 He's an academic in the best sense of the word. He's not only the president of the Cato Institute, but it's guiding light. Anyone who's ever read his works or talked with him can attest to his status as an intellectual. And his political experience spans more than a decade when he served as our Vice Chair of the National Party, later as our National Chair, as a member of the National Executive Committee and as the genius behind the Clark campaign in 1980. Few people are qualified to speak on any one of these three subjects of intellectuals, academics, or politics. And I can think of none more qualified to speak on the relationship of all three than Ed Craig. I'm sure there's an appropriate analogy for being called the genius behind the Clark campaign, but I don't think I'll try to think of it. Not an hour. My involvement in the Libertarian Party dates back to 1972, when a somewhat scraggly group of about 85 of us met in Denver, Colorado at the party's first national convention. We were, I think it's safe to say, a colorful group of people, each with a different background and perhaps a different motivation for being there, but all of us were convinced that there was something profoundly wrong with the political system in the United States. Ideologically, that original group clearly had more of a right-wing bias than exists today. There was, I'm reluctant to report, serious debate at that convention as to whether or not the United States should unilaterally withdraw from Vietnam. Today, Libertarians are more likely to be discussing whether or not the United States should withdraw from North America. And that's more than just an interesting anecdote because it demonstrates the irrefutable point that the Libertarian Party has in its ten-year history become increasingly more ideologically committed as it has grown in size and professionalism. Many people believe that that wouldn't be the case. Indeed, the nature of politics, according to some people, is such that it couldn't be the case. Yet a perusal of each succeeding Libertarian Party platform demonstrates that the application of Libertarian principles to political issues has consistently been done in a clearer, ideologically sounder manner over the years. And that, it seems to me, is most encouraging. Our Libertarian principles act to simultaneously guide and motivate us in our activities without them we are, in effect, a rudderless, powerless ship adrift in a sea of political compromise. And when it comes to compromise, there's no way we're going to out-compete the Democrats and Republicans. And that brings me to the subject of my speech, the full title of which is Academics, Intellectuals and Politics, the return of ideas to the political process. What I want to deal with, in essence, is what I believe to be the correct strategy for the Libertarian Party to pursue. Why I believe it to be correct and what I see as a particular danger to it that exists within the Libertarian movement. Strategy is itself a subject that gets too little attention in the Libertarian movement. Everything we do as Libertarian activists implies a strategic ordering of priorities. We do one thing rather than another, presumably, because we think it well within the limits of our interests and abilities be the most effective in advancing the cause of liberty. In this sense, of course, the existence of the Libertarian Party is itself a strategic phenomenon. For Libertarians, support of and participation in the Libertarian Party is an endorsement of political action as an appropriate strategy for achieving a free society. It is important that we never forget the obvious. The Libertarian Party is not a political party in the traditional sense of Republicans and Democrats. It's not our objective to run the government. The Libertarian Party is, however, a political party. And one of its objectives beyond the obvious one of educating the public about Libertarianism is to dismantle the machinery of government from within. That is to say, to get elected to public office. Now, I happen to believe that the educational and electoral opportunities for advancing the cause of liberty through the Libertarian Party are enormous. That they represent the best opportunity for rolling back the state. That is not to say that it is the only proper strategy or even that it's a good strategy for everyone. Political action for some Libertarians may, in fact, be an inappropriate strategy. But for most of us, it seems to me, it is a good and a proven strategy. But it's not enough to say simply that we should pursue political action. Left unresolved is what type of political activity Libertarian Party activists should be pursuing. The key to a successful Libertarian movement, in my view, which is to say the key to creating a free society, is to involve the intelligent lay public in questions of public policy in serious debate over the political issues which affect our lives. I would argue that such involvement is in fact a precondition to the creation of and to the maintenance of a free society. The history of mankind is a history of the subjugation and exploitation of a great majority of people by an elite few by what has been appropriately termed the ruling class. Now, the ruling class has many manifestations. It can take the form of a religious orthodoxy, a monarchy, a dictatorship of the proletariat, outright fascism, or in the case of the United States, corporate statism. In each instance, the ruling class relies on academics, scholars, and experts to legitimize and provide moral authority for its hegemony over the masses. At this point, I want to make an important distinction between what I would call academics or court intellectuals on the one hand and intelligent laymen or Hayekian intellectuals on the other. Murray Rothbard has accused me of, among other atrocities, being anti-intellectual. I would beg to differ. As I will argue in a moment, I think there's a desperate need to recruit more intellectuals into the libertarian movement. Now, if Rothbard had accused me of being anti-academic, I would have had to have confessed, I think, a certain bias in that direction. Now, that's not to say that there isn't a role for academics to play in society. It's just that it's a more limited role than they currently play, and political action is not the place for them to play it. At a minimum, I would think that we libertarians could agree that massive state subsidies for a higher education and higher education itself is a value-laden term, it more properly might be referred to as prolonged education. That this subsidy has created more scholars and academics than the market system would have, shall we say, demanded. It's not just that there are more scholars incredibly knowledgeable about the sex lives of Cro-Magnon poets than is perhaps warranted. It's that there are literally thousands and thousands of economists, sociologists, historians and philosophers in our society whose life work in a free market system would probably be channeled in more productive directions. An article in The Pacific Sun a couple of years ago offered a somewhat exaggerated but to-the-point discussion of this, the libertarian view of court intellectuals, again not the broadly defined Hayekian intellectuals, which I'd like to share with you, goes like this. In a truly capitalistic society, intellectuals would be paid exactly what they're worth on the free market, which is perilously close to nothing. As a result, almost all intellectuals are court intellectuals. They tell the prince what he wants to hear, and in this country that consists of telling the president and congress and everyone else that our government is just, important and necessary in a word essential. In return they are given tenure at state universities and government grants at private ones. They are plucked out of Ivy League political science departments to become presidential advisors and secretaries of state. They went appointments to head bureaucracies and hold seats on regulatory commissions. And once in place they do what court apologists have always done. They obfuscate, complicate and intimidate the average citizen into denying what otherwise would patently be obvious to him. President Harry Truman was perhaps being unduly personal when he called former Senator William Fulbright an overeducated son of a bitch, but he had the principle correct. Higher education doesn't so much train people to think straight, as it enables them to repeat the most blatant self-deceptions with total self-assurance. That's the end of quote. Of course one of the advantages of overeducation is that it provides a recipient with more information or misinformation about a given subject than is possessed by a layman. It allows the scholar or expert to intimidate through arguments from authority in reference to his PhD. It does not mean the scholar or expert has better judgment or is necessarily more intelligent than broad segments of the lay public. And I think that's particularly true today when it can be argued that the bureaucratized, politicized and unionized academic establishment tends not to be attractive to the brightest and most creative young minds in our society. In any case, as Marx once wrote, the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it. And in order to change the world in a libertarian direction, the movement, the libertarian movement, needs to recruit intellectuals and to motivate those intellectuals to agitate for change. I refer to the kind of intellectuals we need to promote libertarian political action as Hayekian intellectuals. Let Hayek define them for me in this quote from the intellectuals in socialism. The term intellectuals, however, does not at once convey a true picture of the large class to which we refer and the fact that we have no better name by which to describe what we have called the second-hand dealers in ideas is not the least of the reasons why their power is not better understood. Even persons who use the word intellectual mainly as a term of abuse are still inclined to withhold it for many who undoubtedly perform that characteristic function. This is neither that of the original thinker nor that of the scholar or expert in a particular field of thought. The typical intellectual need be neither. He need not possess special knowledge of anything in particular to perform his role as intermediary in the spreading of ideas. What qualifies him for his job is the wide range of subjects on which he can readily talk and write and a position or habits through which he becomes acquainted with new ideas sooner than those to whom he addresses himself. Hayek goes on to include within his definition of intellectuals, journalists, teachers, ministers, writers, cartoonists, scientists, and doctors. He makes it clear that he would include anyone who is concerned about ideas enough to learn the facts about an issue and attempt to convince others of the validity of his position based on those facts. Hopefully that would include the majority of people in this room. That is to say we are for the most part what I am calling Hayekian intellectuals. The key characteristic of the Hayekian intellectual is his desire and his ability to convince others of the correctness of his point of view. In this sense, the intellectual is or should be more important than academic experts in terms of political action. That is why, I think, as Hayek put it, quote, it is not surprising that scholars and experts often feel contemptuous about the intellectual, are disinclined to recognize his power and are resentful when they discover it. I would argue that this contempt and resentment of the broadly defined intellectual class represents a potential threat to the libertarian movement. Before the advent of the libertarian party, the movement was run by and to a large extent consisted of scholars. Most of them were experts in libertarian theory. None of them apparently had any real talent for organizing the movement or popularizing its ideas. Now, it is not my intention to blow this point out of proportion. The main point I want to make today is a need for active, real-world intellectual proselytizing. But I do want to spend some time on it. In a movement that has for so long been dominated by scholar experts, it is important that activists feel a sense of intellectual independence. If they don't, if they take the attitude that the great scholars on high are going to do all their thinking for them, then they're not going to undertake the hard work of learning the issues and taking the libertarian cause to the American people and will be stuck with a movement like we had in the late 60s, which is to say, no movement at all. The actions of court intellectuals to justify the state and to mock those who would challenge its legitimacy have been well-documented by, among others, Murray Rothbard. But it would be a mistake to assume that the dynamics of experts shouting down the public is limited to government. Duncan Newhauser has written, for instance, that, quote, the professional ideology assumes that the professional is an expert as a result of his years of education and learning. Since he knows more about his area, he should tell others what they need. Consistent with this is the idea that the public is unwise and unknowing, unquote. In other words, the more the public understands about a given profession, the less prestige, the less money, and the less influence each professional will have. The Church has, of course, for centuries kept the secrets to salvation in the hands of its appointed experts. Examples of this sort of thing abound consider the American Dental Association's Code of Ethics, which states, quote, it is unethical for a dentist to give lectures or demonstrations before late groups on a particular technique that he employs in his office. It is unethical for specialists to furnish so-called patient education pamphlets to general practitioners for distribution to patients where pamphlets, in effect, stress unduly the superiority of the procedures used by specialists, unquote. And you know how it goes. The Barber's Union requires you to pass a test which asks, among other things, how many bones there are in the human hand before you can cut hair. Now, this phenomenon is something people, particularly libertarians, I think, are very much aware of. But when it comes to the field of political ideology, I think the unfortunate fact is that the same unwillingness to grant non-experts the right to practice in that field exists. Consider the case, and we'll get to the good part, of Murray N. Rothbard, Mr. Libertarian. Rothbard has written an extraordinary 170-page document which discusses what he perceives to be the correct strategy for the libertarian movement. Not surprisingly, there is a large, large role for the philosopher king. Some of the distinctions between what he is saying and what I am recommending may be subtle, but they're important, to quote Rothbard. Most people have neither the time, interest, or ability to be experts in every area important to their lives and concerns. They therefore have to rely on expert authorities to form their judgments in these areas, from politics to morals to economics to medicine. So understanding politics now is like being a doctor. We have to leave that to the experts to continue Rothbard's quote. But since in most of these areas, the authorities are in the well-paid service of the state, it becomes vital for libertarians to desanctify, to de-legitimate these alleged authorities in the eyes of the deluded public. And since the public is not equipped to engage in technical investigations of each of these fields, the major weapon must be to desanctify these people as paid hirelings and propagandists of the exploiting state. That's a phrase Murray's used a lot lately. Once seeing the light, and it requires little or no technical expertise to see this broad truth, the public will then have to turn to those experts and authorities who have remained free of the blandishments of the state. What he says is the public will then have to turn to those experts and authorities who have remained free of the blandishments of the state. Oh, and who do you suppose that will be? One of the remarkable aspects of Rothbard's strategy paper is that about a third of it is devoted to praising the strategic genius of two rather anti-libertarian chaps, Vladimir Lenin and Adolf Hitler. Aside from the fact that the courses of action chosen by two such despicable human beings as Lenin and Hitler should be viewed with extreme skepticism, the obvious problem with an approach which tries to superimpose strategic successes of the past, in one case a past that is over 60 years old and in both cases strategies employed during wartime, the problem with doing that on today's situation is that those strategies have little relevance to today's situation. Yet Rothbard, I can tell you from personal experience, persists in his obsessive role-playing as a modern-day Lenin. For evidence, I refer you to a recent libertarian forum in which he rates each and every national committee member on the basis of what percentage of their votes coincided with his own. Rothbard even rated state delegation votes at the National Convention according to his self-determined party line. To me, this sort of breathless accounting of others' deviations, which was in fact typical of Lenin's cadre during the Revolution, is ludicrously out of place in today's libertarian movement. It's not only counterproductive, it's childish. But here's Rothbard again in his strategy paper after describing his plum-lined vision of a strict intellectual hierarchy for the movement, quote, probably the most successful historical instance of a continuing protracted adherence to this, i.e. Rothbard's centrist line, is Vladimir Lenin. And later, quote, that the Nazis understood the importance of hierarchical organization is made clear by Gottfried Prittum, who writes that, quote, the nature of the Nazi party's organization with its elaborate system of graded commands provided headquarters with a framework for controlling activities at the grassroots level. Some more of the philosophy, which I think helps explain Rothbard's recent tirades and machinations, quote, the Bolshevik party, the fascist party, the Nazi party, all had gradations of leadership in their organizations. In fact, we can now see with greater clarity that one of Lenin's great accomplishments was simply to take the modern theory of organization, of hierarchy of ability and corresponding leadership, which had come to fruition in the corporation, and to introduce it for the first time in a movement for radical social change. Wonderful. There's more good stuff in this paper, which Sirius Libertarian should be aware of if they want to understand Murray Rothbard. Here's another one, quote, Hitler also understood the importance of having a dedicated cadre within a broader party organization. Thus, Hitler once said, it is necessary to have something within the organization of the law of association as a further organization which carries through the furor idea to the full degree in order to preserve the instrument of the unity of the movement against all attempts to destroy it. Hitler Rothbard tells us, was, quote, particularly impressed with the great hierarchical organization of the Roman Catholic Church, unquote. I could go on, but let me say here that I'm not trying to equate Murray Rothbard with Lenin and Hitler. Rothbard has been a giant in the fight for liberty. Rothbard has earned a much-deserved stature among Libertarians because of his scholarly work in philosophy and economics. However, this does not make him a political strategist or tactician. Rothbard, it seems to me, doesn't want to admit he can't do everything. The similarity between him and these historical figures, whose strategies he desires to emulate, lies in the self-delusion of his own infallibility. And that would not be dangerous were not for his desire to project his vision for the movement through his beloved hierarchy. If there is a chain of command and Rothbard is at the top, then he reasons we are all spouting libertarianism according to Rothbard and all as well with the world. Murray Rothbard, in my view, fervently wants to do our thinking for us. Perhaps a couple of final quotes from his strategy paper will make this point clear. Murray Rothbard criticizes the Libertarian Party because, quote, first anyone can become a party member simply by signing a vague and non-enforceable pledge. How one would make it enforceable is interesting to contemplate. And once a member, he cannot be expelled. And second, every party member, regardless of how ignorant, unlibertarian, or moronic, and believe me he holds a lot of us in that category, is encouraged to think for himself as a cadre of being as good as any other libertarian. And finally, in praise of Communist parties, this is still from this memo, in praise of Communist parties that have understood the problems created by the unbridled independence of members that I just cited, he says, quote, every party member is not equal to every other. From the very beginning, the new party member knows his place. And here Rothbard is underlining the manuscript with knows his place. Now, if Rothbard were simply running a corporation which he had designed in a hierarchical manner to sink or swim based on his commands, perhaps one could forgive him his excesses. But as I've stated before, for the libertarian movement to succeed, we need real-world intellectuals who think for themselves and are out promoting the libertarian philosophy. Ours is a philosophy that cannot succeed with an army of robots. Yet that is what I'm convinced the scholar-expert Rothbard wants. Perhaps the most obvious example of this can be seen in Rothbard's vicious attacks on the Clarkford president white papers. These studies, which detail the four major planks of Clark's campaign, were singled out one by one as unconscionable sell-outs. They were referred to collectively by Rothbard as infamous. Libertarian principle was betrayed, he said. The LP platform produced and ignored our message diluted beyond recognition. They sold their souls and ours unfortunately along with it for a mess of pot-age, unquote. Well, you know, it was Rothbard's outspoken criticism of these white papers that really first got me thinking about what motivates the man. Here, with the four best libertarian analyses of current policy questions, they had a written, in my view, and they were viciously attacked by the man who, presumably, was the leading proponent of advancing libertarian ideas. Could it be, I wondered, that Rothbard was like the dental association that didn't want general practitioners to pass along the secrets of the specialists to the lay public? I don't know if you've seen the white papers or not. One of them consisted of one of them was on education written by Bill Burt, one was on foreign policy written by Earl Ravinal, one was on social security written by Pete Ferrara, and one was on Clark's tax and spending cut proposal, which would have reduced the size of the federal government by one-third in one year, which was written by David Bowes. They were all sort of written by several people, but those were the individuals who were primarily in charge of each one. Now, these papers were meticulously researched, professionally written, and meticulously edited to ensure that they didn't compromise libertarian principle. They are excellent examples of what libertarian intellectual activists need in order to compete successfully in the real world of political debate. As I told Ed Clark, Jack Kennedy would have been proud of those white papers. That's just a that's just a joke. Now, I was seriously amazed about what Rothbard had to say about those papers. Rothbard said it wasn't clear from the white paper on education, for instance, that Clark's tuition tax credit proposal was only a transitional plan, and yet here's what the white paper actually said, quote, it is fundamentally contrary to the principles of a free society for government to involve itself in education, it is time that we establish freedom of education and remove government from this area altogether, unquote. Rothbard said the white paper on foreign policy abandoned a principled policy of non-intervention. Here's what the white paper says, quote, the case for non-intervention is based on the moral principles of peace and respect for other peoples, unquote. That's what a principled policy of non-intervention means. Rothbard said the white paper on taxing and spending proposed a cut that was not perceivably more radical than Reagan's. Well, to say that an immediate 50% reduction in everyone's taxes, which is what the white paper proposed, cannot be perceived as more radical than Reagan's proposed reduction in tax increases is equivalent to saying that the Queen Mary can't be perceived as being larger than a rowboat. Rothbard also accused this with regard to that white paper accused this in writing of not calling for the abolition of OSHA. The section on OSHA in the white paper concludes with a sentence, quote, it should be abolished, unquote. But perhaps that is a little ambiguous. Libertarianism will prevail in our society only if we can make it relevant to real people. Only if its proponents are armed with the information, the facts necessary to flesh out the theoretical framework. Libertarianism isn't important because it is a beautifully integrated political philosophy, which it is. But because it is consistent with the nature of human beings, it allows them to live in peace, to secure prosperity, to pursue their individual values, and to control their own lives. But when Libertarian intellectual activists try to convey this to the public, the philosopher king gets indignant. Libertarian ideas are Marie Rothbard's private domain. He's the expert, so forget how good the Clark white papers are. Unauthorized people are dealing in ideas. And I'm not talking here simply about the policies that Rothbard has criticized like the white papers. I'm talking about anyone who reaches out to other people on behalf of Libertarianism. Here's Rothbard in the latest Libertarian form writing in a column that he calls This Is the Movement You've Chosen. His byline, incidentally, is the old curmudgeon, a title he bestowed upon himself many years ago. Rothbard takes Ken Fanny, a Libertarian in Alaska, to task for having said in a newspaper article quote, to the extent that we keep offering a philosophical diversion for PhDs, we're in trouble, unquote. Fanny goes on to say that Libertarians quote, see individualism in a very specific way, cutting wood tonight as opposed to waiting a week to cut wood because of some government regulation. Well, Rothbard just exploded at that. He mocks Fanny for espousing folk wisdom and suggested a campaign on a slogan of chop wood now. I'm afraid, big guy, Rothbard concludes condescendingly, we might have to keep some intellectuals around and even should you excuse the expression PhDs. But what Rothbard doesn't realize is that for the Libertarian party to succeed, it needs white papers and Ken Fanny much more than it needs PhDs scrutinizing Natcom voting records. It needs the folk wisdom that Rothbard mocks more than it needs scholarly nostalgia over Vladimir Lenin's organizing genius. If the Libertarian party is to succeed, we must create the subjective conditions that existed more than 200 years ago in colonial America and which gave birth to the first Libertarian revolution. I'm not talking about strategy here, I'm talking about a society in which intelligent lay people are actively involved in debate over questions of public policy. We have seen the bias court intellectuals and academics have toward increasing state power. In colonial America and for most of the 19th century for that matter, the informed public, the broadly defined Hayekian intellectuals of the period, had a self confidence in dealing with ideas of public policy, that made attempts by the would be ruling class to subjugate the population very risky business. People knew they had rights, they understood what caused inflation, they opposed taxation, they fought subsidies to business, they were literate informed and unintimidated by so called experts. It was a time when people fought for themselves and cared enough about their beliefs to try to convince others. According to historian Bernard Balin there were some 1500 political pamphlets published during the 20 year revolutionary period mostly by ordinary Americans quote, they did not transcend the ordinary limitations of their trade, Balin wrote they were rarely principals in the controversies of the time the American pamphleteers were almost to a man, lawyers ministers, merchants or planters heavily engaged in their occupations the American writers were profoundly reasonable people their pamphlets convey scorn, anger and indignation but rarely blind hate rarely panic fear they sought to convince their opponents and of course Thomas Paine's little booklet, Common Sense which was I think full of what one could call folk wisdom was read by about every literate person in the colonies and 120,000 copies were printed in a population of 3 million that would equate to some 9 million copies in print today in addition to each copy of Common Sense typically being read by several people it was not uncommon for it to be read aloud in taverns and other public meeting places according to Eric Foner what unifies Paine's ideology was that he embraced the dual transformation which undertook America in these years the emergence of mass political participation and the expansion of market relations in the economy and society Foner underscores the importance of popular political involvement in the issues of the day he writes the politicization of the mass of Philadelphians from the master craftsman to a significant segment of the laborers before was the most important development in Philadelphia's political life in the decade before independence the politicization of the artisan class was one of the fundamental political changes of the revolutionary generation which is to say he got the average intelligent layman they were convinced to become actively involved in these issues and did something about it this active involvement of academic intellectuals and business people in political affairs is something that continued for more than 100 years after the revolution as Leonard Ligio has pointed out the Democratic party particularly of the second half of the 19th century was remarkably libertarian favoring individual rights and hard money while opposing mercantilism political debate during much of that century was ideological and focused on the dangers of government power and the legitimacy of government actions relative to the rights of individuals as time went on however ideology gave way to coalition politics to special interest pressure groups into pork barrel legislation the concept of experts and authorities in the social sciences began to take hold politics became a game of delivering block votes with political leaders doing the thinking and the general public becoming less and less interested in political ideology per se the court intellectuals and government apologists finally began to have their way at the turn of the century as the gates to statism were thrown wide open why this happened is open to some controversy Ligio has pointed out that when PhDs became fashionable in the early 19th century the only place to get one was in Europe and young academics traveled there to get their PhDs or certificates of authority and then they returned to the US often with the old world intellectual baggage of anti-individualism but whatever the reasons it's clear that the 20th century has witnessed the rise of the academic expert and the subjugation of the average person and that's just like things have been arranged for most of human history and with that phenomenon of course has been the growth of the state to proportions the average colonial American would never have tolerated the state prevails now as it always has by convincing the intelligent layman that he shouldn't think for himself it is in the government's interest as we in this room know for you and for me to think that other people have an expertise that permits them to make decisions about our lives happily the state has been singularly unsuccessful in convincing the people in this room that a higher academic expert is anything other than a societal leech because of our independence of mind libertarians I think we do represent the only significant long-term threat to state hegemony in our society HLMENT can put it this way all that government can see in an original idea is potential change and hence an invasion of its prerogatives the most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out himself without regard to the prevailing superstitions in taboos almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable and so if he is romantic he tries to change it but if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are Alexis de Tocqueville put it this way after having thus successfully taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will the government then extends its arm over the whole community it covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules minute and uniform through which the most original minds and characters cannot penetrate to rise above the crowd the will of man is not shattered but softened, bent and guided men are seldom forced by it to act but they are constantly restrained from acting such a power does not destroy but it prevents existence it does not tyrannize but it compresses innervates, extinguishes and stupefies the people till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd now to a large extent experts in all fields want us to be a flock of timid animals government does, professional groups do and it seems certain libertarian experts do but those of us who are serious about creating a free society have an obligation to stand up for what we believe to take our case to the people and to enlist as many intellectual activists to the cause as possible I submit that the time for such a renaissance of intellectual activism by the intelligent lay public is at hand the objective conditions are there to quote a recent editorial in common wheel magazine which they felt compelled to entitle in defense of government quote and not since Herbert Spencer have there been so many intelligent people bent on proclaiming the state is the enemy so it's about time the fact is that more and more serious people are coming to the conclusion that the emperor has no clothes that the so called experts in government don't know what they're talking about the federal budget is literally out of control Reagan is proposing a budget of $757 billion and $100 billion deficit the social security system has a $6 trillion unfunded liability and most young people want out of it the famous Reagan tax cut has been exposed as fraud militarism and defense spending are coming under increasing criticism for instance David Broder of the Washington Post in an article last month entitled rising isolationism quoted a woman office worker in Peoria Illinois as saying quote I don't know why we should take responsibility for Poland when we can't get a handle on the problems in our own country and in our own business we can't police the whole world and then there's the economy high unemployment stagflation of severe liquidity crisis times are bad republicans are defending deficits and democrats are wringing their hands over them both parties seem to be seem to think risking nuclear war makes a lot of sense but they can't seem to agree on where we should precipitate one the two major parties have less respect by the public than at any time in this century people no longer care what government says it's going to do to fix our economy or to stop the communist they go in thousands to private hard money conferences to try to protect their wealth they attend standing room only lectures sponsored by physicians for social responsibility to learn the truth about nuclear war they participate by the millions in the underground economy where taxes don't exist for themselves again and that's good news for us if we're willing to do something about it the decade of the 80s could witness the return of ideas to the American political system just as people are learning to think for themselves about social issues and financial issues so could they start thinking for themselves politically the libertarian party has the philosophy for america's future but it's up to the libertarian activists to apply that philosophy to the political framework to the real world to make it meaningful to intelligent americans we need to become intellectual activists who learn the facts about issues and bring the libertarian analysis of those facts to the rest of our society we need candidates of course but we need intellectual activist candidates libertarian candidates need to debate the republican and democratic opponents armed with more knowledge of facts, figures and history for if we can demonstrate to the public that we know what we're talking about the public is going to listen and listening and learning about libertarianism can be an exciting thing for people starved for common sense and concerned about their future fridu krayak was i think writing to those of us involved in libertarian movement when he wrote unless we can make the philosophic foundations of a free society once more a living intellectual issue and its implementation a task which challenges the ingenuity and imagination of our liveliest minds the prospects of freedom are indeed dark but if we can regain that belief in the power of ideas which was the mark of liberalism at its best the battle is not lost the mark of liberalism at its best of course was america's revolutionary period it is up to us to reawaken that independence and love of liberty that was the first libertarian revolution thank you we want to thank our speaker for the day on behalf of convention 82 the clc and of course myself i understand it's going to be here still if you have any questions afterwards we're going to be having i believe another meeting in here starting in a few minutes so i'm sure he'd like to hear from you just as we've heard from him thank you