 Our first speaker for Freedom Fest 2015 is Larry Reed the president of the Foundation for Economic Education. Give him a warm welcome. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much, Brian. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. I hope my speech will be like a mini-skirt. Long enough to cover the subject, but short enough to be interesting. And you be the judge. Mark has asked me to talk about Alexis de Tocqueville and American exceptionalism and whether or not it can last. I think the title of the program is precisely that. Over a nine-month period, beginning in 1831, a 26-year-old Frenchman visited nearly every corner of what was then the 24 states of the American Republic. From New England to the Upper Midwest to the Gulf Coast and the Deep South to the Mid-Atlantic. Then he wrote a great book full of amazing insights. It made its appearance 180 years ago in 1835. Perhaps nobody before or since has ever defined the essence of America better than he did, and no other nation in history offered an essence so profoundly exceptional. Less than half a century after the ratification of the Constitution, America was still an infant nation, but Alexis de Tocqueville sensed the stirrings of greatness. He praised our entrepreneurial drive and initiative, our self-reliance and personal independence, and our vibrant civil society institutions and voluntary associations. He felt our ideals would eventually lead us to lead the world. He believed America had placed two sacred principles, freedom and equality, on a higher pedestal than any previous civilization. They were, he said, our most defining characteristics, the sources of our strength. But he also feared that we would carry one to an extreme that would undermine the other. Milton Friedman was echoing Tocqueville when he said in the 20th century, a society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both. Tocqueville's appreciation of freedom knew few bounds. He's perhaps most famous for this most eloquent endorsement of it. Here are his words. Even despots accept the excellence of liberty, a term he often used interchangeably with freedom. The simple truth is that they wish to keep it for themselves and promote the idea that no one else is at all worthy of it. Thus, our opinion of liberty does not reveal our differences but the relative value which we place on our fellow man. We can state with conviction therefore, and here's the key part, that a man's support for absolute government is in direct proportion to the contempt he feels for his country. He masterfully described how the growth of government could smother our freedoms. Again, in his words, after having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the government then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered but softened, bent and guided. Men are seldom forced to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power may not destroy but it prevents existence. It may not tyrannize but it compresses, innervates, extinguishes and stupefies a people till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd. Tocqueville's view of equality is more nuanced. He had no issue with the ideal of equality before the law or even equality of opportunity. He hated slavery and any unwarranted discrimination. He agreed with the words of our Declaration of Independence that quote, all men are created equal. But he had no illusions that individuals were there after equal in their energies, their talents, their ambitions, their intellect or their character. He was afraid that our egalitarian impulses might someday get the better of us. I have a passion at love for liberty, law and respect for rights, he wrote. Liberty is my foremost passion. But one also finds in the human heart a depraved taste for equality which impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level and which reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom. Now this issue is so critical to our freedoms and our future that I'd like to dwell on it for just a moment. Remember this, free people are not equal and equal people are not free. Put another way in terms of economics, think of it this way, free people will earn different incomes where people have the same income they cannot be free. Economic equality in a free society is a snare and a delusion that redistributionists envision. But free people are different people, not programmable robots so it should come as no surprise that they earn different incomes. Our talents and abilities are not identical, we don't all work as hard and even if we all were magically made equal in wealth tonight we'd be unequal in the morning because some of us would spend it and some of us would save it. To produce even a rough measure of economic equality governments must issue the following orders and back them up with punishment and prisons. Don't be better or work harder than the next guy. Don't come up with any new ideas, don't take any risks and don't do anything differently from what you did yesterday. In other words, don't be human. Economic inequality when it derives from the voluntary interaction of creative individuals and not from political power or connections testifies to the fact that people are being themselves each putting his uniqueness to work in ways that are fulfilling to himself and of value to others as Tocqueville himself might say, viva la différence. People obsessed with economic equality do strange things. They become envious of others, they covet, they divide society into two piles, villains and victims. They spend far more time dragging somebody down than they do pulling anybody up. They're not fun to be around and if they make it to a legislature, they can do real harm. They not only call the cops, they are the cops. If economic inequality is an ailment, punishing effort and success is no cure in any event. Coercive, envy-based measures that aim to redistribute wealth prompt the smart or politically well-connected haves to seek refuge in havens here or abroad while the hapless have-nots bear the full brunt of economic decline. A more productive expenditure of time would be to work to erase the massive intrusive government that assures that the haves are also the have-nots, rather, are also the can-nots. Another superb alternative to coercive redistribution would be, if I may suggest one, to work on our character, each of us one at a time so that we're not only good enough for liberty but good enough to earn a living instead of voting for one. This economic equality thing is not compassionate. When it's just an idea, it's bunk. When it's public policy, it's compulsory insanity. To those who can't understand how different or unequal we are as individuals, I say, get over it. Tocqueville warned that this unhealthy obsession with economic equality combined with an erosion in the respect for liberty and property would produce what we today would call the welfare state. Let me offer you a description of the welfare state. These are my words. Somebody, by the way, not me, but somebody else once said that it got its name because in it the politicians get well and the rest of us pay the fare. Just picture people in a giant circle with each one having his hand in the next guy's pocket. The whole notion of the welfare state rests on this really dumb proposition. Since people are not decent and compassionate enough to assist their deserving fellows in distress, we must expect them to elect politicians who are more decent and compassionate than they are. How ridiculous. Those politicians then take the money from us under threat of imprisonment, launder it through an expense of bureaucracy, and spend what's left not to actually solve the problem, but to manage it into perpetuity for endless dependency, demagoguery, and political gain. And then the advocates of the welfare state compliment themselves for possessing a monopoly on compassion and totally ignore the destructive results of their own handiwork. No thanks. So here we are now, in decades into the very egalitarian welfare state, Tocqueville warned would be the death of American exceptionalism. It threatens to make us like all the other forgettable welfare states that languish in history's dustbins, Greece included. Should we just assume it's inevitable and go along for the ride? Or should we muster the character, the building nation, and that Tocqueville identified as quintessentially American? Well, I hope you know the answer. If you're pessimistic, then you're no longer part of the solution. You've become part of the problem. What chance does liberty have if its supposed friends desert it in the hour of need or speak ill of its prospects? Ask yourselves, what good purpose could a defeatist attitude possibly promote? Will it make me work harder for the causes I know are right? Is there anything about liberty that an election or events in Congress disproves? If I exude a pessimistic demeanor, will it help attract newcomers to the ideas I believe in? Is this the first time in history that believers in liberty have lost a few battles? If we simply throw in the towel, will that enhance the prospects for future victories? Or do we turn back just because the hill we have to climb has gotten a little steeper in recent decades? This is not the time to abandon time-honored principles. I can't speak for you, but someday I want to go to my reward and be able to look back and say, I never gave up. I never became part of the problem I tried to solve. I never gave the other side the luxury of winning anything in a rigorous intellectual contest. I never missed an opportunity to do my best for what I believed in and it never mattered what the odds or the obstacles were. I did my part. Remember, remember that we stand on the shoulders of many people who came before us and who persevered through far darker times. The American patriots who shed their blood and suffered through unspeakable hardships as they took on the world's most powerful nation in 1776 are certainly among them. But I'm also thinking of the brave men and women behind the Iron Curtain who resisted the greatest tyranny of the modern age and won. I think of those like Hayek and Mises who kept the flame of liberty flickering in the last century. I think of the heroes like William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson who fought to end slavery and literally changed the conscience and character of Britain in the face of the most daunting and I think of the Scots who 456 years before the Declaration of Independence put their lives on the line to repel English invaders with these thrilling words. It is not for honor or glory or wealth that we fight but for freedom alone which no good man gives up except with his life. As I think about what some of those great men and women faced the obstacles before us today seem rather puny. This is a moment when our true character the stuff we're really made of will show itself. If we retreat that would tell me we were never really worthy of the battle in the first place. But if we resolve to let these challenging times build our character and rally our dispirited friends to new levels of dedication we'll look back on these challenges someday with pride at how we handled them. Have you called a friend yet today to explain to him or her why liberty should be a top priority? Nobody ever promised that liberty would be easy to attain or simple to keep. The world has always been full of greedy thieves and thugs narcissistic power seekers snake oil charlatans unprincipled narrow-dwells and arrogant busybodies. No true friend of liberty should just roll over and play dead for any of them. Take an inventory every day of what you're doing for liberty or involved in the fight. There are plenty of things you can do if your state isn't a right to work state. Work to make it so. Support people and organizations like the Foundation for Economic Education that are teaching young people about the importance of liberty and character. Get behind the compact for America and its plan for a balanced federal budget and an indirect spending and debt. The compact for America has a booth at the Greenfest, as does Phi and many other fine liberty organizations. Work for school choice in your state to help break the government monopoly on education. And be the very best example for liberty and character that you can possibly be in everything that you do. Whatever you do, don't give up no matter what. Remember these words of the great U.S. Supreme Court Justice George Trump. The saddest epitaph which can be carved in memory of a vanished liberty is that it was lost because its possessors failed to stretch forth a saving hand while yet there was time. Can Tocqueville's American exceptionalism be restored? Can it last? You bet it can. The American dream still lives in the hearts of those who love and crowns off our faces and get to work. Our future, our children's future, liberty's future, all depend on us. I look forward to seeing many of you tonight at the bookstore and over the next couple of days. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you.