Welcome to the FeeCast, your weekly dose of economic thinking, brought to you by The Foundation for Economic Education. My name is Richard Lawrence, and we are here today on a new set, or at least partially new. We have chairs, we have a sign. We have these lovely people looking at us, which we should probably acknowledge at some point when we start referencing their ideas. But we are here, as ever, with Anna Jane Perrell, Dan Sanchez, and Mary Ann March with pink hair. And the pink hair is, again, one of those things you wanted to do before your birthday, right? We turned 30 at the end of the month, so this is item number 28, 30 new things before I turned 30. Excellent. Well, it looks great. Thanks. And we are happy to have everyone on the set today. We are talking this week about sort of something that we were discussing last week, which is banning of all of the things. And it seems like that's happening more and more in that left-wing location of California. Last week we talked about some local municipalities such as Santa Barbara banning plastic straws and how Starbucks has decided to ban plastic straws throughout all of their facilities nationwide. This week we're talking about something a little similar but different. And that is, in San Francisco, that hub of activity and commerce and business and wealth that it is, they are considering, or they're actually working toward, banning free food inside corporate cafeterias, which is an interesting twist on the corporate slash government banning of things bandwagon. And so, Dan, what is happening in San Francisco where companies up to this point are offering their employees food at no charge? Yeah, so we have an article on the website today, San Francisco's protectionist attempt to ban company cafeterias written by our former co-host here, Brittany Hunter. And she talks about how it really is a protectionist move because the idea, the special interest that's really pushing for this are the local restaurants. And the local restaurants are arguing, hey, we can't compete with free. All these tech companies are offering free food to their employees and it's keeping them from going out onto the street and finding a restaurant to eat lunch. And it's keeping money from the local economy and so they think, okay, well, we can force them to patronize us by shutting off that alternative source of food. And the rationale here is what exactly? Why exactly would sort of a city like San Francisco be against companies having free food? I mean, this sounds like the greatest thing ever, I wish we did it at fee, but we do it sometimes. We get pizza, we get fried chicken, but like on a regular basis, we cannot as a company afford to have a chef. This is a problem for some people because... Well, the idea was that San Francisco was hoping that these tech companies would come in and they would bring in not only tax revenue but business, but local business. So their argument is that, oh, well, they're being anti-social, that they're communing in and they're just driving straight into work and then just holding up in work and... Everything in the office, not leaving to the poke bar downstairs, not going to the burger shack across the street. And so the restaurants are upset because apparently their food doesn't taste good enough for the workers to go and patronize them. Free tastes good, man. Yeah. Free does taste good. To be clear, I think is it that they're banning the cafeterias, they're banning kind of industrial-style kitchens within these companies because if they're just passing out free apples one day, it can't be them... I doubt they're banning. I doubt they're banning. We're going to get in trouble. Yeah. I doubt they're banning snacks. Yeah. Yeah. But I guess, yeah, it's kind of like the large, I guess, the large serving of, large preparation and serving of food in a designated dining hall, maybe. I mean, I'm thinking that's what it is. It just seems silly. It seems like they're incentivizing companies to not go there, because if I had a company and I want to offer perks to my employees, such as a delicious cafeteria for free, then fine, I just won't be in San Francisco, I'll go to San Antonio, I'll go anywhere else. Well, it does seem like more and more companies are actually leaving San Francisco and California to go to places like San Antonio or Austin or other places in Texas. Those two states, respectively, are the biggest net out migration in California in the country. So more people are leaving California than people coming in. They are number one in that rating versus Texas, who is number one in net inward migration. This is all according to U-Haul, which is of course the truck rental company that measures all of this. And they should know, right? Because they're renting the trucks. Yeah. Actually, that reminds me. We had an article on the fee website a couple of months ago about, I think, in February about how people are finding it hard to find U-Hauls in places like San Francisco, so many people are leaving one way tickets out and the U-Hauls are going and not coming back. And so we're seeing this sort of pattern continue, continue. My former state where I used to live and I worked for seven years, Illinois used to be number one in net out migration, now California is number one in net outward migration. And Dan Mitchell on our website, one of our authors, actually notes that we continue to see an increasing amount of net outward migration in these high-tax, high-regulation states. People want to get out. People don't like the experience of having high taxes and having restrictions on what they can do and what their places of work can do. Yeah. I mean, because this is just really the tip of the iceberg. I mean, they're a very ban-happy governments in California. They just, it's almost creative how much they're finding different things to ban. They're banning entrepreneurially. They're actually finding entrepreneurial ways to ban things. So it's somewhat of a credit ban. Right. Well, it's more like that they're opening up the entrepreneurship, so to speak, of other states to be less ban-happy and to attract them. Similar to what you were saying, that there's out-migration of people who are fleeing places with high taxes, high regulation, where it's hard to get a job, it's hard to find a place to live because of all these government regulations, that it's the states especially who have less of a burden that are drawing a lot of this migration. So we have this other article called, Americans are voting with their feet for economic freedom. And there was recently a release of the migration data for inbound states versus outbound states. And one finding was that the average top individual income tax rate in the top five inbound states is 4.9% compared to 7.7% in the top outbound states. So you can even see patterns where the inbound states tend to have lower taxes and that outbound states tend to have higher ones. And another case is that, I'm sorry, I lost my place there, but you get the point. Yeah, and so it seems to be a pretty good connection between those people who are leaving a high tax state, right? So that's one of the reasons they could be leaving, according to the data, and going to places where they had to pay less in tax. That seems to be a fairly strong connection. And so this concept, voting with your feet, is something we hear a lot, but maybe not necessarily something that we've really defined very well. Well, basically when you vote with your feet, you're expressing your preferences. Usually we think about this as the actual physical migration, and you might be voting with your feet to leave a place, or, as Dan was mentioning, you might be voting with your feet to enter a place. Yeah, and the thing about voting with your feet is that it's very practical. It's not ideological. You might have certain preferences in terms of how you vote and what you think ideally would happen, but when the rubber meets the road and you actually have to live somewhere and you actually have to deal with the tax burden, with the job climate, even though you might not even realize why the climate is so bad, the economic climate is so bad in one state, it still has the effect that the states with the more reasonable economic policies will tend to draw people in, and the ones with less, so we'll push them out. Well, yeah, I mean, it's a very, when you boil it down, the concept is, I mean, we can talk, what's so, I guess, applicable about voting with your feet is that you can apply it to something as small as, you do really care about the fact that we don't want straws, so I'm going to vote with my feet by choosing to patronize a company that doesn't use straws. That is voting with your feet as much as moving to a new state or, yeah, moving to a new country, something like that, and so voting with your feet is really just a way to express your values without having to go into a vote.  And it may be different from the preferences that they put on social media, for example, which is a very interesting notion, too. So we'll get back to that and we'll get back to more after we take a quick break after these messages. Hi, I'm Sean Malone, director of media for fee.org. Of course, you already know about fees, incredible articles and written content, but did you know that you can also watch our fantastic videos and listen to our podcast at our website as well? Visit fee.org slash shows to get the latest content from the series you love, such as Out of Frame, Common Sense Soapbox, How We Thrive, The Words and Numbers podcast, and, of course, The FeeCast. Once again, that's fee.org slash shows for more great content like this. Thanks for watching. Welcome back to The FeeCast. We've been talking about voting with your feet, also sort of voting with your pocketbook in the case of a commercial exchange. You can choose whether or not to patronize a certain store. And so this brings up a larger point that we have not yet really referred to in this sense, but a friend of fees, a former co-worker of ours, Max Borders, has an event that actually uses this concept in its name. And this concept is called Voice and Exit. And it's developed by a guy named Albert Hirschman, and he lived sometime in the 20th century. And he was basically formulating ideas about how people can interact with commerce or even with government. And that's the sense that Max at his Voice and Exit show, his event, actually uses it. And so what exactly is this juxtaposition between voice and exit? Well, when you express your voice, you might do that politically. You might do that by arguing with people about politics. You might do it at the voting booth. In commerce, you might do it by purchasing something. Or exit, that's withdrawing association, so the freedom of disassociation. So politically, you might actually withdraw from, you might emigrate, you might outmigrate. Or in commerce, you might withhold your dollars, you might boycott even. And so this idea that to the extent that you can withdraw from association, that that in itself is powerful, because people want to associate with people. And so in order to compete for your patronage or your tax dollars, that other people are going to have to try to accommodate you and try to compete and attract you. And so this is a very important concept, because the idea is these are different ways to exercise your preferences, right? You can choose to leave or exit. You can choose to be loyal and stick with it, whether it's a company or state of California. Or you can choose to express your opinion otherwise. Say what you'd like to have changed, vote like you mentioned, Dan. And so this concept we're bringing up because it relates directly to the notion that we were discussing earlier, voting with your feet. And people actually voting with their feet exiting the state of California, for example, for Texas. And so different people want different things out of their life. And the notion of exit in a political sense is what we're going to talk about now. Sort of why people could make the decision and how they could make the decision to interact with their local communities. And what kind of impact that that has on the decisions of the government, so those communities too. Yeah. I was just going to say that this, it reminds me so much of when we saw a couple of states first legalized marijuana. And now we're up to 30 states that have legal medical marijuana in another nine states and Washington, DC, that do legal recreational, just started with a couple and they saw good results and then other states picked up on that and they imitated them. I'm glad you brought that up, Miriam, because marijuana pot generally is maybe considered more of a left wing type of thing, legalizing drugs in that sense. But there's also actually doing things on things that are considered more right wing, such as firearms and guns. Right choosing to live in a state where there's friendly or gun laws. Right. Your notion of where you want to live, what values you want represented in your community and your state and your city, you can affect where you are, right, by exiting or you can affect what they're doing by voice. So, yeah, I think that's why it's so great when you can kick policy decisions down from the federal level down to the state level, instead of having one policy towards drugs for the entire country and you have multiple policies and it's like little experiments where they try it out and see how it works, like see how overdoses, the rate of overdoses, what happens in states that prohibit drugs versus the ones that allow it. Yeah. I think when you take it to a smaller scale, there's so much more respect for the dignity of people and like Dan said, use the word experiment. It's so much better to do smaller experiments than to have an experiment on 300 million people, like their population in the United States. Which is pretty unique in the way that the U.S. is formed from a government side because it's a federal system. You don't have a unitary government at the very top like they would, for instance, in London. The parliament creates laws that are applicable all throughout the entire United Kingdom, at least in the United States you have what they call these laboratories of democracy where if the federal government has a constraint on it through the Constitution that it can't regulate or can't create a law, then the states in many cases can actually do that and that brings it much further down to a local level. And again, these experiments are connected because part of the experiment is like, okay, which attracts the most taxpayers. And how do they interact together? Right. How does Texas interact with California when there's such a disparity between the environments there? Yeah. I really love this term that Daniel Mitchell, one of our frequent writers, has jurisdictional competition. Oh, wow. Explain the term. So it's the idea that when you have multiple jurisdictions and there is freedom of migration from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, that again people are able to vote with their feet. That if there are bad policies, one way that you could tell whether these policies are bad or not is if people flee them. And if you have good policies, then one way that a criterion for that is if people are drawn to them. And so governments are incentivized to compete with each other for taxpayers. And so you can't be too oppressive or else you will lose that competition. Yeah. Ilya Somen to paraphrase him, he kind of describes voting with your feet as having power to pick your political regime. Of course, there are some barriers. I mean, voting with your feet, it sounds nice, but is it that easy to just pick up and go if Atlanta passes laws that I don't like? Well, I've got a lease on my apartment and I work here. It's not as easy for some people. Yeah, there are definitely barriers to exit. And I think that one of the ways that we can maybe improve, improve on exit or make exit easier is to innovate ways to make barriers lower, right? So that's one of the things that we can as individuals, as decision makers do is that we can make barriers lower or figure out ways or innovate ways to make barriers lower to exit. And so over the past few decades, we've had more and more focus on people having voice, right? We've enfranchised many new people, the enfranchisement of women, the enfranchisement of former slaves and people who weren't freeborn white males, right? That's happened slowly but surely over the past few centuries here in the United States. And is the concept of voice sort of been overplayed at this point? Should we focus more on exit? I mean, I think both are powerful. Having the ability to to vote or to withhold your dollars and to get up and go. I think that they lend themselves to one another. And I think that the smaller the jurisdiction that the cheaper the exit is. Because like you said, there are barriers to exit. Well, if you are in the middle of like imperial China and you have one emperor for thousands and thousands of miles in every direction, that's a really expensive exit. And so the smaller you have of these polities, then the easier it is to jump across the border. A polity in the sense you mean like a jurisdiction, the different areas through which people are moving to and from. And the notion here again is exit is not always something that's costless, right? I mean, you can choose very easily not to patronize shop across the street instead of another shop. But things like gentrification. This is a concept that a lot of people in the inner city are concerned about today because you either have new people moving into a neighborhood, raising all the prices of the real estate so that the taxes that people pay on their properties becomes unaffordable. What do you do then? You get another grocery store that's across the street that's instead of the right aid that you used to buy things at is a whole foods, the prices are much higher. What is a person to do? So gentrification in the sense can be a problem that's understood. But your point is that we should make the barriers to exit much lower. Yeah, we should just encourage. I mean, again, thinking about how entrepreneurs can innovate ways to decrease barriers. I mean, that's something that you think that we can apply this to anything. But really, it's I mean, applying innovations to barriers to exit. Like now we have planes when we only had boats. I mean, thinking about how we can as individuals make it easier for exit to be a possible solution because you're right. There's so much voice now. It's like people say they're moving to Canada, but is anyone moving to Canada? You know, right? And even when you can't physically exit, you can digitally exit in a lot of ways like that if you with cryptocurrencies or with internet commerce or with, you know, working for a company in another country that to some extent that these are borderless exchanges. And people can, if there is a good policy in one country, and you can partake of that industry over the internet, then you can benefit from those good policies. Right. So we have a lot more to talk about, a lot more in the weeds to get to. But we're going to exit this segment of our fee cast and go into the next one after a couple of messages. Oh, boy, you know, starting out in the music business or just any business, you have to have the carrot dangling. You have to know what your goals are. I think as anybody goes in without a goal, you're pretty much doomed. This is a family business. My daughters, my son-in-law, my brother, we can't walk away from this. This is not something we'll walk away from. This is something we pass on.  It's just, can you figure out how to go under it, around it, over it? That makes for a longevity of a business. You can't give up. You just don't let yourself give up. Watch Mama Goldtone and more documentaries about women in business in our How We Thrive series at fee.org slash shows. Welcome back to the fee cast. We've been talking about several ideas here. We've been talking about voting with our feet if we don't like a place that we happen to live in. We've been talking about exit versus voice, right? We have a lot of voice in our politics today, in our conversations, talking about whether exit is possible, whether it's costless, whether we can do things to bring the cost of exit down so that more people can exercise that option instead of just complaining about things all day on Facebook. But I like complaining. One of the things I want to talk about now is sort of when you talk about jurisdictions, which are these areas of certain power, right? And a jurisdiction really can be defined as geographic or even a non-geographic area where a certain authority is exercised, right? And if you don't like that authority, you can leave that jurisdiction. You've been talking, Dan, about the notion of federalism being able to kick down the authority or the power down to the local level. And so the next question I have is what does local power or authority look like? When you bring government down to the smallest level, what does that mean? What is the smallest level that makes sense? Well, I really agree with Ludwig von Mises, who once said that... This guy right here. Yeah, this is Ludwig von Mises, an Austrian economist, who also had a lot to say about politics. And in one of his books, he really advocated for the complete right of secession, that any group of people should be able to secede from whatever larger jurisdiction they're part of. So secession, of course, is separation, saying, I'm out, we're going to get out of this altogether and exit. Yeah, and he said that if it were practical, that really that should be extended down to the level of the individual. So to me, that's the ideal size of sufficient smallness, is down to the individual. Whoa, a radical, nothing was going to go there with sufficient smallness. I think that sufficient smallness is a concept that at least economists toss around a lot when they are talking about how we apply policies, especially I think from a market-driven or individual choice-driven model. Specifically, I think about how sufficient smallness is something that people explore when you're talking about property rights and conserving resources. You have to have sufficient smallness for that to work. Sufficient smallness is, yeah, something kind of, I think that it's a moving target depending on what goods and services you're talking about, what individuals you're talking about, what kind of values you're trying to inform or you are being informed or are informing your decisions. So sufficient smallness, I think, is obviously a moving target. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, I think part of what you're getting at is this fear that, okay, well, if we get too small, then we're not going to have enough of diverse resources to sustain ourselves. But you have Hong Kong, for example, which is just a city-state, and they are very natural resource-poor because this is very small, but they're very rich at the same time. So the idea is that you trade with other countries. Other jurisdictions, other people who have things that you have or that you don't have that you want and they can actually produce for you at a cost that you're willing to pay. Of course, this is the hallmark of the free market system. Yeah, when I think about my ideal for a sufficiently small community, I tend to think of it as being small enough where people can get what they want. And what I mean by that is in terms of urban planning, that all the people who want a lot of public parks and public spaces, that they can go to a community of like-minded people and they can all vote to do that with their tax dollars, whereas people who don't want to pay for those parks, they can go to a community with other like-minded people and they won't have parks and then everybody wins. This has implications not only for a city with its city next door that happens to have values that you might prefer over the one where you are, but also states, right? There are no real barriers between states. If you want to move, there are also implications for international borders as well. But you scaled up, but even to scale smaller, going from a city to neighborhoods. Yes. And most people who move within states are choosing their neighborhoods. When we cross state and even county, when we cross county lines, that's usually when people are moving for jobs. Yeah. Well, and the other notion there, of course, when you're talking about scaling even lower is a subdivision, a private sort of homeowners association is a kind of jurisdiction that you might at some point, even though you decided to move into it, want to exit because the fees are too high, your neighbors suck, the dog keeps pooping on your lawn and no one does anything about it. And so jurisdictions aren't only government, but they're any kind of regime of power that we can either opt into, opt out of. The question is to what degree it's easy to do those things. Yeah, I think it's like communes. I mean, that's technically a jurisdiction. Kibbutz, a kibbutz in Israel, where you come together and voluntarily in theory. You are working on a communal basis with other people. You are harvesting all the goods in a communal sense. You're not keeping any for yourself. You're doing everything for the community. And one would hope that in this kind of modern voluntary commune that you would have the ability to leave with no problem. Yeah. Yeah, I think an important point is that political fragmentation does not necessarily mean economic fragmentation. That you can have a global division of labor even with a really small politically balkanized city-states that, and in fact- Balkanized meaning very fragmented, very small. Yes, yes. And in fact, you're more likely to have free trade with those because the bigger the jurisdiction, the more they can afford a policy of economic isolation. Whereas, again, a jurisdiction as small as Hong Kong, basically they have free trade forced on them. That that's the only way that they can prosper. In order to get things that they need. Yeah, OK. And similarly, political fragmentation does not mean cultural fragmentation. That you can have a big community with people speaking the same language, even having the same religion, having the same customs and norms, but having different political jurisdictions within that. And so what you're basically saying, Dan, is even if you do have very small, sort of voluntary authority jurisdictions, that doesn't mean necessarily that everyone's on their own, right? Yes. You don't talk with anybody. You don't share a culture with anybody that you're all growing everything you need on your little plot of land, and that's it, right? You still have the ability to trade with other people to get what you need, right, which is an important difference from some of the ways that we think about isolationism in other senses.  Yeah. So smallness actually lends itself to a more, almost like you have to be willing to exchange with others. Yeah, so like more. Oh, yeah. So even now you have the European Union, which is trying to make Europe into a super state that the European Union, even though it establishes free trade within Europe, it is hugely protectionist outside of Europe, and it can afford that protectionist policy to some extent because it's It's efficiently large, yeah. But what made Europe rich in the first place was its political fragmentation, that throughout the Middle Ages and after the Middle Ages, as it grew rich and into the Industrial Revolution, that no one power was able to centralize control over all of Europe, that you had lots of different countries, lots of different city-states, but you had a lot of commerce in between that and a lot of cultural unity too. So you had a lot of experimentation, in many ways you had a lot of progress from those elements of experimentation that were allowed to flourish underneath all these different competing jurisdictions, unlike where you mentioned in China, Imperial China, everything under one unitary state, and God help you if you deviate from whatever they wanted to do in Beijing. Yeah, so if an emperor of China decided, oh, well, okay, printing is no good, then printing was no good, no printing throughout the entire realm. Whereas in Europe, it's like, okay, you won't let me do printing in this country, I'm just going to hop across the border, and that's what happened over and over again. That's what I was going to ask if there was a lot of physical migration that was taking place as well during that time in Europe. Yes, yeah. And so what's the high note that we can end on here? Okay, so we have some degree of jurisdictional competition here in the United States. If you love plastic straws, move to Georgia, we'd love to have you here in Georgia. And if you don't like straws, California awaits, right? And the only thing that needs to happen is for us to figure out how again, now that we focus so much on voice as a society, how we can focus more on exit, how we can get it possible, how we can make it possible for people to afford either culturally or spiritually or socially or fiscally to move from one place where they don't agree with things to another place where they do. I think we need to encourage innovation, again, to decrease barriers to exit so that we can then encourage exit.  And whatever they want to do, whether that is having straws or whether that's not having straws, I think that exit is so critical to, I mean, to ultimate human progress. And I think that so encouraging innovation, I think is one of the keys to encouraging exit. And I think that innovation could look like a lot of things that could like Airbnb, that could resemble certain ride-sharing companies that give people greater access to leaving. It could mean lowering property taxes. It could mean doing other things that make it possible for people to live their values, which, of course, we at FI love living our values. Our values are many, and you can find those out on our website. One of our values is not to take too much time beyond what we've promised. So we're going to end it right here. We would love to see you next week at the FIcast. Look up all of our other episodes on our YouTube and Facebook channels. In the meantime, have a great weekend.


Assalamu alaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuh. Alhamdulillah it's great to be here at SBIA, very historical institution for Muslims here in the San Francisco Bay Area. And we pray that Allah continues to bestow His blessings upon the community as it grows and expands. InshaAllah soon you'll be running out of space. The MCC they went from place to place and they got their dream building and now they need another building. And so these are called good problems because they're indicative of growth in our community. Alhamdulillah tomorrow as we all know is the 20th year since the attacks of September 11th, 2001 and those attacks no matter what who you believe did it. So you could believe there was been that in his crew. You believe it was the Mossad, CIA inside job. Whatever you believe it was terrible and it was a crime and it has affected the world. And in a sense in many unprecedented ways is led to two very destructive wars from this country. One which is ended a little earlier. One phase of the war in Iraq and Syria ended and but a new phase began. The new phase is aerial bombardment or what they're mentioning now for Afghanistan war from over the horizon by robotic drones and it's it's ironic that the last act of that phase of the war was and a family of 10 people seven children being wiped out by a hellfire missile sent from a predator drone and I say that just to say that's the opening salvo and the new phase of the war in Afghanistan. We pray that a lot has mercy on the Afghan people and that there's peace and stability that our sisters are able to continue and the pursuits that they were involved in. Now while the spirit of the sharia brings great blessings to all men women children safety security peace and unity inshallah to the great muslim land of Afghanistan home of so many of our great scholars and personalities very beautiful and tough resilient people it's a lot higher bless them but but those two wars and over a million dead muslims all are rooted in the events of september 11th and that's about as controversial as i'm going to get someone said don't be controversial because it's a it's a time of remembrance for the american people i found that strange because i thought we're we're the american people also as if you know it's us and the american people and that that argument my dear brothers and sisters that argument is old and it prevents us from having those difficult conversations that's going to move this country forward that's what they said after this september 11th the tax no don't get too controversial don't talk about american foreign policy because american people are mourning so well that means i'm mourning too so i'll be affected by whatever anything is said so it's it's it's inexcusable that we can't have that conversation it's inexcusable that anything that would go against the false narrative of make america great again like again why a false narrative because it's either great for all of us or it's great for none of us and great again implies native american genocide so it wasn't so great for the native people it implies slavery and all of its brutality the african-american community implies here on the west coast uh chinese uh being hunted down like dogs 18 killed in one day in one of these west coast cities i forget which one maybe port in oregon it implies japanese internment and so it's either great for all of us or it's great for none of us definitely it's been good there's no doubt about that but we want to see our country be great and unless and until we're able to have those difficult conversations unless and until we're able to recognize that there's more than one story making up the american experience we won't be great we'll be good but we won't be great and we want to see our country be great there are many effects we can look at uh on the american muslim community itself as a result of the attacks on 9 11 one thing it there there are things we can look at in a positive sense and there are things we can look at in a negative sense and one of the positive thing things is that it led to many people who are involved in andawa and islamic work stepping back and examining the effectiveness of their approach so a lot of the rhetoric was delusional and so we had you had groups talking about khilafah here in america this was caliph caliph caliph caliphonia and things like that and without taking into any account just the difficulty of major societal change the hard it was for the prophets of the light of selim and a pre-modern society with a relatively small population to affect change against the arab as the messenger of Allah so how difficult would it be in a major complex massive country complicated country like the united states to affect meaningful societal change with no media resources to speak of no political capital at all to speak of no means to affect the popular culture to speak of and we could go down the mist and so september 11th in a in a sense was a wake-up call for many people and helped include myself some of us to reassess what it really really takes to change a society for the better it's easy to change it for the worse we see the consequences of many calculated efforts to change the country for the worse coming to fruition and it's not just on the on the side of the right wing we could point to trump and the forces that produce trump and most importantly the forces that produce the people who would vote in large numbers for a figure like donald trump and we need to look no further than the quran a lot highly reminds us in the quran look at that he can thus do we put some oppressors over others because of what the people themselves have earned so as a society we we earned donald trump and so many of us including muslims some muslims are are given to vulgar speech so when someone like a trump comes along with the vulgar language and boorish behavior yeah i like that guy that guy got my vote because he's just like me and we were talking earlier uh more relevant to the topic uh trump in a certain extent to a certain extent is a product of 9 11 and that's one consequence of 9 11 and that that that divide between those who want to fight a war on terror and those who want to take a more reason and balanced and just approach to the problems that were seen as producing those events and so that divide grew and grew and grew as the brutality the torture the wars got more and more uh entrenched into the national psyche the divisions became further and further entrenched until you get the severe polarization that culminated not with trump's election but with trump's exit where the polarization really came to a head to such an extent that half of the country says trump should be in jail for citing an insurrection and half of the country says how could you dare accuse trump he didn't do anything that was a peaceful rally and muslims are interwoven with that because for the first time in our history coming out of september 11 anti islam became a significant plank in the platform of one of the two major political parties anti islam and anti islam as a policy you're all familiar with the recent confessions of the fbi agent who and they were spying at zaytuna then zaytuna institute infiltrated and he was so outraged about how the fbi was transformed from a law enforcement agency and to an intelligence agency set up to spy on muslims set up to turn a blind eye to the demonization of muslims formally the fbi was fighting against organizations like the kufats clan how many of you saw the movie black clansmen mashallah right you know the law enforcement enforcement is infiltrating the clan that was at a local level but this was happening at a federal level and so it was a law enforcement agency it was turned into an intelligence agency to spy on the muslim community out of the mistaken belief that you have sleeper cells we're working for al-qaeda embedded in american society and they had to be weeded out and the only way to weed them out was to use the kind of intelligence and counter insurgency tactics that are used against foreign countries but to use those against our own citizens and that's taken a toll in some segments of the community uh recently some of you probably saw the the suicide report that was featured on mpr i mean if you saw that american muslims i don't know which american muslims they talk to are twice as likely as members of other religious communities to commit suicide and when the main driver that kept coming up over and over again was islamophobia and islamophobia and its uh current iteration comes directly out of 9 11 there was an opportunity for these groups to capitalize on the national fear and the hysteria resulting from those attacks to gain the financing necessary to traumatize large swaths of our community you can't do that easily and you can't do that cheaply but in the environment created by 9 11 people willing to pay for it and you've seen the reports from care from our very own bay area you see berkeley zaytona college doctor hatham bezian the studies of just how much money was being spent by these organizations to spy on the muslims to incarcerate muslims the initial dragnets to deport muslims and so the community are aspects of our community were traumatized may Allah give us tofiq and may Allah help us to deal with this climate so here we're going to shift gears because we could talk all night about what went wrong we could talk all night about the policy implications we can talk all night about the impact on muslims the radicalization of some of our youth comes out of 9 11 because a natural reaction many young people are rebellious and if an innocent person is told like you're a criminal you're a terrorist you're going to have some that say okay if you want me to be a terrorist i'm going to show you what a terrorist is it's sort of a human reaction and so that comes out of 9 11 so you have americans going overseas and joining al qaida going overseas joining isis or going to join some group in pakistan some of that jayshalli muhammad or this or that jayshad qayyaba this is a natural reaction for some people especially young people were very idealistic and when those ideals are shattered some people reconstruct an idealistic vision in less than desirable ways and so we could talk about all of that but what i want to do is shift gears and to just talk about how the original islamic community the community of the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam as captured in the Quran and the sunnah how did they deal with the climate that they faced the climate of hatred the climate of fear and so islamic phobia fear and the terms extremely debatable because phobia is in irrational fear but if you see people who are captured in their most barbaric you see oh here's the taliban they're taking oh you see a guy with hair all over the place with a turban on his head hair flying everywhere face scowled up with an ak-47 if you're scared of that that's a rational fear that's not a phobia so be that as it is the the the climate is one that's driven by fear and the the the koresh one of the objectives was to instill fear in the hearts of the Muslims through the torture of the Muslims the persecution of the Prophet himself sallallahu alayhi wa sallam to exploit the power differential that existed between the Muslims and the koresh what what got them through that one thing that got them through that were a reminder exactly what it means to be a believer and we need to be reminded in our day and our time in the post 9 11 environment we're still believers and what does it mean to be a believer in the face of fear so there's a verse in the Quran that reminds us of that exact thing and so this is after two verses for that which is relevant and explaining this verse those who the people said that all of the forces are gathering against you right this the post 9 11 environment that the christian right is gathering against you the zionists are gathering against you the clan and the skinheads and the Aryan nation you're the new enemies they're all gathering against you they're not worried about african-americans and jews anymore they want muslims they said all of these forces are gathering against you fear them tazad ahum imana it only increased their faith why didn't increase their faith because when they realized all the forces are gathering against you we can't go to this tribe they're joining the koresh we can't go to that tribe they're joining the koresh we can't go to this we can't go to that the only one we can turn to is Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala and when they turn to Allah with sincerity and total dependence on Allah it energize their faith it restore their faith it renew their faith it strengthen their faith and this is the first step for us dear brothers and sisters the first step for us is to strengthen our faith because we are a faith community and if not we are nothing at all if not a faith community we're nothing at all and as the faith erodes in the face of fear in the face of envy in the face of arrogance in the face of superiority then we end up like other people worse so we'll end up with suicide rates like people who have no faith we'll end up with divorce rates like people who have no faith we'll end up with young people running away from religion like the young people in other communities are running away from religion because faith is our foundation and so the first thing that allowed that community to overcome that climate of fear that climate of persecution that led to the two migrations to avesinia to ethiopia and then the great migration to medina it was faith that that of imana and that increase in faith as opposed to a decrease was rooted in their turning to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala because they realized there is no where else to turn and so as we muslims our community realizes there is nowhere else to turn a lot of people think you turn to the left the democratic party but as soon as you stand up and not follow them they'll they'll be just as anti muslim as the republicans you can bank on it if you say i'm a muslim and i i i really appreciate your environmental policies because we have a real climate crisis the west coast with the droughts and the fires the east coast with the hurricanes and the rain and the floods i appreciate that but as a muslim i can't get down with the lgpt qi plus agenda see how long they'll like you then and so what the muslims do compromise our principles where i am down with the agenda okay good muslim you're acceptable but manifest your islamic values and see how see how far you get the point is we are people of faith and it is our faith that will pull us through and our faith will be increased when we turn to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala and ways great and small to re reconnect with the quran not just reading it reciting it it's beautifully recited in the magrid prayer and here in the introduction to this talk we're reading it the translation in a language that you understand so that the meaning begins to shape your consciousness there's tremendous benefit in reading quran and arabic but if you don't understand the arabic language that recitation will uplift your soul that recitation will bring comfort to your heart but that recitation will not give you an understanding of the rich philosophical ethical intellectual heritage that's rooted in the quran in the quranic message rather so we have to get in touch with the message that's what increases our our faith because the message connects us to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala and his messenger sallallahu alaihi wa sallam we have to learn to cry right for many of us our tears have dried and many of us our eyes our hearts have become so cold that they cannot communicate a message to our eyes to shed tears we have to soften our hearts how do we soften our hearts barely the remembrance of Allah brings tranquility to our heart and the tranquility comes through the softening of the heart and that renders our hearts more receptive to the message and that receptivity translates what is the heart of the message what is the dominant theme of the quranic message i'll give you a clue every chapter starts with it except one mercy mercy is at the heart of the quranic message and when the Prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam was shedding tears after the the death of his son ibraheem and another occasion the death of a child amongst the sahaba the name escapes me right now and some of the companions said what's this old messenger of Allah you're the messenger of Allah you're crying he said these tears are mercy which Allah has placed in the heart of his merciful servants and so we have to soften our hearts and when our hearts are soft and they become more merciful and when they become more merciful they become the the conduit that connects to the all merciful the merciful people are the ones they all merciful will show mercy to and so these are the things that we have to do and these things will open our hearts these things will be the foundation for our faith increasing we have to move beyond fear so they they they connected with Allah ta'ala and they place their trust and their dependency on Allah ta'ala because all the hosts that were gathering against them they couldn't turn to them they're all gathering against you so there's no one for you except Allah and so they fled to Allah the fear of Allah flee to Allah and in fleeing to Allah they realized this is the source of our trust this is the source of our salvation this is the source of our of our escaping our condition as the next sentence affirms and they said Allah surprises us what an excellent one to entrust our fear to and so brothers and sisters when we do those things necessary to strengthen our faith and then when on that basis we turn to Allah and we acknowledge that Allah is the most excellent for us excellent one for us to entrust our fair to then our burden will be lifted the fear will be gone the low will be lighter the the confidence in our religion in our community will be stronger and we'll begin to do those great things that those who preceded us they did one of the lessons from the aftermath of 9 11 that we should always reflect on always reflect on is that it wasn't the end of the world this large blessing for the muslim community did it happen before after 9 11 happen nine afterwards the climate wasn't so anti muslim that muslims couldn't do this this zaytuna college did it happen before after 9 11 after 9 11 and you can go down the list sisters are still wearing hijab and there might be an isolated incident here or there but sisters you've been attacked lady anyone throw or throw anything that you lately tried to pull your scarf off and so this this lesson brothers and sisters is critically important 9 11 was not the end of the world and I say that to say this those who preceded us they faced situations that very well could have led to them saying this is the end of the world when the monger horde swept across the heartlands of Islam leaving millions of people dead stacking up the the the heads and pyramids when they left the town or village to to strike fear into the hearts of any survivors that might see it did that destroy Islam it did not why didn't it destroy Islam because those people who survived they have faith they had so much faith that they could look those mongol conquerors the descendants of ganas Khan and his children he could they could look them in the eye and they could say you need a slam after their lands their villages have been decimated you need a slam and so they never lost confidence in their religion they never doubted and Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala and as a result within two or three generations they brought those conquerors into Islam and a lot of you are Muslims to that are witness to that because you have the very name of those conquerors you're all cons so if on those circumstances they could retain their religion if under those circumstances they could have so much confidence in their religion that they can bring the people conquered them into that religion what excuse do we have under the circumstances we're confronted with what circumstances what excuse do we have not to have confidence what excuse do we have to blame Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala what excuse do we have to be committing suicide what excuse do we have to be filled with fear and a verse later where is that fear coming from that is satan he instills the fear of his dupes into you fear them not rather fear me if indeed you are believers goes back to faith if indeed you are believers and so brothers and sisters after this 20 year period of challenges hardships difficulties struggles let us return to our faith with confidence let us return to a good opinion of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala let us return to the tranquility and the peace and the calm that emanates from a heart that's in touch with the mercy of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala let us return to the remembrance of Allah let us fill our homes with the remembrance of Allah and all of his manifestations with Quran awrad abqar awrad mentioned that fill let let these fill our homes let us come to the masjid to learn to be in communion with our brothers and sisters to to show people that we are forging on that we're still here that we're not going anywhere and that we will be a great community we started with greatness and make America great again and we'll end with greatness we can contribute to making America great not again for the first time because as a community we are multiracial we have our issues but we're a community you come you see people from all backgrounds you see african-american converts european-american converts you see increasingly latino converts you see south asians you see central asians you see arabs you see all people africans senegalese sudanese all gathered together and brought together into one family the family of la ilaha illallah alhamdulillah and this can teach our country that brotherhood and sisterhood is possible you see our community with relatively small numbers but doing great things in terms of charity assisting how many millions of dollars are raised from our community for organizations like islamic relief and helping hands and penny appeal and this this one and that one just to provide relief for muslims and people increasing in this country islamic relief is in uh in new orleans they were there after katrina they were there after the tornadoes and kansas and the midwest during the tornado season and showing people muslims are extremely charitable extremely charitable and in an age where someone like ayn ran can be a best-selling author who advances a philosophy that altruism is an evil and bio characteristic that one should avoid that's the heart of her philosophy altruism is bad to think of others before thinking of yourself for prioritize others prioritize your own interest is bad this is called ethar this is called sadaqa this is called zakat this is again at the heart of islamic teachings and at a time when many americans are moving away from that our community can demonstrate that this is still a living viable approach to life we can teach so many lessons yes we have problems but alcoholism is in one of them our last year or the year before the global alcoholism study how many of you saw that all the countries plagued by alcohol all western nations countries where alcoholism is one percent pakistan bangladesh though you have some western educated luli people having their petty worthless parties drinking alcohol and acting like their brits but the overwhelming majority of the people 99 percent of the people those out in the villages up in the mountains there's no alcohol in their lives this is something we can show and demonstrate and contribute to making this country great giving priority to others you know what was driving the the right wing movement towards heightened degrees of xenophobia fear of strangers heightened degrees of racial based exclusion a lot of it is just selfishness anti-immigrant sentiments if you read our the hawks child we had it part of our book club at zaytona college strangers in their own land why did the tea party emerge and primarily older carcassian americans who feel or who are increasingly resentful because immigrants who are getting government assistance cut the line who's helping us who's helping us and that resentment grows until it becomes the foundation of a political movement what do we know what do we muslim see as one of the foundations of our society of our politics who those who inhabited the land those ensar who were their Medina first well iman and they gained faith so again faith is central they love those who migrated to them so love is important america will never be great until all of us love each other even if it's at a basic fundamental human level because we recognize all of us muslim jews christians atheists hindu buddhists all of us have been ennobled by allah subhanahu wa ta'ala we have been noble of the human being are we allowed to mutilate people in a battlefield like hamza radi Allahu anhu was mutilated can muslims then turn around and do that to people who are muslim no we can't why can't we because even that dead non muslim person has a basic dignity afforded to him or her by allah subhanahu wa ta'ala their creator and that human dignity can't be violated by mutilating their corpse so if that of just a basic fundamental human level we can show that we love people that we care about their well-being you have grown them and had your ileyhim and they find no agitation in the hearts of what others were given we're saying they're cutting the line they're getting food stamps from my tax dollars you're getting medicare medicaid from your tax dollars tax breaks best besides the point but resentment over what others are given why are we spending millions not billions millions of dollars on witch women and infants and children women infants and children why are they getting discount on milk no one's giving me discount i work hard what is the what is the foundation of the muslim community they find no agitation in their hearts based on what others are given and they give preference to others they let them take it i would prefer they have it while no canada be him khasasa even though they themselves were suffering from poverty i do need it but they needed more i do need it but i'm a single guy they have children those kids need this i can survive this is what we can teach our country at this very critical and crucial time or we cannot allow the division the hatred the bitterness the resentment that has been exacerbated by what happened on september 11 2001 to fester until it grows and becomes malignant and spreads throughout our body politic and threatens the very foundation of our union the choice in terms of what we do as a community that choice is ours brothers and sisters and we pray that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala blesses us to make the right choice blesses us to make the courageous choice blesses us to make the morally and ethically sound choice bless us to make the choice that will be pleasing to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala our lord so may Allah bless you may Allah bless SBIA may Allah bless all of you for taking time from your at the end of a very busy week you're tired and you could be home unwinding and relaxing but you chose to come here may Allah bless you for that and reward you you pray that what we mentioned can be of some benefit to you and as they say ila liqa until we meet again