 All right, good afternoon. Welcome to the Cato Institute for our book forum today. My name is David Bowsen, the executive vice president of the Institute, and I'm glad to have you here. I will introduce each speaker before he speaks, and then we'll have time for questions afterward. And then, of course, we invite you to stay for lunch and get your book signed when we're done here. When I was a young libertarian, I used to marvel at the broad interdisciplinary knowledge of Murray Rothbard and the people around him. They knew history, economics, philosophy, class analysis, and they integrated it into a comprehensive libertarian theory. But many of those people are gone from us or in retirement today, and most younger scholars, libertarian and otherwise, tend to be more specialized than that. But Tom Palmer carries on that tradition of wide-ranging interdisciplinary scholarship, and he adds to it a commitment to actually spread that knowledge and to help other people understand and advance liberty. This book, Realizing Freedom, has a specific and meaningful subtitle, Libertarian Theory, History, and Practice. Tom talks about the nature of rights and justice and markets, about the historical development of liberty and civil society, and about liberty and practice from gay rights in Moscow to blogging in Egypt to whether taxation is theft. But it's also a very personal subtitle because Tom has become one of the deepest and clearest thinkers on libertarian theory, and he's also, by this point, been involved in a lot of libertarian history, student groups, taxpayer groups, the anti-draft movement, the struggle to undermine communism, the Rothbard Circle, the Cato Institute, and of course, he is a whirlwind of libertarian practice. I was just reading this annual report on the activities of the Atlas Global Initiative, a program that Tom started a few years ago at Cato and then took over to the Atlas Foundation, and just reading the captions in here about Tom is exhausting. Tom Palmer speaks at the Freedom School in Malaysia and the Freedom School in Ukraine. Delivers the annual Julian Simon lecture in New Delhi. Debates free trade at the Liberty Forum in Brazil. Meets with members of parliament in Penang, Malaysia and chairs a conference in Kuala Lumpur. Lectures on free markets in Bishkek, and Tom, you should list the countries as well as the cities. I didn't know that was Kyrgyzstan. Addresses student leaders and cabinet advisors in Tajikistan, speaks on the legacy of communism at the Oslo Freedom Forum, is interviewed about the financial crisis in Jakarta, meets with professors and lectures on property rights in Kabul. As I say, I'm exhausted just typing the summary. Briefly, let me say that Tom Palmer holds a doctorate in political philosophy from Oxford University. He has written for publications ranging from the Washington Post to Al-Hayat to the encyclopedia of modern political thought. He has been director of student affairs and director of Eastern European Outreach at the Institute for Humane Studies, and senior fellow and vice president of the Cato Institute. And now he is vice president for international programs at the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, and general director of the Atlas Global Initiative for free trade, peace and prosperity, as well as remaining a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and director of Cato University. Officially, I think this is Tom's first book. But really, libertarianism a primer and the libertarian reader would not have been brought into existence without his guidance throughout the writing and editing of those books. So this is not the first time Tom's ideas have been available in book form, just the first time that he got the credit. Please welcome the author of Realizing Freedom, Tom Palmer. Thank you very much, David, and when I make a presentation like this, I'm always mindful of what my mother would think. I have to give the thank yous at the beginning, so I don't forget my social graces. And a few people I'd like to thank in particular, there's a long list of people to whom I'm very grateful, but Dr. Jason Kuznicki, who's here with us right now from the Cato Institute, without him pestering me, bullying me, encouraging me, and giving me very useful comments that while this essay is duplicative of this other one, they cover the same ground, we whittle down over a thousand pages to a slim of 539, I think. So a mere slip of a pamphlet compared to what it might have been without Jason's generous assistance, so thank you very much. Also, I'd like to thank the Cato Institute for providing an extremely cool place to work that's fun and engaging and intellectually stimulating and with good colleagues. All the sponsors of the Cato Institute who make all of this wonderful work that Cato does possible, and in particular David Bowes and Ed Crane for building this institution. As I was reviewing just a mountain of articles that I tried to fish out and remember if I published this here or there, I'm not a big chronicler of my own work. And I pulled out things were a little too juvenile, too dated, not particularly relevant anymore. And when I had my finalists, I noticed a number of themes that had been in a way cooking in my thinking over the years of writing these. And I thought I'd review some of those. The first theme is about the rule of law, the intimate connections between liberty and rights and the rule of law. Now, anytime someone talks about the rule of law, most people feel their eyes turning back in their foreheads. It just seems dull and uninspiring or stale. Quite a few years ago, I watched a German film by an avant-garde leftist and they mocked the rule of law. They showed a very, very old man stammering some difficulty getting out his words. He said that the Reichstadt, the law-governed state, was a great accomplishment. And the point was to mock him, how boring and stupid to favor something like that. But it struck me that that elderly man, back in the 1970s, had lived through a horror, a lawless regime, national socialism. He knew how important the rule of law is. And in fact, the rule of law should be inspiring to us. It is a serious goal and without it, there is no freedom and there are no rights. Its centrality has made all the more evident to me by the work that I do in post-totalitarian and some still semi-totalitarian societies, in which the central issue is the development of the legal institutions of liberty. The rule of law. Without the rule of law, one is at the mercy of the arbitrary will of other people and that is to exist in a condition of unfreedom. Milton Friedman, through his great credit, corrected himself many years later about his comments on the Soviet Union. He said in 1989 or 1990, there are three things you have to do, privatize, privatize, privatize. And years later he recognized, he said that was naive. You can't privatize into something that doesn't have a legal framework of property rights, of contract, of the rule of law. Those are, as our colleague, Bill Niskanen, discusses them, the soft infrastructure of the free society and they should be the focus of our attention. John Locke put it, as he did so often, very clearly, when he discussed the relationship between law and freedom, so many people complained there's too many laws or being harassed by laws and we understand what they mean. But in a sense, those are not laws, they're commands or edicts or interferences. As he pointed out, the end of law is not to abolish or restrain but to preserve and enlarge freedom for in all the states of created beings capable of laws where there is no law, there is no freedom. For liberty is to be free from restraint and violence from others, which there cannot be where there is no law. Freedom is not, as we are told, a liberty for every man to do what he lists or whatever he is inclined to do, that was the view of the other side. But it is a liberty to dispose in order as he lists his person, actions, possessions, and his whole property within the allowance of those laws under which he is and therein not to be subject to the arbitrary will of another but freely follow his own. Those who have the power to arbitrarily reassign, eradicate, or create rights in order to achieve their ideas of fairness or efficiency or community, put all the rest of us at their mercy and eradicate our freedom. It's a theme that I deal with on a number of occasions in my book when I criticize those who advocate so-called welfare rights or positive rights as entitlements from the state, and I'll talk about that a little bit more in a moment. It was a great accomplishment of the tradition of classical rights thinking and one of the great figures here is Thomas Aquinas and the later scholastic thinkers, whom I also discussed in the book, to connect what is called in the legal literature subjective right, the idea that you have a right to do something or to be paid $10 for something that you sold, your right, and objective right when we say this is the right thing to do or this is the right ordering of the world or justice. And in particular, the way in which justice is achieved is by respecting the rights of all the members of society. It's a justice-generating machine, if you will, where Albert Nozick later articulates fundamentally the same idea in his book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia. But that achievement is put in peril when others say, well, we'll just rearrange the rights so as to generate incompatible or conflicting rights such that we have to override them to achieve justice. And again, I have an essay on John Rawls. This is a central problem, I think, in Rawls' claim to be a liberal because he overrides rights in the name of justice. Now, the second theme that struck me as I was reading through these is the historical rootedness of abstractly formulated accounts of rights and the importance of identifying a narrative of liberty for every cultural context. I've gotten into a little hot water with some conservatives because I say, I do not defend Western values. I don't go around the world saying, I'm here to promote Western values to you uneducated, non-civilized, non-Westerners. After all, Western culture, we can say, yes, it does have within it the ideas of rule of law, peace, justice, respect for rights, toleration, and so on. But Western history also contains within it self-war, imperialism, genocide, murder, slavery, and systematic oppression. Those are also part of the Western history of civilization. My Chinese friends quickly point out to people who come and talk about Western values. Yes, we've had a taste of that. Karl Marx from Germany imported his Western ideas and we don't like it very much. So those are also Western ideas, if you will. The challenge is to find within every cultural context the indigenous roots of liberty because every culture has a narrative of liberty and also a narrative of power and oppression as well, going in parallel, if you will. What we as advocates of liberty need to do is to excavate, dig down, identify in every cultural context those roots of liberty. Now, significantly, however, libertarian formulation of rights are always in abstract terms. We talk about every person, not every tall person or every person like me or every person of a certain gender or color or religion, but every person has rights. The American Declaration of Independence put it neatly, we hold these rights to be self-evident that all men, and it's a quirk of English that they use men when it means human being. I don't think this is a gendered expression. All men are created equal. It doesn't say English people like us, but all human beings. And in that text, in one context, is applied later in other contexts. Frederick Douglass gives his famous Fourth of July speech. He says, this says, oh man, does this not apply to me and other people like me who live under a condition of slavery? So those abstractly formulated rights are essential to the libertarian tradition, but if they're to have staying power, they need to be rooted in a historical culture. The rights that the Americans articulated in 1776 reach back to Magna Carta in 1215 to the English Bill of Rights as well. They have a historical rootedness. You can find in Chinese culture the ideas of Lao Tzu and Meng Tzu or Mencius, similar ideas about the rule of law, limitations on power, and the rights of individuals. So the great challenge for libertarians in every culture is to find the roots of the narrative of liberty and connect them to our contemporary debates and discussion, and that's a major reason why I have a fair number of essays on history in the book. The other reason is I just love history and it's fun, so I thought I would write about historical themes. Now the third theme of the book is the role of ideas, and we hear this quite frequently, ideas matter, ideas are important, and yet a lot of libertarian political economy ignores that. Some of the public choice theorists seem to apply that the only thing that ever matters is interests. That's a bit naive. The more sophisticated ones allow their interests and ideas, Madison certainly understood that there's passions and interests as well, that ideas matter, they're very important. There was no material necessity that European civilization at the beginning of the 20th century turned so strongly away from liberal values and toured violence, oppression, brutality, all inflicted in the name of the state or the race or the universal class or some other false god to which flesh and blood human beings were sacrificed. One of the problems was, and I think libertarians of the day bear some responsibility, they did not rise to the challenge to criticize those ideas strongly and robustly and too many of them fled the field because they saw this as the new wave. In my view, libertarians should never shrink from the battle of ideas from confronting an affair and open debate, the ideas of collectivism or violence or statism. His F.A. Hayek put it, we must make the building of a free society once more an intellectual adventure, a deed of courage. And I've tried in this book to engage a lot of the critics and I hope in a fair way, in a way that recognizes the valid points that they make but responds to their erroneous arguments. The fourth theme is how is the significance of implementing the ideas of liberty, undertaking the project of reform and improvement. When I started promoting libertarian ideas in the Soviet Union and the satellite states, we spent a lot of time a smuggling books and the photocopying machines and so on. And I heard this problem put very clearly once by a friend, Boris Pinsker in Moscow. And he said, you know, it's very easy to turn an aquarium into fish soup but to turn fish soup into an aquarium is really a more challenging task. And that was the problem that they faced to turn fish soup into an aquarium. I've discussed a number of those challenges and some essays in the book. They're certainly inadequate. I've organized conferences with the K-1 citizen others and Beijing and Belisi and elsewhere to address these topics. All I'll say about that is whoever can give us a recipe for how to introduce the institution of the free society will get a Nobel Prize and a hearty handshake for that because that is the biggest problem we face. We know pretty well what works. Security of property, limited government, toleration, whereas Adam Smith put it, peace, easy taxes and a tolerable administration of justice. What we do not know and do not have any good models to describe is how you get that if you don't have it. That is one of the biggest challenges that we face today. And the final theme, which leads to my conclusion, is the importance of action. It's not enough just to sit in a room and saying, I'm a libertarian, I'm a radical, and then criticize others who may not be radical enough according to your standards. It certainly feels good, but it doesn't advance the agenda of liberty. The hard thing is to take risks and try to actually improve the condition of the human race by introducing liberty and greater respect for justice. So I'll conclude by mentioning as part of the challenge, addressing the critics of libertarian ideas a straightforwardly and a fair way. Listen to them carefully, don't just dismiss them because they're bad people, they don't come to the right conclusions. Learn from them. Concede the points that they make that are valid and where they are onto something. But then also respond to those arguments that they make that are erroneous. And I do that in a number of essays in the book. I was just sick of all of the communitarian misstatements of what classical liberals believe and the encouragement of David Bose wrote an essay called Myths of Individualism, to defend liberal individualism from the caricatures that were coming out of academic writers of a communitarian bent. I'd also like to mention a few others that are in there. One, criticism of G.A. Cohen, the recently deceased professor at Oxford University, Marxist professor. He wrote a critique of Robert Nozick. It's very ingenious. It's been very influential. It's cited in book after book after book. He answered Nozick, he destroyed Nozick. I read it very, very carefully and he does no such thing because he's confused in his own analysis. Even taking all of his premises for granted and thinking through them, the conclusion does not follow from the premises. And I was a little surprised that it seemed no one else had read his argument, his very ingenious argument involving bargaining theory carefully enough to notice that when I brought it to his attention, he was quite angry with me. And demanded to know whether I was criticizing the conclusion or the argument. I thought for a moment and I said, the conclusion is the conclusion of an argument. There's not two different things and the conclusion does not follow from the premises. And he was even angrier and wanted to know if I was attacking the conclusion or the argument. Another though that might be more interesting to a Washington DC audience is the unending series of attacks on libertarianism by Cass Sunstein, currently head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Very, very smart man, very distinguished professor of law at two top law schools, University of Chicago and Harvard University. And in a delightful book, you'll get the general flavor from the title, The Cost of Rights, Why Liberty Depends on Taxes, which is one of a series of attacks on libertarianism. He argues that all rights are grants from the states, from the state. That is to say, all rights are welfare rights. That is his explicit acclaim. And that, as he points out, all rights, all legal rights are or aspire to be welfare rights. The argument is ingenious. He says, if a right isn't enforced, it's no right at all. I disagree very strongly. You can have a right that's violated. It's a meaningful thing to say. Victims of rights, and their rights violated. He suggests it's a meaningless claim. But even if we grant his claim, he argues as follows. Every right, almost every right, implies a correlative duty. And duties are taken seriously only when dereliction is punished by the public power drawing on the public purse. Thus, quote, the right against being tortured by police officers and prison guards is not a negative right, as we would normally think of it, a right not to be tortured. It's a positive right. It's a positive right that the state hire monitors to watch the guards and punish them if they torture you or abuse you. That's an interesting claim. And I thought about it. I said, well, there's a big problem for that. This is not an argument for rights. This is an argument for white rights. Don't exist. The reason is roughly as follows. If I have a right that the police not torture me, it's because the state has hired monitors to punish the police in the event that they torture me. But I would only have a right not to be tortured if I had a right that the monitors punished the police in the event that the police torture me. But I could only have that right if there were super monitors monitoring the monitors who monitor the police, such that if the monitors failed to punish the police, they will be punished by the super monitors. But I could only have a right not to be tortured by the police if the super monitors had super super monitors over them and so on. This generates an infinite regress. If there are rights, there must be an infinite scale or an infinite stack, if you will, of monitors punishing those below them for violating your rights. But by the syllogistic inference of modus telendo tolens, if A then B, not B, we can conclude not A. Consequently, according to Cass Sunstein, there are no rights whatsoever, which I think actually is the logical outcome of his entire legal theory. Is the elimination of rights. Similarly, you find a lot of advocates of welfare rights, such as Joseph Raz, Jeremy Waldron, arguing, well, of course, rights come into conflict all the time when we have welfare rights. You have a right to paid vacation, I have a right to medical care, these conflict. So the state will just decide whose rights are going to be respected. With a consequence of that, if you think about it, is not to add another layer of rights, a richer, more robust set of rights in society, but to eliminate rights from the legal and political system altogether. Because if my right and your right come into conflict and the state must decide which right is to be realized, it is by stipulation on the basis of something other than rights, which these people never bothered to specify, what that happens to be. Is it tribal allegiance, personal friendship, cronyism, bribery, racial preference? We can think of lots of ways in which these conflicts have historically been resolved, if you will, or one party triumphed over another. But we would not identify these with the principles of liberalism or of a rights-governed polity. So with that, my time is up. I look forward to Tyler's criticisms. He's one of the smartest people I know. There's a small group there. And I very much look forward to what Tyler has to say. Thank you so much. This program is making me feel old, because not only did I know Tom Palmer during all those exhausting activities, even though in my case they were only exhausting to watch, I met Tyler Cowan when he was in high school in New Jersey, planning a protest of the draft. And as you might suspect, he was an unusually talented high school student. Roseanne Rosanadana on Saturday Night Live used to respond to questions by saying, you ask a lot of questions for someone from New Jersey. Well, so did Tyler, but he grew up to actually investigate the answers. Tyler got a PhD at Harvard. Bill Nascannon likes to say that he has a Harvard degree in a Chicago education. I suppose Tyler has a Harvard degree in a George Mason education. He's also using what he learned at Harvard to supply education at George Mason, where he is now the Holbert C. Harris Professor of Economics and the general director of both the Mercatus Center and the James Buchanan Center for Political Economy. Although he may be better known for his books, including creative destruction, how globalization is changing the world's cultures, in praise of commercial culture, discover your inner economist and create your own economy, or he may be better known for his column in the New York Times, or maybe for his popular blog, Marginal Revolution, or indeed he may be best known for Tyler Cowan's ethnic dining guide on the web. At any rate, he's thought a lot about libertarianism and about ideas in general and about things that make our lives better. So we're delighted to have him here to comment on realizing freedom. Professor Tyler Cowan. Thank you, David. I'm very honored to be commenting on Tom Palmer's book. As always, when the book is a collection of essays, the commenting is somewhat of a daunting task. So I thought I would take on just a series of the main questions that face a commenter on what is a collection of essays. The first question is, what do I as a reader see as the essential unity or unities in the book? And I see really two. The first is I see this as a construction and articulation of a vision of what I call reasonable libertarianism. I think we're in a world right now that is growing very partisan and very rabid. And a lot of things which are called libertarian in the libertarian party or what you might call the Lou Rockwell-Ron Paul camp or to my eye, not exactly where libertarianism should be. And I think Tom has been a very brave and articulate advocate of a reasonable libertarianism. And if I ask myself, does the book succeed in this endeavor, I would say yes. The second unity in the book, I think, has to do with the last 30 years of world history. I know in the United States now there is less liberty, but overall the world as a whole over the last 30 years has seen more movements toward more liberty than perhaps in any other period in human history. And maybe not in Dubai, but I suspect most of these movements toward liberty will last or at least a great number of them will. So there've been these movements toward liberty and they've been motivated in part by ideas and the question arises, which are the ideas that have been the important ones for this last 30 years? And I view Tom's book, whether he intended it as such or not, as a kind of guide to which have been the important ideas driving the last 30 years. And a lot of the book goes back into history pretty far, the 18th century, the levelers, debates over natural rights. And I think precisely because it takes this broader perspective, it's one of the best guides or maybe the best guide as to what have been the important ideas driving the last 30 years rather than the misleading ideas or the dead end ideas. So that's my take on the essential unities. Another question you might ask about a collection of essays is which of them did I like best? I thought about this for a while and I have two nominations. The first one is 20 Myths About Markets, which is the essay on economics. I don't know any piece by an economist that does such a good job of poking holes in a lot of economic fallacies and just laying out what you hear so often. You would think an economist would have written this long ago but to the best of my knowledge not. The other favorite little piece of mine is called Six Facts About Iraq, which explains from Tom's point of view and Tom has been there a number of times what's going on in Iraq and why. And it's only a few pages long but I actually felt I got a better sense of Iraq reading this short piece than almost anything else I've come across. I'm not sure exactly what's the common element between the two I liked best. They both start with the number but I think what it is is the ones I like best in some way reminded me the most of Tom when he is talking or I had the sense of Tom being locked in a room and forced to address a question and not being allowed to leave until he had given his bottom line approach. And I think what he's very good at throughout the book is just getting directly to the point. If I ask myself the question, which of the essays did I like least? I did like all of them. I would say the parts I liked least in general were the quotations from other people. I liked them fine. In part I mean this as a compliment to Tom. But I do think that overall I had the sense that even though this is a 500 plus page book at a lot of times in it I was wishing for more Tom Palmer in an odd sense. And I thought the parts that dealt with the history of ideas were good, the quotations were good, the quoted people were good. I don't have any objection to those parts but they were still somehow my least favorite parts of the book that I wanted Tom to be in some way more subjective or more a bit locked into the room and someone's interviewing him and he just has to say what he thinks. So that would be the answer to this other aspect of a collection of essays which part that I like least. You also might ask about a collection of essays what would I have wanted more of? And this is perhaps an unfair request again for a 500 plus page book written over several decades but nonetheless as commentator, it's my privilege to set out what I would have wanted more of. I would have wanted more of Tom's experiences as a traveler speaking on liberty in different cultures and more of a sense of which ideas of liberty are culturally specific and which are not. Even though this is a topic where it's very hard to be scientific, I would have gladly seen more of the subjective Tom on this question and have had just a bit more of the narrative of the book and have it feel more like something that happened over time while these exciting events were going on. So that's what I would have wanted more of and just a sense of as Tom visited all these unusual places including New Jersey, I might add. Actually, Tom and David visited me in Hillsdale, New Jersey when I was like a Todd, I think I was 15 and they were in town and they stopped by and we had a great chat. That visit had a great influence on me at the time but the sense of when Tom went to New Jersey, when Tom went to Iraq, when Tom went to Kyrgyzstan like what doubts did he have about the future of these places and where did those doubts spring from and what really are the cultural foundations of liberty and how that caused Tom's own thought to evolve. So if I'm allowed to wish for a sequel book, I would just lock Tom in a room, turn on the tape recorder, transcribe what he says and develop this narrative of Tom's 30 plus years on the road doing this very important project. In terms of what are the parts of the book I disagree with the most. Let me cite one very small thing and then a bigger thing. The essay I thought I disagreed with the most was the essay on infrastructure where Tom defends the prospect of private roads and I'm not sure exactly how far he wishes to take this but my disagreement I think is the following. That I can well imagine private roads working if you're starting from scratch but if you live say in this metropolitan area and you ask what should we do with the Beltway it's my view that we could not successfully privatize the Beltway or maybe we could and then regulate it but we wouldn't be getting a real privatization and the plans I've seen for road privatization most of the benefits of those come from congestion pricing which we could do with government ownership so I think I'm more skeptical on road privatization than is Tom at least in this essay and again I'm not sure in the essay how far he's pushing it but there was never a sentence that popped up where he says I don't think we can privatize the Beltway and if I had written this essay I would have put in such a sentence. In terms of like the bigger picture of the book I agreed with much more in this book than I disagreed with but at the end of the book I still had a clear sense of where Tom and I are different thinkers even though we have a lot of common background and a lot of common sources and reading the book caused me to rethink what that is and let me just speculate on that for a moment and here I'm reading into Tom this is not what I found in the black and white in the book and Tom may have a different account but I think Tom is basically a more radical libertarian than I am and I am a more moderate libertarian than he is and I'm pretty sure he'd agree with that characterization and you might ask why and the sense I get reading through these essays is that Tom has more faith in ideology than I do that he tends to see the possibility of having a kind of new ideological revolution that would move the world to a kind of sustainable libertarian point and again it's nothing he says it's just the sense I got reading the book the view I had reading the book as libertarianism it involves all these concepts there's so many concepts in this book and I think there's something about ideology that tends to only be able to carry along with it a small number of concepts and I tend to distrust ideology more than Tom does so I think he sees the choice variable as should the world have more libertarian ideology and he says yes and I agree with that but the actual choice variable I tend to think is something more like how much more ideological can thinking be and I'm suspicious of thinking which gets too ideological because I think it tends to fall into us versus them good guys versus bad guys victimologies a lot of negative habits which we also see in the 18th century which was a time of slavery and a time of conquest and a pretty mixed bag for liberty so I tend to see our current setup as like for biological reasons people will probably never be able to have the mix of libertarian concepts and radical ideology that would be required to bring us to where Tom wants us to be and that we have what we have it's not that libertarian we can work on the margins to make it better more libertarian freer using libertarian ideas and I think this difference in perspective was my sense reading this book is what accounts for why Tom is a more radical libertarian and I am a more moderate libertarian than he is in some I would just congratulate Tom on the book it's a fine book it's interesting on pretty much every page I liked all the essays it's a fine achievement and it reflects not just a book but really an entire life lived in the service of liberty traveling around doing the world good and dedicated to the notion that living in a life according to the passionate belief that ideas matter is something possible desirable and can do the world a lot of good thank you all thank you Tyler that was uh... uh... uh... very useful in and and complimentary uh... critique and I appreciate it we're going to take questions now we're going to bring a microphone around please wait to be called on but Tom I wonder if you might first want to respond to Tyler's last point about ideology no you can stay there you mean the scurrilous comments the slander the abuse I was going to privatize the beltway so you know what kind of socialist he is yes and I think that uh... Tyler is on to something I do think that marginal improvements are important and I don't belong to that category who says uh... I don't want marginal improvements if it makes me feel like I'm not asking for the whole cake and there are people like that part company with them I think marginal improvements are a very good thing we can have a more just society is better than a less just society seems fairly obvious to me but some people reject that because they say somehow you're compromising if you're willing to subtle for that but I think that there's also maybe a little difference in the institutional setting and that is that the people to whom we owe so much are people who were if not all or nothing they were very radical without the levelers without Sebastian Castelio without people like that who were tortured and abused and never gave up we would not enjoy religious freedom no way in my opinion it's because of those people who said I will not participate in harming other people because of their religions if you go to berford uh... in england and you can see where the levelers were executed they were ordered to invade ireland and they said we will not wage cruel war and persecution over matters of conscience and they were shot they said you cannot make us do an unjust thing and a lot of the people that I work with in china in middle east in afghanistan and elsewhere put themselves at great risk and I don't think that they would do it for a modest incremental improvement they're motivated by a strong ideology if you want to call it principles another way of discussing it that makes them undertake these a great uh... risks and in china that I was just in uh... beijing few days ago uh... the people I know there who really are willing to sacrifice everything uh... for what they believe in it's because they're motivated by a passionate commitment to a sense of right and wrong and I know that Tyler you are too uh... but you write for the new york times and you can't show it but that it's that passionate commitment to the distinction between right and wrong and i think that is absolutely very important to the success of of liberty some difference but i think if you look at the long history we owe to those people so much and without people had that ideology we could call it uh... we would not enjoy the freedom that we enjoy today okay let's take some questions bring the microphones down here we'll start here my name is steve hank and uh... no affiliation uh... i i did notice your comment about uh... tolerance and it kind of elicited uh... mister palmer's call uh... comment about tolerance and i've always thought that tolerance whether you're tolerant or not is a moral value and it's not really uh... whether it's not part of the of being a libertarian in other words i believe that all people are basically have some prejudices and bias that's part of the human species and this this make believe that we can create perfect intel people with no biases is is wrong but my point is that i i thought that and maybe this isn't a question for a comment i thought that uh... tolerance is really one's individual moral code and and to lump that in with libertarian views i think you can be very intolerant and be a libertarian as long as you don't want to take actions are bob coercion to enforce that intolerance of other people but if you wanna if you want to hold both intolerant values i think we should welcome most people at least as far as being uh... libertarians we may not like them personally uh... because i think that that libertarians do it this service and not and not saying all we're about is is right not that everybody has their own individual morality and it's not that we as libertarians don't have our morality but it's individual it's not part of our libertarian okay i think we might be using the word toleration or tolerance in different context i'm talking about the political legal toleration so for example uh... the great figures in the emergence of religious toleration were typically not indifferent to religion they were deeply religious people who said it is wrong in a moral to burn another person alive because you don't share that person's religion so we're talking about just the legal and political context doesn't mean indifference and that's actually a very important point i'll explain just for a moment it's very convenient for people who are indifferent to or hostile to religion to take credit for the ridge emergence of religious toleration this is historically false in prez agorans very good book how the idea of religious toleration came to the west really puts this to rest the great advocates of religious toleration were not people who are atheists or agnostics they were deeply religious people who said to hurt another person to burn them torture them break them on the rack expel them because of their religion is a monstrous crime and those are the ones who suffered they were themselves burned because they stood up for toleration they said this is a substantive moral commitment to live in a society where we can peacefully live with one another but it does not imply you're indifferent to religious values or other kinds of values you may hold them very deeply their central character of your identity and yet or shouldn't see and yet and because of that perhaps you embrace the philosophy of live and let live that your neighbor does not share those commitments but you respect your neighbor's rights perhaps there's a distinction here that gets to the the disagreement you and tyler uh... had you responded to this question by discussing the toleration of the state that is not killing or arresting people there's also the question of are you a tolerant person sometimes we say that well you could kind of say a libertarian is fiscally conservative and socially liberal and some of our friends prefer to say fiscally conservative and socially tolerant there you get into the question of you could be legally tolerant of dissenting viewpoints religions lifestyles whatever and still be morally intolerant but is it likely that you're going to be a supporter of liberty if you are in fact tolerant person in the social way that it's generally understood and maybe both of you have some thoughts on that my point of view is this on the whole question that we're much better off from having some percentage of radicals including radical libertarians in society and some percentage of those people in fact won't always be tolerant of those who disagree with them tom is but i know plenty who are not tolerant in this way but i still think it's better to have such people it's a kind of motivation uh... but that said when we ask the question what percentage of society can we expect to become very radical in what i would call a safe way i think it's well under five percent so as much as i admire a lot of the pragmatic effects of radicalism in the minority i think we are perpetually in a situation of making marginal improvements with the radicals we have in a large number of moderates and we're going to inch along and uh... toleration is a good personal quality but it's not actually always a political virtue a lot of the great movers of change in history have not been very tolerant of those who disagreed with them and we need to accept that other question in the back we'll see journal dot com uh... this question is for tyler uh... you mentioned a difference you saw between what you call reasonable libertarianism and ron paul and lou rockwell libertarianism could you amplify on that and give some examples between the two when i hear what some libertarians say about immigration i feel very uncomfortable even though i do understand there's a real problem with mixing immigration and a welfare state uh... when i hear excess talk of conspiracy theories and when i read about uh... the fear of the north american union and the nafta superhighway and all that and a general sense among some elements of the right that there's a belief in liberty but there's a mood or tenor or tone to it that i feel very uncomfortable with even if i might agree with a lot of the policy prescriptions ultimately i regard a lot of those people as less liberal liberal in the good sense in the broad sense and actually just some of your median voters today who are not very libertarian so i feel uncomfortable with a lot of those strands and some of you may know some of the people from those strands have attacked tom pretty viciously and i don't understand why they would attack him that viciously for what to me or just ought to be intellectual differences so i think uh... right now the libertarian movement is under a real threat of kind of splitting with a sort of fisher into a kind of right wing libertarian movement that decides to cast its lot with hard right republicans and another kind of libertarian movement which is uh... probably a overhaul more liberal more secular more historically-minded uh... more socially tolerant and uh... less keyed into the political right okay uh... we'll take a question there and then one over here jordan you could bring the mic down here what kind of uh... public reaction has there been to the book or the essays when they're published earlier both positive and negative i guess in the media this is not the sort of book that where the hollywood producers call for the movie rights although i keep saying that i i expect either brad peter canary to play me uh... in the book uh... but i'm aware their reviews coming out in some of the european papers as we've reviewed in the reform on it italian so those of you read italian can read their views and there's a review coming out in the new york social site on so all the swiss will be chattering about this and in the farm for the agamite site on which will set the german financial elite on fire uh... so but this is not the kind of book that i expect to see in the airport uh... lounge next to books on cats or um... until of the hans management techniques so tom you stated that the big one of the biggest challenges is the introduction of the ideas of liberty to people and professor kowin you question the reliance of an ideology on bringing about like big changes uh... so my question is have you either in this book or in general attempted to mesh the ideas of agarism as developed by uh... people like samuel conkin general shulman others uh... that says it's essentially not uh... just the introduction of the ideas of liberty uh... and lessening the state after that but tackle actively engaging uh... creating competing institutions and engaging in counter-economics to bring about a more right-respecting property-creating world shall i uh... i don't think i address that in the book uh... but uh... i don't think that it's a strategy for liberty to attempt to escape from the state it's not a bad thing if people avoid unjust uh... transactions in the state i was once at a conference of the federal judge he said of course you have an obligation to obey even manifestly unjust laws i said no i don't so what do you mean i said why am i obligated to do something which is clearly unjust and he was just shocked i could see the blood trickling out from his ears at the very thought and he said well okay then you'll break the law and turn yourself in i said no why should i that's not different perspective so i'm all in favor of avoiding stupid or on manifestly unjust laws but i don't think that the avoidance generally has a great role in uh... changing those rules in some sense it does uh... one reason why prohibition collapsed was people kept on drinking but i wouldn't call drinking a strategy for destroying prohibition uh... i wouldn't endorse that per se it changed because people said enough we've had it plus of course there was a great depression and they wanted to that the tax revenue which probably contributed as well uh... so those strategies i don't have any problem with people say this is what i want to do with my life it's their lives didn't do what they want i don't see them as a strategy to change society to become less unjust the people changer the ones who stand up and say i won't tolerate this not the ones who kind of evade or hide not that there's anything wrong with that pilot kato used to publish books on privatizing the postal service but now i'm thinking the postal service is just going to end up forgotten in a corner of the federal government there absolutely uh... it's already not the postal service per se but delivery is already mostly privatized through the internet and many other devices cell phones right uh... curtuler from your strategy department uh... time you spoke about uh... narrative of liberty and a narrative of power in different cultures in your travels your reading is there any other culture where the narrative of liberty is as strong as it is anglo-american culture because you know from what i know of libertarians you i think it's not just because i'm an american but a hugely disproportionate number of the important thinkers in the movement are englishmen americans or or uh... from some other country that's a british offshoot uh... that's uh... uh... a powerful question and i do think that the anglo-saxon contribution has been immense but it's easy for me to say that because i'm saying it in english also uh... there was at one time a very very large german movement for liberty and they lost but i don't think it was essential to being german that they lost that debate they're outmaneuvered by one of the most malicious evil people who ever lived as autofund bismarck who set the stage for what's going to happen in this century they lost it was contingent i was at a conference years back with a very nice but not very bright conservative and he we were discussing iris to tell you in ideas of virtue and uh... chinese confusion ideas he said okay i get it you start with Aristotle you get the american founding start with confucius that cultural revolution and i said well there are a lot of things that happen in between we should think about one of which is what happened on december eleventh twelve forty one it looked at me blankly as as most people would and i said that's when all of the icon was poisoned by one of his uh... wives over the succession issue of the of who would be the sun otherwise the mongols would have made it all the way to spain and uh... destroyed all the european cultures instead they returned to kirk worm to let the new uh... kind of cons and then never came back to europe they left the two tribes of the golden horde in russia then they invaded established uh... the uh... uh... young dynasty the moogle empire in india smashed all these other civilizations but not europe the europeans were really lucky that they did not get subjected to the mongol invasion so after this period europe is subject to very little external incursion they were not overrun periodically by nomads great historian one pointed out one thing to note write this down is a great lesson of history never be conquered by nomads very bad idea and the consequence for china was this fabulous commercial free culture the southern sung dynasty was shattered the uan dynasty is established and then later the ming reaction sets up a principle that the chinese turn inward in a way it's just been in the last thirty years that china has begun to recover seriously from the mongol conquest i don't see an essentialism there kind of lucky england developed a particular culture of the rule of law and exported it uh... iceland would be my other great example but it's really small but nonetheless other places that were not lucky and got conquered by the mongols did have this tradition and again if we had been having this conversation in the year twelve hundred uh... you would be saying was any other civilization like china that has a great tradition of liberty and commerce and culture certainly not the savage uh... barbarians of the british islands a bunch of historical accidents happen now we're living in an age when the trajectory has been such that that was the one that has become in some ways dominant and withdraw on it but if it's to be successful in china it cannot be because the chinese say we shall all become englishmen they have to see themselves as developing chinese libertarianism or it will not take root okay we'll take a question right here and then one all the way in the back was the uh... tom and also tyler uh... tom was talking about how uh... it all boils down to kind of a right and wrong and you give the example of levelers but i'm wondering in in a modern context when we we see right and wrong uh... issue by issue by issue you know terry schiavo one day somalia somalian pirates the next uh... is there necessarily going to be a coherence cross issues in other words people come to different conclusions about what is right and wrong and does that necessarily aggregate into a movement i'll just address it very quickly uh... i certainly want to say would not want to say everything boils down to right wrong that would be just an unlivable universe everything was black and white in that way it would drive us insane uh... there's also better and worse there's got shot on no and there's indifferent a lot of cases uh... and most of the situations we face are more like that like the latter ones but we do sometimes face cases of right and wrong and we have to say this is wrong military conscription is inefficient it's also just plain and people like milton freedman stood up against it and argued repeatedly every level of public discourse right in newsweek columns in front of college audiences daytime soap opera competitive tv talk shows in congressional testimony in debates with generals in the army he would always calibrate it he said this is wrong and i think that's one of the reasons why he was successful uh... it's not the only reason there's also a lot of military brass said we don't like having slave soldiers and it turns out they run away we'd rather pay them and have a professional military but freedman's moral commitment was one i think necessary ingredient to the elimination of conscription and were all better off that he had a strong sense of right and wrong that was active in that case but not all cases are like that i don't think the future of liberty is going to depend on the coherence of a movement i think it will depend on the evolution of technology technology is going to change a lot in some ways it'll make us much more free and maybe in other ways make us much less free and we haven't figured out what that process looks like but i think actually a lot of it is in the cards and i worry more about that than anything in the back and they will take a one here uh... pollinus a graduate fellow at heritage uh... i'm interested in hearing from both of you uh... more about the uh... aspects of libertarian thought that you see as universal and held in common between the the german or austrian tradition and the anglo-saxon tradition and uh... those that you see as being culturally distinct uh... between those two traditions you go first i think the way i view world history i assign a larger role to what we might call culture in a deliberately vague way then tom would so when i hear of tom's examples of china or the german liberal movement before bismarck i tend to think the developments we've seen are are less contingent then tom thinks they are so this implies that a hundred two hundred years from now the countries that are the freest will probably be a lot of the same countries that are the freest today even though i think over a timescale that is longer a thousand years there's a lot of turnover but i think culture is pretty sticky even somewhere like france which is one of the more most liberal countries in the world with one of the strongest historical classical liberal traditions it's very difficult to make headway with a lot of ideas in france or in germany and i think there is something nearly unique to the anglo-saxon world and no one's ever put their their finger on it but i think that's very precious and i worry more about us losing it and i'm not convinced that it's going to spread very far and china has a lot of economic freedom but the final outcome of that experiment is in my view very much up for grabs and i don't see that much really truly liberal thought coming out of china even though there's a lot of belief in capitalism and commerce and uh... i don't know when i look at the last four or five hundred years of chinese history i see a lot of very bad things happening and almost all the good things are in the last thirty years and i'm just not convinced that's going to last well i will convince tyler that he's wrong but it will take a few years uh... some of the most interesting libertarian thinkers right now are writing in chinese and uh... i think about lu juning and the work he's working on right now uh... uh... the dialogue of confucius uh... louts uh... as a development of libertarian thought people at the economics faculty at the food and university in shanghai or peaking university where i gave a lecture uh... week or so ago these are really smart people who grapple with very hard problems and their work is important and one of the projects i'm working on with colleagues is translating their work from chinese into english because i think the rest of the world will benefit from it they're thinking very very hard thoughts uh... as to a Austrian-german tradition i don't see these as so hermetically sealed people read english and educated english people at one time read german uh... as well i think that one of the distinguishing characteristics of england was after the spanish armada they don't get invaded in a really big way and i think that that matters a lot because when you're subject to periodic invasions horrible wars occupations there's a strong incentive for you to say our state has to be really strong to defeat the other state from taking over and engaging in additional predatory behavior and the english are pretty lucky these various incursions are pretty small after that period fairly easily beaten back so they have a long period of stability the united states has been fairly lucky a monstrous horrible a civil war that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives had several consequences some of which are good elimination slavery some which not so good growth of the centralized federal power in general uh... we're pretty lucky in this country that our neighbors are the ferocious canadians and the militarily formidable mexicans uh... so that being isolated in this way protected by these great oceans has allowed liberty to floors to greater extent with less threat of constant invasion in warfare my fear is we are now losing that those oceans are no longer such a great barrier to aggression and what we're seeing right now is the development of a uh... exaggerated view of nationals of threats to national security that is driving the loss of our freedom so that natural advantage that america has had of having the friendly canadians and the uh... generally friendly uh... mexicans as neighbors uh... that that's dissipated and we cannot take for granted the political culture of liberty that americans have sort of grown up with and we're going to find ourselves more like the libertarians of austria and idly and other european countries subject to constant invasion of having to develop political system of rule of law that actually protects liberty and does not become just a garrison constant war with its neighbors as much of central europe was okay question right here uh... i have sort of a question for both of you one uh... taller you mentioned that the u s is becoming less free uh... and i think uh... mister palmer had said that uh... you know that the civil war the good thing and then the bad thing was the expansion of government and for some reason with all the debates that we've had i tend to agree with you we're less free so i'd like to probe that a little bit and see what prescriptions you have for our time uh... i'd like to ask you uh... given what you said today religious tolerance and all the rest uh... many europeans feel that they do have kind of a clash with islam not in the sense of the extreme islam but in the sense of what is our law is that sharia is that the law of of janeva or or whatever and please note that the recently the swiss have said no minarets going forward so two problems for both of you i would to first of all just second everything tom just said about foreign policy i would even take it a bit further i think a lot of our liberty of the last fifty years in this world has been due to nuclear weapons sooner or later nuclear weapons get used and i worry about how things will play out the next time they're used and again i don't have any very particular prediction but i'm certainly not predicting that they go away and i'm also not predicting they'll never be used again so what that speed bump looks like and how bad it is that's the number one thing i worry about domestically i just worry about too much government spending and we're doing nothing to address that problem and i see more and more of a short-term mentality in politics whether it's for good policies or not even the people who advocate a lot of policies i agree with when i look at their rhetoric and how they make the pitch i see a lot more short-term ism and there is a way in which politicians are more accountable to voters because of media but a lot of the effects of that have been harmful uh... namely the short-term ism and i see that is getting a lot worse before it ever gets better and i don't have some grand strategy to get us out of it but right now we are on economically an unsustainable path and we absolutely need to get off it but we're making it worse and worse increase of affirmative rights and increase of spending aren't those related of course if you have more rights you have to back them up with enforcement and money i know the foreign policy is another issue but domestically don't we have something going on here that may be negative to ultimate freedom and liberty today on the senate floor john mccain put forward this bill to take out all the medicare cuts out of the obama health plan and uh... it's bad enough but what are we left with them and that's uh... someone who just ran for president against obama so i don't see many voices with influence for anything good anywhere and to me that's pretty worrying it's not nineteen ninety three anymore we're much further along a certain path and it's getting worse let me add to that a comment on a real fear that i have which is that the uh... nationalistic right and the social democratic left unwittingly team up i'll give you an example of what frightens me first we're gonna get obama care we might then this does really frighten me loss of control over my own spending uh... for medical care but what the right is going to demand in my nightmare scenario is well we have to make sure foreigners don't get this so what do we need a national identity card to make sure that the foreigners are kept out to me this is horrifying a the idea that i'm going to be enrolled against my will in the so-called public option one of these uh... workshopped terms that they went up over every possible euphemism for socialism and came up with this he said no public option it's okay about it socialism uh... and the idea it will be self-sustaining is a joke it will run a deficit in the second year and that we've made up for by general tax revenues and that would begin to expand and expand and expand and crowd out other options and then the nationalistic right says yes mexicans are getting this mexicans we got a tattoo we're going to make sure that you are enrolled in the state's programs and controlled and monitored well no actually we we do want to move on and then the last thing on islam i think that the swiss vote was terrible this is a private property issue if you own a piece of land and you want to build a minaret and presumably it doesn't generate negative externalities of the usual sort that is dealt with by land law you should be able to do that church minaret mosque temple Scientology Center this is a matter of private property and the swiss response to this i think was a terrible terrible uh... mistake i work with a lot of muslim libertarians on this we should always remember the greatest victim of the intolerant radical politically slums or whatever we want to call them overwhelmingly are other muslims who they murder because they're in their way and we really to stand with those people and make common cause right i'm gonna take the prerogative to ask the last question uh... to both of you which is a question i asked tyler at the recent montpeler in society meeting and that is you all have just talked about lots of bad trends obama care unsustainable fiscal spending libertarians tend to believe we're on the road to surf them and have been for a long time and by lots of measurable standards the government is getting bigger and and therefore we assume freedom is getting less but we sometimes fail to note that not only did we bring down marginal tax rates but we ended conscription we ended jim crow we provided more freedom to women and jews and gays and lesbians we have loosened up free speech in a lot of ways although we've cracked down on it in a couple of ways are we on the road to surf them are we less free than we were at some previous point i'm not sure what that point is it nineteen seventy five is it nineteen fifty is it eighteen fifty when exactly you know did we start on the road to surf them or is that a wrong metaphor i'll start with that i think we are less free than we were in two thousand uh... and that actually matters i think we've had a really bad nine years uh... and in that regard response to nine eleven exaggerated uh... military response the optional foolish invasion of iraq and so on we're less free than the year two thousand and i see it at the moment going in the wrong direction certainly in the united states are we less free than nineteen fifty now i don't think so i think lots and lots of people enjoy a lot more freedom than they did at that time so it's a question of what's the timescale that matters and there's also geographical question are people in russia even though they're subject to the criminal regime uh... in the kremlin right now are they more free than they were in nineteen fifty nineteen sixty nineteen seventy nineteen eighty yeah i think that's quite clear same thing with china and there are one point three billion people there so we could kind of weight them pretty heavily in the freedom scale and they're more free than they have been it's hard to say but possibly any time in the last hundred years uh... certainly since the uh... people's republic took over i don't think there's any question about that and then we could handle about different cities and times in nineteen twenties and so on but by and large those are places where they didn't join political liberty of any sort they're subject to british or german or french or occupation in various places so overall i think china is probably much freer than it has been anytime in the last hundred years with one point three billion people they they count very heavily in them in the measure of human freedoms overall i'm an optimist but the united states has been seeing terrible retrograde mode movement in the last eight or nine years and we need to work very hard to change that same answer all right well that's quick in that case please go out and buy a copy of realizing freedom ask tom to sign it and join us for lunch upstairs