Ed

free markets and commerce and letting economics and markets lead how we structure our, at least the commercial part of our lives, we kind of want markets to punish all bad ideas.

Right.

We want it to be a kind of final court of justice for the world.

And I'm afraid that that is not true.

You know, what do stocks do?

They discount future cash flows of corporations.

What do bonds do?

You know, they are a bet on the solvency of a nation, you know, and that could connect to geopolitics a little more closely.

But you can have an empire that's plenty solvent.

There's been a lot of them in history where you'd want to own their bonds.

So we can't turn to markets to solve these kind of political and moral dilemmas for us.

But so that's the thought number one.

The contradictory thought is this, where we see markets flourish,

in history where, where markets are places where people can make good money over a long time and retire and be happy and compound wealth and all that.

Those almost one-to-one turn out to be places that have rule of law.

You can't over time, make money in the Russian stock market.

You haven't, you haven't consistently made money over time in the Chinese stock market.

And importantly, in the case of China, you haven't made good money there, despite the fact that the economy has grown leaps and bounds, right?

So investors didn't grow with the economy in China, a place where rule of law is an open question.

So if you think we're heading in a direction where the rule of law doesn't apply,