 So, the first reason, I think, is what I call the collectivist premise. And this is looking at the welfare of the group rather than the well-being of the individual. And it says, what's good for, quote, society as a whole? How should we distribute society's resources in a fair way? I think the better way, the more rational way to think about political issues is to focus on the individual. And I think if you think about what's good for the individual, you come to a very different conclusion. So the two essentials in my judgment of what makes us happy and successful life, and I think this came through in all the talks today, is thought and effort. This is Isaac Newton and Steve Jobs. It's thought and effort. The willingness to challenge conventional wisdom to think about what's true, what's right, what's good, and then the effort to execute and carry out your plans. That's really what is going to make you happy, successful, and achieve the things you want to achieve in life. And therefore, if we're thinking about what a good political system is, it's one that encourages and protects your ability to exercise thought and effort and then to keep the results. This is my daughter, Olivia. She's about one and a half now. More her. More her. I promise this will end at some point. So just to illustrate this point that the welfare state is interfering with thought and effort, the core activities that we need in order to live a happy, successful life, when my wife was pregnant, we thought a lot about, well, how the heck are we going to raise this little creature into something useful? Like, what are we going to do? And are we going to encourage her to be independent? How are we going to encourage her to tackle life with all the vigor that it requires and so on? But it also occurred to me at a certain point, what if I were evil? What if instead of wanting to raise her to be a happy, independent adult, I wanted to crush her little infant spirits and just completely turn her into a record dependent of a human being? And I made a list. So I wouldn't teach her to make good decisions. I would just tell her what to do and demand that she obey me. I wouldn't make her work for anything. I'd just give her stuff, make her an entitled brat, unless she was so evil as to go and try to get her own job and work for stuff, in which case, now she's going to get charged rent. I would tell her, hey, forget property rights, help yourself to other people's stuff, and don't object if they help themselves to yours. And then I would take out tons of loans in her name and go spend it on Vegas. So that would be pretty rotten. But that, in effect, is the whole essence of what the welfare state does. What the welfare state does is it stops and punishes us from doing the right things and rewards us for doing the wrong things. The more rational, productive, independent minded we are, the worse we are under the scenario, and the more lazy, dependent, unambitious we are, the better we are. That's really the whole setup. And let me give you one example to really drive this home. So my dad and I have very different goals for retirement. He's been running two tech companies for now over a decade. And he's looking forward to just a couple of decades playing golf, traveling the world with mom. I want to be doing this speaking and writing and so on as long as I can. Now, given those different goals, we would have very different approaches to preparing for retirement, right? We'd save vastly different sums. We'd probably start saving at different times. We'd put it in different kinds of investments. We'd make a lot of different decisions. Yet the welfare state, even if it worked the way that we're told, it should work, right? Even if it really was, the government was setting aside your money into a 401k or something so that when you were tired, you had an earned benefit. Even then, it would interfere with you making those kinds of assessments. It would say, hey, Watkins, no, no, no, you've got to save 12.4% today rather than use it on things like starting a family or starting a business or buying a home. No, you have to do what we say. You have to do with it. That is the whole essence and the deeper meaning of the welfare state is it interferes with our ability to make those independent judgments. And so I think if we think deeply about political issues, we need to think about the need for the freedom to make the assessments about how we plan our lives, including our old age. The last thing I'll mention is what I call the Garden of Eden premise. So this is the idea that thought, effort, that's unfair that life should require these sorts of things. Why should you have to think so hard and make good decisions and set aside resources and work and so on? Life should be like a Garden of Eden where it just guarantees you all the things you want without thought and without effort. Well, clearly life's not like that. What are we going to do in order to make it like that? Well, we're just going to take from the people who do think and produce and give to those who don't. People often say, well, what about the people who don't actually save for retirement? Yeah, that's the whole idea behind the welfare state. If you're not so farsighted as to plan for your life, we're going to take from the people who are farsighted and give to you in order to try to guarantee you this effortless positive existence. Now, that sounds pretty unfair on its face, right? So what we're also going to do is we're going to concoct a bunch of arguments to make it not seem that unfair. So for instance, you didn't earn it through thinking and producing. You didn't build that. Society gave it to you. Luck is what created your wealth. So we're not really taking what you earned. We're just taking what you happen to stumble into. And then we're going to have a bunch of arguments that say, and by the way, you don't have a right to what you earn. You have a right to what you need. And this is the idea that we talked about before about need being an entitlement. What you need entitles you to something morally, that's what gives you a right to it. And so when we take from people who, quote, earned it and gave to those who didn't, that's a moral endeavor because, after all, that's what justice is all about. Well, the fact is we don't live in a garden of Eden. But we do live on a glorious earth. An earth where we can have anything we want. If we're willing to pay the price. If we're willing to exert the thought and effort that life requires. And that is what the debt draft interferes with. It's depriving us, step by step of our ability to exert the thought and effort in order to make our lives as glorious as possible. And that's why I think the solution is not to reform it, not to rein it in, not to make it sustainable, but to, as the other draft, abolish it. Thank you. Let's give it up for Don Watkins. Who has got some questions for this gentleman? First of all, excellent. Thank you. Good read. Have you read The Forgotten Man? By Amity Schlays? Yes. Yeah. I had Amity, so she wrote a book for those of you who don't know and The Great Depression, very well done. And of course she covers the fact that this is the era when social security is created. I actually interviewed her for my podcast, The Debt Dialogues. Feel free to look it up on iTunes. It's free, so hey, we can't go wrong there. And we talked about this and a lot of other issues, yeah. What are your thoughts on change? And I asked the question, I hope I don't take you on a rabbit trail, but we vote change in this country, like it or not. Well, except for I actually think there's a dime of difference between the left and the right in this issue. I mentioned that social security, for instance, enjoys 8% support. So the first talk I ever gave, I remember it was at least one of the really early ones. I was giving on why we should abolish social security. It was to the Beverly Hills of California Country Club. So I'm driving up to LA from Orange County where I live and I get there and I'm ready to tell people why we need to scrap the whole program and I get into the room and it's about this size. And the average age is between 80 and dead. And I said, there's going to be a riot here. It's going to be the slowest riot in history. I mean, they'll be kind of limping towards me. Hey kid, but nevertheless, but I actually got a standing ovation. And I thought, well, maybe it's because they're rich people and they care. But actually part of what I found is that although support for social security and support for these programs is wide, it's not as deep as one may think. And part of what we can see is that this is why people have to lie about how it works. If the program really was to its roots popular the way, say, like, you know, mom and apple pie in the military is popular, you wouldn't have to lie about it. You wouldn't have to like say, oh, we only take 6.2% of your income. No, they'd be up front. They say we take 12.4%. You wouldn't have to say, oh, it's insurance. Does anybody know what FICA, your social security comes from FICA taxes. Anybody know what the C stands for there? Contribution. I worked for a 5.1c3 nonprofit and guess what? If you don't give us a contribution, we're going to treat you the same way as social security. Like, no, they have to disguise taxes as contributions. The more that people understand about just how it works and where it's leading us, the less the support is. Nevertheless, there is support. And my view is because it's an issue of ideas and that people think that these programs are right and necessary. And my view is that until that's challenged, then you're only gonna get politicians who support it. If you look through the history of social security, the right has promoted and pushed it and expanded it as much as the left. Often more so because they can get away with more. And so until we change our thinking and we're willing to challenge conventional wisdom, the way we're willing to challenge it over diet and exercise and so on. Until we're willing to challenge that conventional wisdom, we get nowhere, even though we're on this kind of no-win path to 205 trillion dollars in debt. And so there really is no shortcut besides change your thinking, challenge yourself to think independently about these issues and then try to get other people to think that way. But if you do that, part of what I was trying to stress is I think there's actually less resistance to good arguments than you would think. There's really no argument for social security for the welfare state. There is none. There's emotions, there's appeal to emotions, but there's no argument. And so that's really where the battle lies. We're taking a different look of something that we've been diving into in the last couple of years. Now we have Don Watkins right here. How social security is sabotaging the land of self-reliance? Bring it on home, good stuff man. Thanks man. Yeah, you got it. By the way, if you can do the math is longer than we've had social security since 1935. Now did the elderly starve in the streets? And it turns out that amazingly no. Amazingly people figured out a way to live without handouts for over a hundred years and it's pretty fantastic when you think about it. They were very entrepreneurial in their whole approach to life. And so I'm just gonna go through some of the mechanisms that they took in order to not, as they say, starve in the streets. So first of all, people worked. It's kind of funny today where we think of like, ah, work's a real burden. But actually the people pushing for a welfare state complained for many years because the elderly, those darned people refused to retire. The fact is that they found their lives more meaningful, more meaningful, more valuable, more enjoyable with work than without it. So the first reason I think is what I call the collectivist premise. And this is looking at the welfare of the group rather than the well-being of the individual. And says, what's good for, quote, society as a whole? How should we distribute society's resources at a fair way? I think the better way, the more rational way to think about political issues is to focus on the individual. And I think if you think about what's good for the individual, you come to a very different conclusion. So the two essentials in my judgment of what makes us happy and successful life, and I think this came through in all the talks today, is thought and effort. This is Isaac Newton and Steve Jobs. Thank you.