Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Happy to see you here bright and early at 9 o'clock on Friday, the next to the last day, the last full day of Mises University. It's my pleasure to speak with you this morning about government and big business. We've certainly been talking about government already during the week, once or twice, government has come up. We've been talking about business, of course, and I want to try to bring the two together in a slightly different way. You know, in general, you might think that, you know, business and government have a fundamentally hostile or antagonistic relationship, right?  I think that must be TJ Rodgers. You know, the sort of heroic business man being hectored and stymied by the politician. You know, you might remember Obama's famous, you didn't build that speech, which was not directed specifically at big business, but really at all business, large and small, and most of us had a, many of us had a not completely sympathetic reaction to the former president. On the other hand, you know, there's increasing talk, of course, there's been talk for many years about the idea that maybe government is actually helping certain businesses, ones that it favors for whatever reason. Everybody's interested now in, you know, denouncing crony capitalism, so-called crony capitalism. The idea that some firms become large and successful because they have access to powerful folks in Washington or Brussels or wherever it might be, and that maybe some big businesses are actually taking advantage of the consumer by working hand in hand with oppressive government. So we want to try to tease out these relationships in a little bit more detail, but let's start with a very sort of a big picture perspective. So what in general can we say about the role of government in the business sphere, the role of government in regulating and otherwise dealing with entrepreneurs, capitalists, and so forth? Well, you know, what most, most of us learn in school, how many of you were in the Tom Woods, Tom's afternoon talk yesterday, where he's continually referring to, you know, well, this is what you got in high school, this is what you were told in college, now here's the truth, right? So what most of us were told in high school and college and probably what most adults implicitly believe is what you might call the public interest view or public interest understanding of the role of government in the business sphere, right? So this sort of standard view holds that, well, I mean without without the government to be sort of the policeman and traffic cop and to make the rules and enforce the rules and so forth, things would be chaotic, consumers would be taken advantage of by unscrupulous companies and so forth. In other words, for the business sector to work well, to have a thriving market-based economy, you need a strong and efficient government to define and enforce property rights, but more importantly to redress so-called market failures, right? You know, externalities, public goods, monopoly and so forth. I'll be speaking in another time slot this afternoon at two, I think, on Austrian economics, some criticisms made by Austrian economists of the theories of externalities and public goods. And I spoke a couple of days ago about monopoly. You know, in contrast with this sort of benevolent, naive, public interest view of the state, we might contrast what we call a private interest view. In other words, that when government intervenes in the economy, it is doing so to benefit some private interest, some special interest. Now that private interest might be, you know, the ideology of Bernie Sanders, right?  But leaving that aside, right, even in the absence of that case, there may be particular commercial interests which benefit from government intervention, right? Some of these are easy to see, like a tariff, right? If the U.S., you know, increases, places a large tariff or increases its tariff on, you know, imported steel from India, for example. It doesn't take a whole lot of sophisticated analysis and almost any econ student and really almost anybody can easily see that, well, a tariff is going to, you know, have a distributional effect, right? So domestic steel producers will benefit from a government, from some intervention that makes it difficult for foreign steel producers to compete, right? But while other people will be harmed, I mean, Indian steel exporters will be harmed, but so will domestic consumers who will pay higher prices for steel and higher prices for goods and services that are made out of steel. So it's not too hard to see that, you know, a steel tariff far from, you know, helping society as a whole is basically taking money from some people's pockets and putting it in the pockets of other people. Same thing with other kinds of trade restrictions, subsidies, equotas and so forth. But if you think about it, many government interventions in the economy have this same kind of character, even when it's a little bit less obvious, like health and safety and environmental rules, right? So you might think, oh, well, you know, the Environmental Protection Agency in the United States, do you use another U.S. example, obviously serves the function of giving us clean air and protecting us from, you know, big companies that would otherwise put smoke in the air and dump dangerous chemicals in the water and so forth. Therefore, it must be the case that a group like the Environmental Protection Agency is benefiting the public at large, is benefiting society at large.  They're evil. Okay. But actually, you know, many mainstream economists have also become convinced, not only Austrian economists and others, that really what these kinds of rules typically do is they give competitive advantages to certain firms over others, right? So most environmental health and safety regulations are difficult to the cost of compliance can be quite high. They're very detailed. There's their questions of interpretation. Many times you have to buy expensive equipment, you have to hire many lawyers and so forth to figure out the rules and to deal with the regulators and so forth. Well, what kinds of companies can more easily accommodate that burden? Large companies, large incumbent firms that have a big legal staff and a public relations staff and have a lobbying office in Washington, D.C. and can more easily accommodate, can more easily, you know, adjust their behavior to these rules than smaller firms, newer firms, less politically connected firms. Okay. In the case of the EPA in particular, the way those laws, for example, the Clean Air Act, the first major piece of U.S. environmental legislation in 1970, was written specifically so that the restrictions applied only to new construction. So the owners of existing factories were exempt from meeting all of these requirements about putting less sulfur dioxide in the air and so forth. It was only new firms that were bound by these tough restrictions. So naturally, you might expect that owners of existing firms would be all in favor of the EPA. They would be all in favor of the Clean Air Act because it increases costs for their rivals. Okay. There's a whole literature in economics on what's called raising rivals costs. So many times business people will favor government interventions that actually increase their costs because they think it will increase their rivals costs even more. Right. This hurts you more than it hurts me. So I'm all in favor of it. So a lot of rules that look like on the surface, they're just protecting the planet or whatever, really are helping some firms gain an advantage over other firms. Right. In general, politically connected business people, just like any politically connected person, can use the regulatory system to his or her advantage. Now, there's some literature in in Austrian economics and public choice economics and modern political economy and the economics of regulation and so forth on these kinds of issues. Identifying some specific features that help us to sort of understand where we see these kinds of behaviors and where we don't. For example, we're more likely to see regulations or government policies that benefit some firms over other firms when the benefits of that intervention are highly concentrated while the costs are widely dispersed. Again, think of the steel tariff. Right. So imagine there's just a small number of steel producers in the US and if a steel tariff increases the prices of steel by some some significant percentage that has a huge impact on the incomes of domestic steel producers, their shareholders and so forth. And we say, yeah, but it makes steel more expensive for all of us. Yeah, but only by a little bit. Right. Each of us sees a small increase in the prices of different things that we buy. It's not enough for us to get really upset about it. Right. So we're not going to go, we as you know, members of the public, we're not going to organize ourselves into a group. We're not going to go organize a march on Washington, D.C. and hold signs and all that.  But if I'm a steel producer, am I going to go march on Washington? Am I going to make sure I get my steel tariff? Am I going to make sure the tariff doesn't go away? Absolutely. I'm going to lobby like crazy for that because that's my whole livelihood. Okay. Bruce Yandel, who's a sort of Chicago school economist, public choice economist, has done some really good work on regulation, has described what he calls bootlegger and Baptist coalitions as means of explaining the kinds of regulations that we see. What he has in mind with his clever analogy of bootleggers and Baptist is prohibition in the United States in the 1920s. I stole this picture from Yandel when he gave a talk here at the Austrian Economics Research Conference a couple years ago that his argument is in the 1920s when alcohol sales were illegal in the United States, you had two groups arguing very strongly in favor of alcohol prohibition. You had, you know, Baptist quote unquote, not meaning literally the Baptist denomination, but religious people or anyone who thought that alcohol should be banned for moral reasons, right? Alcohol is, you know, it's harmful, it degrades your character. In fact, a lot of the arguments for prohibition, if you look at the historical record, were made by groups that claimed that there was rampant alcoholism throughout society, that men in particular were going to the bar and getting drunk rather than being at home, taking care of their children and helping their wives and so forth. And that, you know, it's important to maintain the moral fabric of society that we eliminate alcohol. We try to ban alcohol from public consumption. But of course, these sort of moral groups, groups opposing alcohol on moral grounds were not the only ones in the story, right? Another group that benefited tremendously from laws prohibiting the legal purchase, manufacture and purchase of alcohol, of course, were bootleggers, right? The mafia, Al Capone. Al Capone became the most famous gangster in America from selling, you know, running bootleg rum in from Canada and from South America and so forth, right? So people who sell the illegal product at very high prices and so forth also want alcohol to be illegal, right? So Al Capone was in favor of prohibition. That's what made him Al Capone, okay? So Yandel points out that, look, if you're a bootlegger in the 1920s, you don't need to go on television, well, I didn't have television, go on radio, right? You don't have to make the 1920s equivalent of like a Tom Woods podcast, right? And say, you know, alcohol must be illegal. We must keep prohibition in place because I am making a boatload of money off of it, right? They couldn't do that. But Yandel's point is the bootlegger doesn't have to do that. He can just sort of remain quietly in the background and let the so-called Baptist group go out in front of the public and make the case for him. So, you know, the environmental, environmentalist version would be, you know, I'm an owner of a big factory in the 1970s. And if the government makes it illegal for new factories to pollute, then that makes more money for me. Of course, I can't go out and public and say that. But I let Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, and back in those days, there were groups like the Club of Rome arguing that we were going to use all our natural resources the next, you know, two weeks or whatever. I let the environmentalists make the case for me. I let them take the heat, let them articulate to the public why we need this rule that really benefits me, right? So Yandel points out where you have kind of a, you know, sort of a group making the public interest argument and another group that's working behind the scenes to get something for their private interest. You're more likely to see that kind of regulation be enacted. You're more likely to see it persist and so forth. Okay. So let's talk a little bit more broadly about how, you know, sort of free market thinkers have approached business.  You know, if you've read Ayn Rand's novels, what she had in mind by big business was the heroic entrepreneurs and industrialists, you know, of her fiction works. But I think most, most Austrian economists, most sort of classical liberal political theorists have not been very favorable toward the Ayn Rand view, arguing that, well, historically, many, if not most big businesses have not been noble fighters for free enterprise, but have been happy to take advantage of government interference, where it's in their interest. Okay. So in the 1960s and 1970s, there emerged a group of historians who were called the New Left revisionists. They were leftists, but they were different from the sort of traditional left-wing historians. Most famous of these is Gabriel Kolko, whose books Railroads and Regulation and the Triumph of Conservatism are highly recommended and were extremely influential in sort of challenging what was then the consensus view that government acts in the interest of the consumer to protect the consumer from big business. So people like Kolko and these other authors, many of them wrote revisionist histories of the progressive era in the United States. And they pointed out that, no, the progressive era, far from being an example of government stepping in to protect the consumer from the excess of big business, in almost every case, the major pieces of progressive era legislation, like the Pure Food and Drug Act, for example, were really examples of a bootlegger and Baptist kind of a thing, that they were really in the interest of certain large companies. For example, the Pure Food and Drug Act was supposed to regulate stockyards and make sure that food was being prepared in a healthy and hygienic way. But the Pure Food and Drug Act was strongly, the main interest behind the Pure Food and Drug Act was large meat slaughter houses in Chicago who were losing business to smaller local slaughterhouses, local butchers. They wanted to put the village butcher out of business by passing a law saying the local butcher cannot cut up the cow into stakes. Only an authorized factory and an authorized warehouse in Chicago or Kansas City or St. Louis is allowed to do this. And so, of course, the owners of those authorized facilities lobbied like crazy for a law that would put their competition out of business. Okay, so again, these are sort of left-wing historians who said, gosh, if you look at the rules that we progressives are supposed to favor, it doesn't look like they were really in the interest of the public. They were more like versions of crony capitalism. And Murray Rothbard very much embraced this view of the new left historians in some of his writings on what he called corporatism. So corporatism is not the study of the corporation. Corporatism is an economic system in which certain large and influential corporations use the state to their advantage. And he wrote about this in the context of antitrust. The progressive era, like the new left historians, also later in the 20th century, World War I, the New Deal and World War II. So now, let me offer my own sort of analysis. What are some of the effects of government intervention, specific effects of government intervention on business? Well, one is, you know, if you're a business person in an industry in which the government plays a strong role, it's, of course, in your interest to understand that role and to try to change that role and to make things better for you. Right? There's a famous quote from PJ O'Rourke. I don't know if he's the originator, sort of the conservative humorist PJ O'Rourke, put it this way, when buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators. Right? You hear people in the United States and other countries talk about, you know, we spent so much money, there's so much money in politics. So we need campaign finance reform and other laws that restrict how much private money, how much money people can donate to particular candidates. And you might remember the judge saying, I guess on Monday night, talking about that as a violation of the First Amendment, right, and a violation of your property rights. But there's all this call to reduce the amount of money that's in politics. I mean, from our point of view, from this point of view, if you think there's too much money in politics, the solution is not to make it illegal to donate money to politicians. The solution is to have an economic system in which no one would want to donate money to politicians because they can't do anything. Right? That's my approach to campaign finance reform. Maybe the problem is that we have a system in which people want to give millions of dollars to Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump or whoever so they can get stuff. Right?  Okay? I said, let's keep in mind the concept of fiduciary responsibility.  Right? To give money to the state, to bribe politicians and to lobby and so forth because otherwise my shareholders will earn lower returns than the otherwise would. I may think it's an evil rotten corrupt system, but I'm in the system. It may not be up to me to decide how to participate or not. I've got to do what's in the interest of my shareholders. Okay? So, we don't necessarily blame the corporate executive who engages in rent seeking behavior. The problem is that there are rents to be sought. Okay? The solution is to get rid of the rents and you get rid of the rent seeking. Okay? Mises has some interesting discussion in his little book, Bureaucracy from 1944, which I would recommend, on how the interventionist state or interventionist policy affects other aspects of business, like the organizational structure and management style of companies. He talks about how regulations that make firms less responsive to the market, that reduce the power of consumer sovereignty, make firms larger and more rigid, you know, more bureaucratic so-called than the otherwise would be. Okay? So, you know, when we complain about, oh, I don't like big companies and look at the airline industry, right?  I mean, in what industries do we tend to see that kind of behavior where firms are not very responsive to consumer wants, where we see what looks like a lot of inefficiency persisting? Well, those will tend to be the industries where we have the most government intervention, right? I mean, you know, software companies are not dragging people out, you know, on the street and beating them over the head, because software is a much more competitive industry where there's a lot less government intervention than airlines, right? I mean, it's basically a state-enforced cartel of airlines, of air service in most countries, like in the U.S. We can talk about that later if you want. There's a great book by a legal scholar, Mark Rowe, in his book, Strong Managers, sorry, yeah, Strong Managers, Weak Owners. He argues that the sort of Anglo-American-style corporation where you have a large number of shareholders, each of whom owns only a small percentage of the total stock, and sort of powerful, entrenched managers who are really, who are not the owners themselves, but are the agents of the shareholders, but yet hold tremendous day-to-day decision authority, because no single shareholder is large enough to influence corporate behavior, right? You get a ledge-free rider problem, the problem identified by Adolf Burley and Gardner means the so-called Burley and Means Problem or separation of ownership and control. And Mark Rowe points out, well, that's not something that just emerged on the market, right? That in the U.K., in the U.S., and some other corporate law systems, you have very strong restrictions on large institutional owners, right? So in contrast to, for example, Germany and Japan in which banks own large blocks of equity in corporations, it's illegal for banks to own corporations in the United States, part of the Glass-Steagall reforms in the 1930s. So part of the reason that managers have so much power and shareholders are so weak, according to Rowe, is because in the U.S. and U.K. and some other countries, we have laws making it that way, right? Laws prohibiting more, you know, stronger, more powerful groups from also playing an ownership role in the corporation. So things that we don't like about how big business seems to operate may not be the natural consequence of sort of market forces, but may themselves be the consequence of some other kinds of government intervention. What about firm size? This has been a big issue in some of the literature, some debates and arguments that free market people have, right? Is it the case that because of, you know, because of the welfare state, because of government intervention, in the U.S., we have much larger firms than we otherwise would have, right? Is it the case that government intervention, on average, helps large firms more than small firms and makes firms much larger than they otherwise would be? This is an argument that Roderick Long has made, people like Kevin Carson who make this argument. Well, I mean, it certainly is true that there are a number of important policies that do promote firm size, that do help big firms over small firms, and do tend to make firms bigger than the otherwise would. I mean, one way I like to put it, and this relates to the point that I made earlier about raising your rival's costs, you know, if you think that there are fixed costs of interacting with the state, i.e., hiring lawyers and PR staffs and lobbyists and so forth, learning the ins and outs of Washington, D.C., or Brussels, or whatever the capital is, knowing how to deal with politicians, you know, you can't do that just a tiny bit, you've got to invest a fair amount in learning how to master that skill, and once you've mastered it, you might as well use it, right? So if you think there are fixed costs of interacting with the state, then they're kind of economies of scale, economies of scope in lobbying and rent seeking and so forth, right? You know, again, just communicating regulatory compliance. I mean, in some industries, I actually, I'm on the board of directors of an insurance company, and it's, of course, the regulated industry, and probably, you know, half the time of the board has spent dealing with compliance issues, making sure that all of the eyes are dotted and the teas are crossed on various government forms. Okay, once you know how to do that, it's a lot easier for you to do it some more than for somebody who's never done it to just start doing it. Because it's very hard for startup companies to enter a regulated industry because you've got to master all this legal ease and you've got to know which person to bribe and so forth. So that helps, it gives an incentive for firms to become large so they can exploit these economies of scale and scope. Intellectual property might be an example of this kind of a rule as well. Now, in many cases, large companies get direct subsidies, making fun of Elon Musk earlier in the week, right?  That's kind of subsidy I can get behind, right? But he also gets direct cash payments, you know, from various municipalities and so forth. So, yeah, you might argue, oh, a firm like Tesla is, you know, getting a lot of support, direct support from the government. So that's why it's growing. You know, Goldman Sachs, what can you say? You know, I think of Goldman Sachs as like, you know, a fourth branch of the US federal government because it's so, so entrenched in Washington and so forth. You know, Boeing, the Boeing's major customer is the US military. The US gets huge amounts of subsidies, direct and indirect to airline manufacturers, aviation companies, not only the manufacturers but the commercial airlines too. But that's sort of easy to see. But there are also a number of less obvious things that might be considered a subsidy for large firms, you know, like the fact that the government owns most of the roads. So, Kevin Carson, for example, has argued that, yeah, Walmart is sort of a crony capitalist firm because, you know, what's Walmart's, what's the secret to Walmart's success? Well, I mean, vast economies of scale, right? And the most efficient distribution system of any retail company in the world are one of the most efficient. But of course, Walmart, to get the stuff to you cheap, it has to go on a Walmart truck and go out on the interstate highway, the taxpayer subsidized interstate highway. Therefore, it has been argued that firms like Walmart or Amazon, which use, you know, government subsidized airports and air traffic control and so forth, that large retailers that rely on subsidized transportation are really examples of sort of crony capitalism, right? That in a free market, you wouldn't have any Walmart's or Amazon's because if you had to pay the full cost of shipping your stuff around, it would be more efficient to produce things locally and not to produce in one big plant and then distribute all over the world. I don't think that argument's correct, but that's an argument that folks have made. I mean, what can you say about these kind of examples? Well, I mean, yeah, in most cases, I think these are government interventions that favor size, that make firms larger than they otherwise would be. Does that mean that if we could eliminate all government intervention overnight, all big companies would disappear and we would go back to sort of small household production, cottage production? No, I think the answer is clearly no, because there are many, many government policies that favor smaller firms, right? They're government policies that attack size and favor firms becoming smaller or favor existing small firms. And I trust, for example, right? If you're, you know, Mama Goldberg's deli next door to the Mises Institute, I mean, Mama Goldberg's has, I don't know, they have four or five of their restaurants here in the Auburn area. I think they have more in Birmingham, maybe Atlanta.  But I think, you know, it's highly unlikely that the Federal Trade Commission or the US Justice Department is going to file an antitrust suit against Mama Goldberg's deli. This is a little teeny tiny thing in Auburn. Okay, but of course, if you're Subway or Jimmy John's or McDonald's or some large nationwide chain or any large manufacturing concern, you're much more likely to be the target of an antitrust suit. There's also what the economist Fred McChesney has called rent extraction. Rent extraction. He's got a great book called Money for Nothing, okay, on this phenomenon. And McChesney says what often happens, you know, we usually think of lobbying as a business person, a company, you know, going to the bureaucrats and saying, hey, I'm going to support you in these ways. I'm going to give you money.  But McChesney points out, sometimes it works the other way around. And one example of this is the antitrust case against Microsoft in the 1990s, which I mentioned the other day, that one of, I remember reading at the time, many antitrust experts and, you know, former antitrust officials quoted anonymously and so forth in the New York Times saying, can you believe this tech industry? I mean, who do these people think they are? These tech companies, you know, Microsoft, they don't even have an office in Washington.  You're supposed to be, you know, bowing down to us in Washington. You're supposed to be lobbying. You're supposed to be giving us bribes and favors and we're not getting those. Therefore, we're going to tighten the screws, right? We're going to come down on you hard and let you know that's not the way it works in America.   And of course, after all these years of litigation, now all the big tech companies, of course, do have Washington D.C. offices and they lobby like crazy and all the tech CEOs were giving bazillions of dollars to Hillary Clinton or whatever, right? So the tech companies do play Washington's game now.   They just think, you know, why do they, why do big companies, why do investment banks and big manufacturing firms, why do they pay these ridiculous sums of money to hear a speech by Bill Clinton? I mean, he's not that interesting.  There's a good, how many hours of him on YouTube already. I mean, what could he say that's new? What are they really doing when they pay these people big money? I mean, one interpretation is it's kind of an insurance payment.  Chelsea, of course, I'm talking about. When that happens, we want to make sure that we're in the Clinton family's good graces. And when the Clintons are making policy about XYZ, they will remember, oh yeah, remember that firm that paid Bill, how much money, you know, Goldman Sachs paid Hillary 500 grand when she was running for office, you know, that goes down in the ledger as a little plus sign or whatever.  So it's kind of, it's a little bit of an extortion game. And so a lot of companies give money to politicians, not because they want to get a certain outcome, but as sort of protection money to make sure that they aren't hurt down the road. One good piece of evidence for this is if you look at corporate donations to political parties in the US, I don't know if it's true in other countries too, not the contributions of individuals who work for that company, but corporate level contributions to PACs and so forth, they're pretty evenly split between Democratic and Republican candidates, like in the same election. So a company will give the maximum to the Democratic candidate and the maximum to the Republican candidate in the same election. You think, okay, well if they're lobbying to get certain, if they're trying to get their favorite candidate elected, why would they give to both? If they're hoping that one candidate will win and enact some policy, then why are they giving to both? I mean, it's probably just they want to make sure neither one will be really mad at them after they win. Right, again, this is like the PJR work thing. If we lived in a world in which the person who wins the election for Congress or the Senate or even the presidency basically doesn't do anything, they have no power over you, then why would you waste your time bribing them? The fact that companies give money to everybody and anybody suggests that they're worried about what could happen to them if they don't. Other things, so some accounting rules like corporate disclosure requirements. Publicly traded companies have to disclose information in their financial statements that privately held companies do not, and so many companies may prefer to stay small, smaller than they would be if they went on the public equity markets, if they listed on public markets because they don't want to have to meet those disclosure requirements. There are direct subsidies for small companies, you know, especially in the tech sector, right? Governments build science parks and fund incubators and the SBIR program, which gives cash to tech startups. You have lots of indirect subsidies as well. So if we're going to say that subsidized interstate highways constitute, you can give sort of an unfair advantage to Walmart and Amazon, then we would have to say that subsidized electricity, subsidized telecommunication services give an advantage to small firms that are able to be in some small town, right? If it weren't for electricity subsidies, maybe you couldn't afford to live in Auburn, Alabama. You'd have to live in a big city that has a big nuclear plant, okay? And the only reason a little startup company can be in Auburn, Alabama or wherever is because they have access to the internet and they have access to, they can make phone calls, they can get electricity off the grid. All of those things are subsidized by the state just as much as the road system. So it's not clear that the kind of Kevin Carson argument makes any sense, specifically favoring one type of firm over another, okay? Now, more generally, I mean, think of what the government does to the economy, to society, right?   Reduces stocks of human capital. If you want to use that language, it makes us all dumber than we otherwise would be if we didn't have state control of education. Reduces the marginal product of labor in many contexts, right? So, I mean, all of these things, you know, it might be that if we had, you know, sort of free society and we had better education systems, better transportation and communication systems, maybe the economies of scale and scope and production would be even larger than they are now. Maybe we'd see bigger firms than we see now if we were to get rid of the state and all of its harms. So, the point is, it's very difficult to say ex-ante what the world would look like if we could eliminate all government intervention in the economy.  I mean, maybe it's possible and you might see that in some parts of the world, but there's no theory that tells us ex-ante, no historical evidence that would allow us to predict that that's necessarily what we would get. Actually, my conjecture is in many parts of the world and in many industries, we would see more consolidation and centralization of production if we got the government, you know, off our backs, so to speak. Okay. There's a good, there's a debate that Roderick Long and I had back in 2008 online on this very topic, Roderick was saying that corporate hierarchies are sort of the product of government intervention. I was arguing the contrary, of course I'm right, but you can, you can just Google that and you can find, you can find it. Okay, so just a brief note on sort of the legal form of business organization, the corporation specifically. The corporate form of organization, right, the limited liability company has been kind of a controversial issue among sort of market oriented economists. So there have been claims that even if large firms are legitimate in the free market, publicly traded corporations are not because they receive a special, they receive special privilege from the state in the form of limited liability. Okay, so I mean, it's also true, of course, that there may be tax advantages to incorporating rather than being a partnership or a proprietorship even for just a small operation. But what most people have focused on is, you know, this claim, so opponents of the corporation claim that the reason that most production takes place under this particular organizational form is because the state has granted corporations immunity from certain kinds of legal actions, right? So as you know, under the corporate form of organization, the shareholders, the owners cannot be personally liable for the debts of the corporation or for torts committed by employees of the corporation. Okay, and of course, that's one of the great innovations, historical innovations that allowed entrepreneurs to accumulate large amounts of capital, right? Because, you know, if if Tom Woods back there starting a new venture, a new Tom Woods dot com kind of a thing and he asked me to partner with him and to give him some money.  Then of course, I'm not going to invest. But if Tom tells me, hey, you can invest a hundred bucks in my venture.  I mean, of course, I would never invest in Tom, you know, Tom Woods thing like that. But hypothetically, you could. Therefore, Tom can raise a lot more money than he could if he were not able to issue that that kind of protection. So is limited liability an illegitimate grant of the state? Is it a form of privilege for large companies, for corporations in particular? So I think it's important in answering that question to distinguish two things, right? So there's two forms of limited liability. There's limited liability for debts. In other words, limited liability against claims, credit claims by creditors. And then there's limited liability against claims from victims of torts. In other words, the first the creditor category is simply this, right? If I invest in Tom's firm and it goes bankrupt, you know, can the bank, which right, so if I invest in Tom's firm, I get an equity stake. I'm not guaranteed any particular payout, right? I either make money or I lose money depending on the value of the equity after Tom has done his thing. But let's say Tom also has a bank loan where he agreed to a fixed repayment schedule of so many dollars per year. What if the business goes belly up and Tom can't pay the bank, right? So if Tom has set up a limited liability company, then the most the bank can get, they can take the assets of the company, but they can't come after me personally. Now is that legitimate or illegitimate on the free market? The answer is it's neither, right? Because that is a purely private contractual arrangement between the bank, Tom and myself, right? In other words, you know, in a pure laissez-faire society, Tom Woods comes to me and says, hey, will you give me a hundred bucks and I'll give you these shares in my firm? My first question is going to be, well, Tom, what kind of arrangement do you have with the bank, right? What did you tell the bank about what the bank would be entitled to if the business were to go belly up? And if Tom says, well, Peter, I told the bank that if the business fails, you know, the bank can get its hands on, you know, not only the capital invested in the firm, but the personal assets of the investors. Now notice if Tom were to try to strike that deal with the bank, the bank would love that, right? So the bank would probably give him a really favorable interest rate. That'd be good for Tom. But of course, most people like me would say no thanks. I'm not interested in making that investment. But on the other hand, if Tom can go to the bank and say, look, bank, I want you to lend me money, but it's in the contract that if I can't pay you back, it's on you. Well, I mean, the bank might still give him a loan, but he probably charged him a higher interest rate, right? But then Tom shows me that contract I'm more willing to give him my hundred bucks. The point is this is something that can be worked out on the market, right? Equity holders, debt holders, the entrepreneur, we can all negotiate for whatever kind of arrangements about who has to pay whom, what in different states of the world. That's not a, that's a purely private contractual issue. So whether or not he adopts the form of limited liability is just that's between us. That's not a policy issue whatsoever, right? So the issue that libertarians worry about is, okay, so Tom hires Lucas, you know, as his delivery man. And then Lucas is driving, you know, he's driving carelessly down the street and he runs into Jeff Herbner knocks him over and breaks Herbner's leg, right? Herbner has all these big medical bills. Tom Woods, Inc. doesn't have enough money to cover Jeff Herbner's medical bills. Can Jeff Herbner come after me? The guy who has, you know, invested a hundred bucks in Tom Woods, Inc. for an equity share. That's the more tricky issue. That's the legal issue. And so in, in most jurisdictions, if Tom has incorporated as a limited liability company, Jeff Herbner's out of luck. Okay, now is that an illegitimate grant of the, of state privilege? I think the issue is probably not for the following reasons and then we'll stop. Right, the more, in fact, this is a much more general issue than a corporate issue, right? Suppose Tom Woods does not set up as a corporation. He's just, it's just a mom and pop proprietorship and he hires Lucas and Lucas breaks Jeff Herbner's leg. I mean, is it Tom's fault? Most people assume that, oh, well, if the Domino's pizza driver, you know, is driving recklessly and causes an accident, it's Domino's fault and Domino's shareholders should be liable for that. Well, I mean, maybe it's the driver's fault, right? I mean, unless, unless Domino's specifically told the driver to speed, then why is it the company's fault, right? So this is a general kind of principal agent issue. You know, when is the owner legally liable for harms caused by an employee? And the way courts have typically ruled and common law courts, long before incorporation statutes ever came onto the books have argued that, you know, the employer is only legally liable if the employer, you know, very specifically directed the employee to act in a way that causes harm or has great risk of harm. Okay. I mean, if I, you know, if I punch though in the office, it's not Lou Rockwell's fault. I mean, it's my fault, right? So the legal term for this is respondeat superior, right? When is the superior legally liable for actions of the agent? And the answer is only in these certain limited circumstances. My point is libertarians who critique limited liability assume that the default should be the owners of an enterprise are legally liable for all torts committed by employees. And there's that's not the obvious default case. In fact, that's not the historic common law default. The historic default is no, you're not employers, whether they're corporations or not are not liable for torts committed by employees, except in these special circumstances. So it's not at all clear that the corporate form is some kind of a special legal privilege. Okay. So I've already run over my time, but all I wanted to leave you with is the idea is that government does help big business, but government helps small business too, right? Government policy has lots of effects, diverse and complex effects on business firms. Corporations benefit from the state, but they're harmed as well. And limited liability is not an is not obviously an artificial state privilege. Okay. So the bottom line is what would business firms? What would the corporate landscape look like on the purely free market? Well, I mean, we just can't say ex ante, but my my view is let's give it a try and see what happens. And then we can solve these debates by looking and seeing what actually does emerge on the free market. I think that's a policy that we can all support. Thank you.


Give the people what they want. Give the people what they want. Give the people what they want. Your weekly movement news roundup. Give the people what they want. Your weekly movement news roundup. The 94th episode, 16th of September, had to check the date, I'm afraid. A lot of stories for you where Zoe and Prashant from People's Dispatch, your favorite movement-driven news source, general news source. Why even movement-driven? One of the best places to get the news. I'm Vijay from Globe Trotter. Happy to be with you on this Friday. We're going to go with a very positive story. It seems we're going to look at the Brazilian elections. I'm surprising myself by saying a story about elections is positive, especially in 2022. Zoe, what's going on in that titanic election in Brazil between Lula and Bolsonaro? Well, I'm still remaining a bit reserved in terms of whether I say it's good news or bad news. Polls have pretty much stayed the same. One of the biggest polling agencies, Datafolio, which has one of the most respected kind of formulas and methodologies for doing opinion, voter opinion polls, just released another poll yesterday. Lula is polling at 45% compared to Bolsonaro's 33%. This has essentially been the difference that's been present for the past couple of weeks. It hasn't changed a ton. There's been tiny differences in other polls, but this is pretty much the standard at this point. As you said, we're two weeks away. We're two weeks away from these titanic elections. The big question on everyone's mind is not really is the look and the win because it seems like it's pretty much in the bag. Bolsonaro has essentially a 33% stronghold of Bolsonaro supporters, people who have been completely loyal to him, but this hasn't really increased. People don't expect that it will increase even if it goes for a second round. Most likely people who vote for other candidates will either vote in a null vote or support Lula. The question is, who knows what happens? October could be crazy and all of this could be completely turned on its head, but really at this point the question is, is Lula going to win in the first round? The tendency is indicating that it's possible. He's at 45%. As I said, Bolsonaro isn't going to really increase beyond 33%, 35%. But it really, it also depends what's going to happen with these other candidates. Cedro Gomez, who has essentially served to be a diversion away from the Workers' Party, has not dropped out of the race despite pulling below 10%. He continues to have pretty low numbers, not a popular figure in Brazilian politics. And so really the question is, is Lula going to be able to push over the threshold of 50% to get this first round election? We'll see. If he does win in the first round, it will definitely put him in a stronger position to take on these challenges that Brazil faces today. It's in a deep economic crisis, deep social crisis, deep political, deep social crisis. As we've reported at People's Dispatch, unemployment rate through the roof, the real has lost a lot of its value, increasing the numbers of homelessness in Brazil. Brazil is back on the hunger map with millions of people suffering from food insecurity. Lula's going to need not only a strong Congress, but also really to show that he has the confidence of the people to be able to enact the policies, the bold policies that will be necessary to lift Brazil out of this crisis, to fight the privatization that happened during the Temer presidency, during the Bolsonaro presidency. A lot of the major achievements that Brazil was able to make during Lula's presidency during Dilma's presidency were completely reversed during these years of Temer and Bolsonaro. This will be key. He needs to show that he has a strong foot forward. However, first round victory also means it opens the door for Bolsonaro to kind of wage a full-fledged campaign about voter fraud. If it's a close race in the first round, there are a lot of concerns about what the responsible Bolsonaro would be. That being said, this week in a podcast interview, he said that he would hand over power if he loses in the elections. This is, of course, contrary to what he's been saying for months, contrary to what he was said on the 7th of September to his supporters. So really, as we've said, everything can happen in October, but this is what we've seen so far. This is what the polls are saying and this is what analysts are saying generally. This is what analysts are saying. Amazing how generous of him to say that if he loses an election, he'll hand over power. Remarkable which the Egyptian president could hear this statement from Mr. Bolsonaro. In Egypt, of course, a whole other different crisis. Prashant, very, very sad news coming from the prisons of Egypt. Tell us what's happening there. All right, Vijay, like you said, because with Adil Fatah el-Sisi, the issue is not about handing power if he loses as much as rigging elections so that he never loses, which seems to be the case. But Egypt is a remarkable, it's a remarkable situation right now. It's going to host COP 27 very soon, a meeting where leaders across the world are going to come together, talk about how to somehow save this world from disaster, how to build some kind of an equitable, equitable way to sort of redistribute our resources. But Egypt is also a country where it seems that of nearly 120,000 prisoners, over 65,000 are at least political prisoners and that's an unbelievable number. And the most recent statistic has been that close to three political prisoners have died in almost about a week or so. And most of these people have gone to jail after Adil Fatah el-Sisi came to power in his military coup and we have seen this issue being highlighted again and again. We've seen the fact that rights organizations for instance have continuously raised this especially also keeping COP 27 in the forefront. But what does not seem to change is the fact that across the world, Adil Fatah el-Sisi continues to enjoy the kind of complete untrammel support so to speak. We saw that he did meet Biden and other leaders in the region recently and this is despite the fact that there has been a fair amount of chronicling of this kind of the horrible situation inside Egyptian jails. The key aspect of course being the fact that medical negligence is attributed is the key aspect. By medical negligence what people really mean is that prisoners are treated so badly the health conditions are ignored and completely left unmonitored so that they they sort of move towards an extremely bad situation health wise and we also have the instance of Al-Abdul Fattah who probably one of the most prominent political prisoners in Egypt. Again despite the huge international outcry we see that in recent times he's been on a hunger strike for months now consuming almost no solid food if I'm not mistaken. Despite all this he's barely been allowed to meet his family the kind of facilities but the kind of even basic rights that even a prisoner enjoys in most parts of the world are completely denied to him and this is after a career of political persecution the fact that he's been put in jail multiple times for charges such as spreading fake news many of the charges against political prisoners are like these so vague spreading fake news and a random notion of terrorism a huge number of people are in pretrial detention as well which has been used by the state very effectively to sort of ensure that any kind of dissent is foiled. So I think you know as we move towards COP 27 this is a very important question that people's movements also need to keep asking and highlighting because Egypt is a linchpin of the imperialist project in West Asia because you know from what gets a huge amount of supplies from the United States it is essentially blockading Gaza it plays a the role of a collaborator with Israel so all these together even in Iran for instance it has its own interventions in the Horn of Africa as well Libya for that matter so keeping all these interventions in mind I think Egypt is really a country that people's movements rights organizations really need to keep focusing on especially as we move towards the event which will have international attention. You know you pointed out the very great grave problem of the prisons in Egypt of course there are consistently human rights reports written about this the United Nations has weighed in on this doesn't seem to have much of an impact but look I'm going to take us to Syria where there is a new UN report 50 page report very interesting report about the renewal of fighting inside Syria in both the northwest and northeast different sectors of the fighting in in the northwest largely around the area of Idlib where the you know various let's say the anti-government forces have been hold up very ugly fighting starting there in the northwest where of course there's the remaining oil of the Syrian people there is a battle with various forces including if I'm not to be too critical of the UN report also gangsters there's very little of that in the report the UN officials have warned that large scale fighting might start again they hope it will not currently they estimate that the government of Bashar al-Assad controls about 70% of Syria it's pretty amazing 30% is outside the control of the government of the territory there's been some increase of aerial bombardment including by Russian aircraft this is of interest of note because of of course the war in Ukraine that continues where I must say I'll come back to this in the end you know the Ukrainian forces made enormous gains in Kharkiv and in other parts of Ukraine pushing Russian forces back almost to the Donbas region and in some places to the Russian territory itself but in Syria there's some increase of Russian bombing and so on but the bit that caught my eye which was to me really underreported was the dozen or more Israeli air strikes against Syria in the past six months the first six months of 2022 in these first six months there have been a dozen air strikes what has Israel been striking here's what's interesting Israel has been hitting not military targets but has been hitting the airport in Damascus and the airport in Aleppo these are principally night raids there was a night raid on Aleppo airport on the 31st of August and then Israeli planes came back and bombed the airport on the 6th of September these bombings have been and my notes are pretty specific they've been bombing various kinds of navigational capacities radars at the airports and things like that the authorities at Aleppo international airport worry that if a bomb strikes a place where there are civilians the chance of civilian casualties very high the intensity of the attacks has increased the Syrians sent a note to the United Nations it says Syria reminds the UN that Israel today has no qualms about expanding its repeated attacks on different areas of Syrian territory and endangering Syrian airports and civil aircraft now this has happened at the same time as the Europeans have lifted sanctions on the Syrian airline Cham Wings the main government airline that flies inside and around Syria the Europeans have lifted sanctions on the airline and just at that point the Israelis are bombing Syrian airports it's interesting that there's been very little consideration about this and the reason bringing this up is because not because the Syrians have been complaining about and I read out part of their statement not because of that but because in the United Nations report it is noted specifically that the Israelis have bombed at least a dozen sites it's a very conservative number inside Syria because there's a lot of contested bombings by Israel that have taken place I'm not even focusing on that I'm just focusing on the simple fact Israel has been bombing two civilian airports not the military side of the airport but civilian infrastructure in the airport for which reason the airports have to constantly shut down or fly blind without radar very dangerous endangering civilians inside Syria very little international commentary on this and I'm not surprised by that but I want to raise it for our viewers and listeners to pay attention to this has not been happening now I said I was going to come back to the issue of Ukraine because to some extent it is related as I said the Russians have been increasing stepping up bombing inside Syria at the same time as this the Russian forces suffered a real defeat in Kharkiv being pushed back there's a lot of conversation on Russian television shows open debate about the war about how the logistical lines have been stretched and whether Russia should go for a full mobilization and therefore increase the war in intensity not clear exactly what decisions will be made at the end of the program I'm going to come back to a meeting being held in Samarkand of the Shanghai cooperation organization Vladimir Putin the president of Russia is at that meeting come back to this part of the story you're listening to give the people what they want brought to you by people's dispatched Zoe and Prashant I'm Vijay from Globetrotter 94th show that we have today is an important day in Mexico it's the 16th of September in the Zocalo tens of thousands of people are gathering not only in the Zocalo but in other squares public squares in Mexico celebrating their great day of independence Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador going to speak and so on he's the president Zoe you have something else on your mind I think something about the Assanges I gather that they have decided to pay a visit to Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador Well it is important to mention that this great day in Mexico because a lot of the presidency of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has invited many personalities politicians social leaders to participate in this anniversary of independence and because of the story that I'm going to talk about which has to do with the Assanges it's interesting to think of this celebration and this gathering happening in Mexico and parallel to what's happening in the UK where people are also gathering but it's to commemorate and enshrine colonialism in the Royal Family and really just kind of want to point out a bit of the moral bankruptcy that we see kind of existing in the UK and Europe and really what we're seeing from Latin America is an emerging kind of unabashed challenge to US imperialism for the past several months leaders across Europe have essentially bowed to US interests on all fronts whether it's energy sanctions on Russia whether it's upholding their different policies whereas we've seen in the past week the government of the city of Mexico bestowed the keys of the city to Julian Assange the co-founder of WikiLeaks who is being persecuted by the US government in collusion with the government of the UK and other European governments a Spanish spy agency was spying on him when he was in the Ecuadorian embassy in Sweden the case in Sweden was really the basis for which he was detained and we've seen in the past week only in Mexico has he been invited to have asylum in Mexico by Amlo his family was given the keys to the city they were welcomed into the congress chambers but also a former Honduran president Manuel Zelaya also called on the UK to release Julian Assange so it's really interesting to see this moral voice of reason that emerged from this region that has been so long attacked by the United States been under the boot of US imperialism and they're standing up on very key issues not only issues that relate to their own economies but really issues of international order of geopolitical independence from US imperialism so I think it's an incredibly interesting moment right now in Latin America with the reconfiguration of the political scene with more progressive governments the question was always going to be how are they going to take on US imperialism what is going to be the response and what we've seen in Mexico what we've seen with these statements from Manuel Zelaya is that they're not they're going to stand up to US imperialism and on these questions that are so sensitive to the State Department which is of course Julian Assange and as we've been reporting at People's Dispatch Assange this year is a crucial year for his case and the border was approved by the former Home Secretary of course now with the change in Prime Minister with Liz Truss there is a shift in the cabinet and this case continues but the UK has not changed its stance on whether to not only keep Julian Assange in prison but also on his extradition but people of the world are still standing up on October 8th and 9th they're going to be surrounding the UK Parliament and a human chain to demand that lawmakers take action and demand his release there's several other campaigns going on to call for his release Julian Assange is considered by many a prisoner of the empire because he dared to reveal these crimes of imperialism which of course we are always referring to on this show the crimes that we saw in Iraq and of course Afghanistan which I know Prashant is going to talk a little bit about now yes Prashant is going to talk about it because there's a great article on the People's Dispatch website by Amitabh Roy Chaudhary really found it interesting Prashant glad that you run it he's a veteran journalist what's the story with this humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan and of course Vijay it's a two-fold crisis we talked about the crimes of imperialism on the one hand it's a crisis we'll come to that but the most recent bit of news was the fact that the United States has decided to for the purposes of safekeeping mind you that's a very important word to note it has decided to transfer Afghanistan's money of foreign reserves basically to our Swiss to a trust in Switzerland and Swiss Bank basically and this is one of the most observed bits of news you get to hear there's a lot of absurd news as part of journalism but this even by those standards kind of stood out for a street spa because we know that Afghanistan's reserves were frozen by the United States along with its allies there was nearly 7 billion dollars that the US had control over first of all with nobody's concerned the Biden administration decided to split it into two and you know reserve one bit for legal proceedings related to the 9-11 attack in which the Taliban basically had no role to play but nonetheless 3.5 billion dollars of Afghanistan's money Afghanistan people's money was basically allocated for that and then for regarding the other 3.5 billion there have been talks going on for months regarding what to do about it and again might be one the important thing is that this is the Afghan people's money and finally the decision that has been taken is to transfer this to another entity which will then have which will then be magnanimous enough to approve transactions for various economic aspects may not necessarily be for aid per se so this is basically what has happened over the past two days I was reading a Washington Post reported this which had a very interesting line which said that the US and the Taliban have wrestled over the money for months now the fund is very interesting because it gives the impression that this is something two parties have a right on whereas that's really not the case and it's tragic that this is happening at this point of time because Afghanistan is going into its second winter under the Taliban and it looks like we talked about this last winter as well it's depressing coming back to some of these subjects so regularly we talked about this last winter about how bad the situation was and this winter nearly a year later nothing really seems to have changed because you know apparently for about 92 percent of households are struggling to meet their food needs as the article points out if you look for instance at the fact that the economic output of the country has shrunk by nearly 30 percent since last year August 2021 and despite all the concern expressed by various international players by various countries who talk about human rights who talk about say you know making sure we need to help the people etc etc only 40 percent of the money called by the UN that's 4.4 billion has actually received so far so this is the kind of situation in which people are there is widespread poverty there is widespread hunger we see Afghanistan has you know for the since 2000 since the US invaded they really didn't focus on building anything much but we are seeing an actual deterioration in conditions that is taking place because the fact that on the one hand the government has you know completely failed in so many ways but more importantly from an international perspective countries in the west especially have sort of taken this extremely hard line position and taken this position by which they basically denied the people of Afghanistan visit their resources so keeping all this in mind very very difficult time in the coming months as well for the people I think it's very important that the journalists keep writing about it but not just write about it in terms of a humanitarian disaster which it is but also link this humanitarian disaster to the policies of those who would deny the people of Afghanistan the money and whatever little help it can bring no one is saying that that money would solve all the problems or that money is the only reason for these problems but it is I think very irresponsible not to link these two well it's something to pay attention to 20 years ago the the countries that surrounded Afghanistan including China which took leadership on this assembled a meeting in Shanghai and in the summer of well 2001 they started establishing a dialogue about what to do with the Taliban rule and how to basically prevent Afghanistan from basically you know having a serious meltdown to put it very bluntly that grouping developed into the Shanghai cooperation organization the SCO which met is meeting yesterday and today in summer Khan Uzbekistan for their 22nd meeting it's very important meeting it's ahead of government meeting I want to make some points about the Shanghai cooperation organizations meeting the first point is that well this is about now 20 years of the SCO and over these 20 years from just being a handful of countries that were around Afghanistan you know including the Central Asian Republics China Russia came into the mix very soon and so on now it has grown India is a member Pakistan is a member and in this meeting Iran joined as a full-scale member of the SCO so in these 20 years the SCO really has grown to become a major a force in Eurasia drawing in more and more members in the region that's the first thing to think about when you think of the SCO secondly the entry of Iran is interesting and I think it bears some reflection now Iran is taking an interesting position regarding the energy crisis in Europe you know as a consequence of the European and US sanctions on Russia it is getting harder and harder for European countries to source natural gas and oil from Russia on the 24th of August the oil minister in Iran Jawad Oji made a statement in Tehran which actually surprised me Mr. Oji said that Iran is prepared to supply oil and gas to Europe to make up for whatever you know deficit there would be from Russia this is an interesting statement made by Mr. Oji essentially what he's telling the Europeans is if you can get the United States to come back to the table of the 2050 agreement well maybe we can sort something out but certainly the Iranians not with the full appetite to start a new negotiation around their nuclear energy policy they want the United States to return to the 2050 agreement as if Trump hadn't pulled the US unilaterally out of that international agreement but Mr. Oji said look we're quite prepared to supply Europe interestingly during the discussions at the SCO meeting in Samarkand it has become quite clear that China is willing to buy Iranian and Russian energy up to whatever point is available in fact you know China used to purchase a lot of its energy from Saudi Arabia that has been declining as China has increasingly been purchasing energy from Russia and Iran in other words the SCO is not merely about political issues and it's not merely about the status of Afghanistan subsequent to the US occupation of Afghanistan from 2001 till 2021 that 20 year period China has developed different kind of orientation in the region including the Belt and Road Initiative also announced in 2013 in Central Asia building infrastructure and so on so what you see in the SCO now is trade issues have come to the surface including energy infrastructure development Mr. Xi Jinping in Samarkand promised more funds towards building infrastructure in Central Asia huge statement because Central Asian governments have really been struggling you know they are fundamentally integrated to the Russian economy sanctions on Russia has had an enormous knock on effect on Central Asia I've done a story of two stories about the problems of food security in Central Asia as a consequence of the sanctions on Russia so the entry of Iran as a full pledge member in the SCO is a message by the Chinese saying they are actually not prepared to take seriously US sanctions on either Iran or Russia that they are happy to buy oil and natural gas from both the third point of importance here is at the Samarkand meeting it's the first in-person meeting between Vladimir Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China since February 4th that's before Russia entered Ukraine and at this meeting in the public statement made by Mr. Putin he said something curious he said that you know basically the Chinese don't agree with what we've been doing in Ukraine didn't say it so bluntly but effectively that's what he said and China has also indicated that you know they are not really happy with what's happening in Ukraine it's a very interesting development we'll follow it you know return to it next week final point I want to make about the SCO meeting is at the SCO meeting Xi Jinping said all our countries need to worry about color revolutions I know Zoe Prashant and I have had a serious discussion on how to report on some of these issues of color revolutions come back to that as well friends you've been listening to give the people what they want brought to from people's dispatch and globetrotter next week I'm going to be writing an article about the SCO so hopefully you'll have a more coherent assessment of it see you next time it's our 95th show only 5 more to go more selfies needed guys


Four ashore residents continue to benefit from a series of theoretical and practical training geared at improving the economic empowerment of parents enrolled in the community after school backyard kitchen garden program. The empowerment comes from months of agricultural training that saw participants learning crop cultivation techniques resulting in the eventual harvesting of fresh produce that their households will consume. The initiative comes as a result of a partnership with the Ministry of Equity, Social Justice and Empowerment, the St. Lucia Conservation Fund and the Caribbean Biodiversity Fund. Fidore Justin Alcindor is the Social Transformation Officer for Cassville Central and South. For some people, backyard gardening is just another hobby but for the participants of the Four Ashore After School Program Community Kitchen Garden Project it is a vehicle for cultivating community and soil. When I think of community empowerment I think of projects such as these that encourages food security, environmental conservation and unifies communities with the private and public sector. The kitchen garden project began with a comprehensive 3D training in agricultural best practices for the program's 30 parents. In addition to cultivating crops, the program also serves as a vital bridge in helping to unite the community. It is going to bring the community back together. A lot of people have the notion that once you have four Ashore it is not something very good. However, as a community, any time we have a project, we want to, we get together and we execute it together as one big family, as one happy family and at the end of the day, we are noted and seen as the community. With the theme cultivating community and soil, the project seeks to encourage deeper community values and a deeper appreciation for growing what we eat. Participants learned soil types, alternative methods of small scale gardening, compost making and the application process. They also got an opportunity to visit an established farm to gain a better understanding of how a farm operates. I'm hoping that it benefits me in the future to learn more about agriculture and understand the well-being of agriculture to actually manifest it in the community and develop ourselves more towards the agriculture because it's beneficial for the whole community as well and for our youth coming up in the community as well. The project included at least two farmers markets and will conclude with a graduation ceremony. The farmland for the community garden was donated by former agricultural minister, the late Ira Duvay, with monetary contributions to Tallinn EC $5,500, coming from Sandoz Grand, the St. Lucia A&C Port Authority and the St. Lucia National Lottery from the Ministry of Equity, Social Justice and Empowerment. Shivrai Marius.


And we hear the ID Tech Act show and hi, so who are you? Hi, I'm Karen from PussMate. PussMate stands for Printed Smart Devices and we are working in the field of Printed Electronics for quite some time. So you have a bunch of printed smart devices right here? Yes, exactly. So what is going on here? What we are doing is to print electronic features into paper-based products and make them more secure at a very easy way. So what is this, for example? That's, for example, a regular paper card. So it's a standard paper with our feature inside. It's printed, fully printed. It's special. It's not just paper. Something is inside, yeah? Yeah, there's a conductive feature inside. One conductive layer, a special pattern. And this pattern allows us to unlock any digital content with the help of the smartphone. But we are not using NFC and also not the camera. We are using the touchscreen of the smartphone. And by placing this card on the screen and swiping over it, it gives me access to digital content, so whatever the customer wants to have. So did it somehow trigger a secret pattern, a capacitive pattern to the screen? Yeah, something like this. So I'm using the capacity of my body to interact with this because the structure itself is completely passive without any battery. And it changes the input of my finger what I am doing and this is what our software can detect. But what is going on here? What happened there? So inside there's an electronic structure, but you do not see it. It's completely hidden on the inside of the pack. Is this something like this? It looks similar to this one. So what is this? Can you show? That's just a conductive pattern inside. So it could be printed with foil-printing like this or also with carbon-based inks, which we have some samples over here. So this is a pattern of conduction? Yes, exactly. And each one is unique? Not necessarily, it depends on the project. So it doesn't have to be unique. But for this kind of stuff do you want to be unique or not? At the moment we are not focusing on unique codes or unique identifiers for this kind of stuff because we sell it as a smart hologram. We say usually people cannot really see if a hologram is a real one but now with this kind of technology we help our customers to verify a product or a label or a hang tag by the help of their smartphones. So is it for secure login? For example. But how can you do secure login if every single card is the same? So it's not really a login to an account or something. It's really like saying that this is the authentic product. It's more about this. So when you have this then you get access to some content? For example. So this is just a basic technology and there are a lot of applications. So one is really to secure documents or to secure products to verify these kind of products. And of course there is also strong communication with the end consumer. So maybe I can show you a pharma pack. It has some other implications. So especially in Asia there are a lot of pharmaceuticals, fraud pharmaceuticals, counterfeited pharmaceuticals. What we do is to print an electrically conductive pattern into this pack and just by placing it on the screen and swiping along the edge it's verified as an original product. Nice. And if I have this I can also do some additional things. So if I swipe for example in the other direction it gives me more additional information. So for example I can add a reminder to my calendar or whatever as long as I have the patient online I can communicate many different other things. So you can make like these very many big quantities? Yes. So that's exactly where we focus on really on mass products. It's printed on standard printing machines. So it's just like an additional ink, the additional conductive ink where we can recommand which is suitable for the processes.  It can be printed on recycling paper and also the ink can be recycled completely. It's also compostable. And that's really a difference where we think if you print on mass products. On what material you print on? There are different possibilities but for example carbon based inks like we have here, the black ones. Yeah, can you show? So what is this material here? That's really carbon.  On paper? On paper, yeah. So these are test elements. And this is completely compostable. And it doesn't have any electronic waste. And what's going on here? Is it a similar demo? That's a similar demo. It's a different kind of interaction so we can have a look. So this is more that I'll take the pack, place it on the screen and swipe it over the screen. Like this. It's recognized. And now I can for example get an additional spot for ponds for promotion and marketing. That's cool. This could potentially be big for kids' games and stuff. Yes, that's also possible. You can put it in a magazine or something. Games, interactive features. So the user really interacts with the product. That's also something special. So it's really like high product intimacy. You could have it inside the playing cards? Yes. For like all these games people play, right? Yeah, yeah. You can imagine having interactive games on an iPad for example or tablet for kids, for educational stuff. So there's really a lot of application possibilities for this basic technology. And just before hearing this video, so you have some different demos here? Yes. This is the one you just showed? That's what I'm showing. Maybe you have seen the one with the drivers license. So what does that do? So that's a sticker which can be attached to any driver's license card. And where is it? You just see like a very thin layer. So maybe you can see it here. It looks like a design, right? It's a design and it's overlapped. It's a conductive polymer, so almost transparent. It's sticked on top of the driver's license and any driver of a company car has to prove that he's still having its driver's license at hand. And we just send a link to the driver and he can scan with the help of his smartphone his driver's license wherever he is. So he doesn't have to go to the car pool manager anymore to show its driver's license. This becomes an alternative to RFID and NFC? Yes. But at a much lower cost and really at a queener. It's a queener technology. We do not have any electronics. And just sticked on or just fully recycled? It can be sticked on. It could be labeled. It could be packed. It could be papered directly. So there are a lot of different possibilities. And this is a label, for example, yeah? It's a digital printing. You make them in this quantity like this? Yes, of course. We're not using this at a mass scale. So actually, this is a small one. Yeah, that's the box. This is how the boxes are printed, really on big machines, offset printing machines and a lot of sheets. So how many you print? It depends, of course. It depends, of course. But it's like a thousand sheets is nothing. So it's like that's just a matter of minutes, yeah? So how big is your company? You have been doing this for a while? We are a technology development company and focusing on the technology itself. We are 12 people in our office and mainly developers. So print engineers and software engineers who are working on the interaction of the printed features and the software detecting these features. And where are you based? We are based in Chemnitz, Germany. All right. So is this new? Yes, it's new. Since when? Since when is this? We started with our company in 2016 and that's also the invention is going back to this time.