So, ladies and gentlemen, dear friends and comrades,
I couldn't believe and still I cannot believe that the Mises Institute has asked me
to deliver the Henry Aslet Memorial Lecture.
I'm in no way up to the job and thought I'm very thankful to Lew Rockwell and Jeff Tucker
and really flattered to be here.
I can hardly hope to provide you with the same remarkable insights
offered by the other lecturers over this weekend.
Of course, I got the distinction of being the one speaking the funnest English over all of them,
and I will also ask you to forgive me if I will speak mainly as a movement person in the manner of speaking,
which is, after all, the hat I wear best.
So, after so many great Austrian scholars, now it's time for a free market cheerleader.
Now, I don't have to remind this audience what a sharp mind Henry Aslet was before being a great populizer of the ideas we believe in.
His book, Economics in One Lesson, has opened the eyes of many people, bringing them to a better understanding of economics than what they could have achieved in many economics classes.
I don't just say so because I'm not an economist myself and I find relief in the consideration that I could understand economics even if I didn't endure years and years of neoclassic brainwash.
That was a cheap shot, I know.
I say so because economics in one lesson is just a magnificent example of how powerful a book can be, of how many lives it can change, of the kind of light it can cast over obscurity.
Either the obscurities of a dismal science or the obscurities in which political powers always try to wrap itself up.
Also I'm very proud, let me say, in my institute, the Instituto de Brunelione is going to publish a new Italian edition of Heslid's book by the end of the year.
So like Frederic Bastiat, Heslid was the great enemy of economic fallacies and with teaching sound economics also gave timeless lessons on the value of liberty.
Liberty. If we agree with Amherst on that, some books leave us free and some books make
us free, Harry has that books definitely belong to the second category. And this is true for
many works sold out by writers and journalists who supported the cause of free market, private
property and individual liberty over the years. I hope this talk can be, if anything, a declaration
of Love for Free Market Journalism. This is partially for personal reason. As any human
being I have few talents, many deficiencies. If any of you is interested in my deficiencies
I will be happy to provide you with a phone number of my ex-girlfriend. She used to give
lectures on the subject. As far as my very few talents are concerned I always found very
The day I realized I could actually make some money from it, I was happier than ever.
So in the last six, seven years of my life, I've been publishing quite a few op-eds and articles, mainly in the Italian press, in a desperate effort to spreading libertarian ideas.
I particularly enjoy the kind of serendipity I believe you also benefited from.
We wanted to gain freedom, and this is why we do what we do, why we sacrifice our time and our energy for the sake of pursuing a political ideal.
And what we did find in our way? Not freedom, at least so far, but friendship.
Real solid friendship, which is what makes it a joy to endure in promoting a political philosophy that is far from being popular,
are popular, which does not pay off as much as the competing ones, but which fits us with
a sense of righteousness and belonging.
I am blessed by the fact I work with people of such qualities that I can hardly remember
a day when it was not under the benevolent influence of their enlightening friendship.
Ideas can progress only over the shoulders of men, and the moral, before even the professional
excellence of my colleagues at IBL and C&E, of the people in this room and of the many
Many good libertarians doing great scholarly or journalistic works all over the world bring
me in a mood of euphorical optimism.
I will try briefly to enter two different kinds of subjects.
At the beginning I will try to explain why I believe classical liberalism somehow implies
the necessity of fighting in the trenches of public opinion, and later on to discuss
as the pros and cons of new technologies in this field.
Now the subject I want to enter now, even though briefly and in a very impressionistic way,
so to speak, is to me one of the most fascinating and I suppose is also for most of you.
Educating public opinion has historically been the means by which classical liberals
have tried to change the societies in which they live and move them in a more liberal
direction.
In a manner of speaking, liberals have always appealed to the means of persuasion.
This is at least for two major families of reasons.
Historically, classical liberalism emerges as a coherent body of thinking in the very
same age that saw what we call today public opinion to become a force to be reckoned with.
Classical liberalism is born in a time when a fledgling private sphere was developing and
blossoming.
We see salons and newspapers becoming a feature of the civil and political life of European societies.
In a complex matrix of political change, with representative institutions coming to life,
and natural rights of man being vindicated vis-à-vis absolute power, public opinion plays a vital role.
Its importance is associated with the idea of the existence of a civil society which is separated from the state,
An assumption that is in turn at the very roots of classical liberalism.
In a manner of speaking, public opinion is at the same time an essential tool and an ideological ingredient of classical liberalism itself.
In the second book of its essay concerning human understanding,
John Locke says, quote, the law of opinion of reputation as the third law that men typically refer their action to,
coming after divine law and civil law, writes Locke,
By the relations they bear to the first of these, men judge whether their actions are sins or duties.
By the second, whether they be criminal or innocent, and by the third, whether they be virtues or vices."
The measure of what is a virtue and what is a vice is for Locke established by a secret and tacit consent.
Through men uniting into political society have resigned up to the public the disposing of all their force, so that they cannot employ it against any fellow citizen any further than the law of the country directs. Yet, they retain still the power of thinking well or ill, approving or disapproving of the actions of those whom they leader more."
The statements bring us in a context where the social opinion processed by people, of course filtered by time, is recognized as having an essential value for social interaction.
What comes to mind is obviously a very different characterization of public opinion in ancient times vis-a-vis this view.
In his book on the structural transformation of the public sphere, Eugen Abermas recognizes a central role for Locke's statesmen in a process that brought public opinion to become an important feature of the political debate and, more generally, the knowledge of the millions, namely something which is valued rather than despised by political thinkers and political actors.
In his study, Aberma shows how the appeal to the public spirit gradually becomes a highly significant moment of political fight, public opinion being for him a category of the bourgeois society, ultimately self-contradictory, but we shouldn't get into that.
It is not by chance that in his thoughts on the cause of the present discontents Edmund
Burke defines the first study of the statement as, quote, the temper of the people among
whom he presides, end quote. For those who oppose absolutism, government should be intended
as a servant rather than a master of people. This is why people's opinion acquires importance
and gains consideration. On a more ideological ground, we can see that the classical liberal
Classical appeal to public opinion can be understood in two different ways.
Maybe an appeal to self-constraining forces within the body of a society, which brings
us back to Locke's law of opinion and reputation.
Customs and social penalties have proved to have some efficiencies in fostering order
in a society and keeping a balance in it regardless of direct action by political power.
So liberalism, anyway, has not just been defending the legitimacy of prejudicers, so to speak,
but has also gloriously defended free inquiry as the only way to get closer to the truth.
In the hierophagitica, there are few sentences that are more moving than John Milton's passionate
cry, give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience
above all liberties, and so forth.
Well, by the way, we should remember to send a copy of the book to our friend, the bureaucrats at the University of Nevada.
But either way, the value of the opinion of the people is being placed above the stake of government regulation.
Many have found inconsistencies in the classical liberals' appeal to reason in this defense of customs, of the legitimacy of opinions,
and of the heritage of the past, and are valued as such.
On this front, I find truly exemplary of the essence of a classical liberal perspective.
The reaction by a Spencerian libertarian, such as Hulsworth Donister, that's quite too much for my English,
to the idea that theory of evolution was to be thought in schools,
being obviously very much a proponent of theory of evolution.
In 1895, he wrote, quote,
The State should not be permitted to teach the Darwinian Theory of the Origin of Species
at the expense of those who accept a special creation hypothesis.
It is not fair an honest evolutionist have faith enough in the final triumph of the truth
not to request or desire even the unconscious assistance of their adversaries.
The idea of separating the game of knowledge-building from political power does not imply that public opinion cannot cast new light on the mechanism that underlies political power.
In a way, if we can find a unifying experience in different streams of classical liberal thought, it is the fight against the Arcana Empire.
The attempts to establish constitutionally limited governments, no matter if they succeeded or failed, were exactly the attempt to force political power to be reliable, transparent, predictable, that is not arbitrary.
Opening the access to power via democratic institutions, making the debate over legislation a de facto food-public debate, was another step that was originally intended to undermine the most distinctively dangerous features of power.
Somehow, free market anarchism builds upon the failure of these attempts and on the observation
that since the political class is always keeping at hand the key of the chastity belt we try
to impose on them, we should better resort to other strategies to get rid of its oppression.
Public opinion is key in this scenario. We know from Etienne Labessy and David Hume that
The Government Cannot Survive by Pure Force
Hume's famous words,
nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye
than the easiness
with which the many are governed by the few
and the implicit submission
with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers.
When we inquire by what means this wonder is affected,
we shall find that as force is always on the side of the governed,
The governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is therefore, on opinion only, that government is founded, and this maxim extends to the most despotic and military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular.
The consent of the people is an essential tool for government survival as an institution, given the fact that policemen are, as we all know, even in the most totalitarian state, just a limited fraction of the population.
This is why public education is so essential to governments all over the world, not just because it's a pillar of the welfare state for the reason we all know, but first and foremost, it is the instrument by which the state lowers the cost of coercive transfer of money by taxpayers to tax consumers.
If everybody did not believe in the legitimacy of taxation, of course we would have many people resisting this form of institutionalized robbery.
However, state education is the vehicle by which the legitimizing formulas of the political status quo are disseminated in the citizen's mind, typically at a very early stage, so that they influence the behavior and the basic beliefs of individuals for most of their life.
The public education system, conservatives I believe are right on this point, is the battlefield where great so-called cultural wars are fought.
But the first of these cultural works is the work to give legitimacy to the state as an institution, to dress it up in neutral clothes, to make it a natural fact of life as much as the sun over our heads.
The state has by and large succeeded in such an effort so that the very existence of groups like ours that venture to question the right to exist of the modern state is sometimes taken just as a quaint evidence of a lost past.
No matter what kind of weapons we can use, when we compare our magazines, our website, our think tanks, to the magnitude of the state education system, we soon realize that we are, you know, bad mice fighting with an elephant.
Now I apologize if any of you feel offended in being compared with a rat, but the good news is that rats can scare elephants, and sometimes that happens.
Persuading people of our argument is very far from being easy. It often takes a tremendous amount of time.
It probably implies the necessity of changing our vocabulary depending on the people we are talking with.
In a manner of speaking, there are many roads to Damascus, and all of them deserve to be worked if they can gain new members to our club, new fighters to the cause of liberty.
So if the state ultimately rests largely on opinion, obviously it has to be fought and defeated on the ground of opinion.
But this is not all. By saying that the state rests largely on public opinion, we are merely putting in a different way our original point, that is that consent accounts for a good deal of social interaction.
In his Social Statics, Herbert Spencer thought that an instinct of our freedom and a sympathy which makes us respect the likely freedom of our fellows compose a mechanism capable of establishing social contrasts in which the low-equal freedom that, in Spencer's mind, is the juridical principle that governs a free society can reign.
It's true that the young Spencer embraces an anthropology very similar to the one displayed by philosophical radicals.
His evolutionism leads people toward progressive self-perfection.
His approach has been described as a final state natural theory, which is a fair sketch actually,
meaning that people can enjoy their natural right just as soon as the process of evolution is perfected.
Still, in 1851, Spencer could write it when, quote,
We reflect upon the character of modern ideas and agitations,
on the declaration of rights, liberty of the press,
slave emancipation, removal of religious disabilities,
reform bills, et cetera.
My gosh, those were the times, in a manner of speaking.
And consider how, through all of them,
that runs a hindered spirit, and now this spirit is manifesting itself with constantly
increasing intensity and universality.
We shall see that these facts imply some moral change, and explicable as they are by the
growth of this compound faculty responding to the law of equal freedom, it is reasonable
to consider them as showing the mood in which such faculty seeks to play social arrangement
in Harmony with Dead Law, end quote.
The most important faculty to be developed
in the social landscape was for Spencer
the jealousy of liberties, a watchful determination
to resist anything like encroachment upon rights
that, according to him, generates among those in power
such respect for these rights as checks any desire
they may have to address the people and the rights of them.
In a state of mature evolution,
A free man, quote, loves liberty as a miner loves gold, for its own sake and quite irrespective of its advantages, end quotes.
Another, again Spencer, what he too highly values is liblacy watches.
He quickly detects any attempt at the diminution of it, and he opposes aggression the moment it initiates.
Indeed, when a community consists of men animated by the spirit that we have just exemplified,
the continuance of liberal institution is certain.
Now, I think Spencer is up to a very important point when he concludes that, quote,
political freedom, therefore, is, as we say, an external result of an internal sentiment.
It's alike, dependent on the moral sense.
To be sure, I don't want to imply that the hopes of classical liberalism rest upon, you know, the fate of a new man, that some features of human nature have to be changed if we want to live in a free society.
But I think that the consciousness of the value of freedom, as well as the ultimate deconstruction of the fundamental mystique of the state is a necessary step to achieve the goal of a society in which aggression is minimized.
Even if we are not to attribute much credit to Herbert Spencer evolutionary approach, even if we are still recovering from the disillusion that the transition from status to contract was never completed,
I think there is a common sense, there is much common sense in recognizing that, again, quote,
The very antecedents of a peaceful agitation serve in some measure to ensure the success of the free institutions obtained by it. End quote.
Continues Spencer. Quote, not anger, not the anxiety to escape from torture, is now the transforming force, but a calm determination to get human liberties recognized.
The carrying out one of these battles of opinion to a successful issue through long delays and discouragement, through ridicule and misrepresentation, implies a perennial source of energy, quite different from the mere insurrectionary rage.
In place of a passing gust of anger, a persistent and ever-strengthening sentiment is here the acting agent. Agitation is its own gymnasium.
If we endure enough, in other way, the new institution won't express just what Spencer
calls an exceptional state of the popular mind, but rather it's a vitriol state.
Now, this may sound a bit naive, especially because these lines were written long before
socialism became, well, the leading political theory.
In a manner of speaking, when he was writing social studies, Spencer saw very little competition
to the ideas that inform his mindset.
Still, this does not change the fact
that he is giving us an impressive catalog of the reasons
why classical liberals should not abandon
the trenches of public opinion.
Writing one century after Spencer,
and thus in a time when the individualist perspective seemed
to be irremediably lifeless, and on the other hand,
socialism was more popular than ever,
The coming slavery, Spencer feared, has consistently become reality, yet Frank Chodorov didn't
chase to show optimism.
One revolution breeds another, he contended, outlining a strategy that the Mises Institute,
among others, is successfully putting in practice today.
Since the only direction youth can go is away from the current collectivistic tradition
towards his opposite, those who cherish the individualist stock of values must try to
peddle them to this embryonic revolutionist.
We must polish up our ancient arguments, apply them to the current scene and offer them as
brand new merchandise.
We must do a selling job.
Youth will not buy us out, lock, stock and borrow, but will be rather selective about
it.
will take what seems good to them, modernize it, build it into a panacea and start a revolution.
God bless them, end quote.
This is the great hope underpinning what has been and still is one of the most distinctive features of the libertarian movement,
reaching out to students.
Seminars, conferences, books targeted on the youth are already building a new generation of intellectuals,
and, last but not least, laymen who are not particularly interested in making their ideology their job, but who are strong as rocks in their beliefs.
The primary task of such an educational work should be, in Murray Rothbard's words, quote, again, this is quite too much for my English,
the bamboozling, the public on the entire nature and procedures of the despotic state.
Changing the world one mind at a time is far more difficult than changing it by gaining power
and executing all of our enemies.
I know some of you and I know perhaps some days like you wake up in the morning
and you had that dream during the night, but it is more consistent with our fundamental beliefs
and it is the more satisfying exactly because it is so challenging.
Now, how do new technologies fit into this scenario?
Well, I think that the role of the internet in the growth of the libertarian movement can hardly be overestimated.
We are still a very small minority whose voice is hardly heard within the establishment.
Those who are pursuing a career in academia know well the kind of difficulties you are forced to endure
if you chose the way not to conform to the dominant consensus.
Those who write in the papers know well that most of the time you have to explain the argument you want to make
to your editor twice or three times just before you realize, you know, there's something over there.
And, generally speaking, I believe that our daily life is made of small triumphs and great frustrations.
Every time we succeed in winning an argument with a friend, every time we gain people to the cause we believe in,
every time we meet a new student or reader who is expressing interest for the bunch of crazy radical ideas we are trying to sell him,
Now, as it is obvious, mass media do not exist in a vacuum and pay a tribute to the existing political consensus.
They are also tied up to political power in more subtle ways.
In many European countries, media are directly subsidized by the state.
In the country I come from, primary sources of information, that is news agencies,
take their money directly, not even from the state or the parliament, but from the prime minister office.
Now, this is why we happen to have, you know, basically a dozen of clones of writers disseminated just between Milan and Rome.
And how independent in dealing with political affairs they can be, I leave it to your imagination.
But even when you come to papers and TV that do not depend on public funding,
Their publishers are often businesses that rely so heavily over political subsidies and or some particular kind of regulation that they will seldom regard the frontal opposition to government as a viable option.
This is one of the reasons why the Internet has been such a great tool for developing our network.
Also, I would like to say at the beginning that, in a way, one great thing about the Internet is that it's a continuous antidote against basically our loneliness.
If you think to the founding of the Mont Pelerin Society, basically you've got 50, 60 classical liberal scholars gathering together in Switzerland and then in Venice, Italy, some other places.
And for them was a tremendous experience, I mean, as being said by Peter Klein in the session on internet and electronic media.
I mean, really, if you talk to some of these people, for them was one of the very few occasions they had to meet likely minded individuals.
Now we can exchange papers. I mean, we are constantly in touch one with each other, with emails.
This is why, and I suppose this is a very positive development for most of you in the audience, now I will say that in continental Europe most of the libertarians I know are Rothbardians.
If I just give a quick look to the people working for the center of the new Europe I work for, I see at least four people over six, so it's not a small number, that are permanently in-depth to a certain institution in Alabama for having opened their eyes on the nature of the state.
Cecile Philippe, Gabriel Calzada, Martin Stefunco, myself, all have been here and are trying to apply what they learned now in Europe.
Cecile runs a small but fast-growing French free market think tank named after Gustave de Molinarie.
Gabriel has just founded a Juan de Mariana Institute in Spain and teaches at the Universidad Reywan Carlos in Madrid.
Martin is a very well-known opinion-maker in his country, Slovakia.
These are just the first names that come to mind.
Americans, so very much 95% of you, forgive me for focusing on Europe, which I know a little bit better.
For example, we have a research center like the Liberalny Institute in Prague.
It is organizing a European-Austrian Scholars Conference, which is a clone of this event,
The Lithuanian Free Market Institute in Vilnius is the best ink tank in Europe to me and its directors are as sound as you can get.
You all know what a splendid work Christian Comanescu and these associates have been doing in Romania.
And I'm also happy with what we are doing in Italy, and I think we are very much fast growing in just one year.
Three to seven employees, and we had a very big conference for students named GACID, the Mises Seminar.
With more than 70 paying students, it was quite a marvel for us.
We have a monthly seminar in Milan, which is named, again, guess it, the Rothbard seminar, which is doing pretty well.
So, I don't want to give you a wrong impression. I mean, the impact of all of this reality is still to be checked.
And some of them are problems, some of them major problems, or are in a period of stasis.
For example, in Italy, what I find to be the most pressing problem is to cultivate a new generation of scholars, and I know that very few people know better how hard it is than Lew and Jeff.
I mean, the classical liberal movement is first class in attracting nuts, and I place myself among them.
But so far hasn't proved to be a particularly good magnet of young bright students to invest in.
We benefit from the scholarship of great people, some of them being here this week.
But I also should mention at least Carlo Lucieri and Mario Colombatti.
We did have great scholars in the past, from Sergio Ritoso, Franco Romani, Antonio Martino, Dario Antisa,
and many others, all of them sounding like a bit funny names to you, but they had a useful
impact in our country.
But the problem is that we still need to find some suitable heirs.
Now Italy has the best free market journalist in Europe, in the person of Oscar Janin, another
funny name to you, but I assure you, a contemporary heiress, still I don't see many of his like
emerging.
A good sign is that we recently started to get some women into our movement, as you know, I mean, it's really a cultural divide,
when you start getting women before and later, and surely these had so far lasting consequences, but just on the hormones of our many nerds,
I mean, it was the only change it had so far.
The fight for liberty needs continuous dedication, eternal vigilance, obviously, and professionalism.
Our problem, and the problem of many people in Europe, has been that many things have been done in the past, but in quite an erratic way.
We still lack in many European countries, and this is why I was mentioning the developing of think tanks, because it's definitely a good step in that direction.
The primary feature of a successful political movement, which is organization.
And I think now we are doing all a little bit better, even though there is still a long way to go.
But all what I just said is also really linked with the new technology.
In many ways, you know, for example, our institute is an office, but nobody is ever there.
All of my colleagues, with the exception of the secretary, work from home.
And we gather together basically when we organize events.
With a blackberry and a good internet connection, I believe you can really supervise the activity of a small free market institute from any place in the world.
But what I said is also related with new technologies, because it is a testimony of the overwhelming success of tools like mises.org and ludrockwell.com.
That is, websites that are so powerful and well done, that are literally feeding a movement with ideas and articles, exercising a real influence on people all over the world.
I mean, just think, through the amazing amount of translations of Austrians into European languages, that were possible just because, you know, they were available, the original text and the English translation released freely on the web.
It is particularly interesting when you compare this situation to what was the historical situation of samizdat, obviously, in Eastern Europe.
Now, I think the internet is adding up to a phenomenon that Donnie Storpe, again, described very well for his time, quote,
20 years ago, I took a census of the individualists in this country, England.
It was at the end of the 19th century.
And I found that they could all be seated comfortably in a bus.
12 years ago, I took another and I found that their number had increased to about 300.
This increase I attributed mainly to the teachings of Mr. Herbert Spencer.
and Verber Spencer. At the present time, the individualist of England may be counted by
thousands and perhaps tens of thousands. I attribute this further increase partially
to the same cause, again to the teaching of Verber Spencer, and partially to the efforts
of the Personal Rights Defense Association and the Liberty and Property Defense League,
and partially, of course, to the visible, evil effects of the practical state socialism
of the Legislature."
Now I think that if you substitute the name Herbert Spencer with the name of Mises, Hayek
and Rothbard, and the Liberty and Property Defense League with the Mises Institute and
the many likely institutions that are trying to make a difference in the contemporary world,
then you have a fair picture of what is happening today.
The key difference is that the Internet gives us a much clearer vision of what others are
And what we are doing in our small circles all over the world by allowing us the possibility of staying in touch with them all over the year.
I mean the possibility of staying in touch with people who live even far, far away from us.
As a movement we are growing and I believe there is no doubt about it.
The Internet is also a great tool, not just for connecting people, but also to free ourselves from the kind of notions that were imposed on us during our school years.
And also it's a great tool for providing access, you know, knowledge to people living in countries where it's impossible perhaps even to buy books.
I mean, you should really measure the influence of the Internet, for example, on the very few but growing number of libertarians in Africa.
I mean, that's quite amazing.
So it is just so much easier to get in touch with Austrian economics, for example, even if all your professors are new classics.
If you can get all the sources just by Googling the name of Carl Menger.
I should also mention here the wonderful online Library of Liberty that David Hart edits for the Liberty Fund, which seems to me to be one of the greatest gifts ever made to any libertarian scholar in the world.
Still, I believe sometimes we should remind ourselves that we do not live in a Google world.
On the Internet, our ideas enjoy a far wider representation than in real life.
They are much more part of the debate in newsgroups, mailing lists, websites than in magazines, TV, broadcasts, even conversations over a glass of wine.
I fear that in getting too connected, we may get a bit disconnected from reality.
This has also some relevance to the kind of vocabulary we use in discussing with other people in the real world.
What I fear is that we may experience what happened in Miguel de Cervantes' novel to, you know, the hopeless Mr. Quixana,
who ended up being so taken by novels about chivalry and the epic struggle between good and evil
that he decided to dress himself up as a knight and became the heroic nightmare of wine mills.
If our fight for justice is in many ways as hopeless as the one of Don Quixote, we should
anyway keep our feet down to the earth.
We shouldn't forget that we are not winning the war of ideas and that, if such a conflict
is ever to be concluded with a happily ever after, this requires continuous dedication.
Opening up a libertarian blog is important, but I believe is at least as important as
convincing our roommates that, for example, virtualized medicine is not such a great idea.
Now the fact that there are many libertarian websites, many libertarian mailing lists,
many libertarian discussion groups can be, and certainly is good, but can also be bad
news from another point of view, especially if you don't look to America, but you look
The good news is that since the Internet is the game of younger people, we are obviously
nurturing a number of younger libertarians greater than ever before.
The bad news may well be related to the fact that doing things on the Internet is usually
very cheap and amazingly cheaper than organizing conferences or publishing books.
This is obviously good insofar as it makes it possible for us to make the most of our
funding, but in some places and in some circumstances simply show that a libertarian movement was
or is not able to find and cultivate donors.
Now I think this is not something that can be easily overlooked.
It is true that fundraising, especially in Europe, is even more difficult than in the
United States and that in our European countries people typically do not think of donating
money to political non-profit institutions per se, and it will take time before we can
achieve a mentality shift as relevant as to make the idea of helping with your pocket
because of liberty appealing to the enterprising bourgeoisie, which is still, I believe, more
or less our social constituency.
But you cannot have a political movement without donors and benefactors.
In other words, you cannot have a political movement that is composed purely of intellectuals.
This implies in a way it's very failure. It means you never succeed in establishing the link with that part of civil society you are fighting for.
I think the Internet has given us so far just a fleeting glimpse of what it can do for the cause of liberty.
We do still have to develop a better understanding, again I speak as not the Mises Institute, everybody else,
I think we still have to develop a better understanding of what use can be made of internet broadcasting, for example.
Very few people do what Mises Institute does, for example, in Europe, making available online MP3 files of conferences and meetings,
which is a very powerful thing, especially with the development of broadband, even in third world countries like Italy.
Daily updated website in Europe's rarity, and I can name but one, which is Libertad Digital in Spain, that is really self-sustaining free market online magazine.
Blogs are often a great thing and can help a lot in popularizing ideas, especially when they are sparkingly written,
But sometimes they can prove to be a sidetrack, and sometimes they produce, at least to me, an oversimplification of political analysis, which is almost equivalent to the one customarily supplied by printed newspapers.
I think, you know, our movement is doing very good as far as using RSS feeds, for example, is concerned.
I'm among those that read Jeff Tucker article on www.lewrockwell.com and the day after call his webmaster asking for RSS feeds I think the internet provides us with wonderful ways of managing our mailing list and for everybody that has the need to spreading ideas is of course a very important need but we are just at the beginning of a process and I believe there is much we will see in the future.
If I have already annoyed you enough, I will go to the conclusions.
If a free society is to be attained by persuading people, the role of what Hayek called the second-hand dealers in ideas is of primary importance.
I believe a free society can be achieved only by convincing our fellow man of its superiority over possible alternatives.
Freedom has to be recognized as a value to be protected, and Spencer was right on this point.
In such a scenario, I can hardly picture a more important role than the one Harry Haslett served.
And many people, including many people in this room, continue to serve.
I'm far from being always happy with journalism.
Sometimes you have to write about things you do not really care about much.
Well, it's the market, baby.
Sometimes you have to simplify your thoughts and your ideas in such a way that you have,
well, let's say, inadvertently to be fair and kind, but in a way that you have overstepping to mere sloganeering.
And that's very bad.
Sometimes you may feel that you're worsening your intellectual skills.
And sometimes, well, in a very unconscious being of modesty,
that you're not really qualified on a particular subject.
Sometimes you may feel that you're just talking with yourself.
But now, I would like to tell you something that I think about it over and over,
but I still find shocking and frightening.
That is, there are readers out there.
And even things you believe will be unnoticed, sometimes they will not be.
A good line can change the mind of another human being. You can seldom resist contemplating the power of your own words.
And this is why I believe the best investment a writer should consider is an investment in his own style.
Never be content with the way you write, even if you are Dante.
Only people who have a very unprofessional approach to writing believe that it is all about a natural gift.
It may be a part of the game, but you need to work on the way you write, making it better and better, so that at a certain point there will be people who will read your articles for the sheer pleasure of doing so, regardless of whether or not they agree with your positions.
When you reach that stage, it becomes ever easier to convince your readers, because by making them adept to your prose, you'll make them adept to your ideas.
I would like to conclude this very small reflection with a quote from Harry Aslett.
It comes from the speech he delivered on the occasion of his 70th birthday,
and explains very well why we shouldn't shut up,
why we should continue in trying to follow his footsteps,
why there is a lot to do for free market writers who want to breed sanity in the intellectual debate.
Quote, we have a duty to speak even more clearly and courageously, to work harder and to keep
fighting this battle while the strength is still in us.
The times call for courage, the times call for hard work, but if the demands are high
it is because the stakes are even higher.
They are nothing less than the future of liberty, which means the future of civilization.
I find these words as beautiful and inspiring as true.