 I've been asked this morning to introduce Carl Hess. And that's an easy task. The hard thing is to keep it down to a minute or so. Carl is one of my favorite people in this movement, probably, I guess you could say, in the world. Many of you probably know the Carl Hess story. He started out posing as a conventional Republican. This man actually wrote speeches for the National Association of Manufacturers back in the early 60s. And then when something of the magnitude of the Goldwater presidential campaign came along in 1964, Carl signed on as, I think, chief speechwriter and was responsible for many stirring lines defending the principles of liberty, including the most famous one, that extremism and defense of liberty is no vice, which we all know and love. And I believe it was 1969, he authored an article for Playboy magazine called The Death of Politics, which for many years has been considered one of the best basic introductions to libertarian thought and libertarian analysis aimed at a general reader. And that magazine, I think, won an award for best article of the year and has been reprinted widely, and I think probably is still in circulation. Carl, in the late 60s, decided that he'd had it with posing as anything conventional and decided to really live his life as a libertarian resisting the state and has dropped out of organized things like paying taxes and lived first in Washington, DC, working with neighborhood groups, and later moved to West Virginia, where he has continued to live as a person active on the community level in very decentralized, spontaneous order kinds of activities. I think it's an interesting reflection of the diversity of the libertarian movement that Carl Hess and I have a great deal of admiration for each other's efforts and feel very comfortable being in the same movement together. We are each working in our own ways to achieve the goal of greater liberty, and it gives me very great pleasure this morning to introduce to you Carl Hess. This is the first time I've ever been to a libertarian convention as a delegate. I'd like you to hear my side of the story. Just as it took Murray Rothbard to tell me I was an anarchist, it took our new state chairman, Steve Fielder in West Virginia to tell me that I probably was a libertarian party member. But my real intention in being a delegate, because I'm sure I'll serve no useful political purpose at all, not understanding Robert's rules of order, or anything else about that, my real purpose is to tell you that at a time when so many people are jumping on the party and doing things that my feeling is that no activity by a libertarian that I can think of is harmful to me, and that every activity by every libertarian in any crazy direction they go is probably in the long term helpful to me. And so I would like to say that although I'm not a very political person, that I support the party absolutely in its activities these days, and I hope not to be too much of a drag on it. I'm a sort of anarcho-rothbardian craniac with distinct tendencies toward pulism. I find that it hasn't disturbed my health or sleep too greatly. I suppose talk about practical tools, and that, it seems to me, is the first practical tool, although it's sort of a wispy one. And that is tolerance and trust. I'm amazed that there are people in the world who have so much excess time and energy that they can spend time fighting their friends rather than their enemies. But everyone has to have a hobby, I suppose. I subscribe wholly to the Leonard Ligio theory of friendship. Leonard told me a long time ago there's the only gauge of the potential friendliness of a person was whether or not that person would call the police. Any non-aggressive action? That seemed rather reasonable to me. I've long since disparate of changing the world, having had enough trouble changing me. And I look around at all of you, and I know that there isn't a single one of you as the correct line on anything. And you're well aware of the fact that I don't. And yet, for some strange reason, we're all here together, and the bloodletting is usually philosophical rather than real. And I think you should never let a person's crazy ideologies interfere with your friendships, because ideologies are, after all, an explanation of the way people act at their very best. You should keep track, mainly, of how they act. If they won't call the police, then that's a good step forward. If they have some variant of opinion, I think you can probably learn to live with it. I live in a neighborhood in West Virginia where people's opinions are absolutely incredibly, they're horrifying, absolutely horrifying. But every now and then, when I don't show up at the right place at the right time for a long period, people will drive down into our little valley and ask if there's anything wrong. And I rather appreciate that. I remember that one of the major assholes of history was where all the people associated with Adolf Hitler, and particularly a street brawler named, I believe, Ernst Röhm, who bled to death once on a street by refusing the services of a Jewish doctor. Now, that's carrying ideology to a rather dangerous point. And I would hope that it would not be true that anybody in this room would bleed to death because they were refusing the services of a men's orchestra or something of that sort. There's no step toward liberty, it seems to me, that it's so slight that it shouldn't be wildly applauded. I listened yesterday to part of a discussion in which people seemed to be angry at a local official, a libertarian who won a local office, because he wasn't perfect. What's very difficult to be perfect is an anti-statist in a state system. And the person who was able to do anything is doing something, which is a tad better than doing nothing. So I think it would be very nice for us to, one, celebrate small victories. That's another sort of psychological tool. Celebrate small victories, because you're not likely to be able to celebrate many very big ones. I mean, none of you are going to live long enough to see a perfect or a perfected world. But every one of you will live long enough to see a perfected you. It occurs to me as your major project is perfecting you, not the universe. You have to do something first there. Now, in your process, as in my process, you will do things that will offend most of your friends, probably, but they can still remain your friends. Well, anyway, so much for the sermon. But I really mean that. I know some people, I'm sure, in here who have the most incredibly bad opinions on things. But there's not a person I feel in this room that I wouldn't welcome if they were fleeing from authority in our little valley in West Virginia and wouldn't want to protect and love. I can't say that of very many FBI agents. Also, now for two practical tools and things. First of all, for probably the 9 millionth time, I would like to read something from the notebooks of Lazarus Long that strikes me as fairly important because it leads to as a tool. It's the sort of, see, I'm attacked often because I'm not the world's greatest fan of the division of labor. To me, it may be necessary, but it's a great inconvenience. I would really like to be able to do everything in the world. That would be very pleasant to me. I'd like to know everything in the world. The division of labor is necessary, I know. But the fact that I don't like it doesn't mean that I don't like you. And I don't like people who say that it is sacred in nature. It's simply that I don't like it. Now, what possible differences I'd make? I will not call the police on you, and I'll try to, I will divide labor when necessary. But here's a statement about a sort of person that I feel is equal to all of the tasks of liberty. And it might be something toward which we might all aspire. This is from Time Enough for Love, Robert Heinlein, a notorious fascist libertarian. Whose various idiosyncrasies certainly doesn't stop me from admiring him as one of the finest writers in the world. As a human being, should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, con a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying. Take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. I'd like to do that. I want to talk about tools, so I want to try to make a point about tools. I am not a renowned theoretician of anything, unfortunately, so I have to fall back on tools as the most comforting part of my life. But I would like to make a point about them. Although it may be true that ideas change the world, it may not be true that we can easily identify those ideas. I understand that there are people who automatically assume that it is only social ideas that have changed the world, forgetting the fact that there are ideas involved in the creation of tools and that these tools, both intellectual and material, have changed the world considerably. And I made a list of a few events that I'd like to share with you. I'd like to share some contrast with you. In 1000 AD, Venice was consolidating its empire in the Adriatic, and an Indian mathematician invented zero. Now, we all know about the Venetian Empire, but what really changed the world most, the concept of zero, clearly. In the 1660s, there were 50 major treaties in war going on. I'm sure a lot of the people here know about them and can expound elegantly at great length on their impact, but that was the period in which Newton invented differential calculus, which ideas really changed the world the most. I think the tool did. In 1793, there was the reign of terror, and Whitney marketed or began to market a musket with interchangeable parts. Again, it's curious as to what changed the world most. The Monroe Doctrine was in 1823, and everybody knows about that, a great turning point in the world's history, but that was when Babbage began work on his calculating machine. Babbage's work has changed the world probably more than any event in the history of the world. And I dare say that when the aberrations of the great religions are forgotten will probably be a time when people will say that when Babbage and the woman who inspired and sponsored him began his work, that the world really changed substantially. Well, we go on. The Mexican-American War was in 1846, and John Deere introduced the steel moldboard plow. And here's a biggie. In 1847, Marx wrote The Poverty of Philosophy, an answer, of course, to Pradone's work. That same year, a bull presented the foundations of Boolean algebra. Now, there's no contest. Marx may be said to have caused a good deal of mischief in the world, but the impact has nothing. It's seriously very slight compared to the impact of Boolean algebra, on which much of our future is firmly based today. Well, here was a big one. In 1865, the worst president in the history of the United States, the patron saint of bureaucrats and of imperial government, went to his reward. That was Abraham Lincoln, of course. And in that very same year, MIT was founded. I would celebrate both events a bit, but I celebrate MIT a bit more. Then in 1903, Lenin and Trotsky formed the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party. Big deal. The Wright brothers also flew that year, which has impacted the world the most. Without aircraft, as a matter of fact, the Russian aggressions wouldn't be nearly as effective as they are. They should also celebrate the Wright brothers. Well, in 1932, now we're getting into an era that I could remember. Actually, I was in, oh my god. Well, at any rate, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the second worst president in the history of America, won his election. And then by stunning congruity, the Nazis won 230 seats in the Reichstag of plurality. So it fascists everywhere. We're beginning to do rather well. When I was about 18, I was city editor of a major metropolitan daily, having had the good sense to not go to school, but to go to work instead. And I got fired from this job because they asked me to come in to direct the sorrow, the journalistic sorrow at the passing of Roosevelt. And I told them I certainly wouldn't do it, because I was too drunk from celebrating. I've never had very good taste or good sense about gestures. But at any rate, that infamous year was also the year that Heisenberg got his Nobel Prize for the Matrix Theory of Quantum Mechanics. I'm happy to see that Quantum Mechanics is doing us a little more good than those other handshadows. In 47, there was the Marshall Plan, that glorious transfer of resources. And it had its mirror image in the Soviet Union and the foundation of the common form, which was the Russian version of the Marshall Plan. Except it was a good deal cheaper. And that was also the year of the transistor. Now, seriously, you can't take seriously things like the Marshall Plan as changing history when they're up against something like the transistor. Well, I just got a couple more, two more. There was 62 in which the US established the first mission in Vietnam, an infamous and terrible thing. But on the other hand, it was balanced off because Crick Wilkins and Watson got their Nobel Prize that year for the molecular structure of DNA. And even though the Vietnamese War killed so many hundreds of thousands of people, intimate knowledge of the structure of DNA is going to keep many more millions alive in the future. So it does work out. Now, this might expose the final and favored one is, in 69, Nixon was inaugurated. And this was either the beginning or the end of everything according to your position. That was the year that Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. Well, that to me is one of the most, that's one of the really great moments, because we're not going to stay here. We've been embarked on a slow journey to the stars ever since the first person started banging things around in a cave and looking at the stars and wondering what they were and realizing they weren't God's eyes. And we'll get there. And it's very difficult for me, looking at this list and thinking about this list, it strikes me as being presumptuous and probably a little crazy to try to predict very accurately what is going to happen tomorrow because you don't know somebody may come up with something equivalent to this, which will change everything in reality. Well, the feeling is that libertarians in particular need not predict the future. They must instead be in a position personally to take advantage of it, to be incredibly flexible, very flexible, to know that there may be some material fact tomorrow that will shake the roots of most of their prejudices without having to shake their root notions of liberty, whatever they are, the non-intervention notions, the feeling that the only responsible project in your life is you and that to take on the responsibility of trying to make other people good or bad or anything is either not worthy of you or is just a waste of time when you could be getting on with the project of you. Now for more practical tools, let me say that there is a form of economic development that I think may commend itself to libertarians. I don't know what sort of productive work the people in this room represent, but I am always astonished to know that people who say that they live their life in opinion and that that's the most important thing and they go around bothering everybody with their opinions that they also do real work. And in this real work, they probably accomplish where they do that work more to establish a good name for liberty than in harassing their friends with their factional differences. Every libertarian who is a good, skillful, creative producer of anything is likely in their neighborhood to impress their neighbors and to be able to talk to them about the character involved in loving liberty. The advantages that this gives for a person producing things, after all, it is now abundantly clear that having tried every other nutty system to get things done, to grow food, to invent things, to have good music, and so forth around the world, that they've all failed save one. That is the notion of letting people free to do things for themselves. And Jefferson, oh, good old Jefferson. Jefferson said, you know that humans were not born with saddles, nor other humans born with boots and spurs to ride them. He knew everybody is known for a long time, and we have tried every alternative to it. None of it works. Ronald Reagan is the only person I know who thinks the Soviet Union is a dangerously competent society. I mean, most people understand that these people are really bumble-footed. They don't do anything terribly well. And if, well, god, you know, they don't even have good t-shirts. I saw it some TV program showing a Red Square recently. There was somebody walking around with a Pink Floyd t-shirt on, and it occurred to me. I hope it wasn't a tourist, because it occurred to me that if we could open one McDonald's and get you two over to play some good rock for them, it would probably subvert them more than anything the CIA could come up with. And this will reveal a personal prejudice of a deep sort. We could somehow manage to smuggle a lot of Macintoshes into the Soviet Union. It would all be over. But we trade so well, and we war so poorly, that it occurs to me that, like any good general, you look to your strengths for combat. There's no question about our excellence and superiority in matters of trade. We're a merchant people. All of us. I mean, even communists in America are usually successful at their businesses. As a matter of fact, the only communist I know terribly well is an extraordinarily rich and successful person. So it's the only way you can have time to afford to be a communist. So I think we might stick to that libertarian. Now, libertarians, what are libertarians good at? Well, there are several kinds of libertarians I have observed. There are political ones, and there are commercial ones, and there are cultural ones. And in all of these areas, they do quite well, it seems to me. I'm, I guess, I tend a bit toward the cultural, not out of absolutely a choice, but because when, thanks to Murray Rothbard again, Murray gets me in more trouble. He suggested that I write a letter to the Internal Revenue Service, telling them that in eloquent terms, why I was ceasing to pay taxes. And so I did, not taking fully, I wasn't fully aware of the consequences, because I thought, you see, like many libertarians at that stage of development, I thought that sweet reason sways everyone. And that all you had to do was explain this to these thugs and brigands, and they would suddenly come around. Well, that's not their job. Their job is certainly not to be reasonable. And so they divested me of all material possessions very quickly and left me, as I've often said, with only one thing, which was me, for which I thank them heartily, because it has kept me from backsliding, which would be tempting from time to time. I now have to make out in the cracks of the society, which I find is a very fine place to be. The underground economy in this country is probably less inflation-prone and is expanding faster than any other part of it. And it's where many libertarians should be, probably are. The French historian Fernand Brodell, who is certainly a great favorite of mine, seems to have found that this is a characteristic of history that, when people want to survive, they join or form an underground economy. He ascribes the existence of Italy today, almost completely, to the underground economy. They have at two levels of an economy. They have the visible economy, as he puts it, and then they have the underground. So I think that's true here. We have both. To rail against the visible only is fun. To be part of the invisible is practical. And so I would hope that everybody here is involved in some way in the black market. In the Winston Churchill, not a renowned libertarian, did say at one time that the only contact with freedom that the British had had during the Second World War was the black market. And may still be true. But I just said, oh my god, such whimpery in high places. I remember that Ronald Reagan once actually said, he actually said once that if the underground economy would pay its taxes, he could balance his budget. Extraordinary. I have a little interest in his budget. But at any rate, so we have these various kinds of libertarian. And it's led me to this sort of feeling. I think that libertarians require to be extraordinarily competent at what they do and at where they fit into this equation so that being very, very rich, I don't mean moderately rich. I mean filthy rich. Is really a sensible libertarian position. On the other hand, being absolutely poor but creative is an alternative to a really good libertarian position. I've chosen to be poor, but it's been arranged for me that I am officially poor, so I have to be unofficially rich. And that I am. I am not a millionaire. I do live exactly like one. And I find this too is an acceptable alternative. Now in between, there are the commercial libertarians. And it is to them, I feel that there falls the major task of promulgating notions of liberty. I cannot think of a single business or productive activity in which you can engage, in which you cannot influence customers, neighbors, and suppliers with ideas of liberty. A very homely example, there is in Berkeley, California, notorious libertarian territory, there is the chain of top dog sausage stands, run by a man whom Murray refers to as the hot dog anarchist. And indeed he is in every one of the top dog sausage places, which have a superb product. For those of you who have no concern about your health, I hope suicide also be a very reasonable alternative. But in every one of these shops, there are an immense number of clippings up on the wall, explanations of outrages of the state. And it's a nice atmosphere in which to get messages across. The same thing can happen in anything you do. I know that I'm a welder and lately a woodworker. And I find that the transition from discussing the fabrication of some stuff out of a quarter inch plate to discussing the enormous folly of government and the great desirability of working for cash and not paying taxes and things, easy transition to make. Most people who are engaged in any useful activity have a practical sense that the government is their major enemy these days. And most people begin to maintain two price schedules, as you know, with a significantly lower price for cash. Now, I don't think they're doing this out of a regard for greenbacks or the color or anything. They're doing it because it's protective. They are all, we are all parts of an underground economy. And it's really not terribly subversive because it is what will save this country, the landscape of this country and the people of this country, against the follies of the political people. Well, now, in terms of commerce, what are the practical tools that we can employ as libertarians? First of all, there's attitude of resistance, which means we'll try anything. We do not look up the zoning code first. A sense of libertarian adventure impels you to do it and then let them complain about it and to make an issue out of it and to probably influence people on your side. There are very few people, except you're possibly the immediate landholders, who will be offended by your establishing the world's largest whatever on your property. Other people will be drawn to your courageous stand. And if, in fact, you lose and the state finally tears down what you built, it is likely that the state will appear to be worse than you. Now, you say, oh, but I will have lost everything. Nonsense. Libertarians can't lose anything because they start again tomorrow and build something else. I've just come from a meeting with people who wouldn't be caught dead here, as a matter of fact, but every one of whom is a first-class practicing libertarian. And as we spoke and gave our little biographical sketches to each other, it was apparent that characteristic of all of them was the fact that they had lost millions. And as I pointed out, reported gross income of $6.19. But they had made and lost millions, and they had no fear of this. So I think a great psychologically good tool for libertarians is not to be obsessed with a fear of failure, but to be obsessed instead with the successes that are always intermittent with any series of failures, to be prepared to finally be comfortable with themselves if they had nothing else, but to dare and to venture, to build, and to talk on the basis of accomplishment and not simply on the basis of theory. The tools of practical accomplishment have been too little extolled in libertarian circles. Now, if you are in any sort of business, it occurs to me there would behoove you to try to find other people of a similar disposition and urge them to work, locate, and to operate near you. In our part of the Shenandoah Valley, we have discovered that there are numbers like Australia. It's now filling up with misfits and people have been rejected by the society at large, people who really are entrepreneurial in nature and extremely skillful in practice. One of the most notable examples are the folks who made this shirt as a matter of fact, a little manufacturer in a company called Deva, and they have done some extraordinarily good libertarian educating in the Shenandoah Valley because they work with piecework and they farm out stuff to people in the neighborhood. Of course, that means the unions hate them, the politicians hate them, Ralph Nader hates them. They grossed a million bucks last year and they play volleyball every afternoon. And they have managed to make significant inroads against bureaucratic interference with piecework. Now, that's an important lesson. Now, they don't want to grow because they're at an absolutely perfect size. And the purpose of an enterprise, to many libertarians, I find, is that enterprise which makes possible their perfect vision of the way they want to live. Now, they're not really trying to serve society. They're not really trying to do anything except live exactly the way they want. These people would be unable to live that way if the place got any larger, a million bucks a year is okay. So, how do they protect themselves? How do we protect ourselves without going to the inconvenience of becoming large enough to hire a lobbyist to go to Washington? One way is by federation and by encouraging other people of a like mind to come into your geographical, your regional area, which incidentally is very likely not to accord with political boundaries. I live in the Shenandoah Valley in a political subdivision called Berkeley County, West Virginia, but I feel I'm a resident of that nation. Oh, pardon me, I meant country called the Shenandoah Valley. Now, one way we're approaching it is to try to encourage other people to come in, people who have the same vision of working in order to make their lives possible, absolutely on their own terms. The more of them there are, the more impact they will have in the area, the more protected they will be from reckless political activity, without any one of them having to spend full time on it or to be huge in nature. I believe this is going to work and the variety of people now in our valley strike me as being remarkable because we have biotechnologists, very important. Genetic engineering is clearly one of the most important activities in which a libertarian could involve themselves. So we do have several genetic engineers in the area that programmers all over the place. And fortunately, one of them as a matter of fact is involved in a very high level computer security work, which means we have somebody who knows how to defeat any known security system, since he's designed half of them. So we have, down to people who are making a good point about non-chemical farming these days, more productive, less costly, to people who do any number of things, small fabricators, artists, crafts people, all sorts of things. I think that by encouraging economic development in our valley along those lines will all be very much better off. Now, there is a particular tool or area of practical work that I like myself very much because I think it's most important, that involves schools. So long as a substantial number of children are subjected to a public education, which is education to be a member of the public. It strikes me that we're in very deep trouble. So that any libertarian that can, either as a public school teacher, I know it doesn't seem to me offensive. If you're going to be a saboteur, where else would you be? But in the bowels of the ship. As a public school teacher or as the proprietor of a private school, it occurs to me that beginning to work with children is massively important. Children who are taught, I try to make this as a broad a statement as possible. We are at a point, I believe, of conflict between people who teach facts and people who revere inquiry. As of course I do, Bob. But at any rate, there is another meaning to that. Children who are taught facts are usually by the time they're eight or nine almost lost. It's difficult to retrieve a fact-taught person back to the world of thinking. Now there are some 600 schools in this country, I believe 600 may be much more. Already, who are using materials from the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children, which means that they will not teach facts to any young child. That's a terrible thing to do to a child. They are teaching instead thinking and the process is involved in thinking. Now these schools, all impossibly small in number, are turning out people who may be irretrievably thoughtful. And infinite and great pests to the state. If you can do anything to hasten that, you will probably do more to deserve your crown of glory than anything else that you can do. Save a child and you save a substantial part of the entire future and part of your own future because you'll be rather tired one of these days and weary. And you will have to depend on some of these young folks to do the heavy lifting. I now have to depend on it. You will want them to be thoughtful. They will not be thoughtful unless they have had the good fortune to be in a school that uses thinking rather than fact material. So schools are an essential libertarian project, it seems to me. And again, whether you're a public school teacher or not is not the point. I'm really, I do not have tremendous amount of patience with people who feel that you can only be a libertarian if you are perfect in all ways. I don't feel, I feel like working in the public school system in order to teach children, to encourage them to think is itself a sort of sanctuary movement of infinite importance. Oh, on sanctuary movements. It occurs to me that it might be very pleasant to have a libertarian type sanctuary movement of a special sort to protect and encourage and indeed to smuggle in those folks from Hong Kong who are anxious to come here but have no encouragement whatsoever. Now they come with vast amounts of money which strikes me as being useful and they usually, and they usually are very productive and creative people. So you can be quite selective about it. Now I don't know what church, in what church we could shelter these people but it seems to me it would be a very pleasant addition to the more indiscriminate sheltering of people in some of the traditional churches. I would like to provide sanctuary for a rich citizen from Hong Kong that could potentially help my cash flow a great deal. So that, but that's an aside. There are so many other things. I spoke just earlier in this meeting to someone who was developing a new building material, fine. The construction of buildings is an endless opportunity to engage in arguments with the bureaucracy, good. And to say good things to your neighbors, also good. I remember when I started building the house in which I now live, people in our neighborhood referred to it as a Polish swimming pool because it had three sides in a hill and the fourth side was empty. And they thought this was the silliest thing they'd ever heard of. When I built the house finally, without any consultation with any zoning administrator, so an electrical inspector came out once and asked me what I was doing and I explained it in such a way that he either didn't understand it or actually sympathized with it. He went away and he's never been back. But when we got the house built and people came out in the dead of winter and below zero temperature and discovered that the stove, which is at this 2,000 square foot houses, only heating source with dead cold and that they were warm, they understood that our Polish swimming pool with its 54 feet of glass facing south actually worked. Well now, this disturbed a number of prejudices that they'd had about building things. First of all, somebody who was obviously inept at most things had built it. Secondly, it defied their conventional notions of building from such an entry to a person's consciousness you can go anywhere. In short, if the house in which my grandparents lived was crudely and wrongly built, silly sort of structure, maybe everything else deserves re-examination. There is nothing that you can do that doesn't open a good conversation. So building, I think, is fine. The other day in the paper here, there was notice that Arizona University has begun a project in which they will try to find people who produce toxic waste and bring them together with people who can utilize the toxic waste. Well that's, to me, one of the most disappointing things of the year has been the fact that that was announced by a state university and not by a libertarian toxic waste company. Because it's such a perfectly sound, free market answer to a very complicated question. So I would urge somebody in here to spend a little time thinking about that. Of course if a libertarian can cure cancer that would be an excellent boost for things because when you accepted the Nobel Prize you could demand that it be paid in gold. And thus raising all sorts of new questions. And so it goes. Now another thing is, this is another warning, and I suppose I'm talking more about psychological tools, aren't I? But what the hell, I got to thinking about it. There is something I've noticed that some libertarians are prone to that I'm not too sure is a terribly useful tool. Although I love you, I'm sure that there's great merit in your practice of it. But that's the assumption that they have power. So they will argue about things as though they had power. And other people will make counter arguments as though they had power so that when Colonel Poole recommends something I may because I am of a different disposition, I may say well I wouldn't do it that way and we square off. This is silly. He has about as much chance of influencing the Joint Chiefs of Staff as I have of influencing the Quaker Church. So what we need to do, except he does have, I mean it may rub off, which is why I delight in the fact that he says these things. It wouldn't occur to me to say them. It's dirty work and somebody has to do it. The reason that I, Bob Poole could, as a matter of fact, come along and tell me that he was actually an undercover agent for the IRS. And I would smile and invite him to dinner figuring that he just may be needed a job. Because my feeling is that there's nothing he could do that could possibly counterbalance the incredible value that he has added to all of our lives by cutting back City Hall and by concentrating on local activities. I think it is probably in a social or political sense the most important thing that a libertarian has done in my lifetime. So that's the way that goes. Well, finally, what can I say about these tools? You have to invent them yourself. You have to use them yourself. And you have to take them very seriously. And as you use them, put little clippings up on the wall for your neighbors to see. You will never make much of an impact in your neighborhood unless you are respected, I believe. Not for what your opinion is, but for what you do. In West Virginia, nobody knew that I had a strange and curious life. They knew that I was a welder. And the first job I did on a farm in West Virginia, the entire family came out. And as I finished, it was welding up a big dump truck. And as I finished, the kids in the family, well, turned to their father and said, hey, daddy, that's not a bad bead. Looks like it'll hold. And I occurred to me, my God, that's the important thing. If my weld doesn't hold, I'll never be able to talk to these people about anything. But the weld held and I was able to talk to them. When it finally, they saw some article I'd written in one of the magazines for which I most often have written in the past few years, Gallery or Playboy or something like that. And that's what they all read, which is why I all write for. They thought it was just funny. You know, ha, ha, ha, ha. That's something, see, they think that what I do is weld and that what I do when I don't have anything else to do, which is almost true, is write articles for these people. And they don't mind that stuff. They have wonderful character along those lines. So first you have to prove that your welds hold in your neighborhood and then you can talk to people about anything you want and you should. If you want to, that's really an option, isn't it? So that's my, I guess my advice is simply that you should be, because you represent a strange position in the world today, you should be very competent at some familiar task and then talk to your neighbors. And my, what else can I say? I think we should all leave here and go forth and prosper mightily in each and our own way.