Tim Carney's speech to Koch group in Jan. 2011

Here's the conclusion"

I see the protestors and the added attention on what you guys are all doing here as an opportunity for people to say, "What are you doing here? How much do you care, and in which ways, about liberty?"

Is it really just to increase your profits? Because my answer is, at least for the short term, there are much better ways to increase your profits than coming here. Go to K Street and hire a couple lobbyists. HireTony Podesta. He'll help you probably more than these guys will, if what you care about is short-term profits.

If you care about building a business, if you think that enterprise is a worthwhile endeavor, if you care about liberty for moral reasons, because you know that it's wrong to take somebody else's property without their consent, that you want you to profit, but you want to profit from a consensual exchange with customers -- if that's why you care about liberty,that's different from simply caring about profits. That's wanting to profit in a moral way, refusing to profit through unjust means.

And you might care about it for the empirical reasons RichFink talks about: in freer countries, even the poor people there are lifted up.The greatest welfare program you can have is economic freedom.

And there are all sorts of reasons to care about liberty. I think a lot of businessmen who do talk about "capitalism," when the rubber meets the road, and they have a choice between capitalism and profiting through cronyism, and through what I call "regulatory robbery" -- a lot of people choose the other route.

So it makes a difficult decision sometimes for businessmen.Which one do you care more about? Are you willing to forgo profits that are perfectly legal just because you think it's the wrong way to do it?

I think those are the questions. The media will always think the liberals have the moral high ground, and I don't believe that at all. I think that people pursuing enterprise and profit through free markets have the moral high ground. But so many people who say they're going that route, really will take the profit even if it takes government to get it.

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