 Our panelists today represent a group of libertarian activists Who are all lay people who are not professional libertarians? They all have day jobs and families and bills and the same kind of everyday concerns That I'm sure most of you have a lot of conferences like this. We tend to get talks by academics Or intellectuals, so we thought it would be interesting to get the perspectives and the ideas and some strategies From just some intelligent lay people from all walks of life different ages Different backgrounds and experiences, but I think you'll find that everybody on the panel is a very dedicated very intelligent and Might have some interesting ideas for us I'm going to introduce everybody just very briefly you can meet up with them later Some of them provided their email addresses on the program But what we've asked them to do is to give just a few brief moments of remarks of What they think from their perspective ought to be done What's what's a strategy or what are the tactics? What are the options available to us? And then when they're done We can field questions amongst the panelists themselves or or from the audience So we hope we'll have a good discussion with lots of feedback and and enthusiasm on the end is Bill Haynes our host today someone I think a lot of you know quite well He's been a libertarian for many decades and involved in the golden silver business for many decades as well See the next to him is Catherine Muratori. She is a scientist a biochemist With advanced degrees in that field and also these days perhaps the most important job. I'll stay at home mother Sitting to her left is Jordan Osmond She's someone who's been a friend of the Mises Institute and who has the unique talent of being both an IT and a finance expert in one package Sitting next to her is someone I've known for a long time Mark Victor a very well known attorney in the Phoenix area He's tried and won some very high-profile cases dedicated libertarian and also a Former student who I think whose life was changed by being in law school with Butler Schaffer professor Butler Schaffer To my left here is Hunter Hastings who is a marketing expert who's worked throughout his career for some of the biggest names in Fortune 500 companies in the area of marketing and he has some great ideas about strategy for the broader libertarian movement See it next to him is Taylor Cohn it Taylor is a principal in the in the Cohn it automotive group which owns a series of automotive build your dealerships across I guess Southern California and some other states and he also Manages and runs one of those dealerships himself and finally on the end. We have dr. Don Prince who has been a Libertarian stalwart for many decades. He is a retired medical doctor Dermatologist and once served as the head of AAPS, which is sort of the anti AMA group within the profession of medicine So a round of applause for our panel. Thanks to all of you They're going to join us and I told Bill that we would start with him So Bill take it away. Okay. I have three. Let me have this. We have some water here, please I have three minutes to say that in a very brief In that very brief three minutes is that we cannot pass up any opportunity to bring even one individual to the libertarian idea To bring them into libertarianism and they open up freedom and liberty. We have no idea Who that person will impact in their lives now personally when I am discussing or sometimes it in into a debate with a dedicated socialist I Do not try to bring him around to my point of view But I try to present my case in a manner so that those people who are listening will be brought to my point of view. I Would not waste my time sitting down with a dedicated socialist one-on-one and discussing anything with them Obviously we need to abolish several federal departments and divisions But we're here to discuss non political solutions and that would be a more political one My personal experience is in academia as a scientist So I'll leave creative entrepreneurial scientists the task of finding market solutions that can poke holes in the regulatory apparatus but there's a reason that I initially thought of abolishing federal level agencies and That is because not only is there a vast regulation of applied medicine But also a tremendous amount of funding of science in the United States So I think a non scientist who is interested in the cause of liberty can advance liberty in the sciences by Just being more aware of funding of sciences For example, the National Institutes of Health spent three quarters of a billion dollars this year to train over 15,000 scientists Now scientists don't think of themselves as being recipients of welfare, but they obviously are At the 25th anniversary celebration of the Mises Institute Professor Hoppe gave us a talk on anti intellectual intellectuals and they are those among us who think independently Fight for freedom and against the state He pointed out that the Mises Institute is central to providing alternative financing to anti intellectual intellectuals. I Agree with this as a graduate student I did send some of my taxpayer provided stipend to the Mises Institute In return they sent me at that time it was called the I think Austrian economics home study course so to borrow a term that Mr. Goyette Goyette just used I was immunized with that and and we all need those booster shots After being paid to complete a PhD and then looking towards a career of Monetary support from federal grants a libertarian scientist has to stay alert to To what the government is doing especially in the fields of education and research We can see that the current model is not lifting science up. It's bringing it down and We can just look at examples in the market and compare that to the bloated biomedical research areas But it's the theoretical framework of Austrian economics that gives that kind of observation Meaning and the libertarian scientist has to continually hold on to and study and get immunized with Austrian economics and sound history and philosophy and Rothbardian ethics In order to continue to question the role of the state in scientific funding and research As someone in the computer industry, I just want to say that entrepreneurialism is Continuing to just explode and the internet is completely assisting that through things like crowd sourcing and that sort of thing So from the standpoint of the entrepreneur, there are great things happening in the market My question is is there a way that we can harness that as a group that has specific interests in Let's say propagating the ideas of liberty and sharing those out with with more and more people broadly Is there a way that we can do that? leveraging some of the entrepreneurial ideas, I would actually add entrepreneurialism to Jeff's for Solutions, I think instead of perhaps reacting to the system We should be proactive and start really looking at ways that we can harness Harness our communities harness our knowledge Create new softwares if more people are aware of how to implement their own servers To leverage some of the technology that's out there instead of you know buying into the we'll call them the big box Outfits that are running that right now You know we could decentralize some of that because There is an advantage from a security standpoint to be decentralized It's what we call security by obscurity because it can't hit us all at once But by the same token then we're also all Under the same level of scrutiny and surveillance The violation of privacy rights ready or not We just had an act passed on the 27th of October Called the CISA Act which is basically cyber cybersecurity Information sharing so ready or not They're about to find ways to share when you have a breach of data Who you are? What you were doing and send it off to our friends that you know the state and Federal government so that they can see what type of attack was taking place And that is an absolute breach of privacy So read your privacy statements before you download software the the younger generation Has no idea how insidious the internet and the folks that are managing our Infrastructure are everything you have on social media everything you have Even in an email. It's it's someone's got it somewhere whether in this was well before the NSA Information came out. It's stored by the nature of the internet Someone has a copy of that so just assume that that information is out there But there have to be some ways that we could decentralize and leverage the knowledge of the people in this room and Start creating new structures new ways of sharing information that could actually benefit The libertarian movement in freedom in general without having to be in other words Let's stay one step ahead of them You know, we don't have to always be reactive so that's that's my my proposal Okay, so the short guy's got to stand up yes, I'm standing First off I want to take issue with something that was said already I do think we should confront the socialist Let's not be freedom wimps. We're right about this stuff and let's get out there and confront them We may convert some people there are probably people in this room who started out as socialists What what's to lose nothing to lose and lots of things to gain? Let's confront everybody on everything all the damn time Okay, so how to fix the justice system in five minutes here it goes I Got six things. I want to say number one We're not going to fix anything anywhere at any time until we can win more hearts and minds period That's the only way to get freedom. We got to win more hearts and minds. It doesn't matter who's elected It doesn't matter what the Constitution says doesn't matter what the Supreme Court interprets Do we have enough people who understand the ideas of liberty? That's where we need to be focusing if we got enough we'll have freedom if we don't like right now We'll have tyranny. So that's where we need to focus about fixing the justice system really and everything else But number two you can't fix the justice system until you fix the law Period it doesn't matter. We got to get rid of all victimless crimes we got think of this as Think of this as two separate areas of the justice system We've got procedure which is how do we sort of process cases through the system then we've got the substantive law The procedure is not that bad if you made me the king of the procedure There's a lot of things I'd change, but it's really not that terrible. We do a pretty decent job not perfect But pretty decent at figuring out who's really guilty and who's not guilty Which really just means the state hasn't proven their case But it doesn't matter if what they're guilty of is a bunch of stupid shit that shouldn't be against the law in the first place So so fixing the effectiveness of the system doesn't matter and is completely irrelevant Until we can fix the law number three what I'll call jury Education here's what I mean by this the jury was supposed to be the final check on state Power just had a buddy of mine who's a lawyer in Italy who I met because of Lou Rockwell He read one of my articles in Italy and he contacted me and said hey Mark I'm a lawyer in Italy. He came to visit me a couple of weeks ago and we talked about the system They don't have jury trials there could be a big problem What I love about the jury trial is when I'm standing up there We've gone through a lot of aggravation by the time I stand up and closing argument in front of the jury But when I'm standing there, it's just me And the jurors it's me and the rest of the people's representatives They should be able to do whatever they want to do. We should be able to get the bureaucrats and the Terranical big government nuts out of the way. It's just me and them I need to be able to tell them you can judge the law as well as the facts I need to be able to stand there and say ladies and gentlemen Even if you think the state's proven the case the law screwed up who cares if this guy really had marijuana Find them not guilty But in addition to that we need to be able to tell them what the punishment is They don't get to know what the punishment is Could you imagine being a juror and coming back with a guilty verdict thinking that this guy's gonna get probation? when because of our crazy ridiculous Punishments that we have now all throughout the United States and Arizona is one of the worst states on this They don't understand that they just completely ruin somebody's life People make decisions based differently on what they understand to be the gravity of the decision as Judge Kaczynski pointed out in an article recently on this very point We think differently we invest a different amounts of time in whether we should go to Starbucks or some other Coffee house in the morning versus whether we're gonna buy a new house, right? Shouldn't I be able to tell them ladies and gentlemen of the jury if you come back with a guilty my guys got to do 20 years? Think about it carefully. I can't say one peep about that. We got to educate the juries Number four we need to abolish mandatory minimum sentences I can't go to trial in a lot of these cases I talked to the gun guys all the time and the gun guys give me these scenarios and they say you know Mark, what if this that the next thing happens and then I shoot somebody in my house? Maybe it's a good shooting, but if it's close They're never gonna get to trial because the situation is gonna be such that if the jury comes back and says that they acted Reasonably they leave with me we go they buy me dinner if the jury comes back and says no you were Unreasonable then they go away for maybe 20 years none of you will take that chance All of you will walk in and plead guilty to a lesser charge because you're stuck with the mandatory minimum if you lose We need to be able to give judges the power to say you know what? Even though the person has been found guilty and it could be first-degree murder still there needs to be an option for Probation so people are allowed to send cases in front of the jury I can't tell you how many cases I would have loved to have tried in front of a jury that I can't Because the risk is too high Number five we got to reduce caseloads the crushing volume of the caseloads in our system There's an article today in the Washington Post about this and they name Maricopa County and they have identified here some of the worst death penalty lawyers ever you would think That in a death penalty case would have tons of resources and tons of attention. I've done lots of death penalty cases I just I'm finishing one up now. We have such crushing caseloads that these Public defenders and even prosecutors just don't have enough time And that's never going to be reduced until the drug war ends period huge lack of resources and then finally number six because I know I'm Running out of time. We got a we got to get real about the Commerce Clause and about federal jurisdiction We got this monstrosity of a federal justice system I can remember talking to a federal prosecutor recently and I said I said is there anything you think you don't have Jurisdiction over and we talked about lots of things and I said what about a DUI case Do you think the federal government could prosecute DUI cases and he says well cars move in interstate commerce and all the parts are made Into he's absolutely right. This is a slam dunk win For the federal government in terms of a jurisdiction There is nothing that I can think of that the federal government couldn't exercise its Jurisdiction over and so we got to get all these crimes out of the federal government We got a we got to get the Commerce Clause and I know I hear I can hear Butler over there Because he taught me about the Commerce Clause He's gonna give me a hard time when I meet with them We got to do something different with the Commerce Clause because it reaches everything It's an infinite source of endless federal jurisdiction until we fix that. There's no fix in the federal justice system Anyways, let's just focus on winning hearts and minds Whatever it is you do if you're right if you speak if you're if you're Lou when you got a big big website out there I don't even care anymore if you run for office I don't even care if you run as a Republican in your Rand Paul more power to him Hunter understand sure. Thank you Yeah, start that's you did that's a hard act to follow So what must be done? Here's my proposal. We need to build a more attractive and more cohesive brand for liberty So let me explain that as Jeff said my professional experiences in building brands Brands of people love Brands of people are devoted to Think about Pepsi and Apple and Jack Daniels one of my favorites and BMW Many of these started as niche Properties and were expanded into global brands with with dominant preferences Successful brands have a couple of Attributes firstly they offer their adherence a it's what we call a functional benefit. There's something in it for them They make individual lives better or at least on the subjective preference scale. They make people feel like their lives are better So brand marketing is a very Austrian concept You figure out what people want and you and you give it to them and they rate it on their own subjective scale second brand stand for something powerful that can generate just astonishing levels of emotional investment and tremendously loyal behavior Apple makes you technologically astute and socially cool at the same time Jack Daniels makes you authentic At least for a while BMW makes you feel like you're the best driver in charge of the best equipment So these brands stand for something that's very attractive to people the Liberty brand actually lacks many of the attributes of a successful brand and I think our brand is in danger of being perceived as negative We tend to be against a lot of things if not against everything rather than Relentlessly positive and optimistic, which I think we should be we're not always really clear what Liberty means for the individual How does it make a difference in there in their everyday lives and we don't consistently engender that emotional investment of great brands Although we have to say dr. Paul did that in his campaigning and showed what could be done. So there's a there's a terrific sign there So I don't have six things but I have three things first make it clear that we are for the individual We believe it individuals. We love individuals. We believe they can succeed and and we want them to succeed the state Hates individuals they repress individuals and so we need to be for that emotional Heroism of individuals individuals or liberties heroes the functional and benefit then is exercising individual economic power We are economic power. We're the biggest part of the economy. So let's bring that to life. Let's empower people Mises said that consumers boss because the consumer decides what is produced based on their preferences and To Jordan's point the entrepreneur directs the market economy by rearranging the factors of production to produce what consumers want That's economic power. So let's bring this to life. Let's promote individual economic power Entrepreneurs as Jordan said, but it doesn't have to be Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. It's starting a small business in your in your locality It's freelancing Mary Mika says there are 38 million freelancers in the economy and so there's there's lots of opportunities at that level an Individual can harness the power of cloud computing. They can they can Get kickstart of financing. They can use the internet. There's no limit to the to the scale that individuals can can operate at so let's Drive that individual opportunity then on the opposite side refuse to do business with the big crony businesses Let's support our entrepreneurs and do our business locally and and do it with entrepreneurs And especially refuse to do business with the big banks, which a lot of us have identified as as particular crony capitalism That's radical decentralization. Let's do it all with our in our local communities with local businesses Let's do for localness in economics. What Whole Foods did for local produce? I was I was listening to John Mackey the other day and he says he's taken the local produce Component or local organic produce a component from 5% to 30% in a very short period of time Just think of that just think if we could get 30% of people to switch their accounts from a big bank to the local Community Bank that would get noticed so economic power at the local level and Then the emotional benefit is pride Let's be proud of our own self-reliance. Let's throw off the Dependency that the state insists that we all have pride in localness pride in the exercise of our individual economic power Let's make proud self-reliance and the voluntary Collaboration of self-reliant people like us the highest value for the individual And then the last thing is that we need a brand leader and as mr. Goi said there's no nobody better than the Ludwig von Mises Institute to be that brand leader. Thank you I'm actually going to be reading notes from my phone. I'm not checking my Twitter updating my Facebook, so So my idea is about what is to be done are related to Communication specifically how to change our language our conceptualization and our organization so we can have more influence and I believe that these techniques are in the vein of the strategy of Winning hearts and minds but I need to apologize to mark for my first point because it's going to sound a little wimpy and I Hope you can just read between the lines on it so First libertarians excel at rational judgment and evaluation We're able to scrutinize any social situation and quickly determine who is right and who is wrong who is moral and who is immoral But we're not what we're not so good at is communicating our values and needs and thoughtfully considering those that motivate others Particularly those values and needs that are universal to all of mankind. I Think libertarians would benefit enormous enormously for mastering the art of empathy as best described in Marshall Rosenberg's book nonviolent communication With greater empathy we can not only listen for what others We can all we can not only listen for what others need so we can explain the solutions we have to offer But we can better explain our own needs and help others to understand that we are not motivated by blind faith to rational ideology I see empathy as the true language of liberty that all libertarians can embrace second libertarians seem to spend a lot of time conceptualizing the flaws of our current system as hunter mentioned and Imagining the methods by which it might end to the point of even fetishizing collapse But we spend comparatively less time imagining what might replace it and offering these entrepreneurial visions to others While it's true that no one can know for sure what the future state of a free market might look like Each one of us can come up With a vision and take steps to turn it into a reality if we took all the time and the energy we invest in fantasizing about the collapse of the state the death of the dollar and the bankruptcy of the welfare system and instead worked out business models for voluntary security organizations and alternative currencies and Community aid organizations we could start putting them into practice now and start living in the libertarian future Let's offer others a practical vision of the future and how it might function differently Let's each come up with something specific That we do with more liberty than we have right now rather than obsess about Liberty like it is an end in and of itself and not a means to other ends Third, I believe libertarians should be the most organized social enclave around and to that end We should all form our own local associations of like minds and get together on a regular basis These Mises circles are great, but they only happen a few times a year and Hans-Hermann Hoppe's property and freedom society is an excellent forum But it takes place far far away Libertarians often like to think of themselves as the brave but lonesome voice of sanity But we aren't really alone or at least we don't have to be I Formed a group in my local town that meets monthly to read and discuss Austro-libertarian ideas and I found that generally people interested in freedom are free thinking in other areas as well such as nutrition parenting philosophies and even personal values and lifestyle These organizations are a great way to gain new perspectives and form real friendships that add to our quality of life and Turn our obsession with liberty into another practical social advantage so in Enclosing a language of empathy a constructive conceptualization process and a local association of like minds These are three ideas which could improve every libertarians communication and influence Although I'm speaking for Practice of medicine the first concept I had mentioned is Advocable to everything and that is if you are a patient a consumer in this case You need to have the money yourself Because only in that way. Do you have the power to make your correct decisions as? an individual physicians I must look only to you and This concept has been greatly distorted over the past 60 years as Many of the things happen this started during a war in this case World War two Where people started to looking for a third party to fund some or sometimes all of the money So the first concept is to be sure the patient the consumer stays in your hands This also has a huge Concept also relating to that in that you make the best decisions to satisfy you not a third party and What I would like to point out is now them almost all of the money is flowing not to you the patient But is run by a third party. I pointed out this is just exactly now Instead of a practice of medicine It's like veterinary medicine the person paying the money in this case the owner Contacts the vet says should we pay for this or not? Fifi the the patient in that case is less now this entirely and you know when I first pointed out this concept People grasp that right away that the complaints I had interesting that was a veterinarian's which I thought was quite The second concept is to return to true insurance Insurance is not to be paid for the everyday activities. It is something that financially would be Catastrophic economically if you have faced that so we need to go back to the concept of true insurance and the insurance should be owned by you Through a market experience the idea that now that I am over 65 I can focus only to one insurance where I must pay over a lifetime just for that So-called insurance is absolutely wrong and the third thing I'd like to point out is I am a physician The third party like refer to me as a provider. I'm a provider to my family I'm not a provider for the government and so I view this the concept because I Must focus back to what I mentioned only to you It is only in this way that as a physician to a patient the most intimate Information the patient can give to me as a physician to benefit the patient most and that type of Privacy is totally violated when a third party enters into this what should be a beautiful Relationship I have watched in my lifetime a beautiful profession Which was one of honor's profession he turned into profession that was more like the oldest profession Let me just mention that Peter Kalman is an entrepreneur For and a representative for Kalman associates which puts on trade shows around the world He's also been an absolutely outstanding Campus coordinator on behalf of the Mises instead, so Peter. Thank you Jeff. Hi So I'm really bad at following instructions and getting places on time when people tell me to sorry about that But I'm also not very good at telling other people what to do So when I first heard the topic of today kind of struck me as kind of interesting for libertarians to be talking about What people other people must be doing and so I just want to kind of start with a show of hands Can you raise your hand for me if you're a voluntarious that is if you believe in nonviolent cooperation in humans interacting without coercion without force if you believe that Violence is wrong no matter who's doing it and if you believe that good ideas don't require force I'd love you to raise your hand for me. I'd hope that everyone alright a few people don't that's alright So I'm not gonna make your hands tired. I promise keep them up Keep them up now keep your hands up if you believe in voluntarism as a philosophy That's gonna bring us to a freer society lower your hand if Anyone in your immediate family disagrees with you That's if any of your parents any of your siblings any of your spouses or any of your daughters or sons Happen to believe that government is a solution to bring us to a freer society Okay, there's a lot less hands now I'm gonna have to put my hand down for the next one if anyone in your extended family Disagrees with you put your hands down. I've got about 30 uncles. I'm from New Jersey, so I'm not there's no way I'm gonna get all of them, but you know, I think you guys can see where I'm going with this Are all of your friends? Voluntary is are all the people that you buy on your vendors that you buy from on a day-to-day basis? Are they volunteers are you know are all your clients libertarians or all the people you're doing business with libertarians? You know, and I think this is a really good place to start thinking about things. I think Really the only thing we can change is what's immediately around us and honestly really the only thing we can change is ourselves But we can set an example through our successes for those who would like to follow it We can't force anyone to follow it obviously but if our Austrian economics and philosophies of non-violence and Avoiding coercion can lead us to greater successes because we've removed that bureaucracy that layer of fat from the government I think that is going to show people and create a bourgeois around the idea of being a libertarian because the successes will speak We'll speak for themselves, you know Um There are you know, there are a lot of ways around this political action You know I've got some books here from the RLC of the Republican Liberty Caucus of Los Angeles County Some some guys that are undercover anarchists that are infiltrating the Republican Party I'm trying to get delegates for someone somebody. I don't know. I mean there There's a lot of things people touched on but I kind of want to go back to agorism which was kind of touched upon a Few of the people Hunter and Taylor was yeah spoke about engaging with the communities that were a part of it Just sort of my theme as well. I work with Liberty Dot menu. It's on a website. That's on the program next to my name It's an it's a place for Liberty minded entrepreneurs to find one another, you know My suit was made by a voluntarious if you bought your suit at Macy's you're contributing to the state You know that that might seem a little bit ridiculous but I mean I don't really think that the black or gray markets are as Faux-pas as people imagine because the first three years of my life Employed from 12 to 15 at my uncle's sandwich shop I was getting paid under the table and I think that's a pretty common occurrence for people back east maybe not out here But I know there's a lot of black and gray markets. That's not just selling drugs So I don't know I just I find that that if we all are cooperating with each other non-violently and through peaceful means we can set an example through our actions rather than Badgering people and telling them what to do and as far as the hearts and minds go We really need to work on the ones that are closest to us before we work on the rest of the world