 I think it's good for us to actually go through the Criss Hughes Up Ad, because I think it brings up so many fascinating issues about how people think about this. And I'm probably not going to hit on all of them. I'm sure if I spend another few hours with the essay, it could come up with another 15 angles to talk about because it is rich in the conventional way, both Democrats and Republicans, both the left and the right, look at the world. And Criss Hughes clearly comes at it from the left. But, you know, not clearly, but there's some clear hints that he comes at it from the left. But it's a way of thinking that unites all those who think about economics, think about capitalism, things about markets, think about government from a collectivistic framework. And that, of course, is something that is common, both on left and on the right, and probably the biggest challenge we face today. Alright, so as I said, Criss Hughes is the co-founder of Facebook. He's known Mark Zuckerberg from the Harvard days. I guess they were roommates. They shared a house in Silicon Valley when they first moved to Silicon Valley and started the company. He was there when all the major decisions in the early part of Facebook were made. And one of the points Criss wants to make early on is that he likes Mark Zuckerberg. This isn't personal. He doesn't say that, but he implies that. But he makes a deeper point. He's trying to make a deeper point, and he's trying to make the point of, you know, Mark is human. And here he sounds like a conservative, I have to say. Mark is human. And humans we know are flawed. Humans we know are flawed. And we should be very careful. We should be very careful of giving immense, what he said it calls, unchecked power to flawed human beings. It's interesting though, and this is true both on the left and on the right because both, but particularly on the left. On the left they talk about humans are flawed and therefore we need massive government in order to check the power of these flawed individuals. And they never consider the idea that the people in power, government power are flawed as well, that they're also human by this logic. Of course, conservatives usually use the humans are flawed argument to defend capitalism. What they say is, yes, humans are flawed. We agree with you humans are flawed. And therefore what we don't want to give politicians too much power. We want to disperse power. And, you know, capitalism is the ideal system for flawed human beings. And, you know, Iron Man was brutal in her critique of this argument for capitalism and argument for from depravity. You know, Hayek makes this argument and almost all conservatives make this argument. It's our inability to reason now inability to be rational lack of information or lack of knowledge that makes capitalism necessary, which is which is the opposite of Iron Man's view, which is it's the fact that we can reason it's a fact that we're rational. It's the fact that we can be good. It's the fact that we are able that we are competent that makes capitalism necessary. So, you know, right from the beginning that comes out of this. So, you know, Mark's Mark Zuckerberg, he's human. And therefore he is he is flawed. And therefore we don't want to give him unchecked power. Now one thing I want to I want to I want to talk about right off the bat because this kind of fuels this entire article. It fuels all the articles on the Facebook issue. No matter where people come down in this, it ultimately is is kind of in the background. And it's it's it's a crucial important issue that you have to think about. And that is that they equivocate all the articles equivocate between two kinds of power. They see no difference. And this is this the left is always done and the right is doing this constantly. The two types of power, political power and economic power. The idea is they're both unchecked power. They're both power. They're the same. And indeed, the way to cure one is to use the other the way to cure excess economic powers to use political power. Now, there is. However, a fundamental and this is to a large extent. To a large extent. To a large extent. Well, this is one of the fundamental problems in all these arguments, one of the fundamental argument problems in all the arguments, not the, but one of them is that they can differentiate between economic power and political power. And they don't see the difference. They don't see the fundamental difference between what constitutes political power and what constitutes economic power. And that is the difference between economic power and political power. Well, the fundamental is that political power is not does not rely on voluntary association. It relies on coercion and force. Government is force. Government power is the force to curse. It is the power to curse. It is the power of the gun. It is the power to force you to do things you don't want to do. It's not about voluntary exchange. It's not about voluntary association. It's not about trade. There is nothing voluntary about government actions. Government actions are coercive by their essential characteristic is coercion. You pass a law and people don't follow it. They're in violation of the law, which means they have to go to jail, pay a fine. Force is inflicted on them. The essence of government is force. The essence of economic power is voluntary trade, voluntary association. You do not have to work for any particular company. You do not have to buy any particular products. And you do not, and I know this is a shock, many of you, particularly those of you watching this on Facebook. You do not have to be on Facebook. You don't. Really. You can get off if you choose to. And it's not like you have to have an alternative. No. Human survival, individual human survival is quite possible. And some would argue even preferable. Without Facebook in your life. Facebook is not a requirement of human survival. But even those things that require human survival require your energy and effort and require your voluntary association, your voluntary trade with other people, potentially. But Facebook is something you voluntarily engage in. So economic power is based on voluntary association of voluntary trade, voluntary participation. Either party can walk away. And I mean either party because that also means, because it's voluntary, that Facebook can decide that they don't want to associate with you. They don't like you. So Facebook has the right to discriminate in terms of who it associates with, who can use its platform and who can't. And you have the ability, right, to not be on Facebook. And that's the essence of economic power is even if you grow very powerful from the economic perspective, have a lot of money, have a lot of market share. You still cannot force people to use you. You still cannot force people to interact with you. You still cannot force people to be employed by you or to provide you with services. The whole basis of a capitalist economy, a free economy, is the idea of voluntary exchange. And even in a semi-free world in which we live, the essential is voluntary exchange. Now, the government restrains that and limits that unfortunately through the use of coercion, through the use of political power, through the use of force. For example, Facebook can't discriminate in certain cases. It can discriminate ideologically. It can discriminate, for example, based on color of skin or sex or orientation or whatever, right, which it should have a right to do. But still the scope of voluntary choice and voluntary interaction is still quite substantial. We still live in a society that is far from fully, and I don't know what percentage is. But still is powered by voluntary association. The marketplace is still powered within the constraints of bad laws, within the constraints of the curse of power of government. Within those constraints, we still voluntary associate. And none of these people differentiate between that. To them, they are the same. And of course, this goes back to the Sherman Act. It goes back to anti-trust laws. It goes back to all of the legal precedent, the coercion of government, that it cannot differentiate. It does not differentiate between those two forms of power, and it assumes they are the same. It assumes that because you have 80% of a market or 90% of a market, even 99% of the market, you are somehow forcing people to use your product. Forcing in the sense of cursing. And that's just not true. It's just not true. Now, there is an argument to be made that in a crony economy, there is a mingling of economic and political power. And indeed, we're going to get to that. Facebook's call on regulators to regulate it is exactly that, is giving Facebook through government political power. Because that regulation is probably going to restrict competition. It's probably going to entrench Facebook into the position that it has. And when that happens, one must fight against it. So one must always fight against regulation, against government expansion, against government control, against more and more and more power in the hands of those who wield a gun, in the hands of government. Wielding a gun should only be tolerated, approved of, if it's done in self-defense. Not if it's done in order to protect some companies against competition. All right, let's see. So let's go back to Chris Hughes' argument. And he's making an argument that Mark is all-powerful. I mean, part of the article is very much to put it all in Mark Zuckerberg's lap, if you will. This is not a company that is even run by the board of directors, he argues, because Mark Zuckerberg controls 60% of the voting shares. So the board actually doesn't really oversee the company because the shareholders can't vote against Mark. Mark also doesn't just own Facebook, doesn't just own Facebook. He owns Instagram and WhatsApp, which involves billions of people every single day using now. And only Mark gets to decide how to configure Facebook's algorithms, although of course he doesn't, to determine what people see in their news feeds, what the private setting they can use and which messages actually get delivered. He sets the rules for how to distinguish violence and incendiary speech from the merrily offensive. And he can choose to shut down a competitor by acquiring, blocking, or copying it. So it's interesting, we've gone here from demonizing just the corporation as all-powerful, having control of all these things. To now focusing on the CEO, on the owner, and driving it, Mark Zuckerberg is too powerful. It's Mark that we need to control. Now interestingly, he describes kind of Mark's character a little bit, which is fascinating, because again he has this, I don't know, almost love-hate relationship with Mark Zuckerberg, because you can tell he greatly admires Mark, and yet he thinks he doesn't say this, but he implies it that Mark has become some kind of innocent monster of his own making. He says, Mark is single-mindedly focused on growing the company, on becoming the best, on becoming, in a sense, competing away, beating the competition. Beating the competition no matter what it takes. No, but within the law, without violating anybody's rights. So he talks about, you know, that Mark's focus on growth has led him to sacrifice security and civility for clicks. You know, not thinking about things like, again, Chris Hughes, right, how it would change the culture, influence election, or empower nationalist leaders. That's where you get a sense of ways coming from politically. Suddenly there's an empowering nationalist leaders. What about socialist leaders? Maybe he could empower socialist leaders. I mean, now that he would never, I guess, object to. So, you know, and he talks about Mark's, you know, single-minded focus on being the best and winning the competition and, you know, being, you know, dominating the field, right, dominating the field. And then, of course, he goes into this whole analysis of, this is not what America's about. He writes, America was built on the idea that power should not be concentrated in any one person because we're all fallible. This is the conservative, at some extent, founder's argument. But the founders had a deep understanding of individual rights. So the idea of lack of concentration of power had more to do with rights and checks and balances. And the idea of what it meant to protect then it just meant in terms of fallibility. But, you know, he and many conservatives turned this idea of fallibility into the central argument. There's no issue of protection of rights or anything like that. So he talks about, you know, we've created a system of checks and balances in order to exactly protect this. And again, notice, no differentiation between political power and economic power. Political power and economic power are the same. So if we've done this in the realm of politics, if we've created checks and balances in the realm of politics, then we must create checks and balances in the realm of economic power. It is just unacceptable to give corporate actors private individuals the kind of economic power that we've supposedly, you know, not allowed our politicians to have. Although it's kind of, it's really interesting because of course in the end he's got solutions for what should be done about Facebook. And his solutions give a lot of power to politicians, a lot of power to the politicians. He quotes John Sherman, author of the Sherman Act. And so just to show you that these attitudes are not new. They didn't come about yesterday. They didn't come about because of Facebook. They didn't even come about, you know, because of, you know, anytime recently because of the left dominating the world. John Sherman was a Republican congressman, Ohio Republican. I think it was a, it wasn't a congressman. He was a senator. So here's the quote from Sherman. If we will not endure a king as a political power, we should not endure a king over the production, transportation and sale of any of the necessities of life. If we will not submit to an emperor, we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity. No difference, no difference between political power and economic power. No difference, but what is cursed, what is forced and between what is voluntarily exchanged, what is voluntarily engaged in, what is a product of voluntary association and trade. And of course he gives the example of, you know, and we did this. We, you know, we broke up monopolies like Standard Oil and AT&T, never mentioning all the protections AT&T got before they were broken up. And of course, not that I supported the breakup of AT&T. I'm just saying AT&T would have never existed if not for the support as a kind of monopoly without government support beforehand. And of course never mentioning that by the time the Justice Department actually broke up Standard Oil, it had less than 30% of the oil of funding capacity in the U.S. And, you know, antitrust was irrelevant to that. Except impediments. But if we allow the oil companies to have the power, which you say has come to them, because we need the oil, it's a question of supply and demand. So if we approach this laissez-faire, as I think you would like us to, free of government intervention, free of all the force and the regulation and the controls which you abhor. Now we've got Mr. Gigantic Oil Baron saying $2.50 a gallon. Now here's what happens. The blue-collar guy who's trying to make a living and feed his kids can't buy gas for his truck, can't possibly survive in the free marketplace, and suddenly he's on welfare and he's got to go for a handout, another feature of government that you abhor. You can't have it both ways. But all this is economic fallacies. To begin with, nobody in a free society, now we're talking about the free market in which the government doesn't interfere, nobody can become a monopolist. All monopolies are created by a special privilege for government. It's only by an act of government that you can keep competitors out of your field. Therefore you couldn't become that kind of monopoly. The power you hold as an industrialist is not the power to use force. It's the power of producing something of value. That people want. And it's the people who literally control you because every purchase is a vote in the favor of some businessman and in a way against others. It's the public who decides what they want to buy and what they pass up. If, using your examples, you became this powerful tycoon economically, but you cannot force anybody to deal with you, and you cannot force competitors out of your field, then every smaller man would be in that field because you would have established a price way above the market. You might last months, if that. So in other words, if I tried to be Mr. Big and charge outrageously high prices for gasoline, I would go broke in your view because in your, leave them alone and let competition handle an approach to civilization. Somebody with a smarter, with a better mousetrap, pardon my mixed metaphor. No, that's a very good one. All right. Would come along and undercut me. That's right. Sell at a cheaper price. But it isn't just my view. You know what I'll do? I'll buy him up the minute I see this bird. I'll buy him. I'll own him on Tuesday. And where will you get your money when you're not allowed? I'm already holding them up for $2.50 a gallon. But they're not paying you. You say they're all going out of business. They've got to get to work. We're married to a petroleum civilization. This has been done, you know. It isn't incidentally just my view. That is history. There are people who have tried to corner the market repeatedly, and the result was that they went broke.