 You guys know basketball? A little bit. Follow the NBA a little bit. Anybody know who LeBron James is? Best basketball player in the world. That's all big, tall, athletic, unbelievable player. So I am a pretty lousy basketball player. I've got all the wrong jeans, and I haven't practiced that much. But you know what? I want basketball fairness. I want to get on a court with LeBron 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 I'm going to have zero points, because that's what will happen. I want fairness. I want equality of basketball. So how do we make me and LeBron 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. Granted, I haven't worked hard. But you know what? Fairness means equality. So I demand basketball fairness. I want to be able to play with LeBron James on the court and have a chance of winning. What would he have to do? Because you can't make me better. Maybe a little bit. And we're not enough to beat him, not enough to even score one point. How do we do it? Don't be shy. Break his legs. Yeah. That's right. You'd have to break his legs. And 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 that happens every day. 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 had, you haven't worked. Most of you haven't worked. You're still students. Maybe you've all worked a little bit. But 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 gonna spend more time working than doing anything else in life, maybe other than sleeping, right? 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 mean, I make a decent living. They take 50% of my money. Oh, should I have them break my legs? What's better? I don't know. Some days I think I'd rather the IRS just came and broke my legs and left me alone with the money. Cause 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%. He's not, it's not good enough to take 50. He wants to take 80% of my time, my effort, my resources. How does that, 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, right? 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. Right? 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 where we can'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, I 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's 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 professor 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 gonna 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 that's 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 variety of different people? 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 were better at 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 real equality 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, I, 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 government connections? Oh that's, 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 and 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 you 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 LeBron James when he dunks the ball, right? That's cool when we see that. When I 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 LeBron James ever will add to my life. LeBron 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, but. So to me, what we should be celebrating is ability and talent. What we're celebrating is success, not condemning it, not ridiculing it, not trying to bring it down and denounce it. So, in my view, inequality is a rouge, a facade, a facade 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, we're not interested in, the money that we take from the rich is not gonna help the poor. What really they enjoy is to pull down the rich. What they really want is to break LeBron 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 Krugman, 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 lives. To try to make the most of your life. To try to, whether it's financially, if you wanna be rich, fine. Or 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 that 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 Ayn Rand, who I think provides you with the ideas and with the ethics that make it possible for you to make the most of your own lives. 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 you should each celebrate your own life. Thank you all. I'll take questions. Thank you.