next two weeks. it is typical for town hall. if you want to stay in touch, you can find out more at our web site. the best way is to become a member. membership starts at just $35. it provides a discount on books, tickets, and more. best of all, it gives you a feeling you are part of everything we do here, over 350 events a year. we are a member-supported organization. you can pick up a membership card in the lobby or sign up online. tonight's debate will be moderated by a seattle native john mckay, who grew up on capitol hill and attended seattle prep high school and the university of washington. he served as u.s. attorney under george w. bush from 2001 through 2007, when he resigned with eight other u.s. attorneys. following that, he joined the

faculty at the university school of law, where he continues to teach. i want to turn the proceedings over to him now. he will introduce our debaters and tell us exactly how the evening will proceed. please give us a warm town hall welcome. [applause] >> good evening, everyone. it is my privilege this evening to be here at seattle's town hall, here in the great hall, and to welcome you to what is now the fifth in a series of national debates on very important topics. tonight, we talk about the role of government. our title is government -- what is it good for? that may be a provocative line for our debaters. we are privileged to have with

us here tonight david callahan. he is an author. he is a commentator and lecturer. his books, in particular "the cheating culture and the moral center" are tremendous commentaries, worthy of your consideration. he is a graduate of hampshire college and holds a ph.d. in politics from princeton university. to my left is yaron brook of the ayn rand institute, a well-

known community advancing objectivism. he is a writer and commentator. we were talking beforehand. we are hoping our debate -- we are not using as a yardstick the presidential debates, just to put you all at these. what we hope for tonight is engagement on important ideas, important issues. we have two a tremendous protagonists. we are asking all of you to participate. we will have plenty of opportunity and time for questions for all of you for our tremendous debaters. i would like to jump into our discussion tonight. my role will be simply to move this along to various topics, but not to be afraid to linger on important topics, as our

debaters and chairman may determine them to be. if we read from the headlines today, the first issue could only be characterized as failure. i am referring of course to the joint committee looking at the question of the reduction of united states' debt to, and the failure of the joint committee, the analysis failure. that might be a good place to start on what the government is and should be. i'm giving you each an opportunity to open in the context of the question. i want to give each an opportunity to meet. -- to speak. david, we will turn to you first. you make five minutes of an opening statement.

>> it is great to be here tonight. this is my fourth appearance at town hall seattle. as always, i am thankful to the fantastic team that makes these events possible. a town hall is truly one of the best venues for public discussion in the country, and i have been to a lot of them. on one of my previous visits to town hall, i was the only person on the stage. while it is certainly fun to be a monopoly provider like that, i am also looking forward to tonight. the role of government is the central issue of our time and our politics. i am thrilled to be here to make the case for a public sector that is strong, that is effective, and that can advance the common good. let me sketched out the way i see things. for starters, the questions here tonight -- the real question is

not what should government be doing, as if government were some autonomous entity with its own agenda. the real question is what do we, the citizens, want to do through government this is a democracy after all. government is our common tool to get things done. government is us. it is a tool we use when we want to do things that we cannot do as individuals. that we cannot do through the free market. the cannot do through a civil society or charity. the best way to think about government is as a set of public structures that we have built to make society better for everyone. in a great many ways, the story of america's success and prosperity over the past century is a story of how we

together have built these public structures and expanded the role of government to improve our lives. i will talk about a bunch of those good things tonight, but let me flag major and overarching rules for government. first, we use government to protect ourselves. protection is a fundamental role of the state. it goes beyond protecting ourselves from street criminals, or from foreign terrorists. we have also turned to government to protect ourselves from other things, like contaminated food, pollution. americans no longer die in droves from food borne diseases, as they did before the creation of the fda in 1906. we no longer took on the air we breathe in our cities. we also use government to protect ourselves from

unscrupulous business practices. the government protect us or should protect us from being ripped off in financial fraud or exploited by you serious -- usurious lenders, attracted by false and advertising are harmed by dangerous products. government protect us in the workplace. seven years ago, 100,000 workers died every five years on the job, because employers did not care whether they died. that was at a time when there were only 4 million people in the labor force. today, 5000 workers die a year in a labor force which is much larger. fewer americans are dying on our highways since the federal government stepped in to regulate auto safety in 1966. the auto fatality rate has dropped by 400%.

seat belts and air bags, regulated and mandated by government, have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. they want government to play this protective role, but for decades, powerful interests have been working to destroy these protections, often to increase their own bottom line. this helps explain why investors lost trillions of dollars when wall street was allowed to turn into a casino, why so many americans have lost their homes to predatory lending, why so much air pollution persist, causing asthma and heart disease were a government watchdogs are sleeping or have been put to sleep. bad things happen. yet all this bad stuff apparently is not enough. there are politicians trying to strip away even more of these protections, trying to kill the

fda, the epa, and osha > a second major role for government -- again, a role we have chosen together as citizens -- is to help build a stronger economy and ensure prosperity for everyone. capitalism is a great system for creating wealth. but it can also be a phenomenally harsh and brutal system. it allows some people to live like kings and others to start on the street. it can be a very unstable system, prone to booms and busts. this is not the kind of society americans want. we believe in economic freedom. we want to use the market and business to build wealth, to realize our dreams. but we also believe in mutual obligation and taking care of each other.

as a society, ideally we try to manage capitalism through government to get the best of both worlds, to get the prosperity and the freedom, but also the fairness and the security. we have not been doing that very well lately. we have not been getting the best of both worlds in that way, because government has been too weak. the evidence is everywhere around us. to many americans live in poverty. to many americans are unemployed. t 00 many do not have health care and cannot afford college. all of this at a time when the top 1% have more wealth than the bottom 90% of americans put together. that is not ok. it is not the kind of country you want to live in. it is not the country the founders envisioned. we can do better, and government

offers us a way to do better together. i am going to come back to the super committee question. >> may i ask you about the context of your remarks? you have talked about the weakness of government. it seems in the joint select committee, an enormous amount of power seemed to float into that committee, but it has been a failure. when you say the government is weak, would we strengthen something that, when given power, seems to fail? "super committee was a failure because the republican party has been taken over by anti- government ideologue's, who will not raise taxes under any circumstances despite the fact that taxes are at their lowest level in 60 years as a percentage of gdp, and we are facing the retirement of the boomers. that is what the super committee failed. it is not the problems of government structurally. it is about the republican party

has lost its line. -- lost its mind. [applause] >> let me turn to mr. bork in the context of your opening statement, to address the failure. we want to give you an opportunity to open as well. >> i would be happy to. this is my first appearance at the town hall. thank you for inviting me. hopefully, it will not be my last. you will have to let me know afterwards. i feel like david is more at home and i am, but i would like to be an home. >> you are very welcome here. >> i would also like to thank demos, and our moderator for being willing to moderate this discussion. i want to take a step back a little bit. i think we will get into all the different concrete issues that david has brought up. i am eager to comment on all of them, but probably will not get

a chance to comment on even half of them. i would like to take a step back to ask the more fundamental question. why do we need government? what is it for? is there something unique about this country and the experiment that is america? because i believe there is. i believe in the 18th-century, the thinkers of the time, and the founding fathers in particular, faced a crucial turning point in american history. they had to decide who each one of our lives belongs to. is your life the property of a king? is your life the property of a tribe? the property of a group? the collective? in democracy? is your life the property of

someone else? because that is the way human beings have been living forever. before 1776, you as an individual did not count. you did not. you are responsible to some other entity above and beyond you as an individual. but the enlightenment did, and what the founding fathers established, is the first country in human history where there was not true. the country was established with the idea that your life belongs to you, not to the king, not to your neighbor, not to any group. it does not matter. your life is not owned by the tribe. it is yours. it is yours to live as you please. the founding fathers -- this country was established on a

moral principle of individualism. on the idea that we are autonomous entities that have a moral right to our own life, a moral right to our own ideas, a moral right to pursue our own happiness, and infringed by majorities, by codes, by anybody. how do we live a life like that? hundley fulfill that individualism? how do we live in a society where everybody is pursuing their own interest in a harmonious way? the founders, following john locke, had a concept called individual rights. the idea was if you live your life the way you wanted to live it, pursuing your own values, your own happiness, that was ok, as long as you did not use force against neighbor, as long

as you did not impede your neighbors' ability to do the same. we all have this right to pursue our dreams, our happiness, our values. but we need an entity to prevent us from using force against one another. we know throughout human history, unfortunately, we are a pretty bloody race. people use force all the time. that is what this particular government was instituted to do -- to protect us from a neighbor who might decide to steal our stuff, to defraud us, to take stuff away from us. that is the role of government -- to protect our right to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. that implies a very small government. that requires a government that just does these things --

military, judiciary -- and leaves us alone otherwise, leaves us alone to live our lives. once a government starts doing all the things david would like them to do, they have to start infringing on my rights. a really goode is cause out there. people need more health care. people are not getting the bill -- the best health care that could otherwise get. there are only two options ultimately to get me to help them. one is to ask. that is the system i like, a voluntary system where my rights are respected, where i get to make the choice of who to help and who not to help, under what conditions to help them, under what conditions not to help them. the only other choice is to

force me to do it. and that is a violation of my rights. that is a violation of my right to life. that is taking property away from me and using it in a way i do not want to use it, or that i have not chosen to use it. and that is fundamentally wrong. it is wrong when we do it to each other. but call it stealing. it is equally wrong when we get a group of people in the room and vote 51% to take my money away. it is still stealing. it is still wrong. it is still a violation of my rights. it is still the government the founding fathers warned us against, a government that tries to tell people how to live, what to do with their money, could to help and who not. my approach to this issue is very simple. government should do one thing only and do it really well. it should be as big as a means to be to do this one thing, and

that is to protect individual rights. everything else, all the wonderful things david might have for society, should be achieved or not by a voluntary association, individuals pursuing their own life and their own happiness. in terms of the super committee -- >> a failure, perhaps. >> in my view, the failure is not the failure of the super committee. it is the failure of 100 years of a mixed economy that has brought us to the brink of bankruptcy, administration after administration spending money on things the government should never have spent money on to begin with. the failure is spending money we do not have. the notion government should be able to borrow all the time, as much as they want, which leads to greece.

it leads to chaos. it leads to the violation of each one of our rights to live our life in the best way that we choose to live our life. the system we have today is the system of autocrats dictating how and what and where we should live. and yes, in some very narrow field, you could aggregate the numbers and say somebody is better off. but what if i am not better off? i do not accept the right of the government to dictate that. the super committee is a technicality. they failed. it is funny to blame it on republicans when the problem really -- >> would you blame both parties? >> republicans are awful. republicans got us to this point, right? the bush administration was one of the great disasters of a

20th-century. >> could we answer democrats into the response as well? the you have the same antipathy to the democrats? >> i have a great antipathy toward the democrats. >> i did not want to leave them out. >> certainly would not want to do that. >> my view is that the problem in washington is spending and too much regulation. if the only solution is to cut, cut, cut and reduce the size and the scope, it significantly the scope, of government. -- you cannot do that by raising taxes. there is stuff you can do with taxes. we can talk about that. >> we will come back. death and taxes will come to all of us. but i would like to turn to davis -- david. we have heard a very narrow view of government, and a dramatic clash between our speakers, which is exactly what we hoped

for. yaron mentioned the philosophy of government, the philosophy of our founding fathers, "and john locke, who famously said our rights are life, liberty, and property, followed by thomas jefferson, who replaced the word property with, one might argue, "the pursuit of happiness." i am wondering if you have a comment on the basic view toward government in our society. is it a property right? is there a narrow view of government? is that the government came to be as we know it in the united states? >> i think government should be what americans want it to be through our democracy and the social contract. i think americans strongly support, for the most part, the government we have -- strong support for social security and medicare. strong support for a role in environmental protection.

strong support for the fda and its role in protecting us against bad food and drugs. strong support for food stamps, unemployment, and other key elements of the social safety net. strong support for investing in infrastructure. strong support for having government paperwork role in investing in science and ensuring we keep up in global competition. we have the government americans want. this is not some kind of autocrat dictating to us how your money should be used. we, as a democratic society, have made these choices. >> yaron says there is one aim of government. you said there were too. he said the governor should be there to protect us. there might be common ground in your first element and his. i am unclear as to your second point. you said that it was to address

the question of capitalism. i took it to mean the government should manage capitalism. am i wrong? >> absolutely. >> what is the disagreement in terms of the protection element between you and yaron? >> i believe in a more expansive role, as do most americans, for government protecting us from a bunch of things. not just from street criminals. not just from hard terrorists. frankly, whether or not i lose money because my house is burglarized or lose money because my financial investor rips me off because the securities and exchange commission has been downsized does not matter to me. i have still lost the money. whether i die because i am murdered or whether i die in a workplace accident because my employer is cutting corners does not matter. i want protection, as do most

americans, from a range of dangers that exist in modern society. >> to americans need to be protected in that way? >> no. this is the difference. i view force as unique, something very different. it is something people inflict on one another. it is the one enemy of human life. in my view, to be successful in life, to prosper as human beings, what we need is to be free to use our minds, to think, to reason, to solve problems, to engage with reality, choose between a variety of options, make decisions. we need to be free. when you have a gun stuck to the back of your neck, you are not thinking. you are doing what the guy says. the one thing that obstruct our ability to thierefore to be successful, is force. in my view, force is unique.

it is not like cancer. it is not like a virus. it is not like voluntarily taking on a risk that maybe somebody else would not. i believe people should be able to take their own risks. force is unique, and i want to banish it. the only thing i want from the government is to ban it. the example david dave is a little fuzzy. we both believe the government has a role to play in catching fraud. if there should be an s.e.c., it has only one job. that is to catch bernie madoff. the reason it cannot do that job is because it is monitoring every transaction i make. i have to file loads of paperwork. i am an honest guy. i am not cheating. i am no court in advance. they are just waiting to catch me. they are so flooded with a

million forms that they do not have time to catch the real crux. we both agree the crux of -- i think. >> what about catching the ceo of world,, who committed fraud. >> that is the job of the police, however you want to call it. catching crooks, catching people who defraud other people, is clearly the role of government. the role of government is not to look over my shoulder to tell me what kind of transaction i can and cannot engage in, how many shares i can or cannot buy, who can sit on a board and who cannot, and who can invest in stuff. when it is force, and i include fraud under force, the government has a legitimate role to play. but there is a fundamental difference between harm that occurs to us -- for example, safety. the notion is that safety came

from government. all the statistics show that safety improves in an industry dramatically. the government puts in regulations. that reduces the rate of improvement. safety makes sense from a proper perspective. i know it is a shock to people who have never been in business. it is not a profitable activity to kill your employees. it is not. [applause] >> before you proceed, the statement has been made by david, and i want to give you the opportunity to expand your comment. you talk about our financial system. he has suggested that capitalism needs to be managed. would you care to comment on that statement? we will give david an opportunity to expand as well. that is a different concept than protection.

would you like to address that? >> obviously i am against it. i think government should only do one thing. it should not be doing this. >> you do not see capitalism as a threat to individuals in any way? >> i see it as a contract. i believe it is a protection that causes the harm, not capitalism. i know a little bit about the financial crisis. i can address that. why did we have a financial crisis? this banking system is the most regulated business in the united states. capitalism and the mortgage business -- where? it was completely subsidized, completely controlled. how many of you own your own home up right? thank you. all of you guys are subsidizing my mortgage. the government is everywhere in these industries. it is no accident that three of the most regulated industries in

the united states led to a major collapse. the regulations caused the collapse. it is the regulations, the attempt to control a voluntary, healthy win-win interaction between participants and the marketplace which causes those transactions to become lose- lose, which causes the risk behavior you saw during the financial crisis. that is what causes the problem. that is not the solution to a problem. we never blame the regulators. we never been in the regulations. the last 100 years, we have always blamed the so-called free market, even when there is no sign of a free market in the banking space. anyone can see it. >> on this concept of managing capitalism, if one turns to the demos website, there is a

statement supporting the occupy wall street movement. can you tie that together in terms of managing capitalism? >> fundamentally, the occupy wall street movement is about taking on the excessive economic inequality that has grown up in this society. and it has grown up because starting a couple of decades ago we decided to take in more hands-off approach to the economy. we did not intervene as structural trends started to siphon more wealth and upward. globalization. technological change. not only did we not intervene to defend the middle class in the face of those trends, but we made situations worse in washington by lowering taxes on the rich, by making it easier for the people on wall street and the ceo's to make these huge fortunes by lifting compensation got out of control. this is, i think, what occupy

wall street is fundamentally protesting against. unless we manage capitalism, it does have a tendency to concentrate wealth at the very top of our society. that i think is fundamentally incompatible with american values. this is an egalitarian society apart. we need to intervene through our collective tool of government to preserve that egalitarian spirit in the face of an economic system that has total disregard for it. >> if one were to look at some of the photographs of the tea party movement, you will occasionally see a sign that would relate to the ayn rand institute. what does objectivism have to do with the tea party movement, if any? would you like to comment on the occupied -- occupy movement? >> i have a lot of sympathy for the tea party movement. i think it is very confused.

it is, to some extent, impotent. it does not have a real agenda. it knows what it does not want, and i am with them. they do not want big government. how they get there, they have no clue or plan. that is unfortunate. it is a huge missed opportunity. the fact that americans stood up and said enough is enough, to me is a wonderful thing. many of those people took inspiration from "atlas shrugged." occupy wall street is a very different movement. it is not about shrinking government. it is about expanding government. it is supposedly against cronyism. they are not against cronyism. that are against cronyism they do not like, wall street cronyism. i did not see signs that objected to the auto bailout.

that are not against subsidized solar energy. they are for their types of subsidies and corporate engagement with government. i would like to see government completely disengaged. i would like to see government stop subsidizing all business. if i had any position of power, the first thing i would do would be eliminate all tax subsidies to business. get the government out of business school. get them out. lower corporate tax rates dramatically and slowly phase out all the regulations. absolutely, government should not be involved in any of that stuff. i sense about occupy wall street is that they are very much -- in

terms of inequality, this issue of wealth inequality. now, i do not have a position on wealth inequality. i do not know what is right -- and i do not think david knows. i do not know what is the right inequality of wealth. i do know that inequality is a good thing. i do not think we should all be equal. tall people would have to have their legs cut off. >> let's give david a chance to comment on that. >> on the question of what is the right amount of inequality, there is no absolute answer to that. i think it would be a good thing if we lived in a society where all boats rose together, which was the case for most of the early post-war decades.

the rich got richer, made a lot of money, but the middle class rose, the working-class rose. starting in the 1970's, we entered a different kind of economy in which only the costs -- gots really went up. the income of the top 100% have grown by almost 300% since 1979 while the incomes of middle- class and working-class have barely moved at all. that is not the kind of society we want to live in and that is the kind of situation we get when we have an unregulated form of capitalism, when we take a hands-off approach. i think we need to do something about that if we're going to retain our egalitarian democracy. remember, inequality of income and wealth always translates into inequality of political power.

people with money and wealth can easily translate those resources into a bigger say in our democracy, and that is not compatible with the values of this country. [applause] >> so, i said i do not know what the right mix is, but i know how to get there. how to get there is freedom, is leaving people alone, is getting the government out of picking winners and losers and getting the government out of leaving some to falter while helping others. let people be rewarded based on what they produce, not based on what some bureaucrat thinks they deserve. >> let me put the question directly to david. is government pose a role to redistribute wealth? >> absolutely -- government's role to redistribute wealth? >> absolutely, yes. we do it through social security and medicare, which enjoys wide

public support. we do it through education. redistribution is a fundamental role of government. the last time we had a situation like yaron describes is 100 years ago before the income tax, before the regulations of government. what did that society look like? it was in effect an oligarchy. that is what we will get again if we try to go back in that direction. >> this is completely rewriting history. >> robber barons? >> from 1800-1850, average incomes in united states doubled. gdp per capita grew from the civil war to 1913 at the highest rates of human history. at the same time, the united states was absorbing millions

and millions of the poorest of the poor from all over the world. freedom works. was there disparity of wealth? absolutely. i am not against that. i think that is wonderful. if some people are making huge amounts of money, that means that we value the services we're providing. how do you make money in a free market? not today, were some people make it by getting subsidies from the government. you make it the way microsoft made money, by selling a product that people value. and you benefit from the service that product provided your life. good for bill gates. he worked to the max. he lived his life to the fullest. and at the same time, at the same time, he made all of our lives better and that has made him a lot of money. [applause] >> let me ask you, --

>> microsoft employees here in seattle. >> let me ask you, should the government role be to promote disparity in wealth? >> know, the government is neutral. this is the radical position i take. let me just address one thing. he is right. america notes -- america wants what it once. this is not a debate about popularity. nobody likes i'm advocating for, but i am right. and believe in the separation of government from economics. i do not believe the government's should be involved in distributing wealth, managing capitalism. if you want to be a socialist, you can, as long as you can convince other people to go and

live with you and a commune. if you want to bail at detroit, get a bunch of people together, pull your money and go bailout detroit. >> is it important to have significant wealth disparity as a product of society? >> if it is a product of freedom, then yes. i am a strong believer that equality is an evil gold. the regime that came closest to achieving equality was in cambodia. they killed 40% of their population in the killing fields. who among you is equal? i do not believe in equality. i think it is an evil idea, an awful idea. when the founders talked about equality, they talk about equality for the law. in those days, if you were an

aristocrat and you were accused of murder, the aristocrat on a much lighter sentence. what the founding fathers objected to was that kind of inequality. the government should treat everybody the same. the marketplace is going to treat us all different because we bring different things to the marketplace. that is what makes it fun. >> i think we have our clash in terms of what the role of government might be, at least in terms of outcomes relative to wealth. let me turn to a point on which i think i perceive some agreement between our debaters, and that may be the role of the government in regards to national security. if you wish to throw in law enforcement, i would invite you to do that as well. this is it the that the one thing government should do is keep us safe. does that mean that you favor significant, even massive increases in our military

budgets? >> i think we would both agree that government has a major role to play a national security. we may even agree on the size of resources needed for that. >> should we increase it? >> at this point, clearly we need to reduce our military obligations. in fact, that is already going to happen under the budgetary deals reached by congress in august and also through the trigger agreement. we're looking at defense cuts of about $1 trillion over the next decade. i think that makes sense. we've been fighting two wars abroad. we need to turn to domestic challenges and we need to really focus on the economic challenges that we face to compete with the likes of china, brazil, india. it is a jeer-economic game, and we need to be more effective -- geo-economic game, and we need

to be more effective at that game. >> i certainly think it can be cut. i believe the military should serve one purpose and one purpose only. there is the theme here, right? that is to protect the lives and property of america. i do not believe we should be building democracies. i do not believe we should be helping the south koreans defend themselves when they do not want as helping them defend themselves. i believe the role of the u.s. military is to defend america. somebody attacks us, we should go find them, crush them, and come home. i do not think we need to build anything that breaks or rebuild anything that breaks. i believe in the military that is lean and mean in the sense that it does what is necessary, whatever is necessary, to protect the life and property of american citizens. >> we want to move soon to the point in which we involve all of you and the questions for our speakers, our debaters this

evening. i want to turn his back before we do that to the question of why we have government in the first place. i think is a fascinating question. each of you have touched on it. how are we supposed to evaluate the effectiveness of our government? whatever its size may be? and if i may be permitted an editorial comment, i think it is fair to say that if you ask americans today what is their view of the success, not what it should look like, but the success of government, you have a very poor response. people see dissension, dissension in politics, a lack of commitment at least even in the words to the pursuit of the common good but rather the acquisition of power. it seems to be a great infirmity in government today, at least that is how i think much of the public use it. what is the metric, from your different points of view, on how

government can be successful? you mentioned the gross product of our country. what is the output of our country? i think you could go to other parts of the world and they might choose a different kind of determinant for whether or not government is successful. is government successful when it promotes happiness? if that is true, how is it defined? good, a financial success? is it the degree to which people can engage in leisure time? what is the metric of government success? >> i think that is a good and tough question. i think for too long we have been measuring the success of our society through narrow economic indicators. gdp is the dominant indicator we are always using to look at how things are going. taking the need to move beyond that to create indicators which capture how people's qualities

of life are, and that involves a number of different things. involves how much time they have for leisure, the strength of communities, the cleanliness of the environment. demos has a project right now called beyond gdp in which we are looking at these kinds of alternative indicators. bhutan famously has the gross national happiness. i think that is going in the right direction. one thing government can do is the instigator of some of those new indicators and create the kind of data necessary to major our progress. in terms of how you measure the met tricks -- necessary to measure our progress. in terms of how you measure the metrics themselves, that is difficult to do. many americans in the abstract art disenchanted with government, but when you ask them about the particular things government does, they like it.

they like social security. they think government has been very successful in ensuring retirement for older people, injuring the seniors have access to medical care. the allied governments -- ensuring that the seniors have access to medical care. they like the government's role in keeping the miming clean. today, under 10% of seniors live in poverty. that is a remarkable success for the war on poverty that has so often been derided. >> is there a metric for happiness? we have gross domestic product, we have a gross national happiness scale being proposed by others around the world. i fear that your answer may involve something more like well, the less the government does, the happier we are, but i want to invite you to offer a

metric for government, even in a very limited view, what would be in metric for evaluating government? >> my approach is completely different. this is not about what makes most of us happy or some measure of happiness. i certainly want to distance myself from the idea that the measure of successful government is high gdp. i just think that a successful government has that, but my view of the metric is individual freedom. if the job of government is the protection of individual rights, then the measure by which we measure if the government is succeeding or not is, is it protecting individual rights, or is it the biggest violator of individual rights? government violates our rights today. it infringes on our freedom, so

the metric i would use is, to what extent are you free to plan not your life, to make the choices you need to do the things you want to do in your life? i think on that matrix we are failing. we have been declining dramatically for the last 100 years. i believe government should not be engaged in, for example, the decision of whether i should be allowed to take viox or not. there is risk involved, but i should be able to decide. it is a decision i should be able to make with my doctor or my pharmacist. every time the government makes

a decision like that for us, we have less freedom, less ability to pursue happiness. and yes, i believe individuals are less happy as a consequence, although i do not think you can measure happiness, certainly not collective happiness. >> do you have a comparative analysis from your viewpoint? is there another government somewhere that you think we should be emulating? are you referring to the united states government or all governments? >> no government has ever been like the government i would like. no government has ever practice the kind of government i think the founding fathers imagined. even they did not practice it. but to the extent that governments have advocated for freedom, people have been

successful, gdp has grown, happiness has grown, freedom has ground. i am a huge lover of 19th century america. i know that david has a different perspective of pre- world war i america. i think that was the golden age of this country in which individuals were actually as free as we have been in america. if you compare china to hong kong. if you compare america to hong kong, we are sinking in economic index like a rock. i think there are better governments and worse governments, and i think the u.s. government, which started out as the best government in the world -- i am an immigrant. i came here because i believe this is the best government in the world. i think it has eroded over the last 100 years and is moving away from that freedom. even by simple indexes of

freedom, dropping dramatically. >> the me turn to david to give us a comparative analysis. dark pictureron's of the last century rather puzzling. the last i checked, the last entry was pretty good. this was the time we created the first mass middle class in the history of the world. the 20th-century was a time when we became the freest, most dynamic society in history of the world. it was a phenomenal century when america became the richest country in the history of the also, and that' period coincided with the rise of a powerful government that was committed to making america number one in a lot of different areas, a government that was committed to building a modern middle-class through the gi bill, the interstate highway system that opened up the

suburbs, public universities that made higher education affordable, scientific investments that put us on the cutting edge of industry and technology. the government played a central role in creating the golden age. the golden age was not the 19th century when children were working in factories, people did not have the right to organize and robber barons ran america. the golden age was the 20th century, absolutely. and in terms of the international comparison, i think one of the best examples in the world right now is denmark, a country known for its economic freedom, a country that is a great place to do business, but also a country with a great social safety net and a lot of investment in human capital through its education system. we are in a major competition right now with other countries that have very strong

governments that are trying to chart their role in this 21st century. >> let me take this opportunity to invite the participants who are here with us in the great hall of seattle's town hall to join us at the microphone here to my left, to your right. we will have someone here to sort of moderate activity for us, but i ask you to begin thinking of your questions and to come forward. while we're doing that, i just want to make a comment about this last bit. maybe i am standing in the middle for a reason. i would say that from my standpoint i continue to believe that i live in the greatest country of the world, whether we look at it from our economic success an opportunity to the role that we play in terms of safeguarding the world's security. not to say that we're perfect.

i think americans, better than anybody else, expose the weaknesses for all to see, and that is a powerful thing. since there seems to be some agreement that this government may not be good for certain things and that our metrics may be skewed, let me just give a few. this is from "newsweek" magazine, who attempted to pull together some of the of the happiness indices from around the world, health, education, politics. in the quality of life index, the united states this 31st. in recent rankings of the world's most livable cities, economists ranks the american entry at 29. the quality of living survey, number 31. perhaps we have another form of agreement here. >> which countries are at the

top of those lists? >> i could not say. i believe a number of them are scandinavian. others believe that china, as the emerging power of the world, will head the list. >> i propose that we take the top of that list, scandinavian countries and others, and open the borders in both directions and see where people move. i'm willing to bet that the movement will be to this country. that is were smart entrepreneurs want to be. we would have to have a very different political environment to engage in experiments like that. >> we do want to involve our guests here at town hall, so we will take some questions now for our speakers. >> a question for yaron brook, i

wonder where is the morality of allowing unhindered accumulation of wealth. in a country where you have people working three jobs and having no health insurance, i wonder where the morality is coming in. also, a country that prides itself and christian values, christianity does not espouse that you have such a wealth disparities. >> let me just make it clear in case i have been understood. i'm a radical. i do not believe in christian morality. i think it is a corrupt morality. i think it is bad. i do not believe you are your brother's keeper. i do not believe you belong to anybody else. i believe in the morality of rational long-term self- interest. i think your own responsibility is to your own happiness, rationally pursue the of the long term. i do not believe and sacrifice.

i do not believe your job is to take care of other people. i believe one of our jobs is to take care of ourselves, make our lives flourish. i want to ask the opposite question. what is the morality that says that i cannot accumulate beyond a certain amount of wealth? what if i am selling products that you guys love so much that you keep buying, and you buy more and more, and i make a profit? why do we live in a country where making wealth, creating value for people, trading what people value for value, is somehow despicable morality? giving it away after you have made it is good. if you want to make bill gates a sane, do you know what he would do? he would give it all away and given to attend. then we would declare him a saint. -- he would give it all away and

moved into a tent. then we would declare him a saint. rex thank you for the question. >> i do not think that wealth is created by individuals acting alone in some heroic fashion. i think well this created by individuals working within a society where there are the foundations for wealth creation, the roads, the schools, the infrastructure, the legal system, and that society decides together how that wealth is used. individuals do not get to decide completely on their own. and actually, this is not a view that i created out of the blue. this is a view that andrew carnegie famously espoused in

his essay "gospel of wealth," in which he argued for an estate tax on the grounds that because society created wealth collectively, created opportunities for people like carnegie, we needed to capture some of that wealth and recycle it so that opportunities were created for others. that is what redistributive tax policy is all about, creating opportunities for all. as to some of the other points, he keeps saying that look, government should not have to solve the problem because people will step forward to solve it through charity. we know historically that that is not the case. 75% of seniors lived in poverty in 1975. in his world view, we get rid of government and we expect charity to solve it, and then we also

espouse the philosophy of radical self interest which takes away anybody's sense of obligation for anybody else. that is a formula for a brutal, brutal society. [applause] >> next question, please. >> i would like to bring the discussion down to two very concrete issues that seem to me some of the greatest threats we're facing today. yaron.estion for he how is your understanding of the role of government deal with what economists callnegative externalities', which is simply pollution, the danger of global climate change in the world? and for david, it is a question about democrats who seem to join so eagerly in waging war for the

purpose of gathering resources in the world because we realize we're running out of everything. and finally, if i could ask mr. mckay, to include you so you will not be left out -- >> you are very kind. >> one of the issues i have understood the courts are doing, related to the role of government, is ruling that if we go to war, that is a political issue, and make no judgment about whether the war is legal or illegal despite the fact that justiceeme court jackson said that initiating a war of suppression is a crime. that should last the three of you for under an hour.

[laughter] >> thank you for the questions. i think our speakers are who people came to see tonight, but i think that the courts have had a very important role in determining accountability for international activities, especially for war crimes. you yourself mention nuremberg, but also the war crimes tribunals for yugoslavia and rwanda, for abuses in what we consider to be the rules and laws of war. >> media did not make myself clear, against a -- maybe i did not make myself clear -- against ourselves. i am speaking of the invasion of iraq. >> on the question of guantanamo bay, the executive branch displayed a wide view of the power of the executive to hold individuals outside the united states in what could be seen as

a constitution-free zone. the supreme court stepped in and said not so fast. individuals there have the right to petition for habeas corpus. it is a pretty dramatic conflict between the role of the executive in war making any application of constitutional rights. the court spoke loudly about what could go one at guantanamo bay and very much restricted the role of the united states there. i think we will continue to see the supreme court taking an active role in the national security -- the executive branch. that is my answer to my question. thank you for involving me. he made me feel more useful here, because i think the better questions are coming from you than from me. let me turn to david first to answer the question he posed to

you. >> very quickly, it is crazy to be fighting wars and expending resources 12,000 miles away. we need a policy for developing renewable energy here at home, and in my mind, this is a great place for government to take the leading role. this is a strategic area, and i think the best thing government can do is to set a price on carbon. push up the price on carbon and the market will solve the rest of the problem. if we do not do that now, quite apart from the challenge of climate change, we're going to continue to be dependent upon oil from some of the most dangerous places on earth. >> they are related, i guess, because they all deal with oil. i do not want to get into the question of our policy on war, because that will take this in a completely different direction. the idea that renewable energy

is around the corner is ridiculous. it is vanishing. it does not exist. 95% of all the energy in the world is from carbon sources. except that. it is going to be like that for a very long time. if there was really an alternative, do you think a venture capitalist in silicon valley would not be investing like crazy in it? all government is doing is throwing money at this problem. it will be one of the biggest boondoggles in american history. the idea that windmills and solar panels are going to solve the problems in seattle in terms of producing enough energy for us to consume the way we are today, forget it. the only way to do this -- david is right. to have a carbon tax and lower the standard of living dramatically. that is what happens when government intervenes. the standard of living goes down. to the issue of externalities', first, i have to point out that

people lois talk about negative externalities', but i want to talk about positive externalities', which are far more dominant. i keep bringing a bill gates. bill gates is a huge positive externality to every one of your lives if you live in this community. the number of jobs, facilities, the wealth created because he chose to locate microsoft here and build his business. and yes, he did not do it alone. he paid people to work with him. he paid his suppliers. he paid for the private infrastructure. there are no free lunches. i completely agree. the whole society is involved, but that is what the price system does. it rewards people for the degree of their involvement. employees who became early and contributed more get more because of that.

you cannot dump your garbage in my backyard. we know that. we have established that for a very long time. let's get innovative. let's create private property everywhere, including on water. including creative ways over the air. let's figure out how to protect our private property, each one of us. just like we protect our backyard from our neighbor polluting it with his garbage. there are creative, private, leo ways in which we can protect ourselves from harm delivered -- legal ways in which we can protect ourselves from harm delivered through the water and the air. we do not need massive government regulatory systems to achieve that, and indeed, i think it is slowing down the process. i think human beings would live in a cleaner environment if we got rid of the epa. it slows down progress.

the human environment today is the cleanest environment it has ever been in human history. it is cleaner and than london in the 19th century when there was menu are everywhere. industry -- a maneuver -- manure everywhere. >> government is the government of people. what is the proper government would depend on what your view of people is. what kind of creatures, what kind of circumstance, how do people live, what are their capabilities, whether they're competencies', how should they live, and i wonder if both speakers could address,

fundamentally, how do you view people? >> i think people are moral animals who believe in and cooperation because it is in their self interest. i believe human beings have a high degree of empathy for other human beings and that there are evolutionary reasons for that. when you cooperate, when you make sacrifices of your own self in order to strengthen your community, you get long-term rewards. i think that the government we have, in which people are making sacrifices, letting some of their wealth be redistributed to help others, is a reflection of that basic empathy and desire to advance the public good. >> a believe that the fundamental here is that people are rational. the need to use their minds. the need to use reason in order

to improve their lives in order to achieve happiness. all of the values around us are products of the human mind. the human mind thrives. it is possible to think, the reason -- to reason and be rational when the mind is free. be rational. be reasonable. create stuff. pursue values. when the government tries to tell us how and what we should do, who we should help, this or that, it is restricting our ability to think about what truly is in our rational self interest. it is restricting our ability to reason. i'm all for corporations. i am again sacrifice. i'm against forced corporations. i'm against slave camps of any kind.

free people voluntarily cooperate with one another in a rational way. >> i have a question for each of you. david, it seems that your view is that it is better to be a slave than to be poor. i want to see how you feel about my statement and hear your argument. then, for yaron, my question for you is, when government fails to do what we want through the democratic process, is there a point when it is proper to have a revolution, to initiate force, and if so, what the society look like at that point? >> david? >> i think that yaron said he

believed in voluntary cooperation among free people. that is what we have in the united states. not as much as we would like because there is too much wealth and power in hands of a tiny elite who are using that to have a large voice in society, but together, we are making decisions that have actually made us a lot richer. we have become a much wealthier society of the last seven years in part because of a proactive role -- 70 years in part because of the pro-active role of government to enable us to build more wealth, invest in human capital and invest in our physical capital. >> must be choose between freedom and slavery? >> i do not think that slavery is on the table here. nobody is talking about slavery. the closest thing we have come to slavery in this country is when we had slavery, and it was

slavery that was an institution run by the free market, unchecked by government. [boos] >> so, we have raised the question of freedom, the question of slavery. now the question of revolution. >> let me talk about slavery. clearly, slavery is wrong and it is the government's job to make sure it does not happen. i agree about the civil war. i think we should have gone to war because rights were being violated. that is the role of government to stop the violation of rights. >> if it is the position that the government has failed in such a massive way, what we do?

do we have a revolution? >> the founding fathers revolted against their government for a lot less than what we have to suffer under our government, a lot of it. i mean, in seattle, the tax your coffee. everything is taxed. it is a different context and a different world. i am not an advocate for armed revolution. for many reasons. among others, we would lose. [applause] [laughter] government needs the sanction of the people in order to govern. that is why we have the government have. the people, the overwhelming majority of people, believe, in one form or another, slightly to the left, slightly to the right, with this.

if you believe in something different, what we need to do is convince them that they're wrong. convince them that their ideas are wrong. this is an intellectual, philosophical, ideological battle. it is the battle of the mines. it is the battle of reason. it is not a battle of arms. and we're not going to win the battle unless we engage in it at this level and try to convince enough people that the way we're heading is the wrong way. >> i think you have covered the ground. let's go to the next question. >> thank you for spending your evening with us. it is my understanding from what you are saying that people inherently tend towards violence and that humans are also inherently selfish. you talk about acting in your

own self interest in the basis of morality. i wonder if he could talk about the role of correction in your ideal government. how do you catch the bernie madoffs if you do not have regulations and checks, and how the use of the rampant corruption -- how do you solve the rampant corruption we see in our government now? >> how big and robust must government be in order to catch all of the bernie madoffs better out there? >> unfortunately, we do not catch them all because we're too busy with other stuff. first of all, let me correct you. i do not think people are inherently selfish. i think to be selfish requires hard work. my conception of selfish is the pursuit of your best interest,

rationally, over your lifetime. what is best for me? how should i live my life so that i should live a flourishing life? aristotle talked about this. that to me is hard work. that is not a common view of selfishness, doing whatever you like or in a momentary sense, lying, cheating, dealing -- stealing. how do we catch bernie madoff? there are lots of ways. in the case of bernie madoff, it was actually pretty easy. some of the people who wanted to invest with bernie madoff looked at his books and said, this is a problem. and i'm going to call the cops. and they did. a hedge fund manager wrote a nice memo to the sec. he sent it twice. it was about six years before

they finally caught him, elaborating on this being a fraud. i think it is not hard. when all you're trying to do is catch crooks, it is not hard to catch them. let me argue something radical. there are a lot less croaks under capitalism than with regulations. regulations create all these loopholes. we lebanon in burma were businessmen are taught do what ever you can get away -- we live in an environment where business men are taught to do whatever they can gget away with. i do not think we need a huge government -- i think, you know, certainly, the justice department could be quite a bit smaller. you need enough to get the bad

guys. >> our other speaker tonight is the author of a book called "the cheating culture and the moral center." you might be able to address this. >> i said in my opening remarks that capitalism is a great system in many ways. it is fantastic at producing wells. it is dynamic. it rewards hard work and creativity, but it also has some down sides. i talked about inequality being one of the down sides, but another of the downside is that capital-letter some, when it is not properly regulated -- down sides is that capitalism, when it is not properly regulated, it tends to become corrupt. it also tends to corrupt the political process. in terms of the corruption of

capitalism in business, we have seen that in spades in the last 10 years. everybody talks about the financial crisis we just went through, a crisis that incur occurred, in part, because the ratings agencies that were supposed to tell us whether subprime mortgages were sound were compromised. they had a major conflict of interest with the companies they were reading. there is huge corruption throughout the real estate and mortgage industry as well, with lax regulation of mortgage brokers, appraisers, lax regulation every step of the way, and that helped to produce the collapse we saw. remember, there was a housing bubble in almost every developed country in the world. it turned into a financial crisis here because of weak walked dogs -- week watchdogs in weak government.

capitalism inherently krebs government because wealth inequality -- inherently corrupt government because wealth inequality affects government. the financial industry spent $3 billion loosening regulations -- lobbying to loosen regulations. how do we deal with that? we have to get money out of politics. we need tougher rules on lobbyists. we need to do a number of things. >> but you're not suggesting that regulations are actually the cause of the problem. our regulations causing the bad conduct? >> that is totally false. during the 1950's, 1960's, 1970's, and into the 1980's, before the systematic attack on

the regulation of our financial industry, we did not have the kinds of scandals and crashes that we have seen in just the past 12 years. we did not have enron, world,, tycho, not to mention goldman sachs, countrywide, and all of the stuff we have just seen. we had some financial instability. we had some scandals in the 1970's. one reason we had the accounting scandals later on is because we did not respond effectively to the accounting scandals in the 1970's. regulatory changes were never made. accountants or writing their own roles in washington, and that is how the system got broken. >> before the justice department went after microsoft, microsoft spent $0 in washington. today, microsoft spends $9

billion annually. >> let me clarify, you are referring to another washington. >> i am referring to washington, d.c., far away from this one. >> just a quick warning, we have about five minutes left. >> the questions are excellent. please bring them forward. >> i have to be quick. this has me going nuts, i must say. in full disclosure, i am a big government democrat, no question, but i have run into government 1000 times and thought, this is the stupidest thing. but it does not happen more often in government than in the private sector, wells fargo, comcast, sprint. every single private entity idea

with has regulations based on the assumption i am cheating and it makes it more expensive to deal with. my real question is, why do we believe this is about government versus free enterprise? the american system of government -- those founding fathers -- i read a lot of the federalist papers. they were not talking about john locke and economics. they were talking about roman systems, athenian systems, and how human beings are at risk of abusing power. in government, we tried to set up a system to regulate the abuse of power, and we have no such system in free enterprise to regulate the abuse of power. here is my question. in america, we get a credit for free enterprise which is built not so much on free enterprise

for the first 20 years as it was on free land. >> is there a question? >> the question is, -- >> we will ask that question. >> can we take another question as well? >> we will take on the role of free enterprise and another question and give our speakers a chance to answer both. >> why has there been absolutely no, not one mention, that our freedom is about to be taken away with the two stealth provisions put into the defense bill of 2012 that is voted on tomorrow. why are we not talking about this, because it is about ready to happen tomorrow? >> can we take another one?

>> we will take one more. >> i was wondering if both of you could try to define for me the common good and what that means to everyone, not just in this room, but across america. what is the common good? i hear that all of revenues and everywhere, and i have never really heard it defined. it all over the news and everywhere, and i have never really heard it defined. >> that is a tremendous final question along with the other ones. we will give the speaker is an opportunity to sum up with their comments. >> i think that the society we want to build is a society of balance, a society where the america and the value of mutual obligation is respected, upheld an advanced through government.

civil society can play a role, but i think government has a dominant role in ensuring that we take care of one another. it is also about ensuring a strong free enterprise system. these are not mutually antagonistic ideas. government and business have often worked together, historic they come to create more wealth and opportunity -- a historic to create more wealth and opportunity. we struck the right balance in the early postwar time when we had strong free enterprise but also strong government. i believe we can do it again. that would be one definition i would have of the common good, a balanced society where you have both strong government and dynamic free enterprise. they're certainly not antagonistic inherently. >> it is no surprise that you

have no definition of the common good because there is no such thing. there is no such thing as the common good. all there is is individual good. we can create a society in which individuals drive by pursuing their good, or we can criticize -- individuals thrive by pursuing their good, or we can create a society in which some benefit by other disadvantaged. though some may be unions, politicians, whoever. they are all bad. the idea of sacrificing some people for other people is bad. the kind of society -- [applause] i do not want balance. i do not want a little bit of poison. i do not want a little bit of sacrifice. i do not want a little bit of violation of my freedom. i want to be free.

i want you to be freed. i want a society in which those freedoms, this individual freedoms are protected, and that is the job of government. there was a question about the marketplace. it is really important -- we do not have a free market today. when sprinter whoever treats you badly, that is not the free market. all of these businesses are heavily regulated. there is no competition in cable. there is no competition in these services. there's no competition in ratings agencies. the three are the government granted monopoly and guess what? they do not do very well. what we have is a mixture. lots of government controls and regulations and some freedoms. the reason we have been successful over the last 100 years is because that mixture has not gotten too toxic.

the amount of freedom left in our society has allowed business to create the wealth, to create the products to make the goods that have allowed us to thrive and be successful. but that mixture is becoming more and more and more toxic, to the point where, i agree with the steady, incomes in the united states are flat to declining. economic growth is flat to declining. our freedoms are declining. so, i am an advocate of individual freedoms, individual rights, no common good, government stay out of my life except to protect me from bernie madoff. [applause] >> let me just add a couple of

quick words of thanks, first to seattle's own town hall for hosting this event, for all of you for participating in it tonight. thank you very much. i think all of us would agree that one important role of our government is to allow this kind of criticism and debate to flourish. so i think all of you for joining us. i want to thank for being with us -- i want to thank david callahan and yaron brook for being with us. we have had this debate about the role of government for as long as there have been government. it is a healthy debate. i want to thank our two debaters. pleaoi