 Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Aaron Powell. And I'm Trevor Burris. And joining us today is Lawrence Reed, President of the Foundation for Economic Education. Welcome to Free Thoughts. Hey, it's a pleasure to be with you, Aaron and Trevor. I guess let's start with having you tell us just a bit about the Foundation for Economic Education, which has been around for quite a while. It's one of the granddaddies of the free market movement. Yes, it is. It was founded in 1946 by the late Leonard Reed. No relation. He spelled his name R-E-A-D, whereas mine is with two E's. But I did know him in the last seven years of his life before he passed away in 1983. He was a remarkable man, born in Michigan, became interested in, first of all, private enterprise and general business principles early on. He was a businessman himself for a time and worked later for the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce. But he had an epiphany at one point when he was with the Los Angeles Chamber, thanks to another gentleman who equated him with very principled ideas of liberty and genuinely free market. So he transitioned from a pro-business guy to a pro-enterprise free market guy. And over the years that he ran fee from its founding in 1946 until his death in 83, he was an amazingly prolific man, a gentleman of the First Order, and really kept the flame of liberty alive at a very dark time in the late 40s and 50s, especially when fee was practically alone in promoting these ideas of individual liberty. This distinction you just made, his shift from being pro-business to pro-free markets, that's often a distinction that I think gets lost on a lot of people, especially non-libertarians, non-free market sorts. What is that difference? The difference is huge. In fact, there are an awful lot of people who have come to oppose what they think free markets are or capitalism, because they think that these things involve businesses using their political connections to get something at other people's expense or use the political power of government to stick it to their competitors in some way, a kind of cronyism. I know that the term often is used crony capitalism, but I like to say if it's capitalism, it isn't cronyism. The more cronyism that's practiced, the more it looks like some form of socialism, with political power determining who gets what. So I think it's important, in a generally free market, there are no favors, free and open field for people to compete, to start businesses, to compete with the biggest of existing firms, and no special favors from the government in the form of subsidies or goodies of one kind or another that disadvantage anyone else in the marketplace. So in the original incarnation of fee, was the idea for an educational, has fee changed much in basic mission since 1946, still focusing on educating young people in the ideas of economics? Was there anything very different back in the 50s? Yeah, in those early years, because fee was alone for the first decade or more, it spoke to almost anybody of any age, any occupation, and so it was probably rather difficult to market in that fee never really focused on a particular demographic. And I can understand that, I think at the time that's what it had to do. But over the years, in part because of fees progress in spawning a lot of other groups, we've had to make some changes at fee. Now we focus exclusively on young people, high school and college, and even within that demographic, we've focused more narrowly on those young people who are newcomers to ideas of liberty. If you come to us and say, I want to come to a fee seminar because I've been to Cato University, I've been to an IHS program, I've read Human Action three times, we say wonderful, we'd be happy to connect you with the next level, but you're not what we're looking for. We want to be thought of as the first start, the first portal into liberty ideas for young newcomers to ideas of liberty. That's how we change, but our core principles have not changed one iota. Is there a difference in the way that, I mean aside from maybe the degree of knowledge that you assume on the part of the person you're talking to, is there a difference in the way that you go about teaching young people versus older people about these ideas? Yes, there is. The younger the audience, the more you've got to make use of technology. I think the younger the audience, the more stories are important to communicate the message. That's what young people remember, that's what they relate to. For instance, one of our key themes is the indispensable connection between liberty and personal character. If we talked about that in any kind of a preachy, condescending way, we'd lose our audience. But when you're talking to young people, I think in discussing matters of personal character and its connection to liberty, I think the best way to do that is through stories. So we've become great storytellers at FI. At many of our programs, we're getting our principles across by talking about exemplary people, living and from the past, who have been advocates for liberty and walk the walk. I wanted to ask you about someone who, actually, I don't think we've really mentioned much on free thoughts before, but who is very associated with FI, Henry Hazlett. I wanted to ask you about him and for listeners who aren't familiar with him and aren't familiar with his excellent book, Economics of One Lesson. Can you tell us a little about him and his association with FI? Absolutely. Henry Hazlett was a very good friend of Leonard Reed's. He was on the board of FI for many years. When he passed away in the 1990s, he bequeathed his personal library to FI, which we still have. He was a remarkable man and contributed so much to our understanding of communicating ideas of liberty and free markets to a broad lay audience. He was not a PhD in economics, but he had an uncanny ability to communicate ideas so that anybody could understand them and actually get excited about them. He certainly did that in his classic and best known work, Economics in One Lesson. FI has helped to keep that book alive. It remains to this day available on our website and in our bookstore. You can get it from other places as well, but we've made sure that it's always in print and it's one of our best sellers. But Hazlett was just a phenomenal guy. One of the most treasured things I have is correspondence letters that he and I exchanged way back in the early 80s. He's a remarkable guy. We're talking about communicating free markets to young people or anyone whatsoever. I'm sure you have a lot to say about the fact that since Adam Smith, we seem to know a lot about how markets work, but it seems to be very difficult to convince people that markets are a good thing. Why is it difficult to convince people that markets are a good thing? Well, I've often said that anybody can be a socialist. All it takes is the desire to have something that belongs to somebody else and the willingness to use political power and force to get it. But to be an advocate of liberty and to be a consistent one whose actions follow on from the principles, you've got to practice things like restraint. You can't stake a claim on somebody else's possessions just because you want it or have a good idea. I think liberty is the only social, political, economic arrangement that requires that we live to high standards of character. I've never in all my reading of history seen a single civilization where the people have lost their character and kept their liberty. So it doesn't take much to be a socialist, but it does take a higher level of understanding and of moral character, I think, to live your life within the principles of character and liberty. You've got to keep your hands out of other people's pockets. You've got to associate with others in a way that respects their lives and their property and sometimes with the human desire to be secure, those things go by the boards if we think we can grab something no matter how we get it. So among young people right now, Bernie Sanders is quite popular and the Bernie Sanders supporters might respond to what you just said by saying, don't you have it backwards? So the free market's capitalism is motivated by acquisitiveness, by greed, by competition that grinds people down and leaves people out whereas it's the socialism or the social democracy that is based on the character of sharing, of recognizing when you have enough and other people don't and using the mechanisms of the state not to steal but to better the worse off, give everyone a leg up, give everyone a chance. Well, I wouldn't call it sharing if you have to do it at gunpoint and that's what socialism ultimately reduces to. So I think it's important for people to understand that each of us comes into this world with the right to do anything that's peaceful and we are each obligated to respect the lives and the property and the wishes, the choices of other people so long as each of us leaves each other alone. But socialism departs from that and assumes that if it's a really good idea we can use the political force of government to get it. I want a society and I think this is true of every libertarian where people do the right thing because they want to not because they have to. I think it's great that kids can go to college and I think it's great that people contribute to scholarship funds to enable them to go to college but it wouldn't occur to me as a believer in liberty to call the cops and to at gunpoint take from people so that anyone can go to college and that's not because I think government or that the private enterprise is inherently greedy or anything. I think we all have a sense of acquisitiveness. There's nothing about socialism that does away with that. It's just that under socialism your acquisitiveness can only be satisfied by using political force to get what you want. Whereas in free markets if you want something you've got to persuade you've got to convince, you've got to produce, you've got to freely associate. You don't use the force of government to get what you want. Given that you're in the free market education and business and world when not business life pursuit is a better way of putting it have you come to a conclusion of something that you think is the sort of the main reason people disagree with free markets? And I mean specifically with Aaron and the Bernie Sanders thing. Is it that they don't think that the market would supply these things or do a good job of supplying healthcare so people don't know enough about the mechanism of the market that can make these things work to have healthcare and education and charity or is there something more rapacious in some of these people who really just want to take from people who have something to give it to people who don't because of their view of justice maybe not rapacious but at least more just about forcible redistribution for justice's sake. Yeah, I think there's something to that but there are other factors at work as well. I'm trying to remember how you exactly put it at the opening of your question there. Well the question I'm just about, yeah, the question of just they don't have the belief that the market works. I mean and so I mean maybe the first thing we have to do is just convince them that it does because they think that they're comparing Bernie Sanders promises to Mad Max chaos of the robber barons era or some sort of image they have of what markets are like that they're probably wrong about. Yeah, people often judge markets against a perfect ideal and if you judge anything according to that it's going to be found wanting. They don't have the same high standard when it comes to government if they did they'd be looking around right now and saying holy cow we trusted it with providing education but we've got 40, 50, 60% dropout rates in government schools that are graduating kids claiming that they've got a 12th grade knowledge but in fact it may be 7th or 8th grade unprepared for the future we've got massive government failures in so many areas but yet people so many people seem to think well that's okay at least we mean well when we do it through the government but if they applied the same standards to the private sector they'd be horrified. So I think part of the problem here is we just got to get people to realize you can't judge markets against an ideal and judge government against far lower standards and then end up saying well we just have to have more government what if it's a massive failure and I would argue that it has been in so many areas. So I'm curious about your thoughts on one issue in convincing people of the value of markets and the freer the markets the better I mean a lot of us around the country and all of us in DC are both baffled and reeling at the rise of Donald Trump and his anti-immigration and his anti-free trade arguments and when I have criticized Trump on my Facebook page or elsewhere one of the arguments that people make about why his supporters about why we ought to be more sympathetic to his supporters than we might otherwise be is that free trade brings enormous benefits overall and it brings enormous benefits in the long term but free trade can also hurt people who lose out in that competition that you allow people to exchange with other countries and suddenly the high paying and relatively low skilled factory jobs move overseas and so now you're saying look free trade is good GDP is up and the country is becoming wealthy over time and you don't have a job. Yeah and you don't have a job and the skills that you have are now worth a third or half as much on the open market as they used to be so how do you go about promoting the value of economic liberty specifically to the people who have been hurt by the competition that comes with economic liberty. Yeah it is a tough issue there's no question about it because people are interested in the here and now often more so than they are the future and they're more interested in themselves and what immediately affects them than what might affect them next year or in 10 years part of the problem we always have in advocating for free markets is to get people to think longer term that what strikes the eye as Henry Haslitt would put it isn't necessarily the full story so there's no question we cannot deny the fact that when you allow people greater freedom to trade with people elsewhere in the world that some individuals will in the near term be hurt but that's no different than it is in any other aspect of an economy even when domestic competition arises one hamburger joint puts another one out of business because consumers say I'd like the new burger better than the old one so these are changes I don't think you can ever get completely behind us it's the nature of a dynamic economy that's based on the right of individuals to freely choose with whom they want to do business so yeah I... It might not convince everyone but it's a one way of doing it I guess That's right and if you get people to realize hey it may be uncomfortable to have free trade for some people but it's even more uncomfortable and probably for a lot more people if you try to freeze the market in place close the door to things like competition from overseas new options, slower prices, more choices and so forth in the long run that does benefit everybody better and no one has the right to use the political force of government to feather their own nest or to keep the job that they presently have you have the right to convince people hey buy for me instead of that guy but you have no right in a free society to use the force of government to compel somebody to buy from you or to hire you instead of whoever they may choose otherwise to deal with Now you've been doing this for a while if you found sort of methods of communication to talk about free markets that A you think are particularly useful and good and you mentioned stories is a really good way of doing it but if you sidle up to someone at a bar and you just sort of start talking you know what's the first kind of thing you say to them and then the second part of the question is do you have any particular pet peeves about the way that some people might talk about markets that you think are counterproductive and not really helping the situation Sure, I do have thoughts on these issues and in many cases they were prompted originally by my reading of our founder's work Leonard Reed he had a uniquely special way of communicating to people he was always calm he was always gentle he never came across and say what's wrong with you I got to beat this into your head until you get it and he strongly believed that if you are a humble person and your humility shows in the sense that you communicate to people that you don't think you know everything that you're willing to listen then certain barriers come down right away but also I think another important tip is be patient with people sometimes you see someone advocating for liberty who is just so impatient to get you to come aboard 100% on everything as quickly as possible sometimes it works better just to convince people of a few points here and there and be very encouraging to them as they rethink their premises let it take a little time and ultimately you're going to have a greater chance of a guaranteed convert than if you try to beat them over they have with everything all at once So I want to go back to this project that you talked about on exploring the relationship between liberty and character I had recently read your essay on this topic and I was struck by the line that you mentioned earlier about how free markets and liberty is the system that demands of us high character and is unique in that regard and I was wondering how that fits with this other defense of a system of ordered liberty in a system particularly of free markets and of capitalism that says one of the really neat things about this is that it works even if people are of let's call it lower moral character or in particular are greedy because it channels that it turns what look like vices into productive virtues in a way that other systems don't So is there a conflict there between the system requiring moral virtue and then this argument that it seems to make productive vice? No, I don't see a conflict at all I think you can come at it from both angles and in my mind sometimes it's which came first chicken or the egg issue but I think the two things together work powerfully together that before a society can become free I think people have to understand such things as respecting the lives and the property of other people I don't think a society of thieves will likely emerge into a society of freedom so at some point you've got to raise your character and recognize that there are others in society and they deserve just as much respect from you as you would expect from them but then I also agree with the argument you've raised that free markets have among its many benefits free market has the benefit of encouraging progress every time I go into say Walmart or any store for that matter I'm greeted by people who would otherwise have no reason to ever say hello to me or what can I do for you or how can I help you but the very fact that they're part of an operation that is designed to curry favor with me and get my patronage means that they've raised their standards so I think it works in both directions but what I'm most convinced of is that a people who abandon strong elements of personal character who become largely dishonest or impatient or timid or irresponsible I think it's only a matter of time before whatever freedoms they've got will be lost some people might listen to you say character and think that you sound antiquated is the word I want to say that the discussion of character belongs in a different era it's the kind of thing that leave it to Beaver talked about and he sits down while he and the beef and he tells them about these things and we don't really do that anymore it all seems kind of quaint to talk about character with such earnestness so two questions like if you agree with that that's kind of changed why do you think that has changed and is it a valid critique to say that character has kind of it's kind of passé and we need a new way of talking about markets Well you can certainly advance ideas of character or at least pretend to advance them in ineffective ways like wrapping yourself in the stories or analogies that seem like yesteryear to a lot of people I think it's more important to stress today that how many people out there really don't want to live in a society where people deal with each other honestly would anybody really upon reflection want to live in a society where everybody's lying to you all the time stealing from you or in other ways are irresponsible or impatient with you I mean these are timeless values yeah it's true that times have changed and our heroes are not the same that they once were but the timeless values underneath strong character I think are just as valid as ever most people overwhelmingly most people want to live in a society where they are respected where others deal with them in an honest fashion so I don't see these core character values as being in any way outdated it's just how we sell them that can be seen as outdated now that's kind of interesting because I mean people might be thinking about character less and we do have again I bring up Donald Trump again which I mean it's important to talk about it because it's such a crazy phenomenon post-character post-character kid does that mean that maybe people aren't drawn to good character anymore they just they want someone who's a clown and funny and says whatever pops into his mind well I think what's motivating the sympathy for Trump is and I admit that it's far greater than I would have anticipated and in that sense it's been a disappointment to me but I think what motivates it is a justifiable anger with the way government has been operating in recent decades I just think Donald Trump is a very poor vessel into which to pour that anger but I'm sympathetic with I mean people have darn good reason to feel disdain from so many in both parties who have let them down so many times but I'm afraid if they glom on to Donald Trump that they're setting themselves up for just as much of a disappointment at some point as they've ever had before Do you think there's anything about government or big government in general that you can kind of expect disappointment or it will breed the kind of disappointment with Washington that maybe Bernie Sanders and Trump are both a part of because government promises a lot and can't deliver much and when we centralize things in Washington it creates difficult situations where everyone feels like they're not being represented maybe it's just part of the growth of government it just makes people disappointed Oh absolutely I've written on this in a number of places if anyone thinks that they can have both good government and big government at the same time I think they're sadly mistaken the bigger government gets the more it claims a share of what other people have produced the more it's in the business of pleasing constituencies by throwing other people's money at them buying votes with public money and so forth the more you concentrate power in Washington or any place else the more you get nastiness the more you get people falling over themselves to get in charge of this massive redistributive apparatus and they'll do anything in many cases to get a hold of that massive amount of power and wealth either to enjoy it personally or to keep it at bay and what happens is increasingly the bigger government gets the more truly good people of solid character look at it and say why would I want to drag myself through the mud forget that business I'm going to do something else so you end up getting the worst people in big government so you got the worst of both worlds you got a big powerful government with the worst people running it that's why I think it's a critical point that people understand that the bigger it gets the more corrupt the nastier it's going to be and the more of a magnet it's going to be for the worst among us well I've heard this different story though where I mean the story that I know is that before the government came along to save us from many things such as food and drug regulation in the progressive era or how the government needed to help us out in the new deal that the real chaos helping out unions, workers minimum wage laws the real chaos that existed which is not a product of government it seems that as we've progressed as a society we have seen it has moved with bigger government we're richer and we're living longer lives now we probably have higher happiness quotients than people in 1850 and we have a much larger government so it can't be that bad it seems like the story is actually the progress it's synonymous with the growth in government well it's constantly amazing to me how relatively free people and relatively free markets continue to overcome some of the worst mistakes and follies promoted by government but in your question you rattled off quite a string of what I like to call bumper stickers of the status left and each and every one of them reports What a coincidence I did that Yeah really I had no plans whatsoever but bumper stickers I like that bumper stickers of the status left so what are some of those? Well one of them you mentioned was that the New Deal saved us and you know if people buy into this stuff yeah they're going to be led ultimately to the wrong conclusions and to embrace the wrong ideas but just take that one about the Great Depression and the New Deal so many Americans have been taught the bumper sticker that capitalism failed us free markets failed us in the late 1920s and had to come in and rescue us but you look at that more closely as one of the chapters does in my recent book Excuse Me Professor you'll find that at the core of that crisis was mismanagement of the economy and lousy policies from government you had the Federal Reserve a creature of the federal government causing an unsustainable bubble in the 1920s with historically easy money dirt cheap interest rates just like we had before 2008 you had a boom in the stock market because of it and then later when the Fed reversed itself and jacked up interest rates dramatically it pricked the bubble and the depression began and then Congress made it even worse and two different administrations Republican and Democrat successively exacerbated it with a string of crazy policies you had Herbert Hoover writing the Smoot-Hawley tariff in 1930 that virtually closed the borders to international trade if you were in a business that depended upon trade overseas you got flattened by Smoot-Hawley and then in 1932 in the face of the depression the income tax was doubled the top rate more than doubled this is even before Franklin Roosevelt but when he comes in with the new deal he ends up prolonging the depression by at least seven years so there's a lot more to all of that but we are constantly those of us who advocate free markets barrage by these status bumper stickers that say very casually all the free market caused the depression governments the answer what in fact a detailed scholarly analysis proves just the opposite Do you think that this is an interesting part where I think fee fits in because we feel like we've we in the broad free market tradition thinkers since in the 20th century in America we feel like our story hasn't been told I feel like in a very big way and that's why we started things like fee and then later Cato or IHS because the professors just weren't teaching it and the media wasn't talking about it that's the way it's often discussed do you think that's true I almost never run into anybody who's hostile to the free market because they thoroughly read our side they know the literature they've read Hayek, Mises, Friedman and so forth and have simply come to the conclusion that it's false what I run into almost all the time are people who think they know what free markets are who know the bumper stickers that criticize it but know nothing of the literature or the rebuttal to status myths that we are trying to feed constantly propagated put in front of people so I think what we're fighting is not a scholarly reasoned and deep-seated fundamental understanding of the economy that just happens to be different from ours I think what we're fighting is widespread ignorance false assumptions that need to be corrected so I like your project as a way of addressing that because it is when you're trying to get people to accept these ideas one of the problems with free market economics as it's often presented is it's and arguments for liberty as well is that it's often very abstract economics unfortunately becomes very mathematical those are difficult things to inspire people with like you want to get the people to read the literature but most people unless you are really hardcore are not going to pick up human action and read it you have to be quite inspired to do that and so this way of going about it through storytelling so one of the things that you do at fee is write this series called Real Heroes about men and women who have lived these values and contributed to this tradition are there people who are particularly inspiring or have particularly good and valuable stories for promoting these ideas Oh absolutely, I've been writing this series now every Friday on our website fee.org for about a year so I've come up with almost 50 of them already and there's so many more if you take Ludwig Erhard for instance a name that I remember hearing as a child growing up in the 50s and 60s but his name is largely forgotten today here's a guy who after World War II became an important figure in Germany, ultimately Chancellor he was an architect of fixing the post war Germany economy, just imagine what he inherited the place was a mess, defeated, devastated, occupied refugees pouring in Germany was a complete socialist mess after the war, after 12 years of national socialism under Hitler but within a decade it would become the richest country in Europe again largely because of Ludwig Erhard was a Sunday when he announced to the German people he was going to abolish all price controls and rationing and rely upon free markets for the distribution of goods he was going to employ a sound currency and replace the hyper inflated one he followed market principles and in no time at all the free markets saved Germany there are lots of people like that in history that students are not hearing from and typically in the government schools in writing your series on these heroes these interesting characters, did you have one that was the most surprising that you sort of discovered I mean maybe we just heard about it but is there someone that you said wow I've never heard of this guy and this is quite amazing? Yeah absolutely quite a number of such occasions but most recently one that really grabbed me I'm happy to say I met this man's son just a few weeks ago in Poland he concerns a gentleman I'd never heard of until last fall his name was Witold Pilecki P-I-L-E-C-K-I he's got to rank as one of the bravest people in the history of the world he not only fought to secure Poland's independence after World War I for the first time in over 100 years as a country again he later when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939 and two weeks later the Soviets invaded from the other direction he joined the resistance against both the Nazis and the Soviets became a leading commander in that resistance and after a year of fighting with word that there was this place called Auschwitz in southern Poland where desperately things may be happening he volunteered to get himself arrested in the hopes he might be sent to Auschwitz so he could report from the inside he had no guarantee that he would in fact be sent there he could have been shot on the spot but he got his wish he was sentenced to Auschwitz where for two and a half years he organized a resistance and his reports the documents he smuggled out the transmissions that he was able to do makeshift radio for a time became the first comprehensive eyewitness accounts of the holocaust in the Auschwitz concentration camp but his story didn't end there I thought if nothing else had happened but he spent those two and a half years in Auschwitz he'd be a hero but he did something that only 143 other people have ever or ever did and that was to escape from Auschwitz he made his way back 200 miles to Warsaw where he became a leading commander in the Polish uprising, the Warsaw uprising he was captured again by the Germans they didn't put two and two together and realize he was the same guy that formed the resistance within Auschwitz he spent the last months of the war in the German prisoner of war camp and finally when the camp was liberated in May of 45 he had about four months of freedom the Polish army had him in Italy for a time and then when it was apparent that the Soviets weren't going to leave Poland they needed somebody to infiltrate back into Poland go underground and report on Soviet atrocities and so they sent Witold Poletski and for two and a half years under cover in Poland he's now reporting on Soviet activity and atrocities until he was finally arrested and tortured put on a public show trial and executed in 1948 at the age of 47 well the reason that that's important for history is important is I think that courage is one of those indispensable character traits of liberty I don't see how it timid people will long keep their liberty because the world is just full of people who would be happy to take your liberty from you if you give them the chance and Poletski put everything on the line for these people and that was how I did not know about him before I have to say that in March of this year just earlier this very month I spent an hour with his son who's now 85 and still keeping alive the legacy of his father so when we look at figures like how do you say his name again? Poletski and say that okay we're going to talk about him on the fee website as you've written about him is it unfair to have libertarians take quote-unquote ownership of people who probably were not libertarian in themselves if someone doesn't want to be oppressed like that's most people but they're not libertarian heroes per se they just don't like to be oppressed is that fair to take ownership of them? I would never claim something of another person that isn't true and in my story about Poletski I didn't talk at all about what his views may have been on issues like the role of government or free trade I mean who knows that just wasn't what he was known for but he certainly exemplified one of the key character traits that are that is essential to preserving liberty and to read too much into these stories but when somebody stands out in one way or another irrespective of where he may have been on other things I think often those are stories that need to be told Now when you look around and you see where fee has gone and what fee is doing now and then you also look at the world and see Donald Trump and other things going on do you feel optimistic about what we've accomplished how much do you feel that we and particularly fee too but in the broad free markets have accomplished and then going forward do you feel optimistic about being able to accomplish more? Well I'm very proud of the movement for liberty of course I wish that we had more victories under our belts than we have and arguably in many respects the trends are not moving in the right direction at the moment but I'm a long term optimist and I try not to let events of the moment ever get me down you have to be an optimist I've often said to audiences if you're not an optimist if you're a pessimist you've got to ask yourself what's the point of pessimism you don't know the future at least we ought to have reason to believe it can be better if we work pessimistic you're not going to work very hard for what you know to be right and you're probably not going to be very effective in convincing others to join your cause so I think optimism is an important motivator for all of us nobody knows the future but I do know this if those of us who believe in liberty decide the cause is lost, what's the use let's just go back home and do something else then I would be very pessimistic about liberty I would not win the future but there are so many people today who weren't around doing these wonderful things for liberty 10 or 20 or 30 years ago planting seeds that will sprout in due time I'm very optimistic for the future I just don't let pessimism ever get me down Thank you for listening Free Thoughts is produced by Evan Banks and Mark McDaniel To learn more, find us on the web at www.libertarianism.org