 Well, it's not easy to follow Jeff Dice and David Gordon, although I could be worse off, I could be following the judge and Ron Paul, so that would be. The term anarcho-capitalism has, we might say, rather an arresting quality. For while the term itself may jolt, but while the term itself may jolt the newcomer, the ideas it embodies are compelling and attractive and represent the culmination of a long development of thought. If I had to boil it down to a handful of insights, there would be these. First, each human being to use John Locke's formulation has a property in his own person. Two, there ought to be a single moral code binding all people, whether they are employees of the state or not. Three, society can run itself without central direction. From the original property that one enjoys in his own person, we can derive individual rights, including property rights. When taken to its proper Rothbardian conclusion, this insight actually invalidates the state. Since the state functions and survives on the basis of systematic violations of individual rights, where not so, it would cease to be a state. In violating individual rights, the state tries to claim exemption from the moral laws that we take for granted in all other areas of life. What would be called theft, if carried out by a private individual, is taxation for the state. What would be called kidnapping is the military draft for the state. What would be called mass murder for anyone else is war for the state. In each case, the state gets away with moral enormities, because the public has been conditioned to believe that the state is a law unto itself, and it can't be held to the same moral standards that we apply to ourselves. So the third of these ideas I'd like to develop at slightly greater length, in these passages, in the passages of their moral treatises dealing with economics, the late scholastics, particularly in the 16th and 17th centuries, have been groping towards the idea of laws that govern the social order. They discovered the necessary cause and effect relationships. It was a clear connection, for example, between the flow of precious metals entering Spain from the New World and the phenomenon of price inflation. They began to understand that these social regularities were brute facts that could not be defied by the political authority. This insight developed into fuller maturity with the classical liberals of the 18th century and the development of economics as a full-fledged, independent discipline. This, said Ludwig von Mises, is why dictators hate good economists. True economists tell the ruler that there are limits to what he can do by the sheer force of will, and that he cannot override economic law. In the 19th century, Frederick Bastia, as David noted, placed great emphasis on this insight. If these laws exist, then we must study them and understand them, but certainly not be so foolish as to try to defy them. Conversely, he said, if there are no such laws, then men are merely inert matter upon which the state will be all too glad to impose its imprint. He wrote, for if there are general laws that act independently of written laws, we must study these general laws. They can be the subject of scientific investigation, and therefore, there is such a thing as the science of political economy. If, on the contrary, society is a human invention, if men are only inert matter upon which a great genius, as Rousseau says, must impart feeling and will, movement and life, then there is no such science as political economy. There is only an indefinite, excuse me, an infinite number of possible and contingent arrangements in the fate of nations depends on the founding father to whom chance has entrusted their destiny. The next step in the development of what would later be called anarcho-capitalism was the radical one taken by Gustav de Molinari in his essay, The Private Production of Security. Molinari asked if the production of defense services, which even the classical liberals took for granted, had to be carried out by the state, might be accomplished by private firms under market competition. Molinari made express reference to the insight we have been developing thus far that society operates according to fixed intelligible laws. If this is so, he said, then the provision of these services ought to be subject to the same laws of free competition that govern the production of all other goods. Wouldn't the problems of monopoly, he asked, exist with any monopoly, even the states that we have been conditioned to believe is unavoidable and benign? It offends reason, he said, to believe that a well-established natural law can admit of exceptions. A natural law, he said, must hold everywhere and always or be invalid. I cannot believe, for example, that the universal law of gravitation which governs the physical world is ever suspended in any instance. Now I consider economic laws, said the Molinari, comparable to natural laws, and I have just as much faith in the principle of the division of labor as I have in the universal law of gravitation. I believe that while these principles can be disturbed, they admit of no exceptions. But if this is the case, he said, the production of security should be not re-removed from the jurisdiction of free competition. And if it is removed, society as a whole suffers a loss. It was Murray and Rothbard who developed the coherent, consistent, and rigorous system of thought out of classical liberalism, American individualist anarchism, and Austrian economics, he called anarcho-capitalism. In a career of dozens of books and thousands of articles, Rothbard subjected the state to an incisive, withering analysis unlike anything seen before. I dedicated against the state to this great pioneer and dear friend. But can it work? It's all very well to raise moral and philosophical justifications to the state. But we are going to need a plausible scenario by which society regulates itself in absence of the state, even in the areas of law and defense. These are serious and difficult questions, and glib answers will naturally be inadequate. But I want to propose at least a few suggestive ideas. The conventional wisdom, of course, is that without a monopoly provider of these services, we will revert to the Hobbesian state of nature in which everyone is at war with everyone else, and life is, quote, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. A ceaseless series of assaults of one person against another ensues in society sinks ever deeper into barbarism. Now, for one thing, it's not even clear that the logic behind Thomas Hobbes' fears really makes any sense. As Michael Humer points out, Hobbes posits a rough equality among human beings in the that none of us is totally invulnerable. We are all potential murder victims at the hands of anyone else, he says. He likewise insists that human beings are motivated by and indeed are altogether obsessed with self-interest. Now, suppose that were true. All we care about is our own self-interest, our own well-being, our own security. Would it make sense for us to rush out and attack other people if we have the 50% chance of ourselves being killed? Even if we were skilled in battle, there is still a significant chance that the attack we launch will end in our own death. How does this accord with self-interest? Hobbes likewise speaks of preemptive attacks. The people will attack others out of fear that those others may first attack them. If this is true, then it's even more irrational for people to go around attacking others. If their fellows are inclined to preemptive attacks of people they fear, whom would they fear more than people who go around indiscriminately attacking other people? In other words, the more you attack people, the more you open yourself up to a preemptive attacks by others. So here we see another reason that makes no sense from the point of view of the very self-interest. Hobbes insists everyone is motivated by for people to behave in the way he insists they must. As for law, history affords an abundance of examples of what we might call trickle-up law in which legal norms develop through the course of normal human interaction and the accumulation of a body of general principles. We're inclined to think of law as by its very nature a top-down institution because we confuse law with the modern phenomenon of legislation. Every year, the world's legislative bodies pour forth a staggering number of new rules, regulations, and prohibitions. We've come to accept this as normal when in fact it is historically speaking an anomaly. It was once common to conceive of law as something discovered rather than made. In other words, the principles that constitute justice and by which people live harmoniously together are derived from a combination of reflection on eternal principles and the practical application of those principles to particular cases. The idea that a legislative body could overturn the laws of contract and declare say that a landlord has to limit the amounts he wants to charge for rent to those acceptable to the state would have seemed incredible. The English common law, for example, is a bottom-up system. In the Middle Ages, merchant law developed without the state at all. In the US today, private arbitration services explode as people and firms seek out alternatives to government court systems, staffed in many cases by political appointees and that everyone knows to be inefficient, time-consuming, and usually unjust. PayPal is an excellent example of how the private entrepreneurial sector devises creative ways around the state's incompetence in guaranteeing the inviability of property and contract. PayPal had to deal with anonymous perpetrators for a long time of fraud all over the world so the company would track down the wrongdoers and report them to the FBI. Nothing happened. Despairing of any government solution, PayPal came up with an ingenious approach. They devised a system for preemptively determining whether a given transaction was likely to be fraudulent. This way, there would be no bad guys to track down since the criminal activities would be prevented before they could do any harm. Small miracles like these take place all the time. In the free sector of society, not that we're encouraged to learn about such things. Recall as the centers for the disease control issued false statements and adequate protocols for dealing with Ebola. But it was in a firestone company town in Liberia that did far more than any public authority in Africa to provide safety and health for the local population. There's a great deal more to be said about law and defense provision in a free society and I discuss some of this literature at the end of Against the State. But the reason we focus on these issues in the first place is that we realize the state cannot be reformed. The state is a monopolist of aggressive violence and a massive wealth transfer mechanism and it is doing precisely what it is in its nature to do. The utopian dream of limited government can't be realized since government has no interest in remaining limited. Now a smaller version of what we have, of course, would be preferable. But we cannot, but it's not a stable and a long-term solution. So we need to conceive of how we could live without the state and its parasitism at all. The point of this book is to speak frankly and at times perhaps even shockingly so in order to jolt readers out of the intellectual torpor which the ruling class in a system of youth indoctrination has lulled them. We might have a fighting chance if most people were aware of the Rothbardian ideas in this book and in our intellectual tradition generally. They would never fall for the state's propaganda line, its apologies, its moral double standards. They would be insulted by these distortions and dissimulations. And that's what we do with the Mises Institute. We don't publish policy reports in the vain hope that Congress will defy its own nature and move towards freedom. Every one of these policy reports ends up in the trash can as I can testify for my time in Washington. They used to dupe the gullible into thinking that the Washington think tanks they support have influence in Washington. Instead, we set forth the truth about the state without compromise or apology. The reason Ron Paul attracted so many young people all over the world was that they could see he was speaking to them in plain English, not political ease. He was speaking frankly and truthfully without regard for the lectures and the hectoring he would get for it at the hands of the media. We've tried to emulate Ron's approach. And of course, we've been delighted to have him as a distinguished counselor to the Institute since the very beginning and as a member of our board as well. The stakes are too high for us to do anything but speak frankly and to speak what we know to be true and to do everything we can to speak what we know to be true. It's easy to publish toothless essays about minor public policy issues. It's harder to focus on war, the Federal Reserve and the true nature of the state itself. But that is the path we have willingly chosen and we hope you'll join us. Thank you. I want to call Mr. Lou Karabini up here, Lou. I know that Lou Karabini to the people in this area of the country, think of him as sort of Mr. California but he was born in Indiana. He had a long successful career with Park Davis and other companies. He early on started promoting libertarian ideas and educating people in them. And then on one wonderful day, he started a little business, the Pacific Coast Coin Exchange in Long Beach which is, he's grown into the very famous Monnex and hugely successful company. Lou is an extraordinary entrepreneur. Not only has he been successful in putting the freedom that he's been afforded under the free market, not the government, in deserving people in this country and all over the world, but he's also a great benefactor of liberty for the Mises Institute and others. And because of his great achievements as an entrepreneur, because of his great achievements as an educator in liberty, by the way, I wanna mention, I hope everybody's gonna get a copy of his Inclined to Liberty, which thanks to his generosity is free and they're in the bookstore out front. Christie Holmes has them near her. It's a great book and even, I can tell you even more importantly, David Gordon says it's a great book. You know what it is. So I wanted to present you with our 2014 Entrepreneurs' Medal in recognition of your magnificent work, the magnificent person you are. Oh, I forgot, by the way, to mention the most important, how could I do this? The most important thing about Lou Carabini, he and his wife, Anne, have been married for 61 years. They have two children, four grandchildren, five great-grandchildren. And Lou, we think you're wonderful and thank you for everything. Thank you very much. Thank you.