 For those who don't know me, my name's John Tillman. I'm the CEO of the Illinois Policy Institute. And it's going to be my pleasure to introduce the introducer of our speaker, which I volunteered for. So actually, Iran, I'm not going to introduce you, somebody else is, which is very exciting for you. This is how important you know the speaker is when there's two different introducers. That means the stature of the person is very, very high, and that's very exciting. But the other thing I should say is our speaker tonight is just an amazing and interesting guy to hear, and I can't wait to get to him. But I just want to start with a couple of opening remarks, and then I will tell you a little bit about a colleague of mine who will come up here and introduce tonight's main event. How many of you were aware there was a teacher strike in Chicago? Yes, and how many of you think that went really well for the children? The children, wait, wait, wait, wait, you weren't listening, were you? I saw, no. How many of you think it went really well for Karen Lewis and the teachers union? How many of you think Rahm Emanuel gave in far too much, far too soon? Why do you think that was? Anybody gotten a theory on why the children were left on the outside and the Chicago public school system and the families have no choice? Anything else? That's a pretty good one. Anybody want to add? Yes, sir. There's an election coming up. Yes, the mayor was under tremendous pressure not to let this strike linger, and the bottom line why it turned out the way it did was because as I said, dozens and dozens and dozens of times, if not more than that, the Chicago public school system is a monopoly provider of teaching services to 350,000 kids, 83% of them low income, and the Chicago teachers union is a monopoly provider of the labor to the system. And so the two people at the negotiating table were both monopolists and the parents of those children were not at the table. The only way to put pressure on people at that negotiating table is to empower parents instead of leaving the Chicago public school system and the Chicago teachers union in full control of the system. And that's why the Illinois Policy Institute is very dedicated to education reform. And we have Ted Drowski, are you here? Ted, are you in the room? Ted is not in the room. Well, I'm getting the wave. Nope, Ted's not here. Ted is out doing something I'm sure much more interesting than what I was about to have him do, which was introduce our new director of education reform, Joshua Dwyer. I don't know if Joshua's here, there he is. Raise your hand back there. Everybody give Joshua a nice round of applause. He's joining us now as our director of education reform. We're very excited that he's here and clearly we have a lot of work to do. If education reform is one of your passions, you will see his name popping up on our website. Feel free to send him an email and he'll tell you a lot more about it. I'm happy to tell you that one of the reasons the Institute has been so effective at informing and shaping public policy debates is because we have some of the smartest, most effective people in public policy in the different key areas. We have Paul Curse, you're a labor specialist. I just mentioned Joshua now in education reform. Of course our policy shop is run by Ted Dabrowski. I wish I could name every single person on the policy team. I can't do that. So those of you I haven't mentioned don't take it personally. But one of the things that those of you who support us financially do is allow us to bring amazingly talented people in to do the policy work. We're also not only the ones doing the policy work here in Illinois, we're the only ones who have a material presence day by day, week by week, and of course month by month in Springfield. We have an office in Springfield. Christina Rasmussen heads that up. What is essentially our lobbying arm by Illinois law, although we call it issue advocacy here in Illinois, is headed up by Matt Paprocki. Matt, are you here tonight? Matt, there he is, way back there. If you wanna know who's gonna twist the arms of legislators and get them to adopt a Liberty agenda, it's Matt right back there. He does good work. Matt came to us from the inside, inside of the beast that is Springfield, so he knows how the game works. But nobody spends more time in committee meetings, legislator meetings than the Illinois Policy Institute staff. And I just wanted to share that with you, and that's one of the reasons we were the go-to resource for the media during the Chicago teacher strike. We did, I think the number was, I heard today from Diana Rickert, who's here somewhere, 386 hits in media. How many of you saw me on John Stossel's show, anybody? John Stossel, be very happy to hear that, so we'd want more viewers, Fox Business Thursday nights, nine o'clock, please watch John, even if you never see the episode I was on. It was an amazing episode, though, about union power. So just wanted to share a little bit of that with you, and then I would like to introduce to you a new addition to our staff since August. John Knowles serves as our vice president of external relations at the Illinois Policy Institute. You all probably know this, I always like to joke, then you've heard this before. John O'Hara, who used to hold this position, left us to go live with his wife in Columbus, Ohio, I guess, if you have to choose between pursuing liberty in Illinois or pursuing matrimony in Ohio, that's a logical choice that John made, and we have found that John continues to also pursue liberty there as well, so we're happy for him. But we're thrilled to death that John Knowles has joined us. John holds a bachelor's, a BA in international relations from Western Michigan University, as well as a Juris Doctorate, that's a law degree, that's a fancy term for a law degree, and a fellowship certificate from Michigan State University. My wife is a Spartan, and she was very happy to hear we'd hired a Spartan. John came here with his wife, Jennifer, from Florida. John had been heading up the Ave Maria Initiative down there and doing their development work and their public relations work, and did a great job for them and set a record there in terms of fundraising, and we're looking forward to him helping us have the resources we need to push that ball up the hill and make sure that Illinois turns around and becomes a state where liberty prevails and prosperity most surely follows. And John's gonna come up here and make a few remarks and then introduce our speaker, John Knowles. Good evening, everyone. That was really generous, John. Thank you so much. Indeed, just seven weeks ago, my wife and I were living about a mile and a half from the Gulf of Mexico in a very comfortable and wonderful life, doing great work and enjoying, looking forward to a pretty bright future, and we gave all that up for the opportunity to work with John to do something very special here in Illinois, and I think it was the smartest decision I ever made. If I were to ask all of you to describe your dream job, I think that you would probably start with elements such as the opportunity to actualize the gifts and the skills that you were given, the chance to work with world-class colleagues and associates, and the chance to serve a great cause, namely the cause of liberty. I get to do all those things in this job and I count myself as one of the luckier guys around in that I get to do that. So that's the first thing I wanted to emphasize. The next thing I wanted to say is that we have a great opportunity this evening not only here from a wonderful speaker but also to engage with my colleagues, the men and women that John Tillman just described to you all. They're circulating amongst the audience tonight and I hope you'll take the time to speak with them and to learn what they do at the Illinois Policy Institute. Each of them are working hard every single day to make this the absolute best place to invest and build your life. So that's what we do here. You know, the other thing I wanted to extend to you all real quick is that we're the only organization that is doing what we're doing. I really mean that. And organizations that are endeavoring to do things at the scale that we are do need resources in order to do it. And I know that each of you are committed to a number of different causes and charities but I would just encourage you to look at ours amongst them. And I think that we're about to experience an evening like a lot of the ones that each of us have had in the past. We're gonna encounter some big ideas. The ideas of Ayn Rand are the kind of things that could change the world if they were embraced by more people. I think that we're to come out of it with a lot of energy, with a lot of excitement and enthusiasm to do something, to channel our energy into something positive and creative. If you feel that way like I know that I'm gonna feel at the end of this event, I hope you'll find John Tillman and I because we wanna talk to you. We wanna talk about ways to connect your energy and your ideas with some of the work we're doing at the Illinois Policy Institute to make Illinois the absolute best state it can be. So at this time I'm very pleased to introduce our speaker this evening, Dr. Yaron Brooke. He holds an MBA from the University of Texas at Austin and a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin. He is the executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute. He's also a columnist at Forbes.com and his articles have been featured in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Investors' Business Daily, and many other publications. He's a frequent guest on a variety of national television programs. He is the co-author of Neoconservatism, an obituary for an idea. Sorry, I didn't even intend to do that, I promise. So he is a contributing author of Winning the Unwinnable War, America's self-crippled response to Islamic totalitarianism. His newest book, which is a national bestseller, Free Market Revolution, How Ayn Rand's Ideas Can End the Government, is co-authored with Don Watkins, a former finance professor. He speaks internationally on such topics as the causes of the financial crisis, the morality of capitalism, and ending the growth of the state. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in giving a warm welcome to Dr. Yaron Brooke. Thank you, John, and thank you, John. It's cool when you meet with somebody and you say, you know, one day we'll invite you to come and speak, and a lot of people say that, but then it happens, it doesn't always happen. I am not used to standing by the podiums. If I get a little, and there's a camera here, so I can't really move much, and the mic is here and everything, so if I get a little antsy, it's because I'm trying to go that way. Thank you all for being here. This is what a setting, it's a beautiful venue. So I'm here to talk about a mystery. A mystery I think we're all confronted with every day, particularly those of us active in this fight for a free America, for freedom more broadly. The mystery is this. Freedom works, capitalism works. Everywhere it's tried, it works. Whenever it's tried, it works. To the extent it's tried, it works. And the fact that it works is not hidden. It's not mysterious. It's right there in front of our faces. It's right there for anybody who's willing to open their eyes and look. If you go and travel through Europe and you see the difference between heavily-status countries and less-status countries, it's there in the cause people drive and the standard of living people have. It's self-evident. How many of you have ever been to Hong Kong? Anybody ever been to Hong Kong? Everybody, before you die, you gotta go to Hong Kong. You gotta see this thing once. Hong Kong is a rock, basically, in the middle of nowhere. There's nothing there. 100 years ago, there was a little fishing village there. Has no natural resources. It has nothing. And yet, over the last 70 or so years, people risked everything to get to this rock. They swam. They got on rafts. People drowned on the way there. People got killed at border crossings trying to get there. Why? What was on this rock? Protection of freedom. That's it. There was no safety net, no Medicare, no Medicaid, no Social Security, no Socialized Medicine. Just a government that protected people's property rights and left them alone pretty much. By the way, they couldn't even vote. But for a long time, under British rule, but people risked their lives for those economic opportunities, for that freedom, for that ability to make something of themselves. And today, I don't know what the population is there. I should probably look it up. I use it enough in my talks. But when the Chinese took it over, there were seven million people there. From nothing, seven million people. And they live on a tiny little rock. I mean, it's not like California, where you have lots of space and we can build single family homes. They live in high-rises. They live in, but they're free. They're freer than any other place in Asia. It works. Standard of living, the per capita income of people in Hong Kong is equivalent to that of the United States. If you chart per capita GDP versus economic freedom, it's correlated. It's not a mystery. People have done this. It's easy. It's simple. And again, this is thought history. The United States, when it was free, grew very, very fast. Now, we're not growing at all. And economic growth has declined, even when it grows. It grows at a low rate, as government has grown. So we've been running this experiment. It's actually 200 years now, this experiment's been run. It's a social, political, economic experiment. And the data is in. It's been in for a long time, and we know who won, and it should be all over. And yet, we're losing. We're losing on every front, at least on the West. Government is growing. Government is growing in every dimension. Titanum and state in the United States and across Europe is growing. The regulatory state is out of control. You have to get a license now in California to shampoo hair. I come from the one state worse than Illinois, so. We know, for example, just to feed off of what John just said, right? We know competition, innovation, entrepreneurship work. Every industry we try, it works. Yet, if somebody raises the notion of let's privatize education, sell all the schools off, bring entrepreneurship, innovation, and competition to education, people run from you like you're some nut, right? I'm not, I'm talking about real privatization. People think you're crazy. We won, and yet we're losing. And it's not that we lack economic knowledge. We've had great economists on our side. They even won Nobel Prizes. Now I know that's been, you know, anybody could win a Nobel Prize these days. President Obama is evidence of that. But then, of course, he follows in the proud footsteps of Yasir Afat and the leaders of Northern Vietnam. So, you know, there's a long tradition there. But look, we've had great economists. Economic knowledge. You know, we know why markets work. It's not, again, it's not a hidden mystery. You know, whether it's Friedman or Hayek of von Mises or the many, many, many Chicago school, Austrian school economists, it's there. The knowledge is available. The knowledge, and it's been there for 50 years. It's been there for 50 years. So, reality's on our side. And economics is on our side. And we're losing. And we're losing. So, I want to challenge us today to try to explore why it is that we're losing. Because it's not that we're wrong. And it's not some big conspiracy out there. And it's not that we're not smart enough. And it's not that we don't have the knowledge in economics and in politics. There has to be something else going on. There has to be something that causes smart, intelligent people to close their eyes in front of the facts. Pretend they don't exist. Or actually distort them completely to create facts that fit some other story. But it's a distortion. There has to be something that causes these smart, intelligent people to advocate for policies that if you open your eyes, you know, lead to poverty and disaster. And yet they do it over and over and over again. You know, stimulus packages don't work. Now that should be a revelation because they've always worked in the past, right? They've never worked, ever, right? They didn't work in the Great Depression. They didn't work when they were tried during the 70s or other periods where the US economy got into trouble. They've been trying to formulate a right kind of stimulus package in Japan for 20 plus years with absolutely no results. And yet, and yet, no fear. We are going, you know what Einstein called this? Insanity. Thinking that you can do the same thing over and over again and get different results. That is insanity and yet we're all insane. And this is not a democratic problem because remember the first stimulus package was Bush's and it was only 300 billion and it didn't work because it was too small. So Obama did 900 billion and it didn't work because according to Paul Krugman, it's too small. They have no shame. So what is it? What is it that can cause people to look at reality face on, look at the facts straight on and conclude something completely opposite of what the facts suggest? Now I would argue that that means that there are more fundamental ideas at play. Ideas that cause people to shape their economic theory, to shape history, to shape the facts of reality in order to fit their much deeper beliefs. So nobody believes Keynesian works. Keynesianism works. It just doesn't because it's been tried and tried and tried and it doesn't work. But look, if you believe that government is the solution, that the only solution conceivable because there's something about markets and about individuals that you don't trust. So your starting premise in life is government is the solution. Then Keynesianism is the only economic theory that you can use because it's the only economic theory that says government is the solution. So you don't pick Keynesianism because it works. You pick Keynesianism because it's the only thing that fits your much more fundamental assumption. Paul Krugman doesn't believe his economics work. He doesn't care about economics. He cares about a much bigger philosophical agenda that he is pushing. So what are these ideas? What are these ideas that people hold on to and that shape the way they look at reality and shape their politics and shape their economics and shape everything else? Well, let's start with their ideas about the marketplace, about their attitude towards the marketplace, towards capitalism, towards freedom. Because not only do they reject all that, but I was telling you, so every time I do these debates, I do debates on the causes of the financial crisis and within like 15 minutes, it's clear that the other side has absolutely nothing to say, nothing. This crisis was caused by government from beginning to end. I can prove it over and over and over again. There are a million concretes that you can use. There are a million examples. They have nothing to say. They greed on Wall Street, right? That's the argument. As if greed suddenly mushroomed in 2005. Wall Street finances always wanted to make money. There's nothing exceptional about the late 2000s. What funneled it in the way it was funneled? That's all government. They have nothing, absolutely nothing to say. And yet the audience, you know, it doesn't, they are so eager to blame Wall Street. They're so eager to blame capitalism. What is it about capitalism on Wall Street that makes them so eager to blame it? So eager to ignore the facts, to ignore reality and blame capitalism. So what's capitalism about? What are markets about? What are we going to the markets to do? What is the purpose of the marketplace? I usually use my iPhone, but somebody took it. I can't use my prop, right? Yeah, he's waving his iPhone back there. Thanks. Why does Steve Jobs build an iPhone to make money? Why do businessmen go to business to make money? No, not just to make money. They love what they do. They love the challenge. Steve Jobs loves the beauty of his products. He loves to see his vision manifest. But it's all about Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs is in business because of Steve Jobs because of his passion, his values, and the fact that he wants to make money, profit. Now I like to say, some of you heard this, so you can still laugh. I like to say that in 2008, when the economy was spiraling out of control and I went to buy my first iPhone, I did it because I wanted to stimulate the economy. Because I know that's why you guys go to the mall. Because you care about your fellow man and you wanna make sure that there are enough jobs in Illinois. You go to the mall to make your life better. You go to the mall to buy the values you think will make your life better. When you go to the mall, when you're a consumer, you go because of you. The marketplace is the place in which we go in order to pursue our self-interest, our material self-interest. It's a place in which we enhance our own lives, whether it's by working and being productive and gaining the self-esteem that comes from that, making the money that then we can go and buy nice things for ourselves and for our family and for our friends and for the people we love. The market is about self-interest. It's about profit. In the broadest sense, profit. We are profit as participants in the marketplace. And yet, what do we know about self-interest? What have we been taught about self-interest since we were this big? Well, I grew up in a good Jewish family and I was told, think of yourself last. Now, my mother didn't actually mean this, right? Nobody actually means it when they say this, right? But this is the morality we try to inculcate in our children, even though we don't want them to take it too seriously. Think of yourself last. Selflessness is the essence of virtue. To be noble is to sacrifice. To be noble is not to think of yourself. You know, Emmanuel Kant, the great philosopher, said that if you are making a decision, even think about what's in it for you. Even that enters into your mind as a consideration. It's not moral. It's out of the realm of morality. Morality means selflessness, no thought of yourself. People take this seriously. When we think about what is noble in life, we don't think about making money. We don't think about creating a business. We don't think about going to the mall. We think about sacrifice, but giving with expectation of what in return. Nothing, that's the essence of sacrifice. So Bill Gates is running Microsoft right in the 80s and 90s, making gazillions of dollars for himself and for his employees and for the people with him, and he's building a product that impacts every one of our lives. Indeed, every life on the planet is impacted by Microsoft. The standardization, we wouldn't have the technology we have available today at our fingertips without somebody standardizing around a product which is what Microsoft did. Everybody's life is better off for Microsoft. How much moral, ethical credit does Bill Gates get for that? Zero or negative, because he dared to make money in the process, and a lot of it too. And the more you make the less moral credit you get. See, he's actually a bad guy, or at best neutral. Now when does Bill Gates start becoming culturally a positive guy and nice guy, somebody you wanna hang out with when he starts giving it away? This is true. We live in a culture that thinks that nobility is about giving away, but making the stuff, creating the wealth, eh. We don't really like that much. We like giving, we don't like creating. That's bizarre, just on its face, there's something very, very wrong with that. Now I, you know, I probably shouldn't say this, but I think I could guarantee Bill Gates' sainthood. What would he have to do? To be a saint. I'd have to give it all away, move into a tent, because there might be some suspicion that the fact that he's giving it today, he's still enjoying it, maybe. Maybe he's having a good time. And he still lives in that beautiful, huge house, right? And he still drives a really nice car. So you'd have to give it all away, move into a tent. And if he could bleed a little bit, it's funny, but it's sad. That's what we view as noble. That's what we view as moral. That's what we view as right, as just. Not building, not creating, not trading. What's a trade? Trade is I give you something, what do I get in return? More than what I gave, and what do you get? More than what you gave. So when you go buy a car for $20,000, how much is the car worth to you? More than 20,000, I hope, right? Otherwise, why would you give up to 20? You'd be indifferent. I'm the dealer, how much was it worth to me? Less, I made a profit. Who lost? Nobody, win-win. The essence of trade is that we enter the transaction with the intention of win-win. Now you might buy a lemon and you might land up losing, but the intention of every trade is a win-win. What's the sacrifice? Lose-win. The whole idea is you lose. If you were winning, it would be a trade. The whole essence of what the word means is you give to the expectation of nothing in return. Lose-win. How come lose-win, which by the way, if you're in business, you know that when you get into lose-win, win-lose transactions, what do they almost always end up being? Lose-lose, lose-lose. Somebody wins and somebody else is expense, then they lose in the end. So we elevate lose transactions to some more moral nobility and win-win transactions, we kind of shrug off and say, well, that's just a marketplace, who cares? And that's a good reaction. Usually, you know, the real moral, the moral ethicist would say that's a bad thing because what are the two people doing when they're doing the win-win? They're both pursuing something that we don't recognize as moral, their self-interest. So nobility is giving, sacrificing, losing. Ignorability is making money, creating stuff, trading with other people. A culture that believes in that cannot and will not ever become a capitalist culture. That is irreconcilable. Now, Adam Smith had a way around this, Adam Smith fudged this, because he got this, right? I don't know if you've read Wealth of Nations, 1776. You should always remember when that book was published because it's the key date, right? Everything happened in 1776. Adam Smith says the baker bakes the bread, not because he cares about you, not because he cares about the family who's gonna buy the bread, but because he's trying to make a living and he's good at it and he enjoys it and he's trying to take care of his family. The grocery store that sells you the bread doesn't care about you, it's trying to make money for themselves, for their families, so that they can live. The trucker delivers the bread and he goes on and on the examples and he says they're all in it for their self-interest. Now, Adam Smith is uncomfortable with that because our culture is uncomfortable with that. Even some of you are probably uncomfortable with that. Certainly everybody outside this room is uncomfortable with it. So what's the solution? Well, Adam Smith solves it by saying this. Indeed, we all pursue our self-interest in the marketplace, but if you aggregate it all up, the invisible hand makes it so that everybody is better off. Society, the group, benefits. So even though self-interest itself is eh, we don't really like it that much, in aggregate, if you add up all these eh, you get something good. Nobody buys that, nobody buys that. Nobody buys that by doing immoral actions, you can aggregate them and get morality. So how does this manifest itself? Well, your moral responsibility should be to take care of other people. So if there's somebody suffering over there, you need to take care of them. You need to put aside what a productive work you're doing because that's being selfish and you need to take care of that person. Now, it turns out that most of us, most of the time are pretty self-interested. So we don't. We actually pursue our own careers, our own jobs and everything. So the government steps in and says, look, we know you wanna be a good person. We know you don't really want that person over there to suffer. We're gonna help you out. We're gonna take the money before you get a chance to spend it. And that way you won't be self-interested and you'll still be taking care of that person over there. And you say, okay, you know, there's this myth in the United States that this is a class culture that poor people vote left and rich people vote right. That's complete nonsense. I live in California, right? Rich people vote way left. Way left. Why? Because they wanna be forced to take care of that person otherwise they feel guilty because they were brought up by my mother. I should, right? Because we all were. They were brought up with the idea that morality means taking care of that person and if you don't take care of that person, you're not good. And if the government forces you to take care of that person, how bad could that be? And every program, every entitlement program starts with just a small little group of really, really needy people who are somehow struggling at this point in time. And it's your moral obligation to take care of it. It's our moral obligation to take care of them. So we'll just pass a little tax just on a few of us that won't go too far and it'll just take care of that small group. And then, of course, three years later, there's another group, right? I mean, think about healthcare. So first it was really, really poor people. They needed a Medicaid. And you know, how can you let really, really poor people not get quality healthcare that everybody else gets? It wasn't they were dying in the streets. Just, and then it's old people, right? And then it's old people that, you're not getting quite as good a healthcare as we can imagine if they were really, really rich. It's a lot of duty to help them. You get Medicare, Medicare. And then there's people who fall in the cracks. They're not quite middle class enough to buy insurance, but they're not quite poor enough to get Medicare, so we create programs for them, particularly if they're children, right? We have lots of these little programs for children because children do what? They tug at our heartstrings even more. They tug at that moral notion that we're responsible even more. And of course, Republicans have granted them all high ground that we need to help that person. If you accept that you are your brother's keeper, then you have lost. We've lost because we've accepted. So I'm my brother's keeper, so there's my brother, and there's my brother, and there's another brother. There are a lot of them. And if they know that I'm keeping them and I have a lot of money, they're gonna be one of them. They're all gonna declare brotherhood to me, right? That's how the entitlement state grows. It grows, it grows. Every time you add a little bit, they really seem to need it, but you keep adding. And today, Social Security is used for all kinds of things. Medicare, Medicaid have blown all out of proportion. We have multiple healthcare, and of course we've got Obamacare now to cover that other group that we priced out of them or could call the uninsured. And when that doesn't solve the problem, we'll socialize medicine completely, which is clearly their agenda, which everybody wants. And that'll solve the problem. Everybody will get the same lousy healthcare. But it'll be the same, and there won't be one group that needs it more than another group. They'll all need it the same. So they use it to tug at our heartstrings to get us to support other people, to redistribute wealth. The whole redistribution of wealth is based on you are your brother's keeper. And then there's a flip side to this. We call that in the book, we call that the argument from need. And then there's a second argument, and it's called the argument from greed. What do we know about self-interest? What do we know about self-interest, right? It's not just that we're told you shouldn't be self-interested, you should be selfless. We're also told that self-interest means being what kind of person? Eh, what does that mean, eh? It means a lying, stealing SOB. When I point at the kid in the corner there and I say you're selfish, what do I mean? I mean you're a horrible person. I mean you'll do anything to get you away. You'll step onto anybody, you'll backstab people, you'll lie and cheat and steal. Now what does selfishness actually mean if you just think about the word? It means taking care of self. Now does taking care of self involve lying, cheating, stealing, and walking over people? It turns out, not so much, right? I don't know how many of you have ever lied in life. I'll assume all of you. It doesn't work. It doesn't further your life. It doesn't make your life any better. It makes your life much worse. Ask Bernie Madoff. Not just because he was caught, but because he was miserable while he was not caught because he had a lie stealing cheat from his best friends. And he had to survive with that. And we're not built to survive with that. He says he's happier now in jail than he was before he was caught. I believe him. Cause I know that if ever I've lied, it's been horrible. And if you lie bigger lies and you lie, you remember he was cheating all his friends and he was lying to his family. And I mean you can't live, you can't look at somebody. You know, I like to say, you know, at my age I barely remember what actually happens. Like what happened last week? If I lie, I have to remember two things. Actually more than two things, right? And then I have to remember who I lied to and who I told the truth. I mean it's impossible. I mean it's just stupid. It's self-destructive, which is exactly what Bernie Madoff's behavior is. So they, but what they've done is they've got this very clever deal, right? They tell you, if you're selfish, that means if you're self-interested, that means that you're gonna be a lying stealing SOB. Nobody wants to be that. And the only alternative they give you is to be selfless as a moral ideal. Now, what do we know about businessmen? Well, if there's one thing we know about businessmen is that they're self-interested. They're about profit. But self-interest equals lying, stealing, and cheating. So what do we better do to businessmen if they're lying, stealing, and cheaters? Regulate them before they have a chance. You ever notice when you walk into an elevator, there's always a little thing on the wall that says that a government bureaucrat has been here and approved this elevator works. Every single elevator in the United States has one of those. And that really reassures me, because now I know the elevator won't fall. Because if that diploma wasn't there, I mean, we all know that the best way to make money in the elevator business is to kill your customers, right? Just let those elevators drop, so I'm gonna make out fortune. No businessman thinks that way. I find an interest in their businessmen, I talk to business groups and they say, oh, in our business, you can't do that, but those other businessmen in their business, they would cheat and cut corners and kill their customers. Just not in our business. Well, you don't make money that way. You know, imagine there was no FDA. We'd all die eating McDonald's because they would poison us. Because they don't have no self-interest in keeping their meat clean, right? I mean, it's ludicrous. But we don't trust them. We don't trust them. And I'm not even talking about the sophisticated finance, you know, finance, right? We overlay finance with regulation, the power regulation, and they always seem to be crises, so we add up more regulations and they still seem to be crisis. Nobody ever thinks maybe the regulations are causing the crisis, which is exactly what happened this last time. It's happened every time since the 1930s, even the 1920s, I would argue. No, we don't think that because we know, instinctually, right down here in our gut, we know that those businessmen are crooks. It's just a matter of when we catch them. Now, the best example of this was Saab-Ainz-Oxley. Saab-Ainz-Oxley was passed in 2002 because of WorldCom and Enron and all those. Real business crooks. They were real business crooks, they are some. I was on Bill O'Reilly's show. And Bill O'Reilly, right, a Republican, I think. You wonder sometimes. Bill O'Reilly wanted to fire every CEO in America. I was there to defend the 99% of CEOs who are good guys. And he yelled at me and he turned red because I dared defend CEOs who had not been caught defrauding their shareholders, right? Because to him, as to many Americans, the three, the WorldCom Enron and the five, six other examples would just prove that this is how they all are. It's just these got caught. And what we need is to create an accounting system. Anybody deal with Saab-Ainz-Oxley? Some of you probably do, yeah. An accounting system that's so monstrous, but looks at every little detail, then we can catch them now. Finally, we'll see that they really are the crooks we all believe that they are. Of course, how many crooks is it caught? Did it prevent the financial crisis? No, no, it's caught nobody. But it's cost of the economy. I've seen various estimates, but they're all north of $1.5 trillion. You know, by what vote it passed the Senate? 98 to zero, to zero. Because this is the thing about Republicans, conservatives, however you want to call them. They share them all, they've given them all high ground to the left. They never challenged their moral high ground. They never challenged that perception of business. They never challenged the need or the greed. So the argument for greed, the argument that self-interest will cause you to misbehave is the argument for regulation. The argument for need, the argument that your moral responsibility to just your brother, well, it's actually not your real brother, but your kind of adopted brother, is the argument for entitlements. And that's how you get an entitlement state and a regulatory state, which is what we got today. This is about ideas. This is about fundamental ideas, and in this case, the fundamental moral idea about what is good, what is right. Ainran challenges all of this. She rejects the notion that morality is about selflessness. She rejects the notion that nobility is sacrifice. Indeed, she says sacrifice is bad, because it's lose-win. Who wants to lose? Losing is bad. She's an advocate for rational self-interest, for the business with self-interest, for self-interest rooted in win-win. For self-interest rooted in the trader principle, in the relationship of traders, in the relationship of values, in the relationship of I give something and I get greater value, and you get greater value. But all of us pursuing our self-interest, and she says that's not good. You don't have to justify that because society's better off. The justification is in and of itself. It's because you are making your life better. What's more noble? What's more moral? What's more right than taking care of yourself and the people you love? Of making your life the best life that it can be? Of living a flourishing, successful, good life? This is Aristotle, if you've read Aristotle. This is what Aristotle was about. The virtues in Aristotle are about a flourishing life, not about society, not about your brother, not about other people, about you. But how to make life the best that it can be for you? And you do that through these trading relationships, through these win-win relationships. So by doing that, what happens to other people's lives? They're better off, just like we're all better off because Bill Gates was greedy for more money. He was. Made a lot of money and then he kept going and he made even more. But that's good because how did he make his money? By selling us products we wanted at the price below what we're willing to pay for. He could've raised the 20 bucks and we still would've bought it. He could've, right? So a morality based on self-interest that elevates the one value that makes all, you know, where do we get all this stuff? These amazing books, this building with 40 stories, the lighting system, the chairs you sit on, the clothes you wear, everything. Everything comes from one place. Because if you think about man in nature, dumped out there into nature, right? If you look at your neighbor, we're pretty pathetic animals. We're weak, we're slow, we have no fangs, we have no claws. Try biting into our bison. They used to roam around here, right? You can't do it. What makes all this possible? What makes it possible for the human race to exist? Your reason, your rational faculty, that's what makes it all possible. It's nothing. There's no values out there that are not ultimately made possible by the human mind. That's what we should be elevating. It's our ability to think. And what's the enemy of thought? What's the thing that can prevent you from thinking? What's the thing that can prevent you from acting on your beliefs, on your thoughts? Force, a gun, coercion. So if you want people to be able to pursue their self-interest, to pursue their life, to pursue their values, to build skyscrapers, what do you need to extract from human relationships? Force, coercion. That's what individual rights are. That's what the founding fathers conceived of, a political system that extracts coercion from human relationships. Rights are rights to freedom. Rights to do, rights to act. They're rights to live your life. The founders got this. And they created the only political system in history that allows us to pursue that, to pursue our life, to pursue our values, to pursue our mind, to pursue reason, to build, to create all those things that we poop are. But that's what this country's about. That's what made this country great. That's what the political system in this country makes possible. It's the creation, not the giving. The giving's fine. It's got nothing against charity. It's very nice. Do it, you know, I run at 501, C-32. We love your support. But what's really important to you, to your life, is the work that you do, is the things you create, is the values you create. That's what's important. That's what's noble. That's what makes you a good person. Not the charity that you do. Nobility is about creating. It's about using your mind to change reality, to make it better. And that's what the founders created in this country. That's what we're losing. And the founders got it. They got it at a much deeper level than most people accept. Not completely all the way down to the Randian level of understanding the morality. But in politics, they got it. Because in the Declaration of Independence, the most important political document in human history, more important than the Constitution, because it sets the framework for the Constitution, you cannot understand the Constitution unless you understand the Declaration. In a Declaration, it doesn't say that your job is to maximize social wellbeing. It doesn't say that you are your brother's keeper. It doesn't say that the poor are entitled to what you have earned. It says that you have an inalienable right, which means nobody can take it away from you. Not 99.9% of voters can take this away from you. You have a right to your life, which means a right to live your life as you see fit, to pursue the values that you think are right, to fail, and maybe learn from that failure and do better next time. Or maybe not, and be a failure. You have a right to live, to pursue your life, and you have a right to liberty. You have a right to be free of that curse of power that is typically from the government, but from your fellow man. The one job of the government is to protect you from your fellow man who wants to harm you, right? To punch you, to steal from you, to defraud you. That's what protecting individual rights means. So you have a right to your own life, you have a right to your own liberty, and in the most selfish political statement in human history, you have a right to pursue your own happiness. That is a profound statement. Notice you don't have a right to happiness, you have a right to pursue your happiness. Now, if we can recapture that, if we can recapture the idea of pursuit of happiness, with the entire morality that that implies that you own your life, your life is yours to live as you please, that nobody has a right to force you to do something you don't want, then we win. That's what we have to recapture, and it should be easy, because we have the real moral high ground, and we have an incredibly appealing message. We're for the pursuit of happiness. Now, it doesn't get any cooler than that. Thank you all. So Dr. Brook has agreed to take a few questions. Roxanne is going to walk around the microphone if you'll just raise your hand. You can ask your question. Thank you. I really enjoyed your speech. As a young fan of Ayn Rand, it's hard to find people who talk like you do. My question is how can people, millennials of my generation, go about trying to change this negative perception of selfishness, and try to empower more young people to embrace it and take charge of their own lives? Well, the first thing you have to do is talk about it, and it's hard to talk about it, because again, it goes against everything else in the culture, and it goes against the norms, against the common belief, but you gotta, the number one most important thing any individual could do is speak. When somebody says something you disagree with, tell them, you don't owe them a lecture, but just say, I have a different perspective. I think X. We gotta change the debate. They own the debate. The other side owns the debate. They own them all high ground. They own the terminology. We've accepted the words that they use. We need to take it back, and we need to challenge them. So, speak, which also means write, you know, writing letters to editor, writing our page, write whatever you can do. Get people to read good books. There's a book in the back there which counts as one. You know, let's let, and that book is written, it really is written for, it's not gonna convince a leftist. It's not gonna convince anybody on the left. It's written for people who generally have a sense that government is too big, government is too intrusive, they know it's wrong, and they're looking for solutions. It's not trying to convince them, right? If you think, ah, we're just getting started, right, with governments, you know, Obama shouldn't read this book. Not gonna help him. But, the Tea Party should read this book, because what we need now is to take all the people who have that emotion, and give it intellectual ammunition. Give it, give it the moral backbone. Give it some, give them something to fight for. And, you know, what we need in this country is not just the political revolution, which I think, I think we do ultimately, but we need a moral revolution. Without a moral revolution, we will not have the political revolution. We will now get rid of public schools, unless we're willing to challenge this notion of the philosophy of need. We won't get rid of public education without challenging the very notion of the role of government in education. Government has, just to be clear, government has no role in education, none whatsoever. I mean, it does a lousy job with a post office, which is a simple thing. I mean, I like to ask people, if you want to get a letter, if you want to get a letter to the other side of the country the next day, do you use the post office FedEx or UPS? Nobody says the post office, right? So I say, so why are you comfortable dropping your kids off every morning at the post office? It's the same mechanism, same incentive structure, same monopolistic behavior, same union phenomena, same thing. Why do you think you'd get better results? The quality of the post office is the quality of public education. And what you need is to get rid of the monopoly and the only way you get rid of the monopoly is to break it up and that's to sell it. And if you're worried about poor kids then start a foundation. And there will be, there'll be lots of charity, there'll be lots of money going to help poor kids. Nobody wants an education. There won't be anybody who wants an education who won't get one. And it'll be a thousand times better than anything we have today because you'll unleash the entrepreneurial, the innovative spirits of this country that today are focused on developing a better phone. That's all we can think of. Let's take the best and brightest and smartest people in the world and get them to make a better phone. To help with the minds of children, that will give to mediocrities at the Department of Education. We want the real entrepreneurs to get that iPhone just right. Imagine a Steve Jobs in education. Imagine a Steve Jobs in the automobile industry. Imagine a Steve Jobs in the airline industry. Our airplanes today are the same airplanes we flew 50 years ago basically. There's no difference. The same automobiles we drive. There's been no real innovation. And the reason is we regulate innovation out of these industries. We destroy them through government. So let's free them all up by getting Steve Jobs the freedom to go to any industry he wants not just into the one that happens to be less regulated. No, if I answered your question. Good evening, Dr. Brooke. I read with great interest, your book almost finished it. And you did a great exposure of the virtues of free market. But I kind of respectfully disagree with some points that you constantly equate self-interest with the maximization of profits. But I will say that the most successful entrepreneurs, please in our lifetime, might be not necessarily motivated with the maximization of profits itself, but something else. If you look at the case of Bill Gates, Jobs and even yourself, you are a very high qualified individual. But you're not really, I think, pursuing the interests of maximization of profits by pursuing an intellectual endeavor. You are pursuing something else, the maximization of attaining something unique. And at the end of the day, creating great contributions with your talent. And I think that's something that is kind of missing your book that is not necessarily maximization of profits in itself, but the maximization of your own potential, full potential. So when I talk about maximization of profits, I'm talking about in the context of business. And yes, Bill Gates maximized profits. His profit margin, if he wanted, if he cared about me, he would sell those products a lot less. iPhone has, or the first iPhone had about a 60% profit margin. Six zero. Any of you in business know how rare that is. And how amazing that is. He could have sold it for 40% less than that easily. He was maximizing profits. That is the job of business. And that's a good thing, not a bad thing, not even a mediocre thing. It's a great thing. Because of course Apple made a lot of money so it could reinvest, make the products even better, make even more profits, it could reinvest, grow the business, get into new products, the shareholders are better off, management is better off, everybody's better off. That though is in business. In other areas of life, we're not talking about money profits. We're talking about spiritual profits. But it's always profit in a sense, right? So yes, I could go to Wall Street, you know, I think, and make a lot more money than I do. I mean, I had a PhD in finance, I could have gone to Wall Street, but I love teaching. I love doing this, right? You could give me a lot of money and I would still do this rather than go to Wall Street. Many, many seven figures, and I'd still do this, right? So, but that's because, what? Because I love this. I enjoy it. I get a profit out of it. Might not be money, but I'm getting something out of it. It's still pursuing my self-interest. So yes, self-interest manifests itself differently in different air realms. We are non-materialists. We're not about money. Money to me is not that important. For somebody else, it might be more important than to me. That's fine. I mean, we all can have different weightings of where money comes in. But money in and of itself is just, it's a measure, right? It's the work that Steve Jobs loves. It's the work that Bill Gates loves while maximizing profits. So, absolutely. Only a portion of self-interest is captured by monetary profit, or captured by anything materialistic. Most of what self-interest is about is completely spiritual and has nothing to do with material goods. But it's still self-interest. Okay, this is the last question. As a West Point graduate, I'm a little curious to hear what you have to say, although I think part of your answer of the last question might apply here is with the morality of self-interest, how do you reconcile service in the military? Oh, I thought you were going to ask me about phone policy. I was looking forward to that. So, I think service to the military only makes sense if you're fighting for good country. If you're fighting for freedom, if you're fighting for liberty, if you're fighting for rights, if the country sucks, then there is no nobility, no virtue, no goodness in serving for your country. Indeed, you're a traitor to freedom and liberty if you fight for country that's anti-freedom and anti-liberty. A Nazi soldier should not be viewed as anything but a bad guy. Now, he was forced to be, but he volunteered. Or in the Soviet Union or any country, that is not a good country. Now, no country today is what we consider completely good, but you still live in this world, in this life, and you gotta fight for the best that there is. So, you fight for the value of freedom. You fight for, which is a very, very important value, and you could conceivably, you could quite conceivably say that, look, I am willing to risk my life for the kind of world that I want to live under, a free world, a free country that I want to live under, that my kids will live under, that my parents, so very selfish, self-interested, and I'm willing to risk my life because I do not want to live. I would rather die than live in an unfree world. I would rather die than see Osama bin Laden win. I would rather die than see the Nazis or the Japanese win because I value freedom. It's completely self-interested. It's just like, you would say, I don't want to, if my wife is drowning, I don't want to live in a world where she is not part of it. So, I'm willing to risk my life to save her, not as an act of sacrifice, not as an act of selflessness, but as an act of self-interest, because it's my life. Now, if it was a stranger drowning, I don't know. I'd have to calculate the probabilities. I mean, you laugh, but so would all of you. So would all of you. I'm not dying for some stranger. I'm not, period. Now, if there's a small probability that I'm risking myself, and it's a life, and that's valuable, then I'm gonna help them, but I'm not dying for a stranger. Ain't happening. So, because I'm self-interested, I value my life too much, and I think most of you do too. And that's moral, that's noble, that's good. People who die for strangers, knowing that they're strangers, because they're strangers, that's not good. This is how radical the moral case that I'm making is. That's not good. All those heroes that sacrificed for nothing, not good. Not moral, not virtuous, don't deserve it. So, flip, your life is the standard, not somebody else's. Thank you all, I'll let you go and catch the football game. So ladies and gentlemen, just a couple of moments real quick. First of all, on behalf of the Illinois Policy Institute, folks, just one more thing. On behalf of the Illinois Policy Institute, we have this gift for Dr. Brooke. This is a very special gift. I'm gonna let you open it, Dr., but while he's opening it, I just wanna say that this is a cross pen that we've developed that is very unique to the Institute. And our hope is that perhaps Dr. Brooke will write down his next series of great thoughts using this very pen. So thank you so much for having me. And he'll sign the books today with the two. Folks, thank you to the Illinois Policy Institute staff that helped out with this event tonight. You are a wonderful audience. Thank you for the questions you asked. IllinoisPolicy.org is a website where you can find original content. You can't find anywhere else. Please check it out. There's some great stuff on it. Folks, the next big event that we're doing is on Tuesday evening, November 6th. This is a very exciting occasion. Every election night, we have a big party, but this one is special because we are celebrating our 10th anniversary at the Illinois Policy Institute. We want all of you to be a part of it. It's gonna be on Tuesday, November 6th at six o'clock p.m. at the Hotel Polymar here in Chicago. Please be a part of this event. Come to our website, RSVP, give us a call if you'd like to be a part of it. It will truly be a very unique and special occasion that we want you to be a part of. Folks, thank you once more. Thank you, Dr. Brooke. Have a wonderful evening.