 You kind of set 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 and the basic idea was What happens once we change people's ideas well then that is easy because the fact is like it or not We get the politicians we deserve and Want so everybody says I want lower 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 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 every 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 you know 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 did we vote on but the Those will come people believe me. I spent 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 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 you know people should be doing their own thing and you know 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 of the air oil companies doing what they're doing to back I mean, it's it's insanely 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 and be happy and that's just so I mean like if you just just the US Half the the GDP right now is military You know 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 with the safety net? So my view is that the purpose of government is to protect our freedom a Broad from threats abroad and threats here. So police military and ultimately law courts So, you know, we can debate about exactly is our you know, 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 a 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 as fossil fuels that have made us living to 80 So the idea that the only reason people get cancer now and they didn't used to is they used to be dead first from other causes fossil fuels and 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 burning made-off 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 waste water 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 It 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 we're gonna 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 fuel is making people sick. It's that For today's living standards, I think it would it would be improved and people wouldn't and old people wouldn't be getting as sick except Let's say health care that they they have certain drugs that Have you dependent on the drugs instead of simply caring you because it 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 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 Or you don't expect it to be that bad if they don't have a sense of Look the the 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 the Washington Post would love it if they could have an expose and how they're keeping this curious side No, these are people who want to help people by and 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 lagged 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 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 one of my good friends is one of the leading Ebola People you probably see 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 You know 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 somebody here's it It's not just holding back cures It's the amount of tests and so on the pride 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 have 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 is 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 the second thing is there was a bunch of government interference in all sorts of ways Whether it was subsidies and cronyism handouts to you know big business special favors for business There was all sorts of regulations there were minuscule handout programs But essentially what you saw in America before 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 you know the more free we were the faster we grew The better the culture was and so on and so I think the if we're gonna 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 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 to support their own lives and treat them like burdens and resources And as if we take that first step will be on the road to a genuinely free society Thank you