 because of the left. The whole agenda of the left right now is focused on bringing about some form of equality. And to do that, they have to convince us, they have to convince all of us that inequality is evil, that inequality is bad. Now, what's interesting is, if you read Ayn Rand, Ayn Rand was talking about this 50 years ago. This whole discussion of egalitarianism, of the benefits of equality, of the evil of inequality, is not new. It was big in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Rand talks about it quite a lot. And the left, it was a big agenda of the left back then. It kind of died out and kind of went away. And it seems to really have come back with the Obama administration. Really as a major thrust of what they're trying to do, of what they want to do. And I think what happened in the 1970s is this inequality debate, in a sense, hit a kind of a brick wall. And the brick wall is the American spirit. Americans don't like the idea of equality. We just reject it. It's somehow wrong. We admire achievement. We admire success. We look at, historically, Americans have looked at wealthy people and said, wow, I want to be like that. I want to be successful. And they've attributed people success to their own abilities, to their own hard work, to their own innovation, to the use of their own minds. So Americans have always had a healthy view of success. Another thing that the inequality debate is challenged by is the fact that Americans, again, historically, have been individualist. They viewed the individual as the important unit in politics, in life. It's about individual success. It's about individual prosperity, not in terms of classes. I mean, nobody talked in terms of classes in America until relatively recently. It was about, how does this affect individuals? So when the left started talking about these issues of inequality and we want to achieve equality, Americans rebelled against us. This isn't the American thing to believe in. And then the Berlin Wall falls. And that whole idea of equality kind of disappears. Why has it come back again today? Well, I think what the left has been doing over the last 20 to 30 years and what it's doing even more intensely today is trying to lay the foundation for the success of the idea of this equality. And equality of what? Equality of outcome is what they want, right? Equality of abilities, equality of just equality. They can't really even define it. Equality of happiness, I've heard people talk about, right? They want some equality of outcome. But they need to lay the foundations. And how are you going to lay the foundations out? How are you going to make it saleable to the American people? How are you going to get the American people to buy into this idea? Well, the only way to do that is to undercut those two ideas, the idea of success and the idea of individualism. And that, I think, is what the left has been dedicating itself a long time, writing about it in subtle different ways. They've been writing about it. They've been working on it. They've been trying to find ways in which they can attack the notion of individual success, the notion, more fundamentally, of individualism, to prep the American people so that we become much more accepting of the idea, the egalitarian idea, the idea of equality, the idea of the evil of inequality. So let's talk a little bit about how they've been doing that. I mean, you saw this in an obvious way with Obama. And you can even see the sequence of this. Even before he talked about inequality and even of inequality, what was the first thing that Obama talked about? It was, you didn't build it. I mean, you didn't build it. Is a direct attack on what? On the notion that you as an individual are successful, that you as an individual have earned something. You didn't build that is an attack directly on the notion of personal responsibility, of responsibility for your own achievements. And if it's not your own achievements, if you're not responsible for the wealth you have, for the income you have, for whatever it is that you've created and built, then what's the big deal about taking it away from? It's not yours. It's ours. Note that he does two things very successfully here. I mean, successfully, we'll see. But he does try to do two things. One is attack the notion of success and attack the notion of individual. It's we helped you. It's not even any particular individual who helped you. If it's this particular school teacher who helped you, then I can write them a check. That's easy. I can take care of that. And indeed, that's what we do. Bill Gates didn't write all the software for Microsoft. True. But he paid everybody who helped him write that software, right? But it's not about those individuals. It's this ambiguous, amorphous, undefined we, this collective that's unspecified, the people who built the roads, the people who built the schools, and your favorite teacher, and your employees, and your suppliers. And it's we built it. So it's not your money because you didn't build it. It's not you are not responsible for it. Again, what they're trying to do is delink what's yours from your own efforts. And if they can do that, then they can take it from you. They can build the legitimacy for the idea that whether you're Bill Gates or you're a bum on the streets, your equal can neither one deserves it. You didn't build it. Now, but you didn't build it has deeper roots. It has much deeper roots that again, go back over the last 20 to 30 years to philosophy, to ideas that are being taught at our universities and our schools that are being preached by some of our leading businessmen. And this is the idea much more fundamentally that you didn't build it. Because everything you build, even if you literally built it, is just a consequence of luck. Luck? I mean, Bill Gates is lucky. There's a wonderful book, wonderful, because it's very well written. I forgot its name, of course. The guy who wrote Tipping Point, Gladwell. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book. And he explains that Bill Gates just happened to go to school that happened to have a computer lab, and that he happened to have some opportunities to work in that computer lab. And he happened to do this, and he happened to do that. It wasn't him. It just, the stuff happened to him. And again, it goes even deeper than now, because it's not just the luck of circumstance that they talk about. But it's an even deeper luck, and Bill Gates talks about this himself. Bill Gates was born with particular genes that are suitable for a pro, you know, to be a computer guy and a businessman. He was born in a century where those genes were particularly useful, right? He was born to a family that encouraged him. He had no control over his family, his genes, or the century he was born into. This is all luck, right? And if you don't, you know, now, this all comes from John Wall's philosophy and a lot of other kind of leftist thinkers that have been talking about this for the last 20 years. But there's a prominent businessman who says this all the time, and he talks exactly in this language. Anybody know who that is? Juan Buffett. Juan Buffett talks this language. You'll see him in interviews talking about, well, I'm just lucky. And what he means is this deeper form of luck, right? So the wealth he made isn't his. He didn't build it. It just happened because he has the right genes and the right family and the right education, the right century, and so on. And he was in the right place at the right time. And of course, Bill Gates is Juan Buffett's protege, so you're starting to see Bill Gates talk like this, right? So these ideas are entering. Again, it's all time to cut. It's all to subvert this idea that you built it, that you're responsible for your life, that you're responsible for creating and building and making stuff. Because if you're not, again, then how come it's fair that you have all this stuff from other people? And we'll see the assumption built into that, the corrupting assumption there, right? So the idea is that you didn't create stuff. You didn't build it. But they have to build further on this, right? They have to continuously advocate for this notion that it's not yours. Or if it is yours, there's an injustice. Because again, American people are pretty stubborn about this idea of respecting ability, respecting achievement, and respecting individuals. So you see entering into the language more and more ideas that reflect, implicitly reflect, implicitly and explicitly reflect, the notion that if you have a lot, one, you probably didn't build it, and two, you actually took it from somebody. Or that the fact that you have it means other people don't. And you see this whole notion of a zero-sum world, nobody actually admits to believing in zero-sum. Nobody actually advocates for zero-sum, but it's in the language. It's in the giving back that so many of our rich philanthropists talk about. We give back, what did you take? What did you take that you have to give back? But if it's a zero-sum world, anything that they have, they took from somewhere. It's in Obama's speech, the latest state of the Union. When he didn't say the wealthy make, he said the wealthy take. The wealthy take a big portion of the pie or whatever the term was, right? But it's the taking. It's not making money, it's taking money. And that does, again, two things. It undermines the moral right to whatever they took, because they took it. And implicitly it says it's ours. It's again, this we, right? We built it. It's really ours, and those guys are taking a bigger piece than they share, right? So again, all this is meant to soften us up, to undercut our ability to defend against us, to prepare the American public for, well, inequality's evil because those guys didn't build it. They're taking a bigger part of the pie than they should. It's not theirs to begin with, it's ours. We want some of it back in order to bring about more equality. They even make ridiculous economic arguments to argue that inequality is bad somehow. Again, to appeal to the practical nature of Americans. We want the economy to work. We want economic progress. We want economic success. Haven't you heard that inequality is holding back economic growth, right? I mean, this is common now. Krugman writes about this. Allen Blinder writes about this. The president has talked about this. Inequality slows down economic growth. Now, how does that work? How does it work that inequality slows economic growth? Well, we know, and this is a metaphysical fact, that you cannot question. There were drives the economy as consumption. Drives it, that's the starting point. Because 70% they come up with this bizarre number out of GDP, 70% of GDP is consumption, 70% of the economy is consumption. Therefore, what drives the economy is consumption, right? So you start with that. Who consumes more? The rich or the poor? That's a percentage of their income. The poor, much more, right? Because the rich save and invest. And saving and investment, that's no good for the economy. What drives the economy is consumption. So if you take money away from those nasty investing and saving rich, and you give it to those wonderful consuming poor or middle class or whatever, then the economy will go faster. Now, I'm not gonna teach you all economics, but that is like one of the stupidest arguments in human history. It really is, because what drives the economy long term is saving and investment. Put aside the rights issue of all this, but just from a purely economic perspective, you can't consume more than you produce. So how can consumption be 70% of an economy? What are you consuming? Every dollar I used to buy ice cream, I had a work to produce. I can't consume more than my income. Now I can borrow stuff for a while, you can consume more than you produce, but you have to pay back. So you have to, at the very least, it's 50-50. And of course what drives consumption is production. There's the creation of stuff, the building of stuff. Not the, you know what consumption is? What happens to ice cream after you eat it? It's gone. Consumption is destruction. Now it's good destruction, the ice cream really tasted well and makes your life better, right? It's good, it's hard to say good destruction, but it's a good form, right? But that's what it is. Production is building stuff, making stuff. That's what is important, that's what drives an economy. So not to say using all these economic arguments. And I'm gonna speculate, this is not wild speculation, that they know they're bogus. They know this isn't true. But they're trying to make this argument, right? Their thing is inequality and they wanna get you to believe that it's bad. And if inequality slows down the economy, the American people are gonna go, oh no, we want economic growth, so let's get rid of inequality. Because we're practical people, we want prosperity, we want success. If that is what we need, by what right? Can we tell those men, go ahead and produce what we want? While we're insulting you, while we're trying to control your business, and while we're not leaving you, that which you produced, today it's crudely obvious, if we need the oil companies, we have only one of the choice. Either we produce oil ourselves and no government has ever done it or can do it. Or we have to accept the oil companies terms, pay them whatever they can get, the more they get, the more credit to them, because that means the country needs it and pays them. They've produced something needed by the people. And we must say thank you, instead of putting or proposing to put a tax on them in order to give the money to the government who does nothing. The government doesn't contribute anything except impediments. But if...