 Let me just say one of the themes of my talk tonight is cooperation and so I should certainly say that that I hope these works will stand for at least some time maybe they shouldn't stand for a long time because I hope other things will come along but if they do I learned an awful lot from the people from John Locke on who are in the libertarian reader but also from a lot of people in some cases who haven't even written as much as as the people who are in the reader but who have done a lot to develop and synthesize and integrate libertarian philosophy people like Leonard Ligio and Sheldon people like Ralph Raco and Walter Grinder and certainly my colleague Tom Palmer was very helpful in writing these books so I had a lot of help and it was in that sense of a cooperative effort which will make my eventual topic here tonight appropriate. In 1995 the Gallup pollsters found that 39% of Americans said that the federal government has become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and liberties of ordinary citizens and the pollsters couldn't believe that 39% of Americans could believe that so they went out and tried it again but they took out the word immediate threat and that time they found that 52% of Americans agreed that the federal government was a threat to our rights and freedom. Now I'm sure you're all wondering who are these other 48% who are the 48% of Americans who don't think the federal government is a threat to our rights and freedoms but there certainly is a growing number of people who do seem to believe that in the United States and also a lot of places around the world many places of course where they've had a much clearer picture of how government is a threat to your rights and freedoms but I do think that we are seeing some intellectual change ideological change in the American public and I think one reason for that is that there is a breakdown of all of the ideas on which the bureaucratic welfare state was founded. I think Americans learned in the 1960s that governments will wage unwinnable wars, spy on their domestic opponents and lie about it. They learned in the 1970s that government management of the economy leads to unemployment, inflation and stagflation, stagnation. They learned in the 1980s that governments cost an intrusiveness rise even as a succession of presidents run against Washington and promise to reduce the size of government and now I think in the 1990s it is time to apply those lessons to discover the alternative to unlimited government and to make the 21st century not the century of the state but the century of the free individual. Obviously the question that we're all wondering is how many people are ready to learn that lesson and I think the answer is that there's a lot of understanding of the problems with things that have been tried. All the alternatives to libertarianism, fascism, communism, socialism, the welfare state have been tried in the 20th century and they've all failed to produce peace, prosperity and freedom. No doubt there will be more alternatives brought up. I have not listed monarchy because I think by the 20th century that had sort of dropped from the scene but I got a letter from a colleague who was commenting on the book and said I won't go into pages of praise. I wrote him back and said well one sentence would have been okay but here are some suggestions and he said sustainable development that's going to be the next challenger. That's what they're going to use. Everybody's going to talk about sustainable development and it's going to be the case for planning. Obviously there are all good ways going to be challengers but I think that all of those have been tried, have failed. The problem of course is that getting out of the welfare state is going to be a very tricky economic and political problem but I think there are more people recognizing that Western style big government is going through a slow motion version of communism's collapse which means in a sense that they understand the problem and that's the first step. One of the issues that I think people are noticing is that economic growth has slowed down dramatically in the United States and Western Europe starting in the early 1970s and there have been a lot of explanations offered but the one I would put forward is the dramatic growth in taxes and regulation that went on in the period leading up to that. I have some statistics in the book about the number of pages in the federal register which doubled and then tripled from that level right there around 1970 and it has remained at a high level ever since and so maybe it's no surprise that economic growth has dropped so much. Great Britain which had higher taxes and more socialism in the United States obviously has suffered even more. In the 19th century it became the richest country in the world. In the 20th century it became the symbol of economic stagnation. People all over the world talked about the British disease. It's come back a little bit with some modest reforms by Margaret Thatcher. It is in fact doing better than the rest of Western Europe now but it certainly isn't back to what the 19th century was. 30 or 40 years ago John Kenneth Galbraith wrote a very influential book called The Affluent Society and what he did in that book was observe what he called private opulence and public squalor. That is he observed that privately owned resources were generally clean, efficient, well maintained and constantly improving in quality. While public spaces were dirty, overcrowded and unsafe and his conclusion from his observation was that we ought to move more resources into the public sector. One could come to a different conclusion from making that observation one would think. And I think that conclusion is that when you move things into the public sector they tend to become dirty, overcrowded, unsafe and they decline in quality. The welfare state moving much of society into the public sector, the welfare state has produced government insolvency, lower economic growth, social conflicts, dependency and a very terrible decline in individual responsibility. And I think a lot of people perceive that and they know we need an alternative but they haven't yet been persuaded of what the alternative is. And that's the case that libertarians try to make and the case that this book tries to make that there is an alternative, a consistent alternative to what we've been doing that is different from the tradition that the people were used to. For libertarians obviously the basic political question is the relationship of the individual to the state. What rights do individuals have if any? What form of government if any will best protect those rights? What powers should government have? What demands may individuals make on others through the mechanism of government? And there are essentially only two ways to answer these questions. You can either organize society coercively through government dictates or voluntarily through infinite interactions of individuals and private associations. The basic political issue for any political alternative that's offered is who is going to make the decision about any particular aspect of your life, you or the government. You or somebody else and that somebody else is almost by definition the government. Do you spend the money you earn or does Congress? Do you pick the school your child will attend or does the school board? Do you decide what drugs to take when you're sick or does the Food and Drug Administration? Do you make your own investments or does government tax away your earnings and tell you it's saving for your retirement? In a civil society you make choices like that. In a political society somebody else does and because people naturally resist letting other people make important decisions like that for them, a political society necessarily rests on force. You can't make decisions like that for other people unless you're going to ultimately be willing to back it up with force. Today I think we are seeing the failure of political society across the board and I could go on from here and talk about education, the environment, social security, healthcare, all those kinds of things to make a sort of policy case on this. But I don't have to persuade this audience of that kind of argument that I could list pages and pages of government failure. So I want to talk about something else here and that is building on both the libertarianism a primer and the libertarian reader. I identified a number of key themes of libertarianism and if you read very carefully you'll notice they're not exactly the same key themes in the two books because they were written weeks apart and I changed my mind but we're moving so fast. There's slight differences in the way you divide it up. But tonight I want to talk about two key themes and that is competition and cooperation. I think there are a lot of people who think that this is a trade-off. This is like the Phillips Curve where you trade off unemployment versus inflation. In fact, competition and cooperation are two parts of the market process. They're not in opposition to each other. They're both necessary parts of a functioning society, certainly a functioning market. In the libertarian reader what I identify as the first principle, the first theme of libertarianism is skepticism about concentrated power. Libertarians are very skeptical about anybody having power over anybody else and particularly about anybody having a lot of power over a lot of people. The very first reading in the book is 1 Samuel 8, which is God's warning to the ancient Israelites of what it would be like to have a king. It's a wonderful passage that should have been in more libertarian books before now. It was in a lot of libertarian books up until maybe the 19th century and not too many in the 20th century, but it should be better known because it records how the Israelites went to God and said, make us a king to rule over us like all the other nations. God said, these will be the ways of the king that will rule over you. He will take your sons for his chariots and your daughters for his kitchens and he will take your vineyards and your olive fields and you will cry out in that day because of the king that rules over you. That's a pretty powerful passage. One of the points I make in the book is everybody in Western civilization, which was also known as Christendom, everybody read the Bible. That was the basic touchstone of Judeo-Christian civilization and there it is right there early in the Bible. The idea that a king is not something divinely inspired might be a necessary evil, maybe something you put up with, may even be better than an alternative, but it's not divinely inspired and we should always be very skeptical of it. This theme continues right up obviously to the present. Another selection in the libertarian reader is the federalist, number 10. How do you control special interests? Once you create a government, how do you control factions that will try to control the government? Again, the founders were coming up with ways to divide power. I think there's a kind of fundamental philosophical issue here, a practical issue as well. That is, which is better to find the right answer to whatever the question is and then impose it over a whole society, whether that's a city, a state, a nation, whatever, or to allow different ideas, different plans, different approaches to be tested, experimented with, competing and adapted or adopted both. Libertarians, of course, say the latter is better. It's better to have a decentralized process, better to have competition, better if you make a mistake that it doesn't affect everybody. Just recently the state of California commissioned a task force to discover how good education in California was and it came back and said, for the last 10 years, we've been doing everything wrong and that's why the test scores have been going down. Well, it's a bad thing that California was able to impose these ridiculous educational ideas on something like 20 million kids, but it's better than having been able to impose it on the whole country, which we would do if we had a unitary system of education. Now, if we were lucky, the minister of education in Washington would figure out the right way to educate and would impose on every school in 3,000 or 15,000 school districts around the country the right way to educate. If you think there are good odds that the centralized authority will pick the best alternative and impose it, then it would be understandable that you would favor centralized authority, but if you think the odds are, given all the ideas out there and how many of them are the best, the odds are that whoever picks would probably pick the wrong one, then you want competition, you want decentralization, you want to be able to see what other people are doing, but this other idea is very powerful. President Clinton says it's my task as president to, I've forgotten the exact quote, but it's something like to manage the diversity of this great country and unify it. You know, why not enjoy the diversity, but no, he sees that he's got to bring us together somehow. The governor of Kentucky said recently that if a new way of teaching in the classroom works, every school should have it. If it doesn't work, no school should have it. There's always the possibility, of course, that it works for some kids and not for others, but even leaving that possibility aside, why not test? Why not let the schools in one county do it and if it seems to work well, maybe the next county over will adopt it and then maybe the big paper in the state will write about it and other people will find out. A lot of people just think that's too slow, why not get it right and go on and do it? So anyway, libertarians think that competition gets you to much better solutions overall than centralizing. And that's why libertarians in different eras have conceived ideas like federalism and the separation of powers, why the free market evolved, and why libertarians resist attempts to replace it with central authority. It's how the western intellectual system evolved. We don't talk a lot about the fact that the western intellectual system is also a competitive process like the market. Nobody has the authority to decide what truth is. You put forward an idea, it's tested, it's argued with, if it can be empirically tested, people do that, and if nobody can knock it down, then it survives, kind of like a business. A successful business is one that hasn't yet been out-competed, but if you look at the Fortune 500 from 20 years ago, 40 years ago, 60 years ago, you see a lot of businesses that appeared to be successful then that have been out-competed since then. So that's kind of the case for competition. Now I want to talk for a minute about cooperation because I think an awful lot of people hear competition and they think antagonism, hostility, dog eat dog. There may even be a gender gap issue here. Michael Prouse of the Financial Times raised this in one of his last columns before he left the United States that maybe it is the case that on average men like the idea of, you know, get out there in that tough marketplace and compete and let the devil take the hind most because men are sort of built differently from women. But maybe women hear that and they think, what about the people who are left behind? What about the kids? What about the less successful? Maybe they're more empathetic. Maybe they're more concerned about those who might be losers in that process. And so maybe we haven't been communicating as well with women more than men but with a lot of people because men and women here have this concern that competition is dog eat dog. So I think we need to talk more about cooperation. There have been a couple of examples of this theme recently. This kind of ties into the notion of atomistic individualism that I'm sure you all heard about in college that, you know, if you ever mentioned, I ran to a professor. You probably got a load about atomistic individualism and Nietzsche and things like that. But just the other day, last Friday, Charles Krauthammer reviewing Charles Murray's new book in The Washington Post said, until Charles Murray came along with this new book this week, the Libertarian vision was, quote, a race of rugged individualists each living in a mountaintop cabin with a barbed wire fence and a no trespassing sign outside. Somehow he neglected to mention arms to the teeth. He did go on to mention though atomized individualists living in a castle with a moat. Well, I'd rather have the castle than the mountaintop cabin, I guess. But, you know, what kind of a vision is this that this is what Charles Krauthammer thinks libertarians thought until now? Fortunately, he said, Charles Murray has a vision of libertarianism that involves community and friendship and association with others. And I think that will be the libertarianism of the future. Of course, it's also the libertarianism of the past going back thousands of years. But it's not Krauthammer's not alone in thinking this. Amitai Etzioni, who some people think is the most distinguished social scientist in America and who has a new book out in which he makes these statements or something very similar to what he had written earlier. Etzioni says that libertarians believe that individual agents are fully formed and their value preferences are in place prior to and outside of any society. And he goes on to say libertarians ignore robust social scientific evidence about the ill effects of isolation. E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post says libertarians seem to believe that individuals come into the world as fully formed adults who should be held responsible for their actions from the moment of their birth. Well, who could believe anything like that? I mean, you would think as you wrote those words you would stop and think no rational adult could believe these things. No one can believe that the typical human being comes into the world fully formed with ideas and responsible for his actions from the moment of birth. This would mean that, you know, there was no religion, no culture, no family, no friends, no newspapers, no heroes. This is crazy. It's hard to believe they really believe, libertarians believe this. But it's what they write. And I think this canard about libertarianism has been very damaging. And I think those of us who write and advocate on behalf of libertarianism need to focus more on the theme of cooperation. And I try to do that in the book some. If I were writing it today I'd probably do more because I'd become more conscious of seeing this critique partly because of the reviews of my book in Charles Murray's and so sort of principle I couldn't write the answer to the things that I only found out about because of the book reviews. Now the point we need to make is it's no news to us or to anybody else that human beings can barely survive and can hardly flourish alone. We want to interact with others, we get value from interacting with others. And besides we need to, what could any one of us do alone? Find a cave and hide in it, possibly kill an animal and wear a loincloth? Who wants to live like that? This is not a rational thought and to suggest that a whole tradition which in fact, as I point I make in both of these books, is the tradition at the heart of western civilization. The struggle for individual rights and liberties against the state to think that that tradition believes something like this. I could point to Hayek talking about association and cooperation, but we don't have to start there. It goes much further back. It obviously goes back to the very first people who started trading and realized the benefits of not fighting with each other, but instead trading and engaging in the division of labor. But just to talk about a few progenitors of the libertarian tradition, John Locke and David Hume said, it is to achieve the benefits of interaction with others that we enter into a society and establish a system of rights. Adam Smith talked about the division of labor, the way we can cooperate in a free society in the libertarian conception. We have our natural rights and we have the obligation not to interfere with the rights of other people, but all of our other obligations are chosen by consent or by contract. That's the distinction that libertarians make about cooperation and individualism. The only issue is, do you choose the ways you will cooperate? Do you enter into it by consent? I understand that at a panel on Charles Murray's book, a distinguished conservative thinker, said that it was ridiculous to talk about individual autonomy when we abridge our autonomy all the time by employment contracts and marriage contracts and mortgages and so on. Apparently just not grasping that the unique characteristic of all of those is you enter into them by consent. They're not imposed on you. You choose to bind yourself to certain rules to make agreements and to be bound by them because we all benefit by making those kinds of agreements. They don't get that. So when we talk about individuals have the right to do whatever they want to, so long as they don't interfere with the rights of others, maybe that formulation sounds sort of Nietzschean to people and maybe we have to think about how to rephrase that, but we understand that when we say that we are not talking about the kind of atomistic individualism that your professors like to derive. People live and work together in groups. How would you be an atomistic individual in a complex modern society? Does that mean eating only what you grow, wearing what you make, living in a house you build for yourself, restricting yourself to natural medicines that you personally extract from plants? Maybe there are some critics of capitalism or advocates of back to nature like the unabomber or like Al Gore, if he really believes what he wrote in his book, who would like to live like that. But I've never heard a libertarian saying he wanted to renounce the benefits of what Adam Smith called the great society and move back to the state of nature that he could achieve on his own. The point of a system of property rights, the rule of law and minimal government is that it allows maximum scope for people to experiment with new forms of cooperation. Everything from trading routes to promises to corporations to condominium associations and mutual funds and stock exchanges. All of those are ways that people cooperate and they're all experiments and they're constantly changing but they're experiments to find ways to cooperate better to achieve more mutual gains. One of Vetsioni's other comments is libertarians have no notion of shared value or common good. Well, of course, we think freedom is a common good and so the statement falls on its face. But we also think lots of these other things are common goods. I get a shared value. I get a common good by participating in a condominium association. In doing that, I have had my freedom restricted in some ways but I've concluded that my standard of living is enhanced by everybody in my condominium association agreeing not to do certain things and making promises to do certain other things. In a marriage, of course, you believe that your the quality of your life will be increased by each of you agreeing to certain things. It's not imposed on you by force but it is an attempt to achieve a shared value that you couldn't get on your own. So as I say, humans can barely survive and can certainly not flourish without interacting with other people. We associate with others for instrumental ends. We want to produce more food, exchange goods, develop new technology but we also, as human beings, feel a deep need for connectedness, for friendship and love and comradeship and entering into associations of all sorts like that, we produce spontaneously not through any central plan what we call civil society what Thomas Paine contrasted to political society. Civil society is just all the associations among people. Families, churches, schools, clubs, fraternal societies, condominiums, neighborhood groups and commercial society, corporations and labor unions and trade associations and partnerships and so on. And all of these associations serve human needs and there's a sense in which libertarians really ought to emphasize civil society and voluntary association more than individualism because none of us really wants to go off and live all alone. We want to live together in a variety of ways. I might just note here in talking about civil society that there are analysts who distinguish between commercial and non-profit organizations. Sheldon almost did that in his introduction referring to the private sector and the non-profit sector but I think that the key distinction is coercive or voluntary and in that sense non-profit and for-profit organizations are all part of civil society. It's only the state that is outside civil society. The key characteristic is whether your participation in it is voluntarily chosen. And I might note also and this is sort of a key point that Hayek makes that all of the associations within civil society are formed for a purpose whether it's a marriage or a supper club or a corporation or a stock exchange they're all formed to achieve a purpose but civil society itself has no single purpose. It is just the result of all of these choices. The spontaneous result of all these other purposive associations. The market is an important aspect of civil society and I think there are people on the left who want to distinguish between civil society and the market. In fact, the Washington Post asserted recently that civil society is the space between the market and government or something like that. The market is clearly part of civil society. It's voluntary associations. People coming together people cooperating to achieve a purpose. The market arises from the fact that humans can accomplish more together than they can individually and from the fact that we can recognize this. If we were a species for whom cooperation was not more productive than individual work or if we were unable to discern the benefits of cooperation then we would not only remain isolated and atomistic but as Mises put it each man would have been forced to view all other men as his enemies. His craving for the satisfaction of his own appetites would have brought him into an implacable conflict with all his neighbors. Without the possibility of mutual benefit from cooperation and the division of labor neither feelings of friendship and sympathy nor the market itself could arise. We would have a war of all against all if there weren't benefits to cooperating and the benefits to cooperating are why we need property rights and markets. So we know what's mine and what's yours and how we can combine it. Those who say that humans are made for cooperation not for competition fail to recognize that the market is cooperation. Ford Motor Company wants to cooperate in providing me with transportation so does Toyota. So they compete to see who can best cooperate with me. America Online and CompuServe are offering different ways of cooperating to get to the benefits of the information age. But the competition that they have is to find out who can cooperate best. And when you get away from the consumer level and you talk about companies that are selling services to other businesses they are competing to see who can provide the most efficiency for businesses that are then delivering products to the consumer. So the whole issue there is who can cooperate most efficiently. How can we get more benefits by cooperating? Philosophers call this cooperation if you look in modern management text you'll find it called synergy. So you probably toss the word synergy in from time to time to sound more contemporary. But the point is life would indeed be nasty, brutish, and short if it were solitary. But fortunately it's not solitary and that's why life is no longer nasty, brutish, and short because we have found ways to cooperate to achieve everything from the internet to modern medicine to virtually instantaneous transportation to all points in the world. So the point is competition and cooperation are not choices. We don't trade them off against each other they're both part of what Smith called the simple system of natural liberty. Now the implication of the need for cooperation and competition is that so we can cooperate and compete to cooperate better we need limited government. And I talk a lot about that in the book but I don't have to tell anybody here about the benefits of limited government. So I will just say remember that Smokey the Bears rules for fire safety also apply to government. Keep it small keep it in a confined area and keep an eye on it. As we enter a new century and a new millennium we are encountering a world of endless possibility and the very premise of the world of global markets and rapidly accelerating technology is libertarianism. We cannot imagine the world of Star Wars or whatever our vision of the future is not the Star Wars exactly but the technology and the travel that you see in those movies. We can't imagine a free and technologically advanced society being produced either by a stultifying socialism or a rigid conservatism. If we want a dynamic world of prosperity and opportunity it will be a libertarian world. And at one point my publisher wanted to subtitle this book something like the newest old movement in America or the oldest new movement in America. And although I thought that was a little confusing I think it captures an important point and that is that the simple timeless principles of the American revolution individual liberty limited government and free markets turn out to be even more powerful in a world of instant communication global markets and unprecedented access to information than even Jefferson or Madison ever imagined they would be. Libertarianism is not just a framework for utopia as Robert Nozick called it it is the indispensable framework for the future if we are going to have a future if we are going to have a future of global markets and unimaginable technology it will have to be a world of markets individual empowerment and limited government and that's the point I try to make in both of these books and I hope that you will take a look at them and find that I've done at least an adequate job and recommend them to people and if you didn't buy one here please go to a bookstore and buy one if you did buy one here please go to a bookstore and buy another one that way that we'll get it on the bestseller list we'll get free press to reprint it we'll get the bookstores to keep reordering and maybe it will have an impact on the world thank you Bumper I assume we have some time for questions Yeah and I've got it so David I'm going to ask the first question if I may okay since you just mentioned Robert Nozick I was thinking about him a lot throughout your presentation because I had a conversation with him a couple of years ago where I was surprised to hear him say that some very disparaging comments that he labeled as libertarianism and he was promoting what he called communitarianism so what and then since then of course I'm sure you're aware of this sort of a movement that's come about and could you talk about that and how it relates to the theme of your talk tonight sure I can't really say much about Nozick's current views one of Bob Nozick's charms is he likes to deal with a subject learn everything he can apply whatever insights he can and move on so he wrote a book of political philosophy 20 years ago which is drawn on in my primer and excerpted in my reader and he has not written about political philosophy since then and I'm not sure when he says he's a communitarian how different he really sees that being from libertarianism there are a lot of people around today who call themselves communitarians and they mean a variety of different things by it the communitarian network I think took a poll recently and they ask people questions like do you do you think you know do you think society should be run by an authoritarian government or the people should do anything they want to with no regard for others or that there should be a balance between rights and responsibilities and they found that most people took the communitarian position that there should be a balance of rights and responsibilities I mean most of the questions really were just that silly you couldn't possibly choose either of the other alternatives I have debated communitarians they do mean a lot of different things in some sense communitarians believe that the rights of the community take precedence over the rights of the individual but I think some people who say that don't really mean anything terribly unlibertarian by it sometimes what they really object to is the sort of ACLU attitude that there should be lots of public property and public enterprises and then once you're forced into all these public spaces other people should be able to use them in ways that make them very unpleasant for you you know this is the idea that there should be public libraries and then people who stink and harass women should be allowed to use them once you once you create the government enterprises the government spaces the ACLU may be right in saying generally people have a right to be there if they're citizens the problem is creating all these spaces where people cannot consent to certain rules you go to a private shopping mall and you will find that it's pretty peaceful you go to a public shopping area in a lot of places these days and it's not very peaceful and the reason isn't much easier to keep order to to recognize that people enter the private area by consent and they will consent to certain rules of decorum in order to remain there and in association with others there clearly are people who call themselves communitarians who mean the state should make decisions for people it should make one decision should be imposed on people but I think a lot of people who would say this really do want the same balance of rights and responsibilities that we do after all we understand that with every right comes the responsibility to respect everyone else's rights with the right to enter into a contract comes the responsibility to live up to the terms of that contract and so in that sense we too believe in rights and responsibilities I'm not sure it's exactly a balance I mean they simply are the same thing in that sense and I think we have to sort out what communitarians really mean there was a wonderful article in the Economist magazine a couple of years ago about this in which the author argued that the high communitarians of the academy are frighteningly authoritarian but fortunately have ideas that will never appeal to anyone in real life so they're not very dangerous while the low communitarians of the popular press have some troops do appeal to people but whenever they really bump up against liberal values in the sense that we mean liberal values they shy away they're not really going to take away individual rights they're going to say people ought to have more respect for the ideas and opinions and property of others well that's okay they're going to say that if you know if you're using the public streets you should respect the other users we can agree with that we may have some disagreements with a lot of communitarians on what you do once you have all these public spaces and we're going to have trouble persuading them that the best way to solve this problem is to have fewer public spaces and more private spaces which as Galbraith observed will be safer and cleaner and more pleasant to be in I once debated a communitarian Amitai Etzioni and I read his book first and throughout the book he kept saying communitarians aren't talking about new laws we just want people to respect each other we want a national conversation about the need for more respect and civility so I typed up in my computer everywhere he called for a law either a new one or cited one that was already existing that was an example of what they wanted and printed it out on that computer paper that ripples down and so I got up and said well he says he doesn't want any new laws but this is how many laws he's talking about in the book now unfortunately I was debating him in front of an audience of communitarians and they were entirely impassive at that demonstration they didn't mind the fact that there were a lot of new laws being proposed but I do think there's a lot of disingenuousness in the communitarian discussion and you have to press them on what do you really mean Bert? David you made reference to Charles Taylor you made reference to Charles Taylor's recent book in what ways do you agree with Taylor and what ways do you disagree with him? I'm sorry I didn't read Charles Taylor's new book Charles Murray's new book that I read I misspoke okay Charles Murray's new book Charles Murray's book is very good if I had not written mine I would say it was the best introduction to libertarianism available and I would urge you all to get it and hand it out to friends and recommend it to colleges there are a couple of differences mine is a good deal longer although I think not terribly long but his is quite short almost an essay his book is not so much an introduction to a tradition and a body of thought as it is a personal interpretation that's what he called it it is his way of looking at the way to organize society and the way to analyze public policy and in almost every instance it is a libertarian way he calls it that and he's right he talks about individual rights at the beginning he talks about some of the practical aspects he has some very clever phrases and thought experiments in there there's really not a lot ideologically that I disagree with it is said that he would keep about 40% of the federal government around and I keep less but I think that most of that is just sort of a bit of quibbling over transitional how much do you think you can really say you would get rid of how much do you think is transitional there's one thing I recall from the book that I think is very wrong and I think if he were here he wouldn't really make much of a defense of it he calls for getting rid of most of what federal government does he does however suggest that education in the United States be turned into a voucher plan at the federal level which would mean that a very large percentage of federal spending at that point would be education vouchers now he's in favor I believe in the book of getting rid of government-run schools so he would have only government funding of education no government schools at all but the money would be at the federal level I think libertarians could argue about whether that would be better than what we've got now I think the virtues of competition and decentralization and federalism suggest that that's a mistake and it would be actually worse than what we have but he does want to voucherize and I'm sure he would say that and if you read the book that is the important point he's making about education the federal thing seems kind of an afterthought other than that I'm not sure there are any major differences that I have with the book the differences between the books are not so much philosophical as style of presentation yes yes when you uh when you mentioned the part about monarchy you piqued my interest and I thought by golly he's gonna deal with this perhaps substantively and I'd like to ask you if you'd say something about that not about absolute monarchy which I'm sure everybody in this room would disagree with as I do of course but if you could say something about a form of monarchy which has been much maligned yet which is more and more the object of study which was medieval organic monarchy which had much of what you're talking about I think in terms of what you're calling libertarianism I'm sorry this is a very sophisticated seminar I don't know a whole lot about medieval organic monarchy either in my view the whole notion of a monarch is elevating some people to be better than others in the eyes of the law and I'm against that I think that's wrong that's why I did about 16 television interviews last week saying that the most expensive inaugural in history showed the trappings of an imperial presidency a very minor issue that somehow caught the attention of the media and I kept getting calls about it the organic monarchy or even the modern constitutional monarchy is not necessarily if you're going to have a limited government not necessarily the worst kind you could come up with if you have a country in which that is a tradition in which there's some rootedness there there might be some value to it one of the arguments made for a constitutional monarchy is the politicians have much less authority and prestige because they're just the government the nation is embodied in the monarch and instead of thinking that the president is the leader of the nation and there might be a case for that I would not want to import it to the United States but I can see why some people want to keep the monarchy around in England there is this theoretical possibility that a prime minister who got out of control in Great Britain could be removed by the monarch and that the people would buy that to some extent we saw that in Spain when there was an attempt to sort of reimpose fascist dictatorship and the very courageous Spanish king strode into the parliament and said you're not going to do this we have a constitution and this is outside the constitution and because of this centuries of tradition that were embodied in him he was able to make that happen so my colleague Tom Palmer who spent two years at Oxford studying the history of the struggle for liberty I'm sure would give you a much better answer on the medieval organic monarchy because he wanted me to put a lot more in the book than there is about the Magdeburg law and the golden bull of Hungary and the oath bound associations of Germany and so on and they are a part of the western tradition we frequently talk about the Greco-Roman tradition and the Judeo-Christian tradition in western culture but there is also this Germanic tradition that's very important for law and government that is very much the oath that bound people together but it was understood that the oath was voluntary that they chose to bind themselves to each other and to say we will abstain from these kinds of activities in order to create a peaceful society and in that sense the organic monarchy was part of that system John I have two unrelated questions the first one is I wanted to ask you about passage from your book or not even a passage a sentence fragment that was quoted in a review on the weekly standard and what the meaning of that was the weekly standard said you started out with the direct declaration of independence saying we are endowed by certain rights with our creator and then you said that you said the argument begins before that but it interprets that statement to mean that the argument begins before God and that your book just disregards God in the libertarian philosophy and yet hearing you quote Samuel it's hard to believe I mean I can't understand that you would mean that and then quote Samuel so I was wondering if you could say what was meant by that statement was it taken out of context why don't I answer that and then when I said the argument should start earlier I meant earlier than the statement we hold these truths to be self evident and so maybe that wasn't clear having quoted the whole paragraph of the declaration and then say begin the argument earlier what I said what I went on to say then was most libertarian philosophers would start with the concept of self ownership and they would examine the concept of self ownership and say what are the other alternatives well everybody could own everybody else but that has certain practical problems do you have to get everyone else's permission before you can take a drink of water or someone could own everyone which you know is a traditional God-King sort of relationship the God-King owns everybody else and that seems to have many problems and therefore we are left with self ownership as the logical starting point if we are self owners then we have rights then what are those rights and that sort of thing so I didn't mean to imply that it would be before God but I would say that I don't believe in a theocracy and therefore I believe that any government must be rooted in reason and rational argument and whatever legitimacy government has must be apparent to people of differing faiths and therefore I don't think you can say well whatever we have was ordained by God declaration does mention at one point nature and nature nature or nature's God separate from endowed by their creator so I would argue that the the self-evident truths are not necessarily related to the the possibility of a creator so you're right to say yes I talk in the book about the Judaic and Christian impact on the development of the idea of liberty and I do start with the passage from Samuel but it is still the case that the case for liberty and the case for limited government has to be rooted in reason that is apparent to all and not in faith my second question has really nothing to do with that you mentioned the benefits of a global marketplace and there seems to be a well there is a disagreement in libertarian on some international trade agreements some libertarians say I mean I think Kato says this that Gatt and NAFTA Kato doesn't say things scholars at Kato say this scholars at Kato say that NAFTA the free trade benefits on balance these things are better for freedom right some libertarians and some protectionists using libertarian arguments will say no that this paves the way for a global control of businesses and certainly there are those on the left that want to embody and trade agreements global environmental regulation and wage regulation my question is as libertarians how should we look at international trade agreements and international agreements in general well I think you have to look at it empirically I don't really get into that in the book this is a primer and the publisher is very clear that they wanted a sort of timeless primer not dealing with the issues of the day so there is one chapter on the issue of the day but it pretty much makes the case for free trade it doesn't get into these kinds of questions I think you have to look at it empirically and you have to decide economically and politically are these trade agreements we're talking particularly about NAFTA and Gatt but there are other examples do they enhance free trade more than they limited I think it is absolutely correct that there is simply no such thing as a 2000 page free trade agreement you don't need more than about one page to have a free trade agreement so if it's 2000 pages you know there's something else going on there I was struck by the fact that during the NAFTA debate some libertarians who I believe genuinely were libertarians who support free trade held press conferences with people who are clearly protectionist and they one by one came to the microphone and said vote against NAFTA because it's free trade and then the libertarians came along and said vote against NAFTA because it's not free trade now you know in politics you make an alliance with whoever's on your side on the particular conclusion but I thought it was a particularly incoherent kind of press conference because they disagree on what the effects of the law would be they just agree that what they think it would be is not what they want my conclusion in a way it was more political than economic was that NAFTA was on balance better than feeding NAFTA and you can go through a lot of the economics that there were long arguments about does it threaten American sovereignty will it mean international regulators will impose costs on us I am persuaded that that was largely not the case that on average trade barriers would be lower and there would be more trade but I also thought there was a political point and any libertarian could clearly disagree with this as a strategic tactical assessment but my feeling about NAFTA was if NAFTA is defeated will members of Congress say boy we better go get a cleaner free trade agreement and bring it back to the floor no I think they would say the 50 year post-war consensus in favor of gradually freer trade has ended and I think the next result of the defeat of NAFTA would have been protectionist agreements or protectionist policies on the part of the United States I also sort of thought that if the Salinas government didn't get NAFTA through and remember the Salinas government faced tremendous leftist and protectionist and nationalist pressures and had really pushed against the prevailing trend of Mexican political culture to get a free trade agreement with the United States and I felt if NAFTA were defeated it would probably mean the end of that market opening for the Mexicans and that would be a bad thing for them and also a bad thing for the United States now the subsequent history of the Salinas government of course made it clear that NAFTA was hardly enough to save either Salinas himself or his economic policies but I still think on balance that was the right conclusion but they're certainly libertarians I respect who came to a different conclusion on that one and the World Trade Agreement and GATT was pretty much the same analysis with a few details different David I'm Joe Winkelman and I would like to first of all thank you very much this is my first coffee club and it was a real treat I want to go back to the issue of cooperation and what for me is a part of that and that is reciprocity in terms of a contract there is no such thing as a contract between unequal partners that works it's my sense that as people either willingly give up their rights to government or are coerced into having a rights taken by government that there is a reciprocity in play there in terms of heightening a greater demand from that government in return for having lost freedom now whether this operates at a at a a level of consciousness I'm not sure but it's just a thought and I wonder if you would address that in terms of libertarian philosophy well I'm not sure I follow the question so let me make a couple of comments and and see whether they address what you're thinking about you said a contract between unequals is not possible or not valid no I it certainly could be valid legally valid what I was saying is that there's no such thing in my view of a good contract a a mutually beneficial contract between highly unequal partners well I'm not I'm not sure what you mean by that if you mean unequal in terms of rights then of course I think all people should have equal rights and and therefore there couldn't be a contract between unequals unless you possibly mean children children might have different rights that would be one aspect of it a contract between an employer and and a laborer who has no clue that's what they're getting into a homeowner and a home builder etc that's not my main point my point was that I agree with you what you're saying on contracts that there is a sense of cooperation there my point is if it's true cooperation there will be a reciprocity as expressed in that contract or expressed in the relationship okay I do want to disagree with what you just said then of course there are contracts between unequals and they're perfectly good contracts Bill Gates is far richer than I am and he knows far more about computers than I do and I contract with him every day and I don't he is benefiting me by making me this offer and I don't have to use Windows 95 but if I choose to it's because I think I'm being made better off now you may say that I'm smarter than some people in society about choosing between operating systems but you'd probably be wrong and certainly there are areas where each of us is ignorant and one of the points that I make in here and actually I've made it in my argument about school choice is there are a whole lot of things I don't know anything about how to buy but the fact that some people know how to buy them means the prices have to be kept pretty honest I don't do I'm not a very good grocery shopper there's only one or two products that I know the price of otherwise I go into the grocery I take whatever's offered but my mother was a very careful grocery shopper and she compared prices and compared ads and she knew where the produce was better and where the meat was better and doesn't take very many shoppers like my mother to make both Safeway and Giant and all the other companies bid for their business and therefore I'm free riding off them there are some things I'm a pretty good connoisseur of political affairs magazines a reasonable connoisseur of books and things like that some kinds of music so you know I'm giving people benefits there so I don't buy this argument about contracts between unequals there's no such thing as equal knowledge in any contract but when you start talking about government I think there is a difference there nobody ever asked me if I wanted to give up my rights to the government I was born here and when I came of age I was told when you start working you have to give 40% of your income to the government I wasn't asked about that I give a certain percentage of my income to my condo association and I'm willing to do that I get benefits for that I obviously give a certain percentage of my income to the grocery although I don't have a long-term contract to it I'm happy to do that but I was never asked if I would like to enter into this contract with government I wasn't offered any competing opportunities there I was just told and I think you can make an argument that we accept a limited government in order to protect our rights but once you go beyond that I don't think that I agreed to any of these other things and the arguments for all of these other things turn on issues like well the majority voted well the majority may have voted for Giant over Safeway but I don't have to accept that majority and so why am I impressed by the fact that the majority want Fairfax County to build a new convention center if I don't I shouldn't have to pay for it so I just don't think there's I don't think there is such a contract in the case of government I didn't ask the question right let me try it from another direction to see if there's a linkage if there's no linkage then there's no linkage when you talk about your condo association you willingly enter into that association you give up some of your rights as you described your words and you get a benefit back that you think is worth it okay yeah but let me let me clarify just one point there I don't give up any of my inalienable rights Thomas Jefferson said inalienable rights I do give up my right to certain exercises you know I agree not to play loud music I agree not to put screens in the front windows things which I have a natural right to do but I give them up in return for benefits that's right right and with the exception of TV antennas in certain condo associations where sports freaks believe are inalienable rights I would agree my point is that's that's how it works and that's really how it works in the real world with government you're obviously right it is coercive unless someone chooses to come to this country and take on the responsibilities and benefits of citizenship the point I was trying to get to is that you strike a balance with your condo association so that you are comfortable that what you are giving up whatever that is is worth what you're getting back and that balancing mechanism is a market in government my question is do we have in effect creeping reciprocity a demand for government services that once people are coerced into the system as we all are being born into the country do we start looking for balances and and reciprocal benefits to in effect balance out what we've given up and and the question in my mind arises from how do you deal with elites in society and how do you deal with pressure groups which is a basic fundamental question we haven't resolved in this country is there something hardwired about our trying to strike a deal even as we emerge in a coerced situation with government well that is one of the motivations for increasing the size of government I don't think it's the main motivation but you do hear people saying well trains are subsidized so why not automobiles I'm not in favor of all these programs as long as they're going to be Governor Allen's going through this right now we're paying those taxes we ought to take that goals 2000 money now there's a pretty good case that taking the goals 2000 money is a net bad thing even if it's free money even if it's money coming in it's a bad thing but but there are people who make that argument there are people who say their group is getting it so our group is getting it that goes you know there's a lot of that that does happen and I think Harry Brown had a good way of addressing that when he would say to audiences would you give up your favorite government program in return for never paying income tax again because you all know that the big spenders are always saying why do you object to the national endowment for the arts it only costs you 67 cents a day are the arts not worth 67 cents a day why do you object to Amtrak it only costs you 32 cents a day you go through all the programs they're all you know reasonably cheap but I think Harry summed that up right the real cost because the 10 votes for the national endowment for the arts and are added to the 20 votes for Amtrak and the 300 votes for social security and the 25 votes for farm subsidies and you end up paying your whole income tax for this one or two programs you like now let's face it there are some people who would not give up their favorite government program in return for never paying income taxes again and the most obvious example is retired people their favorite government program is their income and their future income taxes are zero so of course they wouldn't make that trade and that could be a problem and the question is how many people perceive that they're actually net losers because of government that even if you could persuade them and that is a problem now you ask how do we control special interest how do we account for pressure groups that is a very good question the founders came up with a pretty good way they created a government with such limited powers that it wouldn't do you any good to get control of it there wouldn't be any point in it there was a consensus that we don't want the government going around taking money from some and spending on others and James Buchanan made the argument in one of his books that there was more than just the constitution there was a constitutional consensus it was agreed that we don't do this but once that got breached a few times then people did start saying well if they can pay for cancer research they can pay for heart research and they can pay for that they can pay for AIDS research or if they're paying for cancer and AIDS research then shouldn't they also be paying for energy research why is that not included so you do get that kind of thing going on he called it the collapse of the constitutional consensus which was a little different from the collapse of the actual constitution so one answer is that we try to move back to a point of having a limited government if you have a limited government special interest groups won't fight to get control of it Jonathan Rausch wrote a good book on this demo sclerosis it's not a libertarian book and his conclusions aren't all libertarian but there's a lot of facts in there about how the growth of interest groups parallels the rise in the growth and power of government as Washington gets bigger trade associations move to Washington lobbyists move to Washington I actually wrote about this in Cato policy report just the other day using Microsoft as an example it's a little bit sensitive because Microsoft has recently become a contributor to the Cato Institute and I appreciate that support and I think we're the the biggest defenders in Washington of competitive enterprise and therefore they should be giving us money nevertheless what I said was for 10 years the brilliant people at Microsoft stayed out there in Redmond Washington working all night making stuff for us and then the government started harassing them and the first time they paid the government money to go away and the second time they paid the government money to go away and long about the third or fourth time they said we're gonna have to hire Washington lobbyists and went to the Washington PR firm and open up a Washington office and give money to think tanks to get plugged into the Washington scene that sort of thing and I said the terrible thing about all of this is these brilliant minds at Microsoft are being diverted away some of the energy out there is being diverted into the parasite economy right now all they're doing is fighting off the government but now they've got a Washington lobbyist and he wants to be important so right now he's trying to fight off the government but next year maybe he says say you know there's a tax bill coming and you don't realize how it's going to affect you but if I could get this clause out of it you'd save a lot of money and what are they gonna say try to get that clause out of it and then he's gonna come to somebody and it won't be Bill Gates it'll be some third level official at Microsoft and he'll say listen there's a tax law coming and you know you change a couple of words in it and it'll be the hardware makers who pay the tax on a computer rather than software manufacturers what do you think of that well that'd be a good idea so you'll do that and then it'll be you know there's a government subsidy program and you could get some of it well we're you know in for a dime in for a dollar and at that point Microsoft will have been sucked into this Washington system and I hope that won't happen but it's happened to an awful lot of companies who came here just to fight the government and ended up being part of it hiring ex congressman to tell them how to run their Washington operations that sort of thing happens so the easy answer to how you control special interests is you have things like free trade competitive markets limited government few powers to hand out low taxes maybe a balanced budget requirement the hard question is how do you get free trade limited government and a balanced budget requirement and the best answer is that you can do that at a constitutional level as long as we've got the system we've got now where the government is a bottomless pit then everybody's going to be wanting to dip into it and it will be very difficult to get people to stop but we might be able to get two-thirds of Americans to agree that this is a stupid system with everybody dipping into the pot let's all get together and agree that's what the argument for a balanced budget amendment is we know we all want a subsidy but we'd all be better off if nobody could get the next subsidy so we could agree if nobody can have one I'm willing to give out my shot at one we need to we need to move it way back not just a balanced budget but back to article one section eight of the authorized powers of the constitution that's a much more difficult challenge if you go back to let's say the 1840s or 1850s and those so-called wild west where there was total lawless nests and if you and I had an argument I'd just pull out a gun and shoot you today the west is all is run by bureaucrats and you have the city of san francisco somewhere along the line from 1842 today we had this growing government and bureaucracy I assume that you don't like the wild west of total lawless nests which is actually the situation in the former Soviet Union in some sense where would you sort of stop the growth of government and the sort of emergence of order in the historical sense well is it 1910 or is it or is it something structural I don't I don't think you can I don't think you can name a year there's a problem with your premise there was an article in one of the very first issues of the journal of libertarian studies called the not so wild wild west and terry anderson and pj hill I think it was looked at some figures on the not the wild west and discovered that some years there were no murders in dodge city some years there were no murders in abalone in Kansas um I'm not sure about the overall murder rates depending on what you call the wild west and all of that but some of the places that we think of as the wild wild west were not all that dangerous they certainly weren't as dangerous as today's cities and they may not even have been as dangerous as you know today's suburbs or rural areas so it's not absolutely clear that that's right people always have an incentive to want to live in a peaceful area there are people who think they have a comparative advantage at violence and they may not want to but if enough people do then you may still be able to achieve that I think the answer is I want a government strong enough to protect me from other people and not strong enough to interfere with my rights itself I it's a real challenge to figure out exactly how that is I think you can say that in the soviet union what some of the liberals there like maybe anatoly chubayas who I think is is genuinely a liberal are trying to do is create a government that is limited but strong they had a government that was strong and unlimited and they sort of overthrew it and now they don't seem to have a government strong enough to stop marauders and bandits and yet it's also far beyond its powers in terms of what we would consider limited government so it's a real challenge to do that and I think one of the problems may be you said the wild wild west was like the soviet union and I don't think that's right the wild wild west was after all heir to hundreds of years of the development of civilization and the rule of law in england and the united states and as people moved west they didn't lose all that historic knowledge about how that happened sure it might be aggressive men who tend to move west and yes some of the civilizing influences of the east may be are lost but the soviet union has really been through 70 years of a kind of combined anarchy and totalitarianism and that's a very different situation to be in so my answer is I do want a government strong enough to protect rights but I think that is a much smaller government and more importantly a much more limited government than we have today it should be able to arrest wrongdoers it should not be able to go out and do wrong itself and I think the constitution of the united states came pretty close to defining that the constitution should not have authorized a post office but other than that it wasn't too bad and of course the constitution of the united states didn't allow for any local police power and that's really what you're getting at how much power should the local police have and I think well the answer is they should have enough power to stop people from hurting each other or to punish them when they do Charles Murray was asked at this panel where these conservatives criticized him the other day I wasn't there but it was reported to me that one of them was talking about sexual predators on the internet and everything and what are you going to do about that and Charles was saying there shouldn't be any censorship and at some point this conservative critic said so are you just saying you'd wait until they committed a crime before you'd arrest them and Charles said well yes I mean what else can you do of course you wait until they commit a crime before you arrest them that's what the rule of law is all about so I want to establish the rule of law and I want swift and sure punishment when people break the law or violate rights should be the key point and the challenge and it is a real challenge is to come as close as you can to that ideal but I think early America was fairly close I think that the Constitution of the United States was pretty close with a few big exceptions like allowing slavery but other than that in the application of the law I think it was pretty good okay we you talk about the government as a coercive force as a government making decisions for us versus the individual making choices on his own part and I want to say that I've having been in Washington a while don't feel that the government makes choices for me I feel that it's the IRS agent acting under the aegis of the government it's Hillary Clinton and a group of people who somehow are either coerced or bought into agreeing with her it's a congressman who has done the kind of thing you were talking about with Microsoft who those are the people who are making the decisions and none of those people come are gonna and try to coerce me it's somebody else that does it acting as their agent all done under the aegis of government and this seems to me that it's different from looking at a government that is some big all-knowing wise organization that has assimilated information for many people has tried to observe what the majority wants I don't feel it's that at all your comment well I agree with that of course government is individuals but the problem with government in the United States is that it confuses a lot of people's understanding of individual rights I think when you say libertarianism is the idea that adult individuals have the right to live their lives the way they want to so long as they don't harm the equal rights of others people habitually live that way people don't habitually steal from their neighbor or hurt their neighbor it's only when you confuse it with government that people start thinking of pro-family legislation or minimum wage laws or income transfers as being something different from taking money from other people or going into their homes and telling them how to live their lives so in that sense the government is this mystical thing that confuses what we're actually doing to each other but you're right it's carried out by individuals making the balance as to what individuals are responsible for and what is somehow systematic is a challenge and sometimes it becomes a real challenge like in the Nuremberg trials you know do you hold the whole system responsible or do you say individuals who did this are responsible and in circumstances like that we have tended to say individuals are responsible in the United States government we almost never do there was the decision by Congress a few years ago to compensate the Japanese Americans who had been incarcerated during World War II on the basis of no suspicion no actions or anything and I thought at the time that was a reasonable thing do they had been terribly harmed by their government but of course I didn't harm them and yet my taxes are going to go to pay these people and I thought that they should at least start by seizing all the assets of anyone still alive from the Roosevelt administration anyone who was in Congress at the time certainly John Jay McCloy who was the sort of chief architect of that policy unfortunately it took 50 years or at least 40 years to get around to making that apology and so there weren't too many people left that you could hold responsible but no one ever brought up the idea of holding individuals responsible it was not the nation of the United States that made this horrible decision it was not even in a sense the government of the United States it was specific people and we knew who they were and we could have held them responsible so I think we should recognize that individuals make those decisions thanks very much Bumper thank you for listening and I hope you like the book