 The title of my talk tonight is Libertarians and Liberty, and perhaps when I get towards the end we can find out why I've put those side by side. I think that it's safe to say that the standard fare for mankind throughout all of man's history, even including today in most places, is arbitrary abuse and control by others. The standard instrument for abuse is government, and all over the world liberty is always taken in the name of righteousness, never in the name of evil. In other words, what I'm saying is that large amounts of liberty is the rare occurrence in history, and oppression in varying degrees is the norm. Even in the United States, as Thomas Jefferson predicted, he said that the natural progress of things is for government to gain ground and for liberty to yield. Now we who identify ourselves as small L libertarians are all too aware of this process, sometimes to a detriment I believe, but the average American is unattentive, apathetic or sometimes or most often a party to the assault on liberties by the state. One measure of this insidious encroachment by the state is the rapid erosion of our bill of right guarantees. I would like for somebody, and I've challenged people all over the country, to tell me which of the original bill of rights guarantees are fully protected in the United States today. For example, the 10th Amendment guarantees powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution nor prohibited by it to the states or reserved to the states and respectively to the people. Now that seems to me to be plain language. So you tell me how the federal government can constitutionally mandate speed limits, control public schools, control waste disposal sites and make hundreds of other edicts. Better yet, try to think of something that you and I or our state can do free of federal mandates. I don't think there's anything. The 9th Amendment, for example, provides that the enumeration of the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. Now many people don't realize that the 9th Amendment was written to overcome Alexander Hamilton's objections to having a bill of rights in our Constitution in the first place. Hamilton asked, and I quote, why declare that things shall not be done by the federal government he is referring to, which there is no power to do? In other words, Hamilton said, was asking, why should we have a measure saying that the government cannot restrict the press when a provision to do so is not authorized in the first place? Now Hamilton's legitimate worry was since it was it is impossible to list all of our freedoms. He said that he thought that politicians and judges would rule that if they weren't listed they weren't protected in the first place. And that no less a distinguished scholar such as Judge Robert Bork would argue that privacy is not protected by the Constitution confirms Hamilton's concern. And indeed, as we know by now, the courts have assigned the 9th Amendment to the dust bin of U.S. history. We retain a few protections of the 5th Amendment, but they're under siege. Among the protections of the 5th Amendment are, a person cannot be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself. Now try this, call up your IRS agent and ask whether the information you supply on the tax form can be used against you in a criminal proceeding. And then ask, are you constitutionally required to supply that information? That's the reason why we have the charade of voluntary compliance. That way when you appear in court and you ask that your 1040 form be inadmissible under the 5th Amendment protections, the judge will laugh in your face. He'll say that you voluntarily supply that information. The 5th Amendment, as we all begin to find out or as we all know, provides nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation. Well, the Supreme Court has gone beyond that. The Supreme Court permits, as in the Hawaii case and some others, the taking of private property for private use, which is not authorized in the Constitution at all. The Supreme Court upholds local jurisdictions who deny owners of private property the right to raise the building and build another building. The Supreme Court sanctions ordinances which deny landowners the right to chop down trees on their own land. This is very popular in California. On private property, you can't chop down your sequoia tree. The, let me just start by one more. The 2nd Amendment guarantees the right of the people to keep and bear arms. Now, you listen to a lot of politicians, you would get the impression that the 2nd Amendment is a deer hunting or a duck hunting amendment. I believe the framers had in mind when they proposed the 2nd Amendment was to permit people to protect themselves against wannabe domestic tyrants. And that's why the 2nd Amendment is under siege. That is, the very people leading the attack on the 2nd Amendment are the very people who want to gain greater control over our lives and restrict our freedoms. An important part of their agenda is to first disarm us. Now, one of the most frequently heard justification for the attack on personal liberty is the pursuit of flimsy notions of social justice. That is, notions of social justice that could not make sense in any kind of consistent environment or analytic thrust. Now allow me to establish what I consider to be the first principles of social justice. And the first principle, if you pay any attention to John Locke and others, Von Humboldt and Goethe, is that each of us fully owns himself. That is, no one has the right to own another individual. Now if we accept self-ownership as a first principle, then certain standards of moral conduct necessarily follow. Among the shall nots in moral conduct or in conduct are murder, kidnap, rape, theft, and any other act that violates individual ownership rights. Now, most Americans have little difficulty in accepting these requirements of self-ownership, at least superficially. But however they forget, ignore, or hold in contempt, another very important corollary to self-ownership. And that is, self-ownership is meaningless unless one owns what he produces. In the extreme, if someone else owns all of what you produce, then self-ownership is meaningless. In other words, a very good working definition for slavery is that a person produces things but he does not have ownership rights to what he produces. He is forcibly used to serve the purposes of other people. Now in our society, this aspect of self-ownership has been under relentless assault for decades. Each year, each of us have fewer and fewer ownership rights to the fruit of our toil. And this can be seen through several estimates, giving the amount of time that we toil to pay federal, state, and local taxes. For this year, we will work from January 1st until May 8th to pay federal, state, and local taxes. That means that we do not have ownership rights for over four months of our productive output. Last year, it was May 6th, and how much do you want to bet? That next year, it will not be May 8th, and it won't be May 6th either. Now, I'm not an anarchist, although I know some of my libertarian friends who are. I believe there are legitimate functions of government. However, the legitimate functions of government are those that secure and protect self-ownership rights. Therefore, it's a legitimate function of government to protect these rights against international and domestic usurpation. Hence, that says it's a legitimate function of government to provide for the national defense. It's a legitimate function of government at some level to provide for police services. It's a legitimate function of government to enforce contracts, adjudicate some disputes, enforce constitutional order, and provide certain public goods. When I say public goods, I mean public goods in the way that an economist would talk about public goods. It is not a legitimate function of government to confiscate the property of on American and give it to another American to whom it does not belong. Herein lies our most important moral failure in our country, and hence the injustice in our society. According to just my eyeballing it, looking through the federal budget book, fully three fifths of federal government expenditures constitute actions that involve the confiscation of the earnings of one American and giving them to another to whom they do not belong. We can think a lot of programs that fit this category. Some are aid to dependent farmers programmed, aid to dependent business, mostly savings loans lately, retirement handouts, and welfare handouts. Many Americans bask in moral rectitude, applauding government actions that they would randomly condemn as despicable if done privately. That is, if I confiscated the money from one of you, I walked up to you and I said give me your $200 and then having gotten the $200 I would go help a homeless lady downtown sleeping on the grate. I would buy her some housing and some food. Well, most of you or most Americans would condemn me as a thief regardless of the use to which I put that money. Now I assert, and this is the problem in America, most Americans don't see this, I assert that there's little conceptual distinction between that act where I walked up to you and when the IRS or the congressman walks up to me and says, Williams, you give me that $200 you made last week and we will help the lady downtown, I see no conceptual distinction between those two acts. If there is, if you press me for a distinction, the only distinction I can come up with is one is illegal and the second is legal. However, legality should not be the talisman for a society which professes a desire for justice. After all, history is full of acts that were legal but clearly immoral. That is, slavery in the United States was legal, but it was immoral, apartheid in South Africa was legal, concentration camps, Stalinist and Maoist purges, they were all legal, but clearly they were immoral. And I think that the big bridge that we have to cross in the United States is the recognition that actions which are immoral when done privately don't become moral simply because they're done with majority consent or under the color of law. I've had a lot of people tell me, well Williams, we live in democracy and as a majority rule, well I first rushed to point them out that it should be, it was designed as a republic, but beside that, I say that democracy or majority rule is no standard for morality. I ask people, well if we voted to, I've talked to ladies about this, I said if we got a vote, a majority vote to rape you, would you find it acceptable? And almost all the time I found that it was unacceptable. Now, I could very easily pursue some of these ideas in greater detail, but I, I will have failed my mission to Atlanta if I did not spend at least a little bit of time giving you some of my impressions about capital L libertarians. Now, we all acknowledge the immense threat to our freedoms, but what has been the libertarian response over these years? Many libertarians see a world of no political trade-offs. That is, either one is 100% libertarian or not at all. It's an all or nothing world of purity tests in many cases. Now that might be somewhat of an exaggeration, but it's close. In any case, I'm here to tell you that those who take the all or nothing position of the world usually wind up with nothing. Now, many Americans agree with many libertarian principles. However, we've not been smart enough to exploit these areas of agreement. In other words, just because some group does not buy into our position on the decriminalization of drugs, that does not mean that we cannot forge an alliance with them on some other liberty-oriented task. In other words, what I'm saying at least in the short run, we have to face the fact that in order to have some political victories, we have to at least make an effort towards appealing to the median voter. And hopefully try to educate voters while we're in office as opposed to trying to educate them outside of office. Libertarians are going to have to recognize that the average person does not spend the kind of time that we do reading Locke, Mill, Hume, Von Humboldt, Jefferson, Hayek, and others, and thinking about liberty. Our response to those who appear to cherish liberty less than we do will have to be more educative rather than put offish. In other words, the tactic that I see or the strategy that I see that will be useful to those who call for, for example, more of the welfare state to help the poor is a response like that goes along these lines that you tell them that I too care about the poor, but your way is not producing the results that you and I want. Let's work together to find more effective ways of helping the poor. Libertarians are going to have to do a better job of selling the notions of freedom. As a matter of fact, I learned a very valuable lesson from Milton Friedman in 1976, I think was, I just started doing some television shows, and Milton Friedman called me up a couple days after, and he said to me, he said, Williams, you did a wonderful job doing the show. He said that your facts or an order, your argument was unquestionably correct. He said you made one fatal mistake, though. He said you did not smile at all. He says when you're talking about freedom, you have to smile. He says you have to, you have to make people think that you're a friendly person because people traditionally are hostile towards freedom. Now, libertarians, and I say this, this is some insight information I get from a lot of people around, I travel the country, I get a lot of mail from people and response my national syndicated column. So I get, I'm just expressing some impressions that I get from people. Libertarians whether, you know, when they're noticed by the general public at all, all too frequently seen as the party that endorses drug usage, prostitution, and gambling. Now, regardless of how far off society is in general, in coping with these issues, I don't believe it's something that we should lead with. And I think that practicality commands that we shed that kind of image. Now, if libertarians have to lead with an issue, and this is just a suggestion, I'm not suggesting a lead issue, but I'm suggesting one that makes a little more sense. And that is libertarians, if they have to lead with the issue, they should lead with one that can gather more sympathy and build more effective coalitions. And I'm saying that if we talked about the libertarian response to the education crisis in our country, I'm very sure that you could build stronger coalitions based on that than building a coalition based on the drug crisis and the libertarian response to it. Now, that doesn't mean that I disagree with libertarian arguments on the drug crisis, but I just think it's the wrong one to lead with and try to build coalitions. Now, let me just kind of close by saying that during my two days I came in last night and I attended a reception, and I talked to many people today. During my two days at the Georgia Libertarian Convention, I leave somewhat optimistic because what is being done in Georgia suggests that we are well on our way towards being a bit more ends-oriented. And for that, we all can be thankful. I think that the Georgia Libertarian Party, there's every bit of evidence that you guys have tried some outreach to get people involved who are not your standard libertarians. That's what you have to do. And so I think that, let me just close by saying that I think that a very, very, that libertarian party all over the country should be proud of what you people are doing in Georgia to try to develop a party that can win the respect and sympathy and loyalty from Americans who do not fully share our beliefs. Thank you very much.