 We're going to begin the conference with the Lew Church Memorial Lecture. The Mises Institute is proud to present the Lew Church Memorial Lecture in Religion and Economics. It's made possible by the Lew Church Educational Foundation, whose chairman is Dr. Robert D. Hemholt. This annual lecture seeks to honor the late Lew Church, who was a Florida businessman and advocate of liberty, and the ideas to which he was dedicated. Starting out as a swimming pool cleaner, Mr. Church eventually established successful businesses in swimming pool construction and the restaurant and travel industries. So he was a real entrepreneur. It's Austrian economics in action. Through it all, he dedicated himself to the value of the free market, private property, free association, entrepreneurship, and liberty, realizing that big government threatened not only the free enterprise system, but all that is good about America. Our 2014 Lew Church Memorial Lecture is Judge Andrew P. Napolitano. The title of his lecture will be The Pope, The Constitution, and Economics. Judge Napolitano is a graduate of Princeton University and the University of Notre Dame Law School. He is the youngest, life-tenured, superior court judge in the history of the state of New Jersey. He sat on the bench from 1987 to 1995. Judge Napolitano taught constitutional law and juris prudence at Delaware Law School for two years and at Seton Hall Law School for 11 years. He returned to private practice in 1995 and began television work in the same year. As Fox News senior judicial analyst since 1998, Judge Napolitano broadcast nationwide daily on the Fox News channel and Fox Business Network. He is nationally known for watching and reporting on the government as it interferes with personal liberty and private property. Judge Napolitano has published in The New York Times The Wall Street Journal and numerous other publications. His weekly newspaper column is hosted by The Washington Times and numerous internet venues and is seen by millions every week. The judge is also a distinguished visiting professor of law at Brooklyn Law School, where he teaches advanced courses on the Constitution. He's also, and I'm proud to say this, a distinguished scholar in law and jurisprudence at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, where he teaches constitutional law to future economists. The judge is the author of seven books on the US Constitution, two of which have been New York Times bestsellers. His most recent book is Theodore and Woodrow, How Two American Presidents Destroyed Constitutional Freedom. His eighth book Suicide Packed, The Radical and Unconstitutional Expansion of Presidential Power After 9-Eleven, will be published by New York University Law School, I'm sorry, as a review article by New York University Law School, and by Harper Collins as a book in the spring of 2014. So please give a warm welcome to my good friend and New Jersey compatriot, Judge Napolitano. Thank you, my dear friends. Very nice to be here. The last time I spoke here at the Mises University in the summer and was giving a series of classes on the Constitution with an emphasis on the commerce clause, there were some people in the room and I didn't know who they were. And Lou Rockwell pulled a little bit of a trick on me. So don't worry about these people in the room because they're townsfolk. There are people that want to audit the class. They want to see what you have to say and maybe you can teach them something really. No, don't pay any attention to them. Now, I was new to the folks who run Mises. So I accepted what he told me. Of course, it turned out that this was a plot between him and Solano because the people in the room were the remaining members of the faculty of Mises University who at the end of the week asked me to join. And I am indeed of the nice things that have happened to me in my life, many of which were just recounted so lovingly by my dear friend and fellow Jerseyite, Joe Solano. Moved more than I can say to be the only non-economist on the faculty here. All right, so I'm walking down the street the other day. I leave a restaurant in Lower Manhattan. This is about two months ago when we had the polar vortex up there. And it was, you know, a single digit weather. And I see this, I'm with a friend who works with me at Fox who just had dinner. And I see a character walking toward me who's wearing three or four coats and a hoodie and a scarf over the mouth. So really it's just the eyes. And he's just sort of waddling towards us and he's walking a dog. And the dog has three legs. I'm thinking myself, now I know somebody with a three-legged dog. Who is this? And the guy is jabbering away on the phone. And I hear him say on the phone, not Boletano like that. Oh, what the hell is this? And then I remember, who do I know has a three-legged dog, John Stewart? I ripped the hoodie off. There he is. John, how are you? We hug and kiss in the streets. The other Fox people with me are like, we didn't believe what we're watching. He said, why don't you come on the show in the next couple of weeks? Great, great. What should we do? Let's find something that nobody could disagree on. What? What do you want to talk about? Oh, something that the whole world agrees on. John, you pick the topic. All right, John. How about Lincoln? You expect me to agree with you on Lincoln, John? At this point, we are really freezing because it's five degrees in New York City and this conversation is going on in the street corner. So fast forward about a month later, I don't know if you saw this experience that I had on the Daily Show where they did a quiz show, a game show about Lincoln. They gave us the questions ahead of time. Of course, they didn't ask all the questions they gave us and they asked some questions they hadn't given us and they had three Marxists who hold themselves out as experts in the Civil War era as a panel to decide whether or not my answers were correct. And at the end of this gig, one of them, a real, real notorious, the fantasist who actually at one point suggested to Mikhail Gorbachev that he should kill people in the streets in Eastern Europe before he would let them secede from the Soviet Union. So you know where this guy's coming from. He looks at me and he goes, do you know Tom DeLorenzo? And I said, well, yes, I do, professor. He's the foremost Lincoln scholar in the country right now. And before he came along, that nonsense that you just spouted on the show went unchecked. And now you have to find footnotes and you can't find them. Anyway, it's an interesting experience every time you're with John. I saw some people cringe a little bit when Salerno said the Pope. I mean, I put the Pope in the title of this talk because I planned to talk about religion and economic freedom. And the present occupant of what we Catholics call the Petrine Ministry, one of the many, many titles for the Holy Father is not exactly a fan of free market economics. So much so that I'm gonna tell you what happened to me. Normally, if you're Catholic, you don't reveal this but I will reveal what happened to me in a confessional booth. Now Catholics believe that what used to be called confession and now it's a progressive name like the sacrament of reconciliation. Not only wipes out mortal sin but returns grace to the soul which the soul enjoyed prior to the sin. And I am making my confession to a priest that has known me for 40 years and in the old pre-Vatican to tradition, it's face to face, there's no screen there. So he gave me a penance which I really thought was a little stiff. Now normally a penance, some little bit of mortification to atone for your sins is typically one our father, two Hail Marys, go smile and be happy at somebody you hate. Something to sort of amend your ways a little bit. I'm gonna tell you what I confessed but you're gonna think that I must have slaughtered some people because the confession was 15 rosaries. Now to say the rosary 15 times on your knees probably consumes if you do it right about an hour and a half. So this is really, really brutal. What the heck could I have confessed that would have justified 15 rosaries? Here's what it was. I said, father, I have been praying that when the pope dies, he goes directly to heaven. Priest said to me, well, that's wonderful but why do you confess this? This is hardly a sin. This is something that is meritorious. He scratches his head. Unless, dear Andrew, there was a time element in your prayer. When do you want the pope to go directly to heaven? Tonight. 15 rosaries before you can receive the Blessed Sacrament. Now why did I say that about the pope? I mean, I'm kidding about this obviously and I know this is gonna be on YouTube now because Rockwell is taping it. Fox Judge calls for the pope to die. I mean, these crackpot media matters people out there can twist anything you say. I say this as a pre-Vatican to Roman Catholic who recognizes that he is the vicar of Christ on earth, juridically authorized to speak infallibly. Thank God, so to speak, he can only speak infallibly on faith and morals and not on economics. Because when he has spoken on economics, what he said doesn't make sense. Now I wrote a piece about this and in the piece I referred to the pope's statement as an encyclical. Now leave it to David Gordon, a practicing Jew, to remind me that it wasn't an encyclical, it was a papal exhortation. And I took great delight in being corrected on this by my dear friend and brilliant superstar, David Gordon, who knows more about Catholicism than half the Roman Catholic hierarchy in the United States. But in this papal exhortation, the pope said things like, it is taking the poor too long to become rich. They have been waiting too long. Whereupon I said, well, if all they do is wait, they will never become rich. Your holiness, more of them have become rich by the capitalist system than by any other system devised by man. And your holiness, the fewer government regulations, the faster they can become rich. I mean, I'm not making this up, this is basic economics. I really do want you to go to heaven and I want you to save souls and not pocketbooks. If you read more of this exhortation, you get the impression that the pope is very interested in a relationship between the government and the free market, which the government calls taxation and which I call theft, so that the income can be redistributed and somehow he, and it's not just him, I'm not just picking on him, but he did issue this exhortation, believes that by redistribution of wealth, somehow the recipients of the redistributed wealth will add to the wealth and themselves become wealthy. Obviously, we know this doesn't work at all. He seemed more enamored with a system of government in which there is private ownership and government control. Well, that's called fascism or government ownership and government control. Well, that's called socialism. I mean, when he was asked by an interviewer what is the worst problem in the world, now think about it, what is the worst problem in the world? The pope answered, youth unemployment. Well, now that is a problem. In certain cities in the United States, certain inner city areas, youth unemployment is 25 and 30%, but can't you think of a problem that is worse in the world? Obviously, the pope eventually thought of one because this statement, youth unemployment, was removed from the Vatican website. How about moral relativism? How about sectarian violence? How about war? How about Vladimir Putin? I mean, you can think of many things that are a worse problem in the world than youth unemployment. But the pope persisted in this apostolic exhortation to criticize the virtues of Catholicism and to do so making an argument from Catholic social justice teaching. Now, Catholic social justice teaching teaches that I am my brother's keeper, that it is my responsibility to part with my wealth, that I do have an obligation to help the less fortunate, that I should give wealth or instruction to the poor, whether I give them cash or whether I give them a fishing rod and teach them how to fish. But every single one of the pope's predecessors who made these arguments argued that this should be done from my heart and not by the command of the government. I mean, what merit is it if the government takes tax dollars from me against my will and gives that money away? That's no credit to me, but if I voluntarily comply with the Judeo-Christian obligation of sharing my wealth, I do so voluntarily, there's the merit. One should not boast about it, but one should do it privately. All right, holy father, before you were the pope, you were Archbishop of Buenos Aires, so you're home one night and there's a knock at the door and a guy shows up and he's got a gun and he says, give me your money. I wanna give it away. You think to yourself, this is a crackpot. Who the heck wants to steal my money to give it away? I'm gonna call the government. I'm gonna call the police whereupon you learn that this guy is the police. He is there to perpetuate the system of stealing from those who produce wealth and distributing to those who don't produce wealth as if the perpetuation of that somehow has a positive economic benefit. As if after all the years government has been doing that, we would learn that it has a negative economic benefit to the self-motivation of the recipient and to the wealth of the recipient. I wrote a piece about this called The Pope and Basic Economics. I write these columns every Thursday they're on lourockwell.com and the print version is at the Washington Times and I usually get a lot of comments from all over the country and other way people weigh in today on the internet. And I got more comments on this piece than any other that I've written including, and you gotta remember, emails never died, including from some members of the Catholic hierarchy, including from some archbishops whose name underpain of something far worse than 15 Rosaries, I have agreed never, ever, ever to reveal. But in this piece, I made what I thought are pretty simple arguments about capitalism generating opportunity, about capitalism elevating hardworking people from the poor to the middle class and from the middle class to more wealth, about the essence of capitalism being freedom, freedom to risk, freedom to work, freedom to save, freedom to create and freedom to retain the wealth that you have acquired and to distribute it as you see fit. Because charity, and here the Holy Father agrees with me, must come from the heart, not from a gun, not from the government, but from the heart. And I get a phone call from a friend of mine who was a colleague of mine at Fox and it was our Rome correspondent and during the papacy of Benedict the 16th, this friend of mine left Fox and became the head of the PR office for the Vatican. And he's still the head of the PR office for the Vatican, even though Benedict the 16th is now Pope Emeritus. And he called me, he said, I don't want you to tell anybody this, but your piece about the Pope was translated into Spanish and I saw it on his desk. What do you want me to do? He says, well, this Pope is a little like Bill Clinton. I said, what? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. This Pope was a little like Bill Clinton in that he'll pick up the telephone at any time day or night and make a phone call. So look, judge, if you get a phone call in broken Spanish and the guy claims to be the Pope, it probably is him. He's like, you cannot make this up. I'm still waiting for the phone call. I don't expect the phone call. I said the 15 Rosaries and then went to my orthopedic surgeon to have my knees examined and my therapist to have my legs stretched out. I'm being a little cavalier. I am enormously respectful of Holy Mother Church and of the papacy, but I'm also respectful of the concept of freedom and to suggest that we should divest ourselves of freedom by some unholy, bizarre, perverse regressive alliance with the government and to suggest that that even remotely would alleviate poverty is itself a poverty of understanding of basic economics. Not too long ago, Timothy Cardinal Dolan was celebrating Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral when all of a sudden he felt a drop of water on his right shoulder. Now he looked up and of course you can barely see the roof. It's 65 feet from the altar to the roof of St. Patrick's, but he thought, well, all right, there's not a person up there, there's not a bird up there. There must be a leak. So they dispatched some engineers up there to find the leak and they found it and they found a lot more leaks and they dispatched another crew of engineers up there and they found more leaks and they gave his eminence an estimate that it would cost about 150 to 175 million dollars to repair the roof. And then as they began to repair the roof, they found other structural deficiencies in this magnificent cathedral and the bill was a slightly north of 200 million dollars. The bill has been paid. Cardinal Dolan raised the money in six months. Now we're back to his holiness and the papal exhortation against capitalism. Where do you think that money came from? Come on. Decidedly not from the government. It came from rich Catholic and non-Catholic capitalists. And where did the money go to? To mainly blue collar, hardworking people that went up on the roof to repair it and the small business people who sold them the materials necessary to effectuate the repair. It was an almost perfect system and as a result, almost anybody, Catholic, non-Catholic, traditionalist Catholic, progressive Catholic can now attend mass in this magnificent cathedral without water coming down on their shoulder because of capitalism. All right, so that's the sort of church side of what I wanna talk about and I'll try and tie it in at the end to the constitutional side. Scholars have typically pointed to two areas, two clauses in the constitution to demonstrate the textual support for the belief that the framers were laissez-faire capitalists. There's a lot of history under the Articles of Confederation that we could go through and it's an ugly history from the point of view of capitalism because it is a history centered around monopolies and cartels and tariffs. And one of the reasons for the constitution was to remove monopolies and cartels and tariffs, which as you know cannot come about without the government because the individual 13 colonies now states had set these up. So if I'm making a barrel or a wooden wheelbarrow or barrels that you would store goods in in Hoboken, I can sell them and make a profit in Hoboken. But if I wanna put them on a boat and sell them in New York City, the tariff is so high that nobody in New York would buy from me, they would buy it from a barrel maker in New York City. And the purpose of the tariff of course is protectionist to protect the local industry. We all know what happens when there's tariffs, there's retaliation and the price of everything goes up. This really got out of control at about the time of the Articles of Confederation. And even though the Articles provided a mechanism for their own amendment, instead of amending them, we are, the Framers met in Philadelphia in the summer of eight 1787 and disregarded why they were sent there and wrote an entirely new constitution. Now we all have some problems with the constitution. It recognized slavery, it recognized the slave trade. It continued to repress women. It used certain elastic language from which we suffer egregiously today as a result of the inordinate aggrandizement of power, the hands of the federal government. But there are several clauses in the constitution which I have argued and many agree with me, manifest a determination by the Framers to have a free market capitalism protected by the government. One of those is the ninth amendment which basically says, hey, we've listed a lot of rights in the eight amendments that preceded this, but we know we couldn't possibly list all the rights. So just because we've listed some freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to self-defense, second amendment as an aside, not written to protect your right to shoot deer, but written to protect your right to shoot at the government when it is taken over by tyrants. The enumeration of these rights in the first eight amendments, the ninth tells us is not an exclusive enumeration. And the ninth addresses the inherent rights that people have by virtue of their humanity. Scholars today refer to that as the natural law, which basically says we have certain gifts as a result of our humanity, either because if you don't believe in God, we are the highest and greatest living, existing creatures on the planet, or if you do believe in God, as I do, because we receive them as gifts from him. And as he made us in his image and likeness, he gave us the same thing that he is endowed with which is freedom. So when I teach law school in the first day, I always say if the states ratified an amendment to repeal the first amendment, Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. If that was gone, do we still have the freedom of speech? And of course, every hand goes up and says, no, if the first amendment is gone, we don't. And I say, well, you gotta read some history and a little bit of philosophy. You certainly have to read the ninth amendment because the freedom of speech is a natural right which comes from our humanity. It's also a negative right in that the document doesn't say Congress shall grant freedom of speech. It's not Congress is to grant. It says Congress shall not infringe the freedom of speech which of course suggests that the framers knew it existed before the government did. Among the rights not enumerated in the first eight amendments is the right to trade, the right to sell a good or service and the right to do so consensually, unimpeded by the government. I have a good or service that I want to sell. You have a need for that good or service and we agree upon the price. You pay me the price, I give you the good or service. We both go home. We both believe that we are richer. I have money in the bank or in my pocket or in a shoebox under my bed. You have the good or the service with which to fulfill your needs or your family's needs or your business's needs. So the Ninth Amendment is one place to which we look for support for the argument of free market capitalism. We would also look to the contracts clause which is a clause in the pushing of the Constitution talking about the authority of the states and the contracts clause says the states may not impair contracts. Well, think of what's become of that today. The leading case is one called Homebuilding and Loan versus Blaisdell, a 1934 case out of Minnesota in which we're in the height of the Depression now so it's the early 1930s and the Minnesota legislature in its infinite wisdom enacted legislation that prohibited all home foreclosures. So if you know that the bank can't foreclose on your mortgage and you're not paying the mortgage, why continue to pay it? So as a result of this legislation, people stopped paying their mortgages and almost all the banks in Minnesota went out of business as a result of this legislation. But the Homebuilding and Loan challenged it and its challenge was articulated on the contracts clause. If the states cannot interfere with a contract and if this contract between the Blaisdells and Homebuilding and Loan was a freely negotiated for a contract, you wanna buy that house costs $120,000, you have the 20, we're gonna loan you the 100, fine, but if you don't pay us back, we can take the house, you agree to this, you agree to it in writing, this is a system we've used for 600 years, all of a sudden the state's gonna come in and say you cannot enforce the remedy in the contract and the Supreme Court sided with Minnesota, which of course accelerated even more banks in going out of business because then even more people stopped paying their mortgages because they knew that there would be no remedy. What was the Supreme Court's argument? Well, the Supreme Court's argument was we are, the legislature of Minnesota did not interfere with the contract. It only interfered with the remedy, which is for closure. Now, this type of nitpicking when discussed in any group of intelligent people here, a law school classroom, a gathering of judges except for wherever the progressives are and unfortunately they're everywhere except here. It is always met with the same reaction that you just uttered and articulated. I mean, this is ridiculous. If the legislature can interfere with the remedy of a contract freely negotiated for, then the legislature has materially and substantially interfered with the contract and that violates the Constitution. Well, from and after home building and loan versus Blaisdell, there are literally hundreds of cases in which federal courts have permitted state interference with contract. If you come to me in New Jersey and ask me to perform some legal service for you and we agree on the price, that all has to be in accordance with the government's regulations, not any agreement between us. So obviously, this part of the Constitution has been disregarded along with the Ninth Amendment. The last, well, there's two more parts of the Constitution. The due process close to the Fifth Amendment says that if the government wants to take life, liberty or property, it must do so pursuant to due process. Now, what does that mean? Well, that means that the government can't just steal your property by suddenly declaring itself the owner. The Congress couldn't enact legislation that said that lovely building on Magnolia Avenue in Auburn, Alabama is now the property of the United States government. It would either have to pay a fair market value for it or it would have to enact a tax. And if it enacts a tax, the tax has to be similar in severity and wait to similarly situated taxpayers. So the Fifth Amendment says that if the government wants your property, it would have to tax you pursuant to some fair system, though, of course, income taxes at the time, blessedly, were prohibited under the original Constitution, or it would have to charge you in a court of law with having broken a law where the penalty that was prescribed before it says you broke the law was the loss of the property. The Fifth Amendment also provides for government takings. Now, in the Philadelphia in 1787, they had a monumental debate about takings. This is the opportunity of the government to take private property for public use. Jefferson wasn't there, but Madison made the Jeffersonian argument. Hamilton and Adams were there and they made the George III argument. Hamilton and Adams argued that the government should be able to take whatever property it wants for whatever reason it wants and not have to pay anything. Jefferson argued, again, he wasn't there, he was in Paris, so we believe from Madison's notes that Madison made this argument. Madison argued that under the natural law, the only moral transaction is one that is truly consensual and therefore if you don't want to sell your property to the government for a public use, you don't have to, no matter what the purported public use or no matter what the money the government offers you because your right to own and retain and use and enjoy private property is a higher moral good than the right of the government, in this case the majority, to take that property and to distribute it for public use. Hence the compromise. The compromise is the government can take whatever it wants as long as it's for a public use but the government has to pay a fair market price for it. So from these areas of the Constitution, legal scholars and even Supreme Court justices prior to the time of the Civil War accepted the prevailing legal theories that the government had no place attempting to regulate the free market. The same time that that theory prevailed, the popes in Rome were writing in sickle calls about Catholic social justice theory, every single one of which imposed the burden on individuals for compliance rather than on the government to coerce compliance. Now fast forward to where we are today and we are in an unhappy place. I don't mean here, but this is a very, very happy place. But culturally, socially, legally, constitutionally we are in an extremely unhappy place and I haven't even uttered yet the letters NSA. You know, when I talk about the NSA, I usually start like this. If you have, by the way, I was at a dinner party the other night and Fox wanted me and this thing went off, it's a blackberry and I took it out and you would have thought that I took out a buggy whip with the people at this dinner table. You still use a blackberry at Fox? There's 2,000 employees there. How many people have blackberries, about five of us. But anyway, I say to the audiences when I'm gonna talk about the NSA, if you have your blackberry or iPhone or Android with you, take it out and leave the battery, make sure the battery is in there. Because I want President Obama and the NSA to hear everything I'm about to say. Now if your device is more than a year old, I'm looking at the young people here because they get new devices every six weeks, if your device is more than a year old, if you take the battery out, the NSA cannot access it. But if your device is less than a year old, there is a computer chip in there which will give the NSA access even if the battery is not in the device. Can the NSA hear what we say from these? Yes, as long as it is not muffled or hidden. When Edward Snowden spoke to reporters in his hotel room in Singapore, he collected all of their blackberries and iPhones and put them in the refrigerator of the room in which he was meeting because he knows and I can tell you that a refrigerator will generally frustrate the ability of the NSA to use your own blackberry, blackberry or iPhone as a listening device. Back to where we are today. I mean, where we are today is one where Uber regulation is the norm and when you make the free market argument, you are looked upon as an odd duck. I mean, there are three members of the United States Senate who are Republicans and get excoriated every time they make a free market argument. Mike Lee, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz. And Rand Paul is, I believe, a very, very serious candidate for the presidency of the United States and I believe that he will bring together a lot of freedom-loving people who have never voted for a Republican in their lives to vote for him. But this will require an understanding of natural rights which transcends anything that we have seen in the government since the time of the Civil War. Oh, there have been some bright spots. There were areas in the early FDR years when the Supreme Court was invalidating the New Deal. There's a famous 1903 case called Lochner Against New York in which Mr. Lochner owned a bakery and the legislature of the state of New York and its wisdom said you can't work more than 60 hours a week even if you want to. And Mr. Lochner was actually indicted for employing people more than 60 hours a week who wanted to make the money. They actually agreed to live on the premises where this bakery occurred. There were several apartments on the premises and Lochner was convicted of paying people more money and employing them for more hours than the legislature and its wisdom said you could pay them or employ them for. And the case went to the Supreme Court which invalidated the statute on free market and on natural rights grounds. This is one of the greatest decisions in the history of the United States Supreme Court. Of course it was invalidated about 30 years later with the onset of the New Deal and is now referred to derisively. Oh my goodness, a judge decided that something was unfair. A judge decided that an individual had natural rights and the legislature interfered with them while that judge is guilty of Lochnerizing. No, I am not making this word up. The great judge John Denson who sits in the third row here will tell you if you really, really want to insult a judge don't say your mother wears combat boots. Say I saw you Lochnerizing. And in these high end academic legal circles that's one of the worst things you can be accused of. And what is it? Finding natural rights and keeping the government at bay. So where does this bring us? We obviously have a battle on our hands for human freedom. The battle is not only in the sphere of privacy NSA but it's in the sphere of economics which is why you are all here this weekend. And it's a battle for the hearts and minds of people in the United States of America. I believe that if Rand Paul is elected president of the United States that means that there is a mandate for him to dismantle much of the government apparatus and that mandate will be manifested in members of Congress as well. This is not gonna happen where you have a libertarian in the White House and a Congress or Senate filled with Republican neocons and Democratic progressives. Some of them will still be there but presumably there will be many, many people in the Congress who will agree with this libertarian in the White House because all of this will happen by an awakening amongst the public that enough is enough. And it's time that we returned to an attitude manifested by the Ninth Amendment and the contracts clause and the due process clause which asserts that the individual is greater than the state and the right of a human being to utilize property to exclude whoever he wants from the property which means even the government is a higher right than the majority to take that property. I mean the definition of a natural right is an area of human behavior immune from governmental interference no matter how beneficial the government claims the interference will be. There is still some recognition of natural rights even among the progressives for privacy and speech and the press but there is no recognition for natural rights in our laws today, state, local and federal for economic liberties. That will require a Herculean effort to bring them back. That Herculean effort begins at gatherings like this one.