An Introduction to Libertarianism

0:00It's great to be here to give a talk to you tonight about an introduction to libertarianism. What is libertarianism? Well, it's something I've been doing kind of informally for a very long time. And introducing somebody to libertarianism is really not that easy, although it's gotten a lot easier over time. When I first started being involved in libertarianism, I was a freshman in college, and no one could really, no one had really heard of libertarianism or the libertarian party. They couldn't spell it, and it was viewed as, you know, some kind of, it's just some kind of subversive philosophy. It's probably communism or something like that.

0:53As a matter of fact, when I got involved with it and I heard about the libertarian philosophy in the party and the first thing I did was I started passing around literature at my college and my dorm and I would put signs up on the bulletin boards and talk to my friends about this and things were going along pretty good. I had one convert after about six months but I was happy with that and then I got I got a call that I had to report to Brother Garnet, and I was in a Catholic college, St. Bonaventure University, I was living in a dorm, and Brother Garnet, or Father Garnet, was a very tough cookie, he actually lived in the dorm that I was in, he was a former marine colonel, The Franciscan Friars at St. Bonamature are the guys that wear those brown robes and sandals.

1:58This is up in New York State. It's very cold in the wintertime. There's a lot of snow. This guy would walk around campus with just that brown robe on and sandals, no socks, going through the snow. He was a very tough cookie, reputed to have literally, not beaten up students, but had his forceful way with them. So when I was summoned to his room, I was thinking, what in the world have I done? And there was a little bit of a list of things that I could have been called in for. But it turns out, he had somehow found out that it was me who was putting this libertarian literature around campus.

2:44And he called me in to say, you know, you must stop this, this is subversive, this is un-American, this is dangerous, you're going to ruin your life, you're going to ruin your professional career, you're going to get kicked out of college. And despite all that, I was relieved to hear that that's what I was being called in for. and believe me, none of you are going to get called in for being a libertarian nowadays. It's still kind of hard though to introduce a group to libertarianism, right? Because you might be interested in it for a variety of reasons. You might be in it for the philosophy, the philosophical issues. You might just hate the Democrats and the Republicans. You might need a good idea for a term paper or or some bonus points in some class or you may have heard about it on The Daily Show or from Bill Maher or something like that and just think it's cool or you may be upset

3:43about the Iraq War or the spying on American civilians, the federal government's doing. So you could be coming here for a variety of different reasons from a variety of different And I'm going to try to cover some of those. And the first is philosophy, because at heart all libertarians share a same basic philosophy that's very different from conservatives and liberals. The conservatives and the liberals have a philosophical basis in European philosophies. Socialist philosophy, liberalism, modern liberalism, modern conservatism, and I'm not just doing that to bad mouth my opponents, well actually I am, but you really do have a sense that libertarianism is an American philosophy because this is where it started.

4:53It's a very individualistic philosophy in that we believe in the individual, we believe that the individual is what matters, that society only consists of individuals, and there are no other sort of collectivist or collective goals, okay, we're not part of the collective, we are individuals that matter in and of our own self. And that's a very American tradition. Second part of this philosophy is property and property rights. And a lot of what the libertarian philosophy is about is about property rights, that you not only have the right to yourself, the right to be free, the right not to be enslaved.

5:42This is not just a law that's passed, that we're seeking to pass. This is something we believe exists, that you have those human rights. But do you also have the right to justly acquire property and to do with it as you wish, to dispose of it as you wish, and that that's very important to individuals. And this libertarian philosophy is also what economists would call anti-mercantilist, and I'm an economist so you're probably going to get a little bit too much of that stuff here tonight, but we're against government intervention in the economy. We're against government meddling in the economy, and of course we're especially against government favoritism, which ultimately a lot of that government intervention leads to, where one group of people get special benefits at the expense of others.

6:36So all of those components of individualism, of property rights, and of being anti-government and Intervention are rolled into this libertarian philosophy. Americans come from unique groups of people, the people who founded this country. A lot of them were orphans. A lot of them Some were religious dissenters from Europe, and then of course a lot of them were serfs or slaves, so we didn't really come from a group of favored citizens.

7:26We came from the downtrodden groups of Europe, the people who had the least advantage in in Society, and libertarians believe that people should be able to control their own lives, even to do to themselves what the rest of us consider harmful, so that we have the the right not just to do the ordinary, the everyday things, but we actually have the right to do whatever we want to, to our own persons, to our own selves, to our own property. And that means allowing people both the liberty and the individual responsibility over things like drug and alcohol use, or fast cars, or skydiving, or whatever it happens to be. And and the idea that we'd allow the government to somehow monitor our behavior and somehow to be our little nanny over what we can and cannot do really goes against the whole libertarian philosophical creed.

8:43Closely related to libertarian philosophy is libertarian ethics. What do libertarians think is right and wrong? And of course this is, as I said, very much intertwined with libertarian philosophy. Now everybody agrees with us that it is not right to steal from others. That's in all the religious creeds, all of the philosophical creeds. It's not right to hurt other people or to otherwise use force against other people. Please consider any of that to be a violation of my human rights or your human rights. To steal from you, to hurt you, or to initiate the use of force against you.

9:34And most people agree with us on that. The only time that force is legitimate is in an act of self-defense. When somebody has initiated the use of force against you, that somebody wants to steal If you feel something that you have, somebody wants to harm you or your property in some way, or somebody is attempting to initiate force against you in any shape, form or fashion, then it is perfectly legitimate for you or your friends or your neighbors to act forcefully against them, to stand up against that initiation of force. Where a lot of people depart company from the libertarians is we also don't think it's right for groups of individuals to initiate force against another individual, or from one group of individuals to initiate force against another group of individuals.

10:37So that if it's two people who decide to use force against a third person, then that still isn't right. That's still robbing somebody. Or if it's three people, or if it's three on two, or if it's five on one, or if it's five on five, it doesn't matter if you go from the individual level up to higher levels. Making things away from people is wrong, and we're against it. And the act of voting doesn't change that. If you've got 101 million people voting one way and 99 million people voting the other way, and the 101 million people want to take away property from the 99 million people, We still don't think that's right.

11:33So increasing the number of people who agree to take money or property from another individual or another group of individuals doesn't change whether the action is right or wrong. In terms of force, the use of force, this is another area where the libertarians line up well with the American tradition, in that libertarians believe in the right to own arms, the right to own guns, the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. And we believe that that the ownership of guns is actually a fairly effective deterrent against other people using force against other people. And we get evidence from that, from the fact that in cities where gun ownership is high, we see lower crime rates. Where the citizens have the right to To have a concealed weapon, we see lower crime rates.

12:51And in cities where we have gun control, the crime rates are higher and go up when gun control laws are either passed or enforced or strengthened. Libertarians believe that free societies should be defended by free people. So traditionally libertarians, most libertarians have been against the idea of having standing armies, of having large standing armies in existence in society. And frankly I feel pretty And frankly, I feel pretty confident with the rate of gun ownership in the state of Alabama that nobody's really going to try to mess with us.

13:43Even if we didn't have an army, I really don't think anybody would try to mess with us. All of my friends, they don't have one gun. You've got like 10, 20 guns. So the South has a particular advantage in this respect in that we're already very well defended in most places. And in Auburn I feel very well defended. I have like three friends who have more than one gun cabinet in their house. Libertarians are also very anti-war. We don't like war. We think war is not a good idea for a lot of different reasons.

14:37Many of the same reasons that everybody thinks war is a bad thing. It kills people, destroys things, never really accomplishes very much. When you think about it, most of the things that war accomplishes, that we could say are good things, were completely unintentional. There was no intention of the war itself. They just happened to happen, like the freeing of the slaves in the Civil War. So war is not a good thing. Everybody kind of agrees to that. But libertarians also point out that that during war we lose our civil liberties and that we lose civil liberties even after the war is over. They don't give them all back. They keep some of them. That happened during the Civil War. It's happened in every war. Americans are thrown in prison without trial. It's happened in every war. We don't like to talk about it because it's kind of not such a great thing, but it happens and it's awful and it's usually unnecessary and of course you're all witness to we're not even in a war right now and we're in war-like conditions on the other side of the world and yet we're losing civil liberties in the United States with the Patriot Act and the illegal surveillance and taping of people things of that nature and so

16:05So government takes our civil liberties and government grows in power during wars. Government grows in size, government grows in expense, government grows in authority during these wars, and after the war is over it gives back a little bit of it, but it grows in leaps and bounds during those periods of time. So libertarians will do anything to try to stay out of war as much as possible, except for of course defensive wars, wars for liberty and things of that nature. Now libertarian economics, I'm an economist and I'd be willing to talk here about libertarian economics all night long, but I won't.

17:00But it's the flip side. You've got the philosophy and the ethics, which we all think are important, but there's also the more pragmatic or practical side of things. So libertarians think that liberty is good in a moral sense. It's morally superior. A free society is morally superior to a socialist society or a fascist or a conservative or a liberal, modern liberal type of society. But libertarianism or liberty is also good for you, good in a practical sense. So that no matter what we really look at in terms of government, we see that it's not good for you in terms of good for your pocketbook. Tariffs and quotas or protectionism, they don't protect us as in the people, they hurt us. They raise the price of sugar, they raise the price of all sorts of goods when they impose tariffs and quotas on imports into the United States. And libertarians don't really like things like NAFTA type approaches We don't care what you do, but we're free traders, and we're free traders with everybody.

18:30We don't pick sides, we don't pick particular goods to protect. We think Americans can compete with everybody in the world. We think Americans can compete with everybody in the world, and we can all benefit from that free trade as history has shown. The prohibition of narcotic drugs does not reduce drug abuse. It does not reduce crime. It actually increases drug abuse. It increases the danger of using those drugs. It increases crime.

19:18Prohibition actually is what makes drugs more dangerous. And of course we can see that at all the Auburn home games, football games. Social Security doesn't make us socially secure. As a matter of fact, it's going to cause a social calamity, especially for you. Even George Bush says that. Even Social Security itself says that. And the only solution that the Democrats and the Republicans are offering are, well, let's raise your taxes.

20:10But the Social Security tax is already the highest tax that most of you pay. And they probably have to take away three or four times more of your paycheck in order to try to smooth out the social security mess that they've gotten us into. The government also has licensing for all sorts of occupations. We have local licensing in Auburn, we have state licensing in Alabama, we have federal licensing of some professions. The idea is supposedly to guarantee everybody quality and safety, but you know those government guarantees just never seem to pan out.

21:06What they really give us is monopolies. Like with the medical profession, they give doctors a monopoly and so the doctors charge high prices and you have limited access to their services. And if you have a doctor's appointment, I think the average wait time now for a doctor is approaching about an hour. If you went into McDonald's and had to wait an hour every

22:01So that guarantee of quality and safety is a bunch of nonsense. Libertarians believe and see that government doesn't work. As a practical matter, government just doesn't work. One of my favorite examples is comparing NASA or looking at NASA. NASA, the aerospace agency for the United States, where we've seen basically one disaster after another, where we've seen every program not come in on time in the last quarter century.

22:49We haven't seen one single program come in on budget and be successful in a quarter century. a quarter of a century and every year they're getting billions and billions of dollars and they'll even admit, some of them will even admit that the shuttle program is just there for show at this point it's just awful and then you look at the X Prize competition somebody comes up with the idea I'll give ten million dollars, anybody can pop up to space back down and back up again like a regular commercial venture would. Ten million, not billion, and boom, somebody's already got the prize. Or you look at the Post Office versus FedEx. The Post Office

23:46versus FedEx. Do I need to say anything about that? 9-11. The Post Office versus FedEx. It's a touchy subject, but as far as my count went at the time, we had 11 federal bureaucracies plus the US military that were supposed to prevent that kind of thing. That was kind of like their major thing that they were supposed to do, 11 of them, plus the military, and the terrorists got by all of them, and the investigations indicate that these people really weren't all that professional, that they really weren't professionally skilled in what they were doing, that they left clues all along the way.

24:43I mean, if you tell a flight instructor, you really just want to learn how to take off. You don't really care about how to land. Hello? That's a clue. The only plane that was stopped in that whole terrible day was done by a bunch of private citizens who volunteered on the spot and died in the process. I don't see how that could be any clearer to people, the failure of government to protect us. I should have brought in a list of those bureaucracies, but of course we all know that not one person lost their job because of that.

25:35Now, one person really got demoted or fired, nobody's budget got slashed, now the private sector was involved with it too, but of course they paid a stiff penalty, the owners of the corporations like the airlines and that kind of thing, they lost billions of dollars by the end of the day, okay, they were penalized for their role in that, The bureaucracies, what did they get? They got much bigger budgets. They got much grander authorities over our lives as a result of their incredible failures.

26:22And those types of examples are out there continuously. And I think a few Americans are starting to realize that this government ain't working at all for us. The John Lee Malvo sniper thing was a pretty good example as well. Here you've got this guy going around shooting people on a regular basis. You've got 900 law enforcement officials trying to track him down. 900. And it goes on and on and on. Going from state to state, city to city, shooting people, killing people.

27:09It's a private citizen that found them and turned them in. Okay, libertarian politics. Politics. What is the entomology of politics? It's important to know what we're talking about. You know what ticks are? Ticks? You know what ticks are? Yes? Yeah, they're blood sucking parasites. You know what poly means?

27:56Poly... It means many. It means many sides if you're talking about a figure. So, poly tics means many blood-sucking parasites. And that's kind of what it's like. I've been in politics and it can be a nasty business. The Libertarian Party has been around for more than 30 years. It is the third largest party in the United States. There are elected officials in most of the states. There are over 600 officials elected, mostly at the local level. The party is organized in all 50 states. It has 250,000 registered voters, but that's kind of misleading because many states don't have registered voters.

28:48In the state of Alabama you do not register as a member of a particular party. So there's a lot of states that don't count libertarians and don't count Democrats or Republicans. Libertarians are very active in terms of defeating tax increases because that's what feeds government. And I'm always very inspired on April 15th to drive past the post office even though I file electronically so I don't actually go to the post offices to mail my taxes but I go there because the AU Libertarians are usually there with signs that say honk if you hate taxes and so I go around the block several times honking my horn.

29:37So they're involved in political activism at the local level, at a fundamental level, at the state, county, national level. And yet a lot of people ask, well, why haven't you guys been able to do anything? You know, it's, well, you know, I really like the libertarians, but why can't you guys get your act together and win these big races? Well, we're a little ways off from taking over Washington, D.C., but I would remind you that the Democrats really only have the support of about 20 to 25 percent of the voters, and that the Republicans only have the support of about 20 to 25 percent of the voters.

30:25The libertarian support at the polls usually amounts somewhere between one and five percent. So we're relatively speaking at the polls we're low or small compared to the Democrats and Republicans in the big races. But remember that leaves fifty percent of the people who don't vote in this country. And we think that they're all libertarian. Well, maybe not all of them. But probably about half of those are libertarian or libertarian leaning. And I know because the people I know who don't vote are really not big fans of government. They don't like to vote. And libertarians, in fact some libertarians don't like to vote because they feel like it's getting your hands dirty in a process where one group is stealing from another.

31:24Now the Democrats and Republicans are not really well liked even by people who support the Democrats and Republicans. And that's true in good times or bad times. I mean it doesn't matter if it's George Bush or Ronald Reagan or Walter Mondale or Bill Clinton. They're really not excited about the Democrats and Republicans. The problem is that those two groups of 20 to 25 percent, they all have a stake in government. Because these people who support the Democrats and And Republicans are usually people who are getting a government check. They are getting paid by the government. They're working for the government. They're working for government contractors. They're getting social security benefits or welfare benefits or whatever it happens to be. They're being paid by the government.

32:23and so you know chances are they're not going to vote for the libertarians who are going to say no we're going to get rid of this program we're going to get rid of that program we're going to cut your taxes okay so the people who support the Democrats and Republicans are self-interested people who have a stake in government spending and they always try to scare people about the libertarians who you better not vote for the libertarians The libertarians, they're going to take away your social security, or you won't have any schools to go to, or you won't be able to go to college because of the libertarians. They're going to take it all away. And so they try to scare people such as yourselves away from the libertarians.

33:19The Libertarian group, that small group that I mentioned, said, yeah, we know that there's government checks out there. We know that government gives a lot of benefits away to other people, but we just don't give up whatever. We don't care. And I'm really excited about the Libertarian Party and Libertarianism in general because America is starting to find its libertarian heritage once again. In the 1970s, the number of Libertarians could easily fit in this room.

34:12The number of people worldwide who call themselves libertarian could fit into this room. In the 1970s and the 1980s, the libertarian party was small, it was weak, the libertarian Banking Movement was small, it was weak, it was populated mostly by nerds and geeks, people who were way too smart for themselves, libertarian events were like Star Trek conventions, all Guys. Things have really, really changed in my experience. As a matter of fact, when this club first started, and it's been around a long time, 15, 20 years, I was the first faculty advisor for this club, we had a discussion that said basically, why should we go through through all of the process of becoming an official club at this university, we're probably not going to be around for very long.

35:32So to see this club doing as well, being as active and effective on campus to me is very satisfying, very gratifying. And in contrast to the Star Trek days, and I do admit to being a Star Trek fan, although I've never worn the uniform or been to a convention. Today, it is cool to be a libertarian. It's cool to be a libertarian. Clint Eastwood is a libertarian. Mel Gibson is a libertarian. Tom Selleck is a Libertarian, Penn and Teller are Libertarians, Dave Barry the Comedian is a Libertarian, Drew Carey is a Libertarian, Richard Branson the guy who owns Virgin Airlines and Virgin Phones and Virgin Records and all that stuff is a Libertarian, Trey Parker the creator of South Park is a Libertarian, is a Libertarian, so is Howard Stern.

36:46About half of the popular science fiction writers are Libertarian. John Stossel of 2020. I know many of you probably don't watch 2020, but I would highly recommend it, and I would particularly recommend John Stossel's segments on there. The most informative television going, and just wonderful stuff, as well as Bill Maher and many others, many musicians, John Popper, the Blues Travelers, and a host of others, Rush, Libertarians are coming out of the closet, and what we're finding is that there's just tons of very successful people.

37:31And the libertarian group, the libertarian party, continues to be a group of individuals who, as far as the surveys are concerned, show that the libertarians are the smartest political party and the most productive and have the highest income. We're just having a little trouble spreading the news to everybody else and I hope that you guys have all benefited from me being here and will help spread the news in years to come. Thank you very much.