 evening is, what is a libertarian? That is certainly a subject about which there are at least as many opinions as there are libertarians, possibly more. The genesis of this debate is a little interesting actually because given that the two opponents here, Mr. Poole and Mr. Konkin are both editors and in the case of Sam at least, publishers of libertarian periodicals, both of which have been less inclined over the years to use the term libertarian for different reasons of course. It's considered by some at least a little bit ironic that these two people should be disputing the question of what is libertarianism. But anyone who has followed the careers of either or both is certainly well aware that there will be a lot of sparks struck up here tonight. In fact for those of you, I suppose they are very few who are not familiar with either or both of these gentlemen, I would like to get them to at least stand up before they come up here to make their formal presentation so you can see who the combatants are tonight in this corner. Wearing the preppy look and weighing appreciably less than his opponent, Robert Poole of the Reason Foundation and Points North. And in this, well it's not a corner exactly, but here's Sam from Long Beach weighing slightly less than the battleship New Jersey which is fortunate because he's being encroached upon by the Navy so I'm told. So all of you are clear on who the combatants are. It's simply necessary to get them up here now and to inform you a little bit more about who they are. Bob Poole of course is the head of the Reason Foundation in Santa Barbara and the editor-in-chief of Reason Magazine. He's also the editor of a number of Reason Foundation books, the most recent of which is Unnatural Monopolies from Lexington Press, available very soon for $25. Now Bob is one of those people who has been criticized by some over the years for his considerable enthusiasm for what other people regard as half measures. On the subject of half measures opinions can certainly differ but I heard an interesting story, I think it's interesting anyway, but it's also a little bit indelicate and Bob certainly would never tell it being the gentleman that he is even if he knew the story in the first place. So of course that job falls to yours truly. It seems that an experiment was conducted in which an engineer and a mathematician were dumped naked into a room which contained two white lines painted on the floor at the far ends of which were two very attractive naked women and they were informed that when a bell rang they could if they wished go half the distance to the woman on their side of the room. Well the bell rang and the mathematician of course stood exactly where he started because he knew he'd never get there. The engineer on the other hand stepped right out and right up to the halfway point because he knew that while he would never quite get there he would get close enough for practical purposes. It is my pleasure to present Mr. Practical Purposes himself, Bob Pool. What is a libertarian? It's something that all of us have loved to quibble about and to argue about at length over the years but rather than get into a lot of quibbles what I'd like to do is just tell you what being a libertarian means to me personally. As a libertarian I believe that liberty is the highest political value, the most important political value above all others. I believe that the initiation of force is wrong, that taxation is theft and that individuals have the right to secede. So I think you can see just from that that my idea of limited government is a very limited government although I do believe in limited government. But I in thinking about what to do tonight I concluded that this debate really isn't or shouldn't be about details of the definition of an ideology but really rather about once one is decided one is a libertarian what do you do with that? What do you do about being a libertarian in the world that we live in today? So that's what I would like to talk about tonight for at least these first 20 minutes. What most of us want once we've decided we're libertarians is to have a world or at least a society of freedom. And so the question that we differ on is how best to have such a thing come about. Now the fact is that no one in this room has ever seen or been in a free society. We don't know in fact what it takes to bring one about. We have a lot of ideas about what might work. We've read about science fiction stories but in all humility we really don't know because no one has ever done it before. And I think this should give us pause when putting forth grandiose theories about the right thing to do and the wrong thing to do in working for freedom. The fact of our libertarian individualism also should give us pause about quickly making condemnations of different methods of working for freedom. And those of us who have some appreciation of evolutionary theory and of the trial and error process that goes on in nature can also, I think, take a lesson in that if a whole lot of different methods are tried for increasing freedom, some are likely to fail. We don't necessarily know in advance which ones those will be. But some will probably actually succeed and bring about more freedom. And so it seems to me I have for a long time been an advocate of the letter hundred flowers bloom schools of libertarian strategy and tactics with the idea that we're likely to get more freedom that way over a given span of years. Now given that I think there are many acceptable ways of working for liberty, let's take a look at some different ways of being a libertarian. First of all there are grassroots organizations and we have many of them represented in this room tonight. Marshall Fritz is self government advocates with supper clubs, Sam's organization, we have SIL and so forth. And in addition we have the libertarian party which some people like and some people don't like. And these are all ways in which people while maintaining their jobs and careers of whatever they are can in their spare time work for liberty in a way that they think is best. Now in addition we have and I think it's a very welcome development over the last ten years the development of professional organizations where people can make full time careers out of being libertarians and working for freedom. We have lobbying organizations in Washington like the National Taxpayers Union, the Citizens for a Sound Economy and so forth, we have the whole hard money movement. Jim Blanchard in New Orleans has made a business and a career out of trying to bring Austrian economics to people who are interested in sound money and who want to make money by it. Then we have the field that I work in of the libertarian think tanks and as I look back ten or fifteen years ago, ten or fifteen years ago about all there was was fee, the foundation for economic education and the Institute for Humane Studies and that was it in terms of any sort of intellectual organizations working full time for freedom. Today we have about a dozen in this country all growing in size and growing in effectiveness. Of course the Reason Foundation, the Cato Institute, World Research Incorporated which is represented here tonight, the Manhattan Institute, the Pacific Institute, the National Center for Policy Analysis, the list goes on and on. Not only that, there are organizations like this bringing up all over the world in England, France, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Norway, South Africa, even Brazil and Guatemala have libertarian think tanks now. Sometimes there are only two or three people but they're out there studying what's going wrong, what statism is doing to the particular society that they're in and coming up with practical ways of getting people who are not libertarians to take ideas seriously and to take freedom seriously. And these groups are having a real impact in a short time. Those of you who read the April issue of Reason and read the cover story about Sisguide, this homeland surrounded by South Africa, may appreciate some of the work that Leon Lowe's Free Market Foundation in Johannesburg is doing in turning a backward backwater into a place where real freedom seems to be coming about and where the lives of hundreds of thousands of people are in fact getting much better because freedom is being put into practice in a way that no one ever thought was possible. In addition, there is a growing and a rapidly growing over the last 10 or 15 years community of free market economists throughout the world that are linked together by a group called the Mont Pelerin Society, which a few people in this room belong to, started by Lou Grigman Mises and F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman that has now developed a support network all around the world of professors and graduate students and young students and recommending each other for jobs and even recommending people for, heaven forbid, government posts in a few cases, but people who feel that they can do something practical to remove burdens, to get rid of regulatory agencies and do this sort of thing. This is happening and it's happening increasingly in this country, in England, and in several other countries. And finally we have journalists who have been influenced by libertarian ideas and who are now writing for mainstream publications for the Chicago Tribune like Steve Chapman, the Wall Street Journal, where two Southern California libertarians are now essentially running the op-ed columns of the Wall Street Journal. People like David Brudnoy who's the most popular talk show host in all of New England. Our generation is getting out into professions of communication and bringing the message of liberty to millions of people every day of the week all across the United States. Now has all of this had any real effect over the last 10 or 15 years? Well I think as I look back at the time that I've been professionally active, I see tremendous changes. We've had a movement to deregulate transportation in this country that has gone most of the way toward restoring free markets in airlines, in busing, buses, interstate buses, truck lines, communications, although there's some problems with the bell system breakup. In fact, competition rather than monopoly is coming to be the standard thing in all of telecommunications. We've had a very large and growing movement of privatization of the state and local level that has opened up markets that has ended monopolies and led to private enterprise getting extensively involved in delivering things that were for many, many years for decades considered to be the exclusive province of government. We have movements now actively working to control government spending to limit taxation. Now sure, these are not abolishing taxation, but they're throwing fear into those who here to fore had thought that they had an unlimited license to take our money, dictate our lives, and do things with them. And those sorts of movements with serious effects like Prop 13 in California just did not exist 15 years ago. In the area of antitrust, the Austrian message that I learned 20 years ago, that the radical analysis of antitrust that said that this is ridiculous, that this does not promote competition, it interferes with the marketplace, this viewpoint which a handful of people held 20 years ago is now entering into the mainstream of the economics world. And all sorts of people, even liberal economists like Lester Thoreau are criticizing antitrust now for making US companies unable to compete in world markets whose industries are not hampered by this sort of thing. The whole idea of central planning is much more under attack now than it was even 10 years ago in this country and in the area of third world development. The welfare state itself is coming under serious sustained intellectual attack, most recently and about the most radical form by Charles Murray with his book that has become must reading for anyone who seriously interested in these ideas. And there have been other people like Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams who have pointed out the devastating effects of welfare on black people in this country. So I think it's fair to say that the growth of an intellectual community in this country and around the world that has been developing and nurturing libertarian ideas and working out specific proposals through the network of libertarian think tanks has had a measurable real effect on increasing the amount of freedom in this country over the last decade. And from the signs that I see as someone in one of these think tanks that process seems likely to accelerate as time goes on. I think we may be reaching a critical mass of professional people working on studies showing the harmful effects of government conveying those in the form of op-ed pieces in the form of television documentaries in the form of books articles and so forth of a kind and a quality that we just did not see even 10 years ago, let alone 20. There are even effects. All the things I've talked about have been basically economics so far. But if you look at areas like education, homeschooling is something that people are starting to seriously talk about. Not just on the right, but on the left as well. This is an issue that's starting to be framed in terms of individual rights versus the state and versus coercion by the state. Dirk Pearson and Sandy Shaw, I think, brought a message of individual control of people's lives when it comes to medication to a mass market with their very popular book, Life Extension and its sequel. And these are the kinds of things that over time start changing people's minds, changing people's ideas, making them more aware of the consequences of an oppressive, large-scale government. Start bringing them to the idea that individual freedom really is practical and can be applied to their own lives. In the area of defense and foreign policy, we saw Milton Friedman and a handful of others who are really more libertarian than conservative work about 12 years ago to get rid of the draft. Now, it's true that that draft registration is back, but I think the intellectual case against conscription per say has still been made and has held out against those who would like to restore the draft. They've gotten only as far as registration, and I don't think it's not at all a foregone conclusion that we're going to see a return of the draft anytime soon. In the area of the involvement of the United States as an interfering force around the world, in particular, the involvement of taxpayers' money in supporting the defense of Europe and Japan, we're seeing now the signs that the consensus in favor of that idea is starting to crumble. I know of three or four books by Syria scholars that are being written right now that undermine that. The pages of the Wall Street Journal over the last four years have had probably a dozen articles challenging the whole idea of NATO and of U.S. taxpayer support for that, and I think it's going to be not more than a year or two until some leading political figures start deciding that this is an issue that the American people are ready for, and that is another libertarian idea that will then become into the popular political currency and we have a strong chance of getting enacted. Finally, let me just say a few words about what I see as the best opportunity facing libertarians in terms of where do we go to market our ideas. Some of you may be familiar with a recent Cato Institute book by people, political scientists from Florida named Maddox and Lilly. The book looked at the baby boom generation and looked at the attitudes that are held by people in basically our generation, people born after World War II. Between 1946 and 1964, there were 75 million people born into this country. The views of the baby boom generation in broad political terms were described by all the political posters and commentators in the 1984 election campaign as being economically conservative and socially liberal. What that amounts to in practical terms is a rough cut definition of libertarianism. It's not a fully worked out definition by any means, of course, but it's raw material, waiting to be shaped, waiting to be reached by our ideas. In the 1988 election, those 75 million baby boom people will be the largest group, they'll be 66% of the electorate by that year. And so what that tells me is that we have the ideas that can reach those people. They are, in fact, our generation. More than their parents' generation, their ideas were shaped not by the Great Depression of World War II. They were shaped by Vietnam War and Watergate. They have a basic distrust of government. Their way of looking at, is that 15? That can't quite be right. I have not talked only five minutes. Okay. Their basic way of looking at the world is along the lines of ours. All they need to do is have the implications drawn out and made clear to them by focused libertarian doctrine. I think many of us are used to because as people of an older generation have controlled the news media for so long, we're used to thinking that the world is always going to be controlled by a sort of a recycled version of the New Deal philosophy. And once, as we see the people of our generation come to maturity and come to get into positions of influence into the prime of their careers, it's going to be a whole different set of conditions that have shaped their way of looking at the world. And I think that really makes it ripe for libertarian ideas. The baby boomers are anti-big government, anti-big business, and anti-union. That's fertile fields for us folks. They generally are pro-individual, pro-technology, pro-entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship has become a good thing these days for the first time in a long time. And I think that offers us again many, many opportunities. Culture heroes who are entrepreneurs are the kind of thing that we can promote and that the people of an earlier generation had forgotten all about. So I think that the time is ripe for libertarians to have a major impact on the American culture, not by trying to set themselves apart as a small radical group, but by reaching out and communicating to what is becoming the large vocal group of our own generation, namely the baby boomers. That way, I think, lies the best hope for a large expansion of freedom in our time. Not by being, not by self-styling ourselves as outsiders, but by recognizing that there's an incipient majority waiting for our ideas if we learn how to communicate them effectively. Thank you. Thank you, Bob. And now, Mr. Poole's distinguished opponent, Samuel Edward Konkin, or S.E.K.3, as he likes to abbreviate himself. Sam has an interesting history in libertarianism, considering what he was telling me a little earlier about being progressively invaded at the Anarco village by the U.S. Navy. He's probably not going to like this metaphor too much, but he reminds me a little bit of the character of Pug Henry in the Winds of War. This was a gentleman who, in a work of fiction to be sure, seemed to have an uncanny knack for being where important things were going on at any given point. Sometimes he was front and center, sometimes he was metaphorically waving from the back of the convertible, but he was there. And Sam, I think, if one was to trace his history and activities over the last 17 or 18 years of what we can refer to as the modern libertarian epoch, has a somewhat similar history. He's been around. Ugly rumors have it that he even had something to do with the foundation of the free libertarian party of New York. At present, he is the guiding force behind the movement of the libertarian left, the editor-publisher of New Libertarian, and what I guess I would describe as the movement's foremost freelance gadfly. Up here to tell it like it is, let me present for your deletion, Samuel Edward Conk on the third. Well, thanks and laissez-faire. I, as usual, get the stranger introductions, but stranger people here. Bob, Bob, I think I should start off with explaining why there's a debate, since it really didn't, I think, come across from the first two speakers, and indeed it was a result from a conspiracy of Dagny and myself, although as usual, as most of these conspiracies, for those of you who are conspiracy buffs, can tell, generally happens when people sit around, have a couple of beers, and say, well what if we did this, and I don't know, maybe that'll happen, and pretty soon, like Adam Smith's merchants, we fixed prices. In this case, it was something I'd noted, a peculiar symmetry, which I, perhaps because of, like Bob Poole, I have a scientific background, I was a quantum mechanic, if you had a quantum, I'd fix it, you know, crawl underneath, get greasy from the quarks, you know. Anyway, it occurred to me that he and I, in a very symmetrical, but antithetical sense, have evolved away from the word, at the same time we were berating him for, or actually just after I'd noticed he was fading out from using the term libertarian in his paper, well, you have to somebody point out the same issue, we've been complaining about how the word is being corrupted in New Libertarian number 12, so while he sits, for those of you who are somewhat new to the movement, I might add that we're kind of like bookends, if you want, with Dr. Rothbard here in the middle, we might be said to define the libertarian spectrum from, I'm sure Bob can add to this, and later in his copious rebuttal time, but he is kind of, from my point of view, he sort of sits on the sharp edge of the far right of the movement, kind of teetering back and forth, deciding whether or not he wants to fall off, and then later in this discussion, I'll probably point out a couple of strong gusts of historical winds that are blowing in this year of 1985, which may send him going with Hurricane Force, most, rather than keeping total suspense, most importantly the onset of major warfare in our time. So anyway, that's the basis of this debate, so I think it's poorly worded, of course, it should be resolved that a libertarian has, you know, seven tentacles and green hair, and then one person would defend it, the other person would point out that they haven't seen any tentacles in the first one, by a great rhetorical force would show that the question of the actual number of tentacles is irrelevant in the debate. That's not what we're doing here, but I think it's the importance of the point comes about from this. Consider the following fact that if he, if his magazine is still considered to have some relation to the thing we call the libertarian movement, then it would certainly have the largest circulation. And if it isn't, then New Libertarian does. It is kind of, again, ironic and strange and something we, in a weird sense, hold in common that both of us, we feel very uncomfortable with this word, at least in our publications. Well, I'm afraid, as certainly after hearing the first part, which I'm technically not supposed to go right into a bundle on, I think that the, you're going to get the impression, if you haven't already, that reasons for our uneasiness are vastly different. Standing here in front of a room full of large, probably, of people who largely feel semi-comfortable with the term libertarian, or, which is a very important distinction you'll get in a minute, once felt very comfortable with the label libertarian, I noticed Bob having no inhibition whatsoever in utilizing the terminology. I gathered that he sees, shall we say, he perceives the market for his magazine somewhat different from what we have here in this room, as a serving the marketplace. Okay, that's pretty much the setup. Now, here is, I guess, where we have to go into the following things. What is a libertarian? Well, the standard definition that we use for many years, besides things like libertarian speak with forked tongue, because we used to use one side of our mouth for speaking to liberals and the other side for speaking conservatives and changing a rhetoric accordingly, it certainly was Jeff, Jeff remembers it well, I can see, perhaps he's still using, he's still doing it, right? It covers a multitude of sins, it covers a large group. In fact, while in 1969 it could be considered, I would say, recognizable faction, or tight splinter, perhaps not all of us, marching under under close-order discipline control from Murray and Carl at the St. Louis Yaff Convention, I would say that it was considered something solid, something unified, something homogeneous to a certain extent. It wasn't true then, it wasn't true in 1969, but it appeared that way at least, and certainly to those of us who were just getting into it, which I think Bob and I were both fell over the brink into libertarianism about the same time, whether or not we both fall from our different directions out of it. This is recognizably no longer the case. In fact, since he was so kind to spend 20 minutes building up the case for me, I would like to point out that most of what he pointed out, or what he was listing there, is a strong indication of part of the problem that we, and I'm going to use the word now, agorists, find with the term libertarian. You know, when we run across Murray and Carl back in the in the beginning of the beginning of September 69, if Sharon Pressley is here, she can bring up 1964 a little later, but in the meantime, and of course Murray can always bring up 1950 when he invented it, the movement directly. But for most of us, for large numbers, population market forces we're talking about here, and that's that's part of the definition. It started in around 1969. There was a feeling of radicalness, of pureness, of hard-coreness of let's go out and get them. Now the definition, as I said at one point, was anything you wanted. By 1971, as a matter of fact, the term semi-cynically was, there are two definitions, two standard definitions of libertarian, regardless of all of the Iranian rhetoric or all the other rhetoric you hear. The first definition of libertarian is anybody calls them soft one. Definition number two, anybody agrees with me. Now you'll notice that each of these serve totally different functions. When you want to go tell the world how hard-core you are, or how many people you are, I mean, and that you're a massive force, and of course in the 69, 71, in the post-New Left period, we were worried about masses. inertia didn't bother us, but mass did for the scientists here. So we're worried about large, getting these large numbers, these masses together, and so therefore anybody ever used the word libertarian, we'd hug to our breasts. I was mentioning to somebody a few, an hour ago, that when Edith Ephron used the word, the big L word, in TV Guide, the biggest circulation magazine in the English language, we immediately cheered, we were here, we were real, we existed, our word was was now appearing in TV Guide, and about a year later, the editor said, well, you know, we're not all conservatives here, we give other sides equal time, you know, liberal so-and-so, and libertarian Edith Ephron. So now we were a third force, I mean our poor, nothing was gonna stop us, we were going bigger and bigger. Okay, the other definition was, of course, every time we have a disagreement with each other, and whenever there is a conflict or a disagreement, we have the second formula comes into play, anybody agrees with me, anybody who doesn't, obviously not a libertarian, there's something else. We either read them out of the movement, or we put hyphens in front of them, and add a secondary effect. Now both of these functions have their purpose, and it's part of the problem of politics, including anti-politics, and reaching people in general of selling concepts that we want to have both of these things on our side. We want massiveness, we want large numbers, we want attract people who want to be groupies, you know, and so forth, to build up a group, but on the same side, we also want to be pure, we want to be hardcore, we want to have something there. As one of the comic strip characters once said, looking down into what was supposed to be the depths of somebody's soul, there's no there there, and if libertarianism goes all the way towards purely definition one, then what is it? Let's say we won, okay, everybody in the world now call himself libertarian. Mao Tse-tung, or his successor, Deng Xiaoping, or whoever, call himself libertarian. You know, this has already begun to happen in California, I can showcase it, Ronald Reagan call himself a libertarian, Jerry Brown call himself a libertarian. You know, I mean, we've gotten presidents who have now the L word in their past, and how far are we going to go? So everybody calls himself a libertarian, so definition one is fulfilled, we have libertarian fascists, libertarian communists, you know, libertarian mass executioners, libertarian, you know, mansonites, or whatever, libertarian pacifists, and so we've won, right? Libertarian is now everywhere, and the word is accepted, and no problem, right? Libertarian government garbage collectors, whatever, libertarian, and of course the ultimate nightmare, which I've described a few pamphlets for those few of you don't remember it, the idea of a libertarian working his way through the system, who arrests one of us counter-economists, one of us people actually go and break laws and things, because we don't believe in the government, and he takes us in front of a libertarian who works his way through the system as a judge, and he takes us in front of a libertarian, you know, he sentences us in a libertarian working his way through the bail, takes us to the jail, where a libertarian working his way through the system as a turnkey helps us prisoner until, eventually, the libertarian working his way through the system as the court, or the prison priest, brings us up to the electric chair, where a libertarian working his way through the system as a state technician is making sure it's in good working order, and libertarian working his way through the system as a burly guard slaps us down on the chair, and another libertarian working his way through the system as an executioner throws a switch and wipes out the one person who is in fact a libertarian not working his way through the system. This is, therefore, I think the distinction that I'm trying to draw. Now, Bob probably made a few good points. I thought even as visually as I was trying to write him down on the possible problems of what happens if you try perhaps to go too far the other way, if there's another way, in the sense of a purity of ideology, so distilled that only one person can hold it, and he's not sure about himself. You know, the ultimate schizophrenia, who shall watch the watcher? Obviously, you know, bisect the lobes and get a severe case of split personality so you can guard yourself of purity. Even not going that far, there is a problem of maintaining the body pure, the body politic, or in this case the body anti-politic, to a great degree of purity, esteemed and extremely good friend Dr. Rothbard here, I could not praise enough for his accomplishments, tends to attract people, probably attracted by his purity to him, and they then form groups and call labels and have an amazing record, a truly entertaining record of schism and splitting ever more thereafter. I have recorded much of those conversations in my journals and without them the entertainment content of New Libertarian would have suffered greatly. I don't think it's entirely, in fact I wouldn't say at this point I'm not to be my libertarian pope myself and grant absolutions here, but it is not so much Murray's fault at all that this kind of thing happens, I think there's a basis involved in the whole concept, the idea concept and methods of maintaining it. The purity that Murray fights for is valuable and is absolutely essential because regardless of whatever else happens and wherever else people want or on the spectrum, at least he's making sure there's a there there. If he wins, much as we disagree with him on certain strategic issues, at least I do, we know that if Murray wins there's some there there. Now I happen to think that if quote he won Murray would be rounded up by the very person that he helped get into the Libertarian party FBI directorship would probably come around and pick him up within a day and I don't think he entirely disagrees with me since I'm sure he had Ed Crane on the list about 10 years ago back when he was a good guy, right? So it's an endemic problem and okay so we've kind of defined here a large spectrum of things. What do we want? Well I think we want purity but the problem is we're going to have a lot of disagreement about that. There's no way around that. I think however that the third method that some of the people and I'm going to only mention them in passing for those of you want to check it out more ask me about Libertarian connection. Neither Bob or I are into them at the moment so it's not a big issue. But there are simply there are a lot of people who take a position of total live and let live and say well all ideologies or as Bob once said probably not meaning quite what I'm saying here let 100 flowers bloom implying that all Libertarian roads lead equally to the result that we want. This is also not true. Some people are simply wrong and it's worth pointing it out. As I made the long description about Libertarians working their way through the system to accomplish certain ends and ending up essentially executing a few people who are not working within the system and achieving some Libertarianism in real life. Well that is clearly a wrong road that those working in the system people took. Okay there are many of those cases and they deserve to be pointed out. They should be pointed out and probably for the rebuttal time and most of the rest of this debate I will be in that position of doing so. I would like everyone to remember especially in the question period right before you totally gang bang up on me for doing what I may have seen appear to accuse others of doing. In the second page or in the third now we've grown in New Libertarian magazine I have carried a slogan which is mutated slightly for grammarical reasons but essentially always said something of the effect of everybody appearing in this publication disagrees. Okay that to me is a profoundly Libertarian statement it does not say that they disagree correctly or properly or that everybody's opinion is equally worth anything. It's a statement essentially that they all have equal access to the market. So from my point of view the question of Libertarianism and what is a Libertarian and how do we more importantly the hidden question there is how do we make the decision who does the choosing and how do we select for that is entirely left to the market. I get up and say it I got an editorial page other people come and print in my magazine I actively seek people who I think will outrage some of the readers and I think are totally and utterly wrong and some cases that they don't get a chance to appear at all. But in fact that is the answer I believe in purity as at least as much as Murray does and I'm sure several other people here but on no circumstances should the mechanism of it leave what we believe is basic the marketplace itself the market decides what the market decided is a great Libertarian slogan. It's our if one the one thing close to unanimous agreement we have on anything that deals to do with human action. Let the market decide. Okay. Now one last caveat on that of course is let the market decide should not mean let's sit back and let the market decide the market is a sum of individual action. Those individuals are entrepreneurs. Murray and I have disagreed a little bit about whether not entrepreneurs are born or made if they are indeed born which I don't agree. I'm sure genetic re-engineering could could help us considerably on that. But I think they're made in one sense or another or they could be made the rest away. The entrepreneurial component of each individual remembering from our Mises that we are all workers entrepreneurs and and capitalists to some extent in varying degrees all can be can be emphasized can be grown and in a sense there's always an entrepreneurial component of all of our lives unless we become total dependents total robots that always exist and did some or greater or lesser degree. Okay. Having said all this having put all this caveats down having shown hopefully with great forcefulness and then you can walk into the literature table anytime and see a great variety on our table alone. I think I've finally come to the point where I am now ready to be properly understood when I choose to solidly and thoroughly disagree with almost everything the previous speaker said. The problem is he has appealed to and given us a long list of what appear to be libertarian contributions. Let me offer a competing system a competing way of looking at things shall we say of viewing things which perhaps make these wonderful gains put them in a little more sinister light. Suppose in fact we take the position that libertarianism does have something to do with liberty does in fact mean that we are for liberty and we take the insight from Dr. Rothbard and many others that the liberty itself is is antithetical to an institution known as a state. Now it's not necessarily the case. It doesn't have to be the case that only the state travels upon liberty. We can we can imagine or we can perceive several other such entities existing around us. But we do know two things from any empirical study whatsoever. One is that the state is the enemy is the largest one that exists in this time and that we were likely to see for quite a while and it dwarfs all others massively. This is the threat. OK. If this is the threat to liberty and the state is pure coercion it has no function of defending liberties whatsoever and this again is a position that most libertarians hold. Then we must ask ourselves the following thing a certain agents of this entity whether or not directly internally within its in the belly of the beast its actual tentacles or its support mechanisms its foundations and institutes which of course it supports and nurtures carefully through a system of tax deductions carefully selected suddenly begin to pick up certain minor things in rhetoric that we've associated with libertarianism does not our suspicion arouse. If our enemy starts using some of our terms or starts attempting to appear in our guise for example say libertarians wore all wore green bow ties except well even the females what power unisex shall have. Everybody's wearing green bow ties the bow ties of course came from Murray and the greens are the far off Ku Kwing shall we say on the other side in a great gesture of solidarity the green bow tie was defined as the unanimous symbol of libertarianism. Well the next day we suddenly find a few government officials start wearing green bow ties and when they come maybe an IRS agent knocks on the door we see one wearing a green bow tie where our guard is lowered a bit maybe well geez this guy's wearing a libertarian symbol maybe he's not such a bad IRS agent and when we're sitting there smoking our dope and the axe comes through crashing through the door and they come kicking in and run in and you know oh wait a minute one of the guys who's busily throwing the handcuffs on us and slamming against the walls wearing a green bow tie things have improved we are now you know it's a little more they're libertarian darts you know they're not so bad we're the system's getting a lot better and then we get dragged up and hey we're probably going to get a good sense this time the judge is wearing a green bow tie no sweat he only gave us 20 years we know of course that somebody wasn't wearing the green bow tie would have given us 35 or 40 or whatever maybe he had a shot in sight so we're obviously better off into the regime of the green bow tie okay what has happened of course has happened what I'm talking about is no fantasy the use of the corruption of political labels is a historic fact since the day the first political label arose any of you who have had the barest history of political science of any political history now that the words liberal the word wig the word wig originally had horse thief interesting enough which is much more hardcore from a libertarian point of view than what they eventually became but the wigs the liberals what does liberalism mean now I mean some of you know that it went something not too far from Mr. Poole's esteem position and in fact was pretty good for its time anyway I'm going to be about to be cut off in time and I think that a lot of what I was going to say is probably much more appropriate to the rebuttal time let me close in one thing whatever Mr. Poole chooses to do I have a feeling that he and many of his friends and elk are going to come to some hard problems of reality the battle for symbolism the battle for rhetoric the battle for ideas that's that's a touchy thing because ideas can both mean superficial statements and rhetoric of fact and they can also mean people like Richard Weaver say acting on them okay I would say that if you watch this debate for further on watch out for the action we can't go into great details about our various actions the next 10 seconds but watch for the action or as one version of this deep through I was said look for the money that's the money the action that's going to distinguish him and I when things like war is declared and which one of us is going to shall we say find a libertarian way to defend our country but perhaps with a little more restraint and drafting and and taxation and which of us are going to say things like let's sabotage the war machine let's run people in underground railroads out of the country etc anyway that's the bait what is a libertarian I think you've heard two interestingly different versions of it and we'll continue it for your delegations to see if you want to shop and somewhere in the marketplace where we've defined the boundaries thank you thank you Sam well Bob your five minutes at least for me this is a bit of a historic occasion tonight because it's the first time that I've ever been present when Sam conkin was wearing a tie congratulations on joining the world of yuppies I think the most the most important question is I listen to to what Sam was saying it's not who calls themselves libertarians or who can be by by some stretching of the term defined as sort of a quasi libertarian or libertarian sympathizer the litmus test is really how much has freedom been increased or decreased by what someone's actions produce that's really the ultimate test it's it's fine to to have people say that they're that they're libertarians or libertarian sympathizers that's not the point point is is there more freedom or is there less freedom from the eye or or no change from what this particular person or institution has done I mentioned very briefly before the example of Leon Low and the free market foundation in South Africa there's a man who is in fact an anarchist libertarian longstanding a lawyer by profession who has for the last two or three years worked for a government under contract being paid by a government in order to develop things like a basic law allowing people who had never who'd been deprived of any right to own property ever historically all of a sudden to be able to become property owners and to homestead land that used to be government land who has authored legislation that at one stroke wiped out thousands of regulations and controls so that people can start businesses freely who has authored legislation that abolished all the hated apartheid laws that were bequeathed to this little homeland of Siski by South Africa now that is a liberty to my mind that is a libertarian who is being effective in the world of making real freedom happen for real life human beings now I can't to claim that that I or many other libertarians in the think tank community in this country have accomplished that much freedom in that short of time have made that kind of a difference a fundamental difference people's lives however the work of libertarian free market think tanks in this country has played a real part in increasing economic freedom in this country in the last 10 to 15 years through such measures as promoting privatization of things that were formerly government monopolies in which today thousands of entrepreneurs are free to go into business fields that used to be closed to them in the deregulation of transportation at the local level in places like San Diego and Seattle and the entire state of Arizona and the entire state of Florida which because of the influence of free market and libertarian economists and policy studies people have now been opened up entirely to competition and entrepreneurship I think theorists are vital we need theorists we need purists we need people to keep us on the straight and narrow to keep us tied to our principles but we also need people who can take the next step of trying to apply these ideas in ways that have a chance of actually succeeding being put into practice I think it gets in the way of making these kinds of difficult real world steps to come up with an all embracing concept like the state as the absolute enemy that one can never have anything to do with because in fact sometimes some people who can do it need to get in there and take hold of things that they can then dismantle an example of someone who is not a libertarian by my definition but who's a sympathizer is someone like Mark Fowler who heads the Federal Communications Commission who has opened up cable television who has opened up telephone service who's opened up the satellite business to competition and who today is leading a strong campaign to abolish the fairness doctrine and end censorship on the broadcast media now that's somebody who's in there I don't think I could do that I would not want to work for the government in that kind of a position even accomplishing or attempting to accomplish the kind of things he's doing but I'm glad someone like that is in there and I think that people like that when they're trying to accomplish ends like that ought to be supported and not viewed as class enemies to be liquidated and I think we need to make more sophisticated distinctions than I think Sam wants to make about where allies may be for actually increasing freedom for real people in realistic spans of time and not just deal with things in abstractions that have absolute black and white good and evil and no shades of gray possible because shades of gray are real and they really exist. I think that'll do. OK, Sam in the last round of the regularly scheduled about you will have the last word. Thank you. Actually, for fairness, I might add that the original debate rules were of course to have positive, negative, negative, positive so that Bob should have the last word. But since we're having question periods, I probably are at least those who feel favorable to him can figure out ways to ask questions in which he can get his last word. I certainly expected to have the same privilege if I had word the other way. There's actually a tremendous amount of specifics. I would love to disagree with Bob on here. Much of them go very deeply into a require a fairly deep roots digging here concerning why we disagree the way we do. Bob, as far as I can tell, I'm sure he's evolved in certain things. We have all sorts of similarities. It's really instructive how we evolve since we're both big science fiction fans. I sort of semi-discovered John Jay Pierce who ran a section inside New Libertarian for a while, dropped out when I ran weekly and Bob picked him up and ran him as a columnist. So we have a certain amount of background in science and science fiction and so forth. And yet, and at one time, perhaps in the 60s, we may have been roughly in the same position. It is no longer the case. I don't really see him, except now that he's quoting Mildsay Tung and letting a hundred flowers bloom, which might be a sudden lurch to the left. I don't have to note in future tutorials. Or, of course, from my point of view, since Mildsay Tung would be far right the other way. But I really haven't seen and all do apologies, perhaps again, due to my position on the spectrum. That much change in Bob's position in the last 15 odd years. I think the rest of the movement, and here again, we get into shady problems of definitions. Perhaps there's one point where I agree with him about shades of gray. It is in describing a distribution curve or distribution graph of the Libertarian movement because we do tend to stretch and shade out as we move along. Some people move faster than others. I think there's a lot of, perhaps, in fact, we're talking about two different Libertarian movements. This also goes back to what is a Libertarian and what are we using the terms as. And to put it bluntly, I consider what Bob Poole is doing is becoming more and more like our not-so-friendly economist, Milton Friedman, an efficiency expert for the state. And I mean this in the following way, that the state itself to exist cannot simply be totally rapacious on all grounds and all times and so forth, grab, grab, grab, confiscate, confiscate, steal, murder, et cetera. There's a certain amount of restraint required for it to maintain its mystique that it is serving some useful function to us. If it was constantly murdering and raping and plundering and so forth, it would have to restrain itself. It even gave up raping a whole century ago when it devolved strata senior, at least in that form. The plundering has probably increased tremendously since the taxation used to be 10%, but after hundreds of years of classical liberalism and gradualism that some people have accused Bob of advocating, we now have 50% taxation in the enlightened, more classically liberal parts of the world. So perhaps there is a flaw in following this and explaining to the state how by restraining their appetite in certain very and well-chosen areas, we can make them more efficient and last longer. Maybe that's not what we want to do. Maybe we, in fact, want to get people out of the state. Siski is an interesting question and it's kind of weird because it almost reverses us here. Siski, of course, is a totally unrecognized pariah of the world. You would think that'd be almost enough for it to gain some sort of friendliness from libertarians since we've all felt as outsiders. And yet Bob was warning us not to identify with outsiders and so forth. Well, Siski, of course, is a sham to a large extent. It's got a kind of perhaps remarket in action within certain limited areas of the market. But in fact, it is a large concentration camp for black people so that they won't mix around and threaten the ill-gotten, non-property-owned territory in South Africa proper. Land which was stolen by ponder and theft and whom much of the original owners remain there to counterclaim it. Therefore, I find Siski in the larger arena to be anything but something a libertarian can find any value in. And having it recognized as a state, since I don't believe in states as many libertarians do, is hardly something for us to leap forward to. I'm beginning to run out of time. I noticed, and I did want to hit the following. Two quickies here. Bob brought up the baby boom generation for what reason I don't know, except that he makes certain claims about their politics, which is ridiculous. You are part of the baby boom generation, as am I. And by talking around to said people, I found a great lack of unanimity on politics approaching that of the libertarian movement. There may be certain averages appearing here and there in transitory passing, but frankly, I don't see it. There's a certain small segment of that baby boom generation I find particularly odious, called yuppies, which you might have run across my cover. Their distinguishing characteristic is that they've given up their ideals. That is what the term means, regardless of what marketing agents are busily trying to launder it up to mean today. Oh, and by the way, this is, of course, not yuppie. This is, unfortunately, Bob has been out of Southern California far too long. This is, of course, a punk outfit from the factory in well-known West Hollywood. That's my idea of dressing up, perhaps, Dagny, who suggested I wear it, thought that I would look too hippie and therefore passe, otherwise I don't know. Anyway, I'm glad to see we're not degenerating to my or sartorial arguments in our big debate here. Can I point out, there's a couple of, one more thing I want to point out here in passing that just struck me when I was taking notes of him that he was talking about U.S. as an interfering force around the world. And in the United States, the U.S. intervention imperialism as the real word, or the word that those of us don't shrink from using, is, and he says, the consensus of supporting it is starting to crumble. I think this kind of says it all. We undoubtedly move in two different worlds that are growing further and further apart. And whether or not they're the same one or whether or not we have a validity here, the idea that anybody in 1985 can just begin to see the consensus around American imperialism begin to flake at the edges, when in fact it shattered into a million pieces and by 1969 is totally overwhelms me with a feeling of almost if I had to wander in Bob Poole's institutional quarters for a while of being a stranger in a very strange land. I think hopefully, and I feel this, that most of the people who call themselves a libertarian movement up until today have felt a similar way with feel similar about such things. And in fact, the movement has traveled along perhaps not as fast as us, me in some cases, perhaps hopefully even faster than me and others. But in fact, we are getting further and further away from this type of reform the enemy, reform the establishment, reform the state. And let's, you know, and wasting time on people with best interests. You see, there's one fact, and this is a perfect thing to close, and there's one fact that is absolutely essential to developing a libertarian strategy and understanding what we as consistent libertarians pure types are fighting for. And that is this. It comes from our Mises. It comes from Albert G. Nock. It comes from Murray Rothbard, who didn't want to stay around for this. And that is this. There are producers and there are parasites in our society. The economic means and the political means of making money as Nock put it and so forth. All of these say the same thing. And the fact is the producers in some sense must always outnumber the parasites or the parasite kills the host and all dies. Therefore, the producers have a vested interest in what we're doing. No, almost nobody that Bob Pool talks about those bureaucrats, those institutionalists, those think tankers, are producers. They are parasites. And I for one have no desire to waste large and inordinate amount of money to convince the parasites on how to trim their operation. In the end, we are fighting for the producers. We are fighting for those great downtrodden who are not yuppies, who are not bureaucrats, who are not civil servants, who don't think of themselves as some kind of amorphous, whatever. And in fact, I feel that they are being pushed around, kicked around, taxed to death. Their business is destroyed and so forth by the state. That is what I'm fighting for, taxation is theft to these people, the draft is slavery to these people. And in fact, when it comes, push comes to shove and they get enlightened, they're going to go for radical solutions and not sit around, talk about 1% cut this year, sales tax reform or whatever. And that's, I think, where we finally disagree. Thank you. I'd like to ask both of our debaters to come up here and sit in what I'm sure are very hot seats by this time, having been under the lights for the entire time. And I will see if the other microphone is live. And I will try in my semi-dazzled fashion to recognize people from the audience who have questions. And Mr. Kresnar seems to be the first one I recognize. The question that John asked, I'm going to repeat these questions for the benefit of the people who want to buy tapes of the session and wish something resembling completeness, is what is the real nature of Mark Fowler's work at the FCC? Is it really increasing freedom or is it just making the government look better and directed to Bob? Right. Now, remember I did not, I did not try to say that I think of Mark Fowler per se as a libertarian, but you've asked a factual question. I think the factual question is that the amount of freedom for people who own radio stations, for people who want to be or are in the telecommunications business, for people who want to put up satellites into orbit or to be in the satellite dish business, for people who want to be in the telephone business, new cellular telephones, all of those people have freedom now that they didn't have 10 or 15 years ago, thanks to Mark Fowler's work, and cable TV as well. And if he succeeds in his campaign to abolish the fairness doctrine, then another huge area of control and power by the state, namely of the censorship exercised by the FCC in a subtle but very real way will be taken away and will be gone. So I think real freedom will be increased yet another step by that. Now, admittedly, Mark Fowler is not campaigning to eliminate the FCC. I wish he were. I wish other people were. We've tried to argue that it should be abolished. And I think, but the point is that the sum total of his actions over the last four or five years has been to reduce the scope of control and power by the FCC to make it more of a redundancy and thereby somewhat easier to argue for the abolition of. So not only has his actions increased real freedom for thousands of individuals and companies, but they've also laid more groundwork for us as libertarians to come along and say, OK, there's much less of an excuse to have this agency there because we've now seen that the marketplace can do a lot more. Gentleman in the front row. You didn't support parasites of what you had. And if it meant like you actually and have a good cooking hamburger which is a key philosophy, you cook the best hamburgers that are for his customers. But he did not support parasites. So from this, of course, as we developed and provided ourselves, I have six buddies. I ordered. I asked, how can you send me six more announcers? I have six friends that I asked to come here today. And they, to a man, declined because they're very private people. They've been very private guys since the early 60s. And their viewpoint, as mine is, is the best revenge is to win well. We want to strike in the early 60s in the era I sort of surfaced as a result of, well, just the fact that Dacne's name was Dacne. You know, taught me here. Because that's really the only data I have. But I'm listening to the debate with you gentlemen. And it's something like, you know, you've seen these exhibits of what people thought the year 1985 would look like in 1935. And here I'm finding out that 1985 is like, it's absolutely libertarian. Organizations and the rest of them are just totally different from anything in the sector. Because our focus was on on a one-to-one basis, how it impressed, doing your best, producing and not supporting parasons. I'd like a comment from each speaker. Help me, help me read it. Camerize that, I guess. It sounds like he wants to witness for Jesus, but he's not sure what the true faith is. Right, that's the problem. No, I just want to know where are we now? I was too careful there. Anyone care to do a little walk down memory lane? Yeah, but it would take up a tremendous amount of time here. A little walk down memory lane. Both of us have been here for quite a while. I think the first thing we should say is that if you want to get at least two different versions of it, why don't you check out our respective publications, which are available in the Huxter's room. With luck, tomorrow I'll have some copies of where were you in 69. And nostalgia items such as that. I did attempt to write a history of the libertarian movement, take what I call a cram history of the libertarian movement for a certain Canadian publication, with a certain person here who sees eye to eye to me and all sorts of things nowadays. At the time I was involved with an editor who decided to purge me from continuing it because I got closer and closer to the present because of a certain divergence, I guess, in our views of what was important in the libertarian movement. The reason I bring this up is I think that Bob and I would have very different histories. I think they would, in a sense, not even differ in the sense of establishment revisionist so much as what we consider important happened. My mention of the libertarian party, for example, as candidates would be extremely minor and in passing and pointing out how much time was wasted by certain people who were otherwise valuable in being involved with them. And I would be discussing all sorts of interesting breakthroughs done by people developing counter-economic techniques, publications, and so forth. I consider Mike Hoy's, for example, Loom Panix publications and dissemination to be one of the major libertarian breakthroughs in recent time. Bob might forget to mention that. I don't know. I'm sure he'll answer in a second or two. But I think it's what I'm trying to say is that there's quite a distinction here since you asked both of us of what is important and what the movement is like. We still have some kind of marginally collective consciousness in the sense that we think there is a movement and so forth. I think there's a libertarian culture. This may arise even more so in an upcoming issue. And since Murray left here, I can say this now without worrying about being jumped on. He's probably one of the main exponents of the statement that there isn't one. You, in a sense, exhibit the fact that there was one even then that you've made an amazing one of life and cultural choices in the way you were gonna choose to live, which, of course, is a cultural statement, not just a pure political one. And I think this has evolved. And yes, you're right. The future or the present in the sense is much differently predicted. And what it'll be like in another 23 years will be different than probably either I or Bob extrapolates. And in the meantime, we're going to keep taking sightings and move towards what we think is a proper target and make corrections, at least I do, as often as possible. Just very briefly, my impression is that it's that most libertarians these days are not living essentially dropped out or trying to be anonymous, but are living active public lives of trying to convey libertarian ideas to other people, to educate by talking with friends and neighbors, by writing letters to the editor, by writing articles and trying to get them published. And doing things of this sort while maintaining active professional careers. It's obviously hard to know how many libertarians there are who have purposely made themselves invisible. That's a very difficult thing to measure, obviously. So there may well be many people who follow the path that you've outlined that I'm not aware of and that even Sam is not aware of simply because of the measurement problem. But there are thousands of active libertarians in all sorts of organizations, and simply as individuals who subscribe to publications who are very concerned about educating other people and spreading libertarian ideas to try to increase support for a free society. It just occurred to me because Bob just stimulated something in what he said. You're also in making an assumption which Bob kind of let you get carried along with here and that the choices either cutting everything off, dropping out, remaining sort of subterranean or underground versus being working within the system, playing the game to a large extent, making all sorts of compromises or whatever being active. In fact, that is not the choice. As I and several of the people who hang around me can attest, I break every law in the world. I'm a walking law breaker and publicly tell everybody about it every time again. I don't pay a diamond to access. I am a legal alien who has gotten away with it for a decade with no sweat. And I get up in front of large audiences of people which are selected. Yes, but selected because they're libertarian. Even if they're not counter-economists, whatever problems I may have with Bob, he would obviously feel morally inhibited at least as of until today of turning me in. I don't know what it will feel like tomorrow. But I think that's kind of one of the last pieces of glue that keep him and I and others and everybody in between in the same movement. And I think that is an option that didn't exist at your time to a large extent because of probably because of conception of it and part it evolved. And partly because of the fact of the movement as a culture, as an entity, as a society, as I perceive it, has become large enough to actually be able to sustain people like me being both productive, both being able to be as productive or rich as we feel like working for it. I don't happen to feel like working for it as much as some do. And I can think of others like, say, Doug Casey who's equally legal and extremely rich and so forth but that can do this and essentially have our cake and eat it too. And that is the answer to all these super individualist dropouts, not you by any means. I'm talking about people like the Connections who argue that that is the only way out of this to drop out totally and to any kind of movementism of the smacks of collectivism and therefore being a libertarian. There's a huge payoff for us and we can have our cake and eat it too. You're always welcome back in my group. No sweat. May I make an analogy, which I hope you don't find too embarrassing. You remind me a lot of the radical feminists who decided the only way they could at least temporarily serve their cause was to give up men and become hardcore lesbians. And it seems to me your position on joining, because of the time to be an individualist required so much out of you to sort of tear loose a society that that seemed to be the only way to do it. I feel there's a connection there. And a lot of people, like a lot of these people who decided to become lesbians not as a social or sexual choice but as a purely political choice, before 1974 was almost incomprehensible. I think there's a certain case, a certain analogy involved there. Yes, I think it would be reasonable to take a few more questions here. Jeff, I think you had your hand up first way back when during our fall start. Jeff asks Sam whether he would consider the transition from a state which conscripts people to a state which does not conscript people to be forward progress, I guess, would be a good phrase. Well, for those of you into sciences and chemistry, I consider those degenerate states. So my answer is essentially, there is no fundamental difference. Anybody who doesn't want to be conscripted can join me anytime in the great counter economy and thunder nose at the state. Right now, several, what, 40% or something of the draft registration elible use have decided they'd rather live in a society in which a state is not successfully conscripting or registering people to be conscripted. And they're living it. Right now, regardless of the state's wishes. That to me is an important, is what in fact we want. The transition state from a state that has one position, official position on conscription versus the state that has another official position on conscription really doesn't attract me as any way to devote energy to have it jump over that energy barrier from one to the other. So my answer is, if you want it down to the line, it's not worth the effort to change from one to the other. The answer is to get out of a system which has a state. Okay, I'll answer it in a larger sense here, because I think we're moving more and more from the political now, I think towards the individual choice issue. If I lived in an area which was claimed by a state that singled out people that were, shall we say, suede black leather ties at times, or golden apple typings for discordian purposes. And being on the special hit list, there were a lot of people in society who wanted to be good patriotic whateverians. And were hunting me. I would probably move from that state to a place where I could get away with a lot more. And the populace was a lot more with me, okay? So for example, if I was a, if I'm having a draft evasion, I'm not gonna hang out in Arkansas, God forbid, poor Paul, but Los Angeles would be a great place to live. Similarly, if I was a Gypsy or Jewish, I would not hang around in Germany between 1933 and 1945. On the other hand, if I could imagine several cases in which probably I wouldn't notice, given certain background and identification that I wouldn't notice much difference between being in Germany in 1939 or being in the United States in 1939, I will argue, and I think you agree with me, that if you weren't a particular ethnic group, you probably are on one of the bad ethnic group lists, including the ones that were rounded up in this country, you probably wouldn't notice that much difference between the amount of fascism in the United States in 1942 and the sense of massive government controls, regulations, conscription, and mass slaughter, and that in Germany in 1942. And so I'm saying on those grounds, yeah, the state's a state. And who cares which of its various ugly faces that decides to turn to me? I think we want some questions here, not some more speeches, and I think we'll take one from this side of the room. Dave. There's a parasite, and I found that puzzling in light of the conversation that you and I had at Nancy Neal's house, in which, if you remember, I don't know how to do it. I either was sober. It was my understanding that we agreed that the world is full of terrible amounts of gray, on the very moral proposition that you're talking about, that a tremendous amount of people work not for the state, but in various situations where they use the state in various degrees or state contractors. There's just gray all over the place, and it's not a very useful procedure for libertarians to divide into the good guys and the bad guys and to carry that into what's been going on here. It seems like you're painting Mr. Fool's position as, well, he's helping the parasites figure out how to manage the blood supply of the producers. And it seems to me that even if you paint it in that, to me, unfair metaphor, if he can get the parasites to think, let's take a lot less blood for a while, and then there'll be a lot more of it, meanwhile, we'll have less concentration camps, so people in Cistai will be better off if Mr. Fool is able to get taxes down a lot, and if he's able to get the government to impact on my life a lot less, and they're doing it for reasons that I don't agree about, I'm gonna be a lot freer, and I think they're gonna have a lot harder time getting me less free later. Would you respond to that? I guess I would summarize that as saying that Dave seems to feel that Sam has unfairly characterized Bob as an agent of the state, and feels that there's a lot more gray as opposed to black and white, so I guess we're down to questions of photographic chemistry here, Sam. That'll be right up your alley. Well, I always warn the quantum, but anyway, okay, as far as I thought, of course, I was trying to be as fair as possible to Bob, and of course, he's fortunately here to defend himself, so I don't feel too put upon there or that I've been putting upon him either. I'll have his microphone in as soon as I finish so that he can immediately jump in and point out otherwise. I'd like to point out, though, that I can never remember agreeing to a world of gray. I definitely do believe in black and white, we're the black and the enemy is the white, and we're the blacks, libertarian, historical color, and just like communists or reds, and yeah, I think that's a fact. As far as what does that mean once we get away from green bow ties and other symbolism, people are, at any given time, unless they work at being consistent, not everybody does, not everybody even realizes it's valuable to be consistent so that you don't contradict yourself all the time, a lot of people have mixed premises, but each of those premises, the way you say it's mixed is because some of those premises are right and some are wrong. Sometimes they apply in some of the time, sometimes they are other time. That doesn't mean gray in the sense that at least a lot of people mean it, if you wanna say a speckled color appears from a distance, fine. I think what I'm trying to get at here then is to get an answer as close as possible and as short a time as possible here. Yeah, I think that libertarians or anybody else when they're dealing with a problem have to separate out the elements which solve the problem and the elements which don't. I hate to sound like a utilitarian since I do believe in natural law and I do believe in natural rights and all the rest of those wonderful but atheistic moral codes. They're all there and I think the rhetoric that's involved with that is useful if nothing else to generate some emotions which we ought to have at times too. That covers a lot of it of what you were asking. The last thing I would guess is this. The statement of whether or not somebody serves the state or doesn't serve the state is crucial to deciding libertarian tactics and strategy on the grounds. How you deal with that is interesting. That in fact is almost a totally untouched upon subject here because we're debating on whether or not it's an important issue. Some people here, again Murray's not in the room but some people shall we say close to Murray who have in fact implied something like class liquidation which was used earlier in the rhetoric, actually sounding like they put people up against them all and shoot them. Others of us have decided that the proper way is a combination of market activities of educational activities and even in the came time social shunning is a useful one. It cups both ways of course so use it accordingly. Yeah I think that we have a core position I think we are a black to a large extent in following it and I believe we ought to use things to reinforce it and I believe there's a need and a use and a value to each and every one of those as individuals for having a collective movement to even go back to the previous question. And now I'm gonna give. I don't have much to add to the question which I appreciated I think it made a very good point. I think it's not very useful to use terms like agent of the state because they're just they're really just loose rhetoric. What you have to ask as I said earlier is what effect does a given set of actions and ideas have on how much freedom there is? And if freedom is increased for real people in the real world then I don't care whether someone can be characterized as an agent of the state or not if the end result of his actions is more freedom. Some people there are dirty jobs to do and some people are willing to do them and others aren't but there are a lot of different ways that freedom gets increased and some of it involves doing things that some of us aren't comfortable with doing like working sometimes in a few places on contract to government or like Leon Lowe does as a lawyer or even if there were a libertarian a real libertarian Mark Fowler taking a position as head of an agency in an attempt to dismantle it. And I think those people really ought to be commended rather than condemned as some kind of evil people. Any additional questions? Fred. Yeah, the definition of libertarian. Fred wants the two debaters to return to the original subject in the spoils board and define just what a libertarian is. Well I attempted to start out with that in a personal sense but to me libertarianism is a political philosophy. It's not an all embracing philosophy like objectivism or some other overall philosophy. Libertarian is simply a branch of a version of political philosophy that says liberty is the highest, most important social value, social political value that coercion is evil. The initiation of force is evil and wrong and we should not accept it. And that the whole relationships among people in a social context ought to be decided in accordance with those principles. Now the differences come in all sorts of implications of what does that imply about the arrangements for solving problems that occur when you try to be consistent with those ideas and Sam and I obviously differ on what we think it takes to put those ideas into practice. Right, I believe you said define this time libertarianism as opposed to libertarian. Again, I'll tell you, in a sense it's a synthesis of what I've been saying before because I think the label is mutating. It's a rapid growing organism, perhaps it's had a little gene splicing I don't know but libertarianism means to me at this point is an umbrella term. It has to be if Bob and I and Dick are standing up here or sitting up here. So it must be a pretty wide umbrella with a large covering area to keep us from the state. And the question is, is that more useful than not? I think we really get down to it. At times Bob obviously doesn't find it useful. He decides not to use the label at all and I think I understand his reasons. They fit with pretty much the philosophies outlined here to accomplish certain ends. It's better from not to wear a label. I find the uncomfortableness going in the other way because part of the time it fulfills what I remember way back to the definition one and definition two. Libertarianism is I think moving towards the point of definition one which is simply all inclusive of all these people who simply profess liberty. And unfortunately FDR profess liberty except that he also wanted a big welfare safety net and Linda Johnson profess to love liberty as his highest value except for of course the massive intervention of people in South Vietnam and so forth. I think the umbrella will stretch, whites eventually stretch to the tearing point and then some of us will want something else to protect ourselves from the acid rain of status and if I can complete the metaphor. I think that is what Libertarianism at this point I think really does meet and so in a sense I don't think we're out that far apart. We may want different things but I think we're seeing the same thing. Gentleman in the back row. Your objective is that you never do want to feel that while you get to escape you reduce its oppression in some areas that helps. That's okay. The question for Bob was to what extent does he feel that efforts to get the state to back off in certain areas serves to reinforce its underlying legitimization in the eyes of the rest of the public. That's a very legitimate thing to be concerned about. But let me step back one step though and raise a question which I wanted to raise in the rebuttal time and didn't have time to about the term the state is a bit of a mixed bag. If you're not an anarchist Libertarian, okay? And I'm not and many Libertarians are not. If you believe that there is a valid concept of limited government then what we have today that goes by the name of the state is a combination of a small amount of valid functions and a whole mess of coercive things thrown on top of it of transfers of wealth from some people to another of interferences with people's lives and so forth. So if what's important to me is to try to separate out things, the vast majority of things that governments today do that I consider to be illegitimate from the small number of things that governments do that are legitimate. And so delegitimizing government is not something that I want to do. Delegitimizing the state when seen as Frederick Bastia described it as a mechanism for having some people get something at the expense of other people, yeah, that I want to do. But I'm not interested in delegitimizing government per se. So what I'm trying to do is to educate people on all of the wrong things, all the coercive things that I see governments doing which you could define as the state and we would agree on. Well, at the same time not trying to delegitimize the basic concept of a mechanism for protecting people's rights which I think can legitimately be defined as government. So I have to qualify the answer a bit. Okay, we'll take one more. Michael, I'll second that one I guess. Michael is asking what is a limited government and isn't that a contradiction in terms? I assume he's asking Bob since I'm perfectly willing to agree with that. Well, that's a subject that could be a subject of two or three hours worth of discussion tonight, obviously. Limited government is defined as a government that whose sole function is protecting people's rights from coercion, which can be coercion from people at home, normally called criminals and from aggression from overseas which is a function that's normally called defense, national defense. And so a government that were voluntarily funded and whose functions were limited to a criminal justice system and national defense would be what I would call limited government. And we've had nothing, we've had things that came close but we've never had exactly what I would call a true limited government of the kind that I am seeking in history. And that concludes our debate. Thank you very much for your kind attention.