 The 21 convention Tampa, Florida, today we have a pretty awesome speech prepared for you which actually has to do with all the stuff that we talk about here at the 21 convention which is about independence, individuality, how to empower yourself, but here we're taking a different look of something that we've been diving into in the last couple years. Now we have Don Watkins right here, how social security is sabotaging the land of self-reliance. Bring it on home. Good stuff, man. Thanks, man. Yeah, you got it. All right, so round of applause. Who here was brought up with the idea that the best diet was, you know, loads of bread, low-fat, kind of low-calorie stuff. Come on, guys, clap. And how many of you, for instance, heard, all right, you guys got to do your 30 minutes of cardiovascular fitness every morning where you're running in a treadmill and everything. All right, now the fact that you're in this room tells me that you think that's probably not right. Is that that sound about right? So the fact that you're in this room tells me that you're willing to challenge conventional wisdom when it comes to diet, when it comes to exercise. And what I'm going to ask you to do over the next hour or so is challenge conventional wisdom concerning your political thinking. Now, when somebody tells you to challenge conventional wisdom, they have a burden of proof because the fact is there's a lot of things in the search to think about why challenge something that everybody already knows. And I'm going to ask you to rethink the welfare state. So why even bother with this issue? Now, I'm not a big numbers guy, but I want to give you some big numbers. So you've probably heard at one time or another that the U.S. government is $12 trillion in debt. That's a huge number, totally phony number. If the government actually had to keep its books the way that, say, a private organization does, we would not be talking about $12 trillion, but somewhere in the neighborhood of $205 trillion. Now, how many of you guys are students or have been students or at one time knew that there have been such people on this earth as students? All right. So I have any student debt in the crowd? Okay. Well, I have a proposition for you. I'm going to add $400,000 of debt onto your current load, but instead of getting something for it like an education, we're just going to give it to other people. Any takers? Oh, you guys are cold. Where is the compassion here? Well, that's basically where we're headed. Now, what's driving this? How is it that the government is going to be spending that much more than it receives through taxes? Well, the basic answer is old age welfare state programs. So social security, Medicare, the big drivers. Also, it's going to be Medicaid, but primarily social security and Medicare. And the basic issue is pretty simple. I'm not a math guy, but even I can work this one out. Right now, there's three workers for every retiree, and each retiree is getting on average $30,000 a year per capita. That, by the time we get older and our kids start growing up, that's going to go to two workers for every retiree and $40,000 per capita. That is not a sustainable situation. And so what I want to talk about in the time remaining is why did we even get here? And what kind of world should we be living in? Which one will actually allow us to pursue and achieve our happiness? So the bottom line is that basically we're broke. But let's make that a little more concrete. And I want to start by taking just one slice. So I mentioned this $205 trillion, and you're probably thinking, what the heck does $205 trillion mean? Let's take 10% of that problem, just social security. So right now, does anybody know how much we pay for social security taxes each month? Like what percentage of our paycheck goes to it? 15, you say? Close, yeah. So if you look at your paycheck, it's 6.2% goes to social security. But as you suggested, 6.2% goes from your employer, except that every economist will tell you, that actually comes out of your paycheck too. So 12.4%. Now for the average millennial worker, and if you were born after 1980, you're millennial, like it or not. The average millennial worker, 12.4% means over $5,000 a year. That's more than a car payment each month you're making to the elderly. Before you can worry about your hopes and dreams, before you can start spending on things like your car payment or paying off your student loans. So why? Why are we in this situation? Another way to think about it, by the way, is that's more than a month and a half each year that you are working without pay. A month and a half. Imagine you open the newspaper and you see a big story about Walmart. And it says, Walmart demanded that their employees work a day without pay just to help out the company. People would be riding in the streets. They'd say, you can't do that. That's exploiting people. But a month and a half, that's where we are today. When we try to actually fix that $205 trillion gap, it's only going to get worse. We're talking two months, three months, four months. We don't really know, but it's going to be immense. And this is what I call the debt draft. Because in a very literal sense, everybody here in this room, you're being conscripted to set aside your goals, hopes, and dreams in order to serve the retirement and healthcare needs of the elderly. So why? Why? I mean, we can't take this lightly. These programs enjoy immense support. And so before we figure out what to do about this, why do we have these programs anyway? And usually I pull the room, but I'm just going to tell you what you guys think. So the three major reasons in one way or another, and I've spoken to thousands of people in this issue, the main reasons why people support the welfare state. And don't kid yourself, these are some of the most well-supported, popular programs that the government actually does. Social security gets 80% support when you give polls. I bet you you wouldn't get 80% support for putting murderers in jail. Like this is enormous. So the first one is Wadkins. What the heck are you talking about? This is not even a welfare program. This is, I earned it. I paid for it, and I'm getting what I paid for. It gives me economic security. So hey, I'm going to reach the point where I can't work. And so I need something kind of a baseline to rest on. So social security is good for that reason. And then the third one is I want to help people in need. I'm not a jerk who wants people to starve in the streets. And so these programs enjoy my support for that reason. So I want to talk about each one of these. And if you guys think, well, I'm not really covering something that's important or whatever, raise your hand. We don't have to wait until the Q&A. This is about getting clear in this topic, not about me pontificating. So really feel free to engage, push back, and so on. So I earned it. So this is basically the way that we're taught to think about social security. And I'm going to focus on social security, not Medicare. It's the same principles, but social security is more straightforward. So if you have any questions about the details about how Medicare works or something, let me know. But basically the idea is, look, I'm young. I give a bunch of my money 12.4% to the government. It puts it in a nice lock box. And when I'm old, all right, I'm happy because I get a bunch of money from the government. Although in this case, I'm sad because I'm old. So that's kind of what we've been taught about the program. That's the idea of I earned it because I set aside money the same way you would with life insurance, the same way you would with like a 401K. But this is how it really works. A bunch of money, take it from you and give in to other people who are older. And you're sad because people are taking a bunch of your money. So that is really, and don't take my word for it. There's a book called Social Security for Dummies. This is not some politically charged memoir or anything. This is a book just telling you the way that it works by a guy who thinks it works wonderfully. And he calls it a pipeline running from young people to older people or from workers to retirees. A pipeline dragging your money, hope, streams, goals and so on into the pockets of other people. Now, you may think that that's a good thing. You may think we have to do that. We're going to get to those arguments in a minute. But what I'm trying to stress is that whatever you call it, you can't call that an earned benefit. You can't earn the right to just have a pipeline running from other people's pockets into yours. I mean, it's like, this is like playground justice, right? It's like Billy stole my wallet. So I'm going to go steal Jack's wallet because it's an earned benefit now. That's basically what that argument says. Now, it's true. It's true that the people receiving it were once young and they had their wealth taken from them in order to support the elderly. So it's not crazy that people think, well, hey, I paid for it. But the point is that if there was an injustice committed to them, it was not by the people who say, hey, stop taking money from young people. It was when they were young and the money was taken from them. So let's then turn to the two really major reasons that people support these programs. So economic security. So this is the idea. Clearly, we're most concerned about opportunity, right? If you're in this room, it's because you want to make the best of your life. You're not really concerned with, hey, how do I not have a complete disaster of a life? But nevertheless, we are concerned with what happens in the worst case scenario, right? What happens if I reach a certain age and I just can't work? I can't support myself? What's going to happen to me? And the whole idea behind social security is, all right, you have a platform of supporting yourself. Now, this is kind of a weird notion of economic security, first of all. So economic security in any rational world, so the way that it's usually treated is how do you guarantee that you have resources even if you haven't produced or saved for them? That's the idea behind, you know, this idea of economic security. But that's not a realistic idea of economic security because the fact is the government can't guarantee economic security. It can't guarantee that those resources are there. It can only guarantee that, hey, if people produce them, we're going to take enough from them to guarantee that you'll have some floor of protection. Any rational idea, any rational conception of economic security is really going to be that if you do create something, if you do invest it, if you do save, nobody can come and arbitrarily take it away. Now, that kind of conception of economic security doesn't really pretend well for the welfare state because, of course, the basic idea there is the government is to say, hey, whatever we want to take from you, we're going to take from you. If we think it's in the public interest, we're going to do it. I mean, how economically secured we feel knowing that we're $205 trillion in debt, which by the way, does anybody have $205 trillion on them? Because if you do, let's go out for drinks after this. No, it's more wealth than exists in the entire world. So that's kind of a problem. But let's look even deeper. You might say that's kind of nice wordplay, Don, but what happens if I'm old and I can't support myself? So the kind of argument that's usually given is that if we don't have something like Social Security and Medicare, the elderly will starve in the streets. Now, there's an interesting test case for this. What happens when people don't have old age welfare programs? And it's called America for every year until 1935, which by the way, if you can do the math, is longer than we've had Social Security since 1935. Now, did the elderly starve in the streets? And it turns out that amazingly no. Amazingly, people figured out a way to live without handouts for over 100 years. And it's pretty fantastic when you think about it. They were very entrepreneurial in their whole approach to life. And so I'm just going to go through some of the mechanisms that they took in order to not, as they say, starve in the streets. So first of all, people worked. It's kind of funny today where we think of like, work's a real burden. But actually, the people pushing for a welfare state complained for many years because the elderly, those darned people refused to retire. The fact is that they found their lives more meaningful, more meaningful, more valuable, more enjoyable with work than without it. And they saved. Who has a savings of more than 0%? If you do, you are the 1% because most Americans don't. People at that era saved between one eighth and one ninth of their income, which is, I mean, that's impressive. Credit obviously is, you know, if you couldn't support yourself, various forms of credit were available. Turning to friends, family, community, informal ways of helping people, the number one, does anybody know what the number one thing people did? So first of all, before industrialization, before people were really dealing with retirement, what was the number one retirement plan? Anybody know? Close. That comes later. The first retirement plan was actually death. You worked, and then you died, and then you didn't have a retirement plan. But now we have industrialization, people are living longer. And yeah, that's exactly what they did. The number one thing people did is they lived with their kids. And when you think about it, social security is in effect like an indirect way of us all taking care of other people's grandparents. Like it's in effect that government wheels over somebody else's grandma, shoves her into our lawn and says, here, you watch her for a while. But no, what most people did is they took care of their own parents if they needed it. There were also things called mutual aid societies. Now, anybody heard of like an elk's lodge or a moose lodge or something? I'd love to see these re-emerge. They're kind of cool. But these are in effect the descendants of mutual aid societies. And these were community groups in effect where you would pay your monthly membership due, and you would be entitled to certain kinds of then support from the club. And it might be things like unemployment insurance. It might be things like private health care. You'd have a lodge doctor, you could see. Or it could be a retirement thing. They had retirement homes where if you couldn't support yourself, you would go and you'd be able to stay at the society's retirement lodge. And finally, there was charity, private charity, which in this era was abundant. Again, we're talking about pre-1935. And people per capita were giving more to charity then than they did today. And so what were the results of this? Was it people starving in the streets? No. The fact is that what was happening with immigration? Were people fleeing the shores of America trying to get away from this wretched area where people were starving the streets and going to those countries that had welfare programs? Anybody know what was going on with immigration at this time? This is the biggest wave of immigration to America. Indeed, the people pushing for welfare state programs, which they started doing really in the 1880s, a model after Bismarck's Germany, they said, well, we don't have to worry about old people in America. They're doing just fine. We have to worry about poor people. So they spent 30 years trying to create welfare programs for poor people. And then they realized, oh, Americans don't care about poor people. Let's focus on old people, because most of us one day aspire to being old. So let's do that. And then they eventually succeeded in 1935, as we talked about. But the best statistics we have in terms of what's going on then, and we don't have great statistics, so take these with a bit grain of salt. But the best ones we have tell us that by 1935, only 8% of the elderly need any form of formal charity, whether it's private or whether it's the kind of minuscule government level programs going on. And what I'm showing here is I want us to remember what's going on historically. So I'm talking about 8% of the elderly need any kind of formal help. And you can extend this line back to infinity, but basically for hundreds and hundreds and thousands and thousands of years, human beings have been living just above subsistence. We're dealing with a time frame right here where capitalism, economic freedom has only started to enrich us. And already people are productive and smart enough so that only 8% need any sort of formal assistance in order to achieve economic security. So if we're thinking about economic security then, the bottom line is that clearly a welfare state is not necessary. And indeed it undermines our economic security by giving the government the power to take away as much of our economic resources as it decides is in the public good. But now let's turn to the biggie. Watkins, I want to help people. You're being a jerk who's just talking about the cost. What about the benefit to these people who need help? What I want to stress and the major point I want to make about this is that whether or not you want to help people is totally irrelevant to whether or not there should be a welfare state. Totally irrelevant. First of all, we've seen people are helping people immensely during this time. Most people don't need help. The vast majority of us are able to support ourselves throughout our lifetime, including old age. But those who did, the vast majority are being helped privately, voluntarily. You're able to help the people that you care about. Yeah. Sure. So the question is how do we compare the help available today versus before the welfare state? If we just compare the amount of giving as a percent of GDP, today it's about 1.5 percent. That number might not be exactly right, but it's in the ballpark. 1.5 percent of GDP goes to charity. Then it was over 2 percent. It's something close to 2.5 percent. So a vastly greater percentage is going in that way. It's more difficult once you start comparing. Well, how do we count the welfare state? Does that count as some kind of percent of giving or something like that? But the bottom line is that it increases significantly. It basically was double as a percent of what people were actually taking home. So the major fact, though, is then if we're talking about, is it good to help people? Do I want to help people? It's irrelevant. The way I like to think about it is this. So imagine that you are in this situation, not where you want to help somebody, but you're in need of help. Let's say you need an operation that you can't afford. So you go over to your neighbor's house and you knock on the door and you say one of two things. One is, hey, I need an operation. I can't afford it. Would you please help me? Fair enough. The other one is, hey, I need an operation. You owe me. What the welfare state is about, and this is kind of the key point I want to stress, the welfare state is not an issue of I want to help people. That welfare state is an issue of people are in need and that imposes a debt on everybody else. It's an entitlement. Under the welfare state logic, now I've asked thousands of people, how would you behave if you were in that situation? And I've never met a person that says, yeah, I would regard myself as entitled to somebody's help. You know, he might want to send his kid to school. He might want to pay off his mortgage, but darn, he owes me first and foremost. But that's what the entitlement state says. That's what the whole welfare state is built around. It's the idea of you are entitled. If you're in need, regardless of its source, regardless of other people's hopes, dreams, priorities, and rights, they owe you because you're in need. So the often what will happen when anybody challenges the welfare state is that you're the jerk who wants to throw grandma off a cliff, right? You want to take away her handouts, you're going to throw her off a cliff. And I think the bottom line here is that the exact opposite is the truth. So first of all, the idea that not giving somebody handouts is the equivalent of throwing them off a cliff. I mean, that's like saying if a thief came to your house and was like, hey, give me your wallet. And you said, no, you're throwing him off a cliff because how is he going to buy his Doritos? No, the truth is the exact opposite. It's young people today by the welfare state who are being thrown off a cliff. $205 trillion. Already you're working a month and a half without pay. And once it gets to two, three, four months, that is what it means to be thrown off a cliff. That is what it means to be detracted from actually achieving the things that you want to achieve in this world. Who knows who Russell Brand is? Often I speak to older audiences and they have no clue and this story just goes poop. So I guess over a year ago, I went and I was supposed to do Russell's show, Brand X, and we were supposed to debate the issue of self-interest. But after the show, I was talking to him and I was telling him about this whole problem and I was saying, look, he's kind of a socialist. So I was saying, look, the welfare state is treating young people as servants. And these debt numbers are going to turn people into actual servants. And he looked at me thoughtfully, which was quite an achievement. And he said, isn't that the point? And he's right. The whole point of the welfare state is to force you to serve other people. And so there's a reason that nobody blinks. The numbers I gave you, this is not some secret theory that I have on earth from the archives of like Don Walken's conspiracy theory. Everybody in Washington knows this. Everybody in Washington will admit it except for people like Elizabeth Warren, who are basically debt deniers who say, oh, let's increase social security. But setting that aside, this is a well-known problem. But they don't blink an eye because the whole idea is that you should be serving others. You shouldn't be so focused on your happiness. You guys are in this room to what? Learn to be healthier, learn to be more fit, learn to get better relationships, learn that is selfish. You guys should not be focused on that. You should be focused on serving others. And the welfare state, it's going to make you. And so that's the deeper meaning of the debt draft is it's making you do exactly what the welfare state says you should do, which is be a servant. I mean basically what the welfare state does is it divides us into a cast of burdens and resources. We're burdens when we receive handouts, right? And then we're resources we're in a position to pay for other people's handouts. Now that is a really, really awful way to view human beings in my view. In my view, and I think this was the founder's view, which is that you have a right to exist for your own sake. You have a right to come into this room and try to make the best of your life, even if those guys out there are not making the best of their lives. The whole idea that you have to serve others and subjugate yourself to them is a really ignoble view of human relationships. Each of us should be free to make the most of our own lives. So how do we get this so wrong? If what I'm saying is right, then how is it common sense? How is it conventional wisdom that the welfare state is a great achievement? And so I want to say a few words about this before we wrap up. So the first reason I think is what I call the collectivist premise. And this is looking at the welfare of the group rather than the well-being of the individual and says, what's good for, quote, society as a whole? How should we distribute society's resources in a fair way? I think the better way, the more rational way to think about political issues is to focus on the individual. And I think if you think about what's good for the individual, you come to a very different conclusion. So the two essentials in my judgment of what makes us happy and successful life, and I think this came through in all the talks today, is thought and effort. This is Isaac Newton and Steve Jobs. It's thought and effort. The willingness to challenge conventional wisdom to think about what's true, what's right, what's good, and then the effort to execute and carry out your plans. That's really what is going to make you happy, successful, and achieve the things you want to achieve in life. And therefore, if we're thinking about what a good political system is, it's one that encourages and protects your ability to exercise thought and effort and then to keep the results. This is my daughter Olivia. She's about one and a half now. More her. More her. I promise this will end at some point. Okay. So just to illustrate this point that the welfare state is interfering with thought and effort, the core activities that we need in order to live a happy, successful life. When my wife was pregnant, we thought a lot about, well, how the heck are we going to raise this little creature into something useful? What are we going to do? And how are we going to encourage her to be independent? How are we going to encourage her to tackle life with all the vigor that it requires and so on? But it also occurred to me at a certain point, what if I were evil? What if instead of wanting to raise her to be a happy, independent adult, I wanted to crush her little infant spirits and just completely turn her into a record dependent of a human being? And I made a list. So I wouldn't teach her to make good decisions. I would just tell her what to do and demand that she obey me. I wouldn't make her work for anything. I'd just give her stuff, make her an entitled brat, unless she was so evil as to go and try to get her own job and work for stuff. In which case, now she's going to get charged rent. I would tell her, hey, forget property rights, help yourself to other people's stuff and don't object if they help themselves to yours. And then I would take out tons of loans in her name and go spend it on Vegas. So that would be pretty rotten, but that in effect is the whole essence of what the welfare state does. What the welfare state does is it stops and punishes us from doing the right things and rewards us for doing the wrong things. The more rational, productive, independent-minded we are, the worse we are under this scenario, and the more lazy, dependent, unambitious we are, the better we are. That's really the whole setup. And let me give you one example to really drive this home. So my dad and I have very different goals for retirement. He's been running two tech companies for now over a decade. And he's looking forward to just a couple of decades playing golf, traveling the world with mom. I want to be doing this, speaking and writing and so on as long as I can. Now, given those different goals, we would have very different approaches to preparing for retirement, right? We'd say vastly different sums. We'd probably start saving at different times. We'd put it in different kinds of investments. We'd make a lot of different decisions. Yet the welfare state, even if it worked the way that we're told, it should work, right? Even if it really was, the government was setting aside your money into a 401k or something so that when you were tired, you had an earned benefit. Even then, it would interfere with you making those kinds of assessments. It would say, hey, Watkins, no, no, no, no, you've got to save 12.4% today rather than use it on things like starting a family or starting a business or buying a home. No, you have to do what we say. You have to do with it. That is the whole essence and the deeper meaning of the welfare state is it interferes with our ability to make those independent judgments. And so I think if we think deeply about political issues, we need to think about the need for the freedom to make the assessments about how we plan our lives, including our old age. The last thing I'll mention is what I call the Garden of Eden premise. So this is the idea that thought, effort, that's unfair that life should require these sorts of things. Why should you have to think so hard and make good decisions and set aside resources and work and so on? Life should be like a Garden of Eden where it just guarantees you all the things you want without thought and without effort. Well, clearly life's not like that. So what are we going to do in order to make it like that? Well, we're just going to take from the people who do think and produce and give to those who don't. People will often say, well, what about the people who don't actually save for retirement? Yeah, that's the whole idea behind the welfare state. If you're not so farsighted as to plan for your life, we're going to take from the people who are farsighted and give to you in order to try to guarantee you this effortless positive existence. Now that sounds pretty unfair on its face, right? So what we're also going to do is we're going to concoct a bunch of arguments to make it not seem that unfair. So for instance, you didn't earn it through thinking and producing. You didn't build that. Society gave it to you. Luck is what created your wealth. So we're not really taking what you earned. We're just taking what you happened to stumble into. And then we're going to have a bunch of arguments that say, and by the way, you don't have a right to what you earn. You have a right to what you need. And this is the idea that we talked about before about need being an entitlement. What you need entitles you to something morally, that's what gives you a right to it. And so when we take from people who quote earned it and gave to those who did it, that's a moral endeavor because after all, that's what justice is all about. Well, the fact is we don't live in a garden of Eden, but we do live on a glorious earth, an earth where we can have anything we want if we're willing to pay the price. If we're willing to exert the thought and effort that life requires, and that is what the debt draft interferes with. It's depriving us step by step of our ability to exert the thought and effort in order to make our lives as glorious as possible. And that's why I think the solution is not to reform it, not to rein it in, not to make it sustainable, but to, as the other draft, abolish it. Thank you. Let's give it up for Don Watkins, who has got some questions for this gentleman. First of all, excellent. Thank you. Good read. Have you read The Forgotten Man? By Amity Schlays? Yes. Yeah, I had Amity, so she wrote a book for those of you who don't know and The Great Depression, very well done. And of course, she covers the fact this is the era when Social Security is created. I actually interviewed her for my podcast, The Debt Dialogues. Feel free to look it up on iTunes. It's free, so hey, we can't go wrong there. And we talked about this and a lot of other issues, yeah. What are your thoughts on change? And I asked the question, I hope I don't take you on a rabbit trail, but we vote change in this country, like it or not. Well, except for, I actually think there's a dime of difference between the left and the right in this issue. I mentioned that Social Security, for instance, enjoys 8% support. So the first talk I ever gave, I remember it was at least one of the really early ones. I was giving on why we should abolish Social Security, and it was to the Beverly Hills of California Country Club. So I'm driving up to LA from Orange County where I live and I get there and I'm ready to help people. Why do we need to scrap the whole program? And I get into the room and it's about this size and the average age is between 80 and dead. And I said, there's going to be a riot here. It's going to be the slowest riot in history. I mean, they'll be kind of limping towards me in a, hey kid, but nevertheless. But I actually got a standing ovation. And I thought, well, maybe it's because they're rich people and they care. But actually, part of what I found is that although support for Social Security and support for these programs is wide, it's not as deep as one may think. And part of what we can see is that this is why people have to lie about how it works. If the program really was to its roots popular the way, say, like, you know, mom and apple pie in the military is popular, you wouldn't have to lie about it. You wouldn't have to, like, say, oh, we only take 6.2% of your income. No, they'd be up front. They say we take 12.4%. You wouldn't have to say, oh, it's insurance. Does anybody know what FICA, your Social Security comes from FICA taxes? Does anybody know what the C stands for there? No, no, no, no. Contribution. I worked for a 5.1C3 non-profit. And guess what? If you don't give us a contribution, we're going to treat you the same way as Social Security. Like, no, they have to disguise taxes as contributions. The more that people understand about just how it works and where it's leading us, the less the support is. Nevertheless, there is support. And my view is because it's an issue of ideas and that people think that these programs are right and necessary. And my view is that until that's challenged, then you're only going to get politicians who support it. If you look through the history of Social Security, the right has promoted and pushed it and expanded it as much as the left. Often more so because they can get away with more. And so until we change our thinking and we're willing to challenge conventional wisdom, the way we're willing to challenge it over diet and exercise and so on, until we're willing to challenge that conventional wisdom, we get nowhere even though we're on this kind of no-win path to 205 trillion dollars in debt. And so there really is no shortcut besides change your thinking, challenge yourself to think independently about these issues, and then try to get other people to think that way. But if you do that, part of what I was trying to stress is I think there's actually less resistance to good arguments than you would think because there's really no argument for Social Security, for the welfare state. There is none. There's emotions, there's appeal to emotions, but there's no argument. And so that's really where the battle lies. You kind of said it toward the end. Convince other people. Let's say I do that. I agree with you. What then? Well, you all heard that right. The basic idea was what happens once we change people's ideas. Well, then it's easy because the fact is, like it or not, we get the politicians we deserve and want. So everybody says, I want lower taxes. And then they ask, well, would you cut this program? No. Would you cut this program? No. Would you cut this program? No. Expand, expand, expand. So we get the politicians that we want and deserve. But if what we want is actually a society in which we're free to pursue our happiness, then that's exactly what we'll get. Now you have to then develop plans for how do we get from where we are today to a truly free country once again, where what you earn is yours to figure out how to best serve your life. But this is not really a hard problem. It's not hard to unwind a system like this. It'll be uncomfortable, but we don't have any good options anyway. One way or another, it's going to be hard on some people. But it's not that hard to wind down a handout program. You just make it less and less over time until it's gone. And then it's just to debate over how much time. So what really has to happen is, fundamentally, people's ideas have to be changed. And then we can have plans for specifically what do we vote on. But those will come. People, believe me, I spend a lot of time in Washington more than I would like to. And there's no shortage of people to come up with plans to do something that they think is popular. The problem is, this isn't popular yet. And so the issue is really how do we make the goal popular? And at that point, actually carrying it out, there's a lot of smart people who are thinking about how to carry out things everybody wants to achieve in the first place. So that's my short answer to that. Hello. I just want to say, yeah, I agree with what you're saying. Overall, I always kind of felt like people should be doing their own thing. And in real life, there is no safety net. However, I think more and more people these days are sicker and sicker than they ever have been. Like cancer was a really rare thing a long time ago. Now it's happening all the time. And I think that's because basically the corporations along with corrupt government are making profits by essentially getting people sick. If you look at what's in the food, the water, the air, oil companies doing what they're doing to back. I mean, it's insane the amount of money they make by making people sick. So to a degree, not only do I think we need a social net because of that, I think the corporations, if they actually paid their fair share, there's actually enough money out there for everybody not to have to work and to be able to actually do what they want to do and be happy. So I mean, just the U.S., half the GDP right now is military. That literally half the money comes in, you look at the secret programs, it's all going there and corporations aren't even paying taxes. So isn't that the issue? Isn't that a much greater and more important issue? And how does that sort of fit into what you're talking about here with the safety net? So my view is that the purpose of government is to protect our freedom from threats abroad and threats here. So police, military and ultimately law courts. So we can debate about exactly as our military functioning the way I think it should. But I want to challenge the premise of the question, which is in effect that corporations and so on have an interest in making us sick. You mentioned oil companies. When did human beings start living longer? Our average age of living was about 30 until we had the industrial revolution powered by fossil fuel companies. It's fossil fuels that have made us living to 80. So the idea that the only reason people get cancer now and they didn't use to is they used to be dead first from other causes. Fossil fuels and the companies who have made our lives longer and more enjoyable have been the biggest boon to human civilization in history. I mean, this is basically, we had to do everything with muscle power and now we can do it with machine power because we have these immense machine calories that keep us alive and do they have side effects? Of course they have side effects. Everything we do is side effects. But one of the great things about things like fossil fuel energy is it gives you the means to then deal with those side effects to deal with issues like pollution and so on. So I think the greatest boon to human civilization has been big business corporations. The profit motive means that there's people right now who are staying up later and working harder in order to figure out how to make your life longer, more enjoyable, more satisfying to figure out ways that you can read more books, see more movies, drive further, live in bigger homes. That's amazing. There's people working for your good because they want to make a lot of money. That's awesome. I want to make a lot of money. I picked the wrong career to do it. But nevertheless, I mean, these are really amazing things. And what we really want then is what we want is a system that protects our rights because they're clearly your people, whether it's in big business or government or anything else, who want to make our lives worse. And you need to protect those rights from things like a Bernie Madoff who's going to steal a bunch of your money or from somebody who's going to violate your property rights by dumping a lot of wastewater into it. So we need a government. We need a government to protect those rights. But beyond that, no, the greatest thing that you could have is the profit motive that drives people to do amazing, amazing things to better human life. And that's really what we should admire and strive to protect. And what the welfare state does in effect is says, hey, you should be guaranteed rewards, not for sitting around thinking about how to make other people's lives better, but just for existing. And how are we going to do that? By taking money from the people who made your lives better and giving it to you. And I think that is completely immoral. And that's what I'm challenging. Hey, I think what he was pointing at was it's not that fossil fuels making people sick. It's that for today's living standards, I think it would be improved. And people wouldn't, and old people wouldn't be getting as sick, except let's say healthcare. They have certain drugs that have you dependent on the drugs instead of simply carrying you because they make money for the pharmaceutical companies. And that is why. But that doesn't make any sense. Think about it. So let's say, let's say I create two drugs. I create one that will keep you sick but keep you paying for a long time. And I create one that will cure you. Could I charge you more for the one that cured you? Would you be willing to pay more for that than for the one that kept you sick for a long time? If you don't expect the disease to actually cure, if you either don't expect the disease to actually kill you or you don't expect or you don't expect it to be that bad, if they don't have a sense of scale. The only reason we buy into these ideas, I know people in the pharmaceutical industry. They're not these demons who sit behind desks and try to keep us sick. And do you think that that would not get into the papers if they did? No. Everybody hates pharmaceutical companies. Washington Post would love it if they could have an expose and how they're keeping this cure aside. No, these are people who want to help people buy in large. And they do. They help people in a lot of ways. And the fact is that if they came up with a way to cure, you would be willing to pay more for a cure than you would for something that lags you along for a long time. Which is why economically it wouldn't make sense to hold back a cure. It would just make sense to charge a lot of money for it. And that's great. You should if you're actually curing diseases. But it's really, really hard to cure them. I mean, one of my good friends is one of the leading Ebola people. You've probably seen them on CNN lately and everything like that. Figuring out how to cure these things is a really, really hard problem. And thank goodness for the profit motive, there's a bunch of people out there trying to solve it. But no, I don't think that there's this secret, like, our neighbors are conspiring to keep us sick, including their own family members. I mean, remember, all these people who are holding back these cures supposedly, you know they have family members who have cancer, who have heart disease, who have all these things. Are they doing it for a buck? That's ridiculous. It's not true. Well, but that's the bigger problem there. So you mentioned just for the record and so everybody hears it, it's not just holding back cures, it's the amount of tests and so on. The primary evil there is the FDA. The FDA raises the cost of creating new drugs and bringing them to the market by thousands and thousands of percent. In a genuinely free market, other people wouldn't have the freedom to arbitrarily hold back drugs that you wanted to take. You would get to decide for yourself and so you'd yeah, companies would go through testing in order to make sure that what they were doing was safe and effective, but not in the arbitrary way the FDA does and so the cost of drugs would be a fraction of what they are today. I regard the FDA as one of the worst killers of Americans in this country for that very reason. All right, last question. I was just wondering, what do you think a free state looks like? A free state? I think it looks essentially, although not exactly, I think it looks essentially like what existed in America before let's say roughly 1900. Now let me make some caveats first of all. So the clear number one caveat is that for a bunch of the time before 1900, there was slavery which is one of the most evil institutions in history. So clearly I'm excluding that as an example of freedom. The second thing is there was a bunch of government interference in all sorts of ways, whether it was subsidies and cronyism handouts to big business, special favors for business. There was all sorts of regulations, there were miniscule handout programs, but essentially what you saw in America before 1900 and definitely before 1935 was essentially the kind of government that I think is right, which is one that's focused fundamentally on protecting people's freedom, protecting their rights and leaving them free to pursue their own happiness. And so that is the model that we should be aspiring to and what we see then historically is the closer the governments have come to approximating genuine freedom, the better life has gotten. It was the more free we were, the faster we grew, the better the culture was and so on. And so I think if we're going to look historically that's the best model, but we can do better. We can do way better. We've come so far just in terms of knowledge, technology and wealth given the freedom that has remained that if we had genuine freedom today, it would be an inspiring sight. There's no reason why education, healthcare, any of these can't be as entrepreneurial and innovative as Silicon Valley and that's what I want to see and that's why I think a good first step is get rid of programs that stop treating people as able to support their own lives, respect their need to think, produce and support their own lives and treat them like burdens and resources. And if we take that first step we'll be on the road to a genuinely free society. Thank you.