 now of his background as a former gold model speechwriter and as a current tax resistor. But what makes Cobb worth listening to for me is not so much these qualifications, but rather his continual development, his many accomplishments which include his participation in the Anacostia Boat community, his expertise as a welder, and his authorship of several books including community technology. Currently I'm having the pleasure of reading Paul's love letter to us with Dear America. In it he speaks about his upbringing and I was impressed with the fact that his mother always required that he read a new book every time he got a new toy. She also had the habit of answering his many questions with the instruction, looking up. It's such a fine upbringing, reaching periods thinking I can never imagine call being boring. And so it's a pleasure to introduce, call has to do with, we'll speak on the subject, the role of technology in the commitment to liberty. For the role of the community. I'm sorry. Well I'm likely to be boring today because I made some notes. I woke up in the middle of the night and thought of something I wanted to say. And if the notes work, I'll be able to say it. Like John Belushi, I'm wired. I must mention something about mother's tutorial technique. I once asked her what her name was. She told me that she would take me down to the Bureau of Vital Statistics. Teach me how to look it up. I looked it up and then she told me that I was never to use it. Her name was officially mother. Worked out very well. We'll talk about community, but to get to it, I need to talk about what I have observed are the two extreme strains of libertarianism. First is the holy rational. In which holding a correct opinion is said to be living a correct life. And people who are extremists in that sense become rather religious in their view of libertarianism because all they ever ask you about is what do you think about something? They rarely ask you what you do. So I assume that they are theological in their approach. The other strain is the extreme romantic strain which eventually leads not to religion, but to hedonism. And such people at the farthest extreme feel that smoking good grass is the ultimate expression of liberty. And the only important issue that's taken the Western world. Now somewhere in between those two are all sorts of real people who synthesize these two strains and who live in particular places called communities. Very few people can avoid this. Gulch, gulch, even was a community. Although I must say not one that I would care to live in since it seemed like more trouble when it was worth. But nonetheless, most of us live in communities. It is where in our lifetime we are either going to or not going to practice some forms of liberty. The notion that the state is going to disappear tomorrow or that there will be a libertarian world is attractive and I wish it were so, but pending the event we are stuck with the world as it is and we are most of us stuck with the places where we live. I don't think it's so very bad. Of course I managed to move to one of the few libertarian spots on the face of the earth. West Virginia, which is my country, has the lowest incidence of drug and alcohol abuse in the country, the lowest crime rate, and the highest incidence of refusal to wear seat belts. Which suggests to me that they don't addle their brains needlessly and they don't listen to bureaucrats. What could be better? I just an anecdote referring to West Virginia when I first moved there and started building the house in which I now live. I wanted to find out about septic systems. I take that very seriously because it involves externalities. You don't really want to go around polluting your neighbors groundwater. So I went down to the county office building and asked where I could get this information and the woman I spoke to said, well, a fellow who has that is out to lunch, but I think it's in the second drawer of his desk over there. Why don't you go look? And so I did, found what I wanted and left. It occurred to me that any place that takes bureaucratic privilege that lightly is a good place to be. And I've enjoyed it ever since. Okay, so now we're living in a community and I have the first rule for impressing anybody with your opinions about liberty. The first rule is be extraordinarily good at whatever you do. Because the first thing people in most communities are going to observe is not your halo of opinion or the fact that you've read 74,000 books on property relationships. They will wanna know what do you do and do you do it competently? So I assume one that you do something. I think it is necessary for most libertarians to do something. A few, I suppose, on annuities can just have opinions but most will be well advised to do something. Whatever it is, the better you do it, the more impressive you will be in your community and the more likely somebody is going to listen to your crazed talk about liberty. So it'd be very competent. The second rule I think, I shouldn't say rule but suggestion is to be a very good neighbor. Their notion is held by some libertarians that if you are polite to anyone or indeed even cooperative, you've committed a grave sin and are guilty of first class whimpery is not necessarily true. I mean, when a barn is falling down, it may be ideologically pure to ask your neighbor how much they will pay you if you help them put the barn up but what you will likely get is not an estimate of cost but a quick blow to the jaw and probably at such a time, she'll be worthy of it. Anyway, so being a good neighbor is extraordinarily useful, it seems to me. Now taking the two strains, the holy rational religious libertarian and the holy romantic libertarian, I've tried to develop some things that you can do if your tendency is in one direction or the other. Mine is notoriously in the direction of the romantic, I'm afraid, which is why I have impure thoughts constantly. Now if your notion is, if your tendency is in the holy rational, the first rule it seems to me is to be rich. I don't think that there is any excuse for a libertarian who believes in lazy fair capitalism to not be rich. That's silly. There's one you can be and second you should be. Why should anybody listen to you in terms of your claims if you haven't yourself done something about it? And I'm inclined to think that this doesn't mean casually rich, filthy rich, is much better. I think my own bow ideal of that tendency is Doug Casey who is now filthy rich. And is listened to by a lot of people and can move around and has guaranteed a good deal of his liberty by, see the last time I saw him he just bought a condominium in Hong Kong. But that kind of mobility is very useful if that's your tendency. If it is your tendency to be a lazy fair capitalist and you're not rich, you're likely to appear a buffoon before your neighbors. As you talk about something that you do not indeed practice. The other thing for that tendency, it seems to me or for any, either of the tendencies really, but particularly for the holy rational. Pardon me if I gasp for air today. I have a very interesting asthmatic seizure this morning when we're selling stuff at a market in Washington and while I was unloading things, I suddenly discovered I couldn't breathe. But at any rate, for the rational is to get into any sort of business or industry. Even if you write books about pure theory that occurs to me it is probably a chastening and useful experience to start a business or an industry. Now among, I'll give you an example of what I think is probably a tactical area, error. Charles Koch, who is certainly identified as a libertarian, has spent God knows how much money on what he believes to be the propagation of a theory. I think he could have better spent that money quite frankly in setting up something that a fellow once described to me as a useful idea, Bill Lear as a matter of fact, said he thought that it would be a good idea to have a place somewhere that could be called an industrial incubator. Started with some seed money, would be a place where people with good industrial ideas could go, have access to first class machinery, develop the ideas, put them into production and sales, become rich, put some of the money back into the industrial incubator. Charles Koch had spent as much money backing libertarian businesses as in backing publications and candidacies for the presidency. I suspect the entire cause of libertarianism would be a lot farther ahead than it is today. In California, I've always thought that there is a beginning of some possibilities along these lines. Many libertarians that I've known out there have clustered their businesses together in sort of mall-like areas. I would very much like to see a libertarian industrial park someday. It wouldn't cost all that much, would it? But it would be nice if a number of libertarian businesses could be together because that's feeling of community, the strength you get from sharing ideas with other people and the palpable demonstration of libertarian activity seems to me would have an interesting effect on the countryside generally. And don't forget everybody that you talk to about the theory of liberty is living in although the most free country, certainly on the face of the earth, they're hardly living in a libertarian society. So you can't really talk about what is going to be and get people as excited as you can by showing them what is, how you work, what you do, what ethics guide you in this productive activity. So it occurs to me that would be nice, a libertarian industrial park. The free market generally occurs to me, a track should attract, of course, every libertarian. So that whatever they do in the market, in a marketing sense, should be a demonstration of the efficacy of as free a market as you can imagine. I'm now, since I ran out of steel and have a lot of wood, I'm now a cabinet maker. And I make furniture and I sell it in a totally unlicensed free market within 20 miles of here. We drive in from the barbarous hinterland and partake of the goodies of this metropolitan center. On an absolutely straight basis, we can undersell anybody in the area. We do good work. We practice free market economics. And we are not hesitant about telling people how we work, why we work this way, why as a matter of fact, we feel it is preferable to live as we do virtually at the official poverty level, but to be free of government harassment, to be as free as possible. The alternative to being free by being very rich is the alternative to being free by being very poor. Now, it occurs to me it makes very little difference to a libertarian, which you are, because I doubt if any portion of libertarian notion would appeal to you very much if you didn't have a tremendous amount of self-esteem. You have a good deal of that. It really doesn't make any difference. Stripped of possessions, what have you got? You, that's the most important thing. Howard Roark, after all, did do a little work in a quarry and it didn't seem to demean him even in theory. So they are both extremes and they're both very satisfactory, it seems to me. We, with the cooperation of the federal government, have chosen the root of poverty. Because I still am the only person I know who has a 100% lien on their earnings from the federal government. And when you ask them, what am I supposed to live on? They tell you that's not their concern and of course it isn't. And I wouldn't want it to be. I'd much rather handle it myself. So I do owe the federal government something. That's teaching me a great lesson about what is important, which turned out to be me, not the money. Well, on the Romantic side, in your community, it occurs to me there are a lot of things that can be done in the areas of social issues which appeal to the Romantic inclination probably a little more than to the holy rational. One of the issues that is absolutely ready-made for libertarians are all ecological issues. Because libertarians have all persuasions that I know of have brought to bear on such issues the entire question of externalities and the economics of externalities. Federal government won't touch it with a 10-foot pole. Liberals would die if notified of it. So only libertarians have any appreciation of what pollution means in the sense of property aggression. And it occurs to me that they can make more informed, more penetrating, more believable arguments about ecological issues than any other people in the country. And the work being done by the folks at the University of Montana is I think a great demonstration of that. And of course, free market efforts to clean up streams and so forth have been wonderfully successful. So this is an issue for the Romantic libertarian that is ready-made and it's an issue that now crops up everywhere with the externalities of chemical pollution, the increasingly troublesome notion of groundwater intrusion and so forth. So there's something to be done in any community along those lines. The Romantic libertarians also, I believe will have a very good opportunity to involve their friends, their neighbors in communities in such things as barter exchanges. I mean, it is one thing to point out that Federal Reserve notes are not money and it's an engaging pastime, but doesn't keep you out of jail and doesn't mean that anybody else pays any attention to this notorious fact. But you can offer the alternative in any community of barter exchanges, which are relatively inflation-proof, interestingly enough, unless you organize a barter club, which are probably a little more inflationary, that is a commercial barter club. Most commercial barter clubs have turned out to be more inflationary than even government spending since people try to unload their least useful materials into it, pile up a lot of credits and then usually sell them at a tremendous discount. But honest object for object time for time barter exchanges in many communities are useful. So are such things as food co-ops. Food co-ops, after all, are an option. Now, I understand that a laissez-faire capitalist will probably say, but that's terrible. It's antithetical to everything I stand for because it isn't competitive, but it is a choice in a free society. You have choices. There are no orthodoxies in a free society. It occurs to me that this is sort of sad for people who have drifted into a religious turn of mind on libertarianism, but they really aren't. In a free society, if some people want to get together and practice cannibalism on each other, that should be a little concern of yours, or if they want to practice socialism together. They want to practice laissez-faire capitalism, or what have you, that the important and operating principle is freedom and liberty, not what you do in it just so long as you do it without aggressing anyone else or initiating violence in order to do it. So a food co-op, although it may sound terribly anti-capitalist, is certainly an alternative and a good organizing point in many communities. Also, when you compare it to the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, it's probably more capitalistic than that. Alternative technologies appeal to me, of course, because I'm tool-centered in what I do, and I find that in most communities, people have become so alienated from tools. They don't understand what good things are available. And that you can make yourself fairly popular in most communities, simply by pointing out the extraordinary things that can be done at a local level, using good technology, not good technology in the sense just of simple technology, but any technology that is appropriate to where you live. You can buy a Gene Slicer, Slicer today for $40,000 if your inclination is to breed new strains of corn germs. You could try that in your community. If, on the other hand, your notion is, as mine is, that you can impress your neighbors by building for $5 a square foot, aha, an absolutely 70% energy-efficient house that has been called by one architectural journal and masterpiece, then that's appealing to your neighbors. It says something to them that free people, not entangled with credentials, not entangled with official this or official that, can do anything, absolutely anything. Build houses, cure the sick, grow the food, do anything. And you can make these demonstrations. Now, just a practical suggestion for people of either persuasion who are in business together. I understand that it is necessary occasionally to be an employee. It is something that very few of us can avoid. However, it is not something to be desired. So even if you are an employee, it occurs to me, whichever persuasion, is yours that you spend a good deal of your time trying not to be one. There's nothing very useful about being an employee, as a matter of fact. So you should try to break away. Being an entrepreneur is 44 and a half times as interesting and as productive. If, however, you're engaged in something that requires a lot of folks to work together, it's possible to have working relationships that are not employee or employee relationships. And I think much more efficiently. So there's a wonderful libertarian publisher named Ted Nichols, who has a quite successful business, very rich business, who says that the people who work there, he tries to make feel that they are in business for themselves. That's the best way of having an employee or employee relationship. And of course, anybody can do that. And I would say that if you have to have other people working with you, that that's a good basis on which to have them working. Have them working as fully as participants as possible. Participants not only in sharing and decisions, but in the ups and downs of the thing. And the worst thing about an employee is that they have very little stake in either the success or the failure of a business. They have a stake in a paycheck, which may depend on it to an extent, but not absolutely. So I think the thing to do is to have everybody hooked in so that their work and what they do is the measure of the success of the operation so that they will share in it. And that they will share in the disaster of loss as well. Not sharing in loss is a terribly, terribly debilitating thing. That's why a lot of employees never have a very great sense of the excitement of being on the edge of disaster and by venturing things. Interestingly, it's curious, it is quite obvious that no interesting social change will ever come from any government, never has and never will. In this country, there are extraordinary changes taking place, the only place where I suppose the long run we should have looked for and that is in commercial enterprise. Today there are several outstanding companies in this country, very successful companies who have discarded the old state model of management, the command system of management, almost completely. And I've instead installed a management system much more like the one I mentioned where people are pretty much in business for themselves. Think of some of these companies. The most powerful computer in the world is built by Cray. They have very little hierarchy. They have a shared vision, build the most powerful machine. People are very much in business for themselves at Cray. Programmer friend of mine was up there recently and he visited in the same week control data corporation from which Cray had come, Seymour Cray. He said at CDC, everybody was bored and sort of walking around like this. He said at Cray, even the janitor was interesting as he was part of it. And everybody was enthusiastic, wonderful atmosphere, analog devices incorporated. Another place where everybody has their own responsibilities, Carl Morgan. Like a lot of scientific equipment, they also make periscopes for the government. They have a notion that whenever an operating unit gets to 500, it's big enough, they just start another company. Dayton Hudson has 88,000 employees, it's a retailing chain. 88,000 employees and 250 people in the corporate staff. It's a good ratio, better than the Japanese ratio. Japanese, that's a paper dragon I'm sure because the one thing the Japanese do not have that this country abounds in is to real creativity. The great Japanese employee slogan is, the nail that sticks up gets hit. You see, it really doesn't encourage a lot of risk taking. But I'm so pleased to note that in a survey recently it was shown that the best Japanese automobiles are now made in America. Quality control, the best machines are now made here. Well, it figures. I mean, the craft unions, despite their great attempts, have not been able to stamp out craftsmanship this country, there's still a lot of it left. And I expect a lot of it, more of it, than any place else on earth. Anyway, there's a kind of libertarian management that occurs to me, should assure that any libertarian enterprise will be more successful than any state modeled exercise. I use state modeled simply that the state operates on that command system. A person, the president, can command the economy and the nation and everything else. Well, we know that's utter bullshit. We should understand that it's no more sensible than a commercial enterprise, as a matter of fact. Now, in a community, you have a chance to practice politics if that's your hobby. It's obviously yours. You have a chance to practice politics. At a level that is immediately rewarding and significant. Now, I understand that the world may end tomorrow due to some excess of the strategic air command, but what the hell? Get hit by a truck, it's just as deadly. So I start worrying about nuclear war totally. I also got to be 61, I recognize that I can't, I don't have to put up with this stuff forever. So you relax a lot once you face your own mortality. But anyway, sheriffs to my mind are probably more significant in the good health of your good health than most members of the strategic air command. I feel you can be more directly threatened by a sheriff. Therefore, if a libertarian wants to become a sheriff, that's a good idea. I think there may not be any so far. There's one with tendencies in Aspen, Colorado, but it's a good office. But at any rate, at the local level, you can practice politics for the one reason which occurs to me to be valid today. That is to protect yourself. In other words, to have some countervailing power against all of these loonies that were running around exercising political power. It occurs to me that virtually any political action is justified in terms of self-defense. Running for office even, or other exotic and bizarre behaviors. If it will protect you, and if you can possibly resist the urge to do something, libertarians should be able to do that. In politics, you can take a number of steps to protect without doing anything to anybody else. You can be on a town council or a county commission, and you can engage in those activities which will abolish zoning laws which won't hurt anybody. Or you can take any action that will not hurt other people and which may protect you. County offices are a good place to be. Let me give you a notion about what the county means in this country. There are only 3,000 counties in the federal states of America, 3,000. Now, if you had 10% of those counties, there are 300 of them. With a substantial libertarian presence, it occurs to me that you'd be making quite a dent in the consciousness of the country and consequently the world, 300 counties. Now, we're taking care of one, I hope, at least 299 for you folks and a few other people. It's not the most overwhelming proposition in the world. Now, suppose it doesn't do any good. It's interesting, it's fun, it's a good way to live. I remember the only sensible thing I recall out of my participation in the New Left, which I do not regret at all, but I remember very few things. Now, I also introduced a certain drugs at that time. Also, but I remember somebody once asked, fellow whose popular name was Rudy the Red, as I recall, an engaging fellow, why he was a revolutionary? And he said, because it's a good way to live. Well, I think that's acceptable. That's the same way with being a libertarian. That's a good reason for being a libertarian. It's a good way to live. So if you can engage in any of these activities, where you are, whether they change the world or not, it may change somebody and it's fun, and you can do it. Now, some specific things that libertarians can do in communities. I have schools written down as the very first point because I suppose that will sound like a broken record to some people, but I do think that generally speaking, the public school system in this country has been the single most fierce opponent of liberty that we have because it attacks the most impressionable people, little people, who expect big people to make sense. It's a terribly misplaced trust, but nonetheless, these little people go to schools and they learn about authority. They learn how to think or anything of that sort, authority. So it occurs to me that in any community, there are a lot of opportunities for libertarians. In terms of schools, Manfred can tell you a good deal about two ways. One, be what my friend Leonard Ligio calls a briefcase gorilla by being in the public school system. And there are extraordinary things going on in it and other things that may happen in it. The more it can be, the more it can be shifted away from the teaching of facts toward simply speculation thinking, the better off at least some little kids will be and some public school teachers are able for a time to do this. That's one approach. The other approach of course is to start a school, a private school, and to have it founded not on the teaching of facts or morality or other such nonsense, but to have it founded on teaching ethics and thinking, logic, dialectics, grammar, and so forth. That's an approach. The other is to keep your kids at home. Teach them at home. It occurs to me that the first most responsible action any libertarian can take with a young person entrusted to them by birth or by adoption is if they possibly can to teach them at home. Lacking some superb alternative in the community. At least save a child. It seems unlikely that we can save all children but you have access usually to one or two that you've produced yourself. And you could at least be kind to them. In some of this I should have mentioned something about crankiness in the community or being ill-tempered, ideological, and well, a proper libertarian. Where you're always bringing up the question of everything being wrong in the community because it does not adhere to Austrian school economics and so forth and abusing your neighbors because they work for the military or do something like that. This is really dumb. And it should have been evident after seeing what happened to the left in this country when there was a left in this country. It was the only country that ever developed a left wing movement which had as its only constituency the upper middle class. I was just some genius involved there. But the reasons, and I was there, I saw it and learned from it. One of the reasons is the left in this country has always chosen as its foremost target working people. They're said to be greedy, they drive Winnebago's and they bowl. And therefore are not worthy of the high thoughts of all of these leftist ninnies. The same thing happens with libertarians. You know, my God, you don't know who Ludwig von Mises is. You're a liberal, you vote Democratic, you belong to a trade union, you know, out. Can't speak to you. It's really wrong. Your neighbors, even though they may have disgusting habits, are still your neighbors. And it seems to me that it is your fate in life being enlightened to be patient with them. Brecht had a line, I forgot, it might have been in Mother Courage, where he said, we who had changed the world could not to our own selves be kind. That's a terrible thing. Whenever I see libertarians squabbling over how many Austrians can dance on the head of a pin and pronouncing anathema on each other, I'd love to have the anathema concession and the libertarian party. You sell tongues of it. That's so silly. What libertarian could possibly be so bad as to call forth all of this invective? I mean, they're roughly in the same world that you live in, headed in roughly the same direction. So a little heresy here and a little heresy there. I got it. If you can't put up with that from your best friends, what sort of a neighbor are you gonna be? Not a terribly good one. Anyway, another alternative for schools. So I think this is really important. I think while I was tempted recently to run for the school commission in our county, I think that it is impossible to change a whole county-wide school system. Manfred would know about this much better than I, but at least where I live, even, and there are only 40,000 people in our county. I don't think you could change it substantially. There are too many parents who want things that can be measured. You know, like did their child memorize 4,000 names or some other perfectly ridiculous thing. But you can't change that. What I'm trying to work for in our county now is that we have a high school of science so that a few people out of the school system can be rescued and go to a place that has nothing to do with facts. Science is the last refuge of the anti-fact contingent on earth because it has only to do with method and thinking and process. And I think it is possible to do that because kids who are very bright are pests and most school systems like get rid of them anyway. And so maybe a little thing like this would be possible to organize. So there are many alternatives about schools and very important. Now, another thing that any libertarian should try to do in the county in which they live is to own a newspaper or radio station. The two other libertarians in our county, we have almost approached critical mass. And now that Steven's moving into the adjacent county we'll have them outnumbered, we'll have them surrounded. The two other libertarians in our county did own a weekly newspaper, first class. A lot of good stuff going on. Then the swinish, to use them, Rothbardian phrase, the swinish press association in our state passed a law that put out of business one newspaper, this little newspaper. It was a very strange thing having to do with legal advertising that raised the rates for everybody else in the state and cut them in half for this one little libertarian paper. So that's not there anymore, but it may be again someday. And it's not a terribly expensive thing to do. Having a newspaper is important. In Bristol, Tennessee, there's a variation of that. A shopper that is run by libertarians in Bristol, Virginia, Tennessee. First class little paper, because it's mainly full of the stuff that people in the area want to know about, what's playing where, advertising and so forth. But it's just full of these strange little footnotes all over the place. It's peppered with libertarian footnotes. Good, a very good process. Shoppers are sort of a cheap way of starting a newspaper. Radio stations. I got FM radio station can be put on the air for $50,000. Good thing to have, libertarians, should try to have a radio station in their county. You raise that much money sometimes for things that aren't nearly as interesting or as permanent as a radio station. A regional magazines that crop up all over the place. Libertarians with a bent in that direction should consider starting one. I don't mean to start one that looks exactly like reason or even behaves like it. I mean, after all, you'd be a shock in your community, but you can be a slowly influential group through any of those means. Now, of businesses, I just thought of a few that it occurs to me would be useful to engage in in any county, well, any business to begin with. If the county is large enough to need it, an ad agency is a perfectly good base for libertarian activities. Keeps you in touch with a lot of people and it makes available a lot of good stuff. Word processors, typesetters, perhaps, if Jared's been busy and sold them to him. And other such things, graphic artists, useful things for propagandizing in a community. An accounting office. And God knows there must be some libertarians who keep track of their vast amounts of money and therefore must know something about double entry bookkeeping or in the libertarian case, quadruple entry. Or at least triple. Well, that's a good thing. Again, it keeps you in touch. It gives you some notion of how you can best keep some of the money yourself and so on. All of the medical and healing arts are first class. Now, one of my dreams along libertarian lines is, is this, that the monopoly of the most powerful trade union in this country, the AMA, will probably not be seriously shaken until some really libertarian actions are taken. One of them would be, I believe, the organization of a nurses clinic. Nurses, obviously, can do, I would estimate from studies I have seen, between 80 and 90% of all of the work that is done in a doctor's office during the day. A step toward organizing such a clinic is to find a libertarian doctor who will shelter it for a while. But sooner or later, nurses who have successfully been working in a community should be able to challenge all of the state licensing laws about practicing medicine. Nurse midwives would be another useful approach to this. But the healing arts generally are first class. It's seen before libertarian presence in a community. Peter Breggin's got some ideas about even the nut business that I think are most appealing. And offer substantial libertarian possibilities. Not as clients, you understand? Now, my own feeling is that machine shops and auto garages are first class. Laundromats, I must mention laundromats. A laundromat is the well of most communities where in ancient times, people used to gather around wells to gossip. People now gather in laundromats and there's no law against having a lot of things up on the wall of a laundromat. It's a good way to make money. It's a good place to display things and to reach people. I remember in our laundromat, well, the first time I went there was a little old lady who was taking care of it. And it was at the time of the shooting up on the Indian Reservation of the government agents. And I approached, the subject was hot and it came up. And I approached it very warily because you really don't know when you're talking to a stranger how they're going to react to the shooting of government agents. Well, I said, hmm. I said, well, those folks up there say that they had some real grievances against the government. She said, you better believe it. And she went in, went on to lecture me about what a splendid thing would have been and suddenly it occurred to me, my God. I now live in a state where government agents are revenuers. Do they have any, they enjoy no shining position. They understand that they are not there to protect people. They're there to tax them, steal from them and put them in jail quite frequently. So, anyhow, laundromat's not bad. About machine shops and auto garages. A good machine shop. Particularly when using cybernated equipment today can do virtually anything. If there were libertarian machine shops in say 10 adjacent counties and they wanted to federate, they could produce any single mechanical object in use in this country today and in fair quantity up to and including locomotives, airplanes and particularly automobiles. A garage where I do some work in our adjacent county has the capacity to build racing engines, which is the capacity to build engines. I would hope that when the laws against market entry are eased so that people can have automobiles that are less grand than the General Motors version, when Ralph Nader and General Motors relax their guard for a moment, that we would be fully capable of producing in that county of West Virginia a sufficient number of automobiles to have a good local market. We already have a good design. It's much better than anything GM's got. It's a good thing to be prepared for because after all, things are sort of coming apart in case you hadn't noticed and it's possible that the federal government is going to be so busy with its fantasies over the next few years that there'll be more and more openings for action at the local level. So I like machine shops and automobile. Garages, any form of freelancing is useful because it will tell a lot of people that you can work at home. Cottage industries of any sort are very useful and unlike the sort of feverish writing of books like Alvin Toffler's Third Wave, which doesn't tell you anything about what people do in their electronic cottages or for whom or why, if you do it, it will be clear and explicable to your neighbors and it may be inspiring to some of them. Housing and the renovation of housing is another first class libertarian activity because one, it will bring you into contact with very odious parts of the state apparatus and if you're very good at what you do, you may win occasionally. So that you'll come into contact with zoning laws with property taxes. I've lately come to think that the property tax is the single most obnoxious tax in the land. I once thought income taxes were but since they're so easily avoided, particularly by people with a lot of income, property taxes remain seems to me the great across the board violation to the extent that you really say that it is impossible to hold private property in this country today. You rent everything. You rent it from the government, some level of government. So if you don't pay your rent in the form of a property tax, you don't have your property. So at any rate, people who are involved in housing and the renovation of housing can have some impact there over time it occurs to me. Also you can introduce some very good technologies into the field. It would be nice if Howard Rohark for instance existed. Why shouldn't he? There must be some libertarian architect somewhere. If there aren't, why aren't they? Anybody who has a few little time to spare might wanna go be an architect. For any rate, the point of it is, it seems to me, this whole thing is that libertarians will make their greatest impact in communities. And they'll make it by demonstrating skills and the efficacy of the ethics of freedom. If not there where, and if not now when. There's really no sense in waiting for the millennia for this sort of thing. Haven't you do a little bit now? As I say, it's always a better way to live. You can have your fantasy right now. You can pretend to be free and it may as a matter of fact turn out to be true. And also may impress your neighbors. So those are just some thoughts on being a libertarian and living in the very real world, which is your community. If anybody has any, a nephemote to pronounce or anything, I wish they would do it now, or discussion and or questions. Yeah. I'd like to add Barbara and Harry Gressen to your list. And I'd like to ask, how do you sell your cabinets? Well, is there anybody officially connected in here? I suppose not. We sell them at Eastern Market on Capitol Hill. And that's why I can't be on the panel this afternoon. I had hoped to arrange to have somebody make our deliveries this afternoon, but that fell through. So I have to do it myself, so I have to be back down at the market shortly. Weekends in general? Saturdays, every other Saturday. Every other Saturday. Yeah. And this time I don't have any of my work there because we had so much stuff that we repaired, antiques that we bought recently at auction. It's a wonderful market. And incidentally, it is as close to a free market as any place I've seen. Is it totally out of control, it seems to me? It's not supervised by anybody. Well, at least not officially. So I tell you, operating, that's one of the greatest things. Guys, see, I was in my 40s and I'd never done a lick of work in my life of any significance, being in politics. I went to work as a commercial welder and down with the first day I showed up at this heavy equipment yard. And somebody just brought something in that they wanted welded. And I was an independent contractor there. And I did it and they gave me money for it. I'd never had that experience in 40-some years of life, except when I was a little kid. Most thrilling thing that I ever had. Well, now I just, I go almost berserk constantly with it. I mean, it's invigorating to do things for people. To exchange with people. I mean, when you get a load of, well, actually, Therese made the best deal. She wrote a, or made, did the graphics for a politician's pamphlet in our county and she got a truckload full of horse manure. For which is the most absolutely wonderful exchange. I've ever had a candidate won, incidentally. I've never written anything for a winning candidate. Therese was just not gonna, but you're right. Hair, painter, house painters are another very good thing. It's a very portable skill. And it means you get to talk to people. I'll tell you one, I offer this to anybody who wants to do it. When we lived in this civilized part of the world, we took a little survey in Northern Virginia of what people needed done in their houses. We found out that the number one need was putting patio doors back on their tracks. Well, now I'm sure given a little time, you could teach an orangutan to do that. But obviously not a GS-14. So there was that, and then there was repairing electrical repairs, and you know what that means? New plugs on lamps. You know, all of this sort of thing, so we figured you could outfit a van and sail through the suburbs and charge 20 bucks an hour. I'm sure there'd be no problem with that and only work a half an hour. And stay in business constantly and be totally unregulated as you did it, yeah. I just want to make a comment about that. Yeah. The number one need with I do these kind of things where I work, I teach, and I'm a somatid, I work, and I do things like painting and things just like that. And there's the non-long need of people to do that because everybody stands out like this. The fingers don't know how to do these things, you say? And if anyone wants to make a lot of money, I'd say we do it. I remember when I was at the Institute for Policy Studies, I taught a little course in home plumbing there because all of these people who were perfectly prepared to save the world didn't know where the hell the water came from. So I thought it'd be... So I did this home plumbing course. And in the midst of it, one of the fellows there, they were all very nice people there, as a matter of fact. This one fellow said, I can't do anything with my hands. It's a concert pianist. You know, you wonder how bizarre the human mind can get. Yeah, that's a good business, yeah. I'm a small town and in fact I've survived on doing a lot of those jobs myself, but I come here to D.C. And I find an awful lot of people who I get the strong impression prefer to keep a checkbook between them and any other human being that they're not actually legally obligated to somehow. And I wonder whether, at least in some communities, you're gonna find if they ever dawn on what you're doing, there's gonna be a reluctance because they're gonna have to start coping with you as a person instead of being a check recipient. I tell you, you can make dense into such people, usually by saying, such things as, I will do this for $100 cash or $150 if you pay me by check. It really makes, it makes believers in cash out of a lot of people very fast. We have that policy with our furniture. You pay by check and it costs this much. Give us cash and it costs that much. If you give us gold. So I think it's, but I'm sure you're right. There are a lot of such people, but all of these things give opportunities to talk to people, opportunities that might not. We thought, as a matter of fact, in our sweep through the suburbs with this van, one of the things in the back of our mind was, would be that we would probably be hired by women whose husband was too busy to put the patio door back on the track. And we thought we might make some significant points about whether or not it is advisable to be married to such a person. And we might, we could offer transportation services for women who wanted to leave home. Yeah. Question at least in some libertarian minds, whether we really are a party or we are not. I'm just wondering how do you see that integrating into what we should be doing as a party? Well, except for Alaska, all you're doing is educational. So you don't have much choice in the matter. And I think it's good. Look, I think the main thing is that you shouldn't go asking people for advice. If you've got a good idea, you should just go ahead and do it. It occurs to me, one of the worst things in the world would be to have an opinion poll on how libertarians should behave. Libertarian should behave exactly the way that they want to behave. And be responsible for that behavior fully. And I think the Libertarian Party has an educational effort. I've certainly enjoyed it. Now that Stephen's moving into the adjacent county, I anticipate there'll be a libertarian governor of West Virginia in a couple of months. Who knows? And then my feeling is I'd like that. I mean, even though a libertarian governor would probably be as big a pain in the ass as any other kind of governor, it would be a little preferable. Yeah, it would really be preferable. I mean, there are things in this imperfect world that are preferable. Not perfect, just preferable. And so it is in most things in politics. Yeah. I'd like to ask if on the local level you have noticed people being impressed with the way you do things. Well, yes. First of all, I think that the thing that impressed me most was when I moved out there I was a welder, simply a welder. Then there was some things happen, national publicity of various sorts that even got to my neighbors and they didn't care. Now I've been at the local auction in our county. I've been to three times with film crews following me around. Not once has anybody ever even asked me what that was all about. They don't care. You know, it's old Carl and he doesn't. So I'm a good welder. They know that and I'm a good neighbor. And this other stuff is ho hum. And I think that you really, I feel that you know you arrived in a community and are part of it when people don't care about your silly business. But it can be influential because after all, people have got to draw conclusions. If you're honest, hardworking and competent, and it is not because you are afraid of God, there must be some other reason. And if the reason happens to be that that's the way free people are likely to behave, that may get across to somebody. And if it gets across to one person, what a wonderful thing. If it gets across to two kids, what a wonderful thing this is. I'm not sure that you can ever be as sure of reaching people as you are, where you live. So I just think that's another reason for doing it. That's my question though. Do you have a feeling that that really has been happening? Yeah, I think so. I mean people who used to think I was just a crank now call up and say, what can we use this technology for this, that and the next thing? I'm sort of the technology coordinator for our county. And I don't know, I've talked to enough people about this high school of science that I'm not, I believe it may happen. And I talk at all of the, my policy is I go anywhere in our county and I'll talk to anybody. The 4-H clubs, the ladies, this's and that's is anything. I don't care what it is. And if you can't talk about anything and not manage to one other thing, I forgot about it completely, but I must mention it. I think libertarians in any community should volunteer to do things as much as possible. One thing, it's part of the principle. That is to say that you can do things voluntarily. Take up the slack, help the sick, the poor, anybody. You can do it voluntarily. We started, tree started, as a matter of fact, an adult literacy program in our county. And I tutor three people in it. Well now there's three people who are learning two things. They're learning to read and they're learning about liberty, because that's what we read about. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Thank you. Hi. Please. Go ahead. Get up. Please. Go inside and you can go back. Go outside. You can go inside. Go inside.