 Welcome. Tonight we are talking about money and power and here with us is Hedrick Smith, a former New York Times reporter with a 26-year tenure and a member of the Pulitzer Prize-winning member team that produced the Pentagon's paper series. His most recently published book is Who Stole the American Dream? And Yaron Brooke, the executive director of the Einrand Institute, a columnist at Forbes.com, contributing editor of The Objective Standard, and a weekly guest on front page hosted by PJTV, Brooke co-authored Free Market Revolution. Our theme, one of the central debates of our time, what is the role of money, power, and the proper place of government in our modern society? What should the role of government be? What problems exist and what is the best way forward to fix them? Our format proceeds as follows. Mr. Smith and Mr. Brooke will each begin with opening statements followed by a discussion between the two of them. At about 7.15, we will open up the mic to audience participation for questions for about 40 minutes. We will conclude with closing statements. I look forward to a vigorous and civil debate and dialogue. We begin with Mr. Smith. Rachel on the scob. Thank you very much for your introduction and I want to thank the Ford Hall Forum for sponsoring this debate tonight. It's a critical debate at a critical time. I think we all know that our country is in trouble and by that I don't mean just the showdown in Washington about the shutdown. We have a society now which has greater divisions of economic inequality than we've had in the last 40 years or so. We have a starkly unequal democracy in which it's dominated considerably by the power of money and particularly the money of concentrated wealth. We have a dispute over the citizens united decision and whether or not corporations should as organizations and other unions and so forth be able to make political donations. I really want to talk about the evolution of American capitalism and American democracy over the last 30 or 40 years. I don't think the question of democracy or capitalism is at stake here. The question is have we moved from what was a workable democracy and a very workable and successful form of capitalism back in the 40s 50s 60s and 70s to one that is unequal and unworkable. Have we gone from a bipartisan democracy in which Washington could pass not only budgets every year but major pieces of legislation like Medicare and the Civil Rights Act to a point where it is so gridlocked that it cannot pass budgets not just at the moment in the shutdown but it cannot pass budgets year after year. And where we have a situation in the economy where over the last 39 40 years from 1979 to 2011 84% of the nation's total growth and money income went to the top 1%. Let me repeat that 84% of the total growth from 1979 to 2011 went to the top 1%. We're not just Paul Krugman and Joe Stiglitz economists on center left but Citibank said we are now witnessing the greatest inequality of any major power since 16th century Spain. Now things weren't that way before and in my book who stole the American dream I was trying to understand how we moved from what was a pretty successful democracy in an economy in which the wealth and prosperity that was generated by economic growth was widely shared and the middle class participated. Economists think about it now almost as though we've become two Americans. There's an enormous divide among us both economically and politically. Economists talk about the earlier period is the period of great convergence Richard Nixon and his famous kitchen debate with Nikita Khrushchev in 1959 actually said that America had a classless society. Nixon was exaggerating of course the CEO of General Motors made 40 times as much as a worker on the General Motors assembly line but what they mean by great convergence was the incomes at the top were not that far from the incomes in the middle were not that far from the incomes at the bottom what was really remarkable when I went back and did the research was to discover that the productivity of the American workforce for the 30 years after World War two from 45 to the mid 70s almost doubled it grew by 97 percent. The household income of the median household the average household in America during that period rose 95 percent 97 percent growth in productivity 95 percent growth at the middle. Economic wealth and growth was widely shared economists have studied that period in terms of the quintiles the top 20 percent the second 20 percent all the way down to the bottom 20 percent all five quintiles moved up in their income during that period and the bottom was actually moved up faster than the ones at the top in addition to that hard to remember hard to believe at that time corporations generated and gave such benefits to their employees that in 1980 84 percent of the people who worked for companies with more than 100 employees got fully paid lifetime pensions from their employers 70 percent got fully paid health benefits so the wealth was widely shared and it was widely shared I believe for a couple of reasons one is the business leaders at that time believed it was smart it was fair in the economy but it was smart business if you paid a lot of workers tens of millions of workers good wages they would go out and spend the money that money would generate demand which would generate the next cycle of growth economists call that the virtuous circle of growth high production high wages high demand pushes new production new factories new equipment we've broken that cycle since then but that was that was remarkable read people like Charlie Wilson the head of General Motors Reg Jones the head of General Electric and others and they said it was the sacred trust sacred trust of the CEO to balance the economic interests of all the stakeholders in the corporation and by that they met the owners the managers the workers the suppliers the banks the creditors the customers the communities they operated they balanced that they also considered it insider trading for them to trade in the stock of their own company because obviously they had special information about what their company was going to do a very different ethic than we have today it was also a time of middle-class power a very strong labor movement able to counterbalance the power of large corporations a women's movement that said women are being paid 41% of what men are being paid for the same work a consumers movement that demanded improvements in the quality of products Ralph Nader wrote a book saying GM and other American automakers were making cars that were defective brakes were failing access were failing tires were exploding people were getting hurt and killed in accidents caused by the industrialists themselves and so there was pressure on the government and therefore pressure on industry to improve and protect the consumers more there was an environmental movement there was a peace movement the middle-class exercise power and had tremendous influence on Washington environmental movement 20 million people in April of 1970 went and demonstrated on Earth Day demanded the cleaning up of the water and the airways and guess what within a year Congress passed the Clean Air Act the Clean Water Act the safe drinking water the safe drinking water act the anti toxic substance act all signed by that great environmental president Richard Nixon why did Nixon do it because of practical politics that was from Bill Ruckels house now what happened what happened to that picture we had a watershed and I thought the watershed as a reporter for the New York Times I thought the watershed occurred under Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s when I went back and check the history I found it it actually started in 1978 under Jimmy Carter and the Democrats what happened was a backlash among the business leaders who had felt the pressure from the consumer movement the women's movement the labor movement the environmental movement Lewis Powell named to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon was so disturbed that he wrote a memo so disturbed about the middle-class power about the increasing regulation of business wrote a memo to the U. S. Chamber of Commerce which they circulated to business leaders around the country and said business you're being taken to the cleaners in the political arena you need to organize you need to move to Washington you need to pool your money you need to develop a long-term plan and what's astonishing is that happened not because Powell was so influential but because there were a lot of business leaders who were frustrated we had the revolt of the bosses there were 175 companies that had offices in Washington in 1971 when Powell wrote his memo eight years later there were two thousand four hundred there are fifty thousand people working for business trade associations there were nine thousand registered corporate lobbyists and that army Powell's army went to work and under Carter they blocked labor legislation they block consumer protection bureau that was wanted by Ralph Nader in the consumer movement they got the 401k plan put in in place of lifetime pensions from companies that evolved over time they got the corporate bankruptcy law changed to the advantage of management so management could rip up labor contracts by going to bankruptcy courts they got the capital gains tax rate sharply reduced they got the corporate tax rate reduced and they began the process of deregulation deregulation of the trucking industry deregulation of the telecommunications industry and it goes on deregulation begins in the banking industry in late nineteen eighty carries on in the early early nineteen eighties under Reagan just a few things last right so what we have is a political power shift that clearly influence policy in the subsequent years and in the economy we moved from stakeholder capitalism to shareholder capitalism share capitalism being delivered to the shareholders and that means pressure on workers wages and you begin to see a wedge develop workers wages male workers wages from nineteen seventy eight to two thousand eleven adjusted for inflation were dead even now remember that's the same time that eighty four percent of the nation's monetary gains are going to the top one percent you begin to see the disconnect between the advance of the economy and the living standard of middle class Americans productivity goes up eighty percent average household income goes up only ten percent and mostly because more women work more hours so what we've seen is is a disconnect and a dysfunctionalism coming into our capitalist system over the last thirty or forty years largely because of deregulation and government policies policies that favorite corporations and favorite the rich tax policies and other policies and also because of a change in the mindset of American business leaders and what their objectives were and actually the teaching in American business schools and what we're left in what finish your sentence and what we're left with is an economy that has broken that virtuous cycle of growth and we're now stuck with very slow growth and the reason is not lack of capital at least the reason is we don't have adequate demand because the middle class consumers are not being paid the same share of the economic part that they used to be paid at a time of prosperity it might seem surprising to some that your argument hinges on a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress and Congress was was dominated by Democrats until nineteen ninety four so what was it about the Democratic Party that which we don't necessarily associate with being pro business that enabled this to happen what happened was after the Watergate scandal in nineteen seventy four there were a number of Democrats who got elected to Congress in nineteen seventy six in districts that had previously been Republican and they were extremely vulnerable to pro business lobbying and this is where Powell's army went to work they went to work on these Democrats particularly in the House of Representatives to move them and what's interesting is you actually see under Nixon and Ford Republican presidents you sort of had an anti-business Congress which was passing a lot of regulatory legislation and in the late seventies under the Democrats you begin to see deregulation start and it has to do with with this power shift and it has to do also with the influence of lobbyist I mean I talked to Tip O'Neill about this the former Speaker of the House and he said to me I've never seen a lobbying blitz like this in all my years in Congress so this was the birth of modern lobbying in in terms of the Washington power game you begin to see it in the late nineteen seventies and the concentration of power the the ability of businesses to be able to target specific members of Congress and to rally business leaders in the districts of those specific members of Congress was enormously effective we now take that kind of lobbying for granted but prior to that we did not have anything like that that was partly was their vulnerability partly was the effectiveness of Powell's army thank you very much I'm going to turn the floor over to Mr. Brooke thank you good evening it's great to see a packed house thank you and thank thank photo form for putting this on I find myself in a difficult position here my political philosophy is so different than Mr. Smith's political philosophy that I have to somewhat backtrack before I challenge the history the causality and the facts which ninety percent of which I disagree with that we just heard so I'm not going to cover I'm not going to be able to get to all of that I encourage you to ask questions in in in the Q&A about inequality about about the causal relationship and so on so it should be fun power and money so what are we talking about here what kind of power what does money have to do with this what power does money actually represent what power are we concerned with why is power a bad thing so let me tell you what kind of power I'm concerned with I believe is bad I believe needs to be limited that is the power to course I think what makes a civilized country civilized what makes a free country free is when we limit or eliminate the power of individuals to curse each other a civilized country is a country in which we eliminate the power of individuals to curse to force to use physical force on one another now what is the entity in human history most responsible for cursing individuals well it's government and of course the founders of this country recognize that and that's why they wrote a constitution to limit the power of government government by its very nature is force government is the power to course and the question is what kind of power do we want government to engage in now I believe that the principles at the heart of the founding of this country at least in theory maybe not so much in practice was the idea that government is there only to protect us the government is there only to protect us from our neighbor cursing us that government is there never to initiate force but only to be there as retaliation as protector as policeman military judge but that's it so to me government's only role again is to protect us from the coercion of others to protect us on the physical damage that people using physical force or fraud against us exert now we've moved a long way from that kind of political power now that is the essence of political power the essence of political power is forced the essence of political power is the use of force the American system is a system in which that is done in self-defense and retaliation never the initiation of force but we moved a long way from that today government is the main cursor government courses us daily it redistributes wealth on a massive and ever increasing scale we didn't hear about that of course since the since the late 1960s to today government is engaged in massive redistribution of wealth that it had never practiced in in the past maybe that has something to do with the decline in economic activity since the 1970s government is engaged in another form of coercion massive business regulations Nixon was at the forefront of this as was described but but this starts in the 1930s and of course accelerates over time and is accelerated over the last few decades even more so counter to mythology leftist mythology George Bush was responsible for massive increases in business regulation over the out of his eight year presidency that is coercion the fact that in order to shampoo here today in California you need a government license that is coercion and who does that hurt not the one percent that is a direct attack on the 99 percent maybe that has something to do with the lack of economic activity when government is so restricting our ability to engage in free economic activity so in my ideal society government has very little government does no coercion government defends it doesn't redistribute and it doesn't regulate it doesn't force its citizens it protects them it is their servant in protection of them against other people's force now there's another kind of power which is indicated by the fact that we're putting money and power together and that we call economic power now economic powers fundamentally different than political power economic power has nothing to do with coercion economic power is attained voluntarily Bill Gates makes 70 billion dollars that's about his wealth by voluntarily exchanging value for value with his customers he sells a product you buy it you don't want his product don't buy it you're buying it because the product is worth more to you than the money you're paying for it it's with less to Bill Gates he has a profit he accumulates those profits he hasn't taken from anybody he hasn't cursed anybody he hasn't used physical force a fraud on anybody yet he's worth 70 billion dollars economic power is not coercion again it is voluntary it is based on productivity it is based on offering values it is based on skill it is based on talent it's based on hard work a society that awards hard work skill and talent is a society in which some people make more than others it's a society that by its nature is going to be unequal inequality is something to the celebrated it's wonderful to have it unequal imagine if we were all the same how boring would that be and of course societies that have tried that out haven't succeeded too well you know across the board so economic power is generated by creating values other people want and by selling those values now this to me is justice this to me is social justice people like the term social justice social justice in an economy free of coercion where people get based on what they produce based on the values that they create they trade those values some prosper some don't some choose not to prosper you know I got a phd finance I chose to teach rather than go to Wall Street I chose not to prosper because not everything financially because not everything's about money I mean I know it's hard to believe but I find it interesting that many people on the other side focus obsessively about money but life's not about what money life's about lots of things about satisfaction about happiness about fulfillment money's nice but money's not everything so justice just society is a society in which we all have the opportunity to go and pursue our dreams the opportunity free of coercion free of anybody's coercion into other people's coercion government coercion to pursue the profession we want in the way that we want it to trade value with value with other people in the society we're in you're looking at me like I'm running out of time I have a follow-up give us an example of for the college students here today how is it that they are what being coerced well if I want to go shampoo hair today and I go and open up a shop in in California and shampoo somebody's hair without a license I get arrested that's called coerced right so that's forced used upon me or for example if I decide that I don't feel charitable this year and I'm not going to pay my taxes I will go to jail or if I devise a new derivative and don't ask the regulator to sign off on it I will go to jail every you know every one of your activities in the marketplace today is controlled by some course of law that is not preventing you from defrauding other people by shampooing somebody's hair I'm not defrauding them it's not protecting anybody it's there to control me of course we know why you need licensing to shampoo hair you know who lobbied for that people who already shampoo hair they don't want competition licensing laws all over the place licensing laws are always lobby for by the people who established because they don't want the competition from other people so my view laws should protect us against crooks criminals fraudsters that's it not against bad decisions not against bad judgments not a bad not against you know ignorance laws are there to protect us against violation of our right to life liberty in the pursuit of happiness and that involves the only thing that can restrict our ability to pursue our life to pursue our happiness is force it's the use of coercion against us them that our path to life a path to happiness is the use of reason in our mind reason and the human mind need freedom freedom of what freedom from coercion in order to thrive the only role of government is to protect us from that cohesion thank you okay now we will have a give our our our two folks well to respond okay I just have a little trouble getting into the world that your own book is describing it's a little bit of a virtual house on world of everybody pursuing life in a sort of perfect harmony and we're all just pursuing our own interests and the only villain is government coming in cracking down on us now and all the economic activity is just exchange of value so let me just recite a few of the things that I ran into here doing the research for this book the company's Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers were two of the biggest investment houses on Wall Street and they collapsed in the financial crisis and the leaders of those companies walked away with 1.5 billion dollars in cash and stock option bonuses while the shareholders were left with nothing and the shareholders weren't coerced but they sure got deprived of life liberty and happiness in terms of that and there was no law of fraud that went and caught these guys and there was nothing to protect people from this happening in Washington Mutual which was the largest bank failure in American history the internal investigators in Washington Mutual went and looked at the operations of some of their biggest offices in Southern California and they found out that in one office 58% of the mortgage loan applications were fraudulent and 80% of the loan applications in another office were fraudulent and all of the fraud was done internally not by the borrowers but by the people inside the the office of Washington Mutual but Washington Mutual did nothing to punish discipline or control those people from cheating customers and cheating the people who had invested in the bank in fact it sent the leaders of those two offices to the president's club in Hawaii and gave them national awards we had five major Wall Street banks recently pay a 25 billion dollar settlement for for improperly and fraudulently in some cases evicting people with foreclosures from their homes and now the attorney generals are going back and looking at those banks for not abiding by their promise to actually handle the banking honestly there are other major banks that have just agreed to pay 2.5 billion dollars in fines because listen to this they manipulated LIBOR do you know what LIBOR is the London Interbank overnight interest rate it is the rate set that sets interest rates all around the country all around the world other interest rates are based on that your car loan your mortgage rate your student loan interest rate are based on something LIBOR plus some percent the banks found out that if they manipulated LIBOR by very very small percentages they could make hundreds of billions of dollars of profits so the traders called in and they reported false information to LIBOR they manipulate LIBOR there's no way in the world ordinary consumers not even other bankers could find out about this this is everybody pursuing their own private freedom and and making the economic system work better we've got JP Morgan now about to pay eleven or twelve billion dollars in another settlement for mishandling mortgages we had during the stock option craze where where business leaders were being paid stock options hundreds sometimes a million shares of stock options a year they get paid a stock at a certain price say the price of the company's forty dollars and the idea is you pay them stock and the company does well and the stock price goes up to fifty dollars and they've got a million shares they cash them in and they can make ten million dollars well there are a whole lot of companies that didn't do that the stock actually backed up to thirty five or thirty two or thirty three and the CEO said wait a minute we're not getting our stock option bonuses how about giving us new stock options at twenty eight dollars or twenty two dollars so even though the stock went down and the price for the shareholders was worse the CEOs were doing better there were over eight hundred major American companies including apple and Steve Jobs that artificially manipulated and changed the price this is the nature of an unregulated situation you need somebody watching the store to make sure the game is being played fairly and individuals unfortunately you are unfortunately not only as the cops say does speed kill greed kills greed kills the economy it kills growth and it kills the middle class so counting on this sort of Halcyon picture that you've just painted isn't the way our economy and our society is working in fact so of course it's not working I mean I'm glad you chose the examples that you chose because you've just chosen the most regulated business in the United States where all this happened there is no way there's no business no business more regulated than banking if you want to start a bank you need to get regulatory approval for your business plan your choice of COCO for board of directors investors who invests in you if you're a bank pre 2008 you had five regulatory agencies looking at every piece of paper you produced at JP Morgan today as we speak 129 regulators go to work at JP Morgan that's their full-time job is to regulate JP Morgan they have offices in their corporate headquarters other investment banks are exactly the same Washington Mutual is probably one of the most regulated businesses ever it's basically was an SNL SNL's were the bank was restricted in what it could do how it could do it when it could do it you know it always surprises me why does all the fraud always come to particular industries and and it's because it always comes to those industries that government controls creates perverse incentives and all the bad guys show up to take advantage of the perverse incentives but the perverse incentives are not created by a marketplace this financial crisis could not have happened in a marketplace the SNL crisis could have never happened in a marketplace the only thing that creates these crises are the distortions that government regulations create let's take examples invest in banking invest in banking well why did the CEOs make all these profits and I care about the dine site well because they knew the Fed would bail them out there's too big to fail don't worry be happy take on risk as much as you want basically the Fed Greenspan put they called it basically told investment banks for two decades now take on all the risk you want will bail you out don't worry be happy yeah they took the risks and they took the rewards but these are awards that were created by government bureaucrats by cronyism not by markets five major bank I mean the settlements oh my god you know this is extortion this is this is what Giuliani perfected Spitzer became a master of this and the current Justice Department is capitalizing on that you go to these banks you threaten them with criminal prosecution you threaten them with things you know reams and reams it costs it takes decades to litigate it'll cost billions of dollars to litigate it's much simpler for these banks to write a check and to make it go away it's better for the shareholders that's sort these resolved but the fact that a bank that a bank settles does not mean anything we live in such a horrific judiciary environment today that businessmen constantly, constantly settle even when they know they're innocent because it is nuts to take these kind of things to courts given awards given juries and given the biases that exist in our society you know I could get into if somebody wants to ask about LIBOR I mean LIBOR is such a you know the way they calculated LIBOR to begin with it's London interback borrowing rate and it basically they would call the bankers up and say what do you think what do you think if your bank had to lend money to another bank what would be the interest rate this is not a market derived interest rate this is based on that opinion now during the financial crisis the early days of financial crisis because our mortgage is willing to LIBOR there was enormous political pressure for the banks to keep those rates as low as possible so when when they were made that call what do you think you know the borrowing rate would be to another bank if the bank is at all the truth which was that interest rates were very high because all the bankers were afraid to lend and borrow to each other because of the uncertainty LIBOR would have skyrocketed your mortgage rates would have gone through the roof and the political pressure on them was incredible to keep those rates low so guess what they lied which is bankers do when when politicians tell them you know and we could go on and on with these things you know stock options stock options are one of in my view one of the greatest creations that that American capitalism has created they are terrific instruments that tie the performance of CEOs to shareholders to firm performance and they resulted in in the fact that if you look at CEO pay and its relationship to performance during the period of stock options there was a very very very close relationship between the two if you look at empirical evidence after empirical evidence in the finance literature in the 40s 50s and 60s there was very little relationship between stock market performance and CEO pay in the 80s and 90s there was very strong relationship between CEO pay and market performance that's why shareholders kept voting these stock options in because it was good for the shareholders CEO pay generally this is you know CEO pay generally divided by market value if you take CEO pay divided by the market value the companies they run was higher in the 40s and 50s than it is today the reason CEOs make so much money today because they run companies that are so much more valuable and they run companies that are so much more valuable because they've been so good at it they've been so good at it in terms of creating value if you look at American I'll end with this if you look at American business I mean this was kind of brushed over but remember what the 1970s were like stagflation the American economy was going a tailspin American business was losing market share massively to foreigners we were we were we were we were inefficient unproductive American businesses were worth very little they were conglomerate they were inefficient CEOs didn't make maybe a lot of money cash wise but they enjoyed running a big conglomerate and going to the nice parties what happened with stock options was you got a restructuring of American business the wonder of the hostile takeovers in the 1980s I know you think this is horrible but the so-called junk bonds of the 1980s that was the restructuring of American business and what happened is what went from an inefficient conglomerate structure in the 70s to the most efficient companies in the world during the 1990s and that happened because of things like stock options and financial innovations that produced some of the best companies in the world in this country thank you okay we're gonna we can have a little bit more back and forth I really want to talk about deregulation but just on stock options for a moment the idea actually of paid performance which is what stock options is was was actually first articulated by Michael Jensen an associate professor of Harvard Business School about 15 years later Jensen looked at the market and said it had been so badly manipulated by corporate leaders in which corporate performance actually went down in lots of cases instead of up but they still picked up lots of stock options that Jensen himself called it managerial heroin in other words managers were addicted to it and it wasn't generating what Yaryn just said but let's talk about this idea of the financial markets being the most regulated of all if you go back to 1980 the first thing that got deregulated was the interest rate on first mortgages up until that time there were state usury laws that put a limit on what banks could charge on first mortgages in 1980 the Congress passed a law that deregulated that so we're moving in the direction that Yaryn says we should move in towards deregulation let the businesses do what they want in 1982 under Reagan Congress passed a couple more laws there used to be a regulation in a law that said homeowners had to put down 20% down payment when they bought a home a law was passed that year which allowed a hundred percent financing of homes it's led to a lot of the risky subprime loans that wound up by blowing up on our faces now the argument was that the self-interest of the bankers would protect them from making loans that were unwise and would cause the bank's trouble and would cause the financial system trouble the second thing that was passed in 1982 was regulation that permitted negative amortization which means that your debt can actually grow while you're paying your mortgage off and how you do that is the same way as if you make a minimum payment on your credit card you pay neither the principal nor the interest but part of it and people didn't get that there was also a regulation passed that allowed adjustable rate mortgages this was going to be a freer market now this is the market that Aaron says it's been increasingly regulated I'm sorry all these steps are deregulatory steps being taken across the board for those banks in 1984 congress passed a law which set up the secondary mortgage market which allowed the mortgage banks that originated the mortgages who used to hang on to the mortgages and make their money through the interest payments that people made on their mortgages to sell them off and incentivize them to charge high fees at the initiation and the origination of the mortgages and sell off the risk to somebody in Wall Street Wall Street got a hold of those mortgages began packaging them securitizing them chopping them up in various different packages and selling them to investors around the world then we had a regulator in name only who happened to be a follower of the same philosophy of Aaron Brooke Alan Greenspan and he believed in the market he said free the market don't regulate there may be a hundred and twenty nine guys in there but don't have them do anything and one of his fellow federal reserve board members said in 2004 you know the subprime market is getting out of control there are a whole lot of hundred percent mortgages being issued to people who can't pay them back it's going to blow up in our faces and disturb the financial system maybe we should regulate that Greenspan said no the banks are not going to do anything against their self interest we can trust the free market in 1998 Brooks Lee born who was a chair of the commodity futures trading commission said we better look out for the derivatives market tens of trillions of dollars are being built on these collateralized debt obligations which is what these pools of mortgages were were called and we're building a castle in the sky it's a house of cards we need to regulate it not only did Alan Greenspan say no but Robert Rubin the former chair co-chair of Goldman Sachs from Wall Street said no Wall Street will take care of itself Greenspan said no this will all work out fine trust the banks Kaboom 2000 this is not a highly regulated market this isn't the details may have been regulated down in the interstices but the basic strategies were not being regulated at all the bond rating agencies were not being regulated they were blessing all these these securities that were being sold to investors without actually investigating there was not a good job being done at all and after the market exploded in 2008 our friend Mr. Greenspan was called up to Congress after he'd left the Federal Reserve and was asked to talk about what had happened and in one of those rare public comments Greenspan putting it rather gingerly said I was shocked to find a flaw in my thinking and what he meant and said was my thinking about the free market working fine on its own and you can trust the banks to look out for their own self-interest and he said and these are his words that cast doubt on his deregulatory policies now this is a man who was in office for 20 years and that's what he has to say about what year and Brooke is advocating right now I knew Alan Greenspan would come to bite me Greenspan has now been a follower of my ideology for a long time at least since the mid 1980s when he headed Ronald Wiggins Social Security Commission and by the fact that he took the job at the Federal Reserve suggest a betrayal of these ideas but you know we could go on all night yeah I don't believe there should be a Federal Reserve so and neither did Alan Greenspan in the 1960s he wrote essays about it so about the fact that they shouldn't be a Fed but let's take I'm just going to take two examples because we can do this all night rating agencies I love the rating agency story because it's a it's a fantastic story so the rating agencies Moody's Fitch and S&P the three of them in 1994 Orange County the county that I live in in California went bankrupt a month before the bankruptcy or three weeks before the bankruptcy all three agencies had them rated a triple A remember and Ron went bankrupt in 2001 I think a week before he run when bankrupt all three agencies had the rating a triple A now when you perform that poorly in a market economy what happens to you you lose market share you go out of business you get destroyed three or 88 you just grew and grew and grew us to the path to the point where they were powerful by the way they're still growing why is that and as an economist you have to go and say what's going on here this is a market failure how can these guys how can this happen well it turns out not surprisingly that there are only three rating agencies because the only three rating agencies allowed the SEC allows three rating agencies only those three nobody can compete with them nobody can compete with them you need SEC approval to rate oh but you say if you're a good economist you say but wait a minute but if they're bad why does anybody use them haha Orissa a law passed in the early 1970s another one of Nixon's wonderful laws that says the pension plans and insurance companies when they invest have to invest in securities that are rated by whom by the three rating agencies that the SEC approves so this is a government monopoly created by government held together by government because they have a built-in audience because of Orissa they'll never lose their customers and they just yeah they screw up over and over and over again the market never punishes them because there is no market and this is true throughout this crisis every time you peel another layer there is a government control there is a government regulation there is a government entity that created the incentives to create the problem I found it surprising that you mentioned that the 1980s created the secondary market in mortgages because that's that's just not true the Freddie Fanny May was created in the late 1930s and flourish through the 40s and 50s and 60s and its whole job was to create a secondary market in mortgages that was the purpose of its creation to buy the mortgages from banks in a team courage banks to give out more mortgages this is housing policy government housing policy this is not a free market government housing policy in the 1960s they added Freddie Mac to Fanny May another government entity to do the same thing and they increased their mandate they demanded that they do more of this that they buy up more of these mortgages and indeed you can pinpoint the point in which bank has could not be relied upon anymore to do because when did this crazy mortgages come about you didn't have these mortgages in the 90s even though these laws were passed in the 80s you suddenly got them in 2000s and what happened was that the Clinton administration told Freddie and Fanny you guys have to start getting much more involved in subprime lending and the Bush administration reinforced that you guys need to get to the point where you're in a sense buying up 50% of all these subprime loans and the Freddie and Fanny basically went to the bank and people forget that in the early 2000s Freddie and Fanny books were such disaster that that they had to stop reporting their quarterly earnings they didn't report financial statements they had to be audited there was massive fraud there which nobody's gone to jail for but the government entity so who would go and and the Freddie and Fanny went to the banks and said we'll buy anything you guys produce don't worry mutual watch the mutual don't worry about paperwork don't we'll buy it all we'll securitize it because we have a government mandate that we have to fulfill and we have to live up to talk about pay the people who ran Freddie and Fanny the amount of pay they made and they will run like government entity so that they raised money at the risk-free rate because everybody assumed that they would be bailed out by the government so that the bonds of Freddie and Fanny were like government bonds and indeed of course they were they were bailed out by the government and they are today in receivership run by the government today by the way they buy 95% of all the mortgages in the United States if you think there's a healthy housing market out there that healthy housing market is because basically government guaranteed institution is buying up 95% of all the mortgages what we have today is one of the most perverse economic structures we've ever seen in the West I know that our audience I know that all of you have questions this evening so we're going to open up the mic for audience questions and participation please go ahead okay mr. Smith instead of talking about these specific instances of what you claim a market failure and what Dr. Brooks says is government failure I'd like you to address the one sort of fundamental moral point that Dr. Brooke made in his presentation one of the one of the fundamental moral points which was the notion of inequality being a good sign about the freedom in a society do you do you not accept that and if you don't what what is the right measure what is the right ratio of CEO pay to average worker pay that would be a valid sign of equality well I think that we as a society in America probably accept economic inequality more than almost any other society in the world and I would certainly say that that yarn is right and I share the idea that people who work hard people who invent things people who who organize and run business as well and so forth deserve a higher pay than people who do routine work but I think there is a sense at which it's kind of like obscenity you know you may not be able to define it but you sure can recognize it when you see it we're at that point in the American economy today it's not a mathematical formula what we have is an inequality in America today that is not only unfair to the middle class but destructive to economic growth there are all kinds of economic studies out of the American economy and periods in the American economy of international economies other foreign economies which show that you have a slower growth rate when you have high inequality of incomes and wealth and that you actually have a faster growth for the economy as a whole so it's not when you have the great convergence that I was talking about before there's a historical record there we can see but their economic studies that have done it so what we're finding I don't think this is a moral question I think well actually it's one of the things that interests me about the difference I have with Yarra and he wants to make every issue a moral issue and I don't see them as moral issues I see them as practical issues and this is practically it doesn't make sense to have the kind of inequality we have it's that you know we have an economy that the moment is failing at least 22 million Americans I think if you want to talk about morality I think that's immoral we have 22 million Americans today who want full-time work and can't get it they have full they want full-time work you know about half of them have no jobs about half of them eight or nine million have part-time work and they want full-time work and another four or five million have dropped out of the labor market because they found it futile in fact we have a lower labor market participation than we had before it seems to me that that and you talked about an ethical society earlier year and I think an ethical society a fair society is trying to generate a decent living for all of the people who live in the society and certainly a decent living for the majority of people who live in that society and what Jeremy Bentham called the greatest good for the greatest number in the 19th century and I think we have what we have now has failed but we regard it as successful because when we look at growth we see the growth figures going up when we look at corporate profits over the last four years corporate profits have risen 20.1 percent per year for the last four years while median household income has risen 1.4 percent so the people at the top are profiting enormously we have large corporations that have essentially detached themselves from the American economy that's one of the reasons why we're having trouble finding jobs for Americans to make it work and when you don't have jobs for Americans and and they can't meet their needs it isn't just a matter of meeting their own needs you can't fund school bond issues you can't fund road funding issues in counties in Ohio and Indiana and Illinois and Wisconsin so I think the answer to your question is it's not a moral one it's a practical one you can respond and then we'll go to the next question you know it is a moral issue it's immoral to steal it's immoral to take things from people it's immoral to cause people to do things they don't want and it's a practical problem because the fact is I believe that morality is practical and what's practical turns out to be more it is a practical issue yes 22 million Americans can't find a job why because a government regulations and because a government redistribution of wealth the idea of the correlation between inequality and and and economic activity is absurd there is no relationship between the two economic growth is associated with economic freedom it is not associated with any particular rate of inequality and indeed the inequality numbers that you've heard are not true there's a recent Cornell paper there's looked at the original numbers and and as as as looked at them properly has taken out the biases has corrected for things like the changes in households and what constitutes a household and shows that the middle class you know I'm not I'm not saying this is good middle-class incomes have grown since 1978 by 20% that's a good enough it should be much greater and yes the top 1% has grown much more than that but why because they've managed to leverage their skill and their ability because of technology because of globalization to a greater extent good for them we're all benefiting from that fact we're all much better for that fact so if you want if you want practicality we can create 22 million jobs tomorrow tomorrow this is easy stuff all we have to do is do away with Obamacare Dodd Frank saw Bains oxley if you massively deregulate the economy as we did don't forget that the late 1970s so massive unemployment in the United States the highest unemployment since the Great Depression how did we get rid of that unemployment by all that evil deregulation that that that caught out Jimmy Carter started it actually Ford started it Jimmy Carter started it and and it Reagan got involved in that's what created the jobs that tax decreases and they ink then the decreases in regulation so we know how to create jobs free up the economy reduce regulations and get the Fed to stop manipulating the money supply to stop manipulating interest rates to stop preventing banks from lending money the biggest problem we have today is that economically is that banks are not lending money because a they're not allowed to and be there incentivize not to because the Fed is paying them an interest on the reserves that they hold at the Fed so the Fed is printing money and then storing it at the Fed so nobody can use it it's the most bizarre economic policy that anybody has ever invented and it's true but Anki is running an unprecedented experiment that is bound to lead to disaster almost nobody thinks this can be successful in the end now I want to say that I want to say for the I want to say for the first time tonight I really agree with year and the Fed is running a totally bizarre policy it is loaning money to the banks at virtually zero percent and then letting the banks loan money back to the federal government at two or three percent no but I mean it's utterly ridiculous all right now let's get it the problem the problem is not the problem is not government regulation holding back excuse me you had your shot all right the next question yeah well capital major corporations are sitting on two trillion dollars of capital they can invest it in company and not investing in the regulation no it's not the regulations at all the moderator demand intercedes next question a couple things about your book mr. Smith I noticed that your book is filled with attacks on rightists right wingers hardcore right wingers hard writers hard members of the right but there's no no no references to leftists or that is to say hard leftists or left wingers in your book I guess they don't exist from your standpoint is that also there's that sleazy slimy reference to the tea party's racist motivation shame on you for that I'd like to ask you okay we're going to keep it this question given your desire to meet up we're going to keep this civil I think I'm going to pass on your question thank you you don't want to ask my question thank you may ask a question professor professor may I ask a question professor cop no what next question thank you hi this mess question is for dr. Brooke dr. Brooke when when Einran was alive she spoke out of against communism and other collectivist ideologies if she were alive today in your opinion would what would she be speaking out against as far as the philosophy permeating through our society and I'd just like to throw out a suggestion of this kind of utopian egalitarianism that that might be out there but I just want to know you know what what should what would she be speaking out against the philosophy that's driving society today I mean it's an unfair question because I don't know what she'd be speaking out against she was a I think she was a genius I'm not and I don't try to predict what she would be but but in terms of the major philosophical threats to America today I think they're fundamentally two one from the left and one from the right from the left it's Rawlsian egalitarianism yes it's John Rawls from here of Harvard I think is a major threat and probably the most influential political theorists and philosopher of the unfortunately of the 20th century has a profound impact on the way people think about the world and is a real threat to freedom and to and to individual liberty in the world today and I think many of the policies many of the the horrific policies of both Republicans and Democrats over the last you know of the last 20 years have been influenced by by Rawls ideas the whole debate about inequality this debate wouldn't have happened if not if I think if not for Rawls on the right I think she would be decrying the the the rise of a religiosity that is that is intolerant that is militant and that is oppressive and I think she would be condemning those two as the major threats to American liberty both an individual level and as a society would you like to respond thank you thank you freedom is a great thing shouldn't be the role of government to ensure that people are free from want free from deprivation free from freezing shouldn't be the role of government to ensure that people are free from breathing contaminated air and drinking contaminated water and that other species are free from extinction in harm and cruelty there are many dimensions to freedom out there other than simply an abstraction for corporations and other rich individuals to do as a police she nets to me both my answer is no I mean no it's not the government's job to take care of endangered species it's not the government's job to protect us from freedom from wants it's not the government's job to protect us from freedom for anything indeed the fact that the government is doing that is a direct repudiation of the founding principles of this country your right to life is a right to you to live your life as you see fit not as a government see fit not as your neighbor sees fit not as anybody else sees fit but as you see fit and you could fail at that life and it's not the government's job your failure all whites mean is a protection of your life from the use of force by your neighbor that's all rights mean when you talk about freedom from want what does that mean that means the fact that you want something means that you have a right to take it from me I say no you don't have that right you know we understand this in interpersonal relationships the fact that you have a desire for an iPhone doesn't mean that you have a right to steal mine but somehow we think that if we all vote for it it's okay for all of us to vote to take my money and give it to you so you can buy an iPhone that there is no there is no there is no difference between stealing as an interpersonal thing or stealing through democracy it is still stealing and we understand this by the way about freedom of speech we don't say you know 51% of us don't like what you want says so we're gonna vote him silenced in speech we understand that that's an absolute right that I can speak whatever but my property that's not absolutely right you you feel completely free to get together with your neighbors and vote me my property away from me and take it away from you to fulfill your wants or your whatever desires you happen to have that to me is theft and that to me is coercion and that to me is the opposite of what government is supposed to do you don't have a freedom to take my stuff you don't have a right to my things okay a theory of government Mr. Smith we're gonna let we're gonna let Mr. Smith thank you we're gonna let Mr. Smith respond okay I just like to go to something fairly basic here and you talk about individuals as though they're they're free atoms floating around in the sky without ever colliding with each other and so we can all exercise our freedom without ever having any impact on each other when this audience arrived here tonight and when it leaves here tonight most people are going to get in cars they're going to drive down the street on the right hand side of the road they're going to stop at traffic lights they're going to observe red lights they're either going to turn right or not turn right if there's an arrow or whether or not it's permitted when they get further out they're going to obey speed limits of one kind or another and there and then we go on and we have a whole bunch of rules that say you can't drink when you're driving you can't use drugs when you're driving you can't speed you can't switch lanes this is impinging on your right in your freedom okay in a very basic sense I mean if you wanted to drive any way you wanted to if you wanted to live any way you wanted to if you could drive economically anywhere you wanted to you can't because when you do that you start to impinge on the freedom of other people to be able to do that we live in a community we're not atomized individuals and you're articulating again and again a philosophy that feels like it comes from 18th century rural America where there was plenty of room for anybody to live any way they wanted to we don't live in that kind of society today we live in an enormously compact and complex society when the freedom of of the CEO of a major company who wants to pursue that policy and the people who get together at the business roundtable begin to impact the way that the whole economy operates and the 22 million people who don't have jobs today that they want don't have the freedom to get them if one or two of them or two or three thousand of them get them they will knock other people out of the jobs the system the environment does not provide them the freedom to do what you say everybody ought to want to do so we live in a society in which we have already in lots of major ways in lots of minor ways accepted limitations on ourselves simply to be able to live together there are enormous benefits for us to live in concentrated societies you can have companies that mass produce cell phones or cars or insurance or even get a number of people to a crazy debate like this one tonight you know and we I think I think what I when I hear you the a priori assumptions that lie behind the philosophy you're articulating assume a reality which simply doesn't correspond to the reality that we live in today and therefore I there are all kinds of regulations and sacrifices and give and take that are involved in the community and you make it all sound like it's dictatorship it's not I've lived in a dictatorship and you've come close to living in a dictatorship I know what that feels like this is very different this is negotiated and yes there is a power struggle there's a back and forth there's a pulling and doing and throwing but you know if you go back and look at the founding fathers you know Washington Jefferson Hamilton they believed in government subsidies to build the Erie Canal Washington talks about the need for domestic manufacturers for the United States to be able to stand up to the British the government was involved in these things right with the founders it's not as if they had this genius idea of its free individuals and we don't get involved at all I mean I it feels to me as though that you what you're talking about is mythical it's nice but it's mythical it's desirable sounds great but it's mythical it's not the real world we live in nothing about this is atomistic I believe in in complex societies I just believe that complexity should not it's too important to be left to the government I believe in individuals pursuing their own self-interest through trade and not through coercion and it is coercive it's not Soviet Union granted it's not even the socialism of Israel but the fact is that people are taking my money every paycheck to buy themselves a conditioning or to buy themselves whatever and they have no right to it it's still theft and there's nothing in my system that prevents the complexity and the roads and the system all you all the rule is you can't put place other people physical risk you can't commit fraud you can't commit crimes crimes in terms of physical force people get along great under those circumstances and I'm glad you find it at least appealing theoretically that's that's good oh that that that was really not a nice cut question so I would like if you guys could talk about your ideas on class mobility a little more I had a climate Steve Horowitz come to Suffolk and he discussed how if you take for example you know women's wages you're saying there's a 40% gap you factor out choices like they're more likely have part-time they're more likely to go into social degrees and get that type of work then the wage gap actually goes down about 2% and it's been decreasing over the years and so I'm just thinking that when we have choices yes we might have different results but that's good that we have those choices and so I just wonder what your opinion is I have to tell you I didn't quite get the point of your question forgive me I'm not I just wanted to talk about class mobility do you think that we have in America and if it's excellent question very important question you know I think one of the things that made me the proudest of America as I was growing up was that we were the land of opportunity that the opportunity for people to rise from the bottom to the top the ratio Alger story was an American story that we read about in our history and it was it was inspiring and the ability of people to move from the bottom to the middle and then from the middle to the top was important what sadly has happened over the last three or four decades is that we've lost the title of land of opportunity we are no longer the country the advanced economy in which it is the easiest to move from the bottom to the top or the middle to the top or the bottom to the middle there are all kinds of studies out that show that if you live in Germany or you live in France or you live in Denmark or Sweden or Finland or Norway or Canada or Australia that it is easier to move from the bottom up to the middle and from the middle up to the top now I think that's going back to Yaron's basic values the opportunity of the individual to live to their fullest potential is terribly important I agree with that absolutely and there are all kinds of built-in disadvantages and there are all kinds of built-in advantages the kids who were born to wealthy parents get all kinds of after-school training all kinds of additional education outside of the classroom that's not available to a lot of middle-class kids and certainly not to poor kids their studies out that show that we probably have 30,000 of the most talented high school graduates in the country who are not going to college because they have no idea that there's any path for them to get there the market doesn't make it available first of all the market doesn't inform them that it's within their potential and secondly the market doesn't make it available this notion that the market somehow perfectly produces solutions for everybody or options not even solutions options for everybody is a myth it's simply not reality in America today and I wish we could get back to the land of opportunity that we once were so we are going to agree on the importance of mobility of the ability of people to rise up and to change and the fact is I mean look the studies all over the map about this about how far America sunk and how relative it is to other countries this this it's not as clear-cut as that but there's no question mobility across wealth standards has declined in America has declined dramatically in America and there's no question in my mind the reason for that is a lack of economic freedom over regulation over taxation over government control you can see economic study after economic study that show the correlation between economic freedom and mobility you know when the greatest mobility in human history was the greatest wealth mobility in human history was during the 19th century in America when there were very few regulations very few taxes very few controls and it was a regular phenomena from short sleeves to short sleeve right in in two generations people would make huge amounts of wealth lose huge amounts of wealth most of the so-called robber barons they're very much so called started out with nothing there would do it poor whether it's Rockefeller Carnegie that would do it poor and yet they succeeded and and there's evidence to suggest that that still happens in America if you look at that if you look at the Forbes 400 more or fewer of the Forbes 400 today inherited their wealth than 20 or 30 years ago most of the wealth the real big wealth a point zero zero one percent is made is created entrepreneurially it's not inherited most of the kids who do that come from middle-class families not from wealthy families and some still come from very poor families so yes we need we need a mobility what we need to have mobility is economic freedom we need capitalism capitalism creates in every time that it's tried free markets create and capitalism I mean unregulated markets free of government force those markets create many many more jobs than are then there are people every experiment in history shows us this is why America so such such mass immigration into America during the 19th century because we created so many jobs look at Hong Kong fishing village to seven and a half million people because they have a free economy that generates huge quantities of jobs and people keep coming in even America today even America today if you opened up the borders people would come in and find jobs it's sad that Americans won't do the job those jobs themselves it's sad that some of those 22 million people won't go and pick apples in Oregon and the apples rot on the trees because nobody will pick them so there's also the fact that our social programs today paid people so much that in certain states it's a lot more than the minimum wage so why go get a job okay this is we have time for one last question and then we're going to go to closing remarks so you're on okay so this is for Yaren it's a multi-parter so one thing that I would like to hear more about is one of the biggest issues I see which is government power over our money so for you over our money so what is the proper funding of a legitimate government in a rights protecting society in other words how would a valid government and all those operations be funded can you talk about the benefits of that system and what a transition would look like what would be the challenges and solutions in 20 seconds so look I believe in a government that is about 80% to 90% smaller than the government that we have today during the 19th century the US government spent somewhere between three to four put aside wars three to four percent of GDP we're spending right now 22% of GDP and that's just at the federal level if you count state and local government the United States today is spending about 42% of GDP government entity is spending about 42 percent of GDP Sweden that everybody calls the model of socialism spends like two or three points more of GDP in terms of government expenditures so we're Sweden we're not that different from Sweden anymore in terms of the size of government so if you shrink it by 90% if you shrink it back to three four five percent of GDP it's gonna be easy to fund I mean you can think of multiple different ways to fund it but look the interesting question is how do we get there not what happens when we get there what happens when we get there is going to be easy to solve because it's going to be such a wealthy society and such a small government that it'll be easy to fund and how we get there is you need principles you need a moral vision you need a moral vision for what you're fighting for you need to start unwinding the state the state you know started with the the ruling classes that control it including it to me the number one issue is cronyism the number one issue that can be dealt with quickly and easy now this is my my only political suggestion tonight this is my suggestion to the republican party or the democrats democrats can pick this up as well as as the number one plaque that they should do and of course neither party will do this they should commit and actually execute on this I'm driving all subsidies to business to zero within the first hundred days of the new administration zero those subsidies to oil companies that'll satisfy the left no subsidies to cylindra no subsidies to banks zero subsidies now I would also encourage them then to massively deregulate but zero subsidies let's see them just do that get government get business out of the business of government and a government out of the business of business so step one stop subsidy step two start deregulating that should be simple right it's impossible republicans just passed a three hundred billion dollar form bill every republican voted for this that basically gives three hundred billion dollars of subsidies manipulating the markets and farming and we know how well that works it's it's it's already a disaster and it's it's always been a disaster so look getting there is about shrinking the government and to shrink the government what you need is to change the moral code that people believe in as long as people believe that you know it is the job of the government to provide for people's wants as long as people believe that they are their brothers keeper and that is their main moral responsibilities to take care of the brother we will have big government we need a morality of individualism and government will shrink as a consequence oh we're gonna conclude you want to you're you're welcome to respond and then we can conclude just go ahead okay all right then we have our our closing remarks now uh and and i'm i'm happy to let either of you go first mr brook want to show i felt like i just gave them uh so did i so did i it was a nice setup question having been in a number of political events i sort of recognized the setup question would you tell us what your philosophy is mr mr brook could you tell us what your philosophy is thank you very much i mean so let me let me feed off of that question yeah i mean i i think that uh you know my political philosophy is ultimately derived from my my belief in morality and in my moral philosophy uh my moral philosophy is a philosophy of individualism it is my view that individuals moral purpose in life is the achievement of his own life the achievement of the best life that he can achieve for himself that means being rational that means thinking long term that means being honest and having integrity and dealing with other people as if their life was an end in itself not just your life was an end in itself uh it means not sacrificing to other people but not expecting other people to sacrifice to you it means living an independent rational long-term existence for yourself for your own happiness and that involves intense social relationships because one of the most self-interested things in the world is love friendship you get enormous spiritual values for those and of course in economics i believe that the main way in which we deal with each other is the same way as in ethics through trade through value for value propositions that's what we do and should do in all our human relationships we don't expect shouldn't expect people to sacrifice for us in uh in in our personal lives we shouldn't expect people to sacrifice for us in economic lives and we shouldn't expect people to sacrifice for us in our political lives politics should be limited to questions regarding coercion because again government is forced that's what it is no matter how you slice it when you vote you're voting about how is government going to use its gun and on whom i want government to use its gun only on the bad guys and here i define bad guys as criminals who are violating other people's rights i.e using force using force or fraud to violate other people's you know individual life and as long as people don't do that and as long as people are not engaged in fraudulent or forceful activities government should leave them alone that all i'm asking really is in a society in which government leads us on you can do whatever you want as a as a group you can get together and start a commune i don't think believer government should have should be capitalist or socialist or anything i just think government should be there to protect us and let us live our lives you want to go found the kibbutz horrible idea they're awful i've i've i've been on them disasters but if you want to go found one and you can find other people who voluntarily go with you go do it you want to go do try other some other kind of social experiment go do it i just want to be left free to pursue my life i want you to be left free to pursue your life our values might be the same our values might be different as long as they don't clash as long as i don't stick my hand into your pocket and take your stuff or as long as you don't you don't try to defraud me government has no role in the relationship between you and me and if that relationship is commercial doesn't matter it doesn't have any business in our love relationship in our friendship you know tell that to conservatives right but it shouldn't have any relationship with it without without relationship without friendship and it shouldn't have any relationship without commercial relationships it should leave us alone that's what freedom means freedom means being left alone free of what free of coercion and in the modern setting the primary course is government so what you want is a moral code of individualism and the only political system that respects that moral code is a system of capitalism a system of free markets a system of limited government but what i would say is that over the last 30 or 40 years the basic trend has been in the direction from the new deal in the direction that yarnbrook would like us to go the basic direction of policy public policy has been articulated by people like Alan Greenspan and Bob Rubin and others towards laissez-faire economics towards trusting the market market values market success the market test has become the far more prevalent yardstick used in most Washington policy discussions during my years down there as a reporter so i i see a different world and a different trend obviously than yarnbrook sees in terms of what's happened and what disturbs me about that is the very morality that yarnbrook would like to see guiding human behavior is going in the wrong direction I believe that American capitalism today is more immoral than it was 30 or 40 years ago partly because wealth is less shared certainly because business leaders see much less of a connection and an obligation and a responsibility first of all to their employees but also also to their shareholders to their owners if you've got 850 corporations in which the CEO and the board of directors are manipulating, cheating, and lying about the date that stock options were being issued in the name of shareholder capitalism you've got a basic moral flaw at the heart of the system and that's just one of a number of that's just one of a number of indicators that it seems to me that that indicate to us that our capitalist system which I happen to support I'm not a socialist I support capitalism I've lived under communism I've seen it it's going off track and it's going off track and one of the measures of it is the inequality one of the measures of it is the concentration of power to suggest for a moment that Kentucky hosiery goes and negotiates with $350 billion a year Walmart to sell its socks and there's sort of an equal each party is free to pursue its fulfillment in the same way is ignoring the enormous leverage that the Walmart has to suggest that the first time buyer and homeowner who walks into a Washington mutual and gets told what he can do or she can do in order to get a mortgage loan and in fact the mortgage broker is giving them a bad loan misleading them about the terms of the loan but guiding them through the process to suggest that they're each one equally able to live and fulfill their ability to enjoy life liberty and the pursuit of happiness is to ignore power realities power realities affect the way people can behave and the examples that I cited about the banks manipulating LIBOR and I don't believe for a moment they were just thinking about it casually and what's your rate going to be they were looking intensely closely at what the 0.001% would do to the hedge funds CDOs that they were going to dump on the market the next day they were looking at very practical terms the same thing as two of those the mortgage agreements JP Morgan has now signed an agreement in which it admits it did wrong the banks are not signing off on those big agreements because it's just cheaper and easier not to fight the government they did something wrong and they know they did something wrong and that that is there's a pervasive loss of ethics there's a pervasive loss of trust in our society that is largely reflective of the greed push in the economy I'm pushed just to go back to one simple statement that was uttered about a century ago by a very wise man Lewis Brandeis who was an advisor to President Wilson and what he was suggesting was that concentrated economic power is the greatest threat to our democracy concentrated economic power in the private sector we Americans are always against concentrated power what strikes me about Jaron's comments tonight is he's only interested in the concentrated power of government power yes it is coercive and there are lots of times when government oversteps but concentrated economic power also limits the free choices of lots of people throughout our economy and throughout our society and what Lewis and what Lewis Brandeis said you should take home with you tonight and judging by the way this audience has responded I suspect there are a bunch of you who didn't come to hear this and won't go away taking this away but I'm going to say it anyway I got 25 Twitters from the Ayn Rand Foundation to be sure to show up at this meeting tonight so I've got an idea who's here and why some of the questions were asked the way they were asked but let's set that aside and remember what Brandeis said Brandeis said very simply we must make a choice we can either have democracy or we can have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few but we can't have both Ladies and gentlemen that is right where we are in America today and if you want to buy Jaron's argument you're going to get greater concentration of wealth he loves inequality and it's going to hurt the country in the end and it's going to hurt our civilization we're going to go into decline if we pursue that line