 Our final speaker this afternoon is Lou Rockwell, who most of you I'm sure know as not only the founder and chairman of the Mises Institute, but also the proprietor of lourockwell.com. And knowing and working for Ron Paul over the years, I've had so many people say to me that Ron Paul is what brought them to libertarianism. Ron Paul is what woke them up. Well, I would argue that Lou Rockwell, through his efforts at the Mises Institute and lourockwell.com is what keeps them in libertarianism by providing just an unbelievable amount of content and education and knowledge every day of his life. One of the hardest working guys I know, please welcome Lou Rockwell. Thank you. A sharp Martian visiting the earth might make two observations, one true the other only superficially so, about the United States. On the basis of its ceaseless exercises and self-congratulation, the US appears to be a place where free thought is encouraged and which man makes war against all the fetters on his mind that reactionary forces had once placed there. That's the superficial truth. The real truth, which our Martian would discover after watching how Americans actually behave. So the range of opinions that citizens may entertain is rather more narrow than it first appears. There are, he will soon discover, certain ideas and positions that all Americans are supposed to believe in and salute. Now the top of the list is equality, an idea for which we are never given a precise definition, but to which everyone is expected to genuflect. A libertarian is perfectly at peace with the universal phenomenon of human difference. He does not wish it away. He does not shake his fist at it. He does not pretend not to notice it. It affords him neither another opportunity to marvel at a miracle of the market, its ability to incorporate just about anyone into the division of labor. Need the division of labor is based on human difference. Each of us finds the niche that suits our talents best and specializes in that particular thing we can most effectively serve our fellow man by doing. Our fellow man likewise specializes in what he is best suited for and we in turn benefit from the fruits of his specialized knowledge and skill. And according to Ricardo's law of comparative advantage, which Mises generalized into the law of association, even if one person is better than another at absolutely everything, the less able person is still able to flourish in a free market. For instance, even if the greatest, most successful entrepreneur you can think of is a better office cleaner than anyone else in town and is likewise a better secretary than all the secretaries in town, it would make no sense for him to clean his own office or type and file all his own correspondence. His time is so much better spent in the market niche in which he excels that it would be preposterous for him to waste his time doing these things. In fact, anyone looking to hire him to do the office cleaning would have to pay millions of dollars to draw him away from the extremely remunerative work he is otherwise doing. So even an average office cleaner is vastly more competitive in the office cleaning market than our fictional entrepreneur. Since the average office cleaner can charge say $15 an hour, instead of the $15,000 an hour, our entrepreneur mindful of opportunity cost would have to charge. So there was a place for everyone in the market economy and what's more since the market economy rewards those who are able to produce goods at affordable prices for a mass market, it is precisely the average person to whom the captains of industry are all but forced to cater. This is an arrangement to celebrate, of course, not to deplore. This is not how the egalitarian see it, of course. And now I turn to the works of that great anti-egalitarian, Murray and Rothbard. Murray dealt with the subject of equality and part in his great essay, Freedom in Equality, Primitivism and the Division of Labor. But really took it on head to head in egalitarianism as a revolt against nature. What serves as the title chapter of his wonderful book that's, I'm sure we've still got some copies outside available of that. It's from Murray that my own comments today take their inspiration. The current devotion to equality is not of ancient provenance, as Murray pointed out. He said the current veneration of equality is indeed a very recent notion in the history of human thought. Among philosophers or prominent thinkers, the idea scarcely existed before the mid-18th century. It was mentioned if only as the object at all, if only as the object of horror or ridicule. The profoundly anti-human and violently coercive nature of egalitarianism was made clear in the influential classical myth of Procrustes, who forced passing travelers to lie in an iron bed and if they were too long for the bed, he lopped off those parts of their bodies, which protruded while he racked out the legs of anyone who was too short. What do we understand by the word equality? The answer is we don't really know. His proponents make precious little effort to disclose to us precisely what they have in mind. All we know is that we better believe in it. And it is precisely this lack of clarity that makes the idea of equality such an advantage for the state. Northen is entirely sure what the principle of equality commits him to. And keeping up with ever changing demands is more difficult still. What were two previously different things yesterday can become precisely equal today and you'd better believe that they are equal if you don't want your reputation destroyed or your career ruined. This was the heart of the celebrated dispute between neo-conservative Harry Jaffa and paleo-conservative Emmy Bradford carried out in the pages of Modern Age in the 1970s. Equality, Mel Bradford argued, is a concept that cannot be and will not be restrained or nailed down. He tried to make Jaffa understand that equality with a capital E was a recipe for permanent revolution, not a problem for Jaffa who, of course, came, as has been pointed out earlier today from the neo-conservative Trotsky tradition. Now, do the Caledarians mean we are committed to the proposition that anyone is potentially an astrophysicist so long as he is raised in the proper environment? Maybe, maybe not. Some of them certainly do believe such a thing. In 1930, in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, it claimed, quote, that birth, human infants, regardless of their heredity, are as equal as fords. We've heard of Mises, by contrast, held that, quote, the fact that men are born unequal in regard to physical and mental capabilities cannot be argued away. Some surpass their fellow men in health and vigor, in brain and aptitudes and energy and resolution are therefore better fitted for the pursuit of earthly affairs than the rest of mankind. Did Mises just commit a hate crime? By the standards of the egalitarians, again, we don't really know. Then there's so-called equality of opportunity, but even this common conservative slogan is fraught with problems. The obvious retort is that in order to have true equality of opportunity, sweeping government intervention is necessary. For how can someone in a poor household with then different parents seriously be said to have equality of opportunity with children of well-to-do parents deeply engaged in their lives? Then there is equality in a cultural sense, whereby everyone is expected to ratify everyone else's personal choices. Cultural egalitarians don't really mean that, of course. None of them demand that people who dislike Christianity sit down and learn thestics, theology, scholastic theology in order to discover something important about the Christian's belief. And here we discover something important also about the holy egalitarian program. It's not really about equality, it's about some people exercising power over others. At the University of Tennessee this fall, the Office for Diversity and Inclusion explained that traditional English pronouns are oppressive to people who do not identify with the gender they were, quote, assigned at birth. And so ought to be replaced with something new. The Diversity Office recommends as replacements for she, her, hers, he, him, his. The following. G, here, hers, here's, Z, Zir, Zir's, Z, Zem and Zir. When approaching people the first time students were told, we should say something like, like, nice to meet you. What pronouns should I use? So when the whole world burst out laughing at this proposal, the University was a pain so we're sure everyone, these of course were just suggestions, I'm gonna be right here. Of course we're not a suggestions of the thought that all right thinking people are expected to have about moral questions that have been decided for us by our media and political elites. Another aspect of equality that's been in the news in recent years is of course income inequality. We're told how terrible it is that some people should have so much more than others. But rarely if ever how we told how much of any extra wealth the egalitarian society would allow the better off to have or the non-arbitrary basis on which such a judgment could be rendered. John Rawls was possibly the most influential political philosopher of the 20th century, a terrible century. And he advanced the famous defense of egalitarianism in his book, A Theory of Justice. He attempted to answer this question among others. If I may summarize his argument in brief, he claimed that we would all choose an egalitarian society. If as we contemplated the values of society, the ones that we'd wanna live under, we had no idea what our own position in that society would be. If we didn't know if we were to be male or female, rich or poor, talented or untalented, or we would hedge our bets by advocating a society in which everyone was as equal as possible. That way should we be unlucky and enter the world without talents or as a member of a despised minority or saddled with any other disability, we could still be as short of a comfortable, if not luxurious existence. Rawls was willing to allow some degree of inequality, but only if its effect was to help the poor. In other words, doctors could be allowed to earn more money than other people if that financial incentive made them more likely to become doctors in the first place. If incomes are equalized, people would be less likely to go to the trouble of becoming a doctor and the poor would be deprived of medical care. So inequality could be allowed, but only on egalitarian grounds, not because people have the right to acquire and enjoy property without fear of expropriation. Since no one in his right mind accepts full-blown egalitarianism, Rawls was bound to run into trouble. The trouble came in the form of attempts to deal with equality between countries. Even the most dedicated egalitarian living in the first world doesn't want equalization of wealth between countries. College professors who teach the moral superiority of egalitarianism during the day want their fine wine and cheese parties in their beautiful homes at night. So Rawls came up with a strained and unpersuasive argument, but although inequality between persons was outrageous and could be justified only in the basis of whether it helped the poorest and equality between countries was quite all right. He then proceeded to give reasons, even though these were the exact reasons he had said that inequality between individuals was unacceptable. Even if egalitarianism could be defended philosophically, there is the small matter of implementing it in the real world. Just one reason the egalitarian dream cannot be realized involves what Robert Nozick called the wilt chamberlain problem. James Audison has called this something like the day two problem. In Chamberlain's heyday, everyone enjoyed watching him play basketball. People gladly paid to watch him play. But suppose we came with an equal distribution of wealth and then everyone rushes out to watch Chamberlain. Many thousands of people would willingly hand over a portion of their money to him to watch him play basketball, and he now becomes much wealthier than everyone else. In other words, the pattern of wealth distribution is disturbed as soon as anyone engages in exchange at all. Are we to cancel the results of these exchanges and return everyone's money to the original owners? Is Chamberlain to be deprived of the money people freely chose to give him in exchange for the entertainment he provided? The reason the state holds up equality as a moral ideal is precisely that it is unattainable. We may forever strive for it, but we can never reach it. What ideology could be better from the state's point of view? The state can portray itself as the indispensable agent of justice, while at the same time drawing ever more power and resources to itself over education, employment, wealth redistribution, and practically any area of social life or the economy you can name. In the course of pursuing an unattainable, egalitarian program. Quote, equality cannot be imagined outside of tyranny, Montell and Baer said. It was, he said, nothing but the canonization of envy. It was never anything but a mask which could become reality, which could not become reality without the abolition of all merit and virtue. The course of working towards equality, the state expands its power at the expense of other forms of human association, including the family itself. The family has always been the primary obstacle to the egalitarian program. The very fact that parents differ in their knowledge, skill levels, and devotion to their offspring means the children in no two households can never be raised equally. Robert Nisbet, the Columbia University sociologist, openly wondered if Rawls could be honest enough to admit that his system, if followed to its logical conclusion, had to lead to the abolition of the family. Quote, said Nisbet, I have always found treatment of the family to be an excellent indicator of the degree of zeal and authoritarianism overt or latent in a moral philosopher or political theorist. Nisbet said, he identified two traditions of thought in Western history, one he traced from Plato to Rousseau, that identified the family as a wicked barrier to the realization of true virtue and justice. The other, which viewed the family as a central ingredient in both liberty and order, he followed from Aristotle through Burke and Tocqueville. Rawls himself appeared to admit the logic of this argument, that the logic of his argument tended in the direction of the Plato, Rousseau strain of thought, though he ultimately and unpersuasively drew back your Rawls' own words. It seems that when fair opportunity, as it has been defined, is satisfied, the family will lead to unequal chances between individuals. Is the family to be abolished then? Taken by itself and given a certain primacy, the idea of equal opportunity inclines in this direction. But within the context of the theory of justice as a whole, there is much less urgency to take this course. Nisbet took little comfort in Rawls' pathetic assurances. Can Rawls, he wondered, long neglect the family, given its demonstrated relation to him inequality. Rousseau was bold and constant enough where Rawls is diffident. If the younger to be brought up in the bosom of equality, early accustomed to regard their own individuality only in relation to the body of the state, to be aware, so to speak, of their own existence merely as part of that of the state, unquote, then they must be safe when Rawls' so refers to us, quote, the intelligence and prejudices of fathers. The obsession with equality in short undermines every indication of health we might look for in a civilization. It involves madness to complete, so complete that although it flirts with the destruction of the family, it never stops to consider whether this conclusion might mean the whole line of thought may have been deranged to begin with. It leads to the destruction of standards, scholarly, cultural, and behavioral. It is based on assertion rather than evidence and it attempts to gain ground not through rational argument, but by intimidating opponents into silence. There is nothing honorable or admirable about any aspect of the egalitarian program. Murray noted that pointing out the lunacy of egalitarianism was a good start, but not nearly enough. We need to show that the so-called struggle for equality is in fact all about state power, not helping the downtrodden, he wrote, to mount an effective response to the reigning egalitarianism of our age, therefore, it is necessary but scarcely sufficient to demonstrate its absurdity, the anti-scientific nature, the self-contradictory nature of the egalitarian doctrine, as well as the disastrous consequences of the egalitarian program. All this is well and good, but it misses the essential nation of as well as the most effective rebuttal to the egalitarian program, to expose it as a mask for the drive to power of the now-ruling left liberal intellectual and media elites. Since these elites are also the hitherto unchallenged opinion-molding class in society, the rule cannot be dislodged until the oppressed public, instinctively, but incoherently opposed to these elites, are shown the true nature of the increasingly hated forces who are ruling over them. To use the paraphrase, to use the phrases of the new left Murray said of the late 1960s, the ruling elite must be demystified, de-legitimized, and desanctified. Nothing can advance that desanctification more than the public realization of the true nature of their egalitarian slogans. The only Rothbardian word missing from that stirring conclusion is one of Murray's favorite de-bambusel. It is that above all that needs to be done. The Mises Institute has accomplished many things over the years advancing scholarship through our academic conferences and scholarly journals, educating students in the economics of the Austrian school, and reaching out to the public to give them a free education worth vastly more than what many people spend six figures on. But put it all together and it amounts to perhaps the greatest de-bambuseling effort of all time. Once you understand the economics of the Austrian school and the philosophy of liberty and the tradition of Rothbard, you never look at anything, not the state, the media, the central bank, the political class, nothing the same way again. Help us carry out our great de-bambuseling mission as we devise more and more programs and outreach to the public and provide a new generation of brilliant young scholars with the tools they need to resist and defy a regime that would intimidate us into silence. Their way is violence, envy, and destruction. Our way is peace, liberty, and creation. With your help, we can tear down the state's benign facade which has bamboozled so many for so long and reveal to all to see that the only winner in the state's crusades is the state itself. Thank you.