Freedom

0:00There's not a lot I need to say about the founder of the Mises Institute. I'm just very grateful to be here in his presence. He's known for many years since about the same time Kevin Duffy was in Stanford boot camp, met a little about the same time. And he's been a wonderful presence in my life since then. And before I get all gushy about it, I just want to say the Mises Institute is incredibly successful This is a very successful and wonderful institute, and Lew's leadership has been really exemplary. Ladies and gentlemen, Lew Rockwell.

0:59Thank you very much. I have to apologize to Chris Whelan, who I don't think is still here. And to all of you, I'm not going to be talking about Hazlitt and Bretton Woods, although I might just mention, although that'll come in the future, but I'll just mention just a very quick anecdote about Henry Hazlitt, who Mises Institute was very blessed to have, to be in his will and to have that recognition from him. But he was fired from two important jobs. In the 20s, he was the literary editor of The Nation, which was a much bigger deal then than it would be today. And The Nation was a classical liberal publication at that time, and they turned, as so many did, to the dark side under FDR and supported the New Deal. And when Haslett wouldn't support the New Deal, they gave him a choice, either support it or go, and he went.

1:50Later, he was an editorial writer for the New York Times, as Chris mentioned, and he kept attacking the coming Bretton Woods. He had followed the whole thing. He of course knew the evil of Keynes. He understood exactly what was going to happen. His wonderful, some of the wonderful articles collected in his book from Bretton Woods to World Inflation. But the publisher of the Times, and I don't know how he was able to keep the Times on the straight and narrow for as long as he did. He's a man of tremendous power and charm as well. But the The publisher called him in and he said we can't, he said he'd gotten the word, we don't know from whom, although we can guess, that the Times could no longer oppose Bretton Woods and indeed had to support it, endorse it, cheer it on, and he wanted Haslett to say and do that, and Haslett said he couldn't, and so he was gone again. But a very great

2:40man, a very prolific man, he once estimated he'd written 10,000 articles during his lifetime

3:16Classical liberal tradition believed would be most beneficial for mankind. It would appear that the more liberty we lose, the less people are able to imagine how liberty might work. It's a fascinating thing to behold. People can no longer imagine a world in which we could be secure without massive invasions of our privacy at every step and even strip searching before being boarded, boarding airplanes People no longer imagine how a true free market in medical care might work, even though all the problems of the current system were caused by government intervention in the first place. People around the world imagine that we need 700 military bases around the world and endless wars in the Middle East for security, although Switzerland doesn't.

4:10I don't think it's insane to think of life without central banks, even though they are modern inventions that have destroyed currency after currency. Even smaller metalsome agencies like the Consumer Product Safety Commission strike most people as absolutely essential, even though it is not they who catch the thieves and frauds, but private institutions. The idea of privatizing roads or water supplies sound outlandish, even though we have a long history of both. People even wonder how anyone could be educated in the absence of the public schools, as if markets themselves didn't create in America the world's most literate society in the 18th and 19th centuries. The list could go on and on.

4:55But the problem is that the capacity to imagine freedom as a very source of life for civilization and Humanity itself is being eroded in our society and culture. The less freedom we have, the less people are able to imagine what freedom feels like, and therefore the less they are willing to fight for its restoration. This has profoundly affected the political culture. We've lived through regime after regime since at least the 1930s, in which the word freedom has been a rhetorical principle only, even as each new regime has taken away ever more and more of our freedoms. But now we have a president who doesn't even bother to pay lip service to the idea of freedom. I wonder if the idea has occurred to Obama at all. If the idea of freedom has occurred to him, he must have rejected it as dangerous or unfair or unequal or irresponsible or something along those lines.

5:50To him and to many Americans, the goal of government has to be an extension of the personal values of those in charge. I saw a speech in which Obama was making a pitch for national service. The ghastly idea that government should steal two years of every young person's life for slave labor and to inculcate loyalty to the government, though obviously setting back a person's professional and personal life. Now how did Obama justify his support of this idea? He said that when he was a young man, he learned important values from his period of community Service. It helped form him and shape him. It helped him understand the troubles of others and think outside his own narrow experience. Well, I'm happy for him. But he chose this path voluntarily. It is a gigantic leap to go from personal experience to forging a vicious national plan and imposing it on the entire country. His presumption here is taken from The Father Leader will guide his children's citizens in the paths of righteousness so that they will all become good like the leader himself.

7:05To me his comment illustrates one of two things. It could show that Obama is a potential dictator in the mode of Stalin, Hitler or Mao. For the presumptions he puts on display are just as frightening as any imagined by the worst tyrants in human history. Or more plausibly, it may be an illustration of Hannah Arendt's view that totalitarianism can be merely an application of the principle of the banality of evil. With this phrase, Arendt meant to draw attention to how people misunderstand the origin and nature of evil regimes. Evil regimes, she said, are not always the product of fanatics, paranoids and sociopaths. Although of course power breeds fanaticism, paranoia and sociopathology, instead the total state can be built in part by ordinary people who accept the wrong premise concerning the role of the state in society.

8:03If the role of the state is to ferret out evil thoughts and bad ideas, it must necessarily become totalitarian. If the goal of the state is that all citizens must come to hold the same values as the great Whether economic, moral or cultural, the state must necessarily become totalitarian. If the leaders believe that scarce resources are best channeled in a direction that producers and consumers would not choose on their own, the result must necessarily be central planning. On the face of it, many people today do not necessarily reject these premises. No longer is the idea of a state-planned society seen as frightening. What scares people more today is the prospect of a society without a central plan, which is to say, a society of freedom.

8:55But here is the key difference between authority and everyday life, such as that exercised by a parent, or a teacher, or a pastor, or a boss, and the power of the state. The state's edicts are always enforced at the point of a gun. It is interesting how little we think about that reality. One virtually never hears that truth stated so plainly in a college classroom, for example. But it is the core reality. Everything done by the state is ultimately done by means of aggression, which is to say violence or the threat of violence wielded against the innocent and their property. The total state is nothing but the continued extension of these status means throughout every nook and and Cranny of Economic and Social Life. Thus does the paranoia, megalomania and fanaticism of the rulers become deadly dangerous to everyone. It begins in a seemingly small error, a banality, but with the state what begins in banality ends in bloodshed.

9:58Let me give another example of the banality of evil. Several decades ago some crackpots had the idea that mankind's use of fossil fuels had a warming effect on the weather. Environmentalists were fired up by this idea, so were many politicians. Economists were largely tongue-tied or in favor because they had long ago conceded the idea that there are some public goods that the market can handle, truly the weather is one of them. Enough years go by and what do you have? Politicians from all over the world, every last one of them a huckster of some sort only pretending to represent their nations, gathering in a posh resort in Europe to tax the world and Plan the Weather Down to Precise Temperatures Half a Century from Now Floyd Lilly and Jim Sheehan, who were both here, were at that conference to heckle.

10:52I wonder if for the entire history of mankind there could have been a more preposterous spectacle than that. I don't know if it was a tragedy or a farce that the meeting on global warming came to a premature end I draw attention to this absurdity to make a more general point. What seems to have escaped the current generation is the notion that was once called freedom. Let me be clear on what I mean by freedom. I mean a social or political condition in which people exercise their own choices concerning what they do with their lives and property. People are permitted to trade and exchange They can exchange goods and services without impediment or violent interference.

11:38They can associate or not associate with anyone of their own choosing. They can arrange their own lives and businesses. They can build, move, innovate, consume, marry, procreate on terms they themselves define. What will be the results? We cannot predict them any more than I can know what everyone will have for breakfast. Human choice works that way. There are as many patterns of human choice as there are humans who make choices. The only question we should ask is whether the results will be orderly, consistent that is, with peace and prosperity, or chaotic, and thereby at war with human flourishing. The great burden borne by the classical liberal tradition, stretching from medieval times to our own, is to make believable the otherwise implausible to be sure the generation of Americans that seceded from British rule in the late eighteenth century took the imperative of liberty as a given they had benefited from centuries of intellectual work by true liberals who had demonstrated that government does little or nothing for society but divide and loot people in ways big and small they had come to believe that the best way to quote-unquote rule a society

13:00is with people's consent and in the most minimal way. Today the social order sounds like chaos. Without anything we dare try, thus we'd be overrun with terrorists and drug fiends amid massive social, economic and cultural collapse. To me this is very interesting. It is the cultural condition that comes about in the absence of experience with freedom. More precisely, it comes about when people One might think it would be enough for most people to log on to the World Wide Web, browse any major social networking site or search engine, gain direct experience of the results of human freedom. No government agency created Facebook, no government agency manages its day-to-day operation, it's the same with Google, noted a bureaucratic agency, invent the miracles of the iPhone or the iPad or other things President Obama says he doesn't know anything about or the utopian cornucopia of goods available at any Walmart.

14:04Meanwhile, look at what the state has given us. The Department of Motor Vehicles, the post office spying on our emails and phone calls, full body scans at the airport, restrictions on water use, The court system, wars, taxes, inflation, business regulations, public schools, social security, the CIA, and another 10,000 failed programs and bureaucracies, the reputation of which is no good no matter who you talk to. Now one might say, oh sure the free market gives us the dessert, but the government gives us the meat and vegetables to keep us healthy. That view does not account for the horrific reality that more than a hundred million people were slaughtered by the state in the 20th century alone, not counting its wars.

14:54This is only the most visible cost. As Frederic Bastiat emphasized, the enormity of the cost of the state can only be conceived in considering the unseen costs, The inventions not brought to market, the businesses not opened, the people whose lives were cut short so they could not enjoy their full potential, the wealth not used for productive purposes but rather taxed away, the capital accumulation through savings not undertaken because the currency was destroyed or the interest rate held at zero, among an infinitely expandable list of unknowns. To understand these costs requires intellectual sophistication. If we lack this understanding, we go through life accepting what exists as a given. If there is wealth in society, there is wealth and nothing more to it. If there is poverty, there is poverty and we can know nothing more.

16:03It was to address this deep ignorance that the discipline of economics was born in Spain and Italy, the homes of the first industrial revolutions in the 14th and 15th centuries, came to the heights of scientific exposition in the 16th century to be expanded and elaborated upon in the 18th century in England and Germany, in France in the 19th century, finally achieving Its fullest presentation in Austria and America in the 19th and 20th centuries. What does economics contribute to human sciences? What was the value that it added? It demonstrated the orderliness of the material world through a careful look at the operation of the price system and the forces that work to organize the production and distribution of scarce goods.

16:52Its main lesson was taught again and again for centuries. This was its contribution. This was its argument. This was its warning to every would-be social planner, your dreams of domination must be curbed. In effect, this was a message of freedom, one that inspired revolution after revolution, each of which stemmed from the convention that we might be better off in the absence of rule period than in its tyrannical premise. and its tyrannical presence. But consider what had to come before the real revolutions. There had to be this intellectual work that prepared the field of battle, the epic struggle that lasted centuries and continues to this day between the nation-state and the market economy. Make no mistake, it is this battle's outcome that is the most serious obstacle to the establishment and preservation of freedom. The political order in which we live is but The Theory of Money and State The Theory of Money and State and yet this power requires the cooperation of public culture.

18:28The rationales for power must convince the citizens. This is why the state must be alert to the status of public opinion. This is also why the state must always encourage fear among the population for what life would be like in the absence of the state. The political philosopher who did more than anyone else to make this possible The only possible was not Marx or Keynes or Strouse or Rousseau. It was the 17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who laid out a compelling vision of the nightmare of what life would be like, he said, in the absence of the state. He described such life as solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Great name for a law firm by the way.

19:15The natural society, he wrote, was the society of conflict and strife, a place in which no one was safe. He was writing during the English Civil War, and his message seemed believable to many. But of course the conflicts in his time were not the result of natural society, but rather a fight over the control of Leviathan itself. So his theory of causation was skewed by circumstances akin to watching a shipwreck and concluding that the natural and universal state of mankind is drowning. And yet today, Hobbesianism is the common element of both left and right. To be sure, the fears are different, stemming from different sets of political values. The left warns us that if we don't have Leviathan, our front yards will be flooded from rising oceans.

20:02Big business moguls will rob us blind. The poor will starve, the masses will be ignorant, and everything we buy will blow up and kill us. The right warns that in the absence of Leviathan, society will collapse in a cesspool of immorality, loaded over by swarthy terrorists preaching a heretical religion. The goal of both the left and the right is that we make our political choices based on these fears. It doesn't matter so much which package of fear you choose, what matters is that you support the state that purports to keep your nightmare from becoming a reality. Is there an alternative to fear? Here is where matters become a bit more difficult.

20:49We must again begin to imagine that freedom itself could work. In order to do this, we must learn economics. We must come to understand history better. We must study the sciences of human action to relearn what Bastiat, Mises, Rothbard, Hazlitt, Hayek and the entire liberal tradition understood. What they knew is the great secret of the ages. Society contains within itself the capacity for self-management. And there is nothing the government can do to improve on the results of Voluntary Association, Exchange, Creativity and Choices of Every Member of the Human Family. If you know this lesson, if you believe this lesson, you are part of the great liberal tradition. You are also a threat to the regime, not only the one we live under currently, but every regime all over the world, in every time and every place. In fact, the great guarantor The power of liberty would be an entire population that is a relentless and daily threat to the regime precisely because it would embrace the dream of liberty.

21:59The best and only place to start is with yourself. After all, this is the only person you can really control in the end. And by believing in freedom yourself, you might make the biggest contribution to civilization you could possibly make. After that, never miss an opportunity to tell the truth, sometimes thinking the unthinkable, saying the unsayable, teaching the unteachable, so it makes the difference between bondage and sweet liberty. This was the vision of Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, it is the vision of the Mises Institute, it is the vision of every dissonant intellectual who dared to stand up to despotism in every age. I challenge you to enter into the great struggle of history and make sure that your days on this earth come for something truly important.

22:46It is this struggle that defines our contribution to this world. Freedom is the greatest gift you can give yourself and all humanity.

23:08Thank you very much.