have rarely been remarkable in maintaining themselves as a bastion of principle and not yet having been corrupted by the atmosphere was a breeze everyday then i got in terms of the building has a one great virtue but a gradual farther away from the most correct corrupting aspects of that atmosphere there's a beautiful buildings and it's a real tribute to what ed crane and his associates of when they withdrew it kato so i'm very pleased to be here on this memorable occasion Athens fortunately also it's only really six thirty nine my time now so i don't have to worry that as well for you people i have sometimes been no as uh... associated with the aphorism there's no such thing as a free lunch which i did not invent and i wish there were more attention paid to one that i did invent
and that i think is particularly appropriate in this city and that's that nobody's been somebody else's money as carefully as he spends his own but also jeffers and i have troops one of our favorite family pursuits as we've driven from one place to the other done something else you have to have somebody keep me something to keep you occupied with is to try it find the opposite of affluence
it's not it's not hard for most of them for example consider history never repeat itself and then there's nothing new under the sun which after you one of the way or looked before you late but he'll as it takes is lost so every aphorisms are almost every aphorism has its opposite and that includes free lunch than the opposite is clear said no such thing as a free lunch the best things in life are afraid
now the best things in life are free that aphorism was unveiled was invented by a popular song writer in the middle twenties then the example he gave was a lot love can come to anyone and the best things in life are free and i'm not sure these days it even most people would regard lovers of free goes
but the reason i bring that up is because in the real world in the world of reality in the economic world
there is a free lunch there has been a free lunch an extraordinary free lunch and that free lunch has been free markets and private property if you consider qua explains why is it that on one-sided level arbitrary line there was east germany before communism fell on the other side there was western
one explain why west Germany has set a different level than Asian there was a free lunch there was a fact that they had a system of largely private market largely free market same thing goes for hong kong in mainland china the same thing goes for the development of united states and great britain
and of all western countries none of us grown and prospered were very few of us there maybe a few examples but very few of us in uh... these episodes of of growth and prosperity have derived from some delivered government messing it dancing to a lot of things improve but they've been a free lunch provided by a set of human institutions which are invisible which as friedrich hayek would always say or a product of human creation but not of human planning on it jilin intention and now the reason i bring this up now is because it seems to me win the united states at the moment have a bit have available to us if we will take it about as close to a single free lunch as you can have safaris at
after the fall of communism everybody in the world agreed socialism was a failure everybody in the world more or less agreed to capitalism was a success and every capitalist country in the world apparently deduce from that but what the west needed was more socialism doesn't matter whether you're talking about the united states are you talking about Germany we're talking about bread or any other many another country for japan for them but less that's obviously absurd then let's look right now the opportunity to really have to his closest thing to a free lunch you'd inconceivable president clinton has said as part of his program that what we need is widespread sacrifice then concentrated benefits he doesn't stress as much the fact that there would be concentrated benefits as he does that week absolutely have to have higher taxes and and sacrifice in order to get this so-called deficit under control the fact is that we need exactly the opposite what we need and what we can have and what is the nearest thing to a free lunch is widespread benefits and concentrated sniper fire