 What I find repeatedly is a strong interest in libertarianism as a concept, as a philosophy, by people. And the reason they're interested, they say, is because it's consistent, it's logical, it's principled. And then they talk about the libertarian party, and many of them tend to be much more hesitant about the libertarian party. They find that it doesn't, to them, seem as principled as they think libertarianism should be. And on the other hand, they don't think it's enough of a political party, which may or may not be a contradiction, but I think those are interesting observations. The same people who are very committed to becoming or being libertarians because of its principled and logical stand find the party, on the one hand, not principled enough, and on the other hand, not political enough. And I think there are reasons for that. I think that it's a good deal, a result of needing more intensive analysis. I think that political issues can be identified that can be both principled and political. I think one example is the 16th Amendment, obviously, the immediate repeal of the progressive income tax is both something very, very popular and at the same time very principled. And I think there are a number of other issues that are similar to that. Now, an area that is an area that people find difficult to deal with and difficult to analyze is foreign policy. And I think one reason that even libertarians have had trouble doing that is that they have not looked at foreign policy as part of an overall philosophical system. They're not knowledgeable about it and therefore they feel it's some sort of special category and therefore some special ideas apply. And that's always seemed strange to me because I've always had an approach based on my overall philosophy drawn from Mises and Hayek. And that philosophy gives us, I think, the insights to deal with any issue in politics, that is, whether domestic or foreign policy. And that Hayekian view of the world and that world including international relations is a view based on Hayek's fundamentally important distinction between law and legislation. If we think of Hayek's magnificent career where starting after World War I becoming a very, very important economist but coming to economics out of a broader political and social theory background, even a sociological theory background, and then contributing to the great breakthroughs in economic thought in the 1930s which placed the Austrian school at the very pinnacle of intellectual importance. And then the recognition that Hayek drew from the fact that despite the consistency of the Austrian economic analysis, it was not accepted, instead Keynesianism was accepted because people weren't interested necessarily in truth but in things that were able to provide political power. And he began to realize that the quest for political power was the central driving motive in politics, not truth, not the welfare of the population but the welfare of the political establishment. And that led him to write his crucial book, The Road to Serfdom, pointing out that that road had already been well traveled and that American and European society had better make a quick decision about whether it wanted to continue on that road or not. And as a result of his recognition of the political sphere as more important than the economic sphere, he began writing the important works that were published in the 1950s, the Counter-Revolution of Science and especially the Constitution of Liberty. And in developing that book, The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek came into personal contact with Bruno Leone. Bruno Leone was the professor of jurisprudence at the University of Pavia. He was the editor of the important classical liberal libertarian journal Il Politico. And in addition, he was a frequent lecturer at seminars in the United States that Hayek was also speaking at. And his lectures and his analyses have been published and provide a very strong approach to the whole question of law. The book Freedom and the Law presents the analysis of Leone which makes this and historically justifies the distinction between law and legislation. That freedom is based on law and tyranny is based on legislation. And Hayek then, inspired by that, has written his trilogy Law, Legislation and Liberty, showing the close connection between law and liberty on the one hand and legislation and tyranny on the other. Now Hayek's crucial distinction drawn from Bruno Leone is that law is what societies develop, what has evolved over many centuries. It is a few general principles and that in the best circumstances these principles are enunciated through decisions of judges and that the Anglo-Saxon common law derived from Germanic law was the best historical example of that approach. But that all societies, to one degree or another, operate on the basis of law. These are customs, they are truths, they are wisdom and to the extent that societies are based on law they will be more free or less free. If they are more based on law they will be more free, if they are less based on law they will be less free. And Hayek demonstrates how in conflict with law has developed legislation. Legislation is the opposite of law. Law evolves out of consensus. Law evolves out of rules that everyone accepts. And as Hayek points out there are not too many of them but those that do exist are true and societies prosper when they follow those laws and societies suffer psychologically, morally and economically when they do not follow those laws. That is when they use legislation. So that legislation forms a constant warfare against law and that is because legislation is not the result of consensus. If there was consensus there would be no need for legislation. Legislation represents civil war. One group in society represented by one set of representatives imposes its will on another part of society. It is not the result of unanimity, it is the result of majoritarian decision. And majoritarian decision is a direct assault on law. So we see that modern society is more and more characterized by civil war. That all legislation is a form of civil war in which one side or another tries to establish hegemony and control over other people. And in Hayekian terms that is the very opposite of law. It is the very opposite of civilization because civilization can only exist where the rule of law exists. Civilization can only exist where liberty exists. And as he said we are on the road to serfdom and the road to barbarism. The more that our society is characterized by more legislation and the discussions around legislation the more our society is characterized by civil war. And the civil war is more insidious because it's more masked than the ordinary civil war taking place where there is direct violence. This is violence once removed, violence more subtle, systems of control that are more subtle. But that to Hayek grievous as it is is less important than the fact that it diminishes the value of law. The role of law in society is constantly reduced the more people approach problems from a legislative mindset. The legislative mindset is a mindset of interventionism. A mindset that says I know better than you what's good for you. A system based on law is based on individual autonomy and is based on the concept that each individual knows best his own interest. And that he will pursue it to his own benefit and if it isn't to his benefit he will learn from it so long as he does not do injury to someone else. The legislative mindset says I know better than you what's good for you. And you have then conflicts among legislators each one saying or each group saying I know better what's good for people and the other saying no we know what's better for people. The fallacy is of course that neither one should have that role. Obviously each one as individuals should be able to freely say everybody in the world is wrong except me and publish it if they can publish it or stand on a street corner and say it. That is obviously a reasonable thing but not to say you must do it. Only by education can people be one legitimately to a point of view by law that is totally illegitimate that is by statutory law or legislation. Now this set of approaches that is the approach of law where people choose their own destinies and legislation where their destinies are imposed on them one faction upon another has its application in the world of foreign relations. The Hayekian concept of law is manifest in the long tradition of international law. International law is a set of principles and concepts derived over many many centuries. Hayek himself has pinpointed as the crucial originating force of the ideas of Hayek in the 16th and 17th century. Those are the great Spanish and Portuguese philosophers of the school of Salamanca. Hayek's student from the University of London, Marjorie Grace Hutchins, has written two books under Hayek's inspiration on the Spanish philosophers and economics. Hayek has seen these as not only the forerunners of Hayek and Mises in economic thought but even more fundamentally in theory of law and especially international law. And so you have the great philosophers of the second half of the 16th and the first half of the 17th century such as De Victoria, Suarez, De Lugo, De Mariana who laid down the principles of law and especially international law that then were taken over and given wider currency by the great Dutch theorist Hugo Grosius. Now their concept of the rule of law and of international law was so important to Hayek that when in 1979 he as chairman of the Mont Pelerin Society authorized for the first time a meeting in Spain because it was the first opportunity after the death of Franco to hold a meeting in Spain. Hayek insisted that one day sessions be held at the University of Salamanca and that he would only speak at the University of Salamanca on the importance of the Salamanca School, the founders of modern international law. Now that international law has grown over the centuries. It was a law that our founding fathers were quite aware of and on which they felt that the Constitution of the United States itself was based. And that law continued to grow in the 19th century. In fact the 19th century was the century of flowering of international law because the 19th century was the century of flowering of classical liberalism. So that if any legal system in the world is closest to libertarianism it's the system of international law developed during the libertarian era of the 19th century. And if you read the writings of leading classical liberal spokesmen such as Cobden and Bright and William Graham Sumner and others, Di Malinari, Passe, the whole French school, you will find international law to be a central theme in their writings. And the approach and importance of international law reached its flowering at the beginning of the 20th century and not the least under the inspiration of one of our great but unsung statesman William Howard Taft who took the lead in associating the United States with international law with international arbitration, conciliation and mediation. And in doing so was opposed in 1912 for reelection by two notorious opponents of that philosophy, Theodor Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. And those two men represent just in opposition to Taft just as Taft represented the Hayekian concept of law and the rule of law, Wilson and Theodor Roosevelt represented the concept of legislation, the concept of tyranny, the concept of a majority imposing its will on a minority. Woodrow Wilson represents in American history the highest form of legislator. The man who could leave no one alone who wanted to pester everyone at home and abroad is the ultimate anti-libertarian. And his whole philosophy reeked of the legislator's mindset and nothing more became Woodrow Wilson than his support of the League of Nations because the League of Nations is the transference to the international sphere of the legislative mold in the domestic sphere. It is based not on law but on legislation. It is based on the concept of collective security which is another word for legislation. Now Woodrow Wilson discovered evil at home and abroad. He discovered what he had learned in his religious upbringing that all mankind is evil but that Americans tend to be a little less evil than others and therefore Americans might be the missionaries to the world, that the American government could be a missionary to the world. That just as, since all people are evil but some such as ministers, religious leaders are a little less evil, they at least can play a slightly more elevated role and similarly American government could be slightly less depraved than the rest of the world. Just as the leaders of the American government could give leadership to the depraved Americans, similarly they could give leadership to the depraved population of the rest of the world. And so we have the illustrious president intervening in Latin America and Mexico especially and then in Asia and finally in European affairs and finally that ultimate gift to us which was the invasion of Russia in the summer of 1918 which American armies invaded Siberia and northern Russia near Archangel and Murmansk which had the great consequence that along with the invasion of the British and the Italians and the French into Russia it rallied all of the Russian people who otherwise hated the Bolsheviks to support the Bolsheviks because they were the only ones standing up for Russia. Now this very issue came to the fore at that point because Wilson's actions, his intervention in World War I and his intervention into the Russian Revolution which helped to cement popular support for the Bolsheviks against the foreign intervention and support of the anti-Bolsheviks who would have been much better off and probably victorious if they didn't have the allies hanging on their neck. Given that situation the people who had originally been taken in by Wilson's point of view, people like Herbert Hoover who attended the Versailles conference with Wilson as one of his major advisors, Robert A. Taft who was Herbert Hoover's chief assistant and who had been taken in by Wilson's rhetoric rather than his father's own brilliant analysis, saw the error of their ways. They saw that legislation, intervention, legislation in foreign affairs is intervention by military means or by foreign aid, foreign military or economic aid that the consequences of that are the opposite of what is expected. In other words they discovered without giving it a name what Hayek has called the theory of unintended consequences, that everyone, all legislators intervene for good and yet they create evil. Every piece of legislation is done for a good purpose and yet the results are always evil. Legislation is done to help people and legislation destroys people. Hoover and Taft did not give a name to it but they discovered the consequences of this, that American intervention in World War I set a terrible price, that the Americans intervened at the point when the European powers were on the verge of a settlement. They were so exhausted they couldn't continue and if they had had a settlement the result would have been stability in Europe, that the war had gone on for half what the period had eventually took place, that terrible devastation had occurred but that the societies yet had not been totally ripped apart. By America intervening it ensured that one side would win and one side would lose but not that the war would immediately end, that the war would continue till one side was totally ripped apart, that societies, all the foundations of society, the law and morals on which societies are built would be ripped apart. And that occurred first in Russia and then in Germany and in central Europe. Those societies were ripped apart by the good intentions of America entering the war to help the world. Every legislator's dream and Hoover and Taft were horrified at what had happened and their role in that. And they saw the same thing happening with American and Allied intervention into Russia. By the intervention it not only made the anti Bolsheviks the tools of foreign invaders, it also prolonged the war and they discovered that war leads to socialism. War leads to socialist revolution. It leads to the organization of society along socialist lines in order to fight the war. They realized that that's what happened in America. Industries were nationalized. In America happily we were able to get out of it when the war ended. In other countries they didn't. They kept those industries nationalized. Or worse, they experienced the Bolshevik Revolution. In 1919 Herbert Hoover set up the Hoover Institution on War, Peace and Revolution in order to try to make people aware of the fact that just as peace leads to capitalism, war leads to socialism. And another way of putting it, the way Hayek ultimately put it, is law which is peace and capitalism is opposed by war which is legislation which leads to socialism. And that's why Hoover and Taft fought so strongly against America intervening in the Second World War. They knew that the American intervention in the First World War had created the chaos that led to the Second World War and also had given strength and power to the Bolsheviks, had created the Bolshevik state. And they predicted a Second War, especially if America intervened, would mean not a couple of hundred million people under communism, but more than a billion people under communism. They have been the only prophets whose predictions have come true and yet nobody pays attention to them. Because they said similar things about domestic affairs. If you read what Hoover or Taft said about Social Security and you read the papers for the last several months, you would know something about prophecy. They had very wide experience. They knew what they were talking about about Social Security or any of the other welfare and New Deal measures that have been put in. And they understood foreign policy. They understood the distinction between law and legislation. And they predicted that World War II could be short and the Soviet Union denied rewards and growth from it that communism would not expand if America stayed out of the war. But America going into the war with America's great industrial capacity, its great goodwill, would have the unintended consequences of prolonging the war. Prolonging the war would destroy society after society and as a consequence of destroying those societies, the only beneficiaries would be communism. Before Hayek or before Leone they had already seen in foreign affairs the opposition between war and legislation on the one hand and peace and law on the other. And they saw the concept of unintended consequences. And so when World War II came to an end, World War II with the massive American contribution, massive American goodwill translated into massive economic power, the consequence was that another billion people came under communist control. And they predicted that continuing that approach to foreign policy would lead to further gains by the communists. And those gains did occur, most especially in Vietnam where both Hoover and Taft warned against American intervention for the same reasons. That America's good intentions would have disastrous results. That the power of American economic and military activity in a prolonged war would so destroy society that people would turn to communism as the salvation. At the moment we see a great conflict going on in American politics, a conflict between legislators. The Democratic Party is par excellence the party of legislators. They love legislation on domestic and foreign issues. Although at the moment I would consider Senator Dole at the very bottom of any political totem pole morally and politically. He's the most despicable man in the Senate today. Yet in 1976 election when he ran for vice president he enunciated an important truth. That all four wars in the 20th century were democratic wars. The Democratic Party being the party par excellence of legislation applies that in foreign affairs. The Democratic Party is the party of foreign interventionism. And the consequences have been four horrible wars. The Republican Party has had a tradition based on William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, Robert A. Taft of much less legislative approach. Unfortunately the Republican administration is an administration that consciously embraced in the campaign and afterwards Democratic policymakers. Many of the important defense and state department officials are people who were Democrats and who thought the Democratic Party was insufficiently interventionist. And who supported Reagan and were rewarded by him. So we have the very horrible situation where neither political party stands for the important American tradition of law. Both stand for legislation. Now as in many other things a crisis of that sort at the same time provides an opportunity. That is the libertarian party is in a position to occupy that mainstream position that neither of the major parties is presently occupied. It is able to appeal to that large segment of the population who are independents, who do not find the Democratic Party's interventionism to their liking and at the same time do not find the Republican Party culturally to their liking. The Republican Party represents a very minuscule part of the population. More than half the population identify themselves as independents because they do not like either of the political parties. Of the rest the Democrats represent about a third of the population and then the Republicans a much smaller segment. And the reason is the Republicans in themselves people do not like to be associated with the Republicans they don't like the Republican Party and its leaders. Nevertheless in national elections the independents vote Republican more than they vote for the Democrats that is for president. Because the Democratic candidates are so horrible and they have no choice and so they have to support the likes of Eisenhower or Nixon or Reagan. And so there is this huge segment this 50% or more of the population who hate the Republican and Democratic parties. They do not affiliate with them in the opinion polls and who in the opinion polls indicate a strong dislike for legislation. So that a political party that enunciates the concept of law and opposes the concept of legislation consistently both on domestic and foreign policies can have a strong opportunity to reach the voting public. Thank you.