 Let me also Offer my words of thanks my heartfelt gratitude toward Lou Rockwell who as a brilliant entrepreneur and and as an heroic effort Founded and built the Ludwig von Mises Institute in his book the Anatomy of the State Murray Rothbard wrote Just of the two basic and mutually exclusive Interrelations between men or peaceful cooperation or coercive exploitation production or predation So the history of mankind particularly its economic history May be considered as a contest between these two principles This contest has been one-sided in the ancient world empires dominated political life Merciless systems of slavery theft and war ruled around the world One exception in the territory surrounded by such empires was the tribes of Israel Even though warned by God himself for the misery they would suffer if they willingly surrendered their freedom That they enjoyed under the decentralized polity of the judges in order to have an earthly king rule over them They clamored for their own enslavement It is instructive that the prize the Israelites deemed worth paying so heavy a price to obtain was to have a king lead them in battle With Saul as king Israel no longer enjoyed periods of peace as they did under the judges But was constantly at war As Samuel had warned Saul took their sons for soldiers Their daughters and male and female slaves servants as slaves The best of their lands produce and flocks And thereby reduce the Israelites to servitude The Israelites would not be the last people to succumb to the siren song of war About the importance of war as a device for aggrandizing the power of the state in its contest against liberty Rothbard wrote In war state power is pushed to its ultimate And under the slogans of defense and emergency it can impose a tyranny upon the public such as might be openly resisted in times of peace War thus provides many benefits to a state and indeed every modern war has brought to the warring peoples a Permanent legacy of increased state burdens upon society close quote War not only vastly extends the wealth transfers used by the state to bolster its rule But advances pro-state ideology Because the state lived lives parasitically on the production of its hosts Those who benefit from the state's welfare transfers must always be a minority of the population The majority must be the victims of the state And therefore their acquiescence in predation by the state must be engineered otherwise that state is finished The legitimacy of the state must be manufactured and maintained through ideology From oriental despotism to american hegemony The state has never failed to attract with its power and pelt Those who would fabricate apology But their litany of claims that our rulers are wise and their rule is A beneficial That our rulers protect us from horrible dangers that our rulers uphold the glorious tradition of our ancestors That our rulers embody the interests of society that our rulers are appointed by god That our rulers bring science and reason to society And so on never explain how such claims turn hegemony into voluntary association murder into defense Kidnapping into vol voluntary association and taxation into free will offering If the state is the found from which all social blessings flow Then why do its apologists resort to instilling guilt in the successful And envy in the unsuccessful to strengthen its power We see through the lies and sophisms of pro-state ideology because we have accepted the truth advanced by those who champion liberty Extrapolating from our experience, we can see that anti-state ideology is a necessary condition to establish and maintain liberty The advantages it has over pro-state ideology are first It appeals to the interest of the majority and second It is grounded on truth about the nature of human action While liberty is consistent with human action, the state is founded on a contradiction Namely that the only way to have an institution to protect our rights is to establish it on the violation of our rights The ancient israelites held to an ideology with many features necessary to keep state power at bay Like a higher law to which all men are accountable and a decentralized polity For a few generations the kings of israel were somewhat constrained by the higher law But the wickedness of the kings who followed them grew and the law was eventually forgotten And the liberties of the israelites extinguished It would take several centuries for the world to witness another spark of liberty It was ignited under salon in athens and its embers growed most glowed most brightly during the reign of pericles But liberty liberty lasted only as long as pericles and his generation lived According to lord acton the athenian system failed to protect minorities and to put the state under the law The democracy of athens in the end led to class conflict which tore the system apart The peloponnesian war extinguished both pericles and the embers of athenian liberty The stoics in rome rediscovered the concept of a higher law to all to which all men are subject In its highest formulation in the hands of cicero, senica and phylo the stoics Claimed that there is a universal commonwealth of the children of god and his voice should be obeyed Freedom is found in obeying the natural laws of god Under a better ideology than the greeks the ensuing struggle for liberty lasted far longer in rome than it did in athens But it never achieved in practice the lofty expression it attained in theory acton wrote Individuals and families association and dependencies were so much material that the sovereign power consumed for its own purposes What the slave was in the hands of his master the citizen was in the hands of the community The most sacred obligations vanished before the public advantage The passengers existed for the sake of the ship closed quote At the height of its power before wars of empire aborted its embryonic liberty and prosperity rome encountered the seedbed of liberty and the freemen of teutonic communities When their leaders were converted to christianity They converted their people After the fall of rome their decentralized polities persisted as the church resisted the centralization of state power Permitting a long incubation period for the birth of liberty Its time arrived in the 10th century When the scandinavians turned from aggressive invasion of europe to peaceful trade In the next century the mediterranean was secured for european shipping venice in the cities of northern italy flourished by expanding trade routes And extending the division of labor from cities into the countryside The hansa cities did the same in northern europe as honoré piran wrote europe became a region of cities built by capital The flowering of commerce in europe was reinforced by the development of a pro-liberty ideology Elevated to previously unforeseen heights by the christian doctrine of the individual person God himself took on human nature and lived as a man Jesus christ suffered and died to secure the salvation of each individual person In heaven god will glorify each person with a spiritual body To live in communion with him and other people Nations rise and fall, but the individual person will live forever more As herald berman has shown the church recasts canon law along lines more favorable to private property And contract in the 11th century The canon law acted as leaven in the different legal systems both civil and commercial Berman wrote perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of the western legal tradition Is the coexistence and competition within the same community of diverse jurisdictions and diverse legal systems It is this plurality of jurisdictions and legal system Excuse me legal systems that makes this a supremacy of law both necessary and possible closed quote As legal protection of private property was extended slowly and surely from the church and merchants to everyone Economic progress was brought to the masses The little industrial revolution Engendered by the protection of private property and contract attracted the attention of scholars To explain the workings of the burgeoning economy John Buridan and nicolas arrest me wrote works in the 14th century Explaining economic activity within the framework of society as a natural order Brought forth by the working of laws god had built into the nature of things Natural law also came to form the basis for man-made law in the high middle ages as berman wrote In the formative era of western legal tradition the natural law theory Predominated it was generally believed that human law derived ultimately from and was to be tested ultimately by reason and conscience According not only to the legal philosophy of the time, but also to positive law itself Any positive law whether enacted or customary had to conform to the natural law Or else it would lack validity as law and could be disregarded This theory had a basis in christian theology as well as aristotelian philosophy But it also had a basis in the history of the struggle between ecclesiastical and secular authorities and in the politics of pluralism closed quote When war arose in the context of this christian pro-liberty ideology it merely slowed instead of stopped the momentum of liberty The hundred years war began to consolidate state power and foster pro-state ideology The reactionary forces were strong enough to usher in the era of royal absolutism The rise of the nation state threatened liberty like nothing had in the west since state power in rome As mercantilist writers voiced the pro-state ideology of the 16th and 17th centuries The late scholastics countered with pro-liberty views The school of salamanca developed a natural law view of politics and economics The founder of the school francisco david toria argued that all persons deserve the same legal protection of their person and property As tom woods is written The toria argued that the right to appropriate the things of nature for one's own use that is the institution of private property Belong to all men regardless of their paganism or whatever barbarian vices they might possess The indians of the new world by virtue of being men were therefore equal to the spaniards in matters of natural rights They owned their lands by the same principles that the spaniards owned theirs closed quote The natural law view of the scholastics was taken up by Grotius in his views on international law in the 17th century And pro-liberty ideology was further refined in the natural rights view of lock and jefferson In the 17th and 18th centuries America proved fertile ground for the revivification of liberty State power was unable to constrain the inclination of people who held a pro-liberty ideology To live with respect for private property and contract In the open territory and decentralized polities of colonial america Nation states had to contend themselves with limitations on the on their power given the possibilities their potential victims had to escape their depredations During its heyday in the 19th century classical liberalism showered people with the fruits of liberty peace prosperity and human flourishing But the pro-liberty ideology refined by the classical liberals was not free from impurities Its fatal defect was manifest in the centralization of state power through the u.s constitution Which fashioned the nation state form on the decentralized polity of the 13 states As hans hapa has written classical liberal political philosophy as personified by lock And most prominently displayed in jefferson's declaration of independence Was first and foremost a moral doctrine drawing on the philosophy of the stoics And the late scholastics it centered around the notions of self-ownership original appropriation of nature given resources property and contract as universal human rights Implied in the nature of man qua rational animal In the environment of princely and royal rulers this emphasis on the universality of human rights placed the liberal philosophy Naturally in radical opposition to every established government For a liberal every man whether king or peasant Was subject to the same universal and eternal principles of justice And a government either could derive its justification from a contract between private property owners Or it could not be justified at all close quote Tragically from the true proposition that a liberal social order requires its members to use defensive violence to suppress aggression against person and property Classical liberals Invalidly concluded that there must be a monopoly provider of defensive violence Given their view that the state is essential to a liberal social order State power retained a foothold from which it would overtake liberty once again That moment came in 1914 as Rothbard wrote More than any other single period world war one was the critical watershed for the american business system It was war collectivism A totally planned economy run largely by big business interests through the instrumentality of the central government Which served as the model the precedent and the inspiration for state corporatism For the remainder of the 20th century closed quote As a prelude to its destruction in the great war pro-state ideology had made a frontal attack on liberty in the 19th century Hunt tully has noted the role ideologies leading up to the war in his book the western front As ralph raco has noted in his review of tully's book Tully deals deathly with the intellectual and cultural currents of pre-war europe Contributing to the proneness to violence or a bastardized nichianism And the anarcho-syndicalism of sorrel But most of all social Darwinism really just Darwinism Which taught the eternal conflict among the races and tribes of human as of other species Even in america pro-state ideology had managed to warp christian thinking during the progressive era from its pro-liberty stance Richard gamble documents this degeneration in his book the war for righteousness As raco wrote in his review of gamble's book By the end of the 19th century progressive protestants often influenced by the theory of evolution Were preaching the successive remaking of the church of american society and finally the whole world Rejecting old line calvinism. They rejected also the augustinian distinction between the city of god and the city of man The city of man was be was to be made into the city of god here on earth Through a commitment to a redefined socially activist christianity close quote The great war unleashed the collectivist forces of socialism and fast fascism across the western world as raco has written The first world war is the turning point of the 20th century Had the war not occurred the prussian holster's ends would have probably had remained heads of germany With their panoply of subordinate kings and nobility in charge of the lesser german states Whatever gains hitler might have scored in the right stag elections Could he have erected his totalitarian exterminationist dictatorship in the midst of this powerful aristocratic superstructure? highly unlikely In russia lenin's few thousand communist revolutionaries Confronted the immense imperial russian army the largest in the world For lenin to have any chance to succeed the great army had to first be pulverized Which is what the germans did So a 20th century without nazis or communists imagine that It was the turning point in the history of our american nation Which under the leadership of woodward wilson developed into something radically different from what it had been before The first world war destroyed the world economy That had been built up during the 19th century under classical liberalism As marie's obsvelte and allan taylor have demonstrated in their book global capital markets integration crisis and growth The degree of integration of the world economy rose from moderately low in 1860 to moderately high in 1914 The great war disintegrated the world economy to a level of integration Significantly below what it had achieved by 1860 By 1929 the level was that far above that of 1860 as it was below 1860 and 1918 By the second world war Which was merely a continuation of the first world war the level of integration was half that of 1860 The level of integration of the world economy has come to surpass that of 1914 only in the 21st century In other words it has taken government 70 years to accomplish what liberty can do in a matter of days The great war destroyed the classical liberal Destroyed excuse me the gold standard and ushered in an era of fiat currencies hyperinflations and depressions have been the result The great war shattered the classical liberal world and ushered in a century of the rise of the collective estate Western civilization having given birth to liberty and nurtured it Sacrificed its offspring before it had the opportunity to grow to maturity throughout the world Instead of liberty american hegemony has spread corporatism to the four corners of the earth Like us our forerunners labored to advance pro-liberty ideology during the dark days When liberty had been eclipsed by state power Their strategy involved building up independent institutions Christopher Dawson in his book the crisis of western education As demonstrated that the intellectual movements of the renaissance and enlightenment developed outside the state To restore liberty in our age. We must build genuinely private enterprises and independent educational institutions Through organizations like the mesis institute We can do our part in the 21st century Enrolling back the tide of the collective estate built up in the 20th century As our forerunners did enrolling back Royal absolutism in the 18th century We must not repeat their mistakes This time our pro-liberty ideology must embrace its logical implications and reject the state root and branch Only then can the potential of life liberty and property Be realized in the flourishing of the human race Thank you