 Welcome to the Cato Institute and welcome to an event that I bet some of you thought might never actually happen. The book forum for the long-awaited encyclopedia of libertarianism. One of the questions that I was asked constantly as one of the editors on the project, assistant editor on the project, was why do you need an encyclopedia of libertarianism anyway? Don't you have Wikipedia and aren't paper encyclopedias sort of passe and do we really need a project like this? And my answer is in two parts. First, we have an encyclopedia of conservatism. There's an encyclopedia of liberalism. There's a socialist encyclopedia. I was given a copy, complimentary copy, as a graduate student of the feminist encyclopedia of French literature and surely if there's one of these there can be an encyclopedia of libertarianism. I don't mean that as a knock on any of the other projects that I've just mentioned but I think it does say something about the place and the importance of libertarianism and its arrival as a political movement that it has reached the stage where it can have a book like this and where a book like this makes sense. And to talk just a bit about the place of libertarianism in today's political life and about the place of this project, we have today, first of all, Ronald Hamway, the editor in chief of the encyclopedia. Ronald is a fellow in social thought at the Kato Institute. He's a professor of history emeritus at the University of Alberta, previously assistant director to the history of western civilization program at Stanford University. He received his PhD in social thought under Friedrich Hayek, for whom this auditorium is named, at the University of Chicago. He is the author of books on the Scottish Enlightenment and on health care and is the editor of a book on drug prohibition. And he is also the editor of the Liberty Press edition of Kato's letters and of course of the encyclopedia of libertarianism, so he's going to say a few words. And joining us to comment on the state of libertarianism and a bit on the project as well, is Charles Murray. He is a WH Brady scholar from 2003 to the present at the American Enterprise Institute. He is well known for his many very controversial at times, but also very insightful books about American social policy, including Losing Ground, American Social Policy 1950 to 1980, In Pursuit of Happiness and Good Government, The Bell Curve and also most recently his book Real Education for Simple Truths for Bringing America's Schools Back to Reality. We had a book forum on that book just recently and he also is currently discussing his work on that book at Kato Unbound, which I also happen to be involved with. And also to discuss libertarianism and the state of the movement and the encyclopedia will be William Galston. He is the inaugural Ezra K. Zilke Chair in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. He's a former Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy under President Clinton. He's been the Executive Director of the National Commission on Civic Renewal. He's fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center, Director of Economic and Social Programs at the Roosevelt Center for Economic American Policy Studies, and so obviously is something of an expert on American domestic policy. He has written on political campaigns and elections and is currently focusing on the project of designing a new social contract, as his website says, and the implications of political polarization. To give you an idea of where this research or this writing is going and why I thought it might be interesting to bring to bring his perspective to this forum, here's just a taste of this. I'm quoting your words here, if you don't mind. To the extent to the extent to the extent that markets cannot police themselves or provide reasonable returns for workers, government will have to step in. Through the public mobilization of capital and will, we must supply public goods, investment in infrastructure, research and post-secondary education, among others that we have neglected at our peril. And many millions of Americans will be unable to save for the future without new forms of public encouragement and support. In short, we need nothing less than a new social contract that reorganizes responsibilities among government individuals and the private sector. So hopefully this will be an interesting and lively discussion, and I will now hand over the floor to Ronald. Thank you. First of all, I'd like to thank you all for coming this afternoon. I'm old enough to find it remarkable. Oh, sorry. There's a big sign here that says there's no need to speak too close to the mic. The sound system is set to help you. Okay. How's this? I was about to say that I find it remarkable that there are more than a handful of people here to launch an encyclopedia of libertarianism. Indeed, as remarkable as I found it, that we were able to locate so many writers who contributed to this volume. I hope you allow me to recount my own experiences with becoming a libertarian. While in high school, that was during the Neolithic age, I, like most others of my age, embraced the standard social democratic sentiments that were then prevalent. A period when an extensive welfare state seemed the only political system consistent with a robust and caring society. We leaned toward libertarianism on most social issues, drugs, alcohol, sex, censorship, but we firmly identified ourselves with wholesale government intervention in the economy. Indeed, the more intervention, the better. However, I was fortunate enough to have as a friend from sixth grade on someone who for some odd reason was fascinated by economics. It's hard to believe that any 15-year-old could be fascinated by economics, but he was. And indeed, he spent his junior high school years not worrying about what other people his age usually worry about, but in reading Adam Smith and in constantly hectoring us with his pro-market views. We as friends thought it somewhat bizarre, but since we were all unconventional in our own private ways, we were able to accommodate his own peculiarities. It was this friend, his name was George Reisman, who finally penetrated my basically ignorant embrace of all-consuming government that would direct the production and distribution of wealth in the interests of equity and the well-being of all citizens. We were arguing one day, I then fancied myself fairly knowledgeable about economics, having taken a couple of courses from socialist professors at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell when he posed the following question to me. In the absence of a basically undhindered market, if you were to have a ton of steel and the choice of making either a hundred refrigerators or a thousand toasters, on what basis would you decide which to make and how many of each? Not having a ready answer, I of course replied that the question was ridiculous, and that there were obvious ways to determine this, and at that point I very quickly changed the subject. But the question kept annoying at me, and as weeks went by I realized I simply didn't have a clue as to how to solve this problem. The result was that I learned some real economics and some months later joined George in attending Ludwig von Mises' seminar on Thursday evenings at New York University. At the same time I was introduced to Murray Rothbard and the very small group of students with whom he was friendly, Ralph Raco, Leonard Ligio, Bob Hessen, and George. At that time around 1956 or 57, to cast your lot with Murray Rothbard was to cut yourself off from all serious social or political discourse from practically anyone else. Indeed, were you to make your views known either among your non-libertarian friends or instructors? In New York essentially everyone outside Murray's living room, you'd be regarded as flirting with mental illness. Your views were laughed at as farcical and nothing you could say at that point would be taken seriously. I remember being addressed one day by one of my professors at Cornell as a member of the Flat Earth Society and asked whether any one of my friends had fallen off the edge of the earth yet. We were an extremely small group, a half dozen Rothbardians and a handful of pro-market students who attended Mises' seminar. The social democratic orthodoxy then in place seemed truly invulnerable and it brought the few of us who had rejected it closer together, happy in the company of each other, while the world was going to hell. It's indicative of the status and respectability of anyone supporting free markets that two of the most distinguished economists, Mises and Hayek, were able to obtain positions in American universities only because their salaries were underwritten by a foundation funded by a Kansas City window shade manufacturer. In 1960 I entered graduate school at the University of Chicago to work under Hayek and they're found for the first time professors who did not regard libertarian views as crackpot. Besides Hayek, Milton Friedman and several other economists were lecturing and writing about the destructive effects of government intervention in the economy. However, this group of economists, even at Chicago, represented a very small proportion of the faculty and an even smaller segment of the student body. It's indicative of the views of the great mass of students that in 1956 the University Republican Club supported Adlai Stevenson. The largest assemblage of students I saw, Adlai Stevenson was the Democratic candidate. The largest assemblage of students I saw in my three years there was for the first meeting of the Fair Play for Cuba committee in 1960. Now contrast these early years, which are now almost half a century ago, with the situation that prevails now. Not only can libertarianism boast several foundations whose budget is in the millions of dollars, but tens of thousands possibly many more adherents and a political party with a membership of over 200,000. There are libertarian academics at dozens of universities and it's no longer suspect to identify yourself as someone who views all government projects with great suspicion. But most of all, at least to me, was the popularity of Ron Paul's campaign this year, despite the fact that he identified his strong libertarianism as constitutional republicanism. One of the most moving events in Paul's campaign was his hour-long discussion at Google in Mountain View, California, where he spoke in front of several hundred Google employees who seemed to be unanimously enthusiastic in their reception of his message. And I was touched to see these views fervently applauded by a huge audience of talented young men and women, an audience that for me at least represented the best of the future of this nation. In light of the increased acceptance of libertarian ideology, it's truly depressing to find that the policies now in place have not only not expanded the area free choice for Americans, but have substantially constricted them. The growth in the size of the federal government is no less than phenomenal. In 1960, public spending in America, both federal and state, totaled $137 billion. By 2005, this had risen to $4.05 trillion. Even holding constant for inflation, federal spending has increased by a factor of four and a half. Government's local, state and federal are currently responsible for employing in one form or another 23 and a half million people, or somewhat over 15% of the labor force, were involved in a pointless war in Iraq, launched as a result of criminally faulty intelligence that has so far cost the nation over $600 billion and 4,000 dead, another 30 to 50,000 wounded. We are encumbered by a Department of Homeland Security in some ugly ways, reminiscent of its namesake, the Heimatzigeheisdienst, to harass and bedevil us in the interests of a security that is impossible to achieve. And in this, unfortunately, most of the American people are complicit in accepting the government's propaganda that one can live a life totally free of risk while still retaining our liberties. Whether one is optimistic or pessimistic in the face of these twin developments, the increased popularity of libertarianism or the undening growth of the libertarian Leviathan state is, I think, largely a matter of private temperament. Still, in the end, it really doesn't matter what we believe the eventual outcome will be since our humanity obligates us to accept and argue the truth, hence this encyclopedia. Finally, if you'll allow me, I would like to read the concluding paragraph of the introduction that I wrote for this book. I wrote, what this volume seeks to do is to offer a series of brief articles on the historical, sociological, and economic aspects of libertarianism and to place them within their broader context. They are for a commentary on the unending attempts of countless individuals to emancipate themselves from the control of an oppressive and overweening state, whether one controlled by a despot or one acting in the name of the wishes of the people. What these articles have in common is the search for a world in which man's objection to the will of others is brought to a minimum. We do not seek as those who would malign us claim emancipation from the laws of God or the forces of nature, to which we are all depending on our beliefs and our circumstances more or less subject. Rather, we wish an open and divergent society in which each may act as he thinks best, despite the consequences of his action. We may exhort others from acting in ways that we feel may harm them, but we cannot use the police power of the state to punish them from so acting. This open society to which Periclean Athens inclined was, we are told, an education to all of Greece. So there was a time when America was an education to the whole world, and it is to this time to which we seek to return. Thank you. So I will go first and give Bill Galston all the rope he needs to hang me with. Bill and I have appeared on the stage together many times, and I've enjoyed it every time, and I expect you to today. Well, I wish I could say this is the best of times and the worst of times, but I think it's basically just the worst of times. I have lived through the arc of the libertarian movement that started in the 1970s. Well, it started, of course, earlier. By the 1970s, you had Milton Friedman publishing a weekly column in Newsweek magazine. You had a variety of people prior to Reagan who were beginning to get attention in the public, and then you had the Reagan years, and then you had intellectually a real ascension where the intellectual excitement in this country on issues involving public policy was involved with libertarian positions. They weren't always phrased libertarian positions, but that was the gravitational pull was the nature of free markets and the values of freedom, and it was just wonderful. And then we had the 1994 congressional election where Newt Gingrich thought he was doing a clever bit of marketing, I think, and actually what he did was tap into a really deep, broad impulse toward limitations on government that seized the day, and then everything went downhill, starting, I think, it's impossible to calculate the total effect that Timothy McVeigh's bombing of that Oklahoma office building had. I mean, it just fundamentally changed the attitude toward people who were saying that government's the problem in emotional ways that I don't think we ever fully recovered from. Then Newt Gingrich had his snit on the 747 and a variety of other things whereby the Republicans stopped acting like the vehicle for limiting government and started acting as if that was incumbent upon them to prove Lord Acton right. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts, absolutely, and they showed that they could lap at every trough that the Democrats had ever crowded up to just as enthusiastically. Then we got George W. Bush, who, given credit, the man never campaigned as in being in favor of limited government. He was a compassionate conservative, and we hoped he was kidding, but he wasn't. And what we've seen these last eight years, forget about foreign policy. I don't know anything about foreign policy. I'm not as convinced as a lot of people are that there will not be revisionism of his foreign policy in the years to come in the same way that there was of Truman's. Domestic policy is just an unmitigated disaster. So where do we stand now? Well, some of what I say is reflective of the fact that I am not a very combative person. So you should take that into account. What I'm saying, I am sort of psychologically comfortable with saying, but I don't think this is a time when libertarianism should be out trying to recruit huge, no new numbers of followers. I think for a while, it was easy to be a libertarian. And it was easy to say, well, you didn't buy into everything, but you bought into some of it. But these were summer patriots as far as the libertarian movement was concerned. And when you've got something like the current banking crisis, they're all too ready to immediately say, oh, well, I guess this proves that we do need government after all, ignoring the fact that we're in this mess because the government said, gee, let's loan money to people who can't pay it back. And created a set of incentives that led people to do things which at the time it was done, right thinking people could predict would come out. But it's not being perceived that way. You have all sorts of people falling by the wayside. And I don't think this is a moment when it is realistic for us to say, oh, we must take the offensive again and we must take the initiative. I think instead, in a way, what we need is to do is to hunker down and be really, really good at proving our case in a way which will have consequences down the road. Because that is ultimately the way that these ideas that could fit into Murray Rothbard's living room back in New York not that long ago became so widespread. It was not just because of wonderful polemics like the road to serfdom. It was in economics demonstrations technical and rigorous by people like Milton Friedman and the growing band of Chicago School economists who demonstrated the ways in which the market works the way they said it worked. And then what they were talking about was reality. It gained popularity because of rigorous analyses of the way that human flourishing, human happiness is promoted by the kinds of things that liberty brings and is impeded and undercut by the kinds of interventions that government brings. It was promoted by rigorous analyses of the ways that government makes things worse when it tries to intervene with complex social problems. That work must continue so that what we're aiming for is in another decade or two the same kind of understanding of the problems that are created by government interventions in social life that I think we have already pretty much achieved at an intellectual level about government intervention in economic life. Because despite the problems today in terms of people saying oh this all proves that you need government after all, I think within the economics departments the basic principles that were established are going to survive. The good news is this, government really does screw it up all the time and they will continue to do so with unfailing regularity in the years to come. I think odds are we are going to have a presidency under Barack Obama whereby I think the guy really believes the kinds of left liberal social policies that he says he believes. I think he really thinks that they can work and in some part of me hopes that he tries them again to give us more grist for our mill. But even if he doesn't do that as time goes on there will be evidence that can be brought to bear on this simple proposition that the way that those of us who have resources live our lives is in fact through the use of the freedom that our resources give us. That those of us who are have not necessarily rich but who have resources use those resources to send our children to schools that we want to send our children to. We use them to live in neighborhoods that we find congenial. We use them to work in jobs that give us satisfaction. And in all of this what we are doing is taking a country that is not free in many ways and we are working around the barriers that are put up before our exercise of our freedom. And a great deal of what happens to poor people and people without resources in this country is that they don't have the workarounds. They don't have the resources to have the workarounds. And the fundamental message that we must give is you know what? People who aren't as lucky as we are in terms of the resources they have, we have to find ways to give them the same ability to run their own lives that we exercise because we do have resources. And the fundamental message that the way you do that is to give people responsibility for their lives must ultimately have resonance. Henry Kissinger is famous for having said once when being complimented on a policy that he, a position he had undertaken thanking the person for the compliment and saying yes in the position has the added advantage of being true. And in a way I guess that that's what I'm saying to you that there's, that at the bottom we are right. We are right. We, all those of you in the audience who are like me are libertarians. Our fundamental understandings of the way the world works are grounded in reality. It is a reality that is easily obscured. It is a reality that is easily ignored. But it is reality and ultimately the truth shall set us free. Thank you. Well, first of all, that's what I thought. These signs are now zero for three. Well, this panel has only been going for half an hour and I've already been astonished. And let me tell you what astonished me. My good friend Charles Murray has just declared before the assembled multitudes that he is, quote, not a combative person. Well, you could have fooled me. You know, sometimes listening to Charles I'm reminded of an episode that occurred in the British Parliament sometime in the 1840s I believe when, you know, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Lord Macaulay, was delivering one of his characteristically assertive speeches and one back bencher turned to the other and said, E gad, I wish I were sure of anything as Macaulay is of everything. Well, but I do want to associate myself with, you know, the theme of the panel so far, namely that these are not great times for libertarians unless you are unnaturally thrilled with adversity. You know, hasn't been a great day, eight days for libertarians. In fact, it hasn't been a great eight years for libertarians and so I want to take this opportunity to congratulate the editors of and contributors to this volume on such a splendidly countercultural achievement. You know, as you might well say what George Washington once said when he was asked about, you know, the new constitution and whether it would pass, you know, and he said, I think I can quote this, you know, we have raised a standard to which the wise and honest may repair the rest is in the hands of God. Now, I am a non-libertarian political theorist and as such I have always cherished the fact that my libertarian friends here in Washington but not only in Washington care a lot about theory. Indeed, you know, typically they're passionate about it. This is wonderful and so I let my fingers do the walking through this encyclopedia and I decided that my highest value added for my 10 or 15 minutes would be just to offer some theoretical questions that libertarians on the panel and in the audience might want to continue. I'll begin with a sentence from the editor's introduction on which I reflected. When the editor from whom you've already heard said, it is a basic principle of libertarian politics that no one should be forcibly prevented from acting in any way he chooses provided his acts are not invasive of the free acts of others. Okay, in the very next sentence the editor cites John Stuart Mill in On Liberty as having given quote, eloquent testimony to this view and then there is the famous passage from Mill and I just pick out a few words not quite at random. The object of this essay is to assert one very simple principle, namely that the only purpose for which power can rightfully be exercised over any member of a civilized community against his will is to prevent harm to others. That's why it's called Mill's harm principle. Now if you've been listening carefully for the last two minutes you will have realized that while the editor talks about invasion of the free acts of others, Mill talks about preventing harm to others. That raises a very interesting question. When we talk about free acts and the invasion of free acts is that necessarily what we mean by harm? Is that necessarily what Mill meant by harm? What do we mean by harm? Right, that is it seems to me a fundamental question that people of a libertarian caste of mind should ask themselves, do we only mean deprivation of life or liberty? I happen to believe that if you deliberately and unjustifiably insult someone to his face you have harmed him. Now does that mean that government is entitled to interpose itself between you and the insultee? Not necessarily. So maybe there are examples of genuine harms to others that nonetheless don't trigger or don't pass the threshold of government interference but there may also be forms of harm to others that we don't include under the heading of life, liberty, property that do warrant that kind of government interference. So I think that libertarians who take Mill seriously, I'm not a libertarian but I take Mill seriously, ought to think very hard about this concept of harm and what kinds of harms legitimate what kinds of responses individual, social or political. Another reflection on the harm principle, even though John Stuart Mill was a utilitarian of sorts, I think it's fair to say that his harm principle is not the same thing as utilitarianism as ordinarily understood. It is not the same thing as the greatest good for the greatest number. It is not the same thing as the consequence of cost benefit analysis which produces interesting problems for quasi-libertarians such as Richard Epstein. In the entry in this encyclopedia on utilitarianism we read and I quote, utilitarianism is incompatible with any version of libertarianism that is based on or demands a strict adherence to individual rights and in the entry on called rights, theories of, we read the following. Libertarianism is generally understood as the political expression of the idea that individuals have a basic negative moral right to liberty. Little farther down, the most important and controversial feature about individual rights is that they override all other moral claims and farther down still we read the central problem faced by contemporary libertarian theorists is how to justify giving the right to liberty such fundamental importance and after a long recitation of the different theoretical takes on that challenge the author of this entry says writes as follows many of these issues are the result of failing to see that rights are an irreducible moral concept. Now I thought long and hard about that phrase irreducible moral concept. Does that mean that we cannot argue to them but only from them? Are they an assumption that we can't resist? Are they somehow self-evident truths? A phrase with you know a venerable history. I came away from the conjunction of these two entries in the encyclopedia a little bit puzzled as to what I was supposed to think about the status of this very fundamental idea. A third, a third reflection on mill and libertarianism. If you read on liberty you see very quickly that mill's position is not the same as neutrality or even skepticism about the human good. As a matter of fact it embodies a very robust and substantive account of the human good and if it didn't mill could never have uttered his famous aphorisms you know to the effect that it's better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied or that it's better to be sacrities dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. I mean these are very important propositions that contain assertions about what the good life for human beings is. Then it becomes an empirical question what forms of social organization are most conducive to the promotion of the good life so understood. That empirical proposition which may justify liberty in some or many circumstances on consequentialist grounds is nothing like the kind of argument that either leads to or follows from the absolute priority of liberty. So once again I'm left I'm left a little bit you know a little bit puzzled. A couple of other reflections about this idea of harm. What happens when the free actions of contracting parties have the effect of harming non-participating third parties. What does the theory have to say about that. Another question what happens when the presence of certain sorts of social norms transforms harm to self into harm to others. Let me give you just one very simple example of this. Imagine a motorcycle rider who rides without a helmet and without health insurance and then gets into a hideous accident and has severe and brain damage that is very very costly to treat. Now I suppose in one version of the world when this when the accident victim is transported to the hospital the first question is where is his insurance card and if he doesn't have one the hospital then says well sorry we're not going to treat you and so on for all the other hospitals. We've done all the charitable care we can afford to afford to do etc etc. Of course we don't take that position. The reason that we don't take that position is that we accept a moral norm socially that makes it impossible for us to do that but through that norm the motorcycle the motorcycle drivers failure to have a helmet and failure to have insurance is transmuted into harm to us. And so how does libertarian function in a world in which certain sorts of social norms have that transmutative effect? I have lots of other things to say but I'm going to suppress some of them in the interests of time and just finish with a couple of questions about the role of government. I was you know my website was unwise enough to include the quotation that the moderator of the panel read to you. I have to say I am unrepentant about the idea of government as a provider of essential public goods and I would imagine that when most libertarians think about it they'd probably agree with me in principle if not in practice but in the entry in the encyclopedia under Richard Epstein previously mentioned I found the following quote I do not think that free markets let alone capitalism supply the answer to all the questions of social organization. Markets depend on governments. Governments of course depend on markets. The key question is not to exclude one or the other from the mix but to assign to each its proper role. That is my position exactly but I don't think I'm a libertarian. Thank you. Ronald do you have anything you might want to? Good grief. You raise a number of very important issues of course. Why don't I just swallow it? You raise a number of very important issues and I think every libertarian would have to concede that not all the problems that you suggest exists in libertarian ideology or philosophy are immediately solvable. I didn't take notes on your objections but there are a few general comments I can make first of all I think it's somewhat unfair to assume that the encyclopedia takes a consistent view throughout these are after all articles written individually by individual academics and reflect the views they hold and of course there is legitimate disagreement even within the body of libertarian thought between one and another. Certainly not all libertarians or utilitarians, not all of them are Chicagoite economists and so on. So there are differences there so somehow I would suggest that to take article A and then say there seems to be a problem in reconciling the position taking here with a position taken in article B perhaps isn't quite fair. You raised about 50 points and I'm not sure that I can remember them all. That was my hope. With respect to Mill the quotation you read of course this is most famous quotation and actually it's taken verbatim from the 1854 English translation of von Humboldt's spheres and duties of government. It implies at least in its strictest sense that harm must be narrowly defined. Now admittedly even Mill himself abandons this in the course of writing the rest of on liberty and somehow to suggest that we haven't got a very firm and absolute grip on what we mean by harm leads to our having to reject the whole idea. I don't think that's true. I could make attempts to try to limit the view of harm to what I think libertarianism means and it would not include harming people by what was the example you gave not the motorcyclist but there was an insult. The insult yes. Of course lying can harm people telling them you don't love them can harm people refusing to have sex with them can harm people but we don't want to legislate in those areas we certainly don't want to legislate in all areas where one person harms another. So then we must have some overall sense of where we cut one off from the other. I would like to suggest that it probably has something to do with threats of physical force or use of the force itself. Now please don't try to pin me down. If I may. Yeah. I would suggest that it may be less important that we are unable to draw up a comprehensive list of harms and more important that there are some things we definitely agree on that are harms and that there's no debate about and working from those areas of certainty gradually into the less certain areas seems the sure course of action if that makes sense. Well I you know if I may I I totally agree with that strategy you know and here I cite as my authority Aristotle you know who argues I think correctly that it's always right to proceed from the more known to the less known rather than rather than the other way around and you know hard cases make bad law they also make pretty bad philosophy. So you know so far so good and just a couple of things in a couple of things in reply. First of all you know I'm well aware of the distinction between an encyclopedia and a single author book and I put those I put the articles on utilitarianism and theories of right side by side not because the same author wrote them and not because they had to be consistent but but because I think the fact that they are not consistent points to a larger theoretical problem a theoretical problem that utilitarians have been concerned about for a very long time namely the relationship between between the consequences of actions for all the people who are affected by them on the one hand and the principle of individual liberty on another that's not that's not an easy question but I just pulled out those entries in order to flag that as a as a serious and enduring theoretical question with regard to the question of harm my point was not that it's incumbent on you or me to have a hard and fast concept but rather to suggest that exactly the conversation that we're now having namely about what we mean by harm and what subset of harms fall under the cognizance of public authority and if if that subset why that subset is exactly the right discussion and you know and just let me just one one more sentence and I'll and I'll shut up you know imagine you know imagine a you know a a policy uh that has the effect of excluding some young people in the society from the possibility of being educated not because anyone stands in the schoolhouse door but maybe we have a universal system universal system of free choice of education but no vouchers and there's some families who simply can't afford it I would suggest that being deprived of basic education is a real harm to the children so deprived and we have to think about that um that's a that's a fascinating example because first place there are a variety of things that uh that bill raised about tensions that I think are absolutely accurate and particularly the tension that you will get anytime you get into any kind of serious discussion with a bunch of libertarians especially if they've been drinking whereby whereby you have some people who say damn it this is a right it's the natural right and I don't care what you know and and then others and I rely myself what more of the others who are more focused uh on uh what works and what doesn't there's there's more of a sense of what's the pragmatic results of this and my defense of libertarianism I try to ground almost exclusively in that which doesn't mean you don't have principles it means you have to attend to these uh issues and then there's a fascinating question of public goods because what Richard Epstein was saying if that was a quote from from Richard right is exactly right and the one you you agree with there is a sphere for government with with the strictest libertarian there is a sphere for government appropriately defined by public goods rigorously set out and that leads to education because in the book in pursuit that I wrote back in 1988 I use Milton Friedman's um capitalism and freedom as the basis for arguing that education is a classic public good and Friedman's logic was that for the perpetuation of a democracy you must have an educated populace that you cannot maintain a democracy without it and that is an externality in a public good which ought to be which justifies government funding of education. About a month after the book was published I was incredibly flattered to get a page and a half single space type written letter from Milton and then I read it in which Milton and at Milton started out by saying you've accurately represented my position but I've changed my mind and he then proceeded to say uh that uh if you look at the history of education in the united states in the colonial period and then in the later period the south doesn't fit into this but if you if you look at the north and as they've moved west what's the first thing that everybody did when they got to a new town they set up a school and what's the first thing they did was they made provision for all the kids to be able to go to that school and and he says look and you cite this evidence in your own book and you would have without any government funding you would have that vast majority of the population being educated that you're talking about and you would have thereby achieved the public good the public good of an educated populace but you haven't had to use the government funding to do it and I raised this because it adds another dimension bill to the whole the whole question of not only do you have to define public goods once you define public goods you have to decide is this public good best met through government interventions or is it best met through other things I I do have to say that I I wrote back to Milton and and swallowing hard and saying that I cannot refute your argument but I still don't quite buy it and and because I am something instinctively says to me uh that if you did have children who somehow did slip between the cracks um under a voluntary system that is going to bother me a lot now the libertarian in me says yeah it's not only going to bother you charles it's going to bother a whole bunch of other people as well and and the fact is that we have a whole lot of kids falling through the cracks under the publicly funded system and we'd have fewer kids falling through the cracks under a privately fund one and so I'm going to conclude my remarks by saying I believe that as well if you talk about net number of children deprived of educational opportunity I'm willing to argue in dead seriousness that a voluntary system without any government funding is going to do better than the system we have right now and I am still troubled by the lack of universality for the reasons that too and and and I think that it's okay for libertarians to acknowledge these tensions I think I think one of the things that libertarians sometimes do is that they are just purer than pure and they are too unwilling to say in dialogue with other people beats the hell out of me but there are a lot of very difficult issues where that's a lot that's oftentimes the the appropriate first response I'm going to exercise my prerogative as as moderator and open up the floor to questions uh I'm sure there will be quite a few and uh please remember to keep it brief and in the form of a question because otherwise it can tend to get out of hand bill of rights then then harm let me give you an example if an employer fires an employee in in one case it's a in one case it's a violation of rights because it's inconsistent with the contract with the employment contract in other cases it is not a violation of rights in both cases it represents harm to the employee in both cases the employee would prefer it not happen but whether it is a violation of rights depends upon the existing contract and we have to think about about where the where these contracts came from and how the rights are defined rather than whether the act itself causes harm would you like to respond to that well um that's you know that that's a long story but I think I think we would both agree uh that not all rights are the product of contractual agreements because presumably we would agree that there are some rights that in that underpin the right and the ability to enter into a contract in the first place and there are there is a system of rules within which that though transactions of that sort take place and there are prerequisites for those systems of rules and so and so I resist the proposition that the only rights that we need to attend to in looking at the firing are the rights that are embedded in the contract because that presupposes exactly the question that's at issue namely what rights can we be said to have and uh and so I don't I don't find it as easy a question as you do and I would I would suggest that if we think about the implications of the right to be a contractor in the first place we may be led to at least some limitations on what you can in fact contract to enforceably on the sub my name is steven sure on the subject of public education we often have these conflicts between parents who on school boards banning books or asking that intelligent design be taught as an alternative although no history class teachers that instead of the constitutional constitutional convention archangels wrote the constitution this is not put forward as an alternate theory we have abstinence only sex education and versus a sex education that does deal with the biology to the extent that sex is a biological function so in terms of libertarian principles are the individual rights those of the parents or those of their children who might demand a complete thorough and objective education oh i'm on the side of the parents of and and i've you know there is a tension of once again between at what point do children have have rights and and what are the extent of the rights and the rest of that um the the question that i about about the design of the the material is put in the schools is such that i would i am just as unhappy about parents who want a kind of education for their children you would find objectionable not being able to get it as i am about it being imposed so that's why for example i think you would probably find an evangelical religious education in a private school to be objectionable in pedagogical terms and in terms of truth value and i've would in no way want to impede the right of parents to to send their children to such a school because i think that with parents you make a grounded assumption that unless there is proof positive to the contrary the parents are responsible for the well-being of the children and to interfere with that requires requires real severe motivation well interestingly starting from a very theoretical point very different theoretical point of departure i reach exactly the same conclusion on this question that charles just stated and if i had a lot more time i'd explain the difference of path uh but it but it does it it your question does raise a more general point that i now want to put on the table and that is that mill's understanding of liberty and of harm and of authority is embedded in a in an understanding of competent agency and that's why he restricts the sway of his theory to quote adults in the full maturity of their faculties and he even goes farther in a now politically incorrect way and characterizes entire civilizations as not having reached the age of maturity and competent agency i wouldn't want to follow him there but certainly the broader point about the relationship between the exercise of liberty and competent agency is one that we ought to think about very very carefully and it is that distinction between developed competent agency and the lack of development characteristic childhood that leads mill to accept authority relations between parents and children that he does not accept as between or among adults which raises a fascinating question what if there are some people who are what i'll delicately call chronological adults you know whose competent agency for one reason or another is seriously defective what are the theoretical and practical consequences of that fact and i think it is a fact if any an american election that would be not always yes thank you i'm john utley with the american conservative magazine libertarians i found now with the bailout that i as a businessman also i it seemed to be a distinction businessmen supported it and live all my libertarian friends almost all have been vehemently against it even though some of us think the alternative was it was a depression or a crash a monstrous crash that the libertarians are so theoretical that it makes many of us rethink our libertarianism that when the real crunch comes it's not these theories you're discussing there was a real crunch about the bailout or disaster at least some of us see it that way the libertarians say well let there be a disaster ron paul being one has said that let it go well there's no necessary contradiction i don't think between saying look the origins of this disaster are clearly and unequivocally in the government's court the government created this problem it would not have been created by the free market and say it is it possible for things to arise because of mistakes that have been made uh which require a a a stop gap solution that is is obnoxious but better than the alternative and i think it is possible i'm not making any comment on the bailout because i have not an economist i have no competence i'm not a competent agent to do so to discuss that but but in principle i can i can see as a libertarian saying okay we gotta do this thing which and i'm gonna hold my nose but don't tell me it's because of a failure of the market because of failure libertarian principles that were in this mess to begin with it's not i might add not being an economist either uh there is an aphorism by ein rand one of the patron saints of libertarianism despite the animosity that's sort of there sometimes uh she said she said something to the effect of uh businessmen make some of the worst capitalists and what she meant by that was that they do form an organized special interest and whether the bailout is economically necessary or not i think there are grounds to be skeptical about the way that has been sold to us the way that it has uh begun to be implemented simply because we know that these people have such great interests in uh seeing this turn out favorably to them and not necessarily to the rest of us and that's something that can be said without any great amount of economic knowledge all that it takes is some basic rudiments of public choice theory and you don't have to you don't have to know complex equations you don't have to have a degree in economics to realize that there are some very powerful interests there and that we have reason to be suspicious let me add one point if i may libertarians are opposed to the bailout not just because it violates the principles of libertarianism but because they feel that the bailout is actually defeating the whole purpose of them of that it it will not solve the problem and that it contains its own inconsistencies which will make things worse so there is there is a practical dimension to why libertarianism would oppose a policy like that it's not it's not equivalent to somebody who defends a person walking along a seashore seeing a drowning man and standing on his rights not to go and help him that would be solely on the basis of principle and with the result that there would be great harm done to one person it is that he's walking along the seashore the guy is in the water but the guy the libertarian says he's better off in the water than if i were to go in and get him i mean so there's a practical there's a practical dimension with respect to this economic thing yes i'm randy barnett from georgetown i in the spirit of the occasion i wanted to say something about modern libertarianism and first of all agree with charles that many modern libertarians seem overly confident that they have the answers to all questions but this tends to be the younger ones and it certainly it certainly describes me when i was younger and not now but i would say in response to bill and his challenge based on the million harm principle that modern libertarians have spent you know upwards of 30 or 40 years discussing this issue at great length and in great depth they're well aware of this issue most modern libertarianism is simply the effort to define what constitutes a wrong to another person rather than a harm to another person there are disagreements about that but that is what the enterprise is and i don't know of any libertarian who thinks the million harm principle gets you off the ground and so it's it's somewhat this is a this is a criticism that's somewhat in aptly aimed at modern libertarians however there is an extraordinary intuitive appeal about something like a harm principle to the general public in fact you'd find that smoking didn't get banned until some credible harm to other story in the form of secondhand smoke studies could be put forward in order to demonstrate some kind of harm to others and given the appeal of this story what's really striking i think is that all other political philosophies have a very difficult time distinguishing prohibitable harm from to others from non-prohibitable harm to others i think the political philosophy that has spent the most time trying to distinguish one from the other are modern libertarians and virtually all other philosophies have basically say well leave it up to a vote we'll point some experts to tell us we're going to run some studies um really non-starters um and you see no real credible alternative theory to distinguish which harms to others count and which harms to others don't count so i think this is a criticism that's least applicable real on a relative basis to libertarians as opposed to other modern political theories i think i think that's that's quite true and in the case of smoking as you point out it was only when people regarded secondhand smoke as causing a physical harm and not simply a harm because they didn't like it or because they found it aesthetically unpleasing or something like that well um a i view that as a friendly amendment b uh since i am not now nor have i ever been a libertarian uh i am less familiar than card carriers you know with the ins and outs of 30 or 40 years of debate in my defense uh since i opened the encyclopedia of libertarianism in part as a genuine learning experience i found on the very first very first page of the editor's introduction a statement of something like the wrong principle as opposed to the harm principle and then the citation of mill as having given quote eloquent expression to the principle of libertarianism that he had just enunciated and so treating me as the naive reader i think i may be pardoned for inferring that libertarians are not nearly as critical of the harm principle as you know the 30 or 40 years of debate that you just cited at the very least my point was to indicate only that there is a problem there in the relationship between wrong and harm uh that needs to be thought through very very carefully because it will do all the work in practice and i will say this on in defense of the editor he is an extraordinary historian and uh but but a political theorist is not necessarily what he claims to be and so uh and i'm a big admirer of the editor as a historian i am of course an excellent political theorist way in the back i'm david kelly i'm uh with the outlet society and i have a question that springs from partly from bested interest if not naked greed as one of the authors of the in the encyclopedia what i know i have some sense over the years of how much work and went into this it was an incredible process and i know that it's the work of many hands what and forgive me if you've said this at the beginning because i was a bit late what is your optimistic uh most optimistic dream about the impact of the book where it will be what it will mean in uh five years ten years whether it's by sales or by what is the readership what what are your goal what is your goal for the book that uh everyone will run out and buy it that they will reseller new york times think on it and that in uh fifteen years the only party that will exist as a serious political party is the libertarian party that's the most optimistic i'll give an optimistic but slightly less exuberant uh take i i often find people who just completely miscategorize or or do not understand at all what libertarianism is and will say things like well you want corporations to run the government and and i can only answer no that has nothing to do with and in fact is antithetical to what i want and uh i enjoyed working on the encyclopedia in so far as i did enjoy it because well there was a lot of there was a lot of drudgery to it but in so far as i enjoyed it i enjoyed it because i found it very satisfying to be able to put forth what libertarianism really is and to distinguish from that those things that it is not and if this book were able to clear up some of those misconceptions like you just want corporations running the government that would be very very helpful and i think also realistic if it could if it could help influence people to understand what libertarianism is a little bit better including some of the contradictions including some of the tensions and disagreements and and perhaps incoherences that would be a very useful public service and i think something it could accomplish do you yes i i i wanted to make clear that i agree well i'm more clear and i want to do this stupidest thing i've ever done and that's disagree with charles murray for a second you know i wish there was an iron ran today who would come out and just every day point out how the government got us into this mess with this bailout and why it's wrong and what the terrible results of this thing could be and i think instead of being quiet i really wish there was a libertarian who could you know with her passion and energy explain why all this is just horrible for this country yeah well if we could if we can conjure up a new iron rand i'm with you uh we don't we don't have that person right now and i guess what i'm talking about is a frame of mind as much as anything else of the photo mea if you want to think about that way but but the fact is that there's been a lot of glibness that has found its way into positions that are taken by people who aren't seriously thoughtful libertarians and they've as i said they're summer patriots and we need to do that absolutely rigorous devastatingly decisive analysis so that in the economics departments of the nation's universities there no matter what their political party is they understand the origins of this problem and how it came about and the implications it has for government intervention in the economy and it's going to be it's going to be a slow process but it there has to be a resumption i'm struggling for words here it's as if there was a very creative period of very good work that was done randy barnett has been part of that other people in this audience have been part of that and the last few years the last several years perhaps out of depression at the what's been going on in washington i think we've sort of fallen away from some of that brick building effort and we have to go back to it if i could just interpose a skeptical word here as charles rightly pointed out you know there is you know there's a distinction between arguments from principles on the one hand and arguments from consequences on the other and it is one thing to say i oppose x particular public policy because it is against the following principle which i know to be true and correct it's a different thing to say i am opposed to this policy because i know with a high degree of probability that it will fail and leave us worse off than we are now now insofar as the argument against the bailout is of the second form rather than the first then that is a complex empirical argument uh and among other things as charles rightly indicated uh a relevant question is henny youngman's famous question namely compared to what right i mean the issue is the the issue is not would we have been better off if we've never found ourselves in this fix in the first place of course the question is we're here we're in this deep hole you know how do we begin to climb out of it and i don't know whether this bailout is going to make things better or worse uh i'm not sure the people who are designing it know for sure although they have some reason to believe it will make things better i'm not sure that you know whether it's going to make things better or worse if we're talking about consequences as opposed to principles and so i guess i would throw the question back to you and say if you are arguing on a practical basis not a principal basis what makes you so sure that it will fail it's not a rhetorical question i'm genuinely interested what makes you so sure that it will fail ah theory you know i can you be more specific i'm certainly non-economic expert but whenever you create a society where you're eliminating risk which is basically what we're doing there is the it's essentially the end of risk that that provides a very perverse incentive to the behavior of individuals and in the long run i think it will lead us to be much worse off in this country now you don't have to be an economist to know that there is something like a law of the conservation of risk akin to the physical law of the conservation of energy there's no such thing as eliminating risk all you can do is shift it right because the world is a risky place and different institutional or personal responses shift that risk around and allocate it differently and so the real question is it are we better off placing that risk in a set of political institutions and policies as opposed to where it has been up to now and i don't find that a simple question given where we are now i want to partially agree with bill on the issue of principle versus where you put it consequences but only partially agree in fact the last thing that you sort of alluded to was whether these things should be proposed in political institutions or not that's almost invoking a kind of principle analysis rather than a purely policy analysis but where i want to agree with you is this i think the kind of principles that you've articulated which i think sort of stem from economic analysis of the kind libertarians are sympathetic with gives you a starting point and a framework in which to conduct a more serious public policy or empirical analysis we're in the kato institute the kato institute is not an institute devoted to the elaboration of first principles it's not a political theory outfit it's a public policy outfit and they and they turn out one you know wonderful study after another to answer the question in the terms you've just required or just requested that these problems be answered in so i think in this sense i want to agree with you i think a thoroughgoing libertarian answer to this public policy question which i certainly cannot provide is going to start with the kind of first principles that you i think insightfully pointed to but it's certainly not going to end there and there's absolutely no substitute for knowing something about what one is talking about and sometimes i think younger libertarians tend to think that if all they have are the right principles that will give them a fully formed opinion about everything when all it basically does give you is the cheat sheet for a multiple choice exam it kind of gives you an idea of where the answers are but that doesn't mean you really understand how it works in this particular policy i mean charles has a lot of knowledge about education policy um they're informed by his principles but he knows a lot about education and you know and that is what you need and so in this sense i think not only do i agree with you i think most libertarians agree with you especially those who work in this building