 Thank you all, is my audio being projected out there into the world. Thank you all on the internet or in cyber space or whatever that is for coming tonight. So I was thinking, what are the issues that we are confronted, what keeps you guys awake at night? My guess is that what keeps you guys awake at night is whatever is going on in college and who you've broken up with recently or stuff that is really in your day-to-day lives and that makes sense. But I can tell you what keeps me up awake at night are my two sons. And it's not because I worry about what they're doing out there in the world. Both of them are about your age, or at least those of you who are students. My youngest son is a freshman in college. My oldest son is a senior in college, so they're both about your age. And what worries me is what future they have. What worries me is what kind of world are they going to be facing in 10, 15, 20, 30 years? What kind of job market they're going to be exposed to in just a few months in the coming years? But really, my biggest concern is that long-term perspective, 5, 10, 20 years. What does the world look like if we just continue the way we are today? If we just continue with the kind of ideas that exist in the world today, with the kind of debate that exists in the world today? Let me give you just a few highlights of my concerns for the next 20 years. Now, I was just reading a report just last week that was published by a woman named Mary Meeker. You can find her stuff on the web. This is a PDF and it's a PowerPoint presentation, and it's fascinating. What Mary Meeker has done, she's a financial analyst. What she did was she took the United States government and she said, I'm going to look at the United States government as if it were a company and I'm going to value it. I'm going to give it a value like the stock market value. What is the net worth of the US government? So you take the assets and you take the liabilities and you compare them and you look at future liabilities and future expected income and you look at what is the bottom line for the US government. Now she uses government numbers, she uses congressional budget office numbers. So these are quite conservative numbers. She's not left-wing, she's not right-wing, she's trying just to be a financial analyst and she's not taking really radical assumptions, simple assumptions that most people would say are probably overly conservative. In other words, overly positive in terms of where the economy is going. She places a value in the US government of negative 40 trillion dollars. That's 40 million million. If you think about what a million dollars is, it's 40 million a billion. I mean it's an incomprehensible number. Now just to give you a sense, the US economy is about, and again these aggregate numbers are not that meaningful from the economic perspective but they give you kind of a ball puck. This economy is about a 15 trillion dollar economy. So our net worth is three times negative than what we produce every year. These are staggering, staggering numbers. This is debt that is hard to imagine. By 2025, only 14 years in the future. Now I know for you guys, 14 years is a lifetime. When you get to my age, 14 years is not that big of a deal. I remember 14 years ago, most of you probably don't. In 14 years, all the income, all the income coming into the US government, all tax revenue combined will pay for four things. Social security, Medicare, Medicaid and interest payments on the debt. That's it. No money for defense, no money for any other program. Just those four. And then after 2025, much, much higher than what the revenue is. And let's put this in perspective. Right now, these Republicans got voted, just recently, they got voted in on a radical platform of reform, the Tea Party Republicans, the Tea Party really backed them. So these up. They're ready to take on these problems and really bring change to Washington. We got a $3.7 trillion budget. We've got a deficit of $1.7 trillion and they're arguing and they're debating about cutting $60 billion, just run the numbers that's under 2%. I mean, no company that was facing that kind of a deficit in its income statement would be talking about cutting 1%, 2%. They'd be talking about cutting 10%, 20%, 30%. But this is the kind of squabbling that goes on. And nobody will touch the big items that I just mentioned. Social security, Medicare, Medicaid. Of course, you can't do anything about the interest payment on the debt. As long as you're accumulating debt, you're going to get more interest payments that you have to make. And right now is a good time because interest payments are really low because interest rates are really low. It ain't going to last. And it's not just, you know, on the national scale, California is bankrupt, Illinois is bankrupt, New York is bankrupt, Michigan State is bankrupt. On the local level, financially, things are just in catastrophic condition. And it's not like anybody has solutions or presenting solutions right now that solve the problem so that in 10, 15 years I feel comfortable. Okay, but we're going through hard times right now, but things are going to be good in the long term. Again, nobody is talking about ideas. Nobody's talking about anything fundamental or take far and possibly. Again, you guys probably only vaguely remember 9-11, but 9-11 was a real shock to the system. Terrorists came all the way to the United States and killed 3,000 Americans with the intention of killing many, many more. The leaders of those terrorists are still around. They're still alive, still plotting, still doing what they think will lead ultimately to killing more Americans. And we have done almost nothing to stop them. Yet, we're in wars in Iraq, we're in wars in Afghanistan, and we're in Libya that seemingly are completely unrelated to that event in 9-11 and that nobody can really explain why we're there and what we're there for and how long we're going to be there and how we're going to leave. And these are little teensy bitsy wars when there's a big country called Iran that's building nuclear weapons. And who knows what they're going to do once they get those nuclear weapons and whether they put your lives at risk in 5, 10, 15 years. The world right now is being really challenged. The United States has never faced the situation that it faces today. It's faced upon conflicts before, but at least at home, economically, culturally, you're a solid. Today we are rotting from within and we're spread all over the world fighting wars that nobody understands, that nobody can explain. And nobody is presenting any kind of solutions. Nobody is looking at that long term and saying, here's where we go. Here's a vision for America. Here's a vision for where we need to go. And the reason is that there are no fundamental ideas out there. Think about the debate about Libya because it's right in the headlines right now. Obama gives a speech every couple of days to try to justify why we're doing this. But think about what's driving our involvement in Libya. What are the ideas that are driving this involvement? And think about whether those ideas are connected in any way to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and kind of our government problems. Is Libya somehow related to what's going on with our budget? Well, why are we in Libya? Why are we going out and bombing those who oppose Qaddafi in Libya? And no fly zone, which was supposed to just knock down airplanes. Now we're knocking down tanks and artillery and just anybody, anybody who we think is a pro-Qaddafi, we're leveling. But we're not killing Qaddafi. We're not there. All we want is to level the playing field. We want to make it as easy for the rebels to kill Qaddafi soldiers as it is for Qaddafi soldiers to kill the rebels. We want to make it an equal playing field. Now, what does that even idea come from? We are spending a billion dollars in every one of these cruise missiles, a million, I'm sorry, a million dollars in every one of these cruise missiles. We're spending billions of dollars over there. What are we going to get? What is your life? How is this going to contribute to any of our life? Is anybody even asking those questions? Why Obama tells us are we going into Libya? And why is everybody defending it? Because the Libyans need us. They need us. Lots of civilians will die if we don't go and help the Libyans. The standard there is not, explicitly not, and Obama makes a real effort to make it clear that the standard is not what's good for you. The standard is not what's good for us Americans. The standard is the Libyans need us, and we can't abandon them in that time of need. Of course, there were Wanda's need us, and there are people who live in Congo need us, and there's a civil war going on in the Ivy Coast right now that nobody's talking about and thousands of people dying there, and they need us, and the Yemenites need us, and the Bahraini need us, and there's no lack of need for America to come in and help people. But the standard is they need. And then we're selective about who we go after, which need we satisfy and when. So need is the standard, and the fact that we're putting American lives at risk, the fact that we're spending gazillions of dollars, that doesn't matter. And when you push them and they say, but what is America's interest in it? What is America's interest in it? Well, they tell you, if we could only defeat Gaddafi, that would get rid of a really, really bad guy, and things will just get better somehow, and things will be much more stable in the Middle East, and we all benefit when bad guys get eliminated and there's stability out there. And this is really a long-term vision, and strategically this is long-term important for the United States, which is they attempt to somehow bring it into self-interest, but they're not really committed to this too strongly, because if they were committed to this, what would they have done? You ever go to, you just go, well, Gaddafi was still a bad guy back then, right? He didn't change. Nothing changed. But back then he was our ally somehow. There's no commitment to ideas. So there are two, in a sense, two strategies, call them strategies, even as a stretch. One is we go where we're needed, where people want us, where they need our help, where they're suffering, and we'll go and help them. And the standard there is other people's well-being. The alternative is, you know, we'll kind of fudge it as we go along, we'll kind of make it up. There are no principles. There are no standard. We call that tragusism, and the other one, altruism, is an ethical view, is a philosophical view around the world, about the world. Take this font-faucy example. INRAN presents us with an alternative view, and that view is self-interest. Your life belongs to you. You are sovereign over your own life. You have moral responsibility over your life. The purpose of your life is to make your life the best that it can be, the most fulfilling that it can be. Your life government is to leave you alone, to protect you from force, from fawn invaders, from bad guys, so that you can live your life to the fullest. We'll come back to that. Now, apply that to this issue of Libya. Are the Libyans interfering with my ability to live my life? Really? They're not trying to kill me as far as I know? They're not trying to steal my stuff? Why are we there? Simple analysis. The principle is, is it in my self-interest to intervene in a crisis in Libya? Isn't it in my self-interest to intervene in a crisis in Libya? Our individual self-interest, not some amorphous national interest in the long term, maybe, whatever. But is it in my self-interest, does it make my life better? And would anyone of us, here's the test I used for you, is this a war you would volunteer to go fight? Is this a war you would want your children to go fight? I have sons. What I tell my sons, you know, this is one where you should go volunteer. This is about your life, about your freedom. No, it's not. I can't tell them I want them to go fight. What could I tell any of you? I can't tell anybody who walks in with a military uniform that this is a battle I want them to fight. Because it's not a battle for them, it's a battle for some need that the Libyans might have. And I haven't even started talking about it, I won't. About who these insurgents are, who the opposition to Gaddafi really is and whether they're our friends and whether they're better for us or worse for us. You could do a whole analysis just from there. The point is, there's no American self-interest. So, the man would say, the activist would say, we shouldn't be there. But if need is your standard, if other people's need is your standard, which is the conventional morality we all grow up with, right? And we're little. What do we talk? The good equals what? Good equals being selfless. Good equals placing your own interests last. Good means sacrificing fathers. Good means being focused on the interests of other people. Other people's needs, according to the morality we all grow up with, is a claim against you. The fact that somebody else needs something means you are morally responsible for fulfilling their needs. That's conventional morality. Now, what about the Libya? They need stuff. We have stuff. We have weapons to help them. We have money to rebuild the country after it. We are wealthy. We are strong. We are successful. Therefore, we have a moral responsibility to help them. That is conventional morality to say, I'm not going to help them. You know, if they want to kill each other and if a lot of people die, it's sad. It's always sad when people, innocent people die, but it's not my business. I'm going to stay out of it, whether that happens in there or in Rwanda or anywhere else. To say that requires the negation of the small ideal that need is the essence of morality. That somebody else's need is a moral claim on your life. That your focus needs to be their interests, not your own. And that's why nobody, nobody, even people who oppose this will say, well, today business is not out. Because that is very self-assertive, self-interested, egoistic. And what do we know about self-interest and egoism? They're not good. Not from the perspective of conventional morality. Conventional morality says, again, you should be selfless, not selfless. Selfless is bad. Self-interest is bad. So that plays out in far and far see. And what are the pragmatists? What are the people in the middle who I said kind of vaguely have this idea that there's some self-interest, but it's long-term, and it's wishy-washy, and it's never, they never hold enough principle. They're kind of the people who've abandoned morality anyway, because they say, look, this altruism, this selflessness doesn't work. It's not practical. You can't get anywhere in life with it. And being an egoist, well, that's clearly a moral, and that's wrong, and that's bad. So we're just not going to care about morality, and we're just going to go through life doing whatever seems to work in the moment. That's the essence of this pragmatic view, which is unprincipled, unfocused, changes all the time, no real long-term view. It's just whatever, in a sense, the urge to. So is this connected at all to domestic policy, to the domestic concerns that we have, for example, about the budget right now and the inability to cut spending? Well, I think it is. Just think about what we're talking about here. Cutting something like, let's take Medicare. Medicare is a program that provides health benefits to the elderly. In 365, you can start, you know, participating. And it's basically subsidized healthcare, subsidized by the tax. Because we pay out Medicare tax, but the Medicare tax doesn't even come close to paying the actual expenses that get expensed on healthcare. Now, why is it that we are willing to basically tax everybody in order to provide health care, unlimited amounts of health care, to the elderly, and in the case of Medicaid, it's to the poor? What is it that leads us to that? It doesn't make any economic sense. It doesn't make any sense in terms of quality of healthcare. What happens when you get something for somebody for free? What are they going to do? If you make the price of a product zero, basically, to the person purchasing the product, how much of the product are they going to pay for? A lot, right? Pass that to them. So people overuse healthcare. They spend a huge amount on it because it's not coming out of their pocket. Every procedure is okay because it's not coming out of their pocket. Prices go up. The system is starting to crumble. Everybody understands. This is economics 101. It's no surprise. Then why is it that nobody is willing to talk about Medicaid or cutting it, privatizing it, doing away with it? Proposals for vouchers, all kinds of proposals out there, but nobody takes it seriously. Medicaid is one of those parts of the budget that nobody will challenge. Indeed, what is going to happen is the solution is going to be to ration kit. Instead of everybody being able to access everything, there'll be a government committee that decides what procedure you will get, what procedure you will get, and how long you're allowed to live, and whether your cancer should be treated in way X or in way Y. That is inevitable because the costs are going out of control. So the only way to reduce the cost is to be concerned about it, to kill us young because older we get, the more we consume. This is obvious. Again, this is not complicated. This is economics 101. So why is nobody willing to put Medicare on the table? Well, because people need healthcare. They need this, right? Once upon a time in the 60s, the perception was that old people weren't getting as good of healthcare as other people, and they needed it. And how can we watch somebody suffer and not get the kind of healthcare treatment that we know is possible in some idealist world? We need to provide it. Their suffering is a moral claim on our lives. How can we stand back and not help them? We've been taught, again, since we put this little, that it's our moral responsibility to help those in need. As long as we hold that premise, we cannot touch Medicare and Medicaid until security and welfare and all the other benefits that are being given. Even farm subsidies. How do they justify farm subsidies? They justify farm subsidies because a small, poor farmer needs it. He'd go out of business if they didn't have it, or join the club. How many farmers have gone out of business? How many farmers have left the farms and come into the cities over the last 100 years? About 90-plus percent of them? But yes, and in the always case, come up with the images, right? There's always an image of a small farm somewhere. If you cut the subsidies, they will go out of business, and they will. And if we all need to subsidize them because it's our moral responsibility, their suffering is on us. But again, if you look at it from the perspective of Ayn Rand, if you look at it from the perspective of self-interest, of what is really good for me in the long term, then I don't want to subsidize farming. And if you look at it objectively, it's quite easy to see that the subsidies, first of all, don't go to these small farm loads even if they do. It's not my responsibility. It's not my business. Why are you taking money out of my pocket and handing it over to him? I want to help my kids go to college. I want to buy a nice car. I want to live my life. I want to start a new business. Why are you taking my money to help people with health care? If I want to help them, I'll do it. But why are you taking my money? Why are you distributing? Why are you sacrificing my life for this? Because that's what it is. It's all about sacrificing some group to another group. It's all about this ethical question of is your life yours, or does it belong to those in need, or does it belong to some group, or are you just a slave of the majority of 51% of whatever they decide, of whatever they think is right? The key question is whose life is it? Whose life is it? And the answer to that question is the answer to all these public policies. Wherever you fall on that question, you will dictate what kind of public policy agenda you want. If you are, if you fall on the side of my life, well, your life is yours. My life is mine. Then you don't want government telling you what a support and what not a support and who to help and who not to help. You want to live. You want to be able to use your money, use your talent, use your mind, use your skill in whatever way you think is going to promote your values in your life. Ideas matter. Ideas and ethics matter. What you believe, ultimately, about what is right, about who your life belongs to is going to dictate all these questions. All the answers to all these questions is clearly dictating it today in our public policy world. And of course, that's just one layer. That's just one layer in ethics. If you've just touched on a tiny little bit, you just scrape the surface and hopefully we'll get some questions so we can go deeper even in ethics. But your ideas about how you know what you know are going to shape your ideas in ethics, but they're also going to shape your ideas in public policy and they're going to shape your ideas in everything that you do in life. You actually, you actually know reality. You actually have a tool to understand the world around you. Is reality. This stuff. Normal. Isn't it normal? Are you just floating around not really knowing what's going on today, not knowing what will happen in the future? Who knows? And therefore, at the whim of somebody else who claims that knowledge, he's going to guide you and help you and don't worry, be happy because we know how you should live your life. It's kind of a paternalistic government that we're seeing more and more of in America today. We're just too stupid to really know how to live. We're inherently irrational. You're seeing all these books out there about the virtues of irrationality, about how people are generally not good at making decisions for themselves and what we need are philosophy kings to tell us how to live, what foods to eat, what cause to drive. You know, you guys don't know that you should all want an electric car. And you should be willing to give up everything you own in order to get an electric car. And if you don't know that, Washington is going to prove it to you by basically taxing away your existing automobile and subsidizing the electric car so you have to buy it. You don't have any choices about it. Or, the alternative, the INRAN alternative is we do know reality. We do have a tool to understand a reason. We can guide our lives. We can figure it out. And indeed, all the values we have around us, everything in this room, the fact that we're all here today, the fact that there is a university and there's students out there, all products of human reason, every achievement, everything, the fact that we can stream this over the web, all over the world. That is testament to the efficacy of reason, to the ability of the human mind. The fact that there are 6 billion people alive today, that we have medicines to cure diseases, that we have clothes, that we have homes, all of that is a product of thought. All of that is a product of reason. That each one of us is individual possessed. And therefore, our lives again, we can be responsible for our lives. We should be responsible for our lives. And we need to get the philosopher kings off our backs. We need to be in a position. We need freedom to be able to make the decision for ourselves. That's another level of ideas. But depending on where you sign in is, of course, there's a third alternative. One's a skepticism, right? One's an objective. The third alternative is, we know what we know through mystical revelation. And of course, what does that lead to? Because I don't speak to God, so he does. Well, there's always somebody who decides what they do, and they let us know, of course, what God says, and they let us know what we should be doing. There always is an authority that tells us what God is saying at the moment and how we should be doing it. Again, we're all too dumb to get it. That's faith. That's blind faith. None of this exists. That's the criteria by which we died our lives. So that's another layer, kind of by ideas, that are shaping the world around us whether we want to or not. So just to summarize, and then we'll go to questions. We are faced with enormous challenges right now. Challenges that I have to admit, even five years ago, I did not believe would be as bad as they are today. Things are deteriorating faster than I ever thought they were deteriorating. Cultural, economic, and even strong policy perspective. The world, as we know it as being challenged, this country in particular, as the baskin of freedom, as a free country, as a wealthy country, as a successful country, is that those facts are being challenged. But what we need to change these things, what we need to move in a different direction is to challenge the fundamental idea that our culture holds. The fundamental idea is to shape all other ideas. To shape all other policies. To shape the direction in which the country moves. And, you know, people say, well, that's impossible. You can't do that. Nobody ever does that. Nobody does such a fundamental questioning. Nobody ever gets to reverse the culture in that way. And it's right. It almost never happens. But in this country, we need to remember that this country was established because exactly such a question, exactly such a challenge to the existing set of ideas that existed in the culture. Our founding fathers understood a principle that was revolutionary at the time. They understood that the individual owns his own life. That his life belongs to him. In a culture, in a world that had never imagined such an idea. In a world and a culture where your life belonged to a king, to society, to a priest, to the pope, to God, to somebody else. The founders understood that your life belongs to you. And they founded a country based on that principle. The first ever. It never had existed anything closely, remotely like this country, in spite of what your history teachers tell you. This is the greatest country in human history. And it was the only country in human history founded on this idea of individual sovereignty. And what we need is to reconnect with that principle and provide it with a better, a greater, a stronger foundation, a foundation that I think on land provides it. And I think that the key in the founding that we need to kind of hook back to is the Declaration of Independence which articulates this notion that each one of us, each one of us has an unalienable right which means a freedom not to stuff, but a freedom to act, to go out and live our life. We have an unalienable right to live our life. Life, liberty, and the most self-interested political state in the human history. Each one of us has a right to pursue our own happiness. And if we can resurrect that, we can start talking about ideas at that level. If we can just resurrect what the founding fathers have, we can just save that enlightenment thinking that today's world. We bring that back. And then add on to that Iron Man's philosophy. That's how we're going to save this world. That's how we're going to save this country. Thank you. And we're going to take questions. Where do you want to start? All the audience is online. So we'll start here. This is Joanne Mike that's currently aside from Dr. Brooks hooked up into our broadcast. So I'm going to pass the mic around to whoever wants to speak. So if you could please raise your hand if you have a question. Okay. I'll go right here. I was wondering about like a Kantian standard or the golden rule that Joanne told us is you'd want them to you. How would that fit in with what you're saying? You know, I would reject such a standard. It's so amorphous and it's so really meaningless that I don't think it is a useful ethical standard. The question is, what is the fundamental purpose of life? What is the fundamental purpose of morality? Why should I do on to others as they do on to me? Where does that even come from? And what I want done on to me that I should do on to others? I mean, I want a TV. Should I give them TVs? I mean, what is it? How do you, what's the standard? Where does it come from? I believe morality has to be a lot more rigorous and Rand articulates that kind of rig. I mean, she, in the virtue of selfishness which I encourage everybody to read the book and the essay, The Objectivist Ethics, she talks about where does morality come from? How do we get right and wrong? What is the standard for right and wrong? And she talks about the fact that as human beings, as biological entity, the fundamental issue forms, the fundamental alternative that we face is life or death. All animals face that alternative. The plant has no choice about it. It automatically, you know, maneuvers itself into a position where it gets the sunlight or digs deep with its roots to get the water. We can't do that. We have to decide. We have to choose values to guide us towards life. We don't have it automatically programmed into it. But the standard has to be right because what does it mean to pursue values, which is what morality is about, right? It's about the pursuit of value. Which value can be important value? What does it mean to pursue values outside of a context of being alive? Of wanting to live. So life is the standard. Now what things should I do? What ideas should I embrace? What virtues should I embrace in order to achieve my life? Life here, I mean, every potential and the whole flourishing of human life. That's what morality, the questions morality should be asking. And then, you know, there's a lot of answers. And it needs rigor in terms of how you develop those answers. What kind of virtues should I follow? I have a rule, you know, and it's interesting because that's the Christian rule, right? The Jewish rule was don't do unto others because they would not do unto you. I think it's a better rule. But it's a rule out of nowhere. Some wise man said it once, you know. But by what standard, you know, is the standard of other people's well-being? And then I don't want to do other... I don't want stuff done to me that it just doesn't go anywhere. You have to have a standard who's interested in my after from the University of Colorado in Denver, Colorado. What in your opinion is the ideal life? What in my opinion is the ideal life? Wow, we're getting different questions. I mean, I think there's some principles that you can put together, and then it really depends on you and what you love to do, what you enjoy doing. The principles are living by the virtues that lead to success, that lead to life, that lead to flourishing. An ideal life is a life of, you know, rational thought with decisions that you're making are made, you know, through the process of reasoning, of thinking, of observing reality, integrating the facts, being objective about those facts, about whether they're true or not, and analyzing them, figuring out what's right and what's wrong, and then having integrity to act on them, being honest, not being willing to fake those facts, not to yourself and not to other people, being ruthlessly honest with the facts of reality. I think that one of the most important things in life, we spend most of our time there, we gain ultimately most of our self-esteem from the work we do, from the productive endeavor that we do, you know, so being productive, taking care of yourself, not being a leech on other people, not expecting other people to serve you. It's taking care of your own means, but doing it is something that you love and something you're passionate about, and living to the fullest through, you know, through your productive endeavors, through your work, through what you do in life, to sustain your life. It's really important to love what you do for your productive, for your work, to be productive. You know, and then there's a whole dimension of enjoying arts and enjoying other people and finding somebody that you can love, finding a soulmate I believe in romantic love, I believe in romantic art and art that projects back to you, the full potential of being human. A wonderful life can be, in spite of my pessimistic tone, during the talk, life can be extraordinarily, amazingly wonderful, even in the world we live in today, but you have to embrace it. And I think though the most important thing is if you want to be happy, happiness comes from achieving one's values and setting goals, attaining those goals, working hard, being productive, being honest, being rational and all that, but there's one element that's really, really important, you have to be willing to recognize your own achieving. We are taught that pride is bad, that pride is evil. Pride is really, really, really important for a successful, full, flourishing, happy life. You have to be able to stop and think to yourself, I'm good at this. I'm a good person. I can be the best that I can be. I can be virtuous. You have to be willing to pat yourself on the back. Self-esteem, which I think is essential for happiness, comes from you recognizing your own value, your own achievement. Nobody can give you self-esteem. Suddenly, they can't give you self-esteem, they give everybody rhythm. So it's achieving and recognizing for yourself your own achievement. I think that's what a happy, full, successful life. Again, there are many components. Work is an important one. Relationships, romance, art, those are aesthetics, those are all crucial, studying. I find it amazing that people can be bored. Life is so interesting. There's so many interesting things out there. There's so many books to read, news to watch, people to meet, things to do. And a life that's focused, a life that's oriented towards that, what I want to embrace it all, I want to live a full life, given these virtues. That is what, you know, a full life, a happy life, a successful life is. Okay. I want to ask, kind of in so doing, I'll pose two situations. To what degree should a person not sacrifice themselves to another? And the situations I want to give are, let's say you're on your way to a very competitive job interview, and on the way you see someone get hit by a car. And you know that you could help them in that situation, possibly save their life, or miss the interview, and possibly lose the opportunity of a really great job. And the other situation is like, say a country like Heidi gets hit at what extent should, you know, a country like the U.S. provide foreign aid in that situation where it's, you know, obviously they have control over the types of buildings they have, but in terms of the earthquake happening or not, it's out of their control. Let's start with the first question, what extent should a person sacrifice to another? In my view, you should never, ever, ever sacrifice to another than you're doing with anything. Sacrifice, now let's be clear what sacrifice is. Sacrifice means giving up a value and expecting what in return. Nothing or something much less important to you. So, sacrifice is a losing proposition. If life is the standard, if everything we do is supposed to enhance our life, make our life better, sacrifice is moving away from life, making our life worse, moving us towards death, which is the ultimate of ultimate. Sacrifice is a losing proposition. It's bad, it's evil according to a judgment. Now, is it a sacrifice to stop and help somebody who's life, you know, might be given if you're, you know, on the way to a job interview? You know, I think it depends on a lot of things, but I think for the most part it's not. Life is a value to us, it's an important value to us. Now, if I know the guy in the car that just hit the thing is Hitler, or he's somebody who I think is a bad person, I'm off to the interview with no sense of guilt at all. But if it's a stranger, you know, my assumption in America, not in every country in the world, but in America, he's a good person, he's a productive person, I benefit from his life, from him being alive. I benefit from a world in which you don't just dismiss the value you're giving me. And I'm willing to stop and help somebody. But let me give you, you know, let's make this more extreme. I've got one of my kids, there's hurts and they're bleeding in the car and I'm rushing to the hospital and there's an accident and somebody gets hurt. I don't care who that person is, I'm going to the hospital. I'm not stopping to help them. So, you know, you're gonna have to wait. You're dead. I mean, the standard, the important thing here is the standard. The standard is your life. But your life in the fullest sense, where you value living things, I mean, we stop to help injured dogs. I mean, we take care of plants. We certainly should take care of other human beings when it's not a factor. They are valuable. You know, if it's a rational company that you're interviewing with and you explain the circumstances to them, then I don't think you're going to miss the interview, right? So, no, I don't I don't think it is a factor. Now, Haiti, I do think it's a factor. I just don't. First of all, the government has no business giving money to him. It's not their money to give. The government's only job, in my view, is to protect our lives and our property. Not to take our property and give it to somebody else. Even if they think that somebody else is the most best, virtuous, nicest, most deserving person on earth, it doesn't matter. It's not their job. Now, should you give money to Haiti? I'd say no. There's nothing to be gained by. There's plenty of stuff you can do at home for yourself. If you've got excess money and you want to be charitable, then contribute to charity that affects your life. And you will benefit from it. This is another country, it's a poor country you don't trade with. There's no value for you at state. I mean, it's sad what happens at state. You know, you should feel sadness when other people are hurt and dying of mass. But it's not your responsibility even if it's not about their building and their response. Even if it's just, you know, whatever, something strikes out of nowhere. I'm more likely to help Haiti than I would be to help Haiti. Haiti needs it more. But I get more from my relationship with the Japanese than I'll ever get from a relationship with Haiti. There's nothing I'll ever get back. Whereas with Japan, I am going to get back. The real value. So again, the orientation in a world where we are so brought up with altruism, we're so brought up with a virtue of sacrifice, and the idea of selflessness. It's hard. But the standard is, is this, does this further my life? Is my life better for doing it? That's the standard. Hold your thoughts, we're going to get to you guys. I'm going to take the question from our audiences on the internet. Question from the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Are there any key points in US history that led us to a society with values different than those of the founding fathers? Yeah, I think they are. I think that it's not an event. It's not a point. It's about ideas. And I think that the key event is the dominance of German romantic philosophy in Europe. Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and the rest of them. The dominance of those ideas, I think are fundamentally opposed to the individualism and freedom that this country stood for. Their dominance in the 19th century is ultimately what led to the decline of the US. And how did those ideas get here? They got here through a very simple mechanism. Americans, wealthy Americans in particular, who wanted their kids to get the best education in the world, what would they do? They sent them to Europe. Harvard and Yale and Princeton who wanted to become some of the best institutions in the world, how did they do that? Well, they hired professors from Germany and France and Britain. So the ideas were imported through our intellectuals, through our university, through kids who went to Europe to get educated. And that's what begins the process of erosion. That's where the progressive movement ultimately comes from. And you see that in the late 19th century. You see it in the legislation. You see it in the attitudes. You see it in the kind of standards presidents and the general public start holding. We'd start becoming a land of individual and we'd start becoming like Europe a land of collective. We'd start becoming, you know, Teddy Roosevelt is a good example. He's all about America. He's all about the state, the country. He's not about individual. And of course, drawlines Teddy Roosevelt to John McCain, whose campaign slogan was country first. Which is a fascist slogan. That's fascism to place the country first. You are all sheep for the country. We're going to slaughter whoever we need to if the country is better off. Country first funny fathers are rolling in their graves. This is about the individual first. The country is our servant. Government is our servant. We are not the servants of the state. We are not at sacrificial land. So I'd say it started in the 19th century. It was intellectual. It was about ideas, ideas, ideas. And those ideas, you know, came in through the universities. They came through our educational establishment. It took a long time to corrupt America publicly. It's taken about a hundred years. But they corrupted us enough. So we got a Wilson with the income tax and League of Nations and the Federal Reserve. And they corrupted us enough so that we get FVR and all the new real policies. And of course it's just gotten worse since then. It would become more and more collectivistic, less and less individualistic, less and less focused on our lives and getting more and more guilt ridden because lady and people are dying really all over the world and we're not doing anything about it and we should. Which is what these ideas lead to. They lead to the crippling of the good for the sake of the suffering. Good or bad. So it's a process. And it's fundamentally ideal. It's not an event. By the question you answered about helping Haiti or not helping Haiti during World War II the Roosevelt administration disallowed a lot of escape troops from the Holocaust from entering the country and one could argue that that was done in their self-interest. So by your rationale, do you think that was correct? No. I believe that people have a right to emigrate or people have a right to exclude people from this country or patrol. The Jews coming to the United States in the 1930s were not at risk to the United States. There was no interest that we had to exclude them and to keep them out and I certainly think they should have been allowed in. I think it's one of the great travesties one of the great historical travesties that we didn't allow them. That we didn't allow those who wanted to flee Hitler and the atrocities that Hitler was going to commit and was committing to come to this country. Jews Slovaks, Russians, whatever. Remember what it says in the Statue of Liberty we are the land of the free. But I'll make it more controversial since that's an easy one. Should we have entered World War II to save the Jews? Imagine Paul Harbour never happened Jews are being slaughtered in Europe. Should the United States have gone there? Because I'd be a hypocrite if I said yes because I happen to be from Jews background, but we shouldn't go to save the wounded. But I'm not going to be a hypocrite. I'm not going to say no. We shouldn't. It's not the United States job to go to Europe and save the Jews. The only reason to go to Europe is if we believe Hitler was a real threat to the United States. To the lives and property of America. And that's a debate you could have. But it's not to save Europeans of whatever type. So I don't think wars should be for humanitarian grounds. I don't think we should send one soldier to fight for somebody else's food from other countries' food. Because of my views on immigration. There's no reason to keep them out. So let's say I have relatives in Germany and I want to invite them to come and live with me. How is the government how does the government have a role in stopping them from coming in? I mean, I'm an American citizen. I have a right to have anybody I want on my property. Who are they to tell me no, you cannot have this person or that person. So there was no basis by which to exclude them. There's a big difference in saying I'm going to risk life and huge amounts of resources and money and so on for the sake of other people versus saying I'm going to let them come in. No cost to me. Quite the conflict. These benefits to me because they would have been productive people in the world more people that we could have traded with. And they would have escaped the horrors of World War II which is ultimately bad for us but I don't believe it meets that level where you say just because somebody else is fighting a war and if they didn't fight a war where you better I'm going to risk people's lives in order to stop that. You have to make the case. And I think you probably can make the case because we've got to hit it. That it is a real existential threat to America. Only then is it justified to intervene. You should not be taking out kids to fight wars for humanitarian reasons to save people. And it doesn't matter if it's five people or five million people getting killed. It's not a question of numbers. It's a question of concern. Okay, we're going to take another question from the online audience. Spencer Roan from Cornell asks wouldn't your position on these public policies such as Medicare and welfare be dependent on what group you're part of? Let's say for instance you're a recipient of welfare wouldn't it be in your self-interest to be for welfare because it benefits you? That's a great question. The answer is no. But why? Self-interest is not just whatever you feel like. Self-interest is not just whatever can get you cash in your pocket to go and buy you some food right now. Self-interest is about living life to its fullest. It's about taking responsibility for your own life. It's about being productive. It's about being rational. It's about engaging in the world. I kind of described that in an earlier answer. By giving people welfare we are actually making it impossible for them to live that kind of world. They are the victims of welfare. They cannot flourish. They cannot be successful. They cannot, for example gain the skills to get a job. So let's take minimum wage. It's an easy one, right? We have minimum wage at $8.50. What if you're a 16-year-old out of school, you need a work support yourself, maybe your family and all your worth in the business world, people are worth something and companies make a profit over every employee. What if you're only worth $6.00 an hour? Because you're not that productive. You're not that talented. You're not that educated. You're only worth $6.00 an hour. That means you're never going to have a job. Now if you got a job at $6.00 an hour then you would learn skills and you would get better. One day you'd make $8.00 and one day you'd make $10.00 and maybe you'd make $20.00 and if you're really ambitious and talented you might become the store manager and you might run the whole company one day. Certainly in the 19th century lots of people, you know the Carnegie's and the Melons and the Vanderbilt started with nothing. Nothing. Much poorer than any poor person today. And they rose up and made something of themselves. So the sky's the limit. But if you can't start, the society tells you if you're not worth $8.50 we're going to pay you not to work. Which is what welfare does. What the minimum wage does. We're going to pay you not to work because you know what? We feel sorry for you. You're pathetic. That is destructive. That's not helpful. You're not helping anybody. You're increasing unemployment and you're destroying the spirit of those people. So it's not in their self-interest to take welfare. What's in their self-interest is to have a thriving free capitalist economy in which they can thrive and succeed and rise up. Now what if you're about to retire? You've paid into the system. You'd be told forever that you're going to get Medicare and Social Security and so on. And then Iran comes along and pulls the rug from under you and takes it all away. That I agree. I think that would be wrong. You know if you're 65 or 70 and you know you paid into the system. It's your money. You've been led to believe that this will exist. That's not how you solve the problem. You don't solve the problem. We're just taking it away from them all at once. This is something that has to be phased out over time. We need to tell 20-year-olds that they won't have Social Security. But they won't have Medicare and Medicaid. 40-year-olds that they'll get a little bit. 60-year-olds maybe get everything. And then you slowly, so that in 40 years there is no Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. But nobody expected it. Nobody was taxed in order to provide for you know the so-called trust fund this mythical trust fund that Social Security had. It's all out on the table. Everybody knows what's going on. So it takes time to transition. You don't have self-interest is again not about what's momentary. It's about what life a full, complete life requires on you. And you can't get that. You can't get you know, you can't get happiness. You can't get flourishing from being a leech on somebody else. It's not possible. So you are those who advocate for welfare because they're receiving welfare. Businessmen who advocate for subsidies are self-destructive. They're doing themselves harm. The thing businessmen should strike towards is to advocate for capitalism, advocate for freedom, advocate for a real competitive market in which they can match wits with their competitors. And you know, that's where you get the self-esteem. If you're getting the subsidies, you're never going to be successful, full of self-esteem type of CEO. You're going to know that you cheated because it's cheating. Cheating doesn't work. Cheating doesn't you know, lead to self-esteem. Lying, cheating, stealing, don't lead to self-esteem. Don't lead to happiness or death or not in your self-interest. There's a question. I'm going to elaborate on the right line. Bad people. The question here. Jennifer Son, University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia asked, how can we as students apply the concepts we've spoken of to our everyday lives, such as to the classes that we take? Well, I mean, I think these principles are exactly the kind of principles that need to be applied to day-to-day lives. Iron Man called her philosophy a philosophy for living on day-to-day lives. It's a philosophy for living day-to-day lives and making decisions about your life every single day. You need to sit down and figure out what I want to do in life. What's really important to me in life as a student? You know, what is my passion? And then structure the classes you take you know, the kind of courses you want to do, the direction you take. According to that. And now we're going to be classes you're going to be forced to take because the university has decided you have to take some boring classes that are too relevant to what you actually want to do in life. And the fact is that that class should be a lot less important to you than the class that is really crucial to what you want to do in life. And I would spend the necessary amount of time to pass the one class and I would spend an extraordinary amount of time on the other one to really excel at the other class because it is essential. But that's two of the relationships you have with people around you. I mean who are good people around you, good people in the sense that they reflect back the kind of values that you believe in that you think are good. Who's going to help you be a better person? Not by helping you, by getting you passed, but by their own example. Who can you benefit from them up? So your relationships, the classes you take, I mean even your relationship to to your family, to your parents, I mean you have to be objective about those things. How important are they? Are they important? How much time should I spend? Do I owe them anything? Because our parents think we owe them everything. We don't. We don't owe them. The fact is kids don't owe their parents anything. Parents owe the kids something. They owe them to help raise them until they're 18. Or until whatever their legal age happens to be. Raise them well until that's the responsibility that a parent takes on when they have a child. You wouldn't ask to come into this world. You don't owe your parents anything. Now, if you love them if you respect them, great that's wonderful. Spend time with them. You know value them, that's wonderful. But what if you don't like them? You don't owe them anything. You don't owe them. So be rational. Be objective about every aspect of your life with students and as a human being. And again, take the time to think about what's really important to you and take the time to acknowledge your own worth and your own success. When they're real if you really have earned the success and earned that work take the time to reflect on that that's what's going to allow you to have the self esteem to cry out to me the happiness to really go through life and be successful. We'll get to, well actually we'll do one more and then we'll get one from the live audience next. I don't have a school but the question is, is belief in God incongruent with objectivism? I ask this in light of what you say about our founding fathers. It's my understanding that many of our founding fathers were religious or as Rand would put them, mystics. So I don't think the founding fathers were objectivists. Let's be very clear, they couldn't have been. Ein Rand was born you know, a hundred and some years after the founding of the country. So the philosophy of objectivism didn't exist at the time of the founding fathers. And we can debate how religious the founding fathers were. I think a significant number of them weren't very religious. Many of them were deists. You know, potentially some were even atheists. But you know, it's not the point. They weren't objectivists. They were about as good as you could be, I think. As good as you could be in the late 18th century, given the knowledge, given the philosophy, given what came before them, given, you know, their circumstances. They were about as best as you could be. I mean they are geniuses and they are giants and they deserve our fullest respect, even if we disagree with them on this or that. And we certainly disagree with them. I disagree with Jefferson more on public education. Some of the things are certainly, you know, some of the founding fathers' attitudes with slavery. There are lots of things to disagree with the founding fathers while acknowledging they are genius and they are great. So you can't use them. You know, I compliment them all the time on their political philosophy, which I think was revolutionary and very striking. But they didn't have it all. They didn't have the right ethics. They certainly didn't have the right epistemology and the right metaphysics. They couldn't have had thought of it yet. Ain Rand was the one who thought of these things. Now to be an objective, I do not believe that you can believe in God. Because to be an objective means a commitment, a hundred percent commitment, unwavering commitment to reason, to the facts of reality, to what exists, to evidence, to objectivity. And the fact is that God is outside of that. God requires faith. No matter how you define it, no matter how you present it, at the end of the day there's no evidence for this being. There's no facts that suggest his existence. You have to say in spite of the fact that there's no facts, I'm going to believe it anyway. That's faith. And that's a negation of reason. And while many people, like the founders, can still be great political philosophers and still do that, and I'd rather have the founding fathers around than pretty much anybody else, that's not objective. That's not objective. Objectivism is, put it positively, rather negative, an absolute commitment to reason in everything, including the question of you know, how did this work come about? What created it? Where did we as human beings come from? All of that is the answer needs to come from reason. It needs to come from science. It needs to come from wrath and from it. So the answers are incompatible in spite of our deep respect for the family. I'm a crowd tea party member and have been a member of events in several states. And the way that it sort of seems to have unfolded is that we've been defined by the media always in negative terms. And actually, the last answer was a decent number statistically are evangelicals. I'm not personally, but many are. And yet we and the objectivist mindset, we're on the same page in so many issues. I know what your experiences were with the tea party, if there have been any. And also if you think that we'll be able to overcome this media definition of ourselves, which I have found to be completely untrue. So the question is really about the tea party. So let me start by saying that I think the tea party's phenomena is phenomenal. It's really, really good. And it's good in this sense. Americans stood up and said enough is enough. We've had it. We're coaching in our freedoms too much. You know, government is growing too big. We want you out of our line. Enough is enough. And they brought back the Constitution, which is not a very sexy topic before. And now everybody's talking about the Constitution. And that's all really, really good. And generally, I think tea party members in a sense, real Americans, they grounded in the American sense of life and what it means to be an individualistic American, at least at the emotional level. That is, that is the case. And I've had a lot of experience with the tea party people. I've given a lot of talks in front of a variety of different tea party people. There's a problem with the tea party. And this is why they are open to criticism from the media. And the problem is that it's not an intellectual movement. It's an emotional movement. It's primarily an emotional response. For most tea party members that I've encountered, they want smaller government, for example. They want government out of their lives. Well, once you start listing the programs, they're very, very hesitant to name anyone that they'd actually cut. Or anyone that they feel comfortable passionately advocating should be cut. When you ask them, what should be the standard for cutting program? How do we decide which to keep them? They don't know. The standard, in my opinion, should be does it protect the individual rights? Or doesn't it? If it doesn't, it should go. If it does, keep it. And there are very few things that we keep in that scenario. They have this understanding of the constitution, which I think is generally superficial. And generally they quote a lot, but they don't have the philosophical understanding of the enlightenment roots of that document. And to me, there's one concept. There's one concept that is missing party somehow got. It would change the history of the future of the United States in a deep way. And that is individuality. Nobody talks about individuality. And this is why I believe they don't understand the constitution. Constitution today is some document written by the gods, the founding fathers. And it's flawless. And it somehow reveals the truth to us. When that's not that's not what the document is. It's the legal document put together by a group of men who come from a particular tradition of the enlightenment thinking, come from a deep understanding of individual rights. And the document is shaped by the declaration of independence, a document nobody ever used. So the tea parties lack this intellectuality. And therefore they leave themselves open for influence from the religious light, which is very anti-intellect, not just non-intellect, but anti-intellect. And so the evangelical rights, the dual way of the separation between states, all from the pragmatists and Republicans. We just want everything to continue as it was before and don't walk the boat. And those are the influences influencing and they're also open. So what I think is kind of the populism of a syrupy. No real ideas. We hate the Wall Street, we hate the drug companies just like Obama does. We're for freedom and we're for, you know, the founding fathers. What does that mean she has made? And that's why the media can latch on and portray them in a certain way. And the future, and so there's a certain, I think the media is wrong and I think they were able to do it, but there's a certain legitimacy to it. The tea party's not deep intellectual. It needs it and it doesn't have intellectual leadership. If the tea party can find that intellectuality, if they can discover the concept of individual rights and put that on the banner. That should be the banner. I mean, understand that concept. Then I think the media will have to back off because this is going to be a serious group that can really talk about serious things and really challenge the Republicans and Democrats on the core issues, not on superficies. But it really needs to become intellectual and that's a challenge and that's why I go and speak to it because it's not going to be coming to a lecture like that. It needs those ideas and we all have to go off and talk about those ideas. But we need to talk about ideas not just about emotions and not just about superficial stuff that we can do. Another question from our online audience. Jeff from the University of Wisconsin in Whitewater asks, both egoism and altruism claim life as the good that just varies on whose life we're talking about. Why should one choose life at all? There is no why to choosing life. But if you don't choose life, fine. I think we're on the fourth floor here and open one of the windows and we can end it. So morality doesn't start according to Rand until you choose life because only that choice of living makes the choice of values which is what morality is about possibly. There is no values in pursuit of death. The only thing in pursuit of death is death. There's no morality relevant to somebody who chooses not to live. So there is no why to choose life other than it's pretty good. Question from University of Colorado Denver. How is it not better for us in the long term to help those in need which then makes those benefits more likely to help us in the future which can serve the standard of life. It's a little bit clunky but I guess the meaning is how is it not better for us to help those in need long term because those benefits can circle back, reciprocate back. That's just nonsense. If I'm worried about losing my job one day about something really really bad happening to me that's what insurance is for. I can go out and buy insurance policy against disability in a free market my guess is you'll be able to buy insurance against a lot of different things and you can go and participate in a voluntary insurance pool which secures you from bad stuff happening to you. But you know I'm pretty confident in life and I believe that because I'm talented and because I work hard in my life from a financial perspective we'll only get better in the future and I'll buy insurance for the catastrophe and I want to live so helping somebody else doesn't rebound to me. I mean I'm never going to use welfare ever it's just not going to happen. So there's no in what right do you have because this isn't about voluntary pools in which we participate I help you, you help me now this is forced force I'm forced to help you whether I'm going to benefit from it or not or whether I think I'm going to benefit from it and I'm never going to if I'm forced to participate in this scheme and I never use it then I'm a loser if I do use it then somebody else is being forced to pay for my life that's not right that other people are forced to pay for me that doesn't enhance my life in any significant way or at all it's just wrong and it's wrong because it uses force to extract stuff from some people and give it to others and it's wrong because it makes this assumption that we're all going to equally likely to have bad stuff happen to us and I don't believe that we're going to have bad stuff happen to them they should take care of themselves and work that that stuff doesn't happen to them and if it does happen to them it's their problem it's not mine now there's an ascension which I like helping people and that is I like to help productive people if somebody productive who's basically a good person something bad happens to them they didn't have insurance for some reason yeah absolutely I'd help them and we have a long tradition in America building the barn going out all the neighbors coming together and building a house for somebody to burn down but you don't do it because when your house will burn down they'll help you because you don't plan for your house to burn down what you do is you do it because they're good people and you know that if they're successful their success will rebound on you I'm a trader I'm a believer in win-wins not lose-lose or lose-wins or if I lose that I believe in win-wins I want to help other people become more productive so that I can be more productive I want to help other people produce the next you know I promise not to use the iPhone in this talk so you know I want them to produce the next great innovation that I can benefit from I want people to go out there and work so that I can trade with them so my life will be better I'm focused on the positive not on the negative the negatives are way with your productive good human being accidents are rare you need to buy insurance to protect yourself against them and then you need to forget them and focus on the good stuff and focus on promoting the good and working and helping those people who deserve your help which are people who are productive people who contribute to your life in one way or another Question from Elan at Princeton Dr. Brooke thank you for speaking to us today you've argued against income redistribution programs in healthcare like Medicare and individual charity as an alternative should we similarly fund the military through voluntary contributions why or why not so first my alternative is not charity I don't believe charity is the alternative charity is a side issue it's irrelevant the alternative is taking care of yourself the alternative is getting a job saving money and buying insurance and in a free market insurance is cheap you only buy it for catastrophic stuff as I said you only buy it for the real bad stuff and save and work and live so I'm not about charity charity will take care of the people at the margins there's a very very tiny fraction of people who really can't take care of themselves but if you can take care of yourself take care of yourself I don't believe in a huge huge amount of charity a free society is charitable but doesn't need much charity people take care of themselves and it's not that hard at all and partially as the immigrants who came to this country in the 19th century with nothing nothing they had nothing in Europe they were being killed over there they got on boats and came over here with nothing they had no relatives here they had nothing over here and they worked their butts off there was no safety net there was no security there was no Medicare there was nothing and yet they lived incredible lives because they took care of themselves and their kids they saved what a conflict they saved they thought long term and they put money aside to take care of themselves and their kids and they sent them to good schools and then within a generation or two their kids were middle class or rich maybe in less than two years you don't need charity you don't need a social safety net to protect you a tiny fraction a tenth of one percent maybe a hundredth of one percent needs charity nobody won't be there for them the best of us don't need it so I just want to correct Elon's assumption that I think charity now how would we fund the military which is a fundamental question and the answer is yes the military should be funded by voluntary taxation that is everybody should write a check to the government to fund the military I don't believe in compulsory taxation it's equivalent of theft so rational people who care about their lives and we're only going to get to a free country where there's even a question of how to fund the military if we're rational and care about our lives rational people who care about their lives would be eager, happy to write a check to the government and I bet you you'd raise every year more than the military needed and they'd have to refund some of the money because people would be so eager to pay for stuff that they get it and you know where you are you're probably likely to write a bigger check why? you've got more assets to be protected you've got more to lose at least because of physical stuff and that's through the police that's through the judiciary that's through the military the three things I think government should be funded I don't believe in privatizing police and government I don't believe in competing on the same geographic area funded primarily through voluntary taxation and will there be free riders? free riders are people who don't pay and benefit from the fact that most of us do pay yes do I care? not so much is there a way to deal with free riders? absolutely I think what the government should do is publish on the internet the names of everybody who's paid and if you see that your neighbor's not on there don't talk to him don't sell him stuff in your store don't employ him there's no right to be employed there's no right let's use social shunning in order to get rid of those people who are free riders there's plenty of ways sort of pulling out a gun and forcing somebody to participate to put healthy pressure on people to do what they should be doing so yes I believe in complete voluntary taxation and I think it would be easy and trivial to raise the kind of money we're not talking about a lot of money not the kind of military I would have it would be small and incredibly powerful and we wouldn't be afraid to use it when we take a couple of questions we'll see what's going on I would give charity to any cause but it was from my own will and not due to any societal obligations would you say that's not of my self-interest even though I really wanted to do that in other words is self-interest is there like a general definition for self-interest or do we all define it ourselves well it would depend on what generated that will right was it just a whim an emotion of the moment I'd say that's not self-interest self-interest is what is really good for you or in the long term rationally thought out now I can think of lots of scenarios where giving charity is consistent with that definition that giving charity is good for me in the long run for my life only my life better in the long run and it really will depend on your personal values so there's not one charity that we all have to give to you we are different we don't exactly have the same value but there are lots of lots of causes first of all you might have you might have a family member something horrible has happened to it can't take it of themselves anymore you love this person you had a relationship with this person it's good for you to help this person because of that love because of that that's a project you might want to give you know money to medical research in certain fields also because if they cure that your life would be better off for you to be cured of your children or your people that you love and the people that you care about I really love babies I think they're really cute they have this incredible human potential if I had money that would be a charity that I would support orphan children or something like that I get a value from them I get a value from human beings that are going to be productive and I do it under the assumption that these kids in that sense they're not bad people they're too small they have this incredible potential to be productive so you have to vastly make those decisions about what is consistent with your long-term well-being and what is inconsistent with your long-term well-being is inconsistent with your long-term well-being there's no difference in that sense in a principle between saying the cocaine is here I feel like doing it or I feel like giving to that charity the principle is the same you're doing it because you have this whim you have this momentary it's meaningless in terms of your long-term well-being neither cocaine to probably be more harmful to you than that but the principle is what you really want you want to get away from gratification and there's nothing wrong with instant gratification if it's towards a long-term well-being and that's true of the kind of relaxation the kind of games you play and so on saying don't get the instant gratification of computer games but do it with the idea that we need to relax, we need to play play is important to our lives within limits if we do it X number of hours a day X number of minutes a day we're going to dominate our lives question from Justin Malone at UC Berkeley Justin asks as far as Libya I must ask cannot a randian self-interested perspective be compatible with improving the world? isn't it better for us to live in a world where all the countries are civilized? we could trade with them have a smaller military even emigrate if the US government makes too many bad laws oh absolutely it would be great 100% in support of a free capitalist rights-respecting Libya the question is would I risk my life for that? if it was even possible we're not talking about a rights-respecting freedom and if I want to risk my life for it I could go volunteer I could probably find a fisherman in Italy who would smuggling me into India into Libya and I could go fight with the rebels to free Libya and turn them into this wonderland the question fundamentally is do I have a right to force you to fight for Libya? and I think it's wrong you cannot bring about a world which respects rights by not respecting rights you're not going to bring about a free world by not respecting the freedom of America of the people where you are so yes we all want that world and you love Libya so much you want to go fight for it I don't think it's in your self-interest by the way but we have a self-interest in making the world a better place but not in sacrifice goes back to the original question now I would even say this in the case of Libya there was a time where you could argue quite clearly in the 1980s and early 90s that Muammar Gaddafi was a threat to the United States he killed America this guy deserves to die and if Ronald Reagan had had the guts to kill him in the 1980s we would be living in a much safer world today and he didn't he bombed the tent where he knew Muammar Gaddafi wasn't there I know there's the same story about United States bombed Gaddafi in the 1980s after he was clearly he was responsible for bombing of a discotheque in Berlin where US soldiers were killed he was responsible for a bunch of terrorism and we bombed him and we were flying the US was flying out of Britain and had to fly over France so we asked the French for permission to fly over them to bomb Libya and the French said no and everybody's assumption is well wimpy French they just want to kill Muammar Gaddafi but that's not what actually happened the French what the French said was if you were commit to it the purpose of the mission is to kill Gaddafi you can fly over but if you're just going there to pin-break this guy and just piss him off some more and not do really anything about him then we don't want to be involved that's the wimpy Australia the French the French don't when they get involved they're the ones bombing Gaddafi's compound right now it's not that bad when they go to war at least in modern times they usually lose still but they don't do it in a wimpy way as we do we lose and we're starting to finish if we killed Gaddafi back then it would have been completely justified in the world because he was trying to kill America the fact is that right now he's not trying to kill America and the fact is there's a country in the Middle East that's killing its own civilians with building nuclear weapons they pray every Friday death to the Satan which is the United States they want to destroy our allies they fund terrorism all the time and they get a pass and that's what illustrates how altruistic how self-sacrificial this Libyan thing is instead of going to Iran and destroying that regime which is a true threat to the United States we go after somebody who was a threat 20 years ago but is no longer he's still a threat to his own people but not a threat to us we have no foreign policy and a strategy if we, if the United States had a real foreign policy if we were committed to destroying anybody who wanted to kill and you know not just wanted, a lot of people wanted but it was actually engaging in activities that would lead us, lead them to kill America if we are to lead destroy and what unequivocable who our enemies and who our friends were if we had a foreign policy that did not deal with dictators and authoritarian regime because it's not in our interest to deal with them and they could go to hell if we protected our oil that we discovered in the Arabian Peninsula that they stole from us since when does oil belong to the king of Saudi Arabia belong to the people who drilled for it and who found it which are the oil companies if we had a foreign policy that stood up to all these things then the world would be clear because they'd look at us and say we want to be like those guys and then the riots in Egypt and the demonstrations in Egypt wouldn't be to establish a what I think is going to happen a significantly religious state an Islamic state not maybe as radical as Iran but moving in that direction it would be truly to establish freedom because they'd have a model for freedom if we want the world to be a better place this is where we need a fight and the fight here is not a weapons fight it's an ideological fight the world would be a hundred times better a million times better if the United States can and should be if the United States would turn to a foreign policy they would then want to emulate the problem is we have no foreign policy we have no colonial strategy we're willing to sacrifice for everything and we're destroying internally the principles that allow us to do it why shouldn't the military be privatized what is fundamentally different from that so the fundamental difference between the military and police is the fact that they are instruments of force force is the anti-reason it inhibits human survival it's evil force is evil the initiation of force is wrong and it's wrong because what's required for human existence what's required for human flourishing is the human mind is the ability to think and act on those thoughts and engage them it doesn't matter what you think you have to do what I tell you otherwise I'm going to blow you up I don't care what reason tells you this is what you got to do it's the opposite it's the opposite of markets markets about freedom about trading win-win force is the antithesis of market the antithesis of reason the antithesis of human existence you can't compete on that you can create a market in the anti-market it doesn't work it's incredibly destructive it's self-destruct what you need to do with force is move it out of society create one entity that monopolizes it that just controls it and keeps it out of human existence the whole purpose of government at least the American government the whole purpose of government generally is to monopolize music it's to extract force from society that's a good thing a good government extracts the use of force from society and then only uses it in retaliation only uses it in self-defense never uses it you know initiate but again it's not a tradable commodity it's not like another good it's not another human characteristic this is evil you cannot trade in evil you cannot market in evil and it just doesn't work what does that lead to? it's the warfare, gang warfare just go to Somalia and see what anarchy does and you have competing military tribalism, collectivism all of that is going to flourish in the day-to-day society and you're going to get authoritarianism there's no question in my mind that anarchy with private police forces private military leads to authoritarianism or to complete annihilation of civilization a question from the University of Chicago let's say somebody comes up with a cure for cancer it's in their best interest to try and control the wealth of society as they bleed the country dry via the price of the cure how does objectivism prevent tyranny? I don't, I guess I don't get why it's tyranny I come up with a cure for cancer I have I have a right, a legal right to burn it and never to use it I don't think that's moral I don't think that would be right it wouldn't be the way I further my life how would I further my life the best by selling it and would I charge such a price that nobody can afford it what do I gain by that I'm not going to become rich the whole point is to charge a price where lots of people can afford it so I can make lots of money so what does it even mean to bleed the country dry now it doesn't allow me to make a lot of money and that lots of people what do you mean is now let's flip this around you have cancer, I have the cure does that give you a right to my cure I invented the cure, I have a pill right here it's my pill, you have a right to it you don't have a right to my stuff you don't have a right to what I invented if you can trade wait, if you can't trade it's sad for you it's unfortunate that's reality, that's the fact once you allow the cancer patient to pull out a gun and force me to provide him with the cure then the gun force is open in society anytime I want something and you have it I'm going to pull out a gun and take it and we will legitimize that so there's no tyranny here this is what freedom is the opposite is tyranny it's a drug company to provide drugs for free to price them low that's tyranny, that's taking away choices now you can talk about the fact that if I price it right and it's a huge audience I can take the money I can fund R&D I can take more drugs I can take more cures I can help more people I can make even more money but I'm doing it because take another dimension of this you know most drug companies would probably have a charitable part where they do help people who can't afford it because we have an interest in supporting human life people are basically good so but they don't have to do that there's no moral imperative one more if there's any audience here and one more from online anyone else in the audience I think you already got one I'm in a philosophy class right now I'm very vocal in that class and a student in that class would like to talk to me over spring break he's essentially an ideological Christian as well as a libertarian I'm kind of wondering when he came to me and wanted to talk at what point in a conversation with someone who's interested in your ideas but has conflicting ideas how do you know when to just stop and move on let me know you know because you have to evaluate the use of your time and how is it best used and if you feel like if you feel like you're just hitting up against a big wall and nothing is getting through and the person is dating and they don't want to look but that doesn't mean that you're talking to somebody and they just get it that just is not going to happen what you're trying to do is lay a certain foundation for them to go home and think about it and maybe slightly moderate their position so that the next conversation becomes more productive but if you have a conversation with a person and then they go home and think about it and then the next conversation is exactly the same as the first one there's nothing stuck and nothing has changed but don't expect this is a huge mistake of Jekyll Smith don't expect just because you got it that everybody's going to get it and they're going to get it as fast as you in exactly the same way as you did this takes time this is hard stuff particularly for philosophy students it's hard for them and the more you think deeply the harder it's going to be because the more questions come about I'm not a philosopher, it's hard stuff that's why I only do some of the philosophy because it's easy stuff that I kind of understand but the deeper you go it's really difficult so you have to respect that you have to respect that context of knowledge and you have to respect that learning takes time changing one's mind takes time when I read Atlas Shrug I was a socialist I was a Zionist and I was an ultra explicitly in here I was committed to those three ideas i.e. altruism, collectivism and socialism doesn't get any worse you know if somebody would have come to me and started blabber mouthing about objectivism or capitalism I would have ignored them and you slowly get drawn into it you get a speech and there's a mystery and you get another speech and you kind of say that makes sense and you argue with it and by the time John Galt's speech comes around you know that's it and then there's 70 pages to convince you but it's time and effort and a lot of thinking it took me a long time to read Atlas Shrug the first time because I fought it I wouldn't believe a word because it seemed completely nuts to me it contradicted everything that I brought up to believe and that I believed it happened so you have to take into account and have a different starting point some people read Atlas Shrug and say this is what I felt all along I knew this, this is how I wanted this this is my life nothing here contradicts me that did not happen so I have a lot more sympathy for people who struggle with it because it's hard it took me years to shake off you know getting teary-eyed and they really flag it go up or feeling sorry for people from the altruism thing the fact that you change your ideas it's a long time to completely undo all this stuff so this is hard work and if you want to help somebody you have to you have to be willing to be patient now I'm not saying at some point you have to say enough enough but you have to be willing to be patient to realize that this is a process and that they have to be thinking that you can do it Taylor, Texas A&M University have the last question for tonight what can one do on a local level and then an individual level to win the future well I think that the two things and you have to start with the individual level you have to start with what you need to do with yourself and that is what you need to do with yourself is live the best life that you can live for yourself understand the philosophy understand how it applies to your life and live it make the most of your life so that you're not going to be able to go out thinking it's anybody if you're not living you just come off as a individual and if you don't understand it at least with a certain level then I think if you want to change the world you have to go out and fight for it it means talking to people it means trying to convince them it means moving them it means engaging with the world engaging with ideas but understanding that it's fundamental ideas that change the world it's not the particular solution to social security you need that as well but you need to understand why social security is wrong it's a violation of rights you need to understand those things you need to fight at that level there are plenty of people who do economic stuff but stay always committed to your own values and I think fighting I used to think fighting was optional I don't think fighting is that optional I think the world is too far gone to be on the sideline I think that once you get it and once you get your life in order you've got to go out there and fight for your life because the future is not guaranteed. 50 years ago everything was good there was some smoothness to American life next generation was always better off than the previous one and the risks were seemed distant they're not distant anymore at least they don't seem distant anymore it's time to fight for what you believe in and that means speak there's no alternative on the elevator, in the classroom to your buddies to people you don't know whether you get involved in the tea parties or whether you get involved in local politics or national politics whatever the group or the forum or the format it is talk talk talk try to educate try to influence don't expect miracles don't expect people to just convert like that just try to influence, move them along try to make them better than they were 5 minutes before you can make people incrementally better have better ideas then if all of us dedicate ourselves to doing that I think this battle in spite of the long odds is a winner thank you thank you