 Our first speaker this afternoon is Judge Andrew Napolitano. I'm sure many of you know him as a Fox News superstar and from his great, great show, Freedom Watch, which we all loved a couple years back. He's also, of course, a very distinguished jurist serving as a judge in New Jersey and also a longtime law professor. But I'm just going to say this is for him is that like Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, two of our namesakes, the judge has always been insistent on refusing to moderate or temper his message even when it might have made his personal road easier. So on that note, we welcome him and thank him for being here. Thank you, my dear friends. Sometimes I don't even realize how my reputation has sunk. Since my master's killed Freedom Watch, but the other day I was at the U.S. Air Terminal LaGuardia waiting to take a shuttle flight to Washington, D.C. and I saw a Secret Service agent. I recognized my newest face and I knew the gizmos that they wear and he sort of smiled at me and before I could say anything, he said to me, good morning, Justice Alito. Before I could respond, a voice behind me goes, that's not Justice Alito. That's the other Italian judge from Jersey, the one that works for Fox. And then the same voice says to the Secret Service agent, and let me tell you, it's a long road from Fox News to the Supreme Court of the United States. What did I do to deserve this? I turn around and it's Leon Panetta. It's amazing the people you meet in this business gives me a big hug and kiss and I said to him, what are you doing with Secret Service agents? You're out of office. He goes, oh, I'm on a sort of a goodwill hospitality tour for the military. I said, bull blank, you're selling your books. He goes, you're right. Don't tell anybody. Alright, I'm obviously here to talk about more serious events. Well, I'll tell you another crazy story. It is unusual the people you meet in my line of work, but the most unusual was Benjamin Netanyahu, who I had met many times over the monitors. The first time I met him was a hallway of Fox just by coincidence. I didn't know he was going to be there and he wasn't expecting me. So I go to embrace him and the Mossad pushes us apart. And he says to them, no, no, let him say hello. Now you'll know when this was by what he says to me. Judge Napolitano, so nice to meet you in person. This is what the Jewish people want to know. What's he going to ask me? Is Michael Jackson innocent or is he guilty? Mr. Prime Minister, this is an only in America. He is profoundly guilty, but will be found profoundly not guilty. All right, two more serious trials of guilt or innocence and to my topic, which is the natural law when Thomas Moore had his last opportunity to address something for posterity and knew that his effort would be futile. He was defending himself in his trial for treason. So he's the defendant and the lawyer. The alleged and proven act of treason was silence. The refusal to assert affirmatively and in writing that the king was the head of the church on earth. He made the following argument to the jury. Now he knew the jury had been handpicked by the king's judges and the king's judges had been handpicked by the king. He knew that he was going to lose this. He knew he was going to be found guilty. He knew he would be executed and the execution method was beheading. Some men say the earth is round and some men say it is flat. But if it is flat, could the king's command make it round? And if it is round, could an act of parliament make it flat? Now when he was making that argument, he of course was not only appealing to the jury's common sense. Of course the king couldn't make a flat earth round and of course the parliament couldn't make a round earth flat. He was appealing to their understanding of the laws of nature that restrain even the government at the time. Henry VIII was about to have him beheaded in the parliament which was the facilitator in his beheading. So his choice between remaining mute at his trial and being convicted or taking a stand for something as affirmative as the limitations on the government he exercised that choice by giving this now classic statement of the natural law. Fast forward to the present day. When Moore said that, this was not a novel argument. He is not the originator of the argument of the natural law. The modern day, it's 800 years ago, but the modern day originator is St. Thomas Aquinas. Still the best explainer of the natural law. But John Locke picked up on this and Thomas Jefferson picked up on it when he wrote the Declaration of Independence and James Madison picked up on it when he was the scrivener for the Constitution. Jefferson's version of Moore's phrase is this, we are endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights and among these is life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. So if Jefferson's correct, if this isn't just some musing and by the way the Declaration of Independence is a statute enacted by the Congress, if you go to the first book of the US code and go to the first page, you'll see there the Declaration of Independence. Probably the most violated statute by the government that we have even though it's the first and the oldest. But it articulates the view that our rights come from our humanity. What are these rights that come from our humanity and if they come from our humanity how can the government trample them? Well the concept of natural rights articulated by Aquinas is this that there are areas of human behavior for which we do not need a government permission slip in order to make free choices in those areas. So things like the freedom to develop your personality. I told O'Reilly he should be grateful for that freedom. The freedom to develop your personality. The right to think as you wish. The right to say what you think. The right to publish your thoughts. The right to worship or not to worship. The right to assemble in groups. The right to refuse to assemble in groups. The right to petition the government for a redress of your differences. The right to defend yourself, I must tell you. The right to defend yourself. The right to keep and bear arms. Does not protect your right to shoot deer. It protects your right to shoot at the government when it is taken over by tyrants. These are the quintessential American right. I'm going down the Bill of Rights. The quintessential American right. The right to be left alone. Codified in the Fourth Amendment. Today called the right to privacy. Codified in the Fourth Amendment. We all know what has happened to privacy. Let's see, how many of us have these in your pocket? Keep it on. I want the NSA and the president to hear everything I'm telling you. Now, I started by saying keep it on. Here's the sad thing. It doesn't have to be on for them to listen to us. When I used to say this about Blackberries and iPhones a couple of years ago, people would say, oh, there he goes again. He's off his meds. He's hanging out with Le Rockwell too much. But today we all know this is true. Today we know that our popular elected government has such profound disregard for our natural rights that it tramples them to extremes beyond which even George Orwell could have imagined in 1984. Without getting into the NSA, another topic for another time. If Aquinas was right and if Jefferson was right and these rights come from our humanity and not from the government, things like thought and speech and privacy and travel, how can the government trample them? Well, the theory of our government is that we have surrendered some of our rights to the government so that the government will protect the rights that we have not surrendered. That's the idea of the government derives its powers from the consent of the governed. Does anyone in this room know anyone now living who consented to the government? Well, the answer is no. It's inconceivable that anybody still living was around when the Constitution was enacted and consented to it. So right off the bat, the idea that the government derives its powers from the consent of the governed is like government itself, a fiction. The fiction is that we have consented to the surrender of our rights. The reality is that our rights have been stolen from us because the government monopolizes force. It's a sad and terrible reality, but it is a reality. In theory, in theory, when the Constitution was enacted and there's a typo in the Constitution, I get in trouble for saying this, the third word is wrong. It says we the people. Of course, the Constitution was not enacted by the people, it was enacted by the states. But that was never corrected. Nevertheless, what surrendered to the federal government was limited to 16 discreet, unique, separate, stated, articulated powers in the Constitution. And then the Ninth Amendment says, just because we've listed a bunch of rights in the first eight, doesn't mean that there are many others. It would be impossible for us to list them all. And the Tenth Amendment says, just because we've given some power to the federal government, we the states, doesn't mean that we kept the rest of it for ourselves we have. That's the concept of limited government. The government must stop when it wants to touch our natural rights and the list of natural rights. Whatever you think our natural rights are, give me the list, I'll add 30 or 40 to them. Because these are the things we all yearn as human beings to do, free from interference by the government. If they belong to us as human beings, like my fingers belong to me, then they cannot be taken away by majority vote. They cannot be taken away by legislation. They cannot be taken away by the command of the executive. They can only be taken away if I give them up myself. I can give them up myself by robbing a bank. I rob a bank. I violate the natural rights of the depositors of the bank. I can then be prosecuted and have my freedom of movement taken away because I have surrendered my natural rights when I gambled that I could get away with that loot from the bank. I could also sign a contract in which I give away some of my natural rights and I've done that with my bosses at Fox. Theoretically I'm supposed to say only what they want me to say. In return they send me a check every week. You know the checks keep coming even though they don't always say everything they want me to say. So you can voluntarily surrender your own natural rights for whatever good you choose to surrender them for. But you can't surrender somebody else's natural rights because natural rights are owned by individuals, by persons, not collectively, not by groups, not by the government, but by individuals. That is at least the theory of the Declaration of Independence and the theory of the Constitution and was at least the theory of the framers, the founding generation of the United States of America. Regrettably it is no longer the theory today and this assault on natural rights began immediately. In the presidency of John Adams the government suddenly had this bizarre fear of the French. I know this sounds incongruous today, but the country was afraid of the French so they enacted the Alien and Sedition Acts which basically said if you want to become a citizen here, come. If you own an acre of land you can become a citizen immediately except if you're French you have to wait 14 years. By the way, if you criticize the president, the government, the Congress or the courts you can go to jail for two years. How could the same generation that wrote Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech? In some cases the very same human beings who wrote that in fact abridged the freedom of speech because the world looks very different when you're on the outside trying to acquire power than when you have power and you've forgotten about those promises you made to get there. In this room after I finish is the Thomas Jefferson of our day who never forgot his promises. Sadly, sadly an exception because today the government tramples natural rights. Today the government to which none of us is consented claims it has the authority by majority vote to assault those liberties that are a part of our humanity. You don't have to believe in a traditional truine God as I do in order to accept this. You don't have to believe in any God in order to accept this. If you believe that humanity is the highest and best virtuous good on the planet then you believe that humanity, each human being is the source of his or her own rights. If you believe as Jefferson and Aquinas and I that we are creatures of an all knowing, all loving God who made us in his image and likeness and as he is perfectly free, we are perfectly free and our rights come directly from him in either way the rights are ours and not the governance to be taken away. The Constitution was written to prevent the government from doing that except when it does it by due process. Due process means if I rob the bank and they want to take away my freedom they have to give me a jury trial and the full panoply of protections that come with it. The governor can't just arrest me as the governor of New Jersey did, not me. He'd like to. Two weeks ago with a nurse who got off the airplane at Newark Airport because she had been treating Ebola victims in western Africa before she could get on another plane to Maine they locked her up. They put her in a tent in a parking lot in downtown Newark they gave her a bottle of water a granola bar and a porta potty. If she had been charged with murder and had been lodged in the Essex County jail a mile away she would have had better creature comforts in a more secure environment than a parking lot tent in downtown Newark. And I made the argument that the governor of New Jersey has flipped natural rights. You see natural rights you can summarize them in three words. Forward the presumption of liberty. The presumption of liberty. Meaning we are self-directed. We make our own choices. It is not our obligation as New Jersey claimed was the case for the nurse to prove we are unworthy of incarceration. It is the government's profound unique obligation to prove that we are worthy of incarceration and it must do so before a jury of our peers an imperfect system but the best system that we can come up with. In fact when the governor of New Jersey was told there's not a federal judge in Newark that will fail to give her a hearing and we have no evidence that she's contagious at the hearing you better let her go now because if you're losing court your friend at Fox News is going to make sure everybody knows that you knew the law and didn't follow it anyway so we let her go right then and there and then his buddy the governor of Maine tried the same thing and there they went to a federal court who released her because the government could not overturn presumption of liberty. The presumption of liberty says the rights that we did not surrender to the government we retained for our self and they can never be taken away from us by popular vote or majority legislature or or a command by a governor or a president. Now if the government recognized the concept of natural rights it would know that virtually everything it has done certainly since the progressive era at the beginning of the last century and perhaps even since the alien and sedition act virtually everything it has done and to protect natural rights has been wrong. Question is there any legitimate activity government has in a free society? Answer yes to protect the natural rights of the people in that society meaning instead of assaulting my freedom my life my liberty and my property protect it that's what we have a government for and a government that believes in natural rights will limit itself to those behaviors do you know have you ever heard of anywhere in the universe today of a government that limits itself only to the protection of natural rights that of course would be our Rothbardian, Jeffersonian, John Lockean Thomistic as in St. Thomas Aquinas ideal. Will this happen tomorrow? No. Will it happen in the lifetime of anyone in this room? Maybe within the lifetime of the youngest in this room and that's why we're all in this room today we need to understand the force of darkness among us and that force of darkness is the very government we have elected and empowered to impose the darkness upon us the better we understand it the more we understand it the sooner we can be free from its shackles I expect that when I die I will do so peacefully in my bed surrounded by people that love me and faithful to first principles that will not happen to everybody in this room some of you particularly the young people must be prepared to die in a government prison and some of you particularly the young people must be prepared to die in a government town square to the sound of government trumpets blaring when the time comes you'll know what to do because freedom lies in everyone's heart but must do more than just lie there thank you and God love you