OK, good afternoon, everyone. Let's go ahead and take our seats. We've got a lot to get through this afternoon, and I only have three hours for this talk, so let's get started. I want to talk about competition and what competition means in a market economy, how should we understand why is it important to have competition? What does it mean for an economy to be competitive? What you typically get in a standard economics course or in most discussions of markets among mainstream economists is the idea that, well, competition is a good thing. We want our system to be competitive, but somehow that isn't going to happen on its own. There's some kind of a tendency for industries and economies to become monopolized or dominated by large monopolists unless we, where we typically means state regulators and judges and so forth, play some sort of active role in making it competitive and preventing the economy from being monopolized. I mean, you see this all the time, going back at least 150 years or more to the progressive movement of the late 19th century. You can read about that in Murray Rothbard's book on the Progressive Era that was just published within the last couple of years here by the Institute. De Lorenzo's written about the origins of antitrust in the 19th century. And we know that in fact, it was not, these were not movements led by the people, like most so-called populist or progressive movements. They were led by large, powerful special interests who were trying to develop, for example, antitrust laws that would be beneficial to themselves rather than to the market. In the 20th century, as the neoclassical paradigm became dominant in Western economics, you had within industrial organization and antitrust theory, the dominance of the so-called structure conduct performance paradigm, basically the econ 101 monopoly diagram arguing that, well, there's a natural tendency for industries to become monopolized and you need vigorous antitrust enforcement to make sure that we preserve some balance between competition and maybe some benefits that might accrue from monopoly. You know, actually for a while in the, I don't know, 1980s and 1990s, the structure conduct performance paradigm was kind of in retreat. There were, like the Chicago School, for example, launched some very powerful critiques of the structure conduct performance paradigm in the 1960s and 70s and those seemed to have taken hold in the 80s and 90s in terms of public policy. Now there's been a switch backwards and now we're seeing sort of a move towards a more aggressive antitrust stance again, at least a lot of calls for that, especially in regard to everybody's favorite whipping horse, right, the tech industry, big tech. So big tech, you know, social media giants, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, so forth or under fire, maybe not Apple so much, but under fire both from, you know, progressives like Elizabeth Warren and on the right you have social conservatives like Josh Hawley, the junior senator for Missouri who sort of, both of whom are sort of at the forefront of anti-big tech crusades. I'll talk a little bit more about that also on Friday during a lecture that I'm giving on data management and privacy regulation and so forth. So first of all, I mean, let's just remind ourselves what we mean by competition in ordinary language. Right, a competition is, you know, an event, a contest, several people competing against each other for some kind of a prize, like at school or sports. For example, I have a picture here of an epic chess competition between Tom Woods and Walter Block from a few years ago here at Mises U and it's interesting seeing, you know, two old bald guys going at it over the chess board with a crowd admiring them. I don't remember the outcome. Tom Woods assures me that he wiped the board with Walter Block, but Walter Block said it went the other way, but we also use the word, a word like competitive as an adjective to describe like a particularly intense competition. So I mean, I'm not that skilled a chess player so both Tom and Walter would easily crush me but the battle between the two of them was pretty evenly matched. And so we might say, boy, that was a really competitive match between Walter and Tom. In the common law or, you know, sort of in the natural law to build upon the judges talk from last night, you know, competition and monopoly had a very different meaning from the one they have in mainstream economics today. Right, monopoly was understood as a restriction on competition awarded by the state. Right, so think of, you know, some of the first large multinational companies, you know, the Dutch East India Company, for example, that had ships going to Indonesia and bringing back spices and so forth to Europe in the late medieval period. I mean, when we say the Dutch East India Company was a monopoly, we don't mean, you know, they had a very large market share. We're not talking about the Herfendahl Index being above some certain number. What we mean is they had a legal grant from the Dutch royal family to trade with the East Indies and no one else could legally do this. It was against the laws, against the royal charter for any other merchant to engage in trade with those islands. Only the Dutch East India Company was allowed to do so. So a monopoly was understood as a government grant of special privilege that outlaws competition by other firms, okay? In conventional economics, monopoly has come to mean something else, right?  You might remember to your undergrad econ class, maybe you're taking one now, the notions from neoclassical economics of perfect and imperfect competition. Right, so there's this kind of what Mises would call an imaginary construct of a perfectly competitive industry or a perfectly competitive market which has certain attributes and certain desirable properties. And if we see a market in the real world having characteristics that differ from this perfectly competitive imaginary construct, then we, you know, that's some inefficiency or loss of wellbeing that has to be remedied somehow. Usually the main criterion for perfect competition is the ability of firms to charge prices that are greater than marginal cost. So if a firm can charge prices above costs, then it is said to have some monopoly power or monopoly pricing power. The Austrian school has a very different approach or actually there are several approaches to monopoly within the Austrian school which I'll talk about in just a moment. Just to remind you, you've probably, most of you have seen a diagram like this, right? This is what you get in an undergrad textbook. You've got supposedly a firm, firm producing some commodity. And, you know, this is one small firm in a sea of many, many similar firms, right? Each firm is just alike, each firm's product is identical to the other, every other firm's product. So no firm has the ability to attract customers to its product over a rival's product based on some features or something because all the products are assumed to be the same. So the model describes each individual seller as facing a perfectly elastic or horizontal demand curve, right? I'm a little wheat farmer in Iowa, whatever. I'm selling wheat. You know, the market price of wheat is so many dollars per bushel and I can sell as many bushels as I want at that price without affecting it, right? If I dump a whole bunch of extra wheat on the market, I'm so small relative to the total industry that doesn't drive the price down. And if I, you know, withhold my wheat from the market for some reason, that doesn't make the price go up because I'm a tiny, tiny player in the market. So I take my demand and marginal revenue as given and I maximize profit by choosing the quantity where marginal revenue is equal to marginal cost. And the idea is that, yeah, gosh, this is really neat.  In the long run, you get entry and exit of firms that drives economic profits to zero. You get this kind of inter-temporal allocative efficiency and, wow, this is so good. This is the kind of world we want to live in. But alas, right? Reality bites back and instead gives us firms that sell different products, right? And an iPhone and a Samsung Galaxy are very similar but they're not identical and a McDonald's hamburger and a Burger King burger are similar but not quite the same. So in reality, products are not perfect substitutes and therefore sellers have some degree of monopoly power according to the conventional analysis. So rather than facing a perfectly elastic demand curve for the product, a firm with monopoly power faces a downward sloping demand curve for the product. And maybe you've done the algebra the geometry on this before, you get a downward sloping marginal revenue curve that is below and more steeply sloped than the demand curve. And so when the firm maximizes profits by setting marginal revenue equal to marginal cost, the quantity produced is actually smaller than the quantity that would have obtained under conditions of perfect competition. The firm sort of withholds some output from the market in order to drive up the price and climb up that marginal revenue curve and get a higher level of profit than what otherwise have obtained. Oh, and by the way, this is not only bad for consumers. It's not just that consumers lose some of their utility that goes to the firm in the form of profits, but there's also some extra inefficiency in the form of the so-called deadweight loss triangle, which is representing a lost gains to the consumers that are not captured by the seller. The point is, this is bad right compared to the previous diagram. So if the world looks like this, we've got to do something to make it more like that other world in which firms have perfectly elastic demand curves. It's kind of an interesting mental exercise, right? It's kind of a little game that you could play. You can look at the math and you can poke around with it. What does it really tell us about competition or its absence in actual markets composed of real people engaged in purposeful human action and so forth? I mean, the short answer is not much. There are a lot of, you know, even within the neoclassical paradigm, there are a number of critiques of this model which we don't have time to get into. But I'll just share with you some of the critiques that have been levied by Austrians. Rothbard, for example, pains to point out that this notion of the perfectly elastic demand curve cannot obtain in a world of actual, you know, purposeful human actors, right? Every seller in fact contributes some discrete quantity, not an infinitesimally small quantity to the output of the industry. And so every seller's actions will have some impact on price. Remember those diagrams I showed you before? Again, they're mathematical abstractions. When your professor tells you, well, under perfect competition firms are really small, your professor doesn't mean that, well, they only have like 10 employees. Like really small means like literally of size zero. I mean, it's kind of a, it's sort of a calculus-based argument. In other words, the claim is as the number of firms approaches infinity, i.e. as the size of each firm approaches zero, the profits obtained by the individual firm in the long run approach zero and price approaches marginal cost and so forth. So if we're in that diagram I showed you of the perfectly competitive market, the firms literally have size zero. I mean, there are a lot of small businesses around, but I've never seen one that had the size zero had zero labor and zero capital, right? So I mean, that can't literally be true. So no matter how small a firm is, it's bigger than size zero. The firm produced, contributes some output to the market and so forth. In the world of purposeful human action, we're not dealing with infinitesimally small units, right? Remember Carl Menger's analysis of economic goods and Menger's analysis of marginal utility, of course, is in terms of, refers to actors choosing discrete quantities of actual goods in the real world. Not like, oh, in the limit, in a calculus sense, the change in utility approaches zero, okay? You know, there's another point too, if you try to come up with sort of a welfare analysis of anti-monopoly policy. So suppose the government says, well, we're gonna make it illegal for a firm to sell less output than it could hypothetically have sold if the market were more competitive. Yeah, essentially, we're compelling the firm or an individual to produce more, okay? Well, then you're violating the sort of property rights or rights to life and so forth of the person who's being forced to bring more units to market than otherwise would be the case. You often see this kind of example used with like celebrities, to take for example, my doppelganger, George Clooney, you know, I don't know how many movies per year George Clooney makes. I mean, in the old days, in the golden age of Hollywood, 1920s, 30s, 40s, you know, actors worked every day and they made dozens of movies per year. Now a big star like George Clooney might be in one or two movies per year and you know, people want to see them or at least they did when they could go to the movies. I guess they wanna stream them now and so somebody makes money off of that. You know, you could argue that, well, there's only one George Clooney, so he has a monopoly on George Clooney acting, right? I mean, the other actors are kind of similar but they're not perfect substitutes. So, I mean, he should be compelled, if you follow the sort of standard logic, to act in as many movies per year as is humanly possible.  He gets to sleep and have bathroom breaks but he should continually be acting. Otherwise, he is withholding some of his labor from the market and making the price of George Clooney's labor artificially high. I imagine it's pretty darn high, right? But if he acted every single minute of every day, his earnings would probably go way down, right? So why is he allowed to withhold labor from the market to jack up the price? I mean, if you think, well, that's silly. Of course, George Clooney should not be compelled to act against his will to provide more units of George Clooney labor to the market than he desires. You know, well, why should Jeff Bezos be required to provide more Amazon stuff to the market, to have more transactions or provide more units of Amazon web services or whatever, right? Any alleged monopolist is producing less than what the regulator thinks should be produced. Okay, so if you're gonna compel people to produce more, then we should all be compelled to do whatever we're told to do all the time and not have any control over our own labor. Another point to this is a little bit more subtle is, you know, this whole idea about the demand curve. They say, well, if the demand curve for a product is very inelastic, that gives the seller more ability to raise price over cost. Maybe you did an example in your class at school, you know, comparing like, you know, cigarettes and candy bars or something and looking at how the elasticity of demand affects prices and quantities in those markets. I mean, elasticity of demand is not sort of given by nature, the shape of the demand curve, the properties of the demand curve, the elasticity of the demand curve reflects consumer preferences, right? And if demand is inelastic, that means that people are not willing to reduce their consumption very much in the face of an increase in price. Well, okay, they could have chosen something different. I mean, elasticity reflects consumer choice. So it's not obvious why, you know, well-being is somehow better in a world where firms act as if they're facing perfectly elastic demand curves as opposed to demand curves that are not perfectly elastic or maybe super inelastic, right? That's totally up to consumers. It's not a technological concept. Elasticity is an economic concept that reflects human choice. In his opening talk on Sunday night, Joe Salerno briefly mentioned a difference of opinion between Mises and Rothbard on monopoly. I'll just say a little bit more about that here. Mises rejected the standard approach to monopoly that I've sort of briefly outlined here, but Mises did articulate a theory of monopoly price that does come from the Austrian tradition of Manger and Bumbavark and Wieser and others, but which is not, I think is not as sort of, has sort of fallen out of favor within the Austrian tradition today. And Mises' theory was not one about the existence of monopoly as a situation or not identifying firms as monopolists, but rather Mises argued that under certain conditions, the prices that obtain in certain kinds of markets are different than the prices that would have obtained in other kinds of conditions. So Mises had a theory of monopoly prices. Mises thought you could distinguish praxeologically competitive prices from monopoly prices. And Mises argued that, well, if you have these special conditions, you have a single seller of a unique good, a good for which consumers perceive there to be no substitutes. Again, this consumer perception, so Mises didn't think this was some kind of a market failure, he just sort of noted it in doing his analysis that if you have a unique good and a single seller or cartel of sellers and the demand for the product is inelastic above the competitive price, the price that would have obtained if there were lots of sellers of this same good, then the price is gonna be higher than it otherwise would have been, okay? Mises thought logically you could sort of, you could theorize about what a monopoly price would be and what the competitive price would be. And he said, well, in practice, the existence of monopoly prices does violate consumer sovereignty in the sense that consumers would have been willing to pay for additional units had they been released to the market, okay? Like I say, of course you have to add to that the fact that consumers' willingness to substitute is also a matter of consumer preference and choice, right? But Mises thought these conditions, in practice, these conditions will hardly ever obtain and so there's no sort of public policy response needed. Mises just thought it was sort of an interesting theoretical puzzle, an interesting situation to think about, not really relevant for policy. So Rothbard actually embraces Mises' approach to monopoly pricing but disagrees with some of the steps in Mises' analysis.  Rothbard says, well, given that, given that we don't really know what the competitive price would have been if conditions had been different, we really can't distinguish the price that obtains on the market from a price that would have obtained on the market if you'd had more sellers or a different elasticity of demand. All we observe is actual prices that occur in market exchange, right? We don't observe the imaginary construct of the competitive price, we only observe the actual price. And so even theoretically, we can't really distinguish monopoly prices from competitive prices. In other words, all firms try to maximize their revenues, they try to maximize their net income, their profit given their beliefs about demand as we discussed yesterday. Entrepreneurs are buying factors of production, combining them into goods and services, offering those for sale on the market based on their beliefs about demand and so forth. And this idea that, well, it's only if the demand curve is inelastic above a certain point can monopoly occur. Rothbard points out, all firms price in the elastic range of the demand curve. Why? Because if they were currently pricing in the inelastic range of the demand curve, they would do what with the price? They would raise it because if the demand curve's inelastic when you raise the price, your total revenue goes up, right?  I mean, all firms, no matter what the market conditions are always gonna be pricing in the inelastic part of the demand curve. So above the actual price, the demand's gonna be inelastic no matter what? So all prices, this characterizes all prices not just a special set of prices, okay? Rothbard argued instead for a return to the common law or natural law notion of monopoly as an exclusive government grant. Rothbard said we should reserve the term monopoly for cases like the US Postal Service or the East India Company or a public utility in many, many cities and towns across the world. It's only one company that provides water. In the US as you may know, most of these or many water, electric, waste disposal services are not provided by a government agency. They're provided by private firms that have shareholders and are incorporated and so forth but firms that have been given an exclusive grant by the city, you're the only one that can lay electric wires. You're the only one that can put pipes in the ground and send water to people's houses and so forth. Sometimes it's not quite that obvious. I mean, a patent is a monopoly.  So as long as I hold the patent, no one else can legally produce the same good or service as the one on which I have the patent. Some other kind of exclusive grant or a charter, trading privileges, licensing and so forth is sort of a kind of monopoly. Occupational licensing has the same kind of monopoly effect. To cut hair, you've got to have a barber's license. It's illegal to cut hair without a barber's license in most places. So that restricts the quantity of people who can cut hair and it increases the profits of those who have the license. Okay, I mean, I think occupational licensing is terrible except in higher education where we need the PhD granting process to prevent students from getting low quality education. I mean, it's for your protection. It's nothing to do with my wages. Even trade policy tariffs and quotas can have a monopolizing effect in this sense. So what we mean by monopoly in the Rothbardian system is some government restriction on the ability of people to compete. If the city of Auburn said, Tom Woods may not play chess and then Walter Block is the champion, well then Walter Block earned his championship through monopoly privilege. We'd say Walter has some monopoly power on the chess board. That's probably the only way he could win, isn't it? So I wanna return to something I mentioned earlier just sort of turning to what's going on in the world today. You know, this sort of naive idea that well, in the absence of strong anti-trust policy and regulation, markets will tend toward monopoly in the neoclassical sense. Therefore, we need the antitrust laws and we need government to regulate utilities and so forth to try to make them more competitive, keep their prices down. You know, that was sort of the dominant paradigm in the mid 20th century. And then it was challenged from a number of dimensions. Oliver Williamson's transaction cost approach criticized the structured conduct performance view sort of a vertical relations. I mentioned that just because Williamson, Nobel Prize winner, passed away a few months ago. A lot of people are revisiting his work. The Chicago School, as I mentioned in the 60s and 70s and 80s published a number of critiques of the structured conduct performance paradigm. In the 90s and 2000s industrial organization economics became dominated by game theory as a sort of standard analytical tool. And that sort of threw into question some of the Chicago School's contributions. And people sometimes referred to post Chicago antitrust analysis referring to the game theoretic industrial organization modeling. And that was kind of the dominant thing when I was trained. But in the last three or four years, we've seen a revival of something that to me is much closer to the old structure conduct performance paradigm. It's critics call it hipster antitrust. It's adherents call it something like Neo Brandeisian named after Justice Brandeis who was a strong proponent of strong antitrust enforcement during the Progressive Era. This antitrust, I don't know, activist, I guess, named Lena Kahn. It's kind of at the forefront of the hipster movement. She's a law student who wrote an article that criticized big tech companies and said, well, even though they don't look like monopolists on the seller side, because most of their stuff's free. All the Google services, you get are free. You don't pay for those. You use Twitter and Facebook and so forth, Instagram. Those are all free. So it doesn't really, we can't really say they're charging monopoly prices and earning monopoly profits to consumers. Maybe you can say that for Apple, but not for the platforms. Well, they must be monopolist in some other way. It has something to do with on the labor side or how they squeeze their input providers or whatever. So she's kind of one of the stars of the hipster movement. Interestingly, one of the areas in which we've seen a revival of interest in the traditional monopoly theory and the traditional antitrust analysis is in the study of minimum wages. Okay, so Mark Thornton has a lecture later in the week on labor markets and minimum wage laws, which I'm sure you'll be interested in if you're interested in this. But it's worth mentioning now as an application or extension of Austrian monopoly theory, okay? In last, I don't know, decade or so, we've seen a lot of policy attention on minimum wages, right? You get the fight for 15 movement. I guess that started in Seattle and other places, now spread to other cities. We observe in many entry-level employment sectors a substitution away from labor towards automation. At a higher minimum wage, more and more fast food joints are gonna switch to kiosks because they're cheaper than hiring workers at $15 an hour. I don't remember who I saw two or three days ago on social media wanting a, was it $50 minimum wage, $50 per hour minimum wage? Would solve some progressive activists how that would solve all our problems. I don't know what people like Sanders and AOC want the minimum wage to be. I'm sure it's much higher than 15. Probably if you've taken an undergrad econ course, you've done an analysis of the minimum wage already. And the way we typically do it or at least the way we used to do it was using a sort of simple model of the labor market with supply and demand curves, okay? With an upward sloping supply curve and a downward sloping demand curve and you've got the quantity of labor on the horizontal axis and you've got the rental price of labor, the wage on the vertical axis. And how many of you've seen this kind of a model before? So, well, in a free market for labor, the equilibrium wage would be whatever that is where the supply and demand curves intersect. If the government passes a minimum wage law where the minimum wage is above the market clearing wage, right? That means that at that higher wage, the quantity supplied is gonna be greater than the quantity demanded. So you've got this extra surplus of labor on the market. More people wanna work at that higher minimum wage than there are jobs available to them because employers are less willing to offer jobs at a higher mandated minimum wage so you get unemployment, right? So, the standard economist critique of minimum wage laws is to say, yeah, but maybe it's good for those workers who are able to keep their jobs and remain unemployed, sorry, remain employed, but it's gonna throw a lot of people out of work and so it doesn't provide a net benefit on the labor market, okay? Okay, fine. This seems pretty, it's hard to argue against this. I've seen people like, even Paul Krugman back before he turned evil would say that things like, well, this analysis is of course correct, but I personally prefer to have fewer people working at a higher wage than more people working at a lower wage. It's just a subjective preference on the part of the policy analyst. That's why I want a higher minimum wage, but nobody thought that it was sort of good for the labor market in general. Okay, this analysis, and maybe you use this when you argue with your friends about minimum wage laws, this analysis is obsolete now, okay? Rather, what's becoming more the mainstream analysis is to say, no, no, no, this doesn't work because this model assumes that the market for labor is competitive. What if it's not competitive? What if rather than monopoly power in the labor market, we need to worry about monopsony power? Okay, so remember, monopsony is like the equivalent of monopoly but on the buyer side rather than the seller side. Okay, so if a monopolist is a single buyer selling a unique good or service, a monopolist is a single seller selling a unique good or service and therefore able to charge prices higher than competitive prices, a monopolist is a buyer, a large powerful buyer who is able to influence the price on the market to push it below what it would be in a competitive buying situation. Okay, so just as monopoly prices are supposed to be above the competitive prices, monopsony prices are, I'm an monopsony wage would be a wage that's below the wage that would obtain if the labor market were competitive. So if employers have monopsony power, then the wages that obtain in an unregulated labor market are lower than they would be in a competitive labor market. Okay, and if it's not possible to use antitrust to sort of break up these big firms and take away their buying power, the next best alternative is to regulate the wage to push the wage up to get it closer to what we think the wage would have been in the absence of monopsony. Okay, that's the currently fashionable argument in policy circles for minimum wages. Okay, you can find a handy Vox explainer if you want this theory Vox explained to you and you can find a lot of good stuff on this. You know, I probably should have mentioned earlier when we were talking about monopoly, you know, what's the remedy for monopoly power in the mainstream analysis? Well, I mean, one remedy would be leave things the way they are, you know, leave the big firms in place but just regulate the prices they can charge, right? Don't let a monopolist charge high prices, force them to charge lower prices through some kind of price regulation, right? Or you could just sort of break them up, use antitrust to divide, split the big firm into lots of little firms.  I'm not sure what you'd use for that, like an atom bomb or something, but you know, in this case, if it's not feasible to break up the firms to take away their monopsony power, then you just use price regulation, thinking of the wage as a price, to force the wage to be higher than it otherwise would be and closer to its sort of competitive level. It won't surprise you, probably, to hear that I think there's some problems with this analysis, okay? There's some problems with the monopsony argument. I mean, first, we can talk about kind of theoretical problems along the same lines as Rothbard's critique of Mies' argument for monopoly pricing in output markets, okay? So just as Rothbard argued that, you know, all demand curves facing sellers are at least somewhat inelastic downward sloping, we can also point out that all supply curves for laborers on the market are at least somewhat upward sloping. Okay, there's no such thing as a perfectly competitive labor market where the supply curve for labor is perfectly elastic, right? Firms can go out and hire as many workers as they want at the given wage without affecting that wage. I mean, that world doesn't exist either because labor is not perfectly heterogeneous, sorry, labor is not perfectly homogeneous, right? So every worker can affect the supply of labor at least a little bit by choosing to work or not to work or to work more hours or fewer hours. Because there's really no way to distinguish a competitive input price, in this case, a competitive wage from a monopsony input price, in this case, a monopsony wage. So this is perfectly analogous to Rothbard's argument about output prices, okay? So, you know, again, if you think the logic through, in the absence of legal restrictions, suppose it's the case that some firms are paying wages that are below the wages that would obtain under competitive conditions. You know, the equilibrium or market clearing wage is $10 an hour, but some firms, just because they can, because they're big and powerful and mean, right? They only pay $8 an hour for their workers. Well, I mean, that would provide an incentive for another firm to jump into the market, an existing firm or a new firm, you know, an offer, what did I say, $8? No, offer $8.50 and bid some workers away from the firm that was charging prices that were too low. And well, that would give an incentive for yet another firm to jump in, and so forth. Remember when we were talking yesterday about entrepreneurship and profit, right? Entrepreneurs are competing against each other for factors of production, and they would like to pay as little as they can for factors for inputs. They would like to pay a price that's way below the discounted marginal revenue product. If they can, good for them, that gives them some extra profit to put in their pocket, right? But if we assume that there are lots of other entrepreneurs also trying to do the same thing, then it's unlikely that you'll be able to get a unit of the factor at a price that's much less than the discounted marginal revenue product. Now, you wouldn't pay more, but if there's a lot of firms competing, you're probably gonna pay pretty close to that discounted marginal revenue product. Well, this is an application of that exact same principle where the input being provided is labor, right? And so the entrepreneur is hiring units of labor services and is probably not gonna be able to pay a lot less than the discounted marginal revenue product of labor. Otherwise, other entrepreneurs will jump in and take advantage of that and help to drive that price up towards its DMRP, okay? And let's be practical here. I mean, is the monopsony argument really a good one for minimum wage laws? I mean, let's just think about it on a practical basis. What do we know about the institutions of the labor market in most times and places, especially at kind of the entry level, for entry level wages? It's really hard to imagine a single buyer or a buyer's cartel for something like unskilled labor. I mean, how many of you worked in food service as we euphemistically call it when you're in high school? You know, you worked at McDonald's or Burger King or something. A lot of people work in fast food.  Anybody can learn how to do it.  It's not a huge city. It's not New York City. It's not teeny tiny, but it's kind of a small, small city. I mean, how many fast food restaurants are there? Just between here and the hotel, how many fast food restaurants do you pass by? Is it really conceivable that either they would all somehow form a cartel, hey, let's all agree. Nobody pay more than $3 per hour. I mean, it doesn't make sense. In fact, I mean, today and for certainly, probably for the last decade. There are very few, you know, cities and towns or MSAs or the prevailing wage for fast food workers is not quite a bit more than the minimum wage. I mean, even in Auburn, McDonald's is paying more than the state of Alabama legal minimum wage for fast food workers because that's how you get them. Otherwise you can't hire enough. Why? Because lots of other people want to hire them too. Okay, so the legal minimum wage, I mean, the equilibrium wage in the absence of minimum wage laws would probably be much higher than the minimum wage anyway. So in most US cities and towns, I don't know about the entire world, but in the US, mostly minimum wage laws, it's kind of virtue signaling, right? I mean, politicians can say I support minimum wages, but even without those laws, the wages would be higher than the minimum wages anyway. The minimum wages are typically not binding, in other words. Also keep in mind that, you know, of all the different factors of production that go into making a McDonald's hamburger, you've got the meat and the bread and the machinery and the investment capital that's needed to set up the restaurant and the managerial expertise and all the specialized tools and so forth. The input that is the most mobile and flexible and most easily substitutable is no offense. You and me, right? Whoever's working in the McDonald's, right? That labor is highly mobile, right? If one firm were paying way below what other firms pay, you're not gonna stay and work there. You can go work for another place. So it just really, you might imagine some markets where monopsony arguments might be plausible, right? There's a highly specialized kind of labor, I don't know, say in sports or something. If you're a professional basketball player and you're not getting a good contract offer in the NBA, you really, I mean, you could go play professional basketball in China or something, but that's probably not a close substitute for playing in the NBA. So maybe you earn less than you would if there were six different professional basketball leagues because you don't have many other options for how to utilize your talents. It's a very specialized kind of labor. Is that really the case for people who earn the minimum wage, minimum wage jobs? No, I mean, labor is a highly non-specific and highly mobile factor. So it really just isn't plausible. I think this is just sort of a fancy way of justifying, again, the virtue signaling. If you say you advocate minimum wages, it makes it sound like you're for the little guy, you don't want workers to get ripped off and all that kind of thing, but I don't think this is a very good argument for it. Okay, so just to summarize, the most sensible way to think about competition is not as this kind of imaginary construct with an infinite number of infinitesimally small firms and so forth, but rather we should think about competition as a process of rivalry among entrepreneurs and also factor owners, including laborers and so forth, who are free to compete as they see fit within some kind of legal framework within a framework that establishes property rights and enforces contracts and so forth, right? So as long as people are not legally prevented from trying out a particular venture or competing, trying to get hired in a particular job, then those markets are competitive. That's really the only meaningful sense of the terms competition and monopoly. It doesn't matter if you've got just a few firms or a lot of firms, it doesn't matter if the firms are large or if the firms are small, it doesn't matter if firms are currently earning high profits or earning losses, right? Remember in the neoclassical model of perfect competition in this sort of long run equilibrium, all firms are earning zero economic profit. So you often see these studies, we go out and try to estimate the profit margin and automobile manufacturing or whatever and we find that it's greater than zero. Therefore, that market is not competitive. I mean, come on, it's also, I think I mentioned this yesterday too, all of the stylized anecdotal examples. Well, what about Google? No one will ever be able to overthrow Google even though it doesn't have a state license. I can legally create a search engine, but it's not likely that many people are gonna use it. I mean, yeah, but Google has not been around for 200 years, right? I mean, Google was introduced when other search engines, Yahoo and one called Altavista is not around anymore, dominated that market. I sometimes show my students an article that was published, I think it's 11 years ago now titled in one of the tech magazines titled, will my space ever lose its monopoly? I mean, as long as there is no legal prohibition on other people competing with you, your market position is not safe, no matter how large of a share of the market you might currently have, okay? Obviously, we want a system that encourages entry and exit, right? If I'm out competed by somebody, we don't want government subsidies that keep my firm alive, that prevent me from laying off workers and so forth. I mean, we can talk about coronavirus stimulus later if you want, this afternoon in the Q and A, but we want a system that encourages innovation and experimentation and so forth and the typical kinds of legal protections, anti-monopoly law and competition policy and so forth typically have the exact opposite effect, okay? Government attempts to limit monopoly power as conventionally defined cannot make society better off, can't make workers better off, can't make consumers better off. I mean, the best government policy towards competition or the best government policy towards monopoly is don't create any, okay? Let people compete in the market and we will get all the benefits of competition. Thank you.


So we're gonna start up with a movie short movie one minute and so I'm very happy and I'm asking you for a big applause the title of the talk is surveillance state limited by acts of courage and here is our speaker it's Robert Thibault and I'm asking to applaud now thanks well thank you thank you to the computer chaos conference Congress for inviting me here again this year and thank you for everybody for showing up and for your support for mr. Snowden and the Snowden refugees what I'm going to do is this year I have a PowerPoint as in past years a PowerPoint presentation but with a lot more slides there's gonna be a fair amount of information I'm going to disclose today so if there'll be a certain part of it that's a bit technical but once we get through that then I'll go to the the big points on what's happened to my clients over the last year so I'll start with the presentation all right now as as you're all aware mr. Snowden was in Hong Kong 2013 and that's where he made his disclosures about the NSA egregious illegal and criminal conduct of basically using electronic mass surveillance to spy on on pretty much every country in the world these and he's currently a in exile in Russia as we all know and here are the Snowden refugees and I'll just introduce them and in case not everybody's familiar but on the left is Vanessa she's from the Philippines beside her to her left is a jeet from Sri Lanka a former soldier and to a jeet's left is Nadika from Sri Lanka and her partner Sopun so Nadika and Sopun have two children the little boy D naft was actually born in 2016 so he he has not had the chance to meet mr. Snowden yet and the little girl at the foot of Nadika at September and then beside her is Kiana Kiana's the daughter of Vanessa on the far left hand side as for myself since last year basically systematic efforts by the Hong Kong government from the immigration department to legal aid to the police there are parallel efforts basically to put pressure on me and I'll go into detail on exactly what happened but the Hong Kong police were basically arresting several witnesses that were testifying for the Snowden refugees and the police were putting it to coursing attempting to course these these witnesses and some of them are my clients to make a case criminal case against me and it was at the point that the Hong Kong police attended my former residence in Hong Kong looking for me seven police officers but I realized I needed to reach out and get help and it was time for me to leave Hong Kong so I received assistance from the Canadian government advice and assistance and also lawyers without borders Canada who whom I'm very grateful to I left on the 30th of November 2017 and I'm not able to enter into Hong Kong now what had happened was the immigration department from late 2016 to right up to the end of 2017 early 2018 had basically used different tactics to overwhelm me with work to make it administratively possible for me to do my job when that didn't work the immigration department had actually made applications to the duty lawyer service to the Hong Kong bar Association and to the torture claim appeal board basically seeking to have me removed from acting for the Snowden refugees and their appeals the legal aid department basically has stopped paying me my fees and those fees go back to 2012 and the duty lawyer service has paid only a small fraction of my fees and have delayed payment over years the torture claim appeal board fast track the Snowden refugee cases usually in Hong Kong when a an appeal is filed just bear with me a second when appeal is filed it usually takes about a year or more before an appeal is actually brought up to be heard but in the Snowden refugees case in 2017 it only took three weeks before the cases were called up only the Snowden refugee cases now what had happened in this was unknown to us unknown to me till August 2017 but the Hong Kong police they had been investigating the Sri Lankan police incursion into Hong Kong targeting my clients but in fact what they were doing is they were investigating the witnesses for the Snowden refugees and the Snowden refugees and myself and in August last year one of the key witnesses to the Sri Lankan police coming to Hong Kong looking for the Snowden refugees where he was arrested by the police he was denied a lawyer and actually I'm his lawyer and the Hong Kong police denied access to how let me have access to my client and as I mentioned earlier the police around my house actually searching for me now what what's happened in Hong Kong and what's happening in many democracies and around the world our governments are becoming increasingly authoritarian and governments seek to obtain information private data on civilians but at the same time these governments and government departments don't want to disclose anything so as a part of this presentation I'm going to be disclosing you know the identities of certain people as part of making Hong Kong a little more transparent but it's these two police officers break or low and miss young one wing these are the two officers that arbitrarily arrested and arbitrarily detained the witnesses to the Snowden refugee cases and these are the officers who made systematic attempts to coerce a number of witnesses to testify against me from what I understand they were asking my clients to say that I made up the story about the Sri Lankan police coming into Hong Kong and my clients told the truth that I never said any such things to them and in fact they explained they're the ones who were the witnesses and informed me now just to give you a wider context this is Mark Andres again he's the lead Canadian lawyer for the Montreal legal team which is handling the refugee claims by the snow and refugees in Ottawa Canada and in February 2018 Mr Sigan was in Hong Kong and as he was leaving Hong Kong at the airport there were seven police officers waiting for him as he boarded the aircraft and this was clearly an act of harassment and intimidation but the Hong Kong government the Hong Kong police force made it clear they wanted to send a message to Mr Sigan Mr Sigan went back to Hong Kong in July 2018 and he went directly from the airport to see one of the snow and refugee families and they went to a public area that was actually at the top of a building where you wouldn't expect anyone and it turns out two plainclothes police officers had followed and basically had Mr Sigan under surveillance and followed him right to the roof so Mr Sigan was in Hong Kong both times to meet with the Snowden refugees so you have a situation where the lawyers are being attacked they're being harassed by the Hong Kong authorities and you know I'm gonna be going through you know other departments that have been part of this you know systematic harassment on myself and the other lawyers but at the end of the day to attack lawyers who are simply doing their job acting without fear or favor is really an attack on the Snowden refugees and it sends a message that it's an attack on any vulnerable person that's entitled to legal representation what it is is it's an attack on the core of a rule of law now with immigration they had obstructed me by expediting the Snowden refugee cases at first instance they had asked the duty lawyer service to remove me from the cases they did the same thing with the torture claim appeal board and the Snowden refugees cases are at the appeal stage at right now and the immigration department made a formal complaint to the Hong Kong Bar Association saying that Mr. Thibault should not be representing these clients because he knows them too well and I was stunned by this complaint and what the Hong Kong Bar Association has done is they've grabbed the hold of that complaint with the full intention of proceeding against me in disciplinary proceedings ultimately the goal of immigration is to have me removed as the lawyer for the Snowden refugees or at a minimum prevent me from providing effective legal representation the legal aid department after the Snowden film came out in 2016 they completely they stopped the majority of my payment due to me for years and it's a significant amount and at this stage they're not paying me anything they also struck me off the legal aid list for doing refugee work in the courts so there's no way for me to ever do work in the courts for refugees unless I do it on a pro bono basis and completely unrelated to this I had done a significant amount of work in in criminal law in the high court and the legal aid department stopped instructing me for these cases for no reason at all and this despite under Hong Kong's constitution that anyone who's a criminal defendant or an appellant has a constitutional right to choose their lawyer that is their absolute right what this has done is it's put a normal enormous financial stress on myself it's left me significantly distressed in my ability to practice law and represent my clients now the duty lawyer service and I I have the administrator grace Wong and Kenneth Chan is the chief court liaison officer and they these basically are the two key people operating the duty lawyer service but over the last year or so they've only paid about 24 percent of my fees and they've systematically delayed payment and they've removed me from they removed me from two of the three snowden cases but what I would say is that I still represent the snowden refugees but privately through a solicitor who instructs me and the duty lawyer service systematically stripped most of my clients away from me during this past year and then in November 2016 just a little over a month ago the duty lawyer service basically you know expressly so they didn't trust me they didn't trust my professional competence and at that point despite the clients all trusting me the actual clients I was under illegal ethical obligation to resign from all my cases I had no choice the Hong Kong Bar Association now the snowden film was premiered on the night the September in 2016 in Toronto at the Toronto International Film Festival and on the 19th of January 2017 the Hong Kong Bar Association held its annual general meeting where they there's an election for a new bar chairman and vice chairman of the bar and at that annual general meeting bar council members raised my identity through my nationality and accused me of breaching provisions of the bar code for my assistance and my involvement with mr. Edward Snowden snowden refugees and I had been warned by a fellow barrister who very discreetly warned me that the bar association is looking for a way to cause a lot of trouble for you and and and at that point there had never been any complaints against me by any of my clients and there were no complaints about from the snowden refugees there are no complaints from anyone as far as I knew about the work I'd been doing for the snowden refugees and mr. Snowden so this is going to get a little bit technical if you can bear with me less than two months later I received a letter on the 8th of March and it was a formal complaint by the standing committee on discipline saying that basically accusing me of bringing the bar association into disrepute that I had put the snowden refugees lives in danger or I put them in a difficult position and the second thing was I did all of this to make money for myself which is ridiculous the basis of the complaint was an anonymous complaint the evidence for the complaint none it was completely an anonymous complaint there was no information provided where the anonymous complaint came from how many people there were how it was delivered so between April and May 2017 I wrote to the bar association and saying look I need to find out more about what this anonymous complaint is and I asked for disclosure how it was delivered if they knew who the complainant was or if there was more than one um internal communications what had concerned me was the racist and malicious conduct of the bar association members at the annual general meeting in January that they had chosen to identify me based on my nationality and they had done so behind my back in the 8th of March complaint the bar association listed two pages of questions which were wide in scope and ambiguous and they had mostly to do with mr snowden and I realized this was a fishing expedition and they had absolutely no evidence on on anything so I asked for disclosure by the 9th of June why the 9th of June of 2017 because for 12 years I had a spotless record I did nothing wrong at any time but the Hong Kong bar association decided last year in parallel with the anonymous snowden complaint to raise a five-year-old complaint where I was accused of being impolite to a prosecutor who failed to disclose evidence in the middle of a criminal trial this is this is a trivial complaint that should never be entertained by any bar disciplinary tribunal and the lawyer representing me was mr grossman at the time a queen's council and he communicated to the bar disciplinary tribunal that it was beyond his comprehension why five years after complainers made that it should be suddenly prosecuted now and he described the complaints as a disgrace and trivial rubbish those are his words but at any event the bar association was in a rush to have this case brought against me now one thing I should explain is with bar disciplinary tribunal proceedings in Hong Kong I have no insurance to protect me so whatever the legal costs are of the proceedings I have to bear them with duty lawyer legal aid not paying me holding my funds from me I didn't have enough funds to fight this fight something that was so trivial that I've been devised by my lawyer in London Jeffrey Robertson who's who's also Julian Assange's lawyer and lawyers in Canada and lawyers without borders Canada that no bar association would ever have brought this to disciplinary proceedings so I admitted the complaints for the simple reason that I couldn't afford the legal risk I'd be bankrupted if I fought it and without disclosure from the Hong Kong bar on the Snowden complaint and the racist remarks at the annual general meeting in January 2017 I didn't trust my instincts where I didn't trust that I'd be receiving a fair hearing in any event I was I was legal costs were awarded against me over 11,000 euro which I didn't have I still don't have and as for the anonymous complaint my request for disclosure it still hadn't been made which raised a lot of suspicions in my mind and then shortly after this parallel complaint was decided against me the bar association finally made some disclosure but minimal and then I discovered there were these two complaints completely anonymous unsigned and if you look at the bottom it says large group of exasperated barristers and this was a shock and if you look at the date it's the 9th of September 2016 the bar council the standing committee on discipline since the 9th of September 2016 had concealed and hidden this from me in March 8th 2017 when they brought the formal anonymous complaint against me the bar association all they had to do was attach that to the original complaint but they chose to conceal this to hide it it what kind of a bar association behaves in such a way now looking at the complaints from these two two large groups they say that I allowed myself to be quoted and then have photos taken of me and others and then they say my clients were put in danger not none of my clients have complained none of my clients have said you put me in danger or you put us in danger I never provided specific details on when the clients were located now number two these persons now will never be able to be resettled in the third country to remind everybody in Hong Kong there's a 0.2 percent acceptance rate of refugees my clients had a chance of winning the refugee cases that's 0.2 percent about 120 cases since 1992 have been accepted out of close to 40 000 refugee claims so the barristers who wrote this seem to be completely ignorant of the fact that refugees have pretty much a zero chance of ever succeeding and as such ever being resettled now they said this was disgraceful that I should be visiting Mr. Snowden in Moscow as Snowden is an international fugitive on every interval stop that's like telling a heart surgeon don't go into the operating room because there's going to be blood there that's like telling a medical doctor don't treat somebody who's been arrested by the police because they're a bad person that's telling a criminal lawyer which I am don't defend the innocent don't defend Mr. Snowden he's guilty already that's what the Hong Kong bar association is saying and they said this was all highly damaging to the bar I I ask Philip Dykes the chairman of the bar association I ask Robert Pang of the vice chairman of the bar association what damage has come to the Hong Kong bar association because I defended Mr. Snowden because I defended the Snowden refugees and one thing I'll say is the Hong Kong bar about Mr. Snowden and Snowden refugees have said nothing about Mr. Snowden's extraordinary acts of disclosure of criminal conduct they've said nothing ever and they've said nothing about the Snowden refugees they've remained silent so here's the problem two large groups of unknown barristers all deciding to remain anonymous this could be one barrister it could be hundreds it could be thousands there's a little bit less than 2,000 barristers in Hong Kong so every single barrister could have been part of these two groups complaining about me for doing my work for Mr. Snowden and the Snowden refugees and there's no way for me to identify which members of the bar association are not part of the large group of exasperated barristers and I stress again I wasn't aware of that until August 3rd if you look at the trivial complaint of me being accused of being rude to a prosecutor there were two barristers on the bar disciplinary tribunal how do I know they were not included in the large group of exasperated barristers so let me put it this way it's like the police arrest any one of you take you into a court criminal court and there's a judge sitting in the court and you say to the judge I'd like to have disclosure of the evidence against me and the police says no we're not going to show it to you the prosecution says we're not going to show it to you and the judge says we're not going to show it to you you're found guilty and then after being found guilty you find out who complained against you it was a large group of judges so this is what's exactly happened in Hong Kong in my case the people investigating me could be in the large group of barristers and the people who judged me are also barristers could have been in that group so what the Hong Kong Bar Association did is they brought themselves into disgrace they created a procedure that was inherently unfair and potentially biased if I had known about these complaints I would have never submitted myself to this jurisdiction and admitted to the facts I would have ignored it all so that judgment against me is illegal and the fine against me the cost order is void and the reason for that is the Hong Kong Bar Association's concealment of all of this Mr. Robertson Jeffrey Robertson also Los Angeles lawyers advised me and I had wrote to the bar association that in England Australia and Canada no bar tribunal would act on an anonymous complaint absolutely not because there's the risk it's motivated by malice and prejudice so you have to think about in January 2017 when at the annual general meeting the Hong Kong Bar council members pointed pointed me out by my nationality and made remarks against me that there was no evidence for Robertson advice that could have come from the CIA or another intelligence agency and as for disclosure Robertson as I know myself pointed out that to have a fair procedure the accused should has a right to know who the accuser is and has a right to see the evidence before him the bar also wanted information on clients Mr. Snowden and the Snowden refugees that are privileged and confidential and there is absolutely no way Mr. Snowden or the Snowden refugees would allow me to would waive privilege and allow me to disclose that nevertheless the bar association continues to proceed against me so there's three fatal problems with what the bar association did the anonymous complaint they should not and cannot proceed on it it came from a large group of barristers who for all I know are the same people who are in the bar in the standing committee on discipline the same people in the bar council and the same people in the bar disciplinary tribunal and that it's quite clear that the complaint because it's all about Mr. Snowden that it's politically motivated and the targeting of me based on my nationality indicates that it's also malicious and this is what Mr. Robertson's talking about lawyers without borders requested disclosure lawyers without borders Canada intervened and requested disclosure from the bar association bar association said no it's confidential and privileged how can an anonymous person have that kind of confidentiality and privilege so the bar association is trying to defend unknown people which makes no sense because no confidentiality or privilege exists so this is again continued concealment by the Hong Kong bar association now after a year you know why why why was all this happening but after a year the Hong Kong bar association brought five new complaints against me what they're doing here is they're trying to grab data trying to grab intelligence at the same time they don't want to disclose anything to me and they want to prosecute me in these quasi-criminal proceedings and this is the same thing that big government does they want to reach out and they want all the information from everybody but they don't want to be transparent and be accountable and as Ed Snowden said in Citizen 4 in the hands of a system whose reach is unlimited but whose safeguards are not no on a higher level on an overarching level when you have organizations that are court of rule of law that want information for example on Mr. Snowden detailed information but at the same time won't even disclose to me as the biostrofer Mr. Snowden what evidence they have against me to prosecute me all based on an anonymous complaint this is all about government overreaching its boundaries and at the same time not wanting to disclose not wanting to be transparent not wanting to be accountable I'd like to mention Robert Pang Robert Pang is now the spokesperson for the Hong Kong Bar Association on the matters that I've raised publicly about my treatment now I just highlight he was a bar council member and the chairman on the standing committee and discipline in 2016 then he continued as the vice chairman of the bar in 2017 and the year after 2018 at the same time he was also director of the duty lawyer service council now mr. Pang had in his hands the anonymous complaints from the very beginning he was privy to that information from the very beginning and he's now the spokesman for the Hong Kong Bar Association mr. Pang said recently oh we're not relying on the anonymous complaint anymore we were never relying on it but the original complaint said anonymous complaint I asked for disclosure including the bar minutes the bar council minutes from meetings stating that they're not proceeding on the anonymous complaints that has never been disclosed to me then mr. Pang said there's an identified complainant for two years I've asked for a disclosure of that no identification of a complainant and mr. Pang by saying that after two years saying there's an identified complainant that's completely unethical to have hidden that from me for two years but it doesn't matter because there is no identified complainant because mr. Pang was asked for the identified complainant as identity or her identity and it was never given given so what the bar association did is they brought in another five complaints against me for not replying to their demands for disclosure of my information on my clients and my cases so they're using their powers to punish me for not disclosing but at the same time I had written to the bar association saying please disclose to me all the evidence you have against me and then I'll take advice from mr. Robertson Queen's Council and then I'll reply to you they never disclosed instead after a year they brought fresh proceedings against me for not replying which is a lie I did reply I'd like to go back in history a little bit and this goes back to rule of law okay mouth of a lion in Venice in the 14th centuries what had happened was post boxes of a lion's face were put in and people could put in anonymous complaints criminal complaints and by the late 14th century there was the council of 10 that would decide who they would prosecute based on anonymous complaints almost two centuries later Venice government decided well we have to make sure there are three witnesses this was a reign of terror and as Mark Twain had had stated that you know there were the terrible lion's mouths these were the throats down which went the anonymous accusation thrust and secretly in the dead of night by the enemy that doomed many an innocent man this kind of behavior is not rule of law and I'm pointing out to you the way human beings have behaved in history there's also the existence of the star chambers which existed between the 15th and 18th century in England but today they're basically referred to as a legal administrative bodies which making strict or arbitrary rule in the secretive proceedings and John Cameron Queen's Council in Canada in describing the way the Hong Kong Bar Association is behaving says does this remind you the star chamber complainants and adjudicators protected from public accountability in a professional body engaged to protect the public stuff from Aurora has written extensively about all that's happened in Hong Kong with myself and my clients but basically how this is an attack by powerful government and the Bar Association really attacking seven vulnerable people who helped Mr. Snowden and John Cameron the Queen's Council had said that if an anonymous complaint came to him if he was a bar council chairman he'd throw it in the bin and that's exactly what should have been done in Hong Kong but was not Manfred Nowak the former UN Special Rapporteur and torture commented on the bar Hong Kong Bar Association's behavior and says that current actions against Tipo could only be explained by the fact that probably enormous pressure from outside is exercised Oliver Stone discussed the Hong Kong Bar Association and the government's treatment saying it was outrageous now going to the Snowden refugees at the very bottom Oliver Stones quoted in the National Post to Canada he talks about Snowden I think he helped humanity by pointing out a situation I think is intolerable still and then he talks about the people who helped them were human beings and in a way it's about human beings against governments so in summary you've seen the Hong Kong government abusing its powers against seven vulnerable people using disproportionate resources Canada continually delays knowing very well that it's not safe for the Snowden refugees in Hong Kong and they've done nothing to make a decision the Sri Lankan government having come into Hong and threatened my clients so why are these seven the only seven Snowden refugees on the entire planet why are they so special to these governments and why has Canada delayed and in my view this comes down to the Snowden refugees are something they represent something that every government is afraid of that they have the moral strength and conscience to do the right thing despite being deprived of everything in Hong Kong that they don't fear the government and that they're willing to protect whistleblowers and they represent a force of transparency and accountability and Stone is asking and he was quoted on the 29th of November 2018 why hasn't Canada taken in these people you know they'd be an asset just last over a week go Justin Trudeau talked about Canada signing up to the global compact on on migration and he says Canadians should be proud of this that we're showing leadership on one of the important issues around the world which is migrations and immigration and we're demonstrating that rigorous systems and an open policy actually leads to economic growth and economic advantages in stronger communities and being able to do this in a way that shows global leadership and of course does not impinge on our own sovereignty is something that Canadians should be proud of but Trudeau's done he does he's done nothing he's spoken he's not spoken about the Snowden refugees and no decision has been made on their cases and what we don't understand is through the legal team in Montreal an NGO is set up and we've raised funds to pay for everything for the Snowden refugees in coming to Canada and living in Canada so there's no cost to the taxpayer so why has Trudeau why has the Minister of Immigration and Med Hussain a former refugee himself who obtained refugee status in Canada why have they done nothing why does Canada continue to tolerate that the people who are asking for protection to be left at risk in fear and deprived of their dignity why has Canada not made a decision why did they continue to drag their feet so there's a standoff Hong Kong doesn't want to decide the cases Canada doesn't want to decide the cases I have no doubt if Canada rejects the cases Hong Kong will reject them so we have two jurisdictions two states dancing around the Snowden refugees and forgetting about them and this is disgraceful I'll come back to this later but this has been going on for more than two years now and the clients do need everybody's support and that means financial support but I'll talk about that later what I'd like to do is to have a short Q&A and then after the Q&A I'm going to proceed to another another issue so if anybody has any questions I'll take questions for about five minutes we have a signal from the internet can I please listen to the question okay we have a couple of questions here the first one is as as Hong Kong is increasingly under pressure from China where harassment of human right laureates is routine do you think China is involved in this case and if so is it based on pressure from the US or is it professional jealousy the last part I couldn't understand you talked about something about China something about the US yes do you think the China is involved in this case and if so is it based on pressure from the USA as Manfred Manfred Noah could point it out there's in his view it's likely there's a powerful outside force putting pressure on the Hong Kong bar on the Hong Kong government one thing I should mention is mainland China is the largest weapons and arms supplier to Sri Lanka and there's clearly an interest of the mainland Chinese not to have Sri Lanka criticized the second issue is Beijing and Hong Kong do not want ethnic minorities in their jurisdiction particularly not refugees okay China's ethnocentric in its politics and at the same time Hong Kong is not a multicultural society so the narrative of the Snowden refugees is not consistent with the narrative of the Hong Kong government the Hong Kong government is there's no such thing as refugees or asylum seekers they're all illegal migrants they've only come in here to take money away from us as for the United States I have no doubt that the United States and the other five eyes have an interest in what happens in Hong Kong and I have no doubt they're putting pressure on Canada okay so do you want to go on with the next question from the internet yes and also are you surprised about how the other party strikes you so hard during this case um what are you surprised about how you got a strike so hard during the case I was surprised that the Hong Kong government were the instigators the government that's supposed to provide international protection to refugees and asylum seekers but it was the very party that my clients have put their trust into is the party that's attacked them and their lawyer and this is disgraceful and this whole conduct was a surprise in the beginning but as things progressed I realized that Hong Kong is not a democracy it's an authoritarian system where the leaders are the majority of the leaders and the leadership of Hong Kong is appointed by Beijing so this is a this is a jurisdiction that has had democratic freedoms and constitutional rights steadily eroded over the last couple years so no it wasn't a surprise in the end because quite clearly the Hong Kong government has no interest in listening to its society they have no interest in listening to their wants needs and concerns okay thanks so if I see that right we have one question over there no not really okay oh there's another one yes please micro number two yes there's a connection to the huawei case the which case the huawei case the daughter of the boss of huawei main investor has been held in kanan are you or a very well difficult legal issue and I think they're playing a very really good game here um the it's huawei huawei is the telecom company yes I understand um the the treatment of the snowden refugees uh it's just part and parcel of you know the discrimination and racism that exists uh in Hong Kong and in mainland China against ethnic minorities um and I I don't think there's any direct link to the huawei case but that's a completely different subject which uh I really don't have time to address today okay I think that's also okay and I don't see any more questions oh there's another one hello so I think that's the last question yes last question yeah thanks uh micro number one thank you first very work um second is there were there any attempts by your colleague various two colleagues in Hong Kong to maybe also issue a statement of a even larger anonymous group isn't there sorry were there any attempts by your colleagues the Hong Kong Barista Association to also issue a statement or to make a counter complaint and then sign it you know larger anonymous group or in any have you have received any support from your colleagues no absolutely none not the only colleague that was sympathetic and supported me was the person who said your your nationality was raised at the annual general meeting in January 2017 please be careful uh they recognized I had done nothing wrong that was the only time okay thanks it's very hard to to hear that and the more I'm happy that you're here and I think you've got a little surprise for us right I I do I have somebody who's visiting right now and I'd like to bring them on the person on the screen okay so can we please get hello good evening this is Vanessa one of the snow revenues hi Vanessa how are you all right all right don't don't be nervous is there anything you want to tell the audience today about your situation in Hong Kong yes um thank you so much for supporting us while we do both time and um now I wonder why I'm not here in Hong Kong um Vanessa was was it the Hong Kong was it the Hong Kong bar that caused me to leave Hong Kong yeah the Hong Kong bar sorry now Mr Robert Tebow is not here in Hong Kong because the Hong Kong bar they bring uh anonymous um complaints against Mr Tebow and uh the Hong Kong bar is trying to defy um me and other snowden refugee uh Mr Tebow of our being lawyer and uh snowden refugee never complained about Mr Tebow to the Hong Kong bar and uh the Hong Kong bar um put me in the daughter at risk and it is a shameful to the Hong Kong bar what has done to Mr Tebow and uh Hong Kong bar uh they never help um never care there's not an refugee and um for uh Justin Trudeau um the prime minister of Canada right yeah yes the prime minister in Canada he talks about um helping refugee why it's a typical for seven snowden refugee in the world and um uh why is delaying why he's not making a decision now and um we are not safe in Hong Kong uh we cannot go back to our home country and um I hope they make the decisions now so stop delaying make the decisions now all right thank you Vanessa thank you if I if I just may step in very shortly um would you like you don't have to thank us we have to thank you for yeah does anyone does anyone have any questions for Vanessa yeah do we have questions you have the chance to ask directly don't be shy okay I don't see any questions all right you see they're all excited as well so everybody is nervous right there's no questions there's no questions there's one comment okay okay microphone one please ask a question yeah I'd like to know how's life for refugees in Hong Kong so do you feel there's any public support for refugees in Hong Kong and how is your quality of living in general um what I'm saying for my only interview I don't as a refugee or asylum seeker in Hong Kong I don't get any assistance from the Hong Kong government since 2016 when the Hong Kong government is questioning me about everything how many days I was put in stay in my house so I told her that I cannot answer her question she should contact my lawyer Mr Robert Tebow so after that I can be stopped my assistance so I made my daughter never get any assistance until now from the Hong Kong government even my daughter educations my rent so um it's so hard for me to survive but um I'm very thankful to my lawyer Mr Robert Tebow and the people who support me in Canada and all over the world who didn't make the donation and make us fundraising for us so me and my daughter can survive in some sudden refugee but um I'm also afraid because we are not safe here in Hong Kong so it's not easy for me and my daughter and all of some other sudden refugees in Hong Kong so we are not safe here and in general it's it's not easy here in Hong Kong it's it's very terrible life here it's very depressing and I need to be to be brave and I have to be trust to my lawyer Mr Robert Tebow and my lawyers in Canada so I hope soon I can me and my daughter and the others so that we can get in Canada for our safety and for our freedom thank you thanks to you thank you so much okay are there more questions I don't see oh there's one coming if I may go on yes may I ask you what would happen to you if you were denied asylum basically sorry what would happen to you if you were denied refugee status in Hong Kong or Canada or both in both places what would happen to you Vanessa if your cases were rejected I deny oh um if if my case is rejected in Hong Kong or in Canada um I cannot go back to Philippines I have very high profile right now so I should I me and my daughter will be called in Philippines so um my life is there's no point for me and my daughter to survive anywhere so I um maybe will be killed maybe my daughter there's no any future for her and um um or there's there's no life waiting for me and my daughter because the only thing is send me back to Philippines and me and my daughter will be killed will be died there's there's nothing for me and my daughter thank you okay so any other questions this is the last question there's a last question yes okay microphone please um hello I'm kind of reluctant to asking you this but I have to do if you could go back in time and decide again what would you do sorry can you say it again if you could if you could go back in time and decide again after knowing what you know now and having been through this would you do that again would you would you help Snowden again would you decide the same again or different I'm always say yes um I wanted to help him and um for me what he's doing is the right thing he's not gonna do anything wrong and um I'm not doing anything wrong I just help him and um for me he's he's helped so I help him and um Vanessa would you would you do it again yes I would help him again thanks I would do it again wow I have shivers running down my spine by so much humanity and yeah brave brave brave woman thank you so much okay thank you thank you Vanessa you have a good night thank you okay good night everyone good night and best wishes thank you okay that's it that's it and let me just tell you if you have some spare money donate it's a good cause thank you so much