 Thank you. It's great to be back in Porta Lega. It's been, what, 15 months or something since I was here last? So it's always good to be here. So this morning you heard a number of talks about egoism, about altruism, about Einstein's philosophical foundation for capitalism. And I want to go back to this idea of what it means to be egoistic, what it means to be selfish. So to be egoistic, one is primarily concerned with one, one is concerned with one's own life. Your moral focus is on trying to make your life as an individual the best life that it can be. To live a flourishing, successful life. Now how do we do that? How do you do that? And aren't we all, at the end of the day, isn't everybody selfish? Doesn't everybody do what's good for them? No, I wish. And the reason is that we, unlike other animals, we do not have pre-programmed in us the knowledge of what it takes to be successful human beings. What it means to be successful at living. Plants know what values to pursue and they do it automatically. Animals know what values to pursue in order to survive, in order to stay in existence, and they do it automatically. We don't know anything. I mean look around this room. A bunch of weak, I'm looking, I'm making sure this is true, slow, no fangs, no claws. I mean I drop you in the middle of the Amazon, you don't have a clue. You don't know how to survive instinctually. You don't have the instincts for survival. You don't have the knowledge encoded in your DNA of how to make food. You can't even hunt. I bet you most of you can't even hunt. And you know, I don't know where food comes from. I once asked here in Puerto Alegre at a high school here, Roberto took me to a high school to talk to the kids and I asked them, where does food come from? What do you think they said? The supermarket. The supermarket. Because we don't know how to grow food. So how do we get the food? How do we hunt? Anybody know how to make clothes? There's probably somebody here who knows how to make clothes. I don't know. If you drop me naked in the Amazon, I don't know how to make clothes. So how do we do it? How do we hunt? How do we farm? How do we make clothes? How do we make iPhones? How do we make everything around us? What do we have to do in order to do to achieve that? What do we have to do? What's that? Because if you just let go and say, I'll let my DNA do it, then you'll die. You'll die. So what do you have to do? What action do you have to take? What's that? Trade. No. What are you trading? You have to create something before you trade and the other party has to create something before they trade. So what do you have to do in order to create something so you have something to trade? What's that? Produce. How? Think. Because you don't know how to produce. The DNA won't tell you how to produce. Your DNA won't tell you how to build a bow and arrow. Your DNA won't tell you how to farm. Your DNA won't tell you how to sew a suit. There's no content there. You have to figure it out. And what is figuring out mean? It means thinking, using your reason, applying your mind to the problem of your existence. Nothing is just available out there for us, just as an aside. It's like everybody talks about, you know, economics is the science of scarcity, right? Science is science of scarcity. There's scarce resources out there and we just have to figure out how to divide them up. No. What's really we need to figure out is how to produce the stuff so that it's not scarce. The question of production, question of trade, the question of existence depends on our ability to think, to be creative, to use our reason, to shape the world around us, to fit our needs of survival. None of that comes automatically. If you're determinist, you're dead. If you're real determinist, because if you just sit waiting, it's not going to happen. You have to think, and thinking is not automatic. It's not like everybody thinks. Thinking requires an act of will. It requires us to choose to think, to choose to look, to choose to engage, and at the end of the day to choose to survive, to choose to live. And that's the foundation, that's the essence of what it means to be an egoist, to what it means to be selfish. It's the choice to live your life. It's the choice to live a good life, and therefore it's the choice to think, to use your mind, to use your reason. People who don't do that are not egoistic. They might not be altruistic, they might not care about other people, but they don't care about themselves either. Caring about yourself means thinking, solving problems, the problems that relate to your life and how to make your life the best life that it can be. And that's not easy. It's not easy. To be an egoist, to be selfish is hard work. It means thinking about all the possible values and choosing the ones that you are going to dedicate your energy to achieving, figuring out which ones are good for you and which ones are bad for you. And that's not easy. Who are good people that you want to associate with, be friends with, fall in love with, who are bad people, who you want to stay away from? That's just day-to-day thinking. It's not simple to discover what is good and what is not, what is right and what is wrong, what is worth pursuing and what is not worth pursuing. And that's if you're doing the work necessary, but most people don't do the work because we don't teach them to do the work. We tell them morality is about sacrificing for the people. And how should I live? I don't know, whatever. Morality is not about that. But Ayn Rand's conception of morality, similar to Aristotle's conception of morality, is very different. For Ayn Rand, morality is a science. What science? The science in a sense of a good life. The science of how we should live if we are to attain happiness, if we are to flourish, if we are to be successful at life, here are the principles, here are the guidelines. Because we're not programmed. We don't know automatically how to live. We don't even know how to survive at the most basic level. Never mind how to live a good life in an environment in a society like we live in today. All this requires work. All this requires thinking. Egoism, selfishness requires work. It requires thinking. It requires figuring stuff out. And the consequence of that figuring stuff out is all the values we have today. Everything we have around us is a product of somebody's thinking. So if you had to boil down selfishness and Ayn Rand's virtues to one principle, it's be rational. Facts are facts. Don't put your wishes above the facts. Integrate those facts. Think about the world around you. Use your mind to discover what is true and what is not. To discover what values are pro your life and which are anti your life. And then pursue the values that are pro your life. That's the essence of Ayn Rand's morality. That's the essence of being selfish. And very few people unfortunately do it because they haven't been taught. They're still wondering. They're figuring out what they should do. And they get conflicting information. They get the opposite information about what it means to be good. And secondly it requires effort. It requires choosing to think. Choosing to value your own life. Now thinking. Thinking requires us to deal with facts. To deal with truth. To deal with choice. What's the enemy? What's the enemy of thinking? What makes thinking impossible? What's the enemy of thinking? What's that? Force. If I put a gun to your head, you can't think. You follow orders. There are no options. There are no choices. There's no fact. There's no truth or lies. There's just doing what will allow me to stay alive which is follow orders. Force, coercion, authority. Imagine an authority that says this is the truth. It doesn't matter what you think. This is the truth. How do we know it's the truth? Because we say so. Because it's written in a book. Because it was revealed to us by some way. And the truth must be followed. And if you don't follow the truth, we use coercion against you. Authority that declares to the world this is right, this is wrong, independent of your thinking, independent of your conclusions, independent of your values, independent of your mind makes thinking irrelevant. If I have to abide by the book, then it doesn't matter what I think. It doesn't matter what you think. It doesn't matter what the facts are. It doesn't matter what reality is. It just matters what the authority tells me the truth is. That's anti-thinking, anti-reason and therefore anti-life. So, coercion, force, authority that we have no choice about are all anti-life, anti-egoism, anti- your life as an individual. And the fact is that when we get into society, when we get into groups, when we get together, there are always going to be some people, some people call them politicians, call them other kinds of leaders who want to impose their will on us, call them criminals. They're the crooks, they're the mafia. And there's people who want to tell me what to do and how to live and what values to pursue. And don't give me any choice. They take a gun and they put it to my head, whether it's a real gun or whether it's a figurative gun, that's anti-life. And that's what needs to be eliminated from society. So, for Iron Rand, there's a principle that describes the kind, how we should treat one another in a social environment. There's a principle, a concept that captures this idea that you cannot use force against another human being. Whether it's a majority can't use force against a minority. Well, what's the smallest minority? Individuals. The only real minority is the individual. Can't use force against the individual. There's a concept that captures that. That in a social setting, in a political setting, you cannot use force against individual. What's that concept? It's the concept of rights. Rights, individual rights, is the idea that you, it's a moral idea. It's an idea that says your life is yours. Your moral responsibility is to live your life based on your judgment. And therefore, in a social setting, we cannot use force against one another. In a social setting, you are free, free from coercion of other people to live your life. In pursuit of the values, your reason determines, are good for you. Your judgment, your choices, your reason, your life. None of my business, none of anybody's business. So rights are this idea that in a social setting, we cannot use coercion against one another. No matter what the noble cause that we might have. Oh, this is good for you. This is going to make you a better person if I put a gun to your head. Or if you follow my regulations. Or if I just take some of your money and give it to somebody else, it'll make you a better person. No. Never. No matter the cause, coercion, force are anti-life because they anti-reason because, and that's anti-human choice, anti-human life. That's the idea of individual rights. An idea that Rand has is that the only job of government, the only job of government is to protect those rights. It's to eliminate coercion from society. It's to monopolize the use of force and only use it in retaliation, only use it for self-defense, which is the only appropriate use of force. You might have heard from libertarians this idea of a non-aggression principle. Well, this is the non-aggression principle in a sense. But this is the philosophical cause of this non-aggression principle. It's not a principle that, you know, there's this assumption everybody gets it, force is bad. No. 99% of people think force is good. If it's for a good cause, if it's for my cause, and all of our political system is built on force is good. We tax people to redistribute wealth because redistribution of wealth is good. And we're willing to use force against you because that person over there needs the money and it's your moral responsibility to help him and you're not. So I'm just making you a better person by stealing your money and giving it to him. I'm helping you be moral and I'm helping you have some money. Win-win, right? Or lose-lose, as the case may be. What I'm trying to say is it's never right, no matter how good the cause might be and the cause here is not a good cause. So force is wrong because it cripples the mind. Force is wrong because it cripples your choices. It takes choices away from you. And what we want is to create a political system. What we want is to create a social system in which we have no force. We don't deal with one another by force. How do we deal with one another? Going back to the answer to the first question I asked, through trade, through voluntary trade, voluntary interaction. You want my money? What do you got to offer? How are we going to trade? Materially, spiritually. But it's about trade. It's about win-win. And it's, again, not just in a material realm. It's in every realm. In friendship, you're trading. You're trading in spiritual values, but you're trading. Imagine a friendship in which one party gives and the other party is passive or undercuts. How long does that friendship last? Very little time. Friendship is about mutual respect. Mutual values. Sharing and trading those values. Otherwise it doesn't last. And most marriages don't last because, most marriages that don't last, don't last because. It's not win-win. It turns into win-lose. It's not a trade relationship anymore. It's a sacrificial relationship. And one party wants out, or both parties want out. We know this from our personal relationships. How often that happens. So I end up saying when we deal with other people, both in the material realm and in the spiritual realm, we should be traders always seeking to better our own life through interaction that betters the other party's life as well. We're creating win-win relationships. That's how we should behave in a social setting. Now, how do we formalize that? How do we formalize that in a state, in a country? Well, we formalize that through a government. A government that follows certain principles. And the principle, the fundamental principle is that government is limited to only doing one thing. Protecting us. So a government that protects individual rights. And what do we call that system? What do we call the system of government that protects individual rights and does nothing else? A government that does not intervene in the economy, that does not redistribute wealth, that does not regulate businessmen, that leaves people alone to be free. To be free to pursue their own rational values based on their own judgment, based on their own choices. And as long as they're not violating each other's rights, leaves them free, alone. What do we call that? What's the name of that kind of system? Capitalism. That's capitalism. Capitalism is not the system of competition. It's not the system of markets. Those are all consequences. But capitalism is the system that respects individual freedom, respects it so much that it only grants the government the ability to protect that freedom and nothing else. It's a system of individual rights. It's a system where the government protects individual rights and where one of those rights, the right to property, where property is all privately owned because only private individuals can own property. And of course, property is necessary for survival. That's why it's so important. We can't survive unless we can benefit from the things that we produce. Capitalism is fundamentally the system of freedom, the freedom of the mind, the freedom of the individual. To choose his values, to pursue those values for the purpose of what? Happiness, individual happiness. So capitalism is this ideal which we can make real. I have no doubt about the fact that we can make real. In which a society is created in which violence, force, coercion, authority are outlawed. And in which each individual is then responsible and free to pursue their own life in pursuit of their own happiness. Now to me, that's a beautiful message. Capitalism is about happiness. Capitalism is about the pursuit of values. Capitalism is about freedom. All the economic stuff is all true, but it's secondary. That's the essence. That's what it's about. That's worth, you know, really fighting for. And it should be a message that we can, we can convince people about. And every attack on capitalism is an attack at the end of the day based on altruism. It has to be. Because it's obvious that capitalism is what's good for the individual. It's obvious that capitalism is what's good for thinking, productive individuals. So the only way they can undercut capitalism, the only way they can convince us to abandon capitalism is by convincing us of the morality of altruism. Because the fact is that if altruism is true, then what about the poor? There's always going to be somebody who's poor. Their need is a claim against me. Their need is a moral claim against you. How can we allow a society to have all this immorality going on? Where some people have and other people don't have. The whole discussion of inequality in the world today. I mean my response to inequality is always in a free market. Who cares? What's it got to do with anything? But if you're an altruist, the fact that some people have less than others is an offense. It's bad. And therefore, it's okay to take from some and give to others. Altruism also tells us that being selfish is what? Being self-interested, being an egoist is what? What do egoistic people do? What do selfish people do? According to the altruists. Because they don't think of... I think of egoism as thinking. I think of egoism and self-interest as thinking for yourself, pursuing your own values and being a trader. But that's not how the altruist thinks of egoism. How does the altruist think of egoism? You do what? Yeah, you exploit. You do whatever it takes. You lie, cheat, steal. You exploit people. What does business do? Is business altruistic or self-interested? Just almost every business. Altruistic or self-interested? Obviously, everybody knows that. It's self-interested. But the altruist convinces us that self-interest is lying, cheating, stealing. And business is self-interest. So business must be about lying, cheating, stealing. Now, if business is really about lying, cheating, stealing, what must we do to business? Well, we could destroy it, but we like the stuff that they produce. So we don't want to completely destroy it because we like the taxes. We like the stuff. So we can't completely destroy it. But if you knew there was a group of people that you had to interact with, but they generally were tempted by lying, stealing, and cheating, what would you do with them? Regulate them. You would want to control them. You would want to look over the shoulder. You would want to check their numbers. You would want to tell them what they can and cannot do. You would limit them. You would constrain them. That's exactly what we do to business. And it's not because businessmen are bad, objectively. It's not because there's a history of food companies poisoning our food, but we think, oh, businessmen, they're self-interested. If we leave them alone, they might poison the food, so we better watch them so they don't. Because we really believe altruism teaches us that the way to make money is to kill our customers, right? Best way to make money is poison your customers, kill your customers. But we treat businessmen that way. The whole regulatory regime that we have is based on altruism. It's based on the idea that self-interest always leads to bad behavior, to destructive behavior. And therefore we must control. The only way to get rid of regulations, I mean really get rid of regulations, not play at the edges, but really get rid of them, because we don't need them. The market is a much better mechanism to guarantee that our food is safe, much better mechanism to guarantee that buildings are safe, much better mechanism to guarantee that everything we have is of high quality than the government ever can do. But if we got rid of those regulations, the only way to get rid of those regulations is to say being selfish is not about length-cheating and stealing. It's about pursuing values. It's about trade. It's about win-win relationships. If people understood that, then they'd say, well, of course we don't need regulations. We don't need to watch over businessmen. They're not evil people. But right now, the assumption, the implicit assumption, when we talk about businesses, as soon as we let them free, as soon as we let them lose, as soon as we give them a little bit of freedom, they'll cut corners, they'll take stuff away, they'll distort. So this moral question is not a theoretical question. It doesn't just apply to the individual's life and individual choices. Although that, I think, is the most important application to it. The most important question about ethics is how to apply it to your life. But it has massive social consequences. If you believe in altruism, you cannot, at the end of the day, consistently be a capitalist. And they're not. That's where they compromise. They give in a little bit. They, consistency requires that you actually believe that morality is a guide to a self-interested life. To a good life. And that being self-interested is not being a lying, cheating, stealing, thieving. It's about thinking and trading and producing. So capitalism is a system of individual rights. It's a system of individual freedom. And it's a system in which we separate government from economics. So one last issue that comes up when we talk about inequality and comes up when we talk about capitalism. Everybody says, yeah, but businessmen, they manipulate the government. Certainly in Brazil they do. Government and business are going to be in bed together. And they're going to dominate everything. And they get, the businessmen are going to use force that the government has in order to control all of us. Right? What do they call that? What do we call that? Corruption, cronyism. But think about it. Why do businessmen lobby government? Why do businessmen get involved in cronyism? And I never say crony capitalism, please. Never, just one little change if you can make in the way you talk. Never talk about crony capitalism. Cronyism is a feature of statism. Cronyism is a feature of socialism. The more socialism you have, the more cronyism you have. Why? Because the more power you grant the state over businessmen, the more they're going to lobby, the more they're going to try to influence, the more they're incentivized to actually gain political power. But if you make politicians impotent, impotent politically, not impotent, impotent, right? I know there's some politicians here. I didn't want to imply that. If you make the government only do what it's supposed to do, which is protect individual rights, then what am I going to lobby them for? They can't give me any favors. They can't give me any goodies. They can't give me protection from competition because they don't have the power. So the only way to get rid of cronyism is to end government power over business. And the only way to do that is to separate completely and thoroughly state from economics. There should be no state economic policy. None. No economic policy. No finance minister. No economics minister. No Treasury minister. None of their business. Economics should be determined basically by our individual decisions and the trade that we do among ourselves, free of any intervention, free of regulation, free of redistribution of wealth, free of the state centrally planning our activities. It's about freedom. And that means it's about the pursuit of happiness. And this is what it's going to require for us to be free to pursue our lives, free to pursue our happiness, free to live wholly as human beings, free to live up to our potential as human beings. We must be free, free of coercion, free of force, free of authority. And that's why we must fight for capitalism, the only system that gives us the freedom to achieve our happiness. Thank you all. All right, we got plenty of time for questions. We have 25 minutes for questions. Those who are watching us online can also send questions through the comments on the site. The ones that are watching us online can send messages through the link, please. You can ask in English or Portuguese. Thank you for the presentation. I'm going to become inconvenient of the questions, I think, at the end of the week. But I understand, for all this matter, that if the person believes in their ability, in their ability to judge, in their ability to be productive, in their choices, therefore, they have the code of life, right? And the code of anti-life, which is what we are talking about here, would then be a lack of self-confidence in themselves, of self-esteem, of not believing that I am capable of being the best vector, not a vector, but the best president of my life, that I am capable of doing this. So it would be a lack, this code of life would be a lack of self-confidence, self-confidence, that is, I allowed others to choose for me what I actually know would be the best for me. This would be a question. One at a time. You can ask the second question in a minute. Okay. But I can only remember one question at a time. Okay. So I'm not against two questions. You can stay there. You can ask after I answer. So I'll take the question as, is self-esteem required in order to be, in order to be a moral person? And no, in this sense, I think self-esteem is something we must seek. It's a result of being a moral person. That is, if one acts appropriately, one gains self-esteem. A lot of us, when we're young or when we first start out, don't have the kind of self-confidence or self-esteem, but we go out there and make choices. We go out there and achieve things. And as you achieve, you gain that self-esteem and you gain that confidence. And self-esteem is deeper than just confidence. Self-esteem is the sense that I belong in this earth. You know, I can do okay here. This is my world. Now, a lot of, particularly in the modern time, because of our educational system, a lot of people don't have self-esteem because we're not, we're trained on the opposite. We're trained that it doesn't require effort to get a ribbon or to get a trophy. You know what ribbons are? You know, ribbons for achievement, but then everybody gets a ribbon so there's no achievement. And that lower self-esteem. If you tell your kid you're the best thing in the world, even when they're bad, you're not giving them self-esteem. You're destroying self-esteem. Self-esteem is a consequence of achieving values, of achieving life-affirming values. So a lot of people don't have self-esteem. But one of what I read, one of the cardinal values that I read has in addition to reason, in addition to thinking is self-esteem. It should be what we seek. And the way to seek it is to use our mind to achieve life-affirming values, to challenge ourselves, to push ourselves, so that in a sense we get confirmation that yes, we do belong in this earth. Yes, we can survive. Yes, we can succeed. Yes, we can have that ability. And the biggest tragedy in the world today, I think, is the fact that parents destroy their kid's self-esteem, not only by giving everybody ribbons, but also by, you know, discouraging them from looking up to heroes. Life's not like that. They're no heroes in real life, we tell our kids. Oh, they are heroes. And they should aspire to be heroes. That's how you gain, again, the self-esteem. They should be heroes within their own life. So I think self-esteem is something you build, something you create, something you pursue. And it's attainable, it's accessible to anybody who chooses to think and use their mind and guide themselves towards their own values and set themselves real challenges. Thank you. The second question. Thinking about it, about self-confidence. And actually, I have a lot of questions about how people don't understand this philosophy, and I've tried to find in several literatures, for example, understanding the anti-capitalist mentality of von Mises. I've tried to read Karl Marx to try to understand the origin of evil, because this spread in such a way, it looks like a virus. And the second question is actually very simple. If you think it would be a way to call attention to the world with regard to this subject, create a day of the Revolta de Atas or a day that companies do their revolt to call attention to the day of independence, the day of everything. If that would be a way to call attention to a society, for example, like the Brazilian one, with an exceptional relationship. Thank you. Don't believe in Atlas Shrug. Or think Atlas Shrug is nice, but they don't buy the philosophy, they don't completely engage and embrace the philosophy. But yeah, generally I'm all for anything that brings attention, positive attention to these ideas and get people curious and maybe to read them. But the more the deeper question you're asking is why don't people embrace this? And it can't be just that not enough have heard of it. That's a problem. We need more people to hear of it. But a lot of people have heard of these ideas, a lot of people read the books, a lot of people see Venezuela and see what socialism results in and they see, I don't know, Chile in comparison. And they're still socialist. So there has to be something deeper, something more vicious going on that is preventing people from accepting these ideas or even engaging with them. How many of you know people who say, I don't want to read that capitalist, selfish person, I don't even want to read it? Because it's scary. It's against everything we believe in. And that's the fundamental. The fundamental is that the idea of freedom, the idea of liberty, the idea of capitalism, the idea of individualism, these are hard ideas in the context of a society that for 2,000 years are being taught about the virtue of sacrifice and the deeper the sacrifice, the more painful the sacrifice, the more depressing the sacrifice, the more blood involved in the sacrifice, the better, the better. And this has incongruated us since we're little kids. You're supposed to live for others. Now nobody wants to do that. Nobody does that, but that's beautiful. That's perfect for the authoritarians. Because what happens when you do stuff that's inconsistent with your moral belief? What is the emotion evoked by that? What's the emotion you get when you live one life but the moral ideal is another life? Guilt, guilt, Catholics and Jews know this, right? Particularly Jewish mothers and Catholic mothers. Guilt. And guilt is what? It's an amazing mechanism to control people. Guilt is an amazing mechanism to get people to do what you want. They don't want you to be fully sacrificial. They don't want you to be fully altruistic because they want you to feel the guilt and then they can control what you do. But that guilt only exists because we buy into it. You know, everybody's concerned about the poor, about people who can't. I mean, all the questions. Any Q&A you ever do, people say, well, what about these poor and what about people who can't take care of themselves and what about this and what about that? Always what about those people over there who need something? Who is the biggest beneficiary in all of human history of those people? No, politicians have done nothing for those people. Who's actually done something for those people? For all of us. Who are the biggest beneficiaries for all of mankind? Who? Businessmen. Businessmen. Who brings people out of poverty? Politicians? Just look around Brazil. Politicians are trying to bring people out of poverty for what? Since the beginning of Brazil. How many people have come out of poverty because of political, because of politics? Poverty is bigger because of politics. Politics increases poverty and they love it because it's more people to control. It's more people to guilt. More people to tax. They're not interested in poverty. Altruism is not interested in poverty. Who did more? Who did more to bring people out of poverty? Who did more to benefit mankind? Bill Gates or Mother Teresa. I mean, if you have to think about it, then you're not thinking right. Because it's not even close. Bill Gates by building Microsoft. How many people in the world did he affect? Positively. Billions? Billions? How do we know it's positive? Because people were willing to give up $100 to get something for Bill Gates, which meant what they got from Bill Gates was worth more than $100 to them, which means their life improved by the difference between the value of this thing and $100 by that amount. And he did that over and over and over again, hundreds of millions of times with billions of people, and all of their lives got better. Even people who never traded with Microsoft, I don't know, some tribe in the middle of the Amazon that gets aid. How does that aid get there? Well, by use of modern logistics, which require computers, which require Microsoft, even they benefit from it. Every human being on this planet almost has benefited from Microsoft. How much moral credit does Bill Gates get for being the greatest beneficiary mankind has seen in the latter part of the 20th century? Zero. Negative. Why? Because he made money. He made money doing it. He benefited himself. He traded. He didn't sacrifice. What would we have to do to make Bill Gates a saint? Some of you are Catholic. What would it take to make Bill Gates a saint? Bill Gates Foundation. What's that? Bill Gates Foundation. That's a beginning, not enough, a beginning. So first, Bill Gates has to leave Microsoft. God forbid you make money. God forbid you build a company. God forbid you create stuff. God forbid you change the world. He's got to leave Microsoft and start a foundation. Not create, well, give it away. That's good. Now he's a good guy. We love Bill Gates now because he's giving his money away. That's good. How many people's lives will he change? A few thousand, maybe tens of thousands, not billions. No, he closed the billions. But now he's good. Not a saint. Why is he not a saint? He's rich, still lives in a big house, still drives around in a nice car, flies private jet. He can't be a saint if you're rich. So what would it take for Bill Gates to be a saint? He'd have to give all the way, move into a tent, and really he needs to bleed for us. He needs to bleed a little bit. You go to museums, see pictures, paintings of saints on the wall. Ever seen one where the saint is smiling? Happy? Having a good time? No. I mean, it's funny, but it's really sad. Because what it means is our moral code requires suffering to be the best, to be an ideal, to be a saint. In my world, Bill Gates is a saint for building Microsoft, for being happy, for being a successful human being, living life well. That's a saint. That's moral. That's justice. Your life should not be measured by how much you sacrifice for other people, by how much blood you spill, by how sad you are, by how pathetic your life is. Your life should be evaluated by how happy you are, how many values you achieve, what you succeed at, how good this one chance you have at living, how much of an advantage you've taken of it, to live fully as a human being with all of our faculties, not in any just one dimension, in all the dimensions, to be fully human. And that requires this, requires reason, choice, action, requires living. And that's about prospering, it's about succeeding, it's about being happy, it's about great life. You should be smiling if you're a saint, not full of arrows about to die for the cause. So a whole moral view shapes why we cannot succeed. People don't, you know, I debate socialists all the time, right? And they say, it's a moral ideal, socialism. Because yeah, it's about sacrifice and it's about sharing and it's about not caring about yourself but caring about other people. Socialism is altruism, in politics. And they say, okay, so it's failed every time we've tried it, but it's an ideal, so we have to keep trying. We'll only stop trying when it stops being an ideal. And that's right. As long as the world views altruism as an ideal, they will keep trying socialism over and over and over and bloody over, bloody over, bloody over, because people die. But nobody cares if they die because hey, life's about sacrifice. So we sacrificed 100 million people to experiment with communism. What's the big deal? What did Lenin say? You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet. 100 million eggs in this case. So that's why we need a challenge. We need a new ideal. An ideal of reason, individualism, happiness, success. And if that's the ideal, then obviously socialism fails. Nobody's tempted by socialism if they want to be happy. Then we will win. But that's the ideal, and that's why it's so hard. Because it's about ethics. And you're fighting against 2000 years of Christianity. You're fighting against most secular philosophers. You're fighting against a whole 2000-year-old tradition of altruism as noble and good and virtuous. And it's not. It's evil. All right. Do we have time for more? Yes. Well, I mean, what you have to do is teach people the value of their own life. And I don't think that's particularly complex, particularly for the average person. We have to advocate. Those of us who do read, first of all, you're not going to do this unless you've got a big group of intellectuals and business leaders who have read, who do understand, who have investigated and figured it out and know it and are certain about it. And then we need to find a variety of different ways to communicate with people these ideas. And there's no one gimmick. There's no one thing. Here's a slogan, and if you give the slogan, it'll just flip somebody's mind. It doesn't work like that. It's about examples. It's about arguments. It's about discussions. It's about debates. It's about speaking, speaking, speaking, speaking. And first you have to have the intellectuals who develop these ideas. Then you have to have people who can then articulate those ideas in all kinds of ways. We're not going to win until we have artists presenting art that presents this view. We're not going to win until teachers are free to present these kind of views in schools and in universities. We're not going to win until we have radio talk show hosts who talk about these ideas. We're not going to win until these ideas are not broadcast into the culture. Through all the mechanisms the culture has to broadcast these ideas. But to do that, you first have to have a cadre of individuals who really deeply understand them. So that's how you convince. I don't have a sentence to give. But I think the thing most appealing about this set of ideas is your life is yours. Your moral purpose in life is your happiness. Here's some principles that if you understand them properly, if you figure them out, will lead to that happiness. And then everything else will fall into place. Everything else will fall into place. So if I want my happiness, if anybody wants to be happy and understands the principles that lead to happiness and understands that you cannot be happy unless you make choices, rational choices about your life, then you don't want Mother Government sitting on your shoulder telling you, do that, don't do that, eat this, don't eat that. You want to be free because you believe in your own capacity to make choices and your happiness is the goal and only you can figure out what's good for you on the concrete level. So you have to do it. So freedom will be a consequence of people respecting their own life and their own mind. Not the other way around. We will get capitalism, true capitalism, when people want to live free, when people want to pursue their happiness, when people have a respect for their own reason, for their own mind. She's been waiting. So the two of you and we'll do that. Excuse me for the monopole of the questions. I think that you and I are monopolizing the microphone. First of all, congratulations for the lecture. I think it summarized very well the feeling that we all have in relation to capitalism because it is a system much superior to all the others, or more utopian, let's say. I totally agree with you when you say that the only role of the State should be to guarantee the fundamental right of life, the freedoms of the individual. I think that today the country that we have the most as a gabarito, let's say, is the United States, which is the biggest symbol of freedom and capitalism in the western world. For us, we have our personal defense, both of external forces, other states, and even homicides and thieves inside here. So both the security of our country and our own individual depend on armed forces, military, police, anyway, to apply this use of coercive force that the State should have. This requires a certain spending, a public spending. And at the same time, so that we can say what is the right of whom, in my conception we have to have a system, a fair system of judgment, of laws, so that people can respect the individuality of the law. Until where is my limit, until where is your limit, in what we disagree with, maybe someone has to intervene. My question is, how to do this without the financing, where does money come from to have a very powerful military force, for example, in the United States, and have an internal security, also, in the police, and, in addition, guarantee a fair system, ethical and moral, of fair judgment for the entire population, to be able to mediate the interests of the people. Where does this financing come from? And if you believe, if it is not an utopia, think only voluntarily we would be able to raise the money for all of this. Thank you. To imagine what it's like to live in a free country, really free country, where the government does so little. You know, first let's concretize what it means, right? I mean, I don't know what percentage of the Brazilian economy, or percentage of GDP the government spends in Brazil. But you don't need a military, you don't have a police, as far as I can tell, because crime is rampant all over the place, and your justice system is amazingly corrupt, and yet they manage to spend huge amounts of money. But if we go back to the closest maybe we've ever been to capitalism today, deal with the United States of America and the latter part of the 19th century, the United States government never spent more than 3.5% of GDP. 3.5% of GDP. Today it spends 20 to 21. So you could cut 80% of the American federal budget and still have a military, a pretty decent police force, and a reasonably good court system, right, in America. 80% would be gone. Imagine we all got an 80% tax cut, and they eliminated all the debt, you know, that they carry. How amazing the economy would be, how much growth there would be, how much wealth would be created, how much we'd all be better off, and how much fear we would feel. And then imagine once you get there you say, okay, we don't believe in coercion, so now we have to get rid of the last piece of taxes. How are we going to fund the government? So first, let's get there. And then we can have the debate on how to fund it. That would be pretty cool. Ayn Rand wrote an essay in her book, Capitalism Not Known Ideal. I don't think it's in Portuguese yet, but I think it's one of the books that are going to be translated soon into Portuguese, so I will encourage everybody to read it when it's out in Portuguese. But in Capitalism Not Known Ideal she has an essay exactly on this question. And she says first, it's going to be a long time before we get there. There's a lot to cut before we even get to that point. And there's a lot of understanding that we all have to have about the role of government before we can cut. There's a lot of education, a lot of debate, a lot of discussion before we ever get there. And then the question is how do we fund a little bit of funds that are necessary to defend the borders, to defend internally, and to have a court system. And she gave two examples of what you can do. One would be, you know, fee for services. Certain services that the government provides could be provided for fee. For example, if we had a contract between us, a legitimate contract, we could just have arbitration and mediation, right, private. But if we wanted to be enforced by the courts, we would have to pay a fee to the courts in advance when we signed the contract so that the courts would have supervision over this particular contract. Not everybody would do it, but enough, I believe, would do it and think of big contracts between big companies that would fund the court system quite easily just through this fee. But what about the rest? There's a whole bunch of more money we'd need. And here's where I think it's hard if you're a Latin American, or if you're Israeli, or if you're European to get this because of the kind of world we live on. But I believe people would write checks voluntarily to the government. As an American, it's easy to imagine that. Because when we get to the point where we're free in that way, we'll be rich, much richer than we are today. But we'll also have that self-esteem that we talked about before. We'll have that confidence. My life is mine. We'll believe this. Otherwise, we're not going to get there. My life is mine to live as I see fit. And I want to deal with other human beings as a trader, not as a leech, not as a free rider, if you know economics, but as a trader. And if somebody's providing me security services, if somebody is policing me the border from enemies, if somebody is defending me from fraud and from murderers, I want to pay for that. I don't want to be a leech. I don't want to be a free rider. Now, well, 100% of the people believe that. No. But who cares? My belief, strong belief, is that the problem is going to be that the government will have too much money, which is not good. So there'd have to be some kind of constitutional thing where they have to return the money, because they get so much. Because we would be so generous. Imagine living in real freedom, real freedom, where you make all the choices in your life and nobody can curse you, nobody can force you. And that the police are not chasing down, you know, so-called criminals who haven't hurt anybody, where they're no victims, but that the state has decided it's a crime. Where they're really, you know, drugs right now is a good example. Well, what do we have drug laws? Somebody's decided these drugs are bad for you. And I think they're bad for you. But it's none of the business of the state if I want to commit suicide. And once they start regulating these drugs, then they're going to start regulating the good drugs too. Like medicines, which they regulate heavily. You have to deregulate all of that. And if now the police, instead of chasing after people who want to inject heroin into their arms, which are not doing me any harm, they're doing themselves harm, and instead of actually protecting me, I'm happy to write my local policeman a check. Because I'm getting a value for it. So I know that sounds utopian, and the more cynical a culture is, the more utopian that sounds, and Brazil is a cynical culture. I come from Israel as a very cynical culture. And we're cynical because our government's corrupt. It involved in all of our lives. It does all this stuff. And we don't believe people are generous. We constantly are trying to cheat and trying to manipulate, and that's our experience. But that's not life under freedom. It's not life under freedom. So I have no, no hesitation would tell you that there'll be more than enough money, more than enough money from voluntary revenue generation to fund a government like that. Okay, last question. No, that's it. All right, thanks everybody.