 Welcome. I'm John Caldera, president of the Independence Institute and your devil's advocate. We've talked to him on and off over the years, but I find what he promotes to be so fascinating. He's here again. You're on Brooks. Glad to have you. I think it's good to be here. All right. You're associated, of course, with the Einrand Institute, and I love people who are scared about Einrand. Yes. I mean, there are all these other authors. There are all these other philosophers, even people who dabble in economics and morality and stuff. None of them get the hatred. All you need to do is go into any American college campus and go, well, what about that Einrand? And I do that all the time. You do that for a living. Why is this author who did Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, We the Living Anthem, and a whole bunch of philosophy books that I've got to be honest, I cannot read her nonfiction. I can't. It's just too dry for me. I can't do it. Why does she get such a hateful reaction? Well, because she challenges our most fundamental beliefs, and she challenges people left, right, center. It doesn't matter. She challenges the entire political spectrum, not just on the politics, not just on the economics. There are lots of people who do that, right? But she challenges us on ethics. She challenges us in epistemology and how we know stuff. She challenges our metaphysics. She challenges religion. So she really takes on everything. She takes on 2,500 years of thinking in the West, and she says, most of you have been wrong, and here's an alternative way of looking at the world. And that's a challenge. That's a challenge. There's lots of people who say you're wrong. There's lots of people who come up with different ... I love them bolder. There are fruit cakes there who say the world is not what you think it is all the time. There is something threatening. There is something dangerous about Ayn Rand's philosophy. Because she's not only saying you're wrong, she's saying what she thinks is the truth. And that means you have to live a different life. You have to live a different life personally, or she suggests you live a different life personally. And the way you look at the world would be completely different. So if you take, for example, the new atheists, right? The new atheists became very prominent in arguing faithism. But when you actually look at their politics and economics, what are new atheists? Sounds like a rock group. Yeah, you remember, they should have become a rock group. Sam Harris and Dawkins and Hitchens. Oh, Richard Dawkins and Hitchens. Those guys, they called themselves the new atheists, because they had a shtick going. And it was very, it was quite profitable for them. And they were, okay, so they challenged everybody on the religion stuff. But then when you look at the morality, you look at politics, you look at the economics, standard middle of the road, nothing, right, bland. Ayn Rand challenged you on the religion, challenged you on what the purpose of life is and what you should live for, challenges you on, well, what kind of political structure we should have and how does the economy work, even challenges you on what is art and what is good on what is bad on. So, and every major question that people have, she comes up with an answer that people are not expecting and it forces you to either think- But it's different. Or act differently. It's different than just that. And it's hostile. Okay, so what do you think? Let's go to the hostile part of that. Mean. All right, it's not just greedy, all right? Not just greedy, but her philosophy is downright cruel. Yes. You know, in her world, there are no children there. You know, there is no charity. It is doggy dog. You are judged and you will judge. And your satisfaction is the only thing that counts. It is very easy to lampoon as cruel. It is, but some of the things you said are true to her philosophy and so the things you said are not and to her novel. So, nothing in her philosophy is anti-charity. It's just not particularly pro-charity in terms of being the most important model of virtue. Nothing, it's children. I have children, almost all the people I know who advocate for philosophy have children. They're children in Atlas Shrugged. They're just minor characters in the book because she was writing a book about something else and children didn't fit into the story she was writing. And she didn't have children. That's true. But none of that, so, but it is true that what she says to people is, you should live for yourself. You should live for your own flourishing, for your own success, for your own happiness. That should be your moral purpose. And the reason it's lampooned is because for 2,000 years we've been taught that the reason, the purpose of life, is sacrifice. What's noble is to live for other people. It's their well-being that's important. The whole morality, the conventional morality is about other people. Oh, the ultimate virtue is being selfless. And in order to make that credible to people, because nobody actually wants to live to other people, nobody actually is selfless. So in order to make that credible, we create this pretense of the only alternative to being selfless is to being a lying, cheating SOB, right? And then Ayn Rand comes and says, wait a minute, there's a third alternative. You can be rationally long-term self-interested. And lying is not in your self-interest. Cheating is not in your self-interest. And you could live for yourself without being that monster that people like to portray. People have a very hard time with that idea. Very hard time with that idea. Let's throw in what economists would euphemistically call externalities. All right, so, you know, I'm living for myself, and I'm digging for gold and gulch gulch, because man, it's all about my satisfaction. And I'm just digging away, and I'm blowing up hills, and I'm using chemicals. And all this stuff flows into the river, which then goes downstream. And that's somebody else's world. But I'm living for myself. The guys downstream, they can live for themselves too. You know, therefore, the philosophy is bankrupt because it doesn't take into account those people living downstream, living in the wasteland you've created while you're seeking your own selfless, selfish satisfaction. So it's exactly the opposite, right? It's systems of government and systems of morality that tell you that you have to care about others and sacrifice for others and be selfless. That are the filthiest, dirtiest places on planet Earth. It's actually systems of government that encourage people through property rights to pursue their own self-interest and to exploit their piece of land, the way they see fit, that are actually the cleanest places on planet Earth. And the reason for that is, that the reason for that is, well, but that's because politics is a manifestation of a particular ethics. We get socialism when we have a selfless ethic. We get capitalism when people are focused on the pursuit of their own happiness. There's not an accident that that is in the Declaration of Independence and the country we've got as a consequence is the United States of America. It's those selfish founding fathers who are focused on people's right to their own life. Not to the common good, there's no common good in the Declaration or the Constitution. There's the pursuit of your own life, your own liberty and happiness. Let's get to externalities. It's very simple. If the world is divided into private property, which it should be, this should be, you know, people ask me about the problem of the commons. The solution there is not to have any commons. The solution to that is to privatize everything we can privatize. It's a problem with the air, but other than the air, you can pretty much privatize everything. And we know from common law going back a thousand years that you can't dump your garbage in my backyard. I'll sue you and I'll bankrupt you, and that's it. And the law's about this, and these are laws that protect property rights. I cannot pollute a river if you own the river. When the river's public property, then it becomes a problem because it's owned by nobody. But if the river's privately owned, which in the West, and we're in the West right now, there was the beginning of law to define private property over rivers in the 19th century. We stopped doing that once the government came in and took over all the land in the West. But if we actually have respect for private property, externalities, all these negative externalities wouldn't exist. And of course what people really don't talk about is all the positive externalities created by my selfish pursuit of my own well-being. It's that selfish pursuit of people's own well-being that creates all the goodies that we have around us. I'm going to keep pushing you on this. All right. That's good. There are some externalities you don't see for a while. There are some externalities that even in that private world, we're not going to get to the land being privatized, not in my lifetime. Not in my life to me, though, but that's the world we should be striving towards. I'm there. But my nuclear reactor, when I dumped the waste on my land, you might not notice the damage for a long time. But there's an assumption here. The pollutants I put in the air, it is distributed across the globe, and therefore it's not my neighbor next door, but it's the world in general. So you run a non-for-profit, I run a non-for-profit. I can imagine in a world of laissez-fait capitalism, I can imagine non-for-profits that go around and say, you know what, we're going to monitor a quality, and we're going to find who's polluting the air, and we're going to sue them on your behalf. So there are wonderful, voluntary ways without creating a massive governmental infrastructure and government agencies and regulations up the kazoo in order to make sure that people have the kind of information they need to make sure that you are not harming me. But it also is an underlying assumption there. And that assumption is that I live, I'm producing, and I don't care about the rest of the world. I don't care about my children because they're breathing the air as well. And I don't care about my grandchildren because they're going to be radioactive. And that's bizarre, right? If you're self-interested, if you're selfish, you care about your life. You love your life. And by extension, you love life. You love other human beings. I am much more generous. I am much more caring as a selfish human being than I would if I were selfless. Because I find selfless people resenting the fact that morality only gives them stars, only gives them credit when they don't think about themselves and only when they help other. Now, I, because I know what my life is worth, when I see somebody, I don't want to hurt other people. Why would I hurt other people? Put aside the politics of it and the right issues and the legal stuff. I want to trade with other people. I see the enormous value. And this is true of most people. When we look at businessmen, what we see are greedy, selfish people. And that's why we regulate them. That's why we control them. Not because they've done anything bad. Indeed, 99.9% of businessmen would not pollute, would not steal, would not cheat, would not do any of these things in pursuit of profit. The great one panel cartoon, guys' houses are flier, flames are burning everywhere, firemen are coming with hoses and ladders and buckets and they're all rushing to the door and the guy owns the house goes, no, no, no, no, guys, I'm a libertarian, don't come and help me. Yeah, but that's nonsense. That's a caricature, right? That's a caricature, but in the real world, in the real world, self-interested people want to compete, want to compete, we gain huge benefits from other people. But in the real world, where we are today, today, I still need the police. I still need... I'm not an anarchist. Let's be very clear. I am not an anarchist. I believe government is a necessary good. Let's use that term very carefully because people use anarchist as a complete epithet. It's a bad thing. I agree with him. But there are economic anarchists. There are capitalistic anarchists out there who believe that over time, we're going to get fire departments, we're going to be private. I think they're nuts. So say that again because I think it's private. And fire departments, I'm not including fire departments in the government because I agree, we used to have voluntary fire departments. You can have private fire departments. You can deal with fire departments without government. But you cannot deal with police. You cannot deal with the military. You cannot deal with the court system outside of government. So the only purpose of government... What about disputes? You're on my property. That's a court. That's a court. And that's government too? Absolutely. The final arbitrator of those kind of disputes has to be government because otherwise how are we going to resolve it? Well, like in the wild west, I'm going to carry, you're going to carry, we're going to go out at high noon and duel it out, not a good society to live in. So force is the one thing that it's the job of government to monopolize. It's the only thing that the government should be doing. It should be there to protect our rights. And what is a right? A right is to be free, a right is a freedom from coercion. The only job of government is to protect me from coercion. It's to protect me from people polluting my river, my river. It's to protect me from people destroying my property. It's to protect me from people who want to loot me and... What about polluting, what about polluting our air? Yeah, so air is another way in which I personally had damaged. If I'm putting stuff into the air and you can't show me damage, then, you know, by what way do you stop me from doing what I'm doing? You have to be able to show damages. If you can show damages, sure you can stop me from doing it. Let's talk morality and business in that, you know, capitalism and corporatism are really two different things. And they get conflated all the time by, you know, those bastards who make money. Well, we forget that while the left loves jobs, they hate the people who create those jobs, you know, and they hate the benefits from what is created because somebody makes money off of it. But there's also a lot of truth when they scream about the cronyism that happens among that world. I see it every day here in Colorado. I see it in business. I see it with tax increment financing. I see it with corporate welfare and regulations that you can't have this, but you'll get no more credit if you buy this battery operated something. And so it and that is evil. It is. But that's not capitalism. Is it? No, no. And that's why I hate when people call it crony capitalism. No, capitalism is not crony. Statism is crony. So what drives cronyism is state power. When you give the state authority over people's business, when you give the state the ability to regulate and control, people are going to fight back. And when they fight back, they're going to hire lawyers and they're going to get enmeshed in politics and they're going to try to manipulate the system in their favor. My favorite story here is the Microsoft story, you know, Microsoft early 90s. Microsoft. I don't know if you know this, but you've got an accent. I do have an accent. I'm sorry. Microsoft. So Microsoft was the largest company in the world at the time. All right, right. How much money did this spend on lobbying in Washington, DC? Zero. Arvin Hatch, a Republican senator from Utah, brings them in front of the Senate Senate committee and he yells at them. You guys have got to start spending money here. You guys got to build a building here. You got to have a presidency. You got to hire lawyers here. In other words, he says, you got to bribe me, but we don't do that in America. So we call it lobby. Microsoft says at the end of the shearing, yeah, you leave us alone. We'll leave you alone. We're not interested. We don't need Washington. We're running the largest company in the world. We're actually producing values here. We don't need to mess with you guys. The only thing we create are ones and zeros. Yes, yes, it happens in the ether. It happens on hard drives. Yeah, you know, what are we here to lobby? Yeah, exactly. So six months later, not going to do. We're here from the Justice Department and we're here to go after you because you're violating the antitrust laws. What did we do? You're giving away a product for free. I don't know. The audience probably doesn't remember, but we used to buy Netscape for 70 bucks. You had to download it, a browser. You had to pay for it. In order to get on the Internet, you needed a browser, which you paid for for Netscape. And Microsoft said, oh, we'll give you one for free. If you buy DOS, you'll get Internet Explorer for that, for that. They got harassed by the Justice Department for over 10 years. Their business was almost destroyed. Guess how much money they spent today on lobby? How much? Tens of millions of dollars. They've got a beautiful building. You know the Cato Institute? Oh, yeah. Building right behind the Cato Institute is a Microsoft building. It's a beautiful modern building, all glass about equal distance from the House of Representatives and the White House. And now they manipulate the system. They go off to Google. They do this. But who brought them in? I mean, the power we give government, the only way to get rid of cronyism, in other words, is to make politics impotent. That is to separate state from economics. So we need a separation of state of economics. The smaller the government, the less regulations, the less controls. If we had a copper tax of zero, then there'd be no cronyism. But short of that, nothing you do will solve the problem. You're also missing a simple market reality here. When I try to get into the market, even in your world where I can get into the marketplace easily, there's no barrier, I'm going to have to compete in order to get a market share. Now, if I already have a market share, I can either compete with you, upstart, but I don't want to do that. Then I've got to convince the millions of people who are my potential customers to choose me over you. It's so much easier to go to City Hall and convince five sitting calcium men to regulate the taxi industry and make sure that nobody else is involved in it. But this is why the Constitution should be written in a way that they can't regulate the taxi industry, right? So if you, this is my point, as long as politicians have power, people will go and seek to try to get favor of small politicians, whether it's unions, whether it's businesses, whether it's all kinds of people were voted there. And my point is the only way to stop that process. There's no other way. There's just no other way. It's to say to city council, you know what? I'm not sure exactly why you exist, but the one thing you cannot do, you cannot regulate businesses. You cannot tell them where they can be. You cannot zone. You cannot interfere in the lives of individual citizens. Maybe we don't need you or maybe we just need you to oversee the police and that's it. All right, stop there, stop there. Love it. Which unicorn is going to ride in with the magic wand and get us from here to there? Iron man. Iron man. Iron man. I mean, this is about education. This is about education, education, education. These are shortcuts. There's no unicorn that's going to ride in. It's our job to get us there, right? It's your job, my job. It's our job to go out there and teach and educate and promote. And if we don't, then we're never going to get there. And even if we do, there's no guarantee that we get there. But even if we do, and listen, you've dedicated your career, I've dedicated mine to fighting for this ideal. And I work in a world of Democrats and liberals and unaffiliated and bills that come by and lobbying and this and that. And I try to weigh in my voice towards this idea of freedom. All right, but I'm up against guys who own the Taxicab Company, the government-run agencies that don't want to see any competition. They can afford the lobbyists. They can afford that beautiful new Microsoft building. And they can play that game. And we're sitting here shooting rubber bands at the moon saying, you know what, if we just put out a nice little paper, we're going to see all this thing crumble. This is why I don't do policy, because I would be unbelievably frustrated if I did, because you're describing the world as it really is. I believe at the end of the day, everything is driven by fundamental ideas. We would not have had a United States of America if not for Enlightenment thinkers, if not for Spinoza, Locke, ultimately Adam Smith, and everybody in between, Voltaire and Montesquieu and all of their French Enlightenment. Without those thinkers, there's no America. That's where the action is. The action, and we're losing there too, let's be clear, but the action is at our universities. The action is philosophy departments. The action is econ. The action is where fundamental ideas are being discussed and debated. And if we can't swing that, all the policy work won't help us, because people vote against their self-interest all the time, against their long-term self-interest. They show it to their self-interest. I don't consider that self-interest. I consider that suicide. But they show it to their satisfaction. You used that word earlier, which I would never use. They show it to their satisfaction. They work all the time. They're against their long-term self-interest. Liberty and freedom is in everybody's long-term self-interest. That's something nobody realizes, nobody cares about, nobody works towards, and unless we can instill those ideas at the very basis of society, we lose. And we're losing. The fact is we're losing. We've got an administration in Washington that's supposed to be on the right, which wants to tell me who I can buy stuff from and who I can't buy something from. You also have an administration on the right that's saying, hey, California, you can't make your own crazy-ass regulations. That's a step this way. You've got an administration that's pulling back not all these, but a lot of the regulations that you're railing about. Some of them, and here and there, and at the end of the day, I'm not sure that that's all wiped out by a stupid trade war and an attitude towards trade. It's not the trade war that's bad. An attitude towards trade, particularly international trade, that says trade is a zero-sum game. That attitude, if that attitude is incockated into the American public's mind and into the Republican Party's DNA, then we're in for a long ride towards hell. The frustration is, you priests, because that's what you are. You're a priest. I am an evangelical, even a nominatious. I'm an evangelical. So you're a priest and you come here. One, you only exist because we spin off enough wealth that somebody can give money and support priests. Well, as I told you earlier in the show, I'm not talking about you personally. I'm just talking about philosophers. Yeah, but the fact is, philosophy changed the world. You would not be here. We would not be here if not for John Locke. I agree. We would not be here. Economics would be here not for Adam Smith. That's where the action ultimately is. I'm not just agreeing with you, but I am adding something. The addition is this. Not only do we need to fund the priests and philosophers to teach the next generation, we have completely surrendered the political battle to engage those ideas. You mentioned the... Hang on. Yeah, I know. I can't. I'm just visually... No, it's in Israeli things. We can't let other people talk. We have to talk over them. No, that's Italian. That's Italian, my friend. Middle East. Mediterranean. It's all the same. So, but we are not equipping our foot soldiers to go out there and do it. We're not translating this into politics. We have surrendered that, which means our educational systems are nothing more than propaganda. Organizations are higher ed especially. And so, there needs to be a marriage of the philosophy with the political. And this is where it gets messy. And a lot of people over here would rather be right than win. Yeah. I mean, I agree with that. I don't disagree with that. I mean, I mentioned... I teach here in Colorado at the Leisure Program. The Rocky's regularly. So, we're teaching the people who actually go out into the trenches. You know, we do policy. I mean, I make fun of policy. But you have to do policy. Because you have to survive to win another day. You have to push back anywhere you can push back. All I'm saying is, you've got to have it all. You've got to talk about the fundamental ideas and you've got to talk about how they apply. And you've got to... I wish people did this. You've got to project an ideal, particularly to young people. Young people want to be idealistic. Young people want to believe in something. And the socialists are very, very good at this. They're not timid about telling them what they want. We want communism. And they rally them up. They don't call it communism. They call it, we're going to save the planet. Yes. And we're going to save the planet through socialism. Yes. Through democratic socialism. Yes. We're going to save the planet. And therefore you can be part of something much, much larger than yourself. And we need to do the same. We don't do that at all. When I go to campuses, I say I want to save the planet. I want to save humanity. I want to save mankind. And you do that through capitalism. It's the only system that has ever brought anybody out of poverty. And it's the only system that has created the kind of wealth we have today. And it's the only system that can actually promote human well-being in the long run. That's the message I have to hear. And when I talk about capitalism, I'm not talking about the system we have today, which is Crony. With Crony, I'm talking about this capitalist ideal, this laissez-faire capitalism. And I push them in that direction. Now, are all of them going to convince? No. But we got to stop pushing in that direction. Got about a minute and a half. So let me lead them to the trough here then. All right. So somebody's listening. This guy's crazy. He's worshiping some broad who's also crazy and mean and all the rest. But I tell you what, because I'm so superior, I'm going to read something on this. Not a whole lot, because nobody can pick up Atlas Shrugged and everybody should put it that way. And they do, right? They do. Half a million copies sold in 2009. That's not a pamphlet. That's not... I'm getting curious. To help them get from there to here, what's the next step? Where should somebody go to look to learn? Nobody's going to re-block. How do you get them to tempt them in that direction? What is the sales that you're going to do? Well, I mean... By the way, this is a way to plug your site. No, no, no. I get it. I get it. Inman.org. That's the website of the institute. Spelled A-Y-N. A-Y-N-R-A-N-D dot O-R-G. And go follow me on YouTube. I do podcasts almost daily. I release videos, short videos, long videos, all kinds of videos. And you'll learn a lot about the world around us, at least my perspective on the world around us. And, you know, sometimes I'm entertaining as well. Certainly I'm radical. If nothing else, I'm consistent and radical. So you're on brookshow.com, Y-A-R-O-N, brookshow.com. All right. If somebody was going to pick up one pamphlet, one quick read, one comic book, what would it be? Oh, my God. Pamphlets. I would say Inman has these short two essays. One is called Man's Right, and the other called The Nature of Government. They used to come into Pamphlet together. Man's Right and The Nature of Government. You can find them online for free in Inman.org. Got it. Always fun, Your Honor. Hey, read me in the Dead for Post. Listen for me on K-How Radio. Check out the Independence Institute at thinkfreedom.org. We'll see you next week.