Charlie Munger: I could answer those very quickly.
[Laughter]
I think it's perfectly asinine to even pause to think about them. You know, it's one thing to think that gold has some marvelous store of value because man has no way of inventing more gold or getting it very easily, so it has the advantage of rarity.
Believe me, man is capable of somehow creating more Bitcoin. They tell you they're not going to do it, but they mean they're not gonna do it unless they want to. That's they mean when they say they're not going to do it. They say there are rules, and they can't do it - don't believe them.
When there's enough incentive, bad things will happen. It's bad people, crazy bubble, bad idea luring people into the concept of easy wealth without much insight or work. That's the last thing on earth you should think about, because if it worked it would be bad for you cause you'd try to do it again.
[Laughter]
It's totally insane. And by the way, I've just laid out a wonderful life lesson for you. Give a whole lot of things a wide berth, they don't exist, you know crooks, crazies, egomaniacs, people full of resentment, people full of self-pity, people who feel like victims - there's a whole lot of things that aren't gonna work for you. Figure out what they are, and avoid them like the plague. And one of them is Bitcoin.
[Laughter]
And the worst thing would happen if you won because then you do it again! It's total insanity, and it's so easy to simplify life from just all these things there beneath you; I don't even want to know people who are promoting Bitcoin. They are not my kind of people.
Scott DeRue: So Charlie, what I hear you saying is you're not going to be investing in Bitcoin, is that fair?
Charlie Munger: I think that’s fair.
Scott DeRue: So let me move to a similarly maybe controversial topic, if you read the news recently, but there's a lot of tax policy conversation going on, both here in California and nationally as well. What’s your thought on where this ends up in terms of the tax policy?
Charlie Munger: I think we will get a tax bill, I think they will squeak it through, and they'll make whatever adjustments they have to get the last few votes.
I don't think it's a bit crazy to give an $2,000 a year to all those people who make $70,000 a year and have a lot of children. That strikes me as good politics and probably good policy.
I also do not think it is crazy to reduce the corporate income tax on the C corporation, and if you look at the world, a lot of the places that have worked best, including Singapore and so forth, have that policy. It may even have good macroeconomic consequences.
A lot of the people who are screaming about it and are so sure it won't work - they may not be right. It may actually work pretty well. It causes the capital values of the companies to climb up and there's a wealth effect from the increased market value of all the companies. Everybody recognizes there's an effect, but people some people say it's small, and some people say it's going to be large, and I'll tell you what they all have in common: none of them know.
It is not totally inconceivable whether it'll work well, and with so much of the world doing well with similar tax policy. The Democrats go berserk on this subject but I think they're wrong, and it may actually help them. So, I'm not sure it'll work - it may not - but it's not totally crazy. www.canadianvalueinvestors.com
Scott DeRue: Well it reminds me of a piece of advice that they you've offered and given to me which is, people often have a point of view and the danger in and having that point of view is you start to assume with certainty that you're right.
Charlie Munger: Absolutely! Totally Crazy.
Scott DeRue: And I think what your point of view is you need to have a point of view...
Charlie Munger: Just a minute, here's a very important subject I've thinking about all my life. You asked for my opinion. I don't really know how well it's gonna work. I don't think anybody else does either. I think it'll work to some extent, but how much, I don't know.
Now, is it unfair? Well corporations are, by and large, owned by a bunch of charitable endowments and by a bunch of pension plans. The whole world is going into a world where they're trying to have the business interests of the company support their huge pension obligations which are getting bigger all the time.
China is trying to do exactly what the Republicans are. China wants to have the main businesses in China owned more by the pension plans and the stocks to do well. I don't think China's crazy to have that at all, and I don't think Republicans are crazy either. It could work pretty well. It's not just some evil thing that people are cooking up. It's a disagreement between people, and both sides who have violent hatreds and contempt for the other side - they're wrong.
It's a disagreement on policy that ought to be civilized. When I see Congress on my television set, and the degree of hatred they have - I mean really serious and way more than as usual - it's evil to hate that much. It's a mistake to hate. It's always been true that anger comes in reason leaves; it's a truism. So, do you want to adopt a political point of view where you're angry all the time? If you do, welcome to the house of misery and pretty low worldly achievement to boot. So if that's what you want, just behave like those people you see on television.
Scott DeRue: The other thing that's true going back to any earlier comments is the difference between a careerist mindset and a shareholder mindset. In politics we have the emergence of a careerist mindset that is shaping how people behave because they're trying to survive.
Charlie Munger: Not only that, they have a groupthink just as the Moonies go crazy because they hang around together, so do our politicians. Do you want to go crazy? Is that what your ambition is in life? Just make yourself a violently-believing politician on either side, and you'll turn your brain into cabbage. You got one brain - why would you want to turn in a cabbage?
Scott DeRue: So, Charlie, I've got a question here what's the new amazing technology that you're most excited about?
Charlie Munger: Well, I tend not to get very excited about things. I think that technology changes the world - and that reminds me the other thing.
If I ask you what was the biggest the worst single mistake in the work of Adam Smith: the biggest mistake in the work of Adam Smith was he was totally right about markets and so on and the advantages of trade division of labor and so forth. What he missed was how much the steady advance of technology would advance wealth and standards of living. He in the 1700s, was living not too much differently than the way they lived in the Roman Empire and he just missed it. But - and there in fact had been huge improvements in technology - he just missed. He just wasn't very technically minded and it was really stupid. Now I ask you a harder question: what was the worst mistake David Ricardo made?
I'll tell you the answer, David Ricardo got the first-order consequences of trade perfectly right, and it was not an obvious insight and it was a great achievement.
But he didn't think about the second-order consequences. He wasn't mathematical enough to see, and he wasn't mathematical to think what would happen in one country had way higher living standards than another. Like Adam Smith, he missed the main issue. In a place like the United States, if you have an advanced nation and some other nation which is numerous but the people if anything are better on average than yours in terms of their innate quality - which I think is roughly true of China - and they're in poverty, living in caves, and they're caught in a Malthusian trap and you got an advanced economy and you suddenly go into free trade...what is going to happen is Ricardo proved it - both sides are going to live better - but the people here that are assimilating all great economies of the world are going to go up way away faster.
So you go up 2% a year and they go up 12%, and pretty soon they're the other dominant nation in the world and you aren't. Well are you really better off? Well the answer is no. Ricardo never figured out any of that stuff, so I'm telling you this so you can fix your inadequate knowledge of Ricardo.
One of the interesting problems of that is you can't understand Ricardo properly without thinking about the United States vis-a-vis free trade with China, without thinking about the tragedy of the Commons.
If we had the only nation in the world, except for China, we could say won't trade with them we'll just leave them in their damned agricultural poverty and we'll just...and we could probably have done that. Well the whole rest of the world will trade with them, and they're gonna rise anyway.
So, we don't have any power to hold back the rise of China by not trading with him. So we had to do what we did and once you do that now they're going to be a greater power than we are. The two of us are gonna be big enough so we can accomplish pretty much anything we both want to do, so we have to be friendly with China.
So, you can imagine how I like Donald Trump complaining about these Chinese. It's really stupid. It's a compulsory friendship. You'd be out of your mind to do anything else. Why wouldn't you want to have an intimate, friendly relationship with the biggest other power in the whole damn world?
Particularly when they got a bunch of atom bombs. It's just nutty. We have no alternative but to do this. And when that happens you're gonna get a certain amount of misery, with the people who are competing with the Chinese as a rise from poverty with trade and so forth. That was inevitable. It's not the fault of evil Republicans who don't love the poor - that is just total balderdash. It just happened, and we didn't have all these choices.
Scott DeRue: So Charlie, in wrapping up we've got I don't know roughly 250-300 people in the room tonight and many of them looking at their futures, their careers with many decades ahead of them.
Charlie Munger: I wish I had many decades. I'd trade some large numbers if I could just buy some life expectancy.
Scott DeRue: As you look back on your life experience, what's the most important piece of advice that you would offer everyone in the room tonight as they look forward and into their futures?
Charlie Munger: Well there are a few obvious ones. They're all ancient. Marriage is the most important decision you have - not your business career. It'll do more for you good or bad than anything else. Ben Franklin had the best advice ever given on marriage: keep your eyes wide open before marriage, and half shut thereafter.
[Laughter]
It's amazing how if you just get up every morning and keep plugging, and have some discipline, and keep learning, it's incredible how it works out okay. I don't think it's wise to have an ambition to be President of the United States or a billionaire or something like that, because the odds are too much against you. Much better to aim low. I did not intend to get rich, I wanted to get independent. I just overshot.
[Laughter]
And by the way, while you're clapping, some of the overshooting was accidental. You can be very deserving and very intelligent, very disciplined...but there's also a factor of luck that comes into this thing.
The people will get the outcomes that seem extraordinary are the people who have discipline and intelligence and good virtue, plus a hell of a lot of luck. Why wouldn't the world work like that? So you shouldn't give credit for the unusual.
A friend of mine said about a colleague of his in his fraternity: he says old George was a duck sitting on a pond and they raised the level of a pond. There are a lot of people would just walk into the right place and rise and then and there are a lot of very eminent people who have many advantages, and they've got one little flaw or one bit of bad luck, and they 're mired in misery all their lives. But, that makes it interesting to have all this variation.
Scott DeRue: Well, Charlie on behalf of everyone here thank you. Your wisdom I often say as an educational institution we not only can provide people with knowledge but the most important thing we can do is give them wisdom and judgment and your comments I know for me and I expect for everyone in this room tonight have added to our wisdom and our judgment and also inspiring at the same time thank you very much.