 In presenting Murray to you is a teacher, scholar, writer, professor, editor of the libertarian forum, but of as many books that we just give you one title, the latest, I believe, The Ethics of Liberty. I think that will do for this audience. It's a pleasure for me to call on Dr. Murray and Rothward to deliver the keynote address of the world libertarian, first world libertarian convention, the Bertha Theory, 82. Okay, Murray. See, one prophecy turned out to be incorrect. I'm here, none of my birthday soups, everything was fixed up by the authorities, the hotel, whatever. Well, it's a great pleasure and privilege to be here and it's a really great honor to deliver the keynote address of the first world libertarian international in my own irreverent terms. I could call it the liberty term, but I think I won't do that. The first problem I was confronted with in giving a keynote address to this group is, how can I speak trans-culturally? I don't know how many nations are represented here, but quite a large number and how can I speak to people, each one of whom has a different culture, a different national history, a different history of the movement. And how can I meaningfully talk to trans-nationally or trans-culturally to the libertarians? Okay, the first answer to that was easy. First answer is the libertarianism itself, of course, is international, it's trans-national. It's cosmopolite. The glorious idea of liberty, of a free market and a free society is universal, as not dependent on culture or time or place. For that ideal is based on the nature and on the rights of man, of human beings, wherever they exist. So we have this, of course, this one great common language, so to speak, or common terminology of common concepts, which is libertarianism itself. Okay, then I thought I would try to work out for this gathering, at least the beginning of a theory of stages of the libertarian movement. A theory which we might be able to apply to every country, regardless of how small or how advanced the movement might be in the particular country. I'm not saying, of course, that these stages are inevitable, that one must always go from one to the other, but I think every movement will pass through one stage, one, two, et cetera. Okay, the first stage, in any given country or region or area or city, the first stage, the movement necessarily begins always with one person. One person has an idea. One isolated individual somehow discovers libertarianism, how he or she does it, it can happen in many different ways, by reading, by listening to something, by thinking, or whatever. So we have one solitary libertarian living isolated in one particular country or region. In the United States, such a person's often called a lone nut. So stage one is the lone nut stage. I think of states that were rabies or such as myself, of course, went through the lone nut stage, and many people here probably have. I was a lone nut in the 1940s. That was my lone nut period, probably earlier than that, too. Okay, so the lone nut continues on in the Gatfly status, arguing with people, being a pest, whatever, learning more about libertarianism. And finally, a great moment arrives in the lone nut's development. He or she finds another lone nut. Now this is a tremendous thing. This could be either sex. It could be the lone nut either finds or converts another libertarian. This is a great moment in each person's development. And now we have two lone nuts. Of course, it's much more effective and much happier than one lone nut. We have two friends, buddies, comrades, who pal around together, who discuss these great ideas that they've just learned about, sit up all night discussing them, and so forth and so on. So now we have the stage two, the buddy stage, of the pair, the two lone nuts together stage. At this point, I should say something about the conversion process. If indeed the first lone nut converted the second lone nut. Because, of course, conversion is crucial in the growth of the libertarian movement or of any movement. I think that most conversions, there are many ways that conversions can take place and have taken place. But I think that most conversions occur not by verbal bludgeoning or by high pressure tactics, but by the convert, either hearing or reading or whatever. It's something which he feels or a statement or statements which he feels or she feels with a sort of a shock of recognition to be articulating something that he believed down deep for many years. Gee, I always believed that. I just couldn't put it into words. I keep finding every libertarian after libertarian who says that. How did you, especially in the early days of the movement, we find another libertarian and we say, Jesus, how did you become a libertarian? Like, how did you become a deep sea diver or whatever? And the person would say, well, I came across this or read this or heard this and I said to myself, I believe this all my life and I never articulated it. So I think this is crucial to the conversion process. Okay, so we have these two buddies, either the first long nut found or converted to the second buddy. And the third buddy comes. That third convert appears. Now this growth from two to three, this is stage three in the development of the movement. Growth from two to three is not just a 50% increase. Of course it is a 50% increase quantitatively. There's much more than that because one person is a lone nut, two people are two lone nuts, three people, that's already a school of thought. Has a much bigger impact on life around them than two people. Gee, three people believe this crazy thing. Maybe there's something to it. So now we have a school of thought. We have a little group. And it seems to me, at least my experience has been, my observation has been, once you have three people, it's pretty easy to get six or seven. And then we have six or seven, you're now in stage four of the movement, which the study group stage or what the Marxist call the circle stage of the movement development. You have now a circle, group of people, six, seven, eight, nine, whatever. Become libertarians and boy, boy, this is fantastic. And also there's ramifications of this and they study and they meet on a regular basis as a study group. They read, they discuss long into the night and so forth and so on. They get in touch, they read libertarian classics, maybe they put out a little newsletter. They get in touch with libertarian groups in other countries or other regions, other cities. And so we have this circle stage. I, myself, was in the circle stage during the 1950s in New York City. We had a little group of six or seven hardcore friends and colleagues and about three or four hangers on, which we call the circle Bastia, which of course ramifies to all of you. Okay, so that was our circle. And I think this is, again, the circle stage, I think as happens in every movement and libertarianism. In the circle stage, as I say, we have regular meetings. You tend to meet once a week once, whatever. And there are discussions and arguments and theoretical refinements and so forth. But one thing you must say, one thing that happens, of course, all sorts of disagreements will occur in our six or seven people, you're bound to have at least eight opinions. If not more. But one thing among the differences, first of all, all differences tend to be, how should we put it? I wouldn't say unimportant but lovable. In other words, somebody says, I'm the favor of dolphin rights. Well, okay, this is, we have a, we have a nutty pal here who's the favor of dolphin rights. But it doesn't really become a strategic significance one way or the other. As a matter of fact, strategy is one problem that never arises in the circle stage of development. Nobody accuses anybody else of selling out. You have eight people in a movement. Nobody worries about what, what's strategic, what issues should these eight people talk about first? Nobody talks about leadership selling out. Nobody worries about the training principle because when a movement, if you have six or seven, usually young and usually uninfluential, unknown people, the problem of selling out principle never arises. Okay, it's just a practice, it's usually a problem. It's a matter for big joke, big hilarity. Say, hey, we're gonna sell out tomorrow. Yeah, yeah, right. These six or seven people nobody's ever heard of. Okay, so that's the, by the way, this stage, this circle stage is also usually a force of friendship stage. I mean, it's almost inevitable that circles or six or seven people are gonna be very close friends. And so you have a friendship situation along with, or what's now called an affinity group situation along with a libertarian study group. Okay, and this is very, I would say, this is also a very happy time for most of the people because they found, here they were alone nuts and now they found six or seven people and by God this is fantastic, okay. There's no problems of growth because if the growth occurs, it's usually, in good years it's one a year. If they add one more person to the study group, they're doing very well, okay. Net addition of one, there'll be somebody dropping out. So problems of growth, problems of strategy, just simply do not arise in this situation. Okay, we now have, and of course I'm speaking mostly from the United States experience, it's, we have the largest and most advanced movement. There comes a point, stage five I guess it is, it's this number, number game here. Where something happens to the circles and the circle stage gets transcended into a movement stage or a movement activist stage. I don't know, a proper name for it. Movement activist is one name for it. The movement is so, properly so cool. A mass movement in the sense of a nationwide movement. One, by the way, one sign of whether you're in this nationwide movement or not, whether you're out of the circle stage is very simple. The sign I remember full well, I don't remember the year and this happened to me. In the early stages of the movement, there were like six libertarians in New York, six in California or whatever. You know every libertarian very well in the whole country. That means no problem. And so if any libertarian article comes out, you know this, you know who wrote it, you probably saw the article before it came out so forth and so on. One of the hallmarks of the leap into movement, to the mass movement stage is when you see, hey, this is a pretty good article. Who the hell is this? Who wrote it? You don't know who this libertarian is who wrote it. This is a very key, significant point. Something happened, bell goes on in your head so to speak because this is, the shows of the movement is in what Rostow called take-off stage of development. When the movement begins to take off very rapidly. Okay, there's many, of course, many movements just stay at the circle stage forever and definitely. Others leap out of it as the United States movement did. I think I would date these take-off stage of the American United States movement. Two famous dates, I think. One is the summer of 1969 when the conservative young Americans for freedom, the campus group, split into the libertarian wing and the traditionalist wing over the draft question of our fact. And libertarians were all either kicked out or left yaft and began to think of themselves for the first time as separate, self-conscious libertarians rather than conservatives. It's completely separate from conservatives. That was one big step. And the next big step in the take-off stage was early 1971 when the New York Times highlighted this growing movement for the first time in the Sunday Magazine section of the front cover. And by doing that, of course, it tremendously accelerated the growth of the movement since the media interacts with the, especially the New York Times, New York Times says that it must be important, that sort of thing. It said it self-accelerated the growth of the movement. Okay, so this growth out of the circle stage, of course, is a magnificent thing. I mean, it's a great, it's a fantastic, unbelievable thing. It's a wondrous shock, matter of fact. And it does, however, cause problems, okay? It causes psychological problems and organizational problems. The growth out of the circle stage might be called Kierkegaardian terms, a leap of will or a leap in being. Okay, it's a tremendous qualitative as well as quantitative leap. All right, so I'm gonna talk about that for a bit. The, if the, okay, if the movement is lucky, as I said, I have this take-off stage, which is highly exhilarating, of course, but can be troublesome, all right. Before this, as I said, on the circle stage, you made one convert a year. Now people are suddenly converting all the time. People pop up everywhere. Who are these people? Call themselves libertarians, okay? And one of the immediate problem of that is, before this, all libertarians were close friends. Okay, it's an affinity group or friendship group situation. Now, all of a sudden, people are popping up who you don't wanna receive in your own home, right? This is a big psychological shock. See, before this, boy, this person is libertarian. You take them into your home, you're wine and dynamism is fantastic. Every libertarian is ipso facto, a great person, great lovable person. As more libertarians flood in, you begin to find well, a tremendous, tremendous shock of, unfortunate shock, this time of recognition, that there are a lot of libertarians and not great and lovable people, okay? This is, because in the early days of the libertarians, as I say, because of the circle stage, I think. The early stages, one tends to think that all libertarians are great, okay? Then, as I say, a shock occurs, and you begin to realize that there are people and there are a lot of jerks out there who are also libertarians. I think there's a point here that there's probably, I think I can safely say, there'll probably no higher proportion of great and lovable people in our movement than there are anywhere else. I know it's a terrible thing to say. I'm gonna say it. I think being libertarian makes us libertarians, all right, but it confers no special grace in other areas of life, all right? Or to put it another way, libertarian movement doesn't promise us a rose garden. It only promises liberty, but by God, that's enough, okay? So, that is an adjustment shock to get across. I remember in the first days, early stages of libertarian movement in the United States, there was a theory, you should always deal with libertarians in business world. You should always hire libertarians first, deal with them in business, because since they're libertarian, there must be rational, able, capable, and so forth and so on. That theory was shot down very quickly. So, that's simply a fact as a division of labor, all right, and libertarianism, as I say, confers no special grace for other aspects of life. We like to think it does, but it doesn't, all right. Okay, there are other inevitable problems and leap into activism. Strategy, which was previously a matter for high jokes and high jinks and all that, suddenly becomes a real problem, okay? Now, most people in the circle stage, and you're seven or eight people, you don't think about strategy, don't worry about it. What should we do first, and how should we go out again, selling out and so forth? The whole thing is ludicrous, even to think about in terms in the 1960s or 1970s in that period. But all of a sudden, when you're now a mass movement, becomes an important problem, and furthermore, it's a problem that nobody thought about up till then. So, it's sort of a shock problem. Okay, the, also, well, and there are several aspects to this, which I'll go into. One is, in the movement stage, theoretical differences become invested with importance that you didn't have before. The lovable eccentric, who's in favor of outlawing circumcision, is child mutilation. Suddenly becomes a threat, right? You don't want the organized movement to call for the outlawing of circumcision, presumably. Comes at least an embarrassment, if not a threat to our organized movement. The person in favor of dolphin rights becomes something that has to be dealt with, gingerly that. Not with the same open lovability. Okay. So you have, so problems become more serious when the movement stage is reached. And then another problem is also inevitably involved in this. In the circle stage, people enter the movement, first of all, they get assimilated very quickly. There's only one newcomer a year. It's easy to get socialized, so to speak, or assimilated into the group. And most of the newcomers in the circle stage are people who love to sit around talking about theory one night. I certainly did, and every one I knew did in that period. This is the sort of thing where you say, at three in the morning, if somebody, if X owns a gorilla, and the gorilla runs loose and throws Y into Z's plate glass window, who's responsible for the window, for the damage to the window? Is it X, is it Y, is it the gorilla? Okay. These problems occupy a great deal of time during the circle period. But now in the activism period, a new brand of people start coming into the movement. You have mass activism. People are not that interested in theory anymore. Not interested in theoretical discussions. They want to concentrate their energies on stuffy envelopes, or setting up booths at county fairs, or whatever, whatever, okay. And all these other mundane activities that are involved in ideological or political activism. So this is great, except it becomes important to redouble the internal education front. In other words, to make conscious efforts now, to keep principals alive, to keep educational, internal education, reading, discussion, all that stuff, alive in the movement, whereas before you didn't have to keep it alive. It was there, that was it. That was the movement. Now you have a problem getting, sort of artificially getting engendered and making sure it happens. Otherwise the whole thing might die out. You might have people being active while the point of the activity gets lost somewhere in the cloud eight, 10 years back. So in order to keep the movement libertarian, there now becomes important to keep the theoretical vision held up and talked about and even pestered about from time to time, okay. In addition now to the, okay, to the greater importance of theoretical differences and of internal education and the movement stage, new problems pop up. As I said, strategy becomes important now. Even if people, A, B and C are three people, all of whom agree perfectly on all principles, let's say, and all applications, they would probably have differences in strategy or tactics. Which issues should we talk about first? Which issues should we not talk about? So forth and so on. So these become important differences now crop up. Plus you do have a problem now of opportunists willing to sell out, willing to abandon principle, hide principle in order to get quick gains, whatever the quick gains may be, okay. So all these problems now come pouring into a movement which is not prepared for it. There was a movement which is happily sitting around discussing who's responsible and the gorilla gets thrown into the glass window. All of a sudden they're confronted with a whole bunch of these new and upsetting problems. In addition to all that, okay. Organization itself, what we're really talking about here of course is problems involve any organization of any size, okay. Organization itself involves problems. You have, as I say, people have common goals or differ on which goals to stress first or which courses of action to stress first. Resources, of course, are limited, okay. So, and you're gonna have situations where groups of people differ on, honestly differ on tactics and strategy and they're gonna try to battle for their own position. In addition to all that, we have, since we've gone beyond the pure friendship stage where everybody loves everybody else into a situation where it doesn't happen, inevitably gonna have personality conflicts in any large scale movement. So that's another thing which gets added in to the strategy differences, the theoretical problems, so forth and so on. All these things now see zero in, surge in about the same time. In addition to that, if I haven't stressed enough problems so forth in the movement stage, I'm not trying to discourage people from getting into the movement stage, otherwise. I'll point out in a minute. I'm just trying to be realistic and prepare you for what happens as you get into this mass movement area. Another critical problem that occurs with a large scale organized movement is the question of money. Of course, all organizations require money, right? Money is a fuel for any kind of activity. And money itself raises a host of problems per se. Most, many libertarians, if not most libertarians, dream, I think, about becoming full-time libertarians. In other words, wouldn't it be great if I could spend all my energies 24 hours a day advancing the cause of liberty instead of only one weekend or whatever, a weekend a month or only evenings, wouldn't it be great if my career were also libertarian? Now this is, and that's in that case, of course, if this were true, we have a tremendous multiplication of leverage of people who are libertarian, benefiting the cause and expanding the development of liberty. So that's, of course, a very fond hope. In a circle stage, it's totally unrealistic, sort of a dream thing. Boy, wouldn't it be great if I could be full-time libertarian when nobody can buy shoe laces. Okay, but then in the movement stage, we have the movement activist stage, or stage five, and I've talked about, all of a sudden this becomes a realistic possibility. There are full-time libertarians now popping up, okay. And this is important to pop up, because I submit that the, any cause, whatever the cause is, any kind of development of any sort, whether it's the science of astronomy, or the science of physics, or manufacturing computers, or playing chess, anything involves, any cause involves organization, involves some full-time professionals and they are doing it all the time, okay. In other words, no flourishing activity can subsist only on volunteer, volunteer action. I shudder the thing what the state of physics would be, or astronomy, or whatever, resting, if we only rest on an 18th century period, as it did in the 18th century, on only volunteer, or amateur efforts. So we now have a situation, we have a cadre or group of full-time professionals and libertarianism, along with volunteers. This is bound to lead to clashes and all sorts of, and problems, all right. In addition to that, one of the problems which it might lead to is there's often a great temptation for full-time professionals to lose sight of the common objective. In other words, lose sight of advancing the cause of principles of liberty. You start off, let me put it this way, in the early stages of movement activity, movement activism, people found organizations of all sorts, many organizations in the United States that devoted to advancing liberty. You start off, I wanna set up such and such an organization in order to advance liberty at a certain front. In order to do that, in order to keep doing it as a full-timer, you have to raise money. So fundraising becomes a key means to this goal. The problem is in many organizations, I've seen this about 20 years now, what tends to happen is that the person doing it, the full-timer doing it, begins to lose sight of the objective. In other words, the means of the ends begin to reverse themselves. So the end becomes fundraising. So instead of fundraising being the means to advancing the cause, the end is fundraising, or fundraising for his own income, and the goal, the means become tailoring the purpose of the organization in order to please the donor. In other words, if the donor likes tariffs, well, gee, maybe you should forget about free trade for 10 years, you know, that sort of thing. And so this is a very strong temptation. Something has to be obviously guarded against as one and bitter member of such an organization told me about 20 years ago now, in one of the early days of the American movement. In that case, quote, the organization begins to take on the dimensions of a racket. The goal becomes simply time-serving or keeping the organization going for its own sake, and for the sake of the job holders. Okay, so this is another pitfall that comes with the movement activism stage. All right, so far I've been, I seem to be painting a pretty grim picture of what's involved in the leap from the circle stage to a large-scale movement. I'm sure many of you would say, well, boy, I'm glad we're small in our country. But I'm not trying to discourage you. As I'm trying to prepare you for, who are now on the circle stage for the problems to come, because you'll be able to meet the problems a lot better than we did when we weren't prepared for it. Because despite the headaches and the problems and all the grief that may be involved in it, this leap in being or this leap into a movement stage must be embraced and embraced with enthusiasm. Why should it be embraced with enthusiasm? It's very simple. Because for we libertarians, libertarianism is not merely the intellectual contemplation of a wonderful, true and just political philosophy. It's not just the aesthetic contemplation of a beautiful ideal. The ideal of a world without organized aggression, a world of harmony, of freedom, of prosperity, of mutual cooperation through voluntary activities and free markets. It is, of course, all of that because we become libertarians in the first place, because we fall in love, so to speak, for the goodness, the truth, and the beauty of libertarianism. But we libertarians, it seems to me, are not content with contemplating justice, contemplating truth, goodness, and beauty. We're not playing intellectual games. We mean to change the world. We want to put this thing into reality. In order to do that, in order to, because we are setting out on a noblest task, I think of all, to dismantle the Leviathan state in each of our countries and ultimately throughout the world. And in order to do that, in order to put liberty into practice, in order to bring it out of the closet and so to speak out of the library into the world, in order to usher in a world of freedom, a world free of the thugs and organized gangsters that are making so many lives a hell on earth, we have to organize, we have to become a mass movement despite whatever problems might be involved. Okay, so, because to organize anything, whether it's playing chess or producing automobiles or advancing the science of physics or whatever, it needs organization. And so, organization is needed in the victory of liberty. And what I've really been talking about is the problem of all organization. And also, I would add something else. Life itself brings problems, right? I mean, let's face it. So we can either meet them by trying to hide under the pillows or we can rush out to face these problems confidently and joyously. In our case, we are grappling with such problems on behalf of the greatest cause of all, the victory of liberty. So, when the time comes in each of our countries to advance into the movement stage, we should rush to embrace it with enthusiasm because it's gonna be a tremendous development toward the eventual triumph of human freedom. We should simply be aware that embracing this new higher stage of development means agreeing to its requirements. It means giving up the cozy era of the affinity group. It means being willing to have an organization act, even if a minority in the organization disagrees with a decision. If the move, because in the affinity group, the tendency is to have unanimous consent to everything. It's always great to have that. Everybody and all the eight people can agree in everything. It's terrific. It's better than having five people out of vote three, obviously. But if we're gonna have a movement of any size, we can't have unanimous consent for every decision. And one of the reasons for the deterioration of the famous New Left in the United States in the late 1960s is they believe very strongly what they call participatory democracy. And participatory democracy meant unanimous agreement on every decision. I mean, really every decision that the organization was gonna make. And as a result, life itself became one big committee meeting, one big continuous meeting because you have to decide everything. What to paint the walls? One guy wanna paint a brown, somebody else blue. You argue for 12 hours on that. Until every individual in the organization agreed on the color. This is literally the triviality that this all is involved. So life became one continuous meeting on the New Left and members who went home to go to sleep at night were accused of betraying the organization. They left the meeting, all right? We don't want that to happen. Obviously, not only is this pretty horrible way to live, it also is counterproductive to achieve the goals of the organization. Okay, they're also in the early days of the movement. I haven't heard this in a long time in the United States at least. In the early days when we leaped into a mass movement in the early 70s, there were some libertarians who attacked the very concept of movement as being somehow collectivist and anti-libertarian. It seems to me, however, there's nothing unlibertarian about individuals banding together to advance common goals, read upon common goals. There's nothing unlibertarian about voluntary organizations to play chess to manufacture automobiles or to advance the cause of liberty. Just as there's nothing unlibertarian about voluntary organizations, that is with leaders, committees and all the rest of the apparatus of organization. Although they're constantly pop-up libertarians that say this is unlibertarian. It might be unpleasant in some ways. It's certainly not unlibertarian. Of course, there should be one caveat about the movement because obviously we want in the libertarian movement individuals who are free men and women who are not robots. And we don't want people who subordinate their individual lives or ideas or convictions of the truth to the quote movement on quote or the collective. Even libertarian movement itself. Liberty, of course, is at rest on individuals. Okay, I'm gonna talk now a little bit about the run-through and sort of very quickly the features of the organized movement in the United States, this activist stage. I don't think I'm gonna step on Fred Stitt's territory because it's gonna be very quick run-down. If I slight anybody, if I slight any individual, any groups or organizations, I apologize right now because it's gotten so big that even I can't read all the stuff that's coming out. It's only a great day when you can't read all the material that's coming out in your country on libertarianism. Can't keep up. And there's lots of, there's new groups being formed all the time and so forth and so on. So this is just sort of a run-through of the United States movement at the present time. Okay, the movement is an abundant variety of organizations, suiting varying tendencies, tastes, occupations, interests and so forth and so on. There are scholarly institutes, magazines, newsletters, campus student groups, educational clubs, organizations and scholarly disciplines, tax rebels, political lobbying organizations and so forth. The lobbying or educational groups may be general or they may concentrate on one particular issue, vital to libertarians and building coalitions around that issue. Some organizations live a long time, others rise and fall after a few months or after one issue of a mimeograph newsletter. So there's all sorts of diversity. There's a really rich variety and diversity of libertarian groups and organizations in the United States and this is by the way a variety and diversity to be cherished, not only for its own sake and I think it is but also because with such polycentrism, if we can use that famous Marxist term to our movement, with polycentrism, any grievous mistake of principle or strategy or organization by any one group will not prove fatal to the movement as a whole or to the cause of liberty. So if one group goofs, makes a big mistake, they might go down the tubes or retrench or something but the other groups will still continue to flourish. So we have sort of a free competition if you want to put it that way in libertarian groups. Okay, in the scholarly world, which is my own major interest, I'll start with that. There's for overall libertarian scholarship, there's the Center for Libertarian Studies in New York with which I'm associated. An accordingly journal and journal of libertarian studies, which I'm the editor. Okay, I'll start with my own shtick first. On the west coast, there's the Reason Foundation as journal reason papers. A philosophically oriented periodical edited by T. Bohr McCann, a venerable and low-key organization implicitly interested in libertarian scholarship as the Institute for Humane Studies, which publishes bibliographical literature of liberty. Comes out about twice a year. The Association, I think that's called Association for Philosophy and Society. I think they changed their name at any rate. This organization is a group of neo-Randyan philosophers centered in the Midwest. They meet usually once a year or twice a year. There was an Austrian economics newsletter published by the Center for Libertarian Studies, advancing the principles of Misesi in illustrious economics. And the Center also grants annual Liberal-Liberal Mises fellowships for pre- and post-doctoral study in all the disciplines of human action. The Cato Institute, now located in Washington, publishes a semi-annual scholarly Cato journal devoted to applied economic and legal problems. And both Cato and the Institute for Humane Studies hold week-long seminars during the summer for a quick course on the overall principles and features of libertarianism. These seminars perform two functions, really, an educational function, also gathering new recruits into the movement, finding new people. Magazines and periodicals are everywhere in the United States. A whole bunch of them. I don't even know all of them myself. They range from the relatively large circulation, soft core and slick and outreach-y, as we call it, soft core outreach publications like The Monthly Reason and Inquiry. The smaller circulation newsletters like frontlines to my own feisty and aggressively hard core monthly libertarian forum. There were political lobbying organizations, such as the Hardcore Council for a Competitive Economy in Washington, with its magazine competition, a soft core national taxpayers union, and various gold bug groups and periodicals devoted to returning to the gold standard, many of which are free market and even libertarian. There are anti-political groups, such as Sam Konkin's New Libertarians, who put out several periodicals, none of which names I can keep straight, and a new scholarly volunteerist. There was a bizarre publication called The Libertarian Connection, which I haven't seen in about 10 years, but I understand it still comes out. The reason I stopped subscribing to it was because they come out on purple paper with purple typewriter ribbon. So those of us who have semi-blind hived off on that one. But I understand, I'd say they're still coming out. On the campus, there are two student libertarian organizations, the Students for Libertarian Society, which publishes Liberty, probably the larger group, and the Older Society for Individual Liberty, which puts out Individual Liberty, another publication, and which emerged in 1969 out of the F-split that I mentioned a little while back. Okay, there was, of course, one organization I have left out, and deliberately so, because it deserves special treatment. That is the biggest libertarian organization in the United States, the Libertarian Party, political organization. This is the political party stage, stage six, I guess. My number's straight. I'm not a quantitative-ist. How many members of the LP have we don't know? It's very confusing. There's, first of all, there's a decentralized structure in the United States, so there's state parties and then there's a national party, and you have the option of being a member either of the state party that you're in or the national party or both. So, the whole thing's very confused. Let's venture a guess of about 12,000 now for members. Well, I'm just, this is very hunchy, so to speak. The largest proportional and to the population of the best organized parties are in the Western states. States like Alaska, California, Hawaii, Arizona, Colorado, and Texas. Now, our Westerners like to think that this is true because of the individuals and entrepreneurship on the frontier, the Western and the Wild West frontier, and maybe they're right, who knows? Very possibly true. The national party publishes a bi-monthly periodical, the LP news, and each state party puts out its own newsletter, the most prominent and widest red being those of California, Texas, and Colorado. The total votes in the party, of course, enormously greater than the actual membership. In other words, the votes are, of course, coming in by people who like whatever and they're not necessarily party members. So our last presidential candidate in 1980 acquired over 900,000 votes. That's Ed Clark who's here this week. The nominal party membership of 12,000, of course, a lot bigger than the actual number of dedicated activists who show up all the time. So there's a whole structure here. The libertarian party contains within itself caucuses that dedicated to particular points of view to which each caucus tries to convert other party members. There are the libertarians for life in an anti-abortion group trying to change the party's pro-free choice and abortion platform. There's a defense caucus and the radical caucus of hardcore militants who publish the bi-monthly periodical libertarian vanguard. Now it should not be surprising after all, I've talked about the pitfalls of organizations in stage five and in stage six, which is the political party stage, that the libertarian party has experienced all the joys and heartaches and much more as we say in United States in spades that we've said was a lot of organizations. In other words, the libertarian party has had even more of course of these problems than any individual group. First place, the ELP is the biggest libertarian organization by far. And secondly, it's by nature an umbrella group that has to take stands on a whole bunch of issues. It can't confine itself to the gold standard or whatever. And also has to unite, has to focus on single, on particular issues in the platform, state and national platform, has to focus on single candidates, has to have only one candidate for president and so forth. So therefore, a necessity for unitary action, umbrella unitary action, which makes things, which makes life quite difficult because there are lots of enormous amount of disagreements and factions upping up. Okay, and each candidate of course must then select the most important issues which he or she will focus on. So the result of this large size necessity for speaking out on all the issues, selection of single slates and all the last to maximize the arena of conflict, differences of opinion, strategy differences, tactics, personality struggles, power struggles and all that. And yet again, I'll say the same thing as I said about stage five. It's all worth it. The leap into the political party is really the sixth stage. The political party doesn't replace the other organizations. Many Americans for some obscure reason think that ideology means political party and that's it. If you're a socialist, you must join the socialist party. If you don't, they're confused. This of course is not true at all. Political party is the electoral arm, the electoral activist arm of the libertarian movement. There are many libertarians that don't join it who are not interested, for example. All those who are opposed to political action. So there's a whole range of differences. And libertarian parties, I'd say, is a political arm, a political electoral arm of the movement, electoral politics of the movement. It is the movement embodied in party politics, put it that way. Okay, I don't think, I would say then, that just as there cannot be massive growth of a libertarian movement without organization in the previous stage five, so there can be no successful movement without a political party arm. Why is this? Why are there great benefits to a political party which I think outweigh the problems by a great amount? Well, there are many reasons for the many benefits that political party confers on a movement. First place is to perform as a mass educational function. Most people, at least in the United States, I don't know how it is in Europe or in Asia, but at least in the United States, most people only think about political issues in the context of electoral campaigning. They'll think about, you know, they'll think about if somebody's running for governor, they'll think about the issues which they won't think about for the rest of the two years. The greater interest and attention of that then will bring the message of libertarian principles and programs to broad masses of people who have never heard of it before. Help change their minds in direction of liberty. Help recruit them in the sense that, gee, somebody listens to something, watches on television or something. Gee, I believe that for all my life. So now he's hearing on television instead of meeting the person, you know, face to face. So it expands the area of possible conversion. And as I say, the political party then recruits new people into the movement. It educates, it beams the ideas forth and draws new people in. And some people when they draw in won't join the party because they're not interested in party politics but they'll become libertarians anyway and that's a good thing. That's a good step. In other words, just increasing the pro-libertarian climate in the country is worth it, so to speak. All right, thirdly, a libertarian party, as it grows strong enough, and in several states we have gotten to this point, it functions as a pressure group that can be far more effective on politicians than any single lobbying organization. A party has more members in the first place than any usual lobbying group. And so it presents a larger threat at the polls. My God, it got 12,000 members. They might kill me in my district, something like that. So a political party, even with only say 5% of the vote, can exert a balance of power sort of thing on the major parties, scare them and push them even against their will in a more libertarian direction. So it sits for libertarians, the goal of a political party is not getting patronized jobs but rolling back the state. Any libertarian party should be delighted to find themselves being co-opted, so to speak, they're programmed stolen by the major parties. That's great, then you advance up the ante, as we say in poker, and start making greater demands, let them steal that, till finally the state is wiped away. Finally, as a political party grows even more than this, beyond the balance of power stage, it will be more in the position of actually winning office, which we've done in a few cases. And by winning office, by actually entering office, we can then cast votes and push through programs which will roll back the Leviathan state directly. There are many anti-politics or anti-party libertarians who claim that it's possible to dismantle statism without actually getting into office. Mass civil disobedience, for example, is one thing, everybody refuses to pay taxes next year, something like that. That I think, I'd love to see that happen, I don't see any realistic possibility of it, I haven't seen it happen yet, let's put it that way. Even though there are a lot of tax rebels in the country, there's no mass, it's not a situation where all 200 odd-million people say, we won't pay taxes next April 15th, or anything close to that. It's true that mass civil disobedience can be very effective. For example, when alcohol was prohibited in the United States in the 1920s, it essentially broke down because it wasn't enforceable. In other words, people just drank anyway, and the whole system, the whole apparatus of law began to break down. And so repeal of prohibition really was a result of that. Still in a long and spitefully fact, there was heroic tax rebels and rap resistors and drinkers during prohibition are heroes. It's still not enough, in other words, it's still a vital need for somebody to get in there and actually repeal the laws. To actually get in there, enter state office and dismantle it. Legislators who will repeal the spotic laws, executives who will heroically refuse to enforce them, judges who will rule for the common and natural law of liberty against state power. These people are needed, and I don't see the state being dismantled or being rolled back without it in any significant sense. So libertarian movement seems to me should be, is and should be multifaceted, should have educational institutions, periodicals, campus groups, lobbying efforts, et cetera. We also, however, need a mass political party, a libertarian party which will pledge itself to aid the victory of liberty by rolling back and dismantling the state by the electoral process. I think, by the way, even though a libertarian party is important, the growth into the sixth stage, so to speak, it's important not to launch such a party without adequate preparation. It's possible to start a party too quickly before there's enough people, before there's any common agreement, and so forth and so on. Marxists never launch a party without, they call it pre-party formation, which they put in, they sort of try to prepare the way and get coalitions and get groups together to agree on something before they actually say, we are the radical communist liberation party, whatever it is. I think it's a good lesson to heed. Okay, now on the final section here, is to talk about what theoretical issues need to be decided when you get into the movement stage, especially the libertarian party stage. There doesn't have to be agreement on everything, every jot and tittle of everything, okay? You don't have to agree on, well, for example, in the early stages of libertarian party in New York, I remember, there's a group of people who believe that we couldn't start a political party without a whole philosophical smear from the very beginning, because you start with A is A, you work, those of you who read on Iran, you work through the whole thing, concept formation. If anybody disagrees on free will or concept formation or A is A, even, they're kicked out. Now, I think that would be, you never get to the political party stage, if you insist on a total correct philosophic agreement on everything. So I think that's on dolphin rights, does that matter? So I think it comes to a point where you have to say, okay, we agree on the basics, let's now start organizing, because if you wait to read every conceivable lemma and syllogism, you'll never do anything at all. So, but I think we have to get certain broad agreement on key issues. Fairly early in the game, not necessarily before a party is launched but pretty early in the stages. And I'll just run through, finish by running through some of the, which I think some of the key questions which should be decided. One of them, of course, is the morality of political action. There are a lot of libertarians in the United States who think that any political action is immoral. It's unlibertarian, voting, running for office, a holding office. Obviously, if you, you have to agree that political action is moral in order to become a political party member. Okay, so I think this has to be decided by political party people, hopefully by other libertarians too. I frankly don't see why it's immoral. I've been engaging in these arguments for years. If the state leaves us, this air, not all countries are allowed to vote, but in many countries, the state leaves us this particular area of choice, okay? You can vote for a party of your choice every two years or whatever. I see no reason why we cannot morally use this choice to help scuttle statism. The state is stupid enough to leave us this choice. Let's use it. Now, this action was taken by our classical liberal forebears. We have classical liberal forebears, of course, the liberals and radicals of the 18th and 19th century, and by the American revolutionaries and crazy libertarians of those centuries, and they did pretty well, and they accomplished an enormous amount in rolling back the state. Largely through the electoral process, and also mass civil disobedience and other stuff, and certainly using that too. We also have to remember, however, as we engage in political action and join political parties, that to remember the wise maximum of Lord Acton, the power corrupts, as well as Jefferson's adage that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, or as the Catholics might say, running for or holding office is not itself a sin, avoid as it all for occasions for sin. So this has to be guarded against. Okay, secondly, the key question I think, at least from my point of view, in the eternal argument which always is taking place between rights-based versus utility-based libertarians, do you ground your belief in liberty and utility and efficiency in one hand or in moral principles and human rights on the other? It seems to me extremely important without the moral, morality, and rights-based position. We are for liberty, not only or mainly even, because freedom will bring us more soap and more bathtub as much as we like soap and bathtubs, okay? We are for liberty and against oppression, because we believe strongly and passionately in the morality and justice of liberty and the immorality and criminality of statism. I think very few people will struggle for liberty as a lifelong commitment, which we all do, often against great odds, merely from 20% and more bathtubs, I think, or for a bit more efficiency. So I think libertarians must be the kind of people who want above all, demand justice. And fortunately, this usually goes along with utilitarianism, utilitarian economics. But not always. Fortunately, I think in the United States, aside from a few benighted, freemenide economists, there are very few libertarians who take the efficiency route here. Most libertarians are rights-based and justice-based libertarians. For one thing, utilitarian economists are always making exceptions on the libertarian principle. I always said, well, of course, you can have neighborhood parks or something like that. A morality-based libertarian makes no exceptions. Uncompromising and consistent. Okay, as I say, I think the battle has been won in the libertarian party, at least on that question in the United States. Many of you might be wondering why I didn't put first on this list. I have about, I think, five things here. Why didn't put first the famous problem, anarchism versus monarchism? Or anarchism versus limited government? Governments strictly limited to defense, police, and courts. The reason I don't talk about it much is because even though the problem was highly important in theory and should continue to be debated for forever, as far as I'm concerned, for purposes of practical organization and within the libertarian party, it's made very little, caused very little difficulty. In other words, anarchists and monarchists have been working together very closely and without much friction. Since the famous Dallas Accord in 1974, when they hammered out wording agreements where the anarchists don't call for smashing the state and the party platform or whatever, and the monarchists don't call for, don't say the proper function of government is to do such and such. You just leave that alone. I think the reason why both groups can work together on this is because after all, we agree on 99% of stuff. In other words, both the monarchists and the anarchists agree on rolling back about 99% of the state. So why not do that and then worry about the other 1% after we get it? It seems a little premature to start belly aching about the 1%, but we have the 99% to agree on. So that has not really posed a problem in the United States. A political problem. Okay, but this is point four of the basic issues. But while anarchism versus minicism has caused very few practical difficulties, there is a, I think, a big problem, which has still not been resolved. Namely, where one stands on what I call abolitionism versus mandatory gradualism. In other words, aside from the anarchist, the minicist question. Do you favor abolishing the state or 99% of the state or wherever as fast as you could possibly do it? If you had a button on this podium, a magic button, and pushing this button, I could eliminate the state. Would I do it? My answer, of course, is I would blister my thumb pushing that button. So I'm an abolitionist. Other people are what I call mandatory gradualists. In other words, they believe, no, no, we shouldn't do it. Even if we had the magic button, we shouldn't push it because there are all sorts of other problems that are superseding that. We cause social dislocation. We cause unemployment and temporarily, we cause disappointment of expectations or whatever. In my view, it's very important to take the abolitionist position because it means you're holding nothing else higher than liberty. Of course, to be libertarians, you should hold liberties as your highest political objective. So this is, as I say, it's a continuing dispute. Of course, there is no magic button, obviously, where we can just abolish the state, but this attitude toward the magic button affects, I think, attitudes toward political action by all libertarians. It affects your whole attitude toward the state and toward political problems and so forth. My hero on the slavery front, William Lloyd Garrison, who was an abolitionist and also a libertarian, by the way, in general, said he was in favor of immediate abolition. He didn't think of what would come immediately. He didn't think of the immediate abolition of slavery, although it turned out to be a pretty much a one-step thing. But he believed it was important to say that morally, we are in favor of immediate abolition, even though probably in practice, we're gonna get gradual abolition, even though we don't like it. So this is a continuing fight, the radical caucus of which I'll remember has a, I'm gonna quote this plank on this. It's called No Compromise Plank, which I think is a really sweet plank. It is, the radical caucus insists that all reforms advocated by the libertarian party must diminish governmental power, I would say, I would add that, strongly diminish it. And no such reforms are to contradict the goal of a totally free society. Holding high our principles means avoiding completely the quagmire of self-imposed obligatory gradualism. We must avoid the view in the name of fairness, debating suffering or fulfilling expectations, temporize and stall on the road to liberty. That sets forth, I think, the issue. Okay, finally, I think in the practical sense, this is the abolitionist thing is more of a sort of a mood or a general thing, a spirit that permeates libertarians. By the way, there are anarchists, the anarchist-minarchists dispute, there are many anarchists who are gradualists, there are even maybe one or two minarchists who are abolitionists. Although it helps to be, if you're an anarchist, it helps to be an anarchist in order to be an abolitionist, obviously, it's sort of a certain tendency there, but it's not necessarily, it's not a one-to-one correlation. Okay, I come now to the key practical political issue, the only real practical political dispute in the libertarian party, which I think has been successfully overcome or successfully settled. I think it's one on which every libertarian party must take a stand. I think it's a key question. This is the question of foreign policy. Everybody, I mean, every libertarian believes in the free market, there's no real dispute about that, every libertarian favors civil liberties, there's no real dispute on that. The real basic vital gut question is the question of war and peace. The early days of libertarian party in the United States, libertarian party took a non-libertarian foreign policy position, in my view, in other words, it took essentially the same position as Democrats or Republicans. It's like a pro-interventionist, quasi-pro-war position. In my view, it's central and critical to take a foreign policy stand, which is totally opposed to war, especially modern war, which murders necessarily, murders masses of innocent civilians. There's a big difference between modern war and jousting, you know, medieval jousting, nothing wrong with that, so like voluntary dueling. You know, Sir Gawain has that sort of lance a lot, that's great, and the rest of the people watch on the battlements and cheer their own favorites, sort of like a Super Bowl, football. But modern war is not a Super Bowl, it's a situation where masses of innocent people get killed. Libertarianism seems to me, it's always been a source of wonder why the many libertarians have resisted this. Libertarianism takes a stand on absolute human rights and a sacred right of every individual to his or her self-ownership or to his or her life, liberty and property. Unmolested by coercion, whichever way you want to formulate it. It's always been a puzzle to me how such a movement can fail to take an all-out opposition stand, all-out opposed to war, which is mass murder of the innocent. I can't understand how libertarians can come out force square against price controls and wage controls, yep, that's great. Even against taxation and stuff, great. And yet somehow fail to speak out forcefully on the question of mass murder. So, it also, of course, foreign policy, at least in the United States, is a big means by which big government exerts itself. There's a corollary between government intervention at home and government intervention in foreign affairs. It's the same group doing the same sort of thing. Now, fortunately, Libertarian Party, this national convention in New York in 1975, changed its position, took a very distinctive libertarian foreign policy stand, anti-war, anti-intervention stand, which was strengthened and solidified in 1977, so that we have far less concern we have overcome that. I don't know how other libertarian parties are doing on this, but I'm happy to say that I made a contribution to this shift. Okay.