I don’t know if you realize that 33,000 pages of regulations are added in Poland every year. We pay officials so that they can liquidate 8%of all Polish companies in a year and a half. Isn’t it a case of the tail wagging the dog? Has someone completely confused the order of things there? Nobody has ever counted how many regulations are in force in Poland. It can be assumed that there are around 13 million of them. Good morning, everyone . A package with shoes that could cost you over 20,000 PLN in fines. Unclear regulations, convoluted, and completely ambiguous interpretations. Today, I will be able to talk about the structure of law, about its interpretation, about the application of law, and about what you, what each of us, can do to simply navigate better through this thicket, this jungle. I am talking about a thicket of regulations, paragraphs, rules, and other legal meanders. Specifically, my guest today is a Doctor of Law from Jagiellonian University, a professor at the Nicolaus Copernicus Superior School, and founder of the WIGEN law firm, the largest law firm serving the transport sector in Poland. Ladies and gentlemen, Professor Mariusz Miąsko. Good morning, Professor. Good morning to you. Hello to everyone. Thank you very much for accepting the invitation and for the opportunity to talk about the law. It is a great honor and pleasure for me to talk about the law. It is my great passion. Well, for me as well, because we operate in these aspects. We simply move around. The law affects us, you could say, every day, and sometimes even at night. And a first question to start with. Each of us feels the multitude of this law and the even greater multitude of legal interpretations. What would you honestly tell a person from abroad who is not familiar with the application and construction of law in Poland? What does it look like in Poland today, as of August 2026? What does the entire legal structure look like today, so that someone could understand whether it is worth investing in Poland, whether it is worth living here, so that they could get oriented. What would I tell you? Well, first I would frame the answer within certain mathematical boundaries. I don’t know if you realize that 33,000 pages of regulations are added in Poland every year, on average 33,000 . Well, the exception was the year before last, when about 37,000 pages were added. Not 37,000 regulations, but pages of regulations. If we add EU regulations to this, we can assume that there are about 15,000 that apply to the Polish state. So that is, one could say, around 50,000 pages of new regulations annually, of which a huge part, if not the majority, are regulations addressed to entrepreneurs. Well, that in itself shows the scale of the growth in legal substance that entrepreneurs must familiarize themselves with every year. I mean, please note how much time must be taken away from business operations—from the time we allocate to our core business—in order to get acquainted with current regulations, or else fail to do so and face the consequences of not being familiar with them. ask. We must ask ourselves the question: is a human, an average human, or even an extraordinary human, even a lawyer, even a law professor, capable of familiarizing themselves with such a gigantic number of regulations? Well, the answer is obvious. There is no such human; there is no such processing capacity in the human brain. Even Einstein wouldn't have been able to absorb such a gigantic amount of substance every year. Well, that is an indirect answer to the question of what kind of reality we live in. Is this a reality that fosters entrepreneurship, or one that stifles and kills entrepreneurship? The answer is obvious . There can be no other truth here. But now, how many regulations do we have? No one has ever counted how many regulations are currently in force in Poland. It can be assumed that there are around 13 million of them, perhaps a little more. But if we look at the regulation itself, it is just a drafting unit. Since roughly the 1960s, thanks to prominent Polish scholars of legal theory and doctrine, we have known that a regulation is merely a drafting unit from which legal norms are created. These legal norms are created based on specific principles called directives. We will come back to this in a moment. And now, these regulations create norms. No one knows how many norms those 13 million regulations create. Because sometimes one regulation is the source of several norms, and it could be a dozen or so, it could even be several dozen in some extreme cases, and sometimes several regulations create one norm, and then these norms create something that I call supernorms. Legal theory and the doctrine of legal theory don't call them that, but such combined norms I call supernorms. No one knows. There is no such person who would be able to determine how many of these legal norms there are. We will explain in a moment why there is no mechanism, no objective mechanism, to count the number of these legal norms. That in itself must already raise concern. Because if we lawyers—at the university level— know that it is impossible to count the number of legal norms based on, let's say, 13 million regulations, and yet no one knows how many there are, then that also tells us what kind of reality we are functioning in. And then let us go even further. I mean, those legal standards, even if we knew how many there are, we would still have to determine whether they are coherent— that's our term for it—in other words , whether they are consistent in scope, or if they overlap or create gaps, spaces between them, and practically no one studies this systemically. No one systemically studies this coherence within individual branches of law. As it happens, I have been researching the coherence of these regulations and legal standards in several branches of law, including labor law, for 16 years, and I find that, at the level of my scientific research, these regulations are extremely divergent in their scope. So these norms are incoherent; in other words, they don't talk to each other, as if they are speaking different languages. This means that the average Joe, in the best sense of the word, has no way of determining in a deterministic way—we call it deterministic—that is, a certain, binary way. What the result will be after reading the information, the result of the scope of information after reading a given provision? Well, someone might say: "But if we work hard enough"—and I mentioned a few sentences ago that there are special tools, instruments, so-called first-and second-degree directives used to transform the content of provisions into scopes of norms— "well, if we try hard enough, and we have an enumerative, that is, a full, exhaustive catalog of these directives, then sooner or later, and after putting in some effort, we can determine the scope of meaning of a given provision." That’s what it would seem. And here is what might be shocking: in Poland, but also in the European Union, in EU countries, and interestingly, in most countries around the world, a single, enumerative, certain catalog of first- and second-degree directives explaining how to transform the content of provisions into the scope of a norm has not been developed. What is that? Ladies and gentlemen, what are these first-and second-degree directives? They are rules just like in mathematics . You might remember from roughly the eighth grade of primary school a principle regarding equations with parentheses. If we have an equation with parentheses, the rule says that we must first perform the mathematical operation inside the parentheses, and only then outside, because if we did it the other way around, the result would be something, but it would be wrong, which can be empirically proven. And these are exactly those types of principles. And now the question is, how many are there? A part of the legal , scientific, judicial, doctrinal, prosecutorial, attorney, and legal advisor community accepts it. It is accepted that there are 32 of them. Others claim that this value is different. Some claim there are more, others claim there are fewer. Aha, so if we lack consistency, if we lack certainty at the level of the scientific and legal community—and I'm not even talking about the average recipient of the law, but at the level of, let's say, the legal elite in the best sense of the word—we do not have absolute certainty about how many first -and second-degree directives there are . Well, we can already see that the result cannot be deterministic, because if we apply a larger or smaller number of directives regarding the need to decode a given provision, then we will most likely get a different result. I mean, there are simple, of course there are very simple sentence structures like "spot run," where we can basically , without using all the first-or second-degree directives, still be able to more or less determine the semantic scope of that sentence. But if we have more complex legal constructions, such legal sentence structures at the level of provisions, we usually need to use them all. And the question is, how many is "all"? How many are there in total? It cannot be that after hundreds, or basically thousands, of years of legal development—if we look at human history in general or even just the last 100 years of the development of Polish legal science—it cannot be that we have no absolute certainty how many first-and second-degree directives there are, because they are the building blocks for transforming the content of provisions into the scope of a norm. Now the second issue, where did they come from in the first place? One would have to ask the question: these first-and second-degree directives, this basic transformation instrument, right? Well, ladies and gentlemen, if anyone thinks they were created at universities, they are mistaken. Well, they weren't created at universities; they weren't—partly they were. Some were, of course, but a significant part is the result of jurisprudence, for example, of the Supreme Court, the Supreme Administrative Court, proposals from individual representatives of legal doctrine, et cetera, et cetera. But it was never the case that a strictly defined body gathered and said : "Listen, we accept only these 32 and none more, nor any fewer, in order to even have a chance to obtain a repeatable, that is, deterministic result." Repeatable. Repeatable, because we must answer ourselves— perhaps at the very beginning we should have asked ourselves the question: what is law? Law is order, because the only reason why we introduce this artificial construct into the world system, into the ontology of the world, is order, the need to obtain order, and not disorder. So we introduce law not to have chaos, or even less chaos, but to introduce order. This means we must have a fixed set of variables in the form of first and second-degree directives, which we all accept in order to achieve order—that is, to achieve a repeatable result, right? Okay. So that is the first very serious problem. A second, even more serious problem arises from the fact that these first and second-degree directives have no formal status. This is a collection of postulates at the level of legal theory, but there is no act—for instance, there is no fundamental law —stating that we decode provisions, that is, decode the informational scope of provisions, i.e., legal norms from provisions, using (and here, for example, these 32, 34, or however many there are supposed to be) principles. There is no such provision. So we see the second fundamental problem, meaning this is just a set of wishes and expectations. Of some powerful academic body of work. Not to offend anyone here —not "some" in the sense of belittling, I hold it in the highest regard—but the body of work exists, yet we haven't processed it, we haven't taken the step forward to transform these rules and give them formal status . It is simply a collection of rules, just rules. And that is the second problem, but there is a third, even greater problem. Even if we were to agree for a moment that there are only 32 rules or X, if it were a fixed value , and even if we began legislative work tomorrow and say, in three months, gave these rules formal status, these rules still lack a defined hierarchy among themselves. We call this a paradigm, meaning no paradigm has been defined. Ladies and gentlemen, how important, how fundamental is a paradigm? Anyone who has ever taken a trip, uh, by plane and wanted to arrive at a specific place in the world understands this. When a pilot takes off or lands, they have a checklist, and it's not as if a pilot can just extend flaps, reduce speed to a certain value, or deploy landing gear in any order they deem appropriate—it doesn't happen like that. There is a strictly defined list, a set, that determines the sequence of this set of actions. The sequence of this set of actions is the paradigm. Why? Because it has been observed that only repeatable behavior within a strictly defined paradigm yields a repeatable result in the form of a safe landing. So how is it that when we are landing a plane carrying 200 people, we follow a paradigm, and pilots are absolutely held accountable for it and trained to achieve a repeatable result in the form of a safe landing? And yet, when we have 13 million regulations in just one country, we don't know how or in what order to apply these rules. Let's assume these 32 rules—in what order should we apply them? Because if we apply them in a different order, right, the first and second-degree directives, the result will be different every time. Well, because it will be like the rules on a chessboard, right? The number of possible solutions . Therefore, to answer honestly what would seem like a fundamental question that you asked—that is, how should entrepreneurs and citizens feel in this country, can they feel safe, can they safely run a business? Well, you have to understand what law is and you have to understand those very foundations that are missing. Those foundations don't exist, they aren't there. I don't want to offend anyone from the academic community, legal theory, philosophy of law, but especially legal theory. No, no one in jurisprudence, I don't want to offend anyone. I have great respect for Polish scholars; Polish legal theory is absolutely world-class. Basically, most of the most important discoveries in the last 100 years regarding the relationship between a provision and the scope of a norm were made by Poles, and over the last 100 years, key trends in this area have essentially developed here. Of course, there was Leibniz earlier and so on and so forth. Wittgenstein, who contributed a huge part to the body of work, but it was the Poles, so I don't want to offend anyone here, so that you understand correctly, because surely some lawyers will watch a podcast on such a topic, so I don't want to offend anyone. On the contrary, what we are doing is civilizational, as Professor Krótkiewicz says, because we are building this new legal system—the world's first deterministic legal system and semantic representation of law—for over 16 years together with Professor Krótkiewicz's team from the Wrocław University of Science and Technology. But more scientists are joining, it's a team of dozens of people, both Polish and international currently. We are trying to create the world's first deterministic system, that is, repeatable, so that in strictly defined contexts, we get repeatable results. Because imagine you are an entrepreneur. You want to invest , for example, 40 million zlotys in building a factory, you read a regulation, and you get result X, and the same—you start the investment, you put in the first 10 million zlotys and reach some permitting phase, and an official from the environmental agency, or any other municipal office comes, and says they read the same regulation, and they got result Y or anything other than X, and we get upset. And there is a very common saying that where there are two lawyers, there are three opinions. I would say, why only three? There could be an infinite number of opinions, because if we don't have a paradigm, if we don't first have a defined catalog of directives for transforming a provision into the scope of a norm, and then we don't have a paradigm, there could be an infinite number, right, of these opinions. And on top of that, there are problems of a logical nature, because one must also be aware that there is such a layer as well. In general, we are building this system in over 30 layers. There are 30 such layers that need to be fixed and systematized at a purely engineering level, because our work, which this is, is de facto engineering work. And not even just de facto, it is, in some areas, quite literally engineering. There are also errors in logical operators. For example, imagine, I made a very preliminary comparison of key branches of law like civil law and criminal law, and it turns out there are functional errors involving "and" and "or," but not just those, because there are many more logical operators, but I am simplifying it. Imagine that some have been there for 10, 15, 20 years, and the community is perfectly aware of them, yet no one is fixing them. No one is fixing them. It is hard to understand why. Probably because no one has approached the issue from a purely engineering perspective, and these multiple interpretations simply do not bother lawyers. And now, imagine you are an entrepreneur, or you are the Prime Minister and want to create ideal conditions for the development of entrepreneurship in Poland, and you say : "I invite investors to Poland," or you say you know that 90%of all state budget revenues come from entrepreneurs . Therefore, I want to have not 3 million entrepreneurs or 3.2 million, but I would like to have 6.4 million, because if I had 6.4 million Polish entrepreneurs, 100%of the Polish budget would be covered by the work of Polish entrepreneurs. Because Polish budget revenues are some 600-plus billion. The budget deficit is some 300 billion. Therefore, if I had twice as many even small entrepreneurs, then 100%of the budget would be covered, I wouldn't have to take out a loan, because 100%of that budget would be generated by Polish entrepreneurs. So you say: "I am the Prime Minister, I want to create for you. Invest in Poland, develop here , I am creating friendly conditions for you." So where should the Prime Minister start? Well, most prime ministers are historians—taking nothing away from historians or history , as I myself like history very much and value historians—but they don't understand the foundation, that the foundation of the state is this legal soup. However inelegant it may sound, we live in such a legal soup. In everything. This microphone was created within strict legal conditions. This podcast is being broadcast under strictly defined legal conditions. Our clothes, the desk, everything was created. There is no such element. We are even breathing under strictly defined legal conditions. Therefore, we are all living in this legal soup. And now the Prime Minister needs, more than anything, order at the level of legal regulations, so that entrepreneurs feel that the money, time, and life they invested based on the laws they read produce a deterministic result, so there isn't a situation where they get two, three, five, or ten different outcomes. One result: they read a regulation today in a specific context, and no official or court in the world will change that scope. That means the investment is secure. You have seen, or surely heard in the media, Mr. Florek from the fantastic Polish global company, Fakro, had to move out of Poland and build one of his leading production plants in the United States because he could not reach an understanding for months, or even years , with officials who interpreted the same laws in completely different ways. It ended with taxes mostly going to the United States instead of the Republic of Poland. That is exactly what I am talking about. That is why fixing the law, fixing the law is the foundation. That is why I called it a civilizational project. I mean, it wasn't even me who named it, as Professor Krótkiewicz said that what we are working on is a civilizational project, not even just fundamental for the state or the world, but truly civilizational. I will get to that repair in a moment. How is this done, and is it perhaps a utopia, because with the massive scale of reforms mentioned here, it seems like work that would take at least decades. But we will come back to that. However, I wanted to touch upon things that are very simple and poorly understood. If two lawyers disagree on the interpretation of a law, it does not necessarily mean that either one of them is right. They could both be wrong . Both of them. Over 30,000 pages of regulations are created annually. What does that mean? Because on one hand, we have a situation where we cannot keep up where new regulations should actually appear, because technology is changing and operational solutions are shifting. Through various kinds of inventions, I don't know, AI has appeared, we are trying to tame it somehow, although it might limit us more than do anything good, and that is it. I understand that new legal issues are necessary here. However, well, if that were the case, we would be up to date with the law, and we are not. Does this point to the total incompetence of the people creating these legal provisions? Well, I understand that if there are so many pages year after year , it means we are improving our work. But you can't run a company that way, having to introduce so many amendments every single year. The company would be paralyzed. A state is, after all, a form of a company. And here is another thought that comes to mind. I understand that if laws are created poorly, then the errors in interpretation should be split at least half-and-half in favor of the taxpayer, the person meant to benefit from the law, or against them. Yet, in daily life, it seems that the overwhelming majority of interpretations are disadvantageous to the citizen. How do you, Professor, perceive these two aspects of lawmaking and their interpretation? De facto, that was five questions, but I will answer from the end. It is a very valid and wise suggestion that, in cases of interpretive doubt, the burden should not fall on the applicant. For example, an applicant seeking an administrative decision—I don't know, a construction or environmental one—and that is the case. And this may surprise you, but a few years ago, the previous government introduced a revolution in the Code of Administrative Procedure, introducing Article 7a, which states exactly this: if an official or judge has doubts about reading provisions, they cannot interpret them to the applicant's disadvantage. No, they are forbidden from interpreting it to the applicant's detriment. And do you know what has happened in the years since this provision has been in force? Almost nothing. Meaning officials and judges habitually violate this provision or ignore it by claiming that they have no interpretive doubts. They have no doubts. The interpretation is drastically different from that of other lawyers, judges, officials, or the applicant, yet they have no doubts. Therefore, they will not apply this provision. This is a direct circumvention of this provision. Hence, for instance, I have requested disciplinary proceedings several times in recent months against, for example, several judges of the Voivodeship Administrative Court who circumvent this provision in exactly this way. But not only against them, also against several local government appeal board officials and municipal officials, for whom I have filed notifications with the prosecutor's office. Because this is a failure to respect our rights. It is a grave violation, because it is a violation of our right to dignity. Because that is what it all really comes down to. So, if there is a regulation—because a regulation is a social contract which, as we have established, is the source of order— it cannot be that someone comes along and says that in their judicial or official majesty, they will be the one to interpret which regulations to apply , or use some loophole that allows them to bypass or ignore that regulation. It might be shocking to most of you that this very valid postulate, which you, Mr. Editor, have articulated, has actually been in force in the Polish state for several years, only it is not being applied in the vast, overwhelming majority of cases. We must honestly admit that there are very few judges and very few officials who truly abide by Articles 7 and 7a of the Code of Administrative Procedure, but that is an absolute margin; honor to those wonderful people, but unfortunately, it remains an absolute margin. In my lifetime, we have handled—our firm has conducted over 12,000 administrative proceedings. A gigantic amount. We are constantly carrying out more; this is one of the areas we specialize in. Consequently, we have an overview of how these courts and officials invoke this regulation. Well, exactly in such a way that they don't respect it, which means they don't respect us. Because what does it mean that they don't apply the regulations? It means they don't respect us as a society. Because we, the society, elected our deputies, senators, and the president, and we suggested to them as our representatives, that we, the society, would like to have such a regulation, and these deputies, senators, and the president, on our behalf, introduced it into the Polish legal order. But a huge portion of judges and a huge portion of officials do not comply with it, and that is why this is a deeper problem. It is not just that they don't apply it; they are actually violating our right to dignity . They are violating our right to dignity, because that is exactly why we introduced such a regulation as a society. We, the people—because judges and officials are, after all, just our employees. We hire them because it is we, the entrepreneurs and the wonderful employees of enterprises, who generate 90%of the entire budget; we are the ones who hire everyone else in the public sector. We respect them to ensure things go well, we hire and respect them as human beings, and we expect exactly the same in return. So, if we have introduced specific regulations into the Polish legal system, we expect that for the money— our money, because they are paid from our funds (no public sector employee has ever generated a single zloty, as their entire salary and the taxes on it originate from money that we, the entrepreneurs, had to earn and that had to go into the budget to be redistributed to any official, from whom the state did not take money from in the first place)—we have hired these wonderful people, we created these regulations, and now we expect them to comply with these rules exactly as we, the people, introduced them into the system we created. Law is a purely artificial system. It is an absolutely artificial construct. If those officials, and judges are officials, do not follow the rules we introduced into this system—we citizens, including us entrepreneurs—it means they do not respect us, it means they take away our right to dignity. The right to dignity is a fundamental right, because among first-generation human rights, the right to dignity is at the very top. Only later do we have the right to life , the right to liberty, etc., but the right to dignity is primary, because every human being is born with the right to dignity. Now, this right to dignity is so fundamental for us. It is so fundamental that officials often think: "Oh well, I’ll just interpret this provision differently, I won't issue that decision for him." And that reduces it to something very material, when in reality, it violates our right to dignity. Because we, reading the provision in this legal system, expect a resolution consistent with the agreement, consistent with the social contract as it stands today. If it were different, our expectations would also be different. And judges and officials probably don't realize this when they churn out this massive, gigantic scale of administrative decisions or rulings. Of course, not all of them, but a huge number are inconsistent with the content of the law. But here we arrive at where we started. What kind of consistency can we talk about when we live in a system of chaos, where— because I study, among other things, the entropy coefficient in a system of legal chaos—the legal system is a system of chaos. For now, we have these 33,000 new regulations and 13 million old ones. On top of that, we have no established catalog for the interpretation of law. We also lack a paradigm for the interpretation of law, so it is a system of chaos. And that entropy coefficient could be high. So, this is a coefficient that, when heard by someone with a scientific mind, immediately brings thermodynamics to mind, and quite rightly so, from physics. Exactly in the system. Exactly . I, I exactly, exactly. I drew this idea from there. There is, of course, an idea, one could say, not only the Boltzmann one, the thermodynamic one, but there is also the Shannon one, which refers to semantics, but there is a slightly different scope for understanding this entropy there. So I make more use of this Boltzmann one, paradoxically, the one concerning thermodynamics, because it has, contrary to appearances, very much—of course by analogy, of course by analogy , to be precise here—it has a lot in common in understanding chaos itself, the source of chaos. And unfortunately, we are closer to that coefficient of, I would say, one than to the zero coefficient. So this system of chaos is , one could say, almost unlimited. It is, there, almost, one could say, peaking towards one. Here some people who deal with cybernetics may have a different opinion on whether it is towards one or zero, because they approach it a bit differently, the measure is different, but generally, we understand what we mean: that this system is closer to complete chaos than to order. Why do we need this order? Legal order, so that economic order can function. Now, please imagine that we are building a bridge or a viaduct, or an airplane. There are just as many, from several hundred to several thousand, sometimes millions of parameters. For example, I once asked a question on Google: how many parts does a spacecraft consist of, right? They say over 2 million parts. And all these parts are ordered. There, the entropy coefficient is closer to zero, meaning there are very few variables that are unknown, that produce unknown results. And the coefficient of these deterministic results is very, very high. That is why the world functions, why statistically every other viaduct doesn't collapse and every other statistically airplane doesn't fall, but they actually fly. Critical cases happen, as we know, and this is fundamentally needed in our country. And now, if, in addition to this, judges and officials consciously omit certain regulations, such as Article 7a , which you rightly demanded should be there—and it is there, only even you, the editor, didn't notice it, because most Poles didn't notice it, because officials simply don't apply it, they omit it. So if they add yet another element, that is, the conscious elimination of regulations that favor the citizen—in theory they favor the citizen, and in theory only in the perception of officials and judges who attack the system and eliminate it— then they are adding another element, another variable, which causes even greater instability in the system. And in such a state, it is impossible to live. That is why we issue quite a lot of disciplinary motions against these judges and officials. We even happened to file disciplinary motions against three Supreme Court judges, and not because we dislike these people. After all, I don't know these people. To me, they aren't even names or surnames. I don't even look at what exactly they are called, because, well, what would that give me? It's not that I want to cause any trouble to any official or judge. That is not what I am about. What I mean is that we are desperately trying to restore, to increase the coefficient of repeatability and determinism of this system, meaning to decrease the probability that this system will collapse, as it is essentially on the verge of collapse. Actually, the process of collapse has certainly begun, but it's hard to say how long people will accept, at the level of their perception, a system of total chaos, that is, a state in which regulations are increasing dramatically . It is no longer possible, it makes no sense to read on all these portals that some regulation has changed, because you would have to spend all day not doing any work to read that this traffic rule changed, that one changed, that speed cameras will work differently now, that something else is different, or that you need something else in your car because it has to be different. I don't read it. I would have to spend the whole day exclusively reading about what has changed in one single area. And yet there are, as we have already established, millions of these areas, and as for the scope of standards, we don't even know how many. We don't even know how many. It could be tens of millions, or maybe even as many as 100 million. It is hard to say how many of these ranges of relations between norms there are. So, is it possible to live in such an overregulated system? Well, we are living. But do we feel happy? Well, no. Do we not have the feeling that we are game to be hunted? Well, I have such a feeling. I clearly feel that I am game to be hunted. I drive from Krakow to Warsaw, and there are these average speed cameras. You're driving along calmly, you set the cruise control, suddenly it's 110, for a moment nothing , then 90, and that 90 is kept for 1.5 km, after which it's back to 110. Why on earth did they suddenly introduce a 90 limit on the same stretch? Well, just to trap people. And so they can later talk about how much they care about safety. How can it be that year after year the total of fines that the Polish state has extorted from us—or rather, officials of the Polish state, because the state is us, but we pay the officials—has grown from 650 million to a billion 360 million, I think? How can it be that the value of fines has increased by 100%? Exactly like this, by fleecing us with such regulations, which human perception can no longer catch, is no longer able to register. Why did you ask the question, why are these regulations being introduced, and is it possible to function with them? Well, in the short term, it's possible. Is it possible to be happy? No, it's not possible. Can you build anything on this, in such an over-regulated state, can you build entrepreneurship? The answer is mathematical. Well, if 260,000 companies collapse within the last year and a half, and 110,000 collapse in a single quarter—to be perfectly precise, we are counting those that have folded, those that were suspended, or are in liquidation bankruptcy. Liquidation bankruptcies: 260,000 in a year and a half, and 110,000 in just one quarter. So let's ask ourselves the question, how many companies are there in Poland total? 3 million 200, 3 million 200, give or take, wait a minute, so are we saying that the Polish state has liquidated nearly 10%, 8%of all Polish companies in a year and a half? I mean, the Polish state has liquidated 8%of companies in a year and a half, which means it will take the Polish state just 11 years to liquidate 100%, and they won't have a problem with us anymore, knowing that we contribute 90% of all revenue. Someone might say that’s not true, that it's 90, because they'll say it's 80 if we count all the surcharges. Well, I’m adding everything. I’m adding the fractional part of the fines we pay. I count not only all the taxes added together, but also concessions, licenses, all the tributes that we entrepreneurs pay. I mean, we provide 90%of the entire budget, and the officials we pay—we, the entrepreneurs and our wonderful employees working in businesses—we pay the officials so that they can liquidate 8%of all Polish companies in a year and a half. Isn't it a case of the tail wagging the dog? Hasn't someone gotten their priorities completely mixed up there? These people just aren't aware. They have no knowledge, or only a rudimentary understanding of economics, rudimentary knowledge of the law, rudimentary knowledge of how the state functions, and rudimentary knowledge of where money comes from—and that for the Polish state to have more money—not from loans, not from borrowing, like 10 -year bonds which currently amount to nearly 300 billion zlotys annually—we must have strong businesses overall. And among those strong ones, there must be as many international firms as possible, exporting our services and products abroad. Part of the taxes will be paid there and return to Poland, because what are businesses, after all? What are enterprises? They are like pumps. Imagine a globe or a world map, and now imagine Poland—where are those funds supposed to come from? Well , for example, they could come from selling raw materials. But we are selling them. KGHM sells copper all over the world. We could launch a program to sell other resources. But it's blocked at various levels, isn't it? We aren't extracting the massive resources we possess, so there's basically nothing to talk about. Well, we could, of course, send...But, as you can see, the Polish Central Communication Port is dragging its feet . Everyone knows that if it were expanded, a stream of redistributed products from around the world would flow through Poland in Central Europe, which would naturally generate customs revenue. But we don't have that. So, for now, we entrepreneurs still provide 90%of the revenue for the Polish state. So, it's important that when we see Poland on the world map, we think about where else to get that money from? We would need to install some pumps, those kinds of...Install pumps like you drop into a well. Install pumps that draw water. Only they won't pump water, but money into Poland. What are these pumps ? They are large, global Polish enterprises. Large, medium, but global. They could even be small but global, because even we, as a law firm, only employ about 50 lawyers—we aren't a large firm, not even a medium one, really. And yet, we serve foreign companies, so we are a kind of micro-pump that pumps money into the Polish state, because our foreign clients pay money that enters the Polish system—in other words, we bring money in from the world. Now the point is to have as many of these enterprises as possible, as many global , large, medium, and such small and micro ones as we are, but they should all be pumps, and they should scatter as many of these pumps across the world as possible to pump that money in. That is exactly what the Germans do. That is why the Germans twice did not allow Porsche to go bankrupt. They preferred to secretly subsidize them illegally, in violation of European Union regulations, to subsidize Porsche. They said that a company like Porsche, just like SAP, can only fail once. In Sweden , it only fails once, but if they subsidize them, they will survive and then, for decades, they will again be that pump pulling money from all over the world into Germany. And now we must respect entrepreneurs, because we are —we all must respect ourselves as entrepreneurs—but officials must respect us too, because money in Poland and prosperity do not come from loans, since loans must be repaid, but from the work of entrepreneurs like us and our wonderful employees, where we set up these pumps and push this stream, these hundreds, thousands of pumps larger than the Polish state's own money. That is why we have now become the 21st largest economy. It is because we had the ability to pump a stream of money into Poland. We did it better and more effectively than other countries. Officials do not understand this, and that is why officials must bear— answering your question directly from the very beginning of this topic—must bear criminal responsibility and must bear financial responsibility, individual, individual, personal responsibility for acting contrary to the regulations, for ignoring Article 7a, which you, Mr. Editor, very rightly pointed out, for obviously interpreting regulations to the detriment of the applicant. They must bear it. I even prepared a petition to the government once, and I think over 3,200 entrepreneurs signed it. I sent it, and I will be advocating within the association of entrepreneurs and the council of entrepreneurs that we are forming, I will advocate for these regulations to come into force. Officials must have the feeling that they have to pay a financial penalty privately, from their own money, for actions that are absolutely*contra legem*, standing in opposition to the content and scope of the law. Judges must bear this responsibility just the same, and judges must also bear criminal responsibility for actions and for rulings*contra legem*. I will explain in a moment what*contra legem* is, so that we understand it well, just as officials must bear criminal responsibility. So what is*contra legem *?*Contra legem*is when a regulation says that this is a glass, and we all see, based on the information we have gathered throughout our lives and the entire ontology of the world, that it is a glass, that it is not a flower. And the official says: "No, that's a flower, you won't get a permit for a glass, because it's a flower and that's *argumentum a contrario*." Jurisprudence based on*argumentum a contrario*reasoning. Such jurisprudence based on*argumentum a contrario* reasoning is categorically prohibited. It’s not just because I say so. There are 14 Supreme Court rulings on this, two Constitutional Tribunal rulings, and 100%of legal scholars—the most prominent jurists of the last 100 years —have stated such reasoning is forbidden. Unless it is to the applicant's benefit. If it is neutral or beneficial—to the benefit of the applicant, the citizen—or if it is neutral for the citizen, then of course it can be*a contrario*, and it even should be if it's favorable. But it cannot be if it is to their detriment. So how is it that a massive amount of administrative decisions—and you have no idea how vast—and court rulings— administrative courts, not just provincial, but courts in general—are based on*argumentum a contrario* reasoning, which is the exact opposite of what the provision and its scope actually dictate? Because those officials don't respect us, they don't respect the system. Fundamentally, they don't even respect themselves. Because if someone comes along and so openly ignores a regulation—they are a lawyer, they are an official—well, it starts with them not respecting themselves, right? And then, as a consequence of that lack of self-respect, they don't respect us: us entrepreneurs, us citizens, us people, right? Us people, simply put, and they violate the right to dignity, which is the most fundamental issue. So you see, it runs very deep; you have to dig deep . There are no simple answers, in my opinion. I mean, I could be wrong, but in my opinion, you can't just heal the economy with a single element. That's why you see, we are creating, we have created—it is registered—I invite you to join this association, "We Entrepreneurs." www. myprzedsiebiorcy.org—the "org" is very important, like organization. I invite you to sign up: entrepreneurs, employees, officials, and judges alike. We don't divide, we unite; we respect everyone and expect respect in return. And that is why we founded it, to build three pillars: a strictly economic pillar where we say we must build enough enterprises based on the Laffer curve principle so that we cover 100%of budget expenditures, meaning that nearly 1 trillion zlotys, 970 billion, that we cover 100%ourselves. We will cover it ourselves. We don't need foreign banks to push another 150 billion in loans on us every year, which we have to pay for anyway. You pay, I pay, we all pay, all of us here, we don't need that. So what to do, based on the principle of the Laffer curve, to put it simply, to build 50% more entrepreneurs, and for them to be strong enough to act as pumps in the international market and pump money into Poland. That is the first pillar. The second pillar, without which nothing will happen, it is impossible. That is the repair of the law. Repair of the law. And that is why we are dedicating so much time in parallel to repairing the law, to creating a new legal system that will allow us, for the first time in history, to be free people, meaning to read a regulation and say: "Aha, this cannot be changed," it can only be interpreted in this specific context. And we are dedicating gigantic work to this in a very large team. For 16, for 16 years, we have been dedicating immense work to this. Then there is the third pillar. That is a social pillar. We have been divided very strongly until now. Entrepreneurs versus employees. This is a false division. After all, for us...employees , I am both an entrepreneur because I own five companies and an employee at the same time, and for many, many years I was also an employee. PR, this is a false division. After all, to us entrepreneurs, employees are closer than family, because we spend more time with our employees than with our family . Well, more, objectively I know that this is also unhealthy and it shouldn't be that way. It shouldn't be that we overwork ourselves, but we do spend more time. They are our closest people, there is no such division. If we do well, our wonderful, marvelous employees will do well, and officials will do well, and judges will do well, and everything will be fine, but the foundation must be us, we entrepreneurs . Until Poland discovers some astronomical resources of gold and diamonds or crude oil, which it would then, right, sell to the whole world on a gigantic scale, as for now, the Polish state has us, and we are that gold, that diamond, that good, the luxurious, the most wonderful of the Polish state. By the way. We the people , because we are all people after all. That is why these three pillars must be built in parallel. Of course, a new tax system. We are trying to develop a revolution in the tax system. That is yet another sub-team that we are working on. But these elements must interact with each other. This social element includes, we founded such a social movement. "We the People," also many years ago with Paweł Jochymek. Now it is developing great over the last year. "We the People" to connect people. We the people, after all. We the people is me, a human being. A human being, that is, human rights, and at the peak of human rights we have dignity, but not in opposition; in combination, in symbiosis, based on spirituality. No, I am not talking about religion, because one religion might affect some people, another one others; I am talking about spirituality . Spirituality is something universal. The fact that things are so wonderful in the Polish state, that we don’t have assaults, that women are safe, children are safe, that we walk around in the evenings, that it’s not like in Paris where at 10:00 PM there isn't a single woman, or even men in Paris. Everyone is terrified. This is only because there is a very high potential of spirituality in Poles, which has remained from, so to speak, old history , from our ancestors. And this has meant that this Decalogue, even if someone is not a Catholic, well, at least from the third commandment onwards to the tenth, is a universal catalog of rules and principles. Consequently, we are building upon this , so this social element is also a spiritual element. We are building a new state on this. There is no other way. There is no, there is no alternative. If someone tells me there is an alternative, then look at what other countries look like. Is there an alternative in the paths that France, Great Britain, or Spain have chosen? First, 300 years of colonialism, 299 years of French colonialism, not even counting the current quasi-colonialism. And on what? Not on building strictly strong entrepreneurship from the beginning, but built on colonialism. This has caused France to now be at odds with its former colonies. These people come from those very colonies and say these are their tenements, because they drip with the blood of their grandfathers, and they are right, because that is how it is. And let's look at Spain, at Portugal, let's look at Great Britain, where are they? Because they didn't build on healthy entrepreneurship, but built on such brutal colonialism. They lost their religion. Again, when I say religion, I mean this spirituality, and not a specific religion. They said that the state could be secular and that those values, those from the third to the tenth of the Decalogue, that they that they are transparent. So, those who thought differently came to their country. They showed them they are not transparent, and they introduced their own rules in Belgium, in the Netherlands, in France. I mean, you can’t live there anymore. They moved in; there is no vacuum. They didn't want their own principles, they didn't respect their own principles, so they will now respect the principles of others. And we must resist this, by the way. It’s not that we don’t respect people of a different skin color, but we demand respect in our own country, because this is our country, and these are our rules, which we certainly didn't develop ourselves. We are only a small part. We are at the very finish line. Generations worked for this. Thank you for staying with us until the end. That is the best compliment for this conversation. If it was worth your time, please subscribe to the channel, like, and comment. Thanks to this, there will be more such meetings here. If you want to keep listening, the next part of this talk or another video from the Krzysztof Strobel Podcast channel is waiting on the screen. New episodes every week. We invite you to watch, and talk to you soon.