 So the first thing I want to do, which I think is well always important in the debate or in a presentation generally, is to find terms. I think it's important to define your terms. Because one of the things I find when I debate people on socialists or the various categories of socialists is that they never define capitalism. And what they use is what they do is they assume the world as it is today is capitalist and therefore all the ills of the world today are blamed on capitalism. So three and a half billion people around the world are truly unbelievably poor. They're so poor that their net worth is negative. So indeed I'm probably richer than like a billion of them. Just me alone and I'm not a billionaire. Just me alone because they have negative net worth and you add negative numbers. What do you get? A big negative number. So it's easy to be richer than a lot of negatives. But are they living under capitalism? Is the real question we should ask ourselves and clearly they're not. Like people in Africa are not living in capitalism. People in Asia are not living in capitalism. Indeed I would argue and will argue vehemently today that we in America don't live under capitalism and there is no country in the world today that is a capitalist country. Capitalism does not exist in the world today. What we have is lots of countries that are mixed. A mixture of socialism and capitalism, socialism being statism, the state involvement, heavy state involvement, heavy state redistribution of wealth and some property rights that are regulated controlled by the state are not true property rights because I can't actually do what I want with my property. I have to get permission for almost everything that I do with my property. I used to live in California, that was the case. You need to get a permit to chop down a tree. You need to get a permit to redo your house. You need to get a permit for everything. That is socialism or statism, some form of statism. It certainly is not capitalism. So what is capitalism? So the definition of capitalism is a system of real free markets where the state does not intervene in the economy, does not intervene at all. That is capitalism is a system in which there is a separation of state from economics in which the state does not intervene in economics at all. So I agree, cronyism is bad. Having a lot of money, therefore gaining political power is bad and indeed the only way to prevent that and still be a little free, still be free at all is by restricting the ability of the politician to have any influence on the economy and therefore there's never any reason to lobby the politician because he has no influence on the economy. He has no way of gaining favors or penalizing the competition because that is banned. So capitalism is a system in which economy and politics are separated in which all property is private property in which the state does one thing and one thing only. And that's protect individual rights. Protect individual rights in a way somebody like John Locke would have conceived of individual rights. That is the freedoms, freedom from coercion, the freedom to do, act, produce, live by your own judgment based on your own ideals. And the only job of government is to protect you, make it possible for you to do that and protect you from whom or from other people because when we live in a society there are going to be some people who crooks, frauds, criminals, bad guys. And since we don't want to live inside, at least I don't, there might be some anarchists in the room, but hopefully not. Since I don't want to be carrying all the time to, you know, watch myself, we institute a government, an institution whose sole responsibility it is. It's to defend each one of our lives, to defend our property because property is essential for life and to protect our ability to pursue our own happiness but basically to leave us free as individuals to pursue the values that we believe are necessary for our own survival that we believe are necessary for our own life to leave us alone, right? So capitalism is the system where individuals pursue their individual values, their individual happiness, free of coercion and the job of the government is to make sure that they are free. That's it. That's what capitalism is. I don't see it in America. I don't see it anywhere, indeed, in the world. To some extent, I would argue it's never existed. To the same extent, I think the socialist would argue that socialism is never existed in his kind of form. I don't think capitalism has ever existed. I think, but I do, we'll say this. So let me complete the moral argument and then I'll get to the practical argument. Now, why is this good? Why is this system right? Why is this system just from a moral perspective? Well, what is moral? What is good, evil? What is right versus wrong? Well, the standard for me for determining whether something is moral is is it consistent with human survival? Is it consistent with human flourishing? Is it good for human life? That which is good for human life? That which furthers human life is the good? That which destroys human life, attacks human life is bad for human life is evil. That to me is good and evil. That's right and wrong. That's the essence of morality. And it's an individualistic morality. Because what is human life? Human life is your life, my life, each individual. There is no class here. There is no group here. We impose those ideas on people. But as human beings, we're just us. We're just individuals. And as an individual, the values that are good for you, the values that long-term lead to human success and human flourishing are the good and the things that lead to human failure are the bad. Now, what is the most important thing if you believe in human flourishing, in human success, in human progress? What is the most important value for human beings? For individual human beings? What is it that makes possible success and flourishing as a human being? Well, you know, we don't have time to go into all of it, but please ask about this. It's our human capacity to reason. It's our capacity to think. It's our capacity to know the truth. It's our capacity to integrate the data from reality to capacity to shape reality in order to fit our needs. That's what makes it possible for this human race to survive because, look at you, you're pretty pathetic animals otherwise. We're weak, we're slow, we have no fangs, we have no claws. You're not going to survive out there in nature without a capacity to reason, to think, to strategize, to invent, to innovate, to produce. What makes us different than any other animal is we're not programmed to survive. You actually have to figure out how to survive. So the most important thing about being human is our capacity to think. Now, thinking requires freedom. It requires the ability to try stuff out, to fail, to experiment, to do a variety of different things. Knowledge is not just embedded in our minds. We don't know what's right, what will work, what will succeed. We need to go out there and live and choose and make decisions. And again, fail sometimes and get back on our feet. The most important thing for human intelligence, for human mind, for human beings to flourish is their ability to think freely and to act based on those thoughts within freedom. Free of coercion, force, authority. Okay, I didn't see the signal. Force, authority are the real enemies of the human mind. They are what limit our ability to produce, create and really live out there. So you want a system that protects our ability to think and act on our thoughts. That's capitalism. It's a system that eliminates the one enemy of thought, which is violence, fraud, people using guns, people using authority to dictate how you should live and how you should think and what you should do. Think Galileo. Now I'll just end with this. It turns out that when you leave people free, when you let people think, when you take away the authorities, when you take away state control and limitations, to the extent that you do that, and I said there's no ideal capitalist country yet, but there have been attempts to get there, to the extent that you do it, to the extent that you practice this freedom, to that extent you produce economic wealth, you produce economic success, you get rid of poverty, to that extent that you practice capitalism, you are successful in bringing about rising standard of living, rising quality life, longer life expectancy. In every dimension you improve human life, and to the extent that you do the opposite, to the extent that you use coercion, that you use force, you use authority to suppress human freedom, primarily the freedom to think and to act on that thought, to that extent you become poor, to that extent you suffer, to that extent life becomes miserable. That's the difference between capitalism and socialism. The one is a system based on individual freedom, the other is based on individual suppression and incursion, and the consequences are obvious. One leads to wealth, one leads to disastrous poverty. Thank you. So in terms of definitions, I agree they're important. I'm surprised by Iran's definition, because as he says, by his definition there are no capitalist countries on earth, so just notice what an extreme position he's defending. I take it you're defending an economy with no state involvement whatsoever. So that's setting the bar high for you, which I know you know, but I want to make sure they know. So okay, that's point number one. That's a pretty extreme situation. Well, why? Well, think about all of the things that government does, not in spooky Venezuela, but in USA, baby, all the stuff that the government does right here to promote, I'll use your concept here, freedom, which as a liberal egalitarian, I hold dear to my heart as well, freedom. I think people who defend the sorts of positions you're defending misunderstand freedom. So there's formal freedom, which is freedom from interference, very important. There's also effective freedom, the freedom to actually accomplish things in the world. Both are important. Government, it's true, can be a source of interference. It can prevent you from dumping that coal ash in the river that you just really want to dump. You know, you just, to live your best life, you want to dump that coal ash and the pesky government won't let you do it. Admittedly, it's a restriction on freedom, formal freedom. But it also yields freedom dividends, obviously. So when we impose restrictions on pollution, we augment the effective freedom to say develop in a healthy way without coal ash in your water. Without government, we would have much less effective freedom. I would point out that all, different point now, doesn't fetishize private property or any kind of property from the standpoint of freedom, even formal freedom. All property rights are restrictions on freedom. This is my pen. He can't have it, okay? This limits what he can do. If he comes and tries to take my pen, which I hope he won't, because he's bigger than me, the police will come and, well, they probably won't, but I could theoretically call the police and get them to interfere, right? That's right, that's right. But the point is simple. There's no simple mapping from property rights to freedom, even formal freedom, because all property rights represent interferences with people. Ask yourself how free homeless people are in our society. They ain't free at all. They aren't free. They don't have formal freedom. If they try to sleep someplace, what's going to happen? The police will evict them. So even from the standpoint of formal freedom, a sort of libertarian capitalism with no safety net at all would be a disaster. But finally, in defining what, in making the moral case for capitalism, you mentioned that that which furthers human life and flourishing are good. Well, I agree. That's a good definition of good. That which promotes flourishing is good. Well, I just am wondering how taxing, say, Bill Gates, so that he can't buy a seventh yacht in order to fund, say, vaccines for kids or public education or any of the valuable public purposes that our government serves. How is taxing Bill Gates for that purpose not furthering human life and human flourishing? I submit that even by your own standard, you shouldn't embrace this kind of radical libertarian capitalism. The government does many good things. May I stop there? Thank you. That's all right. Yeah, okay. Just the ash in the river. Let me just comment on that quickly. I'm sure there'll be environmentalist questions afterwards we can cover. But look, if the river's mine, you ain't dumping your ash in my river. And my definition of capitalism in the river is owned by somebody. They're not just out there aimlessly owned by nobody. So you can dump your coal in my backyard. You can dump your coal in my river. So the solution to externalities, what we call externalities in economics, is to privatize. Once you privatize externalities, most part go away. I'm sure there'll be more questions on this. Let me make, I want to make one crucial point. By the way, I embrace the idea that I'm, what did you call it, extreme? Absolutely, I'm radical. I don't like the word extremism. I don't think it means anything. I'm radical. You know, I believe in this all the way, right, in its purest form. Wealth is created. Wealth doesn't appear. There is no pie that we then get to divide up among people. Somebody has to create the pie. You create a pie, you create a pie, you create a pie. You can't then just take, and this is the definition of private property, the pie you created is yours, because you created it. Because you build it, and you do build it. You made it. You bought it. It is yours. Indeed, private property is not a rejection of freedom. It is a necessary aspect of freedom. There is no freedom without private property, because to live, I need property. Whether I need property in order to grow vegetables, I can eat them, or whether I need property in order to build the machine that I'm going to sell and make a lot of money, or the factory that makes the iPhones, or whatever the property is, you cannot have life. And indeed, life sucks where there's no private property. I mean, life sucks, I really mean sucks. Really, really, really bad. So, freedom necessitates private property. You cannot have one another. But let me go back to the pie. So, the pie is not a social pie. It's not we created this pie now. We get to decide how to divvy this pie up. No, I created a pie. Keep your hands off my pie. That's capitalism. I want to give out some of the pieces of the pie to some of you. I want to trade my pie for your pie? Fine, as long as it's voluntary. As long as I don't steal your pie, as long as I don't take your pie by force, you can do with your pie anything you want to do, as long as it doesn't violate the rights of other people. As long as it's not using force against others, you have a right to do with your pie what you want to do. Pies are not social, and they're not static. That's the other thing, right? From 300,000 years ago, the beginning of Homo sapiens, you know, I'm willing to accept that that might be the wrong date, but somewhere a long, long time ago, when Homo sapiens began, until about 250 years ago, everybody on this planet was dirt poor. It was under $3 a day or less. Everybody on the planet was like, that few aristocrats over here who by our standards were still dirt poor. They didn't have electricity. They didn't have running water. And then something miraculous happened. We got a little bit of freedom. Not the full freedom I would like, but just a little bit, about as much as, you know, we've had. And what happened? Wealth creation took off. Took off. So then now we can say, you know, there were only 3.5 billion people who were poor. Actually, the number's a lot less. According to the UN, extreme poverty is at the lowest that's ever been in human history. It's down to 8% of the population. Why? Because a few countries in Asia have adopted a little bit of capitalism. Imagine if they've adopted a lot of capitalism. There'd be no extremely poor people on planet Earth. So the only system that has ever brought people out of poverty, the only system that has ever brought people out of poverty is capitalism. And it's done such a spectacular job of doing it that it is striking that every place on the planet that has adopted a little bit of capitalism has shrinking extreme poverty and every place on the planet that has not adopted capitalism is still extremely poor. Africa is the last continent to struggle with adopting capitalism. Rwanda, Botswana, Namibia are starting to do that. Their GDP is going like this. They've adopted property rights. They've adopted some of the elements of what capitalism looks like. And suddenly, they're getting less poor. So if you care about poverty, which I think any human being cares about seeing able people who are poor stay poor, then capitalism is the only solution to solving the problem of poverty that still exists in the world. Thank you. 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, whims 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 broads.