 Good afternoon. My name is Ed Crane. I'm President of the Kato Institute, and I'm delighted that you're here to share what should be a fascinating event. I've been looking forward to it for some time. We're going to have a, sure enough, formal debate on should we welcome a libertarian future, and I think we should. But in any event, so often debates in Washington are not really debates. People are starting from totally different premises. Today we have four individuals who are four of the sharpest policy minds in town, and all four of them come from basically a liberal perspective in terms of the framework of their analysis, liberal in a classical sense. So I think there's common goals that they share, and yet they do come to some starkly different policy prescriptions, not always, but in many instances. So it should be a lively and enlightening debate that I'm looking forward to. Format will be for each of the panelists to speak for eight minutes. We're going to start with the pro-libertarian side, and then have the side that's somewhat skeptical about the perspective. And then in the same order, we'll have three-minute rejoiners, and then I will ask the panelists if they like to ask a question of each other, at which point we'll throw it open to the audience, and then there will be reception afterwards. So with that, let me introduce our speakers to it at time, I think. First speaker will be David Bose, who is Executive Vice President of the Cato Institute. He's been here at Cato longer than anyone other than yours truly, and plays a critical role in all of the policy output that Cato has. He's the author or editor of several books, of course, the most recent. His libertarianism of primer from Free Press, and also the libertarian reader from Free Press. And joining him on the libertarian side is Charles Murray, my little fishing buddy, who is the Bradley Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, the author of several books, Losing Ground, which I think was one of those classic paradigm-shifting books in terms of the way people look at welfare today, in pursuit of happiness and good government, which I think is a great, great book, and the bell curve. So we're delighted to have these two individuals supporting the libertarian position in this debate today, and starting with David Bose. Thanks, everybody, for being here. We have tried many forms, of course, of government in the 20th century, from communism and fascism and apartheid to the interventionist welfare states of the West, and the results have been unsatisfying. Americans sense today that the New Deal Great Society paradigm has failed to bring about peace, prosperity, and social harmony, but I think they're not yet convinced that there is a feasible alternative. Many people have observed the problems that I would argue have been created by excessive government and have come up with what I would consider some odd solutions. A classic in that line of thinking was the book, The Affluent Society, by John Kenneth Galbraith. Back around 1960, Galbraith observed what he called private opulence in public squalor. That is, he said, he saw a society in which privately owned resources were generally clean, well-maintained, safe, and constantly improving in quality, and in which publicly owned resources were generally overcrowded, dangerous, dirty, and deteriorating, and his conclusion was that we ought to move more of society's resources into the public sector. Libertarians offer a different answer, one that I think is more likely to bring about the peace, prosperity, and social harmony that Americans are searching for. That answer is a society of free and responsible individuals living in a constitutional republic in which government's powers are few and defined. In a libertarian world, adult individuals would have the right and the responsibility to make the important decisions about their lives, decisions that too often are seized, irrigated by government. Libertarians believe that people should be free to live their lives as they choose, but that is not to defend the sort of atomistic individualism that all of your professors love to derive when you are in college. How one could be an atomistic individual in a complex modern society is beyond me. Would that mean wearing only what you can make, eating only what you grow, living in the house that you build for yourself? Some critics of capitalism or advocates of back-to-nature, like the Unabomber or Al Gore, if you really believe what you wrote in his book, might endorse such a plan, but I don't know any libertarian who would want to renounce the benefits of what Adam Smith called the great society, the complex and productive society made possible by social interaction. The key issue that divides libertarians from statists all across the political spectrum is not community versus individualism. As a lot of people would tell you today, it is consent versus coercion. Libertarians insist that individuals have the right to choose the kinds of associations they will make with others, and those associations take myriad forms, families, churches, clubs, communities, neighborhood associations, mutual aid associations, and all the institutions of commercial society, partnerships and corporations and units and so on. The key issue is not whether we will be associated with others in many ways. Of course we will. The issue is whether our participation will be voluntarily chosen. Libertarianism is a philosophy of politics. It does not tell us how we should treat our families, how we should run our businesses, or how we should worship. It says merely but importantly that individuals have rights and that society works better when those rights are recognized. The political system envisioned by libertarians is very much the one outlined by James Madison, a government of delegated, enumerated, and thus limited powers, ideally limited to government's basic function of protecting our life, liberty, and property, and thus ensuring our ability to make our own decisions and cooperate with others in civil society. And yet today, the federal government spends over $1.5 trillion of our money every year and says that we should sacrifice more. In 1950, the average family paid only 2% of its income to the federal government. Today, the average family pays 25% of its income. Democratic governments today presume to regulate more aspects of our lives more closely than the autocratic governments of the Ancien regime ever did. Governments in the United States assign our children to schools and choose the books they will read, require us to report our economic transactions to the government, deny terminally ill patients access to pain-relieving life-saving drugs, and prescribe the number and gender ratio of toilets in buildings over into the public. From the grand scale to the petty scale, a network of regulations affecting every aspect of life. And although it rarely comes to this in civilized modern societies, it should be remembered that behind every regulation, grand or petty, stands the government's willingness to enforce it with force if necessary. Expansive government has destroyed more than institutions and charities. It has undermined the moral character necessary to both civil society and to liberty under law. Professor Galston himself has written eloquently about the impossibility of a liberal society really being indifferent to the values that its citizens hold. And I agree with that. But I think there's at least an empirical question about what you do with that implication. It seems clear to me, for instance, that today's private schools teach not only the free ours, but civility, respect for others, and appreciation for the American system better than public schools do. So, as in so many areas, our agreement that there is a need in society doesn't necessarily imply the advisability of government action to bring it about. The bourgeois virtues of work, thrift, sobriety, prudence, fidelity, self-reliance, and a concern for one's reputation developed and endured because of the virtues necessary for success in a world where food and shelter must be produced and where people are responsible for their own flourishing. Government can't do much to instill those virtues in people, but it can do a lot to undermine them by subsidizing people, by regulating, by enforcing decisions on people. It can take away both the incentive and the need and the opportunity to make moral decisions for ourselves. As a moral matter, individuals ought to be free to make their own decisions and to succeed or fail according to their own choices. And as a practical matter, when we shield people from the consequences of their actions, we get a society characterized not by thrift, sobriety, diligence, self-reliance, and prudence, but by profligacy, intemperance, indolence, dependency, and indifference to the consequences of our actions. As we enter a new century and a new millennium, we are encountering a world of endless possibility. The very premise of the world of global markets and new technology is libertarianism. We know that neither a rigid conservatism nor a stultifying socialism would bring about the free technologically advanced society that we anticipate in the 21st century. If we want a dynamic world of prosperity and opportunity, if we want a world of virtue and good character, we must make it a libertarian world. The 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 in global markets than Jefferson or Madison could have imagined. Libertarianism is not just a framework for Utopia, as Robert Nosey wrote, it is the indispensable framework for the future. Thank you. Student neglect to mention Charles Murray's book, which is what it means to be libertarian, which is a great complimentary book to David. It has always gotten so depressed after saying the bell curve that you can't remember what comes next. In eight minutes, the first place, what he said, for a large part of my own views, David said, there's nothing he said I did not subscribe to, but let me put in eight minutes an issue I know that Robert Bell are interested in as well, and that has to do with questions of how it is the people that satisfy lives, which I think are going to be forced to the forefront in the near future in a way that they have not been in the past. And I think that the libertarian answer is going to be increasingly the one that is seen as not just the one which is economically most productive, but compelling, and I mean it for this reason. Until now, a lot of the welfare state has been based on, the argument about the welfare state has been based on debates about whether we can afford it. We are very close to a time. I would argue we may be there already, but we certainly within a matter of a few decades are going to reach the time at which certain kinds of choices can be made unconstrained by being able, if we wish, to give every person above the age of 18, let's say, in this country an income well above the poverty line. And we will be able to tolerate the work disincentives that would entail, even very large work disincentives, because the accumulation of wealth is increasing so rapidly that that simply will be financially feasible. It actually is financially feasible probably already now, but we're sort of at the end. And I guess the question that if you could tomorrow do that, financially without a problem, should we do it? And should we do it in terms of the way it would affect the lives of human beings? My basic position, which many of you in this audience are familiar with, goes as follows. You don't do it that way. You must not do it that way. Because what you are trying to accomplish with social policy is to enable people to live satisfying lives, not merely to have food and shelter and clothing. And furthermore if we have discovered anything over the last 50 years of the welfare state, it is that there is an intimate link between the way we go about acquiring material resources in this life and the satisfactions that we are able to derive from. And I guess I would put as a simple kind of evocative argument for those of you who are parents in the audience, what would be your reaction if a rich relative of yours said, oh by the way, I want, I'm going to tell your children tomorrow that as a BHMT they can count on a guaranteed income for life. I think a lot of you would be appalled that the reason you would be appalled is because you feel very emphatically how important it is for your children to learn that they must be self-reliant, that they must be responsible for their own lives, and that to have access to this kind of guaranteed income, or to any other form of the welfare state you care to specify would be terribly destructive to and I'm arguing that is true for the populations of all. I often characterize it this way. Most of the people in this room already live lives that are de facto free. We pay too much of taxes. We are, many of us who are engaged in businesses are hindered by regulations which I do not need to trivialize. They are very important in undermining other sources of satisfactions in our lives. But in a whole lot of ways, we have discovered workarounds whereby we can hire the accountants we need, we can hire the lawyers we need, we can provide the services that we need in order to get around the idiocies of the government. And what has happened with social policy in the last 50 years is much more important with regard to the folks who do not have access to those kinds of resources. Community has become so trendy as a topic that I almost hesitate to talk about it. I think a lot of glib thinking has been associated with community, but the essential part of the position is correct when it says that the geographic community remains critically important to large portions of the American population. Important in ways which it is often easy to lose sight of, those of us for whom our little platoons to use that word's phrase are scattered all over town in the form of professional associations and clubs, or for that matter all over the country or all over the world. It is easy to lose sight of the ways in which people who are looking for important roles to fill. Folks who are at the bottom of the bell curve, whether it is in distributions of intelligence or other personal qualities who are never going to be rich or famous, the ways that they are going to find satisfying places in the world is because they have roles as parents and as members of community which are meaningful. And what social policy has done in the last 50 years is to denude communities of the kinds of activities that give communities vitality that engage them in what should be called I think the stuff of life. What I have in mind is that for communities to function it is important that they have the action that they are the ones who are responsible for comforting the lonely taking care of the poor educating the young doing all the things that give texture and meaning to life and action. And in tears, the dialogue I want to engage you can you have a governmental partnership in which the government says to the communities and have these institutions in which you folks can feel like you are playing a meaningful role but we the government will also help out and I would argue the answer to that question is no. That when you have government partnerships like that you know it's wrong and that everybody knows it and that they don't work and that we can look back to the 1960s for many examples of how it doesn't work and that if you want to achieve the goal that is so widely talked about today a satisfying meaningful place the only way to do it is to withdraw the government more completely than is contemplated by the Republicans or the Democrats. The same kinds of remarks I think should be emphasized with regard to making a living. One of the quintessential ways of getting ahead in the society has always been to start a business but a lot of what has happened in recent years has been to denude the possibilities for somebody who does not have a lot of financial backing and again is not a genius but who is willing to put his sweat equity into his life deny that person the kind of opportunity that he deserves to be able to run a small business to have his own vocation independently of the kinds of government regulations which those of us who work for large corporations can't get around because we have batteries of lawyers we have the accounting departments and the rest of it to deal with those problems but which systematically prevent people from doing that kind of thing which provides me with that. As I said at the beginning, trying to say all this in eight minutes is very difficult and I'm conscious as I've done it of all the gray areas I haven't filled here. The essence of my position is that in a post industrial society and an extremely wealthy society it is more important, not less important that people have genuine responsibility for their lives and that the people who are most to be benefited by a libertarian future are not the rich guys but not the smart people it is the people who at the present time are being systematically prevented by well-intentioned government programs from the doing the things that will give content to their own experiences. Thank you very much. Bill Galston is a professor of public affairs at the University of Maryland and director of the University's Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy where I'll be going in a month for an event. During the first two and a half years of the Clinton administration he served as deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy. He's also the author of six books and of course many articles in the area of political philosophy and public policy. He rolls in the campaign of my nemesis, John Anderson and worked as issues director for Walter Mondale's campaign in the early 80s. Certainly somebody who is highly qualified to participate in this debate and is also affiliated with the Democratic Leadership Council and the Progressive Policy Institute. Wait, let me do it the way I did the other one. And the other speaker is Robin Will Marshall who has done a marvelous job at the Progressive Policy Institute in creating a lively and very constructive think tank that is trying to undertake the daunting task of interjecting ideas into the Democratic Party. No less a daunting test in heritage trying to get ideas into the Republican Party. But Robin is the founder of the vice president of the DPI and the director of economic studies at the Progressive Foundation. He served as the principal economic advisor to Bill Clinton in the 92 presidential campaign and as a senior advisor to the Clinton War transition he still acts of course as an advisor to the administration. Before joining the institute Rob was the deputy national issues director and senior economic advisor for the Dukakis medicine campaign. Before that he was an associate editor of the US news empire report. So we'll start with Bill Clinton. Thank you very much and I'm grateful for this invitation not the least because it's given me the opportunity to read two admirable books on each member of team A. I take it that my goal is not to advance my own views so much as it is to engage in a dialogue about the views put forward in these these two books. And I will try to do that within the limits of the eight minutes. I should say that one of the things that jumps out of me is that the two members of team A disagree on some very fundamental matters leading me to wonder exactly what libertarianism is. I'll give you three examples. Charles Murray officially and explicitly subscribes to the category of public goods and sketches conditions under which government may legitimately pursue public goods whereas David Bowes in his treatment of that issue comes very close I think to arguing that there aren't any real public goods that it is always possible to redesign modes of production and property rights so as to rule out that mechanically. Another example Charles Murray affirmed repeatedly in his book the need to argue pragmatic from the consequences of individual collective actions and not just from the principles of libertarianism or any other set of principles whereas David Bowes seems to reserve arguments from consequences to emergency situations and is much more content with argument from first principles. A third example Charles Murray at various points in his book is explicitly willing to count what he regards as reasonable trade-offs between principles of individual liberty on one hand and the satisfaction of human needs on the other whereas for David Bowes that kind of trade-off is close to morally forbidden so one of my questions is what is libertarianism? Is it the Charles Murray version or is it the David Bowes version? I think it makes a big difference. Now one of the interesting things about these two books is the different levels of the balances political philosophy constitutionalism public policy. I think it invites these books invite us to commit some political philosophy but also to engage in other levels as well. David in his opening remarks identified the category of choice or consent as key and I agree and so let me turn to page 43 of his book and read a few words whose familiarity I hope has not read contempt. We hope these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights that among these among these note that phrase and the pursuit of happiness that to secure these rights governments are instituting among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the government. Now I think that's a tolerably good statement clear of liberal political philosophy and what that tells me is as the words themselves state the just powers of the government are derived from the consent of the government from which it follows that if a people in ratifying a constitution endows its government with the power to tax in order to pursue the purposes of that instrument then consent in all politically meaningful senses has occurred and it is impossible to talk about taxation as coercion. Let me put it differently but to the same end. If there are any legitimate powers of government and both members of TV say that they are unless you believe that government can carry out its legitimate purposes whatever they are without human and material resources you must endorse the conclusion that the government that has been created has the right to mobilize the resources needed to carry out its legitimate purposes otherwise the government would be a nullity with regard to the legitimate purposes of government we've already heard from the declaration of independence I underscored the phrase among these to suggest that in Jefferson's mind life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are not the totality of the rights that we have and the document itself invites us to consider what rights we have I would also point out that the preamble to the constitution which is a document that enjoys the legitimacy, contemplated the declaration of independence the first government in human history to come into existence through the consent of the people the preamble to that constitution states the point of the document in expansive terms terms that include the phrase welfare, the American people consented then and consented today to a constitution which in legitimate ways pursues the general welfare at how much more time do I have two minutes let me take up then just one other issue which I think balks very large in the libertarian analysis and that is the issue of spontaneous or resonant phrase like pivotal to the expectation that voluntary cooperation can substitute for all or nearly all forms of coercion I'd like to read another few familiar words this from Federalist 51 where James Madison writes what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature if men were angels no government would be necessary the constitution that we have reflects the understanding that virtue including the virtue of spontaneous cooperation is in short supply and because it is in short supply government is necessary that's not the only reason that government is necessary one of the reasons we need authoritative rules as the framework within which free and spontaneous decisions can be made and in some cases we need authoritative rules to deal with the free writer problem that is to say that people will embrace a certain set of means as desirable the hope that they themselves will not have to pay a price of furthering those means through an individual contribution and here in conclusion let me grasp the metal firmly because David Bowes has identified the draft the military draft is one of the key dividing lines between libertarians and others and I would say two things first of all the question of whether the draft is legitimate is not a question of whether the people as a whole have consented to a government that has one of its powers in order to promote the common defense the institution of the draft and I think it's pretty clear the answer to that question is yes but with regard to the question of spontaneous order here's what David Bowes has to say the libertarian believes that people will voluntarily defend a country worth defending he is much more of an optimist than I am I believe that there are many human beings who think many citizens of the United States who think that the United States government is eminently worth defending but have given half a chance would shirk their duty to contribute to the common defense and that is why we need a government that has the power to do what libertarians would deny the power to do those remarks I feel a little redundant but let me say first how pleased I am to be here today I want to salute Ed Crane and Kato for sponsoring such a serious question and I want to say right off that David Bowes and Charles Murray have published works that really offer very challenging briefs for their point of view now let me say I reject that brief ultimately I cannot find a logical demonstration in the argument and the argument to me seems to rest on assumptions that I find problematic at best still I admire their ambition they set out not simply to argue that minimalist government is efficient or fair but to demonstrate logically that it is required by the nature of man and of society but this effort is so great falls I believe on its first principle which is the idea of natural right the basic claim is that whatever people can do it is their right to do by nature so long as it doesn't injure anyone else right since this is a right by nature it precedes government and society and therefore which therefore have no standing to alter it now natural right is an old idea derived by some philosophers from underlying concepts of the character of God or of reason but David and Charles don't do that instead David claims that his intuition tells him that his rights rest on the natural order Charles doesn't use the word intuition but his sense of it is the same intuition doesn't demonstrate anything it's an assertion confirmed by feeling my intuition is different now my feelings be concerned no one but myself but with all respect the logic of libertarianism cannot rest on David and Charles's feelings nor does it matter to the logic of the case that Thomas Jefferson also considered natural rights to be self-evident in fact I find my friends recurring appeals to the authority of Jefferson and the other founders are peculiar since Jefferson and the founders also thought it was perfectly proper to take lives and property by force in order to assert those rights they did after all lead a violent revolution much of the argument of these works however rests on a particular natural right and that is the right to property yet this right is also asserted as self-evident now in one respect I share this view the right to your own mind and body does seem prior to anything else because without an individuality itself seems impossible but the same cannot be said of property outside your body and your mind now this is a question that John Locke gave a lot of thought to and I gratefully accept his guidance based on his analysis of personality and the essay understanding Locke does accord some property some intrinsic or natural status because we come to know both our own capacities and the character of the physical world when we create by our own efforts something out of nature and we come to know what we can do and the characteristics of the world around us so that the act of creating property has natural status because it is the way we form our individuality but for Locke the natural right here is to create property not necessarily to retain it that right is related to society because it depends on the rise of a money system and a broader commerce and because it is useful both for the division of labor and to reduce problems of scarcity according to Locke's logic the right to retain property outside your own body and mind is not natural at all it exists but it is social and political now in a certain sense David and Charles implicitly I think acknowledge the political status of the right to retain property at least in the form their argument state because instead of establishing a right to retain property a priority they instead refer to hypothetical consequences something that Phil noted as well what might happen if there were no property rights but if the proper character and extent of property rights depends on whatever produces the best result how do we judge that? If everyone knows his or her own interest one answer is to ask everyone and use law to generalize the conditions for achieving whatever the best results are in short in the absence of an a priori demonstration of the natural right to retain property the definition of property rights becomes a subject for the democracy which can legitimately address it because it is based on consent as Bill noted the logic here is clearly not libertarian rather from both Locke and me and Bill and I think the founders government based on consent does not by nature limit freedom but rather can create the conditions for the development of individuality in a world where many individuals have to share a common physical space so Ed it's not necessarily the case that the only two ways of organizing society are coercively through government or voluntarily through association something I know that you say from David's book there's a third way based on consent now David at least does acknowledge that democracy presents a problem for libertarianism when he argues that democracy and liberty are not the same from that point on however both he and Charles are generally silent on the subject of democracy perhaps because in a certain sense their argument is an attempt to make a case for liberty without democracy that is without common consent but we cannot get rid of consent in government entirely because people need certain public goods such as law enforcement, national defense and who would have thought it pollution control still we cannot logically still they cannot logically concede that democracy with all its connotations of collectivity can impose a desirable rule of law to provide for these goods so they posit an alternative again a point that both Bill and I noticed social order and the rule of law arrives not through a political process but spontaneously whereas Charles puts it libertarianism makes one simple claim deprived of the use of force human beings tend to cooperate but what do these claims mean and what is their conceivable basis I think we're back to intuition in any case it's worth remembering that Locke and Hobbes both thought that disorder and lawlessness were just as natural as order and cooperation and perhaps more so then there's the sticky problem of just where our extensive government came from if American life and society were satisfying before extended government as Charles suggests then why did Americans ever choose bigger government in particular why did government grow as the franchise was extended now maybe the generations of Americans who use the democratic process to extend government just didn't know their own best interests or perhaps elites hoisted big government on everyone else and have somehow managed to maintain it for generations if so then either democracy has been a conspiracy in the fraud as the militias now claim or generations of Americans have suffered from false consciousness as the Marxist used to say a third alternative is that the libertarian embrace a radical individuality is simply a choice by some people while others choose otherwise namely for the security of co-activity it's not enough to object that the co-activity of others say the social security system that's the kind of co-activity I'm referring to should not be binding on you David and Charles because you feel it threatens your individuality it could be said with equal force that your assertion of individuality threatens their choice as well there is another point I find puzzling David praises the constitution for reserving rights not explicitly delegated to the federal government to the states and the people Charles makes much the same point in his notion of subsidiarity which says that legitimate functions of government should be performed at the most local level possible why? if the issue was government's power in principle what difference does it make if this force is exerted at a local or national level presumably this is another argument from results rather than principle namely that local governments are observed to use less force or to use it less often but if results of the measure the case for local government is subject to empirical argument and government can properly be conducted at whatever level is considered most likely to produce the most efficient results with a minimum of force at a national level it may be a global level finally permit me a few points as an economist if taxes and regulation cause the slump and productivity of the last 20 years then why did it appear so suddenly why did it occur across the world if the size of government were the reason for the slow growth of the last generation then why did growth accelerate in the preceding generation when the size of government was also expanding and it got a much faster rate why did growth continue to slow in the last two decades as government size stabilized the fact is the United States became rich in an era of fairly extensive government which after all did not begin in 1964 in the end David and Charles I respect your faith I don't share your intuition despite your efforts both logic and history as well as sentiment point me in a different direction or let's say that in the spirit of order and cooperation and the tradition of libertarianism I choose a different field thank you Bill for your comments now we will have three minute rejoinders beginning with David Bowden I appreciate those very careful readings of both our books and three minutes is hardly time to respond I will note to begin that both Bill and Rob criticized the moral foundations the philosophical foundations of libertarianism which was perfectly appropriate given the way the books were written I'm not sure they actually answered the question should we welcome a libertarian future which one could conclude the answer was yes on more or less consequentialism utilitarian grounds however I think we can guess that they would say no and the fact is that and so this line of argument is certainly sensible let me take a crack at this question of by ratifying the constitution did we consent to everything the US government has done since I think that's sort of the crux of Bill Galston's disagreement with this brand of liberalism yes we the government derives its just powers from the consent of the government Bill did not emphasize the word just that's an important part of that phrase the powers come from the consent of the government but they must still be just powers and I think the just powers are those stated in the previous sentence to secure these rights governments are instituted among them that is the purpose of government to secure rights the rights, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness yes it says among these and I would make the case that we have an infinite number of rights I can stand here all night enumerating rights that we have what we usually do is enumerate rights each time the government threatens one of them we don't try to write them all down in advance and that indeed was what the original constitution did the constitution began with the premise that the people have rights they may delegate some of them to the government in the constitution they enumerated the powers they were giving the government and they couldn't give the government the powers they didn't already have I don't have the power to take your wallet for my purposes therefore I don't think I can delegate to government the power to take your wallet for my purposes I can only delegate powers that I would be allowed to exercise myself but to secure rights more effectively we create a government so I think we have not consented to everything the government has chosen to do since then I read the constitution as consenting to delegated enumerated and thus limited powers the powers specifically to secure rights now I acknowledge that just to secure rights we do need some government and if that government requires a national defense in particular it may cost some money and we do therefore have to have to grant the government some powers I don't think that means that we therefore have consented to anything congress does and I think that's the key distinction here we're also asked why did the government grow without the 200 years and of course in some ways it didn't by ending slavery it in effect reduced substantially the amount of course in society but government grows not always through a majority of the people saying okay we now consent to more things it also grows through rent seeking through minorities even tiny minorities of people managing to manipulate the political process and that is what the constitution was supposed to forestall I believe that's what general welfare meant it was stating that the purpose of the government will be to serve the general welfare not the particular welfare farm subsidies Chrysler bailouts building building mass transit systems in the chairman's district those things serve the particular welfare not the general welfare and that's what the limited powers of the constitution were supposed to forestall one last point I'm asked why why do you prefer state governments to federal governments should your principles apply in both places yes I think that's absolutely right but there is something more than a consequentialist argument there is an argument from the principle going on that competition is better than monopoly and competition among 50 states is better than a monopoly federal government competition among 3000 local governments is even better competition among 6 million private businesses is even better but 50 is better than 1 and I think there is a principle basis there for for devolution of power I just want to say David went 4 minutes everyone did such a good job on their actual speeches that were in good shape time wise why don't we give 4 minutes to David I have not only want to express my gratification at the way that our books were read by both of our team B in my case it is virtually unique to have someone read them before they talk about let me point out one thing however neither of the speakers did address both David and I are making a very ambitious claim they did not talk about we are saying that human beings are hard wired if you will to require responsibility for their lives in order to live satisfying lives and that freedom is not only a natural right it is fundamentally important to making good on this deep seated requirement so that's an issue that I'd be interested to give a response to and I think it's central understanding why David I feel so strongly about the need for libertarian state and why we should welcome a libertarian state in the future let me take my one crack at the spontaneous order issue and the quotation from Federalist 51 about if men were angels we would not be a government David and I are not anarchists and we want to provide in government that which James Madison who if I remember correctly wrote 51 also one which is to say you've got to have government to prevent people from hitting each other over the head you have to have government to prevent each other from using coercion and fraud which indeed they will use because they are not angels however to say that we want to think that spontaneous order will work is not really such an intuitive statement on the contrary I think it has a deep and extremely persuasive empirical backdrop let me put it in the form of a challenge name for me in American history an occasion when there was over an extended period of time oppression of any group of people that did not involve either the illicit use of force or the threat of force and I will say in preface to the remarks they might make and why is it that at Cato they got the last word on all these things what court advantage to me you know if you want to think about economic coercion in the 19th century and bosses exploiting their workers and in that kind of case in every instance there was the use of goons or the threat of the use of goons to enforce that kind of exploitation if you want to talk about what happened with blacks following the civil war let alone before the civil war but following the civil war you did not have a situation in which people were using purely non-violent means you always had the use of the police illicit to enforce social norms I would say that empirically human beings have a great argument to make for the proposition that deprived of the use of force human beings have a real good track record we do get along and here is the reason as discussed beautifully by Adam Smith human beings are not angels but they do have a deep instinctive desire for the approbation of their fellow human beings if you have a society in which it is permitted to get approbation for being the strongest and the most ruthless use physical force to dominate other people that people are oftentimes delighted to get that kind of approbation when that kind of approbation is withheld from them by the rule of law which David and I are both strongly in favor of the only way you get approbation is by behaving in ways which elicit approbation for ways in which you are cooperating it's not magic, it's very consistent with human nature in this regard also I would just make another parenthetical statement the kind of thing that neither team A nor team B can document at any length in the spirit which is that not only do we have a good track record when it comes to the use of force I would say that on almost any measure of success of government policy that is used by government activists whether it is safety or health or civil rights or poverty you name it if you take a look at what was happening in this country before the government started to intervene and what happened after the government started to intervene you do not suddenly see those trend lines turning in a positive direction after the government got involved it is crucial to understand that I am not trying to revoke an ideal United States of the past in which everything was just fine and I don't think David is either we are however making another empirical claim that on all important indicators of social progress the United States was moving in the right direction extremely rapidly before government intervention and not only has government intervention in the vast majority of cases failed to accelerate that progress in many cases it has impeded it I would address four issues very quickly first of all it was not my argument that throughout American history everything that the government of the United States has done is in the four corners of the Constitution that would be absurd but certainly not mine my point is only that through the process of popular consent to a government as contemplated in the Declaration of Independence that certain powers are explicitly granted by the people to the national government and if you look at if you look at the Constitution it very clearly says that Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes duties, impulses and exercises to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States and so my point is only that if the people have consented to a Constitution which has that as one of its enumerated powers that taxation for those purposes and to that extent is not coercion let alone theft and if that point is granted that I don't care about the details with regard to the issue of personal responsibility Team B couldn't agree more and that is that is why the Progressive Policy Institute, the Democratic Leadership Council have been on the forefront for 10 years of an effort as the 1992 phrase put it to end welfare as we now know and to turn the welfare system into a work system so the disagreement there is not on the level of principle we freely acknowledge that being handed something is typically much less constructive than going out and making it for oneself that is not the issue the question is within that moral frame what is a legitimate productive role for government I note with interest that my friend Charles Murray is in favor of a $3,000 education voucher for each and every one roughly 50 million school children in America today which his math and mine tell me is a $150 billion government program only 3% of which now exists so the issue the issue is not personal responsibility per se the issue is the role of government in either promoting it or hindering it that is an empirical question and not a categorical question with regard to the issue of spontaneous order my point is only that you need an enforceable framework of rules in order to have an arena within which the drama of spontaneous order can be enacted and the question which rules you need how detailed they are depends on the facts of the case David in his book gives a wonderful description of the San Francisco airport and air traffic control versus the millions of individual decisions that automobile drivers make and carry out every day fine but I hope he is not suggesting that the air traffic of his country should be conducted on the same terms and principles and that would be absurd we need one structure of rules for one kind of activity named the air travel and a very different looser structure of rules for another activity named automobile travel and so the question in each case is what the facts of the case require an empirical question not a categorical question I will assume the fourth point my friend Bill's last comment because it is a very instructive comparison the air traffic control system and the system mode traffic control it is a decentralized system that is automobile traffic but it is one that rests firmly both on the exercise of public resources and the expression of law that is we stop at stop signs we stop at red lights we construct the roads we know the laws but by knowing the laws we have an expectation that other drivers know the laws and so consequently seems to me that the entire structure of what is presented as a generally free system that is the way we conduct ourselves in automobiles rests upon a common enterprise that is put in place through the common effort of government David, of course we do not delegate the right to take someone else's wallet to government because we don't have that right but we do delegate the right to take something out of our own wallet to government as Bill has pointed out we agree that people in government can sometimes be corrupt and stupid and make bad decisions or corrupt decisions as in corporate welfare they can in government they can in any enterprise even in think tanks but that's what elections are about in politics you don't have to abolish government to try to read yourself with the potential of error in government you have to abolish those people in government who make the mistakes who make the mistakes or are corrupt third of course we are mainly capable of responsibility Charles we are even capable of virtue if not there would be no civilization certainly we do not hold that government is necessary because all of our impulses are nasty and brutish but the fact is that government is there when virtue and responsibility fail and also where circumstance fails in a catastrophic way and the community makes the decision that they choose not to tolerate a catastrophic failure for a child or an old person for example and finally examples of sustained private violence against the rights of the government that is that is absent the threat or use of public force so the question is can you give me an example of some time the fact that the fact that virtually no women for generations could enter any of the professions for example was violence against their rights was not carried out by government was carried out by private associations anti-Semitism in the United States was not sanctioned by law or enforced by law fortunately there are examples and it meant in some cases cases of violence against groups against the rights of groups or individuals are addressed through private associations sometimes they are addressed in government most often they are addressed by both because as the society comes to agree that that kind of violence is no longer tolerable they turn to government to reinforce the change that private associations are undertaking from the panelists I'd ask Bill to be the first questioner you can direct it to one or the other people from where you are I'll I'll address my question to David I may bring Charles in the parade as well in his book David argues against the pursuit of equality of opportunity on the grounds that any effort to realize it completely would mean an intolerable intrusion into the family I think he's absolutely right about that and I would like him first of all to explain why it is that the pursuit if it is the case that the pursuit of full equality of opportunity will have those consequences why it follows from that fact that the pursuit of equality of opportunity has won among a number of plural goods we pursued up to the point that no farther follows from the defects of the full pursuit and in that connection I would like him to comment not as a matter of practice but as a matter of principle on Charles's proposal for a $3,000 per child education voucher which would have as one of its principal consequences the equalization of opportunity okay that is a good question and it gets at the heart of one of the arguments that I tried to make in my book which is we have a pretty good society we are generally free, we are generally prosperous why do we need this relatively radical argument and the point I was trying to make throughout I think is that yes we have a good deal of freedom and a good deal of prosperity we could have a good deal more of a practical matter, we could be much better off and without some anchor some principle to bind us to tell us these are the roles of government and that's what it will be limited to I think we end up inevitably at least at a government that takes $2.5 trillion a year from what we've earned if you include federal, state and local governments and prescribes the number and gender ratio of toilets and buildings open to the public without principles to keep us to the rules we have established we will end up with this sort of unlimited out of control government so my point about equality of opportunity was if you truly want to create equal opportunity for every child in America you first got the problem that natural endowments differ if you say we'll live with the natural endowments then you've got the problem that family environment is different from a book not too long ago that argued for the cause of that taking children away from their families and raising them essentially in kibbetses and then at the age of 18 hey you're on your own many of you of course have read the short story by Harrison Bergeron that talks about actually scarring the beautiful and impeding the brain processes of the smart in order to create true equality that's something I presume no one actually favors the question is if you decide that you really cannot create this fully quality of opportunity then why not establish equal rights as the point that government should enforce and leave it at that level otherwise you're into this wide range of things as for my good friend Charles Murray's proposal for a $3,000 federal voucher for every child in America he couldn't have been serious I I think there were a couple of issues there clearly if the government is going to pay for education some form of competitive provision makes more sense than the monopoly systems we've got now so if the question were what about a voucher at the state or local level then I would say it's better than what we've got but it's not as good as full educational freedom I think Charles didn't want to get into the issue of arguing between the federal and the state role and so he said federal I would oppose that I would say keep it at the state and local level but I would also view it as a pragmatic issue in theory in principle I would prefer a system of full educational freedom where one of the responsibilities of being a parent is paying for the education of your child or of soliciting private support for that education I persuaded I would change my mind he may it's all together no I don't I would just oppose the question and either or both of you take it on to try to get sort of the essence of the libertarian position that somebody who is making honest living in line with his own business should be people who do what he wants to do groups of people should be able to do the same let me pose a question this way if to people want to reach an agreement about a job and I want to hire a guy who is in work and I spend my years how much I'm going to do if the other guy is willing to say yes to that what business of the government is it to impede that transaction in any way, shape or form and I'm going to make the question I hope a little tougher if you are going to say oh well if you talk about large corporations and then you've got the imbalance of bargaining power et cetera et cetera and there I'm going to sort of stipulate I agree that poses special problems but when you get down to a much smaller scale of small business as people employ a few people why on earth does the government have any business saying to citizens of the United States you shall not come to mutual agreements of this sort in most cases they don't have the only ground dictating some terms of the agreement or some terms of the of the exchange um excuse me I just I don't want to get a sidetrack on an issue aren't I right in saying that for terms of employment and employment are tightly circumscribed in all sorts of ways now if we yes they well I wouldn't say tightly circumscribed I don't know we have a minimum wage for example we have a minimum wage which is cited by both of you as a painful constraint on economic freedom well about 97% of Americans are affected in no way by the minimum wage that is their wages are significantly higher so no one is forcing businesses to pay them more than businesses think they're worth I frankly as an economist cannot understand how how minimum wage can ever force a business to pay a worker more than the business can pay than the value which the worker can provide to the business and that is that is a minimum wage does not want you to hire anyone it says that if you hire someone you have to pay him at a certain minimum so in fact I don't agree that the terms of employment are tightly constrained I think there are cases in which there are unnecessary regulation in cases in which the regulation is perfectly sound one of the reasons that regulation is sound for example of workplace conditions which is an issue that both of you addressed one could say that there should be no restriction on no safety requirements in the way you conduct your business because after all anyone any worker has the right to not work in poor a business which is not safe that would require perfect knowledge one of the roles of government in economic life is to in effect try to offset both either information costs or more often information deficits which people have by establishing minimums which transmit that information and so the individual it would be very inefficient for the individual to have the individual worker to have to make a safety survey of every workplace before deciding to work there and so the government reduces those information costs to a general regulation that's very efficient Charles Bill you have a comment then Rob your question Yes I'm delighted that Charles asked that question because it gives me an opportunity to get him perhaps to comment on one of the examples that he put forward you know as an example of government either being useless or worse than useless I refer to OSHA and Charles points out that in the 20 years before OSHA is was established the rate of deaths on the job declined from 27,000 to 17,000 I think that's about it and in the 20 years after OSHA the decline was from 17,000 to 8,000 I think I have a new paper now I would I would start with the observation which I think is a pretty general principle of social policy that later increments of reduction in harm and promotion are harder to accomplish than early increments that the early increments are generally cheap and easy and farther along you go the more difficult it is typically to get additional increments of the harm by your own figures in the 20 years before OSHA deaths on the job declined by 37% and in the 20 years afterwards they declined by 51% suggesting that if nature had taken its course the rate of decline would have slowed down because it gets harder but in fact it accelerated significantly and so I could do a calculation the number of lives saved over those 20 years because of the difference between 37% and 51% 37% and 51% and that suggests to me that the example one of the examples you put on the table of useless or worse than useless government intervention is an example of exactly the difference and I would add only one of them it seems to me that the argument for preemptive action is particularly strong when the harm that would otherwise be inflicted is irreversible and uncompensable and death on the job is a very good example we don't want to get into a 5 minute argument specifically about OSHA so I'll try to frame the comments as generally as possible one is that where as I can see the general principle about to the last 10% is harder to fix than the first 90% whereas you have had a dramatic change in the nature of work in this country away from the kinds of industrial workplaces which were the most dangerous for service industries another thing you had going for OSHA a natural change in the way that work was being done which made it easier for them to produce results but in fact the way I think I put that in the book was fairly modest this actually is one of those cases in which I'm not trying to say government was counterproductive often is but rather in something which has had an enormous intrusive effect on the way people run their businesses as well as enormous expense you really have to go you have to get down and look at those coefficients real hard and control for lots of variables to try to make a case that OSHA actually has done a lot of good and that more generally and this is a broader theme and I think one where libertarians don't have a good empirical case but have not done as good a problem without empirical cases they should I'm saying let's take a very hard look at what we can see as the positive added value of government interventions because of my confidence that's going to be real hard to find I have contemplated the possibility of doing a book which would consist of lots and lots of trend lines of this sort and what I would do at the outset of that is send along a letter to you and to Rob and to the center of modern policy priorities and to Ralph Nader and everyone else and say folks this is the book I'm writing and if you will provide you with trend lines that you think support your case for positive government effects not only we'll say I might put them in the book I absolutely guarantee you to put them in the book basic standards of quality of data and so forth and so on because is my view that there is a case out there to be made which says boy this emperor is not completely naked and maybe with OSHA you've got some jockey shorts for it but boy is there not much out there and that the question is not can we afford to get along without the good things the government has provided for if we get rid of government in the ways that David and I would like to do not that in a huge majority of cases there is nothing to get along with that I'm going to ask two short questions please reasonably short answers because the audience has been very patient I'm going to extend the program to quarter six which gives us 22 more minutes well my first question is Charles if I send you trend lines do I share with you proportionality there are a lot of trend lines there are a lot of trend lines I'm going to cut out of this the issue of regulation of course is not the issue of stupidity regulation how many bathrooms for each gender there have to be on each floor building that's at least not the issue that your works address your works address the project of the fundamental project of government regulation not whether stupid regulation should exist but whether areas of life should be regulated at all now the alternative that both of you offer is recognizing that life involves risk is that a civil process will supplant those regulations that you are entering sue I would like a description of your thinking as to why a change which would proliferate the civil sue process in this country would be progress either as a matter of efficiency or as a matter of human civilization and spontaneous work Robert the first statement is that as the liability law has evolved in this country since the late 1950s it has become a nightmare and if you say to me that if we continue the same ways in which we have perverted the concepts of liability and negligence out of all recognizable shape and you don't want to have a lot more of that kind of litigation I agree with you I would argue that given the kind of tort system that we had up until the late 1950s which was imperfect but pretty good that in fact you are not looking at millions of suits that have to be filed because you have all of these people who are being damaged and the only way they can go out and get recompensed for it is by suing that when you have a sensible tort system which does hold manufacturers or service providers liable to commit harm that the threat of a suit is a very powerful shaper election and that it does in fact deter this great bulk of the events that you want to prevent either through regulation or through a simple suit so I'm saying if you got rid of regulation and you also reformed the tort system you aren't looking at an explosion of litigation there is no reason why the tort system has to be the kind of monster that we've seen it Well I agree with that but I have to admit that our defense of the tort system is not the strongest element of our argument I do think one of the points is that very many regulations do not actually prevent harm to anyone and therefore there wouldn't be any reason for a suit in the absence of that regulation however we have learned that plenty of things don't harm people who leave lawsuits to the extent that we are balancing one system or another I would point out as I said to Bill Maher on politically incorrect the other night take a look recently at the case of the tainted strawberries that went to the schools the private company is going to be sued probably for all the money that it has is anybody suing the Department of Agriculture? is Dan Lickman going to resign because he let tainted strawberries go to a school? is even one little inspector in the U.S. going to resign? that's the difference between failure in the public sector and failure in the private sector and I think on balance given that life is full of tradeoffs it works better now let me build on the issue that Rob said we are not talking about just the stupid regulations well but the problem is this government we have got gives us lots of stupid regulations so I want to ask Bill should there be if you don't want the rule of individuals have rights and government can only protect those rights if you believe that we have consented to the constitution and that allows the government to do anything that is for the general welfare is there or should there be a rule moral or legal other than the good sense of Congress and periodic elections that would tell us what government could be allowed to do absolutely it was not my position it was the position of some in the 1930s in the Roosevelt administration that the general welfare clause was the only clause regarding the constitution that is emphatically not my position there are limits to institutional powers and those limits ought to be respected indeed more strictly respected than they now are there are also individual rights that are held out in the Bill of Rights their subject of course to legal interpretation but those function you know Robert Nozick's term as psychics on action governed by the general welfare that the government might otherwise like to perform there may be various goods that could be accomplished for example if the 5th amendment were ignored but the federal government does not have the power it should not be granted the power of the 5th amendment so I have no difficulty with the proposition that a government that may as one of its legitimate purposes pursue the general welfare is limited in the ways that it may legitimately pursue it let me add one other and here may be a point of agreement I think that we have gotten into great difficulties because the style of legislation has changed so dramatically in the past two generations I think it is a mistake it is a mistake constitutionally and a mistake pragmatically for Congress to pass excessively general laws and then hand off to agencies of the executive branch a substantial portion of what ought to be the law of making power and to the extent that the regulations proliferate and become unwise, particularly at the margins I think it has to do it flows from this strategy of delegation along with Ted Bowie and a number of other people I think a return to an older understanding of the legislative branch has actually passed the laws of the executive branch to a first approximation as implementable would be a step towards common sense