So, over the last year, two years, three years, certainly with Obama administration, we've seen a real emphasis by the left on the idea of inequality, on the idea that there's something inherently evil, inherently wrong with inequality. Now, they couch this in terms recently in terms of, well, inequality is growing, inequality is getting worse, but they would talk about this, whether those empirical facts were true or not. And indeed, we could argue, and you can ask me in the Q&A about whether the facts are true or not. I think that's irrelevant. I don't think that's an issue at all. And whenever the left gives you empirical anything, you have to be skeptical. I mean, mostly on the right as well. You should be skeptical about empirical evidence, generally, because it's used so much as propaganda and not as fact.  The real question is, what are they trying to get at? Because this inequality is everywhere, and it justifies almost everything they want to do. If you listen to the State of the Union, Obama's State of the Union, almost every one of his programs is justified in some way or another by this idea of the evil of inequality, the idea that we have to do something about inequality. And it's inequality, and they'll talk about this, it's inequality of income, it's inequality of wealth, and those are the things that they're focusing on right now because they seem to have some empirical evidence that inequality of income in the United States has increased over the last 30 years, and the inequality of wealth has increased over the last 30 years. And again, ask me about this in a Q and A. There's some legitimacy to that, but it depends on how you measure and what's important and why you would even measure this is a question. But every one of their agenda items is driven by this idea. And this is important to understanding the whole campaign of the West because of the left. The whole agenda of the left right now is focused on bringing about some form of equality. And to do that, they have to convince us, they have to convince all of us that inequality is evil, that inequality is bad. Now what's interesting is if you read on Rand, I know I was talking about this 50 years ago. This whole discussion of egalitarianism, of the benefits of equality, of the evil of inequality is not new. It was big in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Rand talks about it quite a lot. The left, it was a big agenda of the left back then, it kind of died out and kind of went away and it seems to really have come back with the Obama administration, really as a major thrust of what they're trying to do, of what they want to do. And I think what happened in the 1970s is this inequality debate in a sense hit a kind of brick wall. And the brick wall is the American spirit. Americans don't like the idea of equality. We just reject it, it's somehow wrong. We admire achievement, we admire success. We look at, historically Americans have looked at wealthy people and said, wow, I want to be like that, I want to be successful. And they've attributed people success to their own abilities, to their own hard work, to their own innovation, to the use of their own minds. So Americans have always had a healthy view of success. Another thing that the inequality debate is challenged by is the fact that Americans, again, historically, have been individualist. They viewed the individual as the important unit in politics, in life. It's about individual success, it's about individual prosperity. Not in terms of classes. I mean, nobody talked in terms of classes in America until relatively recently. It was about how does this affect individuals? So when the left started talking about these issues of inequality and we want to achieve equality, Americans rebelled against us. This isn't the American thing to believe in. And then the Berlin Wall falls and that whole idea of equality kind of disappears. Why has it come back again today? Well, I think what the left has been doing over the last 20 to 30 years, and what it's doing even more intensely today, is trying to lay the foundation for the success of the idea of this equality. And equality of what? Equality of outcome is what they want, right? Equality of abilities, equality of just equality. They can't really even define it. Equality of happiness, I've heard people talk about, right? They want some equality of outcome. But they need to lay the foundations, and how are you going to lay the foundations out? How are you going to make it saleable to the American people? How are you going to get the American people to buy into this idea? Well, the only way to do that is to undercut those two ideas, the idea of success and the idea of individualism. And that, I think, is what the left has been dedicating itself a long time, writing about it in subtle different ways. They've been writing about it, they've been working on it, they've been trying to find ways in which they can attack the notion of individual success, the notion more fundamentally of individualism, to prep the American people so that we become much more accepting of the idea, the egalitarian idea, the idea of equality, the idea of the evil of inequality. So let's see, talk a little bit about how they've been doing that. I mean, you saw this in kind of an obvious way with Obama, right? And you can even see the sequence of this. Even before he talked about inequality and even of inequality, what was the first thing that Obama talked about? It was you didn't build it, right?  On the notion that you as an individual are successful, that you as an individual have earned something. You didn't build that is an attack directly on the notion of personal responsibility, of responsibility for your own achievements. And if it's not your own achievements, if you're not responsible for the wealth you have, for the income you have, for whatever it is that you've created and built, then what's the big deal about taking it away from you? It's not yours, it's ours. Note that he does two things very successfully here, right? He had, I mean, successfully, we'll see, but he does try to do two things. One is attack the notion of success and attack the notion of individual. It's we helped you. It's not even any particular individual helped you, right? If it's this particular school teacher who helped you, then I can write them a check. That's easy. I can take care of that. And indeed, that's what we do, right? Bill Gates didn't write all the software for Microsoft. True. But he paid everybody who helped him write that software, right? But it's not about those individuals. It's this ambiguous, amorphous, undefined we, this collective that's unspecified. The people who built the roads, the people who built the schools, and your favorite teacher, and your employees, and your suppliers, and it's we built it. So it's not your money because you didn't build it. It's not you are not responsible for it. Again, what they're trying to do is delink what's yours from your own efforts. And if they can do that, then they can take it from you. They can build the legitimacy for the idea that whether you're Bill Gates or you're a bum on the streets, your equal can neither one deserves it. You didn't build it. Now, but you didn't build it has deeper roots. It has much deeper roots that, again, go back over the last 20 to 30 years to philosophy, to ideas that are being taught at our universities and our schools that are being preached by some of our leading businessmen. And this is the idea much more fundamentally that you didn't build it because everything you build, even if you literally built it, is just a consequence of luck. Luck. I mean, Bill Gates is lucky. There's a wonderful book, wonderful, because it's very well written. I forgot its name, of course. The guy who wrote Tipping Point, Gladwell, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book and he explains that Bill Gates just happened to go to school that happened to have a computer lab and that he happened to have some opportunities to work in that computer lab and he happened to do this and he happened to do that. It wasn't him, it's just the stuff happened to him. And again, it goes even deeper than that because it's not just a luck of circumstance that they talk about. But it's an even deeper luck and Bill Gates talks about this himself. Bill Gates was born with particular genes that are suitable for a pro, you know, to be a computer guy and a businessman. He was born in a century where those genes were particularly useful, right? He was born to a family that encouraged him. He had no control over his family, his genes, or the century he was born into. This is all luck, right? And if you don't, you know, now this all comes from John Walz's philosophy and a lot of other kind of leftist thinkers that have been talking about this for the last 20 years. But there's a prominent businessman who says this all the time and he talks exactly in this language. Anybody know who that is? Juan Buffett. Juan Buffett talks this language. He will, you'll see him in interviews talking about, well, I'm just lucky. And what he means is this deeper form of luck, right? So the wealth he made isn't his. He didn't build it. It just, you know, just happened because he has the right genes and the right family and the right education, the right century and so on, right? And he was in the right place at the right time. And of course Bill Gates is Juan Buffett's protege, so you're starting to see Bill Gates talk like this, right? So these ideas are entering. Again, it's all time to cut. It's all to subvert this idea that you built it, that you're responsible for your life, that you're responsible for creating and building and making stuff. Because if you're not, again, then how come it's fair that you have all this stuff for another people? And we'll see the assumption built into that. The corrupting assumption there, right? So the idea is that you didn't create stuff. You didn't build it. But they have to build further on this, right? They have to continuously advocate for this notion that it's not yours. Or if it is yours, there's an injustice. Because again, American people are pretty stubborn about this idea of respecting ability, respecting achievement, and respecting individuals. So you see entering into the language more and more ideas that reflect, implicitly reflect, implicitly and explicitly reflect. The notion that if you have a lot, one, you probably didn't build it. And two, you actually took it from somebody. Or that the fact that you have it means other people don't. And you see this whole notion of a zero-sum world. Nobody actually admits to believing in zero-sum. Nobody actually advocates for zero-sum. But it's in the language. It's in the giving back that so many of our rich philanthropists talk about. We give back. What did you take? What did you take that you have to give back? But if it's a zero-sum world, anything that they have, they took from somewhere. It's in Obama's speech, the latest state of the Union. When he didn't say the wealthy make, he said the wealthy take. The wealthy take a big portion of the pie or whatever the term was, right? But it's the taking. It's not making money. It's taking money. And that does, again, two things. It undermines the moral right to whatever they took, because they took it. And implicitly, it says it's ours. It's, again, this we, right? We built it. It's really ours. And those guys are taking a bigger piece than they share, right? So, again, all this is meant to soften us up, to undercut our ability to defend against us, to prepare the American public for, well, inequality is evil because those guys didn't build it. They're taking a bigger part of the pie than they should. It's not theirs to begin with. It's ours. We want some of it back in order to bring about more equality. They even make ridiculous economic arguments to argue that inequality is bad somehow, again, to appeal to the kind of practical nature of Americans. We want the economy to work. We want economic progress. We want economic success. Haven't you heard that inequality is holding back economic growth, right? I mean, this is common now. Krugman writes about this. Allen Blinder writes about this. The president has talked about this. Inequality slows down economic growth. Now, how does that work? How does it work that inequality slows economic growth? Well, we know, and this is a metaphysical fact, that you cannot question. There were drives the economy as consumption. Drives the, that's the starting point. Because 70% they come up with this bizarre number out of GDP. 70% of GDP is consumption. 70% of the economy is consumption. Therefore, what drives the economy is consumption, right? So you start with that. Who consumes more? The rich or the poor? As a percentage of their income? The poor. Much more, right? Because the rich save and invest. And saving and investment, that's no good for the economy. What drives the economy is consumption. So if you take money away from those nasty investing and saving rich, and you give it to those wonderful consuming poor, or middle class, or whoever, then the economy will go faster. Now, I'm not going to teach you all economics, but that is like one of the stupidest arguments in human history. It really is, because what drives the economy long term is saving and investment. Put aside the rights issue of all this, but just from a purely economic perspective, you can't consume more than you produce. So how can consumption be 70% of an economy? What are you consuming? Every dollar I used to buy ice cream, I had a work to produce. I can't consume more than my income. Now, I can borrow stuff for a while. You can consume more than you produce, but you have to pay back. So you have to, at the very least, it's 50-50. And of course, what drives consumption is production. There's the creation of stuff, the building of stuff. Not the, you know what consumption is?  It's gone. It's gone. Consumption is destruction. Now, it's good destruction. The ice cream really tasted well and makes your life better, right? It's good, it's hard to say good destruction, but it's a good form, right? But that's what it is. Production is building stuff, making stuff. That's what is important. That's what drives an economy. So notice they're using all these economic arguments. And I'm going to speculate, but this is not wild speculation, that they know they're bogus. They know this isn't true. But they're trying to make this argument, right? Their thing is inequality and they want to get you to believe that it's bad. And if inequality slows down the economy, the American people are going to go, oh no, we want economic growth, so let's get rid of inequality. Because we're practical people. We want prosperity. We want success. Finally, they take the one aspect of inequality that has some legitimacy in terms of being bad. And they blow it out of completely out of proportion. And what's the one aspect of inequality that you can say is we, I think certainly, would all agree is bad and wrong? Well, what would occupy, what would occupy movement about? What were they really upset about? Bailouts, right? So they were upset about cronyism. So they take this inequality and they say, you see those rich? They're all cronies. They didn't build it. They didn't create it. They took it and the government helped them take it. The government helped them by distributing wealth to them through cronyism. And the government did it only because the government is captured by all this money that goes into business and they lobby and they have to give it to them. So it's not the government's fault. It's the business's fault for taking money through the government. And we all go, yeah, we're against cronyism. You know, we don't like that either. And a lot of Americans are upset about cronyism. So if they're wealthy or wealthy because of cronyism, yeah, we're upset about that. And that's the one thing they have kind of legitimate, right? That they can use and they blow it out of proportion. Of course they're not consistent about it, right? Because the Occupy Wall Street movement was in primarily, what was the focal point of the Occupy movement? It was Occupy what? Wall Street. So they were upset about bailouts of banks, right? But what were they not upset about? Yeah, they weren't upset about bailouts of Detroit. There was no Occupy thing in front of Detroit officers and this, right? So they're like somebody else, they don't like others. Which is typical of the left, you know? Don't subsidize this guys, we want to subsidize these guys. So they use it selectively, but again they're using it to undercut. Undercut this notion of there's real wealth being created. There's real achievement out there. There's real individuals that are responsible for their own lives and responsible for the creation of this wealth. And this permeates across so many different issues, so many different places and they keep raising these little issues. But you always have to look and see what are they trying to do? And often what they're trying to do is exactly destroy this American spirit. What they're trying to do is undercut it. And they're succeeding. The populace today is far more receptive to an egalitarian argument. An argument for equality, then they were 50 years ago. Then they were 20 years ago, 30 years ago. Because they've been slowly, you know, they've been chipping away at our resilience over and over and over again. So this is how they're trying to, you know, they're trying to undercut because they come up against this barrier. Their view, inequality is unjust, inequality is wrong, inequality is evil. And you American people, you don't get it, right? And therefore they're trying to create an intellectual foundation for them to get away with what they want to get away with. Now, what do they want to get? Right, what is this inequality? How do you deal with inequality? If inequality is really a problem, which the left tells us it is, and more and more Americans are becoming, you know, convinced that inequality is a problem, how do you deal with it? What is the way in which we deal with inequality? Because inequality is all around us. We're all completely unequal. We know this, right, we're unequal in lots of different things. What is the way in which the left or anybody who's concerned about inequality like this deals with it, the only way? Yeah, so when it comes to wealth, you talk about redistribution, but let's take, you know, I like to use the example of basketball, right? So LeBron James is a really good basketball player. I used to use Michael Jordan, but, and actually this is an old enough audience that they know who Michael Jordan is. Right, Michael Jordan is really good, right? I'm really bad. That's unequal. It's not fair. I want to be as good as Michael Jordan. I deserve to be as good as Michael Jordan. What right, I mean, he was born with good genes. He was born in a neighborhood where they played a lot of basketball. He was tall. He worked hard, but that, you know, he didn't choose that. That's just dictated by his environment and his genes, so it's not his choice. So what, why does he get to have five wings and I get nothing, right? That's not fair. So I want to play basketball as good as Michael Jordan does. And it's my right. God damn it, right? So how do we do that? How do we make me and Michael Jordan equal in basketball? Yeah, yeah, you have to take him down, because you ain't getting me as good as him. I don't care if I train every minute of every hour that I'm awake for the rest of my life. It's never going to come even close. So the only way to make us equal is to break his legs. And actually, if you'd seen me play basketball, you would know that's not enough. You'd have to break his arms, too. Now, you laugh, but that's reality. That is reality.  To achieve equality means breaking people's arms and legs. There's no other way to do it. Equality can only be achieved through coercion. Equality can only be achieved through destruction. There's no other way. So take inequality of wealth, inequality of income. Oh, that's easy. We just redistribute wealth. Well, that's a nice word, right? Redistribute. What does it mean? It means we go to some people and we put up pan in their pockets and we take their money and give it to somebody else. But what does money represent? What is money? Because that doesn't sound too bad. As compared to breaking arms and legs, that sounds like big deal. It's just money, right? But what is money? Work. What is work? Time and effort. What is life? I mean, the one thing that life is, it has a finite amount of time. When I work, you know, we kind of joke around by saying, everybody works 40% until April or something or May for the government, and then they work for themselves. And that's kind of funny. No, that's tragic, right? This stealing time from you, this stealing the fruits of your effort, they're breaking your legs and arms. They're taking from someone, giving to others. That is breaking arms and legs. There's no difference. They're taking your life away.  It's called time.  The one life you have, there ain't no other. That 40% that's gone, it's gone. It'll never come back. That's really, really sad. I mean, horrific. Well, they don't do it to everybody. They do it to those who have. Right? They do it to those who have. Now, and the other ways in which they cripple those who haven't, but to those who have, they cripple them through taking their money. And that's the Michael Jordan example. They're breaking people's legs. Why? Why are they choosing to break his legs and not his legs? Why are they taking Bill Gates's money and not Joe's money? Because he's good. Because he succeeded. Because he made it. Because of his virtues. The destroying virtue, Michael Jordan. Think of virtue, Michael Jordan basketball, right? It's an easy concrete. Why are we breaking Michael Jordan's legs? Because he's so good. In the name of what?  In the name of my mediocrity. With sacrificing the greatest player who ever lived in the name of my mediocrity in basketball. I mean, that is evil. It doesn't get more evil than that. That's what the inequality, right? That's what they have to do. To achieve equality, you can only do it through cursing. And who do you curse? The able, the good, the competent, the people who have something. That's what inequality demands. Because there is no such thing as equality in nature, in life, in reality. There's no such thing as equality. Inequality is metaphysical. Inequality is the state of life. We are all born unequal. We all do have all kinds of abilities. We all exercise those abilities differently. We don't have equal opportunities. We don't have equal outcomes. And we're not equal. And we choose not to be equal. And we sometimes choose to be poor and not rich because it's more fun because we're doing a career that happens to be more fun than making money. There are lots of things that we do. And that inequality that, if you will, the differences between us would make life interesting and fun. Some differences. Some differences are not so fun, but some differences. I want Michael Jordan to be 1,000 times better than me, a million times better than me. That's fun. It was just like me. Nobody would watch basketball, right? So inequality is a metaphysically given. What they're fighting, what they're fighting is reality. What they're fighting is existence. What they're fighting is the metaphysical nature of life. And that's why it's so vicious. Because to fight reality, you have to hate reality. That's what really motivates this whole agenda about inequality. It is, at the end of the day, it's hatred. It's hatred for Michael Jordan. It's hatred for ability. It's hatred for the Bill Gates. Pull them down. It's not about helping people up. Not about helping people up, right? You can see that in discussions like they're talking now about the minimum wage. The minimum wage, and we can go for a long time about the minimum wage, but the minimum wage, the bottom line is the minimum wage increases unemployment among unskilled laborers, right? If you're in a city youth in between the age of 16 and 26, unemployment rates in the United States are over 20%. They're close to 30. France, which has the highest minimum wage in the Western world, has the highest unemployment among youth in the Western world. It's 50%, right? And they're all in a city, in that case, the Muslim. Hear the black and Hispanic primarily, but it's in a city. These are the people that supposedly were trying to help with the minimum wage. But this is an economic fact. When Paul Krugman writes economics in his textbook, he points out that the minimum wage has to create unemployment. Law of supply and demand. When he writes in The New York Times, he contradicts himself. He says, oh, no, the minimum wage is wonderful. Because they don't care about lying. They don't care about the poor. That's not what it's about. It's not about helping anybody. It's about equality for the sake of equality. It's about destroying the able, pulling the able down. That's what it's all about. I'll give you the ultimate example of egalitarianism, of the striving towards equality. And this is what I always think about when I think about equality. So there was a group of intellectuals, not that long ago, 20th century, who really took this idea of egalitarianism of equality really seriously. They studied in some of the best universities in Europe, primarily in France, under some of the great philosophers of the time who taught egalitarianism and equality and so on. And they absorbed all this philosophy. And they went home. And what they discovered at home, they attained political power. And what they discovered at home is an incredibly unequal society. Some people lived in cities, and some people lived out in the countryside. And that's not equal, because life in the city is easier. It's more prosperous. And life in the countryside is pretty rough, particularly in this country. So they said, that's not equal. That's not right. So they forced everybody to leave the cities. They emptied the cities out. Everybody was forced into the countryside. And then they looked around and said, still not equal. Some people can read, some people can't. Some people are well-educated, some people are not. Some people are smart, some people are not. Some people can play basketball, some are not, whatever. There's no equality still. What are we gonna do? How do we establish equality? Now, we're in a hurry, right? We're ideologues. We wanna get this egalitarianism stuff done. So what do you do?  What's that?    Or you butcher them with knives, as the case was. You take people who have glasses as an indication of intelligence or whatever, learning, because you need glasses to read or something. You shoot them. You club them to death. You get rid of them, one way or the other. In a country of five and a half million people, almost two million people were killed, two million people in the killing fields of Cambodia. This is not some theoretical stuff. This is real life. This happened in the mid-70s, not that long ago. These students studied with Jean-Paul Sartre and a bunch of really fancy French philosophers. And they took their studies seriously.  And they went home and they killed 20% of their own population. That's what this ideology is about. That's how evil it is. That's what we have to hold in our mind. Egalitarianism is death and destruction. It has been in the past, they've done it, they've executed on it. It will be in the future unless it stopped. So how do you stop it? Well, first we have to reject the whole interpretation of the concept of equality. Equality, the way the left uses it, is what I mean by called an anti-concept. It doesn't mean anything. It's anti-reality. There is no manifestation of it in reality that we would identify. Because inequality, as we said, is metaphysical. It's there, we're all unequal. That's the reality. To have a concept of equality is to have a, is to fight against reality, is to go to war with reality. But there's a sense in which equality is, does have meaning, an important meaning. And we need to fight for that sense. Because the founders use it and the founders use it in the right way. In the Declaration of Independence, they tell us that all men are created equal. But what do they mean by all men are created equal? Well, under the law, but it's deeper than under the law. What is the contrast at the time? Yeah, in Europe, you've got aristocrats and serfs. You've got people who are born into privilege and born into slavery. Nothing that they do, no virtues of theirs, no hard work, no ability matter. That's their station in life. And the law discriminates between them. They are not treated the same by the law. And they have no ability to change their status because the law oppresses them into this. Even in the US, unfortunately at the time, there were slaves and masters. The point of where all created equal is that we all have equal rights. We're all equal in freedom. We have no masters and slaves. It's not that we're born the same. It's not that the outcome is gonna be the same. It's that we all have the right to be free of coercion. We all have a right to pursue our values, to pursue our life, to make our life the best life that it can be, to pursue rational values in trying to attain our life. Free of coercion, free of force. Free force from our neighbor. Free of force from a distant neighbor. Free of force from our government. Free of coercion, left alone. That's what equality means. We'll all equally have the right not to be cursed. We're equally free. We're not born into slavery. Nobody is born into slavery. Now notice that every attempt to do away with inequality, the inequality that the left moans about, necessitates violating the principle of equality. The real principle of equality. Note that any attempt, any attempt to achieve the left's vision of equality necessitates rejecting the true sense of equality. Because how do we achieve, how do we remedy inequality? Cursion. When you take Bill Gates' money and give it to, I don't know, Joe Smith, are they equal? No.  He's not equal in rights. His money's not his. We're stealing it. It's okay for us to steal his money and give it, and this guy's getting stuff that he didn't earn that's, right? So we are violating the principle of true principle of political equality. The principle of the founding. The principle of individual rights in order to fulfill this perversion, this anti-concept of equality as defined by the left. So we need to be advocates for true political equality, which means individual rights, which means anti-corrosion, which means your pursuit of your, the positive pursuit of values is something that the government protects us. The government is there to protect us from coercion that stops us from being able to pursue our values. But only from coercion. But again, note, every attempt to remedy their inequality involves coercion and therefore involves violating rights, and therefore can't be right. So we need to advocate for true liberty, for real political freedom, for real equal rights, real equality, and we need to take that concept from them. We need to reject their interpretation of equality and need to adopt our own, but we need to be clear on what it means, otherwise we lose. And we can't buy into any aspect of their debate about inequality. I mean, the one legitimate aspect is cronyism. Well, cronyism is bad because what, because coercion is involved. Money's taken from someone given to others. It might work in the other direction. It might be complicated to track the money. It's not an issue of inequality. Inequality is not the problem with cronyism. Corrosion is the problem with cronyism. Now, to do that, the more fundamental thing we have to do is we have to be able to defend individualism. We have to be able to defend the idea that the individual is, should be the ultimate beneficiary of their own work, their own thinking, their own pursuit of values. That the individual is the political unit, the only political unit of importance. That there is no collective. That all there is are individuals. And all there is that's important is individuals. That we each do the work, that we do build it. We do create it. And yeah, there's luck. But what is the moral status of luck? Yeah, we all are born with different genes. Is that unfair? Is it unfair that some people are born geniuses and other people are born dumb? I don't know. You know, low IQs. Assuming you're born with a particular IQ. I don't know the answer to that. Is that fair or unfair? It's neither. It can't be fair or unfair. Is it fair or unfair? Is it just or unjust that a tornado went through, picked the town? I mean, justice doesn't apply to it. It just is. You can say it's sad. You can say it's unfortunate. You can say it's tragic, but you can't say. You can't label it a moral term. Morality only applies to what? To human choices. Right? To human choices. It's kind of funny because it assumes, morality assumes free will, right? Because it's choices. And they reject free will and claim morality as they mantle. So yes, we're all born with different stuff. Yes, some people are horrifically born to bad circumstances. Horrible circumstances sometimes. And that's sad. But the fact that they're born into it is not an issue of justice. It is what it is. It's what you make of it that matters. It's what you do with it that matters. Indeed, the whole idea of saying that it's all luck is a real insult to those people who are born into those circumstances and do phenomenally well, who overcome them, who work hard, who apply themselves and at whatever level of success they attain do it for themselves in spite of their circumstances, of their genes, of whatever. It's incredibly insulting to people who've exercised their free will to make themselves better. So we have to protect and defend free will. We have to defend the idea of individual success, of individual ownership over what we produce and individual ownership over our own values, individual ownership over our own minds. And that's the key, right? Because all our human values ultimately come from the use of our reason. And that is the most important of all things to defend. There's no such thing as a collective consciousness. And there's no thing out here that's thinking for us. You go on a meeting, there's no group think. I mean, you can help each other think, you can stimulate thought and teams work optimally when everybody's thinking for themselves and people are helping each other think, but there's no group think. Because at the end of the day, what we need to defend is human rationality, human reason, individual human reason, because that's the only kind there is. There is no other kind. It's the human mind, human effort, individual mind, individual effort, individual choices that lead to individual success. They lead to whatever outcome there is. We do each one of us build it. We do each one of us own it. We need to stand up for individualism, for the individual as what's important in life and as the creator, the builder, the thinker, the doer. And reject all of it, the whole kid and caboodle of the inequality debate. All of it is irrelevant. I don't care if the empirics are true or not true. What's right or what's wrong? It's irrelevant. Their agenda has nothing to do with the numbers. Their agenda is about destruction. Our agenda is about individual life and individual success. That's all we need to defend. And that will determine the fate of this country. Thank you all.


There is a winding passage that leads up to my heart and what comes down this passage is commonly called a fart. The fart is very useful, it sets the mind at ease and warms the bed on wintry nights and disinfects the fleas. Humour is an important component of children's play and nowhere is this more apparent than in their verbal play. It serves a wide range of purposes allowing children to challenge, undermine and disarm adult power and seriousness, to explore taboo topics as various as sex or toilets and to experiment with dazzling displays of verbal dexterity. Many funny rhymes are ones which accompany specific games, activities such as counting out, clapping or skipping. Rude variations of Popeye the Sailor Man for example accompanied clapping games in the mid 20th century. Others are simply performed and passed along for fun. Their humour, their cheek, their rhyme and rhythm, imagery, play on words and frequent parodic traits are all reasons why they appeal to children and why they're memorable. An important class of verbal humour is parody. The history of children's language play abounds in parodic versions of different genres Christmas carols, pop songs, advertising jingles, Valentine's Day rhymes, happy birthday, football chants, musicals, TV theme songs. The wide variety of genres involved demonstrates a real mixing bowl of popular cultural references where everything is up for grabs, nothing is sacred and the punchline is all. The sources are equally diverse, other children, adults, comics, books, television, films and the internet. The OP audio collection, selections of which appear here, has a good many rude rhymes in particular, more than have appeared in today's well-regulated playgrounds. This may be partly because their collections include games and songs played in the street in London Council estates and parks as well as school playgrounds. In the changed geography of childhood, the street as a place for play has drastically diminished, while playgrounds tend to be more scrupulously overseen by teachers, learning assistants and play workers. Either children produce fewer rude rhymes in these circumstances or they keep it more carefully hidden.