 Welcome to Free Thoughts, a podcast about libertarianism and the ideas that influence it. Free Thoughts is a project of the Cato Institute's Libertarianism.org. I'm Aaron Powell, editor of Libertarianism.org, and a research fellow at the Cato Institute. And I'm Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the Cato Institute's Center for Constitutional Studies. Every week on Free Thoughts, we talk about libertarianism, but just what is libertarianism? To answer this important question we brought in an expert, our colleague David Bose, executive vice president of the Cato Institute, and author of Libertarianism, A Primer. David, let me start by asking you for the elevator pitch. Just what is this libertarianism thing that we keep talking about? When I was first promoting libertarianism, a primer on radio and TV, the line I came up with, the very quick line was, libertarianism is the idea that adult individuals have the right and the responsibility to make the important decisions about their lives. And I would point out, you know, each one of those words is important. We're talking about adults, rules for children may be different. We're talking about individuals, we're talking about individual rights, but the corollary of rights is responsibility. That's part of libertarianism, too. Make the important decisions about our lives, and then, if the host didn't interrupt me at that point, I can go on to say, and there are so many ways that our government doesn't allow us to make those important decisions. It takes a good bit of our money. It forces us to invest it for retirement in a particular way. It tells us where our kids go to school. It tells us who we can marry, although, increasingly, it's less restrictive on that. It tells us what we can eat and smoke and drink in different ways. So in all of those ways, government is interfering with individual freedom. So in your experience, having promoted the ideas of libertarianism for a while, is the most common reaction an understanding of that, or is it an idea that it's naive, almost, or a little simple-minded? I think at that level, people understand it. And one of the problems, of course, is that when we state libertarianism, that simply, who could disagree with that? Everybody has the right to live his life the way he chooses, so long as he doesn't interfere on the equal rights of others. Almost everybody will agree with that. They may have a different view of what interferes with the equal rights of others, from my view, or they may simply forget that they believe that when somebody happens to mention something they don't like, like using drugs or paying people less than the minimum wage. All of a sudden, then, I don't know for sure if they think, well, that interferes with your rights. Certainly, I've heard from conservatives the claim that somehow knowing that other people are using drugs or reading pornography or engaging in homosexuality is interfering with their rights somehow. I think a lot of what you say, and so the libertarianism is allowing people to live their lives as they see fit and getting government out of the way to let people do that. But a lot of these examples that you give, it seems to me that people who are in favor of government involvement in schooling or government regulating food production or all of these other things, it's not that they're saying, well, what we really need is government to come in and control people. They're saying, look, what you said is great, and we all want people to be able to have liberty and live the kinds of lives they want, but they need a government to help them do that. So we want you to be able to eat whatever kind of food you want, but we want to make sure that the food you eat isn't poisoned, isn't rotten when it gets to you. We want to make sure that you have the kind of education that you need in order to live a fulfilled life. So we're not trying to control you. We're just trying to give you that structure you need in order to live well. Are those people missing the point? What's the difference between government trying to help and government trying to control? Well, yeah, I think they're missing the point. And yes, in a lot of cases, people do intend that we should all be able to live free liberal lives and all of these things will help. One of the pitches for Obamacare is if you don't have to worry about healthcare, you can quit your job and start a startup. So if you want entrepreneurship, you should make it easier for people to quit their jobs and launch a startup. So I guess this is like a lot of things where you have to look at dynamic processes. What will happen if we do it this way? One of the things that happens if the government makes decisions for us, and I don't see how anybody can argue that the government isn't making the decision about where we should send our children to school. They may think it's a good idea, but they are making that decision. One of the things that happens if government makes your decisions for you is you never learn to make those decisions. If you've never had to pick a school for your child, you may very well feel that you don't know how to pick a school, but you know how to pick a car, and that's pretty complicated, too. And you don't even think about, I don't know how to pick a car. You know that you ask your friends, you ask your father, you buy a copy of a car and driver magazine, you buy consumer reports. There are lots of ways to find out how to buy a car, but we don't have any of those things for schools, or we do for private schools, but in a much less visible format. So, yeah, a lot of people believe that that would be the case, but we're taking responsibility away from people. If we tell people how they should eat, then they don't develop their own good eating habits. If we tell people they can't use drugs, then they don't get a chance to discover what's interesting to them and what is, and what the consequences of actions are, and the point Hayek made, if we knew what the outcome of liberty would be, then we wouldn't need the liberty. The point of liberty is that we don't know what the outcome is. Even if I'm very well informed about what the best life for me right now is, that might change. I didn't know that the internet was part of the best life for me 15 years ago, and if we had even more rigid control, then I never would have found out that the internet could be a fulfilling part of life. So, do you think that I get a lot of, you hear about the word extreme a lot, taken out against libertarianism. It's an extremist philosophy. Sometimes that just could be just an insult of some type, but would you accept that to some degree, extreme or principle to some degree? I remember reading some years ago about, you know, a kind of declension or conjugation, whatever it was that goes sort of, you sweat Aaron perspires, I sparkle. So, one of the ways of looking at this for any political advocate is, I am principled, you are extreme, Aaron is a pig-headed fool. Anyone can say that depending on where you are. I also think one way to look at it is, we don't think about the things the government does that kind of are extreme. They arrest a million people a year for smoking pot. That seems kind of extreme. I had a reporter way back in 1980 when I was traveling with a libertarian presidential candidate. A reporter said to me something about extreme and I said, no, we reject the extremes. We reject the extreme idea that the government should take half of all the money a working man makes. We reject the extreme idea that American boys should be sent to die in conflicts around the world that have nothing to do with the vital interests of the United States. Now, if you say, well, it's not extreme because we're already doing it and that makes it not extreme, okay, but I kind of think it is extreme to take money from people at the point of a gun and especially to take as much as many states do and it's extreme to send people to die in deserts where American vital interests are not involved. So you mentioned the 80 presidential campaign and that's another topic I think is interesting where now we hear a lot about libertarianism, but it's been around for a while. I think it was... We got 1% in 1980 at Clark, correct? Right. And some might have said that was the height of libertarianism and maybe different times we hear a new era of libertarianism is emerging. What is your take on the general path since you've been doing this? Are we at the height of libertarian thinking now is this a time where we have opportunities before us that weren't there or is it just sort of a cyclical process? Well, that's an interesting question and I feel so immersed in it that I have trouble being able to tell. I do think you could say that 1978 to 1982 probably was the high point for the libertarian party. Gary Johnson got more votes in 2012 than Ed Clark got in 1980, but he got a slightly smaller percentage. So the libertarian party seemed more on the cusp of something big back then. And in some ways there was a growing and self-conscious libertarian movement in the late 70s and early 80s and in some ways I feel maybe there's not as much of an exciting self-conscious libertarian movement these days. But that's partly because libertarian ideas have moved more into the mainstream. Some people would say they have become less radical themselves. Most libertarians maybe are more freedmenite than Rothbardian these days. However, it may be that there are just as many Rothbardians as there were in 1979. It's just that there's a lot more people who are basically libertarian but not quite that extreme. So one of the questions involved in all of that is what does it mean to be libertarian? And in my book I have a pretty forthright principle definition. I focus it around self-ownership and the non-aggression axiom. On the other hand, in my e-book, The Libertarian Boat, and the studies we did on that, we have a real loose definition of libertarian. It's just to three kind of vague questions about the size of government than we call you a libertarian and we get 15% of the American public. So I do think there is this broader group who have been identified now and politicians or political observers are identifying libertarianism as a strand in American politics. They talk about the libertarian faction in Congress and we never saw that before. So in those kinds of ways there's growth even though some of the institutions of the old libertarian movement have kind of withered. Let me ask you about these basic principles that you say you argue for in your book. One of the critiques that is often leveled at libertarians, especially ones who advance the non-aggression axiom or principle, as you mentioned, which is this idea that we cannot aggress against the person or property of another person. Who has not himself initiated aggression. So that would mean that I can't, it would be impermissible for me to force you to just kind of pen you into a corner and threaten you with force in order to prevent you from leaving. But the argument that's often given against libertarianism or against this kind of libertarianism is that the property rights themselves is a form of aggression because they're me saying this area here is mine and if you come into it I can now aggress against you. And so do we, how do we get to this kind of basic set of principles that violence is one thing but kind of these strong property rights which are really important for libertarianism and kind of the basis for a lot of our views about the proper role of government, the proper role of taxation, all these other things. So how do we get to that and how do we go about defending those ideas? Well being modestly a public intellectual and definitely not a philosopher I'm not sure if I can prove the case for private property. To some extent in most public debate that I engage in, people accept the idea that there's private property and the question is, well how full should the rights of private property be? Should you be able to do this or that so do we justify it entirely? The most obvious way to justify property rights it seems to me is that civilization would be impossible without them. At a Cato gathering recently I gave this cartoon history of the world and I'd collected cartoons for decades and I finally put them together in a PowerPoint and the very first one shows one caveman saying to another let's cut the earth into little squares and sell them. Well when you put it that way it sounds ridiculous and maybe with two people it is but you get to maybe ten people and then you start saying I want to build a hut and I don't want you to be able to come and take it and to do that I have to know that what I do on this property is mine and therefore the concept of property rights emerged in extremely early society and you could call it homesteading I just went over here and I said this part is mine and I drew a line around it and then whatever I build on it or store on it I'm supposed to be protected and eventually the rule of law grew up to develop that. Now that is a consequentialist argument it's not a purely what is the term deontological argument and maybe that is the basis for where we start this process so the most compelling argument for property rights is we could not have five billion people or one billion people without it we could not have houses and apartment buildings and the internet and microphones none of that would happen which is why every human society developed a system of property. We talked a lot so far about the things that government is not allowed to do or that government shouldn't do what is government supposed to do in a libertarian system what is the proper role of government should it have any role at all? Well as you know libertarians disagree about that certainly if we talk about the 15% then they think that maybe they think government should do less than it does but they may not have a very radical view of how much less it should do and I wrote something a few years ago saying libertarians are not anti-government which is a term often thrown around in the media we are for limited constitutional government and as you know every time you forward that quote on Twitter you get people tweeting back well I'm anti-government I don't believe in any government so I know there are people who believe that the way to protect life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is to have no state, no government anarchists anarchists yes my own view is that the protection of the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness or life, liberty and property is an appropriate role for government that I don't think government needs to provide public goods much less private goods it doesn't need to make us better people but it does need to protect our rights and so our right to life our right to liberty we should and so I agree with the traditional limited government view that for that you need national defense not wars around the world but national defense you need courts to settle disputes and try violators and you need police to apprehend and to maybe to prevent crime and certainly to apprehend criminals that's my view of what an appropriate limited constitutional government is now in the in the scope of you mentioned the 70s I think we can, would you say that the modern libertarian movement begins in the 70s more or less? history is a complicated process the modern libertarian movement begins the first time one caveman says to another back off put down that rock and the American Revolution and abolitionism and the peace movement and the libertarian movement but in some sense you could say there's probably two places you could place it there's a revival of liberal ideas that are beginning to be solidified into libertarian ideas in the reaction to the new deal so for instance 1943 when Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Patterson and Ayn Rand all published books that's one possible beginning of the modern libertarian movement so 1943 is one possible beginning in the late 60s and early 70s there's kind of another beginning the founding of the international, the society for individual liberty groups like that the founding of the libertarian party then in 71, 72 and all of that process sort of continues until the late 70s during the era of Vietnam Watergate and Stagflation which probably is something that's pushing a lot of young people to look for alternatives and then the movement starts I think to broaden and become more diffuse but yes certainly one place you could date the beginning of the modern libertarian movement is around 1970 and since that time we've had going to Aaron's question about what government should be doing and the idea is here of limited, consciously limited minimal government but there's a lot of people who have very strong views as you mentioned anarchists and other views on how much government should be doing and since the 70s that have created a lot of divisions and it's something you've seen a lot of so your view on the purity of the divisions about libertarianism in general whether or not that these ideas of purity tests and exactly what government should be doing and you're not really libertarian unless you disagree with X, Y and Z how do you take that debate in general? Well you don't have a very vibrant political movement unless you have a lot of argument going on you know if you have a revolutionary vanguard party like the communist party then maybe you're not supposed to have debate at least you have democratic centralism that once the decision is made then everybody goes along with it but the socialist movement had all kinds of divisions so I think it's a sign of health generally that there are lots of arguments going on In 1970 in the 70s probably the real debate was sort of anarchists versus limited government advocates and in the libertarian party they sort of came to an agreement that we're against all the following things and we will not affirmatively say we all agree on supporting these things. I think as a political movement that's probably the way libertarianism works we're generally against government spending against high taxes most of us against the federal income tax against the federal reserve against foreign wars against the drug war if you got rid of those things how much of government would be left and how much of that would you then want to get rid of I don't see how why a political movement has to agree on that we have a lot of things to get done and that doesn't mean that along the way we won't propose to get rid of this piece that you think shouldn't be gotten rid of even though all these other things should so not everybody can be in the same place all the time. The more troubling thing to me is too many crazy elements of libertarianism that I think are not very helpful in presenting the ideas to the world that are a distraction from the real discussion and I'm not I'm not saying the real world is just the political movement I do think the philosophical movement getting the principles right is important. If I want to think for instance about how to think about some proposed new copyright law the first thing I'd like to do is clarify what I believe libertarianism teaches us about intellectual property and then say does this new law move us closer to it or not. Now it's possible that there are it's possible that without knowing that I really believe at heart about intellectual property I can still believe this bill or this bill is a bad one but generally I know those things because they move away from a society that eliminates organized coercion. So I think it's important to get the philosophical part right even though as a political movement we don't all have to agree. Let me ask about compassion because I think this is one of the things that's often thrown at libertarians is that we're not compassionate. That we believe in these strict rights and that the government's job is to enforce those rights, protect us from violence, protect our property, enforce contracts and that that sounds all well and good but there are going to be people who fall through the cracks of the riches that the market creates or people who are hurt through no fault of their own and then don't you need government to step in and help those people. So I think it's important to keep in mind that we don't care about these welfare programs to provide a safety net. What about the people who slip through the cracks? Right and so we're told that because libertarians generally aren't in favor of those sorts of programs that we lack compassion that we don't care about the poor that this is a philosophy of just like I want to keep what's mine and I don't really care about other people and that's I know that's not so how do we go about responding to that? I mean do we need the government in order to provide this compassion to help people in need? Well that's a good question and you're right it is one of the most common criticisms of libertarianism. I think proper libertarians are compassionate the libertarian philosophy is one that opposes concentrations of power that is concerned with the rights of every person including the poorest and weakest and has demonstrated through history that it is the way to make to liberate poor people from the backbreaking labor and short lives that are the natural condition of mankind. But it's true that libertarians don't wear their compassion on their sleeves and having concluded that the way to get widespread prosperity especially for the least advantage is to have a system of individual rights property and free markets we don't necessarily feel we have to keep pointing out that that's the virtue of it our our task becomes insisting that the government not violate these rules which will in fact make most people better off most of the time so we absolutely can point to the fact that we have risen up out of the muck and beyond backbreaking labor because we have free markets not because we have government doing a lot of things for people why do we not have child labor anymore not really because of the child labor laws the child labor laws came in as the market got wealthy enough that people didn't want their children working anymore so we do do that and when we think about eliminating poverty eliminating want we should think about the systems that we do favor and not just the ones that we don't favor we favor the family which is you know the greatest institution of redistribution we favor economic growth and free markets which is the institution that allows all families to rise from desperate poverty we support institutions of mutual aid people come together in things like the lions clubs and rotary and things like that which are not as significant in our lives as they were a couple of generations ago when that really was where people came together and threw money into a common pot that was their insurance system but it wasn't corporate it was a mutual aid system and then we believe in charities and we believe in churches and charities and all of those things do more for the poor than government does so we should at least say let's make sure we've made all those things work before we turn to government and then we have to look and see is the government on net a benefit and it's easy to say I saw a woman sleeping on the street the government should have a shelter for that woman what it's harder to see is what are the long term and even medium term effects of these programs Charles Murray points out the poverty rate in America was falling mildly but steadily until the war on poverty was created at that point the poverty level leveled off he would also say that the welfare system bears a significant responsibility for the fact that the unwed motherhood rate took off in the mid 1960s when the welfare the federal welfare state was created so I do worry that these programs trap people into poverty make it easier today to be on a program than to find a job the problem is if you're on a program instead of having a job today there's a good chance you will be on a program and not having a job tomorrow and next year and so to some extent this is as people used to call economics the dismal science they were wrong in the description of what was dismal about it but it is a reality based science it is about hard truths and processes and dynamic ways of looking at the world and sometimes it is perceived as heartless to say don't spend that money on a good cause today because the result is fewer business startups, less business expansion less economic growth and more people trapped on the government dole in a permanently dependent condition but that's a tough argument to make to people and I heard one of my colleagues on the radio just this week talking about the extension of unemployment benefits while a Democratic congressman kept saying have you looked into the faces of the people at an unemployment insurance office I don't think you could say to those 1.3 million families if you walked into them personally that you don't want to extend their benefits we know really as a matter of empirical economics that the longer unemployment benefits extend the longer bouts of unemployment will extend the real problem there is the longer you are unemployed the harder it is to get a job after that so we're concerned about processes but at the moment that somebody's hurting that's not an easy thing to explain so do we if someone comes along I get this statement or question a lot to me if I articulate the systems that we advocate that alleviate poverty and do a better job of it than anything that's ever been designed or discovered and they say but yeah but there's still people who are going to slip through the cracks well you know one thing about slipping through the cracks is there is no system through which people don't slip through the cracks if there are homeless people sleeping outdoors in December we have a welfare state we have a welfare state that spends trillions of dollars and yet it leaves people sleeping on the street so it's pretty clear that the welfare state prevents some people from slipping through the cracks now you could go farther in the welfare state you could have socialism well we tried real socialism in a third of the world and that turned out to leave people slipping through the cracks too including most of the middle class so I don't think you ever get perfect solutions in the world let's take the public schools as an example the critic of libertarianism would say if you don't have government schools many poor children will slip through the cracks they will not learn to read and write and then where will they be well they're right that would be a terrible thing a lot of people in modern world not learning how to read and write that would be very bad well how many millions of kids are graduating from school or leaving school without having learned to read and write in today's government schools I cannot imagine that a competitive system of schools that had to compete with farmers would produce more kids who have slipped through the cracks of the reading and writing and arithmetic classes than the government schools are doing so that seems to be a pretty clear example welfare maybe is a little harder to see but we know there are people leaving school as teenagers who don't know how to read and write but yeah but you're not even trying I mean that's the thing it's like but you're not even trying to make sure they don't slip through the cracks I had a friend once who talked about two people he had dated recently and one was kind of a libertarian who said what we need is smaller government and more growth that's what will help poor people they need better lives that's what they need to worry about and growth will do that the other one said oh I feel so I want to be an activist I want to work for these programs I want to get people things I want to expand unemployment and food stamps and so on now my friend was pretty much a libertarian himself he knew the first person was right the second person actually wasn't right the second person's ideas would actually hurt the poor and yet he felt more warmly he thought the person with the programs was benevolent and compassionate and who wouldn't want to share a life with a benevolent compassionate person rather than with a heartless economist so even though he knew that these ideas would not work he was attracted to a person who thought they would interesting I sympathy for that and the idea of trying as I agree that results matter more than effort I think we would often say it matters in terms of someone's moral character what they're trying to do but we also need to look at what actually happens and who slips through the cracks yes it does matter for moral character although there is a question if you truly feel for the people in Syria and therefore you want the United States to get bogged down in another 12 year war is that good character I don't know if you truly feel for the poor and therefore you get them trapped in dependency and a world of slow economic growth is that a sign of good character now may partly be as Catholics would say it is a matter of ignorance if you were ignorant of the effects of your policies can't really hold you morally responsible curious to know what a Catholic priest who understood economics would say about moral character if you advocate things because you are a good and decent and feeling person that in fact are bad for the people you're trying to help what does that say about your chances at heaven I could say Aristotle would say this person has their acting out of the virtues that's great but they don't have full moral character because they've got poor judgment so they're acting for the right reasons but they're doing it poorly and in order to have really good moral character you gotta have both that seems like a reasonable position although I do understand the argument from ignorance if you just truly don't know that these programs are worse for the poor and of course we should also keep in mind the possibility that we might be the ones who are wrong but in either case whether we're the ones who might be wrong or these other people are wrong if you're out there in the world working to advance something you really care about helping these people and so you're working really hard and putting a lot of effort into a set of solutions you can be ignorant about whether they work but it seems like you do have some obligation to check to really put some effort into seeing is this the right path am I doing the right thing that it's okay to be ignorant but you should recognize that we all have a level of ignorance and put some effort into it some people try to alleviate it a lot of what we're talking about with compassion and the welfare state there's be people listening to this who might be saying well that just sounds like Republicans conservatives we talked a little bit about the history or the post war history in particular and there has been more of an alliance with the conservatives for libertarians than with democrats I just wonder your thoughts on that general do we have more in common with conservatives in recent modern times there was definitely more cooperation if you go back farther libertarianism originally was known as liberalism it was the philosophy that arose to challenge the monarchy the aristocracy the monopolies the established church clearly a movement of the left in those terms and that's how the terms left and right originated a lot of intellectual historians would say as a lot of liberals in the late 19th century turned toward wanting to use the government to advance what they saw as their values then there was this split and the libertarians or liberals wanted to want to use the government who believed still that the rule of law and limited government was the best way to achieve these good results began to seem like conservatives and then in the post war era you clearly had in the united states and the world soviet communism a huge threat to liberty and domestically a rising welfare state that was the political change that was going on both libertarians and conservatives were very much against both communism and the welfare state which allowed them, pushed them to work together in a way they might not have if the world we faced was a world of perpetual war then you might see libertarians allying with the left or a world let's say where slavery was the dominant issue then libertarians should probably be working with human rights activists of the left against the people who are not today's contemporary conservatives but people who would be called conservative in a society where they were trying to preserve slavery then you'd see libertarianism as being on the left so yeah in our recent time and now the federal government has become so big with so many programs and such constant focus on spending and the budget that we tend to focus on those issues and republicans use a lot of libertarian rhetoric Ronald Reagan was very good at it and even Mitt Romney who I don't think believed a word of it was pretty good at talking about free markets and private property and Obama's taking us to socialism along the very same path I used in Massachusetts except it's different when it's in the state so we have tended to find ourselves alive there one of the things that has meant over the past 50 years is that an awful lot of libertarians missed out on the actual libertarian trends that were happening in society the movement against Jim Crow and organized racism there were some early libertarians who sort of stated that they were against Jim Crow and organized segregation but they didn't get involved in the civil rights movement the movement of women's liberation perceived as being a left wing movement and therefore libertarians tended to ignore or actually oppose it the gay rights movement all of these areas the anti-war movement libertarians have been a little more involved in and have unfortunately not stepped up to the game the last five years when the democratic president is prosecuting wars and the left wing anti-war movement just folded its tent and went home there are other issues like the drug war where libertarians and liberals have often been allied even though people like Bill Buckley were also critics of the drug war so I don't think at its most fundamental level libertarians are more allied with the right whatever that term means but it's probably true that in modern America we have perceived freedom of religion freedom of speech, freedom of the press less threatened than economic freedom and therefore we have felt less need to be involved in those kinds of issues to be involved in constraining the growth of the transfer state let me ask another question that commonly gets asked of libertarians which is these ideas you know if they're as good as you say they are and that they create the wealth that you say they do and they lead to better lives and all these other things that are really valuable why aren't there libertarian countries why don't we see this embraced on a much larger scale than it is more libertarian countries and there's a general trend in the world in the direction of more libertarian countries there used to be oriental despotism and feudalism and then absolute monarchy and tribal violence and in a later era there was military dictatorship across a lot of Latin America and what's happened since the Enlightenment since around 1700 is a movement first in northern Europe and then in the new United States and then in more of Europe and then in more of the world toward a society based on markets not monopolies based on security of property rights the rule of law freedom of religion a movement a movement toward merit not status elimination of monarchy and other forms of absolutism and even when monarchs have been preserved as in Great Britain they're constitutional monarchs they are not absolutists so in all of those ways we have moved strikingly in a libertarian direction from the nature of the societies that preceded those and in the past 30 years if you look at the economic freedom of the world index that Cato and the Fraser Institute publish every year almost every year you see economic freedom increasing in the world over the past 30 years pretty steadily even though it's been falling in the United States the last few years and the report shows that the big reason it's increasing is that it's increased in China and India and that's such a huge portion of the world that if that's happening then things are getting better so as a firmly radical non-aggression axioms self-evident truths libertarian I certainly could say there are no libertarian countries but as someone looking with a sense of history I can say a lot of countries are getting a lot more libertarian than they used to I mentioned a society of merit instead of status and one of the huge things that means is people not being excluded from social and economic life because of their race or their gender or their religion or now their sexual orientation so in all of those ways we have libertarian-ish countries I mean you certainly would not say there are no liberal countries in the classical liberal sense there are definitely illiberal countries and there are liberal countries and some countries are more liberal than other liberal countries so is there a libertarian country like Galtz-Galtz? No, but to a lot of the world the United States did and does look like Galtz-Galtz they think it is so free even though I was just reading a blog post today on how it dropped a little bit it dropped in a number of areas civil liberties, economics and so on and the author suggested that you got to stop calling yourself the freest country in the world maybe there's another country that's freer maybe there's a few countries that are freer but all of those countries together are really the freest places in the history of the world. So what do we say though that the libertarian vision is utopian in the sense maybe in a lot of senses but it may be in the sense that people are not libertarian that people don't really want most people don't really want a libertarian We mentioned 15% from your research or libertarian or even just that if you say hey do you want a subsidy or not or do you want this to continue that that is what will always happen well there's always a tendency for people to want to want benefits and especially to want benefits that are free on the other hand philosophical and ideological change can happen people in the middle ages and clearly I know more about Europe than I do about what was going on in Africa during that period but people in the middle ages thought it was perfectly natural that God rules the world through the Pope and the king and everything is the way it always has been and it always will be and that's okay and I guess a lot of them didn't even think about why does it have to be this way and that's one of the things that the enlightenment brought into the world was it doesn't have to be this way we can think about alternatives so most people aren't libertarian well yes most people are willing to accept something if it's free and many of us are tempted to use the government to punish our enemies I mean if we didn't have a First Amendment how many of us would be saying you know let's shut up those people fortunately in the United States number one we have a culture where we just kind of know you're not supposed to do that and number two when somebody says I think we should do X and you say that violates the First Amendment half your listeners will just say oh that's true it means something to people so that I think is significant and I think there's two ways you can think about utopian is a political philosophy utopian one way is it'll be very hard to get there because the world is complicated and not everybody has the same understandings and so on the other is if we got there it wouldn't work and that's really what utopia nowhere originally meant so I say socialism is utopian it's a beautiful dream let's all share we have all these goods why should some have more than they need and really Bill Gates would agree that he has more than he needs and why should others have less than they need so why not share that's a great vision doesn't work charity works, churches work mutual aid works but if you actually try to share all the goods of society the closest to actually doing that the world probably ever came was Leninist Russia and it was a disaster it was such a complete collapse of society that the communists themselves declared it not to be communism it was war communism but what it really was was communism they really tried to eliminate money and share other than of course the the pigs at the top they got more but they tried to share and it caused society to collapse there wasn't food libertarianism is utopian in my view in the sense that it's going to be very hard to get to the totally life liberty and property society that I would like for political reasons but if we did it would work it would be the richest society in the history of the world we could have a rule of law in which we would not eliminate violence and murder and rape but we would punish it and I think therefore we would have less of it so it's not utopian in the sense that it can't work it's utopian in the sense that it's tough to get there but the closer we get to it as in western Europe the united kingdom the united states New Zealand, Australia, Hong Kong the closer we get to it the more economic growth there is the more social harmony there is the less violence there is the more peace there is so if your goal is peace, prosperity and freedom the more libertarian your state the closer you'll be to those goals what do you say to the conservative variety of critic that's all great but if we give everyone this freedom lots and lots of people are going to do bad things with it and by bad things we don't mean violence or violating rights or stealing property but what we mean are behaviors that if everyone's doing it is going to degrade the moral character of society and bring us much lower than we would have been without that freedom so everyone's going to run around and have promiscuous sex families and take lots of drugs just kind of the outright hedonism view and that's bad and so we need to restrict which is probably tied to the libertarians or conservatives who want to smoke pot type of very base characterization well that's right to some extent if you really want a society where everybody worships god in the same church on Sunday morning then you're going to have to go back to the middle ages and try to have that world and unfortunately since the light enlightenment came into the world it's pretty much impossible to get back to that conservatives had been making that argument about the changes in America since at least the 1960s and yet we look at our society today and we say yes there are people who use drugs and we think there's a lot more premarital sex than there used to be there's certainly more open homosexuality there's more access to pornography now that we have the internet if nothing else lots of those things are true and yet despite the big government and everything our society remains pretty strong most people form families get jobs raise their children all those kinds of things but it is true that capitalism erodes old systems and old ways of doing things capitalism and economic growth make it possible for young people to break away from their families earlier and easier than they could you know if if your society is poor enough that you as a young man can't really afford to live anywhere other than your parents house well then have a lot of nuclear and extended families there's probably less premarital sex too well that might be right I have seen one conservative organization that I think correctly bemoans the fact that the automobile allowed courting to happen somewhere other than mother's parlor there if you're a real conservative you should worry about that um part of it I guess is what you think people would be like if we didn't threaten to beat them up and arrest them and I think that more of these uh socially dysfunctional things happen because we agree to subsidize the uh unsocial activities um simply because we allow people to do them without being put in jail Brink Lindsay in his book the age of abundance talked about how the indices of social disorder kind of increased until the late 70s and then they started trickling down and he suggested this was freed from a lot of old strictures and freed from the constraints of poverty um people experimented with lots of lifestyle choices many of which didn't work out very well and within a generation many of the extremes of those kinds of lifestyle choices were much less significant and that's an example of society evolves and there will be wrong roads taken. Hayek talks about the need for um for freedom to allow the experimentation with new ways of living that we hadn't anticipated before but some of those ways of living will not be very successful and some people will regret that they pursued those ways of living while others will be able to look and see I don't want to do that however this other thing that looks interesting um so it's a it's a part of social evolution and social evolution is better for all of us than social stagnation. So perhaps as a part of the evolution point as a final question uh with where do you see libertarianism going from this date forward we have uh more and more murmurings about libertarianism and more and more hit pieces which I always say is a is a good sign that there are more and more people out there writing things that are saying we're all crazy uh and so do we see this going forward is there a lot of growth to happen is there going to be a libertarian movement of sizable portion would you be so bold to protect? Well I wouldn't I feel very uncertain about the way society develops within the next 10 20 years um over a longer term over 100 years I believe the world will become more libertarian precisely because libertarianism works more and more countries are going to see that allowing freedom of religion and freedom of speech actually creates a more harmonious society and that allowing more reliance on markets creates a more prosperous society people will see that now to the extent that that happens significantly it could reduce the value of a libertarian movement you won't have as much to be opposed to um it seems very difficult in a modern democratic society to consistently organize people against big government that isn't violating their fundamental rights of freedom of speech living where they want to marrying whom they want to and so on you get people who oppose big government overspending and deficits and once in a while they turn out at the polls and they try to turn out the people who have done that but really creating a political movement is difficult I do think over the next few years I expect to see more people becoming libertarian and more media coverage of libertarianism but how that will affect the world in the short term I don't know. So I know Trevor said that was the final question one more final question it's the question the kind of ultimate libertarian stumper that gets thrown at us all the time so I thought I'd give you an opportunity to be stumped by it and that is what about the roads? You know to me that is just silly what about the poor man you look at the woman by the side of the road and you feel something should be done and you're susceptible to the politicians argument something must be done this is something therefore this must be done the roads are an economic service people want to get from one place to another people want to make money giving people what they want I'm not very worried about the schools or the roads people will supply them now and this is where our being trapped in a particular kind of world means we just can't see I can't see I don't know how the roads would be provided and mentioning schools reminds me of that what would the schools be like after 25 years in a libertarian society well maybe there wouldn't be schools I think it would be education but maybe it wouldn't be schools so the real question is not what would the roads be like but what would mobility be like and maybe we'd all be wearing jetpacks and maybe we'd have been wearing jetpacks 30 years ago if it wasn't for the government roads just look what happened to telephone innovation when we broke the bell system monopoly there was no innovation for 50 years things got a little bit better but there was no innovation only black phones too I think well actually one of the big deals was the introduction of the princess phone which had a graceful oval look and then telephony exploded nobody could have predicted that we didn't know that was possible so liberate education and watch educational technology and progress happen and liberate mobility and who knows driverless cars maglev roads jetpacks or people may decide to live closer to their offices because it turns out transportation is more expensive than we've been required to confront since we pay for it all through taxation so I don't know the answer but I am not at all worried about roads markets can provide goods and services that people want want to thank David Bose for joining us today on free thoughts and thank you for listening if you have any questions or comments you can find me on twitter at arosp you can find me on twitter at tcburis tcburus and you can find me on twitter at david underscore bose free thoughts this is a project of libertarianism.org in the cato institute and is produced by ebb and banks to learn more about libertarianism visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org