 Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Aaron Ross Powell, editor of Libertarianism.org and a research fellow here at the Cato Institute. And I'm Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Constitutional Studies. Joining us today is Edward H. Crane, beloved founder and president emeritus of the Cato Institute. I guess we'll start at the very beginning. How did you become a libertarian? Well, I used to say, and it can't really be true, that I've always been. I can't remember when I wasn't a libertarian, but I guess I started out as a Goldwater Republican, you know, conservative. But as soon as I read libertarian stuff, whether it was, you know, Iron Rand or Isabelle Patterson, the sense of liberty being across the board and doesn't stop at the economic border always made sense to me. And so I guess I've always been a libertarian. My father was a conservative doctor who didn't really know much about public policy and my mother didn't care about it. But I always was attracted to the libertarian perspective. Then you grew up in California, correct? Well, I was raised there. It's not clear how much I grew up. I was in Southern California and went to high school there and then went to the University of Redlands for my freshman year. And then on to Berkeley, Redlands said they would not kick me out if I did not come back. They would? What did you do? Well, they had rules. You couldn't have women or liquor in your dorm. Oh, that's horrendous. Yeah, either one would have done me in. So I went to Berkeley where I was, you know, I was a radical at Redlands at Berkeley. I was just another one of the guys. And then you got involved. How did you get involved with the movement, so to speak, actual professional libertarianism? I don't think before I came around there was a professional libertarian job out there. I was kind of the first employee. Well, at least people working for a broader libertarian party. Yeah, well, I became a member of Youth for Goldwater at Berkeley, which was kind of a small group, as you might imagine. And I was a precinct captain for two precincts in Berkeley. And we got six votes and one precinct and seven and the other. I knew the names of all the votes. I was kind of a fanatic Goldwater guy. Although I was less enthusiastic when he flipped on Social Security. But, you know, I really admired the guy. When you think about the end of the New Deal being maybe 1952, it's remarkable that within eight years the number one political book in America was the conscience of the conservative, which really still holds together today, if you read it, but it was a repudiation of the New Deal across the board. And that's why it's, you know, there are many reasons why it's a shame that Kennedy was killed, but he and Goldwater were planning to debate issues, go around the country together. They liked each other. And that would have been a nice thing to see. I mean, Kennedy would have won anyway, I think. But certainly once he was killed, Goldwater himself said he knew at that moment that he Goldwater would never be president of the United States. So I guess before you became the first professional libertarian, I suppose, what did, at that time, what did the libertarian movement look like? Well, I went to the first libertarian party convention in Denver. I think it was in Denver, which is my hometown. And it was at the Radisson Hotel in June of 1972. And I walked into that place. And as a libertarian, I've always known it was appropriate to be tolerant of alternative lifestyles. But until I walked into that room, I really had no idea how many alternatives there were. I've told that story before. But I mean, it's, there were randians, you know, with black capes and long cigarette holders. There were gold bugs draped in gold. There were anarchists in black. But goddammit, there were all people who believed in liberty. And I think there were 85 of them. And they were very excited that they were from 13 states. That was, you know, you get it. And it was an interesting group of people. I went up to the suite with about a dozen people. John Hospers, who was the nominee and was there while they were writing the Statement of Principles, which I think is kind of gone by the side. But he had to sign this thing to become a member of the libertarian party. But John Hospers was a remarkable man, a very well-respected philosopher at the University of Southern California and a tenured guy. But he took a big risk to do this and run for president. His running mate was a guy named Tony Nathan, who passed away just last year. She was a wonderful person. And she was a radio broadcaster. And I got a call. I was working for Scudder, Stephens and Clark in an investment firm in Los Angeles. And I got a call from her. And she said, Ed, I need a campaign manager. And I said, Tony, to begin with, you're running for vice president. And beyond that, you're on the ballot in two states. So I, you know, with all due respect... The odds are against you, yes. Yeah, you're not going to win. And she was in, let me see, Colorado and Washington State, I think. No, to another two marijuana states, maybe. Oh, yes, we got started early there. So anyway, she was insistent. And she said, you don't have to do anything. I just need your name on the station area. I said, okay. So I was, so if you ever ask who the campaign manager for the first woman in American history to receive an electoral college vote was, it's me, old Ed Crane, because she did win. And I was in a car with John Hosters going to some speech in Los Angeles, because we were both there. And he says, and he says, you know, we're going to get an electoral college vote. And I said, no, you're not, John. And he said, yeah, no, I just talked to this guy, Roger McBride. He's a Nixon elector in Virginia. And sure enough, Roger voted making Tony Nathan the first woman in history to receive an electoral college vote and making the libertarian party a third place finisher in the electoral college anyway. Now, did that actually, was that a story outside of your life, your libertarian, the world then? Was it a story that this elector had defected? I can't remember that happening in my life. Maybe it has. No, Roger had actually written a thesis in college on how the Constitution allows electors to vote their conscience. They don't have to, even if they're committed, they don't have to vote for that person. And he sent a copy, it was a book, I forget what the title was. And he sent it to all the Virginia electors, so they had been forewarned, he felt. And so he did that. How does a guy who writes a thesis like that end up getting chosen as an elector? It seems like the people who choose made a bad choice, right? I don't think electors are vetted. I mean, you look for contribution levels and that sort of thing. So that's how I got started. So after the 72 campaign ended, you found yourself with the LP, the Libertarian Party? Yeah, no, coming out of the convention in Denver, I lost a coin flip and became vice chairman of the Libertarian Party of California. And there were 20 regions, and this is information that nobody wants to hear about, but you ask me. And I was in charge of 12 regions, and I would take my little 240Z and it went all over Southern California. And I think by the time I left, they had 10 of the regions had their own newsletters and we were really getting something. I was excited that Hospers got 980 write-in votes in California. I had no idea there were 980 Libertarians in the world. And to go to the trouble of doing that and how did they find out he was a write-in candidate? That kind of encouraged me. And so I guess it was in Dallas I was elected national chairman of the party. You know, I had gone in it because I thought it was the Libertarian Party. And by the time I found out I was national chairman, it was too late to get out. And the party had been set up by David and Susan Nolan. And they were very good people, the famous Nolan chart and everything, but they were not good organizers. And when I took over, they handed me a shoebox with three by five cards in it and there maybe was a couple of hundred. And they sent the newsletter only to people whose dues were paid up. So maybe 150 people got the newsletter and I immediately went to a newsprint and we sent the newsletter to any list we could find and started to grow the organization. It did pretty well, I think. By 1976, McBride had said to me that if you quit your lucrative investment job and become national chairman, I'll run for president in 1976. And, you know, not only did he wear a coat and tie, but he had his own private airplane in DC-3, which is a little scary. But I thought that was cool. So I did. By then I was with Alliance Capital Management Corporation and I was the youngest vice president in the firm and I gave all that up. Which my wife says it was a big mistake because you could have made all that money and I'd like to point out if I hadn't done that, I never would have met you. But I maybe, that's what she meant, that it was... Well, so we wouldn't be sitting here now. Right. Anyway, so I ran McBride's campaign out of Washington in 1976. Still talking about the LP, maybe we could take this opportunity to clear up a confusion that I get on Facebook and Twitter. People will ask questions of Libertarianism.org's Twitter account thinking that we are the LP. And so what's the difference? Is there a difference between the Libertarian party, Libertarianism with a capital L, and the Libertarian movement or Libertarianism in general with a lower K cell? Well, Beck, when I was running the Libertarian party, it was just Libertarianism. I mean, the foreign policy and civil liberties was all a big part of what we were doing. And so, no, I don't think there's a difference. I mean, the cards are so stacked against third parties in this country that, you know, I was naive to think... I honestly thought I could create a third party. And I still think that it could have happened. And when Ed Clark ran in 1980, we got on the ballot in all 50 states, which was a hell of an achievement back then. It's hard enough now, but back then it was next to impossible. You had to break many, many laws and petitioning and so forth to get in there. But Howie Rich was in charge of the... He's one of the great grassroots organizers ever, both in terms of what he did to get Ed Clark on the ballot in all 50 states, but also what he did with the term limits movement. But that's another story. But Libertarianism and the Libertarian party are different things. I think that was Aaron's question. They're a release. We're not... A lot of people think Kato is actually associated with the Libertarian party in some way or has some sort of official arm of it, but it's not... We're not, if people were wondering. No, no, Kato is not. I mean, obviously a political party is going to act differently and do different things than a think tank will. But I think the philosophy is the same. I don't think there's any fundamental difference. It's just that you can't be successful as a third party in this country. So we got to 76 with the McBride campaign and then you finished the McBride campaign. By the way, McBride was on the ballot in 31 states, which was more than Gene McCarthy who had almost got the Democratic nomination four years earlier. We became good friends with Gene, actually. Oh, he's a pillar in the campaign finance world, too, of course, absolutely. What was involved in getting on 31 states? I mean, what sort of... You said it was complicated, but what sort of hoops does one have to jump through to get on? Well, you'll have some states where you have to get so many signatures in each county and it has to be... and you have to have an elector from that county or an individual to collect the signatures. That's where some breaking the law comes in. And our ridiculous, like West Virginia, had incredible numbers. That Maryland did, too. They just made it next to impossible. We had... I remember once... we got a call from North Carolina where the authorities had arrested the guy in charge of our petitioning there because he was behind and we were all yelling at the people in the states to make sure you get your signatures in time. And so he decided to speed things up. He would fake names and his brilliant idea was he's going to take names out of the phone book for lawyers because they probably are registered. And so this secretary was going through the things. She said, you know, I don't think judge so-and-so would have signed this petition. And so they demanded that this guy give a public apology. They were quite nice about it, actually. They could have just said, you're not on the ballot and we're going to arrest you for 60 days or something. But they gave this guy a chance to publicly apologize. Rather than do that, he jumped off a bridge and, you know, being a libertarian, he didn't kill himself, but it was kind of a humorous thing. We eventually got on the ballot there. What do you mean he jumped off a bridge? To kill himself. To kill himself. Okay, he'd rather kill himself. But, oh, being a libertarian, he was inept. That's why he would fail to kill himself. Do I have to explain all these things? I was just a little confused there for a second. So after 76, Kato starts in 77. Kato started in 1977. I had, you know, I can't talk about Charles Koch, but I will say that I met him through Roger McBride. They were both members of the Mont Pelerin Society. And Roger said, you need to meet this guy in Wichita who's quite wealthy. Not quite as wealthy as he is today, but still substantial. And so I did, and he and I hit it off. And he said, you know, he was impressed with what we did with McBride. We ran like five network TV ads and got on the ballot and all those things and put out literature that was fairly well done. And so he said, what would it take to keep you in the movement? And I said, well, I've been impressed here in Washington with the leverage of Brookings and AEI had. And Brookings is just a typical liberal institution and AEI was not even conservative then. It was just pro-business. But I said it'd be great to have a libertarian think tank. And so he talked me into agreeing to start the Kato Institute. And I said, you know, if you're going to have a libertarian think tank, you don't want me to run it because I'm going back to San Francisco. And it should be in New York or Washington. And Charles being significantly smarter than I am said, no, no, we'll set it up in San Francisco and see how it goes. And knowing full well that I myself would bring it back out, which I did in 1981. But that's how Kato got started. What about the role some of our listeners would be interested in me too about Murray Rothbard and how he got involved with Kato originally and how you first met him and that. Well, Murray was a hero to anyone who was a libertarian back then, including Charles Koch. And so he was actually asked to be on the board of the Kato Institute, his original board member. And Murray is the guy who came up with the name Kato, named after Kato's letters, which in turn were kind of indirectly named after Kato the younger. But philosophically it's a good name since we want to see a renaissance of the ideas that energize the American Revolution. And Kato's letters were read by Jefferson and Payne and Sam Adams and some pretty radical libertarian types in the American Revolution. The name fit, fits. The problem is to make a logo out of CATO, you have to use all caps or it looks weird with a capital C and a small A. That's just more than you guys need to know. But so people think it's a Central Atlantic Treaty organization or something. Crane and the others. Crane and the others is what originally was meant to be. But that's how that got started. But Murray left Kato. Oh, yeah. Murray was a great guy to have as a friend. He was so funny and full of life. But he was not a good guy to have as an enemy. And Murray was very keen on Inquiry Magazine, which was one of Kato's first projects. And Bill Evers was the editor. And it was aimed toward the left. It was really well done. But it turns out the left is not that interested in libertarianism as much as you'd think. I mean, when you think about, well, we should agree on civil liberties. We should agree on foreign policy. But, you know, the left is as interventionist in foreign policy as anybody these days. And in terms of civil liberties, I mean, they don't even believe in free speech anymore. It also feels like the left is rather willing to let their views about economic liberty trump anything else. Yeah. So they'll set civil liberties issues aside in order to regulate and control attacks. Yeah. The intellectuals there see no difference between economic power and political power. To them, it's all co-received. And that's just a fundamental mistake. It's much more, you know, it's much better. If you live in a society where you can tell forward after there are hundreds of millions of dollars telling us to buy edsels, you can tell forward to shove it. But, you know, when the government tells you to do something, you've got to pretty much do it. So it's a distinction. The left doesn't make it. It's really a shame that they can't see that. You mentioned that Murray is great as a friend and horrible as enemy. And he had that sort of purity, strength, vein in him of trying to decide who was against him. I think that probably Murray would have said the same thing about you in his own way, right? Like, that got pretty high level of animosity in the 80s out there. He didn't like me. That seems to happen to me from time to time. But Murray, you know, Evers was the editor of Inquiry Magazine and they thought they'd died and gone to heaven. Their goal was to reach the left. And Evers himself was from Stanford and was just obsessed with what his Marxist academic friends would think if he said this way or that way. But it was draining all the funds out of Cato. And the readership was not that big. So we shut it down and when they got word of that then Murray talked David Thoreau who runs the Independent Institute now in Oakland. He was in charge of academic affairs for Cato and a very, very bright guy. They got him to call Charles Koch to talk Charles into firing me so that they could keep Inquiry Magazine going. And as soon as he hung up with Charles, Charles called me and said that, I just thought you'd like to know that your guy Thoreau there wants you to be fired. And so I walked into Thoreau's office and said, David, you're fired. And he immediately understood what had happened. He said, well, can't we still work together? And I said, no, we cannot. Actions have consequences and you're gone. Who were the first employees of Cato other than you? On day one when the doors opened? Well, there was Ralph Raco and Bill Evers and some secretarial help. But it was very small. And we got our nice offices and got off and running and the magazine was a good product. And we started gradually doing public policy work. And how big was it by the time you moved to D.C.? Well, when we moved to D.C., we were getting rid of Inquiry Magazine and we're scaling it down. So a lot of people just stayed in San Francisco. I don't think there was more than five people that went to the... But we soon had 20 people or so. And we had this townhouse on Second Street that was really terrific. One of the neat things about it is one of the few townhouses on Capitol Hill that had a nice backyard. And so we could squeeze about 80 people into the dining room, living room area for forums and then afterwards have a white wine reception and it became kind of a cool place to go in Washington and it helped us early on quite well. Do you feel like the early days of the Reagan administration had libertarian possibilities to it that were maybe quickly... Those hopes were quickly dashed? I didn't appreciate Reagan back then as much as I do now. But, you know, we're in competition. I... When I was running the McBride campaign, I wrote a letter to Reagan at the time was calling himself a libertarian and talking about how libertarianism is the essence of conservatism or republicanism, I think. And I listed, you know, half a dozen things that he says and believed that weren't libertarian. And he wrote me a very thin-skinned letter. I kind of got to find it. I know it's around somewhere. Yeah, you should find that if it's handwritten by Ronald Reagan. Yeah, it was. Sam Husbands, who passed away a couple of years ago, was a dear friend of mine on Kato's board, but also Sam was a good friend of Reagan's and in fact was Reagan's... What do you call it? People come in from out of town and... House guest? No, director of... Oh. Not etiquette, but whatever. You mean inside the White House? No, no, when he was governor of California. Reception protocol. He was in charge of protocol. In fact, when I took over the libertarian party and it moved to San Francisco, I had got Sam Husbands to agree to quit the Republican Party and join the libertarians and also a guy who was Reagan's appointment secretary, Ned Hutchinson. Ned was quitting the Reagan administration. Ned loved Reagan, but he said, you know, the guy just doesn't care who works for him. Somebody will come in the office and of course, Ned was in charge of who they appointed to positions. And somebody would come to me and say, well, you know, Bill Kerry, I met him at a cocktail party, a really nice guy. He should be an insurance commissioner or something. And Reagan would come in and tell this story and Ned would say, but governor, we don't know him. No, no, you know, I'm sure he's a good guy. So they filled up and that happened clearly when he was president too. I mean, he pointed a guy as a secretary of education who campaigned to create the Department of Education. Which he campaigned against. Which he had campaigned against and won, you know. And then he pointed a dentist as secretary of energy. The guy knew nothing about energy policy. So, you know, one of the great failings of Reagan was personnel. And the biggest personnel failing was George H. W. Bush. Those guys during eight years in the White House had lunch once a week. And that's a lot of lunches. And all those lunches, if Reagan couldn't figure out that Bush didn't have an ideological bone in his body, that's Reagan's fault. And, you know, Reagan wasn't a libertarian administration by any stretch of the imagination, but he had some very, very good people working there. And the first thing Bush did when he took over and Bush was never elected, Reagan was elected for a third term, was firing them all. The only one he didn't fire that I'm aware of was Bruce Bartlett, who was in Treasury. But he kept a very low profile, and then it turns out Bruce Bartlett's a status. Well, I wanted to ask you the letter that Reagan sent you. You said it was a thin skinned. What did it say? Well, I'll call myself any damn thing I want to. Okay. And then he, you know, I wrote back and, you know, Sam Husbands wrote a letter to calm the waters and I think essentially did. But as far as I know, Reagan never called himself a libertarian after that. And I'm not sure that that's a good thing. I probably should have just shut up and tried to refine his libertarianism. So, when Murray Rothbard actually finally left Cato, there's this claim kicked around that you stole his shares of Cato. I had Crane. I think he said Charles Coke did. But they were in Wichita. You know, if you knew Murray, you didn't want to give him any papers. He was not very well organized. But he had actively worked to get rid of me. And it didn't take long to discover that Thoreau's actions were initiated by Murray and Bill Avers, but basically Murray. And so that was kind of, you know, undermining the structure of the organization and his attitude was that he wanted Cato to focus on appealing to the left and was engaged. You know, he considered himself, and so did Bill Avers, Leninists. And part of that strategy, Leninist strategy is to lie, cheat and steal if you have to. Whatever you say doesn't matter. I mean, if you're after a bad guy, then you just cut him down any way you could. And that's the way they operated. And Charles, I think, saw that. And so we just said, you know, this is not working out. So the majority of shareholders voted to, and that was well within the bylaws of the organization. The majority, in fact, everyone except Murray, of course, voted to take away shares. They weren't stolen. Let's turn then to another future shareholder in Cato and the guy who, I mean, played a large role in really putting Cato on the map in Washington, and that's Bill Nascannon. As it relies, it also has a connection to the Reagan administration, too. Well, yeah, he was on the Council of Economic Advisers and I had made a point to get to know him when he was appointed to the Council and walked into his office one day and it was the size of a football field. The old executive office building has these ridiculous, huge offices. And, you know, Bill could care less about that sort of thing. And I told him I would love to get you to work at Cato. You know, when you're done with the council or whatever. And he, going into Reagan's second term, assumed that he would be, because he was at the time acting chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and he assumed that when Reagan was re-elected he would be permanently the... And Reagan didn't want him. I could see where his people would say, you know, Niskan is a loose cannon, Mr. President. We have to be careful about that. We don't... So they wanted to keep him on the council but they wouldn't make him chairman. So he quit one day. There's a knock at the front door on 224 Second Street and I opened the door. That's how many people we had. I opened the door. And there's this six foot five inch Niskan standing there and they said, where's my office? And that's how he came to work at Cato. Probably wasn't as big of an office as it was. It was the size of this room. Yeah, it's about eight by ten or something. And he didn't complain, never complained at all. What a wonderful person he was. He was, you know, not a hardcore libertarian but he was very sound on basic principles. He thought Bill took economics too seriously. He'd read some book or some journal article and that was the truth at that point. He did say it to his credit. He would ask why is there a number to the right of the decimal point? And the answer was to prove that economists have a sense of humor. That changed me because really the number to the left of the decimal point also proves to have a sense of humor in my view. Beyond that, Bill was a man of tremendous integrity and his wife Kathy, his widow, has just been a stalwart in all the difficulties Cato has faced in recent years and she remains on our board. But him joining was a huge thing. It was credibility. So I have nothing but fond memories and admiration for Bill Nuskan. Let's talk a little bit about, aside from the history, you wanted to think tank in the sort of AEI Brookings model. But in terms of your broader principles of Cato, your sort of founding idea of what Cato was, the attitude behind Cato, like the purity, were we going to be a purity test to work with the government more? How did that work? For example, you have different rules for Cato. There's no endowment, for example. I think endowed organizations tend to get lazy. It's just human nature. If you know where the money is coming from, you don't work as hard. Another element of that argument is that people are giving you money to fight the battle. Why do you want to, if somebody said, I'm going to give you $100 million as an endowment and you're going to make, you know, back in the good old days, $5 million a year and that will be what you'll spend. In the meantime, you got $100 million sitting on the sidelines. In five years, you will spend $25 million, but you could have been spending $25 million a year for four years or five when you got interested. I always thought that I never tried to raise money for an endowment. You can consider the building we're in right now an endowment in the sense that Cato has, there's no mortgage payment, there's no interest payments, no rent the Cato owns this place 100 percent and it's such a beautiful facility. I mean, an ideal thing for a think tank. What about ideological purity tests as another? What is the Cato purity test? That's what we get criticized. It kind of goes into the Murray story, too. How would you describe that purity test if there is one? Well, I mean, David Bowes and I really always saw eye-to-eye on what Cato's philosophy was, which was libertarianism presented in a realistic framework, as radical as you can be without being irrelevant to the debate. And sometimes you're too radical and sometimes you're not radical enough. It's a constant judgment call, but I think Cato over the years has done a pretty damn good job of maintaining a non-interventionist foreign policy as strict respect for civil liberties and a rational approach to economic liberty. The work we've done on the Constitution has been path-breaking and free trade. And Cato is, all of our positions are designed to enhance liberty. And of course when I say our, I'm no longer an employee of the Cato Institute, and so I don't speak for the Cato Institute, but these are just my views. You're talking about our history. What about funding sources? I mean, I know that I have been told by people that everything that I say and everything that my colleagues say is just we're, you know, parodying the corporate overlords that sign our paychecks or things like that. I'm very much in favor of funding sources. Me too, absolutely. No, Cato, you know, early on started doing an analysis of corporate welfare, and I'll guarantee you that did not win us friends in the corporate community. We have never taken positions that in order to appeal to some corporation or some special interest group, we've been very good about that. And, you know, in the recent conflict we got a lot of support from across the political spectrum, and one of the common elements of that was that Cato sticks to their principles. So we've always wanted to be a part of the debate but pushing the debate toward liberty and whatever the area was. I mean, it's a shame that more people on the right haven't been like Rand Paul, for instance, really appalled at what NSA is doing and the IRS and kind of the civil liberties abuses that are just endemic to this administration and I think to the Bush administration. Now, of course we don't take government money because that would be about as hypocritical as you could possibly be. No, the board has a resolution that says we cannot take anything under $5 million. Well, we could just suck the... That's a joke. Yes, yes, yes. But the... You have any favorite stories about... Some of the stories people like to tell about you around here, you denying or telling possible donations to take a hike because of what they wanted from us, like Fannie and Freddie, for example. Well, that's right, there's a guy... What's his name? One of the Buckley cousins or whatever had a senior public affairs guy for Fannie Mae and he wrote me a letter saying, Good news, Fannie Mae is going to give you... give Kato $100,000. And back then that was a lot of money and I guess it still is. But it was... Right after Reagan was elected, it was maybe 81 or 2 and Fannie Mae had been living off the left, off Democratic... Democrats giving them money and now that there was this new conservative push, they had to... They wanted to cover their ass and cover their bases and give money to groups that might be critical of them. And so I wrote back and said, I first went to Bill Nascana and he was our chairman. I said, Bill, this is government money, right? And he said, absolutely. So I wrote back and I said, we don't take money from government. And he was furious. How dare you say that? And what do they have? 85% of the mortgage market because they're such good workers because there's an applied government guarantee. And we've done that. People will come to us and say, I'll give you money if you do this or that. And we just say, no, that's not what we do. Now there could be times when, certainly when we see something that we want to work on and there can be corporate or foundation interest and they come to us and say, we want to help you with that and that's fine. But we get such a small percentage of the budget from corporations. I mean, it's under... It's under five. It has gone under three, under two percent at one point. So they could take all that and it wouldn't affect us at all. So Cato's been around now for almost 40 years. And so today, what do you see is the role that Cato plays in Washington in the national policy debate? Well, you know, people say this is the libertarian moment and I think it is and I think that Cato deserves a good portion of the credit for that because everyone can see the failure of government on the left and on the right and to me, the real secret to the libertarian moment are independents who are put off by the social conservatives and who also realize that this high tax and spending agenda on the left doesn't make any sense either. When has the government had some new big project that actually worked? I mean, the incompetence is just appalling and more and more Americans see that now and so, you know, my friend John Malone who was on the board for 20 years or more, a big businessman, Liberty Media and the cable industry, he used to say quite seriously the thing I like about Cato is it's so moderate, it's in the middle and when you think about it, you can make that case. You know, you're socially tolerant which I think most Americans are. You believe in capitalism but not crony capitalism which, you know, a lot of independence understand that distinction and they'll say they don't like the Republicans because of the crony capitalism which, you know, goes on. I mean, you know, Bill Clinton, the court's a Democrat but he's one of the great crony capitalists of our epoch and so I think that Cato is very well positioned. It's got good leadership. It's got very, very bright people who are committed to this cause. It's such a, for a libertarian, such a great place to work because you have people and everyone loves to work here who is a libertarian because you're surrounded by people who share your passion for liberty. And maintaining that detached analysis. I mean, the thing that I really like about Cato, I mean, what the many things I love about Cato but the fact that we are detached from the partisan struggle which I think gives us at least some sort of a promoter of... Oh, it does. Now that I don't work for Cato anymore I can say that I think Heritage made a horrible mistake when they decided to jump in bed with the Republican Party because what the Republicans needed was a conservative organization like Heritage which had very bright people and still does and was run by a very competent guy who had a lot of people in there and yet the... you know, when George H.W. Bush was elected to the White House Heritage acted like, they took... you know, victory laps like this is wonderful, we finally won and I'm looking at George H.W. Bush and I say, are you kidding me? And that... what the GOP needed was a conservative Heritage foundation screaming at them for the transgressions and the lack of principle and they didn't get that they got cheerleaders and that was too bad but... So why do people think we're Republican? Well, I don't think... I think the sophisticated people in the media understand that we're not and... you know, Cato prides itself on being very quick to criticize either party and we're just as critical of the GOP as the Democrats. I mean, that said the Democratic Party is really... doesn't stand for anything good anymore. I mean, we talked earlier about they don't... you know, this... speech code stuff and their willingness to intervene militarily for humanitarian reasons God knows what other reasons because the Clinton Foundation may want to do something. You know, they're hard to justify. Nat Hentzhoff the great civil libertarian who in the 20th century was the greatest defender of the First Amendment is just appalled at what's happened to the left and it comes from the left. But Nat's a senior fellow with Cato now, so good for him. When I tell people where I work, what I do there's often a question about what exactly is a think tank? What do they do? I mean, people know they understand what lobbying organizations are but and special interests and whatnot but the role that think tanks play in this whole process. Well, Cato is a true think tank because we're looking at problems confronting our society and trying to come up with solutions that entail more freedom and so Cato is a very principled organization that takes a philosophy. We don't claim to be value free and Cato has got a philosophy of libertarianism and there are good ways and bad ways of applying that philosophy to the problems of our day but you know, I think Brookings is kind of like that except that their agenda is liberal contemporary liberal and so they're more and AEI under Brooks is that way with a conservative approach but I think think tanks are very important because they shouldn't be caught up with special interest groups or any kind of political party. So broadly speaking as we move into Cato's approaching 40 years and going forward in libertarianism in general we have things like heritage which are really staking out on the red side and then center for American progress on the blue side and Cato sitting in the middle and maybe this libertarian movement are you generally optimistic for both to be the future of the country and be the future of Cato? I am optimistic about America I think this is such an incredible country and we were so fortunate to have all these dead white guys put their mind to the how do you create a free and prosperous society and the first time in human history really that it was spelled out so clearly I think they would have been they're very sophisticated people and they understood public choice and the likelihood that special interests would get control of government and undermine what they were trying to do they'd be surprised that it lasted as long as it did but there's a renaissance of respect for the American Revolution now and Cato is at the forefront of it intellectually so I think it's I think there is you know when Reagan got elected the establishment pro-government establishment on the left and the right I think were shocked that there was this positive response from the American people to the way Reagan described that you know this is a country that you don't have to be ashamed of we have every reason to be proud of our heritage of liberty and the thoughtful initiatives that the founders undertook to secure that liberty and Americans are damn right and that the establishment was really surprised but it's still there it's still ingrained you know Hayek used to talk about cultural evolution and and how you have you know little things like a kid selling lemonade on a street corner is a sign that you live in a free society I mean it's probably illegal to do that now but there are elements of our society just deeply ingrained in our culture that means that we have a chance that if we articulate a vision of liberty that touches on those basic sentiments of American culture you can succeed and the support for Rand Paul I think is remarkable particularly given what a thin-skinned guy he turns out to be but he's very smart I don't know if you guys saw the filibuster he did but it was remarkable no notes it was like a college lecture in the Constitution and our work you know Roger Pallon has done and Ilya Shapiro now to carve out a third way to go back to the original concept of what the Constitution was for has been very important and there are a lot of Tea Party people who appreciate that and I think there are more people on the left now who understand the Constitution is there to protect our civil liberties and we can turn this thing around not least because the other side fails at every initiative they come up with thank you for listening if you have any questions you can find us on Twitter it's pod that's Free Thoughts P-O-D Free Thoughts is produced by Evan Banks and Mark McDaniel to learn more find us on the web at www.libertarianism.org