 Okay, then without further ado, I'll just introduce Ed Crane from the Cato Institute and he will talk about the Libertarian Party in the United States. It shows if you have a small enough room and few enough chairs you can get a good turnout for about anything. I should open with a disclaimer, I guess I gather the program, I don't gather it, I know it. The program says that something about the Libertarian Party being an important force in American politics and that's not really my view, so I'll be presenting a much more negative assessment of the status of the Libertarian Party. Then might be implied from the program. The program does say I am the person to give the inside scoop on the Libertarian Party I have to perhaps regrettably agree with that assessment. I've spent much of the last, well not the last few years, but certainly the first ten years of the party's history I was very actively involved. I went to every NatCom meeting from 1972 when the party was founded through 1981. So for the first ten years of the party I was pretty actively involved. I was national chairman of the party from 1974 through 77 and I ran Roger McBride's presidential campaign in 1976 and Ed Clark's campaign in 1980. So for better or for worse I am well qualified to speak on the party. As was mentioned earlier today there was a split among various groups in 1969 that led to the formation of the activist Libertarian movement in the U.S. As far as the Libertarian Party is concerned it was primarily the YAF split. And the effect of that is that in the early years at least the party had a pretty strongly conservative bias. The Libertarian Party was founded in Denver, Colorado in 1972. And I had been active in politics when I was in college. I went to Berkeley and ran for the student senate on a platform of abolishing the student government. Which I thought was a pretty radical plan, but I was defeated by a Bettina Aptecker whose father was the head of the U.S. Communist Party. I was perceived in Berkeley in the 60s as being more radical. But I had worked for Barry Goldwater in 1964 up through the primary period and became disillusioned with him as he got closer to the nomination. In fact got the nomination, started compromising on his views on Social Security became more adamant about getting involved in Vietnam. And so I just assumed I would never be involved in politics. And then we got notification in late 71 and early 72 that there was going to be an organizing convention for the Libertarian Party. And I thought, what the heck? I'll go. As a Libertarian I had always been respectful of the idea that people should be allowed to pursue alternative lifestyles. But until I went to that convention I wasn't really aware of just how many alternatives there were. It was an interesting group. There were about 85 people there from 13 different states. All sorts of orientations. People who were goldbugs or science fiction freaks or whatever. You didn't see a lot of mainstream America at that convention. Nevertheless, they all had a very strong commitment to individual liberty and were committed to the idea that political change through the two major parties was probably unlikely, at least in the right direction. So I admire those people for having the courage to try to bring the Libertarian movement into the real world. Prior to the formation of the Libertarian Party, what passed for the Libertarian movement was a ragtag collection of counter-cultural types who really had no visibility. And their distinguishing characteristic, I think, was a strong alienation toward their own society. And that's an important distinction, I think. It wasn't just an alienation toward government, an anti-government sentiment, but an attitude that there was something wrong with American society, American culture. And as a result, there was very little interest in trying to reach out and trying to change things politically. It was almost as though it was a sell-out to try to deal with the real world. And I'm not saying the Libertarian Party got off on that foot, but the original group had that in mind, and after several years it really was becoming a factor on the American political scene. We nominated in Denver in 1972 John Hospers and Tony Nathan. John is a philosophy professor at the University of Southern California. At the time, he was the department chair, and he made a tremendous sacrifice in running for president. This was an unknown party, the 14th largest political party in America. And America is a two-party system, so they were pretty far down the road. And he ultimately lost his chairmanship of the department because of his activities in the party. Tony Nathan was a TV journalist from Eugene, Oregon, and she ultimately became the first woman, the only woman, to receive an electoral college vote in the United States. One of the great trivia questions of all time is who was the campaign manager for the only woman in history to receive an electoral college vote? Muah. It was all downhill from there, however. But they traveled around the country and on a shoestring budget of about $5,000 went to, I guess, 20 states, and we discovered libertarians who were out there and who were looking for some means of expressing their political views and were fairly excited about the concept of a libertarian party. I think the attitude of the people in the party who wanted to bring libertarianism to a broader audience was that for better or for worse, and probably for worse, about the only time in the United States that people are actively concerned about ideas or political ideas is during election years, and particularly presidential election years. And if you weren't part of that debate, if you weren't being covered by the media, if you weren't participating in it, it was next to impossible to communicate with the American people, with the middle class Americans who need to be convinced that libertarianism is the proper course if we're going to have the kind of social change we want to bring about. So that was a major reason for supporting the party. By participating in this process, whether or not one thought it was a good thing that the process existed, one had a platform, a vehicle to communicate with people who were interested at that particular time in ideas. And so that's what we set about doing. That electoral college vote, as you know, and the people from the U.S., and I imagine most people from Scandinavian Europe are aware that the actual election of a president is done through representatives who were elected by the popular vote. One of those representatives was Roger McBride, who was a lawyer, is a lawyer from Charlottesville, Virginia. He was a Republican elector and instead of voting for Nixon, when the perfunctory process came up to cast the electoral college vote, he voted for hospice Nathan, giving the party a third place finish in its very first race. In 1974, there was a convention in Dallas at which I was elected national chairman of the party. That's sort of the point where my life starts to go downhill. And I was given a box, a shoe box full of three by five cards which consisted of the acting members of the Libertarian Party. I subsequently tried to mail newsletters and political propaganda and anything I could, any list I could find, Reason Magazine or whatever, and pretty soon we built up a pretty substantial computer list and had a functioning organization in, I think, about 40 states by the time the presidential campaign rolled around in 1976. Roger McBride was rewarded for his electoral college vote in 1975 in New York at a convention of about 500 people. It was a tremendous air of electricity in that convention in New York. Real excitement, a sense that there was enough energy to really change things. By then, there had been a few interesting campaigns that had occurred in New York and Ohio. People were getting to know each other starting to feel like there might really be something possible to achieve with this new party. And Roger McBride was a Harvard Law School graduate, a very successful man who was wealthy in his own right. He was nominated and we pretty much took off from there in 1976. The Libertarian Party was on the ballot in 31 states plus the District of Columbia. And for those of you who are not Americans, you don't just get on the ballot, each state you have to petition and it's a time-consuming, resource-consuming process. But in that election, Gene McCarthy, who just eight years earlier had almost gotten the Democratic nomination, was really cheated out of it in 1968, was running as an independent and he got on the ballot in fewer states than McBride, which was the first indication that Libertarians had organizing ability, which was quite a surprise to all of us. And we got about 176,000 votes. We ran, I think, five or six network television ads. So for the first time, there were millions of people being exposed to the existence of the Libertarian Party and the Libertarian Alternative. That was the most votes of any other third party. So we had gone from 14th largest party in two years to the third largest party, even though McCarthy got more votes than McBride. And that perhaps the most successful race in the party's history was in 1978, when Ed Clark was convinced to run for governor of California against Jerry Brown. And Clark was a terrific candidate, a very articulate Libertarian who was able to express ideas in terms that people could understand. He was not put offish or he was more interested in bringing people in than in excluding them. Clark had an ability to articulate political ideas in such a way that they were, beyond anything, either party was advocating in a Libertarian direction, but not so far beyond that he was no longer part of the debate. And that was an important distinction between different elements of the party, those who wanted to be ultra-radical and those who wanted to communicate with people. My own position is that there's nothing particularly radical about standing on top of a hill in a black suit or even a black flag and yelling smash a state. It's not radical, it's silly. The true Libertarian radical is the one who's most successful in moving our society toward less government domination. And there must be lots of different paths to pursue, lots of different strategies, but it seems to me that should be the definition of a radical. Clark campaigned throughout the state of California, the largest state in the nation. He received 376,980 votes, as I recall, and that was about five and a half, nearly six percent of the total vote for governor in the largest state in the country, which was a significant achievement. And there were candidates throughout the state running for state senate and state legislature receiving on average four to six percent of the vote, which is significant too because it's typically a balance of power vote. So the Libertarian party was really on the scene. It was growing in other parts of the country as well, but I think that was perhaps the highlight of the party's existence in 1978. That year Dick Randolph, a Libertarian from Alaska, was voted into the Alaska state legislature along with another Libertarian, the first two Libertarians ever to be elected to a state legislature where they had an enormous impact on stopping state spending while they were in office. They also initiated a state initiative to abolish the state income tax, which forced the legislature to do that. They've subsequently passed an initiative just recently, as a matter of fact, that has abolished the state equivalent of the Civil War and non-export in Alaska, much to the chagrin of existing air carriers. But Alaska is a good case study of how Libertarian politics can in fact increase liberty. They have a tremendous presence up there, they did until recently, and Randolph is a principled, committed guy, put a lot of money and time in his own career to try to bring Libertarian ideas to the state. He ran for governor in 1982 and got 16% of the vote. So that was the state probably that had the most success. But in terms of the dynamics of American politics, this Clark for Governor campaign in 1980 was perhaps the most successful in 1978. In 1979 we had a presidential nominating convention in Los Angeles. Los Angeles, well, 79 was the year of the convention because of this ballot access requirement. It was important for us to nominate our candidate ahead of time to give us time to get the candidate on the ballot, which was a tremendous advantage to the other parties, the major parties, because of course they didn't have to go through that process. But actually more important than that was the fact that the media wasn't really attuned to a presidential campaign yet in September of 1979. So it was much more difficult to get publicity. In any case, there were some 2,000 people that convened at that convention. It was a remarkable affair. It was contested, a very articulate fellow named Bill Huncher from New Hampshire was running against Ed Clark, who was the favorite and who subsequently won two to one. But it was a very hotly contested race. Both candidates went to most states throughout the country and got significant media coverage wherever they went. And it was clear that the media was starting to take the libertarian party seriously. When I say that the purpose of the party was to expose millions of Americans to libertarian ideas through the political process, that is, through that process whereby reporters come by and cover you because you're a candidate, this was the best example of it. Millions and millions of people being exposed to ideas that were just pure libertarian ideas. And the primary, if you will, was a very important contribution. The campaign itself, well, let me say that during the convention, which had all the trappings of a major party convention, the reason for that, of course, is to present these ideas, as other people have said, radical ideas within a conservative format so that people are not put off by it, conservative in the sense of being consistent with what people expect a political convention to be like. This is not some group from outer space. These are Americans who are doing things the way they are done in this country. The ideas being put forth are radical. They're far different from anything the Republicans and Democrats are saying, but they're being said in a format, in a context that makes people stop and listen. The Los Angeles Times is probably the fourth most important paper in the United States behind the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. It had three front page articles during the course of the convention on this campaign, on the convention, on the race for the nomination. And that, to me, was very significant. Other papers in the country, the news media itself, takes its cue from papers like the LA Times. If they thought it was a serious thing, and clearly they did, then the rest of the country was going to. And I was convinced that the 1980 presidential campaign offered a really unique opportunity for libertarians to establish themselves as a viable third party. And I say viable because in the United States, it's almost impossible to have a viable third party. We have a winner-take-all system, which makes it very, very discouraging over a long period of time. When you can get 5%, 10%, 15%, 20%, and still not elect anybody, not have any representation, any spokesman in the state legislature or the federal government. And for that reason, there haven't been any viable third parties for 40 years in the United States. George Wallace ran a campaign in 68, which was a personality campaign. There was no party behind it. There have been states' rights parties, regional efforts, but there has not been a successful, broad-based third party movement in the United States in decades. And so for libertarians to do that, I think was a very significant achievement. And we were on the verge of overcoming enormous obstacles, which I'll touch on in a little bit. Something that, you know, there are people all throughout this saying, it's a waste of time, don't do it, which can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. But I really admire the people who were involved in bringing the libertarian party up to a point in 1980 where it was being taken very seriously. It was going to be a factor in the presidential campaign. Now, one of the things we had going was David Koch, who was the vice presidential nominee under United States election law. There is a contribution limitation of $1,000 to a federal campaign for each person. Above that, you're abusing your First Amendment privileges, your right to free speech, and so forth. So, you know, to have a contribution limitation like that is analogous to, say, Sears, the big retailer in the United States, saying, well, anybody can compete with this, but they can only advertise up to $1,000. Obviously, a new party needs large amounts of seed capital. Gene McCarthy, when he ran for president in 1968, got enormous sums of money from people like Stuart Mott, the General Motors Air, Liberal General Motors Air, and other wealthy individuals that got his campaign off the ground because he was not part of the Democratic establishment. He'd always been something of a maverick senator. And if the election laws had been in place in 1968, he would not have been able to run. And had he not run, then Lyndon Johnson probably would have run for reelection. So you can see that these laws have a very insidious of impact or effect on the electoral process. The Supreme Court had ruled on a challenge that the Libertarian Party, among others, were a part of the federal election laws. And one of the few rational things the Supreme Court really did was say that, well, if you're actually a candidate, the contribution limitation is an infringement on your rights. If you want to support the candidate, it's not. But so that made it very important for a new party to have a wealthy candidate on the ticket. And David Cope was a personally very shy person and not interested in publicity or getting out in front of other people, made a very big sacrifice financially and personally to be on the ticket. And so we had not only a very good candidate for president and Ed Clark, but we had the resources to publicize this campaign. We had, although we probably wish we didn't have it, through previous campaigns, expertise to get on the ballot. As no other party did, the Socialist Workers Party, the Socialist Labor Party, the American Independent Party, Left and Right Wing Independent Parties have existed in the United States for a long time, but it's only the Libertarian Party that's had any impact in terms of visibility. So we knew from the people that we were going to have working on the campaign, that we were going to be on the ballot, we're pretty sure in all 50 states, which was another first in the last half century in that country. That combined with the fact that we had the resources to purchase somewhere between 40 and 50 five minute television ads in prime time in the United States. Network television ads meant that we were going to have credibility and visibility. My position was, and there are those who say I was naive to expect this, but there was a tremendous disenchantment with the Reagan Carter choice in 1980. People really were not happy with that choice. Reagan was not nearly as popular as he was by 1984. Carter was clearly unpopular. People were very uncertain about Reagan, an actor and didn't take him that seriously. They were afraid he was a little trigger happy and Carter had been a failure in his first four years. So an alternative candidate would have gotten a lot of attention. My position that with all the network television ads that we were running and the fact that we were on the ballot in all 50 states, that the national media would have been very hard pressed to ignore Ed Clark. But by April of 1980, as we were in the middle of our ballot drives, an unusual phenomenon occurred, and that is that a Republican candidate for president who was getting anywhere between one half of one percent and two percent and the primaries dropped out as a Republican, John Anderson was his name, and decided to run as an independent. And for whatever reason, he became the media, the darling of the media and got enormous amounts of coverage. In the early going, most of this enormous coverage was about the fact that he wasn't getting any coverage, which was frustrating to us because he was getting plenty of coverage and we weren't getting any. But in any case, he was then the third party candidate. He was able to get on the ballot, he got a lot of publicity, and he provided the outlet for the media. They were covering the alternative that was really required in 1980 because of the enormous frustration on the part of the American electorate. Anderson was a bombastic, pompous, ignorant person who early on, after he'd been through this process of getting on the 50 state ballots and had some reasonably slick television ads and so forth, actually went up in the polls to 25 percent, which only reflected the extreme frustration on the part of the electorate. As they got to know Anderson, his percentage went down to ultimately 6 percent in the election. But in any case, it precluded Clark from getting network television coverage. And in the United States, you can buy ads, which are important, but they don't have the impact if the networks, the three networks, are not covering your campaign. They covered three campaigns, which was one more than they usually do. They weren't going to cover a fourth. Bill Moyers on public television had an excellent spot on Clark's foreign policy views. There was a lot of very, very fine local coverage of Clark, and he campaigned tirelessly throughout the country in all 50 states. And it was a superb campaign. There were press releases that went out every day, very professionally written. There were four major white papers, one on taxing and spending, that proposed reducing the size of the federal government by $200 billion in one year, and detailed where the cuts would be, which was at that time a third of the federal government. It's only about 20 percent of the federal government now. Radical tax cuts to balance the budget. There was a white paper on social security reform that would have allowed younger people to opt out of social security and essentially put that enormous one-third of the federal government on a road to privatization. There was a white paper on education that would have created education tax credits to undermine the public school system, a very well thought out proposal. And there was a white paper on foreign policy authored by Earl Ravenel, which was a very eloquent and real world statement of the case for a non-interventionist foreign policy. These combined with speeches, major forums throughout the country gave the Libertarian Party a terrific level of exposure. Libertarianism through the Libertarian Party, and particularly the Clark campaign, was recognized and is to this day a political alternative. And 10 years ago, it was not. To me, this is an incredible achievement. The idea that there could be a political point of view that combined both the respect for individual rights, a tolerant view on civil liberties with a laissez-faire approach in economics, that combination of views, much less adding in the non-interventionist foreign policy, that combination of views simply was not part of the game. It was not an alternative in American politics during the 40s, 50s, well, in part it was during the 40s, but in the 50s, in the 60s, in the early part of the 70s, that was just not what one was. One was a conservative or a liberal, but you had a package deal. If you were a conservative, you may have believed in the free market, although there's strong case to be made that most conservatives don't believe in the free market. But you had to believe that it was important to control people's lifestyles and morals and restrict speech in all sorts of anti-civil-libertarian positions. If you were liberal and believed in civil liberties, why part of the package deal was that you had to believe in big government, the New Deal economic programs, redistribution of wealth and so forth. I think one of the interesting aspects of that dichotomy is that for the most part conservatives tend to know more about economics than they think about the implications of their positions on social repression and civil liberties. Liberals tend to think more about civil liberties and not really understand economics. They just sort of go along with these package deals. I think there is an enormous constituency in America that is fiscally free market and on civil liberties issues very libertarian. And in order for them to become self-conscious of that, they have to know that that alternative exists. And I think the Libertarian Party has achieved that. There's an article in the current issue, or at least it was current when I left on my trip, of Fortune Magazine, the most important business magazine in America, which is all about the new libertarians in the business world. It makes this very point that these people are tolerant on social issues and lazy fair on economic issues. And I don't think that article would have been printed, would have run, if it had not been for the Libertarian Party. Nevertheless, Clark only got 1.1% of the vote, 920,000 votes. Quite an achievement really, when you consider in eight years it had gone from, I don't know what hospice got, 5,000 votes or something like that, to 920,000 votes. But it was less than people had hoped. There was a tremendous volunteer effort that had gone into the campaign. There were 25,000 people who contributed to it. It was viewed by many as a failure. My position has always been, contrary to what I'm sure some people believe, that the success of the Libertarian Party longer term was a long shot. That the odds were very much against it. And the only way it could succeed is if it continued to grow, because with the winter take-all two-party system in the U.S., you can't year in and year out go into this political effort knowing your candidate is going to lose. If you don't feel like your effort is resulting in some progress. And from 1972 through 1980, that progress was there. And it took an enormous effort on the part of a lot of committed people to bring it about. But these various obstacles, let me list them now, ultimately I think have overcome that energy that existed early on. Well, one thing is a unique problem that Libertarian candidates are Libertarians who are involved in politics, and that is sort of an a priori approach to politics. That is, we know it's the government's fault, so don't bother me with the facts. Which is fine if we're talking to each other, but if you're trying to convince the average voter that our program is correct, you have to understand the history behind existing legislation, the interest groups involved, why they're involved, have a proposal for getting out of it that makes sense to people. You have to get involved in a manner that reflects a recognition of what other people think. And too many Libertarians who are involved in political action refuse to do that. It was too much work or they felt it was unprincipled, whatever. But it was not effective. There were too few Ed Clarks who were willing to learn the issues and articulate a reasonable Libertarian alternative. That was one problem. Another problem and second problem was this question of momentum. After the Clark campaign, I felt that the party was pretty much over as it were. It didn't really manifest itself until the 1984 campaign when the vote total was 225,000. But it had gone up exponentially and then dropped precipitously. And that, to me, was the end of it. But I thought because we didn't attract the kind of people we needed to in 1980, we needed to get more professional people, business people, people who were successful in their own undertakings in society to get involved in the party. They didn't do that, I think, because they didn't see us on the network television. And that led to a situation where the decline started. A third area, I mentioned before, is this winner-take-all situation in a parliamentary system and a system where there's proportional representation. In the legislature, I think the Libertarian party would have done exceedingly well in the United States. There is a two-party bias in any case. That's another reason people think that the two-party system is part of the U.S. Constitution. You're brought up in school, you're indoctrinated with the idea that two-party system is America and multi-party system is the rest of the world and the communists and so forth. Another reason was the Federal Election Campaign Act, onerous reporting requirements, the main thing being the contribution limitation. There's also enormous subsidies to the major parties, but that's not really the issue. The contribution limitation was devastating to any third party, particularly to us. There is a sixth item I cite is the paradox of an ideological party. Because of all these obstacles in the U.S., you almost have to be an ideological party to get people to put in the work to make the party succeed. You have to be committed ideologically to this political party to put up with all these obstacles. At the same time, once you get it off the ground, you cannot be exclusionary. You cannot say, my God, you're wrong on that issue, you're not a libertarian, you can't belong to this party, which is the way a lot of people acted in the libertarian party. My view is that the party needed to be a peace and free enterprise party, a party that was in favor of the free market, that was opposed to U.S. intervention around the world, and that was in favor of strict respect for individual liberty. And there needed to be ways to articulate that on specific issues, but we didn't need to be in a position where we had to list 2,000 specific applications of this, which is what the media always wanted to hear. The other parties didn't have to do that. So you ended up with a situation where people who might have agreed with 90% of the libertarian platform and 50% of the Republican platform feeling much more at home with the Republicans because they didn't have people telling them, you're not a Republican. There's a tension there, obviously. You have to have ideological leadership in a political party if it's going to achieve what you want it to achieve, but it can't be an exclusionary phenomenon, which to a certain degree the libertarian party was. And finally, there are the people involved themselves. To a large degree, any new party, any minor party, attracts a disproportionate number of people who are looking for really a psychological outlet, an excuse for their own problems in the world. To an unfortunate degree, there were people in the libertarian party who were using it as a social vehicle. It was like their social world, their life. It wasn't a serious political movement to change politics in America. And that element ultimately is now running what's left of the libertarian party. But let me conclude by saying that I think overall the party achieved about as much as it could have, absent Anderson's candidacy. I'd be very interested to know what might have happened had John Anderson not run in 1980, but he did. But the fact remains that libertarianism is now on the political map, which it wasn't before the libertarian party was started. It's become a self-identified movement. It's recognized by every intellectual in the country, by all of the media, by most intelligent people. It's recognized libertarianism with a small l by the Washington Post, the National Journal, major politicians. Once it's out there to be considered, I think we have a terrific chance of making headway. There were, when the party started, hundreds of libertarian activists in the country. There are tens of thousands of them now. That's a terrific achievement. There are, in the U.S., I think about a third of the voters are independent. Most of them are of this baby boom generation that is socially tolerant and fiscally free market. I think they're going to be increasingly attracted to libertarian ideas now that they know that they exist. And I think the libertarian party is responsible for that. And with that, I will conclude and answer any questions you may have. In the back. Speaking of libertarianism in the United States. And to read this history, we do something like this. There are an awful lot of libertarians who are doing research for think tanks like the American Enterprise. They're a heritage foundation. They're paid attention to it. Now, Reagan does not take a lot of advice. Their policy suggestions like people who are on social security things and so forth are covered by the media. And they're considered in the intellectual community and so forth. They're getting a kind of exposure that they were never getting before Reagan was elected. Now, what I'd like to suggest is, what would have happened if... Now, think about the forced market. It really was... I mean, it was talking about people like Gary Hart. It was talking about a constituency that appears to be out there. But they didn't talk to a director. They talked to Ronald Reagan. They identified Ronald Reagan as a libertarian candidate. And they said, well, we don't really believe he's going to do any more important things about being free market party. And that's how the media really kept covering the libertarianism all along. And they included in this, you know, as people feeling people like Gary Hart. They weren't even talking about it. But I want to suggest it. What would have happened, considering in my revisionist history, what's really gone on and why those aren't more important magazines also, is because they're a libertarian and a libertarian scholarship. And thinking and getting those ideas out for people, where people can see they're doing these terrible research that you were saying earlier, is so important to any kind of political action. Now, what I'm asking is, what if all of the money that was put into the Eiffel Tower campaign in the state of Birmingham and so forth, were instead put into this kind of research? How many more noses and hikes and treatments would there be in the world influencing this kind of idea? Well, if you want to put the money into the Cato Institute, I think that'd be a terrific idea. But I, you know, a lot of people have complained about all the money spent on the Clark campaign. It could have gone here, it could have gone there. Well, Burglund didn't raise any money, but, right. Just consider just in Massachusetts, you know, 60,000 dollars. Right. Just to get a personal balance in Massachusetts. Right. What would you want? How much money could you raise for that? The point is that people give money to what they want to give to. And if it's a cause they believe in and they're libertarians, that's what they give the money to. I think there's a lot more money available to be raised by think tanks and research organizations because these people have been identified and because they have been, had their consciousness raised. You mentioned Pete Ferrara, his first major work was for the Cato Institute. His second one was for the Ed Clark campaign. The American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation are not libertarian think tanks. Well, the work that they put out is not identified as libertarian. Even the good stuff, even the stuff that's libertarian. And I think it's a critical distinction is that these ideas cannot be seen as floating good ideas but as part of an integrated political philosophy. And there was no word associated with these ideas to integrate them before the libertarian party came along and popularized it. And that's what we've achieved. Now, I agree with you that there's tremendous progress being made in think tanks and it's not Reagan. And that article didn't, I think that article went out of its way to say that people sort of, these libertarians have voted for Reagan, held their nose when they did it. They don't agree with his foreign policy. They don't agree with his social issues. Yeah. What do you see as the future of the libertarian party in the United States? I don't think it has one. I think it's, I think it's served its purpose. Yeah. Just because a libertarian party or a political force might have declined completely and even disappeared, it does not necessarily mean that libertarians must abandon the political arena. Do you see any chance that one might radicalize one of the other parties eventually build a wing of the Republican party where the pressure is going to be very serious, say a socialist faction of the Democratic party versus a libertarian faction, and eventually with the hopeful growth of the movement as an intellectual alternative, it may even make the Republican party libertarian. I think that's a distinct possibility that there, in fact, this Fortune magazine article we keep talking about is really based on this idea that there is this large baby boom vote out there that neither party has been able to attract. And the question is which party is going to get it because it's a plurality in this next election of the American electorate, and it's not closely identified with either party. And I think there's a chance the Republicans could get it. I think there's just as good a chance the Democrats could become a libertarian party in a very broadly defined way that there is a growing awareness on the part of intelligent Democrats that this special interest phenomenon, big labor, the teachers' unions, all the special interests that they deal with alienate the American people. If you had somebody like a Senator Bill Bradley who seems to understand the tax system better than most Republicans and the need to lower taxes, adopt a strongly free market position, I think the Democrats would have a very, very powerful candidate combining a more socially liberal and less interventionist foreign policy. I think that's the hope is that if we can get this generation of younger Americans to identify themselves broadly defined as libertarians and obviously this group you're always trying to cultivate and radicalize a minority of them. You can't radicalize everyone. But if you can get enough ideological direction from this group and then have it have an influence within either of the major parties, then I think a broadly defined libertarianism could become a major part of either party. I think it's going to be a big influence in American politics regardless of whether one party or the other claims it. Yes? Isn't there a problem with a party that it's all continued over by personal ambition? I mean if you've got a party, a party is a very tight organization and if you want a tight organization as a party, it often results in personal combats. You try to achieve personal ambitions. I really can't see why the party went down after 1980 because there were in fact one million people out there. There were in fact one million people out there who had weighed with you. But you went down because there wasn't any, you couldn't see that there was any chance that you could get a guide, maybe not a guide elected, but that you could have progress in votes all the time. And that problem, you haven't got that problem when you're working in think tanks or whatever. Then the ideas are definitely the most important things. But in a party that happens, other things happen. You're in a personal ambition and there's this winning aim. If you're not winning all the time, people want to be at the winning team. And I think that's the problem with the party and I think the party would have been destroyed anyway. Then at another time, now it happened in 1980, but I think that if the conditions where they would be later, it wouldn't have been destroyed anyway. Well, it may well have been. I wouldn't argue with you that the political parties are not the best associations to work in. There's enormous problems. But they are ultimately voluntary associations and there's no reason why good thinking people can't make something like that succeed over a long period of time. I think it lasted for quite a long period of time, as it was. And that it really was not a question of continuing to win, but continuing to make progress. And it's just a rational judgment as to how long do you want to work at this thing if you're losing ground. I'm told I've got to cut it off here. Thanks.