 OK. We're going to talk a little bit about regulations this afternoon, the favorite topic on mine, if I am dictator. If not, then it's not. But we're going to talk not about specific regulations. We're going to talk about all kinds of regulations that are imposed by the government. You're probably well aware that there are regulations that are not imposed by the government, but they are sort of adopted. They're typically called marketing institutions rather than regulations. So I'm going to focus on those regulations that are imposed on the market by the government. So you already know sort of where I'm going with this, I think. So we can just end the lecture here, and I'll do Q&A. Now, but let's go through a little bit about what are the actual costs of regulations, because it's not that obvious. And to an Austrian, it's actually a lot worse than you might think. See, now I got your attention. OK, so let's do regulations. You've already heard by previous speakers, Dr. Israel and Dr. Newman, about the wonders of statistics and empirics and using data. That's one way that you can study regulations. That's one way that you can figure out what is going on. It's very limited, just like they taught you. So I'm not going to focus on that at all. I'm going to focus only on the theoretical analysis of regulations, and what we can learn about what regulations do in, and should I say, to an economy. And as you know now, after the first two days here at Mises U, theory helps us uncover quite a bit about how the world actually works. It helps us understand how it works. So we can learn quite a lot just walking through the logic and the theory of it. But it has some drawbacks, too. For instance, we can't really tell anything about magnitudes. So one regulation that you might have heard of, the minimum wage, we can't really say how many jobs are destroyed or not and things like that. We just know that going through the logic, it's going to have these kinds of effects. But we can't tell exactly how much, which is why Dr. Newman told us a bit that we can't really predict using the Austrian framework. We can understand what is going on. So we can understand just how terrible regulations are. And I'm going to give you a little bit of a flavor of that terror, if you will. So with theory, we can't figure out the magnitudes, but we can look at both short and long-term effects. We can take a look into the future and peer into the future and figure out what is actually going to happen, or at least compared to what will happen. So what could have happened and what will happen? We can figure out the process, how it works, and we can understand the process cumulative, that one thing builds upon what was already done and so forth. And part of that is, of course, learning. We, as actors, learn. We have experience on things. Entrepreneurs learn from each other. They learn what worked, what didn't work. They also learn of opportunities, perhaps you could call them, that they can exploit, that they can go this way because someone else has already created the foundations, whether that's a new technology or whether they have figured out a new way to please consumers, whatever it might be. But they sort of react upon what has already been created. So you might have encountered this guy a couple of times, perhaps, Frederick Bastiat, the French liberal, classical liberal economist. And he talked about the seen and the unseen. And of course, if you recall, I mean, it's been two slides, but if you recall the title of the talk, it's the unseen costs of regulations. So immediately, some of you probably thought of Frederick Bastiat and his seen and the unseen and the broken window fallacy. And he distinguished between good and bad economists. How good economists only look at the immediate effects of something and never see what might happen down the road, what happens in the longer term. Good economists look at both and therefore also concludes that what looks good right now is perhaps not good in the long term because we lose a lot in long term because we perhaps consumed it right now. Keynesians tend to fall into this trap. So someone like Paul Krugman, for instance, he is a victim of the broken window fallacy over and over and over again. And I've sometimes called Keynesian economics for pee in your pants economics. And some of you know that I'm from Sweden, a cold country. And if you're out in the cold and you're freezing, one way to solve the problem is just to let go. And that will warm you up right now. But it will get even worse later, I've been told. So that's one way of looking at it, right? To do something right now, and it seems like a great idea, but then it turns into something not so nice later on. And it might be even worse than what you actually had. OK. So how do we understand regulations if they're imposed by the government? Well, they really do only one thing. They tell you that you can't. So in a sense, they're much like your parents when you grow up. No, you can't. No, you must not. No, you're not allowed, that sort of thing. That's what regulations do. Might have good purposes, might have bad purposes. Doesn't really matter. They're still at the core of the same thing. They're prohibition of some form. And they're intending to change people's actions. Now, there are two kinds, really. There are the ineffective ones. So if I would tell you to do something that no one was going to do anyway, I can prohibit that. Say, don't pee in your pants right now. I'm guessing only a couple of you, but the most, would have done that anyway. But the thing is, it would be an ineffective regulation, because you wouldn't have done it anyway. So it would have no effect. The point of a regulation, of course, is to affect change, to cause a change to the economy and to society. So the point of implementing a regulation is to cause a change by making sure that people don't do a certain thing. Now, they're a little bit of a blunt tool, because you can't really tell them what to do instead. They will still make up their minds and react in some way. So instead, you say, you can't do this over here. That's an effective regulation, if you actually cause the change that you're intending to, or at least has some effect on your actions. We can also distinguish between consumer and producer oriented regulations. You can tell a producer that you're not allowed to produce this sort of thing. So dangerous toys, or you're not allowed to produce heroin, or whatever it might be. And consumers, the same thing. You're not allowed to do this sort of thing, or you have to do this sort of thing. Those are regulations, right? But they're intended to change your actions, but do they change your value scales? No, they don't, right? They just tell you that you can't, but they don't tell you that you don't want to. They can try to, but that's not the effect, right? Whether you want or not is still your decision. So they will just tell you that you're not allowed to. So keep that in mind. So what a regulation does is that in any situation, we have different options, different ways that we can go. And whether they're right or wrong, we can't really tell, because they depend on your subjective valuations, right? So in this case, some person has four different options that they recognize as options, and that they consider valuable. And therefore, thinking, oh, what should I do right now? A regulation would simply mean that, no, you can't turn right in this situation. You have to take one of the other three lanes. That's it. Or if you have many regulations, then you could have a problem like this, so you can outlaw everything but one way. Of course, that's still subject to the actor's imagination, so people will find a way around, and they might create a path in between and whatever else. But regulations do this one thing. They just tell you that you cannot this one thing. So that means that we can take this concept of regulation, and we can look at the economic impact of it. We can look at what happens in the short term, and how does this affect things, the economy, the structure of the economy, people's actions, the outcome, and so forth, in the long term? Because they're not necessarily the same. How does this affect entrepreneurship? How does this affect production? How does this affect economic calculation? Because it does. And how does this affect prices, and so forth? And keep in mind that this is a cumulative process, because we're never in the sort of neoclassical land where we have just one situation, one choice, and then we start over again. It's a cumulative process. So this is how we might think of it. We can choose to go left or go right. Well, that doesn't mean that we stop choosing after that. We take one action, and then we die. No. We act all the time. And what we acted on before, that's going to determine what options we have in the future. So if you act on something, well, the opportunity cost is what you didn't choose. So you lose those, but you're presented with new options based on the choice that you made. So what you have is, of course, that if you choose to go right, there's going to be another fork in the road. So you have to choose again and make an action. And again, and again, and again, and I can continue. But I think you get the point, right? That all of these choices will be made at one point or the other. And of course, the other way around, too. All of these lead to new options, new possible choices, new actions, and so forth, which means if we introduce one regulation, we say no to turning right here. We really cut off that whole tree of options, that whole tree of different alternatives that the actor could choose from, correct? Those are not possible anymore unless you violate the regulation, right? And some people do that. They break the law and things like that. OK, so where do these different options come from? How come we have all these different alternatives in the marketplace? Well, they're created by entrepreneurs who imagine a different future for us. So entrepreneurs create new products. They create new services. They create all kinds of different things. They present to us as consumers these different options that we have. And of course, they create firms and whatever else. And we're going to talk about that on Friday. But they create these forks in the road and compete with each other by creating more and more valuable options for us that we can choose from. And that turns out that it's actually important to keep that in mind, too. And as I already mentioned, the entrepreneurs also react on each other. So obviously, if someone has created something that works, say, Henry Ford created the Model T and it worked out and people started buying cars like crazy. And others would go, wait a minute. I can do something similar. I can build off of his idea because that seems to work. And now I have an idea that builds off of his idea. And I think I can do this better where I can do something that takes what he learned and what we learned from his innovation and create something new that I think consumers will like even more. So if you had outlawed that first automobile, then you would not get the second one or the third one. You would not have SUVs today or whatever else. You would have something else, of course. But those innovations that have actually satisfied consumers best would not be there. And that's the point with entrepreneurship. What they're trying to do is figure out how to serve consumers best by, in the present, invest capital and imagine what they can create for consumers in the future and provide them with something that makes their lives better in the future. So much better that they're gonna outcompete other entrepreneurs doing the same thing, trying to imagine how to make people's lives better. Okay, so how are regulations different from destruction? As Walter said, they prohibit a certain type of action. So they're sort of destroying that whole decision tree, if you will, right? But the analysis is actually different. They're not the same. So let's look at an example. So there's a tornado here in Auburn, Alabama. And it destroys a lot of stuff. For some magical reason, it leaves the Mises Institute on scale. But it destroys a big chunk of the town. People lose their homes. People lose their cars. They lose a lot of belongings, but we don't lose any people, so we're lucky, okay? So what happens when people get out of their shelters after the tornado has passed or dissolved or whatever tornadoes do? They come out of their shelters and they go, oh crap, I'm homeless. Okay, so they're gonna work pretty hard to get some kind of shelter and get a home again, right? Rebuild the home that they had or build a new building on their lot, the land or whatever it might be, right? But they're gonna get pretty busy doing that because that's the highest on their value scale. And they lost that value, but that's highest. So they're gonna be really active. They're probably gonna give up a bunch of leisure and a bunch of other options because having a home is more than nice, right? Having a home is sort of necessary for a lot of other things. I mean, where are you gonna put your Xbox and play games and things like that? So you're gonna see that after such destruction, you're gonna have a lot of economic activity. And someone like Paul Krugman would say, oh, this is economic growth, economic activity. So to him, you should just destroy as much as possible. That's of course, it's not true. And let's look at what destruction actually means. Well, if Auburn is destroyed and nothing else around Auburn is destroyed, what's gonna happen? Well, people are starting, of course, to rebuild their homes, which means there is increased demand for all kinds of construction materials and tools and machines and what have you. So everybody in Auburn suddenly wants to buy wood and steel and rent all these things and buy hammers. Suddenly the demand for hammers is like, pfft. So those goods are gonna flow in from Moplaika and from other towns around here where they're sold at normal market prices, right? But in Auburn, the need is greater. So we're gonna be more willing to pay more for a hammer because we need a home where someone over there, it's not as willing to pay as much, right? So the goods are going to go where they're willing to pay more, which is here because the need is greater. We can also see that those producing these materials and producing wood and whatever else that we might use here, they're gonna ramp up production, right? They're gonna try to produce a little more. They're gonna ask people to work late. They're gonna place new orders from their suppliers. They're gonna probably even hire more people. I mean, at least if Auburn is big enough, right? Then they're gonna try to produce a whole lot more and they're gonna just scale up and produce a lot more output so that we can fix this problem. So in a sense, the market works, right? The greater need means a higher willingness to pay, which means goods are gonna flow in that direction. They're gonna have fewer hammers in Opelika, but no one is gonna care too much because they, well, it wasn't very high on their value scale, but people in Auburn not having a home is suddenly very high and it's unsatisfied, right? There's also gonna be some disaster relief from different types of organizations, charities, churches, maybe even the government will step in, who knows. So we're gonna have a lot of resources flowing in and doing these things. What is the situation like in terms of the structure of action here? Well, people are still trying to satisfy what's highest on their value scale that it's not satisfied, right? We lost our homes, but what is the highest if we choose from all kinds of different things that we can choose from? Well, we're gonna act to create a home again. That's the highest not yet satisfied want on our value scales. So the structure of action is still the same, right? We're affected because we lost our homes, but we're not affected in the sense that we're still acting on what's highest on our value scales, okay? Now, so the economic analysis of destruction then is that, yeah, we have a temporary loss. In this case, our homes, it's worth quite a bit. So we lose a big chunk of our wealth, but we can still continue on the highest possible trajectory, creating as much value as we can, according to our own valuations, of course. Some people might choose not to have a home, they might do something else, become real world wanderers, no mads, whatever else, David Gordon, something. They're gonna do something without a home. Sorry, David. And as a result, resources are going to be reallocated towards where they do most good. They're gonna follow those prices. So in the sense, the market order prevails. All resources, which are scarce, are being used and reallocated to be used where they make most good, according to consumers' value scales. Which raises the question, how are regulations different? Or are they? That's a good question. Well, we already said that regulations are costs imposed on certain actions. They're prohibitions to do certain things. So imagine that you cannot build buildings, you cannot build new homes. Well, you suddenly lose your home, you want to, but you're not allowed to. That's a different situation than just losing your home and then rebuilding it, of course. Right? And the regulations come in different shapes and forms. They're not really destruction, because they don't destroy a value that was there, but they're destructive because they take options away from you. Okay? So let's take an example and let's assume that in 2006, the government implements a ban on touchscreens. And maybe 2006 is a bad choice in this crowd, but, because it was a long time ago. But this is actually when touchscreens started to be used for real, and you started getting new products using touchscreens, they were not as advanced as today, not as like this one, but they were in existence. Okay? So some guys value scale, he has, he would choose an iPod touch, which was a thing back then. It was a music playing machine which could have thousands of songs in your pocket. Doesn't sound all as amazing today, I know, but back then it was fantastic. It was better than the Walkman, which played cassette tapes, and it was better than the portable radio, which you might never have seen. But anyway, if this guy can choose whatever, he or she would choose to buy an iPod touch because that's what's highest on their value scale. But with the ban on touchscreens, there can be no iPod touch. And maybe they have already produced a couple of generations of iPod touches so people have them, but the next generation is not allowed. So what's highest possible on this guy's value scale is the Walkman, even though the economy is able to produce the iPod touch. Now note this implication then that it's not a one-time loss like destruction anymore. It's a repeated loss, right? Because your value scale is the same and it includes the iPod touch, or this guy's value scale does. It includes the iPod touch. The economy can produce the iPod touch. It's able to, entrepreneurs are willing to and so forth, but they're not allowed because they cannot use touchscreens, the regulation says so. So that option is lost, which means every time this guy wants to buy a new music playing device or just listen to music while on the road, he cannot use the iPod touch because he couldn't get one. He would need to use something else. So that's a lesser value every time this type of action is highest on his value scale, right? He loses this option over and over again. Whoever has an iPod touch already, they can't buy a new one. If it breaks, they can't buy a new one because they can't be produced and they can't be sold, okay? If you frequently buy a new one, if you're one of those weirdos who sleep on the sidewalk outside of the Apple Store every year to get your hands on the new gadget, you can't anymore because they can't produce those anymore, okay? So it's still true that we act in order to attain the highest possible value but not the highest possible value given what the economy can produce for us. That's different because that's taken away from us. And note also that this is a process. It's not this one choice. Remember the fork in the road? It's not one choice. It's over and over again. And it has implications down the line. It's cumulative. So the production analysis then, if you look at the production side, because so far it's only the consumer side. On the production side, they can't produce touch screens. Does that mean that they will not produce anything at all? No, of course they will produce something. Entrepreneurs will produce something that they think will satisfy consumers better. So they will exit their line of production of iPod touches and touch screens and produce something else. What will that be? Who knows? The only thing we know is that these entrepreneurs will not produce what they think will generate the greatest value to consumers because that was the iPod touch, right? So they will choose the second best thing. They will choose to produce something else that they think is profitable, but that is not as profitable or not as value creative as what they otherwise would have chosen. Well, this has two implications, right? First, of course, we don't get the iPod touch. We also get a lot of resources invested in something that is not as valuable, at least according to entrepreneurs, which creates a distorted structure of the economy, right? We have male investments. So we have under investments in what entrepreneurs think that consumers would like. iPod touch and other touchscreen devices. We have over investment somewhere else, wherever they made investments, but they would not choose if they could use touch screens, okay? That's not a big surprise for you, I think, right? This is pretty standard economic analysis. Regulations cause value losses. No big deal. This is really the scene versus the unseen, right? Well, let's add an aspect to this, the cumulative aspect, because there's more to the story. The iPod touch was really the inspiration for what became the iPhone, right? The iPhone was the iPod touch plus a phone plus an internet capable device. Now that's not possible if the touchscreen is not possible. So the iPhone would not happen, which means that tablet would not happen because the tablet was based on the experiences from the iPhone, which also means the next thing, whatever that might be, we still don't know, would also not be produced, okay? So because innovations are cumulative, we would not get any of this stuff, so we would probably not have smartphones today, just because someone regulated touch screens for iPod touches in 2006. Who would have thought, okay? But as the market unfolds, this is a problem and a problem that we will never see either, right? Because if we had not had smartphones, we would not know what we lost either. So the real cost is sort of hidden from us. Okay, so now we have the problem then that we're producing more of something of lesser value unless, in this case, nothing of what entrepreneurs would have chosen to produce because consumers would have benefited most there. There would be more profitability. Well, that also means it's not only about the consumer gadgets, right? This means new businesses are created where they wouldn't otherwise have been created. New types of jobs will be developed where they otherwise would not have been developed, where they will make less money because the bottom line is not gonna be just quite as lucrative as it otherwise would have been. Because entrepreneurs would otherwise have chosen to produce more value somewhere else, which means they would have been able to afford to pay higher salaries. They would have developed new lines of production, new types of jobs where they could pay them much more, where they would do more good, right? They would produce more value for consumers. Now they produce less value over here instead. Are there more jobs, fewer jobs? Who the heck knows? I have no idea. There would be other jobs. I know that, okay? And then of course other businesses will build off of these ideas and so forth. So the unrealized is everything that we didn't get because we had a regulation stopping or hindering in some sense entrepreneurs from choosing to invest in a certain direction. And if you recall the fork in the road, that whole tree of investments are gone and all the innovations and all the developments of technologies and new specializations and expertise and things like that are gone too. Simply because we couldn't choose that first step to turn right instead. We entrepreneurs turned left and we got something else instead. And all of that of course follows maximizing the value possible based off of choosing a suboptimal if you will or lesser value option to begin with. So we're on the lower trajectory. Okay, so the unrealized then is really all these options that we don't have that would be more valuable to us but that didn't happen because of regulations. So all of this that would have unfolded now since 2006 and until the year 3500 or whatever, all of those things are gone. We will never see them because we went another way. This would not be a problem of course if entrepreneurs said, there's a better way of satisfying consumers than touch screens. Because then the whole economy would follow in the direction of satisfying consumers in the best way possible. Now of course that's not what happened. Now what happened was regulators said, don't use touch screens. So entrepreneurs who wanted to do that, they chose to do something else or they didn't do anything at all and other entrepreneurs instead entered and invested in whatever they felt was the right thing to do. So the whole economy is on a different trajectory, right? If you think of the structure of production, all of those resources developed, all of those resources put to use, all of those factories produced, all of those people trained in these skills necessary for employers and so forth, they're a little bit off of where entrepreneurs would have placed them. So the whole economy is worse off. All consumers are worse off, both as producers as labor because those careers are gone and as consumers because the products are gone. So I think you're starting to get the picture, right? Regulations are sort of destructive, quite a bit. Okay, so the unrealized then, the effects on entrepreneurs is of course that they cannot pursue to create those goods that they think that consumers would have wanted more. Now you might be thinking that, well, isn't it the case that entrepreneurs don't really know so maybe they would still, because of the regulation, figure something out that would be more valuable than they otherwise would have chosen? I mean, in the end, who knows, it's uncertain, right? Yeah, it's possible, but it was pure luck, right? Because they make a calculated decision imagining different situations in the future and they think this is the most valuable one, so I'm gonna pursue this, I'm gonna create this. And then if someone says you cannot, I'm gonna go okay, I'm gonna try this instead. If this turns out to be more valuable, that's by pure chance, right? Because they wouldn't have chosen this and it's their money, so obviously, thinking that this will turn out more valuable takes quite a bit of imagination, let's put it that way. And it definitely will not consistently be of greater value. Okay, so all of the economy in this sense is sort of hampered and distorted because of this one regulation that creates investments where they otherwise would not have been. So you can see how this is also related to both calculation and the business cycle theory, right? The business cycle theory where you have over investments in some parts of the economy and under investments in others, well, regulations cost the same thing, right? It's just not regulation of money, which of course affects every transaction. This affects certain transactions, but then it has ripple effects throughout the economy, more or less. So this creates necessarily a lower standard of living unless by chance they happen to figure something out that it's better. But you can imagine a situation, say a fictitious hypothetical country where there are more than one regulation. You're laughing. Yeah, there are thousands and thousands and thousands, right? That entrepreneurs have to navigate through this really, this minefield of regulations and each regulation distorts the structure of production. Places us on a lower trajectory in terms of value creation for consumers. Now you can see the magnitude of the problem, right? That we're not getting the value that we could get. It's quite a problem. Okay, so if we want to sum up this lesson then, this is the book where I developed these ideas. Any regulation distorts the process is basically throughout the economy. It destroys value perhaps, but what's more important is it puts the economy on a different trajectory in a different direction. That's where all the development will go, all the investments will go. Somewhere else than where entrepreneurs would have chosen, which of course means lower value and different things, different careers, different businesses, different structure of society, different gadgets, different everything. Destruction, you know the one that Paul Krugman hails as a cause of economic growth, is no biggie. Dropping a bomb is no issue really. I mean comparatively speaking I should say, right? So compared to regulations, a bomb, yeah it will go off, let's say no one is harmed, but a lot of property is destroyed. People will continue to work on whatever is highest on their value scale that is unsatisfied, which is something that was satisfied before, so there's a loss, but it's still, the structure is the same, right? They're still choosing the highest that they can. But comparing it to regulations where every time you would have chosen something else, you cannot. And then in the longer term the cumulative effect where you can't have the career that you otherwise would have had, you can't earn the salary that you otherwise would have, you can't retire as early as you would have. Whatever else there is, we don't have the knowledge that we otherwise would have, you can't choose the type of education that you otherwise would have because it doesn't exist, because it was never invented. That's the true cost of regulations. So in a sense you can summarize this as even libertarians have no freaking clue how destructive regulations really are. We tend to focus on just that one regulation and the immediate effects, whether over long term or short term, but not the ripple effects, not understanding that the economy fits together. It's an integrated whole where losing something means you get more investment somewhere else that shouldn't have been there from the perspective of the consumers, okay? I hope that makes sense. So let's use an example of how we can use this because this can get a little abstract, right? And we can't really say much about the magnitudes, like I said in the beginning. What we can say though is that imagine a situation where there is a sweatshop, some of you might have heard of these, right? There are sweatshops a little here and there. If you think about it, are there sweatshops? Are they there because the market cannot produce sweatshops? That's a stupid question. The sweatshops are there. So obviously the market could produce sweatshops. Why is it that there's only one sweatshop? In this poor country where people line up so that they can produce sneakers for Nike, make more than everything else that they, all the other options. I mean, usually there are two arguments, right? Foreign against sweatshops. The against is that sweatshops are terrible. They really should have a cushy job like a professor in Oklahoma. So they shouldn't be producing sneakers in Vietnam or wherever, right? Because it's hot in the long hours and all this stuff. That's the first argument against, right? The second argument as well, look at their actual options. What are the alternatives that they have other than the sweatshop? Well, they would be toiling in the field. They would be starving to death, maybe prostitution, or another nice choice like that. Okay, so maybe the sweatshop isn't that bad after all. Comparing to death and poverty. Well, then of course the question must be, why aren't there other entrepreneurs who invest and say, come to my sweatshop instead? Because there is a sweatshop. So you can start one just next to it, right? You can say, you can work half an hour less every day. I'll pay you five cents more every month or whatever. I'll have a small window AC unit. So it's nicer, right? You can see that could happen, right? You could still make a lot of money. And that creates competition between the sweatshops. So they're gonna raise everything pretty much, right? Salaries, working conditions, everything between the sweatshops. What doesn't that happen? Is it because the sweatshop that is there is so generous that no one can beat them. Nike's sneaker factory is so efficient that they can be super generous and no one else can afford it. That doesn't make any sense. No, there's one for a reason. And there's not competition for that same reason. And what is that? Regulations, right? So you don't have to point out exactly which regulation you can just look at the phenomenon and say, wait, this doesn't make any sense. If someone can start a sweatshop, why doesn't someone else do that and compete with them? There should be plenty of money to earn, right? Plenty of money. So why doesn't anyone? Well, it could be simply that the government's there. I said, only you can, and then you hand us some money. Right, that's often the case. If that is not the case, then someone else should be able to. And if they don't, that means something is stopping them from getting the profits that the first one are just getting. Well, what's stopping them? It has to be something that is not economic in nature, right? It's not the market itself that stops them. It's something else, something that is added to and raises barriers to entry and forces them to not do the same thing, right? So in a sense, we can say that the poverty existent in these countries where there is a sweatshop and because there is a sweatshop, we can say this. Because there is a sweatshop, people are poor because there's only one. There should be many more. And there are not more for the simple reason that there are regulations stopping these investments. Because otherwise, they would be on a higher value trajectory. Because it seems like an obvious opportunity to create another sweatshop and now to compete Nike and offer a little higher salary, little better working conditions, little whatever. And you should be able to perhaps sell to say, Reebok or New Balance or some other sneaker brand, right? It shouldn't be so hard. Yet we have the situation where there is one sweatshop and it's there for 10 years, 15 years, 20 years. The only one that doesn't make any sense. If they're making a ton of money, others should enter. And if they're not, something is stopping them. Unless, of course, the conclusion is that, nah, you know, entrepreneurs in those countries that don't like money. I would go with regulations. It seems like the more reasonable explanation. Okay? So poverty itself and the existence of sweatshops, I think are an argument for the destructive power of regulations, whether or not those are regulations in those countries, but they have effects on the structure of the economy overall. But the investments go somewhere where the other voice should not have gone. And we don't get the investments that we should have gotten. And that, of course, makes us all poor, regardless of where we are, all right? Now you know how destructive regulations are in the cumulative sense, the unrealized. Thank you.