 Good evening ladies and gentlemen. It's a great pleasure for me and a privilege to have an opportunity to address a group of this kind. And I want to spend some time sharing with you some thoughts of mine that I have in recent times over the challenges that libertarians need to be facing. I think that all of us think about what would it take to make libertarianism gain greater acceptance. What are the battles that have to be fought in one? And of course there are different kinds of battles in different arenas and to some extent we pick for our own talents and interests lay and we tend to fight in that arena. Fortunately there are lots of different aspects to the battle for libertarianism. And I of course want to focus on what interests me most which is the psychological aspect. I'm not going to talk about the vested interests of politicians who resist change. We know all about that. We're not going to talk about the massive amount of misinformation and ignorance concerning the nature of capitalism in the mind of the average person. I want to just think with you aloud a bit and engage you perhaps in a dialogue a little later on tonight on what are some of the factors in human psychology that libertarianism has to contend with. A few years ago I wrote a book called Taking Responsibility. And in it the book chiefly is about the theme of self-responsibility and what a powerful force this can be for our own well-being when intelligently applied to the different areas of life from marriage to work to the social or political arena. And in one of the chapters I discussed how central is the whole concept of self-responsibility to the vision of capitalism. Capitalism is a social political system which is distinguished from all others in a number of ways but one of those ways is that it's uniquely geared to human self-esteem. It rests on the premise of self-ownership, of self-responsibility, of respect for the rights of all individuals and it stands against any attempt to confer benefits on some members of society by violating the rights of other members. So the good news is that it offers people tremendous freedom and tremendous opportunities. The bad news not in our eyes but in the eyes of many people is that it doesn't promise them a guaranteed risk-free universe. If you read many of the 19th century attacks on capitalism you see over and over again both from the religious quarters, the medievalist quarters, and the Marxist quarters the longing for a kind of a garden of Eden in which life will essentially be without risk. And in which your minimum subsistence, your material well-being will be essentially guaranteed and you will be protected against accidents and it will be a life that in exchange for renouncing or forfeiting freedom you will have the promise of great security. Now of course in our century in fact just in the last decade or so we've seen the collapse of that dream in the communist version. We've seen massive disenchantment with socialism but that does not mean that the dream of a risk-free universe is now behind us. I think that one of the toughest battles in conversations with people and trying to get people to understand the libertarian vision is to understand ourselves and to find a way to communicate that we take something for granted that many people do not. The libertarian mentality is a non entitlement mentality. The libertarian mentality presupposes a person's willingness to accept responsibility for his or her own existence. Now unfortunately there's a terrific amount of mileage to be derived from pandering to people's fear of self-responsibility and politicians pander to it all the time as we know. The welfare programs without exception began as strategies that were intended to remove dependency. In the initial formulations in the initial statements of the great society or the other programs of those times and since the theme was very strong to eliminate dependency. Now we know that no such result was achieved. We know that not only did the programs not eliminate dependency but that the dependency problem is much much worse than it was 40 years ago. The government really runs a very interesting kind of protection racket which is first they break your legs and then they charge you for medical services and they say look these people can't walk they need our help. And many of the programs of the last several decades have been profoundly corrosive of people's self- esteem and self-respect and we have created a nation with increasing numbers of people who have a dependency orientation and increasing numbers of people who really do think they are entitled to just about anything they think they need they feel a sense of entitlement toward and that is a really a profoundly corrupting idea and in fighting for libertarianism we have to be absolutely clear that this is one of the most important battlegrounds I remember being in the dinner party a month or two ago and I was with a group of people that I didn't know but I think were Democrats quite nice people and interested people people curious about libertarianism and they asked me about the whole issue of health care and what I thought about the number of people who were uninsured and how would libertarians address that problem and I said well before we get into discussing how I would see or how my fellow libertarians might see issues of that kind being addressed in a free society let's go to a deeper level is it your conviction that health care is a natural right and they looked non-plus because they were kind of intelligent decent people and they didn't quite feel comfortable saying yes now I know lots of I know I know lots of other people who would righteously say yes but I don't hang out with those so much you see and so I said and they said well and a right I said here is something that libertarianism stands for you can't have a natural right meaning an unearned right to something that has somebody else has to produce I said now however health care is after all a service a product that somebody has to bring it to existence and in our view you can't you can't have a a right to that just from the fact that you're born because look at the position that it puts for the people from whom you are to collect this right they become your serfs and I don't think any of you at this table I said with my usual diplomacy want to stand up for such a viewpoint and it was really a satisfying evening because they said could you send us some literature I phoned up my friends at the Cato Institute and I said listen I want everything you've got on the subject of health care in duplicate now pay for it now I want to by way of setting a frame let's talk a little bit about my work in a non-libertarian context and then I'll pick up the thread and bring it back I promise you to libertarianism I had an interesting invitation from a Hungarian businessman but to come to Budapest spend a week there talk to the Chamber of Commerce and talk to other business groups in Budapest about capitalism help them to understand what a free market society is and how it works help them to understand entrepreneurship help them to understand what are the challenges in transitioning from a command economy to a relatively freer economy and the gentleman the businessman who invited me he says above all Nathaniel what I want you to help them to understand is the idea of self-responsibility because it's so foreign to most people in our country between the religious authoritarianism that many of them grew up with and then with the communists being there a whole generation has grown up in a context where self-responsibility is not a very meaningful idea in the fact it wasn't a very meaningful idea pre-communist either and I think that that is why I don't write that much about politics but I do write a lot about self-responsibility that's one of my contributions and in thinking about what is going on in the world today I want to draw certain parallels I began my practice of doing psychotherapy and in recent years I also do corporate consulting and I've learned some very interesting things in the course of doing corporate consulting which bear upon our interests tonight but I want to tell you a little about this I don't know about you but most of you are younger than me so this understanding may have come to you more easily but I remember in the early 1980s trying to find out what in hell do people mean by an information economy now this is early 1980s I mean I hear people talking about the new importance of information the new importance of ideas and I kept saying well but weren't ideas and information important in industrial society so it took me some time to understand how profound is the change from an industrial economy to an information economy in which wealth is no longer land as in an agricultural economy it's no longer factories capital goods or even money as it was an industrial economy it's now knowledge innovation ideas and suddenly we're living in a world in which everybody's chief capital asset is what they carry between their ears and this has consequences and during the 1980s if you follow the business literature a lot of articles were written talking about the fact that workers now needed much higher levels of training and much higher levels of education obedience no longer was worth much in the point marketplace manual labor had a smaller and smaller and smaller market this was the age of the knowledge worker and knowledge workers needed continuous education and continuous training and as I was reading this I had a kind of an epiphany and I thought Jesus they're missing something very important it's perfectly true that people need new levels of training and education etc but it's also true that an information economy demands of people a higher level of psychological development than an industrial economy because in an industrial economy practically most of the jobs you get the training in a very few months and then you just apply it indefinitely into the future in an information economy with a sum total of human knowledge doubling roughly every six to ten years with new knowledge new scientific discoveries new technological breakthroughs happening and then accelerating rate where the rate of change itself is happening at a faster and faster and faster and faster speed ten seconds after you learn something that's on its way to obsolescence it's an entirely new kind of world which has got fantastic exciting opportunities if you're a thinking self-responsible human being but if you're not it's scary as hell now I believe that worldwide one of the reasons for this resurgence of religious fundamentalism and tribalism and racism is because people are scared they don't necessarily know why they're scared but they're scared there is a apprehension at some level that the world is changing changing very rapidly changing in a way that it's very hard for the average person to understand and the ground underneath most people's feet feel shaky even if they can't explain why they know that the old rules and the old games aren't matching current realities even if they can't explain any of it and I believe that there is a worldwide subterranean anxiety problem caused by this apprehension that we're in a time of escalating change without a clear picture of what it's all evolving toward now when you are living in a world of slow change it's not a great challenge to your confidence in your own mind or your own resourcefulness but the more rapid the rate of change the greater the challenge to your trust in your own resourcefulness in your own intelligence in your own mind and your own ability to make appropriate choices and decisions or to say it more simply the more rapid the rate of change the greater the challenge to your self-esteem we are living in an at the beginning of an information age economy which is going to require of people a higher level of self-esteem to be economically adaptive than was required of them earlier in our history knowing how to repeat motions that somebody else taught you it doesn't give you access to good jobs anymore I remember I was in a boarders bookstore in westwood Los Angeles when a book of mine came out called the art of living consciously and I was giving a talk trying to explain to people about how the world had changed and the great new challenges and why it demanded of us that we operate now at a higher level of consciousness than we had been required earlier and there was a woman in her fifties in the audience and during the question period she says I want to tell you that I am getting more and more upset the more you talk and I said would you care to tell us why and she said for 23 years I held a terrific job pay was good very easy simple tasks I could do it half asleep lots of time to get to gossip I swear to you very little expected people were nice but some company bought our company and fired everybody from the CEO down to me I wonder why anyway and she said this week coming up I've got to meet with two placement agencies I gotta go looking for a new job and I know I don't exactly know how I know but what you're talking about tonight Brandon is about that I know that never again am I gonna have that kind of a job I know that next employer is going to demand that I do much more thinking and be much more conscientious and focused using your word Brandon than I ever had to be before and I'm telling you quite frankly I don't like it I like the old way better I said good luck now what we want to realize is that what is true of an information economy is also true of laser for capitalism of a libertarian society and that is to say it requires a higher level by far of psychological maturity than a welfare state requires let alone a socialist society requires because if on the one hand it offers people tremendous opportunities it at the same time as I've said throws them on their own resources and unfortunately there is very little in our child during practices or our educational system that prepares young people either for the economic realities of an information age economy or for the opportunities of a free society children are raised today with an intent to be raised tend to have a deep entitlement mentality and that makes at the same time because we're more than the product of one particular influence we do see that the great many young people know something is totally wrong with their elders and they are often properly quite disinterested in politics because they kind of got it that the real fun in this world is happening somewhere else and I certainly think it's true is it's been reported many many times that if any one group that is most likely to be sympathetic to libertarianism is who is small businesses is new businesses is entrepreneurial businesses I know it was true or not but somebody insisted that if the last national elections were held exclusively on the internet Harry Brown would be president I think there is a natural match between the psychological traits required to be comfortable with the free society and the psychological traits required to be comfortable in an information age economy and that from that point of view I believe there are very hopeful forces at work in the world today which are going to be driving us in a libertarian direction I'm not going to summarize there's so much positive news that I'm sure other speakers will share with you this weekend from the whole phenomenon of increasing privatization to Jose Panera's success in now eight Latin American countries with a privatization of Social Security one former another even China is expressing an interest in the privatization of Social Security there are a lot of very exciting positive hopeful things that one could point to so I'm going to assume that you know that or you'll hear about it later this weekend and I'm not going to talk about that but what I want to talk about is our need to be very very clear and even compassionate when we're talking to people who don't share our views that we are offering something we are talking about something which to most people is incomprehensibly radical I have I'm in an interesting position I have a lot of friends who are Democrats and they're nice people and they love me and but they're mystified by me because you know they can't think of me in the terms that they usually would think of people with whom they politically disagree because they know me personally so and they'll often say how is that again that they know would you tell me that one more time and I can see they are really struggling the idea of a non-coercive society the idea of a volunteeristic society in which people would absolutely not have the right to impose their values on other people it's just like a fantasy it's like it's totally outside the intellectual range and these are very very smart people I am friendly with Democrats but not with them Democrats okay and so what we are up against as I see it is a challenge of helping people to understand that many of the tenants that the best parents would teach their children applied politically would lead straight to libertarianism now think about that suppose you said to a parent do you want your children to grow up being taking responsibility for their own choices and actions you bet I do do you want to raise children who will understand that in human relationships they gotta carry their own weight and earn their own way of course I do I don't want my kids to be bums do you want your children to grow up feeling that they ought to earn whatever it is they want out of life of course I do do want your children to grow up feeling the world owes them a living absolutely not do you want your children to grow up feeling that they're entitled to what other people have produced without any effort on their part of course not well if you think about those ideas and apply them consistently they will lead you they won't lead you to socialism they'll only lead you to libertarianism so one of the ways that I find it helpful to get people to at least understand what libertarianism about is building bridges between an arena where they do understand self-responsibility and showing how it applies in an area where they haven't thought about it applying you see nobody that I ever met is against self-responsibility totally we all have areas including us I guess where we are more self-responsible and probably other areas where we are less self-responsible I mean we could be for example a person can be a dynamo of self-responsibility in the office and come home at five o'clock and turn into an emotional five-year-old you may have heard of that phenomenon so everybody is in favor of self-responsibility in some respects and few people understand this application consistently I used to tell this story many years ago maybe you'll find it useful I think I wrote it originally in an article for the object of this newsletter but I've used it in talks a number of times since let's imagine that we were just starting out with the United States of America and everything was pretty much as it was except with one exception it was taken as a foregone conclusion that one of the proper responsibilities of the government was to provide people with shoes this was almost regarded as common sense because we certainly didn't want our citizens to walk around shoeless and then suppose some crazy radical would come along and he would say or she would say I don't think the government should provide shoes I think we should privatize the whole issue of shoes people would say are you crazy have you not no compassion do you want a world of poor people little children walking around barefoot what kind of a person are you because it would be totally outside their mental orbit now that was a mistake we didn't make and shoes shoes were left in the hands of shoe manufacturers and it's done a pretty good job we don't see a nation of half shoeless people we don't see children walking around New York and winter and bare feet I'm sorry what did you say oh well that's another story I'm thinking of writing a country and Western song entitled I'm hoping my husband will fall in love with another woman so I'll have more closet space it's kind of a catchy title don't you think back to the point the great contribution that I see in a libertarian part for the libertarian party is in opening up people's awareness that there is an alternative to the varieties of statism offered by our two major parties in other words helping and making a major contribution to making people aware there is such another there is another way to look at social problems there is another way to approach social organization one of the things before I came down to talk tonight I was reading your the draft of your platform and the thing one thing on it made me very happy to read and that was the line about the abolition of corporate welfare because one of the many things that appalls me about most republicans is what a on the one hand what a great opportunity they had a few years back and how miserably they betrayed it as they always seem to if you want to fight for libertarianism and you want people to take you seriously and not see you as the voice of quote big business and if you have any integrity at all you don't begin with feed food store food stamps you begin with corporate welfare you leave food stamps to last if you really mean business and you want people to understand that you really are a new voice and not just more same old same old now it's a great pleasure for me to talk with you but I have to tell you something I no longer much enjoy straight talks but what I really love this question periods so although I was planning to say great many other things I haven't said I'm going to give myself the pleasure of making a pause here and let's make the rest of the evening a dialogue and questions I promise you it'll be more enjoyable I thank you for your attention and please raise questions