 I am very excited to be hosting this event today. Sometimes people say, especially if I prod them, that David Bowes wrote the book on libertarianism. And I hope people will still keep saying that, but from now on, they're gonna have to say that Brian Doherty wrote the book on libertarians. This is a magnificent book. If you've seen it out there, you see it's over 600 pages, plus another 100 pages of footnotes. It's a really impressive job. Brian read everything. He read all the books by great libertarians, and some not so great. He understood them, and in the course of telling a political history, he also told you what the ideas were that distinguished Mises from Hayek, and Hayek from Friedman, and so on. In addition to the books, he read all the archives of letters of libertarians that are in the Hoover Institution and the University of Virginia and other places. He traveled around the country and went through these dusty old files. Plus, he did more than 10 years of interviews with libertarians ranging from greats like Milton Friedman to much more obscure people like me and some of my colleagues. This is going to be the standard history of the libertarian movement for a long time. It moves smoothly from the ideas of Mises and Hayek and Rand to the growth of libertarian think tanks to the factional feuds within the libertarian party. And every reader, no matter how well informed, is going to learn things from this book. And I know that's often a concern for people who think they know a subject, but I can tell you that I've been involved in the libertarian movement for a long time. I wrote a book on libertarianism and I learned things from this book, a lot of things. You may think that you know everything there is to know about Hayek's career or Inran's idiosyncrasies, but do you know who Red Miller was? Turns out he was important. Or how the Buchanan Committee in Congress tried to shut down the incipient libertarian movement in 1950. You may have trouble finding that without actually reading the book because the book is much better than its index. But I can tell you that there's a very interesting story in there about Congressman Buchanan and his attempt to shut down libertarianism. Radicals for capitalism is going to take its place alongside other key books about American ideological and political movements. And so it's a pleasure for me to welcome and introduce to you the author of this impressive book. Brian Doherty is a senior editor of Reason Magazine, the flagship libertarian magazine. He is previously the author of This Is Burning Man, which is another exhaustively researched book about a group of eccentrics. He has worked at Reason for more than a decade. Before that, he was a journalism fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. But most importantly, he started his career as an intern at the Cato Institute. And that should be an inspiration to all of our current interns who are in the room today. He then returned to Cato as perhaps the youngest ever managing editor of Regulation Magazine. We were sorry to lose him to Reason or maybe just to the West Coast. But we're delighted to have him back here today. So please welcome the author of Radicals for Capitalism, a freewheeling history of the modern American libertarian movement, Brian Doherty. Thank you so much. It is wonderful to get that incredibly gracious introduction from David Bowes, who did still write the book on libertarianism, his libertarianism a primer. I still recommend it to everyone. It's the best place to start. It's really great actually to bring this book home in a sense to the Cato Institute because the genesis of this book did arise when I was working here in the early 90s. Just chattering as young libertarians tend to do late at night with a Cato intern named Chris Whitten, who noted that I seem to have a lot of these great tales about libertarianism's past in my head. But I couldn't answer all of his questions, but he suggested to me that it would be great to have a book that documented the history of these inspiring heroic eccentric figures who pushed these very unpopular but very important ideas about political liberty and free markets. He got me going on the idea that I could write such a book. He hooked me up with some funding sources that helped me write it and now it exists and I'm back here talking about it at Cato. For a great sign actually of how much the libertarian movement has grown even since I began writing this book, at the time I actually was the Cato Institute's PR department, just me. And it was in not a building as wonderful as this. So libertarianism has marched on since then or possibly it's just a sign of how well organizations do once I leave them. But I prefer to believe that it's because the ideas that I wrote about in my book have great strength and have grown. Now as you can see it's a really, really fat book and attempting to really be semational about it in the 20 minutes or so I will have your attention is really impossible. But I am gonna hit some high points and themes that I found either particularly interesting and inspirational or particularly surprising as I researched this book. One of the great things about it though you would never know this from studying most contemporary American feminist theory is that the libertarian story has a great feminist hook to it because three of the major foundational figures of this movement in its attitudes, tone, and beliefs were women. Isabel Patterson a very influential literary critic in her day at the New York Herald Tribune. Rose Wilder Lane a popular novelist and daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder of Little House fame who possibly was the ghost writer for her mother's books a very controversial question that I'm not sure I have a full answer to. And of course the mighty Ein Rand who probably needs little introduction though Patterson and Lane unfortunately still do. Patterson and Lane were great American frontier women both grew up on the American frontier in the early 20th century. They both married young and within a handful of years managed to sort of misplace their husbands never to see them again. They both loved America and they both wrote great inspirational books. Patterson's is called The God of the Machine, Lane's was called The Discovery of Freedom that were really dedicated to trying to explain why America was such an unprecedentedly rich and wonderful country. And they found that explanation in the extent to which America recognized libertarian principles about individual liberty and free markets. The mighty Ein Rand of course it was not a native American but as feisty and self made as Patterson and Lane she managed to escape the Soviet Union the most unlibertarian place on earth and managed to get to America and through her efforts and her creativity managed to explain to the world both concretely and abstractly what was so rotten in the core of the premises that inspired the Soviet Union's hideous experiment in central control and as Ms. Rand would have it in irrationalism and altruism and we would not have what we have today in terms of a libertarian movement without these three women's efforts. They were most directly an influence on the man who founded the first explicitly modern libertarian institution that's still around today called The Foundation for Economic Education. Leonard Reed was his name. He was running the LA Chamber of Commerce and published sort of self published in a sense early works by both Lane and Rand before he started fee. Reed is sort of a good entree and into the other most inspiring part of this story was how, you know, I grew up in a world where there was a libertarian party for me as a college student to get involved with and bring their candidates to office where there was a Cato Institute for me to become an intern in. You know, the libertarian world had been laid out for me but the libertarian world did not exist for men like Leonard Reed and the kind of man who it takes to forge and create a movement is a particularly inspiring kind of man and woman to contemplate. It is the fact that these people had to forge something new for themselves that explains an important aspect of many of the characters in my book is that many of them were very, very eccentric. They had to be extremely strong-willed and difficult people because the rest of the world was not telling them they were right. The rest of the world in fact was generally telling them they were crazy if the rest of the world understood them at all. As David alluded in my introduction in the immediate pre-McCarthy era, it was Leonard Reed and the supporters of free markets and individual liberty who were being called to the dock by Congress. The 1950 Buchanan committee to investigate lobbying subpoenaed records from fee sent telegrams to over a hundred of fees funders demanding that they supply Congress with a list of all of these sinister lobbying organizations that they'd been funding. This generated a wonderful letter which I quoted length in my book from the dynamic William Mullendore, executive vice president of Southern California Edison, the man who turned Leonard Reed into a libertarian. He wrote something, it really should be read by everyone involved in the campaign finance reform movement today because he explained at great length to the congressman that the power to demand that a citizen report in niggling detail on his efforts to influence his own government is a tyrannical power indeed and one that an American citizen should respond to with a sort of genteel up yours pal and they need to be hearing more of that. Rose Wilder Lane also was a victim of one of the signs of how despised these ideas were. She expressed in a postcard the opinion that social security was the sort of Bismarckian control mechanism that we had actually fought world wars against a vicious and suspicious postmaster read this and actually reported her to the FBI who sent a local cop to attempt to harangue her about this. She asked the young man if it was seditious to express this opinion about social security when informed that he thought it was she thundered back, well I'm gonna keep writing it and I'm gonna keep saying it and I'm gonna broadcast it on the radio until you come and arrest me. True social security, Ms. Lane said is a seller full of canned vegetables and slaughtered meat and she had that. So she and both she and Patterson never took a social security number, never took a cent from the social security system. As my story went on, there are many other colorful and inspirational characters I will introduce you to very briefly as we go on. Another favorite of mine was R.C. Hoyles, the publisher of what was then the Santa Ana Register is now the Orange County Register in the flagship of a large chain of newspapers. Now there's a family-owned chain but unlike your guanettes or your scripts, Hoyles did not name his company after his family or himself. He named it after what he thought was most important in the world, freedom and the company is still around today is freedom communications. Hoyles in Southern California was one of the only newspaper voices who editorialized against the internment of the Japanese. He always editorialized for open immigration and he did like to in fact even the news side of his paper with his editorial opinions. He liked to encourage his writers never to use the phrase public education. He referred the phrase gun run education. He wanted to remind people of the threat of force that lies behind every government action. He, while a very bourgeois gentleman, he was able to publicly declare that he preferred whorehouses to public schools because people in whorehouses were there voluntarily. People in public schools were not. Another great figure was Frank Chaturov, great libertarian journalist who edited an early version of the Freeman magazine before it became the foundation for economics journal. He is great to study. He was one of the great figures that sort of limbed the division that occurred in the larger anti New Deal coalition in the 50s. The distinction between conservative and libertarian was not as clear cut then. As late as 1946, you can find Ayn Rand herself calling herself in Leonard Reed conservatives. It was not until later that they began to understand the distinction and the Cold War in the 50s context was one of the major fault lines. Frank Chaturov wrote a wonderful essay in the Freeman in which he wondered aloud whether his young right wing friends of the William Buckley variety were for freedom or merely against communism. And he came to decide that they really were mostly against communism. By up through the 70s, libertarianism was such an outsider ideology that most of the organizations pushing it didn't even begin to imagine how these ideas would actually intersect the world of policy from Fee to the Institute for Humane Studies to Robert Lefebvre's Freedom School. Libertarian organizations were consciously about libertarian education, about teaching individuals mind to mind, how to understand and grasp the principles of libertarianism, how free markets would benefit people. It wasn't until the 70s when a bunch of institutions arose that actually began contemplating how to take these ideas and intersect the world's politics and policy. In politics terms, the Libertarian Party in 72 was the first an organization begun by a guy and a handful of his friends in his living room. While I know the importance of the LP or its value to the larger movement is a controversial question, I will at least point out that it is inspirational for any ideological activist to point to the fact that this idea that occurred to a guy and a handful of his friends in his living room in 71 resulted eight years later in 920,000 votes for President Fred Clark on whose campaign David Bowes worked. And even to this day, it was in 2006, 13 million votes cast across the country for these ideas. The Cato Institute, of course, was another of the great institutions that arose in the 70s that began to try to figure out how to take these ideas into the world of mainstream policy and mainstream media. Right around the same time, the Reason Foundation was formed around the already existing Reason Magazine trying to bring ideas about privatization, markets, and competition into municipal politics. So the 70s, I think, was a great turning point when the ideological groundwork laid by these earlier figures began to affect the world of policy. And it has. While we absolutely do not live in a libertarian dream world, we live in a world that is both domestically and internationally so much improved in libertarian terms from the world that we're in at the start of my book, the 40s and 50s, communism, the antithesis of libertarianism, pretty much dead on the international scene. In 1980, we had a president elected who had told Reason Magazine that the heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism. Of course, many libertarians were not totally thrilled with how Reagan actuated these policies, but he was absolutely an important force in making the notion that individual and community freedom and free markets were a good idea and not a dead and gone and buried idea popular. Part of what was behind his ability to do this, of course, was a great libertarian economist and polemicist Milton Friedman, one of the central through lines of my book, a man who is pretty directly responsible for such attributes of the modern world as the fact that we have a volunteer army, as the fact that federal reserve policy has managed to keep inflation below the double digits it was in in the late 70s context. The fact that we have floating international exchange rates. He particularly is a guy who had direct and obvious impact on the real world and that impact I think is continuing. You can see libertarian ideas and the hands of specific libertarian activists in everything from the homeschooling and school choice movement to the fight for the fight for an end to the drug war. To such interesting phenomenon is the movement for private space flight and life extension, the farthest edges of biotechnology. We've seen ideas about social security privatization that were born in libertarian organizations become a serious part of the policy debate. We saw welfare reform that in many ways followed the line suggested by libertarian social scientist Charles Murray in his 1984 book, Losing Ground. Libertarians have every reason to be excited and pleased at what their movement and their ideas have done. Of course, as my friend Tom Palmer pointed out recently on Kato Unbound, there is no direct 100% link between the success of libertarian ideas and the efforts of self-conscious libertarian activists. That is true, but I do believe and I think I've traced the connections in this book well enough to see that sometimes the most radical and eccentric of movement libertarians have had influences on more staid and mainstream types, whether it be the very eccentric Robert LeFave of the Freedom School who believed that you shouldn't cut the ropes that a criminal tied you up with if they weren't your ropes. His particular ideas didn't have much traction. However, he inspired a pair of brothers who attended his school in the mid-60s named Charles and David Koch who inspired by him, but moving on from him, have been absolutely vital in libertarian philanthropy and one real-world effect of their efforts has been the Institute for Justice's Two Victories on the Supreme Court level. That was an organization that the Kochs helped bankroll and still do, I believe. The extremely respectable political philosophy of Harvard University's Robert Nozick inspired and launched by the far more wild-eyed musings of the libertarian movement hero Murray Rothbard, a man who I don't even know if they'd allow on Harvard's campus, but his ideas influenced Nozick and pushed him in the direction he was in. So even the craziest and most lovable of the people who I really grew to adore as I wrote this book have had real-world effects and should not be discounted even for their eccentricities. I'm gonna close today by going back to Leonard Reid, the guy, one of the major founders of the movement who summed up why libertarianism is such a beautiful idea and why I wanted to tell its story. He said that libertarianism was about anything that's peaceful. And I think that's a beautiful and inspirational vision and I think the people who fought against great odds to make people understand why they should want to live in a world where everyone is allowed to do anything that's peaceful. It was a pleasure to grow to understand them, a pleasure to write about them. I hope for all of you someday it will be a pleasure to read about them and I thank you so much for coming out and listening to me today. Who would have guessed that a guy who spent 10 years writing a 600-page book would finish his speech in the time allotted to him? And speaking of the book, if there are any copies left for sale outside, let me tell you that you will never get a better price on this book than my colleagues in the conference department are offering today. So if there are any left when you get out, you should get one now. To comment on a... He's trying to cut my audience. He wants to send a lot of people to the door. Sit down, Dave. To comment on a freewheeling book about radicals, we wanted somebody from the establishment and we hit the jackpot. E.J. Dionne is a graduate of Harvard who has held positions at the New York Times, the Washington Post, Georgetown University and the Brookings Institution. He is currently best known to you as a columnist in the Washington Post. He's also a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and he was for many years a reporter for the Post and before that, the New York Times. In his capacity at Brookings, he's edited several books recently on civil society, markets, religion and justice. He also has written three books about American politics. The most recent is called Stand Up, Fight Back, Republican Tufts, Democratic Wimps and the Politics of Revenge. Now I noticed that on the Brookings website, this book is called Republican Tufts and Democratic Wimps. I guess Brookings doesn't let you call Democrats Wimps. Yes, on your page. Before that, in 1996, in 19... This is what you learned at the Kato Institute. In 1996, he wrote a book called They Only Look Dead, Why Progressives Will Dominate the Next Political Era. Now you might think that eight years of Bush and Cheney made that title look pretty off-target. But hey, Bush and Cheney have given us a Wilsonian foreign policy, a massively expanded government, centralization of education, expansion of entitlements, government programs for marriage and childcare and end-of-life decisions, bans on immoral behavior and subsidies for moral behavior and finally, a Democratic Congress. So what more could a progressive want? But the real reason that EJ was absolutely the right person to come here and talk about this book can be seen in his first book, I think, Why Americans Hate Politics. It's not just the title, but it actually has a chapter about libertarians, the resurgence of libertarianism. And he writes in there, the resurgence of libertarianism was one of the less noted but most remarkable developments of recent years. During the 1970s and 1980s, anti-war, anti-authoritarian, anti-government and anti-tax feelings came together to revive a long stagnant political tendency. Now, I personally would have called it pro-peace, pro-freedom, pro-limited government sentiments, but I think that sentence is in a way a topic sentence for Brian's book and therefore he is the perfect person to comment. And we really appreciate the fact that he was willing to read this long book and come over here to talk about it. As a Catholic, he will appreciate my particular disappointment that having heard the message of libertarianism, he has not accepted it. Please welcome E.J. Dion. David knows how to hurt a guy, all that establishment stuff. That was nicer than the introduction I got recently and I talk a lot about elections and the introduction being ended and now for the latest dope from Washington, here is E.J. Dion. And I know a lot of people in this room think that that's an exactly correct description of me given my views. And I also appreciated David's comment on my interest in libertarianism and it's indeed true that as I will get to that I once went through what a Catholic would also call the libertarian temptation but turned it back. And I will talk about that a little bit, but it is worth asking why would a social democrat or neo-needee, new deal liberal like me be doing in a place like this talking about a book like this? Now one explanation would be Brink Lindsey's very powerful argument recently that ran in the New Republic under liberal terianism where he argued that the new natural alliance in American politics is actually between liberals and libertarians given that the libertarians quest for an alliance with conservatives has led to all those wonderful results that David just described. It is true that as a liberal I am always looking for new allies so I welcome Brink's intervention and indeed David and Brink are coming over the Brookings Institution soon to talk about these ideas. David has also written about this. Lest anybody start talking this is not a formal alliance I happen to be interested in what David and Brink think and I'm grateful that they're coming. It's also true by the way as Brink argues that there is some common ground between libertarians and liberals not only on current issues but also in their history but that is not why I'm here. Nor am I here because Brian in his book called me a famed Washington watcher. In any event I knew that from a libertarian that phrase was almost certainly an insult so it was I did not come for that reason. I think I came for the best of reasons which is that this is a really good book. It's a really important book and it is a fascinating book. Now some might fairly ask and you should the book is worth buying just for the index by the way that David disparage it's there are more names in that index than there are in the passages in the Old Testament about who descended from whom descended from whom. And you might fairly ask do we need all those people from Lysandre Spooner to Bill Evers to Jeff Regenbach and Roy Childs and R.C. Hoyls and Robert LeFavre and Leon Leonard Reed not to mention about a cast of four or five thousand others and I actually think the answer is yes. I think one of the great values of this book is that libertarians who almost on principle reject tradition actually need to be made aware of the rich tradition from which they come. A lot of these folks were nutty people as Brian described them but they could also be seen as delightful eccentrics and eccentrics who had something to say. It's an important book and I wanna get to this in more detail because I really do believe and this is the one quotation from me that appears in the book that libertarianism is the latent and unconscious ideology of millions of Americans and therefore libertarians are more important in American politics than votes for the libertarian party could measure or even the number of people who self-consciously described themselves as libertarian. It's also a fascinating book. I wanna sort of begin and end on the libertarian temptation. My period of libertarian temptation came at the perfectly appropriate time which was back in 1979 and 1980. As Brian describes very well in this book, that period of libertarian influence or rising libertarian influence came about because we really did go through as a country a long period of government failure. Whether you were talking about the Vietnam War or talking about the fall of the Nixon administration or talking about interest rates and unemployment stagflation under Jimmy Carter, a lot of people were rethinking their views of government. Now it's also the case that in 1979 and 1980 I was the one kind of person for whom libertarianism was made. And I believe in some ways the only kind of person, a single male in his early 20s without a family with enough income to enjoy life and therefore not in need of an upbringing as children need, not much in need of society but rather liking the idea of not only a freewheeling history of capitalism but freewheeling life generally. In that period one of the great libertarian essays which I'm gonna quote here was written by Jeff Regenbach and it was an essay called in praise of decadence. Can you imagine a more perfect essay for a single male in his 20s in the 1979 and 1980? But in fact I don't wanna paint myself as too hip or cool back then, if you use hip or cool you're automatically not. I was also fascinated by the ideas and I actually was a paid subscriber to the libertarian review and a paid subscriber to inquiry. That kind of inquiry was kind of like of communist front operation I always thought that it was trying to make liberals think that libertarians were actually liberal. And so they had all this leftist sounding stuff in there but they're really smuggling in all these radical free market ideas between the lines. Some of that excellent and that's also discussed in Brian's excellent history. And I actually prefer the libertarian review because it gave you your libertarianism straight up front, no chaser. But it was and it was also the period of Ed Clark's campaign and that was when I met many of these fascinating characters described in this book notably the late Roy Childs who many of you know and Jeff and Bill Evers and others and followed the Ed Clark campaign. As I will get to the reason I never succumbed to this temptation is partly because I had taken a class years before that was a debate between Robert Nozick and Michael Walzer. It was a course called capitalism versus socialism although the new left kids on campus used to cross out socialism and say capitalism versus capitalism because Michael Walzer was too moderate and democratic, small d for them. And while Nozick dazzled me, Walzer ultimately persuaded me. But I also came around because of this feeling that Mrs. Thatcher was wrong on one of her most important statements, one that libertarians agree with and those of us who aren't libertarians don't. She said there is no such thing as society and I'm gonna close by saying there is such a thing as society. But what made libertarianism so important and thus this book so important? I think that it is this sense that a lot of voters, particularly in the 70s and 80s but continuing now shared the old conservatism skepticism of government intervention in the marketplace and the 60s social liberals opposition to government interference in the private lives of individuals. They were in a sense David Brooks's Bobo's in paradise bourgeois Bohemians. Such voters as Republican poster Robert Teeter put it long ago were pro-choice on everything. They felt that all acts among consenting adults whether in the marketplace or in the bedroom should be legal unless they demonstrably harmed others and there is that lovely line that Brian closed with in terms of libertarianism being a philosophy of peace, of peaceful actions. Many of the younger voters beginning in the 70s and 80s shared the skepticism of the 1960s new left toward an interventionist American foreign policy. They were no more sympathetic to America's interference in the affairs of foreign nations than they were to its interference in their own lives. Now I think it would be mistaken to view the entire post-war baby boom as libertarian. Over the years David Boes has always called my attention to pioneering works of political science among libertarians and many, many years ago David put out a study by William Maddox and Stuart Lilly which I still think is important and David is in a sense reproduced recently in one of his essays. And they found that about a fifth of voters who came to political maturity in the 70s and 60s could be classified as consistent libertarians. They were well off and well educated on the whole. They were much more likely to be consistent libertarians than people of lower socioeconomic status even though many of the wonderful eccentrics in Brian's book were not of high economic status. They were kind of low income people who came to defend the privileges of the rich for radical reasons. Moreover, many of these voters who showed libertarian inclinations and this has always been the problem for libertarianism still welcome government intervention in important areas of life notably environmental regulation, civil rights and equal rights for women. Perhaps the best commentary on the rise of Ronald Reagan came from former Senator Ernest Hollings who spoke in 1980 of meeting a voter who said that who reported that he had fought for our country in World War II had gone to college on the GI bill, had started a business with an SBA loan, bought his house on an FHA loan and drove back and forth to work on interstate highways who was happy that his parents were retired on Social Security and Medicare and he had voted for Ronald Reagan to get the government off his back. And I do think that's a core problem libertarians have had will have for a long time to come. Still in their study Maddox and Lilly found that 55% of consistent libertarians were under the age of 41. Now I think one of the fascinating things about now is that a lot of studies suggest Carl Cannon recently in the national journal made reference to this suggests that libertarianism may be the philosophy of the previous generation influenced largely by the Nixon years and the Carter years and that the new generation is considerably more communitarian. But in this particular generation the people who became conservative even when they called themselves conservative were heavily had their conservatism heavily inflected by libertarianism. And because I loved it so much I can't resist quoting Regenbach's great piece just a little bit because I think Regenbach was one of the people drawing from Samuel Britton who wrote a famous piece called Capitalism in the Permissive Society who saw that in many ways the new left was much more libertarian than it ever was socialist even if the new left and particularly the counter cultural wing of the new left sometimes described itself as moderate. Regenbach of course hailed decadence as a creative force for what was decaying in his view was most of all authority and this Regenbach welcomed in words that would win him star billing in the national review assault on libertarianism. Regenbach declared and I quote that the authority of previous generations was a sorry spectacle indeed. He went on and this would get him in a lot more trouble today. God was a fiction his representatives on earth the bishops and famous preachers were con men who enriched themselves in their churches at the expense of their mostly poverty ridden flocks. Our public men in generals had lied us into imperialism and mass murder around the globe the Vietnam War being only the grossest of many examples. Unlike many conservatives Regenbach loved the 1960s as actually Brink Lindsey does in his new book The Next Event one of the next events I'm sure will be organized in this stage. He saw the 60s as positive and creative precisely because they were a time when decadent individualism flowered and just one more quote from Jeff like every decadent period before it it is a period of innovation and high craftsmanship in the arts and it's passionate commitment to ideas in all intellectual spheres when an individual chooses his ideas for himself judges them for himself and does with them what he wishes to do with them. Life is more likely he is more likely to devote himself to ideas with enthusiasm and dedication than when he is forced to rely on an authority to decide for him what is worth studying and what use is made of it. And that's why Brian devoted 10 years of his life to producing this book. Now I think that I could go on up but I wanna stay within our time because I hope we can have more discussion. I think Libertarianism has gone through a number of periods since the decline of the Libertarian Party. It's a very interesting question to ask what would have happened to the Libertarian Party without Ronald Reagan. It always struck me that in a way Ed Clarke was to Ronald Reagan what Norman Thomas was to Franklin Delano Roosevelt that the Socialist Party could never get any traction in the New Deal period because the New Deal was sufficiently social democratic that a mass movement on behalf of socialism could never arise. Similarly, Reagan was free-market enough, he even hired Bill Nascannon to work in his administration. Reagan was free-market enough to kind of undercut the energy that was created by the Libertarian Campaign in 1980. There were also all kinds of fascinating backstabbing personal hatred moments that led to that which are also all in Brian's book but I think fundamentally Libertarians were handed two problems by Reagan. One is he still lived under and the other is he didn't really live up to their program in enough spheres. But the alliance between Libertarians and the right has continued for some time largely because I think Libertarians until recently have seen their movement largely in terms of economics and less and less so in terms of personal freedom and other spheres. The reason I think there's a kind of crack up now between Libertarians and conservatives is because six years of George Bush make liberals and liberalism look a whole lot better to Libertarians in a number of fronts clearly in the areas of personal freedom related to gay rights and the Patriot Act, clearly in the area of American intervention abroad and finally in the area of the style of politics that is practiced, the style of politics that now has become so terribly partisan that ideas seem to get snuffed out wherever they come from. Now the last question, the last thing I wanna say is why I find it impossible sadly to be a Libertarian and just very briefly, it seems to me that Libertarians underestimate how power is wielded within private institutions. They don't necessarily overestimate the government's capacity to abuse power but I think they underestimate the need for government to regulate the abuse of power by those who are privileged in the economic sphere. I think that markets cannot and should not be the only arbiter of values. I think there really is a problem, an intellectual issue and this I must say I got from my friend Michael Walzer about what can be bought and sold and it seems to me there are many things that we believe should not be bought and sold in a marketplace. The obvious example is the number of years in which you live your life and I think that the way in which healthcare is organized actually makes it quite possible for some people to buy more years of life and some people to have fewer years of life but there are a whole series of areas in which the question of what can be bought and sold needs to be debated and I think a Libertarian's kind of pushed that question aside. Thirdly, I think there is a question of equality of opportunity and how it is to be achieved. I said at the beginning that the Libertarian philosophy was perfect for single, reasonably privileged 21-year-old males. If everyone entered this world as a reasonably well endowed 21-year-old male endowed with enough wealth, enough opportunity, a Libertarian paradise might be possible but we don't enter the world equally. We do need to be reared by families and communities. Some of us have more privilege than others. Some of us need help in order to exercise those very rights that Libertarians so rightly defend. Government help for the less fortunate does not inevitably produce dependency. As the GI Bill and government student loans and a lot of other programs would suggest, our nation move closer to equality of opportunity because of extensive government efforts to offer individuals the opportunities to develop their own capacity and to offer minorities and women protection against immigration. Adam Smith himself, the intellectual father of the free market, was not a pure Libertarian because he favored a publicly financed compulsory system of elementary education. The philosopher Stephen Holmes likes to quote John Stuart Mill who said that, who talked about help toward being without help. That is what public schooling can do and that is what other government programs can do. Far from being a road to serfdom, government intervention can enhance individual autonomy. I'll leave my critique there and just close with why I continue to like and always will, as part of me always will like, even love Libertarians. I was on Wisconsin Public Radio a couple of years back arguing with a Libertarian and for those of you either haven't been on it or haven't heard it, I love Wisconsin Public Radio. Its audience has tilled two ways. There are a lot of liberals, not surprisingly it's Wisconsin, but also an enormous number of Libertarians who call you. And I engaged in a rather lengthy argument with this Libertarian and I finally said that I did wanna tell him something. I know that if I ever find myself in prison or in a concentration camp because of my beliefs, I know Libertarians will be trying to spring me out, not guarding me with a machine gun to keep me in. I am grateful for that and it's why for all my disagreements I'm grateful for Libertarians and grateful for Brian Doherty's book. Thank you very much. Thank you, E.J. Okay, that was great. We're gonna open it up to questions now. Wait for me to call on you and we will bring a microphone around and please make them questions. I'll take one right there. My name is Terry Michael. I run a journalism education program and I call myself a Libertarian Democrat. I think there are about six of us at my last account. I didn't come up inside Libertarianism. I was sort of a teenage left liberal in the 60s. I morphed into a new Democrat in the 80s and then as I approached my own 60s this year, I wisely became a Libertarian. I'm not very interested in angels on the head of a pen, more Libertarian thou arguments and I'm curious what you've looked at the people in the past. What hope do you see Brian in the future for Libertarians doing less as Lyndon Johnson might put it pissing inside the tenant more aiming out? Especially if you read the story my book tells that the movement has already made enormous moves in that direction. The 70s and 80s were a glorious age for people telling this story of that kind of infighting but there's not a great deal of it anymore. There's still a little bit of it and certainly institutions like A Reason or I Work and Cato indulge in very little of it. We're engaging in the work we have to do, journalism and policy analysis that is attempting to convince the world that it should move in a more Libertarian direction. However, that said of course ideologically minded people like to feud and will always do so but a lot more of it goes on backstage as it were private emails and the like. Certainly I've gotten my share of them since his book came out but the movement has absolutely grown. I mean for example both The Reason and the Cato family of operations used to put out gossip newsletters about the movement in the early 80s sort of jabbing at each other and everyone else. That stopped, it will never happen again and that's all for the good. Not to say that it wasn't fun reading those old issues. Brian talks a lot about the eccentrics and the movement and everything and I just wanna say it's not like the Libertarian movement's the only one with eccentrics. 30 years ago I was the press officer for CPAC, the big conservative conference and one of the big jobs of the press officer at CPAC is to keep the reporters from actually talking to the attendees. And I remember once I was sitting in the press office when suddenly a big hulking conservative from out west loomed in the door and said where's the AP reporter? I said I don't know. And he said I've talked to the UPI reporter but I haven't found the AP reporter. I said well he's out there on the floor somewhere and so the guy lurched away and I turned to the AP reporter and said you owe me one. So every movement has its share of eccentrics. Let's look for one now. Thank you I'm proud to be an eccentric. Question for Mr. Dion and a question for Mr. Dodery. Mr. Dion this is a yes or no question. Don't you hate those? I know it, I know it. Just progressive, progressiveness equal liberals. Yes. Thank you. Mr. Dodery. At least for me. That's my person. Well I understand. You're too far. That's the new term that Democrats are using that they are. Progressive as a liberal who's looked at the polls and decided to change his or her name. And so that's why I've taken to defending the word liberal because if you can't defend the label, what good are you? What else are you gonna defend? Fine, fine. He's only got the middle of the road to Mr. Dodery as an eccentric yes. Do you feel that there is outside of the Beltway and I have lived in other parts of the country be them California, Seattle, Idaho. When you get outside of DC, do you feel the resurgence or an increase as there are many of us living longer than the 60s and 70s and 80s when it was clear DNR that the independent movement equals libertarians? Do you see a merger or a thinking that's more for the independent voters who are not accepting either party and if not, where do you put them? I think and I think the data that David here and David Kirby have gathered does show that there are more people whose political beliefs jive with the general tenor of libertarianism though they would by no means embrace the full radicalism of most of the characters in my book. I live in Los Angeles myself. I find that the more abstract you get with how you sell libertarianism, the more support you get. I mean, everyone believes that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are A-okay and you shouldn't really force people around at gunpoint to do what you want them to do. But when you go, well, does that mean that we need an FDA, a lot of people start jumping off the boat when you get there. The quick answer I guess is a little bit not enough and I always like to look when I think of the political future to the 50% or more of people who almost never voted all and I would like to think that perhaps they are the place where libertarian ideas are really ruling the roost. As to how to turn that into policy change, I don't know but my mind and many greater minds in mine are working on it day by day, week by week, month by month. Right there, Randy Barnett. Hi, I'm Randy Barnett from Georgetown. I mainly got the microphone because I wanna say, Brian, I've read the book. It's magnificent. Everybody in the room who thinks of themselves as libertarians should read the book. It's also marvelous. And even those who don't. And even those that don't. It's marvelously well-written. The only exception is the index, which is abysmal. But anyway, that's the main, but since David says I have to ask a question. The question is, do you see a threat either by the current war on terror or the war in the Middle East? Do you see a threat either to the libertarian movement fracturing or splintering in some fundamental way as a result of that development or to liberty generally as a consequence of that development? How do you view the impact? First of all, thank you for your gracious words. Whenever anyone who appears in my book gets up to talk or say something to me about it, a little bit of fear runs through my heart. But I thank you for your gracious words. Randy is a great character in my book. As Randy very well knows, yes, it has created a bit of a split within the libertarian movement. Randy has been, and I'm sure I suppose still is, steadfastly for the Iraq intervention in a way that many libertarians were not. But at least in the way I've noticed it, Randy's opinion intra-libertarianly has remained relatively minority. It didn't lead to a big split. It led perhaps to some within the larger libertarian tent. Having a minority opinion that most libertarians don't share. Clearly the things that the US government has done post 9-11 have represented certain threats to American liberties. And as a peacenik libertarian of sorts, I do believe that the ongoing venture in Iraq is in and of itself a threat to America's long-term well-being. Though I imagine you at least disagree on that as do many other libertarians. But I do think that the libertarian tradition of peace is a valuable and constituent part of the whole libertarian package that war is an extremely blunt and dangerous instruments should be used only absolutely when necessary to defend the country. And most libertarians either at first did not believe Iraq rose to that level or have come to believe it as facts on the ground have changed. Yes, right here in front. Thank you. My question is from Doris Gordon who is busy writing her speech for Stanford. She's burning the, or she'd be here. Brian, in your book, you hope for a world in which personal liberty, and I'm quoting your book, is limited only by preventing damage to other people or their property. In other words, nobody has any right to kill or otherwise inflict harm upon any innocent human being. Also in your book, you speak favorably of stem cell research cloning and you mentioned that government action should be removed from the question of abortion. Does libertarian philosophy define the term people or human being? If so, what is that definition? If not, why do you talk as if such activities are libertarians? After all, libertarians are widely divided on such issues. Sure, I don't think they're very widely divided. So Doris is a very effective voice for libertarians for life, essentially. Obviously it depends on when you define a rights-bearing human life begins. And obviously if you're a libertarian and you believe in abortion, you don't believe it applies to the fetus and if you believe in stem cell research, you don't believe it applies to the, what is a technical term for what? Zygote? So yeah, but if you do and you're a libertarian, you would believe that one of the government's limited function should be to protect all life. And if you think that includes a fetus, then you will think that laws against abortion are just. I have found that most libertarians don't believe that and are pro-choice in the colloquial sense about abortion. I will very quickly limb Murray Rothbard's, I think very interesting argument on this where he said on libertarian grounds, even if you do believe that a fetus is a right, and I do relate this in my book, and I'm making a sort of light version of it, what living being has the right to parasitically attach itself to someone else for nine months after the point that that person has decided they don't want to be attached to them anymore? So he manages to split the difference, say that even if you do believe a fetus is a life, you can come up with a libertarian reason to be pro-abortion. Like I said, if you're under 21, life is rough if you're facing libertarians. I mean, I'm just, I'm already Rothbard, it's powerful, but sort of troubling, at least to me, line. I just wanted to say, Brian's a starter, I just want to say two quick things off that question in the earlier question. One is I do think the existence of libertarians for life, and they are, I agree with Brian, I'm sure the polling would suggest they're a minority group, but they are a significant group, does get at some of the philosophical difficulties libertarians have because a lot of the kind of libertarian arguments for choice on abortion would probably rest on your ownership of your own body. And I think libertarians for life would say that ownership in this instance is a kind of flawed or questionable concept or a debatable concept because your ownership of your own body comes into conflict with the ownership that the fetus, thus a human being in their view would have over his or her own body. And I think that points to the philosophical, some of the philosophical problems with ownership as such a central concept in libertarianism. And listening to Brian, it's actually a question, but I don't want to answer it until it gets to more of the audience. I do think, and this comes from some conversations with Brink Lindsey, that there is an interesting choice now confronting the libertarian movement between, if you will, a hard and a soft libertarianism and that a hard libertarianism actually makes alliances with others in the political sphere much more difficult. A soft libertarianism opens up some alliances. For example, if you take Brink's dream of a libertarian liberal alliance to replace the previous, more or less libertarian conservative alliance, you would end up having to accept the least intrusive ways in which government could prevent excessive inequalities or alternatively lift up those who fall on particularly hard times. It has always been striking to me that the negative income tax, which is now morphed into the earned income tax, was invented by Milton Friedman. And it was an attempt to create a welfare state without the apparatus of a welfare state. And the earned income tax credit has in fact been a direct income transfer to millions and millions of Americans. And it does seem to me that if one begins to talk about a certain amount of redistribution as plausible within a soft libertarian worldview, this alliance becomes impossible. If there is a continued rejection of over redistribution on any grounds, and I think such an alliance that the alliance Brink has talked about is very difficult. But I'll just leave that there and let other people jump in. All right, I'm gonna take a question right there. I'm Arnold Kling. And first of all, I want to congratulate Brian on the book. One of these books that, despite its length, I expect I will read more than once. So it's a really well-woven story. My question might go for both of you, which is, you talk about the sort of who libertarian selects, libertarianism selects to infect. It first infects these eccentrics. And then you say that it infects these sort of young people who have sort of everything going for them. Why doesn't it infect academia much more strongly? And in fact, academia seems very resistant to it. I don't know that I have an authoritative answer to that. I will say that in a large part to the efforts of the great Institute for Humane Studies that the resistance is fading a bit. There are more and more libertarians in academia. I think economics seems to certainly be an area where at least a general acceptance of the benefits of free markets is widespread. I'm gonna have to just think out loud for a second here because this is not something I have an authoritative answer to. I didn't delve into a lot of the big think questions in telling my story. I mean, clearly the problem you confront is that most people, even when exposed to libertarian ideas, do not embrace them. Many of these people are very intelligent people and very well-meaning people. It can't be, as Peter Betke said in my book, that you can assume as a libertarian that everyone who disagrees with you is evil and wrong. Many of them might be, but most of them, you think they're wrong, but they're probably not evil. There's been a failure at a selling job, I would say. I think a lot, I think E.J. actually presented one of the core walls that people run into when they are sort of going around libertarianism is they do believe that there are certain social functions that go beyond the individual, that they believe the market cannot handle that absolutely require large-scale social solutions. I happen not to believe this is true and I think that the works of the people in this book, if contemplated, would, I hope, lead most people to believe it's not true, but I also do think there has to be a value proposition that is perhaps unprovable at the root of it, that you do have to have to, but you tend to need to have a moral revulsion at the notion that you're gonna solve social problems at the point of a gun and if you don't have that, I do find it's hard to make people embrace the full libertarian package because it's always easy to go, well, yeah, sure, I do understand, as most people do nowadays, that markets are very efficient and they do a lot, but what's the big deal if we have this particular intervention? We can't really quantify the consequentialist damage as being too high, why are you concerned with it? If you lack a moral underpinning of thinking that, well, you need a really, really high wall to jump before you say it's okay to stick a gun in someone's head to make them do something. Without that, I think it's hard to grasp a full package and I think a lot of people clearly lack that moral proposition at the heart. Something Brian just said reminded me of my own favorite cheap shot I always used to use against libertarians. I spent time in Lebanon in the early 1980s and you may remember that time and I used to tell my libertarian friends that I just came back from a libertarian paradise that you can, if it's all private militias, you can buy or sell anything you want, you can say anything you want, you have to put up with the inconvenience of a murderous civil war, but otherwise there is no state. I think to your question directly, I think libertarians, from my point of view alarmingly, have made enormous progress in academia. If you look at law schools, the law and economics movement, which I don't think existed 30 years ago, is a very, very powerful force. People talk about the federalist society, but there is a sort of a combination of a subset of them and some pure libertarians who are very powerful in law schools. I think that libertarianism is becoming something close to the form of political correctness in many, many of our economics departments. Economics is a science, unlike the other departments. Yes, there were those of us who would radically dispute that. And indeed, liberals might have been saved a lot of trouble because Phil Graham could probably get tenure now, where he couldn't 20 years ago. And I always mourn that liberals didn't give tenure to Dick Armey and Phil Graham and Newt Gingrich, who would have been saved a lot of trouble. And I think that public choice theory is increasingly powerful, again, I mourn it, but is increasingly powerful in political science. So I think that in a sense, one of the reasons I think the story told in this book is so important is because I think there's been enormous progress on the part of libertarians over the last 30 years. And lastly, I think it appeals to academics because it is, if I may say so, utopian abstract, demanding and consistent, sometimes maddeningly, so. Okay, right here. And Scott, take a microphone to Roger Pilon. I hope all the people here from IHS wrote down that quote about the alarming rise of libertarianism in academia. That'd be a good fundraising line. Right here. Don Ernestberger, lifelong libertarian, starting with Youth for Goldwater, RAND, SIL, LP. You're in this book all over the place. And I have a question, actually, though, not for Brian because I love the book that I've seen so far, but it actually has to do with the sociology that you're advancing here. In addition to being a radical libertarian and now working on Capitol Hill for Congress in Moribacher, I still have my long hair. The fact is, I'm 59 years old. I've raised two children, both adults now. I'm a grandfather. Both of my children are libertarians. I expect my grandchildren will be. I'm still an atheist, still a radical libertarian, so am I an anomaly to this sociology that suggests that libertarian appeals to 21-year-old single men? Or is that, in fact, because you have a deterministic view as opposed to the power of ideas with regard to what it is that motivates people? Well, I know fully consenting, even aging adults who are libertarians. So, as an empirical matter, I do not deny their existence. Specifically, I don't deny your existence. I mean, I think the, sure, I think it's possible to hold any political view no matter where you are situated. There are very low income libertarians and very high income socialists, but I think on the whole, if one, I would need more survey data to prove this, but I think I could muster the survey data to suggest that libertarianism has a peculiar attraction to a certain kind of affluent young person. I wouldn't be overly deterministic in saying that's the only thing that exists. I mean, people have minds they think through issues and they can hold two opinions. But I think as a libertarian society would work, I think it would clearly be kinder to better for more welcomed by certain groups of people rather than other groups of people. And I don't think it's deterministic to say that. I just think that's true. I wanna add something quick to that. Many, and I'm not gonna name any of them because it could be seen as embarrassing to them, but many great libertarian minds and influential libertarian figures have not even managed to achieve Don's level of a respectable job and family have really lived absolutely on the tightest edge borders of life in America, not been people of privilege whatsoever and have held extremely fast to libertarian ideas despite the fact that in many cases they could really use a welfare state. I do think it's wrong. The word radical is in the title of my book for a reason and E.J. did make a reference to the notion of defending the privilege of the rich. As Don LaVoy said in one of my books, epigrams, and this is important to remember, neither the origins nor the essential principles of free market ideas have anything to do with the defense of any of the established regimes of the world. Quite the contrary, the ideas speak for a fundamental transformation of the world. Roger? Yes, that's a good comment for segue into my question about the psychology of libertarians. We've seen in these questions, Randy Barnett's question, Doris Gordon's question at the debates and the differences are not so much over the ends. We all agree on the non-aggression premise. It's over the means. And of course, it's there that you start having value judgments. And of course, one of the libertarian premises is that free people will have various value judgments. And yet the battles are extremely heated over those. Often you get to kind of intolerance among libertarians. And so I wonder if maybe we don't have some psycho epistemological problems here if I may cite the lady about these kinds of things. Roger, you're referring to how angry libertarians get at each other about disagreements. Yeah, I believe Freud called it the narcissism of small differences. You're always gonna be angrier at a heretic than at an infidel, because you can see yourself in them. I'm not enough of a psychologist to get much deeper than that, but it's a very common phenomenon. I don't think we ever will get rid of it. Once you start seeing someone as on your team or should be on your team, you're gonna get really extra mad at them when they disappoint you on any level. The left should hang out in magazine endorsing the Romney's health care plan. What? Could I say the left should spend more time with the right and the right should spend more time with the left because everybody would discover that there's craziness of this sort in every ideological movement, particularly ideological movements that hold to very strong views. I don't think it's hard. I don't think you could be more sectarian than Marxists were, so libertarians. And that's why I think Murray Rothbard is such a fascinating figure because he is a libertarian and feels like a Marxist. I see Tom Palmer has seized the microphone. There we go. Is this on? Okay. That's the part about how great my book is. Yes, it's a great book. And also, E.J., thank you for such an intelligent and elegant and gracious critique. And thank you also for pointing out there's a difference between statelessness and limited government and liberty and what libertarians favor is limited government, not statelessness, a la Lebanon or Somalia. But I'd like to ask a question of view and it goes back to a course I took on sales a long time ago. Find the one thing people will say is the reason they won't buy your product, then knock it out from under them. So the reason they won't buy the condo is it doesn't have a view of the sea. Find them the one with a view of the sea. They have to buy it at that point. You said that the thing that turned you was Mrs. Thatcher's claim that there's no such thing as society. That that was a very important claim that you thought disqualified a libertarian mentality. I think she was philosophically and sociologically naive. Of course there's such a thing as society. It's made up of individuals and all the complex relationships that they have amongst themselves as neighbors, as friends, parents and children, bishops and churchgoers and so on. That's what society is. It's like saying there's no such thing as forests because there are trees. There are trees and there are forests which are made up of trees. But the mistake is to see the forest as another big tree. And the mistake of the Social Democrat is to see society as another person like the individuals who make it up. And so it trips off the tongue. Society decided. We decided. That seems to be an excuse for not giving a justification for majorities using violence to impose their will on minorities. Society didn't decide to ban narcotics. Some people did. And they used violence against other people who want to smoke pot or take other narcotics. And your question? The question is, is he willing to offer a moral defense of why majority gets to say we're society and we're gonna squash our values on the minority and force them through violence, not to smoke pot or whatever it is that they choose to do peacefully with their lives. Thank you. I would love to give an hour long speech in defense of social democracy at the Cato Institute. But I won't do that. As President Clinton might say a lot depends on what your definition of the word violence is. And for example, I do not view, even though taxation takes place implicitly because there was the force of the state behind it, I do not view taxation as a form of violence as I would view other forms of violence. I think it was Marx who said we make history under circumstances not of our own choosing. People live lives under circumstances that are not literally from the beginning of their own choosing. And my sort of problem with libertarianism is threefold. One, as I said, I do believe power can be abused in the private sphere as well as the public sphere. And that I broadly buy Galbraith's notion that you want countervailing power in a society. And I believe that if the state becomes too powerful it is dangerous, but that if concentrations of private power become too great, they too can be dangerous. That's one objection. The second objection is because I believe people are not born with equal opportunity, it is both efficient and morally desirable for the state to rectify some, not all, but some of the inequalities that exist within a society. And the third is I don't view the state as apart from society the way libertarians do on principle. That I do believe that in democracies the state is part of the society, grows out of the society. Even democratic states can abuse their authority, which is why I'm still glad you're all here. But I think a democratic state is different in kind from a monarchy or a dictatorship. And I think that last point may be the core difference between a liberal in American terms or a social democrat and libertarian. Okay, right there in the front row. Lee Edwards with the Heritage Foundation. Another great book. And someone who worked for the most libertarian of all presidential candidates, Barry Goldwater. Brian, what is the present libertarian position and feeling about the Constitution? I know you make some reference to it and some discussion of it in it, but where does the movement stand as a movement today? The cutting edge thinker on these issues is across the aisle from you, Mr. Randy Barnett and his wonderful, or if he was, is he? I don't know, he might've been, he was. He made his point and left, but he wrote an amazing book called Restoring the Lost Constitution in which he attempts to reconcile his previous sort of Lysander Spooner-based anarchist beliefs with the Constitution saying that, to the extent that a Constitution can create only just laws and he interprets the U.S. Constitution in such a way, in a way that I don't always agree with, but it was very ingenious, is to say that properly interpreted, the U.S. Constitution could only lead to just laws, then it does demand allegiance. That's sort of the high-level academic cutting edge of libertarian thinking on the Constitution. On the sort of more activist level, certainly lots and lots of Americans, libertarians, do fall back on the Constitution properly interpreted, including the 9th and 10th Amendment as being a very libertarian document indeed. And while the hardcore libertarian may say, well, it allows for a post office and there's no need for that. You know, when pushed on a lot of these things, I'll say, well, if the government was really doing only what the Constitution explicitly allowed it to do, I'd be a very happy libertarian, even if I still had anarchist wishes in my heart. I would note that on the practical level, the Cato Institute has handed out three million pocket copies of the Constitution. So we don't feel you have to come to a strained interpretation of it to think that if it were the law, it would be a great thing. Okay. All right. In the back corner. I'm Martin Worcester. I'm unemployed. And a great libertarian. Given that the Republican Party believes in big government and war, and the Democratic Party believes in even bigger government and sort of peace, and that libertarian ideas have been increasingly marginalized in the 21st century in the U.S., say something about contemporary politics that will cheer me up, because I've been pressed for a reason. That last thing you say is just absolutely untrue about the marginalization, especially when you look at what the situation was like in the 40s and 50s. I mean, the magazine I work for has about two million people reading it a month online, Reason Magazine pushing great libertarianism. Look around you at these great digs that Cato has managed to build for themselves. Cato's ideas about social security were very much in play in the last couple of years. Reason's ideas about municipal privatization are in play all over the place. 13% as David has pointed out could respectively be identified as believing in the libertarian consensus. We're not marginalized. We're still somewhat marginalized, but less so all the time. And I think if you look around, you will, with an open mind, you will see that you should be of good cheer, Martin. All right, last two questions right here. I'm gonna let you both ask a question and then you can have a wrap up answer. You clearly believe in the power of ideas to be able to transform society. And given your look into the past of the movement, could you comment on the future, in particular through the lens of Generation Y, who seems to attach to conflicting ideas. They definitely do not fit in easily to conventional ideas of politics in this country. Could you sort of just give us a picture of the future based on what you know of the past? I learned something just yesterday that was extremely encouraging and I have not verified it, but I was talking to a young libertarian at a GMU who told me that in the world of Facebook, he has found hundreds of thousands of youngsters on Facebook who identify libertarian as their political beliefs and he's trying to organize them for some bizarre purpose. I definitely do think young people have more and more, especially post-collapse of communism, they're growing up in a world where the general understanding that centralized economic control leads as Hayek explained to us all to an ugly, horrible situation, both economically and politically, that people are willing to risk death to escape. That whole dream is dead. A general sort of live and let live moral sense that it's not a good idea to be bossing people around a gunpoint about things like what they want to eat or smoke or their sexual or marital relations. I am extremely optimistic about the libertarian future based on that. I mean, I and most people who work for any organization like this, we had our minds changed by books or ideas and it still happens every day. And also, I believe as libertarians must that there's certain things that the state does that aren't really gonna prove to work out very well in the long run. The 60s welfare state has already proven that, it's already been reformed. I think the major entitlement programs that still remain are proving that and will be proving it more in the future, that there will have to be a new direction for this country to go in. Libertarian thinkers have laid the groundwork both practically and ethically why a libertarian direction is the way to go. And I'm very hopeful that that will be the way this country goes in the 21st century. Brian, I haven't had the opportunity to read your book but I'm sold, I'm gonna be buying one of these. So I don't know if you touched upon the subject or not, but I believe it was Hayek talked about the fatal conceit and that there's a constructivist kind of view that you can kind of construct this ideal society and move to it. And in my experience, libertarians kind of understand that and yet they turn around and are in fact constructivist. Leonard Reed talked about pushing the button. I think Murray Rothbard was probably as constructivist as could be. I'm wondering if you talk about that in the book and why there's this disconnect between what Hayek said and what really probably most libertarians use as their motive analysis. I do talk about this a bit. Very quickly, one issue involved in this is that I use the word libertarian in a, what do the language mavens call it? A descriptivist rather than a prescriptivist sense. You can make a very good case that it's totally intellectually incoherent to even call Hayek and Rothbard part of the same movement. But in factual reality, they were, which proves that libertarianism is a little bit of a bigger tent. It does include the button-pushing constructivists. It does include the Hayekians, I have a quote from Charles Koch, the great libertarian philanthropist reacting to the button-pushing thing toward the end of the book. He's saying, goodness knows, Leonard, I would not push the button because every social change, if we actually want to make it work in the direction of liberty has to be seen to benefit most people. And while I have a huge Rothbardian streak in my heart and sometimes fantasize about pushing the button, I probably wouldn't because I do recognize that in sociopolitical reality, you cannot institute justice in an unjust world with a snap of a finger without creating a lot of chaos that will not be tolerated and probably should not be tolerated. As radical as I am, it's obvious that moves in the direction of a libertarian world will continue to be gradualist and that's okay.