 Samuel, I'm from SFL Germany. SFL for everyone who doesn't know yet is the largest pro-liberty student organization in the world in terms of leaders, countries represented, and events. It's an international student organization, and all the information you need for it are in the description. Today, I'm here with Geron Brooke. He's an Israeli-American entrepreneur, writer, and activist. He's currently the chairman of the board at the Einrend Institute, and he was the executive director at the Einrend Institute from 2000 to 2017. Today's topic is Reason in a Time of Crisis, and first of all, I'd like to welcome you, Geron Brooke. Oh, thanks for having me on. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for being here. So, the first question I have today is regarding the pandemic situation. Many people say that this time of crisis shows how the market fails to regulate itself. And the question is, how could you tell if the market fails in a time of crisis? Well, you can't now because there is no market. What market? What market is supposed to fail? Governments all over the world, pretty much in every single country, including the United States, have complete control over the healthcare system. The healthcare system is heavily, heavily regulated, heavily, heavily controlled. Of course, in Europe, it's completely socialized. It's completely the realm of government. So, every realm that this pandemic has affected is a realm that government controls and government manipulates. So in the United States, for example, there's a lot of criticism regarding shortages of beds at hospitals. And indeed, the US has compared to Germany, for example, has a lot less hospital beds per capita than Germany does. But why? And the reason is not because of capitalism. It's because for a hospital to expand, it needs approval from the government. It needs to file in America something called the certificate of need. It needs to explain why it needs more beds. And then it's competitors can go to the government and say, no, no, no, they don't really need the beds. They're enough beds and they, you know, and it becomes a political issue rather than a market issue. So for a hospital to actually, let's say have a whole wing mothballed, reserved for an emergency, it can't do it without the government approving it. Now, Germany has a relatively socialized healthcare system. It has more beds per capita, Italy, France, UK have very few beds per capita and they also have socialist systems. So what this crisis has proven more than anything else is a complete failure of government, of government healthcare systems, of government payment system, of government regulatory systems, of government control over the healthcare systems. We don't know. I mean, I can project how a laissez-faire economy would look like in a pandemic, but we don't know that because we don't have a laissez-faire economy in the world today and we don't see how it would respond. So if you want, I can kind of guess how such a system would work, but it would be very, very different than how we have today. But more than that, this pandemic, like almost every crisis that we experienced, shows the complete and utter failure of governments. I mean, the United States, UK, Italy, Spain, France, Germany's done a little bit better. So maybe the German government is a little bit better, but it's not great, right? Completely messed this up, right? The closest governments that came that did a good job on this were South Korea and Taiwan. But the United States completely blew it. It still isn't enough testing. They still don't know what they're doing. They still don't have a clue what's going on. They still don't have the data. They haven't deployed the resources. They haven't put in the infrastructure. They haven't done the necessary things to deal with a pandemic. So no, this crisis has proved how pathetic the response is. It was no plan. If there was a plan it wasn't executed on. And if there was executed on, it was executed on very, very poorly. If this was a business, you'd give it an F and you'd never go into it. You'd never trade with that business again. But it's not a business. It's a government, so we have no choice, right? So what would this look like if it was a free market, a true free market, a lesser free market? Well, imagine a world in which all healthcare transactions are private. Imagine a world in which insurance companies are basically the way in which we insure ourselves against catastrophe. Well, then you have to ask before a pandemic even hits, you have to ask, well, who has an incentive in a world like that to think about pandemics, to plan for pandemics, right? Now, I do believe the government has some role because in a pandemic, you, for example, if you're carrying the virus are a danger to other people and therefore you're potentially violating their rights even if you're not doing it on purpose just because you have the virus. So the government does have some role, some limited role in such a pandemic. So for example, the government would plan to do testing and maybe isolating people who are carriers because they are threat to other people. But beyond that, who has an interest? Well, insurance companies, clearly there's a big, gonna be a big jumping cost. They're gonna have to pay for testing. They're gonna have to pay for hospitalization. You know, life insurance companies might see a spike in deaths, which might be a concern for them. So the insurance business wants to plan for this. Maybe they wanna plan by encouraging hospitals who they deal with to have extra beds. Maybe they wanna plan by having just an emergency program where they do the testing. Like imagine insurance companies doing the testing so that they can control this. Hospitals have an incentive to plan for this. For example, having a wing in a hospital or having an emergency plan to take over a hotel where they can have extra beds or something, right? So the point is that in a free market there are lots of other entities that have an interest in planning for disaster just like any other disaster and putting together plans for disasters. A lot of companies in the United States have plans for hurricanes. They have plans for earthquakes. Why not have a plan for a pandemic? And if you privatize that in the sense that the costs were borne by the people in the market, then once you bear the cost you have an incentive to plan. The problem is when the government says we'll bear all the costs, we'll take all the responsibility, that's the disaster you're seeing today which is a complete unmitigated disaster of government. All right, thank you very much. So given the government's failure, as you put it, what is your opinion about the government all over the world declaring jobs as essential and non-essential, even going as far as to, in some countries, give out licenses for essential workers who are allowed to visit certain places, others are not. Well, you see that everywhere. So even if they don't give them licenses, if a cop stops you while you're driving when you're not supposed to be driving or we are not supposed to be driving, if you say I'm an essential worker, they get a pass. If you're not, you could get a big fine or even go to jail in some states in the United States. No, it is ridiculous. What does it mean essential? Essential to whom? I mean, to me it's essential to be able to go to, I don't know, to get my haircut or to get a restaurant or to go see my doctor, which I wasn't allowed to do until about a few days ago, right? See my doctor, isn't that essential? But no, some central planner, some bureaucrat, some government agency now decides what's essential for me. It's, this is collectivistic thinking. Collectivism says the standard is not my life or your life or the individual's life. Collectivism says the standard is sysitical means since they can't really intuit what's good for society. What do they do? Well, they succumb to political pressure, right? Essential of those that I deem essential and maybe, you know, if being essential is a good thing, maybe I can get their votes that way or maybe can I appease certain groups and odd others and different states in the United States, different people became essential. You know, right now meet packers, essential workers in the United States because we love our meat in the US and there was a risk that the supply chain for me would break down, so we declared. It becomes political and it becomes who's gonna yell the loudest, right? And it's all, again, motivated by collectivism. Again, in a truly free market, government couldn't say who can go to work and who can't go to work. What jobs are essential and what jobs are not. The government would say, here's some health recommendations based on our best experts. We encourage you to stay home under these conditions, particularly those susceptible to it and you take on the risk. You take on the risk and maybe there are extreme circumstances for a short period of time where you have to shut down an area, right? Okay, but then it's finite. You clearly have a definition of what is, you know, who needs to be shut down and under what conditions and clear definition of when you're opening up. None of that of course exists in any of the countries that have done shutdowns, but it cannot be the way it's done today where, you know, again, some philosopher king decides what's good for society, what's good for the group and to hell with our individual values, our individual preferences, our individual values, what matters is what the central planner, what the authoritarian in chief decides is good for us or bad for us. What if an essential worker doesn't wanna go to work because they're afraid of getting coronavirus? I mean, that's a real problem in the US, right? What if somebody needs to open up their store because if they don't, they'll pretty much starve, right? They have five, you know, like this woman in Texas who opened up her salon to cut hair because she said, I had to feed my kids and he made a living, you know, and she was arrested and sent to jail for seven days. They released her then, but she was sentenced to seven days in jail for what crime, for opening up a store to try to make some money so she could feed her family. All of the responses across the board, maybe with the exception of Sweden and South Korea and Taiwan have been collectivist central planning type responses where the individual doesn't matter and doesn't count. So you just mentioned some examples you seem or you deem more favorable. What would be the role of the government in a pandemic like this? The role of the government would be predominantly the role of isolating people who had the disease. So as I said earlier on, if you carry the disease, you are threat to other people. Assuming the disease is really serious, it's life-threatening, right? And it would be tricky by the way to define what a life-threatening disease is because a lot of things are life-threatening to some people. So I believe it should be very, very hard for the government to have a role in a pandemic, right? So it would have to in the United States at least given our form of government, you would have to have a declaration of an emergency by Congress with specifying specific powers that grants the executive. It would have to be reviewed by the Supreme Court and only then could a president do anything. So first of all, it would be hard for the government to gain the powers and then the power would be basically to take people who test positive and isolate them. Now you could initially isolate them by just telling them to go home. But if they violated that, if they refused to go home, you could put them in a hotel room and lock the door in a sense, right? Because they are threat. But that's about it, right? And if the pandemic reached a level, let's say we got a really bad one, right? This is pretty mild, what we're experiencing now. Imagine a pandemic that kills 20, 30% of the people who have it, right? And it's contagious, very contagious. By the way, the Middle Eastern version, what's it called, Mars, MERS, Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome, which is a coronavirus, kills about 30% of the people who get it. But it's not easily transmittable. So you can't get it from person to person, very, very difficult. That's why it's never become a big deal. But imagine if something like that was transmissible. Then the certain circumstances where you couldn't test fast enough and it wasn't possible to isolate everybody, where the government would say four period of two weeks while we get a handle on this, you can't go outside because it's too risky and you're inhibiting our ability to get a handle on this. But again, so their job would be, the government has only one job, that is the protection of individual rights. So it doesn't change its job during a pandemic. The job is still to protect individual rights. It just becomes trickier, what is the violation of rights and how do you protect them? And it's difficult, it's not simple. Clearly what governments are doing today is a massive violation of rights. So again, the job of government is to protect our freedoms. In protecting our freedoms, sometimes it means isolating certain individuals. How you define all that is tricky. And in a pandemic, it's difficult for a government to do that and therefore you need people who know how to think about individual rights, think about individual freedom properly, in order to execute it properly. And we don't have those kind of people, certainly in government today or even in our past, I don't know that we've had. It would be a completely different approach to government and a completely different approach to governing that would have to be in place for a rational response, a proper response to a pandemic. So thank you very much. Moving on from the government's role, let's talk about the individual's role in a pandemic like this. For me personally, for example, it's really hard to act reasonable because there is just a lack of information. So there is no real source. I don't know how deadly or how infectious or risky the coronavirus is. I don't know if locking myself in is really the best move compared to risking, for example, financial losses by not working or not opening my store or saloon. How can you act reasonable in a time like this when you don't have the proper information you need normally to act reasonably? It's very difficult. And it's very difficult in particular because you can't trust anybody who's giving you information, particularly not the government because they all have their own agendas. And that is one of the tragedies of what we're experiencing right now is the fact that we have, both at the governmental level, we have a disinformation or misinformation and then you have all the different politically motivated people releasing information or data that supports their agenda. And again, none of this would happen in laissez-faire capitalism because laissez-faire capitalism there would be no political agenda associated with information because the government would not be in control of our lives as long as we didn't have the virus. So, and think about who would be interested in accumulating information. Again, insurance companies, hospitals, maybe health agencies that are not profits, that are private but non-profits that provided information to the public generally, doctors would be very interested in that information. And we, as individuals, might be more interested in getting information because we, if you live in a laissez-faire world, you're by definition more independent. You're relying less on government. You're more about making decisions for yourself and not relying on authorities to tell you. So people would be more inclined to seek information. There'd be a lot more testing going on which is ultimately what we need in order to know, get the information. So I think it's the lack of information or it's not so much a lack of information. The difficulty in attaining which information is true and which is not is a product of one, a culture that is not trained to think for itself and two, a government that is in way, way, way too many things and way too involved in this information gathering and information seeking business and distorts and perverts it because it's so involved in the economy and so involved in health care and so involved in hospitals and every aspect of this that it's all flowing through the government. Now, my view is in this particular case, in the corona case, we have enough information to make basic decisions about our life. We have had enough information really from the beginning. If you looked at the data coming out of China, nothing much has changed. I don't, when I talk to experts and people who really know the data, the conclusions they had in February about the same conclusions that they have today and that just makes the pathetic response of our government so much worse because there's not that much uncertainty. There's a lot we don't know but there's not that much uncertainty. You're young, you're relatively healthy. The risk to you is as close to zero as is meaningful and you shouldn't be worried about your life. Now, if you live with a grandparent, then you'd be worried about the grandparent. So if you're over 65, you should be worried. And if you engage in a regular basis with people over 65, you should be worried. But if you're not, if you're just hanging out with young people, if you're not going to come in contact, particularly not an irregular basis with people old or with people who might have diabetes or obesity and things like that. And those people should be self-isolating themselves. Then you as a young person shouldn't be worried. You shouldn't be sitting in a dark room. You should be out first of all, generally with viruses being outdoors is better than indoors. Most earth circulation is better than less air circulation. Sunshine is generally good. It's good for vitamin D, but it's good for just generally, it's being outside is good for you. So the things we know objectively, particularly about age, about pre-existing conditions and about being outdoors that are generalizable. And we've known, while there's been some uncertainty, we've known a lot of this from the beginning. And again, the authorities, the people who want to lock us down, the people who want to tell us how to live, they don't have an incentive for us to come to conclusions about this information. But the information has been there, really hasn't changed that much from day one. The confusion that we have about this disease is almost all generated by the authorities. And by conspiracy theorists online from both sides, people who think we're all gonna die and people who think this is the flu. We're not gonna all gonna die and it's not the flu. There's something in between, guys. I mean, you can estimate something in between. And in this case, it's probably closer to the flu than we're all gonna die, but it's worse than the flu and people should be careful. But the people who should be careful, people older than me, certainly older than you and people who have pre-existing conditions and you should know whether you have pre-existing conditions. So it's very manageable in terms of individuals should know their risk levels and should behave accordingly. And it's not that difficult to do. What makes it more difficult is the central planner breathing down our neck. Thank you very much. So Adam Metzik had a question and also for all the viewers, you can ask questions either on Zoom or on YouTube, depending on where you're watching. So Adam wants to know how can we deal with conspiracy theorists inside the broadly understood liberal movement? So as part of the liberal movement in whatever way, shape or form, how can we deal with people spreading conspiracy theories under the name of liberalism? Well, I think they need to be challenged. I think they need to be stood up to. And in some cases, I think they need to be kicked out of the movement. That is, I don't think any movement can survive if it has no standards. If it basically says anybody who vaguely agrees with the idea of liberty is a member. Well, liberty you have to define and you have to be clear what it means. And where people and liberty is not a beginning or an end there is the liberty stands on something. And one of the things that liberty stands on it has to stand on in my view. And again, not everybody in the liberty movement agrees with me is on the idea of reason, on the idea of facts, on the idea of evidence, on the idea of science. If you're a complete and utter real mystic where anything goes where you don't need evidence and you don't need, then you can't be a liberal. Liberal means nothing. It really does mean nothing when it does. I mean, people who can be religious up to a point and still be liberal, but they can be full-fledged. I hear voices and I, you know, forget it. And people who hear voices always want you to kneel before the voices they hear. So they're very non-liberal when it comes to having their truth be foisted on others. So I think conspiracy theories are particularly the egregious ones, the real stupid ones, the really completely nutty ones. They just don't have a place in the liberal. But the first thing you have to do is argue against them to the extent that you can. Sometimes, you know, you can't because they're so illogical, so irrational. They're completely and there's just nothing to do with them. And then you have to just dismiss. But when you can argue against, then I think it's incumbent upon you to argue against them, to present evidence to the contrary and to reject them and to some extent the people who advocate for them. Thank you very much. So a question we are having at SFL is how far can you go on capitalizing on this crisis? So for example, there were people who who hoarded supplies and sold them for horrendous prices or people who, I mean, I've seen people criticized for selling masks. So in Germany, you have to wear masks. And there were people who sued masks and sold them for a profit. And these people were criticized for essentially capitalizing on a crisis. So how far can you go in capitalizing on a crisis like this and still call yourself ethical or be ethical? I mean, I think you can go as far as the market will allow you if there's a free market, right? So the problem with the world in which we live that allows for what seemingly is unethical is that supermarkets are not allowed to gouge and that creates shortages. So shortages are created by the inability of stores of retailers to actually adjust prices to demand, which they should. So imagine if when the toilet paper, the Russian toilet paper started to happen, if the supermarket started to raise the price of toilet paper, raised the price of masks, then the demand for masks and toilet paper would have come down, but the prices going up would have done what? What do we know when prices go down? What does that encourage? Well, encourage suppliers to manufacture more because they can make a higher profit. So what you want during a crisis is prices to adjust to the crisis and send the signals about supply and demand. This goes to Hayek, right? It goes to basic principles of free market economics on the economic side, not on the ethics side, on the economic side, which is that prices are needed constantly, but in particular during a crisis to distribute, to allocate resources, to allocate labor, to allocate capital to where they are needed. So if there's a shortage in masks, you want to encourage producers to produce more masks, not out of the goodness of their hearts, but out of the profit motive. So if you allow prices of masks to go up, then the hoarders won't hoard them because the supermarket's doing it, right? The store is doing it. And then the producers of masks now have an incentive to produce tons more masks and to send them in. But if you stop the store from doing it, you stop the point of consumption, the intermediary between the producers and the consumers, if you stop the prices from going up there because you say, oh, that's unethical for the store to raise prices during a pandemic, then you're not sending the signal to the producer. Then I go and I buy a bunch of stuff and I make a profit off of its sale. That profit does not incentivize anybody to produce more because they can't see it. I've taken it out of the market, right? I've excluded it from the market. What you want is prices to adjust in the market and if they adjusted in the market, if you took away all these anti-holding laws, all the regulations and laws and rules that restrict at the point of sale for prices to go up, then all of these problems go away. But I'm not for, I don't think it's particularly useful or particularly virtuous to go and buy a bunch of masks and then sell them afterwards for a profit. And in the meantime, exclude people who might be willing to pay more money at the store from having a mask until you set it all up. But I don't think it's evil either. I don't think it's immoral either. I think the real evil is some preventing markets from actually adjusting from working properly. All right. Again, a word to our viewers. Many of you are asking generally, our general questions about INREND or about the INREND Institute. We can answer those or we can ask those later. But first of all, let's focus on the topic of the day which is the pandemic crisis. So if you have any more questions on that, please ask them. I have another question and my question is, REN talks a lot about lifeboat situations and how generally ethics or a general ethic cannot apply in a lifeboat situation. So many people would say, well, we are in a lifeboat situation. This pandemic, this is a lifeboat situation. And my question is, is it? And how could you even tell? No, I don't think this is a lifeboat situation. And because it's not life or death with no, you know, a lifeboat situation is me and you on a lifeboat. One of us is gonna live and one of us is gonna die. Zero sum game, no other options. We can't, we can't, you know, get rescued. There's no, there's nothing we can do. We can't develop a fishing mechanism to, so we both can live. There's just no other mechanism. The only situation, the only, or, you know, the famous trolley, stupid trolley thing that is taught in every ethics class, which is one of the dumbest thing I've ever heard, right? Ethics, you know, the idea that ethics is about these weird, crazy situations. No, disease is a part of life. Communicable diseases are part of life. There's a way to deal with it. This is not me or you. If we deal with this properly, it can be me and you. And if we work together and if we work in innovative ways, if we use our minds, we can build a vaccine. We can increase hotel, hotel. If we can increase hospital capacity, we can get more ventilators. We can get an antiviral. We can actually address this issue in a way, right? It's not an impossibility to turn this into a situation where we can add value, where it's not just we all die and that's it or some people have to die. Now it's true, some people will die here, but it is not inevitable that any particular person die. And it's not like we can't do anything. We can't do stuff. So then the question is, what do you do, right? And how do you function? And I don't think anything changes, right? So look, I don't think wars are emergency in that sense. I mean, you could be within a war in an emergency situation where ethics of emergency is applied, but the principles of war, when you go to where how you act in war is not emergency, something you can plan for. Like you can't plan for being on a lifeboat. You can't plan for the trolley, right? You can pretend you're planning for it, but you can't plan for a trolley. But you can plan for a pandemic. You can plan for war. You can plan for an earthquake. You can plan for a hurricane and you can mobilize resources and you can do things without violating people's rights. Rights don't go away because you're in a pandemic. Rights don't go away because you're in a difficult circumstance where some people will die. Some people die all the time, right? There are lots of circumstances in which people die. It's just in a pandemic, it's abnormal. It's different. So we have to figure out a different strategy to deal with it than what we do on a day-to-day basis, like test and isolate certain people, things like that. All right, thank you very much. Another problem of this pandemic is there are a lot of international friction and international support or a lack thereof. So in your opinion, on what basis should governments cooperate in a time like this to help each other or obey at all? Yeah, so first I think generally this whole issue of government cooperation, right? I don't think all government should cooperate. I don't believe in the United Nations. I don't think the United Nations should exist. I think it's an abomination, an evil institution. I think you have to have standards. Some governments are good and some governments are bad and some governments are downright evil, right? And you have to be able to categorize them in those kind of ways. I think governments generally will cooperate are good governments. So generally free governments should cooperate with one another and should maximize cooperation. I think when it comes to bad governments and certainly evil governments, we should minimize cooperation. So I don't think we should be cooperating right now in North Korea. And I'm glad we're not. And they probably got the virus and there are probably a lot of people dying and it's sad, but that's the government, the North Korean government's fault that they're in a position where they can't cooperate with anybody because they are so damn evil, right? They're so bad. But I think we should cooperate with other free governments. So I think the United States and Europe and other governments around the world they're basically free. None of them are completely free. None of them are as free as we would like them to be. But they're basically free, should cooperate with one another, both from an information perspective, from a knowledge perspective, from any other perspective. Look, and at time of disease as well, I do think that there is a wall for international organizations, again, comprised of free countries like the WHO. But I don't think China should be necessarily a member of the WHO. I don't think, again, North Korea, a place like that should be members, but Taiwan should be. And it's interesting that Taiwan had maybe the best response to this epidemic that anybody, the pandemic that anybody has, they've had the fewest deaths, they've handled it beautifully. I don't know if you know, but the vice president of Taiwan is an epidemiologist, sees a pro, he knows exactly, and they did this by the book, right? If you wanna see how to do it, look at Taiwan, right? And with minimal, if any, violation of rights, right? So really, they did it perfectly. So you wanna learn from Taiwan. You wanna learn from one another. You wanna get information. You wanna get knowledge. You wanna have an institution where you can share information. And then institution is probably comprised of the equivalents of the, in the United States, we have the Center for Disease Control, the CDC, probably the CDC from every country has a seat in this thing and where they share information, but it doesn't need a big budget and it doesn't need big things. It just needs to have the cooperation of the relative entities and the relatively engagement. So I think international organizations can be valuable if they're comprised of the right people, the right countries, the right mentality, the right focus on freedom and individual rights. But when you put, when you put the United States and North Korea and, I don't know, other oppressive regimes, Saudi Arabia, oppressive regimes at one table and treat them as equal, no value comes from that. Countries, regimes, cultures are not equal. Some are good, some are great, some are bad, some are evil and it's really, really important to judge and treat them differently based on that. So with the current situation or especially I live near the Czech border and a huge topic in Europe or in Germany especially is what about border crossing? So the governments, each government has their own agenda and their own plan and most governments as part of their plan have huge restrictions on who is allowed to enter or leave the country. So is this in any way defendable in your opinion? I mean, in my view, the ideal situation would be and again, Taiwan and South Korea have done this. They don't have travel bans. But what they do is they have very, they have testing programs at the airport, particularly Taiwan. Now, it's a question of whether you can, if it's asymptomatic, whether they would catch you but they've been very good at it. So in Taiwan, they take everybody's temperature when they come off a plane. So I have no problems with testing everybody who comes into a country and saying you cannot come in unless you test. I am a generally an open borders guy in a sense that I believe in free migration except that I do believe in screening people. I think you should be able to screen people to see if they're criminals, terrorists or carry an infectious disease. So right now I think the best way, given that there is an infectious disease, that we know it, there are these five minute tests that you can do and you can do it at the border. It slows stuff down, it's inconvenient, but it's much better than closing the border. And you just test everybody who comes in. And if the inconvenience is not worth your time, you just don't travel. So to me, a government is, it is appropriate for a government to say, we are testing at the border. And if you test negative, we won't let you, if you test positive, we won't let you in if you test negative, welcome. That I think would be the appropriate thing to do at all borders. So again, governments are there to protect individual rights. People moving across borders don't represent a threat to individual rights unless there's a reason to believe there are terrorists, the criminal, or carry an infectious disease. So those are the only reasons to deny somebody entry in a normal, real free country and in a state where you're not at war. Thank you very much. Peter Rötlein does have a question. And that is, do you think the widespread willingness even fear or to sacrifice people's freedom and livelihood serves to scratch a moral itch which environmentalist has so far failed to scratch in such a sudden and dramatic way? Yeah, there's no question that this is, it is a moral itch. It's a great question. There's no question that a lot of this response, it comes from an egalitarian morality. A morality it says, everybody has to be treated the same. So why are you locked up when the risk of you actually getting the disease and being a burden on the hospitals or anything like that is close to zero because we can't treat old people differently than we treat young people. That would be wrong, right? We can't discriminate. We can't profile. Why not? Why can't you profile, right? If old people are more likely to be sick, then that's a fact of reality. How can you ignore that fact of reality? So I'm not full locking up old people, but if you're gonna lock anybody up, it should be old people. So this is a way to get everybody's sacrifice for all of us to be in this together. People, you know, the altruists, the collectivists love this idea of everybody suffering together, right? We all feel the pain a little bit. Why should only the people who get the disease feel the pain? Shouldn't you feel a little bit with your fellow man? This is what collectivism and the philosophy and the morality of sacrifice leads to and contributes to. It has this mindset of it's okay to shut everybody down. It's okay to destroy people's living. Oh, cause there's a group over here. Some minority, they're suffering right now. And why should they suffer alone? So this is the real evil of altruism as a moral philosophy. This is the real evil of collectivism as political philosophy. This is the real evil of egalitarianism as a political moral philosophy. You know, there's only one way to combat this and that is with individualism. The only way to combat collectivism is political individualism and the only way to combat kind of the morality of altruism is with a morality of individualism. And this is why, to bring Ayn Rand into this, this is why I think Ayn Rand is essential to the Liberty movement. I don't think the Liberty movement can go anywhere and will go anywhere and will have any success until they recognize the importance of Ayn Rand as a philosopher and the importance of having a philosophical foundation rooted in rational self-interest, rational egoism as the foundation of Liberty. Without that, any attempt at Liberty is bound to fail. What the revolution that needs to happen out there is a moral philosophical revolution in the place is reason and rational self-interest at the heart of the Liberty movement. And to me that's the great failure. The failure of people like Mises and Hayek is not to identify the genius of Ayn Rand in philosophy just as they were the geniuses in economics. There's a division of labor which the economists have not been willing to grant which is sad. Because we could be 50 years ahead of what we are today in terms of the fight for Liberty if the geniuses in the 50s and 60s had recognized the extent to which Ayn Rand was important to the cause. The fight for Liberty is a good keyword. A question we almost ask every week at every webinar is, so there can be a point made for this situation damaging the liberal movement or the view of the liberal movement in society by making a lot of people accepting tyrannical acts by the government as necessary. On the other hand, these tyrannical acts are really shunned down upon by a lot of people even people who never actually engaged in the liberal movement and they start to realize that a lot of things we liberals or libertarians, objectivists had stated years ago and that these things could happen. So do you think overall the situation is a risk to the libertarian or the move for Liberty or is it a chance? Well, I mean, in a sense it's both, but part of why I think it's so important to combat the conspiracy theory nuts, if you will, is because this is a time where a lot of people are looking at us, if we've got a voice, we've got an alternative opinion. And if that alternative opinion comes out as nutty, kooky, insane, crazy, then we do ourselves more harm than good. It's really important right now to be thoughtful, to be nuanced, to not go out there and say, oh, this is less than the flu, who cares, everybody should be out at the beach. But to think about what would be an appropriate response to treat science with respect, to treat reason with respect and to think about what would be a rational way to deal with this even in the mixed economies we have today. For example, if you're gonna demonstrate, demonstrate while respecting things like social distancing. Imagine if the demonstrators, like in Michigan and it's other places, actually warm asks and actually separate themselves six feet from one another and respected the science, if you will. Even if they don't completely buy into it, but it just to show, this is not about the science, it's not about the danger. This is about the fact that you don't have a right to lock us in our homes, right? That would change the perception of them, it would change the debate. It would focus it on where it should be, which is on, should government be locking us down or not? Should they be violating our rights in this way? So it's very, very important at this point for the liberal movement to put its best foot forward, to respect science, respect the data, respect information, recognize the danger and offer alternative solutions, offer ways. For example, we should be offering ways in which the price mechanism could deal with a lot of this stuff, right? If the price of testing went up, they'd be more tests. And even if government paid for it, all the government would have to say, okay, we'll pay you double. And it'd be more tests, private enterprise would create more tests and test more people. So it's up to us now to offer using market mechanisms to solve the problems that exist out there. Why are there no masks? Because of price controls, why is there's no PPE? Because of price controls, because the government is the only buyer. Let markets actually function and you'll have all the things you need in order to deal with this and we need to show that. But at the end of the day, I think though, the story that's being told is dominated by our enemies because they dominate the press, they dominate politics, they dominate the airwaves, they dominate even social media. And the story they are saying is we would have all, this would have been a catastrophe if not for the courageous actions by government. Yes, 80,000 people have died in America, but imagine if millions of people would have died if we'd done the libertarian thing, if we'd not had strong government and if we'd let capitalism reign. So it's a very dangerous time because I think the status voices are louder than ours, more dominant than ours and more prevalent than ours and are spinning the story in very different ways than ours. And the people who, in the United States at least, the people who are tending to be more pro open up and so on discredit our cause like Donald Trump, right? Who is not pro liberty, who is not pro freedom, who is not pro capitalism, but it's perceived that way. So I think there's a lot of danger. I was just looking at an interview in Europe with Varoufakis, the former finance minister of Greece who is a real status, right? And he's viewing this as a massive opportunity for a Green New Deal, for much more investment in health, for much bigger role of government across the European Union, for massive redistribution of wealth from Germany to Italy and Spain and Greece and so on. Now the Germany's in trouble, maybe that'll be more sympathetic to the plight of the poor Southern Europeans. So I think those voices are louder. I think they're more aggressive. And unfortunately, our voice is muted by the fact that too many people associate us with the wrong kind of people, with the conspiracy people, conspiracy theories on the one side and with the populists, if you will, the right wing populists on the other side and one of our jobs, it's the separate ourselves. People ask me, why do you attack Donald Trump so much, Iran? Well, one, because I hate his guts and I think it's really, really bad. But secondly, because I think it's really, really, really important for us to separate ourselves from those who innocent people might confuse us with. I think you've mentioned a really thin line which is often talked about in the libertarian movement and that is at what point is a civil unrest or even violence against the state or the executive forces of the state legitimate. Because I've heard people saying that even not complying with government's rules would not be okay or would hurt our cause just like you just said. And I think it's an interesting point. How far does the government has to go until we can say, all right, now it's ethical to even with force resist against the government's actions? I mean, it's a good question. I mean, I'd say there are two factors here. How far can the government go? And then what is your self-interest? So one is, so with regard to government, I mean, Iran said there were three things and right now I can only remember two, there were three things that would define a government where rebellion was necessary, armed resistance would be necessary. Once free speech is gone, once you don't have a choice, one party rule, and I can't remember the third, but let's just take those two. Free speech is eroding, but we still have it for the most part. We don't have one party rule in most Western countries, but the parties seem to be more and more like all the time. So I don't think we're quite there in terms of revolution, but I don't think we're that far in terms of legitimate using force. But then the question is, what's the point of using force? And the point of using force is to win. It's to be freer. And I just don't see that in the world today. So first of all, you'd have to have enough people who agree with you to have a chance, right? It can't be just the three of us. Well, the two of us, they can only see two of us, but the two of us, right? There has to be a certain number of people who agree with us, who make a revolution feasible. It doesn't have to be a majority. Majorities don't win, it's committed minorities, but it has to be a significant minority. So you have to have a sense, okay, I'm starting a revolution and I'm gonna have support. There gonna be enough people with me. So for you to just go out there and let's say shoot government officials, it's just wrong, it's just nihilistic. It's not, there's no purpose. You're not leading to anything. It's just destruction for the sake of destruction. It's not like you'll be reducing the amount of force the government, and the country, the government will impose more force on people because of that. I'll declare you a terrorist and everybody agrees with you a terrorist and now come marching on top of you. So there has to be a end game in sight that's marginally, that has to be at least somewhat realistic. But that doesn't mean you can't do civil disobedience. And I think civil disobedience is something we can do. And I'll give you an example of what I think is the ideal civil disobedience. And a friend of mine just did this in California. These friends owned an art gallery in Napa Valley and they weren't allowed to open. So what did they do? They said, look, so they decided they were gonna open in spite of the law. They sent letters to the governor to the county and to the city, to the officials. And they said, look, you guys don't have a way to shut us down. Our lives are ours. They gave them a little philosophical statement of why they're doing this. We're gonna open. You wanna come arrest us, come arrest us. We recognize you have this. We will sue you. We will take it to Supreme Court if necessary. But we believe we are gonna act based on our... And by the way, when we open our gallery, we will require people wearing masks. We will only allow X number of people at a time in. We will not allow them to touch the art because we don't want it to contaminate across things. We will clean the store. You know, we will be responsible in terms of really taking care of our customers because that's what we do. But you don't have a right to shut us down. And we are defying you. We recognize that there's a violation of law. So we recognize the rule of law. We think this law is unconstitutional. We think this law is wrong. It's anti-individual rights. So we define you. Now to me, that's the proper civil disobedience. It's not like demonstrating in the street where if I'm driving down the street, you're infringing on my right to drive. Why are you blocking my ability, right? This is a private way. It's visible. Everybody sees it, but it doesn't interfere with anybody's life. And it recognizes the rule of law. And yet it announces on a principle basis. We will not accept your violation of our rights. It's our life and we will live our life and we will do it as necessary for our own income. Now what happened, I think, because I haven't got all the info, but what happened was they opened for a few days and then what their authorities did because they couldn't convince them to shut down and they didn't want to come and arrest them. Because if they come and arrest them, that would create a whole other trickle effect. They went to their landlord. See how politicians and bureaucrats are devious. They went to their landlord and said, you need to ban them from the store as the owner of the property. Otherwise we will go after you. And so they closed the store because they don't want to get the landlord in trouble because it's not his fight, right? And he doesn't necessarily have to agree with him. So it's tricky, but those are the kind of things you have to do in your own sphere, in your own life, find ways to declare your opposition without putting other people at risk and while recognizing the rule of law and saying the rule of law, yes, but this law is wrong. This law is irrational. This law violates rights and we're not adhering to this law. And if you want, come and arrest me. That's proper civil disobedience. Thank you very much. Jonathan Hönig from YouTube has a question for you. And that is, if the goal is preserving human life and hardcore lockdowns would result in fewer deaths, why shouldn't the government enforce these hardcore lockdowns? Because the goal is not to minimize deaths or to view some kind of collectivistic way. The goal is to protect the individual rights, to protect your, not your life, to protect your ability to pursue your life. Lockdowns do the opposite. Lockdowns are restrictions on your ability to act in order to pursue the values necessary for your life. So it's not some kind of utilitarian calculation. How many lives the lockdown hurts? How many values do they destroy versus how many lives do we gain? And we're not utilitarians. And again, I think one of the tragedies within the libertarian movement is that too many people are utilitarians because I think utilitarianism is a losing philosophy. You can't do those kind of measurements. Rights are about freedoms of action. When I say the government is there to protect my right, it's there to protect my ability to act freely, free of what? Free of coercion. Free of somebody else imposing themselves on me. Now, in a sense, if you're carrying a virus, you could impose yourself on me. You could cause me to be sick. So the government has a job in separating you if you have a virus from me. But if you don't have the virus, it's none of the government's business, how we interact, what we do. That's why testing is so important because testing provides the criteria for whether the government is involved in my life or not involved in my life. If I test positive, it needs to be involved in my life in order to protect other people's freedoms. If I test negative, government has no role, zero role in my life. So it's not about some utilitarian calculation. It's about protecting individual rights, which means protecting my right to act freely, free of coercion, free of interference by others, which means free of people who are positive carriers. If you're a negative carrier, you're not a threat to me. So therefore the government has no say in how we interact. Thank you very much. Fidia and Mohamed from YouTube has another question and that is hearing you about good governments. Governments under female leadership, for example, Germany, Taiwan, and most of the Nordic countries are highly praised, especially in the use of science-based policies. In comparison, governments under male rulers or male governments, for example, Brazil or the United States, are heavily criticized for not utilizing science. How do you think objectivism could explain this phenomenon? I mean, South Korea's government is run by a male. I just think that the phenomenon is somewhat arbitrary. And so I don't think that there is a universe of rule here that a woman is gonna be better than a man at this. I think we happen to have some really bad men running things right now, particularly, you know, Bolsonaro in Brazil and Trump in the United States. But I don't think there's some universal principle that says that men don't respect science, women do. I know some unbelievably irrational women and I know some unbelievably rational men. I think that, you know, I think it really is a question of the specifics in terms of who the individual is. When it comes to the mind, when it comes to one's ability to be pro-science or anti-science, pro-reason or anti-reason, rationally rational, I do not believe there's any difference between men and women. I think there are differences between men and women in all kinds of other aspects of our lives. But when it comes to the mind and our ability to be rational, there's no difference. And if I don't think there's a difference between a woman's ability to orient a country towards science or not science versus a man, so I think what we're seeing right now is that it happens that the irrational is more visible, you know, in the United States and Brazil and the rational is more visible in certain other countries. But again, South Korea is another example of a country that dealt with wealth where man and actually a leftist who I think is awful in every other aspect of his governing, but he handled this crisis well. You have to give credit where credit is due. So I can't think of a president who would have handled this crisis worse than Trump because Trump is in his essence, anti-science. I mean, this is a conspiracy theory guy. Remember, he was, he led the conspiracy theory about Obama being not an American, not born in America and a fake, you know, birth certificate and all that. That's Donald Trump. That's the, you also talk about conspiracy theories. Trump is susceptible to conspiracy theories. He's not a man of reason. He's not a man of science. So it doesn't, and the same thing by the way of Bolsonaro, they're not people, they might do good things in particular economic realms, but generally these are not people you wanna be, you wanna have at the head of a government in a time of crisis because they are inherently both not men of reason and science. You're not on Hönig again asks if this crisis, doesn't this crisis prove that we need to buy at home and not be dependent on foreign supply chains for medicine and essentials? No, it's the opposite. What you want, what this has proven is that you want a diversified supply chain, that you want to have a situation where when you shut down, let's say you have to shut down. You know, one of these really, really bad pandemics. Maybe somebody in Mexico still producing stuff that you can buy. Maybe somebody in Germany is still making stuff that you can buy. So you wanna be able to have a diversified supply chain. Now it's true that in some areas, some countries that limited supply chains and focus all their supply chains just on China. And I think private companies are learning a lesson right now and they're learning a lesson not never to do anything with China, but they're learning a lesson of diversification of supply chains. And that's a good thing. I think it should be learned by private companies. It shouldn't be something dictated by the state. But that is like saying, well, because there are problems in the world, I should grow all my food. Because you know what? What happens if there's a tornado or a hurricane in the areas where they grow food and I can't get my food from there? So I should grow all my food and maybe I should build my own iPhone because who knows, Apple supply chain might break and who knows if it. You know, this is an argument for subsistence existence and we know what happens there. Good poverty and death and destruction and everything. So no, division of labor works. Diversification of sources works. What you discovered during a pandemic is something like that when big countries are shut down is maybe you wanna diversify your sources but that needs to be done at the private enterprise level. Apple is already talking about building assembly plans for the iPhone in India. Other companies are talking about diversifying away from China into Vietnam, into Thailand, into other play, maybe one day hopefully into Africa where we'd get supply chains into Africa. That is a good thing, but that doesn't need government. What it needs is companies to learn, learn from experience. And again, I think if we'd had real free markets, there'd be more planning, there'd be more thinking in terms of what happens in a catastrophe and they would have been already more diversified. Thank you very much. Peter Rytland has another question. That is, my friends and coworkers are quite taken by the idea that Bill Gates is paying off everybody to enforce worldwide mandatory vaccinations or some other variation of the follow the money epistemology. Do you think this is the result of the inability to think about the world in conceptual terms, in effect replacing abstract ideas with concrete people as the causal agents? Yes, absolutely. And this is the problem with all conspiracy theories. So people look at the world and they see scary things happening. They see bad things happening. And usually the cause of the bad things are complicated. They're bad ideas or they're biological like this virus. I mean, I don't understand viruses completely. RNA, what's RNA? And I've taken biology classes and I'm an engineer and it's still hard to really think about and what is the virus doing my buddy? Somebody just posted a YouTube video saying this, you can't catch a virus, he says. And he has a whole explanation why he can't catch a virus. Really? I mean, it's complete nonsense. But for people who are, so this is all made up, right? So COVID is all made up. So people have a hard time with these conceptual ideas. They have a hard, you know, I believe, I in believe that history is shaped by ideas, by philosophy. And, but that's complicated to see how ideas flow through a culture, how culture impacts politics and how politics shapes the world, right? So you start with philosophy, usually in academia, usually writing books obscure, right? Let's say a Hegel, an Eman O'Conn to Marx and some library writing a book at the, you know, you know, the British, the British library. And then that book influences people. And then that slowly filters in the schools and through the universities into, and then affects the culture. And then the culture, maybe 50 years of this into the culture affects politics. And then you get some really, really bad effect. That's complicated to follow. That's complicated in people. Most people don't think in terms of ideas. Most people don't think they have ideas. They're not conceptual that way. It's much easier to think, oh, there's this group of Jews that meets once a year in, I don't know, some rich guy's estate and they control the world somehow and they pull the levers or it's Bill Gates. He's a billionaire. That's suspicious. That's a big number billionaire. How do you become a billionaire? And there's a lot of unfortunately liberals who say, oh no, there wouldn't be any billionaires in a free market. They'd be competition, BS bullshit, right? Of course, there'd be billionaires in a free market. There might even be trillionaires in a free market. We don't know, right? We don't know how much wealth would be created in a free market and who would create it. People say, oh no, it's because of capture, regulatory captures because the cronies, no, they're not. Rockefeller, the oil guy from the 19th century was richer than Jeff Bezos is today. If Rockefeller in today's dollars was worth over $300 billion, $300 billion. That's much richer than Jeff Bezos. Yet, no cronyism, no government involvement in the economy really back then, almost as close to we've ever come to a free market. The second half of the 19th century in America is about as much as if it capitalism as you get. And yet he accumulated the equivalent of $300 billion. So there's no problem of having highly concentrated industries and making gazillions of dollars in a free market. You have to be exceptional and only a few people can do it. So people are suspicious of billionaires even within the so-called Liberty Movement. They're suspicious of billionaires. So there's always, they try to attribute it to people, to a group of people. Usually it's a group of others. So it's the Chinese. The Chinese are taking over the world. It's all their fault. Or it's the Jews, right? That's a popular one, particularly in Europe. It's the Jews that are doing it. Or in the United States right now, it's the elites. It's the, and they don't understand that it's ideas. No, it's a group of people. Or it's the billionaires. It's Bogate. So yes, conspiracy theories are the way people who are non-conceptual, who cannot think in conceptual terms in the context of ideas, that's how they understand the world. And it's a sign of their weakness and their failure. And we should distance ourselves as much as we can from that. A discussion I had the other days with a friend of mine is even though we judge or we disagree with the government's actions, we have to assume that the bureaucrats or the governments have a plan behind everything they do. And the argument my friend made was, so it is better if everyone followed the bad plan, but everyone follows the plan so we can work through this together, then everyone not following the bad plan and everyone doing what they want to do in waiting for a better plan to emerge because that might never happen. So it's better to act quick and act according to the bad plan as long as there is at least anything we can follow and we can have orientation. But even your friend recognizes that some bad plans are so bad that the outcome would be much, much worse. Let's say you said, I don't know, all obese people have to be put into camps, separated from society because they're susceptible to dying from this. And we're doing it for their own good. I mean, everybody would say, no, well, you can't do that. That's too much, but it's a plan. Even he has to accept that the plan has to be somewhat reasonable. And look, I agree that sometimes following a less than perfect plan, but a semi-reasonable plan is better than having no plan at all and nobody having one. But that's also forced economy. So Sweden, for example, which is the one country that's different in Europe, they have a plan, but it's a different plan than the rest of Europe. The plan in Sweden is not to force into anybody's isolation, but to just to recommend isolation, to advise people to isolate themselves, to try to focus on testing in nursing homes and old people. They didn't execute very well on the plan. I'll give you that. They failed in execution, but it was one that respected their citizen's ability to make decisions for themselves. That to me is easy. It's an easy plan to implement as a substitute to every other plan that Europe is engaged in. And yet we'll see if Sweden has, in the long run, more deaths or not. And even if it does, but we were freer. So what's important is individual freedom. And at the margin, some more people might die, that's possible, but it relates to the, I have a plan, it relates to Jonathan Honing's question before about if we want to minimize deaths. I have a way to minimize, or basically eliminate rape. Eliminate rape from society. Basically don't allow men to go outside ever, right? Men do 99.9% of all the rape. Just don't let them go outside. Or don't let them go outside between 7 p.m. and 5 a.m. because that's when most rapes happen. Or if you don't want to have crime, don't let people out. So you could do that. And that would minimize deaths. But we all recognize that's just wrong. That's not the way you do it. You don't violate some people's rights in order to protect other people's rights. We need a society in which what we do is protect everybody's rights in a way that minimizes deaths. And I believe that lots of capitalism would have a better plan if we were truly free than anything government could come up with. Because hospitals, and we as individuals, hospitals, insurance companies, and other entities within capitalism would do better. Just an interesting fact. In Washington state where the first cases of coronavirus were really, where the first deaths were experienced, I think in Washington state with first numbers. One of the first things the county they did was they called up Microsoft and Amazon and they said to them, look, we think there's a pandemic. People are dying. We think it's communicable by air and all this stuff. The stuff from China has come here. We think it would be a good idea if you guys just got your employees to work at home because a big percentage of the working population in some of these cities in Washington state work for Microsoft and Amazon. And Microsoft and Amazon said, yeah, that makes sense. We don't want our people to get sick. So they immediately sent out a thing saying, work at home. There's a plan, but it wasn't a plan that said, you have to do this, otherwise you go to jail. Here's a dictatorial authoritarian plan. There are ways in which you can have people voluntarily in their own self-interest doing the right thing and government creating the context for that rather than enforcing that. A point I've heard a lot of times is that the reason why Sweden does not need to enforce their rules, but just to recommend them is because the Swedish government is respected by their people. So most Swedish people, they just follow what the government says while in other countries, for example, Germany. A lot of people disagree or even openly dislike the government. So when the government makes some advices, then they just don't follow them through. Yeah, I think there's something to that and the poor Swedes actually trust their government, what a, you know, that's pretty scary. But I think that's true, but the only way to solve that is in the end to build trust and you don't build trust by locking everybody down when it's not needed. And I don't think it's almost ever needed, certainly not in this crisis. There is another question by Rand Lipper, which is what are the challenges the Eurozone faces in this crisis? Given that we don't have a fiscal union, should the European Central Bank increasingly buy Italian government bonds or risk rising interest rates and looming default? Well, yeah, I mean, Italy should default. There's no question you need default. Default is a healthy process. I mean, you know, even though we don't have real markets, you wanna get as much market discipline as possible. I think the best thing that could have happened in Greece was bankruptcy. That is, let your German banks have to write down to zero all their Greek debt. Maybe next time they wouldn't lend the money, right? So the best thing that can happen is default. So I'm all for not kicking, not kicking Greece out of the Eurozone because I don't think Greece should have its own currency. I think that would be a disaster if they had their own currency. I think they should keep the Euro, but nobody should want to lend the money in euros because they should be assessed like any company. And when you look at the Greek government and you see how incompetent and unbalanced they are, then you shouldn't give them any money. So the way to starve bad governments is to allow them to go bankrupt. And the fact that a US government can print its way out of bankruptcy is not a good thing. It's a bad thing because it encourages more printing of money. So I think that this crisis, the financial crisis even more so, you've gotta let them play out. And part of that playing out is the destruction of the kind of creative destruction. And that creative destruction should apply to governments as well as private enterprise and Italians need to suffer. They need to suffer the bad governmental policies that they have chosen, right? They keep electing these guys. So it's not, you don't just blame government for their sins, it's the sin of the people. The people need to suffer for that sin. And you can't have Germans, let's say who are mildly more responsible, not superly more responsible, but just mildly more responsible, pay for your sins, which is what letting the European Central Bank buy the bonds does. And it bails out all the banks. And the banks shouldn't be bailed out. The banks should have to, now granted, a lot of times the banks are forced to buy government bonds. But again, that's a problem. So we need to deregulate the banking system. We need to get rid of those kinds of restrictions, those kinds of incentives. Thank you very much. Now we have some questions, not directly or not at all related to the Corona crisis. I would go through those, if that's okay with you. So one of them, again, by Rand Lippa is, he knows you would love a gold-backed currency, but what are your short or long-term solutions for the financial situations? I mean, that's a really difficult problem question because without some kind of backing for the currency, there is no right or wrong answer because there is no market. You can't have the right price, the right interest rates, the right quantity of money independent of market signals. This is again, going back to Mises and Hayek. You have to have some kind of market mechanism that gives you that. So some simple things that could be done. Central banks should stop setting interest rates. They should stop setting interest rates. They should float interest rates, let the market set the interest rates. So they could kind of determine the money supply and that the market set interest rates. That would be better than the way it is today, where they set both interest rates and the money supply. They double up on the distortion. Governments could announce tomorrow. Again, I don't think this is an ultimate solution. It's just an improvement of what we have today. We will for the next five years follow a Taylor rule. Taylor rule is a rule for monetary policy. We will grow the money supply every year by 3%. And this is the money supply, M3 or M2 or whatever the M is. The answer is what central bankers could do in the short-term medium term is provide visibility, clear objective standards that will guide their behavior into the future and then let interest rates float. Immediately there would be no negative interest rates in Europe, that would go away, which would be amazing. And then the markets would adjust and that might involve a major recession as the market adjusts and allocation of capital gets redistributed, but so be it. You need a major recession in Europe generally. Europe hasn't had a really major recession because in during the financial crisis everything got bailed out. So we don't know what shouldn't be produced. I mean, I know in Germany a bunch of stuff that shouldn't be produced, like the stupid windmills and the funniest thing in ever in human history or your solar panels of all places in the world to build them, Germany really? Has anybody been to Germany? So it's, you've got to provide discipline. The only discipline is the market discipline. So you got to eliminate your influence or not eliminate, eliminate would be some kind of gold standard. You've got to minimize your influence as much as you can and by the way, I'm not for gold standard with the central bank. I'm not for gold standard with no central bank, no government involvement in currency or in interest rates. That is I'm for free banking where banks set the currency, where banks determine what the currency is and how much money is put into the system and what they wanna back their currency with. I assume it's gonna be gold, but that should be the market determining. Thank you very much. Erhard Gaier asked the United or the upcoming election shows that apparently the United States has no better candidate than Trump and Biden. So could this be seen as a problem of democracy as such? I don't think so. I mean, it depends on what you mean by democracy. If you mean by democracy voting, then I don't think so. If you mean by democracy, majority rule, then yeah, majority rule is corrupt. It's evil. It's bad. And what you're seeing all over the world is the corrupting influence of majority rule. That is when government is detached from its role of protecting individual rights and now has an unlimited role determined by whatever the majority wants, then government becomes corrupt. Government becomes heavily influenced by special interest groups or by majority interest groups, but usually by minority interest groups that pull and push and what I in fact call pull peddlers. And when that happens, when government is inherently corrupt, which I think all the governments in the West are, then the people who wanna be part of that corrupt mechanism are not good people. That just a good person would never want to have to vote on how much money to take from John to give to Sally. I mean, the idea of voting on who should pay what taxes, on which industries to subsidize and which industries to regulate, which industries to control, which businesses to kill and which businesses to give money to. The idea of voting for that, any good person would say, I don't want anything to do with it. I wanna be in that position. And of course, you can't vote no on everything. I mean, you could, but what kind of a job would that? You get no enjoyment out of it. And every single bill passed in Congress in the United States violates rights today. So nobody goes into politics because politics is corrupt and politics is corrupt because of the mixed economy. Politics is corrupt because government has become unlimited. Politics has become corrupt because we've moved away from the singular role of government, which is to protect us to an unlimited role of government, which to manipulate our lives and control them. All right. Our time nears an end, but I have one last question. Our group is really curious about, so in your opinion, would Ein Rand, if she still lived today, would she approve or even support students for liberty and our cause? Hi. I think she would have very, well, I don't wanna speak for Ein Rand. I, you know, who knows what Ein Rand was said. I can't speak for her. I have a feeling she would be less tolerant of you than I am. But I think Students for Liberty is a problematic organization and the leaders of Students for Liberty have heard me say this. I've told them this and I've told many of the students. I don't think your standards are rigid enough. I think you're too open and too broad. I think there are too many people within this so-called movement who undercut its success. We talked about conspiracy theorists, but I have a very, very negative opinion of anarchists and people who call themselves anarcho-capitalists. I don't think there is such a thing as anarcho-capitalism because capitalism requires by necessity a monopoly of the use of force of a particular geographic area, which is government. And I think that the conspiracy theorists, the anarchists, the dominance of the anarchists within the movement do damage to the movement and to its ability to grow. The rejection of philosophical ideas at the heart of the movement and the embrace of a big tent, I think is damaging to the movement. I would like to see a smaller tent or much more focus on education, right? We're just educating about ideas of liberty, but to be both an advocacy group, educational group, but somewhat political group, all with this big umbrella, I think creates as a potential to discredit long-term the liberty movement. So I think it's problematic and I've said this and I'm glad you asked the question because I'm glad I get to say it again and I'm glad you guys get to hear it. I would like to see the tent narrowed not to ban people, but to say these are views and our views don't include those. You can still come to our venture, you can still participate, but we don't view these views as legitimate, as legitimately poor. I don't believe anarchism is pro-liberty. I think it's pro-authoritarianism. I think it's inherently authoritarian and anti-liberty and I've done debates on this and if people are interested, they can look up your Anarchy and find the videos I've done on this. So I think that if you stand for liberty movement, you have to clearly define what liberty means and then, which I don't think SFL has done very well, and then stand by those and exclude from that, those views are not consistent with liberty, but the counter to that is. The counter to that is you're young. I forgive you for being young and that you're still testing out ideas and you're interested in a variety of ideas and you wanna listen to them and hear them and it's an opportunity for you to decide what's true and what's not and I think it would be a mistake for me not to at least present these ideas to you. Some of you will reject this, some of them will accept it, some of them, these are new to, some of them already heard them before, but at least gives you the opportunity to, if this was an organization of people in the 30s or 40s, I wouldn't bother because I think by the time you reach your 30s and 40s, most people are pretty, the ideas are there, they don't, but you're at an age where you're shaping your ideas and I think it would be sad if Einwren's ideas didn't have the one represented during this period of time where you think about it. I think Einwren's right. I think Einwren's philosophy is the philosophy of liberty. I don't think they're multiple philosophy of liberties. Now that doesn't mean Einwren was right about everything, but I think the foundational ideas, they are no other foundational ideas for liberty than hers. And we can argue about the details and we can argue about the specifics. I think her attitude towards reason and attitude towards ethics, you cannot get laissez-faire capitalism without them ultimately. And I think when SFL realizes that, there will be a much more effective, even if smaller movement. So, but I'm not holding my breaths for that to happen. So I'm happy to talk, even though I think Einwren might be really, really angry with me, but I'm, you know, so I have to use my judgments based on the circumstances we end on how to get who ideas the largest audience possible. All right, thank you very much for giving us this opportunity and for speaking at our event. So yeah. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it. I'm sorry that we didn't get to do this in person. That would have been a lot more fun for everybody, I think, but maybe in one of our future, in a future year, I'll be able to come to Germany and meet you guys and actually deliver something in person. Maybe we can stop talking about pandemic soon. That would be fun. Talk about something more positive and that'll be good. So good luck with all of your activities and everything you guys do and with growing the freedom movement in Europe. Thank you very much. Thank you. So also thanks to all our viewers and especially thanks in the name of SFL for speaking at our event and for viewing if you are a viewer. Good. Bye, everyone.