenge her. Why should I think of myself last? Why should I think of other people's first? Why are they more important than me? Why a sacrifice noble? Why? And you know what the answer was? Because. Because. And what is... Judaism... I'm not going to argue about Judaism because Judaism is irrelevant because Judaism doesn't dominate the culture. Right? Judaism doesn't dominate the culture. Judaism is an insignificant portion of the moral views in the culture. Even if you're right. You are right. I think Judaism is night and day... pre-Christianity Judaism is night and day better than Christianity from a moral perspective. But that's not the issue. We Jews don't dominate this culture. This culture is dominated by Christian morality. This culture is dominated by the morality of sacrifice, by the morality of selflessness and we can see it in the way we approach it. Now Jews in my view kind of off the record have become Christianized. We've adopted that morality whether he left, said it or not, who cares? He lived 2,000 years ago and he's irrelevant to our discussion today. The fact is the Jews feel more guilty about the wealth they're produced than any Christian does. I mean, why are Jews so left-wing? We have a better class of Jew in this room. Why? But overwhelmingly, you're the tiniest of minority, right? You're the tiniest of minority. Why are Jews so left-wing? Because they bought into this. They feel guilty for their wealth. I mean, this is consistent. Why is Israel so hated by Europe? I mean, just think of it in this way. What was Europe's attitude towards Israel before 1967? I see where everybody knows the 1967 world, right? Where did Israel buy weapons from? Who did Israel buy weapons from before 1967? France. Czechoslovakia was really old. That was in 1948. Before 1967, Israel fought in 1967 with Mirage airplanes, French, with British tanks with German weapons. The Europeans loved Israel before 1967, and actually, I don't know how many of you remember this, but America had weapons embargo in Israel. America refused to sell weapons to Israel until after 1967. Now, what happened in 1967 that caused the Europeans to hate Israel? Because they hate Israel today. I mean, you go to Europe, it's awful. The left which dominates Europe and you could argue anti-Semitic, but so anti-Israel. Why? What happened in 1967 that made them flip? The Jews were not pathetic, miserable people anymore. They won. They were strong. They were capable. We don't like strong, capable people because strong, capable people are what? Self-interested. How do you get strong and capable? By looking after yourself. Looking after you. We resent success. And we resent Israel not for any vice that it did, not for any sin that it committed. The Europeans hate Israel now because of any bad thing that it did. They hate Israel because of its virtues. Because it's strong, because it's capable, because it's able, because it's independent. That's what they hate about it. They hate it for its virtue. And that's what they hate the Jew. That's what they hate Tabanka. Because they're capable, because they're rich, because they're successful, because they've created something. And it all boils down to an ethic that says the meek shall inherit the earth. The meek are the virtuous. The poor are the good guys. Why? Because they're not self-interested. They haven't pursued money. They haven't pursued wealth. They haven't pursued greed. So, to me, it's all about the ethics. If you care about capitalism, if you care about freedom, it's not economics. The economics are easy. We won the economic debate a hundred years ago. Over a hundred years ago. We know capitalism works. You have eyes you can see capitalism works. Go to Hong Kong you can see capitalism works. East Berlin, West Berlin you can see. Today, for kids, you have to tell them they built a wall not to prevent West Berliners from going to East Berlin, because socialism is so admired today, they probably thought all our Westerners were fleeing into communist Germany. We know it works. And yet we turn our backs to it. And it doesn't matter if it's Republicans, Democrats, they all hate capitalism. They all resent capitalism. They all work against capitalism. Every single one of them. Government always grows. It doesn't matter who's in power. Because morally it's uncomfortable. It's wrong. It's about self-interest. And self-interest is unacceptable. So, if we care about capitalism, if we care about freedom, and for that matter if we care about anti-Semitism what we should be advocating is the opposite of what Marx advocates for. Marx wants the rejection of the self. Marx wants the rejection of self-interest. He wants all of us to unify into to be emancipated from our self-interest. Emancipated from our ego. Emancipated from our own identity and merge into the borg, the collective, the unthinking masses, the proletarian which in his vision is just an unthinking mass. Unthinking masses always need what? Leaders, by the way. And the same with the Nazis. The Nazi party was the socialist party. The National Socialist Party. These are just variations of socialism. That's all they are. Communism. Nazis. What we need to do is reject that idea, the collectivistic idea, the altruistic idea, the idea that human beings, individual human beings are just cog in some collective machine. That others are more important than self. That you are your brother's keeper. No, I'm not. Not even my real brother. He can take care of himself. With my help, he can ask. And it's not guaranteed. It depends if he's a good guy or not. Certainly not strangers. I'm not the keeper. I might be willing to help them. But is my moral obligation above and beyond what I might have to do for my kids or for myself? No. Absolutely not. That whole morality has to be rejected. And what we need to replace it with is a morality of individualism. True individualism. A morality that says, no, the unit of measurement, the unit that's important is the individual human being. My happiness is the standard of my morality. My life is what my morality about. Yes, I am self-interested and proud of it. Because I believe that's what morality should be about. It should teach me how to be self-interested. Now I nrand articulate this but this is not new. This goes back to the Greeks. Aristotle. For Aristotle, what's morality about? Serving others? No. It's about flourishing. Individual flourishing. It's about what are the virtues, right? What are the virtues that a human being needs to adopt? The values he needs to seek so he can be the happiest, most successful flourishing person that he can possibly be. That's what morality is about. And to the extent Judaism is pretty good it's because it's there's a relationship there. Right? It's about individual human flourishing. Individual human success. Individual human prosperity. And then if you want to help other people, fine. If it's part of that flourishing, if it's part of what it means for you to be successful and you to be good. But it doesn't start with other people, it starts with you. A morality of individualism, a morality that says, no, my moral purpose in life is to be the best human being I can be. Is a morality there's an envy the other person for what he has? I mean, my approach to really rich people, I'm not very rich. But my approach to other rich people is yay, isn't that cool? And why is it yay? Because I know that every rich people out there, assuming he's made it honestly and assuming he's not in the pocket of the government, the way he's made money is by what? The only way to make money is by what? It's by making my life better. And if it hasn't made my life better, it's made my kid's life better or somebody else's life better. Because the only way you make money is by selling a product somebody else wants. And let's say you sell your product for 100 bucks. How much is it worth to the person to buy it? More than 100. Otherwise they wouldn't bother to give you 100. So they're getting something at 100 bucks that's worth more to them than you get it. Something that was worth less. I mean you sold something that was worth less and you're getting more. So you're making a profit and they're making a profit. Win-win, we're all better off. How cool is that? That should be celebrated. So when I see somebody rich, I'm saying, wow, he created lots of product that people really wanted. He made lots of people's life better off. Probably my better life better off. Good for him. That's terrific. But if I am an altruist in a sense of the whole focus in life is other people then I'm going he's got a lot of money. I've got a little. His moral obligation is to help me. How come he's not doing that? How come he's not writing me a check? I resent that. He should be writing me a check. So I hate him. I want the money. It's not and that's absurd. So the whole orientation, it's like this. And by being self-interested, what do we mean? Right? And this is not a trick question. It was Boone made of selfish. Self-interested. Thank you. You say yes. So Boone made of sat down one day and he said how can I make my life the best life that it could be? How can I live a happy, prosperous, flourishing life? And he said, you know, I'll do it by stealing from my best friends. No, he didn't. Of course he didn't. What Boone made of did is he never thought. Thinking was not part of what Boone made of did. What Boone made of did he saw a pile of money and he said, I want that. And he took it. He didn't think that was going to make his life glorious. He actually, if you look at all these schemes and how they work, they start out small. And I just want a little bit because I want this and that and then bigger and bigger and was he happy at any point in the scheme? Was he happy? No, he was miserable. If you ask Boone, he made of. He'll tell you he's happier in jail than he was before he was caught. How many of you have a lied? Don't. It sucks. It's a bad policy. You don't get what you want when you lie. You mess up it for you and you mess up for the people you're lying to. And you almost always get caught. And that's not pleasant if you lie in business. Nobody does business with you anymore. Lying is not a successful strategy for a successful flourishing life. Neither stealing, neither is any of these things. The bad stuff. It doesn't work. It's bad policy. What is good policy? What's good policy? What leads? What is it that makes us human? What does it make it possible for us to survive? To thrive, to be successful. Trust and ethics. This is before ethics stuff. Before there was ethics. Because ethics is a conceptual. Ethics is something somebody has to think up. Something has to... Instinct. Okay, it's a survival instinct. This is good. So look around the room. No, no, I like the survival instinct. I want to go a little bit with this survival instinct. Look around the room. You can look. We're a pathetic species. We're weak. We're slow. We have no fangs. We have no claws. Our survival instinct put me up against the Sabre II Tiger. I'm dead. Try running down a bison and biting into it. We're just... We do not have the instincts or the physical ability to survive in nature. What do we have that allows us to catch the Sabre II Tiger to catch the bison, to skin it, to make clothes, to eat the food and to build bison bogey bars at hotels? Thinking. We have a mind. What makes us human. What makes every human value that we have possible is human reason. It's our ability to reason. It's our ability to think. It's our ability to figure stuff out. I can't catch it. I can't bite into it. So what do I do? I invent a bow and arrow. I invent a spear. I figure out with my other tribe members how to trap it. I hunt it down. All of that requires what? An Einstein. A genius. None of that is easy. None of that is easy. None of that... No instincts for that. I have no idea how these clothes how to make these clothes. None. There's no gene in me that tells me. You put me in the middle of the Amazon, naked in the Amazon, I'd probably die in hours. Because I don't know any of this stuff. I'd have to figure it all out. But that's what we have this for. So if you're really self-interested, if you really want to have a flourishing life, if you really want to be successful in life, if you really want to do good, what do you have to do? What's the one most important thing you should do? Think. Think. Use your mind to educate yourself. Figure stuff out. But use your mind in everything. And why is lying so horrific? Because lying is the negation of this. You know, there's a saying in computer science, garbage in, garbage out. Lying is garbage in. I mean, I at my age, some of you are older than me, so you appreciate this. I at my age barely remember what I did last week. I mean, this is true. Now, imagine if I lied about what I did last week. I couldn't, because I'd have to remember two things instead of one. But it's actually more than two things. Because you'd have to remember who you lied to and who you didn't, why you lied to them, why you didn't lie to other people. It's impossible to cope. I mean, if you really value your mind and you want to save it for the real decisions you have to make in life, you have to be honest. Because honesty is easy. What actually happened. And that's hard enough for me these days. So if you value your mind, you don't steal, because if you value your mind, you want to know that you can take care of yourself. You want to know you can produce your own food. In a hunter-gatherer context, you want to know you can hunt the bison down. Or you can do something and trade with the hunter so you can get the meat, but you owned it. But when you steal, what are you telling yourself? I can't make it. I can't make it. I need to use force, which everybody universally recognizes as evil in order to take something from somebody else who did make it, who did produce it. Nobody who steals is happy. Nobody who steals is flourishing. They might exhibit symptoms of happiness, but they're not happy. Because happiness requires a deep self-esteem that comes only when you can produce, when you can create, when you can build, when you can make something. If you can't do that, you're flat. And the people who value this in history, what culture has valued the human mind? I mean, the Greeks did, and the Jews did. Another reason not to like us very much, because the other cultures don't. They don't view the human mind as that important. Morality, if you look at the regular morality that we teach in Introduction to Morality 101 at every university in the globe, the mind, reason, rationality never comes up. Nobody ever talks about that. That's irrelevant. That's selfish. That's self-interested. That's how you take care of yourself. Taking care of yourself has nothing to do with morality. They tell you. But that's the enemy. That is the real enemy. Israel is hated because it takes care of itself. Because it's strong and competent. Jews are being hated throughout history because they take care of themselves. They're smart. They value being smart. And they take care of themselves. And they go out there and they're successful in life. Note that right after 67, who became the favorites of the Europeans? Palestinians. Why? Do Europeans care one iota about the Palestinians? I mean, as people? No, because they're pathetic now. They're the ones who are weak. They're the ones who are suffering. They're the ones who are meek. They don't have it to earth. Always go for the meek. They're the underdogs. Never admire strength. Always love weakness. That's the ethical motto of our time. And that's an ethical motto that's inconsistent with capitalism, inconsistent with banking, inconsistent with Wall Street, inconsistent with reality. And that's why we move away from capitalism. For 100 years we'd be moving away from capitalism. In spite of all its successes, we'd be destroying capitalism systematically with this president accelerating that process even faster than any other. For 100 years, I'll get to questions in a minute, 100 years we'd be moving away from capitalism. For 100 years, we'd be moving away from the idea of individual sovereignty, an individual ownership over your own life and what that means. Because we've let this morality infect us. Note that anti-Semitism is strongest in the countries that are least capitalist. This is true throughout history. Why did Jews all come to America? In the 19th century, where there were no regulations, no safety net, tiny little government, about 10% of what it is today in terms of percent of GDP. 10% of what it is today. You could shrink the American government by 90%, and you'd go back to the government that we had in 130 years ago. Why did Jews come here? Everybody came here because of the freedom, because there was still anti-Semitism here, but it was so much less than what they exhibited in Europe, where it's statist socialist control. Do you know what's happening to the Jewish community in Venezuela since Chávez has been around? There's 7,000 Jews left in Venezuela. It used to be one of the most prosperous Jewish communities in Latin America. But they were attacked. They were persecuted. They've left. You go country after country after country, where you have statism and socialism. You get the Jews that blamed, and the Jews have to escape, and the Jews leave. And where do they go to? They go to the countries where there's freedom, where there's capitalism. So if we care about capitalism, we care about freedom, if we care about anti-Semitism, we should be advocates of a new morality. I'm an advocate. I mean, I wrote a book called Free Market Revolution. But the revolution is not economic. We won the economic argument a long time ago. Those of us who believe in capitalism. The revolution is a moral revolution. The revolution is rejection of the idea that your life doesn't belong to you. A rejection of the idea that you are your brother's keeper, that you're your brother's servant, that you owe it to society, that society is the standard. And an adoption of the idea that's implicit in the founding of this country, the greatest country, in my view, in human history. Because this country was not founded on the idea of maximizing social utility, or the idea of egalitarianism, of equality of outcome, or the idea of your brother's keeper. That's not in the Declaration of Independence. What is in the Declaration of Independence? Who's happiness? Social? Whatever the hell that means? Happiness? No. What's in the Declaration of Independence is every individual's right by his very nature to his own life. What does a right to life mean? Put aside what the left would like us to pretend that it means. What does it really mean? It means the right to live your life as you see fit based on your values in pursuit of rational values that will promote your life. Without what? What does it exclude? What's not allowed? Force. If you have a right to something, nobody can force you not to have it. So right to life means the right to be free to act based on your values in pursuit of your life, in pursuit of making your life better. And you have a right, an inalienable right, which means what? Inalienable means what? I have to remind people this, right? That it cannot be voted away. Even 99% of the people voting against it cannot extinguish it because it's part of your nature. It's part of what you are as a human being. It's a requirement of your survival as a human being. So it can't be voted away. You have a right to your life. You have a right to your liberty, which means you have a right to think what you want to think. And nobody has a right to tell you what to think. And it's not just about thought, it's about acting on those thoughts. As long as you're not cursing somebody else, as long as you're not committing fraud on somebody else, it's nobody's business what you think and what you act. Because thought, reason, rationality is what it's all about. That's what life is about. That's what progress and success and prosperity are about. And in the most self-interested, selfish political statement in human history, each one of us has an inalienable right to pursue our own happiness. Our own happiness. Not other people's happiness. To make our lives the best lives that they can be. And nobody has a right to stop us by using force. What the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution try to do is extract and eliminate force from our society. And the founders understood that the biggest enemy was government because the biggest extractor of force was government. Always has been, always will be. And they try to shield us from it. And we've abandoned that notion. And they need us to resurrect that. So if you care about anti-Semitism, you should be advocates for capitalism. And if you care about capitalism, you should be advocates for self-interest. You should be advocates for the pursuit of happiness. Thank you all. Any questions? He was waiting patiently. Thank you, Your Honor. What do you think of the interpretation of European Palestinianism that this march paid to the Holocaust? Because we see no European Tibetanism, no European North Koreanism. There are all sorts of those who might be described as me. Sure. It's a misuse of turning us over. Within the context of one lecture, we understand that, you know, there are disadvantage and extremely oppressed peoples. And the Europeans have no room whatsoever in a sliver of their consciousness for these people. But the Palestinians, that can march paid in full to one of the greatest crimes in history. Well, note that it's not just Europeans. The American Left does this exactly the same thing. And so this is what I think you have to understand about the Left. And it's very difficult to understand this, because at least for me, it's so outside of my experience. The Left is not motivated by love. It's not that the Left cares one iota about the Palestinians. It's not that they love the Palestinians. The Left is motivated by hate and by hatred, by envy, by resentment, by negativity. Marx doesn't love the proletarian. He never experienced the life of a proletarian. He doesn't know what the proletarians do, or he doesn't give one iota about them. What he hates are the capitalists. What he hates are the Jews. What the Europeans do is they hate the Jews. They've always hated Jews for a very long time. They hate Israel because it's successful. And they love the Palestinians because they're the enemy of Israel. They don't love, for example, poor Iranians who are being oppressed by the Mullahs. Quite the contrary, when Khomeini came to power, European intellectuals loved the guy. I mean, just read some of the French existentialists. I mean, they thought Khomeini was God's gift to the planet because he mingled his Islamism with socialism, because he was very clever. Part of his campaign was to get the Left in Iran with him to depose the Shah, and they formed the coalition. And then very quickly, as soon as he established this power, he killed them all off. But he used the language of the Left in order to get them. But they loved him. They don't care about the oppressed people, as you said, anywhere else. Why do they care about the Palestinians? Because they hate the Israelis. Why do they hate Israel? Because they're successful and powerful. But what really irks them is the successful, powerful, and the Jewish. Because Jews represent something. They represent, as Marx points out, the self-interested capitalists in their mind, which is what they hate. Because it's the same thing in France. It's not just Jews they hate them. They hate successful people. People talk about Scandinavia, the utopia of Scandinavia. But in Scandinavia, if you're wealthy, you better be driving a fiat. Because if you drive a really nice, con Scandinavia, they'll scratch it. They'll vandalize it. These wonderful, calm, friendly, blond, blue-eyed Swedes hate the wealthy. There is massive resentment. And it's this envy. It's this hatred of success, which is what motivates all these cultures. I mean, Hitler didn't love the Aryans. He didn't care when I owed her about the German people. He hated life. He hated existence. And this is what's good people, it's hard for them to imagine. Hatred is not part of the way we think about the world. We think about the world as positives. Values is good things. Good people, we try to... But literally, the whole motivation by socialism, the whole motivation about statism, is a hatred of the good. Just a quick question that based on what he was saying. Is it true that there really are no political Palestinians? It's just a made-up name by our father or somebody else? Look, I mean, I don't... I know a lot of people think that I'm not a big... It doesn't matter to me. I don't care what they call themselves. There was a Palestine. The British called it Palestine. The British called it Palestine. There were Arabs who lived in Palestine. They're Palestinians. Arabs who live in Palestine, right? The Jews were the Palestinians. And Jews were Palestinians, and they considered themselves Palestinians. The Jews were the Palestinians. In those days, the Jews were the Palestinians. Yes, and the Arabs were Arabs because they lived under the Ottoman Empire. But you know what? Before the 19th century, the Germans... There was no Germans. So what do we say? Germans are an illegitimate concept because before the 19th century there was no such... There was Bavarians and this type and that type and they were all little city-states. They came together under the nationalistic fervor of the 19th century and they defined themselves as Germans. So I don't resent the Palestinians coming together and saying we want to adopt a national identity called Palestinians that relates to this geographic area. That's not the problem. The problem is they want to kill us. I don't care what they call themselves. If you want to kill me, I'm going to kill you first. I mean, it's got nothing to do with names and the more we obsess about names and about are they Palestinians or not, we lose the battle because it's not important. If the Palestinians were peace-loving, freedom-loving capitalists, then the solution to the Palestinian problem is a one-state solution and let's all kumbaya together round the bonfire. But that's not who they are. That's not their identity and that's the reality. They identify what they are and what they represent. Yasser Al-Fat, the problem with Yasser Al-Fat is not that he was a Palestinian nationalist. The problem with Yasser Al-Fat is he has the blood of babies and children on his hands and he should have hung. I mean, I hope Israel executed him. It's too bad they had to do it stealthily. They should have made it a public execution so everybody sees what it's done to evil people like they did with Aichman. They didn't have to hang Aichman, but they did, right? They should have done the same with Yasser Al-Fat and he's getting me off track and all emotional. Yeah. Okay, so I agree with you in your premise. But I don't think we can also deny that the Torah does have some aspects of anti-capitalism or shall we say socialist behavior. So we say Judaism and capitalism. From the Shreem to the Jubilee to leaving a corner of the field, et cetera. So how do you... Look, I'm not a defendive Judaism, I'm a core religion. You know, I respect and admire Jewish culture that respects the mind, that respects reason, respects learning, but I'm no fan of the Jewish religion. The Torah has a lot of problems in it, right? There's no freedom of speech in the Torah when Moses comes down from the mountain with the Ten Commandments and some Jews have decided to worship a golden calf. Moses doesn't say, ah, freedom of speech. You want to worship a golden calf? Fine, we won't talk to you. We'll shun you. No, he and Aaron take out swords and they butcher. I can't remember the number, but thousands. Why? For the sin of having a different point of view than he did. And God rewards them for it. He makes Aaron and his brothers the quanim, right? So they get a price for it. So there's no relation. I mean, don't take anything I said about the enforcement of Judaism. Quad Judaism. Judaism evolved and the fact is that Judaism came to represent to the world outside, to the Marxists, to the European culture. It came to represent self-interest money capitalism. I wish it was that. Jews are not pro-capitalism. As we've said, Jews are primarily anti-capitalism. The Torah is not pro-capitalism. The Torah is post-slavery. It has all sections in the Torah on how to treat your slave. It's not anti-slavery, okay? It's not anti-slavery. What's that? No, it didn't outlaw slavery, but that's the right thing to do if you really believed in individuals. So I'm not pro-Torah. Quite the contrary. As somebody already pointed out, I'm an atheist. I don't believe in any book as mystical revelation. The point is not what is Judaism. That's a whole other discussion we can have. And no two rabbis agree. So who am I? The point is, this is what Judaism came to represent for the West. And this is where anti-Semitism has a truth. Whether the Jews lived up to that or not is a completely different story. I enjoyed your talk very much. Can I make a plea for one thing? Can we start using word cap which was invented by a French leftist and picked up by Marx. And it's a prujardive term that the left fights to use against entrepreneurship and free markets. Can we start using word cap as what? Free markets, entrepreneurship. But we're not about entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is an aspect of free markets. One aspect. There are many aspects of free markets. But look, it doesn't matter what term we use. Because the left is going to smear no matter what we use. Capitalism, what does capital mean? Capital comes from Latin. What does capital mean? It means head. It means using your head. Capitalism is a system where people use their head. That's great. I mean, it's about using your mind. It's about creating stuff. That's what capitalism really means. And the capitalist, the guy with the money is the guy who's used his head to create the most stuff. So I love the word capitalism. But I'm willing to go with free markets. But the left is going to slow free markets. They really do. Free? They're not free. People starve under free markets. They're not free of hunger. They're not free of suffering. They're not free of child labor. They'll smear anything we choose. The point is to fight them on the fundamentals. To fight them on, not to give them an inch. We give them yards and miles and in light years we give them the microphone. Let's start moving to the front because there are a bunch of people here. I think you're very accurate in saying that we need to advocate for a moral revolution and a political individualism and capitalism. I think you're also accurate in saying that what we tend to do is to play a game based on prevailing moral terms. But my question is what are the best strategies for us to confront it correct? What is a collective financial psychosis? He used a very interesting description of force being associated with bad and stealing and you started out talking about bankers and associating that with anti-Semitism and the juniors and the Jews. I was thinking about the idea that people take loans out of their own self-interest. Where is it that we conveniently forget that when a bank forecloses on a loan or you can't pay or whatever else happens? You went into the deal because you needed something of your own self-interest but they're the bad guys when it doesn't work out and it becomes very toxic or they're stealing from us. Yeah, but this is the point, right? If self-interest is a bad thing, then yeah, I did it out of self-interest but that was a moment of weakness. I needed that home and they should've, if they were good Christians, given me the loan without the expectation of any interest. What does Jesus say? Don't expect to be repaid. Give loans without expecting to be repaid. So if the bank was good, was moral, was just, it wouldn't demand that I have to repay. I needed it. I'm struggling. So if we have a false conception of self-interest, if we view it as negative in the culture, we'll always have this relationship with the financial markets and with capitalism generally. And that's my argument. We have to change the way we view self-interest. We have to tell people, take your self-interest seriously. This is really about your self-interest. Is it in your self-interest to take out the loan? Make sure it is. Figure out the consequences. We have to tell people this, particularly young people. Being selfish, and I use selfish as a purpose to shock your liver, being selfish requires hard work. It's not about emotionally wanting the pile of money. That's not self-interest. That's just wind worship. It's self-destructive. It's what Bernie made up there. Self-interest is about thinking. It's about thinking, I'm going to live another 40 years, I hope. How am I going to make my life what it can be in the 40 years that I have remaining? What actions, what values, what things should I pursue today to make my life the best that it can be over the next 5, 10, 15? That's hard, particularly for somebody young. It's hard. But that's what it means to take your self-interest seriously. And if we teach, and this is the whole thing, we need to teach it from when they're this big, we need to tell our kids, stop sharing and start thinking. Start thinking about what is really good for you. What's going to help you over the long run? And if we can teach kids to think, then they don't just act on whim. All these people who took out mortgages, it was just whim. They weren't thinking, they weren't saying, oh, interest rates always go up. Can I afford it when interest rates will go up one day? Will the state prices sometimes go down? Can I afford it if interest rates ever go down? If real estate prices go down. What happens if I lose my job? That's hard thinking. But that's the skills. We need to teach our kids, we need to teach our college students and they're not taught that. I mean, the whole American educational system is built around emoting. Emoting, emotion. This is John Dewey's theory of education which we as a culture have embraced. John Dewey believed that education was about socialization and emotional freedom. So you get a bunch of eight-year-olds around the classroom right in social sciences class, which is not even a topic should be taught to eight-year-olds and they sit around and say, what do you think about Obamacare? Who cares what an eight-year-old thinks about Obamacare? They're not there to think about Obamacare because all they can do is emotes about it and they can tell you what they think. They're there to study, they're there to learn, they're there to use their minds to learn stuff. They can think for themselves. But that's not what we do. We sit around chatting, we sit around talking, we sit around, what are your emotions? What do you feel about Obamacare? That's the real question they ask them, right? What do you feel about the planet warming? What do you feel about those penguins dying? This is my kids used to get this. What do you feel about the penguins dying because of global warming? So you double whammy there, right? Feeling and global warming and you scoot them up completely. They come home and say, Daddy, you're driving a car and you're killing the penguins. I mean, they do. I'm not making this up. This is real stuff. I had to go to the school and say, if you're going to teach global warming then you have to teach the opposite. You're discriminating against the point of view that says the globe is not warming and there are scientists who say the opposite and you have to teach both sides. So they stopped teaching it completely because they wouldn't teach the other sides. They just stopped teaching it. But that's great, that's a victory. If we connect thinking with self-interest, we win. And if we don't, we lose because the other side is going to win on the emotion. Emotions are self-destructive and we're just going to destroy ourselves if we follow emotions. Emotions lead us to just take the pile of money. Instead of thinking how can I be creative and productive and efficient so that I can get the pile of money. That's what you want. You want to earn it. So I want to answer to this gentleman here that was asking the question about Judaism and I want to say that Judaism is all about free market because it says that you cannot give donation or from your income more than 10%. It means even a person that wants to give more than 10% is limited and why still reason? The reason is because we want to force the people to care for themselves. Nobody will wait for somebody to give all his money. It's not even logical and not even fair. Judaism isn't as all about free market and all about free thinking. And what you mentioned about the religious things, I'm not a religious person but I'm not a lot about religiosity. The Jews are all about freedom of choice. All Judaism is based on freedom of choice. No socialism, no capitalism, it's all about freedom of choice. What's good for you. But on the other hand it's written in the Bible that there will never be, that there will always be poor people in the nation. Always. God will never eliminate them for one reason because by the time at the same time that you are a capitalist and you make money, you should never forget that there are poor people and it's your responsibility. Not the government's responsibility but your responsibility. See I don't think it's my responsibility. I don't think it should be your responsibility. If your neighbor is hungry, your responsibility isn't. If my neighbor is hungry, it depends. Do I like my neighbor? It doesn't make a difference. It does make a difference. See but that's not morality in my view. If my neighbor is a jerk, if my neighbor is a bad person helping him is evil. But my point is, my point is, my point is it's conditional. My help is conditional on the value that you present and if you don't have value because you're a bad person I'm not going to help you. The point is the standard is me, not my neighbor. The fact that my neighbor is starving is not place an obligation on me. I become a slave because he's starving. You don't have to be a slave. Sure it's slavery. What if my neighbor is starving and my kid has a disease and I have to spend all my money on my kid? I'm not obligated to help him. That's all I wanted you to say. Fine. It's not my moral obligation to help him. I could choose to help him and I think good people would choose to help him. In truth there is freedom of choice. Nobody forces anybody but there's always the place to help each other. I'll send you to some places in Brooklyn where there's no freedom of choice where Jews are dictatorial over one another where they follow the Bible like dogma. Judaism is a religion that's interpreted in a thousand different ways. There's some very good interpretations of Judaism and there's some awful interpretations of Judaism. There's everything in Judaism and the way the Bible is written this is the genius of whoever wrote the Bible. The way the Bible is written is you can find whatever you want in it. You want to find capitalism in the Bible? It's there. You want to find socialism in the Bible? It's there. You want to find fascism in the Bible? It's there. Everything is there. No, it's a mushy document that allows the rabbis to argue about everything and to choose what they want and that just proves that a mortal person wrote it. I'm sorry if I'm offending anybody's religiosity. Is your assertion then that Judaism or anti-Semitism arises from economic success versus the Judaism as a religious principle? See, I think that it's... I think there are multiple causes for anti-Semitism. I started off by saying I'm just focusing on one cause. There are multiple causes but I do think that a central cause of anti-Semitism is economic success but not just economic success. The means by which Jews became economically successful. They become economically successful by making money off of loans they gave to Christians and that offended the Christians and that really upset them and God said that that way of becoming wealthy was a mortal sin. Seventh rung of hell. It's the mechanism by which they became successful. But yes, success in and of itself is enough for the hatred. But Jews weren't always successful because they were not because they were still lending money. I mean, I don't know if you know the... you know, the massacre of York in England in 12-something, right? Why was there... They killed all the Jews in York. Hundreds of Jews were killed in York. Why were they killed? Because the local prince, right, owed the Jews a lot of money. He had lent them a lot of money and the easiest way to get rid of that is to stir up anti-Semitic feelings about, oh, they killed Jesus, used religious excuses to stir them up. They drink a lot of babies, but that wasn't the motivation. Motivation was to wipe out his debts. And not only did they care, it was interesting because when they killed all the Jews, the first thing they did was burnt their debt, their accounting, right? They didn't want any... And then, ultimately, again, I don't know how many of you know, but for hundreds of years, Jews weren't allowed in England. England banned Jews until way after Elizabeth I, but first there were no Jews in England. They burned the Jews out of the book. Well, they killed all the Jews, whether they burnt them. Yep, go ahead. One thing I've noticed, as I look at the various professions that are sort of more or less hated, is the ones that the public can see in a more tangible way, say actors or sports figures or speed jobs, they can see exactly what they did to earn their money. And people seem to like them a lot better. The more abstract and intangible the means of learning your money is, the more hated people are. And, of course, financial instruments and things like that are the most abstract and the hardest to see. No, it's absolutely right. So this is an example I give. We've all played basketball. We've all, like, bounced the ball and shot it at a basket. And we all know how pathetic we are. We're terrible at it, right? And when we see a Michael Jordan play, we can say, wow, I can't do that. I couldn't do that if I practiced every day of my life. This guy is amazing and it's entertaining. But you have personal experience that relates to some aspect. We've all tried to swim, but you see a Michael Phelps do it and you go, wow, that's amazing. But it's not as entertaining so he doesn't make as much money, but a Michael Jordan makes. So we don't resent it because we have some experience saying, wow, that's incredible. We know what acting, how hard acting is. So we don't resent them. But being a CEO, what do they do? A CEO, they shuffle paper. They boss people around. That's easy. Anybody could do that. And a financier, all they do is lend money and they charge interest. I mean, that's easy. They're paper shufflers. They do nothing. And what's the productive role of finance? Again, a complex topic, an abstract topic. So yes, the further way a profession is from people's experience, direct experience and direct understanding, the more resentful people are of it. So a CEO of a furniture company is going to be more respected than the CEO of a bank because furniture, I use. I can see the benefit. Banks, that's abstract. That's hard to understand what they do. I can't hide behind my product. I was wondering, are you familiar with Dennis Prager's book Why the Jews? He makes the case. And on the surface, it might seem to contradict, but I actually think it keeps to a little bit of this point and a lot of what you're saying. Dennis Prager sort of traces the history of antisemitism and to capitalist Jews were seen as communists. To communist Jews were seen as capitalists and there's no question that Jews have been very involved in communism and socialism, this kind of thing. His basic, I guess he says in his point of view is that fundamentally the reason antisemitism started with Jews were the people who introduced the concept of ethical monotheism. And while I don't necessarily agree with the way he says it, but I do think it has something to do with conceptual thinking, objective morality, whether at the time, that's what he basically says. If you look to, it even predates Jews' involvement in money lending. The Greeks saw the Jews as the people who made claims. I don't know. I mean, maybe I'm just not familiar with this, but I don't know of evidence to suggest that the Greeks' enrollments were particularly antisemitic. I mean, they hated everybody. I don't think they hated the Jews in particular, right? They conquered people and they forced them to worship their gods or whatever. But you just wouldn't. Yeah, okay. So they would, yeah, well, you could argue who was right on that one. But it's, you know, Greeks are pretty good. But I don't think they particularly hated the Jews. I mean, there were a lot of people who didn't and maybe they argued with, you know, but the roots of antisemites, I don't think antisemitism as a concept exists pre-Christianity. The Christians are the ultimate antisemites. And then the Muslims come along and they're not as bad as the Christians, although they're pretty bad. But they're nowhere near as bad as the Christians until the 20th century. But in the pre-20th century, the Muslims treated Jews not well, but better than the Christians did. So to me, it's primarily a concept that arrived through Christianity. I mean, the Jews were the ones who rejected Jesus as the Messiah. They knew themselves as such for the chosen people. Yeah, and the Jews were arrogant. They dared turn their back on Jesus and they dared, you know, remain a chosen people after the Messiah had revealed himself. And the Messiah was Jewish, right? So Jesus was Jewish. So that, I think, starts it off. That's the beginning of the conflict, right? But from the beginning, notice that Jesus is against money, right? I mean, who does he kick out of the temple? What's the big deal? He kicks the money, he changes out of the temple. I mean, Jesus in a very, very deep, substantial way is anti-capitalist, anti-pusperity, anti-this idea of self-improvement. So could you speak to the second point about the Jews involved in anti-capitalist movements? But first of all, that's a modern phenomenon, right? I mean, there was no capitalism until the 19th century. So it only happens in the 19th century. But yeah, I mean, most of the, look, first of all, Jews lead every single intellectual movement on the planet, right? At least in the West, right? Everything, right? From the communists to the holocaust deniers is run by Jews, right? Norm Chomsky is a Jew, right? Anti, the horrific anti-Israel, anti-Semitic Norm Chomsky. To neo-conservatism, to objectivism. Ayn Rand was a Jew. Lena Pekov was a Jew. I'm a Jew. I mean, in a sense of where we come from, culturally, we're all Jews. So Jews lead almost every intellectual movement out there. And I think the reason is it's because the emphasis of Judaism as a culture has always played on the role of the mind, on the intellectual features. Now, why are they so leftist? I mean, I, because in my view, they have been capitalist. They have been focused on making money, on being successful, on being prosperous. And that clashes with them all code. And Jews, because they're more intellectual, take them all code more seriously. So they feel more guilty than anybody's. Because this is a real question. Why Jews, why is there such a thing as Jewish guilt? I mean, what do we got to be guilty about? Because you have a mother. But why does she make us feel that way? I often use the, you know, I believe that guilt is one of the great mechanisms by which to manipulate people, right? And all you have to do is ask any Jewish or Catholic mother and they'll tell you. It's a way to control people, right? But where does Jewish guilt come from? It comes from this conflict of having an explicit morality, taking it more seriously than I think many others do, and living a life that's inconsistent with that morality. And that is a clash. There's also other reasons. You know, one could theorize about Jewish guilt, but for another time. I agree. I'm not Jewish. But I received a grant to study of JP Morgan and Francis Jackson and some of the early American bankers who were not Jewish. Yeah. Who really provided the capital for the subsequent prominent ones. But the two prominent ones, and also there were two in the founding of our country, were not Jewish, of course. Bishop John Carroll and his brother Charles, they were the fighters of the American Revolution. I don't know how they made their money because they were worth well over 10 months. And what do we call these people today? Jewish or not Jewish? What do we call them? Robert Barron. Not the original because they funded something good called the... But the JP Morgan's, the Drexel's... What about Barron's? Oh, JP Morgan's considered a Robert Barron. Every way I go. Every way I go. Francis Drexel and the Carroll's, I know a lot about, especially the Drexel's and the Carroll's, they were not... they were Catholic... No, no, I'm not saying they... Francis Drexel built the bank, but what he did was he knew if he could build the railroad across the country, then he could help build the country. And he built the missions for the Native Americans, his daughters wanted the African-American schools and boarding degrees. Now that was a charity, but he built it. And he... He was German, and I'm from a small town that was founded in the 1600s, and the bankers were German families. Oh, no, I'm... Nothing I said... So I know they were. Nothing I said suggested that all the bankers were Jewish. They clearly weren't. The Medici's. The Medici's were bankers, right? They may have been from a Persian Jewish family. Yeah, but they weren't Jews. At the time they weren't Jews. But notice that the Medici's claimed they never charged interest. They did what Islamic bankers do today. They give you dividends, they give you this, but they don't call it interest. I mean, most of... Many, not most, the Lombards were other Italian bankers who were not Jews. Many of the bankers in Europe were not Jews. And they were also hated, right? It wasn't reflected in anti-Semitism, a different form of hatred, but they were hated. American bankers of the 19th century are resented and hated today. And today when you have Occupy Wall Street, yes, there's an aspect of Occupy Wall Street that is anti-Semitic. It's not anti-some of the demonstrations as I did, there were anti-Semitic signs in a number of them. But what motivated Occupy Wall Street is hatred of wealth. It's hatred of the rich. It's hatred of success. It wasn't cronyism, right? They hated the fact that government bailed out the bankers, but they didn't mind that government bailed out Detroit. That was okay. The auto companies, that was fine. So it wasn't cronyism they objected to, but it was some cronyism, right? Selective cronyism. Yeah. There's an easy one. Please comment on Wolf of Wall Street. I haven't seen it. I don't intend to see it. The movie Wolf of Wall Street. But this is a long line of movies that goes way back. Probably one of your favorite movies is It's a Wonderful Life, which I think is one of the most anti-American movies ever made, right? Because think about what it's about. It's about a successful banker who's obviously nasty, horrible, a crook and a bad guy. He's horribly portrayed, right? That's a successful one. That's the one who's actually making money. Versus the not successful one. Actually the one who won't default on anybody because he feels sorry for them. So he won't call back the loans, right? His uncle loses the money and the bank is now in default because they're incompetent. So it's a completely incompetent bank and he's the hero. It's exact reverse of what it should be. And then instead of going to Paris, which was his dream, if you remember, when he went to Paris, he wanted to live these fantastic lives. He sacrifices his real deep held desires and he goes back to his town and leaves a mediocre, unmeaningful life. But he has a lot of friends, so it's okay. Well, okay. You know, you had to throw that in there. But it's such... And Frank Capra was very anti-capitalist. I mean, Frank Capra made the movie. He's a very anti-capitalist. And you know, this is a movie that is trying to undercut capitalism, trying to undercut self-interest, trying to undercut the principles of America. It's a principally anti-American movie and every Christmas we watch it. It's considered the American movie. So then if you take that and you take Wall Street in the 1980s, Oliver Stone, which is a movie he used to use in class because it is... If you want to see a movie brilliantly made, I think it's a great movie aesthetically. But it's pure Marxism. I mean, the lines in there, he just takes out of Marx. And Wolf of Wall Street is just, you know, it's one continuum of portraying finances, this despicable activity, this horrific thing. And you see that throughout Hollywood. You see that throughout the left. And it's not just... I used to give an assignment to my students. I used to teach a class in finance and ethics and all the other professors would go, but that's a contradiction in terms. You can't teach that. I used to give this assignment to students. I want you to go out there and find a book or a movie that portrays a successful financier as the good guy. And they couldn't. And they'd say, okay, well, I'll make it a little easier for you. I want you to go out there and find a book or a movie that portrays a successful businessman as a hero. Horatio Alger. What's that? Horatio Alger. You have to go back to the 19th century. You have to go back to Horatio Alger. Now there are exceptions, like Batman. Right? Iron Man. Although, you know, you have to be a superhero, right? Or, I mean, a movie hero there that you could find that actually is. But, you know who commits most of the murders on television? Businessmen. Businessmen. Over 50% of all murders committed on television shows are committed by businessmen. I mean, there's a group in the Midwest that does these statistics every few years. Who commits the fewest murders on television? I don't know if that's a category. People who work for the media commit the fewest. And lawyers don't commit. Lawyers are heroes on television, right? Lawyers, even though it's a culture, we have a low opinion of lawyers, or we think we have a low opinion on television. They're like the heroes because they're defending the little men. But, you've never seen a show portraying businessmen as heroic as doing it, but business is heroic. Again, we didn't build America from 1776 to 1914 into this amazing industrial palace because of lawyers. The heroes who built America are businessmen, right? But there's not a single television show. I mean, when we do do a show on businessmen, it's called Dallas. And the scumbags. The awful, horrible human beings, right? There's never portrayal of a positive... But this is all connected. These are all linked. This is all a result of the morality that we hold and that we hold businessmen as self-interested and, therefore, evil by definition. Can we make this... There's always exceptions. In Queer's folk, the smartest guy in the show is also a highly successful businessman. But that was okay because he was gay. Yeah, I mean, but who can take seriously a show called Queer's Folk? This is the last question. Last question. And then we'll sign some books. I'll sign some books, yeah. I actually disagree with you about the anti-Semitism in Islam. It started with Muhammad himself. I didn't say they weren't anti-Semitic. I just said the Christians were worse. I'm not so sure. Dr. Andrew Boston documents extensively. But I think the thing is, it goes back to what you're talking about with this last view of this. I think we've been so ingrained. I think it's been, you know, that stuff is put back because it's, you know, that Islam is not a threat to them. They think it's, you know, Islam is... Look, you're not going to find... You're not going to find anybody who thinks these Islamists are bigger threat than I am. But history is history. And history is history. There's nothing like Hitler in the Muslim world. The Ottomans, often the people surrounding the successful Ottomans were Jews. The Jews in Palestine under the Ottoman Empire were treated okay. They weren't slaughtered in mass. There were pogroms here and there, but nothing on the scale of what happened in England during the 13th century, what happened in Germany time and time again during the period. I mean, the horrific nature of European anti-Semitism. And we're all European, so we want to forget that. But it's just not true. Now, I'm not justifying Islam. I mean, clearly, Mohammed thought the Jews were bad guys, were evil by nature. He cut off their heads and he did horrible things to them. And then they were second-class citizens like the Christian. But it's not on the... I mean, everything I know about history, it's just not on the same scale. And this is not to justify Islam. It's not to be apologized for Islam or anything like that. Again, you won't find a bigger defender of the West versus them than I am. But it's just the more objective we are about what the history actually says, the easier it is to fight our enemies. And this is why I don't care about what they call it, about this whole question of are they Palestinians or not. It's not relevant to the discussion. None of this stuff is relevant to the discussion. They're the enemy. It's categorized how they're the enemy. Let's deal with it. And I could deal with it. Thank you all. Thank you, sir.