 Thank you. And welcome to the 1979 Libertarian Presidential Nominating Convention. This is a great year for Libertarians and for the Libertarian Party, a year of great challenges and of great opportunities. Look across the room, thousands of people gathered here in Los Angeles today and throughout the rest of the weekend are here to celebrate the growth of a dynamic new political party and a dynamic new political movement, Libertarianism and the Libertarian Party. We have come a long way in the last eight years, a long, long way. Beginning in the minds of a handful of visionaries, the Libertarian Party began with a small group of people gathered in Denver, Colorado. We came from our roots in the tradition of the American Revolution, our roots of a great classical liberal tradition, a tradition dedicated to opposing tyranny in all forms, a tradition dedicated to individual liberty for all men and all women, black and white. The Libertarian Party has indeed come a long way and I think we should here applaud, take this opportunity to applaud three of the people who have helped to make this possible. David Nolan, the founder of the Libertarian Party and the first national chair, Dave, you have our love and our gratitude. Let us also thank the two succeeding national chairs who have helped make this party into the mighty political force that it's about to become an American politics, Ed Crane and David Berglin. Soon, Nolan, last but not least, let us give a little thanks to two men who carried our banner and held it very high indeed in our two previous races for the presidency, John Hospers and Roger Lee McBride. Those are our roots, those are where we have come from. But ladies and gentlemen, we have just begun. This next year and our race for presidency of the United States, we are going to be on the ballot in anywhere from 40 to 48 states. We have in state after state begun to capture people's attentions. We have in county and town and city after town and city begun to capture the attention of the American people who are sick unto death with the two party system in this country and who want a real political alternative for the first time in their lives. So we have people's attention and I believe that we have the answers to the problems that the American people face. Do we have the will to victory? I say yes, we do. I believe that we do. Strongly and my faith and confidence is strengthened. Every time we hold a convention, a meeting, a conference, and faces like those in the audience before me come to pay homage to the spirit of individual liberty and to fight for the victory of the libertarian ideal in this country. The Cassandras of our age cry out, no, no, there is no chance. They see that government stands today as everywhere hostile to human liberty and happiness. That it leads the people, that loads the people with taxes and with debts. They see the public corruption and abuses which have grown up around us. But they think that the American people have lost their will to resist and to fight for their own futures. But they are wrong, ladies and gentlemen, all the evidence from the victory of Proposition 13 to the massive surge of sentiment against big government in this country over the last few years shows that they are wrong. The American people know as we know that when tyranny is nearing, submission is a crime. We stand today in a crossroads in American history, badly in need of a new leadership and a new direction. And what are we offered by the Republicans and the Democrats? Who do they offer up as leaders? And what are their programs? Let's begin by looking just for a second at the Republican Party, hopeless shell that it is. We have running for president in the Republican Party, such towering figures as Robert Dole, who has said that he is running for president to get people, quote, to believe in themselves again instead of relying on Washington, a noble libertarian sentiment. Except the next day he went into the United States Senate and became one of the main forces pushing for the extension of the food stamp program. This kind of petty hypocrisy, which Bob Dole is only one of many representatives in this country, is only one of the many reasons why the Republican Party stands today as bankrupt, having no vision and no alternative to offer the American people. Shall we then turn to Jerry Ford, who Lyndon Johnson called correctly in one of the only correct statements that Lyndon Johnson ever made? One of the wooden soldiers of the status quo. Jerry Ford, you remember, was appointed vice president by Richard Nixon after Spiro Agnew resigned because Nixon thought he was so dumb and competent and mediocre that they wouldn't dare impeach him and leave Jerry Ford as president. Well, I think Jerry Ford is a decent enough man and we can leave him rest in peace, one hopes. Shall we then turn to Ronald Reagan? You guessed my answer. Ronald Reagan postures as a conservative opponent of big government. But what is the record, ladies and gentlemen? The record is that since 1964, when he made his famous television speech for Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan has progressively accommodated himself to the status quo and become one of the staunchest defenders in practice of big government of our time. In a recent press conference, he was asked his position on national health insurance. You know what this great defender of liberty said? That he hadn't made up his mind. While in office, this great defender of individual liberty opposed legalizing marijuana, vetoed several bills to reduce the penalties for marijuana possession to a misdemeanor, during his eight years as governor of California, the state budget more than doubled, from $4.6 billion to $10.6 billion. In eight years, that puts him on the level with Nelson Rockefeller, ladies and gentlemen. And this great advocate of cutting taxes and cutting government spending, when does he raise his voice? He raised his voice to protest aid cutoffs to Brazil and Chile. If this is individual liberty, I for one want none of it. Shall we then turn perhaps to George Bush? The former head of the CIA, who promises us a new candor. This man is one of the true monsters of American politics today. He is proclaimed that the country can't go back to a laissez-faire Adam Smith economy at the same time spouting Republican bromides against big government. He has criticized the Carter administration for failing to give stronger support to the Shah of Iran. He's proclaimed that we've got to get off the backs. Get this. We've got to get off the backs of the FBI and the CIA. And he not only favors this great opponent of big government and aren't they all these days. He not only favors registration for the draft, but one one raises the question of what he might use drafted men and women for when it's forced to take a look at his foreign policy position, where he said that it is not intervention in another country's affairs to support friendly governments facing revolution, like the Shah of Iran. That's not intervention Bush said. That's helping. So I think we have to ask the question here. Mr. Bush, if he had been president and we had had a draft and we'd hand the standby manpower, whether or not hundreds of thousands of American boys and American women might be today in Iran dying and killing for the sake of a repugnant creature like the Shah of Iran. I think, ladies and gentlemen, that the fact that such a man could be running for president of the United States in this country is a real symbol of political bankruptcy that we face in this country. Turn to the last of the major Republicans, a man who I particularly find most contemptible. John Connolly, the turncoat Democrat who manages to become a protege of both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Recently, Big John was asked who he thought the greatest president of the 20th century was. And this master opponent of big government, as he postures this week on the cover of Time magazine, proclaimed Lyndon B. Johnson. But he was equally a supporter of Richard Nixon. Nixon noted in his memoirs that when he unleashed the Christmas bombing of Connolly in 1972, quote, one of my strongest supporters was John Connolly, who called daily to report some new and positive sampling of public opinion. Very conscientious. And certainly, as an aside here, to me, as certain were celebrating a certain split from Yath last night, there's certain a bitter irony in the fact that Richard Vigory, the kingpin of the new right, has recently joined the Connolly for president camp. Vigory, many of you may know, got his start with Yath, Young Americans for Freedom. While Connolly, of course, got his start as a protege for LBJ, Yath, of course, in the mid-1960s was one of the bitterest enemies of LBJ. It just goes to show you what a certain kind of ugly corruption is undertaken, the right wing in this country in the last 15 years when Yath can move in the camp of Lyndon B. Johnson. I agree rather strongly with Steve Chapman's assessment that Connolly is reminiscent of John Randolph's comparison of a political enemy to a rotten mackerel by moonlight shining and stinking at once. But this is not the end of Connolly's villainies. It is only the beginning. According to William Sapphire, the Nixon speechwriter, was John Connolly, who persuaded Richard Nixon to impose wage and price controls by showing him where he could find the hidden support of big business. This is our great free enterprise. And according to National Review, he fought his way up, John Connolly, from the hand-scrabble farm to genuine wealth in the Lyndon Baines Johnson tradition, which is to say that he used political power to amass and then to secure his economic power. Now, this great enemy of big government, in order to provide a discipline for young people, it has endorsed compulsory national service, which would require every 18-year-old to work for some level of government, a plan which the great Milton Friedman has properly called a Hitler Youth type of program. This masterful enemy of big government endorsed Nelson Rockefeller's plan for a $100 billion federal slush fund to bankroll the private energy industry. He has endorsed the guaranteed annual income, the re-establishment of the New Deal Reconstruction Finance Corporation to bail out cities like New York. And he offered up this advice to New York that it ought to blackmail the federal government into giving it bailout funds by threatening to dump the federal bonds that it held on the market. This Reconstruction Finance Corporation would channel loans to government-approved businesses. He has approved government loans to Lockheed and to Penn Central. He is a strong supporter of increasing federal milk price supports. And he told Nixon during the Nixon administration that this should be done to make the very lobby, quote-unquote, more loyal. In the next election, he opposed Jerry Ford's minuscule proposed tax cut in 1975. And he then both called for a 5% across-the-board tax cut, including defense and, after that, endorsed Carter's 3% increase in the defense budget. John Connolly has said that he wants to get a partnership going between government and private industry. And he said that it would be unwise during wage and price controls to think that we can go back to where we were before. American business and labor may have to get used to the idea of living within certain parameters, he said, in the middle of these terrible controls which drove business after business into the dirt, which saw American labor as not being able to pay for their own homes and for their own cars and for their own lifestyles that they had fought so hard to win. Ladies and gentlemen, you ask me, these are the parameters of fascism. Now, the last thing I'll say about big John is that he once said something very true. Declared recently, quote, anytime you start looking for a central government for favors, you sow the seeds of inevitable deep-seated corruption. It can't be any other way, unquote. Well, he ought to know. If you ask me, this man is the veritable symbol of political corruption in this country today. Now, if you ask overall what the real problems with the Republican Party is, you'll get an answer if you ask Governor Thompson of Illinois, you know what he said? He said the problem with the Republican Party is it sticks to principles too much. Indeed, if you ask me, it's hard to find any principles there at all. Now, if we turn from the Republicans to the Democrats, we simply take one more lower rung into hell. There are three prominent people running for president, potentially, and among the Democrats today. Jerry Brown, Edward Kennedy, and Jimmy Carter. I don't have too much to say about any one of the three of them. Brown, of course, is a great enemy of big government as they all are. I sort of think of Jerry Brown as sort of a Hindu mystic version of Richard Nixon. He supports a new space program to get this country moving again. You might conclude from this that he's a little bit spaced out, but he supports compulsory national health insurance. And the plain fact is that while Reagan's budgets grew at twice the rate of Edmund G. Brown's, Jerry Brown's budget have grown at twice the rate of Ronald Reagan's. This master political chameleon, Cole Proposition 13, a mirage, a rip-off, a consumer fraud before the election, and within 24 hours he had become its biggest defender. He is a big spender for his sewer energy authority, for shale oil, for renewable resources. He called for no new taxes when running for office, then turned on a dime and advocated a windfall proper tax, and he said it's not a tax, it's a revenue raising measure. Wow, all that you can say about Jerry Brown as far as I'm concerned is that when he proclaims that small is beautiful, one has moved to suspect that he is referring to his own integrity, consistency, and brains. For those of you who don't live in California are not bombarded by this mumbling mystic day in and day out, there is a very special kind of eeriness to this man, a very special kind of eeriness indeed, and I think that's that kind of creepiness that he projects. I mean he does less harm than many other people, granted, but that kind of creepiness that he projects, which is responsible I think for the fact that Californians heroically would prefer many other candidates for president other than Jerry Brown. There's nothing much to be said about Ted Kennedy, he looks right now as a formidable candidate, and in fact I hope he runs and he'll probably win. If he does it just might cure the American people of their infatuation with the Kennedy clique and with the mystique of New Deal liberalism. Seems that many of the American people yearn so much for strong leadership in the face of people like Jimmy Carter, but they're willing to take even the most ardent apostle of big government in the United States Senate today. He is a man who wants to impose a bone crushing level of taxation on the American people through his national health service plan. He is a man who supports big government in area after area. If you turn from Kennedy to Jimmy Carter, well all I can say is it's another step down. And I was sort of fishing when I was doing this speech for sort of a certain symbolic thing to pick up about Jimmy Carter and his administration. I mean what can you say about the Carter administration at this point that anyone else hasn't said? Well I came across the front page item in the San Francisco Chronicle about Carter's hair raising tail. It seems that while canoeing Jimmy Carter was attacked in the water by a killer rabbit. He was the only one in the canoe but the reporters along the side of the creek and his staff saw him standing up and whacking away at something with an oar. Later he insisted that in fact he had been attacked by a charging killer rabbit and he was beating it off to save his life. That it came after him with teeth barred. Well if you really want to symbol the Carter administration here, he had pictures blown up, they had pictures known that could see him hitting with the oar, they could see him moving around on the boat but they didn't see any rabbit, I'm not alone a killer rabbit. But Carter insisted that the Bonzoic bunny was really there and had the pictures blowing up bigger and bigger and indeed now his staff says yes indeed they see the killer rabbit. But they're not going to release any pictures, that would be demeaning. Look, there's a double-edged logic to this, it's rather charming. On the one hand, on the one hand we have Carter being attacked even by the rabbits and on the other hand there's the sad symbolic spectacle of the Carter administration, the president of the United States beating a rabbit off with an oar. Ladies and gentlemen, these are the Republicans and Democrats. Are these what the American people deserve? Let them hear you in Washington. Are these what the American people deserve? Think too little of the American people. Jimmy Carter said he'd give the American people a government as good and decent and honest as they were and I think he slandered them. These are the candidates who are trotted before us. These are purveyors of privilege, promoters of political pull, puny demagogues who pounce and pray upon the American people. Ladies and gentlemen, compared with men like these, Clark and Huncher loom as giants. If we move from there to the only other political alternative offered the American people to the citizens party proposed and headed by Barry Commoner, we take one step even lower. Every solution the citizen party calls for offers us a call for more and more government power. They offer a cure for the disease of government by proposing that we move toward ranked socialism, nationalizing our energy industry to give the government even more power over our energy needs. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the final struggle of the new class for dominance in this society. It is the hand of power reaching out to clutch and to seize. It's enough to make one wonder whether this is a political party for our citizens or against them. What have these two parties that we have been faced with low these hundred years done? For 100 years now we have been ruled by the Republicans and the Democrats united against the people, pursuing folly and policy indiscriminately always to the detriment of liberty and a prosperity and a peace. They launched the civil war to fight the consequences of a slavery they had sanctioned and promoted. They launched a wicked inflation, income tax and the slavery of the draft to turn brother against brother treating black people first as slaves then as lepers, then as mere boats. Individual human beings treated as anything except human beings. They launched against us the protective tariff setting up a war of victimized consumer against privileged business, wrecking free trade and promoting the economics of nationalism and empire. They have divided the American people by massive grants of privilege to some, subsidies to some and opposing special burdens on others. They have hurled at us one regulatory agency after another, choking the American people in every area of their lives. And ICC, Interstate Commerce Commission first promoted our railroads at the expense of the liberties of our people and has finally seen our rail system threaten on the edge of its grave. It has turned trucker against trucker with the ruinous arbitrariness of its regulations which have led to not but waste and corruption. They have impressed upon us an antitrust system of cynical cast, permitting first one business and then another to use the force of law to shackle competitors, forcing all but the most privileged businesses to tremble and bow down before government bureaucracies of power at once frightening and incomprehensible making the state the master of our people's economy. They have stimulated the growth of powerful interest groups better to manipulate them in the service of power, better to foment that creeping internal corruption which better serves the governing elite as it fastens its control over every segment of our lives. The Republicans and Democrats have brought us jingoism and imperialism, the Spanish-American war and its gloomy legacy, the heritage of imperialism and militarism. They have fastened upon us the Federal Reserve System with its continued monetary exploitation of the American people. They have brought us the income tax, lied us into World War I, imposed upon us, prohibition, our vicious drug laws and to secure their own power, they have continually set one ethnic group and racial group against another there to set in motion those ugly clashes which benefit none but those in power who feed off hatred. They have together brought us racist immigration laws differing only on which group was to be more despised and scapegoated at the moment. They have shackled the American farmer, humbling these proud independent souls before petty regulations and demeaning subsidies. They have launched a public education system which today sees our children without knowledge or independence or spirit or hope. They have brought us the Great Depression using tragedy always as a pretext for more and more and more power. They have lied us into World War II, Korea, Vietnam and more. They have used American use as fodder in their wars, slaughtering foreigners abroad across the globe for momentary political gain, never caring about the lives they have ruined or the future of the countries whose land they have stained with blood. This is the legacy of the Republicans and the Democrats, ladies and gentlemen and we have for too long been silent beheld with silent indignation the cruelties and injustices that they have imposed upon us. And now when we stand at a crossroads in American history, badly in need of a new direction, they trot out leaders with feet firmly planted in the past. Is this what the American people deserve? Do they deserve to be continually harassed by ever mounting taxes and inflation by an energy crisis made in Washington by a threatened return of the slavery of the draft or by a veiled threats of waging yet another war? This one, undoubtedly in the Middle East to secure the oil which our own price controls prohibit American businessmen from producing? Is it any wonder that we are gathered here today, September 6th, 1979 in Los Angeles to declare that we have had enough? Is there any doubt, any longer that to pursue another course that we need a three-party system in this country? And that the new party, that party of hope and of progress must be a party dedicated to securing that simple system of natural liberty for which our own forefathers fought and died only to have their vision betrayed by a bloody power? Or that that party as a libertarian party dedicated to individual liberty, peace and prosperity? Isn't this what the American people deserve? Don't they deserve to be treated as human beings to live their lives in dignity and in liberty? For us, these are more than platitudes and slogans trotted out in election years to win votes than to be put upon a shelf there to gather dust. For us, these are principles, principles of individual liberty which stand as the fountain head of a new program and a new political party ready to make its mark upon the American people, all the American people. In the area of energy, we face crisis after crisis after decades of controls and planning, subsidizing first one form of energy and then another. We mean to solve, we libertarians mean to solve our energy problems by the simple move of deregulating the American economy. Freeing prices and ending our decades long subsidies for nuclear power, our encouragement of dependence on Middle Eastern oil, our monopoly grants a special privilege to public utilities. Let us repeal Price Anderson and establish strict liability for nuclear and other forms of power. And the next time a near catastrophe like that at Three Mile Island occurs, let the utilities pay for the $300 million in cleanup costs. And let's stop them from soaking the taxpayers and the rate paying public. Let them not try to evade responsibilities for their actions again. In the field of education, let us begin the long and difficult but necessary process of getting the government out of education. We must repeal compulsory attendance laws and permit once again competition in education by tax credits and massive tax cuts. Let us end inflation by stopping the monetary exploitation of the American people. By stopping the arbitrary printing of money and ending government control of our money supply. In the area of civil liberties, let us repeal all victimist crime laws. Let us end the drug laws and vice squads stopping once and for all police harassment of gay people in this country. In the area of unemployment, let us end the racist minimum wage laws and our vicious labor legislation which pits one group against another. Let us end protective labor legislation and licensing laws which discriminate against women, minorities and the poor. In the area of foreign policy, let us fight the draft and any other form of slavery. Let us end that bipartisanship foreign policy of global intervention which is wreaked havoc across the globe and make no mistake about it. We mean what we say. Let the governing classes be put on notice that we mean to change the course of history. We're tired of being regulated and controlled by bureaucracies without limit. We're tired of being brainwashed by a public school system without dignity, decency or freedom. We're tired of a foreign policy which divides us into victims and executioners scattering victims across the globe. We're tired of being beaten down by the bone crushing level of taxation in this country. We're tired of black people and other minorities being treated as political footfalls without dignity or rights. And we're tired of being trampled on by the iron feet of oppression and neither are these for us or libertarians mere abstractions. Because we know that behind every oppression there lies a face. Sarah Bart, 16 year old widow, kicked out of her home for non-payment of property taxes in California two years ago. The bitterness, the pain. 68 year old Lois Faulkner, nicknamed by her friends and neighbors Grandma Marijuana. An old woman in a wheelchair sentenced to prison for selling marijuana to neighbors. John Singer shot in the back in the battle of state authorities because he refused to send his children to public schools. An Argentinian exchange student in a New York City gay bar when the bar was raided. Since being gay is a cause for deportation in this country he fled to the second story leaped out the window to freedom who was impaled on a stake in the courtyard below. Don't these people too, ladies and gentlemen, deserve to live in dignity and in liberty. Ladies and gentlemen, in August of 1857, great black abolitionist Frederick Douglass in his passionate campaign against slavery said that quote, the whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to our August claims have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all absorbing and for the time being, putting all other things into silence but it must do this so it does nothing. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom yet deprecate, agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you will find out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them and these will continue till they are resisted. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those they oppress. Ladies and gentlemen, the American people have reached the limits of their endurance for we are a proud people. A nation built on struggle and on achievement. Our ancestors came to this country because they would not bow down before kings and before tyrants. They came to this country to build new lives for themselves and their children. Lives unfettered by chains and political cruelty but the chains and the cruelty of cross the oceans now threatening us all. Everywhere on this planet, the hands of power have clutched and have seized governments horrible and destructive, fierce and inhuman have been founded in blood and supported by barbarity. Ladies and gentlemen, tyranny is here and submission is a crime. We have had enough and we are going to resist to resist the stale politics of the status quo which daily drains our lives of wealth and of joy and of hope. We are going to resist the stagnant politics the Republicans and Democrats who would spend eternity hampering us, taxing us, regulating us, oppressing us, angered by their callousness, deadened by their inhumanity. Let us rise up each and every one of us, men and women, white and black and issue our declaration of independence from the two-party monopoly in this country. And moved by a love of liberty and of justice, let us build a new and decent party, a party of hope, a party of the future, a party based upon the inalienable rights of men and women, one and all, to live their own lives as they see fit, free from the dead hand of coercion and of violence. Let us proclaim to all within earshot that the libertarian party is the party of progress, that we are the new humanitarians come to resist the tyranny which has the American people by the throat. And if they ask us by what right do you resist, we shall answer them, that we are the American people and we will not bend before the power of the state. The libertarian party has come of age. Let's go to work. Thank you deeply.