 Thanks. Thanks for inviting me. This is, I think, my, I can't remember now, my third, I think, Fedsaq, Cornell, Fedsaq Talk. So, it's really nice to be back at Cornell. I'll just play it called. It is called. And I know it's going to be called then. If this is good because it is going to be some disagreement here, which is what makes these kinds of events so interesting and fun. I probably fit more in the number one category of the three that we saw there, although I think Adam Schmidt would be one in three. So, or he would be three and there's a counterpoint to one, but we can, it's such a good question because of course there's the two books. Yes. And it, I think this could be the other one. So, but yes, so I'm going to take a completely different approach. I'm going to take both the philosophical approach and then I'll come back to some of the issues that were raised because I think they're important. And some of them I'll cover here and some of them we'll cover now. You know, discussion is great because, because we both deal with finance. I think the example from the race of financial ones, I was a finance professor a long time ago. Even so, even though I'm going to post this philosophically, we'll then get it to the track from the degree if you guys want to in the Q&A. So, to me, the question of all questions fundamentally is, what is the kind of society that breeds individual human follow? I don't like concepts like social welfare, public good, common good, because I don't know what they mean. Yes, we can aggregate them. But if some people are really suffering a lot, is that justified? This is the whole issue of an inequality, for example. Does that justify some people doing really well? I didn't even measure that, all those. I want to build a society. I'm looking for a society where individuals are free to pursue their function. Some of them will see it, some of them will fail. They're still having big inequalities, maybe. But the studies are built to optimize some utilitarian function. The studies built to optimize your ability to pursue your happiness. And I think, so I think that the, I love the reason independence, but we got that, right? So happiness is one of my favorite terms. I like the whole idea of a government is to do basically one thing. And that is to protect your freedom, to protect your rights, the life, liberty, and property, and the pursuit of happiness. Why? And this is really the question of why do we need government at all? Why can't we just go out there into the world and pursue stuff we want and figure stuff out as we go along? So take a step back. What does it mean, what is the tool that we as human beings need in order to achieve anything in order to pursue happiness? In order to pursue anything, really? What is it that we need to be able to do? What is it that one skill set that we have as humans that's unique to human beings that remains possible? This hall, this technology, cool microphones, all of that. What makes it all possible? What does it come from? Your question. What makes us human? Intelligence. Yeah, intelligence. Our minds. Our capacity to think, our capacity to reason, our capacity to conceptualize, not our thumbs. It is our minds. Our ability to think rationally about the world. That is what fundamentally makes us human. To be successful as human beings, we need to be successful at solving problems. We need to be successful at understanding reality and ultimately shaping reality and the fit, shaping nature, shape the world that is fit, our needs as human beings. When I'm programmed to know what's good or bad, what is a successful path, what is a nausea path, we just are not that kind of animal. We are programmed to self-procure, to figure it out based on the evidence before us. What is the right path to go by? And what reason, what human rationality requires to do that is what some people call an open mind. It needs to be able to explore, it needs to be able to look, it needs to be able to think about, it needs to be able to take in all the evidence and conclude whatever conclusions, whatever the data shows. So what the mind needs in order to really optimize its performance in terms of human worship, what it needs is freedom. What it needs is the ability to think outside of the box, to think new thoughts and not be interfered. We know what happens when it's interfered. We know what happens together there or we know what happens to whole sections of human history where people are not allowed to think, where people are not allowed to act based on their thoughts. At the end of the day, the enemy of reason, the enemy of rationality is force, it's courage, it's a power that tells us what we can and cannot do, what we can and cannot think, what we can and cannot act towards. That's the enemy of human fortune because it restricts what we can look at and what conclusions we can use. And when we come together in a society, there are people that will use force, that will try to impose their authority upon us. There are people who will use coercion in order to achieve anything. And in my view, the role of government and really the only role of it is to stop it. It's to protect us from it. In other words, create a space in which we are free as individuals to do as we please, to find the things that will lead to our success, our happiness, our values, the things that we care about based on our conclusions, based on our patterns, including the idea that we often fail, maybe as part of life. But at least that's for each other, knowing from those failures and figuring it out internally. And to band together with other people and to form corporate, to form businesses, societies or whatever kind of entities we form with other people. But based on the principle of each one of us is a free individual free to live their lives as they seek freedom. They seek freedom without other people seeking freedom. Government is there to protect us. It's to protect that freedom. You know, this is a thing somewhat systemical. The idea is to found this ad, the idea of rights, the blocking of notions of rights, the idea that rights are really freedoms of action, that our freedoms, that our rights are things, the rights to act. And by protecting your right to act, you're protecting your ability to live your life by your mind, by your standard. And then whatever happens happens. It's how the economy then organized. Once we restrict, restrict coercion, eliminating force, eliminate authority. What happens? Well, we don't know exactly, but we got to close to it. You know, after the founding of the country, put aside slavery, the abomination of slavery, there was a lot of freedom. And what we got were free markets. Free markets are not imposed by government. Free markets are what evolves when government gets out of the way. Free markets are what evolves when government step back and all it does. It's so to protect our rights. And part of that protection involves defining, often defining those rights, the scope of those rights, like property. Where does the property begin? Where does it end? Those are not easy questions to answer. You guys will probably take a property class and you'll discover that, right? It's so easy to think over it. It's intellectual property. Some of these questions are tricky questions. That's why we need a legislature. That's why we need a government to figure this out, to debate, to argue, to discuss, and ultimately come up with a conclusion of what are the limits? What is force? What is coercion? Again, a big legal issue. But that's what we need government to do, is to define those things in the Senate with objective, hopefully, laws that we can all understand. And no, there's certain things I cannot do because it violates somebody else's feeling. But to me, that is the role of government. And from that role, markets emerge. And yes, the consequence of that is that much of what's on the books today, much of what the government does today, how to tell how much, whatever you mean, in the Senate, maybe more, does not fit into my definition of good government. Government is probably about, could probably shrink about 80% and fulfill what I would like to see government doing and nothing more. In my role, government does basically three things. In order to protect us, you need a police force, you need a military, and you need a judiciary system. In order to help obituary disputes, you need a legislature, and that's it. Legislature, executive branch, and judiciary, basically that's it. It doesn't need to act in society in any other capacity. We, as private citizens, in pursuit of our values, in pursuit of our life, base on our own ideas, consort everything else out. Do I have solutions to every problem presented out there? Well, of course not. I don't believe in central planning. I'm not going to have solutions, but I have a strong belief that markets solve these problems. Markets are tested. They do solve these problems. Markets fail. There's no question because individuals fail. We fail as individuals. So when we put us together, yes, markets can fail. But the best way out of market change is to start out the market. To explore, to test, to try different things, to figure out solutions, to come out of that solution. The worst thing if I do for market failure is for central planning to then step into it. I know how to fix it. I know how to do it right. I know what the solution is. And of course, that's to some extent a final word, because then the process becomes political. It doesn't become a process of voluntary exchange, a process of interaction, which is what markets based on the idea of voluntary exchange. So, the governor is there to protect us, leave us alone. It's one state, and she's that protection. None of that is simple, random. As a consequence, government would be a lot smaller. And in my ideal, in an ideal form of government, I would actually see a separation between state and economy. So I don't believe the government has the tools, the ability, or the right to regulate markets, including financial markets, including other markets, even when they fail. You know, I'm happy to talk about the welfare state, I'm happy to talk about specific market failures and specific regulations, but, you know, I'm not radical when it comes to the World Lookup. I want it from the smallest possible to that statement in the Declaration, Section of Right of Life, Liberty. Thank you. I'm just going to ask you to move your chairs a little bit closer, so you're also in the frame with Professor Ari. That's perfect. Professor Ari, you've heard a very different perspective on the role of government. What's your initial reaction to that just to get us going with the discussion? Yeah, I will actually keep it short, because I think it's right that one of the problems that I struggle with in my clear categories for the world is that we are constantly debating the definition of welfare and the precise types of market failures that exist. You know, there's conceptual tools there that are contested, in fact. But then I want to highlight that Yanzi has its own version of this, I think, which is the definition of freedom, where there are competing versions of what qualifies as freedom. Right? This is a problem I'll use to any of you, whatsoever. And again, like the choices that I'm trying to make about welfare and the application of specific tools, we're also making choices about which version of freedom we want to see. There's the law of freedom of action. There are other, you know, getting back to the same time period. Other conceptions of freedom that do envision a potentially different tool from the state in creating a positive freedom of opportunity that also sort of deserves a fair hearing in these type of debates. There are antiphetical discussions about free markets. The example that I was given this regard is the poor kid growing up in terrible circumstances within a terrible school system that has few opportunities. A free society wants that person to fulfill their potential. And in doing that, we have to ask the question whether negative freedoms, freedom from state intervention and freedom of action are sufficient to make sure that that flourishing happens. Not because we care about the individual that we do, but we care about society's benefits from having that individual reach their maximum potential or at least have the opportunity to reach that maximum potential. So I'll leave it at that. Yeah, I'll just comment and then we'll take questions. So take that individual, so I think we all agree we want that individual so we have that ability or the opportunity to flourish and be successful. I will take the perspective of yes, I do care about the individual. Individuals matter to me. It's not about what that individual contributes. Society that matters to me is his ability to live a happy life that matters to me. I think that is my small perspective is individual happens, individual flourishing. I want every individual not to achieve it because you can't guarantee that but to have the opportunity for that. I asked myself, particularly today, right? I'd asked myself, why is this kid poor in a rich country like America? Why is he getting such a crummy education in a rich country like America? Why are we living in a time where the country is so rich and yet there's some people and some people concentrated in certain places and certain communities getting such horrible lives? I mean, it's a massive injustice and it's horrible. And I come to the conclusion that much of it is as a consequence of a lack of freedom. As much too much a central planner's attempt to relieve him, to relieve this kid of his suffering, let's call it, is actually causing that stuff. That the welfare state is to a large extent responsible for these problems. It's no accident that public education is stratified. It's clear that public education, the worst education is provided to the poorest people. And it's not even close. If you're middle class, upper class in the United States, you get a decent public education. People complain about how horrible public education is in the U.S. but middle class and wealthy do fine. But if you're poor in America, the public educational system is horrific. Why? Because it's public. Imagine an educational system that actually took the customer into account. Poor people don't get bad services in almost any other realm. They don't get the same level maybe. They don't get bad services in any other realm. The cars that they get are still decent. They're still going to stores, they can buy stuff. Yes, cheaper, but they get good quality stuff. There's no reason they cannot be provided in a private market with good quality education if you had competition, if you had innovation, if you had people driven to try to provide them with good education because there was a market incentive to do so. So I'd like to see in all these different realms real market competition, real innovation, real progress. And then for kids who fall between the cracks, there are always going to be some, there are always going to be some situations where people don't get the opportunities that we would like them to get. There are plenty of benevolent people that we'd love to help out. And that's what civil society is about. We help out people that we want to help out in ways that we want to do it. And we choose the ways that we want to do it. And we do it more as something we want to do rather than something we pay taxes to and forget and let other people do it. And we're not really interested in how they do it and what they do exactly. So I think freedom, and I'll define my version of freedom in a second, I think freedom actually solves the problems we're trying to solve. It solves them by leaving individuals free. It solves them by taking the tools that the market has and applying them to every aspect of our lives, not just to the aspects of life. But again, I think central planners have decided these governments should do and these the market can do. Why? There's no difference in education and health care between those in any other field in which markets deliver products brilliantly. There's no reason they can't deliver products brilliantly in those two fields. And there's plenty of evidence globally and in the U.S. that they have and that they can deliver those products that way. So let me just define my view of freedom. Yes, freedom is a contested definition. You could go, I could go to a room of Marxist or a room of any version and ask them, are you for freedom and have you hide the ball? Nobody in the world is against freedom. We just don't define it the same way. So we're not all for the same thing, we're for different things. I believe freedom is the opportunity to act free of code. It's the freedom of form, coercion and force. Any other definition of freedom I think is self-contradictory. It actually involves subjugating somebody else to your freedom. I think the only definition of freedom that does not involve subjugating somebody else to you is where we're all free and therefore we don't have. So therefore all that's required is no force, no coercion, no imposing your will on me and I can't do the same to you. So I don't sacrifice to you, you don't sacrifice to me and that's real freedom. That's awesome. And just in the interest of time, I'd love to just turn it over to student questions, both here in person and online. From online, please raise your hand and we'll get to you. But Josiah, I want to start us off. Dr. Crook, you just described the hypothetical reality of a poor young child and talked about the ways that he interacts with services both public and private. But bringing that into reality, you described the opposite of what I grew up with as a poor child. The only services that I got anywhere close to the level of the richer kids around me were taught by the public, namely school, food and the like. So I'm wondering how you would support those claims about poor children empirically. Obviously, I'm only one anecdote. I don't. Trump, here. Sure. Sure. I mean, first I'll say, you know, hopefully you got a good education as a poor kid, but you have a lot of education. Because my parents refused to go to public schools. The empirics, I think pretty clear that poor kids get a lot of education in public schools. You know, you can take statistics out of the city of Chicago, the inner city of Chicago, where schools are basically holding pens. Very little education happens there. And across the street, there'll be a Catholic school. Same neighborhood, same kids. And it does quite well, right? And those kids do very well. You know, if you look it up on Google, Marfa Collins, who used to have a school in the very poor areas of Chicago, who kids all went to college, right? Same kids, same, but these were private institutions. By the way, archdiocese of Chicago, these are numbers that are probably, I don't know, 10 years old. But at the time, charged $7,500 a kid, the public schools in Chicago charged $15,000 a kid. So this is a half price, much better education. If you look globally at private education provided to poor kids, there's a wonderful book written by a British academic at Buckingham University in the UK, by the name of James Thule, called The Beautiful Tree. I highly recommend the book. It's a wonderful book, whether you land up agree with me or not. And basically what they find, they did research on schools in Nigeria and India in slums. And what they find in those slums is that the kids don't, nobody goes to public schools. So the assumption was always that parents don't send their kids to school. They keep them home. They don't want them to go to school. And when they went actually to the slums to investigate what they discovered is networks of hundreds of private, little private schools where the education was as good, if not better than the public school, but it was in the local community. Parents paid not a lot because the school was in the community. The teacher wasn't making a lot of money and they didn't have these big institutions that a school is. And there was a lot across the fact that hundreds of these schools, now James Thule is building schools all over Africa, kind of based on their model. So it's doable. It's happening out there in the world in terms of schools and empirical evidence to the poor quality of public schools I think is pretty evident in the United States. I agree with you that you're not getting the same quality services in the public sector as middle class or wealthy people do. But look, a cheap car today in the United States, the cheapest car that you can buy, a Kia or whatever, does the job. It's functional. There is almost in every realm that the private sector produces goods. It produces cheap stuff and expensive stuff. And the cheap stuff is of decent quality. Much better by the way than what you could have got 20 years ago for a lot more money. The private sector moves to make things cheaper and better over time. That's its methodology. And it doesn't want to cut out a whole section of the population because there's money to be made from that section of population less. And they sell them different products. But, you know, I want to apply that to the entire, you know, the entire spectrum of humanity, not just to the people who can afford it and keep poor people with government services, which I don't think are really good. This goes back to our different definitions of freedom at my last pitfall, which is the provision of non-market goods. Working within that framework. So your forward focus will be to be just the same way that a Maserati will. But your degree from the universities at East Wichita State will not give you access to the same opportunities as your degree from Cornell or Harvard. We know it, right? We know it intuitively. We know it in the data. And how that relates to freedom is the fact, well, look where our lawmakers come from, right? Look who holds the positions of power in politics, finance, broader society. The folks at Harvard and Cornell, not the folks from people, not the folks that went to East Wichita State. And there's a freedom dimension to this, which is that if our representatives are systematically taken across business and other elite professions from this category, then we end up with a political system that caters to those interests and does not cater to the guy from East Wichita State. We can both be talking about freedom, and we can both be fairly concerned with, I think, very similar types of outcomes that we want to achieve. But depending on these subtle differences, we can look at the same hypothetical as really very different. To me, primary education is not something that is easy to market. So one thing we have talked about is the hypothetical counterfactual where all education is private. I agree that you would get huge differences in educational quality depending on the passion area for different schools. People could get a higher tuition fees individually. They have more opportunity to travel farther for good schools. And what you'd see in economic terms is like the separating equilibrium where some people would get the forward focus of education. That is one definition of freedom in that world. Equally, though, adopting a freedom to and a freedom to actually pursue opportunities and to contribute in the same way as other members of society is another version of that freedom that Fed also has purchased. Can I make one comment? Because I agree about the politics, so I think that's a really interesting feature of the current system that we have. And I would argue that that is why I don't want politicians to have power over my life. That is one of the reasons, because I think you always get that kind of outcome. You cannot create a system. A government, and we see it all over the world no matter in which country you always get a system where a certain group is overrepresented in politics. I want to make politicians for the most part impotent when it comes to control over my life. I want them to be there to have a very, very, very narrow scope so that the rest is really me in the marketplace. Now, maybe you view that as cooler or worse than the political outcome. That's possible. But I'm not suggesting let's privatize education and relieve the political system the way it is. I want to change the whole system, right? I want to change how politicians become politicians and what they do as politicians. I don't want them to be able to give favors to political groups. I want to limit the scope of what they do dramatically. I want to make them very limited in their power. So that who is in politics doesn't matter that much. Politics never used to be a full-time profession in America. At least a long time ago it wasn't a full-time profession in America. But something you did, in a sense, on the side is service. And then you went back to business and you actually had a career. You actually know it would be good if senators and congressmen who preached to businessmen what they shouldn't do actually hired some people once in a while and had to fire people and had a bottom line maybe to achieve once in a while. Maybe that would refine their abilities to think about what business does and what it doesn't do. So I'd actually not want full-time politicians in that sense. Now, Mr. Moradian, I know you've been waiting online. So if you could unmute yourself and ask your question, hopefully the audio here in the room isn't working. Yeah, sure. Do you guys hear me okay? I'm sorry. What was that? No, no, no. We were just commenting on the technology we have in Cornell Law School here. So please, no proceed. Got it. Thank you. I wanted to continue with the public school car analogy. And you mentioned how poor people would have poor public school education, but they could get a Kia and a decent car at that. How do you reconcile that with the fact that there are currently millions of people that cannot afford a car? And with our current system of markets, you're assuming everyone gets a car? What about all the people that do not have that same access transportation in the private market? So, you know, I don't have the numbers with me, but there are very few people in America that don't have cars. I mean, if you look at poverty at what constitutes poverty in the U.S., and it's well over 90% of people have cars and homes and air conditioning and a lot of things that in other parts of the world would be considered pretty well off relative to... Well, you know, poor in America is relatively, and it's still poor, but it's relatively well off as compared to places where people are really poor and compared to what places were a long time ago. So, I'm not going to defend the system that exists today. There's way too much poverty in America today. There's way too many people who can't afford anything today. There are way too many homeless people today, and the cost of living is too expensive in the United States. There are lots of problems in the U.S. today. The solution is not to double up on the system we have now, because that's what we're doing. We're throwing more money at it. We're taxing more, we're restricting more, we're regulating more, we're throwing more money at it. And these results are not there. I'm proposing that the solution is the opposite. The solution is to free up resources. The solution of poverty is work. It's for people to actually work. And the way to get people to work is to have jobs and to incentivize people to actually work, to take those jobs. And you do that not by giving people money. You see that right now. The labor shortage is partially an overhang of people getting, people who never maybe used to get money from the governor, now getting money from the governor, got money from the governor for a long time during COVID. The solution is not to give people handouts. The solution is to leave the market free so that businessmen can create jobs, can build businesses. Economic growth requires. The thing that he drives economic growth is entrepreneurship. Nothing else. Entrepreneurs drive economic growth. You see that if you look at China and economic growth in China over the last 40 years, it's businesses and entrepreneurs that drove economic growth in China. Not state-run enterprises. It's entrepreneurs in Europe that drive economic growth. More limited because there are fewer entrepreneurs in Europe and therefore economic growth is more limited than it is in China and the U.S. So what you need to do is free entrepreneurs to create opportunities for people. The main opportunity is a job. And if you privatized education, people would be better educated. If you privatized all these different elements, there would be more opportunities for people. So I don't believe in equality of opportunity because I don't think that's, it's an impossible goal. And in order to increase somebody's opportunities, you have to reduce somebody else's. I believe in maximizing opportunity. A society, a free society maximizes opportunities, provides the most opportunities to most people. And in that kind of society, I don't think people can afford a company. Now, I don't have that society in mind right there, but history suggests that. So if you look at Hong Kong pre-China taking over last year, and you see the going from a fishing village to one of the most dynamic cities in the world with a capita GDP higher than the U.S., vast inequality, but people from other countries swam to get there because as poor as they were in Hong Kong, they were richer than they were where they came from. And in Hong Kong, they had an opportunity to go from rich to middle class to being super rich, one of the richest. Many of the richest people in Hong Kong started out with nothing. And the same was true in the United States in the 19th century where we distributed, where we didn't regulate and control everything. People came here with nothing. It took them a while to get something, but that something was much better than what they had where they came from. And they stayed because that's where they stayed. They valued the freedom that they had here, and they rose up and within a generation or two, they got much better, right? Different communities, different rates, but generally everybody improved. So I'm a big believer that, and I think, again, the empirical evidence suggests that when you leave people free, good things happen. Free in a sense of don't force them, don't cause them. Don't give them stuff. Let them produce the stuff. And I think it's also healthy for people. I think people have a different sense of themselves when they create and they produce any opportunities. They make those opportunities rather than when they have it. So I think it's better for them to take a life at least. Thank you both for taking the time. This is the core of your problem with the system that we have right now is that, in some ways, people's freedoms are limited by the action of government. In many instances, though, it would seem that the polity as a whole is coming together and deciding that we need to unify to approach a certain kind of problem that we might not as individuals be able to overcome. Perhaps there are collective action problems or otherwise. And so if that's the decision that the polity as a whole is coming to I'm not exactly sure what the problem is. And just as an example, would you suppose that a central bank is not a good idea? To what? A central bank that copyrights the currency. Is that a good or a bad idea? Should the government get involved or should they leave it to private actors to take care of them? It's a great example. It's an awful idea. I think it's a terrible idea having a central bank. And if I had the time, we could run through why. I'm happy to indicate if you want. But the collective action problem is the more interesting problem. It's not the collective action. The polity, they came together and they decided this is the right way. Who am I to object? Well, the polity, the maturity does not own my life. So you could all come together as they did in Athens and decide that I can't speak. I'm not comparing myself to Socrates. That would be a ridiculous bit. The principle, right? Athens came together and said, you know, Socrates is corrupting our young. What kind of democratically with the polity is coming together? And we're saying kill him. And they basically voted on it. And he accepted it. He drank the Charles poison. I don't accept the authority of the polity of the majority to dictate my life. And again, I think the founders of it, right? And my conception, I think of government is very similar to this, even though I'm more radical than they are. You know, that's why they didn't construct a pure majority in democracy, where you can vote on everything. Even countries that are more majority-oriented democratically, I don't know, Canada, Germany, France, have certain, I have a certain respect for free speech where they're not going to kill Socrates. Why? If the majority want to kill Socrates, why don't we kill Socrates? Polities, right? Where are the limits? And I'm saying the limits are my life. Every aspect of my life. A majority here can't tell me what I cannot own, what I cannot, what profession I should go to, what I should or shouldn't marry, you know, what I can say and what I can't say. This is why I'm a free speech purist, if you will, right? A majority can't tell me these things, shouldn't be able to tell me these things. My life is mine. I start with the individual. Each one of your life is yours. You shouldn't allow other people to tell you how to live. That's the more starting unit is that autonomy of that individual. The fact that his life is his that makes decisions for himself. So I don't find democracy. In that sense, right? I'm all for voting for our representatives, but then I think representatives should have very little, limited, very limited say in my life. Basically helping to protect me from you if you want to silence me. They should come in and say, no, no, you can't silence me. That's it. Yes, a First Amendment right? That's their only job. Because otherwise, leave individuals free to live their lives as they see fit. That's my concern. I agree that I'm in the minority and who agrees with me. And I fear that the majority will want to silence me, among other things, right? And it already has decided that I have too much money and they take a lot of it. That's why I live in Puerto Rico so they don't get their hands on me. It's true, right? Taxes are very high. I used to live in California. 55% of my income was going to taxes. If you add it all up, right, in California. I mean, that's my money. How does the majority get their right to take 55% of my money? For whatever causes they want. Good causes, I'm sure all of them really have, I'm not sure, but let's assume they're all for good causes. It's none of their business. So that's my perspective. It's an individualist perspective, a perspective by which you leave individuals alone to live their lives as they see fit. And you don't try to control them and you don't try to impose your will on them. And then if you want to help other people, if you want to provide opportunities for other people, you can easily, voluntarily do so. It's not that hard. Make the effort. Instead of rallying people around to take my stuff. I don't, look, I don't, I don't, I think we all understand that violence of one individual against another individual is wrong. It's wrong for me to come to you and steal your stuff. We all accept that. But somehow, if I can get the whole classroom to vote to take your money, then it's okay for me to take your money. To me, both the theft, just one is in the, one's legitimized for theft and one's illegitimate theft, but one's legitimate. And I don't accept legitimate theft because you voted on something that's wrong for an individual to do his wrong, for a group to do his wrong. So we'll have one thing, because we've talked about our taxes, freedom and poverty at a couple of points now. And one counterpoint that has always stuck with me is of course that tax rates in the United States at the individual and corporate level have fallen over time since approaching war periods. And by most measures, poverty and economic inequality have increased over that same time period. And to get the government out of my life a few of taxation were to really unlock the freedom that then was causally linked to producing poverty and reducing economic inequality. Shouldn't have we seen a different relationship between lower taxes and measures of inequality? So what's interesting is that the federal government seems to absorb the same percentage of GDP no matter what tax rate it's on. 19.5% approximately, right? Functuates a little bit. So you could raise marginal tax rates to more than 90%. And the government would actually not have that much more. It would get gained in the US based on how the tax laws have been written. It would gain about 19.5%. So it hasn't changed much from 1950s instead of the absolute percentage of GDP that it takes in as taxes. It just takes them in different forms, in different places. Even measures of overall tax burden may have decreased over time. I take your point at the same time that the GDP percentage has remained roughly constant. But that could be explained by the mere existence of the tax multiplier, right? How much the use of tax dollars actually creates a larger pot? I'm not sure because I think even though, for example, wealthy people are paying a far lower marginal tax rate than they used to be. It used to be 80%, 90%, and now it's just under 40%. Even though it's come down that marginal tax rate, the wealthy in the United States in terms of income tax pay a much larger percentage of taxes than they did in 50 years. So the total taxes, the wealthy pay a much bigger chunk than they did 50 years ago even though the marginal rates were much higher relative to everybody else's. And that's because we basically, and this is because of politics, we basically now exclude large portions of population farming taxes. We tax them in other ways. We don't let them get away, we tax them in other ways. But I think there's so many problems we've just seen in the coalition. So I don't think the tax burden has really fallen. I don't see that in the math. Corporate taxes have just come down, but corporate taxes have... They've been coming down for 35. They've been coming down for 30 minutes. Yeah, but corporate taxes are hidden tax on employment and on something. If your corporations don't pay tax, that information doesn't change what you should see. If they're coming down then corporations should be employing more people, lifting people out of poverty off you. But we don't... That's definitely not in the data. In terms of... Oh. Oh. Data since Trump, and in no final time, I mean in no final time. Data's in frame. Well, I mean, data's difficult. I don't buy the argument that inequality... I've looked at the data and see economic analysis of the data. To me, it's true that the press presents it as and a lot of people like to even present it as inequality has increased over the last 50 years. Game over. Now, it's not in the data. If you control for size of family, household composition, if you control for benefits, if you control for the fact that people are getting government benefits, government benefits, but also if you control for the fact that wages have not gone up, but the benefits of corporations pay, if you control for all these factors, inequality has not increased as dramatically as people claim it has. Sorry. But let me just say, because we can all... I mean, that's a whole econometric argument that we can... We don't need the econometrics, right? Benefits. Per person have gone down. Real wages have stagnated for 40 years, so the average American worker is earning less in real terms than they were. This is not true. This is true. No. Unless you don't trust the government dating. No, I trust the government data. The Department of Labor Statistics... Yeah, but if you look at... This isn't econometrics, right? This is just counting. Yes. But it's household income, households have changed. You know, there's a bunch of economists that have done a lot of work on this to show that no, real wages have not stagnated like the conventional story presents they have. But it doesn't. There's a bunch of them. But the consensus for quite a while now has been that... I know I fight against the consensus in almost anything in my life. But when you get 95% of economists... I don't think it's 95% of economists that have looked at it. Economists that have looked at stuff believe that wages are stagnating over the last few years. I don't think that's true. Well, I want to be respectful of both your time for 60 minutes over and thank you both for coming out.