 What is libertarianism? Well, we might say it's the presumption of liberty in human affairs. That is, sometimes we may need government to act, but you have to demonstrate that. You have to make the case for government action. It's the exercise of power, not the exercise of freedom that requires justification. Epistemologically, that makes more sense because you can't possibly enumerate all the things you could do with freedom. Back during the Constitutional Convention, James Wilson, one of the signers, said, in response to a proposal that a bill of rights be added to the Constitution, enumerate all the rights of man. I am sure, sirs, that no gentleman in the late convention would have attempted such a thing. You couldn't possibly list all the rights that people have. So freedom is the natural condition and it's limitations on it that demand justification. And in this talk, I'm going to argue that most limitations can't be justified. Sometimes we forget just how much of our life is, in fact, free. We make thousands of choices every day, engage in thousands of interactions with others, without any coercion. And that's a powerful demonstration of the central place of freedom in our lives and the ability of people to create peace and order without central direction. Freedom means respecting the moral autonomy of each person, seeing each person as the owner of his or her own life, each person free to make the important decisions about his life. Freedom gives meaning to our lives. Indeed, it allows us to define our own meaning to define what's important to us. And thus, each of us should be free to worship, to think, to speak, to write, to create, to marry, to eat and drink and smoke, to start and run a business, to associate with others as we choose. Freedom is the foundation of our ability to construct our lives as we see fit. The social consequences of freedom are equally desirable. Freedom leads to social harmony. We have less conflict when we have fewer specific rules about how we should or how we must live in terms of class or caste, religion, dress, lifestyle or schools. Economic freedom means that people are free to produce and exchange with others. Freely negotiated and agreed prices carry information throughout the economy about what people want and what can be done more efficiently. A free economy gives people incentives to invent, innovate and produce more goods and services for the whole society. That means more satisfaction of more wants, a higher standard of living for everyone and more economic growth. So how do we achieve and protect freedom? We try to discover the rules that govern the world and rules that will enable us all to live together and realize those wonderful rights guaranteed to us in the Declaration of Independence, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. To achieve those goals, we need rules like private property, free markets and tolerance. In fact, you know that bestseller from a few years ago, all I really need to know I learned in kindergarten? You could say that you learn the essence of libertarianism, which is also the essence of civilization in kindergarten. Don't hit other people, don't take their stuff and keep your promises. If we want to get a little more philosophically deep, we might talk about three key ideas of libertarianism. Number one, individual rights and individual rights that we have as a person, not because they've been given to us by the government. They're guaranteed in the Constitution, they're not given to us by the Constitution. Libertarians of different sorts might say in some cases that our rights come from God, in others that they come from human nature, other libertarians might say that they are derived from an understanding of history and economics. What I think all libertarians agree on is that they are imprescriptible. That is, they're not prescribed by any government or any other human agency. They belong to us, they adhere in us as individuals. The second key idea is spontaneous order. In most of our lives, order seems planned. We know that to create a company or even to create a picnic, people have to plan things. We had to plan to do this lecture, plan to put it on the website, create the website, plan to get people to come to the website. All of those things take planning. And so we think that order requires planning. But the fact is they are a product of human action but not of human design. Think about language. Nobody sat down and designed the English language or the French language or Latin. Those languages evolved. People needed to be able to communicate, they needed to be able to come up with new ideas, words for new concepts, new discoveries. Now there are a few languages that actually were designed like Esperanto and what they have in common is that no one speaks them. The language that people actually speak, all the languages that people actually speak are spontaneously evolved. Take law. A lot of people think law is something that Congress makes or the state legislature makes or even that the Supreme Court makes. But the fact is that originally law just evolved spontaneously as a way for people to settle disputes. My tree fell on your yard. Who's responsible for cleaning it up? People went to neighbors, hopefully wise neighbors and asked them to settle disputes. And as those disputes were settled, people started relying on those precedents. Well, this is sort of like this previous case and we made this decision in the previous case and eventually these rules and these precedents came to be known as law, particularly as the common law. And some of those wise neighbors became specialized as judges and law evolved that way. And then eventually government came in and it wrote down the common law and it wrote down all the statutes that go with the common law. But the law was originally a product of spontaneous order. Money is another example. People think money is something created by Ben Bernanke and he certainly created a lot of it lately. But originally money evolved spontaneously. I have fish, you have fruit, I want fruit, but you don't want fish so now we need something that we can exchange as a medium of exchange instead of engaging in direct barter. And so money evolved and eventually gold and silver in particular came to be regarded as the best natural monies. And then, just like with law, the government stepped in and it said, hey, why don't we just print up paper and hand it out? We promised that there's gold and silver behind it. That's when government got involved and that was designed. But money itself evolved spontaneously and especially the economy. Who designs the economy? Who plans the economy? Well, the answer is nobody. Millions and billions of people every day get up thinking, how can I satisfy my own needs? And the basic way that each of us satisfies our needs is coming up with something that somebody else would value. So I may sell my labor or the product of my farm or an idea that I have or goods that I already own in all of those ways. I am engaging in trade with other people and the economy evolves spontaneously and economic growth happens. Until, again, the government steps in and says we're going to plan the economy and that generally doesn't work out so well. So one of the key ideas of libertarianism is the idea that most of the order in society evolves spontaneously. It doesn't need to be planned. The great Nobel Laureate, F.A. Hayek, talked about the fatal conceit. That was the title of his last book and what he meant was that it is the conceit of intellectuals that they can direct resources more efficiently than can millions of independent decision makers. And again, that seems perfectly obvious. Doesn't it make sense that if government planners with a computer decided what everybody should produce and what everything should cost, that would be more efficient than just randomly letting millions and hundreds of millions of people truck and barter and bid in the marketplace? But it turns out it doesn't work very well. And one of the great examples of this back during the Clinton administration was when Hillary Clinton organized 500 bureaucrats into 15 committees and 34 working groups to recreate in 100 days one-seventh of the American economy, the health care system. She thought that she and her bureaucrats could plan the American health care system better than the free market could. Now, we don't have a free market in health care for the reasons that we have a lot of problems with health care, but what we know from historical experience and from economic theory is that competition in the marketplace will produce better results than having a bunch of bureaucrats make plans. But we also need to remember it's not just comprehensive plans like that. Everybody in Congress has got some sort of law or regulation that they think will keep people married or give every child a good home or make people save more for retirement. The argument of the fatal conceit says don't be so sure about that. Don't assume that even your small rules for planning are going to make people act the way you want and if they do, make better results than they would make on their own. So we have individual rights and if you've studied political theory, you know the difference between normative and positive theories. Individual rights is a normative theory. Spontaneous order is a positive theory. It's not saying the way things ought to be. It's just saying this is an observation of the way things are. Spontaneous order is the reality of the world. To protect individual rights in spontaneous order, the third key theme in libertarianism is limited government, limited constitutional government that protects individual rights and what libertarians often say is delegated, enumerated and thus limited powers for the government. That is, we have our rights to begin with. We delegate in the Constitution some of our rights to government. We enumerate in the Constitution which rights we're delegating and therefore we limit the powers of government. Delegated, enumerated and thus limited powers. That is, government is essential but it must be limited if it's going to protect individual rights. Now we might sum this up more specifically and say libertarianism is the view that each person has the right to live his life in any way he chooses so long as he respects the equal rights of others. Libertarians defend each person's right to life, liberty and property. Rights that we have naturally before governments are created. In the libertarian view all human relationships should be voluntary. The only actions that should be forbidden by law are those that involve the initiation of force against those who have not themselves used force. Actions like murder, rape, robbery, kidnapping and fraud. And you know, most people habitually believe in and live by this code of ethics. Libertarians believe this code should be applied consistently and specifically that it should be applied to actions by governments as well as by individuals. Governments should exist to protect rights, to protect us from others who might use force against us. When governments themselves use force against people who have not violated the rights of others then governments themselves become the rights violators. And thus libertarians condemn such government actions as censorship, the draft, price controls, confiscation of property, regulation of our personal and economic lives. The more complex our society and economy get the bigger are the problems with government planning. There are three big problems that economists and libertarians can identify with excessive government. First is the totalitarian problem. The problem that such a concentration of power would be an irresistible temptation to abuse. Those with the power make the decisions probably on the basis of political clout because it's actually impossible for planners to make right decisions. They don't have the market information they would need to really make the right decisions. Number two is the incentive problem, the lack of inducement for individuals to work hard or work efficiently. And number three, perhaps the least understood is the calculation problem, the inability of a socialist system without prices or markets to allocate resources according to consumer preferences. In some ways libertarianism seems to be just the standard framework of modern thought. Individualism, private property, capitalism, equality under the law. And indeed, after centuries of intellectual political and sometimes violent struggle, these core libertarian principles have in fact become the basic structure of modern political thought and of modern government. However, three additional points need to be made. First, libertarianism is not just these broad liberal principles. Libertarianism applies these principles fully and consistently, far more so than most modern thinkers and certainly more so than any modern government. Second, while our society remains generally based on equal rights and capitalism, every day new exceptions to these principles are carved out in Washington and in Albany and Sacramento and Austin and not to mention in London, Beijing and other capitals. Each new government directive takes a little bit of our freedom and we should think carefully before giving up any liberty. Third, liberal society is resilient. It can withstand many burdens and continue to flourish, but it is not infinitely resilient. Those who claim to believe in liberal principles but advocate more and more confiscation of the wealth created by productive people, more and more restrictions on voluntary interaction, more and more exceptions to property rights and the rule of law, more and more transfer of power from society to state are, perhaps unwittingly, engaged in the ultimately deadly undermining of civilization. Lots of political movements promise utopia. Just implement our program and we'll usher in an ideal world. Libertarians offer something less and something more, a framework for utopia, as Robert Nozick put it. My ideal community would probably not be your utopia. The attempt to create heaven on earth is doomed to fail because we have different ideas of what heaven would be like. As our society becomes more diverse, the possibility of our agreeing on one plan for the whole nation becomes even more remote. And in any case, we can't possibly anticipate the changes that progress will bring. Utopian plans always involve a static and rigid vision of the ideal community, a vision that can't accommodate a dynamic world. We can no more imagine what civilization will be like a century from now than the people of 1900 could have imagined today's civilization. So what we need is not utopia, but a free society in which people can design their own communities. A libertarian society is a framework for utopia. In such a society, government would respect people's right to make their own choices in accord with the knowledge available to them. As long as each person respects the rights of others, he would be free to live as he chose. His choice might well involve voluntarily agreeing with others to live in a particular kind of community. Individuals could come together to form communities in which they would agree to abide by certain rules which might forbid or require particular actions. Since people would individually and voluntarily agree to such rules, they would not be giving up their rights, but simply agreeing to the rules of a community that they would be free to leave. Such a framework might offer thousands of versions of utopia, which might appeal to different kinds of people, even socialism. One difference between libertarianism and socialism is that a socialist society can't tolerate groups of people practicing freedom. But a libertarian society can comfortably allow people to choose voluntary socialism. If a group of people, even a very large group, want to purchase land and own it in common, they would be free to do so. The libertarian legal order would require only that no one be coerced into giving up his property. Many people might choose a utopia very similar to today's small town suburban or center city environment, but we would all profit from the opportunity to choose other alternatives and to observe and emulate valuable innovations. In such a society, government would tolerate, as Leonard Reed put it, anything that's peaceful. Voluntary communities could make stricter rules, but the legal order of the whole society would punish only violations of the rights of others. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Each one of us is the best person to make the important decisions about our own lives. What to think, what to read, what kind of family to create, where to send our children to school, where to invest our retirement savings. Limited constitutional government protects those choices, and that's the government a free society should have. In short, we might say, smoky the bear's rules for fire safety apply to government. Keep it small, keep it in a confined area. That's what the Constitution does, and keep an eye on it. That's one of the things libertarians do.