 OK, well, good evening everyone. My name's Owen Collier and first of all I'd like to welcome you all here this evening. I'm not with the undergraduate, I'm the co-host of the evening. I represent the economic society and I want to say welcome you all here, I want to welcome back Dr Brooke, it gives us great pleasure to welcome you back here and I'm glad that we left such an impression that you felt you could come back. Before I hand over to Joe, I just want to say what a great honour it is really for me to be and my society to be invited to co-host tonight's event because I think this guest lecture really is a way for economists in Exeter and indeed all of you to just hear an interesting point of view on a very topical subject and so I hope you get a lot out of tonight's event and tonight's talk of which Joe is now going to tell you some more but as I say, it's on a subject that I know my society begun our discussion session series at the beginning of the year talking about and I'm sure we'll learn a lot more about it and add to the mosaic of opinions that I'm sure we all have anyway. So without further ado, I'm going to hand over to Joe now who's going to tell you a bit more about tonight's event. So thank you all for coming down this evening and joining the undergraduate live and economic society and hosting this event. My name's Joe. I'm the Head of Talks for the Undergraduate Live this year. We'll be bringing you a series of talks and interplenary discussions over the course of this year. A few weeks ago we brought in former Mars One candidate and national physicist Joseph Roesh and in 2016 we'll be playing host to Adrian Sanders, former Liberal Democrat MP of 18 years, Ellen Hath Davies, an international rugby player, rower and biochemist and children's author, our symposium in March. So to keep up with all our goings on, I suggest you like both our Facebook pages. Before we begin, I'd like to introduce our editor for this year, Rosie Loni, who's going to tell you a few things about the journal of this year. Rosie Loni, Head of Talks for the Undergraduate Live. If you haven't been a bit lucky before, I'd be very proud of you to look at our last issue. Also we are currently in the process of doing course submissions for our January edition. So if you've got like writing for us, then please do take our website, Spission Guidelines on there. We're also running a competition this term for the charts with a £30 cash prize and all you have to do is write 500 words on Y, X, whatever you believe X is, is the most powerful tool to change the world. Finally, after the 11th of December, do you look out for open positions on our committee which will be advertised on our website and on our Facebook page? Thank you very much. So today Dr Brooke will be discussing some themes from his upcoming book. Equal is unfair, the inequality advantage is up there. It should be on the shelves around March 29th. Dr Brooke is an author, former academic at Santa Clara University and executive director of the Anne Rand Institute, a lazy fair think tank promoting the objectives, ideals of Anne Rand. Talk should run for around half an hour with another half an hour for questions and feel free to stick around afterwards, we'll be serving food and crudités and such. So without further ado, I'd like to welcome Dr Brooke. So thank you for joining me back. Thank you to the undercount and thank you to the economics club of Exeter and thank you all for coming. I'm just curious, how many of you were here last year? All right, you came back and we got some fresh blood, that's good. So inequality, inequality is a big issue these days. I mean the pope has declared it the issue of our time. President Obama has said it is the challenge of our time. The idea is that we have a real problem on our hands. The economists tell us that inequality is increasing. What inequality means is that the gap between the poor and the rich has expanded dramatically over the last 30 years and in this, in and of itself, the gap is a problem, is an issue that has to be addressed. Of course we had last year the publication of maybe the most important book on this topic by Thomas Piketti, the French economist. The book became a bestseller very, very quickly in the United States. Sold hundreds of thousands of copies very quickly. It was number one on Amazon for a very long time. Everybody read the book. I'm not going to spend a lot of time critiquing Piketti's economics or empirics. Others have done a pretty good job of doing that already. But if you have any questions in the Q&A I'd be happy to answer. But it's interesting, so many people bought a very, very thick book in economics because I think this issue has become so central to the way people view the world, to the way people think about the problems, the issues that western economies are facing right now. Just an anecdote, it's kind of interesting. Piketti's book sold was a bestseller, hundreds of thousands of copies. But just so you know, Amazon keeps track of exactly what books you read and how much of the book you read. If you read it on a Kindle, on an iPad, they are watching you. They know exactly how much you read. So indeed they publish a list of the least read books. And to my great delight, the number one least read book last year was Thomas Piketti's Capital in the 21st Century. So people read a little bit and gave up, which I think is good. But it's not worthy of reading all the way through. So what is this issue? Why is it an issue? Why are we concerned with the gap? Now I can understand being concerned that maybe poor people do not have the opportunities to rise up and to become middle class. I can understand concerns and thinking about and worrying about the possibility of stagnation in the middle class, where the middle class is not improving itself. Again, whether that stagnation exists or not is an interesting empirical question, which I'm happy to discuss. But that's an interesting question. What's going on? Why is the middle class not advancing faster, not growing richer, faster than it is? Interesting question. I even think it's interesting to ask the question of what's going on with the rich. Are the rich really earning their wealth? And what does that mean to earn your wealth? I guess I'm not convinced, actually I am convinced of the opposite, that the gap is what's important. To me the gap, the inequality is a way to avoid discussing the real issues, the underlying issues, the issues that are really problematic, mobility of the poor, the slow growth among the middle class, and the potential that some people at the top have not maybe earned being at the top. So how do you get to the top? Because it's interesting that all of the inequality debate at the end of the day boils down to what? What are we really worried about? And how are we going to fix this? How are we going to fix this inequality? Well, it always boils down to the same. If you read Piketty, he only offers one real solution to the issue of inequality. And that's what? It's to knock down those who have. He offers, there's a solution, 80% marginal income tax rates, a 10% wealth tax that happens every year. So every year your wealth is estimated and you pay 10% of it to the government. And he actually says, he says, look this isn't going to help the poor much because it's not that much money. The reason to do it is to bring inequality, the gap in and of itself down. And the only way to bring the gap down he's proposing is to bring the rich down, bring the wealth down. Not to raise the other side of the equation but to lower the one side. Why are we so concerned with this? What is the issue here that we're really concerned with? So why should people care about inequality? Why do people typically care about inequality? So let's take a few stabs or some hypotheses of why inequality, under what kind of scenario inequality would be important. So if the world was a zero sum game, what does a zero sum game mean? It means that anything I get is a loss to you. So one person's gain is a loss to somebody else. If the world was a zero sum game, then we would be and should be unbelievably concerned about inequality. Because if somebody else has more, it means that I have less. And indeed one can only gain by taking from others because it's all one sum. There's nothing being created, there's nothing being added. And indeed much of the world believes in this zero sum idea. But does it really make sense? Do we live in a zero sum world? Is every person's gain somebody else's loss? Are we always basically at the same level of wealth and it's just a matter of who is getting it, the changes over time? Because a lot of people, I don't know that they think through this idea, but a lot of people hold this idea implicitly. But is it true? Well let's do some, just look at the facts, right? 250 years ago, what percentage of the population on the planet was poor? Anybody? Dongway, just shout it out. Who has time for being polite? 98%. Yeah that's probably right. I don't know the exact number but it's somewhere in the high 90s. Everybody on the planet was poor. We were basically subsistent farmers. We ate what we produced, we ate what we grew and that was it. There was no extra, no vacations, no extra money to consume goodies. You basically woke up when the sun rose and you went to sleep when the sun set and you woke the entire time in between. Life expectancy 250 years ago was 39. I would be dead, you're kind of middle-aged. Most children did not live to see their 10th birthday. They died before that. We've come a long way since then. Not only is the population 7, 8, 10 axed, but we're all richer than that. At least all of us in the west certainly are richer than that. There are pockets, there are areas in the world right now where it's true there's still a lot of poverty, but our wealth is not at their expense. They didn't become poorer because we became richer. We became richer and they maybe stayed poor. So something happened, some wealth was created that didn't come from anywhere else. We just created it. We made something that didn't exist before. Wealth was created. The pie, I hate the analogy of a pie, but let's use it anyway, the pie grew because we baked, I don't know, more pieces to the pie. It's a bad analogy. We're much wealthier today. And think about how we transact. So I like to use my iPhone because I love my iPhone. When I buy this for $300, how much is it worth to me? Well no, who's the economist here? Oh my God. It has to be more than that, otherwise I wouldn't give up $300. I'm willing to give up $300 because this is worth more to me than $300. As it turns out, this is worth a lot more to me than $300. The value to my life of having an iPhone is probably worth tens of thousands of dollars to me. But I'm willing to give up $300 to get this because this makes my life better by $300. How much is it worth to Apple? Less than $300, they make a profit. So we both won. I bought an iPhone from Apple, they're better off and I'm better off. We didn't take it from anybody, we're just both better off. I'll give you a less controversial example because Apple is, you know, some people here might not like them. I love the company. How many of you have read Harry Potter? Oh right, a well educated audience, I love it. And I understand JK Rowlands is an alum of Exeter, so very cool. You bought a Harry Potter book and I'm just going to assume it costs $20 because it's a nice round number for $20. Why did you do it? Because the Harry Potter book you believed was worth to you, what, more or less than $20? More, more. A lot of enjoyment, a lot of fun, a lot of spiritual value, right? That's worth $20. Now, when you did that, inequality increased. You became poorer by $20, JK Rowlands became richer by $20. Indeed, so many people did this that JK Rowlands became a billionaire, thus making inequality a major problem in society. But it's true, right? She became a billionaire and those who advocate that inequality is a problem would view that as a problem. But how did she become a billionaire by making every one of your lives better? I assume you all enjoyed Harry Potter, I did. Maybe some of you didn't. Then you only read the first one, it didn't read the rest hopefully, unless you're a masochist and then you read them all. But I loved Harry Potter, it made my life better. And if JK Rowlands becomes a billionaire by making all of our lives better, that is incredibly cool. And we're all better for it even though inequality increased. Because you know what, you know what Piketty doesn't do and none of these guys do? They don't measure the value of that book to you. All they can see is the $20, because they're economists, they just look for dollar signs. So all they can see is the $20 leaving your wallet and entering JK Rowlands' bank account. And what they see when that happens is an increase in inequality. Just like when I buy the iPhone, Apple becomes richer and I become poorer. But do I really become poorer? No, I become richer. The beauty of trade, the beauty of trade when it's done freely, is that both parties become richer. Wealth is actually created, well-being, human well-being is actually created. We are far better off of JK Rowlands being a billionaire than if she'd stayed poor. Because if she'd stayed poor, that would have meant she sold no books. And therefore our lives would have been poorer for it. Life is more than just about dollars. The book, the iPhone. Now the iPhone actually has translated into dollars because in my case it makes me more productive. So I can make more money. So actually if you actually ran the calculation, my wealth has increased as well because it's worth more than $300 to me, not just in terms of spiritual value but in terms of actual monetary value. So these transactions, this trade, is win-win. The pie has grown. Wealth has increased. Human well-being, which in my view is the ultimate measure, has increased. We're much better off for having Harry Potter, for having the iPhone, for having the stuff that we buy than we would if we didn't have it. And yes, people become billionaires as a consequence. Cool. Because the way you become a billionaire is by selling lots of products to lots of people in win-win transactions that are making the lives of those people better. By $20, by $50, by $100, by tens of thousands of dollars like Apple. How did Bill Gates make $70 billion? By selling us great products that are making our lives better and the world would be a much poorer place if he didn't make $70 billion for himself. So we don't live in a zero-sum world. We live in an additive world. We live in a world in which wealth is created all the time, at least in societies that respect property rights, in societies that respect entrepreneurship, in societies that respect the rule of law, in societies that respect freedom, wealth grows. We become richer and richer all the time. And yes, inequality might grow. But we were all poor once. And then this happened. We all got richer. Some of us got much richer than other people. But the only way they got much richer than other people is by providing services and goods to everybody else. So I say, good for them. So the world's not a zero-sum game. A person who gains does not do it at the expense of somebody else. So that's not a reason to worry about inequality. Another approach to inequality is that, look, the wealth, the pie, belongs to us, to society, to the public. And then it's our responsibility, through our government, to figure out how to distribute it, who gets what piece. And it's not fair that some people get big pieces, some people get little pieces, because it's our collective responsibility. We should vote on it, which is what we do. We call it a democracy. And we vote on it. We say, you should get that piece, and you should get that piece. And yeah, he worked hard, so you should get a slightly bigger piece. We get to decide as a collective, as a group. But is wealth collective? Do we create it? Or do individuals actually create their wealth? Do people actually make this? Is the iPhone our creation? Or was it Steve Jobs's? And if it's Steve Jobs's, how do we have the audacity to claim, that you beat the wealth that he created? And isn't that true of all wealth that's been created? Isn't it individuals who create that wealth? Now President Obama doesn't agree with me. Surprise, surprise. And he had a famous speech a few months ago, maybe it's over a year ago, that has been titled, that you didn't build that speech. Because in the speech he said to businessmen, people who engage in activities of business, he said you didn't build it. Not by yourself, he had employees. You had a great teacher in high school that's responsible for your success, because she inspired you. You drove on government roads, and therefore society invested in those roads, so they own a piece of it. You didn't build it, we built it. If you know a little bit about American political history, I guess, Hillary Clinton had a book years ago called It Takes a Village. And that's the attitude, right? You don't do stuff by yourself. You need other people to produce stuff. I mean Steve Jobs did not do this by himself. He needed employees and designers and all kinds of people in order to make this. He drove on the roads and he went to the schools and everything. And that's the reason, they say, that wealth should be considered social, because all of us did it together. Really? So yes, Apple has employees, I have employees, any business has employees. But you know what? We pay them. They get paid. That's the return they get on being employees. They get paid better than any other alternative they have. Otherwise what would they do? Leave and go and work for somebody else. And you know what? Every business, and I know this will come out as a shock to you guys, and will be a little depressing, but every single business that ever employs you will make a profit off of you. You'll get a little bit less than what you're worth to the business, because nobody's going to hire you to lose money for them. They hire you to make money for them. So they're going to make a profit off of you in any job that you have. It's just like the iPhone and me buying it, right? When you take a job, you know, you're coming out of Exodus or what, £60,000 a year? I'll be generous, right? I don't know, I have no idea. It sounds like a lot of money. That's a lot of money. Except a job for £60,000, how much is your time worth to you? Less than 60,000. That's why you're willing to take 60,000 to give your time to this company, to whoever's employing you. How much is your time worth to your employer? More than 60,000, they're making a profit off of you. Who's lost? Nobody. No exploitation. No, right? It's a choice. A trade. Win-win, just like when you buy the iPhone or you buy the nice shoes or you buy anything else in the mall. Labour is the same type of trade. Win-win, you wouldn't take it if you're not going to be better off by doing it. So, Labour, employees, they've been paid for. Indeed, Microsoft produced more millionaires than any company in human history because they were paid well. And today's are paid very well. At least in the U.S. We can talk about Chinese employees if you want. So, yeah, people help you build it and they get paid for it. And what you get is what's remaining, which is the CEO, the Steve Jobs, who has the ideas, who organizes it all, and he gets more than everybody else. You know what? Because he's more valuable than anybody else. Economically, in terms of production, in terms of value to the economy, in terms of value to your lives, he's more valuable. So he gets more. What about the roads? Government roads, you're using them every day. Don't you owe society something for the government roads? I'm talking about Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or any rich guy. Well, where do government roads come from? From taxes. And who gets taxed? The wealthy. The wealthy gets taxed the most. They're paid for the roads. They pay for it all the time. Indeed, you don't have roads until you have wealth. We, in the modern times, we think that government somehow has money and they create stuff and then we build on top of that. No, government is nothing until business actually builds stuff, creates some wealth, which then can be stolen from it without roads, good roads, until you have taxed money to build the good roads. So somebody has to produce something so that you can tax it so that you can build stuff. The primary is production. The primary is the making of stuff. So we paid for the roads. What more do you want? It doesn't mean the product of society. It doesn't mean the wealth of society just because I paid for a road that I'm using. Then, of course, there's a teacher. We all had a great teacher in our childhood. At least some of you did. I don't remember any of my teachers from my childhood. But that's just because I have a bad memory. It doesn't mean they weren't any good teachers. I'm sure they were. Let's leave it for the Q&A, because otherwise... Just remember the question. We'll do it in the Q&A. What about the teacher? Well, A, they get paid. That's a job. They do a good job. That's wonderful that they do a good job. But if you're rich and you really had a good teacher, then I think it would be nice and just if you went to that teacher, thanked her and wrote her a nice check. That would be cool. That's great. But I don't think we should impose that on you. I don't think you should feel guilty because you had a good teacher. I don't think because you had a good teacher, society owns the stuff that you make. It doesn't give society a right to your value to what you produced. So I don't buy... And I don't think anybody should buy this idea that society owns our wealth. Individuals produce wealth. And therefore, it should belong to individuals and individuals should decide what and how to spend their wealth. What to do with that wealth. What to do with that wealth. It's none of our business. If they want to share it with people, they can do so voluntarily. But where do we get off pulling a gun out and forcing them to take their money? That's called highway robbery. It's interesting. If my neighbor comes to me and pulls out a gun and takes my money, we call that theft and we put him in jail. To vote to take my money, then it's okay. Somehow, we've taken theft and turned it into taxes and taxes are somehow legitimate. All it took was to vote. A pretty cool trick. It's a pretty cool trick. Why? Because society wants it and somehow that makes it legitimate. That's very, very dangerous territory. Because society might not like what you say. Society might not like what you look like. What you dress. Society might not like you. Suddenly, society in Athens didn't like Socrates. He was corrupting the youth by engaging with them and challenging them so they voted to have him killed. That's what happens when you give unlimited democracy to people where they can vote on anything. You can vote to have people killed. Now, nobody wants that, right? Though it's okay to vote to take people's money away. So it might be there's no basis for this question of inequality. For this problem of inequality. I'll just say from an economics perspective and I don't know if there are any economists in the room to argue against me but so be it. You can try. The gap, the difference between rich and poor is meaningless economically. There's no correlation between that gap and any economics, any economic activity or any economics. It's a gap. There are societies which have large gaps and are miserably poor. There are societies which have large gaps and everybody's relatively rich. The gap in and of itself is meaningless economically. I'd love to hear from an economics student here or professor if they came, they probably didn't. The theory, the economic theory that says that the gap is a problem. Now they say that. Crogman says it, Stiglitz say it and hey, they have no more prizes than I don't. But they just say it. I've never seen a theory. I've never seen them actually articulate a reason why it's a problem. Other than regression analysis with lots of holes in them. But that's not a theory. That's an empirical analysis which doesn't prove causality. So to me, what's driving this is not economics. What's driving this is a sense of morality. A sense of ethics. It's just not fair. It's just not right. It's just not just for people to have more than other people. We have internalized an idea that fairness and justice equals equality. Now that's a new conception. Because in history fairness and justice meant you get what you deserve. It meant judging some people deserve a little, some people deserve a lot. In economics what you deserve is based on how much you produce. How much you contribute. How much you add to the wealth. So some produce a lot and therefore they're very rich. Some produce a mediocre amount and mediocre. I know it's and some don't produce much. And they get a little. To me that's justice. More than that. To me that's fairness. That's what fairness means. If somebody produces a lot and gets a little that's unjust. That's wrong. That's immoral. For somebody to produce a little and somehow get a lot that's unjust. That's immoral. Because where does he get the extra from? Come somebody who's produced more and it's taken from them. And redistributed. And this is the key point I want to make today. In order to create equality the only way to create equality one has to commit violence against those who have. Against those who've created. Against those who are talented. Against those who have ability. Against those who contribute more to our life than anybody else. I don't know. You guys know basketball a little bit? Follow the NBA a little bit? Anybody know Le Bon James's? Best basketball player in the world. That's all. Big, tall, athletic, unbelievable player. Right? So I am a pretty lousy basketball player. I've got all the wrong genes and I haven't practiced that much. But you know what? I want basketball fairness. I want to get on a court with Le Bon James and have a chance at beating him. I don't think it's fair that when I get on a court with him he's going to score all the points and that's what will happen. I want fairness. I want equality of basketball. So how do we make me and Le Bon James equal in basketball? How do we make it? He's worked hard. He's got the talent. He's got the skills. I don't. But you know what? Fairness means equality. So I demand basketball fairness. I want to be able to play Le Bon James and have a chance of winning. What would he have to do? Because you can't make me better. Maybe a little bit. Not enough to beat him. Not enough to score one point. How do we do it? Don't be shy. That's right. You'd have to break his legs. If you'd seen me play basketball you'd know that probably wasn't enough and you'd probably have to break an arm as well. But that's not funny because some people have a talent for basketball and in order to equate them with people who don't have a talent for basketball we'd have to break their legs. Some people have a talent and a skill at creating the goods and services that make our lives better. And in order to make them equal to the rest of us we have to break their legs. Now we don't literally go and break their legs. But we take 50% of their income. Now I don't know you guys haven't worked. Most of you haven't worked. You're still students. Maybe you've all worked a little bit. What is income? What is the money that comes in? What does it represent? When you get a paycheck, what does that represent? It represents a time that you've put in. The effort that you've put in. It represents a big chunk of your life. You're going to spend more time working than doing anything else in life. Maybe other than sleeping. That's no fun. So when somebody takes 50% of your income they're taking 50% of your life. They're taking 50% of your effort. 50% of your engagement, your focus, your energy, your mind. I don't know. I make a decent living. They take 50% of my money. Or should I have them break my legs? What's better? Some days I think I'd rather the IRS just came and broke my legs and left me alone with the money. Because I could probably fix the legs with the money. 50% of my life is worth a lot to me. A lot. And yet we just take it for granted. It's okay to take it. And Piketty wants to take 80%. It's not good enough to take 50. He wants to take 80% of my time, my effort, my resources. How does that get just? That's violence, just like the breaking of legs. Equality requires violence because the fact is that we are metaphysically unequal. We're not the same. Thank God. Who wants to live in a society where everybody's the same? Unbelievably boring. Even if everybody was like me, I wouldn't want to live there. This is... We're unequal. Look around the room. We're all different. We have different skills, different talents. Some of us are going to make a lot of money. Some of us are going to choose professions that don't make a lot of money. I'm a teacher. I'm never going to make a lot of money. But I'm a PhD in finance. I could have gone to Wall Street. But I don't want money. I want to teach. I love teaching, if you can't tell. I love this stuff. I love ideas. I love engaging with people about ideas. I'm willing to give out millions of dollars, literally millions of dollars, to do this. Who says that it's all about money? It's not. But I'll command as a chief want to take money from people who've dedicated their lives to making money and give it to me. Why? I've decided not to go out and make money. I've decided to do this. It's better for my life. So we're all different. And you can't make us the same without inflicting serious violence on us. And indeed, even if you try, you still won't make us the same. You still won't make us the same because we're not. That's metaphysical and you cannot change it. Some of us are smaller than others. It's just a fact. Some of us are taller than others. Some of us are prettier than others. All facts that you cannot change. Inequality is beautiful because it is. It's what reality is all about. It's what life is all about. We're not the same. And therefore, the results should not be the same given that we're not the same to begin with. Now, there's one regime in history that tried to make us all the same. They studied in the best universities in France. And they took their professors seriously. They studied Camus and Sartre and they studied Foucault and all the best philosophers of the 20th century. Best in quotes, I would add. And they went back to their home country and they managed to gain control. They managed to get political power. And their goal was to make everybody the same. To bring about equality. A really equal society. An ideal society. Their commies didn't get it right. They were going to do it right. Now, people lived in the cities and some people live in the countryside and that's unequal. Generally, life in the cities is more prosperous. So what do you do? Or you empty the cities. They drove everybody out of the cities and into the countryside. The problem was that even in that countryside people were not equal. Some were good farmers, some were not. Some were foragers picking berries and nuts better than other people. Some were educated, some were not. Some could read, some could not. So what do you do? How do you quickly create equality among all these varieties of different people? Well, you shoot the ones that stick their head up. So if you could read, you were shot. If you had an education, you were shot. If you wore glasses, which was a sign of education, you were shot. If you were a better farmer, you were shot. If you were a better forager, you were shot. If you wore anything, you were shot. Now this is not some science fiction story I'm telling you. This is a story of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. This is the story of a regime that killed almost 40% of their own people. Two million people died. And you can go to Cambodia and you can see the killing fields. And everybody will tell you what the criteria was. The criteria was not random. It was very focused. They wanted to shoot LeBron James's. That was the purpose. Now that's evil. That is evil. And that's what striving for really quality means. It means exactly that. It means violence against anybody who sticks their head up. It means violence against those who are better at something. See, when I see somebody rich, I go cool. You know why? Because how do you become rich? By making my life better and your life's better. And I go, the fact that he's rich means that my life is better. There's no other way to get rich in a free society. Is it cronyism? Is he stealing money? Because he's got gamma connections? That I'm against. Fine. Let's solve that problem. Are poor people not able to rise up? Then let's look at that and examine and figure out what is causing them not to be able to rise up. Let's solve that problem. It turns out that the reason poor people can't rise up is because of all the policies the left has instituted in order to give us equality. Which actually hold people back. If the middle class is stagnating, if it really is stagnating, which is a question, then let's figure out the solution to that. But I can tell you that the real solutions are all in the same place. If we want a good economy, if we want the poor to rise up, if we want the middle class to thrive, then what we need is freedom, not coercion. What we need is to leave people free to think, to engage in the world at whatever level they can, to keep their income, to invest their income, to build, to create. Not penalize them for being successful at it, but cheer just like we cheer Le Bon James when he dunks the ball. That's cool when we see that. When we see a Steve Jobs, I say cool, he's dunking the ball. Just he's doing it in a different field, a field by the way, that adds to my life a billion times more than Le Bon James ever will add to my life. Le Bon James is entertaining. Steve Jobs is life changing. Bill Gates is life changing. Sam Walmart was life changing. I don't know enough British entrepreneurs to give you British examples. So to me what we should be celebrating is success. Not condemning it. Not ridiculing it. Not trying to bring it down and denounce it. So in my view inequalities a rouge, a façade, a façade that's trying to hide the real agenda. They don't care about the poor, they don't care about the middle class. What is really here is what Piketty said. The money that we take from the rich is not going to help the poor. What really they enjoy is to pull down the rich. What they really want is to break Le Bon James' legs. They get a kick out of there. You know the kids who like to build towers and then the kids who like to push them and knock them down? Piketty is one of those kids who likes to knock the tower down as is Crogman, Stiglitz and the rest of them. What they resent is talent and ability and they build whole theories in order to explain it. So I'd encourage you rather than that I'd encourage you to strive for free society. A society where your primary focus in life is not how other people are doing but how you are doing. To make your life the center of your attention, not other people's life. To try to make the most of your life. To try to, whether it's financially if you want to be rich, fine find something you're passionate about. Find something you love. Find something that you can be really good at. Maybe you won't be the best in the world at but you'll be good at it. You'll be able to get self-esteem. You'll be able to get pleasure. You'll be able to get happiness from whatever it is that you are doing. Find that thing and be the best that you can be at that. Stop worrying about what other people do. So I'd encourage you by the way to read Ein Rand I think provides you with the ideas and with the ethics that make it possible for you to make the most of your own life. To focus on the value of your own life. The obsession with other people is what leads to envy. It leads to resentment of other people's success and other people's achievements. And that is a sickness in society and it's a sickness that we should get rid of. We should focus on achievement. We should celebrate achievement. We should celebrate success and we should each celebrate your own life. Thank you all. I'll take questions. Thank you very much, Aaron. If any of you would like to write a response here on for the undergraduate please do send us an email on that. We'd like to take some questions if anyone has any. I have a feeling there are a few. Yes. One of the things I think is really interesting about Ein Rand's thought in general is how it's directly similar to Marxism. So essentially Ein Rand and Atlas Shrug suggests that the productive class which in Marxism is the proletariat and in Ein Rand is the sort of economic intellectual elite should withdraw their labour to show everyone else how worthless they are. And mainly the problem with that is that just like Isar Berlín said about Marxism which is that it's a form of moral futurism that instead of advancing a moral argument simply advances the argument that in the future the proletariat will be the all-powerful class. And so he then suggests that it's the desire and it needs the argument that doesn't around just suggest exactly the same thing about a different group of people and never advances a moral argument. No, because Atlas Shrug is not about the economically powerful withdrawing. It's about the recognition that those who have extraordinary ability in any field musicians withdraw, artists withdraw, doctors withdraw. It's not just about economically powerful people who have great ability. We are as a society a lot poorer without them. And that is true. Without Beethoven, without Brahms, without Mozart, without Michelangelo, without John Locke, we are much, much poorer. Not a little bit poorer, much, much poorer. But that's not a moral argument. A moral argument is not about the elites. It's about you. A moral argument is that the whole purpose of morality shouldn't be focused on society, shouldn't be focused on others, shouldn't be focused on serving others but should be focused on making your life at whatever level you happen to be at in terms of intelligence, in terms of talent, in terms of skills, the best life that you can have. It's not saying that their life is worth more than your life. It's saying that every human life is worth to you and your responsibility as a living being is to make the most of it. And yes, some people are going to make more money but you know what, I have more fun than a lot of billionaires. What are you going to take some of my fun away? Right? It's not about taking stuff away. It's about living your life to the fullest and doing whatever it is that you love doing. Hopefully you can make a living at it. To the max, that's her moral quota. And by the way, a big chunk of her moral quota is about moral. It's about rationality. It's about using your mind again at whatever level of skill you have at whatever profession you're engaged in. Using your mind to be good at that profession, to be good at that skill but most important skill is to live your life. Use your mind to live your life to the best that you can live it. And there's a whole moral theory there about how to live the life as an individual. It's a builds and Aristotle's idea of living your life for the sake of your own eudaimineau, your own flourishing, your own happiness. And Aristotle has this golden mean idea which Inran rejects and she proposes a different way but the purpose is the same purpose. The purpose is an individual. You're obsessed about the politics but the morality is actually incredibly rich in advice on how to live a successful life. And that's what Aristotle claimed and what Inran claims is the purpose of morality. The purpose of morality is to teach you how to live a good life. And it's not about money. So it's not about the great industrialists. That's an extreme sanitisation of Inran who also said that other people's moral claims on you were morally worthless. No, what she says what she said is other people don't have a moral claim on you. That is, they don't have a claim on you. You don't have a claim on them. You're an individual, right? No, because you rephrase morality as about other people. But that's not what morality is about. Morality is about your own life. Again, Aristotle doesn't claim that other people have a claim on you. Neither does Inran. What Inran is saying is to treat other people justly. Why should you treat other people justly? Because it's your self-interest. That is morality. Modern modelists have reframed morality away from Aristotle and pretend that morality is just about our claims against one another. By the way, this is how we get this whole idea of inequality because we're focused on the other. Oh, he's got a lot. I have a little. Therefore, he has responsibilities to take care of me. And I resent him now. And that's how you get the envy that we have in society today. Instead of saying, what I care about is my life, the way he got riches by making my life better, cool. That is a real moral statement. The nonsense amount of philosophy is not morality. It's not morality. You've taken Christianity and sanitized it from mysticism and kept its moral code, which is mystical to begin with. It's not based on any rational facts in reality. And it's not trying to solve any human problem. It's trying to lead to human sacrifice which is the purpose of the moral code under Christianity and it's the purpose of the moral code under Kant and his disciples. Yeah. It's a big question if you keep going. So let me give you the outline because it's a big question. So I believe in government. I don't believe in zero government. I'm not an anarchist. But I believe in government that does one thing and one thing really, really well. And that is protect us. Protect our right to be free. Protect us from coercion. So the enemy in my view of man's life, of human life is force. It's coercion. It's people forcing you to do things you don't want to do. And that's the role of government is to prevent that from happening. So government is there to protect us. A police force you need a military and you need a judiciary system to both help define property rights and then to protect rights generally including property rights. So it's there to protect you and to arbitrate disputes. That's it. So no welfare state. No economic policy. Zero economic policy. No subsidies and favors and loopholes because there's just no economic policy. We don't get involved in the economy. That's it. So a very simple very, very limited government. But not a zero government. So you mentioned that the public services are made by the money that the government would receive from the businesses who make lots of money. Then how would you explain billionaires getting away wanting not to pay taxes? If I were a billionaire I would try all I could to minimize my taxes. I do it today. I do everything I can to pay as little taxes as I can. I consider taxes theft. I consider what the government is taking from me to be essentially stealing half of my life. I'm going to do all in my power legally because I don't want to go to jail in order to minimize my tax bill. I have a creative accountant that does whatever he can and this is on YouTube. So the IRS is probably going to audit me in order to do that. I encourage every billionaire. I encourage every millionaire. Somebody who makes almost nothing. It's your money. Try to keep it. Now again, don't break the laws because it's not worth going to jail for it. But do whatever you can within the law and give as little as you can. But by the way 40% of all taxes in the United States are paid in by the top 1%. So at the end of the day with all the loopholes with all the effort that the billionaires make they're still paying almost all the taxes or almost half of the taxes. Yeah. When you seem to say it was just for the businesses who make lots of money to then be able to, would that money make roads and all these things? No. What I said was that you can't come to the businesses to say you use the public roads which we haven't paid for. But I'm saying they have paid for those public roads so they own nothing in addition. They've already paid for the public roads. Sure they should use them. Just like we use them. I pay taxes. Indeed those who don't pay taxes should be embarrassed about using the public roads because they haven't contributed anything to them. Well I think quality of opportunity is again a very dangerous term because in a sense it necessitates some violence against somebody in order to equate the opportunities. What I'm interested in is maximising opportunities. I want everybody to have as many opportunities as possible. Is it going to be equal? Never. It's metaphysically impossible. Some of you some of you, I don't know might have gone to Eaton and some of you went to our public school. You're not going to have the same opportunities. That's just a reality. And there's no way to make it equal. So we can pretend, we can have a fiction, we can fantasize but it's not going to be. So what I want to make sure is that everybody in society which poor middle class has as many opportunities as they have to do that you need economic freedom. The fundamental to maximise opportunities. Societies in which poor people have a lot of opportunities are free societies. Unregulated societies. Unconstrained societies. That's where you get maximised opportunities. Now let me say something I forgot to say in my talk and then I'll continue with the question. Which there are a lot of. There's one sense in which equality means something. Politically. And that's equality of freedom. Equality of rights. Equality of liberty. We are all born free. You are not born a surf to anybody. You're not born a slave to anybody. You are a free human being. You should be allowed to do whatever the hell you want to do. As long as you're not hurting other people it's none of anybody's business what you do. We don't live in that society. We live in a society where the government can force you not to do what you want to do. In spite of the fact that you're not going to hurt anybody and you haven't hurt anybody. Whether it's licensing laws in California to shampoo hair you have to get a license. Which costs thousands of dollars. Who do you think that hurts? It doesn't hurt me. It hurts poor people. Who can make a living shampooing hair but if they're going to pay $4000 to get a license they're not going to get that job. They're never going to have that opportunity. So maximizing opportunities means getting rid of government intervention. It means economic freedom. It means freedom for everybody. Any attempt to equate opportunity or outcome violates political equality. Violates equality before the law. You're not equal before the law when you're paying a higher tax rate than somebody else. You're not being treated equally. One person is paying a lot and one person is paying a little. And it's not an issue of you did some harm because rich people don't do harm. They do good. I mean assuming they're produced and assuming we live in a free market. Yeah. Someone who can make more money or generate more freedom just by a very natural fact about themselves. Give me an example. If someone wants to take Le Bon James as an example if it's instead, I mean you say you'll never be as good at Le Bon James, let's say that's because he's naturally born a better basketball player. For some of it you say you should be able to have that opportunity to So two things. Clearly Le Bon James was born with physical attributes that make him that make it possible for him to be a great basketball player. Good for him. I was probably born with some other attributes that may be good at this maybe. So the genes that we have we have it's what we have. What maximizing opportunities means is means that once you have a certain identity that you have certain genes that you are who you are you have the ability to make choices to make you the best at that as you can be. Now a lot of people are born with Le Bon James's physique. Well I don't know how many but quite a few. Some people work really really hard at it. Some people use their mental and all sports is a mental activity. Those of you do really really at the top level of sports. A lot of it's up here. Le Bon James and I don't know Le Bon James that well but I know I've read about Michael Jackson. Michael Jordan. Michael Jackson. Michael Jordan works incredibly hard. Watch tapes, studied his opponents studied moves that he admired in other players practiced them and practiced them and worked unbelievably hard. Yes he was born with some talent. Good for him. I was born with other talents. You know we're all born with something. And the point is this. What you're born with is given. Make the most of it and let's create a society that allows people to make the most of it. Not a society that because you're born with some talent we punish you for it. That doesn't have as much talent because you have to say that everyone is born with some talent. Le Bon James level. Le Bon James is the best in the world. I'm not the best in the world in anything. But that doesn't bother me. Because I mean you have to say to people who are just born at the worst and to start born very poor at the start. Just top luck. Including if you're born autistic or severely disabled in some other way. I mean it's sad that they're autistic. It's sad that they're autistic. It's sad that they have some disability whatever that disability is. But that gives you or them the right to take my stuff away from me. How is that moral? You talk about Morelli. How is it moral that somebody's need is a claim against me? Somebody's need is not a claim against you. You don't have unchosen claims. You don't have unchosen claim. There is no original sin. The fact that you were born with talent doesn't mean you owe society or anybody else something. You owe who you are. Your job in life is to maximize what you do with what you have. You don't owe other people stuff. Somebody who's autistic relies I mean autistic is complicated. Somebody who's really physically disabled relies on the good will of people to help him. It doesn't make it right to force people to help him. If he deserves help then volunteer to help him. But force should never be part of human interaction. When you introduce force into human interaction you destroy. You destroy life. You destroy freedom. You destroy who you are. Yeah. Not having things like slums in our society that does actually benefit rich people as well just because it's not nice living in a society of that sort of thing. You can say that 40% of taxes come from the top 1%, but we do need that money to an extent just to make society a nicer place to be. So where do you suggest we get that money from? So I don't believe that. I don't believe that we don't have slums because we have high taxes and the taxes prevent people from living in slums. We don't have slums because the productivity of labour even at the lowest levels in rich societies made rich by the hard work of a lot of people is so high that people don't have to be poor anymore. Well, severely disabled people who would help a severely disabled person? Voluntarily. Yeah, well what do we need taxes for? I mean, the fact is what do we need somebody to put a gun to the back of your head to take your money from it? If I saw a child who was really struggling then I would be happy to take out my check book and write them a check. My problem today is after they take 50% of my money I don't have the check book anymore. The government has the check book and they're writing checks and their checks are a lot less efficient than mine. They're wasteful and they allocate that money not based on my values but based on some bureaucrats values. Yes, way in the back. I'm trying to go back and forth. So you said that you want some form of government in terms of policing and certain things and how you agree that people make narrow money. What about inheritance? Do you think there should be 100% of inheritance to stop the fact that some people are born into something and that is one way where you could break people's legs without actually doing anything wrong? Well I do think it does wrong so I'm against any inheritance taxes. It's the person who left the money, it's his money. For all I care, they could burn it. Do we have a right to stop them from burning? It's theirs. They could give it to their kids. They could give it to strangers. They could leave it to their cat. It's not a my business. It's not a my business what they do with the money. Now, the person who gets the money, their child, if in a free society, if they work and if they invest wisely, they can probably live off of that money. I'm not sure it's good for them to live off the money because I actually think it hurts you to get money without working for it. I think Walford destroys people. I think kids who live off of their parents' checks destroys people because it destroys your self-esteem. The way you get self-esteem and pride in your own life is knowing that you have worked for the things that you have. You've taken care of your family. It's your labor that has made possible the things that make your life a good life. So you can be very poor but if you've done the work and the paycheck is an exchange for the work you have done, you feel good about yourself. You give people a check not to work. You give people a check to live a life that they haven't earned. They don't feel good about it. In my view, the welfare state institutionalizes people into poverty and so does inheritance. So I would encourage rich parents not to leave their money to their kids but it's their money. They can do whatever the hell they want with it. That would be a positive intervention. See, I don't believe force is ever positive. Force is... It might, but it's more harmful for them if you introduce force into the equation. So I don't believe that there's a utility function out there that we maximize social utility. If we just nudge people here and there and force them a little bit here and go, no. The best thing for the human race, the best thing for our species, the way we as human beings particularly survive and thrive is when we're free of coercion. Now, sometimes when we're free of coercion people are going to do stupid things. They won't wear seatbelt. I'm against seatbelt laws. They won't wear seatbelt. Now you'd say, but the law just forces them to wear seatbelt. It's good for them and yeah, I agree with you. It's good for them, but it's not in my business. If you commit suicide, it's their business. I don't believe in drug laws. You want to go and shoot yourself up with heroin and destroy your life, your business. Don't make me pay the bill. But if you want to get high on marijuana, you want to get high on cocaine, how does that affect my life? No, it's the same thing. The principle is I don't believe in using force to make society better. I believe the best society is one where there's no force. You're not forcing a dead person. You're violating his choices. You're forcing him exposed. It's still force. I get it. Go ahead. We were saying about not using force, but do you not think it's a sound investment on the part of wealthy individuals to invest in some corner of government economic policy to help maximise opportunity for the rest of society so that other individuals can thrive and provide things back into the society like, say, you can benefit from, just these jobs can come up with the iPhone, things like that? No, because that's not how it works. It's not. So if you take the richest societies on the planet, that's not how it works. So take Hong Kong, which has a GDP per capita about the equivalent of the United States. It's pretty high up there, outside of the Gulf States, which just, you know, they get their oil. They don't really produce much. They're the richest societies on the planet. What happens in Hong Kong? There's a tiny little safety net, but there's very little government. How did they get so rich? Nobody helped anybody, and that's the beauty of it. You know how they got so rich now? I don't know how many of you have ever been to Hong Kong. Anybody ever been to Hong Kong? Everybody should go to Hong Kong once in their life. Hong Kong 75 years ago was a fishing village. There was nothing there. And what they did was establish the rule of law, protected property rights, and other than that, basically left people alone. And millions of people from all over Asia did everything in their power to get to this place. They got on rafts and risked their lives and their kids' lives to get there. And they came there with nothing. And they produced and they created, and they built, and then when they created, British companies said, oh, that's cool. There's something going on here. And they came in and it was built and wealth was created and poor people rose up. There's still poor people in Hong Kong. But they're far better at being poor in Hong Kong than they are better at being poor in any other neighbour of Hong Kong. So what happens is wealth is not, consumption is not created through government redistribution. That is a myth. Consumption is created through production. The economy is not driven by consumption. The economy is driven by work, by production. When you consume a dollar, where do you get a pound? Where do you get the pound from? Hopefully from working. Working is production. You can't consume more than you produce. So it's all about production and production happens when we're free. Production happens when the government leaves us alone. And the less it leaves us alone, the lower the production we're going to have. And that's been proven time and time again. You look at all of these countries. By the way, I talk a lot about this in the lecture I gave last year. Sorry, I didn't talk about it in the lecture this year. But example after example after example. Free countries do well. Regulated, controlled, highly taxed countries do poorly. How do they get an education if no one's giving any kind of benefit to them? They pay for it like everybody else pays for it. They're a baby. A baby doesn't have any money. Yeah, but that's what your parents for, right? And the parents are responsible for that baby until they're 18. And when you're 18, you could actually work while you get an education. I did it. I got a graduate degree. Nobody helped me. I went and worked and funded my education. So, you know, that's what you do. You work in order to consume. You have to produce. Now your parents might do it. Good for them. And they might help you out. And they might give you, you know, pay for that education. Up until 18, that's their responsibility. Beyond 18, it's your responsibility whether they help you or not is up to them. So that's how you grow. I mean, I'm not saying baby should be born, put them in the wilderness, let them grow into individuals. I mean, that would be absurd. Even for me. Yeah. So, it seems to me that your whole argument is based on the promise that, you know, wealthy people deserve that wealth because they've earned it. But then it would be pointed out that, well, inheritance is a case where someone might not have earned it. So how can you justify that? I mean, answer that quickly because we've already answered it. It's not an issue of them deserving it. It's an issue of their parents who did make the money deserving to figure out what they do with the money. It's their right, as I said, to burn it or to give it to whoever they want. And it's not our responsibility to take it away from them. Yes. Sure. There's something about the macroeconomy. So during the labor market, the death level of the United Kingdom basically doubled. So, and then, during the coalition, a consultative government, right of Cymru, they basically carried out a austerity in the time to produce the death level. And do you think, in your opinion, is this a proper method to pay the debt down? And if not, what do you think is the best alternative? So I don't know what you mean by austerity and haven't looked at British economy closely enough to give you an evaluation of either government, but my guess is they both are pretty bad. The way to pay down the debt is to stop spending as much money. So what government should do all over the world is stop spending money, which means that money gets returned to us. We are much better users of our own money than the government is. So what you want to do is cut government spending as deeply and as meaningful as possible. And then only after you cut government spending a lot should you cut taxes. That even by cutting government spending and starting to not take debt, because debt sucks money out of the private economy into the public economy and thus diminishes its value. You want to leave money in the hands of the private economy as much as possible. Again, you want to leave people free. And it's not just government spending. Much more important even than government spending is government regulation. Government regulation makes it very almost impossible to innovate. All innovation today is happening in areas that are not regulated. Luckily, the federal government has not decided to regulate this. Because if it did, it wouldn't look like this. It wouldn't be this beautiful machine. Indeed, if a government committee made one of these, I'll leave it to your imagination what it would look like. And you all know it, whether you're leftist or white, you all know a government committee would never make anything as beautiful as this. All of you know that, right? But yet, you want the government to make this. You do, because that's the implication of the policies many of you are advocating at the end of the day. OK. He's limiting me. I would go on forever. Yeah. Yeah. So, his fault. When you're talking about everyone benefit team, when, for example, we buy Harry Potter, except for JK Rowling benefits, we benefit. All those examples were in MEDCs, in countries with... Good. So, the China question. In the West. Cool. Well, I was wondering what your opinion is then when it affects another part of the world, such as Africa. I mean, the money, we, Western companies, I mean, they are not their time, they don't have the choice of labour at all the time. They are... Their job is not like the amount they work is not relative to how much money they get and how much they need. How do you get to make that decision for them? I mean, this to me is... I get this at every... Particularly in Europe and in the U.S. as well. This to me is one of the most... Anyway. You sit here in Europe, in your cushy middle class chairs. I'm serious about this. And you want to judge the African, or let's take the Chinese, because that's why, you know, in Apple or the Indonesian so-called sweatshop or whatever. Does that tell me that two bucks a day is not a dramatic improvement in their life? It is. And there's no way for them to get to the point to be as rich as you are unless they go through that phase. And if you deny them the ability to make two bucks a day by charging four, by insisting that companies pay four and therefore they withdraw completely from the market. Because you know what? I'm not paying 600 bucks for this. I'll pay 300. And if I stop buying this, who suffers? That Chinese kid who's right now making whatever, three bucks a day or whatever. And his alternative is to go back to the farm and you know what they did in the farms? 40 years ago when the Chinese were all producing agriculture, they were dying of starvation. 40 to 60 million Chinese died of starvation under Mao. Suddenly you've given them opportunity to actually attain middle classhood, to learn a skill, to have a profession, to make money, to make themselves into something. And by the way, the Chinese never complain about how much they're being paid. You guys complain. We complain in the West because yes, to our middle class comfy lives, that seems ridiculous. But that's because you've never lived in real poverty. Nobody in England has lived in real poverty the way the Chinese and Africans and the Indonesians live. When you go to a place and it's interesting, because take Korea. Korea is an interesting case study, right? You've got North Korea and South Korea. 50, 60, 70 years ago South Korea was as poor as North Korea. They were both dirt poor. And then South Korea instituted some economic freedom. And it made it possible for people to go and work for a buck a day, for two bucks a day. And they developed skills and they increased their productivity and they started building more stuff. And capital flu came in and increased their productivity even more. And suddenly, and you go to Seoul today, and they were as rich as you are. But in 70 years they did it, or 60 years, they did what you've done in hundreds of years. How did they do it? Because of the ability to slowly ratchet up. Now if you demand that they skip and get to your standard of living like that, then they will stay poor forever. And that's what you're condemning them to. You're condemning them to eternal poverty. A kid who is getting a buck or two a day, his alternative is to die in the fields, you're doing him a favor by giving him the two bucks a day. And he's producing something and he's learning a skill at the same time. And one day he'll run the factory. But if you demand that he gets paid for, he'll never have the job, he'll never have the factory and he'll stay poor for the rest of his life. And all you have to do to see this in real action is go to Asia and see how they live under poverty and see how these countries are growing rich. And you know that over the last 30 years, now this is not my statistic, this is the United Nations, you can look up online. Over the last 30 years a billion, that's what a billion people have come out of poverty. In Asia, why because of capitalism? Not because of foreign aid, foreign aid doesn't help anybody, except the dictators who put them in the Swiss bank accounts. What helps poor countries is freedom, you give them the rule of law, you give them property rights, if you're interested in property rights and how it helps poor people read capital ideas by Hernandez de Soto, a Peruvian economist, a brilliant economist. You give them property, you give them capital, a job, that's how you create wealth. Not by giving them handouts. So a billion people have come out of poverty. Now I know some people have said all you guys care about is the rich, somebody said, what you care about is the rich, deserve it. You know what, I don't care about the rich, they don't need taking care of, right? They're doing great, I care about the poor. I care about the poor and the only system in human history, the only system in human history, to help the poor, to help ambitious poor people rise up of poverty and become rich has been capitalism. Free markets are the only, only cure for poverty. The only way in which you become rich so you don't have to have poor people is through capitalism. That's how this country became rich, that's how America became rich, that's how Hong Kong became rich, that's how South Korea became rich. There's no other way to do it because we get poverty, we get a return, a deterioration, we get a destruction of wealth, not a creation of wealth. You care about the poor and the middle class, I also care about the rich because I think that they are villainized which is unbelievably unjust. But I care about young people who I want to maximize their opportunities and I know that the only way to maximize people opportunities is to give economic freedom to the world. And that should be the goal. And that means not sitting here and judging how much a laborer makes in Indonesia. Now if they're chained, if they're whipped, slavery is evil, any kind of slavery is evil. But what's happening in the freer countries, that's not slavery, that's choices that people are making to make their lives better. You don't like it, but it's their lives not yours. I have to stop, so sorry guys, I'd go on all night. Thank you all for coming down. If you'd like to join us in the foyer, thank you. Thank you all for coming down. If you'd like to join us in the foyer afterwards for some snacks and drinks and more, we should see you in the next one. Thank you.