 The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest and individual rights. This is The Iran Brookshow. Alright everybody, welcome to Iran Brookshow on this Thursday, last day of August. Summer is gone. Hope everybody is having a fantastic week and looking forward to the weekend. Alright, we've got our News Roundup show right now. Tonight there will be a show at 8 p.m. East Coast time. I don't have the topic yet but I'll be putting that up soon so we will be talking about that. So join us tonight as well. I keep hearing these massive bouts of thunder that are just outside. The sun is shining right above me but to my south there are major thunderstorms rolling into the area. So if we lose internet, that's why. But so far so good so hopefully we can sustain this. Alright let's jump in. A bunch of news out of China. It seems to be a bunch of news out of China pretty much every day recently. But let's start with the story about the map. So what was it? Yesterday I guess the Chinese put out a new map. It was put out by China's Ministry of National Resources and it's just a map of China. And that should be pretty safe, upset nobody one would assume. And yet in this map China is redrawing the lines of the region. And basically taking every territory that is disputed and incorporating it into China. So you've got Nepal in the mountains there. You've got the borders a little bit moved into Nepal over some disputed lands. Not Nepal is not going to argue too much with China because of course Taiwan is already part of China. It's included there. And the spokesman for the Taiwanese Foreign Ministry yesterday said the people's Republic of China has never ruled Taiwan. That is the fact and the status quo universally recognized by the international community. So don't count us we're not part of the map. India of course has a long border that is in dispute up in the Himalaya Mountains. That is in dispute with China. China has basically and there's been some fighting. There's been some skirmishes between the two countries. In addition, just to report it today again, China is building tunnels. It's building bunkers. It's building all kinds of things on that border. I guess in anticipation of more skirmishes and maybe of China taking the land that it claims is theirs. India's Foreign Minister told TV audiences that China is just making absurd claims. Don't make other people's territory yours. He says we have today lodged a strong protest through diplomatic channels with the Chinese side on the so-called 2023 standard map of China that lays claim to India's territory. So not happy and remember both India and China have nuclear weapons. We reject these claims as have no basis. Such steps by the Chinese side only complicate the resolution of boundary questions. Malaysia. Malaysia has commented that Malaysia does not recognize China's standard 2023 standard map, which outlines portions of Malaysian waters near Sabah and Sarawak as belonging to China. That's the Malaysian Foreign Minister. The Philippines, not happy. They are very unhappy by Beijing's, quote, latest attempt to legitimize China's purported sovereignty and jurisdiction over Philippine features and maritime zones. It has no basis under international law coming out of the Philippines. But one country, one country is silent, is actually not telling us, not complaining about the map. And that country is, unsurprising, Putin's Russia. In this map, an island which in 2005 China and Russia had agreed to split between the two. It's an island that was in dispute since 1860 something, right? They finally decided to sign a treaty split the island in between part of its China's, the part of its Russian. Well, in this map, guess what? The entire island is Chinese. But of course, Russia is in no position to complain. Russia is about as weak as it's been in a very long time. Certainly you're not going to stand up to China. It's one somewhat, well, it has another one, but somewhat ally, given its war with Ukraine. So Russia of all the countries that have had land, you know, symbolically stolen from them. It has stayed quiet and no comment. So anyway, kind of interesting. But it tells you something about China's ambitions. But the real thwarting of China's ambitions is probably not going to come from the outside. The real thwarting from China's ambitions is its own economy and the struggles that its own economy is in the midst of. China's largest property developer, a country garden, which was considered up until a few months ago, like the gold standard, there's no way these guys would get into trouble. They've just warned that they're on the brink of default and that they and they just reported a staggering loss of $7 billion U.S. $7 billion for the first half of 2023. So we've already have a real estate crisis. We've already have, you know, one of the biggest companies ever ever laid going, you know, being in default restructuring. Now we've got the largest property developing the entire China in real financial problems. This of course has effects on the entire economy and just one dimension of the problems. Because in addition to that, as a consequence, partially of that, but not only of that, but of general economic weakness in China. China's top banks now are reporting rising bad loans. So lender borrowers are telling banks they can't pay back loans. So, you know, so the number of bad loans on the big banks, Commercial Bank of China, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, ICBC, Bank of China, BOC, China Construction Bank and Agricultural Bank of China, are all seeing total non performing loans reached 164.8 billion dollars in the first half of 2023. And that's up 7.6% from the end of last year. So banking sector may be facing some issues and maybe facing some challenges. Again, these are the big banks. What about the smaller banks? What about the more regional banks? What about the banks that are, you know, not as controlled by the government? All of these four banks specifically are seeing a lot of these non performing loans primarily jump up in the construction sector. So that's where they're feeling it. That's where the development, as we said, the development is hooting. But it's more than that. We're seeing weakness in factories and manufacturing, weakness in consumer spending. So people, Chinese are feeling poorer partially or feeling insecure partially because of the high unbelievably high over 20% unemployment rate among young people. But also because many Chinese primary means of saving, the primary way in which they save money was not in a 401k, wasn't in stock market, wasn't in bonds, wasn't even in cash. It was in real estate. They bought more apartments. They bought more apartments and often they bought their apartments and often they got a mortgage on buying more apartment, another apartment before the apartment was even constructed. And they up front for an apartment that was going to be constructed. Well, many of those apartments are not going to be built and they're not going to get their money back because the developers have no money to give them back. So the wealth of many, I'd say middle class, lower middle class Chinese, which was tied up in real estate is evaporating. It's called the wealth effect. When you feel like you've got a lot less wealth, you spend a lot less money. So consumption is going down significantly. So this real estate slump is affecting everything else. But you've also got a tech slump and a manufacturing slump. And I'd say the tech slump certainly is related to the increased regulations in control. But so is the manufacturing. More and more of the economy in China is coming out under the control of the government. And as a consequence, it's in decline. It's removed from all the healthy signals, the mechanisms of a market and is being corrupted by government bureaucracy, government planning, government controls. So more and more China is economy. We're seeing more and more signs of China's economy slowing down. Whether it's a recession, my guess is China is already in a recession. They won't report a recession. They'll try to report positive economic growth. But remember that the Chinese government is very much in control of what those numbers are. And of course, the numbers don't never really reflect GDP. Even though we use it, I use it, everybody uses it as a measure of economic growth, as a measure of GDP per capita of economic wealth. It's a lousy measure. It's just we don't have anything better, at least not prevalent, not one that we can all look at. Because GDP captures, to a large extent, it captures government spending. So the more government spends, for example, on real estate that nobody will ever use, on infrastructure, on building stuff, on highways and bridges to nowhere, that all shows up as higher GDP. My favorite example of this is in 1942, during World War II, the beginning of World War II, the United States GDP, for the first time in many, many years, because we had just come out of, we had just, we were in a great depression, the US GDP went up, I think it was 12% in 1942. But that's bizarre, because we stopped manufacturing stuff that people could actually use, that people could buy. We started manufacturing stuff to blow stuff up and destroy it. Now we had to do it, I'm not against it, but it's not economically productive. We sent half the male population of Europe and Asia to fight a war, and somehow GDP went up, while standard of living quality of life plummeted. So you know something's wrong with a measure that gives you that kind of discrepancy. Anyway, I expect Chinese GDP to be down relatively to their targets and what's been probably not going negative because they control the numbers and they manipulate the numbers. I mean, we're still waiting to see whether the US economy is going to go into recession or not, whether it's going to slow down. There have been indications that the US economy did very well in the second quarter. Well, it did do well in the second quarter, it was up over 2%. Third quarter looked like it was quite hot. But again, GDP growth is not the same standard of living quality of life. And suddenly it looks like that it's certain stratas of the US economy, certain American citizens are suffering from economic hardship. The inflation has hit, it is problematic for them, it's making it harder for them to live. We're seeing significant rise in delinquencies and credit cards and auto loans. US consumers are generally super leveraged, they have a lot of debt and we're starting to see as interest rates go up, people defaulting on that debt as they can't pay because of the higher interest rates. You're also seeing poor Americans struggle again with food and with basic purchases. And I guess what we're ultimately going to see and seeing is that the supplemental nutritious sister program, food stamps in other words, is going to rise significantly. It's going to rise significantly as the government welfare system kicks in because people are not managing themselves. So this economy is probably slowing, we know it's stagnating, the question is will it go into recession? I still would not be surprised if it did go into recession, I still think that is the most likely outcome. It certainly looks like the Federal Reserve is not finished with raising interest rates. So interest rates could be going up even further which would again put us at greater risk of a recession. I don't expect right now some kind of major falling off a cliff kind of a session but I do think that we could experience significant economic slowdown and some hardships for people working in certain industries and for people who are ultimately laid off as some companies can't pay off their debts and have to file for bankruptcy. Alright, interesting story about nuclear power. So nuclear power is obviously, you know, it's clearly the cleanest form of energy. It's certainly if CO2 is a problem, it's one that has no CO2, it doesn't produce any CO2. And if you want to go for electric cars, if you want to go for electricity dominating the future rather than gasoline or electricity for heating and for cooling rather than natural gas then you need a lot of electricity and if you want to do this while reducing CO2 there's just no alternative to massively ramping up nuclear energy. But really there's only one country, maybe two, that are doing exactly that that are ramping up nuclear energy significantly. And really the country that is dominating investment in nuclear right now is China. China has 21, 21 nuclear reactors under construction and with a capacity of 21 gigawatts of electricity, which is 21 medium sized cities supplied with electricity. Now, China is committed to doing a lot more than that but that is by far the biggest investment in the world right now on nuclear. India, which is second in terms of nuclear power plants, build out has eight reactors under construction. Eight to 21, wow. And then Turkey is in third place with four reactors under construction. The United States has one. It is the Vogto plant in Georgia. It's fourth, I think the fourth reactor, I think the third one went live very recently and the fourth is going to go live any day now, I think. So by far, right now China is the leader in the world in nuclear technology, in building nuclear technology and therefore in investing in nuclear technology and in innovation in nuclear technology. If you want to try a new way, a cheaper way, a more productive way to build nuclear capacity, China is the place. It used to be the United States, which is pretty amazing because we haven't built really almost anything since the early 1970s or the late 1970s but the United States in a period between the 50s and the 70s built 93 nuclear reactors. That's what we have today. So most of them, overwhelming majority of those were built in probably a 20-year span from maybe from the mid-50s to the mid-70s. That's astounding. Think about how the country must have been to be that ambitious, that willing to build big to invest in the future, to invest in a new technology to change the world. 93 nuclear reactors, the act is producing 95 gigawatts of electricity. That's astounding and to this day the United States still has by far more nuclear reactors than any other country. The second largest investment in nuclear historically was done by the French, which have 56 nuclear reactors and indeed produce most of their electricity, I think close to 90% of their electricity, farm nuclear power. A far better position than any other country in the world in terms of just the percentage of the electricity to farm nuclear power. So this is to say, you know, wow, I mean, America used to be a leader in this field in this industry, but more than that, it used to be ambitious. It used to have big, audacious goals. And we've killed that. We've killed that with regulation. We've killed that with fear. We've killed that with not in my backyard. We've killed it with the precautionary principle. Can't do anything unless you can guarantee to me that it's not, that it's 100% safe. And, you know, it's, I think maybe the nuclear industry is one of the ones that, it's maybe a, what is it, what would you call it? You know, it's illustrative. I think the state of America, it's illustrative of our willingness to take on risk and our willingness to take on big projects and our willingness to invest in the future. And the fact that it's almost impossible to build a nuclear power plant today. There's some projects and I keep reporting on them of these micro plants, but even those where the risk is almost nothing, almost impossible to actually build and actually get approved by the regulatory agencies. Even those are safe and as well, as supposedly easy as those are. It's a massive battle to get done, to actually get done. So symbolic of where America is and where the risk takers have moved to and the risk takers today are not in the United States. The risk takers today are in China and in India. Sad how far we have fallen. All right. We talked yesterday about the fact that about the Biden administration plan to put price controls in a sense on 10 very large selling drugs. And I just read today that insulin is going to be one of those. And that drug makers are going to have to be forced to reduce their prices dramatically. And I found it interesting today that there's a story in the economist of all places that actually talks about, talks against these changes. Now the economist is always really middle of the road when it comes to economic policy. And to the extent that it's critical of the U.S., you'd think it would be also critical of the National Health Service in England and the socialized health systems in other countries around the world. And of course it isn't. Just to give you context, because these other countries blackmail or use the power of the gun, use force in order to get drug companies to give them discounts, the reality is that U.S. prescription drugs are about three and a half times more expensive in the United States than in France or Britain, 3.25 times X. So instead of costing 10, they cost 35. In Germany instead of costing 10, they cost 32, same in Canada. So here's the economist, I thought I'd just read you a couple of paragraphs from the article because I think it's really good, which is shocking for the economist. A problem is that they have swung from one extreme to another. Of course, the problem is extremes, not the principle. Officials will not so much be negotiating the price as setting it. I told you this yesterday, they're bringing a gun to the party. The penalties for companies that do not comply with the negotiation process, comply, right? For a single drug, a severe. They will either face an excise tax of 65 to 95% of the product sales in America, 65 to 95%. I mean, I think this should be unconstitutional under the taking clause. Yeah, under the taking clause. You can have an excise tax that amount anyway. Or have to withdraw all drugs that they sell in the United States from public health programs altogether. It is like turning up to a fight where only one side has a gun. Wow, even the economist is using the gun metaphor. Well, it's not a metaphor, it's a reality. I think we've come a long way when the economist is using the gun. And then they turn to the economic issues. This matters because setting prices low could harm innovation. Pharmaceutical firms are not earning excess, vast excess profits considering the risk of their investment. Now, I don't know what vast excess profits are, but the economist is saying here, pharmaceutical firms, I'll repeat this, are not earning vast excess profits considering the risk of their investments. According to research published in 2021, once they're spending on research and development is treated as an investment rather than expense, pharmaceutical firms are not making outsize returns compared with the average firm in the S&P 500. If they doubt that they will make a sufficient profit on their investments, they will spend less on finding new drugs. Sure enough, studies suggest that falling revenues hit research and development spending hard. This is typical of the unintended and undesirable effects from price regulations. Lower prices are popular with patients today and mean less of a drain on the public purse in the near term. But if they discourage investment in the new medicines, they will be to the detriment of patients and society tomorrow. I mean, this is pretty good. The new rules will have further perverse consequences. Currently, it can be beneficial for a new drug to win its first approval for use by a small group of patients, such as those with rare or late stage cancer. And after that, go through trials of diseases that affect more patients. But the new rules allow a fixed term of unregulated pricing that begins with the first drug approval. This discourages firms to seek treatment for the most lucrative diseases- sorry, encourages firms to seek treatment for the most lucrative diseases first. They may delay or entirely avoid expanding the drug's use into diseases with fewer patients. Another perverse incentive is to give shorter periods of pricing freedom for molecules that are easier to copy when they first come off pattern, making them much less attractive to develop in the first place. Anyway, this policy by the Biden administration is maybe the worst thing they've done since coming to office and they've done a lot of bad things. But this is maybe the straightforward, unequivocal worst thing that they have done. It's a disaster. If there's anybody out there listening and you can do anything about it, stop it. All right. Finally, Taka's love affair, love for authoritarian president of Hungary. Viktor Obann continues. He did a 30-minute interview with Obann in Hungary. As you know, if you watch my show, Taka Karsen is in Hungary these days. And in this 30-minute show, Obann basically came out saying that Ukraine cannot beat Russia. He says, quote, it's not just misunderstanding. It's a lie. It's impossible. He added that Russians are far stronger and that, quote, what finally will count is boots on the ground, numbers of people. He says, we should make a deal with Russians on the new security architecture to provide security and sovereignty for Ukraine, right? But not membership in NATO. He basically said that there's no way that Ukraine can recapture Crimea. I mean, this is the new line of Russian propaganda you're seeing from everybody on Twitter, from Taka Karsen, from all my critics on Twitter regarding Ukraine. They can't win. That's the big new thing. That wasn't what they were arguing a few months ago, but now everybody's arguing the same thing. It's like a party line. It's like, oh, no, no, this is the new strategy. They can't win. We've seen the summer offensive has proved that they can't win. So why suffer the consequences? Why do all this? Let's just negotiate. Why don't they give up some land and save themselves the trouble because they cannot win in all caps? So Taka, of course, is facilitating, is a facilitator of, you know, of this lie. Oban also told Taka that there's only one way he thinks that Ukraine will walk an end. And that is if Donald Trump is reelected as president of the United States, because he's the only one who can actually bring this to an end, end financial assistant to Kiev and basically force Kiev to cut a deal, whereas they give all the land to Russia and they don't join NATO. And in exchange, the West guarantees their sovereignty as if Ukraine would trust the West to do that. And as if anybody would trust Russia to abide by such a deal. And as if anybody, anybody, if they don't join NATO, why would NATO ever guarantee their sovereignty? If they join NATO, then the guarantee of sovereignty is embedded in joining NATO. But if they don't join NATO, you're basically telling Ukraine, no, no, no, we're not guaranteeing your safety. That's just a lie. We're just not going to do it. But that's what Oban is suggesting Taka plays along. Oban says, quote, call back Trump. Trump is a man who can save the Western world. Trump can save the Western world. You know, neither Oban, nor Putin, nor Taka, nor Trump actually know what the Western world is. They really don't have a clue. I mean, all of those people's ideology, every single one of them, their ideology is about as anti-Western world as you could have, as you could be. They're all anti-Western world. Ukraine's foreign minister's response was, we do not know about Hungary, but Ukraine does not trade its territories or its sovereignty. Good for the Ukrainian foreign minister. All right. That is the news update for today. So I'm open to questions. Thank you. We got a lot of stickers today, a few questions, a lot of stickers. Friend Harper, thank you. Daisy, thank you. Doron, thank you. Tom, thank you. Steven, thank you. Let's see. Mary-Eline, thank you. And Jonathan Honing, thank you, all of you guys. Really, really appreciate the support. We're still about $100 short. So $520 questions and we've nailed it. John says, here's to a great show, YBS rules. Thank you, John. Really appreciate the support. Grant says, how much do you see the student loan repayments restarting this September affecting the economy? DC's 0% student loan rates is contributing to home prices increasing. Any other thoughts? I mean, I don't really see it affecting home prices much. I don't think that drove it. I think the home prices are going up almost exclusively because of a lack of supply. That is what's driving home prices up and high interest rates causing people with existing homes not to put them up for sale because they don't want to go out and search for another mortgage for a new home to replace it. But also, over the last, as I've said many times over the last, what is it, almost 15 years now, the United States has just not built enough homes. We've not met supply to demand. And that is because of zoning regulations and because all the Mexican construction workers who worked in the industry left the United States, all the illegal workers, immigrants, left the United States during the 2008-2009 recession and have not come back. And we've restricted immigration since then, made it tougher for employers to hire illegals. And as a consequence, you've just not got enough people working in construction to get the, I don't know how many, over 10 million homes built that are necessary to kind of catch up on the supply demand mismatch. That's what drives home prices up. In terms of the effect on the economy, I mean, at the margin it's going to have an effect. I don't know how big it is. Suddenly, this is money that the students would have consumed, used to consume otherwise. But the flip side of that is that this is money that the government assumed it was getting. And therefore needed to get from elsewhere in order to pay its bills. So the fact that students were not paying back their debt meant, given that government did not cut its spending, meant that government just had to borrow more money. Borrowing more money generally raises interest rates, generally hurts the economy. And it's also sucking money out of the private economy in one part of the economy. So students actually coming back and paying their loans actually reduces the need of the federal government to borrow money. Again, not by huge amounts, but by enough. And that effect offsets the impact of their lower consumption in my view. So I actually do not think it will have a big effect. It will have an effect maybe in particular sectors where people who owned debt were particular consumers. You'd have to look at the age profile and where the money was and what kind of things they consumed. That might take a hit temporarily. But overall economically, the money in a sense just gets reallocated. John says, what is your evaluation of the times radio coverage of the times radio coverage of the war in Ukraine? I don't know the times radio coverage of the war in Ukraine. So send me a link or something because I'm not familiar and I'll try to answer it after I figure out what it is. But I don't know what the times radio coverage is. So sorry. Send me a link though. Let me just copy paste this so I remember to do something about it. All right. Apollo Zoo says dancing with the sheiks. I didn't have Saudi Arabia as a topic this time. Times radio is on YouTube. Okay, I'll look for it. I'm not familiar with it. All right. Michael says, did English common law come from John Locke and without it are we in the dark ages? No, no, no. English common law has roots way, way before John Locke. It starts hundreds of years before John Locke. It probably comes, you know, I don't know, around 1200, something like that. I think it's post-Machinacata, but it is not based on a philosophical foundation. It is based on what the English would consider common sense. So it's not based on individual rights. It's not based on a Lockeian conception of individual rights. You know, I've seen some arguments that it was inspired by the Jewish Talmud. I don't know if that's true, but the Jewish Talmud is in some ways similar in terms of the kind of arguments they make to common law. Is it true that without it we're in the dark ages? No, I don't think so. I don't think so. I think that we're in the dark ages without people like Locke. But, you know, common law sets us back and maybe sets England back. But the fundamental ideas that led to the enlightenment and ultimately to capitalism, I don't think common law facilitated directly. They made it happen smoother, easier, made it happen more in England than elsewhere, but I don't think they would be sufficient to, if you took them away, that history would take a completely different path. Maybe. I mean, history is hard to predict in that sense, but I see no reason. It's not that fundamental. Michael says, in regards to your comments in Goldimere, why can't women be decisive in a state of action the way a man can? Well, I think they can, and Goldimere was. It's just psychologically, I think, far and to them. I think it's harder for them. They bear a bigger cost for doing it, or they bear a cost way a man generally doesn't. And I think that has to do with the way we're wired to some extent. I think it has to do with the great orientation towards action that men have that is a consequence of the fact that we are born with more muscles. We are born bigger, stronger, and more physically oriented towards action. And women are born physically more towards, you know, evolutionarily dealing with kids and dealing with, you know, with the more immediate. The men are the warriors of the adventurers of the people who go out there and bring back the hunt. So there's a division of labor from that perspective. Now, again, that doesn't mean a woman can be as good as a man, but it means that that's atypical. We're talking about typical. And women, some women are better hunters, better writers, better sports people than most men. Look at female athletes. There's certainly better athletes than I am. But they're not even close to being as good as the best male athletes. So if you look at the distributions, the distribution is significantly skewed. So because of that, men are more oriented towards action and towards making decisions around action, dealing with risk associated with action. And I think there's just something about that psychologically that comes from, you know, the kind of bodies that we have versus a woman's body. And again, it's not specific to every individual. It's just a tendency. And that's why somebody else go to me was probably better at it and was in this case better at it than Moshe Dayan, who was a man's man. And yet he fell apart and she didn't. She was the one who was decisive, but it had a major cost in her and potentially a bigger cost in her than an equivalent male. But it's not clear. And it's not clear what an equivalent male is. Very tricky issues that we, I think, don't know enough about generally. It's just a psychology of sex. Michael says, Trump is a fighter. He's been fighting with reality his whole life. Yes, I agree with that. Poki, what are your thoughts on the law of attraction? So I don't know what you mean by the law of attraction is I'm assuming it's something about relationships. So it's something about I mean, because there's a lot of ways in which that can be interpreted. But you know, there's certain I have certain holes in my knowledge. Oh, so this is the law of attraction. Maybe this is it. The law of attraction argues that positive thoughts and actions, repositive awards of vice versa for negative ones. This is one of the 12 universal law of hermetic philosophy made famous by the book, The Secret. I think that there is something to it, but now what they think there is to it, right? That is, it's not positive thoughts in a vacuum. I think it's more the fact that in order to be a risk taker, in order to push forward, to innovate, to advance, to have new thoughts and new ideas, you have to have a positive view of life in the world and the future. So it's not that you can, all right, I'm going to think positive today and good things will happen. I don't believe that. But I do believe that, and this is where I think it comes from, that people who have good lives, people who generally have positive vision around the future because that leads them to take actions that if you were overly risk-averse and overly afraid and overly negative about the future, you would never take. So that's the sense in which it's true. I don't think that's what she means in The Secret. So I would say the law of attraction, qua, the way it's presented in this philosophy, hermetic philosophy, is wrong, but it's capturing something that is true. All right, let's see. By the way, we're, well, not 16 years, $11 short of a goal. Maybe somebody can come in and do $11. I'll ask a question for $11. Have you read Professor Massimo Pigolici's recent piece, Attacking Rand, saying she's misinterpreting Aristotle, how Aristotle was really a collectivist? No, I haven't read that. And I don't know enough about Aristotle to argue one way or the other, although that sounds ridiculous to me from everything I do know about Aristotle. But I think that the main thing, I mean, this is the kind of the question to talk to some of our statistician scholars in Objectivism, talk to them about it, and get from them a sense of why, could it be, is there any kind of reasonable way to read Aristotle as a collectivist? I doubt it, but that's a question for them, not so much for me. Fred Harper says that AI just commented on that, so somebody at AI has already done the work. Mary Eileen says, any government involvement in medicine as being and always will be an outrageous injustice and a complete disaster, it violates the rights of producers and cripples, research, absolutely, absolutely. Of course, every government involvement in anything except the protection of rights does the same thing, but healthcare is so personal that it affects us so in such devastating ways, it has such a huge impact on our lives. Fred Harper says that Adam Aaron Smith, Aaron Smith that the Iron Rain Institute has just responded, has posted a response to that essay on AIRise YouTube channel website somewhere, so go find it there. Ike says, what will eventually happen to student loans in the mid to long term? Will we see a breakdown in the system? No, I think people will just pay them, I think most students can afford to pay them and they will pay them. It is sad because all their money was spent to build fancy buildings at university campuses that I don't think is particularly useful or necessarily valuable that adds much to the future growth of economy and is a perversion because it's all based on taxpayer money and loans that should have never been made, but the reality is that students will work it off and pay back and I don't see, unless we go into a deep recession and people really can't pay it and then they'll fall for bankruptcy, I do think if the government wants to help people who have these loans, if they really want to help them, then what they should, right now you can pretty much get rid of most of your loans through the bankruptcy process, but one loan you cannot get rid of is student loans. Student loans you're liable for no matter what. One thing that Congress could do is make these loans like any other loans that you could potentially write down in a personal bankruptcy. That's the best thing Congress could do to help with this, but other than that people are just going to have to pay it, which means everybody's quality of life standard of living goes down a little bit versus the alternative. The idea of writing them off or just giving them, just forgetting about them, I think is a huge violation everybody else's rights. So one way or another this money has to be paid and it should be paid by the people who used it. John just got us to the target, thank you John, really appreciate that. All right and that covers the show. So again, I will be on tonight at 8 p.m. topic to be determined for a regular year on book show, so we'll cover something in depth. Maybe in Michael Knowles' video, I'm thinking of this video he did about Howie Berry and about Ayn Rand and critiquing both what he said about Ayn Rand and what he said about Howie Berry. I think that could be interesting and fun and it'll be an opportunity to yell and vent and be good. All right, see you all tonight and of course tomorrow at 12, Friday is always at 12, we will have another news roundup. See you then, bye everybody.