 Our next presenter, Bill Nascannon, has taught economics and political science here at the University of California and other schools. He's written a lot of books and articles on bureaucracy and government, and he's been a bureaucracy in government. In 1980, he resigned as chief economist of the Ford Motor Car Company rather than defend import restrictions on Japanese automobiles, which is a tribute to his ability to reason regardless of what the consequences are. He's currently on leave from his positions at UCLA and as a Reason Foundation trustee. To serve as a member of the President's Council on Economic Advisers, would you please welcome William Nascannon. One of you may have been the source of the story that economists or people who are good with numbers but don't have enough personality to become accountants. Right house economists actually have much higher esteem. A wealthy man recently went to his doctor and he said, doctor, my brain is running down and I want a brain transplant. And the doctor said the supply is always limited, but I do have three available and he goes under one glass globe and he says, here's the brain of an eminent mathematician and the price is a thousand dollars. And here is the brain of a TV newscaster. The price is ten thousand dollars, Harvard, because it's never been used. But over here on the far right is a small vial containing just an ounce of brains and it was called White House Economist and the price was a hundred thousand dollars. And the patient expressed, said, that's incredible, doctor. Why is the price so high? And the doctor says, can you imagine how many White House economists it takes to get an ounce of brains? Some economists, however, have had a real influence and have been recognized. When my former colleague and chairman, Murray Weedenbaum, was trying to recruit me as a member of the council, he took me across the street from that lovely old second empire building that houses the budget office and the CEA and some other nefarious offices and pointed to the building right across the street. Beautiful ornate building, which he described as the Art Laffer Memorial building. And I expressed some confusion about that, both that Art and I had worked together in OMB years ago, but I hadn't realized that they had dedicated a building to him. And he said, look right above the doorway. And it said in carved in stone, dedicated to art. So I'm glad some of us have made it. For all of that, let me trot on T-Bor's turf in the Hospers Horse Ranch tonight and philosophize a little bit. A community is defined by its shared convictions. The dominant shared conviction of the reason community is that the only moral basis for a social order is choice and consent. Choice without consent is meaningless. And consent without choice is the consent of the prisoner. Only a society that is based upon both choice and consent provides the basis for a moral order. Now, the difference between that perspective, which ironically used to be called the liberal perspective, is the difference between a morality of process, morality of how decisions are made, rather than a morality of end states. All of the great tyrants of history have rationalized, restricting choice, overriding consent in the name of some higher end state, some condition, which is valued so much higher to them or to some other people to override the fundamental moral basis for a just society. Reason Magazine and the Reason Foundation and the community that it represents is one of the most forceful and articulate representatives of the point of view that we should take consent seriously as the basis for organizing the social order. And that is what distinguishes us from the contemporary liberal and the contemporary conservative community, each of whom have their own agendas about end states. Many of which we will individually share. But the only way that we can work together as a people is to build a society in which choice is available and the basis for choice, whether it is an economic sphere or in any other sphere of our life, is consent. That leads us to a view that the economy should be organized dominantly, if entirely, if not entirely, by an exchange process, by the market. For those evidently few of us who are not anarchists, it suggests that government should be strongly restrained by an agreed upon constitution to the extent possible, should be decentralized to a great deal more than is now the case, government should be the coordinator, but not the provider of a variety of goods and services. And that even when government is in a role of being the collector of preferences or the aggregator of preferences, it should not be at the same time the provider or the monopoly provider of those goods. Reason Magazine has forcefully expressed and defended and promoted and increasingly successfully spread the word on these ideas. Some years ago when Bob and others and I were discussing what might be an interesting subtitle for the Reason Magazine, I suggested the subtitle should be reason because ideas matter, support reason, because ideas matter and the ideas of freedom are what will ultimately distinguish us from the machines and the animals. Thank you.