 Good evening, everybody. My name is Robert Begley. I'm the Development Writer for the Iron Institute. Iron Institute is a 501c3 nonprofit education organization whose mission is to promote reason, individualism, and capitalism in American culture and around the world. Tonight, we celebrate the book launch of Equal is Unfair. Hope everybody buys a copy. Actually, if not here, at least on Amazon or even on audible.com. I have here and we have some t-shirts as well and if the authors have not signed, they'll be around afterwards to do so. Not some words about our esteemed moderator. New York political commentator, DeRoy Murdoch as a Fox News contributor, media fellow at the Hoover Institute on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University, and a senior fellow with the Atlas Network, which supports and connects some 460 free marketing tanks in the United States and 95 countries worldwide. Mr. Murdoch's weekly column, This Opinion Justing, appears in The New York Post, Washington Times, Boston Herald, San Francisco Examiner, and other newspapers across the world. He's been a frequent guest on CNBC, CNN, C-SPAN, NSNBC, and other radio and TV outlets. As a popular public speaker, he has lectured and debated at the Cato Institute, Council on Foreign Relations, Harvard Medical School, Heritage Foundation, National Academy of Sciences, Dartmouth, Stanford, and Tulane Universities. He's a native of Los Angeles, but fortunately he's a resident of that land. Good choice. And a graduate of Georgetown University. He earns his MBA from New York University, and his program included a semester of study at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Dr. Murdoch hopes that someday, the free society will bring in, and every American that's us, more leisure time to experience fine dining, motion picture, skiing, live music, and priceless joys of family, friends, and loved ones. I say amen to that. Please welcome Dr. Murdoch. Thank you very much, Robert, for that introduction and the great opportunity to be here with you here at the Ironman Institute. I must say, this is the most organized and well-behaved crowd I've ever seen. Usually like a room that's chaotic, and you guys spontaneously order yourselves in the most beautiful way. As I look around the room here, everybody here looks very satisfied with your jobs. You're professionally satisfied, and you can't wait to get back to work tomorrow, correct? All right, but let's just imagine a different situation. You're not happy with your jobs. And so somebody comes along and says, you know, I'm a headhunter, and I want to give you an opportunity to change your positions, and go work somewhere else. And you go back and forth, and you have some interviews, and finally you come up with two job offers. And I'll ask you what you think about each job offer. So job offer one, you make $50,000, and your boss makes $55,000. So you have an income inequality of about 10%. And I think even Bernie Sanders would say that's okay. So that's job offer one. And here's job offer two. You make $500,000, and your boss makes $1 million. And that bastard, that corner office is making twice what you are. That's an income gap of 100%. And I'm sure Bernie Sanders and Mr. Piketty and others would be outraged by this sort of situation. So I'm going to ask you all of here, how many would like job offer one? How many would prefer job offer two? Very, very interesting. So maybe the lesson here is it's not about income inequality. It's not about the income gap on which the left is so incredibly focused these days, but really about the overall level of absolute income and the matter of lifting people up, and not worrying about what the gap is, but where the floor is, and moving the floor up rather than trying to pull the ceiling down, which seems to be what the discussion is in this country right now. So this is a very, very topical matter. And as you know, we all know tonight, we're celebrating the release of this book. We're going to hear further from the authors of this book, and I will ask them a few questions and throw the floor up until you can examine them and hear what they can hear, what your thoughts are, and have some discussion here. So let's begin with the first author of our book tonight, Equal is Unfair, and his name is Yaron Brooke. Yaron Brooke is Executive Director of the Ayn Rand Institute. He's the host of the Yaron Brooke show on Am 560 Chicago, which airs Saturdays from 5 to 6 Eastern time. And as of just yesterday, it's airing on Mondays in Miami from 4 to 5 p.m. at 8.80 a.m. He is an internationally sought after speaker and debater. His articles have been featured in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Investors Business Daily, and many other publications. Mr. Brooke is a frequent guest on national radio television programs, and the author of several books, including I love this title, Winning the Unfinable War, America's Self-Crippled Response to Islamic Terrorism, and also Big Ten, the story of the server of revolution, as told by the thinkers and doers who made it happen. Dr. Brooke was born and raised in Israel, where he received a B.S.C. in civil engineering. In 1970, he moved to the United States, where he received his MBA, PhD in Finance from the University of Texas at Austin. He became an American citizen in 2003 and joined this great experiment, which we all are involved. Pertunately enough to this conversation tonight in 1998, he co-founded BH Equity Research, a private equity and hedge fund manager, and he's managing director and chairman of that organization. Sounds like he's in the nonprofit sector and the very, very profitable sector. Congratulations on that. Dr. Brooke serves on the boards of the Irene Institute, the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism, and he's a member of the Association of Private Enterprise Education, as well as the Mont Pelerin Society. So please welcome Dr. Erwin Brooke. So I'm just gonna make a few comments and we really want to get to the Q&A part of this quickly. So just briefly to give you a little background on the ideas that led to the writing of this book. About three years ago, Don and I noticed a certain pattern out there in the intellectual debate in the country that the left was trying to couch almost every issue in the context of inequality and it was new in the sense of the language they were using and how they were presenting it. And it led us to really think, what's going on? Why is this? Why suddenly is inequality the issue? What is happening here? And I think it dawned on us that there's a, in a sense, there's a gimmick here, whether they know it's the gimmick or not, but there's a certain gimmick in inequality or the idea of success. The idea that your neighbor has been very, very successful has never bothered Americans. On the contrary, they've always had a very positive view of it. They've always thought they wanted to be the neighbor. They didn't resent the neighbor. They wanted to be as successful as the neighbor. The American dream, to a large extent, has always been to be as successful as you could be. And if somebody was more successful than you, so be it. It didn't come at your expense and it was fine. And survey after survey have shown, even though this is a decline, that when the issue of inequality comes up, Americans don't care. Europeans, on the other hand, do care. Europeans resent wealth. Again, this is a generalization, but it's a cultural phenomenon. You don't want to drive a really, really nice car in Sweden, in spite of what Booty tells you. The Sweden is not this utopia, because it's like the Rikid, just because people resent the idea that some people have a lot of money. And there's a certain historical context that makes that somewhat reasonable, somewhat, I said. Because in the old days, a long, long time ago, hundreds of years ago, how did you become rich in Europe? By stealing. I mean, that's what, to a large extent, have a stock of cement. You got to steal. You got to exploit other people. And that's how you accumulate wealth. And to some extent, that has stayed in the European psyche. Europeans who left and came to America, people from all over the world who came to America, came with a very different idea, an idea of wealth. Creation, as Ayn Rand talks about, making money. Remember the money speech from Michael Shrug, which I'm sure most of you are familiar with. Making money, creating wealth, not exploiting, but building and making. And the whole sense of life, the whole vibe, if you will, of Americans is, I can make it. I can be successful. I can achieve. And the country grew up with that attitude. And there's really an attempt today to destroy that and to shift that to a European sense. And part of that is to portray people who make money as cooks, as thieves, as old line aristocrats, as European style aristocrats from a long, long time ago. It's why we even, for the first time really in American history, talking about classes. Americans didn't talk about classes. Suddenly that's come into the vocabulary. Everybody's talking about classes. So it really is this effort to destroy what makes America American. What makes Americans, one of the things that makes Americans unique, which is this attitude towards, I'm interested in how well I can do with my life. I'm not interested in how well you do. And I think this is part of the attempt to fundamentally change the nature of this country. There is a certain Europe envy out there. And the whole inequality debate, I think, is framed in order to undercut this, the special nature of what it is to be American and what the American spirit is really about. And I think we identified this as really crucial. You know, if you're going to save this country, that spirit, that spirit of individualism, that spirit of I can do it, that spirit of the American dream are caring about your own success, not about your neighbor's success. It's crucial that we protect that. It's crucial that we defend that. It's crucial that we save that. And that's the logic and the reason we wrote this book. It's to defend America and what makes it special. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Brook. I don't know if he happened to be looking at his watch, but I asked for five minutes. That was four minutes, 51 seconds. I'm good. Our second speaker tonight is Don Watkins, the co-author of the book we're celebrating tonight. Don Watkins is one of today's most vocal opponents of the welfare state. He offered a book, I love this title, Roosevelt Care, on social security as sabotaging the land of self-reliance. He's a fellow at the Inran Institute. Mr. Watkins studies inequality, social security reform, welfare state, and the moral foundations of capitalism. He has been interviewed on hundreds of radio and TV programs and speaks and debates regularly at conferences and university campuses, including Stanford, Brown, the University of Virginia, and the University of Chicago. He writes for Forbes.com, where he's a colonist and his writing has also appeared in The Guardian, Claremont Reviewer Books, USA Today, Forbes, Christian Science Monitor, Investors' Business Daily, The Daily Collar, and Fox News.com. Please welcome Don Watkins. So, Yaron mentioned that if you look at polls, Americans really aren't too concerned with inequality, but he also mentions in a side that that started to change. And that is, the left has made this their kind of central issue. They've been winning this debate. They've been moving the needle in their direction. And so, like, why is this happening? I think that's a really important question. And so, I mean, one possibility is that like Bernie Sanders just has amazing charisma and sex appeal. But I think the more likely scenario is that they have something really powerful in their corner. And I think it really boils down to two things. And you see these in many debates. And if you have these two things going for you, you have the high ground and you're, it's very hard to push you off and to actually make progress in a debate. And that is that they are positioning themselves as standing for a moral ideal. And that they have a narrative that claims to show that when we follow that ideal, we flourish. And when we abandon that ideal, we flounder. And so, maybe you've heard this story of, you know, America and the post war era, we fought inequality and it was America's golden age. And then in the 70s, and particularly in Reagan, we abandoned that ideal. And what happened was the 1% got all the gains, everybody else stagnated, and the American dream has really started to crumble. And so, what has been the response from people challenging this narrative so far? Well, there hasn't been much of one. So how many books, the left has put out somewhere around three to five books on this topic over the last decade, every year, every year. Some of the mischievous blockbusters like Tomah Peacody's, many of them you'll never hear of, but that's okay, they're basically cut and paste from other ones just like them. But how many have come out challenging that? Well, when we started the book two years ago, zero. Since then, after everybody got to see, hey, you can sell gazillions of copies. And by the way, the left has made this their major issue. How many have come out? Well, one, by an economist in Canada nobody's ever heard of. And two, a rehashed thing from Thomas Sowell out of one of his books. Now, Thomas Sowell rehashed is still better than most people on their best day. So I'm not being critical of him, but I'm saying that's really shocking that we haven't had any really serious effort to address the debate. And what kind of arguments do we get when people do try to address the debate? Well, they either challenge the statistics. They say inequality is not as bad as we've been taught. Stagnation is kind of a myth. And these are true and important points often. But I don't think it's sufficient. What's the other thing that they do? Well, does anybody remember Rand Paul's answer to the presidential debates when he was asked about inequality? He said, Democrats make inequality worse. If you want to fight inequality, get conservative ideas and policies out there. Now, both of these claims, both of them concede that economic equality is an ideal. But if economic equality is an ideal, then one thing that we know for certain is that free markets, free enterprise capitalism is not an ideal because whatever else is true about capitalism, it does not lead to economic equality. And so the fundamental thing you have to do is to be able to challenge the moral ideal. And that's really what our book does. Our book you can think of as really a positive. It's a celebration of productive achievement, of the virtue of productive achievement, of the fact that productive achievement makes people better off, first and foremost, the individual who achieved something great. And secondarily, every other producer in economy who can benefit from trading with him, from learning with him. Now, what is the what is the ideal of economic equality imply? Well, since we're not equal when we're left free, it means taking away people's freedom. And in one particularly perverse way, the more you achieve, the more penalties you face, the less you achieve, the more rewards you get. Now, does that sound like a thing that's going to make a country hospitable towards productive achievement? I definitely don't think so. Does that sound like something that's fair? I mean, you gave a great analogy. I'll give a similar one. You have a business and you have three salesmen. One brings in a million dollars a year. The other two just bring in $100,000 each. Now, you're not a crazy radical who's going to equalize everything. But let's just say my top salesman has to give 50% to the the less good salesman. Two questions. Number one, what's going to happen to that kind of company? And number two, how in the world is that fair? Well, that's what the inequality alarmist want to do to this entire country. And so what we have to do is be able to expose their ideal as completely perverse and unjust. But then you have to stand for something positive. And like I said, we're for opportunity, the opportunity to rise by your own productive achievement, no matter where you start, but with no barriers to how high you can rise. And then the rest of the big part of the book is going over their historic narrative and giving our counter narrative and showing that in fact it's our ideal that matters and that makes America great. So hopefully we get to explore that in more detail and just missed it. 10 seconds. Five minutes, 13 seconds. That's pretty good. Thank you very much, Don. I've got a number of questions for you guys and we'll throw it open to the audience. Don, you touched on this a little bit. And how my sound is, it's too loud, too low, so it's okay. If income inequality is bad, then presumably, logically, income equality is good. At what level of equality of income will your opponents be satisfied? And where in the world is income equality ever worked? Well, that's, I mean, that's really a good question for them. So they will often stress, and I've even heard people look at the title and go, you're attacking a straw man. Nobody's for complete equality. Now, if actually that's a lie, there are certainly people who are for complete equality. But we certainly don't imply that today's proponents are out there advocating for totally equalizing. They say they want a little more equality, but the key thing to realize is that they regard it as an ideal. They think morally it would be great if we could all be paid the same, but we have to make some pragmatic, we have to allow for some amount of inequality so that we get some amount of economic growth. Well, how much, how much equality do they want? Well, they never give an answer. In fact, what they'll usually say is less than today. And, and this is not unique. Anytime you have a principle that is evil and destructive, the proponents of it don't want to come out and name consistently with the principal states. They just want to keep moving slowly in that direction. So the minimum wage, how high should it be? They never tell you how high it can never go past this or how high can tax rates be? Never above that. Just a little more today. It's that they always ratcheting, but it's always in the direction of the principal. Where has it worked? Well, let's look at where it's been most consistently implemented. That's the question. And then the question is, does it work? And they'll point to Scandinavian countries, as we point out in the book, the history of Scandinavia actually shows that when they allow more inequality and more economic freedom, that's when they prosper and vice versa. No, the more consistent applications are going to be countries like Communist Cuba, which the inequality critics often celebrate. Some of them happen to hold the title of American president. And then I would say the most extreme or let's say consistent version is the Khmer Rouge, which we also talk about. Now I'm not saying that the inequality critics want consciously to make us look exactly like those countries, but that's their ideal if you take their abstract idea of justice seriously. Let me ask you to expand on that a little bit, because either of you or let's have Dr. Brokindresa's. People in our side I like to think will point to Cuba and North Korea and say, well, I want equality. You've got equality there. And the other side will say, well, look, you don't have to go to Havana or Pyongyang. You can go to Copenhagen, which is in Denmark. I've been there. It's a lovely place, lovely people, beautiful architecture, very good food and all that. If Copenhagen or Denmark is the Vatican city of the income equality crowd, is this really such a bad religion? Yes. I mean, so let's say Sweden, which is a model. I don't remember the statistics in Copenhagen, but it's similar. If you took Sweden and made it the 51st state in the United States, it's just a tad richer than Mississippi. So it would be 49th, which is state in the union. So state of living is low. They live in smaller houses. Yeah. I mean, if you're not very ambitious, the very ambitious Swedes come to Silicon Valley. I've met quite a few entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley come from Scandinavia. Now, on the flip side, Scandinavia is not that bad. That is, we take these mixed economies. The way Bodhisattva presents it, the United States is capitalist. And Scandinavia is socialist, social democratic, and socialism is better than capitalism. Look at how wonderful life is over there. But the United States is not capitalist. And then our socialists were both mixed economies. The United States is a certain mixture and they were different type of mixture. It happens that the way it mixed, we regulate the hell out of our businesses. And we relatively to Scandinavia tax them less and tax individuals left. In Scandinavia, taxes are high and they redistribute more than we do. They regulate less. Easier to start a business in Copenhagen, easier to run a bank in Copenhagen. Financial institutions in that part of Europe, in northern Europe, are far less regulated than Wall Street is in the United States. So different mixtures. And, you know, there is no right mixture we would argue, right? The right mixture is get the government out of the way completely. So is that mixture better than our mixture? No, they're both rotten. They're both bad. But to pretend that one is somehow, you know, that this is socialism and this is capitalism is really dishonest. Now, to really understand Scandinavia, you have to go into the history and to realize where all the wealth came from. And, you know, I'll just quick outline. Before 1960, Sweden in particular was considered the freest country in the Western world. It was more capitalist than the US. It was certainly more capitalist than any other country in Europe. And it was the richest country in Europe. It was Procapita, the richest country in all of Europe. 1960, they decided to go on the path of socialism, take all the wealth they've accumulated since 1870 and redistribute it, which they did very successful until 1994, where basically Sweden was Greece. Sweden was bankrupt in 1994, about the same time Canada was. I don't know if you guys remember when Canada got into financial trouble in terms of its debt. And basically, since 1994, Sweden has been deregulating lowering taxes, lowering state intervention in the economy, redistributing wealth less than it used to and has had a comeback. So the wealth created was created during a time of capitalism. They had the biggest companies in Europe were based in Sweden in the 70s at the peak of their socialism. You know what the biggest industry in Sweden was? The number one revenue generator in all of Sweden was ABBA. Number two was Johan Borg. That's how low they had sunk because of the social policies. Well, ABBA was pretty big. But yes, in terms of real productive capacity, they had sunk pretty low. And now, Sweden's entrepreneurial and again, it's easy to start businesses. They're doing well in a technological world today, but that's because, again, they have certain freedoms we don't, unfortunately. Now let's imagine the two of you turn out to be a pair of Cassandras. People listen to you and the left wins its battle against income inequality. My question is why stop there? Perhaps we should fight housing inequality or housing inequality. So no more construction permits for private homes with more than four bedrooms. After all, how many bedrooms do you really need? And how about height inequality? Some people are tall with another. So if Johnny starts to look unusually tall for a third grader, why not cut his daily milk allowance and give more milk to Bobby who looks a bit short for his age? Where does this end? Well, I mean, the housing stuff is not science fiction. I mean, if you listen to Naomi Klein, who is a real power on the left and is very popular in university campuses, very popular in university campuses, she says, you know, economic growth is overrated. We need to stop growing. We actually need to shrink. And part of what she suggests is limiting sizes of homes, the type of cars and things like that. So there's definitely, that's in the air out there. I was, I did a debates last week in Loyola University, Chicago, and the professor, philosophy professor actually said, look, we have a lot of wealth in the United States, and we live, we live too well. You know, life in the United States is too good. What we should do is reduce our standard of living in the United States so that we can share our wealth with people outside of the country who were not doing so well, and, you know, to reduce inequality. So he was serious about this. I mean, now given he's pretty radical, but this is really an agenda item. And I'll just mention my, you know, example given the book that I've done in lectures for a long time, which is my beef against basketball inequality. You know, I really would like to get on a court with LeBron James and be able to score a basket. You know what, basket. And I can't. And we know it. You know, you haven't seen me play basketball. You'll have to believe me. I'm really bad. And I just don't think it's fair. He was born with athletic capacity. It's all luck, right? And I was born with none. And he happens to be tall and I'm short. And, you know, not exactly from a line of genes that's very athletic and so on. It's not fair. So how do we make it fair? How do we make it so I can play basketball with LeBron James? Well, in every audience, I say somebody will raise their hand and say, break his legs. And that's right. And it's funny, but it's incredibly sad because what's the difference between breaking legs and taxing somebody at 60% percent? I mean, sometimes I wonder, what would you rather do half, right? Once you have your legs broken or 60% of your well taken. I'm not sure which one I choose. 60% is a lot of money. So, but that's the reality. The reality is the only way to achieve equality in any one of these fields is through violence. It's through coercion. It's through taking by force from some people for the benefit in quotes of other people. Sounds like Harrison Bergeron is becoming a nonfiction work. Very, very sadly. Don, this actually ties into the question I asked you, which is once upon a time in this country, we seem to focus on the idea of social mobility rather than inequality. We had our differences certainly between the left and the right, but we generally were held within the confines of a constructive debate about how to help people climb the economic ladder either on their own or perhaps with some assistance from either the private sector or private charities or even some assistance from a limited government. And that was more or less where the debate was. And now we've moved into a totally different direction, which is to bend that concept, focus on redistribution. And of course, it's precursor, which is confiscation, often as punitive a fashion as possible. How did that happen? Well, I think the main transition is that you have to think about what is the operative moral ideal. So this goes exactly to what I was talking about. And one of the, and so you had the kind of egalitarian view, which, which wants to level down. And then the people who want everybody to be able to rise up. But one of the, one of the things that happened is that they didn't know how to formulate the, the morality of opportunity, right? And so you would get ideas like equality of opportunity. Now you can mean that in one of two senses. One is a really good sense, which is we all play by the same rules. So this is the idea of political equality. The government protects your rights, the same as my rights. Black, white, man, woman, rich, poor. So you're almost talking about the aristocracy in Europe. It was, it was the rebellion against an aristocracy where all equal and they're, and therefore equally free to rise by productive ability. It wasn't like I'm, you know, I'm born a farmer, so I have to farm the land just like my father or something like that. But you can also mean equality of opportunity in a very different sense. And that is the idea that we should all have equal initial chances of success. That is that if you're born with parents who are richer than my parents, or if you're born more intelligent than I am, or you get to go to a different school, or one philosopher very recently proposed that maybe it's unfair for parents to read to their kids, because that gives their kids an advantage over other people's children. I saw this as amazing. And so what you had was the ability to take people who were, who believe in equality of opportunity in the first sense, but because it was never made fully clear in what sense opportunity was a value, they bought it into, into this, in the second sense. And that becomes very easy fodder for the egalitarians to prey on. Why? Well, because one generation's outcomes are the next generation's opportunities. And so there's really is no distinction. If you're against equality or if you're for equality of opportunity, you have to be for equality of outcome. And this isn't just some logical derivation that you're on and I dreamed up in our offices. The quality critics tell them, tell you that themselves. We quote Paul Krugman, we quote Joseph Stiglitz. They recognize that, that if you accept equality of economics of condition as an ideal, then everybody needs to be leveled down, whether you are allegedly concerned with opportunity or of outcomes. And so that I think that's one element of why you've seen this transition. Let me add one element to what Don just said. I think the transition has happened because the right has failed to defend the founding principles of the country. So the right failed to defend the idea of political equality. They failed to defend the idea of individualism. And indeed, they never really conceptualized what does individualism mean. They were like the founding fathers, these giants. And there's been an intellectual void since then. I think it's a line ran really, really provides a philosophy for the founding of America philosophy to underpin the ideas of Jefferson and the ideas of the rest of the founding of the founders and ideas articulated in the in the Declaration of Independence. But the writers failed to defend those ideas, which left us on a moral basis. You know, why is it morally right to treat for the for the state to treat everybody the same? Why is it morally wrong for the state to start discriminating, even in the name of something supposedly good, like, like equal opportunity, right? And that failure left us opening for the left, which they have rushed in and they have dominated the discussion. And this is to Don's point earlier, they don't write books about, you know, the really delve into these issues. They leave the moral high ground whenever there's a moral issue, the right runs away and leaves it to the left. And that's why the left wins. If the left has the moral high ground, that's it, you know, which is not going to win as long as we grant them morality. Two more questions. This one has a lot of numbers in it. So bear with me. It goes directly to this whole whole question of the fair share of what the top 1% pay. So you often hear people on the left say the top 1% don't pay their fair share of taxes. In fact, I looked up this, these numbers just about an hour ago, 2013, the top 1% for 19% of national income and made 39% of federal income tax. Meanwhile, the bottom 50% made it 11.5% of national income and made just 2.8% of all federal income tax. And yet it's the top 1% we're not paying their fair share. A couple of years ago, I debated this topic at a law school in San Francisco before the federal society, and I asked a law student there on this topic who was complaining about the top 1% not paying their fair share. I said, look, the top income tax rate is 39.5% in this country. If you don't like that, what do you prefer? 50%, 75%, 90%. And the law student then said to me, it's not about members. And that comment triggered howls of derisive laughter as they showed. So what do the income levelers believe is the fair share of taxes for the top 1% and how does each of you define fair share? I mean, every time I debate somebody and ask them, Don mentioned this earlier, well, what is the right level of equality? What's the right level of taxation? They say, well, we need to get together and decide. This is what democracy is about. We need to vote. You know, taxes are too low, inequality's too high, and we need to reduce. But we'll know when we get there kind of. They won't tell you. But to his credit, Thomas Piketty will actually tell you. So his idea of a fair share of taxes is 80% marginal income tax with no loopholes. So he derides the old 90% in the United States, although he cites it, but he recognized that very few people paid it. He's serious about 80%. He wants everybody to pay the 80% above, I can't remember above what rate, but it's not in several millions. It's something about about half a million dollars. But that's not good enough. 80% and half a million dollars. 80 and half a million. I think so. Wow, that's right. Grab your wallets. But wait, no, that's not the end of it. That's just the beginning. There's more. The real kicker, because remember, his whole thesis, I know, this is too much numbers for me. His whole thesis is that always greater than G, this is great economic insight, which is like economic nonsense. But it's a return on capital is always going to be greater than economic growth. And if the return on capital indeed is always greater than economic growth, then the rich who have capital and his view of capital is very passive. You put it away and it just returns a rate of return will accumulate all the wealth over time. And they'll have everything. They'll have 100% of the wealth or 80% of the wealth. And so how do you fix that? And so it's 80% margin income tax rate. And then on top of that had global 10% wealth tax that is taken from you every single year. So think about it, you get, we calculate your net worth, your wealth, and you take 10%. And then next year, we do the same thing and take another 10%. So you would have to have grown your wealth by more than 10% in order just to stay kind of even. It's a wealth tax, not income tax. A wealth tax, taxing your wealth on top of income tax. The whole idea there is to try to redistribute the capital, the wealth. So he knows exactly what he wants. And he even says in the book, he says, look, the 10% wealth tax won't generate enough money to have a significant impact on the lives of poor people. The purpose is not that. The purpose is to knock down the wealthy people. It's to prevent the accumulation of capital. By the way, who predicted that all the wealth would be owned by a few people 107 years ago, made exact the same prediction? Carl Marx, who will das Kapitalen, the name of Piketty's book is Das Kapitalen in the 21st Century, at least if it was in German. What a coincidence, huh? What a coincidence. He's a new Marxist. Let me ask one more question that will let the audience have at you. Many Americans last Sunday celebrated Easter. And in light of that very recent holiday, I'll ask one more question, which is the braver of these two cardinal sins, greed or envy? Well, greed is not necessarily a sin. It depends what you're greedy for. If you're greedy for achievement and success, then I think that's something actually very noble. And the best people are the ones who get up every day and say, what more can I do to make something better of my life? Envy is pure evil. Warren Buffett's partner, Charlie Munger, says that it's the worst of the seven deadly sins, because it's the only one that doesn't give you even one iota of joy. There's no upside to it. And yet, I do think that envy is clearly, clearly plays a big role. And actually, it's deeper than envy. It's what I remember called hatred of the good for being the good. So we all know the phenomenon of the childhood bully who beats up the straight A student because he feels like you're showing me up and I'm going to bring you down a notch, right? Or Sheldon Freyja, the idea of resenting or taking joy in other people's failures and miseries. There is this phenomenon of rather than some people when they see success don't have the healthy reaction of admiration or inspiration or even a healthy sense of competitiveness. I'm going to get out there and I'm going to I'm going to do even better and kind of a friendly battle of wills. They want to see somebody brought down. And I think that kind of motivation often leads be it's so ugly a person doesn't even admit it to themselves that they always have to find some rationalization. So it's, you know, oh, that kid's arrogant. It's not that I hate it. He that he got straight A's that he stuck up or whatever. But there are also more ambitious enviers who concoct entire philosophic and economic systems to rationalize those kinds of motivations. And so when you when you get, you know, whole theories that basically one person's success is inherently immoral, and that we need to bring everybody down either to the level of equality or, you know, we'll make some allowance for a little bit of inequality. I don't think you can understand that phenomenon on a widespread scale without understanding the role that Andy plays about it. You can't start there in the debate. You can't, you know, come out and just say, Oh, Bernie Sanders, you know, gave it 10 minutes speech or 20 minutes speech. He's envious and go home. You have to actually be able to answer their arguments, but then to understand where those arguments are coming from and what motivates them and why far from holding the moral high ground. Is there an immoral high ground? But that's the equivalent of how they should be viewed. I think it's important to understand the role that that plays. Excellent. Very good. Well, let's applaud that answer. I'll concur with what you say and also make at the point that this can get very ugly. I mean, focus on word warfare and class warfare. And if we have another downturn and things get really nasty, I don't think there's a long far leap from greedy Wall Street bankers to greedy Jewish Wall Street bankers. This sort of thing can get very, very nasty very quickly. So all the more reasons to stamp it out as quickly as we can. Why don't we throw the floor open to deal with questions, state who you are and to whom you'd like to have your question answered. We have a mic. So if you come up to the mic, it might be helpful for the video. That will stick on the video. And we'll just keep going until we're told to stop. So sort of let's start with you. A few years ago, the comedian Louis C.K. made a statement that I think is emblematic of the old left. He said, if you inherited your money, a lot of money, I assume you're not a good person. You're a jerk. But if you made your money in business, I have nothing against you. And the people you're talking about want to level people who made really truly made their money in the free market. That include the founders of Google founders of Facebook. Is there argument that these people are doing something immoral? Or is it simply that by some abstract measure, they should never have gotten that much money. They should have gotten one-fifth or one-twentieth of that amount. Well, to some extent, it's neither. I mean, part of it is the first. But to some extent, it's neither. And this is where, and in the final couple of chapters in the book, we get into this, this is where they become quite philosophical, right? It's that they're lucky. He asked one Buffett, why is he so rich, right? This is second richest man in America. And a fairly intellectual man, a very smart, very thoughtful person. And he'll say, I was lucky. He will say, now he's read John Rawls. It is a question he's read John Rawls because he talks Rawls language. He almost quotes it. And he says, look, I was born with certain genes. I had a certain family that helped me get an education, the respected education. And I was born, this is the clincher, I was born in the right century where those genes mattered. He said, if I'd born 300 years earlier, my genes would have mattered. I wouldn't have been able to do anything with them, right? I would have probably died very young. The fact that he was born in the 20th century, when he was born with those genes, made him, and if you read Rawls, this is Rawls' argument. We're not self-made. We are made, you know, there's a big debate in psychology is that nature is a nature. That's it. And even the real radicals think it's a mixture of both. Really? Right? There's a third element. It's you. It's your choice. It's what you do with the nature. Nature plays a role. Nature plays a role. But it's what you do with them that really makes you who you are. They reject that, and they deny that, or they downplay it. And remember, this is Obama's, you didn't build that speech, right? You didn't build that. So they don't want to give you credit for it. So the guy at Google, you know, he was lucky he was there, he made a lot of money. Now it's time to give it back. And he's not going to give enough of it back. So we need an 80% tax. So we need a 10% wealth tax to make sure that he gives more of it back, because other people helped him. And you know, Western civilization exists. And he benefits from that. And all the stuff that I mean, again, Obama is very articulate about these things. And there's a reason why he says them. It's, you know, it's not that there's a conspiracy here, but they're all playing off of the same playbook. And his speech about you didn't build that came at the right moment in the whole inequality debate. And it lays the foundation for exactly that point. If you didn't build that, then, and we helped you build it, then it's okay for us to take a piece of what you made. You know, it's, it legitimizes us taking stuff from you. And that's, that's part of how they explain it. Nature or nurture, you do have to get yourself up in the morning, don't you? Sir, please. Um, so I think we would all recognize in this room that there's a major difference between the intellectuals and the non-intellectuals, the regular people, and what the intellectuals are after and what the regular people are after. And so I struggle a little bit with how to communicate to regular people who genuinely don't believe, who don't feel hatred of the good. And they don't understand principles so they don't see the underlying principle that intellectuals are after. So I get this, and I'm sure a lot of other people get this argument back, which is, I bring up, you know, similar to your own, maybe not as extreme as the basketball example, but how this is essentially about penalization of people, not about bringing other people up. And I get very reflexive reactions to that this really, that sounds conspiratorial to it. That this is about penalizing other people. And I get kind of a, you know, they turn off their minds. They don't want to hear anything else I have to say after that. So what I would like you to maybe speak to is just, how do you speak to those people who are just, they think that this is just a reasonable measure. And they are right that there are millionaires where if you just raised it 3% or 5% as the left argues, they wouldn't go hungry. They would still have all their boats and their cars and their houses. So how do you kind of address that issue? I mean, a big part of what you have to do is you have to get clear on kind of, well, what's our moral standard here? And so for instance, is the standard for what a person has a right to that they need it? Because like you said, they're not going to die without their boat, right? Or their second boat or their third home or something. Or is the standard that they earned it? And so if you clarify the standard, if you get somebody to say, well, okay, if they honestly earned it, yeah, I don't have a problem with that. What I have a problem with is when somebody gets, you know, they took advantage of somebody else or they engaged in theft or fraud, then you have a really good, you have a starting point from which you can evaluate various things going on in the economy. So you're on mentioned that the fundamental moral objection that they have to anybody to the idea that anybody earns anything. But then, but they also have certain economic arguments that try to portray many things that are properly regarded as earned as unearned. And so this is the whole idea of, you know, for instance, we make a distinction between if you've gotten, earn your money through production and voluntary trade, versus what's often called cronyism, getting a special favor from the government. And now one of the arguments that they'll often throw and that you'll hear echoed back by a lot of people is they'll put that as not cronyism, but rent seeking, which is a word that comes from economics. And that's a very dangerous word because what it does is it package deals cronyism, getting special favors from the government with profits earned on an actual market. And indeed, people like Joseph Stiglitz will argue that profit is proof of a monopoly power granted by government because you wouldn't see profits in a truly free market. But and so you have to be able to then, once you have a moral standard, figure out, well, what are they objecting to? Are they objecting to profit as such? Well, in that case, then, you know, they're violating the moral standard. They said that, you know, people should get what they earn. Or are they objecting to things like cronyism, or people getting bailed out in Wall Street, in which case, yeah, I agree with you, that's really, really bad. But that's a problem of political inequality, not of economic inequality. So it's starting from getting the moral standard on the table, and then going piece by piece through, well, what, what are your real concerns? What are you really objecting to? And is that something that we should object to, or something that's actually good and beneficial? And what often happens in these arguments is that the moral standard issue gets left under the table. And so they'd leap back and forth between pointing to businessmen who, you know, engaged in bad behavior and exploited, and then just people who were successful and saying, and saying, well, I mean, did they really need that much money? And you need to always hold their feet to the fire on the issue. What what is the moral standard involved? I think we're down to about 10 or 15 minutes. So let's keep the the questions and the answers bring home. So we can squeeze all these folks into working with patients. Please, sir. Thank you both. It seems like a lot of the left's criticism of Wall Street at large is underpinned by a fundamental ignorance of the challenge of productively investing money. It's a hard thing to do. To what extent do you think the left's objections to income and quality are due to a naivete about the work that senior executives and hedge fund managers and so forth do ever again? You know, I think it's a it's a big part of it. It's no excuse, but it's only because it's it's intellectual laziness, not figuring that out. And it suddenly is just, I think, a reason why the layman, why average people get easily caught up in this, because I think they really don't particularly finance finance, particularly opaque to them. It's hard to figure out. I mean, and it has a long history, right? They've been taught for a long, long time. For 2000 years, they've been taught that money is barren, that you can't make money off of money. And if you do this, something shady going on, it goes back to Aristotle and the creepy, you know, the Catholic Church. And there's a long, long tradition of viewing finance with suspicion money changes, the money changes. Well, Shylock, I mean, think of, I mean, Shylock is the Virgin of Venice is a brilliant play. And it has all the components of envy of this understanding of finance of, of the moral claims against finance, they're all in there in Shakespeare with no solution. But the issue is all there. So it's very difficult to find and see us to defend themselves and explain what it is that they do there. It's easier in a sense for some other types of businessmen to say, well, we at least produce this product that you guys benefit from. But what do finance do, right? They make possible the product. But that's hard to explain. So there is this issue of ignorance. But look, Park Crookman and Joseph Stiglitz and I just debated James Galbraith. They know better. And if they don't know better, they should know better. Finance is not that hard of a topic. And in economics, they get the world capital plays and how it plays. Even Piketty, I mean, one of the things that so frustrated me reading Piketty's book is that he treats capital as this just the static thing out there that has a return. There's no idea about how to invest it. He can't explain why the people in the Forbes 400 30 years ago are no longer there today. There's been huge turnover in the Forbes 400 because it's not easy to invest your wealth, right? And so none of that is in the way they think. And maybe it goes back to the previous question was what you mentioned about Stiglitz saying that profit is a sign of government grant and monopolies. And the reason is that if you take ECON 101, they put up on the board, perfect competition and monopoly model. And they say perfect competition is perfect. That's ideal. A monopoly is bad. And in perfect competition, what is the profit? Zero. By definition, perfect competition, everybody's earning a profit is zero. Now that whole way of thinking about economics is wrong. Wrong. And the whole neoclassical formulation of economics, everything you learn in 101 is a wrong way to approach economics. Yet that's what everybody learns and everybody studies. And if you follow that pattern, you look at businesses and you say Apple's making a fortune. They must be something, they must have an monopoly power, right? They might be on this side, not on the perfect competition side. But that's the framework in what you think. So the whole field of economics is got real problems as a consequence of the neoclassics and the Keynesians and so on. And this is part of the outcome is ignorance, not just by some of these economists who should know better, but certainly by the population. So ignorance certainly plays a role. I do find it interesting that the attack seems to be on the obscene profits and the billions and billions made by people on Wall Street. But you never hear people talk about the obscene profits of billions and billions of dollars made by Google or the movie studios or movie or music stars. That seems okay. Well, that's not quite true because think about Microsoft. I mean, there was a huge resentment towards Microsoft and the Justice Department responded to that by going after them, for giving us a product for free, Internet Explorer. And when Steve Jobs died, it took a little while because he was such an admired character. But about three weeks later, we noticed these articles about, oh, he didn't give anything to charity and he made all this money and he was greedy and he was too focused on making money. And even with Google, there's a resentment out there. It's just not as visible, possibly because I think they play a clever political game. From a page of Drudge, I think right now, but certainly today was, Google executive is making $100 million a year. Was it Drudge's day? Yeah. Oh, we should have pitched that to the media. There you go. Who should it be? Alison Burd. And this is for either of you or any of you. I agree with the principles you're talking about. And I've long been inspired by the objectivist philosophy of Iron Rand. But sometimes I struggle to see how it would play out in certain real life situations. And for example, okay, if you take equal opportunity off the table and you look at the public school system, well, maybe you shouldn't have public schools for that's another story. But I mean, it's really the income for these schools are generated by tax revenue, you know, property taxes, and you've got some horrible schools out there. And it's sad for the kids, but we're all paying the price. And how do you address a situation like that? Well, I think your question hit on a huge element of it. Once you have the government monopolize the schools, well then, yeah, it is a complete and utter tragedy that they've allowed so many Americans to go to schools that don't educate. But what they've really done by monopolizing education. So first of all, puts them the government in control of the ideas and values our children are taught. So I think that just by itself is completely immoral and destructive. But one of the other consequences is that it keeps innovators out that you can't get people like the heads of Google, or you can't get Steve Jobs rushing to education. Indeed, you've seen when innovators try to go in there and actually do something new and valuable, there's incredible pushback and most of them get frustrated and go away. And one of the things that innovators do is they figure out ways to do things far more cheaply. And particularly in a field like education, I think there's a lot of potential in order to supply quality education at a very low cost. And indeed, there's examples around the world. There's a scholar, James Tully, is it James? James Tully whose research, you could go to virtually any country on earth, the poorest countries, even if they have a government school system, you're going to find a flourishing private school system. Because people value the education of their children, poor people. It's I think one of the most demeaning things we often do, particularly people on the left, is they treat poor people as they need to be handheld and given handouts and basically coddled like children. No, these are people who if they're given the freedom can make something in their lives and will take care of their children's education, even when they barely are scraping by on a day-to-day basis. So I think there's no problem of making sure that everybody gets a good education if we're free to provide an education. And certainly this is a realm for innovators. It's a realm for philanthropy. I mean, you're right. All of us should value living in a society filled with educated, productive people. But that is one major reason not to leave it in the hands of the government. So let me give you a couple of numbers here. The city of Chicago spends $15,000 a year to educate one child. And this is the inner cities among poor kids. $15,000 for one kid. It's one of the worst school districts in the country. It's bankrupt. And this is in the south side of Chicago. This is in the bad areas. In the same area, exactly. The archdiocese, the Catholic schools, cost them $7,500 to educate one child in exactly the same neighborhood, exactly the same kids. So all the city of Chicago would have to do theoretically is shut down its schools and pay their archdiocese to pick up all their kids and they could return half the tax money to taxpayers. Now, the archdiocese is not the most effective and efficient provider of education. Marvel Collins, who had a wonderful school in Chicago in the same neighborhoods, did it for less than half of that. And every single one of her kids went to college or something like that. I mean, phenomenal teacher. And imagine if you really had competition and I'll give you this one way of hope, right? We want to be a little optimistic. The state of Nevada has created something, a passed law that creates something called education saving incomes, which I think is the most positive step in the area of, you know, the area of politics with regard to education maybe ever. The education saving account, the state, if you don't want to send your kids to public school, the state takes the money they would have spent on your kid and they put it in the bank account. So the state gives you the money. So there is redistribution of wealth here, but this is much better than anything else I've seen, right? Put it in the bank account. You can spend that money on any education or product for your child, homeschooling, private school, web classes, online classes. You can roll it from year to year. And if you've got money at the end of the school, you can use it for college education. Now think about what that does that literally creates competition instantly in the state. If I were running a private school, I would immediately move to Nevada because you've got a population that's got the money to pay for the schooling. I think you could run a schooling in Nevada and make money at $5,000, which is how much they spend on a per child. And if that starts spreading, if we can get the political energy around education saving accounts spreading, you could have a real revolution in the field of education. Excellent. Thank you. We're running a long time, so let's keep the questions to 30 seconds and the answers to one minute in all time. So please start. Okay, my name is Dr. Sanders. I have a two-part question. 30 seconds. The left being so far left, it seems these days, how do we best get through them? And second, how do we get political change when we have about zero free market advocates out there? I think the answer is we should go home. That was depressing. It's hard. We have to capture them all high ground, which means a lot of intellectual work. It means writing books, writing, writing, speaking, speaking, speaking, speaking. It means you guys have to be out there and you have to be advocates helping us do it. And it's not easy because it's an intellectual battle and intellectual battles take a long time. Okay, please next. Just over 40 years ago, Iron Man published an article called Don't Let It Go, The American Sense of Life as the Basis of Hope for the Scooters Future. She didn't quite discuss income inequality, but I think she anticipated the consequences. How far have we gone? In other words, are we on that side of the European sense of life? And apart from your book, what can we do to come out of that? So I'll take this. I'll let you have the last question. Given that this is, I think we've come a long way away from the sense of life that she described in the 1960s. And I think, I mean, the sad thing about this presidential campaign is how illustrative it is of how I think the country's in a worse shape than I even thought it was. And based on who people are willing to vote for without naming names, but I think it's obvious, in both parties. I mean, the fact is that it appears that 50% of the population is willing to vote for either Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump, which to me are the flip side of the same coin. They're the same thing. And it is scary. It's authoritarian, it's statist, it's, and it's an expression of anger. And what's really why we say it's not because it's an expression of authoritarianism and they're willing to accept authoritarianism. And that shift towards the willingness to accept authoritarianism is new in America and have existed before. And it's scary. And so I think we've come a long way down, let me pick up in a talk in 2004, I think, called America versus Americans versus America, where he already talked about the significant decline in the American sense of life and how it's turning against the principle of America. And I think he was right. And I think we even further along from that 2004, what can one do? What one can do is fight and speak and speak. And she writes that and what can one do? She says, the number one weapon you have is your voice. You need number one weapon you have is your mind. And you have to stand up. And you know, it's, it's not, you know, I used to think some of some of the stuff like supporting the Iron Man Institute was optional or that speaking up was optional. It is okay just to live your life because it's about living the best. But the world is getting to the point where if you don't fight, it's unclear what kind of life you're going to have in 30 years and what kind of life our children and grandchildren are going to have because I think things have gotten so much worse and they look like they're getting worse. So I'd say we got to fight, which means you got to support our work. You got to get the book out there. You got to go out there and promote Iron Man's ideas and everything that the Institute and everything that the Institute's intellectuals do. And then you need to make your voices heard because with the two few of us, you just need to get engaged and get involved in whatever forum you can and whatever context you can that makes sense in your life. And you got to make your voice heard because part of the problem today is a real intellectual void, which, which the left and the bad elements in the white are filling. And it's that void that we need to at least influence. I like the way James Brown put it. He said, get up, get into it, get involved. You have the last question, sir. I was wondering what you thought about Murray Rothbard and Ann Arbor Capitalist. He even limited government is, you know, requires coercion and is immoral. And you could get rid of the state altogether and just have market pay solutions. You thought you ended on a depressing question. 60 seconds is up. Here's the short version. I think there's some very, there's, they have a bunch of arguments that can be tricky, especially when you're young, but they're actually, what you have to think of what an actual fact they're standing for. And that's tearing down the institution that protects rights. And once you do that, what you unleash is not freedom, prosperity and harmony of interest. What you unleash is force. And so in, in Leonard Peacock's book, Objectism, the Philosophy of Vine Rand, he classifies anarchism as a form of statism. And I think he's exactly right. And so it can be tricky to figure out well, how do you deal with their particular arguments? Because, you know, they are clever sophists. But what you need to do is maintain your common sense and realize what they're actually trying to accomplish is the obliteration of what is in fact an immense historic achievement. It took centuries for men to figure out how to create governments that could even protect, keep things relatively peaceful, let alone one that actually would protect individual rights. That's what we should aspire to build on, not tear down. Excellent. Before I turn the podium back over to Robert, I want to thank him for having me here, Lynn Zinser for getting in touch last week and asking me to be involved in this excellent and very stimulating program. I want to thank all of you for being incredibly attentive and involved and very focused audience. The book is equal, is unfair, Don Watkins, the author's one more.