 Before I begin, a bit of an announcement. In 2004, Dr. Hoppe came to Auburn, came to the Mises Institute in Auburn, and delivered a series of lectures for a week. He gave two lectures every day for five days, one in the morning, one in the afternoon, all of them 90 minutes each from notes. So the title of the series was called Economy, Society, and History. So as the title of that suggests, it was ambitious. It covers philosophy, law, property, contracts, the state, and society, elites, I think courts and security, democracy and monarchy, war, empire, secession, strategy. So it was really a comprehensive week. And our editor, Judy, and I did a little bit of math, and we figured out that a 90 minute speech is generally roughly about 11,000 words. So that means that some total a week is well over 100,000 words, which is going to make a book, a transcribed book of about 800 or 900 pages maybe, a really epic book by Dr. Hoppe. And we're going to work on the transcripts so I can see the joy in his face at the thought of us having to edit those. But really, the point is that one point of this is not only is it valuable material that sort of needs to be unearthed because not enough people heard it live, but the point is that I hope it'll serve as a reminder to some of his critics and his fans of how few people are really equipped to deliver this sort of intellectual work across disciplines. Because we see it so rarely today. I don't know if you've heard the saying that academics today know more and more about less and less. So I think we should applaud people who attempted even when they're a Steven Pinker or someone with whom we might not fully agree. So that being said, on to our topic for today, the zeitgeist libertarians. And you'll forgive me if I focus mostly on the United States, which is, I think, their natural habitat, where they're found in greatest numbers. If you've ever read Murray Rothbard on the Progressive Era, you'll know that he hated a reformer. And he especially hates a pietist reformer, a Yankee pietist reformer. And there's nobody who embodied this more than John Dewey, who was a famous psychologist and professor. He lived from the 1850s to the 1950s. He had quite a robust life. And he was a psychologist. He really earned Murray Rothbard's wrath through his sort of evangelical zeal, although he was secular later in life, for saving the world. Saving the world through progress and, of course, statism, hand in hand. So Dewey had what Murray Rothbard called a seemingly endless career. And he had significant influence. He was one of the most significant writers at the then fledgling and brand new New Republic magazine, which was created in 1914. And it was designed to actually service the organ of the mouthpiece of an unholy alliance between big business and left public intellectuals. So in 1917, in the midst of US deciding to join the World War I fray, Dewey produced an astonishing article. And it bore the perfect title, I think, for our discussion today. It was called The Conscription of Thought. So Dewey, like his colleagues at the New Republic, urged, of course, that the US enter into the Great War in Europe. And they did everything they could at that magazine to encourage a war spirit among what, at that point, were still stubbornly doubtful Americans. And of course, many Americans had direct German ancestry, not too far removed. And they might not have too much enthusiasm for fighting their first cousins. So his pro-war perspective, however, it really had nothing to do with the realities of the war what was happening on the ground in Germany or Britain or France or even, particularly, US interests in those areas. His focus was entirely domestic. That war would help lead America to socialize its economy, of which he approved and greatly expand the powers of the state here at home. So war collectivism in Europe was something to be emulated by America. And war could be used as sort of an aggressive tool for democracy and help foist innovation here. So for Dewey, rejecting American neutrality in the war, it didn't have anything to do with the outcome of the war per se. It was part of his quest and the New Republic's quest to achieve national greatness. America couldn't afford to miss out on this opportunity to join a historic war in United Citizens under the banner of a big power rather than some provincial observer in this great event. So he adopted this pro-war view solely to advance the progressive program at home. And he knew that once this conscription of thought was achieved, once he had American minds convinced to join the war or other progressive causes, that their bodies and their wallets would be easy pickings and that that would follow. So I really love that phrase, conscription of thought, because I think it applies in spades still to America today and to the West. I think we have accepted the premises and the framework of the state, and thus we accept the degradations that follow from statism. The only corrective, of course, in Dewey's time on our own was a full-throated challenge, an intellectual challenge to these premises and to this framework. But yet it is precisely that challenge, the direct and robust challenge, from which the zeitgeist libertarian shrinks. So Lou Rockwell from Time Time has brought up the old adage, the smaller the movement, the louder and more vociferous the factions, which I think is true. And I know what you're thinking, that I'm going to talk to you about these endless libertarian factions left versus right or thick versus thin, modal, versus paleo modal was the term Murray Rothbard came up with, Beltway versus Mises Institute. That's my favorite one, actually. But this is not about factions. This is about something bigger. The zeitgeist libertarian transcends these categories by accepting, I would argue, the ends of progressivism and state action while only suggesting different means to those ends. And in many cases, increasingly only slightly different means to those ends. So like John Dewey sort of hectoring these stubborn Americans still stuck on this old world war, or excuse me, on this war neutrality, the zeitgeisters like to hector us to give up our old modes of thinking. That dreary talk about rights and property and the state, and instead we should all sort of happily accept the spirit and tenor of the age in which we live. So the details, like they did for Dewey, matter less than being in the game. So in this sense, the zeitgeister accepts this conscription of thought, accepts the parameters set by the political world and focuses only on influence within those parameters over all other considerations. So there's a great story involving David Gordon, whom I'm sure many of you know, and the late Ronald Hamway. I hope that name means something to some of you. He was a great intellectual, a Canadian, and he was also a very wonderful, un-PC scholar who was a member of Murray Rothbard's Circle of Osteot in New York City. So David Gordon and Ron Hamway attended a conference at Stanford University, David tells me, in the 1980s, and they were walking back to their car from this conference and a sort of scraggly person approached them. And he was obviously hoping for a ride. And so the stranger goes up to Ron and says, which way are you going? And Ron Hamway's answer was the other way. We're going the other way. And I think that's such a great analogy for how so many of us in this room, I suspect, feel that we're not only at odds with the dominant Western political landscape and the dominant Western economics, but also with the cultural landscape. We don't want to be, in Mises's term, historians of decline, but we're also clear eyed and honest about where we are after, let's face it, a progressive century of war and central banking and statism. But not so for the Zeitgeist libertarians who, as their name suggests, are not only caught up in the spirit of our age, but mostly actually approve of it. And of course this means that they cheer and even advance in cases the prevailing narratives of our day. And we all know what those are. Adnausium. The America and the West are deeply racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic. Western wealth is the result of colonialism and conquest. Climate change is, of course, an immediate civilizational threat. Income inequality is the most pressing economic issue of our time, and so forth. All of these things that just aren't so. So above all, the Zeitgeisters like to go along to get along. Unlike the happy radicals of Murray Rothbard and David Gordon and Ron Hamaway all going the other way from that scraggly person, they actually treat radicalism, at least libertarian radicalism, with this sort of reflexive suspicion and contempt. So we can recall how Murray Rothbard used the term, in the 60s and 70s especially, libertarian movement. A phrase today I think we might regret using. It's certainly a loaded term. Now, of course, when Murray Rothbard used the term by movement, he met a multi-pronged approach. Top-down intellectualism, bottom-up right populism, libertarian political action, but mostly of the educational, meaning purist, sort, along with sort of encouraging a healthy sense of bourgeois sensibility and a willingness for ordinary people to engage in a bit, perhaps a bit of Irish democracy when the state oversteps its bounds. But above all, Murray Rothbard's libertarian movement was something that called for radicalism and real opposition to state power. So by Murray's standards, I would argue that movement libertarianism has to be seen as a failure today, certainly in the political sense. And it is really in every way political and how could it not be? The Zeitgeisters pushing political libertarianism, they accept the politicization of everything in our society, a progressive norm, just as they accept other injuries to liberty. They take what ought to be a radical non-political movement, one that's dedicated not only to, of course, reducing the size and scope of government, but also reducing the size and scope of politics itself. In other words, a movement to make society less political. And they take all of this, this Rothbardian conception, and they water it down, they reduce it to a set of watered-down policy choices. So as a result of this neutering of libertarianism, political libertarianism, I think, has crashed. It's as all political movements eventually do on the shoals of compromise and co-option and dilution. But stepping back from it, to be fair, to the Zeitgeist libertarians, we have to understand that Zeitgeist in which they operate. We have to take a look at where we are and how we got there in the West. Now you're probably familiar with a political notion called the horseshoe theory. In other words, we take what most of us in this room would reject, which is a linear left-right continuum of political philosophy. And we bend that into a shape of a horseshoe. We take a linear concept. And it's used in sort of a facile way to suggest that the far left and the far right have so much in common that they come, they end up coming together like the ends of a horseshoe. So the left veers towards radical socialism the right veers towards some sort of virulent nationalism or fascism. But both movements, if left unchecked, they go to their logical extremes. They start to almost touch and both lead to violent suppression of freedom, to devolving economies and to some sort of nasty and authoritarian ruling class that treats its subjects very badly. So it's a facile argument but it's actually useful for making a larger point that what seem to be widely divergent political motivations can actually lead to similar destinations because I think if you read Paul Gottfried, you will admit that there actually are differences of opinion, motivation amongst the left and the right today. So in terms of differing motivations but similar destinations, I found this funny quote on a website called The Conversation. It's kind of one of these new websites like Quillette or Jacobite out there that's kind of trying to be nonpartisan. So this quote says, when fascists reject liberal individualism, it is in the name of a vision of national unity and ethnic purity rooted in a romanticized past when communists and socialists do, it is in the name of international solidarity and the redistribution of wealth. Well, thanks for clearing that up. I'm glad we all know our motivations but it remains true at the policy level, actual implement policies that what governments actually do, there's a greater degree of convergence than divergence regardless of what the motivations are behind those policies. And I'm speaking here mostly of America and the West. So that's why we might almost view the horseshoe today as having been cut off in the end and shaped into two parallel tracks. And those two tracks today are the dominant political ideologies of our time, neoliberalism and neoconservatism. We might almost call them default ideologies because they really represent a devolution of sorts from older versions of left liberalism and the old right and old conservatism. So the old ideologies and motivations almost seem quaint to us, they seem to scarcely matter anymore. So the old fight now politically is the fight over who controls the political turf, the apparatus of the state between these two sort of narrow ideologies. And when I say narrow or parallel, when I say that they're converging, a few points on that. And I'm talking about neoliberalism and neoconservatism, both purport to represent some sort of third way thinking between a fully planned economy and laissez-faire capitalism. Both are fully globalist, universalist in outlook, elitist, technocratic, hostile to populism certainly. Both treat breakaway sentiments or decentralized political decentralization as dangerous developments to be quashed. Both hate Trump and Brexit. I think that more importantly, they hate Trump and Brexit voters while viewing Hillary Clinton and the Remainers as sort of self-evidently preferable to anyone beyond an exasperating child. Both advocate for a robust role for the US as the chief or even unilateral enforcer of a global world order, military order, courtesy of US Armed Forces and NATO, and of course an economic order, courtesy of US Federal Reserve Bank and the US Treasury Market and other central banks. Both support nation building as an obvious and just endeavor for Western nations in doing so of course they're oblivious to their own neo-colonialist tendencies and impulses. Both support the legitimacy of international organizations like the UN, the IMF, EU, various trade bodies. Both give a somewhat healthy degree of lip service to market capitalism as the driver and as a necessary ingredient for a wealthy society but only within a robust regulatory environment and with robust restrictions on private property rights. Both advocate some variant of what I think we'd have to call social democracy as the acceptable way to organize society. Certainly with a strong safety net, the current Vogue term, I don't know if you've heard Bono from you too, called it welfare capitalism. And of course plenty of taxes to fund it. Both of these doctrines support political correctness, feminism, open immigration, diversity, all of these things as unquestioned positives. And both purport I think to be pragmatic rather than ideological. So you put all this in a blender and you find that today the differences between neoliberalism and neo-colonialism are really more tone and style than substance. So yet not shockingly even with this huge opening with this sort of one party ideology that we have, our Zeitgeist libertarian friends are right there with them. They're on a parallel track right there with the two dominant ideologies, oftentimes sharing their ends as I mentioned and only quibbling about means. So when we look at the Zeitgeisters, we'll find that they too are similarly globalist and universalist in outlook. And not just a good kind of globalist who says, well, Diet Coke is good the world and everybody wants it everywhere. And God bless Coke because I can get a Diet Coke wherever I go. I'm talking about the bad kind of globalist, a political globalist. Like our neoliberal, neo-conservative friends the Zeitgeisters hate Trump. They consider Hillary Clinton the far lesser of evils even when they aren't openly praising her. They accept or at least fail to be much exercised by US interventionism, by nation building, by the Pax Americana concept. Foreign policy in fact always takes a distant backseat to social and cultural issues in their worldview. They hate Ron Paul, of course, for existence, but for instance, but right only sort of muted peons to late John McCain. They accept the role of the Federal Reserve and merely, they tend to advocate for tinkering with these sort of rules-based reforms of monetary policy, not a philosophical or ideological approach. They accept the legitimacy or purported legitimacy of supernational organizations. And despite their sort of attenuated, despite these organizations attenuation of actual cherished democracy. So they accept these organizations lest they be lumped in with those reactionary get out of the UN types that Stephan Cancella mentioned earlier. I think they accept regulated capitalism in the regulatory state as pragmatic and in doing so are almost forced to dismiss property rights absolutism. And it even may be reject the concept of property as the core element of liberal thought. They certainly dismiss concerns about PC overreach or feminist excesses or diversity or academic freedom. These are imaginary right-wing, the Schiblisser constructs. And here's what occasionally galls me a bit. They accept this overarching narrative that liberals are well-intentioned but misguided, both as to means and as like, while conservatives are almost evil by definition. So as a result of swallowing this mainstream narrative, of course they obsess about the alt-right, so-called, which really has no institutional power, which consists mostly of some loud people on social media and really had little to do with the election of Donald Trump. Red states voted, red, blue states voted, blue, and some kind of angry people in the Rust Belt States and in Florida, many of whom had voted for Barack Obama, said, well, we're gonna vote for Trump. That wasn't the alt-right. It was mostly disgruntled baby boomer-aged people, actually. So they obsess about the alt-right and it's supposed to influence, but they don't worry too, too much. Even when Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez run on openly socialist platforms and actually gain quite a bit of ground doing so. And perhaps most importantly, in this set of facts, the zeitgeist libertarians increasingly seek to minimize the intellectual and philosophical components of libertarianism in favor of pragmatic and empirical approaches, excuse me. So in doing so, they end up sounding an awful lot like neoliberals and neoconservatives. And thus, inadvertent or not, they end up pushing political libertarianism toward a convergence with those two other doctrines. They sort of take the marrow out of the bone and reduce liberty to a variant of public policy. And even then, we're talking about approved public policy. Nothing too radical, nothing too intellectual. So they make a fetish, I would say, of appearing neither left nor right, but always end up nowhere and engaging in this sort of endless what-aboutism when it comes to left and right. So why should this be so? Why should it be that we know that neoliberalism and neoconservatives are where they are, but why should it be so that libertarians are in the same spot? It seems depressing, but why does movement libertarianism, the kind Murray sought to create, sort of lack the stomach to present a truly radical anti-state program for the world, a program bold enough to deny the concept of government itself as a central organizing principle in society? Well, yes, of course, we're all human. There is this sense of, again, not wanting to be seen as a reactionary, of wanting to be in the game in the fray in Washington DC and New York and Brussels and taken seriously. That's why you'll notice that libertarians are happy to write progressive friendly articles for the Washington Post or the New York Times, and they're hoping that they might be the next writer hired by the Atlantic or the New Yorker or someplace like that, but it's more than this. It's more than some sort of self-interest, and we're all self-interested. I think we need to cut the zeitgeist libertarians some slack and really view them through the lens of 20th century history and maybe judge them more leniently by doing so, because after all, like all of us, they're creatures of their environment. So if we look at progressivism, if we look at Murray's critique of it, going back to, let's say, late 1800s, progressivism really went from maybe 10 on a scale, a scale of 100 from 10 to maybe 95 today. So anyone who even suggests simply rolling things back from 95 to 93 or maybe going from 95 to 100 a little more slowly risks immediate branding as a neo-reactionary. And I would argue that that's the one thing that the zeitgeisters seek to avoid being called above all a reactionary. So progressivism has been the overwhelming force in Western politics for the last 100 odd years. We have to accept it, consider antitrust legislation, central banking, income taxes, the League of Nations giving way to the UN, two world wars, the rejection of economic freedoms by the Supreme Court, the New Deal, old age pensions like Social Security, Public Works, the Great Society with welfare entitlements and food stamps and healthcare schemes. And of course, finally, the absolute triumph by progressives and leftover each in every culture war issue. So that's where we are after a century plus of progressivism. So what kind of movement libertarianism should we really expect to emerge from all of this? In every meaningful way, progressives control politics, government, business, culture in America and the West. And really, progressivism has become so dominant that we've really stopped paying attention to it. It becomes sort of the baseline that's all around us. It's almost like the furniture or the plants in the room. We're not really aware of it anymore and it does color our thinking. We become so accustomed to it, we hardly even see it. But if we think for a moment that progressives control both major political parties and increasingly the third party and it's a libertarian party, they control the federal judiciary along with all the federal departments and agencies. They dominate education, both at the university level and also K through 12 in government and private. They run the American Medical Association, the American Bar Association. So these two formerly conservative professions are now steered leftward. The Fortune 500 and major global and domestic corporations are run by progressives. Their boards are progressives. Their corporate branding and messaging and political donations are progressive. Progressives run Wall Street. They give far more campaign money again to progressive candidates. Silicon Valley and the tech industry dominated by progressive social media, dominated by progressives. Traditional media, including broadcast news and print publications. Virtually all journalists are progressives. Progressives run Hollywood of course and they hold sway over the film and TV and video and music industries, popular culture, popular literature. And, lest we forget, progressives run all major religious institutions in the West. From the Vatican to mainline Protestant churches to virtually all synagogues, these are all now thoroughly progressive, not only in the political sense, but in the sense of church or doctrine. So the point here is that Zeitgeist libertarianism has not developed apart from this progressive milieu that we're all steeped in any more than any other movement in America the West. And how could it? So our point and our task is not to attack the Zeitgeisters so much as to understand them and to understand the impossibility of a political or movement libertarianism within the current progressive framework. No truly libertarian movement can, when it accepts the wrong premises, it asks the wrong questions as a result and then it of course seeds the terms of the debate from the starting point. It's not a matter of selling out principles for influence. It's more a matter of sort of preemptively accepting the organizing principle of the state from the very beginning. So our responsibility to the Zeitgeisters I would argue is really the same as our responsibility to the world at large. It's to truth regardless of where it might take us and to promoting the timeless ideas that we all know yield peace and human flourishing. But we are not however required to engage in watered down political movements or to engage in politics at all. We're not required to participate in ideological or intellectual movements that accept progressive ends or progressive framing. We're not required to append a set of left cultural precepts onto political liberty. And I think as Keir Martlin said earlier and very well what matters is getting first principles right because without that nothing good follows. Thank you very much.