 So we're going to talk today about, you know, the problem of inequality and, you know, these days it seems like inequality is now ingrained in people as one of the problems that exist out there in the world. I remember, you know, 10, 12 years ago, almost nobody talked about inequality. It really wasn't in the vocabulary as a regular thing that people discussed as a problem with freedom, a problem with capitalism, a problem with western economies, however you want to define them. You know, there was a, I think financial crisis was a turning point and it started becoming a real part of the vocabulary and it really took off when Thomas Piketty published his Das Kapital for the 21st century, you know, which that's the name, right, capital in the 21st century. And he became an instant celebrity and a potential nominee for a Nobel Prize in economics and maybe the most influential economist over the last 10 years and it became almost as a flood in the United States and all over the world really, I mean to Asia, I mean every way people started just to talk about inequality and everything was blamed on inequality. Problem was the fault of inequality, war was the fault of inequality, climate change is of course the fault of inequality and the consequences, the real problem with the consequences it doesn't hurt people the same so it perpetuates inequalities. It seems like this idea that things aren't equal has become a rallying call of the left and the problem is that what I find is on the right what you see is people apologizing for it. I don't know, Rand Paul in the debates, in the presidential debates I think in 2016, Rand Paul's response was in capitalism we have less inequality so if we really had free markets this wouldn't be a problem. So acknowledging that it's a problem and then saying in capitalism we'll have less of it. First let me say you really would have less inequality? I'm dubious. I don't know how much inequality we have in capitalism. How much inequality should we have in capitalism? Seven. Seven. Somebody said seven, I think that's the right answer, absolutely. The reality isn't in capitalism we should have as much inequality as happens. As happens, I don't know if it's more, I don't know if it's less, who the F cares? So the right has been way too apologetic about the issue. Acknowledging it's a problem, recognizing it's a problem saying we have a solution, market solve it. I'm skeptical. Put it that way. But the real skepticism is is it a problem? What is the problem of inequality? Why is it a problem? Why should we care or should we care about this question of inequality? And you know from an economic perspective, I don't know how many economists there are here, students of economics, from a purely economic perspective, does anybody care about inequality? I mean, Piketty has this theory that the return of capital grows faster than the economy forever and therefore all the capital accumulates in the hands of just a few and everybody else becomes destitute, right, duit pour, because the return of capital is growing faster than wages and faster than any other thing that happens in the economy. Who else had the same exact theory? Yeah, original des capitales, right, Karl Marx had exactly the same theory. What can happen, can happen, if you had to say anything about economics, you know that just from a purely economic perspective, marginal return on capital is going to decline over time, it doesn't accelerate over time, and you can grow capital faster than the economy. It just doesn't make any sense. What is capital going into? The economy. So the whole economic structure of the argument against inequality is why does it matter? So one of the arguments they make is, look, the problem with inequality is that rich guys get a lot of money and what do rich people do with their money? What do rich people do with their money? They sit on it, they hold it, right? They don't do anything with their money. And if you took that money from rich people and you gave it to poor people, what would they do with it? They would spend it, they would consume it, and what is the thing that drives the economy? Consumption, spending, and therefore what we want to do to drive economics is get all that rich money into the hands of poor people because the rate of consumption is higher. Rich people don't consume their money. That's the problem. That's what we're told. I mean, how many yachts can you have? How many private airplanes? A billionaires can't spend billions, right? So they don't spend their money. Now, what does hoarding mean in a modest society? I mean, what are they really doing? Do you have Scrooge McDuck? Did you ever see Scrooge McDuck in, remember Scrooge McDuck? Where did he hold all his money? He had it in gold and he had it in a vault in gold coins. And what did he used to go to the vault and swim in it and jump in it and play with it? That's hoarding, right? That's hoarding. But what do rich people actually do with their money? They invest it. What actually drives economic growth? Investment, right? I mean, they tell us that consumption is 70% of the economy. Every act of consumption requires how many acts of production? At least two, multiple acts of production. You can't consume anything until you have worked, i.e., produced, in order to have the money to consume it, right? That's one act. The second act is in order to consume something, the thing has to be produced. And of course, that thing to be produced had a whole chain, a whole supply chain of production that got it to the store so that you could consume it. So what actually drives an economy is production. It's work, it's creating stuff, it's building stuff. And indeed, that's also the hard part, right? The hard part is decide where to invest your money, how to invest it, what to produce, what to create, how to build supply chains, how to get the stuff to the store. Consumption is easy. I put any one of you in the mall with some cash and you're going to spend it. The challenge of economics is not to get people to consume. The challenge in economics is how do you invest and how do you invest well and how do you maximize production? That's what it's all about from purely economic perspective. So there's no, and I haven't heard any other economic argument about why inequality is bad, other than poor people consume more. So we should give them more money so they can consume more, right? Which is by the way what we did during COVID and we saw what happened. You get, you know, when you hand people money, you've just printed and tell them to go consume it, what you get is higher prices. So what's the real argument about inequality? It's not economics. They couch it in economics. They come up with formulas to pretend. They always say some economists believe that there's economic problems, but nobody's ever come up with an actual economic theory that explains why inequality is a problem, is a challenge. Because it isn't. And there are lots of reasons why from a purely economic perspective, allowing in a sense, allowing, right, just a language, right? Allowing people to get rich is an incentive. It spurs entrepreneurship. It spurs hard work. It's, you know, there are lots of incentive arguments why you want inequality in an economy in order to spur production. I mean, the real argument about inequality has nothing to do with economics. It has everything to do with philosophy. Both your moral perspectives and your perspectives about the very nature, I think, of human beings. So one of the analogies everybody always uses with regard to inequality is this idea of, you know, some people have more, some people have less of the national pie. There is a pie, right? There's the national wealth. It's one big, it's like a pizza, right? There's a big pizza over here. And some people got more slices of the pizza and some people have less slices of the pizza. And that's not fair. And that resonates with people. The reason people really get attached to this idea of inequality is, wait a minute, I mean, you come, you know, you invite a bunch of friends to your home and you order a pizza and then you take half of it, you know, the rest of them get the crumbs. And people go, wait, wait a minute, you know, aren't we supposed to share this equally? We're all sitting around, oh, in the family, right? The kid's always comparing who got the biggest slice, right? Shouldn't we get the same slice? And they take that thought about a pizza, a pie, and they apply it to the economy, right? If the billionaires got a lot of stuff, then I must have gotten less. Now, what's the fallacy there? I mean, the many fallacies, well, what's one of the fallacies there about this pie? Well, it's clearly a zero-sum game. And one of the things I don't think we realize, most of us, those of us are interested in free market economics, is how prevalent the zero-sum mentality is in the world out there. People think, or don't think, anti-thought, in terms of zero-sums. They don't understand, and almost nobody teaches it. Nobody explains to them that it's not zero-sum, that trade is a value added. Trade is a fundamentally win-win relationship, win-win transaction. Otherwise, you don't engage in the trade. Now, it's not always, sometimes you buy a bad product, sometimes you make a mistake, but it's always the intention that both sides are better off. Each side is trying to maximize their own utility, their own well-being, their own flourishing. So people have a mentality of zero-sum, and yet clearly the world is not zero-sum. Clearly the world is massively additive, but we don't have economists in particular that don't have a way to really illustrate this, because you can't measure the value created through trade. Not really. I mean, I like to use my iPhone in talks. So I bought this iPhone. It cost me $1,000, $1,000 for an iPhone. How much is the iPhone worth to me? More than $1,000. I mean, you guys all know this, right? Otherwise, I wouldn't have bothered spending the $1,000 to get it. How much more? Yeah, I mean, you don't know. I mean, maybe I know, but you don't know. And those of you economists don't know how to measure how much more. You know, some economists call it consumer surplus, whatever the hell that means. Can't measure it. But this is worth tens of thousands of dollars to me. I mean, really, I can't really put a number, because it's so valuable to me. I can call my kids up anywhere in the world. Read them a bedtime story by video at a marginal cost of zero, zero. How much is that worth to me? Can I monetize that? Much more than $1,000. I can listen to every piece of music ever written in all of human history, right, that was produced and recorded at a marginal cost of zero. I can make a long distance phone calls. I mean, you guys think long distance phone calls have always been at a marginal cost of zero, but no, they won't. They used to be super expensive. When I moved to the US, the site story, when I moved to the US, I moved from Israel. I never called my parents. Like, once every three months, I would call them. And partially it was because I couldn't afford it, and they couldn't afford it. So you never made the call, right? Today, I can call them every day, all the time, marginal cost of zero. And you could go on and on. I mean, the way I found this university, without a map, remember those? Driving with a map? How many accidents have this thing prevented, the GPS system on these things prevented? Because we don't have to drive and look at a map at the same time. Or have our wives look at a map, even worse. A source of many, many fights between husband and wife is whether who's right on the map. That's all gone, because we know the iPhone is always right. And then not to mention your ability to access every piece of information, every piece of knowledge, books, articles, news, everything, right here at your fingertips. If you had to recreate this 15 years ago, it would have cost you millions of dollars. And you can get it at $1,000 today. What a deal. But how much value is that created for me? You don't know. All you can measure is $1,000. So I feel like, if all the economists is measuring is $1,000, I'm even. I'm break even. What about Apple? Apple made 500 bucks. We all know that. Profit margin on these things is about 50%, at least used to be, and they made 500 bucks. So it looks like they made 500 bucks and at best I'm equal. I'm at even. So they're making money, I'm not better off. My bank account actually, actually, if you look at my bank account, which is what Piketty does, right? Inequality just increased. Every time I buy an iPhone, inequality goes up. I get poorer by $1,000 and Apple gets richer by $500. Every time you buy anything, anytime you buy anything, anytime you consume cash because economists can only actually measure the dollars, you get poorer and whoever you paid the money to gets richer. And surprise, surprise, they become billionaires and we stay where we are. But we're not staying where we are, why? Because we have this cool stuff, which again, we can't measure, but our lives are better off. So there's a sudden appeal to the zero-sum mentality, particularly if you're not gonna be very conceptual, if you're not gonna rise to the challenge, if you're not gonna make an effort, if you're not gonna really think about it. Most people today take their iPhones and their smartphones for granted. They just accept them, they're just there. They've always been there, they always will be there. There's no conception of the value they add to their lives and what the transactional value really is and who's benefiting the most. Clearly, I benefit from the iPhone a lot more than the 500 bucks that Apple profited from it. My gain is far exceeds Apple's gain. I become much richer than Steve Jobs did because of what I purchased. So one of the problems with the pie is that it has a zero-sum mentality and it has a static mentality. The pie is fixed. When actual trade and production, the pie is constantly growing. But that's not the real problem with the pie. What's the bigger problem with the pie? There is no one. Well, there is no pie, or what is there? There is no big pie, now what is there? Many small ones. Many small ones, there's your pie and your pie and your pie and your pie. And then what we've done is mush them all together and pretend there's one big pie, a collective pie. But there is also many different kinds of parts. Yes, there's a whole variety of pies. But we're talking just money now. We're just talking about in monetary terms. So they're all dollars or euros or whatever you use in the Czech Republic, right? For now, I hear you're changing. I mean, they are different because the consumer surplus that I get from the iPhone is also a pie. But let's just stick to the dollars because it's easy, right? May I just, one quick... Sure. Ability to think, Michael Jackson and the main... Yeah, we'll get to that. Yes, we'll get to that sense of inequality. I promise we'll get to that sense of inequality. So there is no pie. Each one of us bakes our own pie. And then some economist squishes them all together and pretends there's something called GDP. There's no such thing as gross domestic product. There's no such thing as national income. There's no such thing as a national wealth. There's each one of our wealths and somebody is adding them up. It's just a spreadsheet. But you create the wealth that you create. So one of the problems with this pie is it doesn't exist. And what does exist is yours. And by creating this pie, we're ignoring private property. We're ignoring your right to what you have created. We're ignoring your right to what you own, to your slice of the pie. Nobody has a right to take my pie away from it and mush it with other people's pie and then redistribute it, which is what they are trying to do. I mean, at the end of the day, the whole point about inequality is to take from some and give to others. The whole point of the whole debate is to redistribute wealth. But if you created the wealth, by what right do they take it from you? But this is where they get a little deeper philosophical. Obama, President Obama, gave a famous speech, I can't remember the exact year, 2014 or something like that. I think it was his best speech, his most philosophical speech, and his most evil speech, right? And it's a speech known as you didn't build that speech. Yeah. He basically said, which is a deeply philosophical point which a lot of people believe in, that you're not responsible for baking your own pie. That you, whatever you means, right, is not what baked the pie. You couldn't have baked the pie without, you know, without a great school teacher who taught you how to bake. You couldn't have baked the pie without employees who helped you create the wealth and build the company. You couldn't have baked the pie without a government that built the infrastructure and created everything around you to facilitate you building the pie. Indeed, it's not even clear that you baked the pie because it's not even clear that you as an individual have any free will or have any agency over baking the pie. It's just your DNA did it. You're programmed to bake pies. You know, and if you're programmed to bake pies and if there's no free will, there's no agency, then if somebody takes the pie away because you happen to bake a big pie and they want to redistribute it to somebody else, how do you argue against that? The whole idea of property rights, the whole idea of I own it is that I mean something. I means agency. I means I chose. I made an effort. I created. I built. What Obama's trying to do is undermine the whole idea of deserve, of desert, of really deserving something because you did it. You created it. You built it. You didn't build it. Other people did it. You owe them. As it turns out, I pay my employees. As it turns out, government can't build its infrastructure, not a single piece of infrastructure until it takes my money. Indeed, businessmen have to create wealth first and only then can infrastructure be built. It's not the other way around. It's not first there's infrastructure and then there's business. There's first business, then there's infrastructure. And you can look at history and you can see that. There's somebody has to create wealth that needs to be stolen in order to produce the kind of infrastructure that we have. If you really think that you had a great teacher who really helped you and made it possible for you to be successful in life, go find her. Say thank you. If you want, write her a check. That would be nice. But she taught a lot of students and some of them succeeded and some of them failed. It's still up to you and what you did with what she taught you that made it possible for you to succeed. So one of the things we have to do if we're gonna fight this whole inequality thing is defend human agency, defend the idea free will, defend the idea that you did build that, that it is your effort, your energy, your thinking, your reason, your work that creates the wealth that you own and you own it because you did it. So they have this perception of zero sum. They have a perception of man as a being with no free will, just an automaton. They have the perception that there's no such thing as private property as a consequence and therefore they can take it, mush it all together. I actually did an interview once. This guy used to do these interviews in a car, he used to tape you in a car and we drove up and we bought a bunch of pies and we mushed them all together to illustrate the point. And when you mush pies together all you do is create a mess. It's not a good idea. But they undermine, the whole issue of inequality is an attempt to undermine every aspect of wealth creation, every aspect of economic activity, undermine the very essence of what it takes to create wealth which is entrepreneurial effort and using the human mind to change the world around us. And they're trying to undermine that and defeat that and demolish it. And of course all in the cause of trying to get rid of private property and be able to redistribute wealth at will which is at the end of the day what Piketty wants. Now there is, of course, the question of, well, if you care about inequality why are you limited to wealth? Why should it be only wealth inequality? What about other ways in which we're unequal? And intellectuals particularly on the left have struggled with this because their ideal is true egalitarianism. And the fact is that we're not the same. If you look at any group of people they're always all different in multiple dimensions. There's a true story that I think illustrates the problem that the people who advocate for equality face and how they solve it. So there was a group of intellectuals who actually went to study in Paris to so-born study with the great thinkers of the time, Sartre and the other, the egalitarians, the people who were advocating at the time complete equality. And equality of outcome in the economic sphere but really equality of, and these guys took the classes, took it very seriously and decided when they were gonna get, they were gonna go back home where they lived and they were going to, they were gonna impose this, they were gonna make this real. This utopia was not just gonna be in the books. This utopia was gonna become a reality in the world out there. And they did, they went back home. They gained political power and they started to implement this. So the first thing they observed, first thing they observed was some people lived in a city, in a city, there was one city, and some people lived in a countryside. And this is a problem because they clearly advantages to living in the city and that people in the countryside don't have. And so how do you create, how do you get people to be equal when some people live in the city and some people live in the countryside? What do you do? Yeah, you force them out of the city. So they forced them out of the city. Literally, it came a day, everybody had to evacuate the city. They marched them out of the city into the countryside. We'll get there, right? I'm building up, right? You're stealing my thunder. I already know. I know, I know, I know. Some people know, some people don't. I have to, you know, to be able to perform, I have to at least believe some people don't know. Otherwise, what's the point? We are a terrible audience. What's that? We are a terrible audience. Anyway, right? Even in the countryside they're not equal, right? Because some people are better at foraging food and some people are worse off at foraging food. Some people are better at agriculture. Some people are worse. Some people can read. Some people cannot. Some people are intelligent. Some people are not. What do you do? Well, what you do is you kill off the people who are more in any dimension. So if you wore glasses, you were shot. If you had a college degree or high school degree, you were shot. If you were good at foraging, you were shot. If you were good at anything, you were shot. They literally killed 40% of their own people. Two million out of five million. They killed them. That is indeed the killing fields of Cambodia. You can go there, you can see what happened. And to the day that he died, Popat, who was the commander of this, thought he did nothing wrong because he was just trying to achieve an ideal of equality that has been taught everywhere. And people who have a false ideal like this, an ideal that clearly goes against nature because even if you kill 40% of the population, the remaining people are still unequal because there's literally no way to make us equal. We're all different. Just look around the room. Look around any room. Anyway, it's what makes life interesting and fun. The fact that we are different. And it makes specialization possible. It makes everything that we take for granted again possible is the fact that we are different. And they wanna wipe that out. So when I think inequality, I think Popat. That's what they really want. They might be disguising it in pleasant, nice terminology. But when I think Thomas Piketty, I think Popat. Just another Frenchman educating, homicidal maniacs to go out and do his bidding. Because that's what it has to lead to. Because there's no way to equate us. There's no way to make us equal. If I put any group of people on a desert island and come back a year later, they're not gonna be the same. Some of them are gonna be good fishermen and they're gonna go out and fish a lot. Other people are gonna be good at golf. Some people are gonna be lazy and you sit a lot at the beach and go swimming often and just do enough to get a piece of fish and a piece of vegetable here and there. You can have all kinds of people. Some people will write stories or be the storytellers of the island. Some people will sing and some people, God forbid, don't sing, right? That's part of what it means to be human. We're different and we're different because we make different choices. We're different because we have different wiring to some extent. We're different because we have different interests, different values, different perspectives. So the whole inequality debate, I think, is ultimately geared towards undermining what makes us human, our reason, our choices. Siri always interrupts me. Its goal is this ideal of metaphysical equality which is impossible and evil because it denies what it means to be human. It denies our capacity to be individuals, capacity to think for ourselves. It denies the sanctity of individual life. It's an ejection of all that. It is the worst form of collectivism because it ultimately breeds nihilism and breeds destruction for the sake of destruction. You know, 40% of the population and 50% of the population, there's no end. You wipe up everybody because they didn't live up to your standards. She just killed them all, which is ultimately the logical consequence of what happened in a place like Cambodia. I mean, think about it, the Kabodians were stopped from killing 40, after killing 40% of their own population by Vietnamese communists who thought the Kabodians were horrible, right? In communism, how many millions of communism killed? But even for them, this kind of egalitarianism was too much. But this is what they're really preaching. Now, one other thing that they leverage and one other thing that makes it sound appealing is that equality sounds like a good idea in a context. Indeed, in the Declaration of Independence, what I think is the greatest political document ever written, it says all men are created equal. What did they mean? I mean, funny fathers were no idiots and they certainly weren't egalitarians and they could see that people were not equal. So what did they mean by all men are created equal? In what sense are we equal? Before the law, or deeper even than before the law, we're all equal in our freedom, in our rights. We're all equal, equally free. We all have, all of us have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit habits, property and the pursuit habits. Fundamentally, we all have the right to life. That's what it means to be equal. Not equal in outcome. Not equal as a conservative say of opportunity because there is no such thing as opportunities. Opportunities are just middle of the road outcomes, right? What does it mean to have equal opportunities? It doesn't really mean everybody gets the same schooling. How does that happen? Different people have different teachers, different parents have different schools. Nothing's going to be equal about that. There's no such thing as equality of opportunity. Any more than there is of equality of outcome. We're different. Some parents work really, really hard today because they have more opportunities. Some parents don't, and they can have fewer opportunities. That's just life, that's just reality. What the founders meant is political equality. We're all equally free, we're all equal before the law. We're all equal in our rights. Those rights should be protected equally to the equality before the law. So, equality, political equality, is a valid concept. It's an important concept. And what the egalitarian's leverage is this idea, particularly in America, that we have over equality, political equality, equality is a good thing. And then they poison it with this content that makes equality mean something. There's certainly the founders that mean it to have. But I don't think anybody, anybody really who thinks it through would want it to happen, unless they're nihilistic in the struggle. And indeed, the only way to create any semblance of equality of outcome is to violate the principle of equality of rights. The only way to make us equal, for example, in income or wealth is to take wealth from some and give it to others. Violating the principle of equality for the law. Why are some people taxed at 50%? Some people taxed at 10%. Is that equality for the law? Clearly not equal. Some people are taxed at a higher rate than other people. So, the whole idea of equality is violated once you start redistributing wealth. Once you start having taxation. Once you negate the idea that what people create is there is once you negate the idea of private property. Once you negate the idea of rights, the right to your own life, which property is part of. So any act of equality, of dealing with, quote, inequality, entails violating political rights. And of course the Kamehru's example in Cambodia is a perfect example of that in order to make this equal. You gotta kill us. You gotta take our ultimate right, our life, so life, and every aspect of it. So, we need to defend is politically equal. We need to fully understand what it means, equality of rights, equality of freedom, equality of liberty. As we can defend that, then this idea of economic inequality, this idea that egalitarianism spread, this idea that it's so popular, so prevalent everywhere. The contradictions become obvious. It's not enough just to argue against the idea that inequality is important, but you have to argue for something. It's the only alternative. The thing to argue for that I think undermines inequality completely is to argue for liberty, for freedom. For freedom of the individual to pursue his life based on his own ideas, his own values, based on his reason, his rational mind. And when the government protects his individual rights and leaves him alone, protects his ability to live his life based on his own judgment, and otherwise leaves him alone. And how much inequality will result from that? I don't know. I don't care. It doesn't make any difference. Indeed, the more rich people there are, the more likely it is that all of our lives are better off because we traded with them. We got iPhones, they got my money. I'll take the iPhone any day over my money. Because I get a lot more value than that than $1,000 sitting in my bank account. That's why I did the trading. So I'll do it over and over and over again. So we should reject all our units around inequality, and we should uphold the principle of freedom and liberty. Thank you. Thank you again for the talk. I think we have enough time for questions. Just a quick note before we start the questions. If you start leaving while we are still answering, don't forget to grab the books on your way. And if I can ask you, don't forget to sign the attendance sheet so that we know how many people exactly we had here. We really appreciate it. Don't forget to make a contribution because value for value, win-win. You're winning by getting a book. Make them win too. Exactly. And sign up for the conference in Athens, and sign up for the SSL conference in Lisbon that's coming on the 22nd and 23rd Liberty on Europe. I think the area of this is also going to be represented there. And that's all from me. And now let's move forward with the questions. I think I've already seen one over there. Yes. And Bob, who you are, practically where is it going to be? So I'd like to ask you, what do you think about the unconditional basic income and the arguments behind it? So the question is about unconditional basic income. I mean, I think broadly it is an awful idea. I think it's hollow bullets. Again, the idea legitimizes that some people they need, the fact that they have less, gives them some kind of moral political claim against those people who have, and who produce, that have created, who have the money. And somehow that need must be satisfied. And now we're just debating about what the most efficient way to satisfy they need. But I reject the moral claim that your need is a claim against me. Your need is your need. Deal with it. Yeah, you want me to help you ask. I might voluntarily help you and hang up. But you have no way to my wealth. You have no way to my money just because you need it. So the government has no business in redistributing wealth. If people individually want to redistribute wealth of value reasons and sets of helping somebody, then they can help them. So I think UBI is a horrible idea because it institutionalizes this mentality and it makes it more efficient. Granted, it's more efficient than the welfare state. But that's exactly the way we should oppose it. Right, you know, an efficient criminal is a lot worse than an inefficient criminal. Because an efficient criminal, you know, we've legitimized it. We've legalized it. We've made it okay here. We've granted it a thought. Now, saying all that, as a mechanism to get rid of the welfare state, particularly in America, which has an absurd welfare state, I mean, Europeans know how to do a welfare state properly. The Americans are complete. It's a complete disaster. There's a way to get rid of the welfare state temporarily. Yes, but then you have to only say we're gonna have this temporarily. We're gonna phase it out. Here's the plan. Over 20 years, the UBI will go down a little bit. Every year, it's going to zero, guys. It really is going to zero because you don't have a right to this. We're just doing this to get you over the hump because welfare has been promised. And we don't wanna have completely renegade on the promises. So we're gonna transition it out. But you have to be very explicit. Otherwise, you don't have a moral argument to make. And then it makes sense because in the United States, for example, the U.S. probably has, I don't know, I'm making the number up right now. 150 different welfare programs. And that's probably just at the federal level and then you have the state level and local level. It's just that. And to unwind all that is you don't even know where to start and who's gonna get hood. Where it, you know, aggregate them all. Get rid of every single one of them. Replace it with the UBI and then the UBI gets cut every single year by a certain amount. And that is one way to get rid of the welfare state in a place like the United States. But that would be the only reason to do it. And it would never be an advocate for it. Because again, if you advocate for redistribution, you're advocating for theft. You're advocating for taking from some, their property and giving it to others. And you're advocating for the moral idea, which is need generates a claim against somebody who's been used, which I think is really new. Yeah. To play a little advocate, how about the claim that we need to worry about inequality to keep the passage from revolting? Yeah, I hear that claim usually from rich people. So a lot of rich people say, look, I don't mind this because after whatever the equality is, this is an important issue because I think if we don't throw them, we don't bribe them, then there's gonna be a revolution. And the reality is that there's never been a revolution in a free economy with high inequality. You know, the revolution, they always say, I said, what revolution? Give me an example, the French revolution. Well, yeah, but those were kings. They stole the money from the peasants and the peasants revolted, good for the peasants. I mean, not good for what they did after they stopped. They revolted a bit, right? But take Hong Kong, which had huge inequality. It's no revolution in Hong Kong. I mean, there was a revolution against the Chinese authorities. There was a revolution for, we'll say, in the politics of Hong Kong, but there was no revolution in terms of going out and killing the rich people because they stole all the money because people benefit enormously from the fact that these people create jobs and they know it. There was no revolution in the 19th century America which is claimed to be one of the highest periods of inequality ever. Now, there is, if you, by the other hand, if you do teach the workers, the masses, however you wanna call it, you teach them that they're being exploited. If you teach them that it's a zero sum world and the rich are benefiting from their labor and they're being, it's a no, then they will become politically active and they will put together a political program that expropriates the wealth of the rich and gives it to the poor, which is what we got in most democracies around the world. But that goes to the point where, if you teach bad ideas, you can have bad outcomes. Education, education, education, it's all about education. If we teach people rotten ideas, there's no way we're gonna get good outcomes from them. Yeah, you, yeah, yeah. Do I understand you? I understand that you are against any form of re-institution, yes. What is your point against the re-institution which would implies, I think the term is negative, income tax of the American term is income, it takes credit so that you have a very moderate form of re-institution which makes people's work as a pre-condition for all that evidence. So it seems to be a good way to eliminate poverty without the, and in a relatively inexpensive way to eliminate suffering and poverty without the preferred incentives of the, of your own welfare programs. What's your point? So first of all, this is an idea presented by Milton Friedman and would actually was picked up in the United States with the only income credit and was implemented. And one of the problems in the United States was, I'll get to the why I'm against it in a minute, one of the problems in the United States was, it wasn't implemented to replace welfare. It was implemented in addition to 150 other regular welfare things. And that was a big mistake Milton Friedman made I think because it's a disaster because you can get, I mean the way they gave the system and all of that, it's just really stupid policy. But look, I'm against any government intervention in the distribution of income. I don't think it's a government's job. The government is there to do one thing and one thing only. And that is to protect us, protect our rights, protect our liberties, protect us from thieves, crooks, criminals, terrorists, fraudsters, people like that. If I wanna give, I can create a charity, I can give to a charity, you know, lots of ways in which we can apply helping the poor who can't succeed. And I don't typically, my main argument against redistribution is not quite really economic because you're right. I mean, a negative income tax has little economic impact. It has some because you're taking money from some people to give to others, you can't knock on that. Other than that is the least. And again, I think it's better than you be on. I think it would be a better way to do it. But again, I would be in favor of it, only it was faced out to zero after X number of years because I still think it's morally wrong to use coercion, to use force, to take from some people and give to others as poor as they may be. They can ask for help and that's what charity does. Charity gives to voluntary interaction help to those who need it. But it avoids the course of power of government. Government is courage, that's the essence of government. And I think the only reason to use courage, the only reason to use a gun or physical force is in self-defense. And there's no self-defense. This is clearly violating the rights of those people who have to pay into the system so that those people will get their negative income tax. So it's the most efficient way of doing welfare but still morally I think of fence. Yeah. Since the biggest source of government-induced violence-based inequality is the continental effect through the centralized money printing. But those who get the money first, spend it on the old prices, do you think that are you against the centrally organized money printing? Yeah. Yes, I'm against central banks. I think you're absolutely right. It's a way of controlling the population. It's a way of controlling the economy. It's a way of controlling our choices. I don't think it's efficient. I think economically it's a disaster. Central planning doesn't work on the production of red. It certainly doesn't work on the production of interest rates and the production of money. I think, you know, people say the federation is screwed up and we have inflation up. That's completely wrong statement. The federation always screws up. It has manifested itself today in consumer prices going up. But the rest of the time, it's manifested itself in malinvestment, in misallocation of capital, in a million other things that are going on because the central plan is allocating capital instead of allowing the market to do so. And it's allocating capital based because it sets interest rates and because it is printing money. So as an economist, I would say it's bad for the economy to have a central bank. And economists who've looked at this and compared at least in the US, pre-central bank, post-central bank. And pre-central bank America had a terrible system. It's not like that was a good system. And it was still more stable than the post-central bank. But if you compare central banks in countries that actually had good systems before, it's night and day. Clearly, markets do a much better job. We know this. Every product we have, if markets do a much better job in terms of allocating, in terms of producing an efficient product, money and interest rates are the most important product in the economy because everybody uses them. Every active production requires money and it requires and usually involves interest rate. Every active valuation, if you're in finance, every active valuation requires discounting due to cash flows, which means using an interest rate. Interest rate is the most important parameter in the marketplace. And yet that's the one relief to 12 guys in a room, smoke filled room to make a decision based on the Federal Reserve as a large employer and economist in the world. Based on a bunch of economists sitting around essentially planning. But central planning doesn't work. It never happens. So I think the business cycle is a consequence of central planning. I think malinvestment in the self-cultivation. Capitalism is responsible. I think central banks cause great financial crisis. I mean, central banking is a disaster and it's not surprising because it's a government monopoly. We learned from the Soviet Union not to let central planners get involved in food production because then you get long lines of bread, or you get excess. You either get excess or shortages because you can't get the price right. Taiyay quote a lot about this. Don't get the price right. But he loaded, you know, his perspective was wrong. The reason, the fundamental reason that you can't get the price right is because they don't know what my values are. They can't. It's not an issue of the amount of computing power. You can't know how much I'm willing to pay for the bread, what the value of that bread is to me. So if we don't let them do bread, why are we letting them do money? Which is a thousand times more important. Is this Bitcoin social? Problem with Bitcoin is not that it's social, it's not. The problem with Bitcoin is, I mean, there are two problems I think. I think in a free market, a true free market, I think it would lose. I just don't think it would be the winner in terms of currency because I don't think people would be willing to just accept money that was just in the cloud, in a sense, just bits. I think they would want something tangible. So I think gold would not compete it. I just, I mean, I'm fine with playing that out, right? I would love to live in a world where Bitcoin and gold competed over which one is going to be money. But I think the bigger problem with Bitcoin is that central banks want to love. I mean, we can pretend all we want. But at the end of the day, governments have big, powerful tools that clamp down and destroy whatever you create. And the real danger, the real danger is that they don't allow it. So I'm all for running an experiment. I love the idea of freedom, experimenting, figuring out what works and what doesn't. But it's not gonna happen because we don't live in a free society. There's no shortcuts in other words of the word. You either do the hard work of educating people and ultimately getting involved in politics and changing the political world nothing will happen. Technology won't give us an end route into liberty somehow through a back alley. It just can't. It doesn't work that way. We still live in a physical world. We don't live in the metaphors. Yeah, but Russia just experienced their results being seized by the US. So I think that even the governments now see that they need something that is not in the hands of one government. So maybe they will see that since they compete against each other, they don't need some neutral money at the end. Gold. Yeah, you are very, okay, so you're gonna, you're maintaining a world moving towards freedom because Russia and China are gonna gang up and create a currency that is gonna liberate all of us. If they create an alternative currency, it'd be one that enslave us even more, not that frees us more. And a digital currency run by the Chinese and the Russians will be one that monitors every single purchase you make. I mean, the Chinese central bank already has a digital currency. It's been experimenting with digital currencies for three, four years. And why is it doing it? Because that way they can really get a social score on you. Not only do they have a camera everywhere monitoring you, not only do they have an app on your device that tells them where you are, but now they know every single monitoring transaction that you're engaged in. That's why they want to do it. At least with dollars, you're not being tracked every single day and you could still use cash, which is the ultimate anonymizer, right? You can ultimately, you can buy stuff without them tracking you to rely on Russia to supply us with the tool for liberty is worse than such. The competition won't revise. And by the way, it's just not gonna happen. The dollar, whether we like it or not, and I don't. But the dollar is here to stay as a global currency. That's not gonna change. Because the United States is too powerful and it's too easy to use and move dollars around the world. And people around the world much rather have dollars than you are. Because it's run by a monetary instinct. And the other breaks are all authoritarian countries. Nobody wants to do this this way. Not really. So, you know, I hope I'm wrong. I hope there was a path. Yeah. To this point, you still need to exchange the dollar for the yuan somehow. And that are the intermediary. That could be the free currency or something. But if the government decides that you can't use that as a currency. So if the government decides, you can't use Bitcoin in the United States to buy anything. Assuming Bitcoin is an intermediate currency, that means there's no more currency. Whatever the intermediate currency is, if the United States government says you can't buy capitalism with this currency, then you can't buy stuff with that currency. And it's not a currency anymore. What's the definition of a currency? What's means is this definition of money? That was the main source of the word. It's the common medium of exchange. If what you're using is not, I mean, it will exchange anything because it's illegal to exchange with you. Then it stops being money. Do you mean that it will also mean that no more trade to China? So, I'm not sure I understand. You need the real currency to buy stuff from China. If you can't use it anymore, no trade to China. Yeah, so you don't want to trade with China. I think a lot of people would like not to trade with China at this point. But right now, you can exchange you on for dollars without intermediate currency and change it directly. But you cannot buy Tesla with gold either. No, and gold is not money. I'm not claiming gold is money, too. Gold is not money. Money, you know what money is? Well, no, I got $1,000 in my pocket. $1,000 is money. I can go anywhere in the world, I can exchange them, I can use them, right? It's not good money, but it's money. And it's a medium exchange, everybody uses them. And the reality is that in order to compete with the dollar, you have to create a currency that is going to provide you with more convenience, out less, in the purchase of goods and services. And if you can add anonymity and all of that, great. But the reality is 99% of people that they don't care about anonymity, they give their name and credit card information and they smock where asked them, right? And so, yes, so there'll be a million libertarians around the world trading with one another in goods over the internet. There can be physical goods because the government will ban the transaction into physical goods. You know, and you'll have a currency between each other, but that's not going to challenge the dollar. It goes at least readily convertible. What? It goes at least readily convertible dollars. Yeah, so it's Bitcoin right now, but that could change very quickly. And it could change, you know, people forget, in 1933, in 1935, I think it was March, FDR, the president of the United States, confiscated all the gold in the United States. He basically took it from every single American and there was no revolution, by the way, which is shocking. He took all the gold, it was illegal to own gold in the United States until 1972, one or two, when Richard Nixon did away with Bretton Woods and legalized the ownership of gold in the United States. So for 40 years, I mean, it's incomprehensible to us today. It was illegal to own gold in the US. So governments can be brutal and they can do unbelievable things and they can get away with it, which I mean, they locked us up during COVID, right? So they can get away with a lot and we don't see to resist it. So yes, even gold is not necessarily convertible into dollars in a world where it's illegal to own gold. All I'm saying is, I'd love to see the competition go out there and test it out, but for that we need freedom. Freedom has to come first. You're not going to get freedom through the back door of Bitcoin or technology. You need freedom first and then let's rip in terms of digital competencies that compete with one another and gold and everything else. Ultimately, all money will be digital. There's no question. The question is, will they be back by something physical or not? I believe it'll be back by something physical. Some of you don't. I have no problem with that disagreement. Let's play it out in the marketplace. That's where it should be played out. That's the beauty of markets. We have competing ideas when we test them out. Yeah. Drag's a band and we still can buy them around the corner. So I don't think it's such a big problem. Yeah, but you can also spend a lot of time in jail. Yes. But you still buy it. You just go all the time and buy it. I'm with you. So there's always a black market, always a black market in anything that's prohibited. So you can buy gold, but the difference is that drugs, you can smoke or you can inject. You can actually do something with it, it gives you something, right? Whether good or not, it gives you something. Black markets and all kinds of goods is cigarettes and all kinds of goods. There's a value to it. Having a black market in Bitcoin takes you nowhere. It's a dead end because you can't do anything with it. It's the same. I buy weed, I sell weed for more, and then I buy my Tesla. The same is with this coin. I buy this coin, I sell my Bitcoin for more, and then I buy the Tesla. Yeah, but you see, this is exactly the problem with crypto, right? Crypto, you know, I don't own pro-crypto, but the point is you have to have a use. If there's no use, the use you just explained is I'm flipping it, I'm speculating, and I'm using it to buy out of crypto. Crypto is good to buy out of crypto. That's not a use. That's just trading for the sake of trading. And that's ridiculous. That is not a use case. Yeah, I'm not saving. I'm not saving. You're not saving. There's no value to me. And as soon as everybody realizes there's no value, then it goes to zero. That's a way from 60 to 20. Now it's 25, so who knows? The trading in itself doesn't create value. Everything, the end use case for Bitcoin is not that I can sell it to somebody else. The end use case for Bitcoin is that I can buy the Tesla with the Bitcoin. And then it preserves, supposedly it preserves its value, it hasn't. But it preserves its value and I don't use it for currency one day. But that is what I'm saying. Governments want a lot. They want a lot of competition to put up what their argument against banning. Before the economy gets banning, not for banning. Before we continue with the discussion, do we have any Bitcoin unrelated questions so that we answer them? Yeah, go ahead. I understood that you are against any intervention by the government in order to redistribute for policy. Do we accept it as a governmental role for police, for example? Yeah, I do. This is something. No, I believe I'm not an analyst. Okay, this is my question. Yeah. You say you are morally against any form of, I'm just going to say briefly, you would even reject poverty, alleviation of the income taxes, which is the most efficient without most of the moral hazard, which should take some incentive to work. How come that you can then, given that you are against any form of institution, support for doing policing? Why? Because for the police, if you may argue, the police is you can buy it on your own. You can buy that instead of property into a chase for a burden on your own. And the governmental police wouldn't buy it, redistributing. So if you are against this intervention, in any case, why? No, it's a good question. Why is here your position different? It's a good question. I have to practice my answer because, no, it's very different. It's a fundamental difference. It's a fundamental deep difference. And I have to practice my answer because I'm debating philosophy of Wayne Kaplan of this very question later this year. So I'm dedicating a better new world because he's pretty smart. I don't know if you know of Wayne Kaplan, but he's a big time libertarian economist for the last one. The government is fundamentally about coercion. It's fundamentally about force. Everything it does is around force. That's its nature. Its nature is a monopoly over the use of force, of code. And then the question is, when is it appropriate to use force? When is it appropriate to use force? And I would argue the only time it's appropriate to use force is a self-defense. Is to defend oneself. And therefore the government's only responsibility is as an agency of self-defense. We have nominated it as an agency to protect ourselves. Now you say you can apply the police forces in private courts, and I say you can't. There is no such thing. You would never survive. You wouldn't survive a week. And the reason is that you have to have some objectivity in how you assign and apply the law. Law is not arbitrary. It's not negotiable. It's not, you know, you have your police force. I have my police force. They have two systems of law. We clash constantly. And what that results in is in violence. So private security, private police forces, enforcing a variety of different legal systems that are created by the different protection agencies just results in, we have a term for it called anarchy, it just results in violence. It results in clash, a constant clash. So you need an entity that establishes an objective set of rules where we know I have violated your rights, and therefore we need to, you know, some intervention needs to happen here. And there's a system of law that then also applies a particular procedure. So the entity that is government, that's its job. That's Tony's job, to define objective laws that apply to how we deal with issues of self-defense, how we deal with issues of protecting rights, protecting property, and protecting that. It's not about distributing what, it's about applying those objective laws to ASUSA. Yes. No, you've got a follow-up, so I'll do a follow-up. Yeah. I don't know what to put in place. Yeah, I have a similar question because I have a couple of tellies who argue that it is a fiction to have this small state because once the government gets power, it tends to expand all the time. Yeah, that's about the institution framework. We can do this, we can do Bitcoin or we can do Anarchy. Um, you want to go with this, it's a lot. My argument is, I can make exactly the same argument for Anarchy, right? I mean, it's never survived, doesn't survive, all the least is violence and what the hell. And the reality is that the reason limited governments don't survive as limited governments is because they don't have the ideological and the philosophical foundation for the limitation. That is, the limitation has not defended philosophically and ideologically, primarily moral. There is no moral argument for why the government should be limited other than in my view, I'm hands up. I'm hands up only when it provided. And so, and I came after the funny fellas, not before the funny fellas, so, you know, so you got a state, there was a very shaky ground and it was founded philosophically because the founders are very shaky ground when they found America. And it's done phenomenally well, given how shaky the ground was. But what we need is new ideas to provide a foundation for that limitation, that means we need ideas about what individual rights really mean. Not, John Locke did a great job, but he didn't go all the way because he couldn't defend, I don't think he could defend reason properly. I don't think he could defend the non-initiation of force properly. He was too influenced by religion. He was too influenced by altruism, this idea that the need of others is a moral claim against people. So there were real flaws in the enlightenment that resulted in a fact that when limited governments were imposed, the ideology of the culture was opposed to that and therefore they couldn't survive. And they still did, again, pretty damn well from an historical perspective. What you need is a philosophy. Now, could any system of government be better than the people that are in, the ideas of the people that are in that geographic area? No, I mean, if the people get corrupt, it's over the government, that's just the reality. You can't create a system that is perfect if the people don't want it anymore. So even in the founding of America, was it, you know, Franklin was walking out of a constitutional hall and somebody says, what did you guys do, what did you give us? And he says, a republic, if you can keep it, right? And if you can keep it, you have to have constant, somebody else said, you know, constant vigilance around liberty. You have to constantly fight for it. It doesn't, yes, that was the system. And then we're free and that's it. We can forget about it forever. That will never happen. For instance, Hayek suggested a different institutional constitutional framework to it. But Hayek's institutional, I mean, that is so convoluted and so crazy. And again, what Hayek is rejecting and Judy here has written a book about this. So he's the expert, Nami. But what Hayek is suggesting is ultimately a rejection of the idea of objective law. What Hayek doesn't recognize, doesn't recognize in his writing, is the idea of individual rights and an objective conception of individual rights. And the idea that once we have a conception of individual rights, the wall of government is to protect those rights. So the founding fathers of America got it very close. But they didn't go all the way because they didn't have the philosophical foundations to go all the way. And I think we do today. So it's just a matter of education, education, education. They're not shortcuts. Yeah. You are defending your idea of a very good government, the specific format you have. And do you, or do you have a concern of what you will say about the fact that you might, by defending the most relatively radical form of the government, that you might not make any progress towards your ideas at all? No, I, I, I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't. Yeah, that the, from even assuming that your version is the good one or the right one, that the, that the perfect is the enemy of the, of the good. By saying, I do even reject the punishment of all the other programs in favor of a negative income tax. I don't even want to have that at all. You might, I mean, might reduce your chance of achieving any progress to zero because your, your, your, your, your, your vision will never be accepted. It might even hamper any progress towards this government. Well, I want to separate you, St. John. Never is a long time. So I would argue that, you know, my vision will manifest itself one day because I think truth ultimately does manifest itself. It's just a matter of time. But I do think the short one, let's say a bit later, I do think the short one, I think, if all we want to do right now is shift to, you know, add a half a percent to GDP, lower taxes a little bit, make the government a little bit more efficient. Yeah, my arguments are not going to get us there. I am not fighting for now because I know I'm losing now and I will lose now. I'm not trying to change the politics of today. I'm trying to make a principled case, a principled case for an ideal state one day and it won't be my lifetime and it might not be my children's lifetime. But the only way we're going to get to a truly limited government, and I believe we won't even get to build a freedom-type government without this, is by making a principled moral defense of limited government. And once you start making a principled moral defense of limited government, you know, and you're going to be consistent, then, you know, the logic just leads you in only one direction, and that is that you can be distributed well. Once you distribute wealth, then you're under on the whole basis of a moral government. I would say it's the opposite, right? If you look at America, and again, Europe I know less of it, I believe this is not true of you, but this is true of America. I think it used to have a limited government very simple in my mind. There was no redistribution of wealth in the 19th century in the United States. Zero. And one of the reasons that we're where we are today, where there's mass redistribution of wealth and it's inefficient and it's ridiculous, it's completely wrong, is because nobody made a moral defense for that system that already existed. It was already there. Some logic's there. It was flawed in other ways, but it was already there. So I think the only way we're gonna see progress, real progress, not the literal progress, not that this political party versus that political party, this tax cut, that tax cut. If we're gonna see systematic progress towards liberty, the only way to do it is to do it in a principled way, going all the way, making the argument on principled terms. Under way there, we're gonna have to make accommodations, right, it's not gonna go from zero to one all at once, it'll go in steps. That's why I said, as a step towards ultimate liberty, I think a negative effect is not a bad idea, but you have to have a goal post, you have to know what you're fighting for. And I believe I'm fighting for liberty and I don't know how to fight for liberty without saying you taking my money and giving it to somebody else without asking my permission is wrong, because it is wrong. So if it's right, if it's right, if it's okay to do it, because it's efficient, it's a negative income tax, then why not more? Why not take my money and do other things with it? And it's not just, I mean we're focused on redistribution of wealth. I wanna do it with the regulatory state. I wanna get rid of all government regulations of business. I wanna get rid of the federal drug administration. I want drugs to go from drug companies to doctors to patients or direct to patients. I wanna legalize all drugs and have private markets deal with the information and be subject to it. Private labs review drugs. I don't want the government to review drugs. So I want freedom. I want the government to do one thing, which is policing. I want to do policing and a military and a judiciary. And that's it, nothing else. A complete separation of state from economics. So I can't, and then I can't start making exceptions because then I think that these folks do exist once you make an exception on principle. There's no end to how many exceptions you're gonna have to make. So I'm fighting for that. Now I know that in the meantime, to get there, we're gonna have to make all kinds of immediate steps. I do that to you. I'm not gonna deal with the immediate steps. I didn't present the vision out there, which is what ran, yeah, in the back. Would you say that you're a voluntarist? No, I mean, I don't like that term. I don't know what it exactly means. You're not a voluntarist. Yeah, I think it's associated with activism. No, it's not. It's just associated with liberalism and libertarianism in general. And if you're arguing for a state, you should actually be a voluntarist because if you're arguing with a capitalist and you say that you're a voluntarist, you basically destroy their whole case because what's gonna happen is that they're... But the laws that they impose on you don't accept volatility. No, no, no, that's social contract, right? That's when you get to social contract. Yeah, I don't think there's such a thing as a social contract. What's happening to a state? Not through social contract. What about that? I mean, what was a social contract? They impose the state on everybody else, right? They launched a revolution against the British at a time where many American citizens, not maybe not a majority, but many American citizens didn't want a revolution against the British. And they established a state that most people in America didn't even understand, never mind except. So they are, you know, they are truths that can be articulated and explained to people and people can get educated about. But what you want is to establish a state that is true, that is right, that is just, which means that it is a protective individual rights. Yeah, but you gotta hear about... I don't need a new word. I've got a perfect word for it. It's called capitalism. I don't need another word for it. And then all the capitalism, by the way, is a contradiction in terms. You can't have capitalism if you have anarchy. Capitalism acquires government because it acquires the protection of property rights and only a government could do that. Anarchy cannot provide protection of any rights because anarchy, by definition, rejects the concept of rights because it's only virtual. Yeah, as long as the state is funded with a duration of time or something. We can talk about how a state is funded later. Yeah, coercion should be up. You said that you don't want to make any exceptions because of this, it's very slow. Wouldn't you say that... No. You can't... They didn't have enough to know what's coming, you know? No, the state is not a compromise. The state isn't a necessity. It's a necessary evil. It's a necessary good. I would rather live in a Czech Republic right now than under your vision of an opera capitalism. I consider that one of the most horrific ideas in terms of human life ever. And if you read the history of it, it's exactly how it was. It was horrific places to live. Go read what life was like in Iceland where David Friedman claims that there was this ideally a non-procapitalist society. It was horrible. People slaughtered each other left and right. So, no, I believe the state is a quiet... It is a necessary good because it does something that is required in civilization. Civilization requires the monopolization over the use of italics of resources. If we leave every individual free to use force whenever they feel like it, whenever they want it, whatever the market dictates, what you have is nonstop violence and constipation. And that is one of the most horrific states to live in that one can imagine. So in order to bring peace, in order to make markets possible, capitalism is a marketplace, in order to clean a marketplace, the first thing you have to do is extract force from the marketplace. And therefore you can't have a marketplace in force. You have to extract force from a marketplace, then you can have a market. And now we can trade. As long as force is embedded in the market, there is no market. The market is self-destructive. So the sequence of events is first you need to extract force in every place where you have a market. That's the first thing that's done whether they legitimately or not legitimately, force is extracted and then we can trade. But as long as force is embedded in it, then we're just, I'm pulling a gun at you and we're not trading in. Trading goes out there. I think we have time for one more question here and then we can move to the quiet for a more informal discussion. So do we have for the last question, do we have something anarchy and Bitcoin unrelated? Okay. I'll make you call the idea. Original topic. Yeah. I think it's interesting that even the people who oppose the equality of outcome and say, okay, we don't want an equality of outcome, equality of opportunity that's fine. Isn't it strange because when one thinks about it deeper, equality of opportunity is much worse. And you alluded to it in the Cambodian example, rich city versus the countryside. So equality of opportunity actually means to make people equal in all respects. Even the same people, metaphysically in everything, they're just in one place and another place. Even that's, even that's different opportunities. So people who say, okay, we're just for, I think it's even worse than it requires our even more sort of, you know, more condemnation. More condemnation is more of an opposition. It's a more evil idea. I mean, I think that's right. I mean, all the opportunity is as an anarchy. And it's the kind of outcome that's not just monetary. It's about what gives you opportunities, which is how smart you are, educated you are, how you work, those, that's what creates opportunity. What else creates opportunity? Or how your parents worked, right? I mean, I work really hard to give my kids opportunities. And what you want to do by creating opportunities, is taking that away from you. How do you do that? Well, I think the Cambodia's example is that. So opportunities is a kind of an outcome, a non-monetary outcome, and therefore even worse in terms of how they deal with it. The only way to deal with it is to really put us in chains or to kill us off. So absolutely, and the conservatives, every time they mouth in America, the conservatives, oh, we say, oh, no, no, we're not, we're against the quality of the outcome, but therefore, if I give opportunity, they lost the battle right there by saying that, because that's exactly the case. Some parents work really hard to give their kids opportunities, other parents don't. How do you equate those? Well, the only way is to really suppress the opportunities granted by the parents who work on it, who try to do it. You know, are kids gonna have different educations, are they gonna have, yes. Now, what I'm concerned about is the opportunity set faced by people. I wanna maximize opportunities. I wanna maximize the number of opportunities that every individual on the planet would have. And the way to maximize opportunities is to maximize freedom. The way to get people to have as many opportunities as possible is to maximize the freedom, that's where they have the maximum economic opportunities, whether they take advantage of it or not, they follow. But the opportunity would be there if we can actually achieve, limiting and achieve freedom. All right, thank you guys.