 Speaking of that, this evening it turns out that I am one of the debaters. I will be taking the negative on the resolution, and therefore I won't be moderating this debate. So I must recuse myself from that job and bring to the stage for the rest of the evening Francis Menten, who will be moderator. Francis, please come to the stage. Well, thank you so much, Jean, and I'm so happy to be here. Many of you may know me from my famous blog, Manhattan Contrarian. I hope there's a lot of readers of that here, and if you're not a reader, you should be. It's ManhattanContrarian.com, but there is one thing I'm more famous for than that, and that is being the date of Jane who just gave that fabulous introduction. So with that, let me invite our other debater to the stage. He's Andrew Koppelman. He is J.P. Stevens, John Paul Stevens, professor of law at Northwestern University. He also seems to take part somehow in the political science and philosophy departments there, and he has written a recent book called Burning Down the House, How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed. I notice that nowhere in that title is just stained for the week, which is in today's resolution. But with that, Andrew Koppelman, could you please come to the stage? And our other debater is already on the stage, the man who needs no introduction, Mr. Jean Epstein, the executive director here of the Soho Forum. So one more time, tonight's resolution, libertarianism, has been thoroughly corrupted by delusion, greed, and disdain for the week. And I think this is the time to close the vote. So Jane mentioned, could you kindly close the vote? She has given me the thumbs up. The vote is closed. So Mr. Koppelman is for the affirmative. He will have 20 minutes to establish his case. Then Mr. Epstein will have 20 minutes for the negative, followed by five minutes each of rebuttal, and then there will be a question and answer period, and finally summaries from both sides and the debate will close with a final vote after that. So Mr. Koppelman, you have 20 minutes. Thanks a lot, and thank you for having me here. I really appreciate the opportunity to speak to you all. Two libertarian factions matter in modern American politics. The ideas of Friedrich Hayek, which value markets because they promise a better life for everyone, really has won in American politics. They're commonplace in the Democratic Party, which is a major ideological shift that almost no libertarians have noticed. Freedom is embraced, but it has to be tempered by regulation and redistribution. Not everybody on the left accepts those ideas, but every democratic president has. The Republicans once had a similar view, and some still do, but the Hayekians have lost ground to a different, more extreme libertarianism, which opposes nearly everything that government does. And its most important proponents have been the economist Murray Rothbard, the philosopher Robert Nozick, and the novelist Ayn Rand. And they've shaped some of the libertarian interventions in American politics, most prominently America's climate policies for the last several decades, which have been importantly shaped by the libertarian Charles Koch. To understand modern libertarianism, you have to understand the context in which it began. In the late 1930s, the world's most admired economic managers were Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler. The Great Depression had devastated most of the world's economy. Unemployment stayed very high in the United States, Great Britain and France, and meanwhile in the Soviet Union, which had always been a rural backwater, and in Germany, which had experienced devastating inflation and unemployment, both those countries were booming, stimulated by huge military and public work spending. And most of the leading American and British politicians and intellectuals agreed the only way back to prosperity was a planned economy, scientifically planned. Even people who were unhappy about the dictator's methods agreed that capitalism had failed. Friedrich Hayek felt impelled to respond. He was an Austrian economist teaching at the London School of Economics, and modern libertarianism began with his 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom. He argued that efficient economic decisions couldn't possibly be made without profit property and competitive markets. Central planning would inevitably be both inefficient and tyrannical. Capitalism is valuable because price mechanisms transmit more information than any central planner can possibly know. Prices can generate astonishing levels of prosperity and offer more of that prosperity to the least advantaged people than socialism could. And it's turned out that Hayek was right about a lot of things. There are a huge range of policies that were once unquestioned, tariffs for all major industries, subsidies for failing industries, wage and price controls, price supports for farm commodities. They're generally agreed to be counterproductive and wasteful even the ones that we still have. People don't seriously defend them anymore. They're just powerful interests that manage to get them. And it's been a fabulous success. After the collapse of communism and the abandonment of socialism by major powers like India, the proportion of the world's population living in desperate poverty has plunged. Now of course this has had losers, most prominently the semi-skilled workers whose wages became unsustainable in the face of competition from poorer countries, globalization produced so much wealth that those people could have been made better off as well. The fact that it did not was the product of political choices that could and should have been different. Hayek's view in the road to serfdom didn't entail minimal government. It imposed strict conditions on intervention in the economy. He thought that regulation is appropriate to deal with what economists call externalities, side effects on third parties that aren't reflected in prices like pollution. Government should prevent fraud, should prevent manipulation. It should fund public goods that the private sector won't adequately provide, roads, education, social services, basic scientific research. His aim is to assess the advantages of market, including the inequalities that markets have in gender and ask for some justification for interference with those mechanisms. But it does aim to redistribute in ways that minimally impact markets. The presumption of non-interference can be overcome with evidence. So for example, there's no reason to think that medical care is going to be distributed in an equitable way. He thought that government could try to intervene to prevent misfortunes that people couldn't anticipate like disease. In his 1960 book, The Constitution of Liberty, he actually gives you the outlines of Obamacare. He says, you know, we can have medical care, but let's not have a national health service like Britain. Let's give people subsidies to buy insurance on the private market. And then, of course, you're going to have to require everybody to have insurance. You're going to have to require insurers to insure everybody, even people who are frail and sick. And by the time you're done with that discussion, Obamacare is essentially what you have. Now, that's not the only variety of libertarianism that's out there. What I've described, again, turns out not that much daylight, at least with respect to the extremely fraught issue of Obamacare, not so fraught anymore for some reason, but it was pretty fraught, not that much daylight between Hayek and what the Democratic Party was actually pushing. But there are other varieties of libertarianism out there. Rothbard and Rand Nozick. These folks are romantic individualists. They don't do cold economic calculations like Hayek. They're driven by ideals of personal liberation. And the argument is based on rights. Instead of presumption against interference with markets, they posit an absolute bar. Property is sacrosanct. Anything that enfeebles the state is good for freedom. The weaker the state is, the freer we are. Rothbard's philosophy is the most influential of the three, and lots of people who wouldn't recognize his name embrace his views in some detail. Whatever government does, even police protection could be provided better by private businesses. They should reward those who look after themselves. Taxation is theft. He surrounded himself with young libertarian intellectuals, notably Nozick, who was still a student when he came under Rothbard's influence. Randy Barnett, the mastermind of the challenge to Obamacare. And Charles Koch, who he persuaded to found the Cato Institute. The problems with the philosophies offered by these guys, I'm not going to be able to walk through their philosophical arguments and show why the philosophical arguments are bad. I do that in my book, which provoked this debate, Burning Down the House. So I can only offer you a promissory note here. I will argue that these guys are not very good philosophers, and an even worse philosopher is Ayn Rand, who reaches the same minimal state conclusions, which she defends in apocalyptic terms. So she writes that any interference with markets is going to elevate the coward, the fraud, and to exile from the human race, the hero, the thinker, the producer, the inventor, the strong, the purposeful, the pure. And she's certainly the most widely read libertarianism. Her influence has been cited by Donald Trump, Paul Ryan, many others. And her arguments matter less than her portrayals of good and evil in her novels. All three of them think that the poverty of people who don't prosper in an unregulated economy is simply justice, that we really need to redistribute upward to cut social services in order to ease the burden of taxation on the richest citizens. This view is prevalent enough now that there's a serious danger that the federal government is going to stop paying its debts because people who believe this have enough power in the federal government today to keep it from happening. None of them understood markets as well as Hayek did. All of them are relying on philosophical premises that crumble under even brief scrutiny. A big problem for all of them is externalities like pollution. Rand never seriously addressed the problem. Rothbard thought about it a lot, but his response is radically unstable. It oscillates between either externalities have to be tolerated wholesale because the state can't price them, which he sometimes argues, or most of modern industry has to be prohibited because it affects trespass on property. Another idea that he entertains, although there he also suggests that we'll invent substitutes for fossil fuels very quickly so catastrophe won't follow. Nozick is the most sensible of the three. He thinks that a society should permit those polluting attitudes, activities whose benefits are greater than their costs. Now that starts to sound a lot like Hayek, but it's not rights-based anymore. Now we're trying to think about how you police externalities in order to make up for the failings of markets. And if you are going to do that and police the externalities of pollution in a competent way, it turns out that you need an enormous scientific bureaucracy in order to do the policing to figure out which chemicals cause which harms. All of them are making the same mistake. They have an excessively crude understanding of their core concept, which is private property. All of them imagine it to be absolute dominion over some part of the world unencumbered by affirmative duties or liability to taxation. But property rights have never been like this. They think they're defending existing property rights, but this is an otherworldly fantasy. Property rights have always been burdened in various ways with responsibilities to other people. And if what you value about property is that it gives people independence and autonomy, then that functions nicely performed by streams of government-generated income, social security or Medicare being the most obvious examples. Libertarianism is also susceptible to abuse by predators. Wealth in the United States is increasingly concentrated at the top. Economic risk has been shifted from broad social insurance to workers and their families. Jobs are less secure. A college degree no longer reliably guarantees middle-class status. In any year, 10 to 20% of Americans are going to experience a 25% drop in their income. About a third of those don't recover their prior level even a decade later. Now, some of the growth at the top is the product of legitimate operation of markets. The astounding wealth of Steve Jobs or Bill Gates is a small fraction of the value that they created. Billionaires, when they produce value through the honest operation of businesses, when they innovate, they tend to capture about 2% of the value that their innovation produces. So Hayek offers you good reasons to think that it's good to have billionaires. I'm going to disagree with Bernie Sanders about this. But some of the inequality is the consequence of a crony capitalism in which large corporations and banks have used their power to skew the rules toward themselves. And liberals and libertarians ought to be able to join forces against this. But that requires that we treat the present distribution of wealth as something other than neutral or natural. The most important of these bandits is the fossil fuel industry, which has deployed libertarian rhetoric to make the Republican Party the only major political party in the world that has denied climate change science. And this license to profit by hurting people and destroying their property betrays the most basic commitments of even Randian libertarianism. If the minimal prohibitions of force and fraud were enforced, inequality, at least to the extent that it's the product of this kind of fraud, would at least be ameliorated. But that's a reason for these leeches to try to make sure that these rules aren't enforced, at least not against themselves. And so quite a lot of the political movement to constrain the administrative state, to constrain regulators, to limit the power of the Environmental Protection Agency or the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, is there precisely in order to benefit these people who libertarians ought to look at pretty much the same way that they look at failing industries that are asking for subsidies. Hostility to government has also crippled public services that capitalism needs in order to operate. It is fairly miraculous that an infrastructure bill finally got through Congress. It's not an accident that it took a Democrat to get it through because if you are absolutely opposed to massive government involvement in the economy, then it's hard to get enthusiastic about roads, bridges, funding for medical research, funding for basic science. And so again, it's not an accident that the pandemic response team in the federal government was disbanded by Trump as it happens shortly before the disaster happened. Because when you go looking to cut government, given that there are lots of powerful interests that are backing this or that government program, what you are going to end up cutting is programs that don't have powerful protectors, that benefit everybody in general and nobody in particular. So all of this is self-defeating even from the selfish standpoint of business, which depends on functioning infrastructure. It is, I think, curious that this philosophy has captured the imagination of so many billionaires whom Charles Koch has gathered into a powerful fundraising network. In most times and places, wealthy elites are conservative in the old-fashioned sense. They fear change. They want to keep society operating along traditional lines. Social welfare programs were invented by Otto von Bismarck in the 19th century to pacify the working classes. But in America, Bismarck would be in the marginalized centrist wing of the Republican Party, which has become the party of upheaval and revolution. And I think the recklessness is evident in the crusade against Obamacare. You need to embrace a mighty tough libertarianism in order to cheerfully strive to take health care away from 20 million people. The most consequential effect of libertarianism under Koch's leadership has been the spread of climate change denial and the effective blocking of any coordinated effort to address the greatest danger that the human race has faced in millennia. The federal government started taking this seriously during the first George Bush administration and mobilization by Koch and his people managed to prevent it from happening. We would be living in a very different world if you had been able to pass a climate of carbon tax in the 1990s. If the hollowing out of the state allows economic behemoths to do whatever they like, that what libertarianism licenses in the garb of liberty is crass predation and the creation of a new aristocracy. The hamstringing of environmental regulation empowers a small group of industrialists to impose massive costs on the rest of humanity. This is just another kind of mooching and looting. It is a new road to serfdom. It reinforces the prejudices of the people on the left who repudiate capitalism. The libertarians who embrace it thinking that they are thereby promoting freedom are useful idiots like the idealistic leftists of the 1930s who hated poverty and racism and embraced Stalin. John Gault is a sap. Even in its most attractive form, libertarianism is an inadequate political philosophy. Rights depend on a culture, institutions, even individual personalities that sustain them. In order to be free to live the lives they want, people need more than a minimum state. Libertarianism points beyond itself. Freedom is not the absence of government. It is the capacity of people to shape their own lives. Libertarianism as its core is a protest against the massive apparatus of regulation and redistribution that arose in the 20th century. That apparatus has done a lot of stupid things. You all have copies of Reason Magazine sitting around your chairs. Reason Magazine is right about a lot of things. It's not hard to find stupid things that government has done, but without that apparatus we would be less free. Professors like me aren't active in politics. We sit in our offices and we write about ideas. The useful thing we can do is clear up ignorance and confusion. The prevalence of bad libertarian philosophy has given me an opportunity to make myself useful. Bad political philosophy can kill you. What I try to do in the book is offer for the poison of libertarianism a kind of Narcan. Thank you. Thank you, Professor Koppelman, for that excellent opening statement. Mr. Epstein, the floor is yours. You have 30 minutes. Thanks. Well, the title of Andrew's book, Burning Down the House, was inspired by a story about a fire department that allowed a house to burn because the homeowner hadn't paid his bill. This was meant as a lesson about market failure in this vital area. reasons Nicolespi pointed out that the fire department that allowed the house to burn was run by the government. Gillespie then cited a privately run fire department that has a specific policy of not allowing houses to burn under the same circumstances. Applying that point more generally, I propose to defend the following resolution. Libertarians play an important role in objecting to the delusion greed disdain for the weak and destruction of human life and liberty that has corrupted the actions of the U.S. government in important ways. If I can convince you of that resolution, logic will compel you to vote against the resolution defended by Andrew. In covering this subject, Libertarians draw on the Public Choice School of Politics, which emphasizes that people in government have the same self-interest as those of us outside government. Politics, it's been summarized as politics without romance. Politics without romance includes crony capitalism, the unholy alliance between big business and government, and includes regulatory capture, the tendency for regulatory agencies to be captured by the businesses they're meant to regulate, usually to hinder competition. Libertarians also draw on this insight from free market economist Thomas Sowell. The first lesson of economics is scarcity. There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics. And Libertarians, of course, believe that, quote, power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. I'll be focusing on topics mentioned in Andrew's book, and for the second time, we'll be forced to cover each only briefly. We can delve more deeply into any of them during the Q&A. Andrew said in an interview, quote, a large part of what the state does is protect us from forces that you need the state to control, such as COVID, unquote. But the experience with the government's management of the COVID pandemic suggests the very opposite. We had a pretty good example of power corrupting pretty absolutely when health official Anthony Fauci kept declaring in public interviews that, quote, if you criticize me, you're criticizing science, unquote. There was similar corruption of power when health official Francis Collins privately ordered that, quote, three fringe epidemiologists, unquote, be given a, quote, quick and devastating takedown, unquote, for publicly dissenting from the lockdowns imposed by government during the COVID pandemic. These three fringe epidemiologists happened to be from Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford. One of them, Stanford University epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya publicly declared, quote, the lockdowns are the single worst public health mistake in the last 100 years. We will be counting the catastrophic health and psychological harms imposed on nearly every poor person on the face of the earth for a generation. At the same time, they have not served to control the epidemic in the places where they have been most vigorously imposed, unquote. Compare the outcomes in U.S. states and in nations that had strict government-imposed lockdowns with states and nations whose governments did far less. And you find no evidence that the lockdowns made any significant difference. But there is ample evidence of damage and destruction to life, liberty, and health from the lockdowns. We had the appalling spectacle of the government ordering nursing homes to accept infected COVID patients, where further infections resulted in massive deaths. And the comic relief of a parade of politicians caught personally violating their own lockdown policies like so many fuggish buffoons. The main takeaway was that we need to avoid the top-down intervention of governments' central planners when a pandemic hits or the same tragedy will repeat itself. The one reference in Andrew's book to the U.S. government's many murderous wars of choice occurs in his parenthetical statement about, quote, clumsy disasters such as Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, unquote. Since clumsy disasters implies that these disasters were unintentional, it's not quite the word President Eisenhower would have used when he warned about the, quote, grave implications of the military industrial complex. As Eisenhower noted, quote, the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist, a statement that has proved grimly accurate. The U.S. wars of choice have killed millions in the last two decades alone. On the 9-11 attacks on the U.S., libertarian congressman Ron Paul declared, quote, they don't come here to attack us because we're rich and we're free. They attack us because we're over there, when he called for complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Middle East. Ron Paul's statement was ignored by Barack Obama, who gets a general thumbs up from Andrew. Obama continued the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia, and started wars in Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, and Syria. Obama maintained a secret kill list, murdered American citizens, and in Syria he armed rebels directly affiliated with al-Qaeda. In his presidential campaign, Ron Paul advocated the abolition of the Federal Reserve. By contrast, Andrew endorses the Federal Reserve, commenting, quote, the ability of the central bank to intervene softened business cycles throughout the 20th century with less oscillations of boom and bust, unquote. Andrew's statement, for which he cites no source, is a myth. The period before the 1913 creation of the Federal Reserve was not at all a period of free banking, but one of extensive government control that caused instability. But if you include the entire 20th century, as Andrew does, business cycles have been more severe since the Fed was created. But even if you just take the past half century since the early 1970s, business cycles have been at least as severe as the period before the Fed was created. Based on insights credited to Friedrich Hayek, the economist Andrew endorses, when he won the Nobel Prize in Economics, the central bank is a major cause of boom and bust. The Federal Reserve has also brought the ravages of price inflation, which the economy was largely spared prior to the Fed's creation. There has recently been a plunge in the average worker's real wage as the declining purchasing power of the dollar hammers nominal gains in wages, an inflation caused by the surge in the purchase of treasury debt by the Fed's money printing. The Fed's money printing brings up an evil perpetrated by the central bank that any small D Democrat should object to, the anti-democratic enlargement of government's power over the public purse. Governments normally have two ways of raising money through taxes or through borrowing against future taxes, but governments long ago found a third way. Finance operations through money printing have functioned the central bank performs quite efficiently. When the government need not obtain its funds from the people, but can instead supply the people with funds, observes libertarian economist George Reisman, it can no longer be viewed as deriving its powers and rights from the people." In his book, Andrew mentions the evil of crony capitalism, just as he did in his talk earlier, but he falls far short of exploring the full implications. He correctly writes that, quote, much of the new inequality is not the effect of competitive markets, but of a crony capitalism in which large corporations and banks have used their power to skew the rules in order to redistribute wealth toward themselves, unquote. Andrew calls for liberals and libertarians to join forces against this, but then he strangely asks the libertarians, quote, not to treat the present distribution of wealth as neutral or natural, unquote. But libertarians are the last ones to treat the effects of crony capitalism as neutral or natural. The Federal Reserve that Andrew regards as an asset is a crony capitalist institution in league with major banks. Nor does Andrew mention the compelling evidence that much of the greater inequality and labor compensation can be traced not to the free market, but to the increased role of government in thwarting the mobility of labor in the free market via crony capitalism. Take government's imposition of needless licensing requirements that make it costly in terms of time and money for workers to switch to higher paying jobs. The percentage of workers subject to such requirements has jumped from 10% in 1970 to nearly 30% today, and two-thirds of the increase has spread to more occupations, virtually all of them covering jobs that the less educated could take. Then there's the other far more destructive way in which government has been impeding the mobility of workers. This is the accelerated rise since the 1960s in government imposed rules, regs, and restrictions that have made it increasingly expensive to build housing in high wage areas like New York and San Francisco. The resulting scarcity of supply has driven up the price of housing in these areas, making it increasingly costly for low wage workers to move to these areas and to take advantage of the higher wages. A welfare state does not necessarily impair the workings of markets, Andrew writes, and there is no real trade-off between them, unquote. But the labor markets, the key mechanism by which people climb out of poverty, have been impaired to the point of dysfunction by the U.S. welfare state. According to a study of this subject, quote, In 1967, 68% of adults 18 to 65 in the bottom quintile had jobs, but by 2017, that percentage had dropped by almost half to 36%. As the study also notes, jobs were plentiful in 2017, as plentiful in 2017 as they were in 1967. And as the study notes, quote, Only one structural change can explain the major decoupling in low income households of work-age persons from work, the near quadrupling in constant dollars of government transfer payments to lower income households, unquote. While some might applaud the generosity of our government, others might point out that its welfare state has promoted poverty by fostering a culture of dependency. Libertarians credit the civil rights laws with ending Jim Crow laws imposed by government itself. But Andrew goes much further. He credits the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with, quote, A massive increase in the incomes of black Americans. He dismisses as a, quote, rosy scenario the idea that the private sector could have played a role. As he observes, this was a, quote, strategy that had been attempted for nearly a century without success, unquote. Countering that myth, Thomas Sowell writes, quote, Despite the grand myth that black economic progress began or accelerated with the passage of the civil rights laws and war on poverty programs of the 1960s, the poverty rate among blacks fell from 87% in 1940 to 47% by 1960 before any of those programs began. Over the next 20 years, the poverty rate among blacks fell another 18 percentage points compared to the 40 point drop in the previous 20 years. A slower rate of progress, not the economic grand deliverance proclaimed by liberals. The number of blacks in professional, technical and other high level occupations more than doubled in the decade preceding the Civil Rights Act of 1964. On the social pathology of fostered by these programs, Sowell observes, quote, Most black children, 78% were being raised in two parent families in 1960, while 30 years later, 66% weren't being raised by a single mother. If massive programs are the only hope to reduce crime, why was there so much less crime long before anyone ever thought of these programs, unquote? The government's welfare state has also diminished the greatest anti-poverty program ever devised. The free immigration of the world's poor to the U.S., where they find jobs that earn them a quantum leap in income. As the libertarian economist Milton Friedman pointed out, legitimate concern about immigrants' potential claim on the welfare state fuels opposition to the free immigration that prevailed in the early 20th century. Andrew writes about climate change, but the dissenting view taken by libertarians has also been taken by non-libertarian climate scientists. A book on this subject called Unsettled has been written by New York University climate scientist Stephen Coonan, who served under President Obama as Under Secretary for Science and who identifies as a lifelong Democrat. Coonan is far from being a climate change denier, but in debating another climate scientist still took the negative on the debate resolution about doing a whole lot about greenhouse gas emissions. In his rebuttal, Coonan stated that the proposition of making large and rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions is fantastical. We can't do it. He added, the proposition is immoral. We shouldn't do it. On the point about morality and practicality, a reporter for the non-libertarian New York Times writes about India, quote, with its 1.4 billion inhabitants, India has a need for cheap oil to lift millions out of poverty. That need is non-negotiable, unquote. Andrew celebrates Obamacare as having, quote, built upon Medicare and Medicaid. Speaking of libertarians' opposition to it, Andrew sarcastically observes you need to embrace a mighty tough libertarianism in order to cheerfully strive to take health care away from millions of people. But Andrew himself has unintentionally embraced the overwhelming likelihood that many millions more will be denied health care once runaway spending on these programs becomes unaffordable even by our profligate government. That's the constant warning from the nonpartisan, non-libertarian Congressional Budget Office. This government agency keeps forecasting that soaring debt and deficits of the federal government will eventually force major cutbacks in spending, and it keeps singling out health care spending and social security as the major drivers of spending. In its forecast, the agency assumes that all other federal spending will decline as a share of GDP, and it projects federal revenues to be at least as high as a share of GDP as they ever were over the past 75 years. That's why in its periodic studies of reducing the federal deficit, this government agency highlights proposals for cutbacks in health care spending, thus embracing the very thing that Andrew decries. As a former Congressional Budget Office director once put it in blunt terms, the federal government's budget is on the road to hell. There is no polite way to describe why the world's largest economy has placed itself on a trajectory that looks like a third-world debt crisis. Our current system promises to take care of generations of elderly Americans, but will have no choice but to renege on those commitments. Instead of being honest with those who might otherwise prepare now for their retirements, it's running an intergenerational Ponzi scheme. The same crime as Bernie Madoff's, but worse by orders of magnitude. Andrew has good intentions. He should join libertarians in endorsing the proverb, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Thank you. If I have another minute to go, I only want to say that from what I've said, I couldn't possibly have converted any non-libertarians in the audience to libertarianism. I only want to remind you of the thesis. I as a libertarian, I'm not thoroughly corrupted by greed, I as a libertarian, I'm pointing to the fact that the government needs fixing in major, major ways that the Democrats that Andrew espouses and supports are simply blind to. Thank you again. Thank you, Mr. Epstein. And now, Mr. Koppelman, you have five minutes for a rebuttal. Thank you. So libertarianism, I've said, comes in flavors, some more bitter than others. And the varieties that I was specifically attacking were the rights-based varieties that don't really aren't concerned about consequences. Somebody like Murray Rothbard or Ayn Rand or Robert Nozick thinks that just having the government violates people's rights. It doesn't matter what the consequences are. Gene is not that kind of libertarian. All of the arguments that he made are based on the bad consequences of this or that government program. And one of the things that I emphatically do not aim to do in the book is defend everything that government does. And I say in the book that a valuable thing that libertarians do is they call attention to the dysfunction of this or that government program. Very much like if you imagine a doctor who really thinks that medical intervention is never any good and that the body can heal itself and goes looking for evidence that this or that therapy is a bad idea. Sometimes it could be a fabulous medical research. It sometimes turns out to be true. If you have, let's say, arthritis in your knee and unfortunately autobiographical example, it turns out that physical therapy is just as good as surgery. There's been a lot of unnecessary surgery here. But on the other hand, somebody who thinks that medical intervention is never appropriate, you don't want him as your doctor. Because, you know, it's an overgeneralization. Here or there. The public school choice of politics that says, well, you know, government tends to be captured. You can't trust government. It's a valuable hypothesis. It's sometimes right. But sometimes, you know, I spent some time living in Washington, D.C., you run along the Potomac. When I lived there, you were warned not to get too near that water. It's so polluted you don't want to breed the fumes coming off of that water. Today, they're talking about putting beaches on the Potomac because they've done such a good job of cleaning up the water. The private sector does not have an incentive to control its own pollution because ordinary tort suits can't control them because it's hard to prove what caused which harm only government regulation can provide you with that. Or another example of massive government regulation. You know, I talk in the very conclusion of the book about COVID. And there are really bad examples of government dysfunction. It's one that I don't, that Jean didn't mention. The Centers for Disease Control very early on, when you wanted a test against COVID, the Centers for Disease Control came up with its own test, which was no good and wouldn't let anybody else develop their own test. It's horrible. On the other hand, the private sector wouldn't have developed a vaccine all by itself because it required too much investment. The investment was too risky. The reason why we got a vaccine, which makes it possible for us to be in this room together today, is because government embarked on a massive funding of research that produced the vaccine. I'm going to agree with a lot of his examples. There are needless licensing requirements. Housing restrictions do drive up the price of housing. On the other hand, with respect to climate change, it just isn't the case that third world countries can't develop without massive increases in their greenhouse gas emissions. The Economist magazine, that famous proponent of the free market, has concluded that a lot of the developing countries have managed to grow enormously while reducing their carbon footprint. It is possible to do both at once. And quite a lot of these programs, the kind of spending that he's worrying about, these programs can be made more efficient. But the libertarian attack on Obamacare was fundamentally based on the idea that it is morally wrong to raise taxes in order to pay for the health care of people who can't afford it themselves. That's the moral question that divides me from the Nozikians and the Randians. That is the variety of libertarianism that is most dangerous. Mr. Epstein, five minutes. Well, let me remind you of the resolution. Libertarianism is thoroughly corrupted. Thorough means me as well, because I'm part of that thoroughness. Andrew is quite correct. Is it corrected in your favor? Excuse me. Guys, I'd like 20 seconds back of my five minutes, please. Give him 20 seconds back. I think the moderator's gotten a little corrupted there. So let me resume, start from the top. Give me those five minutes again back as a penalty marker for you guys. But that aside, obviously Andrew is quite right that I focused on consequentialism. You know, we can't give a full lesson libertarianism's ins and outs. Andrew himself said he couldn't take a deep dive into philosophy. I talked about all the consequentialist issues that are on the table for those Democrats, President Obama, whom Andrew apparently regards as a perfect melding of Hayek and responsibility. As I mentioned Obama specifically, and I mentioned not trivial issues, issues of life and death. Massive killing. Been recently estimated that the wars of the last 20 years have cost four million lives. The lockdowns cost life in a major way, the destruction of children's learning. This is major harm. This is a conflagration. The U.S. budget is on the road to hell. And Andrew might say, well, Obamacare is good. It's unaffordable, as the non-libertarian congressional budget office keeps saying. With respect to vaccines, the vaccines, as you probably know, were supposed to prevent transmission, and they dismally failed to do that. They apparently helped keep certain people alive after the government had killed so many in this state and in other states of the Union by forcing infected people to go into nursing homes. And had there not been an FDA, a Food and Drug Administration, which has been indicted for years by the public choice theory as basically ironically delaying drugs, the vaccines could have come out. There could have been all kinds of ways in which all the knowledge that we have from bottom up could have been used in managing the pandemic. And God forbid that we have another one because apparently the government is planning the same awful, destructive, murderous policies. So we're talking about something pretty major. Oddly enough, with respect to the Economist magazine, I've long felt it's the most overrated magazine in the world. It's basically consistent. A lot of head-up there bought Brits. Why don't they just call up people in India, just read the New York Times, the Indians, the Chinese, the Africans. They are building coal-fired plants as fast as they can install them. They look at the U.S. and they recognize the insanity about what the U.S. is doing. We consume 30 times the fossil fuels they do. They are dying of burning dung in their homes. The introduction of fossil fuels over the last 30 years in these countries has saved lives over and over again. They know full well that it's immoral to do without fossil fuels. And that fossil fuels are at least the wave of the future over the next 30 years. And as Kunin, again, on Obama appointee points out, we've had two degrees of global warming and the world is a much better place in every conceivable way of human flourishing. Fewer people die from climate disasters from tornadoes and hurricanes than ever before. We've had two degrees of warming and we're doing far better. Another two degrees, if past behavior is any prediction of future behavior, will deal with the next two degrees. So there is indeed a mass insanity in this country with respect to the policies of our government. Well, the Indians and the Chinese, even quoted in the New York Times and the Africans, recognize that they are not going to go with the philosophy, fossil fuels for me, but not for thee. They are appropriately scornful of all those rich people who fly around in their private jets, leaving enormous carbon footprints and preaching to the poor people of the world that you can do without fossil fuels. So consequently, we libertarians have an important message to convey. And I even, by the way, recognize that Andrew Reid, Foreign New Liberty by Murray Rothbard. There was an awful lot of consequentialism in that book as well. Again, I'm not going to convert you or Andrew to being libertarian if you're not a libertarian now. I'm only trying to tell you, listen to us libertarians because we have an important message to convey to you about a whole range of important issues involving life, liberty and mass death. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Epstein. So we have now come to the question and answer portion of the program. Mr. Charlie Friedberg will be handling the microphone. You can line up over there. But before we get to audience questions, the first phase of question and answer will be between the panelists. You can each have one question to ask the other. Now I should think of who should go first. Why don't you go first, Mr. Koppelman? So while you think about it, we'll keep you busy answering his question. Andrew has answered all my important questions. And so we can leave it to you, Moderator's Perogative, buddy. The Moderator's Perogative. Oh, I just happened to have come prepared with a whole collection of questions. Respect the audience, buddy. I will respect the audience, but we have 30 minutes for this, so I might take five or 10 of that. But I've got questions for both. So Mr. Koppelman, let me go first with you. When I was a kid, the welfare and redistribution programs in this country, including Social Security and Medicare, which were the only big ones that existed then, were about 5% of GDP. And today, if you include federal, state and local, the federal redistribution programs and welfare programs of every variety are up to over 15%, maybe 17%. State and local adds another five. So we're up to 22% of GDP, 20 plus trillion. We're talking $5 trillion a year here. Is that enough? Do you think it should be more? Do you have any limit in mind as to how far this should go? Or is there a huge amount that isn't really needed in there that ought to be pushed back on? What's your view on that? My view is that there's a considerable amount of clutch in all of these programs. They accumulate over time. They badly need reform. The threshold question that was raised by at least the libertarian challenge to Obamacare is whether this kind of redistribution is morally appropriate in the first place. Once you get, and if we're going to talk about the empirics, one of the consequences of market pressures is that the proportion of American workers in the bottom quintile. It's my bite, not on. We think a little bit of what you just said. One consequence of market pressures at the time that Obamacare was enacted was that in the bottom quintile of workers, we're not talking about people on welfare. We're talking about people with jobs. The proportion who didn't have health insurance coverage from their jobs had risen from, I think it was around 20% in 1980, and it had risen to 40% and was continuing to rise. We were seeing more and more people without having any kind of health insurance, and that number was going to continue to grow. So now Obama decided that it was going to be such a politically heavy lift to broaden coverage that he didn't do anything about the inefficiencies at all, and there are massive inefficiencies. The United spends about 18% of gross national product on healthcare. About a third of that is wasted. There are things that we could be doing to clean up the delivery of those services without cutting off anybody that Obama just didn't try. I think that it's going to be tough enough because every one of those wasted dollars is income to somebody. That's going to be a heavy lift, and I absolutely agree that it's got to be done. It can be done without leaving people, without medical care. There are pathologies of the welfare state. The most effective welfare program to avoid creating perverse incentives, and the most successful of the lot, is the earned income tax credit, in which the marginal tax rate for an additional dollar isn't defeating to anybody who wants to earn additional dollar for some of our welfare programs. It'll cost you more money to get a better job in terms of lost welfare benefits than what you get from your job. That stuff needs to get cleaned up, so I'm perfectly happy to agree that there's quite a lot of waste in these programs. On the other hand, it's a rich country. We can afford to take care of our old people. We can afford to have social security. But the threshold question raised by the libertarians that I'm trying to answer in the book is the question of whether redistribution is, per se, immoral, because it takes away from the takers and gives the money to the mooters. That's the argument that I'm primarily trying to respond to in the book, but it's not Gene's argument, so I can't have that argument here. So, Mr. Epstein... Jimmy, Buddy, as I try to remind you, Buddy, when somebody asks a question, the other person can answer it. He's taking over. Can comment on it. Would you allow me to comment on the answer that he just gave? That's what the moderator is supposed to allow, Buddy? Is that all right? I intend to, but I want to throw in a little twist on your comment, which is, is there any level of a safety net, particularly a federally sponsored safety net, that you would endorse? It's not really a sponsored safety net. Look, there's no question that the medical system in this country and the welfare system is essentially a tribute to the insights of public choice theory. It was not designed, in terms of from Andrew's standpoint, to do any real good. It was essentially designed the way those who run the government in league with other businesses wanted it designed. The welfare system is obviously, despite the lip service that has been paid, has been paid to the idea of giving people more independence, giving them back on their feet, helping people to achieve independence in the market economy. It's done exactly the reverse. We have had, since Obamacare was instituted, strangely enough, life expectancy has declined. There might be some connection there. You would have expected such a massive revolution in medical care for so many millions of people, life expectancy certainly shouldn't have risen or at least flattened, it declined. So my only point is that ultimately, ultimately, the problems that libertarians would have to face in trying to reform the system are quite complex. But ideally, ideally, there has always been social welfare for the poor, always been prior to the advent of the government. A myth, an unfortunate myth of progressives, is that government programs came in to play because there were inadequacies in the way the private sector was handling the problem. There were community hospitals for poor people. Doctors, physicians felt the obligation to do pro bono work at these community hospitals for poor people before medical care exploded when Lyndon Johnson came in. The fundamental problem with redistribution is that it's shafting the poor people of the world because it keeps immigrants out. That, by the way, is a fundamental flaw in the philosophy of John Rawls about redistribution. Rawls was indifferent to the real problem of poverty, the poverty of the world. And the glorious history of the U.S. in allowing immigrants in to achieve a better life has been stymied by the welfare state. So, in fact, we have had, if you just look at what happened in the 19th century, we had mutual aid societies, voluntary aid societies, charity up the kazoo. There would be plenty of provision for the poor under those circumstances. But whether you're asking me about the ultimate question, but as it happens, the reforms that Andrew wants are very unlikely to occur because he's working from a model that assumes that government wants to do it better or that government is capable of doing it better. The federal budget is on the road to hell. Obama did nothing about it, Bush did nothing about it, Biden is doing nothing about it, and now, of course, we're facing a crisis with respect to raising the debt. So that's the difference between me and him. I guess I just want to say one more time, are you okay with doing away with the whole federal welfare thing in the private sector? I thought I answered that. Okay. But look at me. But I want to say that, you know, when Ron Paul was running for office, he said, what do you do on the first day? What do you do on the first hundred days? Are we going to pretend, we live a chance, that we simply want the status quo minus those welfare programs? No. That's not our vision. We have to build a better society and a better economy. The only thing I would grant to Andrew, by the way, about that one moment was when the Republicans forced Clinton to try to reform the welfare policies in 1996. The acts that Clinton pushed to get people off welfare, that was a push in the right direction, which got nipped in the bud and thwarted pretty quickly, partly by Republicans as well. But ultimately, yes. Ultimately, the society and the poor will thrive in a free market economy without any of these redistributive programs that only foster poverty by supporting dependency. Okay. I have one last question for Andrew before we move to the audience. In your presentation, climate change and the government as unnecessary or the only way of addressing this is an important part of what you were talking about. As you may know, the EPA and other government agencies under Biden have been given a mandate to get out there and tackle this problem in every way possible. And particularly with the EPA, not just also other agencies and states, there are lots of major things which are not like regulated industry to do it better, but specifically addressed to the freedom of the people and what they can and can't do that are coming down. And I'm talking about forced electrification of automobiles. I'm talking about forced electrification of heat, which Shane was talking about. I'm talking about the attack on animal husbandry, which is becoming a big thing in Europe now and is coming to this country. My last, my own blog post was about what they call virtual power plants, which means ridiculous Orwellian term. They're going to have the control over your thermostat and turn it off on the coldest day or on the hottest day. Do you feel these things are appropriate? Should the government be undertaking these kind of restrictions on freedom in the name of climate change? Well, as I've said before, I'm not prepared to bless everything that government does. The large threshold question is whether pollution, which climate change is an example of, is something that the free market can handle. And if carbon emissions warm up the planet, let's just stipulate that that's happening, there's nobody you can sue. There's too many emitters. The market isn't able to take care of this, so some government's solution is the only way. Now, I suppose you can say with the public choice theory, no, all of the government actors are corrupt, but it's an overgeneralization, that sometimes the case that governments are corrupt, sometimes they're not. Even minimal state libertarians generally envision a police force that's not corrupt. There's, I understand the anarchists have a different view. So it's just too much of an overgeneralization here, but I'm absolutely not. I mean, it's quite useful to point to this or that government program and say that it's badly done, but it's not a problem that the market by itself is going to fix. Well, Mr. Epstein, do you have a comment on that, Mr. Epstein? Well, again, Andrew, with respect to all the things you listed, buddy, about what our government is doing, I do think that they are pretty hopeless, but of course, as you know and many people in the audience know, as I've repeated, it simply is not going to happen. As again, ludicrously, New Yorkers have one of the, among the smallest carbon footprints, and now they're going to impose blackouts on poor people in order to reduce the carbon footprint further. Other localities are not doing it. Insurgently, again, all you have to do is look up the statements or even read the New York Times. India, Bangladesh, China, Africa, they are not going along with it. So it's ludicrous on its face, even assuming that it can work out in the United States. With respect to the larger issue that Andrew poses, of course, he's talking about the dilemma faced by, am I an Ann Cap? Am I a Minnacist? All of those questions are questions we could get into. But of course, even, because Ann Cap's do believe in the rule of law, they think the private market can institute it. And I'm not, by the way, I don't think that if climate change were a problem and we really were facing 50 degree heating of the planet and it's going to be unlivable unless we do something, then there could be a class action suit. A class action suit is messy. But again, I put it to Andrew that those bureaucracies, those regulatory agencies are also messy. Class action suits would involve experts. Nobody, neither libertarians nor status, if Andrew will forgive me for calling them a status compared to me, certainly, have a good solution to these problems with respect to externalities. But certainly, libertarian solution of a class action suit is perfectly feasible and very likely to work out better than having an entrenched bureaucracy that always needs to do something in order to keep itself employed. Bureaucracies want to do less with more. They have bad incentives, so probably working it out through the courts and through class action suits is a better solution to the problem. That's the libertarian solution. Okay, with that, I think we should move to audience questions. And I see there's a group of people lined up. Could you please try to make it a question, try to make it a fairly brief so that the people can answer it quickly and other people can have a turn? My question was for Genevstein, but it was on externalities. And I'm just wondering, let's say, forget climate change, let's say river pollution. How do you think that would be handled if there was no government? Like, how would we deal with the externality? Well, again, see, now we're getting into sort of the, we're plumbing the depths of anarcho-capitalism or of miniki. Anarchists insist that there would be rule of law. And then Murray Rothbard wrote a book called Ethics of Liberty about the laws and codes under an anarchist society. And certainly pollution is an externality that that offends the zero-aggression principle that libertarians espouse, and it would be a legitimate offense to the law, and therefore there could be action through the courts. I totally agree with Andrew that these situations are messy, determining the outcome is messy. But again, if you compare it with the alternative, putting a bureaucracy in charge of it all the time, the bureaucracy could do mischief in order to keep itself busy, and I submit to Andrew that that's exactly what has been happening. So again, the rule of law is something all libertarians accept and an externality offends, it violates the law having to do with zero-aggression, and that would be the solution. Thank you. Alan Mandel here. Two brief questions both for Andrew. Number one, why aren't you aware of the super El Nino that is formed in the equatorial Pacific, which is anticipated to bring catastrophic effects around the world, and there are 48 active volcanoes on the planet, including Krakatoa, the last time 40 years ago. There was a super Krakatoa volcano. The Earth's temperature was reduced by 1.5 degrees, and there are five volcanoes in the United States, Hawaii and the Aleutian Islands. So why don't you know that and incorporate that into your models? Second, and even briefer, on the Federal Reserve, on the Federal Reserve, don't you think, I'll use Gene's term, don't you think that the Federal Reserve has no clue that raising interest rates does not bring inflation down and that lowering interest rates does not help wages keep up with inflation, that they don't know what they're doing and they're jaw-boning in order to try and influence the markets? Well, I think that I'm simply not going to speak to the climate model. I will say that, I mean, the question of whether humans are generating climate change, I'm just going to have to leave it as an exercise to the audience. You know, I'm a political philosopher. It seems to me that the evidence of man-made climate change is massive and catastrophic, but that's all that I can say about that. On the question of whether the Federal Reserve has been ruining the U.S. economy in the 20th century, all I'll say is that the U.S. economy has been performing at a much higher level than the economy of other advanced industrial countries. If you compare our growth with that of England or France or Germany, we seem to do pretty well despite the fact that the pernicious Federal Reserve is dragging us down. Now, I suppose you can always say, yeah, but without the Federal Reserve, it would just be amazing. And all I can say is that no actual world can compete with the fantasy worlds we can conjure up. Again, I remind Andrew, I did a before and after. Not with an imaginary world, but with a before world. There is very good data about the performance of the U.S. economy in the last half of the 19th century and into the 20th, up through 1913. It was troubled by state intervention of all kinds. Banks were not permitted to branch, and actually laws against branching prevailed until the 90s. If a bank can't branch, it can't reduce risk, so banks were having problems. All kinds of problems existed. The U.S. economy was way ahead of the rest of the world in the 19th century and into the 20th prior to the creation of the Federal Reserve. And again, the usual myth that's perpetrated is that the Federal Reserve was created in order to solve a problem. Read the book about the meeting on Jekyll Island and you'll realize that it arose from crony capitalism. Canada did not have a Federal Reserve until well into the 30s and did far better. So again, I'm grounding this in a before and after, a simple before and after to talk about the Federal Reserve. Even if you forgive the Federal Reserve, the Great Depression, which happened 13, actually it happened 16 years after the Federal Reserve was created. Even if you take it for the last 50 years, it did no better in terms of boom and bust than the economy did prior to the creation of the Federal Reserve. Inflation, price inflation, which we are going through now has been far worse. So that's where the Fed gets lower marks. And then ironically, ironically, Andrew is a champion of Friedrich Hayek, and Friedrich Hayek won a Nobel Prize in part specifically credited for his insights into how the Federal Reserve exacerbates business cycles. Next question. My question is for Andrew. Greed, delusion, and disdain for the weak. These were example by you in Obamacare and in climate change. Obamacare was a program where people buy private insurance, they're forced to buy private insurance, and climate change is a series of reforms of purchasing new products on the private market as we see with these electrical heaters. Do you not think that there's greed in these companies that are forcing these new changes? These, whether it's Obamacare, the insurance mandates, or whether it's the climate change. And should libertarians not be skeptical of that greed, just as you might be skeptical of the greed that is promoting libertarian ideas? Well, greed is a constant of human psychology. The specific point that I made by using that in the title of the book is that the desire to dismantle government agencies, I'm particularly concerned about regulatory agencies that deal with externalities like pollution. It's hard for me to imagine what the class action suit that Gina's imagining. I don't know. All victims of carbon emissions against all carbon emitters, what that would look like. But what I've actually seen with the effort to restrict government bureaucracies is a coalition between idealists, like Gene, who want to reduce government because they really think it will make people better off. And industries whose profits would be reduced if they were required to reduce their pollution preeminently, the fossil fuel industry, who would really like very much to be allowed to hurt people without being bothered by the police. That's the kind of greed that concerns me. Just a brief comment. I cited Eisenhower, who talked about the military industrial complex and the dangers thereof, and who predicted that there was a danger of endless wars. Eisenhower was not a libertarian, and maybe he was an idealist like me in the sense that Andrew means, but Eisenhower dearly wanted that rollback of the military industrial complex. Exactly the opposite happened, and we have been living. We are now at a point where we have increasing danger of nuclear war with Russia. I think Eisenhower would be rolling over in his grave, and he was not a libertarian. Next question. This question is for Epstein. Going to the topic of government intervention and climate change regulation, do you also think that India's commitment to net zero emissions by 2070 is misguided? I commend the New York Times to you, and also a non-libertarian publication, that quoted leading politicians, leading those who lead the economy in India, all of whom, when they are really asked about it, specifically say that, yes, we are building coal-fired plants. Yes, do you know where all the oil that Russia could not sell has been sold to? India's been buying it, gobbling it up. And so you will certainly find that if you quote them out of context, they're going to pay lip service to what the big rulers of the world in the U.S. want them to say. They'll be polite about it, but look at what they're doing, not what they're saying, although indeed look occasionally at what they're saying, and you'll find that they are saying that fossil fuels are the ticket for their people out of poverty. Okay, we have time for about one or two more questions. Your next, sir. This is for Andrew. You seem to tout the vaccine as well as certain other government agencies' responses to crises as being quite successful, whereas numerous studies have come out and shown that the vaccine is quite ineffective and basically worthless and has caused all kinds of various heart issues. And you also pointed to the Potomac as an example of, I assume, the EPA being successful. Can you name a single executive regulatory agency that has not been captured by special interest? Well, if you want an example of a regulation that... One of the problems here is that government agencies, they are enormously large and complicated things. It's very hard to generalize about them, but one significant environmental regulation that came out of the Obama administration was the restriction on fine particulates, that is, bits of soot that are so tiny that they can cross the blood-brain barrier, they shorten the lives of old people, they cause brain damage in infants, and they imposed enormous costs on industry, but at the same time that those enormous costs were imposed, the Trump administration subsequently ran a cost-benefit analysis on this regulation of the Obama administration and concluded that the benefits would outweigh the costs, and the costs were in billions, the benefits outweighed the costs by a factor of four or five. I don't know how without government regulation you could have reached the same result. Well, again, I guess Andrew said that he doesn't know how... I'm talking to a law professor, and so I guess I'm thin ice here, but he doesn't know how a class-action suit would work or how any kind of law suit would work about harm that's being done. As Rothbard wrote actually in Four New Liberty, we talk about air pollution, but that's just pollution through the air, it's polluting our throats, it's polluting our persons, and so it's clearly a tort. It is a harm, and the idea that that's hopeless is... I don't see why it's hopeless to bring that kind of case. A million people signed on with a class-action suit, it's reviewed, let's say it's appealed. Excuse me? Every emitter in the country? Well, all the major emitters? These lawsuits are out there currently, you can read about them on the Australian blog where I have called them the stupidest lawsuits in the country. I think our moderator just got a little bit too immoderate there. Again, I readily agree with you, Andrew, that these things are messy. You name the major polluters, and a lot of people sign on, and of course it's reviewed, experts testify, and that's how it gets resolved. Now, you agreed that a government is messy, it's complicated, I suggest you read a book called Why Government Fails So Often. It does one thing right, let's say that was done right, would you just cite it? Could it have been done a libertarian way? I say yes, of course it could have. Final question, sir. Thank you very much. So this is a question for both Andrew and Jean to challenge some of your statements on climate change, both of you. So since the 1980s, since the Reagan tax cuts of the 1980s, there were a couple of very environmentally beneficial tax cuts that produced major changes. Accelerated depreciation reduced the cost of installing property, plant, and equipment. They found that because of that, energy efficiency investments penciled out, and you saw people putting in a lot more new equipment, which made all the equipment more efficient. You saw energy use per capita decoupled from GDP. You also saw Reagan implemented conservation easement tax deductions, which resulted in the growth of 33 million acres of trees on private land since that time. So when you say there's no free market kind of policies that you can use to combat climate, that's clearly untrue because obviously that there are things that you can do that result in innovation in the United States reducing its emissions enormously by free market means. So for you, Andrew, when you say that the Koch brothers have used climate skepticism as a libertarian tool to derail American politics, isn't that untrue? I mean climate skepticism isn't an economic policy. It's a scientific policy, so it's not even libertarianism. It has nothing to do with free market policy. And Gene, when you say, gee, we have to use fossil fuels almost exclusively, aren't you kind of stepping off the free market bus entirely by picking winners and losers and not realizing that innovation is what's really important and that the kinds of energy we use 10 or 20 years from now may look incredibly different because of that power of innovation. So I certainly don't want to condemn market solutions. The question is whether a completely unregulated free market, which means that I get to poison my neighbors and they don't get to do anything about it because I guess we have a disagreement about the capacities of class action suits to remedy very tiny harms to large numbers of people. That's just a disagreement about how the legal system works. But the innovation that was proposed in the 1990s that I think is the most Hayekian is to have a carbon tax that just tells industry, all right, let us have you incorporate the full costs of what you're doing and if you can come up with a cleaner energy solution to this problem, something with smaller carbon footprints, you'll out-compete your competitors and you'll make money and that's how the market works. We create incentives for people to come up with innovations and that is how progress has in fact happened. That would have been the Hayekian solution. To some extent you're still seeing it. My best answer to your question is that indeed innovation is vital, but speaking as somebody who's covered the economy, who's written about the oil markets as a journalist for many years, I look at the fact that North America, US, Mexico, Canada, if they simply allowed all of the oil that's available via fracking and also on lands owned by the US to flourish and if Europe has about 50 years worth of oil and gas, if it's simply tapped all of the reserves in France, needn't be dependent on either OPEC or on Russia, all of those things are possible. Fossil fuels looks as though India and China and Africa are recognizing that the best bet is fossil fuels for the next generation, but of course I readily grant to you that innovation could change that. It just doesn't look as though it's likely to happen given the pace of integration, even if we had a free market for another generation. 2050, 2060, I think probably the future is nuclear. All right, thanks to all the questioners and we are now going to move to the final phase of our debate, a five minute wrap up from each of the participants. Mr. Koppelman, you have the floor. You can use the podium or the chair. No, I'm happy to take the chair here. So I will say there's a range of issues that it's hard to put them under a single rubric. The issues raised by American foreign policy are different from the issues raised by climate change, which are different from the issues raised by the Federal Reserve, which are issues that I frankly didn't talk about in the book. But I will say that the reason why we've had so much prosperity, one of the points that Adam Smith makes in the wealth of nations, is that people tend to innovate, people tend to produce, people tend to produce gains from trade in a world where there is law, where there are reliable rules. And so I guess what troubles me about the idea of an isolationist foreign policy, which has been repeatedly suggested here, is that all of the prosperity we've had in the last couple of hundred years have happened since the Napoleonic Wars, except during the period between World War II, between the World Wars, which was not that great, you have had a policeman of the planet. And I don't think that Eisenhower would have been enthusiastic about allowing Russia to gobble up Ukraine, nor do I think he would have been enthusiastic about allowing China to gobble up Taiwan. I don't think that those events, the return to a world in which nations gobble up one another as they can, would have been good for business. And beyond that, on the consequences of this or that government policy, which we've jumped across a number of them, I'm entirely open to market solutions. Again, a carbon tax is a market-based solution. The question is whether you want to have these government agencies at all, or whether the hypothesis that this or that activity could be better done by the private sector is a rebuttable empirical presumption that is going to be dependent on evidence and dependent on the ways in which we can enlist the private sector or not. The last thing that I'll say just about the climate question and the question of the development of third-world countries is that those third-world countries are going to make the transition to green energy if green and if cheap green energy is devised and handed to them on a platter. The Chinese will steal it, but that's only going to happen if there is massive investment in green energy. That massive investment has happened in the past. It's happening right now, and it's largely driven by the federal government. Mr. Repstein, five minutes. Take the podium. Well, we've been talking about consequentialism for much of the evening. Andrew has humored me by addressing some of the consequentialist points that I made. I'm hopefully brought across the point that the U.S. wars of choice. Andrew himself talked about clumsy disasters in Afghanistan and Vietnam, so he's already talking about millions of lives lost in those wars. So he already seems to agree that we libertarians have a point. I listed all of the atrocious, the murderous things that Obama did, focusing on him especially because Obama seems to be a president that Andrew has mostly gives like a B plus over an A minus two. He has a few problems with Obama. I talked about the lockdowns. There have been hundreds of thousands of people who've died in third world countries, partly because of the lockdowns that we imposed that screwed up supply chains, the fact that we were not traveling to these countries to help them with vaccines. The disasters from the lockdowns have been enormous. And as well, when Andrew talks about how we are going to turn green energy renewables, I think he said wind and sun, or at least he's alluded to wind and sun, how those intermittent, unreliable sources of energy are ever going to become cheap. Well, it doesn't seem as though it's in the cards. It doesn't seem as though it's going to happen. The other, I guess, additional point that I have to introduce is that there has been great doubt shed by those who look at the climate models about to what extent we are causing global warming. Clearly, our greenhouse class CO2 is a cause, but we do know that one of the fastest periods of global warming occurred from 1910 to 1940. It wasn't until the middle of the 20th century that greenhouse gases began to become a factor. So we know that there are many natural forces, and that's the fundamental problem with the carbon tax. The truth is that even though William Nordhaus won a Nobel Prize for talking about a carbon tax, which by the way would have been a relatively modest tax according to most standards, it was unfortunately based on the assumption that we actually know precisely to what extent we are causing global warming. It could be 10%, it's probably considerably less than 50%. So I mentioned that only because again we know that for the foreseeable future, the poor people of the world are dying for lack of fossil fuels and they are making sensible strides toward acquiring them. Again, that's been the secret. Where's that Soviet oil, Russian oil been going? It's been going to India. So again, we are talking about not minor problems with the way our government runs the world. We are talking about major issues, threats to life and liberty. I didn't even get a chance to talk about all the ways. For example, Jay Bhattacharya, who was a spokesperson against the lockdown, was through government intervention, he was shut out of Twitter. We have an assault by the government on Twitter, Facebook, bear in mind one thing. Those who run Twitter and Facebook, they make their money by allowing in the greatest number of users possible. Their motivation is to allow everybody in. That's how they make their money, that's how they sell their advertising. So that's not their incentive. We have an assault on our freedom of speech from the government because the powers that be are upset about our use of freedom of speech on these platforms. That's another fight libertarians are waging as well. So there are a whole lot of important battles that we libertarians want to wage against our government. And I hope I can enlist the brilliance of my friend Andrew Koppelman in supporting those efforts. Thank you very much. Well, let me thank our two excellent debaters tonight for their really fine and focused presentations. The time has come for the final vote. Well, take your, no, no, I'm gonna filibuster here for a minute. So everybody, it's time to vote. And while you're voting, it's my turn to filibuster. I'm going to filibuster with the upcoming events of the Soho Forum. Soho Forum is going to pork fest in New Hampshire, June 19 to 25. So that's coming right up. And they have two debates there according to this information that Jean has handed me. So the first one, the resolution is the right way to persuade people of libertarianism is by showing them that its outcomes are superior without any resort to the flawed non-aggression principle. For the affirmative, David Friedman. That's Milton Friedman's son and also a blogger in his own right. And the negative will be, oh, Jean Epstein once again. He doesn't give me a specific date for that, but it's at pork fest. And also at pork fest, here is another resolution. This is a little more entertaining. It's easier to convert a heterosexual to homosexuality than it is to convert a non-libertarian to libertarianism. And that proposition will be, the affirmative will be taken by Jeremy Kaufman, the negative by Matt Kibbey. Here at the Sheen Center, the next SOHO forum debate will be January 25. January, excuse me, July. It was off by just a little. July 25, so we'll make it the hottest time of the year instead of the coldest. And so the resolution will be the U.S. should have free immigration except for those who pose a security threat or have serious contagious disease. For the affirmative will be Alex Norasti. He is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, which I think came in for some criticism in today's debate. And for the negative, that would be myself. Manhattan Contrarian blogger Francis Menton for the negative on that one. On Monday, August 21, the resolution, today's school choice movement in the U.S. is worthy of support by libertarians. For the affirmative, Corey DeAngelis for the negative, Stephen Kinsella. And finally, Monday, September 18, the resolution, anarcho-capitalism would definitely be a complete disaster for humanity. For that one, the affirmative will be taken by Yaron Brooke and the negative by Brian Kaplan. And I've got one more here, Monday, October 16. The resolution is between now and 2035, electric vehicles in the consumer market will disappoint environmentalists by remaining a product bought mainly by the well-heeled minority. For the affirmative, Mark Mills. For the negative, Rosario Fortuno. So that is upcoming. I've given you the next six for the SOHO Forum and we hope to see you all at all of them. Jane Menton is the voting complete. The voting results. Now I've got to get this in a light where I can read it. Let's see. For the affirmative, pre-vote, pre-debate, 15% were in favor of it, post-debate, 14%. Wait a minute. They lost a point, but only one point. For the negative, pre-debate, 35%, post-debate, 65%. Whoa! They gave the voting. He came into the lion's den and Jean gave me a Tootsie roll, but I don't think I can give it to the proprietor. No, I forgot it. I forgot it. So I'm going to have to get another Tootsie roll, the SOHO Forum Tootsie roll. I'm going to get one over at Jean's apartment after the event. Out of your salary, buddy. I'll get another Tootsie roll from Jean and give it to him. Congratulations, Jean, on your brilliant victory and thank you all for coming. I turn it back over to Jean.