 So, good morning everybody. To my talk today which is titled, Objectivism is Radical. I could have just called it A is A because it should be kind of obvious. Well, of course, Objectivism is Radical. What does Radical mean? It means departing from what Dr. Gatte talked about yesterday, the conventional, the common, the prevalent out there. It's fundamentally different from all of that. Well, we know Objectivism is, so why have a talk on Objectivism being Radical to Objectivists? Because I think it's important for us to remember that it's Radical. And to remember how it's Radical and what ways it's Radical. And this is particularly true as we start engaging more broadly with the world out there. It is particularly true as we engage more and more with tea party groups, with libertarian groups, as we seek allies in different areas to launch campaigns and different issues. It's really important that we hold in our minds how Objectivism is Radical and radically different even from our allies. Now, I'm going to say a lot of things today that are going to differentiate us from some of those allies. Now, none of that is meant to suggest that we wouldn't want to cooperate with certain people on certain projects. That we wouldn't want to work on certain issues with people who have similar views. But I want to emphasize the differences. So think about this talk as emphasizing how Objectivism is Radical but radically different than others. Now, the first way in which Objectivism is Radical is that we take philosophy seriously. Now, that's pretty radical in the world we live in. We take philosophy seriously. Everything that shapes our positions on issues, our lives is grounded in a philosophical understanding of the world, in a philosophical approach to life and to issues. Nobody else out there in the world takes philosophy seriously like we do. So we don't just have positions. We have positions grounded in fundamental ideas and philosophical ideas. And that is extremely unique because nobody out there, including on the left and in the middle and on the right, they don't have a system of philosophy that they can reference, that they can take seriously, that they can extrapolate in a sense form specific positions. Now, I am not a philosopher at all. So I'm not going to spend time here explaining to you why Objectivism qua philosophy is different than other philosophies. It's not what I'm going to try to do here today. What I want to do is take some applications of philosophy, some policy applications of philosophy and show how we're different. That we might sometimes appear to come to the same conclusions as others, but that our conclusions are different. They're grounded in a different way. And even the conclusion itself is fundamentally different. So I'm going to cover some policy issues and show the differences on those. And I just want to remind you, because I'm going to try to ground all these policy issues and really, you know, three ideas and objectives and three fundamental principles and objectives. You know, there's again a whole philosophy behind these that I want you to think about while we're talking about these specifics. We're the only ones out there. Really the only ones out there take reason seriously. Reason and object, and objectivity seriously. And we'll see how that plays out. We're the only ones who believe in self interest. I mean, being selfish, being egoistic and everything that that implies. And because of those first two, we have a unique view of the role of government as protecting individual rights. We believe in government. We believe government is a necessary good. Not a necessary evil as some people, as many people suggest out there in the culture, but a necessary good. And those are three unique philosophical ideas that I'm going to use to talk about three specific policy issues and try to talk about and going to talk about those as radical. But there's another aspect to the fact that we're philosophical and that we're radical. And the other aspect is that that makes it hard. Figuring out what position to take on any particular policy issue out there is hard. It's not easy. It's not self evident. And that's what you see on some of these issues. Robust discussion among objectivists who disagree. Because it's not obvious what the answer is going to be. And I'm going to present at least one of these. I'm going to, well, just one. I'm going to present you what I don't have an answer to. I don't know what the answer is. I mean, you guys might, but I don't. So three issues. We're going to talk about capitalism, particularly capitalism and charity. We're going to talk about gun control or gun rights. And we're going to talk about war. Three areas that we can examine from an objectivist perspective and see how we align, but primarily how we're different than others. Okay, so let's start with capitalism. How do most people, and Dr. Gatte already alluded to this yesterday, how do most people defend? Who defend capitalism? Defend it. Well, it's almost always from some type of utilitarian perspective. It's almost always from the perspective of, well, capitalism is good for everybody. Or capitalism is good for most people. Greatest happiness for the greatest number. Or in a kind of a new spin that I've encountered over the last year, but actually a spin that's growing in dominance among certain libertarians. It's something called bleeding heart libertarians. And if you go, bleedingheartlibertarian.com, I think it is. It's a fascinating site. I mean, you chuckle, but it's actually interesting because these libertarians are actually quite philosophical about this and they take, they're among those who take philosophy seriously in applying, it's the wrong philosophy in my view, but they take it seriously. And their view is we should judge the morality of capitalism based on how it deals with the poor, with the weakest in society. So in their view, capitalism is good. Capitalism is moral because the really, really, really poor do well under capitalism, relatively speaking. It's the best system. It's the best system for the really, really, really poor. So if you rank all the systems based on how the really, really, really poor do, capitalism does best. So that's the foundation. Now the problem is that there's a certain plausibility to all of these. Right? I mean, think about what capitalism has done in human history. In a span of, you know, 100 years from 1800 to 1900 adjunct poverty of subsistence farming was pretty much eradicated from the West. People, by the end of the 19th century, had electricity. I mean, can't we say, look, everybody benefits from capitalism because who doesn't benefit from electricity? Everybody benefits from electricity. It seems kind of obvious that everybody does. Everybody is better off for all the wealth creation that was created during the 19th century. Everybody, who's not? Well, you should read some of the people who wrote in the late 19th century, who hates electricity, who hates capitalism, who hate their increase in standard of living, who hate the fact that their life expectancy is longer. You have to have a standard to determine that everybody is better off. By our standard of human life, yes, but not by their standard. Many of them were miserable because they had the wrong standard. So you read about, I mean, read Marx, right? Marx rails about capitalism. He doesn't say capitalism doesn't increase standard of living. He doesn't say capitalism isn't electricity isn't good materially, but he says it causes alienation. It causes unhappiness. It causes us to be miserable. All this materialism, I mean, this is in Marx, but some of the commentators, all this materialism is bad for the soul. So it's not good for us. I mean, many people were unhappy because of capitalism. It's part of why the intellectuals, who are wiling against capitalism during that period, gain strength and gain momentum and why systematically we've moved away from capitalism. Because most people don't see it as good for them. They see it indeed as bad for them. And indeed, as Dr. Cutte mentioned yesterday, for some of it is bad. If they have the wrong standards, if the standard is power, or if the standard is control, or if the standard is being the witch doctor, then are they better off when there's freedom, when reason reigns, when capitalism is thriving? So there's some possibility to this argument, but it's not right. It's not true. Not everybody is better off under capitalism. Not if you understand what better off means. So do we care? I mean, as objectivists, do we care how the worst off do under capitalism? Is that the standard? Do we care how most people do under capitalism? Is that the standard? Which group do we care about? Do we care about how the wealthy do under capitalism? Is that the standard? Which collective do you want to choose to care about today? What do we care about? What do we care about? Who do we care about in terms of capitalism? What is, who is capitalism good for? It's good for a particular type of individual. What kind of individual is it good for? The virtuous individual, the rational individual, the productive individual, the honest, the independent, the individual that is virtuous. Capitalism is a system that is just, and what does that mean that it's just? It means it rewards whom? Virtue. But the flip side of justice is what? It's rewarding some. It's penalizing others. Who gets penalized under capitalism? Who's worse off under capitalism? Those who are not virtuous, those who are not productive, those who are not rational, those who are dishonest, they do worse under capitalism. You know, now you can, and this is why they object to it. So we're not, we don't support capitalism because it produces the goods. We support capitalism because it's a moral system, and why is it a moral system? It's a moral system because it is a system that is consistent with virtue. It's a system of virtue. Now again, note that nobody else can say this. Nobody else can talk about capitalism and virtue and the relationship between the two. I mean, for a Christian conservative, capitalism might produce the goods, but what is the relationship between capitalism and virtue for them? It's an antagonistic relationship because the essence of virtue is selflessness. It's sacrifice. It's not creating, producing, building. It's not being selfish. It's not being egoistic. It's being the opposite. So they're inherently in conflict with capitalism constantly. They have to be because the system is antagonistic to their moral code. So they can't talk about capitalism in terms of the morality, and that's why they'll never, they'll never advocate for real as if they're capitalism. I mean, look at the, at the best spokesman out there for kind of the traditional conservative view of capitalism. You know, Arthur Brooks from, from AEI, I don't know if you may have fully thought, but Arthur Brooks cannot give up on the concept of a safety net. He cannot say there will be no regulations on the capitalism. He cannot advocate for complete separation of state from economics. His altruism, his moral code cannot allow him to do that. He holds on. He latches on. And the bleeding heart libertarians, many of them at the end of the day will say, look, the fate of the poor is more important than, than non-corrosion. And if we have to cause some people to help the poor, so be it because morality trumps everything else. So they cannot retain the view of capitalism, of the complete separation. So our position in ethics, the fact that we have full selfishness, the fact that we have full egoism, the fact that we fall promoting our own lives radically makes us different than anybody else out there. And it makes our focus different. Our focus is on good people. Our focus is on productive people. Our focus is on virtuous people. It's not on everybody. But what about the poor? Right? Because that's always the first question you ever get in every lecture on capitalism, to almost any group. And that indicates to what extent altruism is so deeply ingrained in almost any audience. The first thing that crosses their mind is not, wow, isn't this cool? All the production and wealth that's going to be created in capitalism. Aren't we all, you know, it's going to be so much, my life is going to be so much better because of this. Their first thought goes to, oh, but what about the other, as Dr. Gattay talked about, right? What about them? Not what about me? How I'm going to pursue my values? This is going to be really cool for me. But what about the poor? How are we going to deal with the poor? Well, my answer is which poor? Are the poor or one uniform group? There's a false premise here. What happens to the virtuous poor? The poor, productive, or honest, or rational, or whatever ability they have under capitalism? What happens to them? They work. Nobody needs to take care of them. They work. They create. They build. They take care of themselves. They're capable of it. They have the freedom to do it. Right? Says they immediately, in their minds, in this altruistic, collectivistic mindset, there's this group that has to be taken care of. And under capitalism, we still have to take care of them. And what are we going to do? But clearly, the ones that are productive are going to take care of themselves. Well, what about the ones who don't want to be productive? You know, what happens under capitalism to the lazy drunk who doesn't want to go to work? What happens? They suffer. They have a lousy life. They might starve. But it is your responsibility to take care of them? Is it your more responsibility to take care of them if they've chosen this life? Is that what charity is for? No. What about those who can't take care of themselves? Right? There's this whole category, right? People who really can't take care of themselves. Well, maybe that's what charity is for. There's families. There are other ways in which to take care of them. But then there's charity. But how many people like that are there in any given society? I mean, it's a tiny little quantity of people. To make that your primary worry about what will happen under capitalism? What will be the big issue? How do we take care of this tiny of smallest minorities that can't really take care of themselves? To make that your obsession is absurd. And yet, so many people obsess just by that question. I don't know what charity is going to look like under capitalism. I don't think history is a good guide here. Because we've always lived in societies dominated by altruism. I suspect charity will be very discriminating. It will discriminate between those that deserve charity and those that don't deserve charity. And it will be discriminating based on virtue and based on, to some extent, you know, the justice of it, right? Some people, it's unjust to help. If two is in trouble, how many of you are jumping to help him? Right? He's an evil guy. If bad stuff happens to him, that's justice. So I suspect that in a free capitalist world, charity will look very different than it looks today. It will be more discriminating. The charity for kind of people who can't will be much more discriminating. Charity will be a lot more focused on creating values like hospitals and children and things like that. But it's not a big issue, and it wouldn't be a big issue, because it wouldn't be needed. It wouldn't be that important. What's important is what? Production, creation, building, living life. So, of getting caught up in this, oh no, everybody will be taken care of under capitalism, don't worry, everybody's going to live a better life. Charity will give to everybody. Nobody's going to worse off, because we're all nice. We're nice, we've been evident, but that's why we're discriminating, and that's why we're just. So note two, if the virtuous are the ones who gain the most, if you will, are the ones who gain in capitalism, who are the ones who suffer the most from the next economy? Who are the ones who suffer the most from statism? It is the virtuous. Statism is about penalizing virtue. It's the productive, it's the creative, it's the entrepreneurs, it's the businessmen. One of the reasons objectivists are so passionate about defending business and businessmen, in spite of the cronyism and the problems with kind of the mixed premises that many businessmen have, is the fact that we recognize the inherent virtue that is production, that is creation, that is building up wealth. Nobody else can do that. Nobody else sees that, nobody else is focused on what is what is virtue and what it means in the context of business. So again, that is one of those aspects that makes us unique in our approach to capitalism, to business, to the world out there. The mixed economy's biggest victims are those of us who are ambitious, whether we're poor, whether we're middle class, whether we're wealthy. It's ambition that the mixed economy and statism destroy. It's entrepreneurship, it's creation. That's what they destroy. That's what we should be fighting against. We should be fighting for the ambitious poor, the ambitious middle class, the ambitious rich, the virtuous, the good guys. And we need to hold in our minds that they're good guys and they're bad guys. Capitalism is for the good guys. So we have a unique view of egoism. We have a unique view of virtue. Virtue is objective. Virtue is not whatever people feel like it's going to be, what they want it to be. Virtue is objective. As a consequence, that leads us to a radical view about capitalism. Not just radical in terms of the culture, but radical in terms of other people who claim to be defenders of free markets. We frame the question differently. We frame it in terms of ethics. We frame it in terms of the particular virtues. We don't frame it in terms of all or groups or collectives. We have a commitment to individualism. Objectivism has a commitment to individualism that I don't think anybody else can even fan them. It's not possible for them to even comprehend often what we're even talking about. And when you talk to many of these free market defenders, it's very hard for them to even comprehend the idea of the importance that we place on virtue and ethics. It's a capitalism. Now let's move on to a topic that I don't have a definitive answer for you on, but I want to give you a flavor of the way I think about it. The way I approach it. And that's the issue of guns, gun rights. Now this is a controversial topic among objectivists. It's divergent points of view. And Ein Rand was not very, did not talk much about this. In a few Q and A's, what she says about it is that it's complicated. That you need the philosophy of law to engage it. And I basically agree with her, but I want to give you kind of an outline of how I think about this issue. And let me put it in a bit of a personal terms. Because I grew up in a gun culture. I grew up in a culture of guns. When I was growing up, there was a automatic rifle in the closet. I grew up in Israel. And my father was in the reserves, as everybody in Israel is. And there was always, I can't remember what type of rifle, but there was a rifle in the closet. When I was 16, I was in the Scouts, right? I was a scout leader. And we would go hiking. And I used to lead this group of 13 or 14 year olds. And we used to go hiking in the Golan Heights and in the Galilee. And we used to carry rifles at 16. We were trained in high school to shoot. And we would take rifles because in those days, it happened on a number of occasions that groups of kids were kidnapped by terrorists and killed. So if you went hiking with a group of kids, you took a rifle even if you were 16. As many of you know, I served in the Israeli military. I shot a lot of different rifles, a lot of different guns, big ones, small ones. I blown stuff up. Big blowing up stuff. There's nothing quite like the thrill of being a gunner in a tank, charging down with targets in front of you, shooting two big machine guns from the sides and firing that cannon. It's scary. It is scary. Because what I learned from that experience, from all of those experiences, is that guns are for killing people. And I don't like killing people. I don't. I don't like guns. And I know many of you do, but I don't like them. I find them, you know, you need them in emergencies. You need them to protect yourselves. But I don't want to live in a culture. I would rather not live in a culture in which I needed a gun in order to protect myself on a daily basis. It's not a culture I want to live in. Guns kill people. That's their purpose. That's the culture I grew up in. Now, I know that in America, there's a different culture. There's a culture where guns are used for hunting and guns are used for other purposes for shop shooting and so on. But, and I understand that. But again, my context is I don't want to, if I could live without seeing a gun, I'd be happy because I'd feel safe. That's what I want to feel safe without having to carry a gun. That's the kind of culture I want to live in. So what are the issues around this? I mean, it's not about what I think about guns or my preference. But why is it that I want to live without a gun? Because I still want self-defense. I still want the protection that a gun gives you. I don't want people robbing me. I don't want people threatening my life. But what is it that we do in civilization? What does it mean when we have government to protect our rights? What does that concept mean? It means we've delegated our right to self-defense to somebody else. We've delegated our right to self-defense to government. That's what it means that the government has a monopoly over the use of retaliatory force. It means that they are now responsible for defending me. And I can now, if they're doing a competent job, I can now not have to carry a gun in order to defend myself. I've delegated that to somebody else to do. And I like that because government brings objectivity to the issue. It brings professionalism to the question. They specialize in it. It's what they're there to do. It's the one thing, one thing that government's supposed to do, right? It's to protect our rights. They're the pros. I want to live in society where they do such a good job that I never fear for my life. That I've delegated that right. They have it. That they take care of defending me. Now, you will argue, right, that there are cases where the government just can't show up, right? It's going to take them too long. And I still have a right to defend myself. And that is true. So one issue to consider is, do you have a right to have a gun for those emergency situations? Where somebody's breaking into the house and by the time the police come, it's too late. And you want to have a gun to protect yourself at that point. That's an issue to be considered. What kind of guns are self-defense weapons in that context for that particular emergency? Does the government then have some role in knowing that you have a gun, registration, what type of gun? Is that something we would want them to know about? I would because if my gun got stolen, I'd like them to be able to track it. If it was used in a crime, I'd like to know about that. But those are kind of issues we'd have to think about, right? Is gun registration legit or isn't it legit? In the context again of the government has this monopoly over the use of retaliatory force, the government is responsible for our self-defense. We've delegated them the right to do this. Now, again, this is a perspective on this that's uniquely objectivist. This idea that we're delegating a right to government. That government has, that there's this importance to objective law. That it's important that they have this objective standards by which to evaluate issues of crime and what is self-defense and what is a coup as a criminal, all that stuff. The way we view government and the importance we place on government, right? A necessary good is very unique to objectivists. It doesn't exist out there. So we've got this issue of self-defense. It's not clear to me what the right answer here is, right? It's not obvious to me where the right balance is between this clearly unique role of government and my right to defend myself in those emergencies. But then there's another layer of complexity onto this. And this is a layer that the founders kind of made real to us. The second amendment is not really about self-defense. It's about the right to revolt. It's about the right to stand up against government and declare one's independence and revolt against the government to defend oneself against one's own government. Is there a right to revolution? Right? Is there a right to overthrow your own government? Well, the founder certainly thought so. That's what the Declaration of Independence is all about. It articulates exactly right that. It articulates when, right, when they found it necessary to revolt against their government. But then you have to ask the question, well, what does that mean in the modern context? Well, what does that mean today for us to declare a revolution against the government? I mean, they have a professional army with F-15s, nuclear bombs, massive weapons. Does that mean we should be able to have those kind of weapons so that we can revolt against them? Well, that doesn't make any sense. Those weapons shouldn't be held in private hands. That's just a recipe for anarchy and a recipe for disaster. So does that even have a role in thinking about gun rights in the modern context, this idea of standing up to one's own government? What would happen if I shot the tax man when he came to collect the taxes? I mean, we all know what would happen. By the way, that's why they have withholding. Can you imagine if you actually showed up? It actually is why they have withholding. In a meaningful sense, they're hiding the taxes away from you. They're hiding the tax man from you so you don't actually perceptually experience writing a check to the government and handing it to somebody with a gun forcing you to pay it. But what would it mean? I mean, and if we are about to declare revolution, if that is really the path that we think is most productive, do we care what the government thinks about us collecting guns? Wouldn't we be buying them on the black market and hiding them anyway? Wouldn't we amassing weapons anyway? So again, I don't know. I clearly don't think we should be owning F-15s and tanks. I have sympathy for the idea that we should hold some guns for self-defense and emergencies. Where's the line? I don't know. I don't know where that line is. But these are the kind of things one needs to think about when thinking about these issues. Thinking about the role of government. Thinking about what rights are involved. Thinking about the realism of this idea of revolution in a modern era that we live in today. Thinking about what it means as we approach a world in which we're even considering revolution. Now, I have to tell you that for the first time in my life, over the last couple of years, I've considered buying a gun. Now I consider that failure. Not my failure, but the culture's failure. It's failed me. I came to this country to avoid guns. Now I'm thinking of buying a big one, right? And I know how to use it. I've been trained. But that to me is depressing. A culture where people think they need guns to protect themselves from criminals or from their own government is not a healthy culture because their government is doing something that causes them to fear it and because criminals are so rampant that they fear that the government won't protect them from them. I worry if an earthquake happens in California and riots start out and, you know, who knows in the culture we live in what violence can lead to, right? That's not a good sign. So again, we take a different way of approaching this question. It's not an issue of, well, why shouldn't I be able to own a tank, right? I paid for it. Somebody's willing to sell it. It's a voluntary transaction, right? It's not an issue of, well, it's in the Constitution therefore it's true, right? It's an issue of figuring out what is right. What is true? What is really, what rights are really at stake here? So again, I think we're radical. We're radical in the way we think about it. Maybe not in the conclusion here, although I didn't give you a conclusion because I don't have a clear one. I still think this requires some expertise and somebody needs to really think this through. But we're radical in the way we approach it and the issues we see as relevant. Okay, let's get to the third one. War. Now I know this will come as a shock to you, particularly coming from me because I've spoken a lot about war, right? I've written a lot about war. But objectivism as a philosophy is the most. Anti-war philosophy ever, ever. Ein Rand is the only philosophy to actually articulate a reasoned defense of the anti, of being anti-coercion, of anti the initiation of force. We have a whole philosophical reasoning why using force on others, initiating force on others is wrong. It's evil. War is about destruction. War is about killing. War is about net losses on every front. War is evil and bad. And we who value human life more than anybody else, who value production and creation and building, hate should hate war in every respect. This is not something we want to engage in. Now again, I'll make this a little personal. I particularly hate war. And those of you who know me know that of all the issues that I'm asked questions about, this is the one I get the most angry about. Because I know war. I know what it's like. And I despise it. So when I was six, right, when I was six, we were living in England, in London. And the six-day war broke out in Israel. And my dad got on a plane and left us for weeks. He was gone because he volunteered to go and fight in the six-day war. Not luckily for us by the time he got there. He was over. He was that short. But as a six-year-old kid, you don't know that. Your dad just went to war and you don't know. He was about shooting and killing, right? When I was 12, we were sitting in synagogue, just picture me in a synagogue, right? On Yom Kippur. As uniform personnel are walking in and calling people out and people are leaving. And it looks really weird because this never happens. And then the air raid siren goes off. And you go into an air raid shelter. And my dad runs home because he's going to be called up. Was remember 73, right? And by the time we get home, he's in uniform and he's on his way out. And this is a real war. I don't know how many of you know about the 73 war, but Israel came this close to losing that one. By the end of that day, I was 12. I had a one week old sister and we lived in an apartment complex. By the end of that day, I was the oldest male in the apartment complex because all the males had gone to war. This is real, right? During that war, which lasted weeks. It did not last six days. You could sit at your window and see cars come up, military cars come up. And this happened more than once. And a male and female soldier would walk out with flowers. And now you would watch where they went. Whose child, whose husband, whose father had died. This is personal. When I was 18, I joined the Israeli Army. I was drafted. So I know a little bit about a draft as well. So I spent time in the military. I shot those big guns, right? But my wife and I, we used to target terrorist homes, weapons depots, facilities where they, where they, you know, trained. And we used to hand those to the Air Force. And the next day we'd get aerial photographs that were devalued and we devalued whether those buildings were destroyed. So we target them. I don't know how many people we killed, but we killed a lot. We destroyed a lot of buildings. I was in Beirut in 1982. And, you know, Israel won that war. This is a war in Lebanon. But to see a city like Beirut, this is a thriving, a city that was a thriving city was because Paris of the Middle East had tall buildings, had an active nightlife. This city was destroyed. It was destroyed. Whole floors were wiped out, buildings that collapsed, mansions were in rubbles. I mean, this is not fun. This is tragic. This is awful. So, objectivism, I mean, and by the way, we'd be called, I'd be called a bloodthirsty, you know, war-mongering maniac, right? By some. We hate war. We don't believe like Paul Krugman believes the war creates economic activity. We know the world destroys economic activity. And think about Ayn Rand, who also experienced war firsthand. Ayn Rand was against U.S. involvement in World War I. Now, that's an easy one because anybody who's for U.S. involvement in World War I is nuts. I mean, but Ayn Rand was against U.S. involvement in World War II. Ayn Rand was against Korea. She was against Vietnam. We were against the First Gulf War, Bosnia, Kosovo, Syria, Libya, any of these. We're against war unless what? Unless it's in self-defense. Unless somebody attacks us or threatens us. So, then the question is, what constitutes self-defense? You know, now, again, I've written a lot about this so you can find it, but note the distinction here. We're against war because of our values. We're for a war of self-defense. Now, let's differentiate that. First differentiated from the pacifist or against all wars. But there are many people who claim not to be pacifist, but really are because they hide. So, I would consider Ron Paul a pacifist, even though he says that he would fight in self-defense. But every time there's occasion of self-defense, he blames America for it and says we shouldn't fight in it. In other words, he's a pacifist who knows that pacifism is unacceptable politically, so he hides behind such a high threshold of self-defense that it's completely impractical and impossible. On the other hand, you have the conservatives or the neocons. Who for them, war is a tonic. War builds character. You know, I was reading a speech by Patton, by the general Patton, who I admire much about Patton, and some of the stuff in the speech is phenomenal. But Patton says in the speech things like war builds character. War is great. War is when a nation is really tested. This is about real virtue is when we go to war. And this is very much, there's a thinking among conservatives in particular that war is this, you know, you're a man when you go and fight in the battlefield. I don't think it's me. That's fine. So, the conservatives want war. Statists want war. If you want to, if you want to see how statism and war work, re-dine rands the roots of war. We re-redine rands the roots of war. It's a brilliant asset. And it shows that war, I'm fine. I think so. Once in a while it comes and then it goes. That war is fundamentally a status activity. It's a zero sum mentality. It's the idea of using war to accumulate resources as if resources are what produce wealth, not the human mind, not freedom. So, their whole perspective on war is a distorted one, an evil one, a statist one, a collectivistic one. It's statism and collectivist. And unfortunately, many conservatives are statists. And certainly the neocons are statists. And they want us to go to war at every opportunity. They want us to go to Somalia. They want us to go to Kosovo. Now they want us to go to Syria. They wanted us to go to Libya. They love this stuff. And the liberals of course are right with them because they're statists too. And Krugman thinks that if we blow up a few buildings, GDP will go up. It's true. And GDP will go up because GDP is a silly measure. So given all this anti-war, right, what constitutes self-defense? Well, clearly if somebody attacks you, then you need to defend yourself. But let me use two examples to illustrate this. 1979, November 4th, it's funny because I remember their date because it's a date I was enlisted in the Israeli army. But it is also the date in which the Iranians took the U.S. embassy into Iran and held Americans hostage for 444 days. Now that is an act of war. That is an act of war. There should have been no hesitation. No hesitation in terms of robust military action to free them and to penalize those who perpetrated it. And I ran about a year later in a Q&A says the fact that we did not respond immediately, we will pay for for decades. Guess what? We're still paying for it. The killing of Americans all over the world. That's an act of war. They require action. They require self-defense. Iran has been engaged in that for the last 30 years. 9-11, if ever there was an act of war, that is an act of war. Now it's not easy to figure out who attacked us. Who is responsible? How do you respond? Who do you attack? All of those are complex issues which I have dealt with elsewhere and you can read about them and listen to the lectures that I've given about all of that analysis. But it requires a response. It requires dealing with the threat. It requires military action. This is war. And this is what government is for. And this is what we should be advocating for. But then the question is what kind of response? Is this an opportunity now to take over the Middle East and reshape it in the form of democracy? Is this an opportunity to overthrow a two-bit dictator in the Middle East and build them sewers and build them schools and all while four or five thousand Americans die in the process? No, this is an opportunity to identify the culprits, to identify the people who spiritually and financially support the bastards who flew those planes into the buildings and annihilate them and annihilate them. However you want to interpret that word. The job of self-defense, the job of the military is to destroy the enemy and return to peaceful existence. It's not to save anybody. It's not to spare anybody. It's not to help anybody. It's not to bring them democracy. We are egoists. We care about us. The job of the American government is the protection of Americans, the individual rights of Americans. That is their only concern. So the way to think about war is you gotta achieve victory quickly, cheaply, and with as few casualties to yourself as possible. Now, what tactics that involve, what weapons that requires, that is a different question. That is from military experts. But the standard must be. The standard must be victory, quick, cheap, with the fewest lives possible. Now, that is radical. Monts Bout, who was a conservative who used to write regularly on the Wall Street Journal, once wrote in a book, he was describing Kosovo. And in Kosovo, Clinton was criticized because he would send airplanes in and they would bomb from afar and then they would leave. And Marx both criticizes this because he says, it's not fair, it's not just, it's not right that we don't put our troops in danger. That's what kind of war is this, where we keep our people safe and we just destroy the enemy. Now, there's a question whether there was an enemy and all that stuff, you know, put all that aside. But that's the mentality. My mentality is you have, you can win a war from the air and never risk it. One American soldier, do it. That's a tactical question of what is required to actually win. So, you know, we agonized after 1911 to figure out who the targets were, what was right. For example, war in Iraq, you know, everybody, we all said it was the wrong war, but should we still support it because it's better than nothing, is it better than nothing, given how they're going to execute it. And we said how it should be executed and they muddled it. But, you know, some objectivist and many outside of objectivism supported it. Supported the way it was fought. I mean, there were even arguments among conservatives, but even among, you know, some aligned with objectivism. You know, what's the big deal? Only 4,000 Americans died. And only 4,000 Americans died. And how can you conceive a human life in terms of only? How is this a numbers game? This is a game of principle. It's not a game of numbers only. I mean, every one of those 4,000s had a life. His life was an end to itself. The fact that they joined the military doesn't forfeit their right for their rights to be protected. It's still the government's responsibility to protect their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They're not cannon fodder because they joined the military. They've got a job to do, but that doesn't mean their lives expendable. But that's the attitude. The attitude during Iraq, by those who supported what was going on in Iraq, was that American lives are expendable for what? For some grander purpose, reshaping the Middle East. What we're seeing today, how that reshaping is going. You can ask me about Egypt in one of the Q and A's. So it's outrageous, outrageous to send American troops into battle with the kind of, you know, kind of rules of engagement that they've received in Iraq. It is criminal. I mean, I'll tell you now, and I know a lot of objectives are going to hate me for this. I voted for Kerry in 2004. And I'm proud that I voted for Kerry in 2004, because I take this stuff seriously. And for George Bush, the San American troops, and I know Kerry would have done the same thing, but somebody had a penalized Bush. For George Bush, the San American troops into battle with their arms tied behind their backs, with blindfolds on, to be killed and slaughtered is treason, is unforgivable. And that's what he did. You just ask Marines of Fort in Iraq. Helicopters were required to approach their targets up close to be able to clearly identify that they were military targets and not civilian targets. I don't know if you know anything about helicopter warfare, but helicopters hide behind a hill. They rise up or some barrier, they rise up, they shoot this stuff and they hide. What happens when they have to get close? They rise up and they get, and what happens when they do that? They're completely exposed and they get shot down. And what happens when they get shot down? People die. Americans die. The people who are supposed to be defending die. That's wrong. That's evil. That's unforgivable. And we as objectivists should not tolerate stuff like that. Now, I'll just say a word about the innocence on the other side, because I know that always comes up. What about the innocence on the other side? And they're all innocence on the other side. I'm not going to pretend that they're not. They're children. They're people who have nothing to do with this. And they die. And they get killed. There's no question about it. But their blood is on the hands of the people who initiated. Their blood is not on the hands of those who are defending themselves. Once you never kill people gratuitously, you kill in order to win. You kill those that are necessary in order to achieve victory. This is how I see how to think about whether you think you should support a war or not. This is the standard. Make it personal, right? I think, I think from Dr. Garte's talk yesterday, it's important to make values personal. So we should engage in wars where we're willing to fight in them. If you're willing to volunteer to go fight, or if you were young, you would volunteer to go fight, that's a war you should encourage your government to participate in. And I make it even more personal, because there's something even more personal than making it about you. If you can look your son or daughter in the eye and recommend to them that they should go fight in the war, then that's a war worth fighting. But if you're going to tell your son and daughter, don't fight, then you have no right to demand that other people's kids go fight, that other human beings go fight for you. That's the standard by which we should evaluate which wars we should go into and which we shouldn't. And then think about how do you want your kids to fight in that war? Do you want your kids to place the values, their lives, of the enemy ahead of their own lives? How do you want to fight that war if you're on the trenches over there? Do you want to put the lives of others ahead of your own life? And the answer should be no unequivocally. Subjectivism is anti-war, radically so. We don't believe in wars of humanitarian aid. We don't believe in wars of bringing democracy. We don't believe in intervening in other people's problems. But if there's a war, if somebody attacks us, if somebody legitimately threatens us, then our responsibility is to defend ourselves and we should do everything to achieve that goal. We are radicals. We're not conventional. We're not conventional about capitalism. Our defense of capitalism is not conventional. Our support for capitalism is not conventional. We don't think about problems in conventional ways. It's challenging to figure out an objective's position on X because we have a whole philosophy we have to consider. We're not conventional about our approach to self-defense, to war, how to engage it, and when to engage it. And most importantly, we're not conventional about living. You know, we have this amazing tool at our disposal. We have this philosophy, a philosophy for life, a philosophy for living, a philosophy for happiness, for success, for prosperity. It's about values. It's about embracing values. It's about living your life to the fullest. Don't waste it. Live it. And what does that mean? What does it require to say to live objectivism? It means think. It means reason. Figure out what your values are. Embrace your values. Enjoy your values. Be passionate about them. Seek them. Experiment. Go out there and search the world for the things that you love that you cannot be lost in. Now I need a new mind. Says Ankar said yesterday, we need to avoid being conventional. We need to embrace what this philosophy has to offer us. We need to be first-handed in that embrace. We need to figure out what is really right, or you need to figure out what is really right for you. What are your values? Objectively, rationally, and live them. Live them to the fullest. You got one, one attempt at this. You got one shot at this. There's nothing worse than a wasted life. Right? So go out and look, and it's hard because we live in this mixed culture of mediocrity and misshapes and just mediocre values. So you have to, you know, this isn't going to come easy. It's going to be a challenge. It's hard work. You know, being selfish, I tell all the audience I just talked to. Being selfish is hard work. It requires diligence and thought and evaluation and reevaluation. Rethinking what you really believe and what your values really are. But it's fun. It's exciting. It's an adventure. Embrace it. Thank you all. You mentioned the 4,000 dead from our current wars, and 150 years ago, of course, was the Battle of Gettysburg, 50,000 dead and wounded. Those kinds of numbers have always struck me as just being floating abstractions. And I don't have a question. This is more of a comment. In his Civil War documentary, Ken Burns gave an excellent concretization of what the Battle of Gettysburg meant. The wagon train carrying the wounded from the south back down to Virginia was 17 miles long. At its narrowest point, the Maryland panhandle was only 25 miles thick. So I offer that more as a comment, as a concretization that maybe in a future talk you might find useful or others who think about war might find useful. And thank you for that. It's hard to really talk about how awful war is and what that's like. I mean, not just as the wagon trail 17 miles long, but can you imagine the condition of the wounded bumping along those trails? I mean, it's just, I mean, rather not think about it, right? Unless you have to because you're facing a war. So you had mentioned that Einran was opposed to the United States entry into World War Two. Yes. And I was wondering if that included opposition in the Pacific Theater after Pearl Harbor? No. So once, I mean, my understanding is, and maybe somebody who knows more about Einran's position could tell us, my understanding is that no, once Pearl Harbor hits, you have to go to war. So you have to, you have to engage. She did, though, think that, in a sense, Pearl Harbor was avoidable. And that was, it was FDR's policies that led to Pearl Harbor. Now, I don't have an opinion on that. I'm not an expert on World War Two. I'm not sure I agree with Einran about World War Two, you know, just broadly. I'm not sure. I'm always hesitant to challenge Einran because she's a genius. I'm not. But I don't know if I agree on this one, because you have to be first handed about this. You know, I think the threat was such that we would have had to enter it at some point in any case. But she makes the case that the Russians and the Germans would have killed each other off. And that's, that is a, you know, that's a viable position to have. One issue that I've been surprised about with respect to our fellow travelers, conservatives and Tea Party people, is Edward Snowden, who disclosed the NSA and, you know, the prison programs and the Verizon phone records, et cetera. They have been vehement some of them and calling him a traitor. Then there's been a number of left-leaning libertarians that call him a hero. What do you think objectivists uniquely bring to the table in terms of calling him either a traitor or a hero? What do you think? Well, I mean, on the scale of traitor and hero, I lean more towards the hero side than the traitor side. But I'm not quite willing to call him a hero because I'm skeptical about his motives still. You know, particularly given his association with countries like Ecuador and Venezuela and so on. And certain things that he said, people have said about him and then is associated with WikiLeaks, which I think is fundamentally nihilistic. The WikiLeaks motivation is fundamentally nihilistic. I do think what he did was heroic in that sense, in a sense. So it's hard to separate the action from the person. I do think they have to be whistleblowers. Our government in many respects is out of control. And the number of secrets that our government has is astronomical. And our government is our servant. It's there to do our bidding. The default should always be to disclose. If it wants to hold something secret, it has to convince us that it's necessary and essential to be secret. And this one, I don't understand why it's secret at all. I mean, okay, so the terrorists don't know we're bugging their phones. Is this a surprise to any terrorist? So I think he's a whistleblower. I think he's a whistleblower that got alarmed by something that the government was doing, that it shouldn't be doing. I think the whole process of the secret court that makes these decisions, the whole idea of the Patriot Act, I think is horrific. And you have to remember the context here. The context here is that we're at war with a group of barbarians who basically live in caves. This war should be over, and if anybody wants to be, you know, this war should be over in three weeks, max. So instead of actually fighting the war, and it's actually engaging in the enemy and identifying him and willing to, we're spying on Americans. Let's monitor everybody's conversations and everybody's web and everybody's this. And it's not an issue what they're going to do to me about this. This is not what the government should do. This is wrong. And I also worry about what they will do with it because look what they did, just what the IRS is doing is public information. It's now selecting based on our political view who to go after and who not to go after. Well, when they get more information, they'll just use more information to go after us. And does anybody here guarantee that they've never broken a law? That they're not doing, I mean, particularly in the financial environment with Dodd-Frank and all this stuff, is anybody here trade who thinks they're not on some edge somewhere? I mean, all kinds of stuff. The world, the world we live in today, the rules and regulations are so subjective. They're so arbitrary. They're so all-encompassing that I don't want to be monitored. I mean, it's wrong in any case for them to monitor, but certainly not in the world to give extra power to the government today isn't sanity in my view because they're going to abuse it. They have a gun, they will use the gun. There's no principled restriction on the ability to use the gun today. So I'm very opposed to the NSA program. I'm opposed to the whole Patriot Act. I mean, if you had a war, if you defined a war, you defined an enemy and defined victory, then for the period of the war, certain things need to be done. I don't know what those things are. You could define them at the time in order to protect Americans from terrorists. But then when it's over, it's gone, right? There's no definition of war. There's no enemy defined. There's no articulation of victory. This stuff will never go away, ever. They're going to keep going. And of course the Democrats and Republicans are united. Anytime, generally a principle, anytime Republicans and Democrats agree on something, run for your life. Because it means all the status to agree on something. So it must be bad. Just a quick follow-up on the hero label. We've got a lot of questions. Okay. I'm sorry. Is it a motive issue or is it seeing how the timeline plays out and what we learn about what he's done? I think it's both. I'm concerned about motive. And I'm not sure I should be, but I'm concerned about motive because I fear that he's a nihilist like Wikipedia. I hope he's not, but I fear he is. Like Wikileaks. Not Wikipedia. No. I'd like to understand more about the self-defense concept in the context of North Korea, who has explicitly stated they want to attack America. So all you guys want to talk about is war, huh? I can't get excited about North Korea. I mean, I don't think they're a threat. I don't think they could even launch a missile. I think it would drop in the Pacific. I don't think they're serious. I mean, I don't think they're serious. I think it's all posture. Look, they're communists. Communists are not suicidal. I mean, they're suicidal in a deep, deep sense, but they're not suicidal in a kind of an existential sense. They don't want to die. And they know they'll get annihilated. So I just don't see them as a threat. You know, they will, if we just stop giving them food, they would collapse. If the West just stopped helping them, they would collapse. So I'm not if I was a South Korean, I would worry. I mean, I think the South Korean should worry because I could see a war between South and North Korea as an act of desperation by the North. But I don't think we have anything to fear. And it's a question of whether we should be defending South Korea. I don't see why we should be. They don't want us. And I don't see why we need to be there. Two quick things not about war. I'd like a little clarification about the sense in which Ellsworth Tooie is better off understatism. And let me ask it this way. If he's better off understatism, why isn't he then morally justified in advocating statism in that case? And then the second thing just let me throw in totally different. Harder issue than the three you talked about. A quick comment. Open immigration. So that coming. Well, of course, Ellsworth Tooie is not better understatism because there is no better for Ellsworth Tooie. Ellsworth Tooie is a pathetic human being no matter what system he's under. But he's not better undercapitalism. He doesn't do better. Now to the extent that he lusts power, he won't get it undercapitalism and he won't get it understatism. But that's not makes him objectively better. It's not that he's going to be happy. It's just that those things that he lusts, power, destroying the able, that he can do understatism. He can achieve his pseudo values. He can't achieve them undercapitalism. He dies undercapitalism. And we let him die undercapitalism is my point. So yeah, I mean, you're right technically. And maybe I could have been clear on that. Oh, open immigration. Yeah, one of one of those one of those issues. So I'm generally, you know, so let's start with the with the end game. Under Lazarus capitalism, immigration should be open in my view. And this is an issue of rights. It's an issue of individual rights. And it's an issue of the individual rights of Americans. I have a right as an American to employ anybody I want to. I should have a right to take my van and drive down to Mexico and load it up with whoever I want and bring them into the United States to work in my factory. It's mine. What role of government? Where's the protection of individual rights in stopping me from doing that? The government has no role in dictating to me who I employ. Now, I would argue that you do need as you enter into the United States, since the government does have a role, it needs to monitor at least how many people are coming in and the fact that they're not dangerous in a sense of terrorists, criminals, infectious diseases, you know, Ellis Island, basically, right. But other than that, the government has no role here to play. It's if I own a hotel and I invite people to come here, what role is it a government to tell them? Oh, no, you need a visa. You need some official document to make sure I mean, who's rights are they protecting by doing that? If I own land on the border and I invite my neighbors over from the other side of the border, I don't see where the role of government plays in any of this in a free market. So we don't have a free market. We have a mixed economy. I don't see these rights still hold. I don't see that these rights go away because we're in a mixed economy. Now, I understand that they're concerns, but let's deal with the concerns. So one concern is the welfare state. You know, people come here and they mooch off of us, right? Well, don't give them welfare. Bandits. I mean, I don't think we should give it off to anybody, right? That's easy. So let's fight against the welfare state across the board. And if you want to start with immigrants, fine, start with no, no welfare for people who come across the board. Then there's the issue of, you know, broadly stated the issue of culture. The problem with culture is multiculturalism. The problem with culture today is Americans. We're losing the culture war. We're the ones who have the problems. We're the ones who have the bad philosophy. Yeah, people are coming in here with bad philosophy as well. We're starting it, right? Let's fight multiculturalism. Let's teach American values. Let's teach them to be proud of what it means to be in America. Let's go back to the model of the late 19th century of a melting pot. You know, and that doesn't exist today anyway, right? We undercut it over and over again at every opportunity. We undercut the idea of the superiority of American values, the superiority of the American system of government, and the idea of a melting pot. You know, then there's the issue of then become citizens at voting. And look, I think citizenship is a separate issue. I generally believe, and again, this is, I think, up for dispute among objectivists, and that's fine, I generally believe it should be easy to come into the country and really, really, really hard to become a citizen. And really, really, really hard to vote. I don't think voting, you know, has to be uniform for everybody equally the same. How you do it exactly and all that is complicated. I don't have the answer exactly. But citizenship should be really hard. Today, it's the opposite. It's almost impossible to come here to work, and it's like that to become a citizen. I mean, I did it, right? I became a citizen in 03. And you go and you can, you can swear allegiance to the flag in any language you want. And, you know, as you're making the oath, they translate it for you. George Bush comes up on screen. Another reason I hate the guy. He comes up on screen when I'm coming to become a US citizen, and he tells me to embrace the culture from which I came and to teach my children all about it. And I'm going, why did I come here then? I want you to tell me that. So I think right now, I mean, I would be happy if we could just get something like that says anybody who can get a job in the United States can come in for their job. They don't have to become a citizen. They come in, they do the work. You know, immigration, we, immigration should be far greater by any parameter that we have today than it is today. There's huge shortages, quite economics, the huge shortages right now, where employers can't find employees in spite of the unemployment. They don't pick apples in Oregon, right? The apple growers in Oregon are the victims of our immigration policy. That's what we should be fighting for. I mean, forget about the Mexicans for a minute. Let's think about the Oregon farm growers, Americans, who've built a family business, who want to grow apples and they can't find employees. So the apples rot on the trees. Well, think about American tech companies that can't find enough engineers. And it's expensive to go to China. And it's hard. And in their business, the two rates are a consequence. I mean, I've been told, I'm not an expert on this, that there are hundreds of thousands of openings for engineers in Silicon Valley. And many of those jobs from China would come back if they were just people that are higher. So I'm for more immigration. And as the end, with the end being open immigration. Hello. I wanted to ask a question about the objectivist position that you stated on gun rights. I feel like I ran commonly said that if you found a contradiction, that maybe you should check your premises. One of the premises I think should be checked is the concept that when we delegate authority, that we give up that power ourselves. So my view of the gun rights issue is that as free people, yes, we created a government and one of the duties of government is to defend our rights, including our right to life. And that the police and armies are extensions of that right. However, we did not give up that right to defend our own persons, our own property. And the fact that we were allowed to own guns is an extension of that same right. We have the right to protect ourselves. So I recognize the fact that you have a right to protect yourself in the case of an emergency, in the case of somebody breaking in or case of somebody attacking you in the street, you have a right to own a weapon to protect yourself. There's a big question about what weapon and again registration and things like that. But you have delegated the right to the government to chase after the criminal, to catch him, to try him, to determine what justice is, what objective evidence is, what objective, what a real trial is you don't get to chase the guy down the street and shoot him. Now if he's in your house and he's attacking you, shoot him, absolutely. So I don't think there's a conflict there. You still have a right to protect your personhood when it's being directly attacked. And you should, I think my position is you should be able to own a gun in order to do that. But this still opens a lot of questions as to what guns and all this other stuff, which I don't have an answer to. Yes. Curious about your position on Egypt, which you mentioned in the talk. Oh, Egypt is just the coolest, right? Because everything that's happening there is just, I mean, it's a tragedy, but it's kind of cool because of the way it's playing out just makes so much sense. So first, you know, George Bush comes out with a forward strategy for freedom. The mission of the United States foreign policy is to bring democracy to the Middle East. So first, we have to recognize the fact that George Bush's vision has come to reality. He got what he wanted. Democracy is in the Middle East. And who do they vote for? The worst of the worst. Exactly, by the way, who we predicted they would vote for, nobody believed us at the time. They voted for the Muslim Brotherhood, the fountainhead of al-Qaeda, the ideological root of militant totalitarian Islam. They voted them into power. So, democratically, I mean, these guys got 49% of the vote and they formed a little coalition and the president won by 51.5%. And now, you know, Americans have a problem, right? Because they're for democracy, but these guys, they don't really like them. So what do they do about it? Right? So they're supporting Morsi. We're giving them, we're giving them billions of dollars and then the better elements in Egyptian society, to some extent, and the hungry elements in Egyptian society, the millions, rise up against Morsi. And the military, who always had power in Egypt, who always controlled things in Egypt, deposed them, right, just a few days ago. Now, what do you do if you're a conventional Democrat or Republican? You believe in democracy, right? So you have to support the bastard they just got rid of. They have to support Morsi because he won an election. But you can't support him too much because he's a bad guy. And you have no way to go with it. You kind of, and you're seeing them, all the convoluted attempts of not just Obama administration, watch Republicans as well, try to somehow justify supporting the military or supporting Morsi. And they can't make heads and tails of the whole thing, right? You know, there's no positive outcome that's going to come about here. There are only two outcomes that are possible in Egypt, in my view, in the short run. And I think one's more likely than the other. One is essentially a military dictatorship, which is what they had under Mubarak and Nasser and so on, which is basically the military will control the thing. They'll hunt down the Muslim Brotherhood leadership, which they've been doing since the 1920s from the beginning of the Muslim Brotherhood. They've been persecuting them. They'll hunt them down. They'll kill them or they'll imprison them. And they'll just rule over them or they'll ban them from an election. They'll pretend there's democracy. And they'll have some kind of government. But basically, it will be military rule over Egypt. And the alternative is that you'll see even more millions rise up against the military now. And ultimately, Egypt will become even more Islamic. Now, if I had to think long-term, which of those two are more likely, long-term, it's Islam as to who will win, because they're the more consistent. Because even the military, sanctions religion, even the military plays up to religion. They're talking to this extremist religious party as part of this coalition, the God rid of Morsi. They're even worse than the Muslim Brotherhood. So in my view, you know, unless, you know, the West wakes up and we start articulating our values, why do we expect Egyptians to do it? I mean, and I have a huge amount of respect for their bravery and their courage standing up for these people. I mean, going out into those squares, marching against an Islamist, marching against democracy in a sense. That is huge. And again, this is where we're pretty unconventional, right? We're pretty radical. We're not for democracy. We're not for a majority rule. So I have no problem saying I was Morsi, even though he was elected by 51%. He's a bad guy. He's a rights-violating authoritarian, even though he was elected. That doesn't give him right to violate other people's rights. So, you know, I think, unfortunately, that the trend in the Middle East is what it is. And the trend in the Middle East right now is towards militant, totalitarian Islam. It's across the entire region, from Morocco to Turkey. And, you know, I don't see anything changes because I don't see any cultural, philosophical change happening. Now, I hope I'm wrong. I hope liberals in a positive sense in Egypt are much stronger than they think they are and that I think they are, and that they will be victorious in this battle. I just think the odds are very, very low. I was really glad to see that your talk was on how objectivism is radical, because I feel like I have a hard time communicating that. A lot of the people I talk to are libertarians and Tea Partiers. Like, I've given a few speeches and stuff, but I find that a lot of times they're agreeing with me. They're smiling and they're nodding at me, like, when I'm giving the speech. And I just sometimes I want to go up to them and shake them and say, no, you don't agree with me. You're not going to go, you're not going to go home and question your Catholicism or whatever it is. You're not going to go home and tell your friends, look, we need to base our Tea Party beliefs on selfishness. You're not, I just have a really hard time basically being, for lack of a better word, angry about, angry enough about it, or combative enough about it to actually change people's minds, but I also don't want to turn them off to it. Do you have any suggestions for that, that alternative, that terrible alternative? Well, I mean, look, it depends what your goal is. Is your goal in life to turn everybody into an objectivist? I mean, mine isn't. If it is, then you need to go whip them into shape, and you're probably going to fail, because most of them are too old to change, you know, and they're too stuck in their ways already to change. Is your goal to make them better, to move them along a path that will lead to a better world for all of us, including them, then help them become better, then move them in those areas where you can move them, move them towards our ideas, towards rationality, towards reason, towards self-interest, knowing that they might never embrace the totality, but anything they embrace is better than not, than better than zero. Now, that's not true if you're committed to objectivism, if you're committed to objectivity, you're committed to a system, you're committed to the aspects of objectivism, every piece of it. But we're never going to have everybody being an objectivist, or I don't know if we'll ever have most people become objectivists. But if it resonates with them, if they're moved by it, if they can become better human beings, if they're going to vote better in the next election, those are all good things. Those are all things we need to move them along. If they help us fight against X, or if they help us fight against something else, that is good, because it moves us in the right direction. We are not going to go from a world where nobody's an objectivist to everybody's an objectivist. There are phases, there is a path, and that path is messy, that path is not simple. I'm not suggesting, please don't take the talk today, as me telling you to go out there and insist in front of everybody that they have to be 100% objectivist, or you will have nothing to do with them. And it's sticking in their face every opportunity you have. Don't do that. It's not going to help your cause. You need to remember it. This is for you, not for you to go out there and try to convince the tea party guy that he doesn't believe in God. It's not. I mean, if he's young enough, you know, start that process, but also be careful how you do it. You've got to do it in a way that's going to engage, that's going to convince, not in a way that's going to turn off. But think about why you're participating in their event, you're participating, why you're talking to the people you're talking to, what is your motive, what is the context? The talk today was for us to remember that we're radical, for us to remember what objectivism is about, for objectivists to be better objectivists. That's the purpose. I'm out of time. Thank you all.