 I wanted to talk today about the rise of the left of, you know, the, if you will, the leftist view of economics. This is spurred by an op-ed that was published by Noonan, Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend. And, you know, Peggy Noonan's a traditional Republican. She's a good writer, but very confused philosophically. But she's actually about this. She, in discussing how it sholts, you know, the CEO, former CEO of Starbucks, run for president or what looks like he might run for president. She says, look, this is a guy. He's got a great story, right? He's a kid from New York, real working class family, you know, wasn't handed anything, didn't get a million bucks from his family. Family went through real hardship, real challenges. And here he is. He builds a company. The company is brand is so well known. Everybody pretty much in the world knows about it. He's created 238,000 jobs as of 2007. And he's changed the world. I mean, Starbucks has changed the world. It's changed the way we drink coffee. It's changed the way we think about coffee. It's changed. It's, it's, it's become, you know, this phenomenon is incredibly successful businessman. And he presents himself as a physically conservative, socially liberal. And, and Peggy Noonan says, you know, that, that's a losing proposition. Nobody's interested in physical service. If take physical services pro free market and socially liberal, put aside the socially liberal for a minute, but let's think about the, the physically conservative. She says, and I'm quoting Peggy Noonan here, America's headed left economically 2008 changed everything deeply undermining faith in free market capitalism. One of the great sins of that time and of all the years after was that the capitalist themselves in their vast killessness couldn't even rouse themselves to defend the reputation of the system that made them rich and their country great. In any case, the most significant sound in 2016 was Trump's audience cheering his vows not to cut entitlements. They would have cheered even louder if he promised increases to entitlements. And Peggy Noonan is absolutely right. Trump governs. Trump advocates. Trump is a man from an economic perspective of the left, not a free market capitalism and entitlements is probably the best example of that. He is not about cutting or reforming or phasing out or privatizing entitlements. He's not for privatizing our healthcare system. He's not for privatizing anything. So reducing a little bit of regulation and cutting corporate taxes, which again, nobody really debated the virtue of cutting corporate taxes. But he's not an advocate for the market. He's not an advocate for free markets. He's also for tariffs. He's also for telling CEOs and telling business from what and how to do things. So, you know, I've talked a lot about Trump. I'm not going to talk about now. The Huffington party or those who support Donald Trump are not pro-free markets. They have moved dramatically to the left of free markets. I've even an understanding of free market that was, if you will, the Republican Party of 10, 20 years ago. And on the left, what you're seeing is the rise of Elizabeth Warren, the rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the rise of Bernie Sanders, the rise of even more radical leftists. You're seeing a dramatic shift further out to the left and the middle, the Democrats who used to be somewhat physically conservative, somewhat free market, they were dying breed. They don't exist really. And even they have moved to the left because that's where the political party is. And if you're going to get votes, if you're going to win elections, that's what you have to play to. So I think it's safe to say, as Peggy Noonan argues, that the country, there is, why? Why has this happened? Why has the country moved so significantly to the left? Now, Noonan states one argument that you hear a lot, and I've made this argument, and that is that we failed significantly in 2008 and afterwards in portraying the crisis as caused by statism, as portraying the crisis as caused by government and refuting the idea that the crisis was not caused by capitalism, not caused by free markets. Indeed, we should have been arguing the case that there was no capitalism, that the crisis was a crisis of the mixed economy, as indeed it was. And she argues that the people who really didn't defend it were the capitalists themselves. And we know this. It was the bankers and the businessmen who refused to defend capitalism. And it was the politicians and it was columnists like her who did not defend capitalism because they don't know what capitalism is. They don't have a clue and they can't defend capitalism. They don't know what it is. And to the extent that they think they know what it is, they can't defend it. Capitalism at the end of the day is the system of self-interest. Capitalism is the system of the pursuit of happiness, your happiness, the individual's happiness. Capitalism is the pursuit of the individual's self-interest, both in the producing side, on the work side, on the productive side, and on the consumption side. So it is, it is that self-interest. It is that pursuit of happiness, that is pursuit of individual values that nobody, including Peggy Newton, nobody can actually defend. Nobody is willing to defend. Nobody goes out of his way to defend. Indeed, they're uncomfortable in defending. At their best, they revert to an Adam Smith-like defense which says, yeah, everybody pursues their self-interest under capitalism, but we know self-interest is no good. But if you add up all these pursuits of self-interest, it makes society better off because of innovation, because of risk-taking, because of entrepreneurs, because of business, job creation and all this. So capitalism is good because of that. So it's the Adam Smith argument. If you add up all the vices of all the individuals pursuing their self-interest, you get a better society and the standard for goodness is a better society and therefore capitalism is good. Now nobody buys that. That is like the weakest, most pathetic defense possible. It's true as far as it goes that, yes, from a material perspective, capitalism produces the best society, but people are concerned with morality and what you're telling people morally is that people are committing sins by pursuing their self-interest over and over and over again in everything that they do in life and that somehow this is washed away by the invisible hand that gives us a richer, more prosperous society. Again, that is not a defense that can work, but that is the defense of Peggy Newton and everybody else who tries to defend capitalism from the right. Everybody else, the libertarians and the conservatives try to defend capitalism. At the end of the day, that's a defense or a defense from ignorance and depravity. Do you know this defense that they give? People are so irrational. People are so ignorant. People are so depraved that you don't want to give them too much power. And of course, the beauty of the marketplace is that nobody has that amount of power. And again, but this is the argument, as I called it, the argument for depravity. So human beings irrational. That's why you don't want central planning. No, it's because we're rational, you don't want central planning. It's because we have individuals that are rational and we as individuals therefore the only ones who can make value judgments for ourselves. It's not a lack of rationality on the part of the central planet. It's not a lack of information on the part of the central planet. It's the fact that he can't be us. It's the fact that every individual is rational. Every individual can make decisions for himself and the central planet cannot be every individual and he cannot make choices, cannot make value judgments for individuals. It's the fact that we are competent, the fact that we're capable of virtue, the fact that we can pursue our own lives, our own happiness successfully that we don't want in central planning cannot work. A supercomputer cannot value for you. A supercomputer doesn't know what your passions are. It doesn't know what your values are. It doesn't know what makes you happy. Only the individual can be inside his own head and know all that. Only the individual has a context in which he can evaluate that. Rationally, of course, objectively, of course, but objectivity, how can an external party be objective for you? How can a third party tell you what your values should be? Central planning is not about human depravity, the inconsistencies of central planning, the impossibility of central planning. The impossibility of central planning is a consequence of the capacity of every individual to pursue his own self-interest, to be rational, to choose his own values, and that those values cannot be predicted. Why? Why can't they be predicted? Well, because we have free will, not because the central plan is not smart enough, but because we have free will. And you can't model free will. You can't replicate free will on a computer. You can't do it better. But again, conservatives, libertarians, many, many people out there, you know, they, that's not their defensive capitalism. That's not their approach to capitalism. That's not how they think about capitalism. So the world has moved leftwards. The world has moved leftwards. Not just because we didn't defend capitalism in 2008. You know, I did. I, I, everywhere I could, at every opportunity I could, and every event that I could, on every TV station that would take me, on every radio station that would take me, I tried to defend capitalism as best that I could. But I was alone voice, voice out there. The, the, the conservatives, the libertarians, and the business community did not defend capitalism. And to a large extent, they did not defend capitalism because they could not, because they did not have the tools, they do not have the tools, they do not believe in capitalism. They do not believe in self-interest. They did not believe in egoism. They do not have the moral basis on which, or the epistemological basis, the philosophical basis on which to defend capitalism. And that's why we moved to the left. Moved to the left because, yes, all the problems are being blamed on capitalism. 2008 was blamed on capitalism. And there was no defense. But I would say there was no defense after the Great Depression, other than Ayn Rand, maybe Milton Friedman of Von Mises, but basically Ayn Rand. After the Great Society, after the inflation of the 70s, how many people stood up and said, no, no, no, the Reagan revolution is not capitalism. It's just a refinement of the, of the mixed economy. And then by the financial crisis, yeah, Alan Greenspan said, this is a failure of capitalism. This is a failure of markets. George Bush said, we have to abandon capitalism in order to save it. And it's over. It's over.