 Thank you all, thanks for being here. So one of the things I think that particularly right now, anybody who believes in free markets, anybody who cares about free markets has to really think deeply about is why we're losing. Because our ideas are losing. You know, you talked about engineers who are on the right, I don't want to be called on the right anymore, right? I don't want to be in the same camp as Donald Trump or a lot of other people who are on the right and we were just talking outside, I hate the whole right left spectrum. Is there such a thing as a right left spectrum anymore? Aren't they all the same? Aren't they really all just collectivists in different forms or in different ways? We, we, and I think, right, you'll, you'll correct me if I'm wrong, but we believe in individualism, right? We are anti-collectivist and the essential characteristic of the ideas that we all believe in are individualistic ideas. We believe in the primacy, the sanctity of the individual and not sacrificing the individual to the group. And yet these ideas are losing. They're losing across the political spectrum and it's bewildering, right? Because we're right, this should be easy. Everybody should agree with us, give them a couple of books and that's it, right? It should be because we really are right. And if you think about from an economics perspective, we have tons of evidence. It's not like we're struggling to show the liberty and freedom and individualism work. We've got history where this has been tried at least to some extent and where when we allow people to be free, when we protect property rights, what happens? Wealth is created in mass, huge quantities of wealth. I mean, Sweden's a great example. If I, you'll correct me if I get my history wrong, but like from 1870 until sometime in the middle of the 20th century, Sweden had a relatively free market, about as free as any country had in the West. And you guys became rich. You went from one of the poorest countries in Europe to one of the richest, if not from the poorest to the richest, right? And then you experimented with socialism or some socialism and you got less rich. And everybody who experiments with socialism gets less rich. And everybody who experiments with free markets gets more rich. I mean, this is simple stuff. I mean, historically, all the evidence, all the evidence suggests that our position is the right position if you care about prosperity, if you care about wealth creation, even if you care about the poor, whatever that means, the poor do better under capitalism than they do under any other system. We've got historical examples. We've got examples right now in the world. You know, we've got in South America, there's a wonderful experiment going on. You've got a country that used to be the richest country in South America is now the poorest country in South America on a per capita basis. What country's that? Venezuela. Venezuela used to be the richest country in Latin America, that oil, that natural resources, that, you know, some economic freedom and they got very wealthy. Now, they still have natural resources, they still have oil, larger oil reserves than Saudi Arabia. Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world. And people are starving in the streets. Children are dying, babies are dying from malnutrition. There's no toilet paper. Basic requirements of human survival are disappearing. They don't grow enough food. They have to import food. Why? Because for the last 15 years or so they've been experimenting as if you need more experimentation with socialism. Socialism makes you poor. Now just across a couple of borders, there's a country called Chile. Chile used to be the poorest country in Latin America. And today is the richest country in Latin America, exact opposite from Venezuela. What happened in Chile? They experimented with some free markets. Quite a bit of free markets relative to the rest of the world. And they became rich. It's right there. So what does everybody want to be? Chile or Venezuela? Everybody wants to be a Venezuela. If you look at how they vote, if you look at what kind of economic practices they want to put into place, if you look at what they actually desire as an ideal, they want to be Venezuela. So what's going on? And it's interesting because even Chile wants to be Venezuela. Because Chile's now elected a president twice, who's a socialist. And she is slowly undoing all the wonderful things that were put in place to make Chile an incredibly rich country that it is today. There are things going on here that is causing people, in spite of the evidence, to reject freedom, to reject capitalism, to reject free markets, in the favor of a failed evil system that has manifest itself as failed and evil. And again, you can see it in Venezuela every day. So I'd argue that it has to be something deeper than economics. Because the economics are straightforward. The economics people can see. There has to be something going on here where people are not valuing the wealth that's created. I mean, the other unreported story of the last 30 years that nobody talks about is the fact that in Asia, when people were allowed just a little bit of freedom in a few areas of life, two billion people or something approaching two billion people have come out of poverty. I mean, it's astounding what has happened over the last 30 years in terms of improvement in health, in nutrition, life expectancy, wealth in countries like China and India and Vietnam and Thailand and not to mention South Korea and Taiwan and Hong Kong and Singapore. And they become relatively rich, relatively where they were. Again, adopting market. And yet, we in the West, we're rich. We're rich because we used to have these systems and we still have remnants of them. We don't want them anymore. We can see the consequences out there and we don't care. And I think that to ask the question of why, why don't we care is the key question, the liberty movement, if you will, those of us who believe in free markets, have to ask and have to answer because otherwise if we don't have an answer to this, we continue losing because we are losing. So, let me try to propose an answer to this question. What is free markets? What are free markets about? What is essentially characterizes? Capitalism, free markets, the economic system, we all desire. What characterizes it? What's the main feature of a free market? Voluntary exchange. Voluntary exchange, that's right. What's that? I'm not sure competition characterizes free markets. If you really think about it, it's a common phrase, you know, competition is what capitalism is about. Think about it. I like to use my iPhone and I'll use it several times. But who's Apple's main competitor, Samsung? And yet in phones, good question, right? Let's assume, let's assume hardware just because that serves the purposes of my example, right? Samsung is Apple's main competitor when it comes to hardware phones, right? And yet, there are a number of items inside this phone made by Samsung. A number of the things here made by Samsung. The thing that characterizes capitalism and free markets more than anything else, in my view, is not competition, but cooperation. Not only between companies, but think about what a corporation is. It's about capital and management and entrepreneurship and labor, cooperating in order to make one of these. Voluntary trading, but that's a cooperative activity, right? And yes, there's competition, but competition is not the core. That's why, you know, we can talk about monopolies afterwards, but this is why there's such hostility to monopolies. Because competition is this idea, beautiful ideal, if it's perfect competition. You're all taught in economics, perfect competition. Waste of time. It's a stupid theory. And then the contrast is monopoly when neither one exists in reality. So voluntary, and you said something. Individual autonomy. Individual autonomy, okay. We'll get to individual autonomy. Let's take voluntary exchange. So yeah, what categorizes markets, right, is voluntary exchange. And free markets means they're voluntary, which means there's no coercion, right? So free markets are markets with voluntary exchanges happen, which means markets that are free of coercion. Now, why do we do the, why do we exchange? What's the purpose of exchange? Like, why did people like Steve Jobs and Samsung and these people, why do they make this stuff? Why does Steve Jobs make this? Make money, right, right? And it took you a while to come up with that. It's pretty obvious, right? People built stuff to make money. But partially we're conditioned to feel a little embarrassed in saying it. Because making money is supposed to be not so good, right? It's not socially acceptable. But Steve Jobs did this to make money and he made lots of it. And I think he was pretty happy with it. I think he was pretty proud of making a lot of money. If Steve Jobs made this for me, then he would have cut his profit margin and given me a break because this is expensive. And the profit margin in these things is like 100%, right? Is it just about money? Why else did Steve Jobs make this? Yeah, he's the fun of it, the beauty of it, the passion of it. This is fun, right? Hopefully your work will be fun, right? You'll get up every morning excited about going to work because you'll be creating something, you'll be building something, you'll be making something for you, fun, right? So Steve Jobs built this for whom? For Steve Jobs. He loves this. He didn't ask me what I wanted, luckily, because I had no clue, right? No focus groups, no polls. Steve Jobs made something that he believed is beautiful and efficient and productive for himself. And he believed, and he had good reason to believe, that we would all fall in love with it because he did. So I'd like to tell the story of my first iPhone, the first iPhone I bought, right? So Steve Jobs makes this for Steve Jobs. When I went to buy my first iPhone, it was 2008. And the US economy was like in massive decline, right? We're heading into a recession. And I wanted to help stimulate the US economy, right? Cuz I know that's why you grow shopping. Cuz you wanna help your fellow man. You wanna make sure people have jobs. You care, right? Why do you go shopping? Why did I buy the iPhone? For whom? Yeah, because I wanted to make my life better in some way or another, I wanna make my life better. It's we go shopping cuz we wanna make our lives better, right? We wanna be more productive, we wanna have more fun, we wanna look cool, whatever it is, it's about ourselves. So when we go into the marketplace to engage in voluntary exchange, what are we pursuing? What are we out to get? What are we pursuing? Social well-being, maximized social utility, the good of society. We don't give a shit about any of those. What are we actually pursuing? Yeah, we're pursuing our own self-interest in one way or another, right? We're pursuing our own self-interest. Free markets are inherently about the pursuit of self-interest. And everybody knows it, very few people admit it, but everybody knows it. Everybody knows it, right? Producers produce cuz they're trying to make a lot of money for themselves. And because they have fun doing it. Consumers consume because they're trying to improve their own life. Whether it's productive or whether it's again fun or whatever it is, they want a better life. And it doesn't matter what good it is, that's the essential characteristic. Markets about self-interest. Markets about the pursuit of self. And this is a problem. Because what do we mean taught since we were this big about self-interest? Don't be selfish. I know my mother taught me, good Jewish mother, right? Think of yourself. Last, think of other people first. Goodness, nobility, virtue is about selflessness. It's about sacrifice. It's not about thinking of yourself. It's not about pursuing activities that are good for you. It's about pursuing activities that are good for other people. Now, nobody actually consistently lives this way. And nobody, including my mother, expects that. But that's what we're taught is the moral code, is the way to live. The virtuous way, the good way, the noble way. Don't pursue your own self-interest. Don't be selfish. Sacrifice, be selfless. And yeah, we know you can't do that all the time. So we allow you a little bit of selfishness over here. But then what happens when you live the self-interested life day to day? But the moral ideal is over here. The moral ideal is to be selfless. What emotion do we get inside when we live one way and we think we should be living another way? Yeah, guilt. And most Americans at least, particularly if they're wealthy, particularly as they get older, feel enormously guilty. And they usually vote for increasing their own taxes because of it. It's guilt, as any Jewish or Catholic mother will tell you, is a great way to control people. So we have a moral code that says that nobility, goodness, virtue is about being selfless. And we have an economic system which rewards and celebrates self-interest. We've got a conflict. We've got a problem. Think about somebody like Bill Gates. Bill Gates builds Microsoft. And he makes $70 billion in the process, richest man in the world. What do we think of Bill Gates while he's working at Microsoft? Good guy, mediocre guy, bad guy, morally. Business-wise, everybody wants to be Bill Gates, right? But from our moral perspective, are we building statues for him? Is the pope going to give him sainthood? Are we going to name boulevards after him, after Microsoft, while he's building this company and making $70 billion? No, he's a greedy capitalist. He's making lots of money. Now notice, how do you make a lot of money? How do you make $70 billion? This is the secret to success. How do you make $70 billion by building something everyone wants and is willing to pay for, by offering them at a price that everybody's willing to buy it? So if you can sell a product to five billion people, you're going to be a billionaire, particularly if you have updates every year and you can sell the updates every time, right? But people are buying it. Why are they buying it? Because it makes their life worse. What's the essence of voluntary trade? That if I buy something for $100, what's it worth to me? More than $100. So my life is not better because I own this thing. And the company has made money because they're making a profit. So Bill Gates made $70 billion by creating trillions of dollars of wealth by changing the world, by making billions of people better off than yet we resent him. Because the essence of the moral code with which we live is not about helping other people. If that was the standard, Bill Gates is a saint, one of the greatest saints of all of mankind. Much bigger saint than Mother Teresa. Bill Gates helped more people, particularly poor people, much more in a much more dramatic way than anybody else probably in the last 100 years. And yet he's not a saint. Nobody even considers him morally. He's the best kind of neutral. At worst negative because he did make money while helping people. Exactly. So now notice how Bill Gates becomes a good guy. He stops making things. He stops producing things. He stops making money. And he takes all the money and he starts giving it away. Now he's a good guy because he's not making any money. We can't accuse him of being too selfish. Now he's not quite ready for sainthood. Why? Well, he's not dead. But even if he died, if he had a heart attack tomorrow, which I don't wish on him and he dropped dead, he wouldn't be a saint. What's missing? Yeah, he's living in a big house. He flies in a private jet. He's enjoying giving the money away. Like he's got a smile on his face when we interview him. Ever seen a saint like a painting of a saint with a smile on his face? Now the whole point of morality is to suffer. Right? I mean, that's what the saints look like. They've usually got arrows sticking out of all of them. And they, you know, Bill Gates would have to move into a tent, like sell this house, move into a tent, give all the money away and bleed a little bit for us. And then I can almost guarantee sainthood. But notice how perverse this morality is and how difficult it is for us, those of us who believe in free markets and capitalism, to advocate for a system where Bill Gates, its best representative gets no moral credit, zero moral credit for what he's done. And that he has to become a philanthropist just to get some moral credit. Now he will have an impact on the world as a philanthropist, a little bit. He'll help some people. Good for him. I have nothing against charity. But he changed the world when he was a businessman. He made the world a better place for billions of people as a businessman. He'll never match that with philanthropy. I don't care how much money he gives away. Philanthropy does not change the world. Charity is an insignificant factor in the world out there. If you think about the billion to two billion people who've come out of poverty over the last 30 years, I would guess that not one of them did it because of charity. Almost all of them did it because of markets, because of the Bill Gates's in various shapes and sizes of the world. Business is what brings people out of poverty, not charity. Foreign aid doesn't help anybody, but foreign capital does. Apple going to China helps the Chinese become middle class, not the US government sending money somewhere. Indeed, foreign aid has been a huge bust in terms of helping people come out of poverty. I'll have a Q&A, but so is it relevant to this particular point? Well, that's a good question, right? Do we need to give it to him? But think about the way we hold it then. The way we hold it then is capitalism is good because people make a lot of money, but it's not deserving of our credit. It's not really moral. You know, morality is really about giving and sharing and sacrificing. And what political system is about giving and sharing and sacrificing? What political system is consistent with giving, sharing and sacrificing? Socialism. So what we're saying is if we're not willing for saying he got the money, he doesn't need moral credit, we're basically saying his activity is not moral. It might not be immoral, but it's not moral. It's not in the moral plane. What is moral is socialism. Capitalism, eh, it's just... And this is the point. People don't care about money. People don't vote money. They don't vote pocketbook issues. They vote morality. People care about money. If people cared about wealth, they would... We would be living in love's a fair capitalist heaven. But they don't. They know that capitalism produces wealth. And of course rich people vote left all the time. Not because they don't... Not because they think they'll get more money as a consequence, but they know they'll get less money. But it makes them feel good because they believe they're doing the right thing. They're doing the moral thing. The noble thing. In California, we raise taxes on the rich. $250,000 or more, you now pay an additional tax of 13% on top of your federal income tax. So we're almost Sweden level. So we pay... If you live in California, you pay 53% income tax. 40% to the federal government and 13% to the state government, right? So they raised the tax from 10% to 13% in California. 30% increase. How did rich people vote? Overwhelmingly, they voted for the increase. Why? Because they were sad. They were told. You made the money. You've got to reward it for it. Now you have to do the moral thing. And the moral thing is to help those people over there who are suffering. Fill in the blank on who's suffering because there's always somebody, right? In this case, it was education. If we... If you don't give them money, we'll have to shut down these schools or we'll have to raise tuition or something, right? They feel guilty. They want to do the moral thing. They know they won't do it voluntarily. Nobody's going to give away 53% of their money voluntarily. So they don't do it voluntarily. So it's fine. I'm going to vote to have my... It forced on me so that I help those people because I know it's my moral duty to help them. And I wouldn't do it through voluntary exchange because the fact is, it's not worth their wealth to do it. So all redistribution of wealth is driven not by economics. There's never an economic argument for redistribution of wealth. It's driven completely by morality. It's by this morality of it's okay to sacrifice. Hey, and they're rich. They already got the money. What's the big deal of sacrificing them, right? For another group. And they get moral bonus because they helped somebody. So morality will always trump these economic arguments. So think about regulations. Why do we have regulations? Well, if we identified business people as self-interested, what behaviors do we associate with self-interest? So when you were in the schoolyard and you pointed at a kid and said, that kid is selfish. What did you mean? That he takes care of himself? What did you mean? Doesn't care about others. And what will that lead him to do? What kind of behavior will he engage in? A bully. Yeah, he's a bully. He'll do whatever it takes to get his way. He'll lie, steal, cheat. He'll bully you to get his way. That's what we associate with selfish. So we've got this concept, self-interest. And in this concept, concepts are like filing cabinets. We put all kinds of ideas in them, all kinds of concreets in them. And in this filing cabinet, we've got businessmen and bullies. And they're the same. They're both self-interested. They're both selfish. So what is a businessman going to do if he's selfish? He's going to lie, cheat, and steal. All of them. It's just a matter of time. Just wait. So what do we have to do to protect ourselves from the bully businessman? What's the only thing we can do? Control them. Regulate them. So for example, you walk into an elevator in the United States and there's a little diploma on the wall that says that a government inspector's inspected the elevator and it won't fall and kill you. Because we know, we know, that if there wasn't government regulations of elevators, those greedy, selfish businessmen would build elevators that fell and killed us all. Because the best way to make money in a free market is to kill your customers. We laugh, but that's exactly the assumption behind most regulations. Why do we have food inspectors? Because if not, McDonald's will poison us. Because that's what self-interest leads to. It leads to cutting corners, taking advantage of people, exploiting them, lying, cheating and stealing. That's what McDonald's would do if we took away food inspectors. And all regulations are justified that way. Bankers would steal all the money and run to, I don't know, Mexico or something. So we have to regulate everything that they do to make sure they don't steal our money. But the assumption is that because you're a businessman and therefore self-interested, you must be a crook. And it's just a matter of when we're going to catch you. So I remember I was on, you know who Bill O'Reilly is? Yeah, the obnoxious Fox host. So I was on Bill O'Reilly in 2002. I think March or April of 2002. And it just mean all these scandals in business. Enron, I don't know if you remember Enron, you guys were little kids. But all these big American businesses, they'd been corruption at the top. And there were like four or five of them, all at once. Interesting, they were all in very regulated industries. But, you know, they all go and Bill O'Reilly, his campaign was we should fire every CEO in America because they're all guilty. You don't have to prove anything. You don't have to catch them. They're all guilty. And I had to go on his TV show to try to defend CEOs and say, look, you're innocent until proven guilty. These guys, you know, your job, Bill O'Reilly exists because of these kind of people. Didn't help. He was, he wanted to fire every single CEO. Why? They're selfish. Maybe they haven't done it yet. But it's just a matter of time. So, morally, we're offered two views of man, of mankind, right? One, Mother Teresa. You give and you sacrifice and you help other people and you never think about yourself. And that's pure virtue. That's wonderful. The alternative is you're lying, cheating, stealing SOB who thinks only about himself. Those are the alternatives. Well, if those are the alternatives, most people do what? They praise Mother Teresa and they live somewhere in between. But what if there's a third alternative? An alternative that says you can be self-interested. You can live a selfish life by not lying, stealing and cheating. That indeed lying, stealing and cheating, it turns out, are not very selfish. Why? You ever tried lying? I assume you all have. It sucks. If you care about your own life, if you want to progress, if you want to achieve, if you want to succeed, lying is a bad strategy. It doesn't work. You usually get caught. You can't have really good, close human relationships with somebody you've lied to. It's hard to maintain because you're trying to cover it up constantly. Every lie leads to other lies because you're constantly trying to cover it up. It's just, it's hard to do. I mean, I'm at the age, I'm getting old, where I can't remember what I did last week. I mean, at this point, I can't remember where I spoke yesterday. I was in some city in Europe, but I can't remember what I did last week. Now imagine I lied about what I did last week. Now I have to remember two things, like the truth and the lie. But it's more than two things. I have to remember who I told the truth to, who I told the lie to, why I told these people the truth, why I told, it's too complicated. I can't handle it. Truth is simple. There's just one thing to remember. So what if there's this third alternative, which is the real self-interest? And this is what Ayn Rand, I think, brings to this debate, what she brings to this debate. She brings us an alternative ethical code, an alternative moral code that says the mother Teresa moral code is wrong. It's wrong not only because it's consistent with socialism, more fundamentally it's wrong because why should I live for other people? Why is other people's happiness the standard not my own? Why is sacrifice, win, lose? Well, no, lose, win. If I sacrifice, I'm losing. That's the definition of sacrifice. Why is there better than win-win, which is trade? Why can't all human relationships be win-win? Why lose? Why sacrifice? Why be selfless? We have one shot at this life. We don't love our neighbor like ourselves. We can pretend, but nobody loves their neighbor like their selves. We all love ourselves more than our neighbor, or I hope we do. That'd be nice if we did. We actually know ourselves. We don't know our neighbor that well. So if you like yourself, you should love yourself more than you love your neighbor. And the best test of this, this is the test, right, of whether you love yourself more than your neighbor or not. You've got kids, and your neighbor has kids. And the kids are drowning in the pool. Your kid and the neighbor's kid is drowning in the pool. Who do you save first? I save my own kid first. And I'm damn proud of that fact. I'm not embarrassed by the fact that I'm going to save my kid first, because I love myself more than I love my neighbor. Let the neighbor save his kid first. I'll save his kid second, but I'll save my kid first. So why shouldn't we care about our lives more than we care about others' lives? Why shouldn't we be focused on our happiness, our success, our prosperity, more than we are on other people's success, happiness and prosperity? And if we were to be focused on our own happiness and success, what values would we pursue? What kind of behavior would we engage in? Would we indeed be lying, stealing, cheating, SOBs? If we really deeply cared, not just about tomorrow, but about a lifetime, a lifetime of happiness and success and prosperity and living a good life, living life to the max, what kind of behavior would that generate? What would we pursue if that's what we wanted in life? What's the thing that makes, that allows human beings to survive and to thrive and to be successful in life that produces almost all the values we have around us? Where do human values come from? Where does human life come from? How do we maintain our lives? Well, because we're a pretty pathetic animal. Just look around the room. I mean, you're pathetic. You're slow. You're weak. Right? You know, you couldn't stand the cold out there without clothes and without heating or without fire and without, you know, real structures. We're not designed for that. What are we designed to do? How do we deal with the fact that it's cold? Think. Yeah, we think. Yeah, we use our minds. What's that? We build shelter. We figure out how to control fire. We make clothes. Nobody has the, nobody here has the gene for making clothes. There's no clothes making instinct. I don't care what the evolutionary biologists tell us. No behavior or whatever, right? This has to be figured out. We have to figure out some genius, figure out how to skin an animal, dry its fur and ultimately design and make clothes. Genius. Einstein of his day. We probably burnt him at the stake. Everything we have, we had to figure out. We had to do what Bill Gates did. We had to study reality, observe what works and what doesn't, invent, create, build, make stuff. That's what human beings do. That's how we survive. That's how we thrive. That's what morality should be about. By doing that, to me, Bill Gates is a moral hero because he made a lot of money, not as a replacement. He made a lot of money by not by cheating, not by lying, not by stealing, but by creating values, by using his mind, by building, creating, making stuff. That's heroic. I don't care what he does with the money, he could burn it for all I care. It's not mine, it's his. It's the making the money that's virtuous, not what you do with it. It's that activity, that rational activity that is virtuous. And if you're really self-interested, if you're really selfish, what you do is you build, create, you make. You use your mind. You use the tools that you use, the tools that evolution has given us to be successful in life, which is our minds, our reasoning. And that's one of the reasons you don't lie, because you have a tool here that relies on, on truths. It does. If it doesn't, it screws up. There's a term in computers, garbage in, garbage out. Your mind is exactly the same way. You put garbage in, you get garbage out. And that's why there's so many rational people out there because they have a lot of garbage in. And when you lie, the worst person to lie to is whom? It's yourself. It's yourself. Because then you're really putting garbage in. So our tool for survival is our mind. Now we want to be happy, right? If you're selfish, you want to be happy. How do we attain happiness? Where does happiness come from? What's the basic premise for happiness? Self-realization, self-confidence, self-esteem. I would call it self-esteem. Not self-esteem in the way pop psychologists talk about it, but a sense that you belong in this place, right? You can take care of yourself. You can make it in this life. Life's rough. It's difficult out there. But you can do it, right? That kind of confidence in life, in living. Now, where do you get that from mostly? Where do we get our self-esteem from? What activity in life do we get self-esteem from? The group. So you get self-esteem from other people patting you in the back. I think that's where you get false self-esteem. I don't think you get self-esteem from that. I think that's what modern psychology teaches us, so we give everybody a ribbon, right? So nobody feels left out and everybody gets self-esteem. Nobody has self-esteem if you give everybody a ribbon. You actually get self-esteem from recognizing your own successes, setting goals and attaining them, and recognizing it. Not other people recognizing it. You recognizing it. Being proud of your own achievement. That's where you get self-esteem. The opposite of selflessness. The opposite of humility. And I don't mean boastfulness. I mean pride, internal pride. I did that. That's cool, right? Pat yourself on the shoulder. You get self-esteem. You can't be happy without self-esteem. It's not enough. It's not everything, but it's crucial. It's a necessary if not sufficient requirement for happiness. Now, where do we challenge ourselves the most? What activity in life is where we push ourselves? We challenge ourselves. You're young, okay? On the job, when you work. When you go out there and work, right? I mean the most important thing for most people is the work that they do. They can say it's family, but all you have to do is look at how many hours they spend with their family and how many hours they spend on the job. And it turns out we spend a lot more time on the job, probably because it's more important for us. You could take a lower income, spend more time with your family, and still live pretty well in the US or in Sweden or anywhere else, right? But we choose to work because we love it if we have a good job. Because it's where we get our self-esteem from. It's where we push ourselves. It's where we challenge ourselves. And ultimately, it's where we derive our happiness from. And this is one of the reasons stealing is so stupid. Because if you steal, you're undercutting exactly that self-esteem. You're undercutting that knowledge that you can create, that you can build, that you can make something. You're relying on other people building stuff that you then use force just to take. In spite of the movies, criminals do not have high self-esteem. They have very, very low self-esteem. Same goes for politicians, because they're the ultimate criminals. And the best evidence of that is Donald Trump. He is a guy who has no self-esteem. How do you know he has no self-esteem? What's the indicator of somebody with low self-esteem? Yes, exactly. So he has the thinnest skin of anybody I've ever met. He tweets at 3 a.m. because some model insulted him. This is the president-elect of the most powerful nation on the planet. He's worried about SNL, or was it the Hamilton? They insulted the vice president. These are the things that worry him. What other people think of him. Not what he thinks of himself. Somebody with self-esteem if you're criticized. What's your attitude to criticism if you have self-esteem? Well, the two options. One, the criticism could be correct. And then your attitude should be, thank you for the criticism. I've learned something. Or it could be incorrect. And then why do you care? The other party is wrong. It doesn't change your life. That's somebody with self-esteem dealing with criticism. And you can see different people, how they react. And it's very indicative of how you think about yourself. So, we could go on for hours on this, but there is a morality out there. I ran a small code of rational self-interest. It's a morality that says you should live for yourself. Not by exploiting other people, not by lying, stealing, and cheating, but by engaging in win-win trade relationship, voluntary exchange, as your means of improving your own life. That the highest value is to think. It's to produce. It's to engage your reason in making your life better. Now, what kind of political system does a person who believes in that kind of ethic want? A political system that takes 53% of his income? A political system that tells him what he can and cannot eat, where he can and cannot smoke, or what he can and cannot smoke. Now, I mean, somebody like that doesn't want to be told. They don't want authority. They want to use their mind and figure it out for themselves. They want to be free. It's the selfless, you know, selfless, sacrificial, you know, all about other people, all about what you need, all about what you care that loves socialism. So, you know, I've got a book out there called Free Market Revolution. And the bottom line of my view of the kind of revolution we need is not as much of an economic revolution. We won that debate decades ago. We've got the greatest economists ever. They've explained every single aspect of why freedom works, why capitalism works. I mean, we need more economists to teach this stuff, but it's done. The work's done. The real revolution we need so that people will embrace those economic principles, those political principles is a moral revolution. As long as people believe that the moral responsibility is to others as a primary, capitalism will die. Capitalism will never be a reality. What we need is a morality of rational self-interest, a morality of respect to reason and self-esteem. People like that will embrace capitalism joyously and en masse. So, we need a moral revolution. Thank you. All right, questions. I thought you wanted to ask a question before, and I didn't get to you, sorry. Go ahead. You spoke about, you started off with individualism versus collectivism, and then you went into Bill Gates. So, I'm just thinking, in terms of Microsoft and Bill Gates, like you did there, wasn't it also part of building a collectivist ideal within the company of your organization and the way you run it? No, I mean, all of everything Bill Gates did was from an individualistic perspective, even though I don't think he philosophically is an individualist. What he did was, think about, he came up with an idea, he hired people, volunteered exchange, he paid them for what they contributed. Individualism doesn't exclude community. We all live in community. It doesn't exclude, and the contrary, I think, communities of individualists are healthy communities. What does collectivism mean? What does the ism mean? It means that the community comes first, that the individual doesn't matter. That's the contrast between individualism and collectivism. It's not that you don't have a group, you don't have a society. It's who, what is important and what is not. Collectivism says we can sacrifice the individual to the collective because the collective, the group, the public is the entity of importance, of moral value. Individualism says no, the individual is what's important, the individual is what has moral value, and you cannot sacrifice the individual to the group. And it's every individual needs to participate in the group voluntarily, only to the extent that it benefits that individual. So everybody who worked for Microsoft got paid, right? They could, they could leave Microsoft at any point. It was a community of voluntary exchange. And yes, he benefited the world. That's what individualists do when they're allowed to be free. Everybody who trades with them is better off. And even people who don't trade with them because, you know, the people who trade with the people who trade are better. If you actually look at the map of how Microsoft impacted the world, it's amazing, you know, just how far it reaches. Because yeah, people in Africa never bought Microsoft software. But the people who built the dams in Africa did, and they built the dams, so, you know, or other things like that, right? So the people who actually benefit Africa or bring jobs to Africa are using the software, so they're benefiting indirectly. That answer the question? Yes. But I guess his drive was probably individualistic to some extent. I agree on that. But I think many people, especially in our camp, miss out on how you actually look at how you drive, how you drive change to some extent. I mean, one of the biggest things whenever you're working in an organization or a company is, okay, I feel appreciated or bad. You actually have your phone and people calling you, and you have kind of a like an external drive. And I think that's really what, very simplistically, some libertarians like quite often fail at. Yeah, I mean, I'm not convinced of that. I think the libertarians fail because they refuse to identify morality as having any importance on the issue. And that they buy into conventional morality. And if you buy into conventional morality, you doom your cars to a conventional end, which is socialism or statism or some collectivism of some form or another. The selflessness is consistent with statism. It's consistent with collectivism. You need an individualistic morality to justify your individualism in politics. Now, how you drive change and how you do that, absolutely. And this is why one of the virtues Iron Man identifies is justice. So for example, telling people you did a good job or giving them a raise or paying them based on how productive they are, those are all forms of justice. Firing people when they don't do their job, that's justice. And it's just as important, right? But it's really what we, as human beings, what we tend to do is we tend to focus on the negative. So we tend to think of justice as the negative. We put criminals in jail. No, justice is mostly about the positive. It's about rewarding. And Bill Gates might have gotten all the money in the world. But if I were to meet Bill Gates, the first thing I would say to Bill Gates is thank you. Because I think that means a lot to people. I think if you hear thank you, that means a lot to you, right? When you've done a good job. And these people never hear it because they make a lot of money. So nobody says thank you to them because they, oh, they got a lot of money. But thank you sometimes means more than what's another billion to Bill Gates? To me, it would mean a lot, but to Bill Gates, nothing. Right? Thank you. Probably means more to him than an extra billion. So, yeah, I agree with you completely. Those things are important, but they have to be placed in the context. They have to be understood in the context of the individual and the pursuit of self-interest. Sure, sure, sure. But she provides humanity with less value. So she's less rich. Bill Gates is not morally superior to your dentist. Just because he made more money. If your dentist is rational and good, you know, and doing a good job. They are both morally equal, right? So it's not, money is not a measure, the quantity of money. It's not a measure of how moral you are. Not making money, living off of other people, you know, is the opposite. But it's the fact that he was so good at what he did that gets him moral credit. And the fact that he got money, he got money, and your dentist didn't get, you know, is not very rich. You should say thank you to both. But they're both, if they both applied themselves, they both made the most out of their lives, they're both equally moral. Sure, sure. And I'm with you with that. That's fine. Although I would also build one for Bill Gates. I'd have a lot more statues than we have today. I'm big on sculpture and art generally. But think about who we do build statues to. We build it to political leaders, to warriors, and now we build it to philanthropists. And all I'm saying is don't take the statue as the standard. The point is who do we elevate as moral ideals? And what we elevate as moral ideas is Mother Teresa. And it's pathetic. It's pathetic. I don't want to be Mother Teresa. I don't want to have any to do with Mother Teresa. I don't think she did particularly good work. She was a miserable human being just in terms of her own fear. Just read her diary. She suffered. She, what a wasted life. So she doesn't go up here. She goes down there. And Bill Gates goes up here. That's the kind of human being I want us all to be. That's the kind of human being when a culture venerates. Those kind of people. Then it's a healthy culture. And we don't, right? And that's my point. You know, who we... And I agree, yes. Thomas Jefferson creates a system that makes possible about Gates more important, right? But let's not diminish what Bill Gates and then how many of them... Think about the opposite, right? What do we actually do with Bill Gates? Well, think about the Bill Gates as of 100 years ago. What do we call them? Robber Barons. Robber Barons. Robber Barons. They're thieves. They're crooks. Why? Because they built stuff and they created stuff and they made stuff. I like to tell, you know, Americans are big on community service and they're big on charity. And they get a lot of their supposed self-worth from the fact that they give charity. America in 1776 was a third-rate poor colony. That's why the British didn't even fight, right? They were too busy with the French and the Spanish important people. America was not significant. Within 140 years, America's the most powerful country in the world economically. Why? Because of charity and community service. Now, granted, because of Thomas Jefferson and the founding fathers who created a particular political system, but the actual wealth, how did we get so rich? Well, because of Rockefeller and Carnegie and J.P. Morgan and the Robber Barons and the reward we give them, forget the statues. Just stop calling them crooks. Would be good. These are the people who built America. There is no America without those great industrialists of the 19th century. And they deserve moral credit for what they did. They made all of our lives, you know, so much better. I mean, one of the reasons why Bill Gates made a lot of money in the last few years is that states are bogged down into Microsoft. They are not using other software systems, right? Well, let's have institutions... Sure, sure, sure, sure. But of course, Microsoft was the biggest company in the world. It's no longer. So competition has worked. But let's take Microsoft as an example with regard to cronyism, because it's a wonderful example. In the mid-1990s, Microsoft used to spend $0 on lobbying. Nothing. No presence in Washington D.C., no lawyers, no building, no facilities, nothing. And they were invited in front of the Senate. And a senator who's still in the Senate by the name of Arlen Hatch, a Republican, so-called on the right or whatever, right, yelled at them. Literally stood up and, you know, yelled at them. You guys need to start investing in Washington. You need a lobby. You need to build a facility here. In other words, you need a bribe me. Right? Microsoft, I mean, literally said at the meeting, he said, the people in Microsoft, Bill Gates wasn't there, but his executives, where they said, you leave us alone, we'll leave you alone. We're not interested. We don't want to come to Washington. We're too busy. You know, we're in Seattle. We don't need you guys. And they went. They left. What happened six months later? Knocked in the door. We're from the Justice Department. And we're here to go after you for antitrust violations. What did they do? What was the sin that Microsoft committed? They gave a browser away for free. When at the time, you're too young to know this, right, Netscape was selling their browser. For like 60 bucks, 70 bucks, we bought. I literally bought my first browser, right? And suddenly Microsoft said, we'll give it away for free. That's that's predatory practices, right? What did Microsoft learn from that? Well, they learned that it Washington won't leave them alone if they leave Washington alone. So today, how much money do they spend on lobbying? By the way, this antitrust lawsuit lasted well over 10 years. At the end of it, a government official was planted inside Microsoft to approve every deal that they made, every feature that the software had had to be written, you know, had to be signed off by a representative of the U.S. Justice Department, right? Today, Microsoft spends tens of millions of dollars on lobbying every single year. It has a magnificent building about equal distance from the White House and Capitol Hill. And they learned. And now, does that then corrupt them? Absolutely. They're already in D.C. Now, when Google does something, they go to their people and say, hey, you went after us. What about Google, right? We can't compete with them. So fix it for us. And that's how they get corrupted. So the solution to cronyism is not let's constrain business. The solution to cronyism is let's constrain government. If government has no power, they have nothing to give. If antitrust laws didn't exist, which I believe they shouldn't, then they have no weapon to come after you with. So you don't bother with them and they leave you alone and you leave them alone. So the solution to cronyism is to get government out of business. Government shouldn't be in the lives of business at all, other than laws that protect property rights, that protect individual rights. Government shouldn't be regulating. It shouldn't be taxing corporations. It should be leaving them alone. And then you won't get the cronyism. But now, and if you want relative examples, there are lots of them. Like Google, Google has paid everybody off, except Europe, right? In America, they paid everybody off. So there's been no antitrust issues with Google. Google dominates, right? It's like if you've ever seen a monopolist, Google is like a monopolist, nobody goes after Google. Nobody touches Google because they paid everybody, right? Apple, Steve Jobs refused to play the game. He was like Bill Gates, right? I don't pay anybody out. You know, they had some lobbyists, but they didn't really do anything substantial. The government went after Apple, right? Something stupid about the prices of the books they sell on iBooks relative to Amazon and deals they cut with publishers. And today, there's a government official at Apple who has to sign off on any deal that iTunes signed. It does, right? So you can see different companies behaving in different ways and how the system is corrupted. And that's what we need to show people. But the blame, I think libertarians make a mistake by focusing the blame on business. When in my view, the blame is squarely on government, on the regulators. That's not what I'm saying. The examples. The moral examples since everybody's bogged down into this. But you can't be free of all cronyism in a system that's so crony. I mean, a good friend of mine, John Allison, who was the CEO of BB&T, an objectiveist. He spoke about this. The whole world knew his position, right? And top happens. The bailout of the banks. And he goes through this regularly and he says, he said publicly, he said to the regular, I don't need top. I don't want top. My bank is fully capitalized. I, you know, this is a bank that never lost money through the crisis. Every quarter, it made money, right? The regulators said to John, they said, we know, but if you don't take the money, we will be in the bank tomorrow and we will write down your loans and you will not have enough capital anymore. So he has to maximize shareholder wealth. He has to take care of his shareholders. So he took the money. He paid a very high interest rate and he was the first banker to return it when he could return it. Is that, is that cronyism? Yeah, in a sense. But what option do you have? You got a big gun pointed at you and you play by the rules. So again, I think, I think we need to explain it. And I think we're challenged because the game is so rigged that it's hard to find kind of the pure businessman who doesn't do it. Yeah, one for, sorry, say that again. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Was that even, was that really? Yeah, I do think. I think it was. And I think, I think you've seen that, you know, people always complain about the sweatshops in China or in Indonesia. It's absolutely what's, it's, it's, it's justice. Workers in the 19th century were not that productive because they didn't have, because capital was still primitive. So they, and if you think about where they came from, if you actually look at wages through the 19th century and you look at standard of living in the 19th century, it goes like this. I mean, even Marx admits that capitalism is enormously benefiting the working class and raising the standard of living because it was. So, yes. And one of the things that capitalism does is if I have this factory and he has a factory and I underpay you, what do you do? You leave, you don't owe me anything. You leave and go to work for him because he's paying more. And that equals, that makes sure that people are paid based on how productive they are. And I think that existed in the 19th century. I think what you've learned about the history of the 19th century is BS is made up, you know, all because all you learn is the negative stuff. All you learn is the bad stuff. And it's true. Capitalism was just being invented. It's a brand new system. It's messy. It takes a while to fully adjust. And yeah, the air was dirty and children were working. But where were children before they worked in factories? What did they do before they worked in factories? They worked on farms. And how many children on the farm made it to age 10? Less than half. Less than half. How many children made it to age 10 in the factories? Almost all of them. But you never learn that, right? You just learn, oh, those children were working in factories. How evil is that? And to our modern years, that goes, sweatshops, you know, this is evil, right? But those kids in sweatshops in Indonesia, their life is better. They're not very productive. I mean, imagine, I don't know how many of you have ever been a manager, but imagine managing 10-year-olds. Oh my God, right? And this is why child labor, this is why child labor disappears because children are not productive. So you go to Nike in Indonesia or whatever the factory is, I'm sure they don't call it Nike over there. And they're paying somebody one buck a day because that's what they're worth from an economic perspective. And yet the people are willing to work for one buck a day because it's more money than they've ever seen in their lives. And on the farm, they're dying. And this way, they can live. So yes, it's justice. Justice is paying people what they're worth from an economic perspective. Not what you think their humanity's worth, but what they're worth to the production of what is being produced. And if you don't do it that way, if you pay them more than what they can actually produce, then you'll go out of business or your products price will rise and competitors will price you out of the market. You'll go out of business and they will lose their jobs. And as they get more productive, what happens to them? What happens to those kids who start out in sweatshops in Indonesia? What happens to them as they learn a skill and as they get more productive? Their wages go up and they have more choices than employers. And some of them become quite wealthy. And a lot of them, most of them become middle class. And that's well documented in China and all over the Asia how that has happened. It happened in the 19th century. By the time the end of the 19th century arrives, we're living double what we were before almost. And there's a middle class. The middle class wasn't created by unions. The middle class was created by jobs. Jobs created the middle class. And the fact that people became more productive. Oh my God. I mean, this is the difference between Donald Trump and what came before. Is we used to be ashamed of cronyism. We used to do it under the table. We used to kind of pretend it wasn't going on. Donald Trump's proud of cronyism. This is like, cool. I get to fly my jet to Ohio and, you know, cut a deal. And it's pure cronyism. And it's out in the open. And he's proud of it. And the right is going, oh yeah, this is great. And it's as if they've all lost their minds. Right? These are people who used to be for free markets. They used to be for... And you can't... Some people say, but he cut their taxes. You can't cut your taxes and increase his. That's not justice. Just because you threaten to leave, you're backmailing me and he's not. I mean, the whole situation is from an economic and moral perspective, insanity. And everybody's cheering and everybody's excited. And, you know, and the funny thing is that Larry Summers... I don't know if you know what Larry said. Let me tell you, Summers was Bill... Was he Bill Clinton? I think Bill Clinton's Treasury Secretary. And he was the president of Harvard. So he's a lefty economist. He was like saying... He was defending capitalism against Donald Trump. Like, they were all outflanking each other to the left. This is why I say we're losing. Nobody. There's nobody out there saying... This is a disaster. This is anti-capitalism, anti-free markets. You know, this is all wrong. Anyway, this is the damage that gets done when people in supposedly who are on the right, who are on the pro-capitalist side, then do awful crony things, which then, you know, makes us look... Everybody look bad, who is supposedly on the right. Yes. This is why I said... Yes, this is why I said the focus when talking about cronyism should be on government, not on business. Business is heroic. The fact that these guys can produce and make the stuff in spite of the controls. And so 75% they do that, 25% they go to government and manipulate. I still admire the 75%. I still admire that they're willing to make. And when you count the regulations and controls, the fact that they are able to still produce and make and build stuff, I think is incredibly cool. So I am a great admirer of business, even though I know it's not pure. So I agree completely if we don't respect people because they don't have this purity, a purity that they can't live by. They would not be in business if they were like John Allison. If he didn't take top, the bank would have been destroyed. His, you know, he would have lost his job, which he didn't care because he would tie the next year. But his shareholders would have lost their wealth. Nobody would have won other than, you know. So you have to know when to stand a principle and you have to know how to disentangle the mess. Cronies is a problem and businessmen get seduced into playing the game. And if somebody's a real crony, they are businessmen out there, that all they do is handouts to the government. I don't know, Jeff Immelt from General Electric, right? Was hired to be CEO of General Electric. Why? Because he's a good schmoozer. He's good at getting stuff from people. He's good at manipulating politicians. That's why he was hired for G. So he could criticize him thoroughly. I don't have any problem with that, right? But most, particularly in Silicon Valley, most of these entrepreneurs are predominantly good guys. Yeah, they do some bad things. But you can't write them off because they do the bad things. And I admire them for building what they build. Well, you're making a big assumption. And that is that Gold Gulch exists. And I don't think it does, or at least nobody's told me about it if it does exist. And you'd think I would know. There is no Gold Gulch, and you can't create one. The idea that the world is horrible, and all these people are evil, and these statists are running the world, but that'll allow you to have an island where you will be free is delusional. Is delusional. So I don't know what's his name, move free, whatever, liberal land. I mean, it's not going to happen. It's not going to happen, right? Nobody's going to allow you to establish Hong Kong on the border between Croatia and Serbia. And they won't want a peace? They won't want it? Or the Federal Reserve won't shut down your banks when you start doing real privacy? And the Marines won't show up if they, with the excuse of money laundering and drug smuggling or something. If you are too, I mean, it's just, it's a fantasy. Now, I'm all for going to Mars. And then killing the technology to get people to Mars so they'll leave us alone. That's fine. Right? So we should, we should be friendly with the Elon Musk who is a real crony. But we should be friendly with the Elon Musk because he has a plan to get to Mars. Right? But there's nothing on planet Earth. Now, I've gotten in trouble by suggesting this. The guy from liberal land almost shot me for suggesting this. I told him, I said, the only way to work, and I've told this to a lot of billionaires. I, I occasionally billionaires ask me where they can escape to and can they, can they start their own country somewhere? Or they owe a floating island or, you know, what do you call, sea-steadying or whatever. And I say there's one condition where it would work. And that is if you had a nuke pointed at Washington DC and you, and they were sure you would push the button when the time came. Then they would leave you alone. But other than that, they're not going to leave you alone. There's no way. I mean, they're so evil, they won't leave their own citizens alone, but they will leave you in the middle of the ocean to do your own, I mean, there's no, it just, it just doesn't, so unfortunately we're stuck right here until we develop that technology they have in Gold's Gulch where you can hide. That would be cool. If you, if you know how to do that, let me know. But we're stuck on this, we're stuck right here. So, so I think, I think the way to end it is say, well, we got to fight because you know what? It's our lives. This screwing with our lives. And it's our freedom. It's not a theoretical thing. It's, you know, you've got another, you know, if there was freedom, you guys would live well over a hundred years old. I'm convinced medical technology would make it easy for you guys to live way over a hundred if the medical technology was allowed to develop. I'm not sure it will be, right? So that should be a real motivation to fight for liberty, to fight for freedom, to fight for the kind of revolution I believe we need, which is a moral revolution. Thanks, guys. I think the engineers are actually working on it. The topic that we discussed before was how to win the argument for liberty and take the moral high ground. And I think that you covered up in the great way that we second and third hand dealers in ideas should take the moral... More high ground for self-interest. Yeah. When we argue for our policy changes and for our ideas, and not buying to that, yeah, this is good for someone else or not only pointing out figures that this will increase the tax increase or something like that. Never do that. Not just not only. Never advocate for policy because it will increase tax revenue. Because never, ever. So like they just legalized marijuana in California. So Neil Cavuto had me on his television show and he said, you're on, this is great because it'll increase tax revenue in California. And I said, who the hell cares? And he was like, whoa, what do you mean? I said, no, this is about freedom. It's not about tax revenue. I want tax revenue to go down in California, not up. I want the government to be smaller, not bigger. So we should never advocate for anything that increases efficiency in taxes. You want smaller, you want them to steal less of your money, not more of your money. Thank you. My pleasure.