WEBVTT NOTE Entrepeneurs and Uncertainty: Back to the Future 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:28.000 Thank you. Well, the last time I spoke to a group of students, the title of the talk was from a movie that was made in the 60s, and the reference today is from movies from the 80s, so it's a little bit more updated, but I'm guessing it's not exactly relevant for you guys, so I apologize in advance that I can't talk about vampires or whatever it is that you care about. 2 00:00:28.000 --> 00:00:39.540 Dr. Thornton explained it quite nicely how markets and prices are constantly solving 3 00:00:39.540 --> 00:00:45.560 this very complex problem of coordinating the use of resources and coordinating different 4 00:00:45.560 --> 00:00:49.360 types of labor and different skills and so on. 5 00:00:49.360 --> 00:00:53.560 My talk is kind of a development of that idea because I get to talk about entrepreneurs 6 00:00:53.560 --> 00:01:21.560 The word entrepreneur is tossed around a lot, especially in bad economic times like the ones we're in right now. 7 00:01:21.560 --> 00:01:31.560 In fact, it's become kind of a catch-all term, and for a lot of people represents just everything that will solve all our economic problems. 8 00:01:31.560 --> 00:01:42.560 Entrepreneurship means the American spirit and the struggle to overcome and the face of adversity and all these other terrible cliches about the good life. 9 00:01:42.560 --> 00:01:50.560 And so for example, Obama in his State of the Union speech said he wants to encourage entrepreneurs, although he was kind of sketchy about what that actually means. 10 00:01:50.560 --> 00:02:05.560 And that's sort of the problem. Entrepreneurship is one of these ideas that most people might have a hard time defining. But somehow, despite that, we know that whatever entrepreneurship is, we like it and we want more of it. 11 00:02:05.560 --> 00:02:17.560 Everyone likes the word entrepreneur and likes to say that they support entrepreneurs politically. And I don't think, for example, that any politician in history has ever gone on record as being against entrepreneurs. 12 00:02:47.560 --> 00:02:51.600 because thinking about entrepreneurs gives us a very useful way to look at basically 13 00:02:51.600 --> 00:02:58.160 any economic problem and it allows us to see some concrete effects of government policies 14 00:02:58.160 --> 00:03:03.720 that might otherwise appear maybe kind of abstract or just way too complex. 15 00:03:03.720 --> 00:03:11.360 Okay, but before we talk about some of this big picture stuff I'll get back to in a minute, 16 00:03:11.360 --> 00:03:16.160 we'll take things down just to the fundamentals and think about a few basic principles of 17 00:03:16.160 --> 00:03:22.760 of Economics. And this is where time and uncertainty come in. We've already had a 18 00:03:22.760 --> 00:03:26.840 little bit of an introduction with some of the Dr. Thornton's discussion of time, 19 00:03:26.840 --> 00:03:34.680 but we'll add a little bit more. Everything human beings do is designed 20 00:03:34.680 --> 00:03:38.720 to have a positive influence on our future, even if the future that we're 21 00:03:38.720 --> 00:03:44.040 trying to get at is just a few seconds from now. The implication of this is that 22 00:03:44.040 --> 00:03:51.480 We exist in time and time only moves forward, right? So there's an uncertainty in everything we do. 23 00:03:52.760 --> 00:03:56.840 There's always a possibility that things can go wrong because there's this gap between the time 24 00:03:56.840 --> 00:04:03.240 you start something and the time that the result happens. And the future is unknown. So this 25 00:04:03.240 --> 00:04:08.840 introduces the problem of uncertainty. In economic terms, we say that action is forward-looking. In 26 00:04:08.840 --> 00:04:13.400 other words, what we're doing right this minute is an attempt to change something that hasn't 27 00:04:13.400 --> 00:04:19.400 hasn't happened yet. We're to try and bring about something that wouldn't happen without us. 28 00:04:19.400 --> 00:04:28.400 And depending on the amount of time involved and the size of the undertaking, some things are much more uncertain than others. 29 00:04:28.400 --> 00:04:36.400 I mean, I think people get the general idea without too much trouble. We're probably all pretty sure where our next meal is coming from, for example. 30 00:04:36.400 --> 00:04:40.400 But what we'll be doing in 30 years, well, that's almost impossible to even get at. 31 00:04:40.400 --> 00:04:44.400 So there's much more uncertainty with something like that. 32 00:04:44.400 --> 00:04:49.400 So we face a series of problems in our everyday lives that arise because of uncertainty 33 00:04:49.400 --> 00:04:53.400 and uncertainty is just a part of life that we can't ever really get rid of 34 00:04:53.400 --> 00:04:58.400 because there's always this unknown future out there that we can't completely account for, 35 00:04:58.400 --> 00:05:01.400 that we can't totally anticipate. 36 00:05:01.400 --> 00:05:05.400 So time and uncertainty become kind of a nuisance for us 37 00:05:05.400 --> 00:05:34.400 In economic terms, this translates into a very big problem, because in an economy as complex as ours, we have this insanely large amount of resources that we have to decide what to do with, and there's always this possibility that we could make bad decisions with resources and end up essentially poverty-stricken. 38 00:05:34.400 --> 00:05:53.400 But fortunately, there's a group of individuals in society who specialize in bearing the burden of this uncertainty, and bearing the burden of decision making, and who take those uncertainty and decisions from people who don't want to deal with them and put it onto themselves. 39 00:05:53.400 --> 00:06:03.400 And these people are entrepreneurs. And as I said, the main theme of this talk is entrepreneurs and what they can and can't do, and the role that they play in driving the economy. 40 00:06:03.400 --> 00:06:12.160 With that, let me just say a few words about what entrepreneurs do exactly and then I'll 41 00:06:12.160 --> 00:06:14.880 spin out a few of the details. 42 00:06:14.880 --> 00:06:19.600 Entrepreneurs bear uncertainty and what that means is they take their own property and 43 00:06:19.600 --> 00:06:21.720 they invest it on the market. 44 00:06:21.720 --> 00:06:26.360 Entrepreneurs invest and investment takes time and at the end of that time, they produce 45 00:06:26.360 --> 00:06:33.960 It's a product, like an iPhone or an iPad, that they sell in the hope of making a profit. 46 00:06:33.960 --> 00:06:38.000 But their profit is determined by other people's decisions, namely the consumers. 47 00:06:38.000 --> 00:06:43.640 If people hate the product, Apple makes losses instead of profits. 48 00:06:43.640 --> 00:06:47.960 This kind of behavior is what economists call entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurship exists 49 00:06:47.960 --> 00:06:50.960 everywhere and at all levels of the economy. 50 00:06:50.960 --> 00:06:58.560 CEOs like Steve Jobs can be entrepreneurs just the same as small business owners. 51 00:06:58.560 --> 00:07:03.200 So let me give you an analogy that might make some of these points clearer. 52 00:07:03.200 --> 00:07:07.460 This isn't a perfect story for a reason I won't get into, but I think it should give 53 00:07:07.460 --> 00:07:11.300 you enough of an idea to see what I'm talking about. 54 00:07:11.300 --> 00:07:16.760 One way to think about what entrepreneurs do is to imagine sports competitions. 55 00:07:16.760 --> 00:07:21.280 The spectators are the consumers. We watch the competition between the teams. The teams 56 00:07:21.280 --> 00:07:25.640 are the entrepreneurs. And we get enjoyment out of the performance of the players. The 57 00:07:25.640 --> 00:07:32.280 performance is the product. And ultimately, the teams compete for us. That's how they 58 00:07:32.280 --> 00:07:38.920 make their money. But it's important to note that it's the players who have the specialized 59 00:07:38.920 --> 00:07:44.040 skills to handle what goes on down on the field. We're not down there because we don't 60 00:07:44.040 --> 00:07:49.280 have the skills and the insight to make those calls, and of course if the players play well, 61 00:07:49.280 --> 00:07:53.120 they earn more because we pay more to see them, and if they're awful, then people stop 62 00:07:53.120 --> 00:07:56.400 going to see them and they make nothing. 63 00:07:56.400 --> 00:08:00.920 And just like in the economy, there are big leagues for superstar players like Steve Jobs, 64 00:08:00.920 --> 00:08:04.960 and just as there are local competitions for the people who provide you with more everyday 65 00:08:04.960 --> 00:08:07.760 things. 66 00:08:07.760 --> 00:08:12.360 The idea is that successful entrepreneurs are masters at figuring out how to deal with 67 00:08:12.360 --> 00:08:13.360 the future. 68 00:08:13.360 --> 00:08:19.000 They demonstrate, through their success, that they have a kind of judgment about the future 69 00:08:19.000 --> 00:08:21.600 that is more accurate than other people's judgment. 70 00:08:21.600 --> 00:08:26.520 They guess better than other people, and in fact, that's why they're the entrepreneurs 71 00:08:26.520 --> 00:08:31.040 and not somebody else like the people who work for them. 72 00:08:31.040 --> 00:08:36.080 I'm not sure if you guys work yet, but whenever you do get a job, you'll find out that no 73 00:08:36.080 --> 00:08:39.700 matter where you work, the same thing always happens. 74 00:08:39.700 --> 00:08:47.140 The people at the bottom always criticize what the higher-ups are doing, and every, 75 00:08:47.140 --> 00:08:52.820 for example, assembly line worker always believes that he has the answers that could just revolutionize 76 00:08:52.820 --> 00:08:57.420 the whole process that his boss is just too dumb to think of. 77 00:08:57.420 --> 00:09:02.460 But the thing is, lots of people can have great ideas, but knowing what to do with those 78 00:09:02.460 --> 00:09:06.140 ideas, that's what entrepreneurs are good at. 79 00:09:06.140 --> 00:09:09.560 The example of someone like Steve Jobs is very useful here. 80 00:09:09.560 --> 00:09:13.920 He and the other people that he worked with were extremely good, not just at inventing 81 00:09:13.920 --> 00:09:21.180 new things, but at figuring out exactly what kind of things people would want in the future. 82 00:09:21.180 --> 00:09:29.540 There are always a great amount of ideas and technologies that people could choose to develop, 83 00:09:29.540 --> 00:09:34.940 but we have limited resources, so someone, namely an entrepreneur, has to make the decision 84 00:09:34.940 --> 00:09:41.940 which ideas to support and which ones to reject, and furthermore has to bear the responsibility of that decision. 85 00:09:41.940 --> 00:09:50.940 On the little graph here, this would be something like below concept, you would have something here, decision-making, judgment, 86 00:09:50.940 --> 00:09:55.940 and really you would have, instead of one concept, you would have a whole tree, millions of concepts, 87 00:09:55.940 --> 00:09:59.940 and it comes down to just one that somebody picks up on. 88 00:10:04.940 --> 00:10:09.940 And this notion of decision-making, this is where the uncertainty problem happens. 89 00:10:09.940 --> 00:10:15.940 Because all the technologies that we have today, like iPads and things, they've been in development for years. 90 00:10:15.940 --> 00:10:21.940 Five or ten years ago, someone came up with that idea, and Steve Jobs had to make a judgment and say, 91 00:10:21.940 --> 00:10:26.940 okay, this idea for an iPad is good enough that I'll give you $100 million to develop it. 92 00:10:26.940 --> 00:10:31.940 But all these other ideas that you offered me, for things like the iCar or whatever, 93 00:10:31.940 --> 00:10:37.060 or whatever. Those are just useless, so we're ignoring those. And then it's only years later, 94 00:10:38.340 --> 00:10:45.700 after investing an incredible amount of time, effort and money, that Apple actually finds out 95 00:10:45.700 --> 00:10:50.660 whether or not the iPad was a good idea in the first place all those years ago. And they find 96 00:10:50.660 --> 00:10:55.700 out whether people do actually want to pay money for it. And it turns out that people do want it. 97 00:10:55.700 --> 00:11:00.740 So Apple has another success story. But it could easily have gone the other way as well. People 98 00:11:00.740 --> 00:11:08.500 People could have wanted something else, and Apple could have lost all their money to people producing more useful things. 99 00:11:08.500 --> 00:11:19.420 So in exchange for doing this specialized task of making decisions about how to use resources and bearing the weight of the future, 100 00:11:19.420 --> 00:11:26.700 entrepreneurs are capable of earning a kind of income that most other people don't earn, and that income is called profit. 101 00:11:26.700 --> 00:11:31.940 Profit is the market's reward for making good decisions, for being good at producing 102 00:11:31.940 --> 00:11:34.500 things people want to buy. 103 00:11:34.500 --> 00:11:39.020 And likewise, losses are like a market punishment because they show that people aren't willing 104 00:11:39.020 --> 00:11:45.620 to buy what you're making and that you've invested in bad ideas and wasted people's 105 00:11:45.620 --> 00:11:46.700 resources. 106 00:11:46.700 --> 00:11:52.500 One of the strange but important implications of this is that even though particular entrepreneurs 107 00:11:52.500 --> 00:11:56.740 entrepreneurs can go completely belly up and wind up bankrupt, that this is actually a 108 00:11:56.740 --> 00:11:58.260 good thing. 109 00:11:58.260 --> 00:12:03.500 The reason is that failing means unsuccessful entrepreneurs have to give up their resources 110 00:12:03.500 --> 00:12:09.140 and their decision-making abilities to other more successful people who can use them better. 111 00:12:09.140 --> 00:12:15.160 In the big picture, the market is always in this process of readjustment, moving valuable 112 00:12:15.160 --> 00:12:20.520 resources between different entrepreneurs and between different industries, always pushing 113 00:12:20.520 --> 00:12:31.780 Now, you may be able to guess where this is going next. 114 00:12:31.780 --> 00:12:36.680 The big question becomes, what happens when we don't let this process work? 115 00:12:36.680 --> 00:12:42.700 What happens when we interfere with this profit and loss mechanism? 116 00:12:42.700 --> 00:12:47.520 For example, what if we bail out car companies like GM who fail at business? 117 00:12:47.520 --> 00:12:58.520 Well the answer is pretty logical, supporting failed entrepreneurs and businesses means that valuable resources will continue to be wasted producing things people don't want. 118 00:12:58.520 --> 00:13:06.520 And at the same time, the waste means that we're not getting something that we actually do want. 119 00:13:06.520 --> 00:13:14.520 Everything has a cost, and the cost of producing things nobody wants is that we lose the ability to produce something genuinely useful. 120 00:13:14.520 --> 00:13:20.520 So we actually punish entrepreneurs who are trying to produce useful innovative products. 121 00:13:20.520 --> 00:13:26.520 Everything gets switched around when you try to use government to manipulate the market in this way, 122 00:13:26.520 --> 00:13:31.520 because you're replacing the decisions of real entrepreneurs who are risking their own livelihoods 123 00:13:31.520 --> 00:13:38.520 with arbitrary decisions by government employees who never have to bear responsibility for the economic damage they cause. 124 00:13:38.520 --> 00:13:43.520 and when that happens all of a sudden you end up in the situation where 125 00:13:43.520 --> 00:13:49.040 government is rewarding people who fail and punishing people who succeed so it's 126 00:13:49.040 --> 00:13:55.880 this perversion of the profit and loss mechanism. Another important implication 127 00:13:55.880 --> 00:13:59.560 of the idea of profit and loss and the rest of this talk is basically a 128 00:13:59.560 --> 00:14:02.920 development of this idea is that it's also important to let entrepreneurs keep 129 00:14:02.920 --> 00:14:09.120 to keep their profits, because taxes, for example, on things like profit, remove the 130 00:14:09.120 --> 00:14:14.400 major reason, the major incentive to risk your money in the market, because if your 131 00:14:14.400 --> 00:14:20.420 profit is taxed away, you have very little to gain, but you still have a lot to lose. 132 00:14:20.420 --> 00:14:25.560 So you have to encourage entrepreneurs by emphasizing the importance of private property 133 00:14:25.560 --> 00:14:30.260 so that entrepreneurs know that if they succeed at providing valuable goods and services to 134 00:14:30.260 --> 00:14:34.260 to society, that they won't be, in turn, punished for that by government. 135 00:14:34.260 --> 00:14:36.260 Five, huh? 136 00:14:36.260 --> 00:14:39.260 Well, challenge accepted. 137 00:14:39.260 --> 00:14:47.260 Okay, so everything I've talked about so far has been describing the kind of uncertainty 138 00:14:47.260 --> 00:14:52.260 that happens in markets, and that kind of uncertainty is difficult to deal with, 139 00:14:52.260 --> 00:14:59.260 but by shifting it from people who don't want it to entrepreneurs who specialize in dealing with it. 140 00:14:59.260 --> 00:15:06.940 in dealing with it. We can actually cope with it pretty well. And as long as we allow entrepreneurs 141 00:15:06.940 --> 00:15:13.100 and markets to do their work, this sort of uncertainty really isn't that much of a problem. 142 00:15:13.100 --> 00:15:17.300 But I just want to quickly talk about a kind of uncertainty that we do have trouble coping 143 00:15:17.300 --> 00:15:23.740 with, and that's the uncertainty created by government. An economist, Robert Higgs, who 144 00:15:23.740 --> 00:15:29.180 is a friend of the Institute and a very good economic historian, came up with an idea that 145 00:15:29.180 --> 00:15:34.940 calls regime uncertainty, which is a way of describing the kind of uncertainty that government 146 00:15:34.940 --> 00:15:40.060 imposes on markets and that entrepreneurs have a great deal of trouble dealing with. 147 00:15:40.060 --> 00:15:45.660 In this context, the regime means politicians and bureaucrats who make economic policies 148 00:15:45.660 --> 00:15:50.060 and invent various economic regulations. 149 00:15:50.060 --> 00:15:54.140 The idea of regime uncertainty is that there are certain things the government can do or 150 00:15:54.140 --> 00:16:07.140 And when they do this, it makes it extremely difficult for entrepreneurs to do what they do best, which is to try to gauge what's going to happen in the future. 151 00:16:07.140 --> 00:16:11.140 So what kind of things does government do that have this effect? 152 00:16:11.140 --> 00:16:21.140 Well, basically any time the government announces that it's working to add more regulations to the economy, or any time it expresses hostility toward the profit motive, 153 00:16:21.140 --> 00:16:25.140 It sends a signal to entrepreneurs that it's dangerous to be investing in the market. 154 00:16:25.140 --> 00:16:34.140 To go back to the sports analogy, imagine if you give the players, the entrepreneurs, a new kind of problem to deal with. 155 00:16:34.140 --> 00:16:43.140 Usually the players worry about the other team and they know what to do and how to play the game and they can strategize about what sort of things to expect. 156 00:16:43.140 --> 00:16:50.140 They know that they have to score X amount of touchdowns and the rules for how to do that are very clear. 157 00:16:50.140 --> 00:16:53.140 But then what if the referees say all of a sudden, 158 00:16:53.140 --> 00:16:58.140 okay, wait, for this play, we're going to change the score that's already on the board. 159 00:16:58.140 --> 00:17:01.140 Plus, we're changing the rules for how you earn points. 160 00:17:01.140 --> 00:17:03.140 Also, we're not going to tell you what the new rules are. 161 00:17:03.140 --> 00:17:07.140 And going into the future, we may change the rules again without warning you 162 00:17:07.140 --> 00:17:10.140 and take away any points you earn no matter what you do. 163 00:17:10.140 --> 00:17:14.140 But just go about your business as usual. Everything's fine. 164 00:17:14.140 --> 00:17:17.140 Well, obviously, no one would play a game like this 165 00:17:17.140 --> 00:17:21.520 Business, because no one would know how and no one would have any reason to spend any 166 00:17:21.520 --> 00:17:24.800 effort on trying to figure out the game because it could always just change and you could 167 00:17:24.800 --> 00:17:28.740 always lose everything through no fault of your own. 168 00:17:28.740 --> 00:17:31.500 And that's sort of what goes on with regime uncertainty. 169 00:17:31.500 --> 00:17:36.640 Instead of trying to anticipate the ordinary uncertainty in markets, instead of trying 170 00:17:36.640 --> 00:17:42.260 to anticipate what consumers will want and trying to figure out how to satisfy consumers, 171 00:17:42.260 --> 00:17:47.900 And so economists end up having to worry about trying to figure out how government works 172 00:17:47.900 --> 00:17:54.540 and what new regulations are going to pop up next week and how they can manipulate that. 173 00:17:54.540 --> 00:17:58.140 So maybe this is a bit abstract, so I'll try and give you a historical example to make 174 00:17:58.140 --> 00:18:01.540 more sense of this. 175 00:18:01.540 --> 00:18:07.140 This idea was first started being discussed in relation to the Great Depression. 176 00:18:07.140 --> 00:18:10.660 America's Great Depression lasted longer than anyone thought it would, and so economists 177 00:18:10.660 --> 00:18:13.460 have always wondered why that was. 178 00:18:13.460 --> 00:18:18.180 And one reason that an economist discovered was that the Roosevelt administration and 179 00:18:18.180 --> 00:18:24.140 the New Deal undermined confidence in business because they interfered so much in the economy 180 00:18:24.140 --> 00:18:30.500 with all the New Deal's taxes, regulations, and price controls that entrepreneurs during 181 00:18:30.500 --> 00:18:32.500 the Great Depression didn't want to invest. 182 00:18:32.500 --> 00:18:36.580 They didn't want to take risks or make decisions because they thought their profits were just 183 00:18:36.580 --> 00:18:40.140 going to be taken away from them as soon as they succeeded. 184 00:18:40.140 --> 00:18:44.420 And there were even concerns that there was going to be a large-scale government takeover 185 00:18:44.420 --> 00:18:45.420 of private business. 186 00:18:45.420 --> 00:18:49.940 And if those things had happened, entrepreneurs would have lost their investments. 187 00:18:49.940 --> 00:18:52.660 So they held back their money and waited to see what would happen. 188 00:18:52.660 --> 00:18:55.780 And so there was very little investment during the Great Depression. 189 00:18:55.780 --> 00:19:01.700 And that's one of the reasons why the recovery took so long. 190 00:19:01.700 --> 00:19:05.640 Now again, that might seem like an old example, but it's relevant to us today because the 191 00:19:05.640 --> 00:19:09.780 situation during the Great Depression is actually very similar to the one that exists right 192 00:19:09.780 --> 00:19:16.760 Now, Obama and his supporters have earned a reputation as being big regulators and it's 193 00:19:16.760 --> 00:19:22.320 expected that they will gradually expand control over the economy in the coming years. 194 00:19:22.320 --> 00:19:26.460 So right now, entrepreneurs feel threatened and they don't want to invest for fear that 195 00:19:26.460 --> 00:19:32.860 some new regulation will pop up to interfere with their business or to confiscate their 196 00:19:32.860 --> 00:19:33.860 profits. 197 00:19:33.860 --> 00:19:39.740 I've said Obama's name a couple of times, but I don't want to imply that this is something 198 00:19:39.740 --> 00:19:44.740 or something that originated with him or this is something that only happens with Democrats or something like that. 199 00:19:44.740 --> 00:19:53.740 Other political ideologies cause the same kind of problems because of their stance toward business and their support for economic regulation. 200 00:19:53.740 --> 00:20:04.740 But that being said, I can't emphasize enough that all the big legislation that's on the table right now and which will continue to be discussed for the next few years holds potential problems for entrepreneurs. 201 00:20:04.740 --> 00:20:10.340 The government's budget and its debt, health care legislation, environmental regulation, taxes, and so on. 202 00:20:10.340 --> 00:20:13.740 All of these discourage people from taking risks. 203 00:20:13.740 --> 00:20:20.640 And when entrepreneurs don't take risks, innovation stops, goods and services stop being produced, 204 00:20:20.640 --> 00:20:25.940 and the economy doesn't grow in a healthy way. 205 00:20:25.940 --> 00:20:29.640 And going into the future, if things keep going the way they're going, 206 00:20:29.640 --> 00:20:34.740 With more and more government regulations and more uncertainty about our economic way of life, 207 00:20:34.740 --> 00:20:41.240 that's the challenge that everyone will have to face to deal with not knowing from one month or one year to the next 208 00:20:41.240 --> 00:20:47.940 what economic controls the government will impose next, or when, or how, or anything. 209 00:20:47.940 --> 00:20:55.440 This affects entrepreneurs especially, but also all of you as well, because you're the ones that investments being made right now, 210 00:20:55.440 --> 00:21:00.320 or I should say, not being made right now, you're the ones these investments are designed 211 00:21:00.320 --> 00:21:06.440 for, is to meet your future demand that people invest in the present. 212 00:21:06.440 --> 00:21:10.360 So the uncertainty being created by government at this minute will seriously affect your 213 00:21:10.360 --> 00:21:14.360 welfare in the future. 214 00:21:14.360 --> 00:21:20.220 I won't tread on Danny's toes too much, but I do want to finish by restating that the 215 00:21:20.220 --> 00:21:26.200 The problems I talked about are very real and very important, and they run much deeper than 216 00:21:26.200 --> 00:21:32.300 simply wondering whether or not we'll get a new iPad in a couple of years. 217 00:21:32.300 --> 00:21:38.420 What we have to do in the coming years is get away from this future that's being made 218 00:21:38.420 --> 00:21:44.340 for us now by bureaucrats and regulators, a future that ends in economic disaster. 219 00:21:44.340 --> 00:21:49.060 And we need to get back to a future that we create for ourselves that is genuinely free 220 00:21:49.060 --> 00:21:49.900 and Prosperous.