 I now give you journalist, speech writer, editor, endorsement, consultant, commercial welder, black panther, student for democratic society, homesteader, community, developer, author, lecturer, metal sculptor, survivalist, future freedom award winner, and movie star, Carl Hess. Well, let me explain something first, and out of the explanation may come a point. I don't have any big philosophies to make points from, so I try to make them out of my life. Why is it that someone who has written so extensively against politics is now editing a newspaper for the largest organized group of libertarians on the face of the planet? Well, let me try to explain it this way. Here are my libertarian actual credentials. I have never initiated force against anyone else. I have never breached or broken a contract in my entire life, and I've never betrayed anyone. Now that's the reality of me as a libertarian. Now let me tell you the bad side. Here is my libertarian opinions. I am an anarchist, that's an opinion, because I can't be one in reality. I am an official, I am however an official enemy of the state. I'm the only person in the United States, I believe against whom the Internal Revenue Service has levied a 100% lien against all income, which is why instead of having income, I merely have wealth. And let's see, and I have occasionally rare spiritual moments at which time I am a pagan, probably of the Druid Buddhist persuasion. Now those are all opinions. Now you can deal with me as a libertarian without being bothered by my opinions, I hope. And I believe this is true of most of us. If we attended to the ways that we lived, rather than always attending to our fanciest opinions, we probably could find that we could get along a lot better together. My conclusion from all of this is that it means that in a hundred years or so, I would love to live in a Minarchist state. Absolutely love to. But I would also feel it would be prudent for the proprietors of the Minarchist state to ask me to leave because I would be forever bothering them about my own idiosyncratic views. But that's all right because I'd just assumed that I would live in the wilderness anyway. It also means that Gordon Tullock and I would certainly not live in the same neighborhood. But that doesn't mean, it seems to me, that we should let what might happen in a hundred years bother us today. We do live in the same neighborhood today. We live on the same planet and under the same laws. And for libertarians to spend any amount of time acting as though other libertarians were their enemies when there are state police available, tax collectors and other vile creatures to be concerned by is beyond me. If I were running the nation state today, I would have my own libertarian present at every meeting to make sure that libertarians never talked about anything practical. Well, anyway, here's something that may be practical. Oh, about the Goldwater business. I could talk about it, but it seems to me, I would talk about things that interested me and not things that interested you. So perhaps when I'm through with this, some notions I have, you could ask questions about it and I will assure you I'll answer anything you wanna know about it. I would say about the Goldwater movement though, it produced a tremendous number of libertarians, but there's something that produced even more, I believe. And the interesting thing is that its anniversary is this very week, August. August 1969 was the occasion of 40% of the membership of young Americans for freedom leaving of that conservative organization to become explicitly because they were libertarians. I'm very proud to say that my older son led that walkout. He got me into some trouble at the same time because he caused me to have a debate with William Francis Buckley Jr. At the time, and I thought while I was arguing with Bill to use the phrase, to learn to love your country, you must learn to loathe the nation. And this sent Bill into the only really dythorambic discord I've ever seen and he just got apoplectic about that, saying that there's no difference between the country and the nation, showing that an education at Yale is not necessarily instructive. But anyway, that's an important anniversary that we might remember. What I wanna talk about is not something that could be called technological determinism, but what I wanna talk about is taking tools into account. I think libertarians sometimes just leave them out of account and I think it would be wise, particularly now for reasons that I'll get to, to be very careful about this. I've noted some things in history up here that appeal to me as being interesting. The first event that I've noted is Euclid. Well, Euclid occupies in my life, I think the most important single historical character because I hate to admit this, but when I was about 10, I stole the only theft I can remember, but it was from a public agency so it didn't really count. I stole a copy of Euclid's elements and I've never been the same since. I mean, because I appreciated at that very moment that the human mind was limitless in its ability to conceive of things. But there is no limit to the things the human mind can achieve, none. No material limits, no spiritual limits, nothing means if I am a terrible human chauvinist, a carbon oxygen chauvinist as a matter of fact, when the silicone intelligence is created, it will be created by carbon oxygen creatures and I dare say that we will always be, we'll be ahead of everything. I think the entire, I'm rather, what do you call it, people centric, I think the entire universe, even our universe doesn't revolve around the sun, it revolves around me. And I feel that all of the galaxies do, how in the hell can you tell where the center of a galaxy is? Might as well be me, I mean they're all in motion so I prefer to say I am the center and Euclid helped me achieve that. Now, 300 years after Euclid, however, there was a cataclysm and the cataclysm was Christ who either inadvertently or not suggested that the human mind was altogether finite, a dependent and incapable of piercing the veil of certain mysteries. Now, what I believe is that this fellow, continuing in the tradition of the pharaohs and other such bureaucrats, was making not an important spiritual contribution but an important organizational contribution and all of the things I have arrayed up here show the difference between organizational statements and tool statements. So Christ's statement is hierarchical, male dominated, yeah, you'd go on and on and on. Terrible, terrible stuff. Although I will say that it is also true that there are Christians who have taken this and turned it into a superbly libertarian belief too. I mean, it is not altogether going away of the classical religionists. There are Christians who are zealously devoted to freedom and who very probably, if you were engaged in any desperate enterprise, would make first class companions. So it's not that I'm against Christians, it's simply that I have some reservations about the author of their favorite book. Next in the data I have listed up there, I'm told by knowledgeable people that the Venetian Empire was consolidating itself in the Adriatic and I take it that that's terribly important and that we should attend to that. Poof, that was also the year that in India, Sridhara came up with a concept of zero. The concept of zero changed the entire world. And not these rinky-dinky empires, they were just continuing the same organizational mode, but zero changed the way people approached the universe. Very substantial contribution. There are 50 treaties at the time that Sir Isaac Newton made his really most important contribution which was differential calculus. What really changed the world? Who can remember the treaties? Everybody uses the calculus. The reign of terror came at the same time that Whitney's musket was developed using interchangeable parts. Well, again, the organizational outcome of the French Revolution is familiar, but so is our interchangeable parts. The same organization was in effect all over the world to be sure, but something was beginning to happen in the way the organization had to react. Because with interchangeable parts, great merchant classes arose, it was possible to change things somewhat, seems to me. Well, next is the year of the Monroe Doctrine, very important, it's still being invoked for any crazy reason the government comes up with, but it was also the time that Babbage began working on his calculating machine. Well, he didn't know that he was gonna change the world, but indeed by that concept which directly led to the computer, he was certainly changing the world in a way that the world couldn't avoid. It had to make some adjustments to it. On the other hand, people have been resisting the Monroe Doctrine fairly successfully. I take it. Now, the next thing is, I can never remember it, is that the poverty of philosophy or the philosophy, in any way Marx's version of that thing came out and that's very important, Marx, terribly important. Marx has swept the world before him. What other bullshit? Bull has swept the world. This was the year that bully and algebra was presented. Well, that's sweeping the world. Marx just continues this old organizational concept that somebody has to run things. Bull and algebra begins by again being the precursor of great information systems, begins to say, no, nobody has to run things, everybody can run things. And that's a point I wanna get to. Well, in 1865, the most scandalous American president who actually resisted the breaking of the country into two parts, should have been broken into 50, was shot, which is a cause, of course, for jubilation for many of us who live in the part of country where I do. But at the same time, there was an important event. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was founded. When the long run of things, Lincoln, for all of his bad actions, cannot be said, I believe, to be as important as MIT. Well, next we get Lenin and Trotsky formed the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party, big deal. And the Wright brothers flew. Good God, that's really a big change. Incidentally, as you'd mentioned in this, you notice how the dates are getting closer and closer together, and is a curious thing. My stepfather, I'm very old, and my stepfather saw the Wright brothers actually fly. The same stepfather saw me fly an F-80 jet at greater than the speed of sound. In his lifetime, he had seen some people from Dayton, Ohio creep along, about 30 miles per hour, and he'd seen his stepson leaving vapor trails at 700. One little lifetime, but that's nothing to what changes today. I mean, since I did that, and now the velocity of human beings is measured in multi-thousands of miles per hour. Well, 1932, bad day, really bad. It was also a day I got fired from a newspaper for refusing to write an obituary about, I don't know, this wasn't the same time but involved the same person, a digression. I was fired from a newspaper once because when Franklin Roosevelt died, I was asked to write the major editorials about it. And I said that I would be unable to do it because I was too hungover from celebrating, fortunately. But 1932 is really remarkable because not only was a form of Italian fascism being instituted in America, but that was when the Nazis got their 230-seat plurality in the Reichstag. Unless it's supposed to be the end of the world, no. You could look on the bright side of it. That was the year that Heisenberg got his Nobel Prize for the Matrix Theory of Quantum Mechanics. Well, I know Hitler changed a lot of lives, but so do all state leaders. All state leaders are villainous. He was just particularly bad and he continued this organizational form, but here comes another idea that's going to make some changes in the world. Well, in 1947, both the Marshall Plan was started and the Common Form, the first great Soviet subversive organization was formed. It was also the year that at Bell Laboratories, the transistor was announced. Oh God, I don't know, it just seems to me the transistor is one of those historic things. Virtually everyone on the face of the earth has had their life changed by the transistor. I don't know if that many have had their life changed by either the Marshall Plan or the Common Form. In 62, the US mission was established in Vietnam and Crick and Wilkins and Watson got their Nobel for the Molecular Structure of DNA. Well, I tell you this, and this is a prediction having to do with the future, that genetic engineering will probably be one of the major activities of the human race over the next few generations and will be one of those things that will save us from our own indiscretions in the past, restoring genetic varieties of grain that have been virtually wiped out, attacking diseases in new ways. It is one of the brightest developments. We have arrived and it will change the way everyone lives. Except that, this old organization form still is there to restrict the tools to put them into the use of particular political powers. That's a remaining problem, I will admit, but in a minute we'll get to an event that may change even that. Well, 1969, everyone's favorite year if they are Republican. Nixon was inaugurated, but Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. Well, even aesthetically it occurs to me that Neil Armstrong's event was superior to that of Nixon. And of course it should remind us that we are continually bothered about the state of the planet and God, things are really bad at going to worst. Hell, we're about to leave it. We already have left it to an extent. I mean, no one in this room can seriously doubt that in the time of at least their grandchildren, we will be mining the asteroid belt. Shouldn't we take this into account? This is a whole new ball game. Now, the Reagan thing has come along at a time when the game is up, I think, for the bureaucrats, because it has always been the policy of bureaucrats to win the day by controlling information. Tyranny's advance by controlling information. Of course they also advanced by the use of guns and clubs and that sort of thing, but it is the control of information that really makes it possible because among other things, if you control the information, people don't have the information that they can shoot back, that it's moral to do so, that resistance to authority is reasonable and possible and so on and so on. And then of course there are the various tools of resistance that expanded information makes. For instance, small television satellite disks measuring a foot across are now a possibility and are being eagerly sought, I'm told, by some of the more mischievous people in the Soviet Union because it is harder to jam these signals than it is to jam radio signals. And if you have a dish hidden away someplace of that size, you can pick up information from the entire globe. It is impossible for the Soviet Union over the next 10 years to completely control information. Continuing with that line of reasoning, the average urban worker in the Soviet Union now in a major urban area is spending an hour and 45 minutes a day commuting, which means that there's an hour and 45 minutes a day in which even the tightest police surveillance would be almost impossible, which means that for an hour and 45 minutes a day, millions of Soviet citizens have the opportunity to deal in the black market, the glorious, magnificent black market, the color of our flag. They have the opportunity to do that, to plot, scheme, connive, make dates, do all sorts of things. There are 100,000 mainframe computers in the Soviet Union now and they are so tightly controlled that even the academic databases require up to three weeks before you can even get access to them. But the first microcomputers begin to come into the Soviet Union. A nation in which there are a number of microcomputers is a nation in which information has been made impossible to bottle up. Now the Soviet Union, as we all know, faces this remarkable situation. They either have to remain in the stone age of productivity or they have to begin to permit managers and engineers to have their own computers. Well, if there are microcomputers in Soviet factories, that means Soviet factory managers, for the first time, are going to have to do an extraordinary thing, tell the truth. They're going to be able to see what it costs to make things, possibly for the first time and people who, competing bureaucrats, can now blow the whistle on these folks. Well, now, is it good to have productive communists? Maybe it's better to have them nonproductive, I think not. The more prosperous they become and the more comfortable they become, it seems to me the less likely they are to want to waste it all on foolishness, such as war and conquest. If we could provide every citizen of the Soviet Union with a microcomputer, we would probably have almost instantaneous peace, just as if we could open a few McDonald's franchises in Nicaragua, we would be a lot closer to achieving peace there than by sending any other form of troops. The incredible thing is, as all of you know, to your dismay or pleasure, the actual argument is all over with. A socialism has failed utterly. The market has won. And specifically, I hate to say it, but the market culture of the dominant merchant nation has won, or merchant people, I would prefer to say. And yet these dominant merchant people, the Americans, are modest about this. And not content with having a culture that has penetrated the darkest corners of the earth. Not content with that, they are so ashamed apparently of being merchants rather than warriors that they prefer to send soldiers instead of merchants. The merchants have never failed and the soldiers have never won. I don't know if it's possible for enlightenment to overcome bureaucrats ever, but it may overcome ordinary people, could be. Well, at any rate, my feeling about the status of the problem, I know we are not supposed to be complacent, but my feeling is, I'm not talking about complacency, I'm talking about opportunity. The fact that the tides are running in favor of liberty doesn't make me complacent, it makes me excited. I mean, I just want to make more things, sell more things, talk to more people, hoist the sale and be off. It's not complacency, that's taking advantage of the most remarkable market opportunity we've ever had. Everybody wants it now, we should sell it. So it's not complacent to realize that the free market, the market, the market, the market has won everywhere and collectivism and individualism has won and collectivism everywhere is a gloomy fail thing. My God, it's to be ashamed of individualism at this point or to say that it's not a compelling thing, it's not to look at the faces of people around the world, I think. Well, I'm a notorious optimist, that's another opinion. My feeling about the world situation at the moment, because I live in the center of Western civilization, which is Berkeley County, West Virginia, so it is certain that I know more about the world than anybody else. And from Berkeley County, West Virginia, what seems to me to be true is that the communist menace, so-called, has succeeded in only one respect. It has scared the shit out of Ronald Reagan, who is the only person I know of now who believes them to be competent, to be able to sweep people before them, if a communist comes in anywhere, that's the end. And the only thing you can do, you can't compete with the idea. I mean, Ronald Reagan's the first one to tacitly say this. We have no way to compete with the idea. We can only compete with the military. Our only competition, he thinks, is with the Russian general staff. Well, hi-ho, that's a great triumph for these communists to have so scared an American president that he will turn an American freedom into a garrison state. They could win that way. In no other possible way could they win. But this way, they have a chance. Well, he won't be president forever. Somebody is going to notice that they don't make very good tractors one of these days. And they will wonder about why is all of the wheat going in that direction, if they're such good farmers. So there's hope, there's hope. But everybody must have a gloomy view also, I notice. It is not, you're not a responsible adult unless you feel very gloomy about something. So I tortured my, not being a responsible adult, I've tried to torture myself into, God, what is it that is going to mean it's not going to work in that I'll be a Soviet surf and oh God, it's gonna be terrible because they don't have the correct epistemological view and I do and I'm lost. And I have felt that, well, the gloomy thing is this damn Star Wars business. That's a $1 trillion enterprise, which means that for 10 years, virtually every graduating engineer in the United States of America would be an employee of the federal government. Now, that's rather gloomy. If that happens, then of course I did, I used to think I moved to Hawaii and now no, I'll move to Iceland. That strikes me as being the absolutely best place to get away from all of this nonsense. But I don't think that's really gonna happen. There's already now a revised version of Star Wars, the cheap Star Wars, in which you have an exaggerated version of a rifle bullet that you shoot at these satellites and it doesn't cost very much. And I should remind you one of the best things that the Pentagon does is waste money. Lord knows if they weren't wasting it, they might be using it to some productive end and terrible business. Well, as I say, I don't know if any of this is true, I just thought of it the other day. The possibilities though, maybe some of you do deeper research than this. But maybe you don't have as much fun as I do. There's been a good deal of talk about what libertarians can do and particularly to make money. My feeling about libertarians is they ought to be filthy stinking rich or creatively poor. Now, thanks to some political indiscretions in my life, I have to be creatively poor, otherwise I'd be supporting the entire US government by being rich. So I am creatively poor and I recommend that to people who are not obsessed by owning things but who are very anxious to use things. I must remind you that you can use things without owning them if you have the proper friends or corporate shells. But being rich is certainly preferable. Now, how do libertarians get rich so that they're not forever moaning about raising money for their projects? Well, they can start business-like academic enterprises as many have glorious academic enterprises that raise money in the market to do a scholarly research and to do it on the terms of the researchers. That's of course an obvious thing to be done. Such people are in business and in wonderful libertarian business. Leon, besides getting the Nobel Peace Prize, should get the Nobel Business Prize I haven't got that yet for suggesting management training in seminars. Libertarians enjoy a clear-cut advantage now in providing advice to managements and let me tell you why, because the final part of this chart, there is a new management form that is finally appropriate to a fast advancing and very flexible technology. The management forms that were appropriate to obsolete production methods such as factory production are not appropriate to a production that involves highly cybernated automated machines, a small manufacturing areas producing great quantities of material, simply not suited to it. What is suited to it is a new management form that is everywhere apparent now in the United States and I hope in Europe. And that is the management form in which there is a vision of production or of business that is pronounced by the creator, the entrepreneur, and in which people are invited to share with absolute responsibility. And short as a friend of mine who has a small publishing company puts it, I want every person in this process to feel as though they were in business for themselves to be fully responsible for something to take the gains and the losses, to share in the gains and to share also in the losses. So it was very appropriate to any new manufacturing. It is happening in the most advanced US companies where policy is being thrown out of the window and where instead individual responsibility is being placed. For instance, Cray manufacturing makes the Cray 1, 2, and 3, these are the most powerful computers on the face of the earth. I haven't read the Japanese press today so that may be an obsolete statement. But nonetheless, they're the most powerful computers of which I know. And at Cray, when you walk through, it's a little place in Wisconsin. It used to, he made the Cray 1 in a barn on the farm where his father lived. The nice machine, $2 million a copy. I mean, it wasn't exactly a cottage industry but it was in a nice homie setting. At Cray, as you walk through, the janitor, for God's sake, can tell you what's going on. And consequently, everybody is involved, fully involved in this. There's no, you see, the function of old management was always to restrict information. Always, that was what they did. If I knew it and you didn't, then I'm a manager. If you knew it, then you'd be a manager. But now everybody's a manager, excellent as working. They're company after company like this. And libertarians have always had this notion, it seems to me, of the possibility of people being individually responsible for anything and everything. They have a natural milieu here in which to operate. And Leon has just scratched the surface, it seems to me, of libertarian opportunities in modern management. Their networks and communications design, most, this is not quite a digression, but most computer programmers I know, if they ever describe how they'd like to live, describe a libertarian world. The point is that they're too involved with what they're doing to really care about it. But if pressed, they would describe, in the libertarian party in America, one of the reasons I find it such a wonderful agglomeration of people is the major single occupation of members of the libertarian party is computer programmer. Well, think now of the traditional bureaucrat and their attitude toward computers. Bureaucrats are stupid, so their attitude may be stupid. They say things like, well, let's ask the computer. See, they actually think they're going to go ask a computer like some cartoon character and it will say, that attitude, that is five. Well, they're not going to go ask a computer programmer. Well, in the history of the world, there has never been such a group of malcontents, a dissidents, playful, terribly anti-authoritarian people. The better they are, the worse they are at this. If the government wanted to hire the best computer programmer in the world, the government would topple in two days. So what do they do? They hire the dummies. You know, the ones who are just sitting there, well, I think I can make this work in three days. So they get nothing. They get nothing. They get no geniuses. What genius would want to work for a place where you had to punch in at nine o'clock in the morning and then listen to some idiotic Lieutenant Colonel tell you what to do. There's a sergeant at the Pentagon. It was, it was for a time, a fairly good programmer. And he had a charge for a time of the computer section involving people available for combat. And he said that the, if this, the Colonel in charge of his section, if this Colonel pissed him off sufficiently in the morning, he said the U.S. military would not be able to know within half a million of how many people they had available on any given day. Well, I think that's just wonderful. And I mentioned the other day these 6,000 contract workers who are manning the top part of our weapons system. They're not under military regulation. And the military's main concern now is in time of emergency might they want to go home? Well, of course they want to go home. You mean some yo-yo comes in and says, well, this is it, the balloon's up. We're about to launch on the Soviet Union. You know, half of them would say, God, I gotta take the kids to school. And the car is to be fixed. So we, I think we will be saved by a wonderful tension between competent people who just want to get on with market activities and incompetent people who want to wield power. The fact is that the wielding of power now depends more and more on competent people who are not dependable for the wielders of power. So I'm greatly encouraged by that. Well, other things that we can do as libertarians, there's books, journalism. And I was particularly struck yesterday by the possibilities of journalism covering uncovered anti-Marxist guerrilla activities. It is true that's a wide open market opportunity because so few people are doing it. The only coverage in America of the Afghan resistance now at the moment that is of any uses in Soldier Fortune magazine. They have people actually fighting with the Afghans and they're raising money on the open market to send to Afghanistan. Well, there are other opportunities like that, I'm sure, for libertarian journalists. Free market bookstores along Jim's line are another obvious thing. One that appeals to me very much is an extension of the sanctuary movement. As you know, there's a movement in America to provide a sanctuary for people escaping from various central American unpleasantness. I would like to have a sanctuary movement for Hong Kong millionaires who also are having a great difficulty in finding places to move. So there might be some realistic possibility there. The movement of currency is of course a libertarian opportunity. Any form of smuggling is a useful libertarian activity. For American libertarians, it's now a growth market because Ronald Reagan has imposed the most serious currency restrictions, I believe in the history of the country, in the past year. Then there's some other things, oh, encryption systems. The best encryption systems I know have been devised by libertarians for their own libertarian reasons. And so I would suggest that to you if that's the way your mind works. Rock music. I cannot believe that the possibilities of writing lyrics for, of writing music for, the great audience for rock music has escaped libertarians. Many libertarians are involved in it, but a libertarian who is wondering where they're gonna make their next million dollars might seriously consider this. It's there. You know, and there are libertarian rock groups all over the place where you could start your own. Then movies and television, and particularly science fiction. Libertarians are quite good at this sort of thing. They should be out hustling their scripts much more energetically. You can make an argument that a profound philosophical statement over the centuries will carry more weight. And I would not discourage anybody from doing it, but I would discourage anybody from doing it who is not awfully good at it. So if you're just mediocre at it, it might be a better use of your time to write science fiction novels to make the same point, but to make them for a much more appreciative audience. Well, they're just so many things. And finally, there's the area of children. Again, I am astonished that there is so much libertarian emphasis on adults. I mean, after all, adults are in a stage of decay. They're all on their way down. When you get right down to it, that's what means being an adult is that you're on your way out. The people who are on their way up are children. And the opportunities for libertarians to involve themselves with children begins with the ones that they themselves breed. I mean, there you have this small person who either has to be sacrificed to state education. We prefer in America to never refer to public education because there is no such thing, but there's certainly a state education, but you can either sacrifice the child to that or permit the child to educate itself with your help. And with such, I would recommend to anybody who is involved with children these days to please read Seymour Paper's remarkable book, Mind the Storms, which is the story of the development of logo, which is a machine language, particularly for children. And to think about the possibilities the children do and can in fact educate themselves with a little help. Now, I believe that educated, thinking children will be a greater force for change in the world than anything else we can think of. That as I say, we're all on our way out now. You know, it's just a matter of a few years. It's a schedule, you're all dead. We all know that, but these little kids, they have so much time. You know, we worry about, can we get it done in 10 years? They can afford to think about 50, 60, 70 years of concerned activity, but they have to have a start. The start is up here and that's whether we permit our children, first of all, to think or whether we deaden their senses by sending them off to be deadened. But then there are schools. Libertarian schools should flourish because libertarians could at least promise concerned parents that their children would know how to read and write. Now, the fact that they would also have learned a good deal about thinking would be something you need not trouble parents with because parents are not terribly anxious to have their children do that. Parents, I know, they keep saying, we want our children to learn things. We don't want them to think. And so you should possibly keep it a secret. I know I taught logic to six and seven year olds at our public library for two years and I had to carefully disguise it as riddles and games. You know, and so parents are fine, they're just learning riddles and games. But what they were learning were syllogisms and they were one, oh God, what a remarkable thing, one little girl went up to the blackboard one day and to answer a puzzle invented a rudimentary form of algebra. Now, you see, only ancient Arabs are supposed to be able to do this. But I tell you that little six year old West Virginia girls can do it. I don't know if boys can do it because they're notoriously weak in math. But this entire organization of opportunity is what greater? You know, they talk about the march through the academies, the communists march through the academies. They picked the wrong academy. You know, here, the little academy, that's where you want to do the marching. Those are the people who make the difference. So I think we should open schools. Well, at any rate, we can all be rich, we can all prosper and eventually we can all be free. And even if we aren't, you know what the hell? You do have the choice. You get up on Tuesday morning and you have to do something. So it occurs to me that you might as well get up and say, well, today I will make more freedom here and make more freedom there and just do it. You know, why be a gloomy gossip about all of this stuff? You may get hit by a truck tomorrow. Think of having being hit by a truck tomorrow and not having advanced your own personal liberty the day before to the maximum. Terrible waste, terrible waste. Well, those are just random thoughts. And now if anybody wants to know anything about the Goldwater campaign, which is not relevant to anything except history, I'd be happy to answer your questions. To hear a few comments about one goes about being creatively poor or how you would recommend with the least possible inconvenience that people go out about doing that. Well, there are exotic ways of keeping your money abroad is one way. And I'd recommend you to people like Doug Casey for advice on that. But creatively poor in West Virginia is not so difficult because everybody is creatively poor in West Virginia. We barter a lot. And I think I mentioned that young fellow who made that stirring presentation about objectivism the other day shared my room with me and he was asking me about a barter. He said, you barter a lot. And I said, I certainly do. And he said, are you an enemy of money? And I find that what house sad that somehow or another the question of money has become state currency, apparently. I assume that money is a way that you store up value. And you can certainly do that by bartering a gold or turnips as well as dealing in state currency. If you live in a rural area, you can live fairly well by bartering, but you need a skill. But then what the hell? Philosophers all need skills. Socrates was a stone mason. He should have also been a survivalist. You do need a skill. Lie, lie, steal. I don't suggest cheat unless it's tax collectors. But everybody does it. You see, I mean, so it's really, you do it. I'm sure. I will just, I would bet you all 30 crowns that I have left to my name that you do this. You lie and you cheat and you steal from the government. I hope that's true. If not, you're missing creative opportunities. So what you need to do is just extend that. And to get over, I think the first thing is to get over the notion of, at this point of official ownership. You know, the fact that the state says you own something is not comforting to me. I wanna own things out of culture. I want my neighbors to agree that I own it and you can do this again, most easily in rural areas. Your particular situation requires your particular solution. And to make a large point out of a small observation, this is true of everything. That every one of us being an absolute individual is required to make individual solutions. And then if convenient and friendly to share information about those solutions with other people without ever suggesting to other sovereign individuals that there is one best way to do anything is in fact, there is not. Personality so often dictates it. So do, go do it, go do it. This says, ask Carl to meet me at the computer. Me is, oh, wonderful. Oh, great, there's a machine here. I have withdrawal symptoms sometimes. Why can't people fall in love with machines? I mean, in traditional marriages often, they're just falling in love with machines, aren't they? Well, so I've gone all the way. I live with my best friend and I'm in love with my machine. Or both of them actually, yes. Okay, let me get on, do something about the Christ thing again because there's part of the Bible that absolutely fascinates me. And that is the Adam and Eve legend. I'm enormously attracted to that because Eve is obviously the first scientist. And what the Bible refers to as the fall is her insistence on knowing something. Yeah, I have, yeah. And that's where you also discovered this wonderful woman, Lilith, who is even more glorious than Eve. But Adam, you see now, Adam, he's, sometimes it makes me think of a sex change operation as being appropriate because, oh, stick God, this loud of a male, his soul contribution was to name things. You know, he had this big contract with God about, well, you know, you take care of me and I'll name stuff. And so he becomes the first bureaucrat. He named everything without knowing what it was. So I'm very much attracted to, yeah. Those early legends are just wonderful and Eve comes out so good. And so does, I hate to mention this, but then I'm on the lunatic fringe of the libertarian movement anyways, even disavow me completely. Satan comes out so terribly good in this, you know. He's referred to as the Prince of Light as though that's some sort of a terrible thing. Oh my God, the light. He's also the Prince of the Earth, the Earth. Yeah, you know, so it occurs to me. He's the Prince of Light, he likes knowledge, the Earth, I love this planet, although, you know, the neighborhood's deteriorating, be all right, you go someplace else. So all of these things are very good. So in parts of the Bible, they're just, it's wonderful. I think I may be a Christian today. Oh, Goldwater, great guy. I still am in close touch with him and we still have the same old arguments, such things as, I hate to keep bringing up religion. He keeps saying, Carl, you can't be an atheist. And I say, why not? You know, I think there may be some law I've overlooked. And he says, well, you believe too deeply. And I say, that's exactly correct. One of the things I believe deeply in is that there's no, you know what? Not caring to offend him too much. But then he accepts it, you know, just as a matter of fact, during the campaign, he was asked to go to church. So pictures could be taken of him and he said, I don't go to church. Yeah, so he didn't go to church and the politicians were all dying. You know, oh my God, maybe that's why he lost. I don't know, he just didn't do anything that he didn't ordinarily do. Revealing himself to be not a very good politician. As all of the press pointed out, you know, they'd say he's absolutely honest, but a terrible politician. And I suppose that was a correct judgment. And he's still just a great man, I think. I have an uncomfortable loving feeling toward him. I have urges to hug him constantly. He's a wonderful, wonderful friend. And he would never betray a friend. I mean, I just know if I went out to Paradise Valley and crept bleeding into the house and told him, boss, they really just, they've got me cornered. I have only one place to hide and it's here. He'd say, well, let's see, how about the pool house? You like that, don't you? And the pool house reminds me, last time I was in Arizona, he doesn't like other people for a time to write speeches for him. And so even in his Senate race in 68, although I was working with the Black Panther and doing all sorts of crazy things, he had me out to write speeches for him. This was the period in which he made a speech in Tucson in which he said, I have much in common with the anarchist wing of SDS. It's in the record. And he loved the Port Huron statement. Just thought it was wonderful because part of it was so isolationist. And he thought, yeah, he thought it was a Yath statement when I first read it to him. But the pool house is, I stayed for a time at the house and then at a motel under an assumed name. I was never permitted to go near the office. But while in the pool house, I had a block of hashish with me that looked like a major Hershey bar. And it was lying on the table. And he has a very sensitive nose. And when he came in, he sniffed, he said, boy, I haven't smelled any of that in a long time. And he's so good about this sort of thing. He said, you know, we didn't know there was anything wrong with that stuff until the Harrison Narcotics Act. And then he talked about all the cowboys who used to be blowing grass from morning till night and on and on and on. It was just, he's always been wonderful, just wonderful. But anything about the campaign? You wanna know why we lost it? We didn't get enough votes. I thought, I think about it this way. I don't think I would wanna do it again. I'm not, this, I vary from Jim Turney's views on the somewhat presidential races. I believe, well, I guess Jim would agree with this, for libertarians are merely a window dressing and educational. My view of libertarian opportunities is at lower levels. And I believe in even Goldwater as president could have done very little. Things can be accomplished. I was so struck by this canton thing. Do you know America is actually a country of 3,000 counties? The county is a very respectable political subdivision in America. And my notion is that at the county level, libertarian party members are already making substantial advances. And people have joked about it, but there's already one little town in Utah that is wholly libertarian. They are trying for the county government next. If they achieve it, there'll be one county that's libertarian. Then there may be another one and another one. Suppose 10% of American counties would only be 300 counties. If libertarian in nature, they'd have to make some difference. And I dare say more difference than a president who would be immediately bound by the Congress and that sort of thing. So I think that, I think the libertarian party I think the libertarian party, I know there are people who just hate this idea, but the fact of the matter is that there is politics in the world. And I'd rather see a libertarian county government than a non-libertarian one. This little city in Utah, its first action was to repeal the property tax. That's not so bad. You see, people in politics can end laws. They don't have to pass laws. I think that they're great possibilities. And I think that the Goldwater campaign was so terribly radical, come to think of it. The first campaign pledge, the first was to end the draft. And the only internal debate on that issue was my position, which was a constitutional amendment, making an impossible ever to conscript an American for any purpose. And Goldwater is rather moderate position that no, we just end it. But that's a nice argument, isn't it? I mean, it's like an anarchist like myself wanting to live in a minarchist state desperately. Also, there was the abolition of social security. He was very serious about this. Following what has become a libertarian party position, sell it off in effect, pay off people who are in it and who want to stay in it, but give other people the option to get out. Then there was the selling off. I mean, you talk about privatizing things. He wanted to privatize the Tennessee Valley Authority. Sell it off with prudent, a very prudent series of statements, offer it first to the state governments of the area that are involved and then let it down and down and down until finally, if you and some friends wanted to buy it, you could buy it, a very radical thing. And speaking of privatizing, which is really part of this whole modern management notion, I'm very pleased to tell you that under Jim Turnie's leadership in the libertarian party, the libertarian party has privatized itself. The entire, all of the functions of the national office of the libertarian party are either have been or are in the process of being sold off or contracted out to independent entrepreneurial contractors so that the libertarian party will have a national office that will reflect its belief in market activities. And I think that's important too. And hooray for Jim. Jim is a national chairman of the American Libertarian Party in case that has escaped anybody's notion. And it is the largest organized group, a pro-market group in America, and I suspect in the world. It may not be much, but it's the largest, yeah. Can I ask you another question? I guess. And just sort of an observation. In 1964, I was living in Dallas and I went to hear Barry Goldwater at a rally. And I certainly supported his candidacy. In fact, I was so angry the night that he was defeated that for the first time in my life, I said, God damn it. Which as a fundamentalist Christian at that time was pretty extreme. I apologize for everything I've said. Doesn't apply to you. But I've not a fundamentalist Christian anymore, so don't worry about that. But my observation at the rally was not that I disagreed with anything that Barry Goldwater said, but that the presentation was so sarcastic that even I found it a turnoff and I imagine that the voters must also have found it a turnoff and I just wonder how you feel about that. Let me tell you about Dallas. That's very interesting. I'm surprised that he even spoke because he was at Dallas, that an old friend of his, an oil man, came up to him and said, Barry, I hate to tell you this, but I'm going to have to support Hubert Humphrey and have a, or Johnson, and have a big, no, have a big dinner for him. And the Senator wondered why. And the fellow said, I'll tell you why. The president of the United States, one Lyndon Buck Johnson, called me this morning and said, I'm sitting here, Mr. X, looking at your tax returns for the past 10 years. And I just hate to think of the trouble that it would cause you if they were all audited. And he said, Barry, I can't afford it. I can't afford it. I'm going to have to support this man. Now, you see, nobody who has not experienced Lyndon Bain Johnson can know what an ogre he was. And the man was the, well, a little example. Have you ever heard of how he first interviewed the next soon to be Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, while he was sitting on the toilet and he made this this rather senior Southern gentleman stand there while he shat and listened to him say that you're going to be the next Secretary of State. There's no depth that the man would not plum. And it was just, it was unusual to me that Goldwater having been subjected to that blow that could even speak in Dallas. I think there's one of the most horrible political moments that I've ever experienced. I share it with you freely. Yeah. And Goldwater moderates his views in recent years. It seems to me, I don't hear much of the old fire govore that I remember. Well, it comes out occasionally and on his opposition to the Chrysler, a bailout and things like that. But there's several things you have to remember. One, he's really an American patriot. I mean, he loves his country and he identifies his country in large part with its government. He's also a reserve lieutenant general in the Air Force. And he's active with the Air Force. He's flown every operational jet that the Air Force has, including the TFX. So he has that involvement. And to me, it's a marvel that he ever did any of the things that he did, but he's still maintained my great affection by being the one who said that every right thinking person should kick Jerry Falwell in the ass, you know? That's, and he keeps coming up with these things just out of, boom, out of his conscience. He just says these things. So I find him aesthetically pleasing. That's better than anybody else. Better than anybody else. Just love him. If I can make one more thing. I'm afraid to say that I think that the Great Nephew in many cases is anti-government. Good. So they started out, remember the tribes? They went to the wilderness, before they had a king, okay? Before they had a king. They didn't talk about this. They didn't talk about this. They just did it. And they've talked about the cedars of Lebanon. And so what they were told was if you have a king, it's gonna cost you. Never sure. Never said that you're income. I'm sure I am. And it wasn't needed. God didn't tell him to have a king. They decided to have one. When Jesus came around, he didn't support the government. He said, you have the cedars, what is cedars? Pay your taxes, but he did not say, go out and join a political party. He did not say support the government. He did not lead the rally in favor of the government. I think that's good stuff. And I wish you write something about Christian libertarianism. Then we could all relax on this business. I don't think they're mutually exclusive. Well, that's wonderful because I'd rather have friends than enemies. If I could, any time I can take a whole group of people and say, well, they may not be my enemy. That's wonderful. Because you realize if you keep doing this, pretty soon, everybody's your friend and you won. How nice. Now that we have mutually converted each other, the great Christian libertarian struggle can come to an end. How nice. Yes. You think that's how the guy says it. Yeah, because he felt it would ruin this man. And I cannot tell you how strongly he feels about personal confidences and friendships. If he could have won the presidency by doing it, he wouldn't have done it. Let me tell you another extraordinary thing about him. There were people on the Goldwater staff who proposed that they start race riots in the United States in order to enhance his chances of winning because they felt that there was a racial element to this. There wasn't for Goldwater, but there was for Republicans. Goldwater heard of this and we had this chat which he said, this is an interesting problem. How do you stop total crazies from doing something like that? Now you could issue an order, they must not do it. They could still do it. How could you absolutely stop them short of assassinating them? And he actually thought of the way to do it. He called in a reporter from the New York Times and said, I'll give you an interview. And during the course of the interview, just casually, he said, they were talking about racial troubles and Goldwater said, well, I've made up my mind on one thing, if there is a major racial disturbance in this country, during my campaign, I'm going to withdraw as a candidate. Sheer genius stopped it right in its tracks and the only way it could have been done. The man's brilliant about many things. And I really admire that. Yeah, Willie, from the free state of Utah. What do you think of the book Conscious of a Conservative and was that written by Goldwater himself or was it ghost written? Oh, it was ghost written. Unfortunately, all of the Goldwater books were ghost written and that's very unfortunate because he has a felicitous style. Where you find original Goldwater writing are in travel writings and he's written about the Colorado River particularly. He knows it, he's explored it and knows a lot about it. He's written a lot about it. His style is graceful and his ideas I think are quite good but there's always this terrible necessity for people in politics to do other things than the most important thing which is express their ideas. And so they're forever hiring people like me to write these things. Goldwater and I shared a frequency and so that wasn't bad but it happens rarely and it's ridiculous. The most important thing a politician should be doing is expressing his political thoughts and that's the last thing they do. But that's not the most horrifying thing which was the most horrifying thing just popped into my mind. Had Goldwater won, I would have been deputy secretary of defense for international security affairs, a position that was actually given to an assistant of mine named Warren Nutter. And you know, things can be worse in the world. I can't imagine, I wondered about that. What would I do in that office? I hope I would have been a trader that I would have done what everything was necessary to stop the Vietnamese war. But I don't know, do you? Do any of us know what we do? I mean, this is why individuals are so important and why trying to understand and appreciate each other as individuals is so important. Because just because we have a pompous or a firm statement of something, how do we know what we do? What do we do when we're lying, bleeding in a gutter? Do we scream for God or for Hayek or for what? What happens when our knuckles are breaking? Do we tell the police that Willie Lee Smith is the trader in their midst? I don't know, I honestly don't know. And I think that to think that we do know is to deny ourselves as people who are more than people of ideas, we are people of, I hate to mention it, because it can get me thrown out of a lot of places where people who have emotions, whether we want them or not, we fall in love and out. We do all of these things and we do them as extraordinarily complex individuals. One little part of our individuality is what we say we believe. I don't know, anything pressing? I guess we can, okay, thanks for having me here. Of course, I must say my one Swedish word, talk.