 I'm Roy Childs. I think that I could use up my 10 minutes entirely with a rebuttal to what has just gone on. Hopefully, we'll get into that a little bit later on. I would like to say that throughout the course of the week, there are likely to be a number of conflicts, arguments, discussions, and fights. This is natural. This is part of human life. It's part of a political party or any other group that wants to institute change. However, I think it behooves us to remind each other why we are here and what we are all about and what it is that unifies us and what common enemy it is that unifies it. And that is the state, the government, of the United States and the other governments on this planet, which has carved up the earth and made the earth into a slaughterhouse. They're slaughtering people all over the world in left-wing countries and right-wing countries. In this country, government grows day by day. Militarism is growing. The social agenda of the moral majority is going to be coming out of the closet. We have to fight for liberty by means of fighting the government programs which are going to be shoved down our throats by anyone left or right, liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat, and the foreseeable future. If you ask me what kind of political party I want to see us become, it is the first strategy, one which aims to achieve positions of political power in this country and dismantle the system of government domination of our lives as quickly as possible. In short, I want a political party to achieve liberty. And if you want a model as to how we can begin that process, I know of no state that we can look at better than Alaska, where Dick Randolph and Ken Fanning and so many others have been doing there have made gigantic progress in bringing not only our ideals but our policies and our programs to the views of the people of Alaska. In fact, if we're going to become a political party to achieve liberty, every stage in the political and intellectual process is necessary. From the most abstract intellectual work of the sort done by Nozick and by Rothbard and by so many others to petition drives, to campaigns, to writing and editing magazines of the sort that at least two of us up here do, every step in the political process and the intellectual battle for liberty is necessary. And there is no one in this room who cannot find a role to play in promoting liberty in this country today. I would like to point out the problems with coalitions and with the Norman Thomas Socialist Party approach to politics, the co-optation strategy. I plan on doing that anyway, but I might as well. It is true that many of the things in the Socialist Party platform have been adopted over the years by the Democrats and by the Republicans. However, I submitted to you that if Norman Thomas were alive today and saw the kind of society that the Democrats and Republicans had built by stealing a few of his programs and bastardizing them and implementing them to buy off parts of their potential constituency, he would turn over in his grave. And if we approach a co-optation strategy, the same thing will happen with us and Ludic von Mises and Ayn Rand whenever she dies or Murray Rothbard or me or anyone in this room, we will all turn over in our graves because we will have given up. We will have given up the process of fighting for what we want to see in this country and that's liberty. Libertarianism is unique. It's not just a program that goes farther in the direction of budget cuts in the domestic arena than Ronald Reagan or has a less interventionist foreign policy than George McGovern. It's a unique program which we cannot see in our respect for civil liberties. Our focus on the issue of peace and non-intervention. Our focus on the issue of laissez faire, of getting the government out of the whole process of structuring this economic system. It is a process and an approach to politics which is so unique that we cannot become tail gunners for lukewarm Reaganites or work with left-wing Democrats who happen to be peaceniks because if we work for Reaganites, we're going to get the more majority social legislation shoved down our throats and we are going to have militarization upon militarization until this economy becomes so heavily burdened with arms that there'll be nothing left to do except shoot them off or sink. As for those leftists and liberals, however many exist today, who want to cut back on the military, we can go along with that and they talk about funding human needs. Well, I've got news for them. The real human need here is liberty for people to live their own lives as they see fit in America and elsewhere around the world. No doubt in becoming a political party which achieves liberty, which runs candidates and does the actual peeling of those laws, of those regulations and the changing of those judicial decisions which have structured our society as it is so structured today, we will face pitfalls and problems. So what? Who cares? Problem solving is necessary to all of human life and there is no chicken little approach which is going to allow us to duck this, not a co-optation strategy nor anything else. It is true that we face a problem now and many of the arguments and discussions over the last few months have raged over the problem that we are having and having a transition from purely talking about abstract theoretical principles like the non-aggression axiom or the laissez-faire capitalism or a voluntary society to proposing actual programs and policies to move toward that. Let's take up the issues in very brief, social security, education tax credits, the gold standard, balanced budget, the whole issue of adequate versus strong defense and the subcontracting of government services. There are problems with each one of these and none of them are purely libertarian in the sense that we would like to make it. I thought the Clark proposal for social security was masterful and the work that Peter Ferrara has done for the Cato Institute is masterful. It takes too damn much time for one thing, to get rid of the social security system and move into a private retirement system. It is a good program to propose as a means of getting people to think about the destructiveness that social security is going to have not only as the baby boom starts to retire and the money runs out, but the effect it is now having on capital investment in this country. Education tax credits are not purely libertarian either because what about those people who are single, who don't have any children, who don't particularly like schools or want to give a tax credit for someone else to go to a school, they are not allowed in this program to get money simply back that they're forced to pay for other people's education. Nonetheless, the education tax credit approach is, I think, in a significant move toward doing something we have to do, which is junking the public school system and moving to a system of private, competing education systems in this country that take full advantage of not only the diversity and social and moral views that different groups have, but even the technologies we have to educate children. It is a way of dismantling the public school system which is wrecking minds today. And that's a very important thing to remember. The same thing could be said about any one of a number of things over which we've been quarreling. The gold standard, for example, is not a libertarian issue. Our approach ought to be that of Hayek, the denationalization of money, getting money supply out of the hands of the government. Nevertheless, I will concede that moving to a full, real gold standard would be a significant step in the direction of limiting the monetary manipulation and exploitation of the American people by the American government. It would be a significant step to take. On the issue of balanced budgets, some people who have griped about the Clark approach to Social Security or education tax credits have endorsed other things such as balanced budgets, gold standards, things like this. Now, we should endorse a balanced budget, but we should want to balance it as low as we possibly can, aiming for the optimum of the zero government budget. That's what we want. I won't say much about the conflict between those who want an adequate versus a strong defense because I don't even know what is being talked about here. I mean, there are so many differences among even educated, very well-read people on the issue of strategy, arms, and this sort of thing that the whole issue of national defense is a can of worms. Nonetheless, these are important things for us to discuss in terms of how we ought to move, in addition to adopting a non-interventionist foreign policy, how we ought to move in the direction of our defense policy. What ought we to do? Should we junk the MX, the B-1, so on and so forth? These are important principal issues, but they're done as part of a policy. Part of a policy to limit, restrain, and restrict government power whenever, however we can. I'll take a quick crack at Bob Pool and the whole issue of subcontracting government services to private enterprise. This is not a purely libertarian program either. It's a variant of feudalism, as long as you retain government monopolies over certain essential public services. So I'm saying that there are pitfalls in trying to make the transition from principles to policy, and there's not one person on this panel or in this room who hasn't proposed something that somebody from a purest libertarian perspective couldn't pick holes in if they wanted to. Nonetheless, these are important decisions to have to be made, and we can't be afraid of them. I'm going to make just a few more comments and hand over the microphone to Bob. We've seen an awful lot of fighting, awful lot of arguing and in-fighting and it's been particularly painful to me and I haven't liked to see it, and I imagine many of you haven't either. I'm 32, I've been a libertarian since 1964, and I've been involved in libertarian movement since 67 when I worked with Bob LeFave. It's a long time, I feel like an old man. I've always seen these sorts of fights and they will continue. Partly this is because of what we might call a phenomenon of the new class in the libertarian party, a new class of intellectuals who will debate and argue endlessly and I am one of them. I am one of them. But I want to point out that because there are problems in making the transition from the principles to the policies we want to advocate and vote on, there is never going to be agreement on specific programs by intellectuals or people who study much in specific issues. There was a point at which I agree with Murray Rothbarn about 95% of his views. Apparently the gulf has widened somewhat over the last couple of years. I sometimes hope that someday I'll see a disagreement between Murray and Bill Evers. But for very large numbers of intellectuals coming from as diverse roots as we have, you're not going to get specific agreement on specific programs and making the transition from principles to policies and programs. So the important thing to keep in mind if we're going to be a political party that wants to achieve liberty is we've got to avoid something. We've got to avoid the rule or ruin approach by anyone to specific policies. And all you have to do in history, if you want to look at how damaging and destructive this can be, is look to the fragmentation of the left where there are 9,000 little socialist workers and labor parties and other things under the sun all over the place, each who's split off over some minor little thing and then never kept the overall picture in mind. I think that we have to accept the fact that different candidates running for different offices are going to propose different specific programs and policies that they see using their own best judgment as being the best way to illustrate and implement the principles that we all uphold together. We all uphold together and we've got to accept that diversity, those competing strategies, and there's no way around that. Let me say in conclusion that I think the short-term future is very bright indeed. And that's different from saying the long run future. I think that is too. I say this speaking incidentally as the editor of a magazine which is shortly to go out from under my feet. So my optimism I think is far less personal than it is political and strategic. We have in political power now the leading man of the conservative movement, Ronald Reagan, who is attempting to implement his policies of minuscule budget cuts in the domestic arena, shuffling the budget around so these dumping trillions of dollars into so-called defense, which means arms and spending more of the same on what Carter proposed, and wants to wreck certain elements of civil liberties as much as he can because he can't get out of his generation gap with the rest of the American people. That and his necessary alliance with the moral majority. I think that if Ronald Reagan's foreign policy continues in the direction that it has been set upon and he spends his 1.4 or 1.6, or however many trillion dollars on defense, quote unquote defense over the next four years, you're going to see the wreckage of the Reagan economic program. I think with the baby boom, with the younger generation being as pluralistic and diverse and having as different attitudes in the world as you can imagine on lifestyles, that any attempt to reimpose some puritanical, Calvinistic, moralistic social attitude, the very idea that Jesse Helms is going to wave a wand and encourage teenage chastity. I mean, ladies and gentlemen, I can't wait to watch that one. So his foreign policy and his civil liberties programs are going to wreck his minor, minor minuscule improvements in economics. We have to be there to present a coherent package deal of non-interventionist foreign policy, a full respect for civil liberties and abolition of victimist crime laws, and we have to be there advocating not some neo-conservative social welfare state that is more efficiently run than it was under Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon. We have to be there with a real alternative and a real political party to achieve liberty in our time. Thank you.