I am delighted that we have been able to do it. I am thankful of the freedom trustees provided the resort for us to do this. Before i introduce our final speaker, i will like to say thanks to the cato Congress Team and in the building staff here for their hard work. They kept us will fail well fed through the day. We have some fascinating panels and speeches, which recaptured the essence of the tumultuous political time we are living in. After this closing speech, i invite you all to continue the conversations over drinks downstairs. Before we get to that, i am delighted to welcome to give this address which is entitled the National Conservative threat to a free economy. The president and founder of the American Action board. He is one of the most prolific writers in the writing space. In preparation of this event, i examined morning emails over the week before i was writing this. He covered topics of ranging of several others. Each post was crisply written. Doug has a extremely strong pedigree of economic Public Policy concerning. He was a academic at Columbia University and at syracuse. He has served in a variety of influential policy positions between 2001 and 2002. He was the chief economist council of economic advisers. He was there with six directors of councils providing budgets and policies to the u. S. During 2008, he was a director of Economic Policy of the john mccain president ial campaign. After a row with the federal commission, he was then founded the roll with the federal commission, he was then founded the role. I was deeply impressed with his insights when i first saw him speak at Nobel Prize Winner annual a couple of years ago. I was there on a panel that day. Given that experience of seeing doug that day, as well as the knowledge that doug is on the front line debating Economic Issues in the media as well as in congress, i could not think of anyone better to offer owners some concluded better to offer us some concluded votes. Welcome. The floor is yours. [applause] thank, ryan. Further very gracious reading of my four the very gracious reading of my resume. My mother is a one line up a very long line of high school teachers. Since then i have been a governor. She is quite nervous about my prospect. Thank you for providing legitimacy to what i do. I want to congratulate ryan, cato in general for a fantastic conference. The unique combination and a great set of speakers talking about the right topic at exactly the right time. You do not always get that. The pandemic did you a favor. The topic is right. I am pleased to have a chance to discuss these very important issues of what is the framework speaking about, economic and politics in the political economy of where the United States doesnt. I have no idea of what i am going to say. I thought as a matter of discipline, the issue, what is the director for this sort of National Conservative style of thinking in policymaking should be done relative to something. That is what economics is. Im going to talk a little bit about which are the competitive economic model on which so many of us rely. A real bonus to speaking here is, i do not do powerpoint or slides. I did my first powerpoint in front of president george w. Bush, he discovered an error and i gave up powerpoint in 2 001. That is the starting point. We all know how we sort of talked to people at the basics the idealized form. People have the freedom to choose which products they do and do not buy. If prices are too high, they say no. If prices are low, they buy them. They may even buy them more. They continue to buy as long as that product provides value. They reveal their values with their purchases. I know how much i valuetwas learners. It is one of two things in i know how much i valuetwas twizzlers. That is the marginal value. The other thing we know is, if the producer cannot sell it to someone that is more than the cost, they can make more money by making more of it. We will just keep making more until the profit opportunity go away because marginal costs will rise. We will find out if that price will simultaneously affect the marginal cost of production and the benefit of valuation ive placed on it. That is the court on how we explain the transmission of values a core on how we explain the transmission of values. I want to talk about the politics of it. I did i think he gets appreciated well. If you think about a nation of 302 Million People all operating in that fashion, what we will learn is that, twizzlers will have a marginal value for everyone who is buying seven votes for that bag. Everyone. All of them. All have exactly the same valuation of that. Then becomes the social value of twizzlers. We do not need a committee to put it together, we know what it is. We all agree on it. If we do not have to take a vote we do not have to take a vote. We all agree. It has a value. The value is a price. The value is matched by the cost of society producing it. The marginal cost is what it cost to labor, what kind of materials goes into it. There is no funny action matthew have to do. Reliance on competitive markets have a tremendous advantage. We agree. How much we should spend ontwas learners, how much labor should go how much we should spend ontwizzlers and labor. When you think about just walking into the range of products that are available just they are, it is mindboggling what a market economy can produce. There is no way a political mechanism can make all of those decisions. Theres not legislation designed that can come to agreement on so many things. The beauty of competitive markets is, we do not meet the politics. It is a nominal political mechanism it is a phenomenal political mechanism. When we straightened that, i think we start to see the value of the free market and the individual liberties delivered to our political discourse. Think about what happens when we do not have twizzlers, think about what we have in the standard market. We have something of National Ordinance that we all share. Some people want little or negative amounts of it. Other people are worried. Now we have to have politics. We have to have a way to decide. How much are we going to at national defense. That is where the political mechanism comes in. Think about how it enters. In that way of thinking where you let marcus do with they can do, markets do what they can do and only allowing on government provision when you have to, everyone is agreeing that the politics are of necessity. We all know that we have different values. We have accepted the deal that says, theres going to be some disappointment in the political outcomes. All of these legitimate values have to answer. It is not going to happen. I think one of the great virtues of the socalled which was where going to let markets deliver everything they can. And only delivered to places where there are market failures, the kind of things that markets do not handle as well we will go to government mechanisms for provision. Those government mechanisms come with a automatic legitimacy. The preferred way of doing it does not work. You have to be doing it in the government. He will accept the short you will accept the shortcomings simultaneously. There is a legitimacy attached to that political debate because of the way we got to it. By in large, how the u. S. Operated for a long time. They produce interestingly enough limited government. As a result, that is when the government was legitimate. It was not a arbitrary restriction on what the government does. I thought it was a incredibly valuable thing. Never perfect. One of the things left out in reading my resume, i work in the white house in 1999. Worked in the white house in 1999. I had been at columbia teaching public finance. For those of you familiar with market courses, they are all about what happens when the market fails. You have to be smart in fixed markets. The government is the solution. I went to the white house. These were republicans and were prepared to intervene in ways that that blew my mind. By the end i felt i was walking free to choose appeared it was the greatest experience in my life. I know the idealist framework i would just walk through was not the reality. It was a consensus on the way things were to work. The consensus seems to have largely because we have not done the education on what it really was. Competitive markets were just not the way to get people rich. They were a legitimate political approach to providing goods and services in the right amount and allocating that through the economy. I think education has to continue. My concern with these other approaches that have various labels, in some, the make America Great label and nationalist perspective, they begin by substituting for that value discovery mechanism called competitive markets, then just saying this is what we value. This is what is important to this country. We are already seeing out there in the world there are going to be old, men, women, huge array of differences. This country should be celebrate for its differences. That is the most amazing characteristics. That immediately sets up a very bad political dynamic. If you are told you are ill in illegitimate, you do not want to participate in the project and you do not respect the people who declared your views as illegitimate. The starting point for conservatives, this notion that there is a set of values. And there is this, who gets to pick up. Whose values get picked. Those are national values. This is the scientific accomplishment buying when he won the nobel prize. There isnt any legitimate way to pick. Theres a systemic fashion along all of the in the population. When youre going to end up with is a dictator. What we see too often is the language and behavior of this way of thinking about the governors role in the economy. Highly as a result frightening to those who were raised with a deep love of freedoms and democratic principles of this country. That is a set of beliefs is a very dangerous way to do business. It leads to things that we see all of the time. They are almost inevitable. It is going to be the case that any such approach to running a country is going to have a huge amount of industrial policy. The market signals are not valuable. They are wrong. There are one set of values that is right. We have to overwrite the market. We have to pick what is going to happen. There is no longer a consensus. They thought that anyone would put a wad of twizzlers, that is easy. There is tremendous amount of policies folder straight out of us. Pulled straight out of us appeared that overwriting of the market is inevitable. Theres not respect for what it does. The market discovers values, the values have been discarded as unimportant in this framework. We do not need marcus to do that markets to do that. Youre not going to get Efficient Government policies. People like me do not like to distort prices. We do not like taxes distorting prices. That is distorting someones value. We want those values displayed. Any National Conservatives approach is going to have the biggest deadly triangle you are never going to see. Second thing that will happen is, theres no particular cost to taken the taxpayers money. You need the money and industrial policies. You are going to have a very large government. There will be no national stopping point for the government. There is not legitimate limited government in this framework. It will get more efficient. As a result, it will be a threat to any sort of sustained rise in prosperity. A sustained growth in the economy. It is inevitable in the foundations. What comes with industrial policies . In light of. It always leads to the corruption. The government, which may have been seeking to represent the nation, but in the end has no legitimate set of values to do so will harm the growth of that nation. It will then also destroy itself with corruption and inefficiencies. The good news here, drinks or after this session when i am done. Number two, whatever this force is, the notion that populism is not good for the populist has not been recognized is a fact. It is a so instructive piece to it selfdestructive piece to it that will in the pack on his own. I am not saying it is all fine. It is important to understand things for what they are. I think that is what we have. It is a very bad idea for me to talk. There are some people who make the correct were premature decision to not list. My message is really simple. There is a political legitimacy to doing business with individual liberty and free markets. It is a efficient way to do things. We had a lot of technical merit from a economic point of view. But its political characters is what i think is the most important feature. It is the things being taught and election time to time. The recent movements has gone through things of our view. A con woman has turned out to be such a threat to the markets. Some of these stray policies have been counterproductive. That is all going to be true. The larger threat, as they will destroy our politics. It delegitimize his people. It undercuts the genesee in the process. It profoundly corrupts in the end. I think ryan and cato for the chance to say this. I think all of you for your patience in listening app i. I wish you nothing but a prosperous future. Thank you. [applause] there going to be mikes around so we have plenty of time for questions. I will thank you. You make a good case but im going to try to put my National Conservative had on and ask you a hard question if you dont mind. You described your freemarket model as idealized and the National Conservatives would say yes exactly, it bears no relation to our real economy. We have had publican president s and republican governments for a long time promising to return us to this free markets. It never happened and we have started to suspect it is not going to. In the meantime, we have these big tech companies. It always comes back to them. They have developed a monopoly over the marketplace of ideas. Asset managers on wall street, a handful of them, exert a powerful influence over all of the publicly traded companies. This combination has produced an