Libertarianism

0:00Okay, kitties, can I have your attention, please? How do you shut them up, Al? We'll give out the nerve. Okay. I'd like to talk to you today about libertarianism. And libertarianism is a very provocative sort of crazy, wigged-out philosophy. And I'm going to be speaking about a half hour, so there'll be a questioning period maybe 15 or 20 minutes. But if you, this audience is like most audiences I speak to about libertarianism, you'll all sort of want to come up at the end and lynch me or something. Because I'm going to be saying things that are very different than what you've been hearing.

0:47Except, of course, if you've had my classes, then it'll be the same old crap. Anyway, so I'll be here after the period and we can discuss questions further and I also have some literature to blow your minds with if you're interested in it. Okay, what is libertarianism? Libertarianism is the philosophical view that it is immoral to commit aggression against non-aggressives. Am I speaking too softly? Is this better? What do I do? Just speak louder? Libertarianism is the view that it is immoral for anyone to commit a crime.

1:44In the way of childhood playgrounds, you can't start up, but you can hit back. Libertarians are not pacifists. You don't have to turn the other cheek or what have you. But you cannot start off, you cannot violate anyone's property rights, you cannot beat anyone up, non-aggression against non-aggressives. Now, this is sort of the moral view of libertarianism, and I'll be going over a few of the other aspects of it after I give some examples of the moral view. Now, I don't think that this is very different than what most people...

2:33I don't think that this is very different than what most people believe. Many passages in the Bible or wherever can be called on to support this. I think that the difference between libertarianism and most other philosophies is the maniacal consistency with which we hold this view. Now, the first thing that we start off as private property rights is that you have private property rights in your own person. There's something in the newspapers today about abortion, where the women's liberation groups are saying that women own their own bodies. Well, this sentiment is very much a libertarian sentiment.

3:19I'm not saying that the women's liberation movement is libertarian, maybe by knowledge, The idea is that if the belly is part of the body, and I don't think too many people would want to argue that, and if the woman owns her body, she therefore owns her belly, and she and she alone has the right to say what grows in it, then we have an example of private property at its best, I would say. So the most important piece of private property that anyone can ever own, woman, man, or whatever, would be your own body, belly, the lungs, everything, the whole bit.

4:04The draft therefore would be a clear violation of the Libertarian Moral Code because it is someone coming over to an innocent person and saying, you know, we've got to ship your ass over to Vietnam or somewhere else. This would just be called slavery or kidnapping, except for the fact that the government does it and we come up with a new term, the draft. I just as well call it slavery or kidnapping. The other parts of private property that you can get to own legitimately are the parts of nature that you mix your labor with.

4:50For instance, the homesteading theory. You farm a piece of land for a few years and you get crops in and then you own it. And you can trade the fruits of it with the fruits of other people's farms or other people's bodies, namely their labor. So pretty much here we have the libertarian moral code, in a nutshell, but it's really sort of uninteresting, as I said before, because almost everyone would agree with this. You'd hardly find anyone disagreeing with it at this level, except for politicians or people like that, but we don't count them. Where I say that we will find differences is when we come to applications of this principle because in applications libertarians are really maniacal in being consistent with this and very few other people are consistent with this principle.

5:42For instance, one of the keystones of libertarian political philosophy is a deep and abiding suspicion of all things governmental. Now why would the libertarian feel that the government is antithetical to libertarian theory? Well, the reason for this is that the government, all governments, always are based on taxation. Now, taxation, you might not realize, is a perfect example of aggression against non-aggressives. For instance, I say that there's no real way to define taxation in a way that does not include robbery. And I also say that there's no way to define robbery in a way that does not include taxation.

6:29Robbery and taxation are the same thing, just as kidnapping, the draft, and slavery are the same thing. And we just get fooled by the fact that in one case the government is doing it, and in another case other people are doing it. There are two arguments offered by the tax collector to try to prove to us that he is not a mother, that he is different than a mother, and I think both arguments fail. The first one is that the tax collector would say to us, if we would have asked him, he wouldn't put us in jail first, is that he comes to us based on a majority vote.

7:22The majority of the people got together, we decided to have a government, so goes the theory, and here he is, our representative, somehow coming to tax us. Now I don't think that this is a valid exception to the libertarian principle of non-aggression against non-aggressors. I don't think that there are any acceptable deviations from this principle. I think that if you violate this principle, you go against libertarianism. For instance, I don't know the exact situation in Hitler or Nazi Germany, but it is recuted that he came to office based on majority vote. Now according to this argument of the tax collector, anything that he did could be based on this argument as well.

8:15Hitler could also say that whatever he does is based on majority vote. So therefore a majority vote doesn't mean very much. So I think this argument is pretty invalid. Also, suppose the mother that we met in Central Park told us that he was elected by a majority. Would this matter as he pulls his knife on us and demands our wallets or the use of our bodies, depending upon his sexual preferences? No, it wouldn't. The second argument that some people might think justifies tax collection is that the government provides services for us.

9:02You know, police protection, and fire protection, and sanitation, and roads, and schools, and the whole bit. Now this, I think, is only somewhat true because most of these services are just sort of a waste in taxpayers' money, as I'll cover in a few minutes. But let's suppose that they were real, valid services. Now, for the libertarian, it's not important that there are real valid services or not. The only thing that's important is whether they are voluntarily agreed upon services. Because, look, the mother that we meet if we go to Central Park tonight can say the same thing. He can also give us services. He can give us used tissue paper or bottle caps or any damn full thing he wants to give us, and he can tell that's services.

9:52Therefore, he has a legitimate claim to the stuff in our laws. He could do this, and he wouldn't insult our intelligence by doing it, as some other people do. He would just take our money in sort of an honest way, without the bullshit that he's providing services for us. Now, I'd like to discuss the provision of services, Because most people maybe at this point could be convinced that taxes are immoral because they're based on, well, because the democratic vote doesn't mean anything and because the services don't mean anything, namely as a moral justification. But most people would say, but if we didn't have the government to provide services for us, we wouldn't have these services.

10:42Services. And people look around and they think that we have murders in the streets and rapes and robberies and wars and stuff, you know, not like we have now, of course, without the government. And I'd like to discuss why I think that the government provision of a service will necessarily be less efficient than if the service is provided privately, either through cooperative groups, There's one difference, there's one reason that I think that the market will always provide a given service more efficiently, and the reason for that is the profit and loss system.

11:29The idea is that when a government bureaucrat or a government hiring or whatever you want When a businessman does a bad job, it's very hard to get rid of him. Whereas when a businessman does a bad job, we have what's called the dollar vote. Mainly, people refuse to patronize him. He loses money or he makes less money than his successful competitors, and his successful competitors can get him out of the market, take his business away. This, I think, does not exist in the government sphere. I'd like to read something to you from today's post to just give you an idea of one of the government services.

12:16By the way, I drive a motorcycle and I'm very aware of this particular problem I'm going to be talking about, mainly these potholes. You know, some of them you fall into and you'd be lost for weeks. They can never find you again. Okay, I'm reading from today's post, page three. At 10 a.m. one day recently, a reporter came upon a Highways department road resurfacing project on Lennox Avenue on 136th Street in front of the Harlem Hospital Center. By the way, that's also important because when the government does provide services, it usually provides services on places like Park Avenue and not Harlem. There was a very interesting case a few months ago about a bunch of rats that went under Park Avenue. There's some sort of railroad terminal under Park Avenue. And, you know, these goddamn rats surfaced at 61st Street and Park Avenue. And you've never seen such an amazement. You know, people are coming, well, these rats don't belong around here.

13:16What are they doing? Let's get them back up to Harlem, where they belong. So you got fire trucks and you got police and you get everybody, you know, chasing these poor little No Asphalt was being laid, nor was there an asphalt truck in sight. Two men in work jackets in the middle of the intersection surrounded by yellow cone markers were talking anonymously. Two more men were standing by a taut cattle, it's fire burning low. A yellow steamroller was parked nearby. As the reporter watched, the two men in the middle, one in a brown jacket and one in a white jacket, moved the marker out of the cars when anyone was talking with gestures.

14:06Brown jackets back, the two men by the cattle drifted off. At ten twenty, the two in the middle separated, brown jacket walked south and into the hospital. At 1022, a man in a green cap puked at the fire in the kettle. At 1030, he took something off the kettle and started tinkering with it. At 1040, he looked at his tools inside. It was a typical street scene in the city where hollows, department men are working as little as two hours a day. Department officials confronted with figures admitted it. Men report to the job sites in the streets late and leave hours early. Equipment leaves the yard to leisurely trickle between seven and nine-thirty in the morning, sometimes later, and starts returning with a roar well before two p.m.

15:00The work time left is during the morning and early afternoon hours of heavy traffic. Coffee and lunch breaks are frequent and long. Logistical delays in delivering the asphalt to resurfacing sites so that work can proceed add up to a lot of idling around. Choice of which streets repairs have hazard in the work that is done is often a slip shot. Record-keeping and sloppy in salaries appear to bear no relation to what a man does or how money works. Now the article goes on and sort of shows about all the waste that goes on in the highway department. Now you might say that waste also occurs in the market situation, and obviously it does. But imagine if any private restaurant ran its business the way this government bureaucracy is running its business.

15:52Pretty soon it would lose all its customers and automatically it would go broke. There would be this tendency in any case.

16:05I'm kind of scared. These highway department people, they're tough. You see, the thing is that there is no automatic firing of people, there is no automatic loss of jobs whenever anything bad happens. When you get mugged or when there's a traffic accident or a traffic tie-up, nobody loses his job, nobody loses any profits, nobody loses anything. In the private sphere, if there's a mugging or something, people do lose their jobs, or there's a direct, immediate effect. For instance, if you go to Mises and you get mugged in Mises and it can happen, what will happen in your response? Well, people are going to stop going to Mises, or Mises will fire their burns guards and maybe hire whack-and-hut guards or some other kind of guards.

16:57So we have an automatic, day-by-day, minute-by-minute, profit incentive to improve services. But many people are very much slavish to their past, they think that somehow the government has always done these things, and somehow the government will always have to do these things. When I mention that there are alternatives in the private market for businessmen to run sanitation or fire protection or defense or police or roads or schools or anything like this, people are really amazed. They can't conceive of the market doing something that the government has always been doing. I sometimes think that if the government were in the habit of making shoes, and I would suggest that somehow the government need not make shoes, you know, people say, but where do they get the leather?

17:44You know, how do they tie their shoes together? You know, how do they sell them? I mean, they just couldn't conceive of this. Actually, there are fire departments working in Arizona. There are many sanitation departments running at one-third the expense There are private fire departments, most of the police protection that we really benefit from is not public police but private police, although we don't somehow appreciate it because they're sort of in the background. I mean, how many people even look to see the police in Mises or in a place like that, or in Madison Square Garden? They do a good job and you don't see them too much. Actually, with regard to the post office, we once did have private post offices. You've seen them in western movies, you know, the Wells Fargo and the Pony Express, you know, the bandits are always ripping them off and stuff, you know, right on the stage perch.

18:42So what happens in the libertarian theory is that the government likes to take over what are called the command posts of the economy, you know, the education, the communications, the money supply, the armaments and things like that, and from here it can sort of rule most of the people. What happened was in the Constitution it said something like that the Federal Government shall have the right to make post offices and the way the Supreme Court interpreted this finally was that they shall have the only right, namely monopoly right, to run post offices. What happened was that before the government took over and they were just competing with the private post offices, they found that when they charged the same prices, the quality was very much lower, and when the quality was the same, the prices were very much higher.

19:34So consequently, they weren't able to out-compute the private post offices. So they finally had to get rid of them through law. But today, people think that you have to have a public post office, so they just can't conceive of private post offices. I think that the free market would be able to provide all the services that government provides, namely all the legitimate ones. I'm not talking about bombing people back to the stone ages. So we've said so far that the libertarian moral view is that it is illegitimate to have a government based on taxation, and also it is unnecessary. The second hypothesis about this would be that the rich and the poor come out exactly equal. This is sort of silly. What this would mean is that the rich give in, the poor give in, the poor get back, the rich get back, exactly what they put in.

20:26Therefore the whole process is sort of non-void except for the cost of doing all this stuff. We can pretty much reject the second hypothesis. I don't think anyone would hold that one. Now the third hypothesis is that the poor subsidize the rich on net benefit, and this is the hypothesis that I think is correct, although this is the hypothesis that most of you have probably brought up on. The things in support of this are the progressive income tax, that would support this view, the idea that the richer you get, the more money you have to pay. But of course, you're now very sophisticated and you know all about loopholes and stuff, where you get all these Ronnie Reagan type people that make over $100,000 a year and pay less than $100 in taxes.

21:20You're all familiar with a whole bunch of loopholes where the very, very rich do not have to pay very much taxes. But income tax is only one of the taxes, and that might be the most progressive of all the taxes. The other taxes are very much more regressive, where the poor pay a much higher percentage of their income than do the rich. All the so-called luxury taxes on beer, whiskey, cigarettes, things like that, the poor spend a higher proportion of their money than do the rich on these things, Therefore, they end up paying a higher proportion of their taxes. But even if somehow you could prove to me, which I don't think you can, that the tax system is progressive, the point is that the subsidy system is really, really progressive. Namely, it's true that the poor people in welfare do get a few crumbs off the table, but when it comes down to giving billions of dollars or hundreds of thousands of dollars, then you're giving it to the rich.

22:15So I say that Hypothesis 3 is correct, that the poor end up subsidizing the rich. Now look, let's look at this from another point of view. Make believe that you were, you know, King Nixon, or King ruling class, or whatever it is, and you were trying to run the economy. It's very strange to think that you would run it after all this expenditure to get a ruling class going, and then you would work it such that the poor benefited from it. and you lost from it. This would be the most altruistic, crazy thing ever. And yet, this is what people believe. People believe in hypothesis one, where the rich help the poor on net benefit, on net balance, excuse me. So I think we have to accept this hypothesis that on net balance, the rich get subsidized by the poor, the poor subsidize the rich.

23:08Therefore, all the arguments about the poor people not having enough money to buy the services for themselves, etc., go by the board. The best authority I could put on this sort of a thing would be one of my greatest heroes, Malcolm X. Now, Malcolm X was always talking about, you know, these phony white liberals and these blue-eyed devils. And his point was, we don't like the liberals to come in and help us. That's the last thing we want, because when they come in and help us, they usually end up scurrying us, or they usually start off by scurrying us. All we want is then to stay off our backs, not steal from us, not take our money in the ways that I've been outlining pretty much. Now, I'm not saying Malcolm X was a libertarian, I'm just saying that there were some ideas of his that I've seen as libertarian.

23:57Okay, let me consider one or two more instances of libertarianism, and then I'll call for some questions. Now, the usual view about the free market is that if we had the free market, we would have rampant monopoly. You have monopolies all over the place. And the usual case in point is something of the order of John D. Rockefeller running around and getting a monopoly. Now, let me draw you a beautiful picture of your country. That's the U.S. Isn't that pretty? That's the U.S. There's Texas and Florida and all that stuff.

24:39That's a lot of stuff. That was great in geography. I don't know what this is, but what the hell. Now, the usual view is that you have these little oil companies spread out all over the land. And what John D. Rockefeller does is he decides to attack one, one at a time. And what he does is he lowers his prices right here and he keeps his prices up or higher elsewhere. And he tries to force this poor little guy out of business right here, who's a local guy and has no ties with the other people.

25:48The Great Antitrust Division, etc., and this will stop it and keep the free market competitive, so to speak. I've already given a libertarian view on this type of thing, namely that the antitrust thing would probably turn out to be an invention of the ruling class interests. There's very little in this country that gets done that the ruling class interests do not want, and far from serving as a way of keeping the big people small, They serve as a way of keeping the small people, the potential competitors, small. Now, the actual historical proof of this, that this is really nonsense, would be an article in the Journal of Law and Economics by a guy named John McGee.

26:36It's in the library. It's in 1958. I forget the exact title. It's something about standard oil and monopoly. Where he shows that from the court records of the 1911 antitrust case of standard law that what John B. was doing was buying up all of these places and the reason he was able to buy them up is there were certain economies of scale and the bigger he got the more efficient he got and the more efficient he got the more he bought up other people and he kept the prices pretty low this is the historical record but it's a little hard to deal with historical records because people can always say well what if it were different you know need Now, the logical argument I would use to oppose this theory or this attempt at explanation of what happened is that it assumes that everybody except John Dee is a real idiot.

27:30For instance, suppose that you were a pig capitalist in another area, in an area that used oil as an input. Say, the chemical industry, you know, for sulfuric acid or something, or a whole bunch of industries use oil, pretty much oil is used in every industry. Now, suppose you had a firm around here somewhere in California and you were watching what was happening to this poor little oil dealer as he was being driven out by John Dee. Well, what would you do, knowing that if John Dee succeeded here and elsewhere, you'd be out because he could raise his prices and you'd be at his mercy? So obviously you do one of several things. Maybe you get your own oil well and not use it. Namely, while Jean-Baptiste is in the act of taking over this guy, you buy up all this oil at a very cheap price in the store.

28:20And then when Jean-Baptiste knocks it out and starts raising this price, you just use all this oil that you stockpile. Or you can get your own oil well, or you can subsidize this guy, or you can offer a partnership to this guy. The second thing, how about all the world oil suppliers? In other words, if John Dee ever succeeded in doing a thing like this to the United States, which I don't think is possible, oil from the rest of the world would come floating into the United States. Of course, it wouldn't, as a matter of fact, because we have all sorts of oil quotas not allowing oil in, but this is hardly a part of the free market, and the allegation is that it's the free market that allows monopoly to be caused. Thirdly, how about all these other guys? You know, they're not complete idiots either.

29:06They could see what's happening in the one place and they tend to band together to some degree to oppose these machinations of John Dick. Okay, one last case of libertarianism, and this is the old bugaboo of depressions. You know, if we didn't have a free market, or rather, if we had a free market, you know, we'd have all these depressions, you know, we'd have business cycles, we'd go up and down and up and down, And I guess we'd end up going far down and we'd all end up dead or something in the logical extension. The idea being that, you know, if there's one Miser who puts some money in his goddamn mattress, this screws everything up. Because what happens? You know, he buys less stuff, right? And then the people that he bought less stuff from buy less stuff in turn, and then they buy less stuff, and everybody starts buying less stuff, and nobody can sell anything, and then the whole thing goes kaput or take the case of just today in the paper our president Nixon, our boy, just negotiated a big agreement with Japanese and German steel producers whereby they would have quote voluntary unquote quotas on their export of steel to the United States you have the same thinking here you know if the Germans or the Japanese

30:28If you sell us any steel, that means that some steelworkers will lose their jobs, and if some steelworkers lose their jobs, they won't buy stuff, and they'll have this thing on and on around the economy. Now the thing is, I think, very clear, that if we buy Japanese steel, and we lose workers here, well, what's going to happen is that we're going to be saving some money, because the Japanese steel is cheaper. And with this extra money, people will spend in other areas, and these other areas will take up the slack, or the market process will tend in this way, so that we'll have full employment even if we have international division of labor. And if all of a sudden a bunch of Mises decide to sock some money in a mattress, this isn't so bad, because for every Miser that socks it away in a mattress, there's another Miser who's dying and his grandchildren are digging it out of the mattress.

31:26So you don't really have too much of a shift. But in the 1929 Depression, as Milton Friedman would tell us in his book on the 1929 Depression and the monetary history of the United States, what happened is that the Federal Reserve system, the safeguard of depressions, what they did is they lowered the money supply by about a third in two or three years and this pretty much caused the Depression. The free market took the blame for it, but it was not the free market's fault, it was the government's fault. Okay, this time I'd like to call for some questions and comments and speeches or what have you. Don't all rise up at once.

32:12Yeah. Question from the audience. Well, I would say it's her belly. I mean, you know, if she could tell her kid to go somewhere else, that's okay. Otherwise, I would consider it trespassing. Oh, I'm sorry. Let me repeat the question and see if I can repeat it to your satisfaction. The statement was, it's all well and good to say that the woman has the control of her own body in the case of abortion, but how about the fact that it's the kid's life that we're talking about, not the woman's life?

33:03Is that your question, Ms. substance? Well, my answer to that would be that it is the woman's body and she and she alone can decide who lives in that belly. Now, if you could have some sort of abortion where the kid lived in a test tube or something else, then the mother would have no right to kill the kid because murder is obviously a prime violation of non-aggression against non-aggressives. But as long as the kid is in her belly, it's sort of too bad on the kid. That would be the answer. Every Man Being Able to Own a Rifle to Protect His Own Property

34:04was that Castro was allowing his citizens to go on. I think the first sign that something is coming up where the dictators are trying to take over is that they're first trying to take all the rifles away, to pretty much get everyone to lay down their arms. I think everyone should have the right to bear arms, and if anyone should disarm, and I'm for disarming too, I think that the biggest killers in the world should disarm first. And the biggest killers are not people with rifles and guns and knives. They're people in B-52s. Please. Yeah? Oh, let's take all of them, say, police, finance, sanitation, what would be the mechanics, how would the people pay for it, what would be the ongoing system?

35:04Well, it's a little hard to forecast what's going to happen when and if we ever have freedom or a free market. Just as it would be a little hard to forecast, say, in 1900, how the TV industry would look like, or what the TV industry would look like. But we can make some speculations. One way might be sort of a pay-as-you-go system, or you might have a contract, a yearly contract with a company, say, a yearly retainer. You know, people somehow think that if we had private fire departments, you know, your house would be on fire and all of a sudden you'd have to start dippering with a fire company while your house burned down. And they say, well, this shows that we can never have private fire departments. The answer to this would be that you might have a yearly retainer. You know, you hire a company and the usual way that it's working in Scottsboro, Arizona is the one place I know of where they have private fire departments

35:54is that the insurance companies get their own fire trucks. Because if you insure your house and it burns down, the insurance company has to pay for it, therefore the insurance company protects your house. So it's a package deal between insurance and fire. But it need not be this way. You could have insurance with one company, and you could have another private fire department protecting your house, say, on an annual retainer, and all sorts of combinations of permutations are possible. You might have a low yearly rate of pay, and if there's a fire, they get paid a bonus. The same thing would be done by sanitation, sort of the way milk gets delivered or newspapers get delivered, only this would be the opposite. Garbage gets un-delivered or taken away. And I don't think that this presents much of a problem.

36:40But I would advise you to go look at Harlem or Bedford-Stuyvesant if you think that the people in the ghetto are getting a fair share from the garbage system. It's a very strange and horrible system. If you do a bad job, you don't lose any customers, because these customers have to pay or they go to jail. It would be the same thing in the police system. Many people think that if we had private police, you'd have to go everywhere with an armed bodyguard. If you had a bodyguard, you'd always be in danger and there'd be rapes and killing, as I said before, not as it is today. But you wouldn't have to have that. You might have people who own the streets. Obviously, all things would be owned privately in a full-free market.

37:28The guy who owned the street would have a great incentive to make sure that street was safe, because if his street got a reputation for being unsafe, people wouldn't come there. or the Merchants Associations could hire a police department to make the place safe. In other words, many types of contracts are possible. It might work like the way Mises works. They hire a police department for them to protect you.

38:01Come on, you deadheads. The question is what function should the government have, if anyone at all? I would say if the government is to have a function, and I'm not against the government or anyone else having a function, I'm only against the coercive aspects of the government. If the government would not have tax revenues, if it would not force people to pay for it, If it would fully depend on voluntary subscriptions, like say a lottery or an off-track betting or whatever, and by the way, if it had a lottery and an off-track betting, it couldn't be like the way they now have it, because the way they now have it is it's illegal for anyone else to have one.

38:48There's a beautiful case in, I think, the Harlem OTB where a bunch of people just busted it in, you know, busted the windows and ripped it all off. They said, you know, here you say that we can't have numbers running in Harlem, The answer to the question would be that it's not so much against government that libertarianism is, as it is against the initiation of violence against non-courses or non-aggressives. If the government would just exist based on voluntary subscriptions and would not either force people to pay money or disallow competition with it, then it would be perfectly justified. Why didn't you change one large power structure for a smaller one?

39:43In the free market, we still have large power blocks taking over and ruling us. Well, the point I would answer to that is that libertarianism is not a utopian thing. We're not saying that we're going to have the millennium and that everyone will be equal and will all live happily ever after. I think libertarianism can best be interpreted as a realistic attempt to diminish power.

40:35You see, I don't see anything wrong with some people having more money than others, I don't see anything wrong with Joan Baez having a lot of money, or with the Beatles having a lot of money, or with Elvis Presley having a lot of money, or with Will Chamberlain having a lot of money, or with Muhammad Ali. Now these people earned it honestly as far as I can see. And every time they earn some money honestly, let's say they invented something and gave a lot of people a lot of pleasure, what they did is for every dollar they earn they must have given ten or twenty dollars to everyone else.

41:36In other words, according to the libertarian view, the state is nothing but a front group for the ruling class, the businessmen, and the surest way to get rid of their power is to smash this status system of coercion that they use to sort of gain all their power. Al, do you want to ask the last question? No? Okay, thank you for your indulgence. Thank you for your indulgence. If you want to come up and ask questions, I'd be glad to talk to you. Thank you, Professor Block.