 Thanks Bumper. Normally I travel kind of outside the beltway and talk to normal people who want to understand Washington. Rarely do I find that normal people come to Washington and try to find out what's going on. So this is kind of a rare experience, kind of more on my home turf than your own home turf. There's a problem. If you listen to Bumper's introduction closely, what comes through from that is, number one, I have been in government. Number two, I'm a journalist and number three, I'm a lawyer. So that may raise some credibility issues with you. And that's why I suggested to him that today was going to be my coming out as a big government libertarian. I've decided that there's a real niche here in Washington, kind of the Kevin Phillips approach on the conservative side. There's a niche for somebody who will always go on TV and say, I'm for free enterprise, but health care is too important to leave to the market. And I figured, oh, this is an opportunity now to kind of distinguish myself from the rest of the libertarian and conservative commentators out there. But Bumper didn't seem terribly happy with that. So I'm going to have to go back to the original speech that I had prepared on the virtues of a free society. I mean, the free society is an ideal, I think, to which we, at least in this audience, all hold. But it's an ideal that's rarely been achieved in this world. For centuries, thousands of years, really, kings and emperors, tribunes and caliphs, princes, sultans, queens, czars and shoguns, priests and proconsuls, bandits and dictators by many other names have enslaved, plundered and killed peoples near and far. The individual was nothing. The mass, preferably armed, was everything. Might was right, the only law of the land. Modern man, of course, is more progressive and understands that this kind of a system is not befitting new or more progressive times. So out of tribes and empires rose the nation state. But barbarity did not disappear. It was rather it was regularized, institutionalized and disguised. If earlier rulers made no pretense of a moral right to rule, newer rulers came up with intriguing and complicated claims of legitimacy, the divine right to rule, for example. Always, however, backed by armed force. It was barely three centuries ago that political systems really began to incorporate and reflect the obvious implications of the Hebrew and Christian faiths, the notion that individuals, as individuals matter, throughout the 1700s and 1800s, demands for liberty rippled throughout Europe and the European colonies. Now, America's founders intended that this country be a city on a hill, a shining city on a hill, an example to the old world. And the old world did take notice. French revolutionaries glimpse the same vision of a free society before rushing down the destructive path of totalitarianism. Some of the same hopes and yearnings even reached such backward despotisms as Russia and China. But these, you know, these small pressures for a free society were soon smothered by other more powerful and popular movements. Through nationalism, man's oldest tribal instincts reemerged, only this time backed by the destructive power of modern technology, organization and armaments. Indeed, collectivism with demands that the political system take charge of society, organize society, decide on its direction rose hand in hand with nationalism. By the turn of the century, intellectuals and politicians alike were hailing the death of the old liberalism, and urging their citizens to be bricks in the wall in the famous phrase of one British analyst, of one empire or another. In this way, the rise of nationalism and collectivism led to a curious return really to kind of a pre-Christian disdain for the individual. What had meaning or value was again the mass, whether it be the German or the Serbian people, French Italians or Slavs, the British Empire or the Anglo-Saxon race, or whatever aggregation was then popular or convenient. One life. It meant little more in Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany or Raymond Pankieri's France or Tsar Nicholas's Russia than in Alexander the Great's Macedonia or Julius Caesar's Rome or Genghis Mongolia. Most of what was left of support for free society disappeared in the military and revolutionary avalanche of World War I. Empires, nations and governments were swept away. Sars and Kaisers were ousted or killed. Millions upon millions of people were killed. Scores of millions were impoverished, starved and ruined. Order was replaced with chaos, autocracy with totalitarianism, prosperity with poverty and hope with despair. Into the breach stepped what were called the terrible simplifiers who blamed the remnants of a free society as much as anything else on the misery that then pervaded Germany and many other nations. People who would have been petty tyrants in past ages proceeded to demonstrate the frightening indeed unimaginable consequences of the confluence of an unfree society with murderous intent and modern weapons. Even the democratic and supposedly free countries had their own simplifiers. Though sometimes more unpleasant than terrible, men and occasionally women who offered modest authoritarian variants of the totalitarian experiments of other lands. The unaggressive but nevertheless bloody dictatorships that mark so many third world countries, the suffocating welfare states that symbolize Europe and the most famous mixed economy of them all in the United States all sacrificed the individual for the mass and itself anointed representative of the state. In America the consequence of a less than free but not wholly unfree society has not been mass murder but a more subtle social innervation and deterioration. People's increased reliance on politics as the solution to every problem or every perceived problem or alleged problem has turned envy into policy, stripped individuals and communities of their traditional social responsibilities, destroyed economic opportunities for the disadvantaged, promoted unjust foreign intervention, undermined private moral and spiritual values and destroyed family and community. Perhaps the most visible though still in direct casualties of the triumph of politics in America today are the gunmen who battle it out on the inner city just a few miles from here and the often innocent bystanders cut down in the crossfire. Indeed this century has been termed the age of politics by the historian Paul Johnson. It has given us the greatest collectivist experiment the extended global test of the proposition that the state can and should be the institution through which we organize our lives economically, socially, militarily and everything else. Even up into the 1970s the state was seen as the best most effective means of achieving progress but now finally the results are evident to all. The time for illusion for dreaming for unrealistic idealism is over. Johnson himself wrote a few years ago but whereas at the time of the Versailles treaty most intelligent people believed that in a large state could increase the sum total of human happiness. By the 1980s the view was held by no one outside of a small diminishing and dispirited band of zealots. The experiment had been tried in innumerable ways and had failed in nearly all of them. The state had proved itself an insatiable spender, an unrivaled waster. Indeed in the 20th century it had also proved itself the great killer of all time. What was not clear was whether the fall from grace of the state would likewise discredit its agents, the activist politicians whose phenomenal rise in numbers and authority was the most important human development of modern times. At the democratic end of the spectrum the political zealot offered new deals, great societies in the welfare states. At the totalitarian end cultural revolutions always and everywhere plans. They marched across the decades in the hemispheres, montabongs, charismatics, exaltes, secular saints, mass murderers, united by their belief that politics was the cure for human ills. By the 1980s the new ruling class was still by and large in charge but no longer so confident. Most of them whether alive or dead were now executed in their own homelands was it possible to hope that the age of politics like the age of religion before it was now drawing to a close. As the end of the century nears there is perhaps no more important question for us. Five years ago at this time the communist dominoes were falling in Europe. Polish communists had been routed in elections that they foolishly agreed to hold. Hungarian reformers were taking over party in the government. Czech aparachics were smothered in the velvet revolution and East Germany was tottering with the Berlin Wall to fall two weeks later. Soon would come the execution of the odious Czesescus in Romania and eventually most incredibly of all the end of the Soviet Union. The lies and statues fell along with the collapse of the secret police in the military. Yet for all the good that has happened many of these nations remain far away from the free society. Decades of reliance on the state and belief in forced egalitarianism have taken their toll. In many cases alas the cry seems to be the state is dead long live the state. Throughout Europe retooled communists are now resurgent. Of course they eschew brutish repression and proclaim allegiance to a kinder gentler market sounding just like well Democrats and many Republicans in the U.S. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that among Bill Clinton's admirers is former Polish dictator Wojciech Gerielski. Last year General Jerozelski acknowledged that communist doctrines were partly utopian and partly wrong but nevertheless praised the values of the left. And what political philosophy did he feel closest to? Actually in Clinton's program I see elements I like a lot he explained to the New York Times. So too in America and in many Western countries do people retain the statist faith. People uniformly hate bureaucracy and waste of course but social security and any subsidy which they receive are different matters. If the U.S. has never suffered the sort of toleterianism that characterizes Soviet Union neither do we see the same level of popular reaction against past abuses despite the current anti-clinton agitation at the polls. Indeed government has grown under liberal and conservative alike. Ronald Reagan in America, Margaret Thatcher in Britain, Helmut Kohl in Germany all offered more rhetorical than practical opposition to the ever-expanding state. In America the only 2% of people say they think the federal government operates excellently. The problem of politics as king steadily worsened during the 1980s with spending and regulation rising especially dramatically during the Bush administration. That the waves of collectivism have not yet abbed in the West are evident enough in Bill Clinton's election in the U.S. and the resurgence of socialists the very people who created the welfare state that's now suffocating productive peoples in Europe in Sweden and in other European nations. In fact much of the problem in American elsewhere is that politics has become more religion than philosophy. Ours is of course a secular age but faith hasn't disappeared rather the deities have changed. Today the reigning theology is statism. Government has become god-charged with the people's salvation and while many people seem ready to switch churches from republican to democrat back to republican they have not lost their underlying faith in their god of statism. Indeed could Americans faith in political society remain were not essentially mystical and religious. Although the results of the age of politics have been a bit kinder and gentler here in the United States then in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union the state has had no more success in solving mankind's most vexing problems such as crime and poverty. To the contrary it's often government policy that creates these very problems and it's politics that continues to thwart serious efforts to solve them. Yet politicians of all ideological stripes here and around the world still refuse to accept the verdict of history that their time is drawing to a calamitous close. Instead they continue to fight to preserve their positions. The worst do it by diverting attention from past failures by causing new crises demanding national aggrandizement a greater Serbia, inflaming ancient ethnic passions and demonizing traditional ethnic scapegoats such as immigrants and Jews. The more subtle seek a different form a kinder gentler form of diversion claiming that they are new politicians. They troll for public support by endorsing change proposing to reinvent public institutions and pledging to offer meaning to people's lives. It's difficult to predict how long these strategies will succeed. In the short term they've worked to a certain extent for men as different as Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia and Bill Clinton in the United States but the positions of these officials and the raft of thugs and mediocrities who run the vast majority of governments around the globe are hardly secure. In the long term most of these people will be consigned to the ash heap of history. The only question is whether they will be alive when their memories are executed and their monuments desecrated. But as Lord Cain said in the long run we are all dead. Today we still have to contend with an age of politics that hasn't yet fully wound down. And if the US has never had to contend with genuine totalitarianism even the US and the West suffer from decades worth of the deification of the state. And while political authority has been exposed for the dangerous and deadly temptation that it is its manifold bureaucracies and operatives remain in place refusing to yield their power. In the United States for example between 1950 and 1990 government spending rose more than 3,000 percent and that growth shows no signs of abating. Today the state consumes roughly 43 percent of national income and even that number an incredible number understates the government's influence. The average person works from January 1st to May 5th to pay his taxes. He works to May 18th to cover the cost of taxes plus government spending and to July 10th to cover those costs plus the cost of regulation. That is he works more than half the year in some fashion for the state. Virtually no human activity today is outside the jurisdiction of politics where you work how much you earn how you manage your family with whom you associate what car you buy from whom you receive medical care what you ingest how you have sex whether you visit other lands all of these and more are matters of grave concern to government at one level or another here in the United States. As a result our freedom our prosperity our morality remain very much at risk. People's ever increasing reliance on the state has transformed American politics causing policy increasingly to be based on envy the desire not to produce more for yourself but rather to take as much as possible from others. Now of course every proponent of the politics of envy proclaims himself animated by public spiritedness who in Washington admits that the higher taxes which he is advocating will be used to pay off the interest group of the day whether corporation union farmer or anyone else who suggests that he has anything other than good will towards those he's intent upon looting who expresses anything but shock and outrage at criticism of his free spending ways with other people's money and who does not have allies galore amongst the interest groups lobbyists journalists academics court philosophers and others affirming that what would look like theft in any other context is just good public policy indeed the problem of envy has always been much more serious than that of greed those who are greedy may ruin their own lives but those who are envious contaminate the larger community by letting their covetousness interfere with their relations with others moreover one can satisfy greed by innocuous even positive ways being brighter working harder seeing new opportunities and meeting the demands of others for instance in contrast envy is rarely satisfied without use of the state true some people simply pull a gun and heist your wallet but for the otherwise law abiding the only way to take what is someone else's is to enlist one or more public officials to seize land impose taxes regulate activities conscript labor and so on statism then is integral to the politics of envy and his institutionalized envy has spread so has support for the state fact the race between productivity and envy productivity has ended up the loser from 1950 to 1990 those supposed evidences of greed in the view of some corporate profits and personal incomes rose about 800 percent and 1800 percent respectively government spending as i mentioned earlier rose more than 3000 percent over the same period of time modest attempts during the 1980s to trim confiscatory taxation levels that once reached 90 percent are now criticized as part of the decade of greed and leading politicians continue to demand the proposed new government programs be financed by taxing the rich now the solution to this kind of a crisis so pervasive a crisis will not come from a little tinkering here or there you know a reduction in the rate of the growth of government spending the devolution of one program or another to estate governments the creation of a few new tax loopholes or something equally modest instead we have to recapture the vision that once held the allegiance to the west for a very short but very critical period of time we need to reclaim the promise of a free society what that requires most fundamentally is a redefinition of the relation ship of the individual to the state the purpose of government should not be to rearrange economic and social relationships to fit the southeast preferences of influential minorities or even majorities not only is there no moral justification for systematic income redistribution but the process inevitably breaks down enriching not the poor but a new class of politicians bureaucrats lobbyists and all of their allies attempts to enforce social justice an empty phrase that has been used to rationalize all manner of social engineering schemes usually end up even more tyrannical remolding private consensual conduct based on the whimsical desires in whoever happens to hold political power or sit in an office in the old executive office building in both economic and social life government involvement should simply cease ensure at the starting point for any solution to today's problems is to bring to a close the age of politics statism has failed so badly in so many ways this century has proved in a far more costly manner than it was an imaginable before man demonstrated how destructive could be the power of modern technology in the hands of the all-powerful state the politics does not offer the solution for the human condition and though the ruling elites that once treated politics as religion have now abandoned their faiths they are not yet prepared to yield power voluntarily so if the first nine decades of the century have been devoted to the rise and fall of collectivist ideologies the final one is likely to involve bringing the political systems around the globe into conformity with a new freer intellectual paradigm but it's not enough to simply denounce political society recapturing americans traditional caution about turning to politics based in fact on their recognition of the fallibility of human beings the inefficiency of public institutions and people's tendency to abuse power tells us much of what government should no longer do that's fairly simple but what should replace the state as the organizing center of life civil society no simple single institution civil society encompasses the range of voluntary human activity conducted outside of coercive government entities civil society is the full flowering of the free society the complicated matrix of human relationships that free human beings construct to achieve fulfillment and happiness civil society was always intended by those who founded this nation to act as a framework for economic and social activity indeed 200 years ago virtually everyone looked first to civil society or the private sector as we often call it today to provide the forum through which citizens would work through their many problems government was to be called in only in extraordinary circumstances when private discourse and action was not possible or would likely prove inadequate now as such a vision realistic today the agents of the status quo politicians bureaucrats lobbyists interest groups and a host of others with a vested interest in political society naturally say no life is too complicated too complex too sophisticated for a return to simpler era they allege and many people educated in government schools by public employees paid to believe in the indispensable role of the state find this kind of talk appealing yes such critics seem to say a free society would be free but would it be virtuous would the world be a better place the answer in a word is yes the first point of course is that at this most fundamental level a free society is also necessarily a just one for all of the torrent of gibberish that they pour forth to justify the manifold activities of government the acolytes of the state never offer a moral case let alone a convincing moral case for abrogating the rights of those who are expected to fund government's good works the very existence of subsidy programs for beekeepers wool producers students exporters small businesses renters home buyers the unemployed and almost everyone else more than a half of americans today are on the public dole in one fashion or another is a violation of the most basic moral principle that people are entitled to the fruit of their own labor yet when is the last time you heard a debate in congress on why for example wealthy dictators in foreign countries have a right to the resources of americans poor and middle class americans and when is the last time you heard a debate on why politically well connected quote minority businessmen have a higher moral claim than taxpayers to taxpayers money to fund a program and i'm not making this up to quote davberry for quote decreasing minority dependence on government programs unquote as part of the commerce department's minority business resource development program when have we heard a moral debate on any of these sorts of issues in short the best case for a free society is not that it would make us richer or smarter or even more virtuous but that it would make us freer and that freedom is the highest goal of politics the chief virtue then of a free society is simply that liberty is right and just and fair yet such an argument no longer has the political force that it had two centuries ago today a disturbing number of people believe that it is the role of politics to provide security provide prosperity and virtue so they want freedom only if such a system will do a better job of delivering the goods so to speak happily a free society will do so the free society is a many splendid creature with multiple virtues among them a practical ability to solve problems indeed it's hard to see how the crisis about which the politicians continually prattle could get worse if people chose liberty while this sentiment may seem a little simplistic all we need to do is look around us put bluntly the greatest enemy of virtue of prosperity and of a good society is the state we've heard much at this conference on how government mismanages all that it touches economy education foreign policy and more simply removing its pernicious influence would therefore be a boon for america for instance where the government to perform its basic duty of maintaining or more accurately allowing private financial institutions and banks to maintain a stable non-inflationary economic environment you know get staying away from the almost constant political manipulation that we see today there would no longer be the recurrent boom bust cycles with accompanying interest rate gyrations and unemployment swings businesses could better plan for the future and hire more workers offer steadier jobs if the state cut the cost of employment now inflated through mandatory benefit laws excessive regulatory burdens and hefty tax levies employers could add more new and higher paying jobs if government dropped its raft of protectionist labor legislation the minimum wage davis bacon act national labor relations board occupational licensing and the like it would allow more people particularly minorities particularly the most disadvantaged in our society to find and fill those extra jobs political society would do much to help the family if it reduced its heavy drain on people's incomes today government punishes marriage child rearing and thrift through its tax policies helping to force into the workforce of many women who would prefer to stay at home with their children expanding employment opportunities is obviously a critical aspect of solving the poverty puzzle which today seems so intractable so too is improving education which a shelled enrichment discussed yesterday has become an inefficient and incompetent government monopoly elimination of this monopoly or at the very least allowing some modicum of competition would do much more to help prepare young people for productive and responsible futures than simply dumping more money into the existing system as proposed by virtually every establishment politician reforming actually eliminating if we are serious welfare to end its counterproductive impact on behavior particularly decisions to marry have children attain schooling and work would help ensure that the poor face the same incentives of everyone else it would also remind us of our duty as individuals and as a community to help those who are in need dropping restrictions on low-cost housing such as antiquated building codes and exclusionary zoning ordinances as well as destructive measures like rent control which you know the impact you can see in washington dc new york and in urban areas across america would naturally and privately help improve poorer american shelter options groups like habitat for humanity could then step in to help meet genuine housing needs arising from poverty not government policy ending local transit monopolies and taxicab licensing would allow the development of a diverse private transportation network serving all parts of urban areas not just wealthy sections such as in manhattan where the licensed cabs only serve lower to midtown manhattan decontrol of child care would end government's attempt to push kids into larger commercial centers the list of where political society where the state where government is currently interfering with the operation of civil society thereby preventing people from better meeting human needs goes on and on so important is the practical superiority indeed virtue of freedom over coercion that is worth dwelling on the issue a bit more no one of course claims that free individuals exercising their liberty in a free society don't make mistakes tragic is the consequences such mistakes may be in individual cases there is nothing the government can do to eradicate the problem unless one really believes that the state doesn't make mistakes but of course it does again and again and again in the last few days the washington post has reported that the federal government has recently written off billions of dollars in agricultural debt and is trying to sell off billions of dollars more in bad mortgage paper but these of course are hardly the only examples of washington's credit run awry over the years the government has lost unending billions on poor small business administration loans failed export import bank loans a variety of what would be hysterical and considered in any other context foreign aid loans and scores of awful agricultural commercial and housing loans worse still of course was the federal experiencing guaranteeing deposits at thrifts banks make some of these mistakes of course but at least they lose their own or their shareholders money and the poorest performers are normally forced out of business uncle sam in contrast has been blindly wasting our money day after day for decades and decades and the worse the worse its performance the more money is voted by congress the next year to solve the problem now part of the problem of course has been pointed out by Austrian economists in particular government simply can't plan because it can't calculate it can't accumulate all the information present even in the simplest marketplace it can't calculate without prices which are set in the marketplace only a free society with freely operating prices is a signal to producers and consumers alike allows a realistic assessment of risks and comparison of likely costs and benefits or even if this were not true the fact that government uses other people's money heightens the likelihood of mistakes being made civil society private society private life rests on the accountability and responsibility political society and it cuts both thus it is almost inevitable that legislators and bureaucrats whose resources are not at stake will yield to free spending special interest groups and make risky loans since the political benefits will normally far exceed the economic costs the fact that politicians are always spending taxpayers rather than their own money exacerbates the inherent bias towards government spending so well analyzed by the public choice economists not only does political society make more mistakes but the effects of its mistakes are far greater when individuals blow it the consequences of their mistakes are fairly limited to themselves their families and some number of other people perhaps employees of a firm even the richest individual in america has only a limited control over other people's lives in contrast government like samson can bring down the temple on everyone around it a foolish landowner can only let his own parcel deteriorate the federal government has mismanaged hundreds of millions of acres of range in forest land a private health insurance company may fail or mistreat its policyholders a government health care system may and indeed does in europe and elsewhere deny needed treatment to literally millions of people allowing many especially the elderly to suffer and die in the process ironically then in this way the market is more representative than politics however democratic the latter is in theory the point is political society is winner take all you may vote for george bush but you get bill clinton as president you may want ups to deliver your letter but you get the post office you may want cheaper clothes made in china but the customs service will force you to buy higher-cost products from south carolina in contrast the marketplace satisfies virtually every preference no matter how marginal or even losing as one might call it coke regularly defeats pepsi in terms of sales but no matter the latter is still available the red cross may be the most famous disaster relief agency but the salvation army and a host of others are still around to help meet humanitarian needs that is the marketplace has far more diversity and far more opportunity thus in a sense one of the virtues of a free society is simply that every additional private activity helps minimize government's counterproductive role whatever the flaws of the marketplace it should be obvious to all today that the state is far more accomplished at generating than controlling inflation far better at destroying than creating jobs and far more advanced inhibiting than in generating community shrinking both the government's regulatory reach and financial take would do more than eliminate a negative it would also leave space for civil society to again expand government at all levels has proved itself to be the greatest of imperialists constantly expanding all the while displacing or regulating private activities people who cared about the arts for instance would find themselves that they would they themselves would have to organize to support the arts whether or not a federal national endowment for the arts and freed from subsidizing everyone else from farmers to exporters to academics they would have the resources necessary to support the arts and anything else that they desired perhaps me even more important though more subtle impact of divesting government of its current responsibility to care for literally everything everywhere would be to help citizens rediscover their own civic responsibilities today many people believe that they gave at the office so to speak and why not with the public sector seizing more than four out of every ten dollars produced supposedly to meet common needs why shouldn't people focus their remaining resources on themselves their needs their wants their dreams without the state as self-proclaimed mother Teresa more people would recognize that they must act for good to be done this in fact would be one of the most important virtues of rolling back the state to allow the diverse flowering of individual and community activism throughout society it was this volunteerism that so impressed lexity to oakville more than a century ago and which continues to set this nation apart from most other countries around the world yet so much more could and should be done need the benefits of this kind of civic activism or twofold first it tends to be more effective for instance a church or another community organization is more likely than a distant bureaucracy to understand the needs of a poor family which may be as much spiritual and moral as economic private institutions would also be far freer to respond adjusting their response to meet individual circumstances another important virtue of this kind of private civil society response is that it in contrast to simply writing a check or even worse having the government make someone else write a check helps transform the giver as well as the recipient as Marvin Olaski author of the tragedy of american compassion is observed compassion once meant to suffer with the exercise of compassion then was to required you to get involved in another person's life it's thereby strengthened rather than severed as welfare state does today the connections of community such a strategy obviously is not easy to implement but it is necessary for a good society and a similar approach would work today a strong vibrant creative civil society supported by the citizenry and unhindered by government could deal with the vast majority of problems now thrust into the hands of public officials the transition to increase reliance on civil society will be difficult and indeed painful at times it remains eminently possible however another virtue of the free society is that it is also more likely to result in a virtuous society probably goes without saying today in the age of the omnipotent state that virtue seems to be losing ground evidence of moral decline was evident enough in my view in the election of Bill Clinton followed by two years of governance by people who so aptly symbolize the decade of greed as they once called the 1980s before their own investment successes came out things are scarcely better elsewhere in society promiscuity is not just a 20-something phenomenon even many preteens are sexually active illigitimacy rates continue to rise not only in the inner city but in middle class america dishonesty and theft are prevalent the entire political system of course is geared for special interest looting of taxpayers and the rod extends further than that after diagnosing the problem some on the broadly defined right part company on this issue a number of very well intended proponents of economic liberty simultaneously advocate statecraft as soulcraft yet one must ask how can they really expect political society which has proved itself to be so poor at every other task other than molting taxpayers and slaughtering other nation civilians and soldiers alike to which it has been called to skillfully mold souls is virtue really among the ends to which government can be realistically directed after all the state is not just economically inefficient and socially maledroit it also increasingly erase its agencies and institutions against virtue public schools formally eschew moral instruction and instead hand out condoms and hide the fact from teachers or hide the fact from parents that they are teaching elementary children how to book condoms on bananas as if that was not bad enough educational officials now increasingly kowtow to activist lobbies the demand children be taught moral relativity legitimizing whatever happens to be in political fashion governments at all levels not only preach but institutionalize the justice of racial preferences quotas set asides and the like california demands that religious landlords rent to all comers how offensive their moral and behavior the district of columbia forces a catholic university to subsidize a campus gay group the labor department threatens to shut down salvation army rehabilitation programs by demanding that participants be paid the minimum wage at the same time the courts have demanded the extirpation of even a mention of religion in the public sphere the federal government happily subsidizes the creation and promotion of art as it is called it is both obscene and sacrilegious and on it goes of course not every state activity intentionally wars upon virtue many programs inadvertently do so consider the disintegration of the family although many many factors are at work and causing this phenomenon a welfare system that subsidizes illegitimacy and family breakup and actually discourages even family formation takes center stage in recent years that disintegration of the family has been frightening to behold over the last 30 years of block illegitimacy rate is climbed from 25 percent to 68 percent and even more on the order of 80 percent in some inner cities it's now an even frightening 22 percent for whites particularly grievous is the problem of children having children between 1986 and 1991 birth rates for 15 to 19 year olds rose by 24 percent in 1960 there were five times as many births to married teens as unmarried teens by 1991 more than twice as many to unmarried teens this lack of family formation joined with the rise in family breakup has had severe economic and social consequences especially when combined with the lower proclivity to work also subsidized by the welfare system it is first the leading cause of poverty as of 1990 the official poverty rate for two parent households with one full-time worker was just 2 percent for single women who don't work heading a household the rate was 67 percent second by crippling the mechanisms that are most important and most effective in transmitting values families and family based community institutions the decline in family values has left too many youngsters without a moral compass leading to both self-destruction and crime against others the consequences of this phenomenon are truly catastrophic children from broken homes are far more likely to do poorly in school use drugs attract psychiatric attention and commit crimes other than those in equally low-income homes where a father is present the 34 million victimizations as the justice department calls crimes now occurring annually are perhaps the most obvious social cost of this valueless rootless generation there's also a tragedy in that generation itself so many young men who end up incarcerated and in jail by any measure then the state would seem to have failed as moral teacher government seldom seems to promote moral values at least positive ones more often than not is actively undermining them as a result virtue seems to be losing ground daily nevertheless the allure of turning to the state remains strong for some even friends of mine allies in many battles if civil society is too weak to generate the right moral values so goes the argument then the government must step in and if that means some loss of liberty then so be it this temptation is particularly strong when confronting a left that seems to believe in choice if it means moral relativism and escape from responsibility but a porous choice if it means private individuals making informed decisions about their children's their their kids' educations their jobs or other aspects of their own lives however freedom and virtue are not antagonists it's a mistake to assume that one must be sacrificed for the other to the contrary they are complementary that is virtue is necessary for a free society to flourish in turn liberty the right to exercise choice free from course is state regulation is a necessary precondition for virtue virtue cannot exist without freedom without the right to make moral choices coerced acts of conformity with some moral norm however good do not represent virtue rather the compliance of that moral norm must be voluntary there are times of course when coercion is absolutely necessary most importantly to protect the rights of others by enforcing an interpersonal moral code governing relations of one person to another the criminal law is the most obvious example as is the enforcement of contracts and property rights but quite different is the use of coercion to promote virtue that is to impose a standard of intrapersonal morality to mold one person's soul in fact the campaign for political society to save virtue seems particularly curious given the fact that our nation's moral tone is deteriorated despite a constant increase in the power and size of the state thus one should ask is our society less virtuous because we've become more free and would becoming less free make America more virtuous the answers to both of these questions is no first did our society become virtuous because government no longer tried so hard to mold souls blaming moral shifts on legal changes mistakes correlation for causation in my view in fact america's one-time cultural consensus eroded even during an era of stric laws against homosexuality pornography and even fornication only cracks in this consensus led to changes in the law in short as more people viewed sexual mores as a matter of taste rather than a question of right or wrong the moral underpinnings of the laws collapsed followed by the laws only a renewed consensus would allow reestablishment of the laws but then a renewed consensus would obviate the need for legislation second as noted earlier government is not particularly good teacher of virtue the state is simply the state is effective only at simple very blunt tasks it has been far less successful at reshaping individual consciences even if one could pass the new stricter laws in today's america the result might not be a more virtuous nation now there might be more or not be fewer at overt acts of immorality but there would be no change in people's hearts forcibly preventing people from victimizing themselves does not automatically make them somehow more virtuous righteous or good the rest of us may feel a bit better but we should not confuse uplifting society's moral core with improving society's superficial appearance indeed i'd argue that attempting to forcibly make people moral would make civil society less virtuous in three important ways first as i argued earlier individuals would lose the opportunity to themselves exercise virtue they would not face the same set of temptations and be forced to choose between good and evil now this approach might make their lives easier but it wouldn't make them or the society any more virtuous second to vest government with primary responsibility for promoting virtue short changes other institutions what we're called governments in pure puritan thought the puritans viewed the family as a government civil government the state was only one form of government in their view in catholic thought this is subsidiarity the role of other institutions in society these private social institutions find it far easier unfortunately to lean on the power of coercion than to lead by example persuade and solve problems so if the law is there they will be much less likely to act in the way for which they are created but rather they will simply seek the support of the state moreover the law is far better at driving immorality underground than eliminating it as a role as a result again we might all feel a little bit better what we see around us it wouldn't make society any more virtuous third making government a moral enforcer encourages abuse by majorities and influential minorities that gain power if one thing is certain in life it is that man is sinful the effect of sin is magnified by the possession and exercise of coercive power now its possessors can of course do good but history especially the age of politics this century suggests that they are far more likely to do evil even in our democratic system majorities are as ready to enact their personal predilections such as okaying the use of such dangerous substances as alcohol and tobacco while outlawing marijuana as uphold real morality and as america's traditional ethical consensus crumbles we are far more likely to see government promoting alternative moral views considering the activities of surgeon general jocelyn elders even the easy tasks easy issues are tough for her when asked about the moral appropriateness of children having children out of wedlock she responded everyone has different moral standards you can't impose your standard on someone else in such a world it would prove increasingly dangerous to give government the authority to coercively mold souls and manipulate civil society in order to promote virtue despite the best intentions of advocates of government of or advocates of statecraft as soulcraft government is more likely to end up enshrining immorality than morality all told a free society is not likely to be a virtuous one now the less let it never be said that freedom is enough in the larger sense of our lives while liberty is the highest political order it is not life's highest objective more over while liberal in the classical sense at least economic and political system is the best one available it will operate even better if nestled in a virtuous social environment for instance a market system will function more effectively if people are honest and voluntarily fulfill their contracts people who believe in working hard exercising thrift and observing temperance will be more productive economic life will function more smoothly if employers treat their workers fairly fewer social problems will emerge if families churches and communities organized to forestall them in the first place greater personal responsibility will reduce welfare expenditures and tort litigation and so on a lush lawn of a compassionate cooperative from virtuous society will make it harder for the weeds of government encroachment to flourish thus advocates of a minimal state need to be concerned about both liberty and virtue but the desire to attain virtue should never ever override a commitment to freedom which is important both in and of itself and as a means of allowing people to exercise virtue the task before us is immense the age of politics has failed it's time to give liberty a chance the virtues of a free society are overwhelming it is first a free society and few principles are more important than allowing individuals families and communities to live their lives as they believe best moreover the free society is better able to save the sort of problems that are inevitable in any social order finally only a free society will allow the fullest formation of virtue which is necessary for any system to flourish our first mission then is to roll back political society the ever-expanding reach of the state into virtually every human home business and other endeavor government should only act where civil society is broken down to punish crimes for instance the vast range of human life should be freed from government's control the state's central role and the organization of life should be ended in the limited instances where the state continues to act officials should adopt the maxim first do no harm no more perverse destructive welfare systems that wreck families and neighborhoods no more confiscatory tax policies that punish entrepreneurship marriage and thrift the state must stop constantly continually encroaching upon an undermining civil society our second job is to recognize and act on our increased responsibilities in place of government a free society not only allows us to do so but to be successful requires us to do so no longer can citizens excuse inaction arguing that i gave at the office civil society arose originally as a natural outgrowth of people's desire to solve the problems around them civil society can be repaired and reinvigorated today only when people act in the same way recovering a free society in this way will not of course be easy for the bulk of human history the free society has not even been thought appropriate let alone considered to be an option even when considered to be an option has been primarily viewed as at best an unrealizable ideal yet despite the seemingly irresistible advance of political society ever since the founding of the u.s americans have not wholly lost either an understanding of the importance of freedom or the sense of community necessary to bind them together we must therefore take hold of the fraying moral consensus and decaying social institutions around us that represent a remnant of civil society and embark upon a crusade a crusade against the state a crusade against the ideology of statism and a crusade against statism's foot soldiers the politicians the bureaucrats the lobbyists and the others as difficult as this task is before us we must accept the challenge for what future do we our children and their children have unless we re-establish the free society what is our future if we do not at least preserve what little bit of the free society still exists whereover despite the apparent resiliency of statism its end really is nigh the age of politics is drawing to a close we may have arrived in fact at the time when not only can we halt the destruction of american liberty but launch a successful offensive on behalf of freedom after all we know the many virtues of the free society our neighbors of course may not or may not at least be yet committed to a free society but most of them are coming however reluctantly to recognize the failures no the disasters the monstrous murder and chaos and poverty resulting from the age of politics almost everyone other than the bureaucrats in washington admit that something must be done so let us lead now after all if not us who if not now when the future success if not survival of liberty in america and perhaps around the world demands no less thank you thank you Doug i was wanted to say that many of us point to a happy period of our liberty and freedoms by quoting lexus to tockville who visited the u.s when only property owners could vote you quoted him scousen quoted him lots of people quote this guy don't you think we should constructively name and quote someone like tom fleming editor of chronicles even bill buckley of nr who deploys our motor voter bill because that's the big difference between this country today and de tockville's 1830 visit when we only property owners could tell everybody else what we're going to do now every joe out there can tell them what to do even though they're illegal aliens thank you well i think the the problem of voting has been caught i mean the difference is not only who can vote but also the what you're voting for in the 1830s there wasn't much of a federal government so even if you could vote didn't matter an awful lot the problem is today the fact you can vote essentially gives you a share of 1.6 trillion dollars of loot in washington and if you're not paying anything if you don't have something at stake in the generation of all that money well then of course your incentives are very different than the people who are actually paying so i think it's the i mean i'd say what i'd work at is not to say don't let people vote i'd say we've got to stop the amount of money in washington i mean i'm quite ready to say anyone in this society who's affected by foreign affairs should have some decision-making you know some participation in the decision making process what they shouldn't do is be able to decide how much of my money is taken they shouldn't be able to decide the sorts of things they're being able to decide that's the real problems they can decide things they shouldn't be able to decide we've got to take those sorts of things away we must be on the same wavelength here i had a very similar proposal but i believe that the problem as you have defined it has a simple solution of restoring very much what the gentleman referred to in our original constitution and i wondered if my question to you after explain this is if you think the cato institute would support that kind of legislation you mean on voting restricting well i haven't gotten to it yet i want to describe this and then my question then will be if you think the cato institute would support this kind of a law you have very accurately described the thieves and the process by which they enslave and confiscate wealth indirectly in other aspects of our law we have already prohibited felons from voting we've prohibited them from having the means to hurt us like guns and things and the precedent in our constitution as a reminder of although ineptly deployed referring only property owners at the time probably that was that was all right because at the time those people who did not own property at being readily available weren't particularly productive but how about a law that says people on the public dole no longer have the right to vote well this isn't attractiveness in that one problem comes in is does anybody who receives any benefit at all do you say social security recipients are on the public dole and therefore can't vote you know you start getting i mean i'm not necessarily opposed to that you know what would the cato institute support that well that the easy answer here is the cato institute itself never supports anything i mean it's kind of people at cato take positions i mean it's one of those things in theory i'd say i kind of like i probably wouldn't advocate it because i think it's kind of it's beyond what is at all likely to happen that i it's better for me to say smash these programs and focus my eye on the programs instead of saying let's stop everybody from voting because i think what's happened in our society is voting is viewed as one of these basic birthrights so i'm willing to say yeah you have a birthright to vote but you don't have a birthright to vote to give my money away so i'm going to focus on the give my money away aspect of the equation not on the voting aspect of the equation but i mean there's something attractive i can see you can see sending a check saying if you cash this check you voluntarily yield your right to vote in the next election you know i mean there's something something to be said for that i think thank you my emphasis is on uh bringing the women into this and i think that if we can convince women about mommy economics that they would learn that the free market can deliver what their children need and food and all that more successfully than the socialism that's been sold to them and when libertarian movement don't do too much in that direction i'd like to know if you have any ideas along the line of how we can bring in more women i think i mean there's a problem frankly you know both women and minorities i'd like you know you'd like to see a broader representation within the movement i think that it is expanding over time it takes it takes a while i think that one has to try to say how how can you make your ideology relevant to people wherever they're at and it probably does require we've had kato and i was published a couple of papers on some of the issues like family leave and whatever and book on feminism trying to say here's why markets and capitalism and a free society are good for women and i think that's essentially what you've got to do is you want to talk to women and say if you really want to be empowered if you want choice if you want opportunity you know if you want the ability to rise as far as you can what you want then is a free economic system you don't want the state you know if you believe that somehow comparable worth will get you ahead well understand the theory of comparable worth with a government kind of runs around deciding what salaries are equal government could equally say not that you know women's salaries should be raised it could say well men's salaries simply should be lowered and there's no reason to believe that you know bureaucrats and judges and politicians are all going to do wonderful things all the time to you so i think the case needs to be made more clearly to them that in fact women's opportunities will in fact be much expanded in a free society that you know if they're concerned about somebody else controlling their lives and destinies well you look at totalitarian systems where elena breznaw sits down in the kremlin and can decide what every woman in the soviet union does somehow that doesn't strike me as being a very pro feminist kind of system or a pro mother kind of you know that i think that's the kind of message we've got to get across that if you want show you know the nice thing about markets again is a market can make a mistake but then you go elsewhere you know if some government bureaucrat makes a mistake he decides that women simply aren't qualified to be engineers no one in that country will be an engineer you know if one firm says we don't want women engineers we go to another firm and they're not stupid and they hire you because they know you can do the job we've got to get across to people that opportunity and you know choice works for the benefit of women as well as everyone else yes um Doug you mentioned civil society and you seem to place it versus to the society that we have now yet most people would say we have a civil society with the government that we have well i believe in civil disobedience just as henry david thorough believed in civil disobedience but i'm never comfortable with the term civil disobedience just just by disobeying bad laws so um um in your kind of civil society i wouldn't want to disobey um so maybe you could help me out and give me a better name for disobeying bad laws rather than calling it civil disobedience i'm not saying there's no civil society today what i'm trying to counter poise is civil society versus political society the problem today is that political society is kind of displaced you know civil society in so many areas that what we have is a very damaged kind of limited civil society oh i don't i think you could call it resisting aggression you could call it protecting your rights uh i mean there are a lot of yeah i think you want to come up with something like that you know kind of vindicating your rights you know resisting the oppressor i mean there's some of this kind of language you see on the left which at times can be fun to play with you know if you want to use it in that kind of a context i think you're right the idea of civil disobedience you're not i guess the idea is well it's civil government is the old term so if you're resisting the government it's civil disobedience but yeah i mean i i would put it more in terms of you're probably protecting your rights you're defending your family you know protecting what is yours i mean they're a whole host of kind of concepts you can play with which is what you're really doing i mean henry david thorough is wonderful this is monstrous war we're involved in attacking these poor mexicans seizing half their country i'm not going to pay for it i mean there i mean what's he doing what he's doing he's saying i won't participate in an aggressive monstrous war now you can't use my money to you know kind of further this war so it's it's something much more powerful than civil disobedience that sounds kind of mundane i mean he's making a profound moral statement about the appropriateness of what i think was a monstrous policy on the part of the u.s government sir i'm a little disappointed in your emphasis on the major evil statism being violation of our economic liberties to paraphrase the famous saying a guy a state that steals 43 of my wallet steals 43 trash but the state that puts me in prison for 10 years for smoking some ditch weed that's the state that i loathe and fear well i've written long and extending in in the book that politics of envy i have the longest chapter in that book is on drug policy i mean i legalize i mean i view that as an economic activity which has been taken over and regulated by the state i mean there is no end of evil of what the state does the 43 percent is a good i mean you know there are a lot of times you talk to somebody who i mean i you talk to people who understand that figure but they aren't quite willing to say legalized drugs so i want to again you focus on something that really attracts their attention against them you're absolutely right i mean what can be more oppressive than to say you know we should be head people who are providing willingly providing willing buyers a substance they want to use you know substance which in my view is no more dangerous than many others which are out there so you're absolutely right on that i didn't emphasize it but that doesn't mean i'm not concerned about it i mean ultimately we have to recognize the you know the end of the government every regulation every rule whether it's parking enforcement or anything else is jail it's prison i mean that's the ultimate enforcement mechanism so if you try to resist and say i want to protect my rights the ultimate thing they can do is throw you in prison or kill you if you resist so that's the i mean we should know that's what i try to emphasize on especially social conservative friends is saying you know you want to do wonderful virtuous things but when are you willing to jail your neighbor that's what you're doing give me the christian justification for jailing your neighbor because and a lot of times they kind of step back well maybe yeah okay i mean they that helps set them back a bit you discussed very well all of the things that are sort of dear to our heart and you're sort of a nice fine glow of righteousness that comes over all of this when you talk that way but the reality of it is that that the salvation of this country to a large extent depends on the people that are in public office it's simply because the only thing that affects my life in your life and everybody's life in this room is legislation that translates into rules and regulations in laws that affect our lives and we can talk about it forever and so the question i pose to you is if you have any kind of a prescription or a game plan that would get dug bandos in the types elected in the public office or get dug bando types to seek public office because everything else is rhetoric and what we i think need in order to advance our cause of freedom is to get people in public office that understand it well if i had such a game plan i'd have a you know there'd probably be bondo and associates political consulting firm would be an operation right now it's not i mean i i think that there's a whole range of activities we've got to be involved in i don't think that there's any one kind of solution on this i think we need people who are active in the political world i think that can be libertarian party it can also be libertarians who are trying to have an impact on the major parties um you know they're i mean they're libertarian groups that try to influence the republicans there are people i know active in local campaigns some of them you know push the the libertarian congressional candidate some of them try to get republicans nominated who are more libertarian i think that what you've got to them so i think that's an important activity in a sense i've given that up i mean i think it's critical but it's very hard it's not my main skill i think that the thing ultimately you've got to change attitudes i mean a century ago grover cleveland vetoed a bill for the relief of unemployment vetoed it because he said it was unconstitutional just this is not the purpose of government now can you imagine today a president vetoing a bill for unemployment relief saying this is uncommon i mean it's just well what has happened then is a change in ideology it's a change in vision it's a change in a commonly understood moral consensus to society where back then there was an understanding that if you take money for non kind of really common purposes it's theft i mean they understood that today no i mean you can take money for anything and i mean nobody in washington talks in those terms so my hope at least to help change the larger kind of discussion because that ultimately will have an impact on who gets elected and if it suddenly becomes current amongst people that people think it's you're stealing if you're taking money and handing it out to beekeepers or whoever else then the politicians will react differently different people will run for office i mean there'll be an impact there so i'm not so what you're saying is an important part of it but unfortunately i don't have great answers on that i'm trying to work at another end i mean kato and a lot of the work i do tries to reach legislators who are at least open or at least make prudential arguments to them and say well you know you may believe in the government but hey it's not working here we have a better idea and this will do better things for people we've got to try all those avenues i mean there's no one thing that we should do i mean we need you need to be politically active you need to be write letters to the editor you need to talk to your neighbors i mean the whole host of stuff you've got to do because we've got to transform society from top to bottom it's not enough to change at the top because i mean we win one election and then the next election we're out i mean we start dismantling all these wonderful subsidy programs you know five years from now we may have an economic boom but next year all the people whose checks are cut off are going to be really mad and they'll vote all of our people out of office so long the way you've got to convince those people that actually they shouldn't be asking for these programs you've got to convince voters that pork is bad doesn't you know the guy comes home and says i've got this great program you want people to say but that means everybody in congress is stealing for this stuff and we're paying for theirs and you got to build that consciousness so let's work across the spectrum what what you're asking for is good i don't have the answer on that one but i say get involved and you know hopefully there are some libertarian political consultants who will be able to do that in time this actually tags right along with that first question we just had i think all of us would agree from probably hundreds of conversations we've all had with non libertarians that a really fundamental problem is most americans do not agree with us on most of these issues and and i think that our representatives are still basically representing what the american people want they think they want this i just want to relay one quick story that shocked me very much and made me realize how much research needs to be done or at least i haven't found the research if it's out there and you can recommend it to me if it is the woman who's the manager of the joffrey ballet said to me you know it's very tough making a go of this now a lot of the smaller ballet companies are dropping out very quickly and the reason is that we are in a whole different environment from where we were 20 or 30 years ago businesses used to give millions and millions of dollars to the arts it's different now and of course her her conclusion was well everybody's more selfish now she didn't correlate anything with you know the nea having been having originated or anything of that nature so i think the average american does not believe that if government were not in the welfare business that anybody would care anything about anybody else and set up these programs that used to be so pervasive in society before you know 1920 1910 so i'd like to encourage everybody and and that's myself included to inform ourselves on on the situation before welfare programs came out how much giving was there by corporations by people what was the situation then if we can point to that historically to prove people do give things do change and people do care about other people and these these problems have been addressed before then i think we can get somewhere until we correct that fundamental misconception that the average american person holds i don't think we are going to get anywhere because they say everyone will be starving and we can't have that so i think one aspect of this which i'd encourage i think that if you want to be effective in making some of these arguments frankly it's more effective if you're involved in civic organizations if you can point to yourself as an example when i was at one conference where a left-wing or left-wing evangelical who'd gone to three successive years of these finally came around and had to admit that you know maybe the minimum wage does put people out of work and yeah maybe you're right you know markets are more productive but you know you guys you just don't bleed that was his objection you know the final objection because we didn't kind of ooze you know compassion and it struck me on the one hand it was an unfair criticism because i mean i do give i am active with my church and what have you on the other hand there is some legitimacy to it which is if people don't perceive that you in fact care if what they perceive as all you want to do is have the great society where you can succeed you know all the bright people can get ahead and who cares about everybody behind then you're going to get hurt and i think there so if you can point to stuff they know i want a civil society i want a free society and here's what we can do the other thing and i think that you're right people don't agree with us with us on some of the philosophical premises but they're increasingly agreeing with us on the diagnosis that the system doesn't work i mean you ask people does the welfare program work even liberals today admit no i mean even liberals today admit it destroys found so we've made some progress and we need to really focus on that and saying well it's not just kind of a practical problem and you tinker there's a more philosophical problem you know it affects incentives it affects us it affects that which is one of the really we got to get rid of it i think on welfare you argue not money the problem is not cost the problems is destroying family and community it means wrecking an entire generation so again lead with the strongest argument i'm not trying to save i mean it's not i want to save a couple bucks on my taxes i mean that'd be nice i want to stop the government from destroying an entire generation you kind of make that argument i think we make some progress because some of these people are going to how can they say no i mean how can you look at the inner city and not be horrified by what you see and how can you have any brains and not understand that there is a relationship there between the kind of welfare system we have a lot of other things rent control and minimum i mean all the stuff plays in together particularly for the poor i mean it's horrible what we do but i think we can win some of those arguments increasingly because the evidence is overwhelming i think it's it's very interesting this is a really diverse group here this week and and the difficulty that that i think i see popping up in a lot of the speeches is we somehow end up looking at what appears to be a monolithic thing called the state and the truth is it's not that way at all uh... washington or the state houses at the state level are full of politicians who have been elected who probably depending regardless i guess of their their philosophical bias when they come into office they're coming to do good for their constituents and when i and and those of us who deal in government affairs work uh... recognize that we spend most of our time fighting special interest groups who are up there doing perhaps the same thing we're doing depending on how we tend to look at these issues when i get on an airplane and go to washington there's usually a couple of politicians on the way and the rest of it's filled with lobbyists like myself for that okay and so it's my contention that if a politician with the best intentions in the world if he's not well schooled in the very principles that we're talking about he can go to washington and not ever ask a question of anybody or do a thing all he's got to do is sit at his desk and wait for the door to open the next morning and the special interest will be there defining what it is he's going to vote for because that's where his money comes from that's where his support comes from and so it goes back to the attitudes that you're talking about the attitudes of the people who are asking things from government have got to be changed because a politician has no has no hope to to stop that door that door is going to open and here come these special interests and i see it day after day in this country and so if you know it would i think your answer that yes we need to do all of these things partly because some of us are better at some things than at other things and have a bit different interests you know i would submit and the question would be if you had a foundation here would you support maybe most of our effort starts with continuing the education process which will hopefully change attitudes i mean if we're gonna you know if we're gonna take up a collection before we leave here today i would like to earmark most of that money to go to the education process so to speak because if we don't have the education and change the attitudes of americans who are not now being taught these principles anymore except through this kind of process that the process the process in washington will just continue to do what's doing it seems well what i think what i'd say is that the the foundational issue though i mean the the ultimate solution is you've got to change the larger environment kind of values environment the ideology the the vision of what government is about so in a sense of what you're asking about that is the most important thing to change now i think that people's capabilities vary so i wouldn't say everybody in this room needs to concentrate on that but rather that is something that all of us should to the extent we can turn attention to though some of us may be much better doing it other things i mean i think the point you make is very good about a kind of a culture in washington i mean this is a place where i mean if you come to washington demanding to you know smash the state and then five years later suddenly find yourself defending programs you will be lauded in the washington post as having grown in office i mean this is consistent that's why i joked about becoming the big government libertarian i mean the way to be successful i mean people would love it i mean this crazy crackpot showed up and now he understands the complexities and the difficulties that we face in solving these problems uh... senator mcclure from idaho was a was a very good example i profiled him in the wall street journal this is somebody when who had backed the amendment to get rid of the income tax at one point when he was in state legislature this is a guy who had really hardcore well by the time i interviewed him he was supporting i mean all the energy programs because he was chairman of the committee at the time he was supporting a bailout of the kennedy center and i asked him about this and he said well you know the kennedy center i mean it's typical the kennedy center got loans from the federal government is going to pay them back of course didn't so it's got this massive debt so what we did is we paid off all the old loans and got them to promise to pay the rest and i thought i'm missing something here i mean i'm just missing something what is and but see he thought this is a major conservative advance so at this this is and this is somebody who was lauded very much as having grown so there really is a james pain in a book called the culture of spending i mean this is a place where you know you you get on committees in congress you inevitably get on the committees that you want to kind of get money out of to help your constituents you sit on the agricultural committee every once in a while the consumer advocate gets on but normally you get on there if you're from nebraska because you want to get more money for your wheat farmers so the whole the whole environment kind of drives you to it and what you've got in washington i think in certain ways are two very different sets of people though they often come to the same conclusions you've got the people who i in a way like somebody like an aldemado who really there's no pretense of ideology about good ol owl i mean this is a man who's i mean you know he likes power he wants to get reelected he wants to help his constituents and his friends and maybe himself if he can i mean this is this is a guy it's wonderful you know he goes in roars about white water and of course you know his own background this is hardly the moral exemplar but there's something nice about this because i can understand it and he's really not too great a threat i mean if the administration proposed kind of the national love administration to kind of promote love in america you know owl might vote for it but he take out any kind of bad powers and he just want to have a big bureaucracy sitting in new york so all of his people get hired that's all he care about so i mean so he wouldn't really be a threat he wouldn't want to do very much he just want to spend some money in new york city now the contrast are the the dangerous do-gooders like say ira magazine or who's sitting in the old executive office building this is a man who came up with a new way to kind of organize road islands economy you know voted down four to one then he came out with he four or five years ago he was lobbying congress to spend billions of dollars on cold fusion so that the japanese would not get ahead of us and then of course he's the major architect of the health care plan now see this is somebody who i think really really believes this stuff now this is a guy who you figure shows up and believes that if the government takes control of the health care system more people will get better care and it will cost less now i think this is a sort of person who refutes everything that dr zaz has ever said about mental illness i mean how can you believe that but he does i mean he really give him control put him in charge of the national health board and everything well this is a sort of person in the middle are kind of do-gooders who don't have a fixed ideology and they can they're often swayed by lobbyists who generally don't want the completely crackpot stuff the dangerous people are the ira magazineers who really really believe in this stuff and those are the frightening people thank you