 this Google related story, opinion piece, New York Times release this afternoon, Jack Poulsen. I used to work for Google. I am a conscientious objector. And we've heard these stories about conscientious objectors at Google saying, look, I do not want to be one of the people who is working on the sort of censorship equivalent of a nuclear weapon, helping China clamp down on the population there and censor what it is that they can consume or maybe even communication and things like this. Different tech companies have willingly provided China with different versions of Facebook and different versions of Google and everything else to comply with the totalitarian control that they're implementing in China. And so of course you have some better minded people working within these companies who object to this. And this is wonderful. I mean, this is a good thing. This is another thing that we have to count on. We have to count on good principle judges in the courts so that when things are challenged, they're going to go ahead and make rulings based on the principles of property and contract rights that are needed to uphold our rights to freedom of speech, freedom of expression, the ability to gain privacy and illegally protect it. These all rest on property and contract rights. That's the courts. That's one front that we talked about. This is within companies, companies that might be assisting China with something that isn't prohibited by our government because we haven't declared China to be any sort of an enemy. It's not illegal. We're not violating any sanctions if we help China implement certain things. And yet you have conscientious objectors within these companies. These are very smart people who are troubled by the prospect of helping China clamp down on citizens. That's a wonderful thing. I agree. And for a long time, Google didn't work with the Chinese government. Indeed, Google was banned in China. YouTube was banned in China. All the Google products or Gmail was banned in China because Google refused to work with China. And it's sad that now Google is going to China and reengaging with the Chinese and the only hope to stop that is employees and customers who say, no, that's not acceptable, what you're doing. You can go, but do it on your terms. And I think if the tech companies got together and said, we will not trade with China, we will not deal with China, if they use that technology for these things. And they went with the Chinese government as a unified front and said, not only can't you use Google, but Apple won't provide you with technology. They're not going to let you have your apps in there. All these companies won't provide you with technology unless you guarantee that you're not going to use it for these things, right? And we're not going to tinker with that technology to give you keys to get inside of it and so on. I mean, China would have no choice but to accept because China has not shown their ability to be able to develop these technologies by itself. Although I will say WeChat, which is the Chinese equivalent of Google, Facebook, PayPal, and Amazon all rolled into one company. Talk about so far. It's a pretty amazing company and the technology is pretty amazing. And they've done a phenomenal job. The problem, of course, there is the government clearly has a key into an ability to monitor that. So, yeah, I mean, to me, look, the facial recognition technology that China uses is no question in my mind was supplied by American and probably Israeli companies. And a lot of the surveillance that the Chinese government is doing in its own citizen is probably being supplied to them by Israeli companies. There's a big negotiations between Israel and China in terms of military technology and other technologies, which I'm sure Israel is providing because Israel feels like it's isolated in the world. It doesn't care about the internal politics of its people who will support them. So I'll support the devil, which is what they're doing in the case of China. So it is very scary, but notice that these engineers at Google, I bet you, are all, God forbid, close your ears, people. They're all probably Democrats. And yet they're probably the ones who are most sensitive to the issue of censorship in China. They're probably the ones that are sensitive to human rights abuses in China. They're probably the ones. So, I think it's really good that these people exist to hold China back on these issues, issues that I think a lot of other people. Okay, but then listen to this, right? And this gets into how complex it sometimes is to apply principles to the particular concrete situations. So what Paulson here is suggesting is that government should get involved in protecting the employees within Google and these other tech companies that are organizing against the private companies. So he says this, he says, tech companies are spending record amounts on lobbying and quietly fighting to limit employees' legal protections for organizing. North American legislators would be wise to answer the call from human rights organizations and research institutions by guaranteeing explicit whistleblower protections similar to those recently passed by the European Union. He says ideally, they would vocally support an instrument that legally binds businesses via international human rights law to uphold human rights. So he wants basically workers to be protected in this. They're going to have their, what was the protection consistent of that they can go out there and whistleblow on Google and then still Google has to give them a job and a paycheck? Keep them and everything. Yes, absolutely. So no, I mean it's ridiculous, but that's why they're lefties, right? They want to work on protection and they also want censorship and they don't get that the government involvement in the workplace is exactly equivalent to this kind of censorship that they're trying to protect us in China. It's a violation of human rights just like the other thing. But yeah, I mean, this is the problem that we're not dealing with people who have any kind of coherent systematic philosophy and don't approach these things in a rights-respecting way. I mean, people are commenting on China here. Let me say this, look, what I was saying before was I wasn't advocating for no trade with China. What I was advocating for is that companies take stock of the way their technology is being used. And if your technology is being used to kill people, to in a significant way to violate the individual rights of people, don't let it happen. Burn the technology if you have to. If you're selling gas to the Nazis in order to, you don't know, you're just selling gas. You don't know what they're using it for. And it turns out they're killing Jews with it or anybody with it, then stop selling them gas, right? Blow up the gas tanks, destroy the gas tanks. If you're selling technology to the Chinese government that allows them to monitor the behavior of all their citizens, don't do it. I'm not necessarily saying the US government should do it because the job of the US government is not to protect the individual rights of Chinese citizens. But as a company, just like you shouldn't sell shoddy products, just like you shouldn't put your customers at home, not only because they'll sue you, but because it's wrong, because it's wrong to inflict damage on other people. Don't sell products in China that are going to inflict damage on those people. And if you say the Chinese will buy it somewhere else, then so be it. Then so be it. I mean, What about this argument though, right? So this came up, God, it's been a year and a half now. And I was on that show, the next revolution with Steve Hilton. And Steve Hilton hates me, he's never going to have me on again because I'm not a Trump supporter. Hilton's one of the people who's been favorably tweeted by Trump. Of course, Tucker has too, but Hilton's more of a cheerleader for Trump. Anyway, they were talking about Apple and criticizing Apple because they're doing business with the Chinese and everything else. What Cook has said is that, and this is something that American businessmen have been saying for a long time, that they believe dealing with the Chinese to a certain extent might influence them in the direction of more freedom. And so they think that even though right now they're not able to give China only full access apps that Americans get or whatever, as if we even here get full access, who knows, right? But the freedom that we have, they can't get that now, but they feel that if they cut off the Chinese market entirely, it's going to be in the long run worse for the Chinese citizens. So there's to a certain extent. And that's where you have to use judgment. I'm not saying you just cut them off because they, you know, you have to carry every single app and, you know, you have to make a judgment. Where's the line that you won't cross? What's the mall line that you won't cross? And I don't, I'm not saying it's easy. I'm not saying it's simple. It's hard to do that. But every company should have that line, right? That line that you don't cross in order to, you know, deal with it with the Chinese government. You know, and yes, because I do think that the positive impacts and secondly, again, your job is not to protect the individual rights of the Chinese, but morality does matter and it matters to you, right? So be moral. Again, it's not always easy in an irrational world to do the right thing. I mean, really, it's not a value to quote open up a market to new customers. If the customers that you're going to end up helping to create thanks to the government that you're working with are just a bunch of slaves, right? So if that, you know, yeah, okay, they have a bigger market and they think they're going to have influence, but they're really not because they're helping to destroy. It would be a very complex, I think, judgment to make. It is a complex judgment, but it's incumbent on these companies as they go global. It's the same judgment as to make to are you, you know, you know, companies should be aware of what is going on, right? And if, for example, if you're buying a product, if one of your subcontractors is selling your product and you know they're using slave labor, is that right? No, I mean, you should not buy the product from slaves. You should not endorse the slave labor. You should walk away. So now in some countries, it's hard to tell if it's slave labor or not. It's not always easy. The line is not always clear. Like the mines in Africa where they're taking out some of these things that are used in our cell phones. Some of those are the equivalent of slave labor. And it's very, very hard to draw a clear line. And as consumers, we should care. I mean, this is what you have to respect the leftists who said, we're not going to buy Nike shoes because it's sweatshops. And I think they're wrong about sweatshops. But I respect the fact that they're saying, if I believe this product was manufactured in a way that is immoral, I will not buy it. I agree with that fundamentally, right? I don't agree with the characterization of sweatshops as immoral. But again, if something I don't buy anything made in Cuba, and I won't go visit Cuba, if North Korea tomorrow, because of Trump's genius foreign policy, opened up its markets and said, we are exporting little North Korean dolls to the world. I don't know, whatever. I wouldn't buy them. And I wouldn't go and do business in North Korea because you're basically facilitating a regime responsible for the murder of millions and millions and millions of people. If I didn't think China was better than that, and I think in the early days, it was a question of whether one should do business in China or not. I think today some of that question has been answered. And China might be changing. China might be getting so bad in the next few years where I would say, don't buy Chinese goods. Don't go to China. I don't think the government should say that, but I as an individual should make the moral argument, don't buy from China because they're so awful. Well, okay, so let me ask you this. At what point are they treating their citizens so badly and enslaving them to where you can, taking sort of a unity of the virtues sort of approach that you could say, okay, they are turning them into an enemy state? Well, that's a different question, right? The enemy state issue would have to, you'd have to see, you know, actions that suggest enemy. That is a certain direction in the development of weapons that suggests that they're talking in the United States. It becomes necessary though, right? So, you know, again, let's go back to 1984 and Big Brother and everything else. One of the things that Orwell talks about in the book, and I think it's true, and I think even Trump, you know, does it to a certain extent here, is in order to get citizens to swallow the amount of control that the government takes over them, they will prop up this idea of enemies. And sometimes in order to get citizens rallying behind the government against a so-called enemy real, imagine whatever, they have to actually do something. So, you know, North Korea's got to do some order because there's an emergency because people are trying to cross. Exactly, exactly. And you need to do something about it like that. But yeah, no, I think that's right, as these countries become more authoritarian. But the other, the counterpoint to that, and this is why 1984 fails and why most dystopian novels fail, is that they don't recognize that as a country becomes more authoritarian, it becomes less rich, technology collapses. Yes, yes. That's the counterargument to China. Yes, China might become authoritarian, but it become less rich, and therefore become less of a threat in terms of military threats to the United States, because you have to have wealth to compete militarily against the US. We have such a massive advantage over any other country militarily. So, you have to monitor all those things. I mean, that's what a president and a foreign policy establishment should be doing. Thinking constantly about who's a threat, who's not, when do they cross the threshold and become a threat, and what actions should be taken as a result? But the one thing you and I agree on is, in so far as these heroic private employee groups within Google and the other companies, they're standing up against Google when it decides to provide this enslaving technology to China, helping China censor their own citizens and content delivered to them. These are great. I think we should vocally support these employees, but should they be given special legal protection via government? No, this undermines the whole idea that they're standing up for. Somebody's arguing that anything you buy from China is supporting the evil communist regime. First of all, the regime in China is not communist. It's less communist than the US regime probably. It's authoritarian, but it's not communist. There's no communist in the Chinese Communist Party. No, I don't believe that every dollar that you spend buying a Chinese good. There is private property in China. It's pseudo kind of private property. There are private enterprises in China, and most of our dealings with China, most of the stuff you buy that's made in China is private. There is a lot of economic freedom in China. There still is a lot of economic freedom. Up until about two years ago, there was quite a bit of free speech in China. And so China was authoritarian, but not so authoritarian as to view every dollar you spend in China as violating individual rights. Now, it might drift back to that position, and I might change my mind about China in the next few years. It's certainly moving in that direction, but I think the balance is still there is enough freedom in China today to justify trading with it if the trade does not involve massively increasing the power of the state. So no state-imposed embargo on China now, and then to follow up on this on Paulson's suggestion, if we did have some sort of a state-imposed embargo saying, and there are embargoes, there's certain type of tech that we're not allowed to sell to China, but as it stands right now, social media and apps and communications is not necessarily one of them. But once there is something like that, then yes, of course, you should have whistleblower protections for employees who rat out the companies who are providing the embargoed goods or technology. Yeah, of course that. But short of that, no, it's left to private institutions. These are all tricky things when you've got... It's tricky things. That's why political philosophy and having people in power, having people in politics, having people in politics who actually think, who actually are thinkers and try to challenge these ideas. So all of this, how do you deal with the Islamist threat? How do you deal with China? How do you deal with other mixed economies? How do you deal with Russia today? How do you deal with NATO? All of these are tricky issues. There's no clear cut, but this is what you do. You pursue your own self-interest, but what does that self-interest constitute? And how do you figure that out? It's just like an individual being selfish is a lot of work, a lot of thinking. In government, you need to do a lot of thinking, and that's what nobody does. On the issues that government is really involved in. So on legal issues, what is due process? How does due process work? What's the right due process? Is somebody's asking here, what would you do? Comment on the adversarial criminal justice system. I mean, that's a big topic we'll have to talk about at some point, but that's a difficult question. I mean, there is clear benefits than adversarial criminal justice system, but I know Leonard as Leonard Peacock has criticized it and said, maybe the French system where it's not adversarial is a better system. The inquisitorial. You have to really dig into it. You'd need to study legal philosophy. You'd need to look at all the pluses and minuses and how they in the end manifest themselves in terms of defending individual rights is one better at protecting individual rights than the other. And it's not easy. And none of the stuff government does is easy. One of the reasons I believe I'm a guest anarchy is you can't do this outside of government. There is no mechanism to establish the proper appropriate objective system of a legal system, system of font policy, system of figuring out whether somebody committed murder or second degree or third degree or an accident or all this. I mean, probably 20 different types of killing somebody that have different legal remedies, right? And how do you give them legal due process and what does it mean to be innocent before, before proven guilty? I mean, these are complex, difficult legal questions that you need an object, you need an entity that's responsible objectively thinking and dealing with them. And the problem today in politics is there's no thinking and there's no objectivity. And there's no standard, right? The standard in an objective legal system is individual rights. There's no standard today. So that's why we're over the place and it's become all meaningless. Yeah, that's, I mean, the adversarial system is a complex topic. The thing that's nice about it is the idea of checks and balances. The thing that is not always so good about it is the fact that you have one side and then an opposition doesn't mean that either side in a courtroom battle is presenting the truth. And in a true adversarial system, the judge is not supposed to be of his own introducing material that he's allowed to consider when reaching his verdict. And then you can have the miscarriage of justice. I mean, in a French system, the judge is the truth seeker. And his job there and he has, he has investigators working for the judge and, you know, that he can bring in evidence. He can, he can, he can try to figure out what the truth is. And then you have, you know, legal counsel on both sides that add, but the end result is supposed to be the truth. So it's, but all these considerations are interesting, important. And they need thinking about foreign policy is the same way. There's no cookie cutter solutions to foreign policy. There's deep thinking about what it takes, what it means to pursue one's own self interest in that realm. And that includes, and that includes whether you as an individual should trade with China, should America trade with China under what conditions? When does China become an enemy? When does China violate individual rights so much that you as an individual shouldn't trade with them, but that the government should still allow trade? But when does it reach a point where the government shouldn't allow trade? All those are complex issues. My view right now is trade should still be allowed. Tech companies should not trade with China when it involves tech transfer that could be used to violate individual rights to the government and that the government should stay out of trade with China. That's right now, but that could change tomorrow if the Chinese continue on their path towards greater authoritarianism. What we need today, what I call the new intellectual would be any man or woman who is willing to think, meaning any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, wins or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of despair, cynicism and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist broods.