 The radical, fundamental principles of freedom, rational self-interest, and individual rights. This is The Iran Brookshow. Alright everybody, welcome to Iran Brookshow on this beautiful Sunday afternoon. At least here in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Hope everybody's having a fantastic weekend. My air conditioning is still out. It'll probably be out until tomorrow. Hopefully they'll fix it tomorrow. So it's hot in here. It's going to get hotter as the show progresses and as the sun moves from that side of the condo to my side of the condo and it warms this room up. I've got the door open. I've got the fan going. We will see but it's definitely hot in here. We got lucky. We got lucky because up until like two minutes ago there's a huge amount of noise coming from the outside. Basically the Puerto Rican gate pride parade just marched right by a condo right on the side of the condo where the studio is. The noise was just unbearable, playing music, all kinds of other stuff, yelling and so forth. So we got lucky because it just ended. On the dot, two o'clock ended. They must have had a thing. Iran has a show. Two o'clock. We got to pass this condo before two and they probably planned the whole parade just to make sure that that happened. Anyway, thank you to the gate pride parade for leaving. We've got a couple of interesting topics. I think today we're going to go deep into the homelessness issue. I think it's going to be interesting. Hopefully it's interesting for you guys. It was interesting for me to do a little bit of research I did on this. So yeah, so let's get started with homelessness. I'll remind everybody that Super Chat is available. Catherine is here to encourage it. Yesterday was a blow out day. Doesn't mean we don't have to make 600 today. So we still have the same goal we did yesterday. We'll see how the month progresses so far. Fantastic. And you can use the Super Chat feature. You can also use the Super Chat feature just to support the show. But questions are preferred because questions in live and everything give me lots of content. Give me lots of ideas for what to talk about. I see already two questions about homelessness. So we'll get to those before we get to the new topic. To that topic, which is just an update on like the opioid crisis. Let me just add, what did I want to add? Yeah, if you guys have ideas for clips that you... I realized the other day that I haven't like done one of these commentary videos on like somebody else's clip, somebody else's video. So if you guys any good clips from Taka Carson or from one of the leftist guys there, somebody's honking the hell out of the road out there. It's the parade is still going on I guess. But if you have any clips from anybody, by then, from one of the leftist commentators, from MSNBC, from wherever, from Lex Friedman, whatever you find, short, don't send me a three hour Lex Friedman show and say, hey, could you comment on this? Because as you know, every 15 seconds takes me five minutes of commentary. So just extrapolate what would take me to do a three hour Lex Friedman we'd be here at night and day. So yeah, send me clips for me to comment on. Action Jackson says Sam Harris and Ben Shapiro just did a segment to get a morality. That would be interesting. Yeah, if you send me that clip, I'm curious. And yeah, I'm curious about that and we'll see if it's not too long. Maybe I can, maybe I can comment on it. All right. Ryan says that I should do a show for my balcony. You know, the studio is always good though. Yeah, the problem with the balcony, particularly if this gives you pride, pride period, or particularly during the day like today, is there's a lot of noise out there and there's actually quite a bit of, quite a bit of wind. So you'd get quite a bit of wind noise on the balcony. So probably not an optimal place to do the show. Plus I'd have to use my laptop webcam and just not high quality. But maybe I still promised you I think a tour of the condo. Maybe we can do something like that. I have to figure out exactly how to do that. Hopefully we can give you a tour of the condo sometime. Because I think you'll like it and I think you'll be impressed. All right. So let's talk about homelessness. And obviously this is a big issue, a big issue out there in the world. You know, if you live somewhere like San Francisco, if you live in New York, if you live in Southern California, Los Angeles, but even if you live in Austin, Texas, last time was in Austin, Texas, under all the highway overpasses. There were 10 cities of homeless people. This problem is very visible. I remember when I lived in the Bay Area, this is in the 90s, homelessness in San Francisco was awful back then. They would harass you. They were very aggressive homeless. And it was just unpleasant. It was unpleasant to go to San Francisco. Particularly my wife used to go alone and it was particularly unpleasant for her. And you know, so I thought it was bad back in the 70s and it's like 10 times worse. Today I was in San Francisco a few years ago in the Tenderloin District, which is, you know, just two blocks away from Union Square. And God, you couldn't walk in the street. There were hundreds of them. Hundreds of homeless people just camped out in the street. So the homeless issue is, we'll get to how big it is in a minute, but it's obviously very, very big in a few key cities. It's interesting that you could go through a number of different states, and we'll talk about why this is, but a number of different states in the Union have very little homeless problems. The homeless problem is concentrated in California, in New York, in Texas, in Florida. And in those places, the homeless problem is almost always concentrated in big cities. And it tends to be concentrated in vibrant big cities like, you know, another place in the Northeast would be Boston. And, you know, a lot less in Chicago, but a little bit in Chicago, I think the weather there is just too damaging. So a number of questions about homelessness. Why is there such a big homeless problem? Why did it kind of show up in the 1980s, you know, as an issue, as a problem? And, you know, what are the origins of it? So why wasn't the homelessness in significant numbers before that? What are kind of the numbers and what's, where is the dominance? So it's interesting. I looked up the numbers and they're about, again, official stats. I don't know how they do this. I don't know if this reflects reality. You can get non-official statistics that are significantly higher than this. So I don't know, I have no expertise in this area. I don't know what to believe. We're going to use official stats here because that's the best I have. And I think there's a lot of also scam ongoing going on to try to beef up and make those stats look a lot worse. But official stats are somewhere around 580,000 homeless people in the United States. That is up over the last few years, but down from 2007 where there were over 600,000 homeless people. I saw one source that claimed there were like 2.5 million homeless people in 2008. I'm a little suspicious of that gap between 620, 630, and 2.0 million. Particularly when you think there's probably a political agenda driving some of those numbers. So what happened in the 1980s that created the homeless problem? And what can we learn from the causes in order to prescribe the solutions? And again, while homeless numbers have probably not gone up that much, certainly not over the last decade, decade and a half. I think what has gone up is their concentration in a few places like San Francisco and the tolerance of them. That is the willingness of cities to let them basically take over big swaths of the city, particularly the downtowns. So it's more the policy towards them and their concentration. You don't find homeless people, let's say, in Mississippi. Even though Mississippi is the poorest state in the Union, there are not a lot of homeless people in Mississippi and we'll talk about why that is. And generally, states like Mississippi, Alabama, states that have very high poverty rates don't have very high homeless rates. Partially this goes to the idea that homelessness is not fundamentally an issue of poverty. Poverty is necessary but is not sufficient in order to create homelessness. So what does create homelessness? And for this, as always, when we dig deep into this kind of topics, it's complicated. It's complicated. And to really get a handle on it and to make, I think, this interesting and to really understand what's going on and understand the complexity and understand what the solutions need to look like, we have to do a little bit of history and we have to go back in history and look at what's going on. But let's start with a fundamental problem. The fundamental problem is a mismatch of supply and demand. In this case, the supply and demand for cheap housing, for low-income housing, for housing that poor people can't afford. I was on a debate with Econ Boy yesterday and one of the claims that he made was if you look at the amount of income that poor people have after they get government transfers, after they get food stamps and vouchers and all the stuff that they get, there are very, very, very few people in the United States who are poor. I think he said 2.5% versus the official poverty number, which is 15%, but that is before transfer payments. Once you get transfer payments, there's almost nobody poor in the U.S. because they all get a significant amount of money from the government that puts them at above whatever the poverty level is. So I don't get that, Wonderfeeam, and I don't think that was true at all. But anyway, Wonderfeeam is commenting on the debate yesterday. I think the opposite is true. So, you know, if you look at poverty, people should have enough money to be able to pay rent. And yet, we have a massive mismatch because we don't have housing for people who are poor. And even poor people who do have housing today spend a disproportionate amount of their income on housing. And this is not just poor people. Just generally, I read somewhere that over 6 million people in the United States spend over 50% of their income, over 50% of their income on housing. That is on rent, so I guess mortgage, but primarily rent. That's absurd. And that lowers the standard of living, the quality of their life, the ability to consume other things, the ability to save. So we have in this country a significant mismatch between people's income and housing that matches that income. We have a supply demand problem, and the primary issue is supply. We just don't have supply of affordable housing, of low income housing, of housing people can actually afford. So, you know, in order to see that, in order to try to understand the problems in the housing market, we actually need to go back to the Great Depression. And, you know, the first thing that we realize when we go back to the Great Depression is that there is no free market in housing. Housing is heavily, heavily, heavily dominated by government policy. We'll talk initially about federal government policy and then about state and local city policy. But there is no, you know, the market will adjust. There is no free market in housing. The left would love us to believe that that is the case. The right doesn't want to really challenge it because they don't want to get rid of the real problems, the real government intervention in housing. To a large extent, the right is supportive of much of the government policy with regard to housing. But there is no free market. In the 1930s, a decision was made to support the construction and ultimately the purchase of housing by Americans. And a number of institutions were set up in order to facilitate that. You probably know of HUD, which guarantees mortgages, which provides mortgage insurance, and therefore lowers the cost of mortgages. I'm sure you're familiar with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Fannie Mae was established right after, right during the, you know, I think 1940. And Freddie Mac was established in the 1960s in order to again support the mortgage market and to make financing a home easier and cheaper so that people could move into homes. And indeed, home ownership in the United States grew from somewhere in I think the early 40s around 40-something percent to over 60 percent. And I think it peaked just before the financial crisis at 68 percent. It has now gone back down to what it was before the financial crisis, before all the housing programs of Bill Clinton and George Bush to about 63 percent. But you know, home ownership is in the 60s, which is a goal of government. It's the purpose of all these programs. You could add to that the fact that the only interest that individuals can deduct off of their taxes is interest on a mortgage. So the government is telling you that the one debt that they will reward you for in a sense by allowing you to keep more of your money is a mortgage. It's the only kind of debt that they value. It used to be that you could deduct other kinds of debt, other kind of interest on debt. But since I think 1986, a tax reform bill, you can only deduct your mortgage. So the government is giving preferential treatment to taking out a mortgage. You can deduct your rent from taxes, but you can deduct the interest on the mortgage, which is equivalent to a rent. So the government has significantly provided preferential treatment for home purchases. And of course, who are the biggest beneficiaries of these home purchases and the biggest beneficiaries of the deduction of interest on a mortgage? Well, the biggest beneficiaries are the middle class and the wealthy. So many, and we'll see that basically all housing policy that creates homelessness is driven by policies that are there to enhance the well-being of the middle class and the wealthy. You know, all done disguised by the idea that we're trying to take care of the poor. And you know, generally what the government does with a lot of these programs is it throws crumbs to the poor. But the real big government programs are always there for the middle class. They're not primarily there for the poor. Put on vote and the poor just are not top of mind of anybody. So what you had is all these government policies driving people to buy homes and making it cheaper and cheaper for people to buy homes are more and more incentivized, particularly for, again, the middle class. On top of that, starting in the 1950s with the, you know, building of the highway system, the United States interstate highway system, there was a huge push to develop areas outside of the cities. In other words, develop suburbia. And of course, the highway system, to a large extent, the highway system made suburbia possible. It's not clear that we would have suburbs in the way in which they developed, if not for the interstate highway system. So we had a highway system that basically made it easy to commute in and out of the cities, allow people to work on the outskirts, but also move jobs into the outskirts, moved a lot of the middle class, higher paying jobs out into the outskirts, and left in the cities primarily manufacturing jobs and the workers who worked in those manufacturing jobs. And part of the idea here and part of the reason why you didn't have homelessness in the 50s, 60s, even in the 70s is because as middle class people, wealthier people were leaving the inner city, they were selling their properties in the inner city, they were moving to the suburbs, they were buying homes in the suburbs. The prices of inner city properties dropped precipitously and poor people could afford to buy those places. Maybe they couldn't buy them, they could rent them, maybe landlords could buy them up and rent them to low income, maybe landlords could buy them up and turn them into these kind of rooms that poor people would rent, particularly single men would rent and pay daily, which got them off the street and provided them with a place to live. So for a long period of time, the inner cities, while not very pleasant for many of us to go to, not pleasant certainly for us to live in, the inner cities were places in which people living on low wages could live. They were filled with crime and again they weren't particularly pleasant, but they provided a roof, they provided community, they provided a home for people. And at all different levels, there were some fairly nice, fairly large homes that middle class and again upper income people had left and sold for very cheap to go to the suburbs that now could be turned into nice homes for families, low income families. But then there were also these like kind of hotel, flop houses, whatever you want to call them, where people could go and just rent a room for a while as they got themselves on their feet. So there were a lot of different options and housing was cheap. The government did build some low income housing started in the 30s, starting in the 30s there was such a thing as public housing and they did build, if you remember, in New York and Chicago and a lot of our cities, they were these massive communist looking apartment buildings with tiny little apartments, ugly, massive, huge buildings. You can still see a little bit of that in kind of the east side of New York, lower east side of Manhattan, but a lot of those buildings, we'll talk about it, have gone. But massive complexes of public housing were built and again were very affordable and people could live there. So you had government owned public housing, but you had private housing that was cheap. It was very cheap all over the inner cities and this was really the situation. So even when people talk a lot about the reform to the mental health system, they took a lot of mental health people out and they left the institutions and into the streets. Well, it turned out that those really started in the 60s and 70s and yet there was very little homelessness in the 60s and 70s. Homelessness is really a phenomena of the 80s and the real question is what happened? What happened? One of the things that happened in the 50s, 50s, 60s, particularly after the World War, but all through the creation of the suburbs, is that the United States produced more housing units, more new housing units than new household formation. So there was a boom in building. There was massive quantities of houses being constructed. Supply matched demand and this trickle down effect where the middle class and the wealthy moved out of the cities created large supplies of housing for lower income people in the heart of the cities. So that's a situation going into the 1980s. Overall, a situation where there's plenty of supply. People in the middle class and the wealthy and the suburbs are poor in the center cities, but they have homes. So there is no real issue of homelessness. But what happens in the late 1970s, early 1980s? People start, middle class people start moving back into the cities. You start getting a phenomena of the U.S. economy shifting, shifting towards service jobs, service jobs that tend to be in the center cities. A lot of cities decide to knock down their public housing complexes in order to build office buildings, in order to build fancier condominium buildings. Partially because these massive public housing buildings are riddled with crime and drugs and all kinds of other problems. And the easiest way is to just get rid of them, rather solve problems, just get rid of the houses. And they knock down these buildings, you know, good riddance, they were ugly and horrible. But they create a problem. Where do these people go? At the same time, you know, so you're knocking down these buildings, you're building new skyscrapers inside the city centers. You, you know, now people have an incentive, particularly young people, to move back into the center city. So neighborhoods are being gentrified. And the thing about gentrification is they're not being gentrified because as a market phenomena, a lot of the gentrification is subsidized by government. So people are getting and developers are getting all kinds of tax credits and all kinds of tax breaks and all kinds of subsidies to go into the cities and start buying up some of these falling apart buildings and turn them into nice buildings that now raise the cost. Put people again kicked out. Where do they go? At about the same time, building codes start shifting. So cities like New York, cities like San Francisco will get to San Francisco is unique, but it's even worse. But building codes across the country start shifting. Whereas it's in a sense illegal to build low income housing. Houses have to have so many bathrooms per bedrooms. They can't be smaller than a certain size of a, you know, certain size, a certain square foot. You know, buildings have to be apartments have to be of high building quality. You know, again, of high to adapt to accommodate a relatively high standard of living quality of life. Not really suited for people for people who don't have a lot of money. So what happens is that the cost of building goes up because the building goes up not because materials have gone up, not because contractors are making more money, but because the code, the building codes as written by the regulators, as written by cities and counties now raise the cost of building the building. So the cost of the apartments is now more expensive. And all those people who were kicked out of the public housing, all those people who are being gentrified out of their neighborhoods and while the owners of those buildings might make money because as the gentrification is coming, house prices are going up and some people are benefiting from that. But those are the owners, but the residents who are paying rent are not benefiting from it. They're being kicked out. There's no alternative housing for them because the cost of housing at the lowest end is higher than what it used to be. Much higher than what it used to be. Not because the market can supply low income housing, but because government won't allow people to build low income housing. Again, all the standards by which housing need to be built have been raised dramatically. So housing becomes more and more and more expensive, particularly in the cities, particularly in cities that are gentrifying, particularly in cities that have robust building codes, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles. Of course, one of the reasons you don't get homelessness in Mississippi is because the cost of housing is low because they can still afford the homes there because, you know, even if the scent of the city might be gentrifying, you can live outside of the city. You can live in trailer parks. You can live in all kinds of different places where the cost of housing is still really, really, really cheap. But you can't do that in Boston, which is, you know, demolishing whole neighborhoods and building skyscrapers, primarily offices and destroying apartments, and then really high price condos, and there's just no building going on that is low income building. It just doesn't exist. And then, of course, you get a city like San Francisco that won't allow building high, won't allow tall buildings, and won't literally won't allow low income buildings for the reasons I said before. And of course, what does that do? That raises the value of the homes of people in San Francisco. It raises the value of the homes in people in LA. It raises the value of the homes in people in New York. It raises the value of the home of the people who are gentrifying. And again, it makes it, it provides massive rewards to the middle class and to the wealthy who are benefiting from rising home prices. They make sure to vote to make sure that the housing codes don't change, that the housing codes are so stringent that only expensive houses can be built so that their house constantly goes up in value. So, you know, this mechanism continues and continues and continues. And some of what has happened is that you do get some low income housing at the periphery of the cities. You see this in some parts of Chicago, outside of downtown. Downtown is way too expensive for anybody in poverty. But even there, housing is still expensive because of building codes and everything else. And there's not enough of it. Because one of the things that's happened over the last 40 years, since 1980, is that we don't build enough. We don't build enough by far. There is a massive shortage of housing units in the United States. And of course, again, some people benefit from that. People already own their home because that's what drives prices up. It's shortages. And the shortage is there because land is not being freed up by zoning committees. The shortage is there because of immigration constraints that don't allow bringing in enough construction workers. We just have a shortage in construction workers in the U.S. And particularly when you clamp down on illegal immigration, building homes becomes much more difficult. You just don't have the labor. And it's not even a price. You can't find the labor. I mean, look at the labor shortage that exists in the United States today. They're what, they're 10 million open positions, 11 million open positions that can't be filled. Many of those in the construction industry. And they could be filled if we allowed for immigration, but we don't. So Michael says, I don't see many homeless people in big cities like Florida, Miami, and West Palm Beach. Right. Because some places are very good at exporting their homeless people elsewhere. But it's just as true that if you look at the actual numbers, Florida has a high level of homelessness for exactly the reasons I've described. Florida has become in many parts of it too expensive for people to live in. And they export their homelessness out because they're tough on the homeless. So yes, you can adopt a tough on homeless strategy, which I think you should, to clear out the pavements, to clear out the encampments, to move them out. And they just move somewhere else. Florida in particular has done that effectively, but Florida has a large number of homeless. I haven't looked deeply into which parts of Florida where they camp out, but they exist. They're there. You know, California I think has the most homeless. California, York by far have the most. But basically every, but Texas has and so does Florida. You don't see homeless people in Dallas, but you see them in Austin because they think Dallas exports them to Austin. Dallas is tough on them. Austin is not. They all go to Austin. But you still have significant numbers of homelessness in Texas. You have them anywhere where you have a thriving, gentrifying city. Austin has particularly gentrified. I'm not against gentrification. I'm against government subsidizing gentrification. I'm against the building codes that make it impossible to build low income housing. I'm against the government subsidizing the housing for the middle class by providing them with insurance and mortgage, by providing them with repackaged mortgages through FETI, MAC, and Fannie Mae, and by providing an interest deduction on mortgages. I'd like to see everybody's taxes cut and all deductions taken away. Daisy mentions Giuliani. I mean Giuliani basically what happened in New York, but this is true in San Francisco. This is true in LA. This is certainly in LA. This is true in Boston. Is there all sections of New York which had poor people living in them? Not just Harlem, but even part of what today is Midtown. There were what are called flop houses. They were these short-term hotels. There were very unpleasant areas in New York to Dubai. Basically what these cities did is they made those things illegal. They demolished them. They destroyed them. Famously, and I read this in an article written in 1989, so this has nothing to do with Trump as president. But the Trump Tower, the Trump Tower that was built I think on Madison Avenue, used to be this kind of, the whole block was kind of seedy and an area where, you know, poor people lived and a lot of kind of one bedroom or one room apartments and rented and they basically knocked it down and built a Trump Tower and Trump got a huge city from Giuliani, a huge subsidy to build that tower as the developers all over the place. See, yes, New York was cleaned up, but it's cleaned up by fascist methods. It was cleaned up by making it illegal, by taking property away from people, making it illegal for certain businesses and certain types of homes to be built by what's called abatement, you know, and by changing city zoning rules. It started before Giuliani. It started in the late 1970s. And yeah, New York is clean. Fascists do a very good job at cleaning up a city. No question about that. But what you get is homelessness. What you get are people who used to live in homes, used to be able to afford to live in homes and now cannot. And, you know, for a while, I think New York did a good job pushing the homeless problem outside of the city. In more recent time, the homeless problem has come back into the city. You know, but it is New York that's created a huge part of the homeless problem, a huge part of the homeless problem. You know, government subsidies is not a market. You know, I don't support subsidies for business. I don't support subsidies for builders. I don't support subsidies for cleaning up a city. I don't support subsidies for Trump. I don't support subsidies for anybody. And I don't support evicting people because the mayor doesn't like the business you're in. I don't support evicting people because he doesn't like the amount of money you make. I don't support changing the rules because you want to clean it up. It's fascism. And yeah, I get it that fascism works in narrow sense, but there are prices to pay. And yes, it's true. We all get to enjoy clean, nice, friendly New York. And we don't care and we don't look at the evils that happen elsewhere. All right, so this is where homelessness came from. Disney did not get a similar deal in Florida. Disney did not evict existing tenants. There was nobody there. The land was vacant. Disney was granted lots of different advantages in terms of taxes, in terms of controlling their own fate. But Disney did not evict other people. The government didn't evict people from their property. It didn't take their property in order to allow Disney to build there. Disney bought a huge track of property, as far as I can understand. And to the extent that the state evicted people, to the extent that the state took people's property in order to give it to Disney, that's wrong. But as far as I know, Disney World was a swamp and Disney developed it. The Trump Tower was not built in a swamp. The Trump Tower. And not just Trump. Much of developed New York was used the state, used government, to take property from some and give it to others. And that's wrong. I don't understand why we accept statism when we benefit from it and we reject statism when we don't. That's how you get more and more and more statism. So homelessness is a phenomenon of housing policy. Homelessness is a phenomenon of government, preferential treatment of high-end housing, middle-class housing, and actively subsidizing and promoting it. Colt says they evicted swamp creatures in Florida. Homelessness is a phenomenon of basically the government outlawing making it impossible low-income housing and basically taking half a million Americans and making it impossible for them to find housing. And then, you know, you layer on giving them free housing, which incentivizes people to stop paying their rent and become homeless because they get free housing, giving them all kinds of other goods and you add on to that drugs and you add on to that mental health and you get the kind of situation you have, but it used to be that even people with mental health problems, even people who took drugs, had housing. It's only in the modern world, it's only in the last 40 years that they could not find housing because it wasn't cheap enough and that they couldn't find housing in the major cities. They could still find it, again, in the countryside, in the countryside, in places like Mississippi, in places like that. All right. The second aspect of this is that certain cities tolerate homelessness and I think that's a different issue. It's not the cause. What the toleration allows is for the concentration of homelessness in particular areas, in particular places and just the generosity that that has led to, and again, is tolerated and you see that in San Francisco, you see that particularly in San Francisco and LA and I think you see that in parts of New York. That is not a cause. That is once you have the homeless problem, how do you deal with the people who are homeless and by tolerating their behavior, by tolerating 10 cities, by letting them just sleep anyway, by letting them congregate, you facilitate the worst kind of behaviors and that's what we're seeing in many of these cities. All right. Let's see. What is the solution? The solution is easy. The solution is simple. It's not quick, but it is simple. The solution is to stop restricting low income housing. The solution is to get rid of zoning or to get rid of the type of zoning that we're talking about. The solution is to get rid of the building codes that make it impossible to build low income housing. The solution is to allow high rises to be built in San Francisco. The solution is for the government to step away from intervening in the way housing is built. The solution is to shut down Fetimac, Fannie Mae, HUD. The solution is to get government out of housing. It's to do away with not in my backyard policies in city after city after city. Well, the way you would get rid of not in my backyard is by taking away the power of cities to control building codes into zone. If they can't zone, there's nothing for me to lobby. People will use their property as they see fit and they want to build something that their neighbors don't like, tough. I'll give you one more example. In much of California, at the local level, they have, again, zoning laws that make it impossible to build more than a house on a particular acreage. So you have very, very, very low density of housing. Very, very low density of housing, which again makes it impossible to solve this problem. You have to do away with it. California actually recently passed a law that says that local communities cannot or must not, I think cannot have as low of a density as they propose and forcing them to have higher density or at least to make possible higher density. It's the government shouldn't force one density or the other. Just get out of the business of it. As usual, free markets are actually the solution to all our problems and free markets are certainly the solution to the homelessness problem. It's to basically eliminate the barriers for developers to build low-income housing that poor people can afford. There's a market there. And it might be that initially, in order to compensate for the evil that is being done by government policy, you would have to, once you eliminated all these other government subsidies, you might have to subsidize this a little bit just to get it started, but then get out of the business and stay out of it. All right. Let's take some questions that are related to homelessness specifically. Okay, Dave says, I've been waiting almost a year for my Bronx Tale review. Sorry. I forgot about it, so now I have it down. I will get it to you. Secondly, I don't think the rise in homelessness everywhere is accidental. There is an element of throwing degeneracy in people's faces to break their spirit and sense of life. I actually don't think that's right. I don't think. I mean, if you go back and look at the history of homelessness when it started, I don't think that has anything to do with it. I think it's just a shortage of housing. I think it's the fact that people won't, you know, again, everything I said that people won't build low-income housing. They won't support low-income housing, not in my backyard. All of the features like that, I really don't think it's purposefully done because they want to show the degeneracy. Let's see. Michael says, do you think most homeless people are homeless because they're not virtuous? No. I mean, certainly, virtue is relevant for some people. They're not productive. They're not rational. They're not trying. And certainly, that's true of many poor people. I don't think it's true of all poor people. I think some poor people, we live in such a mixed economy where the market is not allowed to work properly, so we don't have the right kind of jobs. We don't have the right, as I just said, we don't have the right kind of housing. We don't have the right kind of education. So we live in a society that causes a lot of harm to a lot of people. And I think some of people are poor of no moral fault of their own. So I don't blame them for the fact that they are homeless. Liam says, being homeless is such an inhumane, unacceptable state. That's why people want to end it so badly. I'm not sure that urge is necessarily immoral or altruistic. No, I think that ending homelessness is something we do desire for rational reasons. We don't want to see people suffering the way they're suffering. And we don't want to see it happen artificially, which is what's happening. Homelessness is, again, a phenomena of government controls. It's a phenomena of government control over housing. It is not necessary. It doesn't have to happen. And Bonnie says, what happened to vagrancy laws and private charity? Well, they went out as soon as the government got more and more and more involved in regulating, controlling every aspect of our lives, including our homes and how people behaved in public. So vagrancy laws went out because there were much bigger considerations, right? And altruism dictating that we can't punish people for the fact that they're homeless. And of course, private charity went out because it was crowded out by welfare. And welfare distorts incentives. Welfare is not the best way to help poor people. The best way to help poor people is by jobs and private charity. Private charity that provides incentives for people to find jobs. But people also have to know that if they get a job, they'll be able to afford a house and not just a home. And they'll be able to live somewhere. And so solving this problem of housing is crucial. It's solving people's attitudes towards work and towards jobs and towards poverty more broadly. It's crucial that we solve the problem of homelessness. But housing more broadly because I don't think it's right. The six million households in the United States spent over 50% of their income on housing. That just seems wrong. And it's not a market solution. I don't think the market would result in that. So it's a tragedy that people's standard of living is so low as a consequence of that. James Taylor asks, is there more homelessness in France than Scandinavia because the French and ill-tempered people or because they are less homogeneous society? I suspect it's neither one of those. I suspect that it has to do with the fact that there's less. In spite of the same level of social spending, there is less, for a variety of reasons, less inequality. In Scandinavia, there isn't France. So you still get a vast poverty in France? Oh, I didn't start. So I think that this issue of Scandinavia versus France, I think Scandinavians are... There is less poverty in Scandinavia, partially because of what do you call it, of the welfare state that's more efficient in Scandinavia than it is in France. Partially because Scandinavia has done a better job integrating its immigrants, although not so much recently than France has. France has done an awful job integrating its immigrants and they first created massive poverty and homelessness among its immigrant population. I think it does have to do with homogeneity of society. But I don't even know the numbers. I mean, I'm saying there's more homeless. And partially it's the weather. I mean, it's much, much easier to be homeless in France than it is to be homeless in Scandinavia. If you're homeless in Scandinavia, you leave Scandinavia, you walk away. But I don't have the numbers in terms of Scandinavia and France and how bad it is. I mean, all I was saying in terms of France is what I observed being there. But I don't think that's particularly scientific. Oops, I didn't mean to do that. Okay, Michael asks, God, what am I doing? I'm pressing the wrong numbers. Michael asks, do Western European nations hide homeless people better by forcing them into shelters and off the streets just so they can claim welfareism works? No, I think what works in many of these countries is low income housing. I think they're much more comfortable in having just huge housing projects which facilitate poor people. So if you think about Paris, the center of Paris is very expensive and very beautiful and very clean and very amazing. And the outskirts, the suburbs of Paris are filled with these massive, ugly, huge neighborhoods of low income housing. Where all the immigrants live and where all... So the way Europe has, quote, solved the homeless problem or never created the homeless problem is they never made low income housing so expensive as we did in the United States. I mean the United States has some of the most perverted, distorted regulations and laws of any country that distort supply and demand in ways that don't happen in states that even just nationalize these kind of things. So, you know, it's that they have dealt with it by building massive low income housing. I think the state built it for a logic stand and the U.S. state doesn't build it and the private sector is not allowed to build it. So there's no solution. So we get homelessness where Western Europe doesn't get homelessness because they have sold it through low income housing. We could have low income housing as well. But we choose not to. All right. Well, a lot of questions on this. Let me see if there are any $20 and above. Adam Campbell for $20. In a free society... Let me just... I have to press all these buttons. In a free society, how is the issue of dealing with the homeless that are mentally ill handled? Non-profits, I assume, has the closing of state mental hospitals contributed to the issue. I don't know if the closing of state mental institutions has contributed to the issues. From what I read, that started in the 60s and 70s and yet homelessness is of 80s phenomena. This is a lot has to do with housing and a lot of it has to do with the decline in private charity relative to state welfare programs. And I think that how is this handled in a free society? It's handled by having cheap housing and it's handled by basically by private charity. You know, I think that homeless people, very, very poor people who are mentally ill would not be allowed to just start 10 cities because it's private property. They would not be allowed to just camp out in the street because the pavements would be private pavements. You couldn't just take a pavement and make it yours and just start living on it. So I think a lot of the issues that exist today would be eliminated through private property. And then the question is where would the homeless people go? They would either go to unclaimed areas outside of the cities or private charities would take care of them. And I think at the end of the day, private charities would pick up the slack and take care of them. I have no doubt that there would be enough of these private charities and they would do a much better job than what's being done today. John says, one of the criticisms they hear of capitalism is that it is based on immoral theft, the enclosure of the common land that forced people off the land at gunpoint. What is the proper rebuttal to this argument? There is no such thing as common land. There was unused land, which was not owned by anybody. It wasn't common. It was not owned by anybody. And it was taken by the people who actually use it. You know, part of the problem that we have with housing is there's too much so-called common land. 75% of all the land, western Mississippi, is owned by the state. And if it was owned by private individuals, then there would be much more land available to build. There would be much more imagination. There would be much more entrepreneurship in terms of how to use the land. Right now, that land, much of it is stagnant because the government owns it and doesn't use it, doesn't do anything with it. So, privatized land is one great way to deal with homelessness. Justin Kandel has a quote in the name of the best within you. This is from Gold Speech, I believe. Do not sacrifice this world to those who are its worst. Do not lose your knowledge that man's proper state is upright posture and entranced mind and step that travels unlimited roads. Yes, I mean, but you know, what we need is to reject the attitude that says that homelessness is inevitable, that this is a state of man, that this is how it is. You know, we must strive to be the best that we can. But we must undo all the laws, the distortions, the government interventions, the controls that put up barriers for other human beings to be able to become the best versions of themselves. I mean, think about the children that are born in homeless situations and the tragedy that involves them. And yes, we all have free will and they can succeed in spite of that, but it damn is much harder. And it's unnecessary and it's caused by the state. All right, Dragon North 2009. According to the National Association of Home Builders Study in 2021, developing a home value to $397,300. It was $93,870. Okay, so of the $397,300, $93,000, right? So a quarter of the cost, 25% of the cost was government regulations. Yeah, 25% of the cost is government regulations, but this is the thing. That's all true. So 25% is just government regulations. Then there's a certain type of home that you just cannot build. It's just illegal to build it. It's, quote, unsafe or unsanitary or inappropriate for human consumption or whatever it is. You just can't build $100,000 home or whatever the number is. I don't know what the number is. Suddenly not multifamily residences. There is a threshold under which you just can't build it because of the standards by which they hold you in terms of the kind of building that you have to build. All right. Let's see. Jacob says downtown St. Louis seems to be dying due to homelessness. COVID and the working from home lifestyle. Rest in peace to my recently bought condo valuation. Sorry to hear that, Jacob. But yes, I think that's going to happen to quite a few cities unless they find some reason to get people to come to those center cities. Whoops. Michael says, oh, we talked about this. I don't see many homeless people in big cities like Florida, like Miami and West Palm Beach. Again, the reason is, A, there's a lot more cheap housing in those areas. But B, there is homelessness in Florida. I don't know where it is, but it ranks as one of the states with the highest number of homeless. Miami, because they won't tolerate homeless people, has exported it elsewhere. Colt Savage says they evicted the swamp creatures in Florida. Yep, they did. All right. Thank you, Jacob. Michael says, yeah, a lot of red states can't afford to play these socialist games the way rich blue states can. If Mississippi had housing regulations like California have the state would be living on the streets. Yeah, Michael. The fact is, red states cannot afford to play these socialist games, and therefore they don't have these socialist requirements. They don't have building regulations, and therefore it's much cheaper and easier to live in Mississippi than it is in California. Well, let's see, Jason writes, the fight for affordable housing will be a legal one, like Airbnb and Uber had, but on steroids. It'll be a brave billionaire understanding the legal and lobbying challenges is America's best bet. Yeah, I mean, it will have to be some committed people fighting for freedom in housing that I'll bring it about, because politicians are not going to begin about by themselves. The political incentives are not there. I mean, it will have to be a part of a free market revolution more broadly. I don't think it's going to happen by itself. Whoops. All right, let's see. Harper Campbell is welfare there to keep meritless people out of our way. We basically created an underclass of unemployable people with hygiene and temperament issues. If you cut them off, I doubt they would get jobs. If you cut them off, they would end up committing crimes, and we would have to pay for them to sit in jails, so it may be cheaper to throw them a bone and chew on. I don't believe anyone has the potential, everyone has the potential to be useful. I don't agree. And the problem, of course, with what you're suggesting is that, whoops, let me start that again. So these are two Harper Campbell questions that involve the welfare state. And I don't agree with you that A, they wouldn't find jobs. I think they could and they would. There are plenty of jobs they could and would do. B, the challenge is what happens to their kids. Their children suddenly could find jobs. But once you give their parents welfare and once you institutionalize a mentality of entitlement, you are making their kids the victims of the welfare state as well. So no, I don't think that it is right to say we should have a welfare state just so they don't bug me. Partially because you're taking my money without asking, and I don't want it to be spent on that. And second, because you're destroying millions of people. You're destroying their lives. You're destroying the future of young people and many children. All right. Jeffrey, the restaurant has been too busy for me to watch you live. I owe you money. Thank you for the $50. And for my alhofer Jersey ghost Celtics, absolutely. All right. Richard, why hasn't Section 8 housing solved the homeless problem? We have a lot of, we have a lot in California. I'll have to look into that. I read a little bit about it. There's definitely not enough of it. And it's not, it's just not a substitute for actually having housing that people can't afford. And Section 8, again, it kind of gives people money to find housing, but there's just not enough of it. It's just not, particularly in California, it's just not enough low income housing, houses, buildings. And again, a lot of the problem is you can't build those houses, even if you wanted to. You just can't build them because the building goes as such that make the house too expensive. Ashton with $50, do you think depression is a major cause for rising homeless rate? The homeless rate has not risen. I said this at the beginning of, whoops, I said this at the beginning of the show. The homeless rate has now risen. It's fairly flat. It's been flat for the last 12 years. It's concentrated in certain areas, but it's not going up. And no, I don't think depression is a major cause of it, although mental health is. And you could argue depression is part of that. And mental health will have to devote a different show to mental health. That's a whole other bag of issues and problems that affect the mental health of people. And why we have so many people who have depression, who have mental health issues, those are great questions. We'll have to get to them in a future show. All right. I've got one more question, but before that, let me do the second topic quickly. I won't devote a lot of time to this, but I want to say something about the opioid death, the opioid crisis, the opioid epidemic, however you want to call it. Opio deaths, deaths from opioids and deaths from drugs generally over those of drugs in 2021 was a record year. They flattened out 18 and 19 and then 20 and 21 were up significantly in 21 being up dramatically. You know, so in spite of the fact, you know, a lot of people blamed the opioid epidemic on drug companies. And in spite of the fact that we've clamped down on drug companies, the opioid epidemic continues. A lot of this was blamed on particularly medical practices and particular doctors. Some doctors were sued and taken to courts and suffered a lot. In spite of that, the opioid epidemic continues in spite of the fact that everybody now knows that morphine is addictive. And be careful when you take these painkiller drugs that you could get addicted. In spite of that, we still have an opioid epidemic as fentanyl is the drug of choice these days. But the whole idea was people were taking this drug because they start on painkillers and then they get addicted. Well, everybody knows now. It's been in the news forever now. You can't claim ignorance, not as a doctor, not as a patient, not as a consumer. Everybody knows that these are the results and yet people are dying. And people are dying at growing and growing numbers of people, right? So, you know, the question is really why? Given that we've penalized the drug companies, given that we penalized doctors, we've changed procedures for distributing painkillers, why is this becoming a bigger and bigger and bigger issue? Why are people taking more and more and more fentanyl? And they're mixing it up now with methamphetamines and cocaine so that total drug deaths are up. But, you know, fentanyl is mixed in with all these other drugs, so fentanyl is behind a lot of these deaths. What is actually going on here? Why is the opioid crisis continuing? It's when we've already penalized the villains. And I know a lot of you don't want to hear this. I've got a lot of pushback on this, but I'm going to say it anyway. Because I don't think the villains, I don't think the problem was ever the drug companies. I don't think the problem is drug companies. I don't think the problem for the most part was doctors. I don't think the problem for the most part. I mean, there are problems in the medical system associated with the FDA and associated with drugs and different painkillers and what painkillers are being prescribed and all of that. But I don't think that's a basic problem. The fundamental problem is the users. The fundamental problem is that people want to escape reality. The fundamental problem is a moral problem. It's a lifestyle problem. It's a well-being problem. I think that's the fundamental problem that we have in America. It's a problem of a vast number of... And by the way, the opioid epidemic strikes in rural areas primarily. It's 25 to 55-year-olds primarily. It's white males. It's males primarily. It's people that have given up on life in some way or another primarily. Again, not to say that they're not some people who get addicted innocently. But to a large extent, this is a phenomenon of people using these drugs to escape reality. Using these drugs in order to escape the alienation they feel from the world around them. Using these drugs to escape poverty, to escape hardship, to escape the fact that the mixed economy and the mixed moral messages have basically made them feel alienated from their own life. They have no self-esteem. They have no confidence in their ability to get a job and to have a fulfilling job and to enjoy their job. They are basically detached from their ability to gain self-esteem. They're detached from their ability to have any self-respect. And as a consequence, they are depressed. This is related to the depression epidemic in this country where people don't find meaning in life. And this is ultimately related to, I think, a lot of the violence that we see in our society. People don't have meaning in their life. And it's partially related to education, but not only related to education. It's related to the lack of values and the lack of ability of our world to provide people and to teach people appropriate values. It's the bankruptcy of modern philosophy. It's the bankruptcy of modern religion. It's the bankruptcy of the modern world. And we're seeing that in homelessness. We're seeing that in drug use. We're seeing that in depression. We're seeing that generally in the rise of mental illness. You're seeing that in school shootings. You're seeing that in just general shootings. You're seeing that in the, you know, tribalism that is inflicting the world in which we live. Altruism, we're seeing the consequence of altruism. We're seeing the consequence of mysticism. We're seeing the consequence of a mixed economy. The consequence of nothingness, subjectivism mixed in. Mixed in with everything else. The meaninglessness of life that is taught by modern philosophy. You know, what modern philosophy anyway from the postmodernist to really everybody. Who is out there advocating for values, for philosophically, for finding values, for living a good life, for taking your life seriously, for figuring it all out. You know, the lockdowns, you know, made people, it's interesting. Suicide, regular suicide, not overdose-related suicide. Regular suicide was weighed down during the lockdowns. Partially because people don't commit suicide when they're locked down with their family. But depression was weighed up during lockdowns. Lockdowns helped, but I wouldn't be surprised if 2020 continued the trend. But I think it's a lack of meaning. It's the lack of meaning in people's lives. And the inability to find meaning in themselves. And the inability to use a reason to find meaning. And the fact that our leaders, our intellectual leaders are teaching us nothingness. It's why people like Jordan Peterson were so popular. Because they try to give people a sense of meaning. They try to give them a sense of hope. They try to give them structure to their life. And I think people are looking for that because they have none. Our culture doesn't give it to them. Our educational system doesn't give it to them. Parents don't give it to the kids anymore. This is a world completely driven by emotion. A world driven by subjectivism and, you know, where nobody teaches. The importance of figuring out how to live and how to live well. So, just wanted to, I mean, I really do think that we have, you know, and, you know, by the way, this is all linked, of course, to, in a deep sense, in a deeper sense, the personal responsibility, the responsibility to live your life well. The personal responsibility to make your life the best life that it can be. That attitude, that perspective, that way of thinking about the world. Whoops, I think that's wrong. Just doesn't exist out there. We have, because of the welfare state, and because of, you know, our expectations and, you know, because of populist rhetoric, we have promised people the moon, that the state will provide, that the world provide, and people are going, where's my job? Where's my highest standard of living? Where's my quality of life? You promised me. All right. We've got three questions left. And before we get to that, I'll just remind you that we've got 148 people watching live. Please like the show before you leave. Please give it a thumbs up. If you like it, if you think it's a value, that helps the algorithm. Helps the algorithm promote the show. It's what YouTube looks at. One of the many things that YouTube looks at in terms of helping the show grow. So please click that like button. Doesn't cost you anything. It's really, really easy to do. What does cost you is supporting the show. So please, we're $120 short of our goal for the day, which is $600. So please consider supporting the show by using the Super Chat feature in YouTube. You can do that now. Again, $120 short. It's not a lot. We should be able to make that up. But I only have three questions to answer. So that'll pass very, very quickly. We've raised $480. So that's fantastic. But $600 is the number that we try to attain. So please get there. And of course, you can support the show monthly at www.ruonbookshow.com. Support Patreon and subscribe stars. So please consider doing that. All right. So let's go to Ashton's question. Ashton says, obviously our rights, given in the United States Constitution, are imperative to our happiness. But I think checks and balances on our branches in government are even more important because they prevent the centralization of power from falling into one institution. All right. I think there's quite a few wrong in that. So let me start by saying, our rights are not given to us in the United States Constitution. Our rights are recognized in their Constitution. Our rights are given to us as a condition for being in society. Our rights in a sense are not given to us by anything. Our rights are our rights. They are the appropriate way for human being to live in society. Nobody gives them to you, not God, not nature, not a Constitution. All the Constitution does is recognize them, identify them, and commit the government to protecting them. And let me be clear, there is nothing more important than the recognition that the role of government is to protect our rights. Because it is that recognition, the recognition of the importance of the government to protect our rights, is that what leads the founders and what leads any founders to create checks and balances between branches of government, to create multiple branches of government and create checks and balances between them. Because the founders recognize that if they didn't do that, the problem is not centralization of power, the problem is that without checks and balances, rights would be violated. The reason to decentralize, but it's not decentralize, it's literally checks and balances. The Supreme Court can say, that law violates people's rights, therefore we wipe it out. The executive can say, I am sworn oath to the Constitution, this law violates the Constitution, I'm going to veto it. Congress can say, executive, we're not going to pass the laws you want, because the laws you want, are violations of the individual rights, so we're not going to pass them. So the checks and balances are there to give us as much protection as possible from the government violating our rights. But it all returns to rights. Rights are the central concept of government. Rights are what it's all about. The whole point of government, and structuring it the way it is, and listing the rights and the bill of rights, the whole point of it is that the sole job of government is the protection of individual rights. So, Ashton, hopefully that provides an answer to the question. Thank you, Khmet Tijer. Thank you, Khmet Tijer, I appreciate the support for the show. The show showed $115. You've got four minutes or so to provide value for value so we can get to that number. If not, we still did pretty well today. Andy, have you read Bradley Thompson's take on progressive education and school shootings? I haven't read the latest version. There's three articles. I've read previous versions of it. I actually had Bradley, you can find it on the Iran Book Show. Bradley, on the show in the past. I can't remember if it was Parkland or one of the other school shootings to discuss his views on how progressive education causes his responsible school shooting. I generally agree with him on his views. I think there's more going on, but I think it's certainly an aspect of it, an important aspect of it, a crucial aspect of it. I think government schools are incredibly destructive. I think progressive education is a destroyer of the mind, a destroyer of morality, a destroyer of self-esteem, and therefore it creates the kind of nihilism that brings about school shootings and brings about other shootings. It's not just school shootings. I mean, right now when I look at Google News and look at Apple News, all I see is shooting here, shooting here, shooting here. Now I don't know if that's because there's a huge spike in shooting in the last few days or if it's top of mind. So that's what the reporters are telling us about right now. It's hard for me to tell, but it's still a little spooky that there's just shooting, shooting, shooting, shooting. So, yeah. Alright, Colt says, they can push back all they want, but you're right. I live in a rural area. I've been around a lot of drug abuse, and what you're saying is the simple truth. I think another reason for this is pessimism. Yeah, but pessimism is of course a consequence of the fact that they look around at a world. Again, I didn't press this. I need to get used to pressing the right button because you'll see we're going to have time stamps on all the shows from now on. So I'll actually be publishing time stamps of every question and every answer, exactly the time and every topic that I cover and the time for that topic. But I'm not getting it quite right because I'm a little, I still have to click on buttons. So we're getting there, but a big improvement on, I'll be posting in our time stamps underneath in the description of all of my shows. Again, an ongoing improvement to the amazing app that I have that calculates the Super Chat also is now doing time stamps. Anyway, so Colt, yes, but pessimism, so you're saying another reason is pessimism. Pessimism is the same reason. Why are they pessimistic? They're pessimistic because they don't like their job. They don't like their life. They haven't been taught values. They don't know what they're living for. They don't know what the purpose of their life is. They don't have any meaning. They don't have anything, right? So it is the same cause. It is the same cause. This is relating to the drug abuse. So time stamps will be because I do Super Chat all over. The time stamps will be main topic, Super Chats by question, another main topic like today, Super Chat. So if I remember to click on the button when I'm supposed to click on the buttons, it'll be beautiful. I just have to get in that habit. I also wonder if we're going to bump into a, just because of the Super Chat questions along into a limit on the number of characters I can put into the description of the show. So that's something we're going to have to watch as well. So anyway, we'll see today if this works. All right. Frank says, a common theme of existentialism is the alienated outsider. Do you think this is a base premise of woke Marxism, homelessness, drug use? I think that existentialism accepts alienation. Marx, of course, claimed that workers, the capitalism inherently alienated people. I believe that it's Marxism, existentialism, postmodernism, socialism, the mixed economy that alienates people. Capitalism is the one thing that this alienates them, that gives them purpose, that brings them into, you know, that allows them to live meaningful lives. But the world sees it the other way around. Marx said that capitalism was the alienated factor. I think existentialism agrees with Marx on that. But yes, all of those are related. I think the gravitation on both right and left to these wacky positions, woke and racism and white supremacist, I mean, it's all the same. And then the common person's just frustration with his life and with the world and with the jobs and with the economy. All of that is the kind of alienation I'm talking about. And it's a consequence of, I think, a monophilosophy together with the mixed economy. All right, Aston's saying, are you saying because we're human beings we have certain universal rights, if yes, how do we know these rights? Is it through reason? Yes, we know them absolutely through reason. And it's because we're human beings living in a social context that we have these rights. You don't have rights on a desert island. Rights are meaningless on a desert island. They're not applicable on a desert island. Rights come into existence. They become relevant and they come into existence. When we enter society, when we have other people who can inflict force on us, who can try to control us, who can try to coerce us into doing things we don't want to do. Rights are protection against coercion. Rights are the protection of our mind, the protection of our ability to using reason, choose a way and act in the world. And the only way to discover rights is through reason. Kurt says, I was originally going to say cultural decay, but I didn't want to sound like a right-winged nut. No, we have cultural decay on the right and on the left, but we definitely have cultural decay. There's no question about that. So it doesn't, you don't need, not only right-winged nuts believe that we have cultural decay. I mean, I think many people on the kind of center-left believe we have cultural decay. And cultural decay is not only caused by the left. It's caused by certain elements on the right. I think certain evangelical, the rise of evangelicalism, and the twist that it has taken is part of this cultural decay. Free trade, free trade asks. Conservatives, libertarians, and leftists have a fair amount of popular comedians. Does objectivism needs more comedy to appeal to a broader audience as objectivists lend itself to comedy? You know, yes, we need more comedians, we need more everything. I don't think objectivist comedy would appeal to a broader audience in the same way that others do. You know, so we need more artists, and if comedy is a form of art, then we just need more artists. But mostly we need artists to convey the positive. Comedy conveys the negative. Comedy is generally about negation. What we need is building. It's building up. It's the positive. We need intellectuals to present the positive case, the positive case for freedom, the positive case for liberty, the positive case for egoism. That's what we need, including artists that portray individualism and portray values positively. All right, I mean, I'm done. We're like $30 short of the $600 goals. I don't know if anybody wants to step in and just get us there so we can say we met our targets for today. Don't forget to like the show. Before we leave, we've got about 100 likes, but we probably had 500 people watch the show, and we still have 126 on live, so click on that like button if you like the show. Don't click on it if you didn't, of course. Don't want you lying. And, you know, $30 will get us on the Super Chat. There's Ashton with 20, so we're only short. Why isn't the 20? There it is. We're only short another 10. Ashton has a question. So if everyone in the world followed and practiced the philosophy of objectivism, how much better would life be? Big question, I know. A lot better. We'd be living, so if everybody practiced objectivism, it would have been a process to get here. During that process, life expectancy would have gone up dramatically. We would be living much longer lives, much healthier lives. The technology we would have at our fingertips would be even more amazing than what we have right now. People generally would be happy that you wouldn't have the drug problems, the homeless problems. There'd still be people who are poor. There'd still be people who are miserable. There'd still be people who commit suicide, whatever, but a lot less. A lot less. So in every dimension, we would be all a lot richer with all the material well-being that that would be able to buy us. It's hard to imagine how much better, particularly how much better would be from the perspective of how amazing people's lives would be. How much happiness there would be in the world, if you will. Thank you, Ashton. Thank you, Richard. Looking forward to showing mental health and drug rehab. Thank you, Z400 Racer 337. Thanks for the support. Thank you, John. Thank you. Yeah, we're at $615. We made it. Thanks, everybody. Really, really appreciate it. I'm not sure exactly when the next show is going to be. It depends on my schedule when I go to Boston for the Celtics game. It'll either be on Monday or Tuesday. Wednesday, no show. Thursday, I hope to do a show. I should be back from the game by then. But anyway, I will see you either Monday or Tuesday. Look forward to the show. Thank you, Wolland. Thank you, Adam. Thank you, Roosevelt. Thanks, guys. That has all pushed up a total to $650, and I really, really appreciate it. June is after one of the best starts we've ever had for a month. So thank you, guys. Everybody participates in the Super Chat. And don't forget, you can support the show monthly at youronbrookshow.com. See you all later this week. Have a great rest of your weekend.