 I hadn't taught ethics, and I was interested in political philosophy too, but I found most historical writers on the subject, rather tiresome to read, compared with writers in aesthetics and epistemology. But my dormant interest in political philosophy didn't really begin to blossom until I got to know Inrand. We had a fairly close friendship for several years. We discussed every conceivable subject through the long evenings. I've written about this in various periodicals, most recently in full context last year. So I won't say anything more about it here, except to say that these discussions just energized me enormously. I think I had become jaded enough to feel that anything more I would learn would be old news, but no longer. I continued, still continue to disagree with her about some issues like necessary propositions, but it was never possible to be quite the same after encountering Inrand. How well I remember her saying to me once when I was sort of deprecating the people in my profession, or the profession itself, and she said, yours is the most important profession in the world. The world can recover from material setbacks, but it may never recover from a dose of bad ideas. I often thought of that and think of it to this day in moments of discouragement. Had it not been for her influence, I certainly would never have become a member of the newly formed libertarian party, and surely would not have consented to run for office. I just found, not long ago, some old tests as I was in the process of throwing teaching materials away. There was one test that I have about 50 multiple choice questions on Atlas Shrugged that I gave to my class in philosophy and literature one year. I made up some copies. I've got some here. If anyone wants to test himself or herself on how well he has mastered that book, you've got the chance. I'll give you a copy. Anyway, I was now confronted in a practical way that I had never anticipated with such questions as, what is the proper relation of the individual to the state, or is there a justification for the state at all? And what basis in reality has this concept the rights of man? Many philosophical questions were in the back of my mind as I crisscrossed the country giving speeches and interviews as the LP's first presidential candidate. It was difficult to summarize an issue succinctly without falsifying it through oversimplification. People tend to become practiced at that art. I never became practiced at that. I would give brief answers as possible when a reporter would say to me, what are you going to do with a poor? Let him starve. And then without allowing me to explain anything, they would go on to the next equally sarcastic question. Well, when we put the libertarian enterprise on the road in 1972, we were protesting against the increasing encroachments of government into our lives. We were concerned enough about this to risk quite a bit for it. We didn't know whether the libertarian party was becoming or would become a major influence, or whether it was a flash in the pan destined to die out in a few months. My superiors at the university didn't appreciate my criticisms of the state, from which they drew a great deal of their income. And they thought that going out campaigning against the Leviathan state was beneath the professor's dignitarity. But the growth of that state was enough to keep some of us going and putting in our two cents worth so that at least it could never be said we'd given up without a fight. Well, that was almost 30 years ago. Since that time, the U.S. libertarian party has multiplied its numbers many times over. Many people have absorbed the philosophy of non-coercion a lot more than might realistically have been expected at that time. And yet in the year 2000, the state continues its power over us, undiminished. There are thousands of ill-begotten laws and regulations that wouldn't have been dreamt of in 1972. And yet we see no overt rebellion or revolution or even at some time seems very much public concern about these developments. So what now after the passage of time can we say about liberty in the year 2000? I've tried to be neither optimistic nor pessimistic. Optimistic means making it of as being better than it is pessimistic, making it of as being worse than it is. Of course we all claim to be realists seeing it as it really is, except that too is a matter of perspective, I guess. A word about the military situation in the world which sort of overhangs us all. The future of liberty depends on a lot of things, but this at least, on inhabiting a world that is for the most part at peace. Now that nuclear weapons are abroad in the world, it's safe to say that we always live somewhat in the shadow of war. Tomorrow, China could attack Taiwan, North Korea, hurling missile in Japan. No one knows how far this would spread or how long the process of mutual retaliation might go on. If your country tries to go it alone, it's more vulnerable to attack, but if it makes alliances then it's your ally who may be attacked and then you're bound to join the defense. We can't win, it seems. Sarajevo taught us this in 1914. There's no telling once it starts from a little thing where it might end. I remember the British philosopher C. D. Broad shortly before World War II telling us that he hoped that Europe would not collapse into barbarism before America had emerged from it. What are the chances of an international incident involving a nuclear exchange happening in, say, the next 10 years? Or try the next 20. How about the next 50? Considering how many nations are at each other's throats at the moment, it doesn't it seem plausible that at least one such incident will occur? We don't know, of course. Dr. Mishat Kakao, the distinguished physicist from New York University, advises the inhabitants of any planet, in any galaxy, to conclude their observations of the earth quickly. As he says, any civilization that once developed nuclear weapons is likely to destroy itself in a century or at most two. Quick attack, quick retaliation, more from the first attacker than everything's gone. I don't know on what statistics he based his conclusions. But I can't say that this scenario is implausible. Every nation that has an ultimate weapon does tend to use it sooner or later. And if one nation arms itself so as to avoid being attacked, the other nations will tend to take a pessimistic view of that first nation's intentions and then redouble their rearmament. It's been said, and I have to make this part quite brief, that the only solution is for the whole world to be one nation state, with the power to suppress dissent everywhere. As in the late Roman Empire, when there was peace in the whole civilized world for 300 and some years. But of course, the cure might be worse than the disease. What would you do if you wanted to rebel against a monopolistic world government? You would have no place to go. Well, maybe then decentralization is the answer. And where there was one nation, there should be 10 or 20. They say that the US Articles of Confederation were preferable to the US Constitution. There would then be no America today that is a global power. And some people would like this very much. Although I rather shudder to think what the world would be like without America right after World War II. Anyway, I am not sure what's so superior about a bunch of small quarreling states, let's say Bosnia, Serbia, Macedonia, and so on, in close proximity to one another. Hardly a guarantee of peace. I ran thought that nations had a limited function to provide armies, police, and courts for the protection of individuals in each nation. And many libertarians, as you know, have said that giving governments this much is already a betrayal of individualism. That since all governments are coercive and we are committed to minimizing coercion in the world, that's often given as a definition of libertarianism, the only proper procedure is for each individual to provide for his or her own defense. There would be defense agencies, Allah, David Friedman, which you could join or not as you wish, each competing for the privilege of defending you for pay. Well, volumes could be written and have been written about this. Such agencies, of course, couldn't just be discussion groups. They would have to be armed and ready. Else they wouldn't be able to protect you against predatory gangs, not just neighborhood gangs, but international predators with new and untried weapons. Enormous resources would have to be committed to achieve this, and even more because of the freeloader's problem. There would be many groups, of course, who would rather fight than adjudicate. This too would have to be planned for. I confess that I'm afraid at the, I could be unconvinced. I'm afraid of competing defense agencies for the same reason that Thomas Hobbes was 350 years ago. The author of Leviathan. He was skeptical about having more than one enforcement agency in a given geographical area. Competition and consumer goods? Yes. Competition and arms? No. More than one enforcement agency in the same region? He called that civil war. Which he said is not always armed conflict, but neither he said is it peace. Anyway, there's virtually no chance that nations will declare themselves out of business in the foreseeable future. Not even one of them. Certainly not all the nations in the world. So that just ain't going to happen. Not a realistic speculation right now. About war, we don't know. I fear that the fate of the world is beset by such uncertainties as to render unfruitful any attempt to assess probabilities right now. As long as people have the same basic temperament as now, and there's a real hope for lasting peace, there's also a real fear that one group will see a chance to subdue the rest, that we'll see the chance and we'll take the chance. So that's a question mark. Now to my main and somewhat more manageable topic I hope, namely the relation of the individual to the state, what it's supposed to be like, what's gone wrong, how to fix it for the rest of my time. Two centuries ago, the US was as libertarian as any country on this earth. Its constitution was as elegantly simple as any document could be. De Tocqueville said he could explain it to his readers in a couple of sentences. It listed certain powers that the federal government would have, excluding all the others, and would be permitted to do nothing else except what was mentioned. And then it separated those powers among three branches of government. If Congress enacted laws going beyond that, the Supreme Court would strike them down. The court did strike down a lot of things, flood relief and other measures. The Constitution did not grant such powers. 1890, Grover Cleveland vetoed a $10,000 federal grant for drought relief saying there is no constitutional power to do this. Decades later, a federal highway program only got through Congress by being labeled national defense. The radicals of 1910 despaired of achieving socialism as long as the Constitution remained. We must have a new Constitution, they said, if we were to institute these changes. And of course they were right. But Roosevelt changed all that. You know the story. There's endless debate today, for instance, about national health laws, how many people should be covered, for what conditions, and so on. What seldom asked is by what authority the federal government in the United States has to do with any of these things. And the same for social security, Medicare, federal aid to education, public works projects, regulation in business, subsidies for the arts, et cetera. Example, the Fourth Amendment prohibits secret searches. Justice Marshall, the first justice of the Supreme Court, feared that some future technology would be such that papers could be read from secret drawers without the drawers ever being opened. Well today, of course, that's happening even without any new technology. One new bill before Congress, police can enter a home, search everything in it, and tell nobody. It's hidden in what's called the methamphetamine bill. And there are secret wiretap provisions in this year's 2,000 page omnibus budget bill. They'll probably all sail through, mostly without being read. It goes on. Reed J.Bovar lost rights, one example out of many. Thousands of regulations with the force of law coercively limit the daily activities of anyone who conducts any kind of business, or a farmer is not permitted to farm any portion of his property which may contain a kangaroo rat because it's an endangered species courtesy of the Environmental Protection Agency. And so on and so on, 20,000 pages of regulations can't even be remembered by their own enforcers of the EPA, but whose victims are made to suffer for the slightest infringement or misinterpretation. Or one can read Walter Olson's book, The Death of Common Sense, which is an exposure of the legal system and its corruption and other books of his later and by other people. There's no lack of books on all these things. The information's there. Only the liberal press isn't reporting it. And to a public that doesn't read very much anymore anyway, the books don't make very much impact on the general public. And so the disease of centralized control had not yet spread at far in Abraham Lincoln's day. But in a speech at the Springfield Lyceum made in 1838 when he was only 29 years old, Lincoln laments, and here I'm going to quote Lincoln briefly. He said to his audience, the field of glory is harvested and the crop is already appropriated. But new reapers will arise and they too will seek a field. Men of ambition and talent will continue to spring up. And when they do, they will naturally seek the gratification of their ruling passion, as others have done before them. The question is, can that gratification be found in supporting and maintaining an edifice that has been erected by others? No, said Lincoln. Men of ambition will not be content with a seat in Congress or a governorship. Think you these places would satisfy an Alexander, a Caesar, a Napoleon? No, towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions unexplored. It sees no distinction in adding story to story on the monuments of fame erected to the memory of others. It denies that it is glory to serve under any regime. It scorns to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor. It thirsts for distinction, and it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating others or insulating free men. That is to the Springfield Lyceum. If such a Napoleonic figure arose in America, Lincoln said, it would be a mortal danger to American institutions. And the public would have to be sufficiently firm in its resolution and sufficiently attached to the principles of individual freedom to frustrate such a person's designs. I can't help thinking. I don't think anyone suspected eight years ago how Lincoln's fears would be realized when Clinton came to the throne, a psychopath with no conscience, no real concern for his country, viewed with contempt by his own armed forces, interested only in exerting and prolonging his own power by whatever means possible, silencing or eliminating his personal and political enemies, and all with such a plum that most of the subjects he betrayed were still singing his praises or else terrified into silence and inaction. That's the way it is now. Anyway, Lincoln was right about that, of course. It's human nature to strike out on your own and declare your independence, lay down your predecessor's achievement. This is disturbing, but true. But there's another question. Why do the changes always have to be unidirectional? They always seem to consist of more power to the state and less to the individual. Why? Well, it was a part of the story. Some people have more and some less, and many other people find this unfair. In a democracy, majority rules, there are more have-nots than haves, so the majority votes to take away from the haves a portion of what they have earned and give it in return for votes to those who have not. It doesn't take long for those who have not earned it to be told that they have a right to it, and it doesn't take long either for those who have produced the wealth of the nation and given the workers' employment to lose their incentive to work harder and produce more. And so they produce less. And then as production falters, there's less to distribute among more and more people. The more is taxed away from the producers, the less they produce, and the greater the outcry for more goods. And after several generations of this looting, here is a typical result. A senator gets a bill passed for some ostensibly humanitarian cause, such as teaching retarded kids how to read or taking them on vacation during the summer at public expense. The public considers these good causes. These are voted into law. Most of the money is wasted, diverted to uses that don't have anything to do with the original bill, or employ the author's friends and create elaborate new offices, in which nothing much gets done. But the senator gets a reputation for humanitarianism, the distinction between humanitarianism with your own money and with other people's money apparently still escapes most people. All these programs mean increased taxes, and they bring everyone's standard of living down. Most Americans, I think, however it is elsewhere, have very little conception of how much higher their own standard of living would have been, and how much more they could have done for their own family and their own children if these busy-bodied bills had not been passed. And so bit by bit, more of the nation's economy is handled by government bureaucracies, which consume the fruits of a nation's labor and place it in the eager hands of the totalitarian left. And now let's say a political candidate is giving a speech. What are you going to do for me if elected? The audience wants to know. They want to be sure that they get more out of the federal treasury than they put in in taxes. Any politician that tries to resist that trend is lost. If he says that he'll reduce the size of government, well, this strikes the average voter as a vanilla flavored promise, one that doesn't give any special aid. And this, which is probably the most important promise a politician can give to a voter, but it's considered a nothing. During my campaign, when I was asked repeatedly, what will you do for me if elected? And my stock answer was, I'll leave you alone. Most people weren't very impressed by that. They thought this was a cop-out. You see, the public has already been corrupted by the game of, if you give it to me and take it away from somebody else, and the candidate has to go along with that game in order to win the next election. Even the voter who sees how things are going has already surrendered too much of his tax money, and he's more anxious than ever to get hold of some of it himself. And meanwhile, as the economic crisis worsens, a leader emerges who promises to solve the nation's problems as long as they entrust their fate into his hands. Plato said that democracy and practice regularly leads to dictatorship, and that's the end of the line in which people no longer have any rights against the government, but become its whimpering subjects hoping that those in power will not treat him too badly. It's the signs of such approaching centralization of power that I dread and watch for the most. A certain amount of regulation, bad as it is, I suppose we can live with if we work harder to make up the government's colossal waste of our resources. But the dictatorship of the bureaucracy, which enacts into all the most trivial and pointless regulations, is something that may soon become irreversible. And that's why I quickly take alarm at what seems at first to be small things. Example, a few months ago, there was a million moms march in Washington, officially a protest against killings supposedly caused by gun possession. But let's look ahead. What will be the effect of the legislation they want enacted? It will ensure that if your home is invaded by an armed robber, you'll have no defense against him. The robber is not going to obtain his weapons at your local gun store. It's you who'll be without. Sozjanitsyn records that in the massive roundups of people who were taken to Siberian labor camps, often over 10 million in one year, in one year, 1937, about a fourth of the population of Leningrad were forcibly taken from their homes and shipped to the death camps. If the citizens had been permitted to own their own guns, the massive roundups would not have been possible. The police would have been just too frightened to make these mass arrests. At the very least, the people would have picked off some of them. You can't have the terror of a totalitarian state unless you first disarm the population. At Waco, men from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms sees the Davidians compound and incinerated those in it. I don't know what effect the recent Danforth pronouncements will have on that verdict, if I don't dare say. Agents of the same bureau, of course, descended on people's houses, shot people if they're resisted on the base of a rumor, often false that marijuana was being grown on the premises. The case of Randy Weaver, which you all know about, illustrates the point. And the question arises is, what do we do when our supposed protectors are no longer protecting us but are our aggressors? My doctor in Los Angeles was prepared to comply with the new California Marijuana Initiative, enabling patients with cancer and AIDS to relieve their pain. But federal officials came to his office and reminded him that the federal trumps the state and that if he persisted, they would take away his license to practice medicine. So far, the threat's been effective. It's not violence, just the threat. Last April, we saw TV images of federal agents seizing Ilian Gazales. It was reminiscent of Soviet gun squads making, taking masses of people to their deaths. It was only one person, not many. Principle's the same, though. Breaking into your home without permission, taking you and yours away to God knows where, the state flaunting its supremacy over the individual. If it can happen once, it can happen on a larger scale. And that's why it's so frightening. But according to the polls, the majority of Americans agreed with this operation. I have 10 or less minutes more. I vividly remember reading Solzhenitsyn's three-volume Gulag Archipelago when it first appeared in English in 1978. In fact, I reviewed all three volumes for several libertarian publications. Among the few thousand other horrors, I remember, his description of the vast construction project, the Balmoral Canal designed to connect Leningrad with the Arctic Ocean. And over 10,000 Soviet slaves died in that one operation. No money for this vast engineering project, no modern equipment, only the plentiful supply of human beings. I'm going to quote Solzhenitsyn briefly here and then once more. How were trees to be felled if there were neither solzhenor axes, he asked? Ropes were tied around the trees, and they were rocked back and forth by brigades pushing in different directions. They literally rocked the trees out. The grandeur of the construction project consisted in the fact that it was carried out without contemporary technology or equipment. It would be unfair to compare this canal built with wheel barrow and pick with Egyptian pyramids. But you see, not many people read Solzhenitsyn anymore. It's almost as if his works had never existed. Since people don't know about it, it's not a warning for our time. Kids pursue their daily activities without the slightest conception of what could happen to them with the expansion of the police state or what happened to Russia in our own century. They know nothing about this. Can such things happen again? Of course they could with some variations of time and place. All that's needed is a tyrannical government that controls the game and the total dependence of citizens upon the government. When I wrote the Libertarian Party Statement of Principles in 72, I used the phrase omnipotent state, which some members have considered too strong. But the state is more nearly omnipotent than it was in 72. It can come for you, rouse you from your bed, shoot you without warning on trumped up charges. There's something barely conceivable to us back in 72. And what if you don't cooperate? I'll quote Solzhenitsyn one more time. Quote, a shake of the head and a nod might cost you resettlement in the archipelago. And that was not all. Your children were growing up. If they weren't old enough yet, you and your wife had to avoid saying openly in front of them what you really thought. After all, they were being brought up to betray their own parents. And if the children were still little, then you had to decide what was the best way to bring them up, whether to step them off and on lies instead of the truth to make it easier to live and then lie forevermore in front of them or to tell them the truth with a risk that they might make a slip, that they might let it out, which meant that you had to instill into them from the start that the truth was murderous and beyond the threshold of the house you had to lie, just like your father and mother. Unquote, such are the consequences of not cooperating with the omnipotent state. That's why we can't let it get omnipotent. OK, last brief section, just a few minutes more. I want to sum this up. On balance, where does liberty stand in the year 2000? If the world remains relatively peaceful, there is much that is encouraging. The public has a lot more savvy about libertarianism than it did 30 years ago. At that time, there was almost total ignorance of the difference between initiatory and retaliatory force and so on. Any candidate today can expect his audience to know, at least, in what direction of the compass libertarianism lies. That Ayn Rand's works are now available in Russia is something she herself wouldn't have imagined in her wildest dreams. And it contains enormous promise, maybe the fact that it's on Putin's desk. Who knows what will happen as a result? Maybe it will fulfill Von Mies's prediction that freedom will first break out in Eastern Europe. Who knows? But many people in the libertarian movement, I think, see reality through rose-colored lenses. They communicate exclusively with other libertarians. A presidential candidate in the year 2000 said that by the year 2004, the victory of libertarianism will have been total. Do they think that the world will be propelled into the future in a tidal wave of libertarian sentiment? Have the airport stopped to talk with a man in the street who likes our description of liberty but wants to grab all he can of government benefits? Is he among the majority who thinks that it's stingy of the Republicans to hesitate before passing a law that gives everyone pre-prescription modifications? Freedom is not something about it's about to descend on us in one fell swoop. This whole tendency is not reversible by the year 2004. It has to be achieved in small increments. I was glad when the welfare reform bill was passed two years ago, which put some brakes on the welfare state, saving billions of dollars and putting recipients back on the workforce. I was also pleased a few months ago when the Supreme Court found unconstitutional a law prohibiting a person from carrying a gun within 1,000 feet of a school building never was a federal government's business in the first place. And then how about making a few similar decisions for a few thousand other matters like guns and drugs? And how about acid forfeiture? Can anyone say that's constitutional? But all the while, Leviathan, the great whale that comes out of the deep to swallow us, exerts mounting influence. How is Leviathan to be conquered? I think I'd be willing to give up everything else on our agenda in return for just one thing. Namely, the dissolution of the state-controlled educational system, which tells us where we can go to school. And what subjects can be taught and by whom. The state, remember, also controls the conditions that have to be met for someone to become a qualified teacher. Einstein wouldn't be permitted to teach physics in an American public high school because he didn't have a teaching certificate. And the task of acquiring that is a matter of such dullness and stupidity as to deter many people who will never be Einstein's. The whole educational establishment controlled by the teacher unions with a cooperation of the liberal press are out to ensure that the future will consist of more of the same. We have to get education out of the hands of the state as it was in Jefferson's day. But that's a daunting task, you see. It means hiring teachers who know their subject matter, not just those who have passed the required number of education courses. It means no more dumbing down of the subjects that make tests easier each year just to get the kids past. It means no more pretending that the answers to earth medical problems aren't correct or incorrect only a matter of how you feel about it. It means getting rid of the top heavy educational bureaucracy which will fight to the death any attempt to dislodge it. It means exerting the same patience and determination that the left has done in the last 50 years, turning bright young minds into willing subjects to the latest educational craze, deconstruction or multiculturalism or whatever. And the left doesn't want us to exercise our choices. At a recent demonstration in Washington, DC, officially against the IMF, students held up placards, workers of the world unite as if nobody ever thought of that before. They were asked why capitalist countries were rich and communist nations were poor. Surely that wasn't the climate of the soil, or the soil considered North Korea versus South Korea, East Germany versus West Germany. The answer they gave was, capitalist nations steal from communist nations and the capitalist nations get rich off of them. And that was their explanation. Now, if the students were trained in handling somewhat complex arguments, they could figure out for themselves what was wrong with this and a thousand other naive slogans. They could figure out on their own the consequences of 10,000 foolish regulations to which they're subject. And if they knew anything about the rise and falls of civilizations, they might be able to prevent yet another tyranny from taking root. But you see, they haven't done these things. American public high school students are probably no more informed about what's going on in the world than were the members of the Hitler Youth Movement. They simply have no idea what mischief is cooking in the great wide world around them. They have no idea. It would probably be easy for a tyrannical regime with a few slick slogans to capture their support. Just give them some promises and some money and suppressed dissent and you got it made. Do you really think this could not happen? Do you really think everything would be resolved by 2004? Of course, in conclusion, there's a rising tide of people who would not be taken in by these arguments. But whether they'd be enough to change the social order, we cannot yet say. One great hope for the future is the internet. A rather quick, sudden development spearheaded to a large extent by libertarians, strongly resistant to government controls, possibilities are immense. In one way or another, it will transform our future. Perhaps one can express the hope that by the time all school children have computers, those who use it will be able to spell the words in their own language and make correct change without a calculator. But of one thing, we can be sure. The potential is there. People with a knowledge and goodwill can continue to chipping away at the Leviathan State, bit by reluctant bit, gradually sweeping the whole miserable edifice away. And we as libertarians at least are in the best possible position to spearhead that enterprise. At least we have the knowledge of what is needed and we have the will to bring it about. Thank you very much.