 Speaking on the resurgence of classical liberalism, you've heard mention of the article in Fortune magazine, the leading business magazine in the United States which is published by the Time Life Organization, featuring the article on the new libertarians. And I think what we need to do is focus on the background how in both America and in Europe there has been the development of very large new libertarian movement. And to do that we need to go back first of all for one minute to the 19th century which was the heyday of the classical liberal movement. That is to say when classical liberal political parties were dominant in England and America and played important roles in other European political systems. And in each in each case the classical liberal movements developed internal crises and began to lose that political dominance, political popularity which they had. In the United States that was due to the capture of the Democratic Party which in the 19th century was the great laissez-faire party in the United States. The Democratic Party was captured by monetary cranks, people who believed in fiat money, and immediately lost the majority support that it had, which then joined the Republican Party which previously had been very bad on monetary issues, but which was smart enough to take a more reasonable line on money and to win mass popular support. And it continued to be the dominant party but was so dominant that it split and led to Wilson becoming president. Due to the reaction of the American public to the fact that Wilson first of all after promising not to enter World War I led the country into the war and then imposed all kinds of controls including and especially prohibition. There was a big reaction and the Republican Party regained its dominance until the 1929 depression period, but not learning from Wilson's mistakes the Republican Party became the main proponent of prohibition and this is what gave Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 the biggest base of his support, people wanting to get rid of prohibition. He was elected and then imposed on them a whole range of New Deal measures. But the Republican Party suffered as a result of its association with prohibition and with trying to give special privileges to big business of a major eclipse. And so it is not until 1937 that Roosevelt began to be strongly opposed in public opinion and a new force came about and that was due to the two things. When Roosevelt was reelected in 1936 and entered 1937 he found that despite all of the New Deal measures all of the Keynesian measures that the United States was suffering a new and actually deeper recession the 1937 recession was extremely deep. And at the same time he had tried to impose greater control over the government by demanding the right to appoint new Supreme Court justices, the so-called Supreme Court packing scheme and this led both in Congress and among the American public a huge revolt in favor of keeping the court as a break on big government. So he suffered a huge defeat at the hands of the Senate and facing this huge crisis in the economy he undertook to solve it by a new range of spending and of course Congress would not give new spending after the New Deal had already failed so he had to come up with a new crisis and this was the so-called international crisis and especially his attacks on Japan leading to hysteria and getting people to vote for building new battleships because that would create wide unemployment. So you have the beginning starting in 1937 of what we call military Keynesianism trying to keep pump priming the economy through this military means and this led to a big revolt and one of the consequences of this revolt in the United States was Walter Lippmann's book The Good Society and this had a great impact on Europeans such as Hayek in London and Mises in Vienna and they began organizing a colloquium around the theme of Lippmann's Good Society book and all of the American and European classical liberals began to come together again after a long period when they felt very defeated but this first big block against the socialist programs of the New Deal that occurred in 1937 and the realization of the attempt of the New Deal to try to escape it through military spending led them to come together to see that there was popular revulsion against that that classical liberalism could have a popular base and so the American classical liberals and the ones in Europe began to come together to see some possibility for the future but World War two intervened one result was a number of classical liberals came to America from Europe such as Mises others took refuge in England and so during the war there was a great period of retreat in a sense return to isolation in the United States the classical liberals suffered a huge onslaught from the left especially led by the Communist Party and the result was a great setback attempt to find some places of refuge from this huge left wing onslaught associated with the Second World War and the Alliance with the Soviet Union which the classical liberals opposed and so when the war ended and even as the end of the war was approaching we find a few people and in particular Hayek recognizing first of all that this terrible situation of the constant onslaught of the left could not be permanent and that it was necessary to begin to raise the flag of classical liberalism he did this first in a lecture that he gave at King's College in Cambridge in spring of 1944 in which he proposed the establishment of a new international organization of classical liberals he wanted to name it the after the three classical liberals that he admired the most the three historians Lord Acton and Yucka Burkhart and Alexis de Tocqueville and he gave a very strong reason for that he said if you look at Europe today this is at the end of World War 2 he said Europe is facing a huge crisis there is very little left of a classical liberal tradition very little left of a classical liberal mass movement there are huge socialist movements and huge communist movements and remnants of pro-fascist groups there's very little of the classical liberal movement there's only one group that isn't committed to socialism either in the form of fascism or social democracy or of communism itself and that was the Catholic electorate in Europe and he said there are two choices either the Catholics can be brought as a main component of a classical liberal movement or they can be left to the confusion of the Christian Democrats who are sort of online conservatives and mixing in a little social democracy and will give the people very confused leadership and he proposed that by showing that the classical liberal leaders such as Acton and de Tocqueville and Burkhart were Catholics that there could be a strong resurgence of what had existed in the 19th century which was a Catholic liberal movement and at the same time he published the word to serfdom in order to try and influence first of all the English-speaking electorate and English-speaking intelligentsia as to the need for a strong contest with the developing socialist juggernaut now when the book appeared in England and received a good reception it was proposed that it be published in the United States and as I mentioned earlier the United States media journalists and publishers were very much under the thumb of the Stalinist leadership and so due to this communist domination of American media there was no possibility of publishing the road to serfdom with any of the regular publishers happily there was one little oasis that had maintained a strong opposition to to the communist juggernaut because it looked back to an Aristotelian and Thomas tradition namely the University of Chicago under Robert Hutchinson and due to this Aristotelian attitude they were open to publishing the Hayek book and later actually the hiring Hayek bringing him to the University of Chicago and so through the intervention of Henry Simon who was the leading disciple of Frank Knight who was still teaching there and the colleague of Aaron director who was Milton Friedman's brother-in-law and later of Milton Friedman who came there somewhat after this as a result of that a few thousand copies were run off by the University of Chicago press just as a sort of nice little gesture to indicate how bad things were Henry Simon was so depressed at the level of socialist domination of intellectual life he felt that the laissez-faire potentials were so minimal that he committed suicide and nevertheless soon after the book was published it became a bestseller why was that well first of all by luck Henry Haslett who was the financial editorial writer for the New York Times and was had become a disciple of on Mises did the book review in the Times book review section and was able to present it very strongly and he had already reviewed Mises bureaucracy and omnipotent government in earlier issues and created a slight climate of opinion the book began to sell and the readers digest decided to do a short version of the road to serfdom in one issue of readers digest taking up most of the issue and so immediately millions of people read the road to serfdom in addition the readers digest put out a book in book form that shorter version of the road to serfdom more millions read it as a result of that people in the United States began to feel there was some hope to challenge what was going on and that led to the establishment of the foundation for economic education in 1946 the foundation for economic education was set up by Leonard Reed and F.A. Harper Leonard Reed had been the head of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce when he was first there at the beginning of the New Deal he was a proponent of the New Deal as was most of the Chamber of Commerce people they were leaning towards the New Deals proto-fascist direction and he became an advocate of that and he went to see Mr. Mullendore who was the president of Southern California Edison company who had been Herbert Hoover's personal secretary and Mullendore in had converted him to free market in one hour's conversation and he then became a leader of this of free market movement at the lowest point of the free market and he stood with the free market philosophy became an important advocate because and he became an important advocate because he understood that the only way of succeeding with the free market and the only reason the free market had value was because it came from a deeper philosophy of freedom that the economic arguments were not sufficient that what was more important were the ethical arguments that what the classical liberal movement stands for is justice not efficiency we all like efficiency but that's fine no one dies for efficiency people all die for justice and the American classical liberal resurgence is due to this reliance on justice on the argument of justice Leonard Reid himself derived a good deal of his point of view from American authors such as Emerson and David Thoreau and as a result he was able to make a very convincing presentation and he was joined by F.A. Harper who had been an economics professor at Cornell University and together they drew together a staff mainly a former students of F.A. Harper who became the economics staff at the university at the foundation for economic education one of the first things they did was to follow up on something that had just been done which was R.C. Hoyle's the publisher of the Santana Register outside of Los Angeles had published three volumes of Bastiat's writings Frederick Bastiat the great French mid-19th century advocate of free trade and this began to have a great deal of influence and so Fee then began to publish Bastiat's the law in in its own edition of less than a hundred pages and that one book following on top of the road to serfdom led to the current free market revival in the United States something like a million copies have been in print of the law it's probably the book that has had the most influence on President Reagan and since no one else in Washington probably has read it it may explain why Reagan and the rest of Washington don't speak the same language because Bastiat's the law is a principal defense of justice and private property it very clearly identifies that the role of government is a as an unnatural role a role that is contrary to justice and that there's a conflict between law and legislation along the lines later developed by Bruno Leone and then by F.A. Hayek and at the same time the William Voker fund began to a tax exempt endowed foundation began to bring Hayek over to America finally it established a chair for Hayek at the University of Chicago and a chair for Mises at NYU either NYU or the University of Chicago ever paid a salary to Mises or Hayek these were done by as a result of private funding but nevertheless because of this activity of the Voker fund the work of general education done by the Foundation for Economic Education began to be done on a much wider level now if we look at fees early career one finds the publication of a book by two very young economists that no one had ever heard of called roofs or ceilings at that time the United States had the benefit of rent controls and the these two economists said well you have a choice you can have roofs over your heads or you can have ceilings on prices but if you have ceilings on prices you're not going to have roofs over your head it was a very convincing essay published by the Foundation it was written by two young people named Milton Friedman and George Stiegler in fact when George Stiegler mentioned this particular book in his class at Columbia University young younger than he student graduate came up to him and said well who published that book I'd like to know more about and he said well the Foundation for Economic Education and that's how Murray Rothbard was able to become part of this classical liberal movement so you can see that this began to develop very slowly Hayek in 1947 was able to implement what he had proposed at Cambridge University during the war an international meeting of free market people and that was held at the Swiss resort of Mount Peleron and there was something 40 some odd members in attendance and these included Mises Hayek it included Leonard Reed and F.A. Harper from Fee it included Frank Knight George Stiegler Milton Friedman Felix Morley Pierre Goodridge Henry Haslett John Davenport of Fortune magazine and a large number of European free market people and so they were able to meet and begin a process of intercommunication and comparison of different approaches to the restoration of a free market philosophy now one thing that distinguished the United States situation from that of the European countries was that given the two-party system in the United States there was no political party that had a classical liberal point of view so none of the Americans were involved with political parties the Europeans were involved with what were remnants of the classical liberal parties one example would be the free Democratic party in Germany the result of that was that coming away from the Mount Peleron meeting there were several developments one was that due to the hostility of the especially the American Americans who were anti-religious Hayek's proposal to try to get a leadership role of European Catholics was rejected the idea of naming it after Acton and Tocqueville was rejected and the idea of reaching out to religious people by classical liberals was rejected and instead something more neutral like the Mount Peleron society name was chosen second with the existence of these remnants of liberal parties and the association of these older European professors for the most part with these parties they were tied into trying to maintain a political base popular political base by trying to compete with the social Democrats and the Christian Democrats and so they put forward what amounted to a much more lukewarm free market philosophy epitomized by the so-called social market economy approach of the Germans which is very confusing and very social Democratic and it's a kind of a platform that Ted Kennedy could easily run on but not having that distraction in America the Americans could pursue an educational campaign that is to emphasize principles and this foundation of economic education did very very well it didn't try to deal with particular legislative issues you'd need ten thousand economists working day and night to try to deal with every piece of legislation because the legislators can come up with innumerable things the bureaucrats come up with innumerable regulations you can't defeat each one in turn you don't have the time the energy the efficiency to do it what they did was to attack ideas so for instance they published a book called the tariff idea the whole concept of tariffs of government intervention in international trade was wrong that the Social Security idea that that was wrong that the TV a idea the government intervention in the in the electric and maintaining of rivers and things of that sort was wrong that each that each of the major groups of government legislation instead of trying to answer each one to reach the principle that the principle behind it was wrong just as the principle really of any government regulation is wrong and that's what they tried to show and we're very successful to get people to see not to worry about this year's piece of legislation in the house and this year's piece of legislation in the Senate and whether it's two percent off here or five percent off there because the percentages aren't don't matter it's the principle that matters and if you can convince people of the principle then they will see that government intervention in any area is wrong and then you have an efficient result in other words it's very inefficient to convince a person that a particular piece of legislation is wrong it's very efficient to convince them that the whole idea of legislation is wrong then they can be an effective spokesman for the free market and so the foundation for economic education has been extremely successful now what is an example of that success about 35 years ago one of the members of the board of directors of the foundation who was the vice president for the general electric company chose a Hollywood actor to be hired by general electric to be there mess their educator to speak to weekend after weekend to large groups of general electric managers and salesmen and employees on the philosophy of freedom general electric this vice president was very concerned to educate at least his own employees with the free market philosophy and so Ronald Reagan was educated he was set it was hired and and educated by being given the fee materials especially especially Bastiat's the law he began very clearly he saw that the principle was what was at stake that if you can if you have the principle then you can be very efficient and effective as a communicator of the free market philosophy that there was no point in Ronald Reagan getting up 50 times a year to each weekend group and say well this week's bill before Congress that we need to oppose is such and such and it's 5% wrong here and 2% there instead he presented and him and learned himself how to communicate the total philosophy of freedom and that it's a moral philosophy not a mere question of efficiency that it's a question of principle and over the years he's become as we can see an extremely effective communicator of those ideas and as the Wall Street Journal pointed out about two weeks ago in a single editorial very unusual for the Wall Street Journal that this has led to a crisis of court and country that you have the bureaucracy and the Congress which represents the court and you have as they said the peasants outside of the Capitol whose only spokesman is Reagan trying to challenge the court to try and end the weight the constant weight of taxation the constant weight of taxation that's imposed by this bureaucracy and the Wall Street Journal among others has become an effective voice in explaining this philosophy. Many of the journalists writing for them have been educated in these ideas originally put forward by the Foundation for economic education and then taken by other groups in turn the reason that this has been effective is that along with the Foundation for economic education the Volcker Fund and then its successor the Institute for Humane Studies and some other groups followed Hayek's prescription Hayek in a very very important essay published in the in the Journal at the University of Chicago called the intellectuals and socialism and he lays out how the socialists one because they started out by gaining control at the highest scholarly level and we're able to convince people that socialism was scientific had the scholars behind it and then the next level of academics and then the next level of journalists and editors writers public opinion makers fell into line and gradually public opinion was formed and that what was necessary Hayek said is for the classical liberals to win back dominance at the highest level of scholarship to produce more and more free market advocates in scholarship and then once they do that other people will follow along that will be so clearly dominant even if people don't fully understand it they will appreciate the intellectual dominance that's achieved and so over these years the last 35 years the emphasis was put on training more and more free market academics especially economists to present these ideas and then to bring those ideas into other areas to especially areas like law and economics which the Volcker Fund began at the University of Chicago Law School and in the areas of philosophy political theory and in sociology psychology other areas and so that role has led to a major revolution so that if you go back let's say to 1968 when Nixon was elected there were a number of free market people available and who entered the government but they were really not sufficiently large and they hadn't matured enough in their careers to make an impact and so the Nixon administration not only was a general failure it really has was the major cause of the current crisis because Nixon opened the floodgates to everything that Johnson under the great society had begun if Johnson did it Nixon was going to do it better Nixon was going to be the new Israeli the one who made the conservatives into socialists and he was very successful at least in destroying the American economy putting in wage and price controls disrupting the whole energy industry just was an endless disaster that has not occurred now because there was so many trained scholars available first of all to challenge what Nixon was doing who was at the challenge Nixon wasn't the socialist it wasn't social Democrats it was the free market advocates who said this has nothing to do with us this has nothing to do with the market that Nixon is a trader to these concepts and therefore public opinion began to focus on these free market advocates to see that they were independent of politics and of political parties and then having created public opinion they were able in large numbers to fill important posts in the administration now of course they're totally frustrated by the fact that the congress due to the political party system and to gerrymandering does not represent public opinion and so you have this conflict where Reagan and the economists do represent public opinion the president is the only one in the country of course elected on a nationwide franchise and the congressmen are elected at a much more restricted districts if you look Nick Reagan's free market philosophies dominance is reflected partially by the fact that Republicans for the first time have maintained continuous control of the Senate because the Senate again is elected by a broad franchise but the individual congressmen are not and they are a disaster but they're able to block all the reforms put forward by by Reagan and the free market people so the result will probably be some form of crisis having to do with this as public opinion begins to build up and build up in opposition to what is going on in the in the congress itself now this growth of free market scholars began to have a big impact on Europe young European scholars began to see that it was that the that the Americans who were making new contributions were the free market people the Keynesians and the socialists were sitting back on their old ideas sitting very pretty enjoying the fruits of dominating academia or holding key government positions but the new work being done whether it was in moral philosophy legal theory law and economics league economic theory was all being done by people who are free market and so Europeans who wanted to be involved in the creative forward looking part of their scholar scholarly profession we're looking to the American free market people they were coming up with answers to the problems created by the Keynesians and as the Nixon administration created a worldwide crisis through its inflationary activities by its terrible depreciation of money which alerted the American public to what the free markets people was saying and which has made the money issue the central cutting edge of the questions being discussed in the in the United States and then in the world because as general de Gaulle pointed out already under under Lyndon Johnson the US was exporting its inflation paying for its inflation at the expense of the rest of the world and when Johnson closed the door to the dollar at the Bank of France and insisted on gold in December 1967 he made one of the great maybe the greatest contribution to the history of the 20th century and the consequences of that in Europe to see by de Gaulle's action that there was a crisis and that America's role of forcing the rest of the world to pay for its inflation was something that wasn't very wise from the point of view of the of the other countries and so the critics in America of this gained a great deal of respect and recognition in Europe and larger and larger numbers of European scholars became first aware and then convinced of what these people were saying and of course especially through the Mount Peleron society and through the sister organization of foundation for economic education and IHS in England the Institute of Economic Affairs through England the rest of Europe became aware the huge number of free market people that developed earlier in England than in the continent gave that a big push and then we see how public opinion changed in England as a result of that how they're great great issues that we think are important came on the agenda in the 1970s in England as a result of this much earlier work done by the Institute of Economic Affairs and the similar they and their colleagues even earlier before the organization was formally presented and so we see now in all the European countries a catching up to what has occurred in America and the result is a great deal of fruitful interchange where the experiences in each country are able to be compared and to mutually educate each other as to not only tactics and strategies but in terms of the newest developments in scholarship and research that can be useful in the presentation of these ideas so we're today at a point where we've achieved a great deal of success at a first stage and so we need to be very very aware that we're need to expand greatly the number of people who know what we're doing communicate them to them what we're doing so that first of all they're aware of it and second of all that they become convinced of it and so we need on the one hand to pursue perhaps even more strongly cutting edge of scholarship to follow Hayek's dictum of establishing first and foremost hegemony and scholarship that hegemony and scholarship will lead to hegemony in public opinion and then we have to learn how to apply strategy and tactics to communicating these ideas to a wider and wider number of people especially at the university level and then through them to the rest of society through journalism and and media and similar areas and today we have this great opportunity before us and we need to be very aware of our responsibility to carry that through to its completion thank you very much this Reagan that you're talking about the same one as I'm familiar with it seems that his next administration is making that service as a socialist I don't know what Reagan's thinking of he did indeed learn a lot of the rhetoric of the free market which I believe is partly responsible for his straight success in the polls but his performance has been that of great promises and he's violating everything he's stood for in the campaign and notably could you could you detail some of the well he outlined the promises that he didn't fulfill eliminating the Department of Education yes eliminating the Department of Education energy Department right to slash the subsidies and such things agriculture which he can do both and he was going to balance the budget in 83 and he now has a larger budget deficit than all previous presidents have come on so this massive increase in budgets I'm fearful that the work by the Foundation for economic education if it was handing him a copy of the law has actually maybe have done a disservice to the free market economy because if by providing him with the rhetoric that took to do the opposite and I don't I'm not accusing me no no but I would say I would take a different position I would say that first of all he's achieved a equilibrium in taxation which has meant from the point of view of the interventionist cut in taxation that which is the cause of the of the budget deficit in other words he's trying to cut spending and the Congress doesn't want to cut spending due to the special interest groups this is what the Wall Street Journal was referring to that you have them mass of the people demanding vast cuts in taxes and in spending and the special interest tied to their congressional representatives resisting that and so it's due to the first of all the rhetoric that the public has become aware and realizes they can do something I mean for years and years decades and decades people thought it was all hopeless and all of a sudden they realized that everybody in the majority in the country agrees with them with the free-market philosophy so this has been a big step forward there's a huge amount of confidence growing and as they see that Reagan isn't going to be able to do something they're going to demand rather radical reforms and this is something we have to look forward to and have to be the proponents of they need to have someone for more people out there seriously proposing a radical change in the situation no no but they but they gave a vote to the free market I mean that if they had if they had elected Mondale what would been what would have been the well but that that's that's a different that's a whole different problem libertarian candidate or any candidate who is not yet established is useless to the mass of the voters the mass of the voters can only choose between two choices bad and worse and so they chose bad over much worse I mean that's that's the most they can do they can't do anything through Congress in other words what they know is the party system is useless they've Reagan does not represent the Republicans because there aren't enough Republicans to elect anyone which is why the Congress is in the state it's in he is the representative of them independence or majority of the voters so but there is no party to represent the independence they have to use the Republican Party which not only has the rhetoric of Reagan but puts in a large number of free market people in the government trying to do something but the bureaucracy won't move bureaucracy is going to be there forever mean what the public is beginning to realize is they have to bomb out electorally the bureaucracy they have to abolish it I mean the the failure of the Republicans to abolish the energy and the Education Commission departments represents that what was needed was the total elimination of whole departments that's the present crisis between the Senate and the House the Senate is saying get rid of whole programs so that they never again become a burden on the taxpayer and the Democrats are saying oh let's just cut this year and we'll save and then it'll add up to something and we'll have a false balanced budget so that's where the crisis is getting rid of whole programs and there's a majority of the public who wants to get rid of whole programs but they they're only able to vote for the president and the Senate but they can't through the due to the party system elect them to elect people on the on the lower level and that's mainly due to the total failure of Republicans as a party I mean the Republican Party is a total disaster intellectually and in terms of administration and effectiveness and due to that fact huge numbers of people will never vote Republican on the lower level they don't want people to vote for them anyway the Republican Party is essentially an elite I mean the ordinary Republican activist is an elitist and if he had a majority support it would show him he's not an elitist he's if he becomes a majority then he's his whole psychology is in crisis and so he can only be his his own whole reason for existence can only be confirmed by constant losses at the polls and the result is they achieve that they they they they're at least capable of achieving defeat so that three-quarters of all elected officials in America are Democrats the Republicans turn off everyone and they certainly don't on any level except that the highest level present themselves as free market advocates they all claim that they can do whatever the Democrats do only with you know with but more with more panache or whatever yes well I had a great good fortune to sort of wrangle my way into the Mont Pelerin society as a kind of junior supernumerary book seller at Cambridge I saw you behind that mask in the back I noticed that there were great many people and none of whom I like most of you been talking about this evening with inside the Atlantic Ocean it was very interesting to see said that again they were miles away from Europe or North America I mean there were lots of South Americans and so yes there was a lot of Asians and I don't know any Africans that there may be but it's interesting how the free market idea is now going global yes you know you made sort of you bump into a Venezuelan businessman having their photographs taken with height which is good that is inspiring in Hong Kong there were 300 Japanese pictures taken and also things like the IEA the publishing books on global subjects like development economics and also this book by Stephen Chan I don't know anything one will China go capitalist it's a huge question and I believe that that was a tremendous stir in the far East from all of the people in Europe and America realize can you tell us a little bit about the sort of global direction of these ideas and how you see that development well on the one hand obviously there's very strong roots for free market ideas in British Commonwealth countries especially former dominions so that in Australia some reason not very much in New Zealand but in Canada and South Africa there is very strong free market traditions and those have have developed very well and then with the with the extremely strong and successful role of the IEA that's also then had an influence on these other former dominion areas because both through contacts back and forth and that sort of thing in terms of South America what you find is a very high regard for the work of of Mises and Hayek in some circles Argentina Venezuela and Guatemala are the main areas Mexico City has had a little bit but not really very much there is a growing classical liberal movement in Mexico centered on Monterey because northern there's a big difference between northern Mexico and southern Mexico which isn't the result of proximity to the United States per se there's it's a whole cultural thing but in Monterey which is where they're where the free market type industries have developed in contrast to Mexico City where it's the state industries there's a very strong free market movement but constantly being undermined by the government seizing the banks or seizing you know destroying the money monetary system and that sort of thing but it's mainly in Guatemala Venezuela and Argentina and that's due to very strong initial groups of people who just kept working at it and have made a great success while in the other countries there are small groups but they're not really able to do very much and I think the reason in Argentina Venezuela and Guatemala that so much success was done was that they first of all were very impressed by Hayek and Mises and followed the Hayek prescription of trying to argue the case first at the highest level of scholarship and finally they have also followed the idea that they're the key issue is a question of justice and they've been very motivated by the moral philosophy background to free market ideas and so that has made a big impact they're able to reach students to be very successful in educating and and that's been supplemented by the fact that there's a very strong Austrian economics group in Madrid that publishes in Spanish a lot a lot of the key works in Austrian economics and that is a way of reinforcing in that whole thing there was a question in the back yes you had to finish okay yes I'm not exactly sure whether your presentation of the reasons which led to the displacement of the socialist paradigm among the intelligentsia by the classical liberal paradigm you seem to sort of look at it as a rational phenomenon to be accounted by factors like the superiority of the latter in terms of logic and other factors and I guess that is how you conclude the feeling to the one should have to come first to convince the intelligentsia to kind of debate on the most aspect level etc. Now however if we look at the history of science or rather the historiography of sciences we see that for example the displacement of one paradigm by the other is a very irrational phenomenon and it usually to be accounted by a little sheer factor of boredom the factor of boredom How much emphasis do you put on these things? Well there are a couple of points that you're making one has to do with the question of paradigm shifts and well that's a very very important subject and really deserves you know a whole conference to discuss all of that that's involved I certainly am impressed with the importance of the sociology of science in understanding change and development I certainly do not see it as a some sort of automatic progression of truth and there's no reason at all why truth should prevail I mean the world is surrounded by 10,000 years of ignorance prevailing and so it's only on rare occasions and for no good reason that truth occasionally prevails so we have no historical record to support a sort of universal progress point of view on the other hand one might say that there's been a certain amount of success for good thinking if not logical thinking that has led in the last 200 years to a good deal of progress that's so immense that people are aware of the possibilities and even though they've gotten confused in the process they decided they were so well off why not be egalitarian and share it with everyone and then they find that that leads to the diminishing of wealth not the creation of wealth and that doesn't lead to egalitarianism in the ways that they thought that they turned back to the path that has led to success to recognizing the importance of property rights and a growth oriented society so on that level I think that it's one of the areas that a very minute minute amount of scholarship has been given compared to other areas and so the science of strategy in a sense needs a huge amount of investment to help us understand where we're going and what's going on and you find a good deal of a good number of people don't want to do that they view that as dangerous or constructivist or whatever the case might be and so that there's a great deal of resistance to doing strategic analysis to find out how successes have occurred in the past and what are the needs for success in the present now there was another part of that point that you made could you repeat that a second? The idea was that perhaps we should start explaining certain changes by the nature of the border I don't know I don't think that's the case I see a good deal of excitement being bored earlier by the welfare state and leading to well I mean one possibility is that free market philosophy if constantly pushed will be a constant source of excitement it may not run out of steam in the way that the welfare state has run out of steam welfare state is aimed at an equilibrium society the free market philosophy is as Schumpeter said destroys equilibrium and so to a certain degree there's constant change and therefore possibility of constant excitement it's aimed at constantly disrupting existing customs or forms in order to move forward and progress and the socialist is very reactionary he wants to maintain equilibrium he wants to stop things in its track which then leads to boredom but it certainly should be the case that we should constantly emphasize the challenging and radical nature of what we're proposing so that especially youth can see that it's not something of the past but constantly something of the future could you say a few words about the relationships and mutual influences of Ayn Rand, Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Patterson in the pre-war period that it before Ayn Rand disappeared but her own rear end of dogmatic sectarianism all of these people were influential through their writings and through their conversation at that point the numbers of classical liberals were rather small but did form a somewhat important group in New York they formed a small group in New York but New York being important in other words if you write a book review for the New York Times book review it reaches a million key people whereas if you write it for I don't know the Kansas City Star or the St. Louis Globe Dispatch it reaches a million people who don't have any influence and so this is the reason for instance that the left has always been so successful because being in New York they have access we're all the publishing and all the media and the radio and television and that sort of thing and that's also why the neo-conservatives are so successful there are not many of them but they are constantly having lunch or dinner with someone and it's always someone very important because they're in New York whereas if they went up to Cape Cod or something and lived off and wrote in isolation they wouldn't see anyone and every five years they'd publish a book or something like that so being in New York was very valuable at that time they were able to have a lot of influence on some of the editors of the Reader's Digest for example and to have a certain impact through that medium so a lot of their influence was their ideas expressed in these small groups much more maybe than their books at that time because they were reaching a lot of very equally intelligent people who then debated and discussed issues and formulated their ideas and Isabel Patterson and Roswell Lillain and I and Rand tended to be more radical than the other people and so they carried the debate in a more rigorous direction and kept coming up with new questions to be solved and so in that sense they kept disrupting the equilibrium everyone was satisfied perhaps that the free market worked or something and they kept bringing up new challenges to it so that it was that role that was so important in that formative period but unfortunately and maybe it was just a question of becoming older and moving in different directions and at the same time being said in their ways that they no longer continued to have that impact probably a very important development was the emergence of the National Review Group in 1955 because they brought in a lot of European social democrats and a lot of European conservatives who introduced a whole I mean these were the people that had sort of lost out in Europe and then became dominant for a long time in American right wing ideology and none of that led anywhere but it was very disruptive and created lots of sisms and the free market people were mainly excluded because they were said and this may be an example of the boredom factor that the free market people were boring or too extreme in the case of I and Rand and so for instance it was the famous attack on I and Rand by Whitaker Chambers in National Review to which Murray Rothbard wrote the major response and so on the one hand they thought Mises and Hayek were boring and I and Rand was too exciting I suppose so this was one of the problems and so they thought they had a middle way of all sorts of exciting ideas from the fourth century or whatever it is that they were drawing them from and the unfortunate libertarians were stuck with the sort of big turn of the 20th century ideas which were too boring to discuss I think we need to end at this point thank you very much