 government. So, so let's talk about government. Let's talk about government. What is government? What is government? What is this central characteristic of government? Well, the central characteristic of government as our founders understood really well, the central characteristic of government is force. The central characteristic of government is a gun. The central characteristic of government is compulsion. You don't do what they say, they put you in jail. It's really simple. That's what government is. And so the question, of course, is, well, if government is for us, why do we need it? What do we need government for? Shouldn't we just be left alone? Should we just all be carrying a weapon by our side to defend ourselves? And the answer is no. A civilized society needs a monopoly over the use of force, but only that force should only be used to protect us, to protect us in self-defense. So the job of government is to defend our rights. It's to defend our freedom. That's its job. And for that, government only needs a military, a police, and a judiciary. There's no issue of balance here. The government needs to be 100% dedicated, fully, fully, to defending my freedom, not violating my freedom, not interfering with my freedom, defending my freedom, not telling me how to live, where to live, how much to earn, how much to pay my employees, what kind of business I can and cannot open. No, the role of government is to protect my ability to do all those things. That's what government is for, protection, self-defense. That's it. Other than that, it's supposed to leave us alone. And if you add up the numbers, if you go to government spending and you add up the numbers, right, how much of government spending actually goes to that, right, really to protect us from criminals and crooks and fosters and all of those kind of things, then maybe, maybe, if I'm being generous, it's 20%, 20% of government spending goes to that. Maybe, right? But that's still less than healthcare. And you know, it's probably less than that. And of course, you could argue that our defense spending is not very efficient and not very productive. But let's even say it's 20%. It means you can cut state, federal, local, all of those government budgets by 80%. 80%. And all you'd be cutting is stuff that the government shouldn't be doing anyway, shouldn't be doing anyway. And you should take that money and return it to the private sector where it belongs, where it can be applied effectively and efficiently to make money. And how do you make money? By producing values, right? And what is producing values going to do to our standard of living? It's going to increase it. We could have economic growth of five, six, seven percent. I believe that. But to do that, we would have to shrink government spending by 80%. Now that won't happen in a day. It won't happen in a decade, maybe. But you know what? It would be nice to get started on the road. It would be nice if we took total government spending, local, state and federal and said, you know what? We're going to cut 5% every year. We're just going to cut 5% every year until we get down to where the government is only doing what it's supposed to be doing. And that is protecting individual rights. Ha, that would be amazing. That would be truly, truly amazing if we could do that. But no, now the one political party that claims, that claims that they are for free markets, that they are for limited government, that they believe in the Constitution, that they admire the founding fathers. That one political party called the Republican Party is too busy spending your hard-owned money, my hard-owned money on the pressure group that influences them the most and tries to, makes me so angry. So this is the point. The point is, we've got to refocus the debate to spending and away from taxes. Republicans obsessed with taxes. They believe that reducing taxes solves all problems. It does not. What solves problems is getting government out of the way. What solves problems is actually cutting government spending. I'll tell you about two countries that did this. Two countries it's hard to believe actually did this. It's actually pretty amazing, right? Canada in the mid 90s was in real financial trouble, was like Greece today, by the way, same thing true of Sweden, both Sweden and Canada since the mid 1990s have been cutting government spending. Just to give you an indication that it is possible. America, the United States, had never cut spending. Sweden, the so-called socialist Sweden, is far more, you know, real when it comes to these things than we are in America. We think we're capitalists. That's a joke. Given how much our government spends, how much our government regulates, how involved our government is in everything that we do in every aspect of our lives. All right. So, you know, I would cut, should the government, so let's take this idea that government is there to protect our individual rights. And let's take all the different government programs. So government spends about $1 trillion, $1.2 trillion on welfare. Is welfare, the redistribution of wealth, is that necessary to protection of freedom? No. No, quite the contrary. The only way to do welfare is to violate some people's freedom by taking their money away from them by force. You know, if you need help, then ask for help. You don't have a right to take my stuff. You don't have a right to steal my money just because you need help. Welfare is not about protecting freedom. Welfare is about redistribution of wealth. It's about stealing from someone, giving to others. Welfare is socialism. On a maybe smaller scale, but it's socialism. It's the state deciding which charities we should engage in. It's the state using its guns to take money from some to give to others. It's the state deciding who's worthy to get the money and who isn't worthy to get the money. It's the state creating hundreds, hundreds of inefficient, inefficient programs so-called to help the poor and the old. All these programs do is institutionalize people into poverty, eliminate the incentives to actually improve your lot in life, establish a victimhood and entitlement mentality. That's what welfare does. Welfare has nothing to do with the protection of rights. There should be no government welfare, zero in my world. Regulation. Regulation is not about protecting my rights. Now, if a regulation is there because there's a known risk and we know what happens when you engage in particular activity, I don't know, you build a certain plant and these plants explode once in a while, then yeah, the government can come in and say, no, you can't build those plants anymore in the name of protecting rights because the plant is a threat to people. But that's not what regulations today do, telling us what we can and cannot do, all the licensing laws that tell us what businesses we can have and what we can't have and what we profession we can go into and how much you pay and how much are you going to get paid. All of that government today is involved in. You want to drain the swamp? I'm all for draining the swamp. To drain the swamp, you have to cut government spending and slowly phase out welfare, slowly eliminate regulations. That's what draining the swamp would entail. Unfortunately, that's not what Donald Trump is about. It's not what Donald Trump is going to do. All right, we're coming up to a hard break here, which I have to take.