 It's a good moment to start our lecture. My name is Jacek Spendel. I am a CEO and president of Freedom and Entrepreneurship Foundation, Fundacja Wulnerstie Psytyatraszy. Polish educational think tank, educational organization that aims to educate young Polish people towards the ideas of limited government, free markets, entrepreneurship, and basically economic independence. Our organization is honored to welcome today executive director of Einrand Institute, Mr. Jaron Brooke, is finance professor, ex-finance professor, educated at the University of Texas in Austin. First, he did their master's degree, then a PhD in finance, is a leading advocate of ideas of Einrand, of the objectivist philosophy. He moved to the United States from Israel, where he was born and raised, moved to the United States in the late 80s. Before that, Jaron Brooke also did study at the Israeli Institute of Technology in Haifa in the degree of social engineering. Civil, social engineering, sorry. Good, yes, social engineering. I'm sorry for that mistake. Civil engineering also worked as a surgeon in military for Israeli forces. Since 1987, living in the United States, since 2003, American citizen, he became an objectivist, a follower of Einrand's philosophy, since he was 16. And as I read, before that, Jaron was a socialist. Is that true? Absolutely. Oh, but who was not a socialist? And he was the ending. So Jaron is dedicated to promoting these ideas. He's traveling around the world with lectures, promoting capitalism, telling more about the true causes of financial crisis, morality of capitalism, and ideas of objectivism, and what are the links among all these components. Today's lecture will be based on the newest book, Jaron Brooke co-author with Dan Watkins. And the book is Free Market Revolution, how Einrand's ideas can help to end the big government. It's not the first book Jaron Brooke co-authored. Before that, it was neo-conservatism and obituary of an idea, and also contributed in the book winning the unwinnable war. And that book was about the Islamic totalitarianism, and the war against the Islamic totalitarianism. Also very, very interesting stuff, maybe not fully linked to today's main team, but I think that we are open to discussion. And Jaron will speak first, but I'm sure we'll have quite a bit of time to take questions. So you are totally encouraged to think about the questions to our distinguished guest, to Dr. Brooke. And I think that my time is now finished, and I give you the floor. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you for asking fun of me, so I'm used to moving into the audience. I've got an obstruction. Let me ask you a few questions. How many of you here would consider yourself libertarian? What? Libertarian, conservative, so free market generally. OK. So almost everybody, but not everybody, which is good. We want a few souls to capture. How many of you would consider yourself a capitalist? So this is, so for the last 250 years or so, we've been running, if you will, an experiment in the world. We be testing different social, economic, political systems. Not consciously, but the fact is we have. We've got all different types. Over the last 250 years, in all kinds of places, comes as close as we've ever come to free markets, to capital. That's probably in the 19th century, Western Europe, but primarily America. We know the results. We know they all stop being poor. They rise up in the middle of classes. Even those who remain supposedly poor are far richer than what they used to be. That is, during that period, maybe a generation before you have tried the exact opposite. We've tried communism. We've tried fascism. We've tried 100% statism, if you will. And we know it leads to poverty. It leads to wealth destruction. It leads to everybody being poor. A decline in quality of life, standard of living. Human will be. A lot of freedom, a little bit of statism. A lot of statism, a little bit of... It turns out, you can plot this on a graph. And we can do this on a whiteboard. We can plot it on a graph, and there's no relationship. The more freedom you allow economically, the greater the wealth, the greater the prosperity, the greater the standard of living. Even the poor do better off. The more statism, the greater that piece of statism, the lower the quality of life, the lower the standard of living, the lower the wealth creation, less innovation. All the good stuff from a material perspective, disappeared. And you can plot this on a graph, and you can see that there are a correlation between free markets and prosperity, statism, and poverty. We tried this in different parts of the world. We tried it in Europe. We tried it in Asia. We can look at other parts of the world, and we can see that this pattern has nothing to do with this ethnicity. It doesn't even have to do with history. It has to do with allowing people to be free. The last 30 years, for example, in Asia, have seen an incredible amount of wealth creation. An immense rise of hundreds of millions of people from poverty into the middle class. And you can attribute this directly to the fact that in Asia, over the last 30 years, they've been freeing up their economies, they've been allowing more private property, more free markets. So the point I want to make is this. Free markets work. We all know this. Everybody really knows this, whether they're willing to acknowledge it or not. We all know this. It's, you can see it. All you have to do, I don't know, anybody here in Hong Kong, everybody in Hong Kong. You need to read Hong Kong, no? That's okay. You should, at some point in life, it's worth going to see Hong Kong. Maybe you've seen pictures of Hong Kong. Hong Kong's a tiny little island. 70 years ago, it had a population of about 30,000 people. There was nothing there. No natural resources, nothing. And the British came, and all the British did in Hong Kong was allow for the rule of law and the protection of private property, contract law. Basically, they allowed for free markets to develop. They created the institutions that make free markets possible. And they left it alone. No safety net. I keep forgetting the camera's over there and I'm over here. No safety net. No social security. Very little redistribution of wealth. Very little regulation. And in the last 70 years, it's gone from a little fishing village with 30,000 people on it to a city of seven and a half million people with more skyscrapers than New York City and a standard of living, a wealth per capita, if you will, equal to that of the United States of America. People came there from all over Asia. They swam. They did whatever they could to get to Hong Kong. So, you can just look at it to see the wealth. And it's not hard to see the cause of a relationship. Of course, just across the bay is China, which up until about 20, 30 years ago, basically was starving. A billion people were starving. Indeed, somewhere between 20 to 60 million people starved to death because of communism, because of status. So the contrast is there. It's visible. It can be seen. Of course, again, you can see it in Europe. When the wall came down, the contrast was obvious. In America, you still have to tell kids that the wall came down, the wall was built not to prevent westerners from escaping to the east because they think so badly of capitalism that they think everybody wanted to go to the east. New generation. We saw the contrast and it was stunning. It was greater than anybody even expected. So, we know. We know. Everybody knows that free markets work. They create wealth, they create austerity, they create human warping. And yet, and yet in the West, in Western Europe, in the United States, we're abandoning free markets. We're moving away from free markets and capitalism. We're moving systematically towards greater and greater and greater status. And we have been for 100 years, at least in the United States. We've been moving in that direction for 100 years. For 100 years, we'd be giving up on capitalism, slowly increasing the amount of regulation, slowly increasing the role of the state, increasing the amount of wealth that we distributed, increasing the size of the welfare state. And even though, during those 100 years, our economy seems to, the economic growth seems to shrink. It seems to get, it's not that the economy shrinks, the growth rate seems to be lower and lower. It doesn't matter. We seem to keep growing government, keep growing the state, keep growing government intervention and shrinking the amount of freedom that we get. And it's not that we don't understand the mechanisms of the free market. It's not that we don't understand why markets work. We've had great economists explain this to us. We've had fantastic economists, you know, Von Mises and Hayek and even Walter Friedman and others who've explained how markets work, how the price system works, why it is that freedom free markets lead to wealth. So this is not a mystery, oh, we don't know why it works. We understand that it works and we understand how it works. And yet, we're turning our backs on it. We're rejecting it, we don't want it. And that is something that should concern everybody. Certainly those of you who consider yourselves libertarians or consider yourselves free marketers, consider yourself believers in the free market. Why is this? Because the fact is that those of us believe in free markets, we are losing. We've been losing for a hundred years. Now Poland's a little different, right? Because you've gone from communism to more freedom. But if you look at your Western European neighbors and you can see the direction that they're heading, if you don't watch it, you're gonna head in the same direction. They're heading backwards. And if you look at America, that should scare you even more because the land of the free, what used to be the shining city on the hill for capitalism, is heading away from capitalism towards more and more and more states of them. Greater and greater, greater involvement in government in every aspect of our lives. So the fundamental question again has to be, why, why is this happening? What's going on here? Why are we those who advocate for free markets, those who believe in free markets, those who can see what happens? Why are we losing this battle? There's plenty of seats over here. And what I'm gonna argue today is that we're losing the battle. Because fundamentally, this battle is not about economics. This battle is not about economic reality, economic truth. It's not about whether people are better off or not better off. It's much deeper, much more fundamental. People don't vote. Economic will be. They don't vote for economic benefits of themselves. They actually often vote against it. They vote against the economic self-interest, regularly. And the question is why? In the West, we saw this a little bit in the financial crisis, is that there's almost an instinctual, almost a gut level, kind of a deep gut level reaction against capital, against free markets. People will spawn whenever there's a crisis. Before there's any data, before we've studied it, before we know anything about what's going on out there. We know who's to blame. As soon as the financial crisis hit in 2008, everybody knew who was to blame. Who was to blame? Wall Street. Wall Street capitalism free markets. I mean, the headlines in American newspapers and in European newspapers was, capitalism failing again is their interpretation. So they know this without studying anything. It's instinctual. It's something about capitalism, something about free markets that is so antagonistic to people that they don't have to wait for facts. They know why it's there. And this isn't just in the financial crisis. This has been happening over and over and over. In every crisis, every economic crisis, is always blamed on capitalism. It's usually blamed on a particular group with the capitalism, the what? The bankers, the Wall Street people. Bankers are always the villains. Even if later on, economists were actually studying the data, find that capitalism had nothing to do with it. They would govern policy, they created the problems and everything. It doesn't change anything. It doesn't change anything. So what is it about capitalism? People hate so much. What's capitalism about? What's the essential characteristic of a market place, of a free market? Why do people participate in the market place? Why do they go to the market place? Why does Steve Jobs build one of these? What does he make this for? To make money. Yeah, to make money. And we all, you know, we say that. We all go, no, he doesn't make it to make money. Yeah, he doesn't make a product. That's what he was about. Yeah, that's good. So he was about building something because this was beautiful. He had a passion for it. It's actually something worth. Yes. Ben, what was the profit margin on this? The first Samsung competitor. What was the profit margin? Thank you. 65%. Bill Gates wanted to make money. If he didn't want to make money, he would have sold me this a half price and still made a little bit of a profit. He wanted to make money. He squeezed every last dollar out of me so he could make the money. Now, was that the only reason he made that iPhone? He believed in making beautiful products. He had vision for what it could be. But whose vision was it, by the way? Whose vision was this? Steve Jobs'. He didn't ask me what I wanted. Luckily, because it would have looked a lot uglier than this. So Steve Jobs made this for? Who did he make this for? He made it for himself. He made this for Steve Jobs? He loved this. Even if it had been a failure, he would have loved this. This is about Steve Jobs. This is about Steve doing what he loves with a passion and trying to make as much money as he can. Not just a little bit of money, as much money as he can in the process. And I know it makes us feel a little funny because making money makes us feel a little bit of funny. We'll talk about that. So I, you know, this came out in 2008, the first one. And the US economy is spiraling out of control. There were sessions happening. People are losing their jobs. And I went to the Apple store to buy my first iPhone because I wanted to help stimulate the US economy. Because I'm sure that's why you guys go shopping. You guys go shopping because you care about your fellow man. You want to make sure people have jobs. You learn from Keynes. The consumption drives the economy. So you want to consume so that the Polish economy thrives. Now I'm not going to ask who does that, because there's always somebody who raises their hand and only bothers anybody. But no, you don't go to them all for that. Why do you go shopping? For fun. It's not only fun, right? I truly believe that this will make me more productive. And as soon as I get back to the US, I'm getting the iPhone 6, because I think it would just make me a little bit more productive than the iPhone 5 bag. That bigger screen, right? It's fun. Makes you more productive. It's cool. You know, you like new clothes. You like new shoes. You're doing this for yourself. So what are markets about? Every market. Every single market. You walk outside here. Everybody's participating in a market place. They're buying food. They're buying, I don't know, souvenirs. And everybody's in it. The seller and the buyer, they're in it for themselves. The marketplace. The marketplace is a place in which we pursue our self-interest. The marketplace is a place where we go to make our own lives better. And this isn't the new observation. This is Adam Smith. Adam Smith opened in 1776 in the world of nation. The baker doesn't bake the bread because of you. He doesn't really know you. He doesn't care about you. He's baking the bread to feed his family, to feed himself, because this is how he owns a living. He might love making bread. But it's about him. It's not about you. And the people who deliver the bread and the people who sell the bread don't care about you. They care about themselves, trying to make their living for themselves. Capitalism-free markets are driven by self-interest. Every aspect of the marketplace is driven by self-interest. And if you will, bankers appear as the most self-interested, because what are they about? They're directly about money. There's no product in between. There's no product they can hide behind. What do we mean, talks about self-interest? From what we have to say, what do our mothers, our preachers, our philosophers tell us about self-interest? What's that? Somebody mumbled. It's bad. It's no good. Self-interest is no good. If you're a good person, if you're noble, if you're just, if you're honorable, if you're moral, what are you, self-interested? No, what do we say? How do people like that behave? What's that? Yeah, egoists, this is self-interested, but if you're noble and good, how do you behave? You share. You share, right? You're, somebody said here, altruistic, altruistic meaning what? Sacrifice. Yeah, you sacrifice other people. You sacrifice other people. Your focal point of others, altruism, which is that ideology was really coined by Augustine Comte, the French philosopher, says that the purpose of life under altruism is to serve others. And if you dare think about how serving others might feel good or help you, it doesn't count. It has to be pure, service to others. You have to subjugate yourself. You have to disappear. You don't count. You have to be selfless, selfless without a self. That is nobility. That is goodness. That is virtue. That's morality. That's how we talk. Morality means to serve others. And who are the others we must serve? If it's not us, and if you have something, who should you serve? Those who have nothing, or those who have less, or those who have needs. So they need, there's a claim against you. You morally obliged to serve those who have needs. I was taught by my mother, a good Jewish mother. And she taught me, think of yourself last. Think of others first. Be selfless. Sacrifice. And what do we mean by sacrifice? Because everybody throws this word around all the time. What does sacrifice mean? You give something, and what do you expect in return? Less or nothing. That's the whole point of sacrifice. It has to evolve pain in some way. It has to evolve giving in some way. Otherwise, it's not a sacrifice. Now, people use it in a confused way, but it's not always that clean. But that's what it means. That's the essence of it. It's to give and get nothing in return. Now, when I bought this iPhone, did I sacrifice? I gave. I gave 300 bucks. But why is this not a sacrifice? Because what did I get in return? Much more. Otherwise, I wouldn't have given up 300 bucks. What do we call this? Trade. I got more for the iPhone than what I gave. And what did Apple get? More as well. Because the iPhone to Apple, they have lots of them. It's not worth 300 bucks. It's worth less than a nice profit margin on it. So the trade in a market place is win-win. We both won. At least we tended to. Sometimes you buy a lemon. A lemon meaning a bad product, and you make a mistake. But when you enter the trade, you always intend for yourself to be better off. And the other side intends to be better off. That's the nature of the market. But if you sacrifice, the whole point is to lose. And a sacrifice is noble and good and virtuous. Now, think about that. The market place is set up structurally in the way it functions. In a way that's incompatible with how we define virtue and goodness and morality. We're all at least set up to be a lose-win proposition. Somebody has to lose. Otherwise, it's not a sacrifice. It's not selfless. Take somebody like Bill Gates. Shift from Apple to Microsoft. I'm an Apple guy, so everything positive. I say, how about we go Bill Gates? Take that into consideration. I've been using Apple since 1989. Before, it was cool to use Apple. I was one of those few people who hung in there and kept them profitable just enough so Steve Jobs could come back and make you all guys cool. So you owe me a lot. Yeah, I sacrificed for the good mankind. They always made the better products. It just took you guys a while to figure it out. State Bill Gates. Bill Gates builds Microsoft. He makes for himself, I don't know, 70 billion dollars. How does he do that? How do you make 70 billion dollars? How do you make that much money? This is a good lesson for entrepreneurs, right? How do you make 70 billion dollars? Why do you do this down there as one fine? Yeah, creating a good that others value more than you can sell it for, but you have to have a lot of others, right? Just a few people doesn't get you 70 billion dollars. You have to sell a lot of products, a lot of products, which means you have to make a lot of people much better off because everybody who buys a product is better off, right? It's a trade, win-win. Bill Gates affected almost every human being on this planet. I mean, there's very few people who have not been touched by Microsoft. He has made us all better off, even those of us who use Apple. He's made the whole computer world interconnected. I don't know that the web would be what it is today, if not for Microsoft had done in the 80s and 90s. So he literally changed the world for the better, made the lives of billions of people better off. Even the poorest of the poor benefit because some people have computers that are providing them with electricity, water, all kinds of other things that are facilitated by computer. And yet how much more credit does Bill Gates get for doing all of that? None. I mean, what's that? Now a lot of electricity. Well, we'll get to why now he gets more credit. I'm built into that, right? But how much did he get when he was making all this money? Zero. Or what? Or less. Or negative, negative moral credit. Why did he get negative moral credit? That's two jobs that he didn't like him. No. I'm talking about liking, it's about moral credit. There are a lot of people I don't like, but I admire for something good that they've done. We might not like Bill Gates and they were competitors that might not like each other for a while. But he got negative moral credit, why? Because he was making 70 billion dollars. And we associate wealth creation with negative stuff. We don't like people who make a lot of money. So best he got zero, at worst he got negative. Now when did he become a good guy? As he said, when do we give him some moral credit? When he becomes a philanthropist, when he starts giving them money away. And notice that he leaves Microsoft. So God forbid he's not building, creating anything anymore. He's not making any money anymore for himself. He's just giving it away. Now giving it away is, that's good. Well, it's a sacrifice or not. He doesn't seem to be getting anything for it. So it's good. It's not great, but he's not a saint yet. We haven't put him up, we haven't built statues for him yet. Why? He's not poor yet. Yeah, he's not poor. And he seems to be enjoying giving them money away. And that's a little suspect, right? It's not a sacrifice, because he seems to be enjoying it. Well, how would we get Bill Gates to a point where we built statues for him? And I'm gonna take this off, cause it's getting warm. How would we get into that one? What would Bill Gates have to do? Die. What do you mean? Well, no, dying's too simple, too easy. Dying's too easy. What would he have to do? Cause he's going to die, you know that. Something. Get rid of all this stuff. Yeah, give all his money away, not just get rid of it. Give it out. If he moved into a tent, cause he lives in a very nice house. And if you can bleed a little bit for us, right, if we can see some blood. We want to see pain. We want to see suffering. This is what makes saints. You guys all grow up Catholic, you know this, right? It's, that would make him a hero. Now notice the perversion. I mean, this is perverse. He builds something. He creates something. He changes the world. I mean, beyond the fact that he touches everybody he made, somebody told me he made 15 billionaires out of Microsoft. Hundreds of millionaires came out of Microsoft. Millions of jobs. He looked at the whole supply chain. Millions of jobs were created by Microsoft. That counts for nothing. Why? Because he made money doing it. He gives it away. Oh, now he's a good guy. And if he gives it all away, he's a saint. Nobody wants to be him, by the way. Right, nobody actually wants to be the guy who gives everything away and is paid for. Everybody wants to be the billionaire. But we believe it's moral to give it all away. Like my mother. My mother didn't actually believe that I should think about this first and think of myself last. Right, she's a good Jewish mother. She wanted me to be successful. Which means she wanted me to think of myself. But what we say and what we do and I'm the same thing. We set up a moral code that's impractical. Nobody actually wants to do it. Nobody actually can do it in terms of a living father's consistently. But we look at it as an ideal to strive towards. But we live a different life. Mostly we live a life that's self-interested that's we're looking to make money, to be happy, to be successful. That's the life we live. That's the life we should live. And what happens when you live a particular life but we talk that it's sinful and you're supposed to live some other life? What's the emotion inside? Guilt. Guilt, right? Guilt. And as you know probably guilt is a powerful weapon. It's a powerful way to control people. The whole point of guilt is to control you. I know guilt is to control. The whole point of setting up an ethical system that's unattainable, that you can never achieve is to guilt you into submission. But they know you're always gonna sin. You know you're always gonna break the law if you will. So this is the set up. If you're successful, you feel guilty. And if you feel guilty, I can come to you and say, look, you've got a lot of money. The gates, right? People over there don't have a lot of money. You're not philanthropic enough. You've still got billions. All I wanna do is help you be more moral. Help you sacrifice a little bit. Let's call it taxes. I'm gonna raise your taxes a little bit so that you can help those people if you're bad about yourself. And you have to vote for it. Because we're the wrong person. Guess what they do? They vote for it. Vote 8 is out there giving speeches about how we should pay more taxes all the time. In a laziness presidential election, President Obama promised to raise taxes on the region from 33%, 36% to 39%. So yes, significant increase, right? Close to 40%, high tax rate. How do you think the rich voted? The voters increased their taxes. 8 out of 10 of the richest counties in the United States voted for Obama. In California, we had a super vote. Yes, no, it was a referendum. All of California referendum. Raise taxes on the rich or not? Yes, no, right? And then we're gonna raise the taxes from 10% to 13%. This is on top of the 40%. This is on top of that, right? I know you guys think taxes are low in the United States. They are not, they're very high, particularly in California. How do you think the rich voted? To raise their own taxes from 10 to 13%. They voted to raise them. Because they were told that if they didn't, those people over there would suffer. The students, the poor people, to suffer. And they didn't want to ask. It was immoral to have those people suffer at their expense, so raise my taxes. The whole welfare state, the whole redistribution of states is not based on any theory of economics. It's not based on the idea that somehow this leads to prosperity and everybody's better off. I mean, people even know that it's actually not even better off for poor people. There's nothing better for everybody who's willing to work in a free society than capitalism and freedom. No, this is to appease guilt. This is all about guilt appeasement. This is all about feeling moral. This is all about morality. This is all about your duty to serve them. Your duty not to be self-interested, but we want you to be self-interested so you can sin so we can then take your money. There's a famous line in Alashrug. How many of you read Alashrug? There's quite a few. Famous line in Alashrug, where the government official is coming to the businessman. And, you know, he wants stuff on him. And this is Hank Reader. And Hank Reader says, he says like, but I broke the law, right? Because he realizes he's broken the line. And Governor bureaucrat says, what do you think the laws are there for? The purpose of the laws is for you to break them because that gives us leverage over you. The purpose of morality of selflessness is for you not to be selfless. Because that gives the authorities leverage over you, where the spiritual authorities are here. They can use it, it's guilt. So, we redistribute wealth because of this moral conflict. But it's more than that. Stateism is more than redistribution. Think about the regulatory state. This is what's really growing in America today. Much more than redistribution. The regulatory state in America is growing. Government is regulating every aspect of business. And Europe, of course, is already there. Why do we regulate? Why do we regulate businessmen? Or what are businessmen? We said businessmen are self-interested, right? Do I have to make money? Do I have to make? Think about themselves. What do we know about self-interest? What do we be taught by our moral authorities about self-interest? It's bad, it's wrong. But what does that mean? What kind of behavior does self-interest always lead to, we are taught? Destructive, what kind of destructive? Destructive to whom? Others, right? So, when you point to a kid in a school yard and say that kid's selfish, what do we mean by that? Now, no, the word selfish means taking care of self. We don't mean always taking care of himself. What do we mean? He doesn't share. What's that? He doesn't share. He doesn't share. But more than that, what's the next step? And not only does he share, he also... He wants to sacrifice others. Yeah, he wants to sacrifice others. He wants to exploit others. He likes cheating, stealing, bad person, right? He'll exploit other people. That's what we be taught. We associate it both emotionally and intellectually. Self-interest equals exploitation. Self-interest equals stepping on other people. Self-interest equals backstabbing, right? Lines stealing cheating. That's what it means. Business, self-interest, self-interested, line stealing, cheating, self-interested. They're two of the same. So what's the logical? What's the logic says, right? If business and self-interest and self-interest equals line stealing, cheating, then businesses are line stealing and cheating. And if they're line stealing, cheating, what must we do? We must control, regulate, we must place a little government official here on our shoulders, looking over, making sure you don't like steal and cheat. But you're all crooks. It's just a matter of when we catch you. We know you're crooks, because you're self-interested. Self-interest is crookery. It's how they think about it. And we can see all the regulations that gear towards that. Think about, you know, in America, if you walk into an elevator, into an elevator, there's a little diploma on the wall, right? And it says a government inspector has inspected this elevator, it won't fall and kill you. Basically that's what it says, right? Why does it say that? Because if we didn't have a government inspector who was there for the public interest, he was there as a good public servant for the common good, for other people. If he hadn't checked the elevator, we know that elevator manufacturers would build elevators that killed people. Because what's a better way to make money than to kill your customers? You laugh, but it's true. That's how we think. Why do we have food inspectors? Because we're convinced that if not for food inspectors, McDonald's would poison everybody. Again, that's how you make money by poisoning your customers, I mean, but people don't think that extra step. McDonald's would poison everybody. Why? Because the self-interest itself means exploiting other people. How do you exploit other people in the food industry? You poison them, you buy rotten meat, you don't pay attention to sanitary conditions. Now, it's bizarre to think about it, but it's what we assume when we regulate. It's the implicit assumption behind every piece of regulation. Why do we regulate bankers? Because they're gonna cheat, they're gonna steal. So we need to control them. And who does the controlling? Note that the controlling is done by supposedly unself-interested people, right? They don't ever suffer because they're there to be public servants. We don't trust bankers, but we trust Ben Bernanke or Janet Yellen. Why do we trust Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen? Because they have no self-interest, right? They don't get a bonus. They don't get a high salary. They're public servants. They're doing it for the public good, right? They're more good. Government is good generally, right? Because government is over here on the altruistic side, on the giving side, on the taking care of side, on the selfless side. I mean, unless you read public choice, but nobody does, right? So government is consistent with our moral theory. Government is good. Government is good because now we're cynical about it, but it should be good. It should be good because it's business, man, because it's often just it. Now, to me, this is why state isn't gross. This is why the state is growing. This is why we're losing. We're losing because we want to fence our clenches. We're losing because we accept the moral code in the culture and we all view it by economics, but they don't care about economics. What they care about is good or evil. They care about what's right and what's wrong. And government is right. Redistribution of wealth is moral. Regulation is necessary for moral reasons to control the self-interest. I mean, even Adam Smith, even Adam Smith, who recognized that markets are based on self-interest didn't like self-interest. He said self-interest is yaki, right? It's immoral. It's not a good thing. But it turns out, because of the invisible hand, that if everybody acts self-interestedly, we're all better off. But that's voodoo. I mean, to most people, that's voodoo. If somebody's acting wrongly by being self-interested, how can the result be positive? You can't defend capitalism by saying that the fundamental activity in capitalism is then not so pleasant, not so good or evil. So the battle is an ethical battle. The battle is about these views of what ethics is. And this is Iran's real contribution, I think. She has many contributions. But one of her major contributions to this today is to provide a defense of self-interest, to define a morality of self-interest, and to separate self-interest, to separate this lying, cheating, exploiting, and taking it out and say that's not self-interest. That's nonsense. That's being self-destructive. That's being stupid. It's not being self-interested. Because for Iran, self-interest means taking your life seriously. Figuring out what's really good for you. Figuring out how to live the best life that you can live as a human being. It's about being truly self-interested in a sense of happiness, of flourishing and prosperity and living, living, really living as a human being, living the best life possible as a human being. And that doesn't involve lying, cheating, and cheating, quite the contrary. Lying, stealing, cheating, nobody lives a good life through lying and stealing and cheating. Even politicians, you ever met a happy politician? I have not. Because they don't, it's just, it's their lying, stealing, cheating all the time. It doesn't lead to happiness. What does? What is the human form of self-interest? What is the thing that promotes human life? What makes possible human success? What's uniquely human? The reason. Damn, you're cheating. Yeah. The reason, if I'm lying, we're a pretty pathetic animal without it. We're weak, we're slow, we have no fans, we have no claws, the us versus the seabirds we take up, he wins every time. Run down a bison and bite into it, try that sometime. But you can't do it. You can't do it. Because we're not physically built to survive. What makes it possible for us to survive? We're not just survive, survive. Have all these wonderful things that we have, the clothes that we have, the chairs that we're sitting on, everything, our homes that we live in, the heating, the automobiles, the electricity, everything that we have today is a consequence of our use of our minds. Figuring stuff out. And it's not easy, it's hard to figure stuff out. The first guy who invented clothes, figured out you could take an animal skin and do something with it. Was a genius. First guy who invented agriculture. Was a genius. Figuring out that the seed drops to the ground and water, and then when the thing grows out of it, that's all causally connected. That's the Einstein of his day. And then to take that and figure out that you can actually sew it, you know, and whatever you do to have a whole field of this stuff, right? That was the vocationist there, the entrepreneur. They got a mass producer. Probably took a thousand years between those two discoveries. And they probably crucified most of them for contributing so much to the mankind. But that was using their minds. So for Iron Rand, if you wanna take your life seriously, if you wanna be self-interested, if you wanna live the best life that you can live, the number one thing you must do is think. Use your reason. Apply your rational faculty. And like stealing cheating on the opposite of reason. The denial of your rational faculty. The rejection of the facts of reality. So what we need to do is resurrect the idea of a properly self-interested person. Businessmen are not automatically lynching and stealing because they're self-interested in the opposite. To the extent that they're successful, they are being rational. They're using their minds. That's the great achievement of vocation. That's the great achievement of Steve Jobs. It's the great achievement of any successful businessman. It's his application of reason to the problem of human survival in his particular area. His particular field. And the creation of values that we all appreciate. Therefore he's making money. So if we wanna save free markets, if we wanna advocate for free markets, Rand tells us we have to advocate for the right morality. First and foremost, there's nothing else to do with matter. As long as people believe self-interest is evil and altruism, sacrifice, selflessness is good. Altruism in the sense of living fathers. That the real battle, the real revolution that has to happen, the title of my book is Free Hogger Revolution. But the revolution is not about economics. It's not about politics. It's about a more code, a more code of phobia for individual human beings to live by. Because if we can convince people to be self-interested, really self-interested, not women worshipers, not like stealing cheating, not self-destructive, but rationally self-interested, take their minds seriously, take their lives seriously. Individuals like that, people like that, don't want government over their shoulder telling them what to drink, what to eat, and what to smoke, and where business to open and how to manage their business. They wanna be left free. They wanna use their reason to make their lives better. And what is government? They don't want, government is forced. It's coercion. They don't want coercion in their life because coercion makes reason, makes thinking impossible. If I stick a gun to the back of you and I can say from now on, two plus two equals five. Everything you do, you have to assume that two plus two equals five, well, I shoot you. You can't think anymore. You can't build a, you can't program a computer. You can't build a bridge. That's what regulations are, by the way, that these stupid commanders that lead you away from reality with a gun at the back of your head. So truly self-interested individuals demand to be free. They demand the coercion. They be free of coercion. And they would demand that government's only role be to free them from coercion. So Rand's argument, Rand's contribution to this debate or one of her contributions to this debate is this notion that it's about morality. And I believe that as long as we ignore this, as long as we keep our fight in economics and at the level of economics and politics, we will continue to lose. And nobody over the last hundred years, other than I'm there, has been willing to challenge the fundamental ethical beliefs in the culture. That's where the action is. That's where the real battle is. And that's where we're gonna lose what we did to it. Thank you all. Any questions you have on pretty much anything else? Just need the first one, cause they know. I would like to ask you what is the problem you have with the morality of Bill Gates giving his money away? I believe he's not actually doing it for some of his reasons. He's doing it for good publicity. He's doing it for selfish reasons because he's a rational man. Probably because he just understood that he has enough money for himself and for his grandchildren, so he can do it. Yeah, but that's not why he's doing it. That's really busy, though. That's not why he's doing it. So I have no problem with somebody saying, you know, I'm kind of tired of running Microsoft and what I really wanna do in life is travel the world and help people that are worthy of being helped over children or whatever, that's fine. That's not why Bill Gates left Microsoft. Bill Gates left Microsoft because he felt guilty. Because the culture demanded it. This is why he had to be Microsoft. He would have loved to stay Microsoft. When you watch Bill Gates talk, I've watched a lot of interviews, he talks about his philanthropy and he seems to be kind of enjoying it, but when he talks about business, he lights up. He loves business. He loves making money, but he won't do it because the culture expects him not to do it. See, even if it's for good PR, what a horrible culture we live in. What a horrible culture we live in. Then one of the great men of our time has to do PR. So I don't have much against Bill Gates other than his, you know, if you listen to him, he tells you, Bill Gates says I'm lucky that he wasn't talent. He exhibits guilt. He's on the circuit, he tells students that it's not about making money. He's bought it, so I don't know if you're familiar with John Wolfe. The political theorist, the egalitarian, well, Bill Gates has laws in him, he's read laws, and he advocates for it. When you listen to his speeches, he's advocating for it, so I have a lot against Bill Gates for that. I don't know anything, it's charity per se. Charity's okay, but it's not important. It's not important. You don't get moral value. You're not a good person because you do charity. In my view, you're a good person for building, for creating, for making. For making money, you're a good person. Making money is virtue. Giving it away is nice. It's not important. The world is not built by philanthropists. Philanthropists is an insignificant part of the world we live in. If you think about it, you know, if you think about the United States of America, in 1776, it was like a third-rate colony. Nobody really cared about it, right? The British didn't really fight. They were too busy with the French and the Spaniards and the world. So it wasn't very rich. By 1914, it's the strongest industrial country in the world. That didn't happen because of philanthropy. It didn't happen because of charity. Millions of people who came to America didn't do well because of charity and philanthropy. I mean, it's just not important. Fine, do it. But what's important is the business. It's the creation stuff. Carnegie and Rockefeller and Mellon and what are called Robert Barron's today, they're the people who created the jobs and the wealth and everything that made America what it was and the opportunities and everything. So they should be celebrated for that. The fact that they give charity afterwards. Okay, nice. Doesn't matter. But honestly, think about how the culture looks at it. It looks at it the opposite. The world creation, the building the business, the making the stuff, that's it. It's the charity you know you're a good guy. That I get. The idea that you get Marvel work for charity, I'm a guy. She don't get any more credit in my book for charity. A little bit. But that bulk of it is from building and making stuff. So it doesn't help to capitalism if someone who collected a lot of money, released this money somehow to society and that's what I've got to do too. No, the opposite. Because you're saying releases that money. What is he doing with the money? It's in his mattress? No, it's not. We know it's not. This is the Keynesian myth. It's not in his mattress. He's investing in it. It's in the bank. It's being circulated in the economy in a much more useful way than even giving it away. Because he's actually creating jobs, Bill Gates became a venture capitalist and found young entrepreneurs and gave them money to build businesses. He would do a thousand times more for the world than charity. Money doesn't sit idly by anyway. But this is an excellent example of really smart people. But they're also like people who may be buy a set of property, makes a golden bed and don't invest. But you know that that's...