 Good afternoon and welcome to the Cato Institute. I'm David Bose. I'm the executive vice president of the Institute. And I am pleased to be presiding over this forum. If there are people walking in from outside, let me point out that there are indeed more seats in the front half of the auditorium than in the back half. But that phenomenon may be common to Professor Myron seeing students avoid the front row and the second row. I remember that situation. We're going to talk about libertarianism today. In his book, Radicals for Capitalism, A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement, Brian Doherty makes two claims about libertarianism that may seem to be in tension. First, he says, as the title proclaims, the most significant thing about libertarianism, the element that distinguishes its unique place in modern American thought, is that it is radical. It takes insights about justice and order and the fight between liberty and power farther and deeper than most standard American liberals, patriots, or Jeffersonians, unquote. But he also says libertarians can believe with some justification that we are in some sense already living in their world. We are not living in Karl Marx's world. We live in a world energized and shaped by the beliefs of Karl Marx's political, economic rivals and enemies, the classical liberals, the thinkers who believed a harmony of interests is manifest in unrestricted markets, that free trade can prevent war and make us all richer, that decentralized private property ownership helps create a spontaneous order of rich variety. And also, he said, it's hard not to see a world that is well worth celebrating, perhaps even reveling in, to the extent that it runs on approximately libertarian principles with a general belief in property rights and the benefits of liberty. And that paradox may underlie some of the disagreements that our speakers today may have. Can these two sentiments, libertarianism as radicalism and the modern West as an essentially libertarian society be reconciled? I think they can. After centuries of struggle, many of the aims of liberalism have in fact been realized in the United States, Western Europe and an increasing part of the world. Our world largely runs on the basis of property rights, markets, religious freedom, free speech, and the rule of law. But that word largely remains a provocation to libertarians who understandably focus on the ways that governments fall short of liberal or libertarian ideals. Libertarianism has many founding texts from Adam Smith and John Locke to the works of Hayek and Mises. And maybe it's a sign of a movement coming of age that it now has an increasing number of guides to libertarian thought. When we published the encyclopedia of libertarianism, we had a line of copy that said libertarianism has its primer, its reader, its freewheeling history, and now at last it has its encyclopedia. And today, I guess, we can say that now at last, libertarianism has its dictionary, libertarianism from A to Z, by Jeffrey Myron. Jeffrey Myron is senior lecturer and director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Economics at Harvard University. He is also a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. He was previously chairman of the Department of Economics at Boston University. He holds a PhD in economics from MIT and has published more than 25 articles in refereed journals. He's written extensively on the economic case against drug prohibition, and he has been a vocal critic of the Treasury bailout and the Obama administration's fiscal stimulus. Jeff is also a star teacher. In four of the past five years, the senior class at Harvard has chosen him as one of their favorite teachers. His most popular offering is, of course, titled A Libertarian Perspective on Economic and Social Policy, which has attracted more than 800 students in just four years. He blogs about the book and about current affairs at JeffreyMyron.com. So please welcome the author of Libertarianism from A to Z, Jeff Myron. Thank you very much, David, for the introduction. Thanks to Cato for having me, having this event, and thanks to everyone for coming. So I'd like to start by talking a little bit about how I became a libertarian. And then I'll talk about how I came to write the book and tell you a little bit of what's in the book. And then we'll have some comments and some discussion. So first, I think at some level, of course, I should recognize that I became a libertarian because my father's a libertarian. My father's sitting in the audience here. And he wasn't a libertarian right away. He came to libertarianism a little bit later in life. At one point, I asked him why it took him so long to realize he was a libertarian and not a liberal, a modern liberal, a Democrat. And he said two words. He said, Richard Nixon. He said, if for too long, he hated Nixon so much that he thought the alternative had to be the Democratic Party. But after a while, he realized that was just as bad as the Republicans and came to his libertarian foundations. So that was certainly an influence. My mother has many, many great attributes. She's also here today. But being a libertarian is actually not one of them. So on this one point, I have to give my father credit, but not my mother. So about 15, 20 years ago now, 15 years ago, I started to become interested in the economics of illegal drugs. Up until that point, I had been a macroeconomist. I studied and wrote about the standard sort of boring economics, the Fed lower interest rates, raise interest rates, all this kind of stuff that's in the journals that makes people walk away from you instantly at cocktail parties after they ask what you do. But I was visiting a place in Cambridge called the National Bureau of Economic Research, which was thinking about a project on the economics of illegal drugs. Now, their interest at the time was not whether prohibition is a good idea. Their interest was just our illegal markets sort of more or less concentrated than above ground markets is the demand elasticity for drugs different than for other goods. That didn't interest me so much. But as I listened to the early conversations about this project, which in fact never occurred, it prompted me to think, well, why is it that marijuana, say, is illegal, but alcohol is legal? Yes, I guess marijuana can have some adverse effects. But clearly so can alcohol. And so I was provoked to go sort of think about it some more. I started doing some reading. I realized that the arguments for prohibition didn't seem very convincing to me. I also realized that there was a lot of low hanging fruit from a researcher's perspective. A lot of things one could examine with data about the claims people made for prohibition and against legalization. And so I did some research looking at, say, the effect of alcohol prohibition on alcohol consumption and finding that it wasn't very big. And that, of course, reinforced my view that probably legalization was the right approach. So having done that kind of research for five or six years, I was chatting with a friend, another economist, who was like-minded on the issue of drug policy, agreed that prohibition is a bad idea. And he turned to me and he said, now, of course, you're not one of those nuts who thinks that guns should be legal too. I thought for a second. And I said, well, I think all the arguments I've made for legalizing drugs apply to having legal guns. All the things that I've pointed to, creating underground markets, generating violence between traffickers, keeping people who can own the good or consume the good responsibly from being able to do so legally, all those apply to guns as much as they apply to drugs. So why wouldn't I also be for legal guns? So yes, I am one of those nuts. But that conversation and the fact that I had been writing some op-eds at that point for the Boston Herald prompted me to want to think more consistently and more broadly about what my political philosophy was to be systematic and consistent in applying that perspective, whatever it turned out to be, across a range of issues, not just focus on the drug policy. It turns out that amongst academics, you can get away with being heretical on drug policy. Academics as a group are reasonably sympathetic, at least to the idea of legalizing marijuana. If you take sort of free market or libertarian positions on other issues, on health care, on income redistribution, et cetera, then you make a lot more enemies. So it takes at least a little bit more guts to want to be public in stating those positions. So I decided it was time to think about it more systematically. Now around that time, I ended up getting an invitation to visit for a year. At that point, it was just a one-year visit in the Department of Economics at Harvard. And I asked them what they wanted me to teach, and they said something about your stuff. I didn't know what my stuff was, but I decided what it should be was a systematic examination of what I thought government policy should be toward a whole range of issues, toward antitrust, toward redistribution, toward drugs and guns, international trade, toward economic stabilization, and federal reserve banks, and things like that. And I designed an undergraduate course, member of the audience. One of Kato's interns was actually a member of that first course back in 2004, I think. And the course took all the major policy topics and tried to design, to try to enunciate what I thought the free market, or libertarian, or sort of small government view should be, and construct sort of rational economic arguments for the small government position on each of those issues. The course turned out to be popular. Students seemed to like it. I ended up being asked to stay for a longer stint at Harvard, at least in part because of that course. But I also had put a huge amount of time into writing the lecture notes and designing this course, because I was preparing an hour and a half to say on a topic that wasn't my research area, say antitrust or international trade. So I had to invest way more in designing this course than I would have if I had stuck to my sort of standard fair of macroeconomics. So at that point, of course, I thought, gee, there's got to be a way to get some more payoff from having created all these lecture notes. I'll just dump them into a Word file and I'll turn it into a book. So I thought that was going to be easy. Of course, as you can tell from the fact that that was 2005 and this is 2010, it wasn't easy. So I initially had a fairly standard-looking book that had 15 or so chapters that was organized by topics and that did a very bad job of picking a lane between being an academic book with footnotes and references and gory details and a popular book that was aimed at a broad audience, not at academics, not at economists. And so my first publisher sent it out for review and the reviewer's hated it, the acquisitions that are hated it. And so we agreed that I would return the advance and we ripped up that contract. Around that time, I was also writing some op-eds and I was having fun with the op-eds and I was having some success. And people were telling me that they were clear and to the point and I thought, oh, you know, writing things that are short is nice. Because one, if you're only going to write 750 words about an issue, which is a typical op-ed, everybody knows you can't possibly dot all the i's and cross all the t's. You can't spend time talking about all the possible critiques of your view and the response of the critiques and the critiques of the responses and all of that sort of academically blather. You just kind of have to say what you think or express a clear, simple view, because you don't have space to do anymore. So then it occurred to me to convert what I had done into the dictionary format, into the book that I ended up producing. And so that's what I ended up doing and that went much faster. I was basically able to cut and paste what I had previously done into much shorter entries. So this book, as David said, is basically a dictionary. It's also referred to, probably shouldn't say this in the trade as a bathroom book for reasons you can guess. But the idea was to write a little bit, 500 to 1,000 words in most cases about a broad range of policy topics from central banks to deposit insurance, to quotas, to government funding for science or the arts or things like that, explaining as much as advocating what the libertarian position is on those issues and why. And so most of the entries are about a particular economic policy. A few of them are about some concepts that run through themes that run through the entire book or through the broad set of policies, trying to tie those together. But the point is to give people a taste of what libertarians think and a feeling for why at least some libertarians think that way. I think Tom Palmer will give you a different view of why they might come to those conclusions. But one explanation of why they might come to those conclusions. And so it was meant as a reference as much as an advocacy position as a way of giving because many, many people when they hear that I have these bizarre views say, well, or they hear that I'm a libertarian. What exactly is a libertarian? And there's of course a huge range of views out there. At one extreme it means to people it means the branch Davidians or the Montana free men. Other people think it means Howard Stern because he was the presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party some years ago. So this is an attempt to give a more consistent, very sort of readable, very short perspective. Now what exactly does the book do? The book is about, first of all, policy. When I say it's about policy I'm emphasizing that some people think of libertarianism perhaps as a worldview, as a philosophy, as a way of thinking about a broad set of things. I think of it mainly and certainly in the book as giving a set of positions about what government policies should be. So libertarians in my assessment can be for against unions, for against affirmative action, for against religion, okay? But what they should be if they're consistent is against government funding for all those things. Government regulation that mandates affirmative action, government protections for union. It's about the policies toward those things, not about those things per se. Libertarians can differ about whether they think unions are a good idea or a bad idea if those were totally voluntary, not protected or coerced by government in any way. So what does the book say to give you a sense of that? In one sentence it says we should eliminate, reduce, scale back government policies, programs, agencies, laws, et cetera to approximately what we had in the 90s and I mean the 1790s, okay? Few exceptions but basically the 1790s. So what does that mean? It means obviously scaling back government enormously across the board. Legalizing drugs, prostitution, gay marriage, gambling. It means ending virtually all foreign policy interventions such as the current occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. It means eliminating most if not or almost all government regulation of the economy from the Securities and Exchange Commission to the Federal Trade Commission, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Interstate Commerce Commission and on and on and on. The entire alphabet soup of Washington agencies doesn't exist in libertarian land. It means scaling back enormously, perhaps totally eliminating government attempts to redistribute income, okay? That's a somewhat more subtle issue in my view but certainly virtually all libertarians would agree that the vast majority of what occurs as redistribution is not a good idea. It means ending central banks like the Federal Reserve Bank in the US, ending bailouts, ending attempts to stabilize the economy with fiscal stimuli and things like that. It means more immigration, freer trade, okay? And in any area that you can name, it means at a minimum far less government and in most cases little or no government intervention whatsoever. Now why do I come to all those sets of conclusions and why in particular that set of conclusions? Well, to a large degree, my explanation for all those conclusions is the same. In every case, I'm arguing against those policies because they have a broad range of unintended and undesirable consequences. More specifically, I try to approach and in the course I designed, I encourage the students to approach every single proposed policy in the same way. Someone says we need a policy to fix X, whatever X is. You should say to that person, well, why is X a problem? Is it really a problem? For whom is it a problem? Is it a big problem? Okay, and sometimes once you pose those questions, people will sort of accept that, gee, maybe that's not such a big deal after all. Second, even if there's some agreement that there is a problem, are you sure there aren't private sector solutions to that problem? Maybe things like consumer reports give consumers information about which products are good products and bad products, which projects they should avoid and so you don't necessarily need an FDA or a Consumer Product Safety Commission to protect consumers from the occasional unscrupulous seller. Maybe private mechanisms will deal with those on their own. Second, a step. Say that whether I agree or disagree with the person I'm having this conversation with about whether there's a major problem to be addressed, about whether private solutions can fully address it. The second question is, well, what's your proposed intervention? What are you saying we should do to address this? And how do you know that it's actually gonna affect, reduce the problem that you're trying to reduce? You may think that use of illegal drugs is a problem. Reasonable people, in my view, you can disagree about whether that is a problem at all, but even if you agree it's a problem, do you think that prohibiting drugs is actually going to reduce illegal drug use? You should have at least some conviction or some evidence that prohibition will accomplish that goal, otherwise, no matter what you think about how evil drugs might be, trying to reduce them with prohibition is a silly thing to do because you're not accomplishing the stated goal. So we have to ask about every policy. Will it actually accomplish the thing that it says it wants to accomplish, whether that goal is one that's desirable or not? And third, what other effects is it going to have? What are the unintended consequences? In virtually every case, we can point to a broad range of things that will happen as a result of a policy intervention that are not things that the advocates of the policy ever talked about. Sometimes the advocates of the policy don't recognize that they exist. Many cases they do, but they don't wanna admit to them because that would sort of get in the way of getting those policies advanced. And so we should recognize that all of these things are going to be impacts of standard policy, of most policies, and therefore we should take into account all the effects, not just the stated or the feel-good effects. Maybe you think that redistributing income to the poor is a good idea. So people have different views about that, but you shouldn't be able to avoid in a discussion of whether to have such a policy, the fact that when you redistribute to the poor, you affect incentives. You affect the degree to which people are going to want to work hard in order to avoid being poor because you're going to be promising that they'll have some level of support even if they don't work hard. And any rational person, any honest person should want to recognize both effects, both that you might help some people that you think of as deserving, but you also might generate some behavior you don't want, people working less hard if you undertake to redistribute to the poor. And so my request to the students, my request about every policy is to ask, once you recognize all of these things, maybe it's not such a huge problem in the first place after you think it through carefully. Maybe private sector responses will do a pretty good job of addressing the problem once you think about it carefully. Third, it may not accomplish its goal, and finally it may have all the other things if at the end of the day you're convinced that it's still a good idea to have this policy, well of course you're entitled to that view. But everybody should basically accept that framework because that's what any rational evaluation should do is ask about the entire range of consequences of any intervention. Now my claim, the controversial thing in the book is not that we should think about policies as consequentialist. If put in the right terms, everyone in the political debate would say, well of course yes, we should recognize all those things. The claim, which is more controversial, is that in a broad range of areas, the unintended consequences are huge, the ability of the policies to actually accomplish their stated goals is pretty limited, and so in a vast majority of the areas, the whole set of consequences from intervention is much worse than the set of consequences from non-intervention, even though private markets aren't perfect, even though various private arrangements have lots of imperfections, we shouldn't think that free markets and non-intervention is perfect, we should think that it's better than the alternative. And so that's the consequentialist approach, that's the approach presented in the book about how we should think about policy, and that's what I refer to as consequential libertarianism. Often referred to sometimes as cost benefit libertarianism or empirical libertarianism or maybe just economic libertarianism, but it all gets the same thing. We're taking policies one by one, we're not necessarily asserting that interventions are bad ex ante, we're evaluating each on its merits, but concluding that in the vast majority of cases, they're far more demerits than there are merits. So my hope for the book, and let me illustrate briefly with one application. So the area I've done the most research on, the specific area, is drug policy. What's the claim for having policies toward illegal drugs, such as drug prohibition? The claim is that people use drugs in ways that are harmful for themselves or harmful for others. And of course, at some level, that claim is indisputable. Some people use drugs in ways that make them sick or lower their productivity. Some people drive under the influence or operate heavy machinery. Okay, some people use drugs in a way which contributes to the breakup of their family. So there's no doubt that that claim is accurate to some degree, okay? But calm assessment of the evidence suggests that the frequency with which people misuse drugs from their own perspective or from society's perspective is much smaller than standard press accounts, standard depictions in movies and things like that. It suggests that it's a little different than the frequency with which people misuse things like alcohol or tobacco or indeed downhill skiing or driving too fast on the freeway or eating too much saturated fat and so on so that there's no obvious reason to think that currently illegal drugs are so different in terms of their characteristic than tons of things that are currently legal. Secondly, even if we took as given that policy might want to do something about illegal drugs because sometimes they're misused, prohibition is incredibly hard to defend as the right response because one, very little evidence shows that it actually reduces illegal drug use. It's a very nice paper that produced by the Cato Institute about a year ago, I think, on the Portugal experience. They legalized drugs in 2001. All drugs, not just marijuana, they saw no measurable increase in drug use. Indeed, some indicators suggest drug use was lower after the legalization than before and that's consistent with a broad range of evidence. So even if you're convinced that drugs are evil, that society should want to do something about them, if you're confronted with the evidence that prohibition doesn't cause less drug use, then you'd be hard pressed to advocate such a policy. And of course, on the third dimension, unintended consequences, it's clear that drug prohibition has a huge range of negative things that everyone should think are negative if they accept the basic analysis. So driving markets underground creates violence and corruption. Driving markets underground means there's lousy quality control so that people who do consume drugs, despite the prohibition, and the evidence is that most people do continue to do it if they want to consume drugs, don't know what they're getting, whether it's 10% heroin or 90% heroin. That's way worse than just having access to legal heroin and consistently consuming 10% or 15% or 20% heroin because it's the overdose, it's the unexpected amount, which is far more detrimental than a moderate dose. And the list of unintended consequences goes on. So my attempt in the book is to impose that same approach across the board, and it leads me to think that in all of these areas, whether it's national defense, economic policy, or social policy, even interventions which sound good, even interventions where there is some reason to think that private sector arrangements are not ideal, that bad things happen, the treatments are virtually always worse than the disease, and that's why I come to the libertarian small government, minimalist government conclusion. So my hope for the book is that people, not necessarily that people are persuaded, of course I'm delighted if people are persuaded, but I would be very happy if people find it interesting in the following sense. I had lots of students when I taught the class at Harvard who came to me afterward and said, you know, I always thought I was conservative, but I listened to you and I realized I'm probably more libertarian. Or I'm a conservative, I'm still a conservative, but you made some good points. Some of the things in the conservative arsenal, the differences between conservative and libertarian, you know, maybe you're right about it. Same thing from the liberals, okay? Who would come to me and say, you know, you're right that the liberals are full of malarkey on a lot of this stuff. They're not consistent, and it's not very compelling, and I'm not sure I'm ready to sign on to everything you've advocated, but you raise a lot of good points. So I think, based on that experience, that reading the book will give you a sense of how libertarians think, and why it can be rational to both oppose the war in Iraq, to be in favor of drug legalization, to be in favor of legalizing gay marriage, three standard libertarian views, at the same time be against redistributing income, want to eliminate the Fed, want to repeal, get rid of the Federal Trade Commission, and so on, all sorts of things that would be total anathema to liberals, okay? All of those things are entirely consistent because they all come from being consistent, and careful, and systematic about recognizing unintended consequences from policy. So thank you very much for listening, and thank you for coming. Thank you, Jeff. I can see that Jeff has become a libertarian scholar, but he has not yet become a libertarian activist nerd, or he would know that Howard Stern was never the presidential nominee of the Libertarian Party, nor indeed the nominee of the Libertarian Party for any office in history, though he did spend about three weeks on his radio show speculating about running for the Libertarian nomination for governor of New York, so he got some attention from doing that. Our second speaker, also a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, will probably provide a different view of some of these issues. Tom Palmer is vice president for international programs at the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, general director of the Atlas Global Initiative for Free Trade Peace and Prosperity, and a senior fellow at Cato where, among other things, he directs the Cato University summer program. He holds a PhD in political theory from Oxford University. He is best known these days for his world travels on behalf of liberty. I was just reading the annual report on the activities of the Atlas Global Initiative and just reading the captions about Tom is exhausting. Tom Palmer speaks at the Freedom School in Malaysia and at 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, 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. It's exhausting just to imagine these travels, but Tom is also one of the deepest and clearest thinkers on libertarian theory. His articles ranging from op-eds to journal articles were collected recently in realizing freedom, libertarian history, theory, history and practice. A friend of mine wrote to me recently that Tom's book is the definitive critique of the critics of liberalism. Of course, he also said that my own collection, the politics of freedom made him laugh. So, in a good way. So, whatever lifts your luggage, we have many choices of books here at the Cato Institute. And it probably these days goes without saying that Tom Palmer blogs at tomgpalmer.com. Please welcome Tom Palmer. Thank you, David and thank you, Jeff, for your early remarks. It was a very nice summation of the book. It's a pleasure to comment on the latest introductory book on libertarian thought and especially by a very thoughtful and distinguished scholar, Professor Myron. I'll have a number of very positive things to say about the book, a few modestly critical comments as well and the way of suggesting ways that the second edition of the book might be improved. Let me start with the way that Jeff has used the term libertarian. As he notes in the book, liberalism used to be the term for the perspective now generally known as libertarianism. Now that term liberal, excuse me, libertarian came to be used in the Anglo-Saxon countries, notably the United States, as a replacement for this older term liberalism, which had gone into sharp decline at the end of the 19th century. The ultimate insult was the term itself was appropriated by illiberal theories that advocated replacing plain old fashioned freedom with some sort of higher authentic or true freedom conditions that were all to be achieved by the imposition of force, violence and coercion, which earlier generations of self-described liberals would have been, would have denounced as arbitrary power. Joseph Schumpeter, the great historian of economic thought noted, as a supreme if unintended compliment, the enemies of private enterprise have thought it wise to appropriate its label. Libertarian had been used before this transition primarily in metaphysical discussions to denote people believed in freedom of the will as distinguished from determinists. People believed that everything you do is determined, that choice is a kind of an illusion. It was used in a political sense toward the end of the 19th century by Benjamin Tucker in his circle in the journal Liberty. Charles Sprating in 1913 issued a delightful collection, I think it's still in print, of writings on liberty called Liberty and the Great Libertarians. The term was starting to be used as a replacement for this older word liberal and it was popularized by Leonard Reed, the founder of the Foundation for Economic Education starting the 40s, 50s and 60s for his philosophy of anything that's peaceful as he put it, we should tolerate any behavior that is peaceful. So in general, Libertarian came to be used for what was called liberal prior to that time and still in most of the world when you say liberal, people understand what you mean by that, it doesn't refer to the latest thoughts of Senator Kerry or Hillary Clinton. Those who followed Tucker's logic normally used it to apply to a very radical form of liberal doctrine which they called philosophical anarchism also, the idea that the state should be dispensed to wish with altogether. Some have used it in contrast to mean a kind of radical end of the liberal spectrum so to distinguish from so-called classical liberals and then the Libertarians who are more radical or thoroughgoing or consistent liberals. Now both liberal and Libertarian have a common root word, the Latin term liber which means to be free as in Seneca's famous statement, Nemo liberist key corpora servit, no one is free who is a slave to his body. So thus the root term of both liberalism and libertarianism refers us to a philosophy that focuses on human liberty, typically individual liberty as distinguished in various forms of collective liberty which other people have upheld as well, national liberty and so on. In the great tradition that was derived from the Spanish scholastics, the English levelers, Locke, the radical wigs and on through 19th century liberalism, enjoying individual liberty meant not being subject to the arbitrary power of other people or alternately not being subject or victimized by the initiation of force and violence by other people. John Locke famously argued in his second treaties of government against those who asserted liberty means doing whatever comes into your mind, whatever you inclined to do, whatever you list toward as using the old language. He said, freedom is not as we are told a liberty for every man to do what he lists that is to say whatever he's inclined to do for who could be free when every other man's humor might domineer over him but a liberty to dispose and order as he lists his person's 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. There's been a lot of discussion since then about the problems of what constitutes an arbitrary will, what constitutes one's whole property, what constitutes force, what is coercion and what role rights play in defining liberty and so on. Now all of that moral philosophy was intimately connected to political philosophy and to theories of law and government. The great historian Lord Acton in his 1877 lecture on the history of liberty and antiquity pointed out liberty and good government do not exclude each other and there are excellent reasons why they should go together but he continued. Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is the highest political end. It is not for the sake of a good public administration that it is required but for security in the pursuit of the highest objects of civil society and a private life. Now rather than focusing on the role of good government and securing liberty, Jeff offers us instead an almost exclusive focus on government. Liberals and libertarians believe that government if it is justified at all may legitimately exercise only limited powers. As James Madison pointed out in Federalist number 45, the powers delegated by the proposed constitution to the federal government are few and defined. So just libertarianism is focused not on the securing of liberty as the highest political end but on the limitation of government. As he points out in the very first page of the book, libertarianism argues for limited government across the board and much of the book consists of arguments that more extensive government has bad consequences. We've heard a very helpful synopsis of the book and that we should therefore embrace limited government which he offers as the central feature of libertarianism. There are very interesting and helpful discussions of the ways in which policies and rules interact with propulsive agents. If you impose mandatory savings requirements it's quite likely people will go in debt in other ways. They might, for instance, take out second home loans or mortgage themselves. If you make it illegal to consume narcotics people will find other ways to go about doing that. If you establish healthcare mandates people are going to adjust their behavior appropriately. And that's a very, very salutary discussion and quite helpful. The various chapters offer many wise and insightful comments although in almost all cases they would have been more helpful had they been supported by available empirical evidence and I'll talk more about that in a moment. Jeff rejects the kind of reasoning that he calls philosophical libertarianism or rights-based libertarianism because, and I quote, the arguments presented by some rights-based libertarians can seem difficult to evaluate because they start from assertions that are not readily amenable to analysis or empirical examination. Instead, he offers us what he calls consequential libertarianism based on his claim that most government interventions are undesirable because they fail to achieve their stated goals or because they generate costs that are worse than the problem they purport to fix. And he concludes very neatly the consequentialist approach is thus a cost-benefit calculation albeit one of the broad view of costs and benefits. Okay, I think this is very intelligent and well put. He then does offer an olive branch to the backward Rube-like philosophical libertarians when he says that their view quote is in fact a consequentialist perspective. It is simply concluded that principles like always respect individual rights are useful rules of thumb for balancing the positive and negative consequences of interventionism. Thus, Jeff is arguing that such views are forms of what are called in that boring and backward moral philosophy hypothetical imperatives. That is to say, if you want prosperity you need to do these things as opposed to a categorical imperative. But he seems to rule entirely out of discussion other kinds of what we would call deontological forms, views of justice. But I should point out there's an awful lot smuggled in to what he presents as a common sense consequential viewpoint. For example, what constitutes a good or a bad consequence? We take it for granted. We teach at Harvard, we live in Washington. We all know what good and bad consequences are. I'm going next way to Afghanistan and I can tell you there's not a universal human consensus on what good and bad consequences are. We forget that many writers also in the Western tradition have advocated violence, war, conquest, genocide, extermination as the highest virtue for mankind and rejected libertarian views precisely because they differed on what constituted human virtue. They differed on what constituted a desirable or an undesirable consequence. Now think about such popular writers as Carl Schmidt, I don't mean in the popular sense, but he's very much in vogue in political theory today. Absolutely monstrous human being, the leading juridical thinker of the Third Reich and the darling of the anti-globalization movement. Read anti-globalization texts and at the Rotten Core is Carl Schmidt in every case. He opposed liberalism because we believe in peace and he defined the political as the confrontation of enemies. That is the definition of political life. Or the brilliant novelist Ernst Junger who presented an aesthetic view of life in conflict with other human beings and life in violence. His novel, The Storm of Steel, about his experiences as stormtrooper in the First World War is an extremely powerful statement of this anti-liberal view. Marxists reject liberalism because they disagree on the nature of the human essence. As Marx put in his essay on the Jewish question, man is a species being. Now these words have significance and import. They were put into practice by Lenin and his followers when they exterminated their class enemies, when they issued orders to shoot on site, when they issued commands to arrest so many people, quotas of arrests by each Soviet Socialist Republic and quotas of executions, not arrest our enemies, but arrest 17,000 people and execute 9,000. They did that because they understood nothing is lost when we exterminate our enemies. The individual human being does not matter. The individual is merely epiphenomenal, foam on the surface of true humanity, a mere moment in the process of the attainment of human self-awareness, the overcoming of history and the conscious planning of our own future as a species being. Jeff has to rely on all of those philosophical arguments in order to come to what he calls a consequential libertarianism. He has to rest on the view that the individual human life matters, that each person is precious, that everyone has a life to lead as it was put by the levelers. Without that, he can't tell us which consequences are good or bad or even whether every person is to matter at all. For that we have to turn to the philosophical or rights-based libertarianism. Moreover, at times his arguments become circular and I think that's because he's a decent person. Freedom is valuable because it generates good consequences but among the good consequences he cites in many of the essays is freedom. For example, in the discussion of false and misleading advertising, he notes, quote, much advertising provides useful information about new products and their features. As a small quibble, I would point out that would not be true of false and misleading advertising. It would have to be true and non-misleading advertising for that to be true, but that's a quibble. Much more importantly is the emphasis he puts on freedom as valuable for its own sake. Quote, restrictions on advertising are infringements of free speech. Earning a living is a crucial freedom and advertising helps many people earn a living. It's a crucial freedom. Freedom is here presented as something valuable for its own sake. He continues, indeed, technologies like the internet make it difficult for governments to restrict freedom and advertising is one mechanism that supports the internet. Commercial speech is therefore an important protector of the freedoms safeguarded by political speech. So it seems freedom is one of the consequences of good policies, but freedom is only valuable because of the good consequences of respecting it and this seems less than tightly argued to me. Now he did try to deal with the matter when he concluded this section on consequential versus philosophical libertarianism with this statement, quote, people who want to emphasize liberty, of course, are free to include it as a consequence of limited government. The explicitly consequentialist approach simply forces such arguments to discuss the possible trade-offs between liberty and other effects of policy. Now I would think that, quote, people who want to emphasize liberty would be called libertarians. That's what it means to be a libertarian is to put liberty at the center of your political philosophy. So let's go back quickly to the matter of evidence. He suggests that the so-called philosophically-based defenses of libertarian policy conclusions seem to be assertions that lack factual justification. Unfortunately, there's very little factual justification presented in the book. It's a short book and I'm not going to beat up why it wasn't did to another 100 pages longer. But I think it would have been stronger and more interesting had there been some opportunity to give access to the factual evidence to decide these issues. So I could contrast it with Charles Murray's book, similar, also quite short book, what it means to be a libertarian, in which he offers some evidence, but very importantly a wonderful test, the trendline test, which he describes. Advocates of state policies typically show you changes in good or bad outcomes after the enactment of some policies. So you see the graph, Occupational Safety and Health Administration has started this year and look at what happened, accidents on the job decline. And Charles says, well, that's interesting, but let's ask what happened before that. Let's look at the trendline before and you see the slope of the line did not change, which suggests that perhaps the policy had minimal value if any at all. It's a very simple test, but it's very, very valuable. Something like that I think would have improved Jeff's book is full of statements that I think are almost certainly true, but I would like to see the evidence presented in some place in the book that would allow me to check that. Possibly short discussion at the end of how to go to the statistical abstract or how to check empirical claims. Now in effect, Jeff's book is mainly about policy and the need to rein in government before the cost of state action exceed the benefits. But there's not a lot of meditation on what counts as cost or benefits or whether freedom is a very good thing just in and of itself. But he does get it something that's very important. And despite my critical remarks about his understanding of the relationship, the foundations of political and legal morality, he's definitely right about a very important question. And that is about the rule of rights. They provide the standard of behavior, what he calls rules of thumb, but not the goal of a system of rules as such, which is to live in a good, prosperous, just and harmonious society. We resort to rights talk primarily because we don't have the resources to weigh the costs and benefits of every possible allocation of scarce resources in the world. And so we use simple rules. This belongs to you. This other thing belongs to my other neighbor. Something belongs to me. And at the center of those rules are what we call rights. That said, I do think that freedom is in and of itself irrespective of other considerations, something of value. And that's a position that Jeff seems to both deny and affirm in the course of the book. Now, what I also found interesting about it is that a short treatise on good government, which I think is what the book is about, is presented as a treaty on libertarianism. Now, as I quoted Acton earlier, there's a connection between good government and liberalism. They're excellent reasons why they should go together, as he put it, but they're not really identical. I think that what Jeff has offered us is a very helpful overview of what would be good government, good government that would go together with liberty and policymakers should be mindful of trade-offs. They should be alert to perverse incentives. They should be ready to compare costs and benefits. But that mindfulness, alertness, and readiness are not ipso facto libertarianism, per se. Rather, they're a theory of good government. Now, I'm all in favor of the Division of Labor, idea that is the core of Adam Smith's great book. And when added with the idea of comparative advantage, which is described by David Ricardo, I think this is a good general approach to intellectual life as well. I encourage Jeff to produce a lot more of the empirical work he does in economics, which is extremely valuable. I read his work on the deleterious consequences of drug policy, and it is absolutely powerful. If you want to understand the moral nature of liberty, I think there are other books that may be more valuable for you. But if you want to understand the nature of good government, the ideas of moral hazard and health insurance, perverse incentives, the nature of externalities, and many other issues that require rigorous analysis, libertarianism from A to Z is an excellent place to start. Thank you. Thank you, Tom. Jeff, do you want to make any response before I open it up to questions? No. Okay, all right. Then let's open this up to questions. I'll start right here, and just wait for a microphone to get to you. Yes, Professor Myron, I'm a retired CIA economist. As an economist, that means I'm pretty much opposed to drug prohibition. My question really is, are there any economists in the recent past who have written in support of drug prohibition? I know Irving Fisher in the 1920s supported alcohol prohibition, but I can't think of any more recent examples. And just if I could just mention one piece of good news for libertarians, I've heard on the radio coming in that the most rabid anti-drug member of Congress, Mark, Representative Soudar, has resigned because apparently he was caught having an affair with one of his staffers, so. There are very few, I can't, I know of one economist who's strongly in favor of drug prohibition, and he's very much a libertarian on most other issues, but he's, I think his view is public. His name is Eric Rasmussen. He teaches at Indiana University, and he's a very strong supporter of prohibition, but as you suggest, he's very much the exception and not the rule. Now, the vast majority of economists would pretty readily sign on to legalizing marijuana. They wouldn't so quickly jump on the bandwagon if you were talking about other drugs. There they sort of fall into what I think is the standard trap of thinking that it's the seriousness of the commodity that determines whether it should be legal versus illegal as opposed to realizing that it's the seriousness of the policy that causes the bad consequences. And I wonder, Jeff, you've looked at this, would you say that the social benefits of legalizing marijuana are greater or less than the social benefits of legalizing harder drugs? I think it's probably better more from the harder drugs as I think you were suggesting because one, marijuana is so easy to grow in so many places that the price has not been elevated that much by prohibition relative to what it would be. The resources that we're spending in terms of making arrests and locking people up are relatively modest to what we're doing for cocaine and methamphetamine and so on. The degree to which we're generating violence with prohibition I think is much, much greater for the harder drugs than it is for marijuana. So even though lots more people consume marijuana, we're not nearly as far away from a legalized market de facto as we are for the other commodities. Yes, ma'am, on the aisle. It's from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. Hold the mic close to your mouth. Even closer, okay. My name's Yuteta Bias, I'm from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. Professor Myron, thank you so much for your lucid comments. I'm a psychologist studying entrepreneurship and the more I think about libertarianism and guided by your thoughts, the more I realize this is what I admire as well and adhere to. One of your comments struck me though. He was saying that income differentials between rich and poor tend to be left alone by libertarian thought. And I just recently read a very convincing meta-analysis of over 200 studies that link relative income, inequality in countries across the board with poorer health outcomes and more violence in societies for all echelons of societies. So what is the libertarian policy recommendation in the face of the strong correlation of income deprivation or differentials between rich and poor, bringing about poorer health and well-being for everybody in societies? Thank you. So a consequentialist like me would first sort of talk about income redistribution by thinking of three categories of policies. So one, there are lots of policies which have no sensible efficiency or economic justification. They're merely there to try to protect some people from some high price or low price. And they're a terrible way to redistribute income. So one example is minimum wage laws. Minimum wage laws cause some people to get higher wages by forcing other people to get zero wages. So that's just crazy in terms of its actual impact. Price controls on prescription drugs. Same category. Yes, it helps some people who are low income more readily afford those drugs but it also means you discourage innovation so everybody rich and poor is worse off by not having more new medications produced. Second category is general redistribution via progressive taxation. Having a really high tax rate on Bill Gates and a somewhat lower tax rate on people earning 200, 300,000 a year and much lower rates on people earning much less. So there, I think you can give arguments, people give arguments for that but I just don't think they're convincing. There are a zillion reasons why incomes differ between middle income and high income between low, middle and middle. Some of it is of course luck of where you were born or who you were, who your parents but a lot of it is whether you worked hard, whether you took risks, whether you, and discouraging activity and energy by having very progressive taxation is really counterproductive. Third category is very well targeted anti-poverty programs. So policies that are explicitly aimed at people who are very poor where the presumption is likely to be that the people are poor because of bad luck not because of laziness on their part or whatever. And there I think a consequentialist is more torn. Even those policies are gonna have a lot of negative consequences but I don't think they're as sort of impossible to defend from a consequentialist perspective as the other two kinds of redistribution. Nevertheless, even anti-poverty programs have lots of negatives. They create a culture of poverty which may tend to increase poverty. They create a demand for redistribution so people who are almost poor but not really poor start to think, well, gee, if I were a little poor, I'd get this good benefit so maybe I shouldn't work so hard. That's undesirable and you get to a situation like the United States where we're redistributing tons of money amongst the middle class. We're just taking it out of the pocket of somebody in this room and giving it to somebody else. That's just silly. That wastes all sorts of resources. So being poor is going to mean less of lots of good stuff, including health but that's something you have to accept at least in comparison to all the negatives that the redistribution is going to cause. So maybe you can defend, government-paid vaccines for children and poor families. I think even pretty hardcore libertarians might say okay to that but much beyond that, the set of adverse effects on the size of the pie is sufficiently bad that it's not worth trying to redistribute even for relatively well-targeted and somewhat defensible kinds of redistribution. Tom, do you want to address that? I'd like to add one element and this is something that is implicit a lot of Jeff's book which is the way in which state behavior squeezes out private alternatives. And we could look, for example, at the history of the friendly societies which have been virtually extinguished in most societies in the West. These were associations of poor people, working class people who provided not only income support, they were a kind of social safety in that but also moral support for good behavior. Gertrude Himmelfarb and her books have shown that even after the reform of the poor laws in England which got rid of so-called outdoor relief which was a welfare state, the civil society created the moral institutions that in a period of great social dislocation mobility, alcoholism, out of wedlock birth and other features like that declined throughout this period. So if you're interested in the historical dimension Himmelfarb's books and also David Green, a British political scientist, has a number of books on these lost friendly societies. For many of the Americans and the others, I'll just point out if you ever watched the Flintstones, Barney and Fred always go out to the Lodge, right? That was the friendly society and in the 50s, 60s, people still remembered this. No one goes to the Lodge anymore but the Lodge was the place where you also learned moral instruction. For example, men who drank to excess or men who abused and beat their wives were expelled from these associations. So a very powerful way of shaping behavior and promoting good moral behavior. The welfare state has essentially wiped these out. Just down the street from me, one of the last chapters of the Prince Hall Mason which is a wonderful African-American group that provided this service closed up and is now a Hispanic hip hop bar which has its own social benefits, no doubt. But it's said that these societies have been so severely atomized and I think this is part of the phenomenon you're describing. Yes, right there. Yes, you. Order. I also added the blog for the Association of Politics and Life Sciences and we have a bunch of libertarians there too. And I was wondering, on the biopolitical issues like reproductive health, human enhancement, genetic modification of plants and animals, have you covered any of those issues in your book? Because I know for the philosophical libertarians there's a huge twist there on the right to life at least on the human side, so. Well, there's most of the things you mentioned, I guess not the most obvious one that is discussed as abortion policy. And the position I take there is that we shouldn't be talking just about whether abortion is good or bad. From the perspective that Tom is describing, designing government, we have to talk about whether laws that prohibit abortion are good or bad. And my position is that they're gonna have a range of effects. They may reduce the frequency of abortion, and probably do, but they're certainly not going to eliminate abortion. Some abortions will happen anyway, be either by seeking them in places where they are still legal or by using alternative back alley providers and such. At the same time, banning abortion is going to lead to adverse consequences for some women who are, who are not allowed to terminate their pregnancies or for the children who are born into those families or for the pre-existing children in those families. So that there is sort of a range of consequences, and many of those consequences, I think most people would regard as undesirable that have to be balanced against whatever negative you associate with terminating a fetus. So what I would prefer to see is for the Supreme Court to change the jurisprudence, to say that Roe v. Wade and its sequel I were incorrectly decided that this is a state matter, and then states would choose abortion policy on their own. My forecast, which I think history supports, is that you would see most states that had legal abortion, some states that had virtually abortion on demand, even through the third trimester, a few states that had substantial restrictions, maybe one or two that had outright bans, but the vast majority of women would have access to legal abortion, even if we're left to the states, and that would be a far less polarizing situation, than the current policy where one approach is being imposed on everyone. It's an inherently messy topic because there isn't any obvious place where life begins or ends, and there isn't any consensus on how to make that decision. Pretty substantial fraction of people who don't think that four-week-old fetus is the same as a human life, but very few people who think that an eight-and-a-half-month-old fetus is not more or less a human life, and so you inevitably have to do some balancing, and I think leaving it to states is the best way to do the balancing. When I used to hang around with 19-year-old libertarians, I seem to recall people challenging each other with the question, would you be a libertarian even if the consequences were apparently terrible? Even if it meant that instead of a wealthy society we lived at the level of Cuba today, would you be a libertarian even then? I wonder how our speakers would answer that question. I think it's a false hypothetical. I just don't admit the possibility that that could be right, so I can't answer it. Okay. Tom? I think Jeff has hit the nail on the head. It's about like saying, what if the world were flat? Would you stop traveling at some point? So yes, if the world were flat, I would stop my ship before it hit the edge of the world, but it's not, so I can continue sailing around it. But if I had a fundamentally different view of human nature, would I be a libertarian? No, of course not. I'm a libertarian because I have a certain view of human nature, what it means to be a human being. So if the hypothetical is, if you had a different view of human nature, would you hold the views, you hold the answers? No, because I fold them because I believe in human nature. Okay, right here. It's Tim Lynch with Kato. Jeff, you had a column a couple of months ago about how American foreign policy in the Middle East leads to a lot of negative unintended consequences. Can you talk a little bit about that? And does your book get into foreign policy and national defense, or is it strictly domestic policies? The book certainly gets into foreign policy a bit. It talks about the war on terror. So my position on the consequences of the invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan, let's focus specifically on Iraq for the moment. One, it's costing a ton of money. So the numbers you see in the typical newspaper article are budgetary allocations. Those are not the correct numbers. That's just some accounting gimmick as what fraction of the current military we're gonna say is being allocated to Iraq versus not. The correct numbers are typically much larger. Reasonable estimates would be several hundred billion per year for the past, whatever it is, eight, nine years. So that's a huge amount. Either that could be much better spent protecting us from some other threat in my judgment. I'll come to that in a second. Or it could just not be spent at all, in which case the budget deficit situations are much worse. So that's one. Second is, are we actually making ourselves safer by having our troops there? Well, I will admit that it's very hard to have compelling evidence one way or the other. The incidents of things like 9-11 is very rare. So it's really impossible to say whether any particular policy has caused the frequency to go up or caused the frequency to go down because we only have that one outcome. To me, common sense, however, suggests that any determined terrorist who wanted to commit another 9-11 has billions of targets. There are trains, there are subways, there are stadiums, there are sort of in school buses. There's so many things that could be lodged against the United States by an Osama bin Laden who had access to 15 or 20 suicide attackers that if they had wanted to do it, they would have done it long, long ago. My assessment of the evidence from people who've written about the Middle East is that the objective of the vast majority of the Islamic jihadists, even the ones who clearly do hate the United States and the West, is to get us out of the Middle East. So we're being attacked in the Middle East because we're in the Middle East. And were we to leave, were we to intervene much less? If we were to not be selling arms to both Egypt and Israel, if we were not stationing bases in Saudi Arabia and so on, the antipathy toward us would be substantially reduced. Probably doesn't mean there would be zero attacks against us, but the incidents would be small. So our presence is, if anything, making things worse. It's generating negative attitudes in the rest of the Middle East. And so I find it very hard to see that there are consequences that are beneficial, that are greater than this very explicit cost that we're incurring, plus these intangible costs of generating unhappiness around the globe. Right there. Glamon, I've got a question about environment and about the Gulf oil spill. So let's say six weeks ago before it happened, what would have been your view about the steps to have been taken by anybody in terms of potential risks of oil spills? And now it has happened, would those views be any different? So I guess I don't have a good answer because there's a bunch of things I haven't investigated enough yet. So one thing that I think is sort of interesting is there was an act in 1990 called the Oil Pollution Control Act, which limits the liability of companies like Deep Horizon in the case of these kinds of accidents to $75 million for some kinds of damages. But it's messy. There are other kinds of damages which they do have full liability. So I don't quite understand the details of that yet. If they had full liability and could be forced to pay for the cleanup and the lost income of fishermen and resorts and so on, then I think I would have said before and after that's a reasonable system for dealing with the possibility of these accidents. And it's likely to be far more effective than some sort of government regulatory body stating a bunch of safety rules that have to be followed where the company has to submit a plan that says it's followed all these safety rules. Nobody reads the plan. Nobody checks that the plan has been falling. And so it gives a false illusion about whether there's safety there or not. So the liability would be a better approach. Now, if this federal act has turned around and sort of muddy the waters over whether they really have liability, then that seems sort of crazy. A sort of further thought, which I have to think through much more is, why do we have limited liability corporations or other limited liability companies? That's a particular form of business organization which is a government construct. The government has chosen to define and enforce the rules associated with corporations. What if that didn't exist? Well, we would probably have on average much, much smaller companies. People running companies who thought their personal wealth was on the hook if they cause damages would think a lot harder about potentially incurring billions of dollars of cost imposed on someone else. So maybe the focus on deep horizon and this particular issue is completely sort of off the topic. And should we really, really going back to a much more fundamental issue of what sorts of contracts should we enforce in particular this liability issue which encourages excessive risk taking because the people too taking the risk, deep horizon in this case, are not on the hook for the consequences. All the way in the back and then you can keep the microphone up there and Ashley can ask the next question. When you were giving it, Mr. Meyer, when you were giving her an absolute answer towards like when you were pertaining towards in regard corporations and things, I wanna know what your, both of you gentlemen, what's your opinion or your position on special interest groups and special interest groups as well as lobbying groups and their effect on, or their influence on government policy? So I certainly think there are lots of policies that we have that occurred partially because particular interest groups lobbied for those policies and some of them are bad idea like the tariff on the quota on importing sugar. But I think that's just something we have to live with that we're gonna have a democracy. There's gonna be all sorts of interest group and many of the interest groups argue against really bad policies. So any attempt to kind of limit the political process to short circuit lobbying to limit campaign contributions and so on is just as often or maybe much more often going to prevent people with reasonable interest that should be expressed and should be heard from doing that, even while they sometimes might shut down groups that have illegitimate interest or are asking for special favors and so on. Okay, go ahead. Second part to that question, like our government leaders and our politicians, shouldn't they be more accountable? Oh, the groups, the lobbyist groups and special interest groups, shouldn't the public know like how they may have influenced our policy and which like a particular congressman or senator if they voted their position on a particular matter? We totally agree would be desirable if we knew sort of a lot about which politicians had received funding from this source, what their own sort of interests were, why they might tend to tilt in one direction or another. The question is whether government policies and government rules like campaign contribution limits and lobbying rules are going to produce that transparency. And my assessment is that it doesn't that the media to some degree and other private interest groups do a much better job of providing accountability if we got the whole campaign finance apparatus out of the picture. So imagine that there's no government limits, there's no government insistence that you have to disclose the sources of your funding if you're a politician. But some reporter says, you know, candidates so-and-so, who are your contributors? And the candidate says, I'm not gonna tell you. I don't think that candidates very likely to get elected. If the people in the country want to elect such a politician, well, that's their choice, even though I might think it's foolish. But what I think instead will happen is they'll end up putting that information on a website somewhere, maintained by some citizen group, okay? And then other reporters will go and check it and they'll say, well, you say you only got campaign contributions from these 15 sources, but I've determined that you actually got it from a lot of others. And the media, along with these other public interest groups, will expose candidates who are lying and are getting contributions from various sources much better than the current government system. And a quick comment on corruption. So long as the state has goodies to hand out, there are gonna be people who are gonna come and get it. That's what is happening. Lobbyist refers to people used to hang out in the lobbies of hotels, which is where members of Congress lived. So as they would come to their rooms, the representative of some special interest would meet with them and say, Senator Congressman, we need your support for whatever it is that's gonna benefit our constituents. One of the things that we need to do, and this is a libertarian perspective, is redefine corruption. This term has come to be very narrowly focused on the explicit receipt of cash for a vote. So I give Senator So-and-So money and we have videotapes of them stuffing them in their pockets and so on. This actually is pretty unusual in the United States. It happens, but it's unusual. But we have a deeper kind of corruption which earlier generation of liberals would have identified as corruption. When a politician says, vote for me, elect me, and I will take things from other people and give them to you, that's corruption. It is pure political corruption. And unfortunately, we've had this narrow sense, you have to have a videotape of the guy taking cash. Well, what he's doing is bribing the voters by stealing from some people to give to them. And that should be understood as political corruption. And if we return to that understanding, we'll have a much more nuanced appreciation of the danger of special interest as distinct from the public or general interest. All right, Ashley, and then Roger Rehm, and then we'll go to lunch. There's no question that there are both consequentialist libertarians and philosophical libertarians. So for the Cato Institute, which exists to encourage the consideration of public policy from a libertarian perspective, which approach, if you think of it as a strategy, what do you think is going to be more effective and why? I will actually return to something that Tom was hinting at, which is comparative vantage. For me, I'm an economist. I'm trained to think about costs and benefits. I'm trained to think about consequences. I know amazingly little about philosophy. It makes sense for me, as Tom said, to focus on looking at empirical issues, to look at the consequentialist arguments and try to provide data and numbers and arguments about how people will behave in response to the incentives created by policy. For others, I think it's probably quite different. So I think there are more than one way to help people understand why a conclusion would make sense. There frequently are many correct proofs of a given math theorem. Some using geometry, some using algebra, okay, some using trial and error simulator on a computer. So I don't think there's just one path in different one's work for different audiences. That's my reaction. I think there was an elegant summation of what I would have said in a more complicated way. Ha ha ha ha. Adjurain. Between us and lunch, I'll be very brief, but I want to get at David Bose's hypothetical, maybe a little more practical way. If you analyze a proposed law and your analysis shows that the benefits outweigh the costs, but the law violates human freedom, would you support it? And maybe the closest to it being an example that might come out that way. I'm not sure if this does, but if government puts a tax on cigarettes and it cuts consumption of tobacco products, which is the desired policy, and would you support a law like that? Or any other example like that, would your consequential approach? So it is a very good example. So I would not support, I do not support the syntaxes generally. Taxes on particular commodities that some part of society thinks is a bad thing to consume for a variety of reasons, whether that's gasoline because it hurts the environment or it's alcohol and tobacco because they are bad for the user. Hey, but I think one doesn't really need to use the word freedom to come to that conclusion. As I just discussed, you could use a freedom type argument, but first of all, you're going to make the people who continue to consume the commodity after you impose the syntax worse off because they're still getting whatever bad health effects there might be and they're paying more money for the cigarettes so they have less money to spend on clothing, healthcare, shelter, et cetera. You are frequently choosing which things to define as sins based on political prejudice, not on any thoughtful evaluation of which commodities actually generate bad effects for the user or for society as opposed to are just perceived or asserted to be bad. If we were going to tax things that lead to lower productivity, maybe it should be Jay Leno or any TV show that happens after 11 o'clock because people stay up too light and they're sleepy the next day rather than thinking that it's taxing alcohol or cigarettes or something like that. At a minimum, it would be incredibly hard to know. Hey, there's a standard argument specifically about cigarettes that says when people who consume cigarettes are imposing a negative on everybody else because they make themselves less healthy and therefore they consume more publicly funded healthcare. Well, that might be true. It seems to be partially true, but it's also true they tend to make themselves die younger, which means they don't collect Medicare and Social Security. So if you're going to use the syntax argument and be consistent about it, you'd have to accept the possibility that there's certain risky activities, skydiving or smoking that we should subsidize. Nobody would ever accept that argument, but that means that when people use the syntax argument in favor of the tax, they're basically using it as a political crutch, as a political sort of gimmick, not because they necessarily believe all the underlying assumptions. Thank you. All right, thank you, Jeff. Thanks all of you for being here. Copies of the book are outside for purchase and for signing and also copies of Tom Palmer's book.