 Before that I want to try to depress you horribly which is by bringing up a topic that you brought up which is corporatism. In some ways we seem to be heading for the worst of both worlds. We don't have a government doing the right thing staffed by noble civil servants. We have the government regulating a group of favored corporations who are of limited number. And they're sort of cozy and they don't allow new entrants and those corporations get special privileges and also special responsibilities. There are many ways we end up with this. One obvious way is if banks are too big to fail or General Motors is too big to fail, you just can't let them fail. Then if they do fail the government ends up owning them and then the government has a player in the industry. So if the government owns GM is it going to let Ford put GM out of business? I don't think so. Second way is industrial policy. If we really think it's really important that we have enough knowledge about chip technology that we can make the next generation of computer chips, then we can't let Intel fail or if Intel is about to fail we have to subsidize somebody, maybe it's 100 firms doesn't have to be one to maintain the knowledge of chip technology so we can compete in the future. And the third way, obvious way is environmental regulation. You see that in California. We want clean gas. It imposes huge cost on refiner. So we only have four or five refiners and they have an oligopoly and they can jack up prices and we don't have competition. So we have the worst of both worlds. We have all the inequality of competition without the efficiency. And what I want to suggest is that this is inevitable. It's not something that's easily fixed unless you guys have an easy fix. Not easy to get there but once you get there, get government out of the business of business. If government is out of the business of business, cronyism goes away. When Microsoft was in the 80s and 90s, you know how much money Microsoft spent on lobbying in DC every year? Zero. Nothing. And it was all in hatch a Republican, by the way, who harassed them because of it. He used to have committees where he'd bring the Microsoft people in to harass them because they weren't lobbying. To this day, Apple is being harassed now because they're not lobbying enough, right? How much money does Microsoft spend today on lobbying? Tens of millions of dollars. Because the Justice Department proved to them that they'd better lobby otherwise they're going to get screwed. So I think the way to do it is to massively deregulate, do away with all the privileges and the benefits. Do away with things like too big to fail. But you can't just do away with too big to fail. You have to do away with all of the financial regulations including deposit and insurance. The private market provides deposit and insurance if there is such a market for it. Let banks be raided and people decide where to deposit their money. As long as you have regulations and as long as you have preferred tax ways, you will get lobbying. And as long as you get lobbying, you will get cronyism. No matter what the election reform is, no matter how you try to take money out of politics, they'll find other ways to get into politics. The only way to get cronyism, corporatism out of the way is to allow for true free markets. And the only way to do that is to get rid of government involvement in the economy. If I didn't rewrite the Constitution now, I'd have not only a separation of church and state, but a separation of economics and state. Let the state stay out of the business of business. Good luck with that agenda as long as we have the campaign finance system we have where corporations and wealthy interests can spend virtually as much money as they want to influence politics and elections and policy making. I mean, one of the reasons we have, and I think that Yaron and I would, I'm glad you raised this issue, Mickey, because I think it is an area where there's the need for some real change. And Yaron and I would agree in some respects that there's too much government involvement in picking winners and losers and subsidizing certain industries over others. And that is definitely problematic. But I think it is a major reflection of partly the amount of money in politics. I mean, the reason that these subsidies exist is because they were created by powerful special interests and defended by these interests who have basically bought our politicians and our political process. And I don't think that we're going to be able to do any of the, I mean, just take tax reform to change our tax system to get rid of all these special breaks and loopholes for corporations and various industries. It's going to be very hard as long as, you know, our capital is besieged by lobbyists as long as there's 100 lobbyists for every elected representative. As long as it costs $20 million to win a Senate campaign. As long as it costs $3 billion to run a presidential election in this country. I mean, this is insane. It's a total perversion of our democracy. So Yaron, I'm with you, but unless we deal with the money in politics problem, we're not going to get anywhere. Well, but you're not with me. I mean, you just want to change the subsidies and give subsidies to the industries you believe should be subsidized. No, no, that's not true. I'm happy to get rid of all subsidies to all industries. Great. Well, let's take some questions from the audience. Sir, are you in back? It's actually a mic, and since we're, I think we're live streaming this, if you could go up to the mic and maybe stand in line in the mic, that would really help. Usually when you have an open mic, only 9-11 truthers line up. I'm picking a chance with you. No, I think, well, okay. So I have a question for Don, is it? David. David? Yes. Okay. I, something that seems strange to me was that you seem to be denying free will in terms of jobs that people must rise and fall with the economy. I don't have a college education. I'm making more now than I have ever. I educated myself in my field, and you seem to be saying that these people were required to stay at the skill level that they are, that they could not improve their own skill level by their own effort. So that was odd to me, but what, my real question is, you seem to be saying that these workers have a right to a job that someone else has created. So I do, employers then in your view have a right to employees, because I'm an employer, and I would like to have more employees than I do, but I have to compete with other organizations that can pay more than I do. And if an employer has a right to employees, I mean, how is it different than slavery if someone is enforced to either work for someone or to, I mean, if the employer is forced to employ, it seems that that's forced employment of themselves. They're a slave to their employees. Yeah, well, first of all, it's great that you've done so well and educated yourself, and that's fantastic. And I certainly believe in free will. I believe that people who work hard and make a greater effort and are more creative and resourceful can do better, and that we're not just completely creatures of structural circumstances. I believe that in the real world, structures matter, and the big economic forces matter, and individual effort matters, and what we do as individuals matter. But for many people, the structural forces are so powerful that their own individual effort is just not good enough to change their situation, that they may not have the options. If you live in Toledo and you've lived there your whole life and you're 58 years old and your kids are in the public schools and you lose your job, you can't necessarily move to Alabama or something or go start and become a, you know, go in the fracking industry of North Dakota. You don't have complete choice and freedom, and that's just a reality. I mean, I think everybody can relate to this reality that sometimes we have the ability to reinvent ourselves, and other times we're kind of stuck. And that, in my mind, is where government needs to step in to deal with economic disasters and disruptions that ordinary people are caught up in for no fault of their own. And it's not that I want to force you to hire employees. What I would like to see is during these economic disasters with high unemployment, thousands of millions of people who are idle, I would like to see government do useful things that need to be done. Like, for example, rebuilding our infrastructure. I mean, there's 60,000 bridges in America are said to be in serious disrepair. There's been estimates we need to spend $200 billion a year on infrastructure over the next decade. Construction workers have the highest unemployment rate right now at 12%. Interest rates are all time low. Boy, this seems to be a good time to take all those idle construction workers and put them to work fixing all those bridges by borrowing money at historically low interest rates. Do I have to pay for that, though? Absolutely you do. And you should. If you're smart, you will, because you will do better. Your business and you economically will do better in a country that has strong infrastructure. Look at the Chinese investing in high speed rail, investing in the sophisticated ports, investing in their air control system. Look at the South Koreans who have 98% broadband penetration because of their government leadership. You want to live in a country where we're behind most of the advanced nations of the world when it comes to rail, when it comes to internet, when it comes to scientific research. I don't think so. You know, we have 12% unemployment among construction workers. Why? Because government decided in the 1990s and 2000s that we needed to get 70% of America's into homes and massively subsidized home building across the country so people switch professions from real production, from producing real goods and went to build homes, which is a consumption item. It's not an investment, it's not production in a bubble. A bubble created by this massive government investment into something. So the reason we have these unemployed construction workers is because we've perverted our economy to begin with by government. If government had stayed out of it, we wouldn't be in the mess that we are in today. Sure, infrastructure is great. And, you know, unfortunately the Chinese are this living example and right now they're doing really well so everybody's pointing at them. It's going to be interesting because the same people, not David necessarily, but generally, were pointing at Japan in the 1980s. So I'm kind of curious to see what happens in the decades to come as China implodes in probably the largest bubble in human history. Because it's so centralized. The regions in China that are doing phenomenally well are those regions in China where they have left people alone and as Steve Wynne says, today it's easier, less regulated, less controlled to do business in China than it is in the United States. So in those regions where government stays out of it, they're doing very well and we'll see what happens to others. But I just want to say one thing about moving from Toledo, Ohio, because this to me is absurd. In the 19th century, people got onto their carts, carts, you know, if they were Jews in the Shtetl in Poland, they'd never been outside of a square kilometer probably. They went from central Russia, poor, poor people in Ireland who'd never been outside of their village, were willing to get on boats to go to a safety net, to social security, to Medicare, no, to a place where all they had was freedom, where all they had was opportunity, where nothing was guaranteed. And they gave up, in those days, if you moved from Toledo somewhere, you never saw your family again. I mean, people who moved from Europe to the United States in the late 19th century, early 20th century, many of them never saw their families again because transportation was so expensive and so difficult. So you have to move from Toledo to Alabama. I mean, how horrific is that? God forbid that you have to do that. I mean, if you care about pursuit of happiness, you go where you're going to be able to pursue your happiness, you go where the jobs are, you go where you need to be. And there's no right, God-given right, or anybody's right, to live in Toledo, Ohio, or to live anywhere, or to have employers who are committed to employing people into Toledo, Ohio. What if the employers have all moved to Lubbock, Texas? You're going to keep them in Toledo as, you know, you're right, slavery, because we need to keep people in Toledo? I mean, it's... Next question for questioner, sorry. Hi, I had a question for David. David, of all the things that you want government to do, two questions. First, do you acknowledge that it represents the initiation of force against innocent people? No, two is, do you care? Because all of these things that you're advocating, you know, involve taking money by force or coercion. Coercion is, well, we won't show up with a gun today, we'll send you a warning letter, but eventually we will. Or, you know, being forced into all these nifty social programs you have, like Social Security, because to me, force is a central issue. And when I debate socialists, I bring it up and they just kind of look the other way. So, don't look the other way. Do you acknowledge that you're advocating the initiation of force against people or not? Or don't you acknowledge that? Well, I don't believe that when we do things together that that is a form of force. I mean, you're talking about government... I don't want to be part of your program, so I'm not together with you. What you want is democracy a la carte. No, I want freedom. Right. Which is basically democracy a la carte. You want to be able to have, agree with some laws and not others. Yeah, the laws that initiate force are the ones I'm not going to agree with. Well, I mean, most laws, all laws ultimately depend upon some element of force, yes. And that we as a democracy work together. And Iran has this whole thing about, well, it's the majority can just tell us what to do anytime we want. Well, the founders set up a country with a lot of checks and balances. I mean, we have a system where it's very hard for the majority to just wave a magic wand and make something happen. And we have a bill of rights which was designed to ensure that no matter how much power the majority had, they could never take away certain inalienable rights that people have. So this is the beauty of... So you acknowledge that it's initiation of force? Yes or no? It's not the initiation of force. It is the implementation of a social contract, which is the basis for a civilization. Okay. Let's go to the next one. We have a monopoly on debate here. We're going to enforce it by excluding everybody. You know, this is not a question. This is just kind of a personal statement of mine, which I think is relevant to this. I was born in India and for the first few years of my life, we were very poor. My father then joined a corporation called Godrej. You must have heard about it. It's one of the top companies in the world now. And he joined that. He was a mechanical engineer, which he basically became by studying under street lights in Bombay. He had no money. He was studying under street lights. Someone took him in. He basically ran away from his village, came to Bombay, studied under street lights, became a mechanical engineer, joined this company and stayed in that company for about 35 or 40 years. And that company provided education to me at a rate that was much less than any of the other schools that were around us, that were private or public. With the incentive that when they would train me, when they would educate me, I would hopefully join their company, which many other people who graduated with me are still working in Godrej right now as top engineers. So their investment paid off. And that was an investment in my education. And that is why I could get that education. I could go to college getting to your point about moving from Toledo to Alabama. I moved from India to Russia because there were circumstances where I had to move away. I was away from my family for seven years and I had to survive basically on the street, almost in Russia because I was incredibly poor. Then I came here and then based on nobody's help really, I got to where I am today. I'm a psychiatrist. So what I want to say is that if you leave people alone to what they are capable of doing and if you let the company that hires you do what it is supposed to do to incentivize your production, you can make people get much further in life than any government program would. That's just all I want to say. Let's try to get as many questions in as possible. I have a quick question to both of them. How do you think Europe and Greece are doing? Go ahead, David. Well, not so well right now. I mean, they have suffered a major real estate crash and have done very poorly. Why? Remember that a lot of the countries right now that are running major deficits were running surplus just a few years ago. So this notion that they were going along with a completely unsustainable economic and social model is not true because before the crash a lot of them were doing just fine. And I might add that the countries of Northern Europe, Germany, Denmark, the Scandinavian countries, those countries are doing which have a very expansive social safety net, which pay for have subsidized college education, which have fantastic infrastructure. Those countries have export surpluses. They have lower unemployment than the United States. They've had higher growth than the United States for the past three years. So the implication of your question, which is that an expansive social safety net is incompatible with strong prosperity or economic growth, I think is just empirically proven wrong by the countries of Northern Europe. You look at the countries of Southern Europe, which have been basket cases for decades for many reasons because of dysfunctional political systems, deep corruption, pervasive tax evasion, and you cite them as some sort of example of why humane capitalism and a mixed economy doesn't work. That's just specious reasoning. Well, just one other thing now. Because of what they're doing right now, they also have one other big, very big problem because of their social programs, and that's the Islamic extremist problem that they have in Europe is going down before we do. Southern European countries were all running deficits for a very long time. They were living way beyond their means. They were paying salaries that they could not afford. Many public sectors were ballooning out of control. This is a story in Greece, in Italy, in Spain, in Portugal, not so much in Ireland where it was a real estate crash. And Ireland, the problem was that they guaranteed all the deposits once the crash happened, which was really to save German banks. So the whole system in Europe is broken. This is not a Southern Europe problem. That is a myth. The only reason... You know why they're saving Greece? Why they care about Greece? I mean, why don't they just let it go? The reason they're saving Greece is because if Greece goes under, all the German banks go under and if the German banks go under, then Germany suddenly looks like Greece because it has to be able to own banks out and they can't afford to do so. So they believe that the cheapest way to save German banks is to save Greece. This is the same reasoning why we saved Mexico in 1986. We didn't save Mexico because we care about Mexico. We don't. We saved Mexico to save Citibank. It goes back to your corporatism and everything. Because Citibank was holding those bonds and we were committed of course to saving because it was too big to fail. But there's a myth about Northern Europe and this is the myth. Sweden is the best example of this. Sweden was an incredibly socialist country in the 60s and 70s and 80s and it was fast going bankrupt. Indeed, Sweden was Greece in the early 1990s. It was about to go bankrupt and Sweden has completely transitioned over the last 20 years, not completely but radically transmission from the old Sweden to where we are today. It has shrunk the amount of money the government spends as a percentage of GDP. It has lowered regulation. It is one of the fastest countries in the world in terms of deregulation. And it is moving in a direction that is the opposite of the direction of the United States. Yes, Sweden still spends more than we do as a percentage of GDP. But it's only by a few pointers. It's not that big of a deal anymore. They spend something like 48%. We spend, if you include state and all the other stuff, we spend 42%. So the gap is not that big. Sweden is heading in the right direction. We're heading in the right direction. The myth is that Project 20, we talk about unfunded liabilities in the United States for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. Nobody talks about the unfunded liabilities that Germans have for their baby boom generation. Nobody talks about the unfunded liabilities that Northern Europeans have. In 15 years, they will look very much like Greece. They cannot afford the social programs that they have. They're just waiting, they're just postponing like we are. We're living today without thinking about tomorrow. We're living in the same trend in Europe as a continent, as economies, including the Germans are basically bankrupt today, just like we are. And because of the kind of policies that David would like to expand. This question is more for Yaron, but feel free to chime in. I understand that government is there to protect us from coercion, but are there any gray areas where it doesn't necessarily protect us from coercion, perhaps they ensure a more orderly society or prevent anarchy or that require vast resources or centralized resources such as government. Let me throw out some examples, let's say municipal zoning laws or the issuing of marriage licenses, the building of interstate highways, or even, and this is an education institution of a core curriculum that teaches the Constitution in every school across America so that there's a sense of civic duty and individual rights in students. No, no, no, no. No, I don't think there is. I think it either qualifies under the protection of individual rights and the only, you know, the way in which to see this is you do need a judiciary. You need things like a patent office because of property rights. You need to register off a property, but there's no reason government has to get involved in the specifics of a contract like a marriage. It's a contract, it's a type of contract, and you could create a lot of different types of contracts that look very similar to today's marriage contract that the government should still uphold. They should set the framework of what does a proper contract objectively look like and leave us alone to contract freely under those guidelines. All the other examples, you know, it's really difficult to get into the whole infrastructure question because we're so far from that, right? I mean, let's have that debate when we get to, you know, that's all government does, but I really believe, and I know it's hard to show, and David will make fun of me, I really believe that privately funded and created infrastructure, including roads, would be far more rational, far better, you know, would have a lot less distortions, would create cities that are more manageable and more logical in their structure than a centralized authority that says we need a highway from here to there and we want to create suburbs, why, who knows. You know, so now we live with the subway system, we go, well, how could we have gotten this without government? I've got a lot, I could, we could go on about the railway system and how government destroyed that and then had to build the highway system and not to compensate for the fact that they destroyed the railways and you could go on and on, but the point is that all of those realms, I believe that a private solution would be a better solution and would be the right solution because, to go back to our previous questionnaire, we're against coercion, we're against force and every one of those issues would require force in some way or another and just against force and once you extract force from society, how exactly the things all work out, I don't know. Hi, I find myself listening to both of you feeling depressed. I feel that neither of them are dealing with the inherent weaknesses of each of your positions. David, you haven't addressed at all the cronyism to borrow your own term of bureaucracy and unions, specifically the notion that bureaucracy is formed to solve a problem, but after a while, they have to keep that problem alive in order to keep themselves alive and your own, you know, there's so many things you said that I just, the assumptions that you make that just seem kind of crazy to me, starting with the empirical evidence that you referred to in the beginning that the poor are better and certain circumstances as the other, but I don't even want to go there. I'm curious to know about a government that wants to be small government but is inherently big government, a big army is big government, big police force is big government, big judiciary system is big government. Who is going to regulate the corporations? I remember reading Anne Rand as a high school student and she was talking about corporations self-regulating themselves because they saw the value of keeping themselves in the long term, but corporations today are all about quarterly returns. They're not about the big picture. How is that going to actualize itself? I'll go first. Wow, I mean this myth of corporations being about the next quarter, now we don't have a free market today, corporations are distorted and there's cronyism and granted all that, but this notion that American corporations a short term drives me nuts because it is so untrue. Look at the amount of money that corporations invest in R&D, they invest more in R&D in the United States than any other country in the world by far. That is a long term investment. Look at Apple, Apple today announced, let me finish, Apple yesterday announced products. When were those products put into development? Years ago, they were thinking long term. Exxon makes gazillions of dollars one year. When do you think those profits go to? What percentage of that profit goes into further oil exploration? You know how long it takes from the time you decide to drill to the time you get the actual oil? You know how many decades that process can sometimes take? The idea that corporations are not long term investors and don't care about the long term is ludicrous. Now, in a world in which government is on your shoulder and regulating you to death and the regulations are changing, we still by the way don't know what the regulations of Dodd-Frank are because they haven't been written yet. There are thousands of these things, they change on an annual basis. Yes, corporations become shorter term, the more status you become, the more regulations you have, the more government you have, the more short term corporations are going to become. And the freedom corporations have to think short term, because shareholders are going to demand that they think long term because that's how share prices are determined. I'm a finance guy, share prices in a free market are determined by the present value of future cash flows. Not about earnings tomorrow, but about earnings over the next 10 years discounted, so you care less about the 10 years from now than you do about the next quarter, you care less about it. And that's how corporations, good corporations, run themselves even today. But in freedom, all of them would run that way, otherwise they would be driven out of business. That's why you have hostile takeovers. You have so many mechanisms under capitalism to fix these things. It is statism that prevents that, it's the SEC that prevents today bad corporations being taken over by somebody who could run them better. That's who prevents it. And one other thing, the poor being better off, I mean, empirically. I mean, just think where the poor were 300 years ago. 300 years ago we were all poor. All of us. All of us. Who do you think created the middle class? Where did the middle class come from? It didn't come from the GI bill. The middle class was already well established at its stage before the GI bill. It didn't come from income tax. It came from capitalism. It came from the jobs being created by capitalists, by the so-called robber barons, by the industrialists of this country who created real good jobs. It was by Ford who doubled salaries one year because he wanted the best employees in the country. See, he doubled the wages that he gave his employees. That's the middle class. The middle class were Ford employees, you know, well before the welfare state got in a place. And the poor in America, if you ever meet a... I toured through Cambodia once. You want to see poor people? Go to Cambodia. There are no poor people in the United States if those people are poor. It's not on the same stratosphere. It's not on the same planet. Just briefly because I know we have other questions. I just happened to read an article that cited a survey of CEOs who were asked the question, if you had to choose between good quarterly returns over the next couple quarters or much higher profits five years from now, which would you choose? 70% said good quarterly returns over the next few quarters because they have a gun to their head and a gun is investors and investor groups on Wall Street and it's not the result of more regulation. It's the result of massive amounts of new money coming into equity markets and corporations increasingly and much more aggressive shareholder groups and, you know, the aggressive takeovers starting in the 1980s, these very aggressive shareholder actions have pushed the short termism and, but just to come back to your point about what I left out, which is cronyism and bureaucracy, I think you're absolutely right. I think that government, like any large institution, has the ability to become self-serving and that it is important to constantly look at how we can reform and streamline and I do think, by the way, that these public pensions are very problematic in our example of cronyism because you have the public sector unions that are contributing to the politicians who are setting the pension policies in places like Sacramento and Albany. That is corruption. But isn't the position that you're standing behind strengthening that and worsening that situation? No, I'm not standing behind trying to strengthen the hand of public sector unions at all. I think that that's an area where there's a clear need for reform and I can think of a number of other ways to reform government. You're on and I, we're here agreeing that there shouldn't be any, that we shouldn't have all these breaks and special loopholes in our tax system that subsidize different industries and we need to get rid of all those tax expenditures and that would, and I've argued here as well that the campaign finance system which allows corporations and special interests and labor unions to have so much influence over our politicians is a big reason, maybe the big reason why there's so much cronyism and so much favoritism and we have to deal with that for sure. Let's quickly get through the last three. Okay, this question is primarily directed at David but I'd be interested to hear your response as well. You talked about how expensive education is and you gave examples of a private school in New York and people who want to go to college and can't afford it, but you didn't ever mention why it's expensive and costs have to come from somewhere so I would be really interested to hear what you think these costs are and why you think that education is so expensive. Okay, do you want to get another question as well? Why don't we take all three at once? That's probably a good idea, I'm sorry. And then we can answer all three at once if I can answer. I don't know if you can make this brief but it's about reforming the tax code which is tens of thousands of pages. How do you keep a tax code from getting that big of a Leviathan and would you favor moving in the direction of a consumption tax or keeping with some kind of flat tax? I'd like to hear both of your opinions. Okay, so David you stated earlier that the law involves the use of force. However, only enforcing a social safety net requires a government to initiate force against its citizens which is a big distinction. My question is every thief says that his need justifies his crime. I'm wondering how you would justify yours and what makes yours different? Great. You can justify your crime as last if you want. We have the first one about college education. Education costs, sorry. I'll take that. I'm sure David will have something to say about that. I know what is driving up cost in education in universities and you can see this by the numbers. Cost of education is going through the roof and the number of faculty hasn't increased that much. The amount of teaching that they do hasn't increased at all. It's actually decreased. The average amount of hours they spend in the classroom. What has increased? The number of bureaucrats at universities has increased dramatically over the last 30 years. Huge quantities of new administrators to administer. Actually a smaller population because the baby boomers who came through the system in the 50s, 60s were much bigger. Second, you're seeing fewer the professors are teaching less and less yet their salaries are going up and up. Salaries are going up. This is happening because in a market system you'd expect there to be pressure on this to stop. It's because government is subsidizing this enormously. Government is writing the tuition checks through loans who pretty much anybody can qualify for a huge amount of loans and I think today most students believe they won't have to pay these loans back because Obama's hinted that there's some amnesty program down the road. So why not amass $200,000 worth of loans? Of course they have money. This is the principle. Guess what happens to cost? Goes up. When they buy healthcare cost goes up. When they buy education the cost goes up. But in the high school level the zoning requirements I was involved in private schools locally here. The ability to find a location and find the right location in the zoning and the city control that they want and yet, again I was involved in private schools here, you could run a school at pretty reasonable rates. New York City maybe $30,000 but way below $30,000 in Southern California which is not a cheap place. What you don't have, you don't have a fancy football field. You don't have the fanciest gym in the world. You don't have an indoor swimming pool which a lot of public schools have but you know what? You have great teachers who are really motivated and who excite the students to learn which I think what schooling is mostly about. That's on that one. The tax reform issue because I think it's a good question and also goes to the question of subsidies and corporate welfare. You know, I think Iran and I would both agree that major tax reform is a good idea and that the specific idea of a consumption tax which the questioner mentioned I think is a great idea. I think that in general we should try to go for big tax reform so that we tax things like consumption and things like pollution. We don't tax good things like work and investing in wealth creation. If we could have a tax system that taxes consumption and taxes pollution and then it taxed those positive behaviors I think that we would have more prosperity and I think it would also be harder to engage in tax evasion. I think it's a good idea to engage in tax evasion. I think it's a good idea to engage in tax evasion as to how that might be done. I would want to continue seeing progressivity in the tax system. The question of progressivity brings me to the question of how do I justify my crimes? You know, progressivity is basically a progressive tax system which is a bigger share than people who have lower incomes. This is a system which has allowed us to generate a tremendous amount of revenue to invest in the foundations of prosperity and also to provide a strong social safety net in the form of Social Security and Medicare and other things. It's a system that has been strongly supported by the majority of Americans. This started this discussion tonight by saying government is us. Government is what we choose to do together. We choose to solve how we use government as a tool to solve certain problems that we can't solve individually and that the market can't solve by itself. And perhaps you're on is right. Maybe the market can solve certain problems that government is now taking on. Maybe others, you know, some more areas for civil society. I'm certainly open to having other actors solve problems. I'm open to having government working collaboratively as it often has historically worked with business to do big things. And but regardless, the point is that these are policies that we have chosen together as a country through a democratic process with lots of checks and checks. We have done just some random putting a gun to somebody's head. And by and large, by the way, this system of mixed government, progressive taxes, strong social safety net has worked. We have become the richest, most successful, powerful nation in the history of the world. Largely with this model over the past 80 years. So, you know, to say, oh, this is terrible and let's substitute the model we have of a mixed economy with some completely radical utopian untested, never tried in any country, in any place, at any point in history, let's replace the system we have which has worked so well with this alternative utopian vision I think is deeply naive and dangerous. That sounded suspiciously like a closing statement. You're on if you want to take a brief closing statement. I think the fundamental difference just came out, I think. And that is the way we view coercion. I view forcing people to do things they don't want is wrong, wrong always. The initiation of force is always wrong. And yes, we've created lots of mechanisms to make it seem appealing. We have local communities and we vote and then representatives and they vote and we make it touchy feeling, we make it feel good. We have decided to coerce you. It's true we have. No, we deserve the politicians we have. We deserve the laws that we have because we David's absolutely right. Most of the American people like this system. They want this system. They think it's okay to coerce people by majority rule. I'm saying it's wrong. I'm saying the system is inherently morally corrupt. And if something is inherently morally corrupt, it will also go bust. It's just a matter of time and I believe we're heading there. We became the greatest mightiest industrial power in the history of the world from a backward colony during the 100 years in which we were the freest we've ever been. The period from 1776 140 years until the break of World War I when we established ourselves clearly as the strongest country in the world. That is the period where we were most free, not as free as I would like us to be, but the most free we've ever been. That is when we grew. That's when the wealth was created. We've been cruising since then, you know, with ever growing state involvement in our life, with ever growing government impeding on our freedoms. We're going to pay for it. The day is coming. I don't want to be all doom and gloom, but it's coming. I don't know when. We're seeing a little bit of it right now. But the point is that that's where we created the wealth, not post great depression. Post great depression has been a mess. Yeah, we've done well because we still left parts of the economy free. But the key issue again is the issue of does democracy, does a system, does us justify force. And in my view, it never does and it never should. Thank you. Thank you. That concludes our debate. Please remember to stay for the reception. Both authors will be selling and presumably signing if necessary their book.