It is a delight to have all of you here this morning. Areend of august and people still a vacation. School is starting in some areas. It is feeling Like Washington is getting and the gear of things. Were all too happy to help it along. Very happy to be here for the release of a new report of the Heritage Foundation. The 2015 global agenda for Economic Freedom. A copy of it. This is a study that is produced by the Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at the institute for Economic Freedom. Both of which are distinct and the Heritage Foundation. I am especially happy to be here for two reasons. , a is to hold my good friend keynote speaker. He is one of the smartest people i know and economics. His also a true gentleman. But most importantly, he is a good guitar player. He is a fan of the blues and jazz as i am as well. I keep teasing him about putting together the Economic Freedom group as the latest ring in rock. Something is wrong with the term. The other editor is i was, the founding the latest of which will be discussed today when i was Vice President of heritage. See these reports continue to watch them grow. The most important things the Heritage Foundation does in my opinion. To have thismely discussion today because of what is happening in china. And the u. S. Stock market. Problems that are causing the melted of chinas stock market not limited to china alone. Many of the same economic ,ailures, the rest of the world the huge debts, corruption, bloated state owned enterprises, lack of transparency, lack of rule of law and Economic Freedom. As you will learn from todays discussion, many of the mistakes china and others are making are being done by this administration. We should not be surprised our economy is in trouble, too. Loss in particular the ability to lead the world out of recessions and troubles which im sure all of our participants particularly grant, will be talking about. To get us started, grant will deliver some remarks. He wore many hats and has a wide range of experience in trade and Economic Policy and law. In 2001 to 2005, roughly the same time i was at the state department, and with undersecretary of commerce for International Trade. A number of historic trade deals were enacted while he was in office including the normalization of trade deals with china and the Training Development act of 2000. Before his tenure at commerce, he was chief International Trade councils of the Senate Finance committee, which is the top trade position in congress. Today he is the principal managing director at a traded Investment Consultant firm. He is an adjunct professor, or director of the International Technology and innovation foundation, and also a Senior Advisor to the center for strategic and international studies. After grant makes his remarks we will be joined by commentary from bill olson. Bill lived for a number of years in beijing and also spent some time in moscow, so he has a unique perspective on the economies of these two countries which im sure he will share with you. Also jim roberts, Research Fellow for Economic Freedom and growth of the center for trade and economics here at the Heritage Foundation. I will ask grant to come up and deliver his remarks and then after that we can hear from the other two. Thank you very much. Grant thank you for that kind introduction. I am at the age where when somebody goes back through your bio you start aging all over again, so im not sure how much i actually really appreciate introduction. [laughter] the blues part i like. The one thing that keeps us young. My job here is first of all to applaud the release of the global agenda. I look forward every year to the index coming out because it is a benchmark against which we can measure the extent to which societies first of all, recognize the importance of Economic Freedom and then second of all the extent to which institutions promote it or undermine it. I will come back to this at the end, but the problem that you see reflected in the global agenda report that is coming out is where the United States is. It has been mired for some time. America has to be a beacon in terms of Economic Freedom. We cannot depend on hong kong to be the advocate. There is no alternative. We have to be the defenders of not only our own freedom but understand that our freedom depends on embracing and defending elsewhere. Im going to come back to that. But really where i want to start, and why i welcome the opportunity the foundation has given me is an opportunity to reflect on my own experience but also to reread the road to serfdom. Im going to start with a personal reflection and that i am going to spend a little time on highest highest just as a reminder. And that i will come back why i think Economic Freedom ought to be central to the president ial campaign and why i think the problem we are facing in the End International markets reflect why this freedom ought to be central to the debate. First to the personal side, i am what i would like to say the fortunate son of my father. He was a refugee from lithuania. Like many immigrants before him he received a new name courtesy of ellis island. He was extraordinarily conscious because of his Life Experience of the freedom he enjoyed in his adopted country because he could measure it against the freedom he had lost in lithuania. When my father was born in 1922 the first year lithuania had gained its independence in roughly five centuries. He witnessed the gradual erosion of that independence forces from within Lithuanian Society and without. He saw was destabilization and then occupation by the soviet union. Its destruction following the nazi invasion and soviet occupation, at which point many of his friends, many of them jewish, were murdered, and following the return of soviet forces following the 90 day siege at leningrad. My father, who had gone underground to resist the soviets, tried to persuade his father and their family to leave. His father refused, arguing that things would return to normal after the war. My grandfather in a letter to his father expressed his sorrow for not having followed my fathers advice, but in fairness he had grown up in czarist russia and had succeeded by becoming a widely respected hospital administrator. He could not conceive of how different life might be in a totalitarian society. In the end of my father did escape with only his sister. They made their way across europe and eventually to about that took them to sweden. German control stop them about a mile offshore and my father had to swim a mile to shore. It was qualified freedom. They were a group of refugees that found their way to sweden at the end of the war. As is often seen both in my fathers life and my own, his luck held. As he was in stockholm and applying for refugee status, essentially political asylum, even my mother who was serving as a Foreign Service officer in the hotel diplomat, which was at that point the American Embassy in stockholm, and my mother used to tell a story that she walked down the hallway and saw this man who is about 63 with dark green eyes and dark hair, and says she fell in love immediately. Of course my father tells the story from the opposite perspective, and he came down and saw this beautiful woman, nearly 6 feet tall, blonde hair, blue eyes, and fell in love immediately. [laughter] in those days the Foreign Service was a lot less enlightened than it is today. As a woman you were fired if youre married, even to a u. S. Citizen. So when they finally did mary in 1949 my mother left the Foreign Service and returns to minneapolis for i was born. I am the fortunate son of all those events. Roughly 70 years has passed since my father met my mother at the hotel diplomat, and it was ironically at that time in london, another expatriate, haye wrote that book we now know as the road to serfdom. I had observed it before i read it. My father and i would normally walk together and enjoy the beauty of the mississippi river. Every so often, which kind of frightens you as the young boy, my father turned to me, really and in a very solemn way, to try to explain what his experiences had taught him. The single statement that summarizes his lesson is one that returned to me when i was rereading hayek. He turned to me and simply said, grant, someday someone will offer you security in exchange for your freedom. You should never take it because he lined up without either one of them. And in broad outlines, that was hayeks view. At the end of the day, what hayek warned about is just as relevant today as it was in minneapolis. Freedom is individual. It cannot be dissected neatly between the political and economic realms, and for that reason hayek warned that the lack of Economic Freedom was a death sentence for a free society. Hayek underscored, quoting the words of hilaire belloc, that the erosion of Economic Freedom with the erosion of freedom itself. As hayek put it, the freedom to own a private property is the most essential freedom. Only the means of production is divided among people acting independently that no one has power over us. We as individuals can decide what to do for ourselves. Hayek understood, moreover, that the freedom of individuals to shape their own lives is closely associated with the growth of commerce. That, mind you, offers a stronger explanation of the rationale for free trade in adam smiths famous discussion of the division of labor in a pin factory, or david ricardos discourse on comparative advantage using portuguese wine. It is about the free part, not about the trade part. At the end of the day it is about the right of the individual to choose, free of coercion by the government or by another person in our society, that indicates the idea behind freetrade. Hayek recognize that that erosion of freedom what interests the individual farmer or worker, but the basic individual that we had inherited from russo, pericles, the supreme tragedy as hayek thought was that it was largely people of goodwill, then you were admired and held up as models in democratic countries, who prepared the way if they did not actually create the forces that ultimately destroyed that inheritance. Indeed, an apt subtitle for hayeks work would be that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Those who advocate for a limited Economic Freedoms do so as an appeal for the common good. This includes those who advocate for raising the minimum wage despite the fact that it acts as a tax unemployment itself. The result of raising the federal minimum wage is a pretty good testament. The obvious example of that, but the most obvious example of that is the affordable which compels every american to buy Health Insurance regardless of their need for it, that acts as a compulsion to justify it be desired to make Health Insurance affordable for every american. It ignores the way it paves the way for the reduction of other freedoms. Obamas willingness to ignore the rules, it is symptomatically the broader justification by which the ends justify the means, regardless of what that means in terms of respect to the law and the constitutional limits on executive power for the erosion of individual freedom. The fact is that the Affordable Care act was originally supported by researchers here at the Heritage Foundation simply underscores the problem. It is confronting the political exigency at any moment. It is easy to forget that liberty is the ultimate and we seek, not merely an instrumentality that can be casually sacrificed on a series of incursion that is outweighed by the common good. Hayek understood this because he knew that the principal that the end justifies the need it means is that considered either amoral or amoral. There is literally nothing which consisted collectivists must not be permitted to do is observe the good of the whole. So much like liberal socialism, hayek put that they are guided in their endeavors by the power they possess and by transferring that power to society or to government they are therefore extinguishing power and the exercise of power which at times disenfranchises people. But what that implies is that the tyranny of the collective good is defined by individuals who claim to record represents the interests of the politically disenfranchised. It is essential to understand hayeks time. As a young man in austria he witnessed hagel rejecting the interests of an individual in favor of the interests of the state. We tend to see german history through the lens of world war ii. What hayek sought to remind us of was that the evolution of german thought predated and prefigured both the embrace of socialism in germany in the late 19th century and the later emergence of nottingham. As hayek pointed out emergence of nazism. The theory of the collective good could not be realized without compulsion. The key to the practical input a limitation of that example was the promise of security. German society recoiled from chaos in the aftermath of the armistice that ended world war i. The promise of security became powerfully seductive. Freedom from choice rather than freedom of choice. As hayek pointed out, far from increasing the chances of freedom and promise of security became the greatest threat to it, which explained why again, my fathers words continued to echo in my mind. In turning to this years report i dont intend to discuss any insights there, which i of the panelists will do, but i want to focus on one right up front. The report says that in 2010 the United States fell from the highest category of economically free countries and has been stuck in the ranks of the mostly free, second tier Economic Freedom category ever since. That, to my mind, represents the key issue of the 2016 president ial campaign. At the end of the day we have to determine to ourselves if we are willing to vindicate the idea of Economic Freedom because it is indivisible of the idea of freedom as a whole, and whether well pursue that not only for ourselves and make it eight key principle of our Foreign Policy, and organizing policy of what we do. Frankly, even in the reagan years, it was not fully integrated as a part of the agenda that we need to pursue. The reason we need to do this is very much not only in our own interest but in the broader idea and acceptance of what it needs means to be an individual and to be free. Thank you very much. [applause] thank you, grant. Thank you, kim. As kim noted, our index of Economic Freedom over the last 21 years has shown that we lead the world in Economic Freedom and growth. Greater Economic Freedom correlates with more freedom per capita in more countries around the world. Worldwide increases in Economic Freedom this year have been driven by improvements in trade freedom, monitoring freedom, and freedom from corruption. Regrettably in the past year average scores for most other Economic Freedoms including business freedom, copyright, they were freedom, and financial freedom, have fallen. More troubling in 2015 where the losses of Economic Freedoms due to increases in the size of government, higher Government Spending caused this deterioration. Our global agenda that is based on these index of Economic Freedom scores and they are calculated using four pillar areas. Region of in every the world. For example, while International Trade plays an increasingly significant role in the economies of the United States and other countries, unfortunately negotiations for further trade have grounded to a halt. The global agenda notes some potential bright spot for global trade, the ongoing effort to negotiate a transpacific partnership, or a 21st century trade agreement that could be beneficial to each country willing to make policy changes that would include reducing tariff and nontariff terriers, improving protection of intellectual property, improving International Investment rights, dismantling agriculture and many other government subsidies, and limiting the support of state owned enterprises. As documented in the 2015 index, protectionist measures, industry specific subsidies, are essentially protectionist enforcement actions, such as antidumping regulatory measures reduce efficiency and competitiveness and diminish the prosperity of all nations. All countries should resist these policies and the United States should lead this resistance. Labor freedom and business freedom scores are higher in countries with laws, regulations, and policies that give employers f