 Now, I don't know if it works in Poland, you see. How many of you have read Harry Potter? Harry Potter? Oh, okay. Once you translate it to Polish, everybody's read it, right? Harry Potter, great. I love Harry Potter, but Harry Potter, the problem with Harry Potter is it's made me poor. I spent well over $2,000 in Harry Potter. Think of it. I have two boys, I have two sons. They were about the same age as Harry when the books came out, right? So every single book that came out, I had to buy two copies. The night it came out, because they both wanted to read it all night, right? So I had to buy two copies. And then I wanted to read it. So I bought the audio tapes, right? And we'd go on a road trip and we'd listen to it together. That was a family thing we did. So I had to buy three copies of Harry Potter's books every time they came out. But then there were the movies. And I don't think there were just seven movies, right? So seven times three is 21 books I had to buy. And then the movies, but there were like nine or 10 movies because they wanted to maximize the amount of money they made on them, so they cut them up into lots of different pieces, right? So then another 10 movies I had to go to. And then there's all the like the Disneyland rides and all the stuff. I spent over $2,000 in Harry Potter. And according to Thomas Piketty, I'm $2,000 poorer because of it. And J.K. Rollins, the woman who wrote Harry Potter, is a billionaire. I mean, how disgusting is that? Like, it's horrible. Like, inequalities just exploded. I got poorer by $2,000 and she got super rich. Because what can't he measure? Ever. Economists cannot measure this. What is it? The value I get and my children get from reading Harry Potter. And the value I get from my children enjoying something. You can't measure that. There's no dollar sign next to enjoyment. There's no dollar sign next to spiritual values. There's no dollar sign next to happiness or fun or however you want to define it. We can only put dollar signs next to money. So the whole debate about these pies assumes a fixed pie. It's all material. There's no actual value there. Just material value. Anything you get in exchange. And it's not even material value. Because even though the iPhone, in some ways, is a material value, in other ways, it's spiritual value. Because I can listen to music on it. I can watch TV on it. I can do all these other things on it. I don't even measure this material value. The pie is only dollars. It's only money. And life's not about money. Shocking from a capitalist, I know. But life's not about money. Life's about happiness and fulfillment and success and flourishing, which you need money for. And a lot of money helps. But the measure of one's happiness or the measure of one's fulfillment and flourishing is not how many dollars you have in a bank. And if anything, people who hold money instead of actually spending on things that they enjoy, are probably not having as much fun. So there's no pie because the pie grows and the pie's not just money. The pie's also these spiritual values. And we can't measure those things. So we can't even analyze a pie. So that's one of the problems with pie. It just doesn't work. It doesn't reflect anything about reality. It doesn't tell us anything we didn't know before we used the analogy. This is why analogies and metaphors are very, very dangerous because they usually don't mean anything. But people like to simplify. But when we simplify, we usually lose what's interesting. And in this case, we lose everything that's interesting. But there's another problem with the pie. What assumption do we make when we talk about pies and pizzas? The assumption is that somehow this pie belongs to us. Poland has a pie. But the fact is that Poland doesn't own anything. Poland doesn't create any wealth. Poland doesn't pursue any values. You do. And you do. And you happen to be Poles and you happen to live and live in Poland. But Poland doesn't exist for all meaningful purposes. What exists are individuals. So yes, as an economist, I can take your pie and your pie and your pie and squish them all together and pretend it's a Polish pie. But it isn't. It's your pie and your pie and your pie. And I have no right to take your pies. What right do I have to your pies? The fact is that each one of us creates his own pie. And how do you get to decide how much of it you get to take? It's my pie. And if I get to keep it, there is no national income. There is no GDP. There is no national wealth. Those abstractions from the fact that you have wealth and you have wealth and you make income and you make income and you make income. These are bad, bad abstractions. Not to be useful for economics. But they're also very confusing because suddenly we think, oh, I'm an American. My GDP is trillions of dollars, 15 trillion dollars. Isn't that cool? And then I get to vote on how much of the trillion dollars, 15 trillion dollars I get to keep? No, you don't. It's not your 15 trillion. If you only make 50,000 a year, that's yours. That's it. If I make a million dollars a year, that's mine. That's it. And you don't get any of mine and I shouldn't be able to get any of yours. And you don't get to squish pies together and pretend that they're your pie. So the whole pie analogy is conditioned on collectivism. What is collectivism? Collectivism is the idea that the group is more important than the individual. However you define the group, the nation is more important than the individual, or the tribe is more important than the individual, or the proletarian is more important than the individual, or the race is more important than the individual, or fill in the bank is is more important individual. And that my friends is anti-liberty, anti-freedom, anti-everything that we should stand for. And that's why I reject all those isms including the way we use nationalism. Because at the end of the day nationalism is the idea that the nation is above the individual. And I say no nothing is above the individual. There's a nation, alright? Who cares? It's either a rights-protecting nation or a rights-violating nation. Since all nations today are rights-violating nations, some violate it a lot, some violate it a little. I want to live in a place where it's violated a little, not a lot. That's it. I don't care where that is on the planet Earth. I don't care what the color of the skin of the people around me is. I don't care where they come from. I don't even care what language they talk, but they better speak English. Because that's it for me. I want my rights to be violated the least, ideally zero. But that not happening in my lifetime. So the least is best. That's an individualistic perspective on the world. That is a rights-respecting perspective on the world. The group has no priority over the individual. And what happens when we place the group above the individual? What do we always demand of the individual to do? To sacrifice for the group. You have a big piece of the pie. You've got to sacrifice a piece of it for us. No. I don't believe in coercion. I don't believe in force. I don't believe in sacrifice. But note that the whole debate about inequality is contingent on sacrifice, contingent on force, contingent on coercion. The whole idea is you don't deserve the piece of pie that you make, and we're going to steal some of it in the name of what? Never in the name of me getting powerful or me getting rich at your expense. It's always in the name of the group, the collective, the states, the nation, the race, the tribe, fill in the blank, right? Whatever it happens to be. Some higher cause than merely you individual. And I say there is no higher cause than you individual. And that is the great discovery that is the West. When we talk about Western civilization. Western civilization is not about countries. It's not about nations. It's not about tribes. It's not about collectives. The innovation that is Western civilization is the respect for the first time in history we attribute to the individual. We have elevated the individual above all those other groups. We have made the priority of the state only to protect that individual and do nothing else. That is the real achievement of the West. It comes from the recognition that each one of us as individuals has a mind. And in our mind and our reason and our rationality are able to know reality, understand it, integrate it. And therefore we can all take care of ourselves. We don't need mother government to take care of us. We don't need somebody else deciding how much pie I get. You get as much as you produce.