WEBVTT NOTE It's Always Darkest Before the Dawn 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:14.000 Well, I'm going to talk about the dark before the dawn, and in arguing that dawn will follow the present darkness, I must first establish that the darkness exists at all. 2 00:00:14.000 --> 00:00:25.000 If you believe Robert Bartley of the Wall Street Journal, the dawn has already arrived with the government's response to September 11th and its political and economic aftermath. 3 00:00:25.000 --> 00:00:31.000 Barley is a supply sider and if you know something of that school it's a very mixed bag. 4 00:00:31.000 --> 00:00:37.000 It can be good on the need for tax cuts and the fallacies of zero-sum thinking. 5 00:00:37.000 --> 00:00:45.000 However, it's dismissive towards debt and public spending and all too friendly towards inflation and state intervention in general. 6 00:00:45.000 --> 00:00:49.000 Barley writes that before the Bush administration's bombing campaign, 7 00:00:49.000 --> 00:00:55.280 America was consumed with guilt at quote being too powerful, too prosperous, too 8 00:00:55.280 --> 00:01:00.520 assertive. Now however with the war we can consolidate a quote new century of 9 00:01:00.520 --> 00:01:07.160 safety, peace and spreading prosperity. Now the supply-sitters can be an 10 00:01:07.160 --> 00:01:13.280 absurdly pan-glossian bunch as long as stock prices are rising and for many 11 00:01:13.280 --> 00:01:17.040 years the Wall Street Journal's editorial pages have never found a low 12 00:01:17.040 --> 00:01:23.640 No stock price it didn't believe can and should be raised with an injection of new liquidity. 13 00:01:23.640 --> 00:01:28.240 That leads the writers to celebrate any event that will prompt the Fed to lower interest rates, 14 00:01:28.240 --> 00:01:31.480 war, for example. 15 00:01:31.480 --> 00:01:36.360 The journal is hardly alone in the opinion that war and prosperity go together. 16 00:01:36.360 --> 00:01:41.600 The whole media hold that the overthrow of a tottering and thuggish regime in dirt poor 17 00:01:41.600 --> 00:01:46.040 Afghanistan represents some sort of triumph of the national will. 18 00:01:46.040 --> 00:01:52.500 A foreshadowing of the government-run utopia of peace and prosperity headed our way. 19 00:01:52.500 --> 00:01:58.560 The tactic here is an old one, the identification of military prowess with economic health, 20 00:01:58.560 --> 00:02:03.920 which conflates the voluntary sector of private productivity with the coercive sector of central 21 00:02:03.920 --> 00:02:10.560 planning and accepts fallacies from Keynes's view that government spending boosts productivity 22 00:02:10.560 --> 00:02:15.920 to Lenin's that capitalism thrives on military conquest. 23 00:02:15.920 --> 00:02:21.520 But Bartley goes further. His point is not only that prosperity and military assertiveness 24 00:02:21.520 --> 00:02:27.320 stem from the same political priorities, which is not true in any case. He actually suggests 25 00:02:27.320 --> 00:02:33.960 that militarism itself is what brings about prosperity. His column is a tribute not to 26 00:02:33.960 --> 00:02:40.120 enterprise but to the war planners. Bartley should know that it is not the military that 27 00:02:40.120 --> 00:02:50.120 It is prosperity that makes possible the military, like all government programs, to exist in the first place. 28 00:02:50.120 --> 00:02:57.120 Government revenue that funds the military is seized from the private sector the way a parasite lives off a host. 29 00:02:57.120 --> 00:03:05.120 The healthier the host, the happier the parasite, which is allowed to become fatter and stronger than ever. 30 00:03:05.120 --> 00:03:13.120 Thus it is capitalism and the astounding productivity of the free economy alone that accounts for the power and influence of the U.S. 31 00:03:13.120 --> 00:03:20.120 As to the government, when it isn't taxing the markets, it's draining their productive powers in other ways. 32 00:03:20.120 --> 00:03:28.120 The current war and recession, for example, is being funded through credit expansion, which has led to massive debt accumulation. 33 00:03:28.120 --> 00:03:34.120 Meanwhile, the Fed's 12-month campaign to keep the economic expansion going has been a failure. 34 00:03:34.120 --> 00:03:42.120 and its pushed interest rates so low that saving already at historic lows is punished severely in favor of stock speculation. 35 00:03:42.120 --> 00:03:50.120 In the second half of 2001, American politicians got into the act by urging consumers and businesses to go on a spending spree. 36 00:03:50.120 --> 00:03:57.120 This was an attempt to stymie the good instincts that people have to get their financial houses in order during a recession. 37 00:03:57.120 --> 00:04:02.120 Instead of dumping debt, debt of all kinds has reached very dangerous highs. 38 00:04:02.120 --> 00:04:08.120 America has driven up total consumer credit as well as corporate credit to record highs. 39 00:04:08.120 --> 00:04:16.120 Neither cheerleading nor an artificial injection of liquidity, however, is a viable substitute for old-fashioned rebuilding. 40 00:04:16.120 --> 00:04:22.120 As we've learned at this conference, real economic growth can't be created by a printing press. 41 00:04:22.120 --> 00:04:29.120 At a time when the political establishment is using happy talk to generate the appearance of happy days 42 00:04:29.120 --> 00:04:39.120 and spending untold billions on war and welfare, no one wants to hear the message that there is a price to pay for this fiscal and monetary profligacy. 43 00:04:39.120 --> 00:04:48.120 Quote, war prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings, Mises wrote. 44 00:04:48.120 --> 00:04:58.120 The earthquake, he said, means good business for construction workers and cholera improves the business of physicians, pharmacists and undertakers. 45 00:04:58.120 --> 00:05:06.060 But no one for that reason is yet sought to celebrate earthquakes and cholera as stimulators of the productive forces in the general interest 46 00:05:07.660 --> 00:05:15.700 Government power and market productivity work at cross purposes as Mises wrote quote history is a struggle between two principles 47 00:05:16.080 --> 00:05:22.560 The peaceful principle which advances the development of trade and the militarist imperialist principle 48 00:05:22.860 --> 00:05:26.200 Which interprets human society not as a friendly division of labor? 49 00:05:26.200 --> 00:05:39.200 The Military State is a state of bandits. It prefers to live on booty and tribute. 50 00:05:39.200 --> 00:05:45.200 In Mises' view, there are times when employing the military is necessary. 51 00:05:45.200 --> 00:05:49.200 But he pleads with us not to be naive about the consequences. 52 00:05:49.200 --> 00:05:54.400 Consequences, quote, not only economic, but moral and political conditions will be affected, 53 00:05:54.400 --> 00:06:00.440 he writes, militarism will supplant democracy, civil liberties will vanish whenever military 54 00:06:00.440 --> 00:06:05.800 discipline must be supreme, hence says Mises, the use of the military always comes at the 55 00:06:05.800 --> 00:06:10.820 expense of liberty and there's no reason to pretend otherwise. 56 00:06:10.820 --> 00:06:16.080 We see the erosion of liberty taking place in our own time, thanks to legislation passed 57 00:06:16.080 --> 00:06:21.600 This fall and winter, the federal police now enjoy unprecedented rights against the people. 58 00:06:21.600 --> 00:06:29.760 And our supposed free media have been ignoring this or, in the most abject, toting fashion, heralding it. 59 00:06:29.760 --> 00:06:34.040 Right now, political deviants are being rounded up without probable cause. 60 00:06:34.040 --> 00:06:41.960 In recent days, students said to hold anti-government views have been visited by the FBI and the Secret Service at their dormitories. 61 00:06:41.960 --> 00:06:43.280 So have business professionals, 62 00:06:43.280 --> 00:06:45.800 overheard making cynical remarks, for example, 63 00:06:45.800 --> 00:06:47.120 at the local gym. 64 00:06:48.160 --> 00:06:50.600 As for Congress, it's become utterly useless 65 00:06:50.600 --> 00:06:52.320 in curbing the executive state. 66 00:06:53.400 --> 00:06:55.560 By congressional decree, the chief executive 67 00:06:55.560 --> 00:06:59.040 has been granted unprecedented authority and autonomy 68 00:06:59.040 --> 00:07:01.680 in complete violation of the Constitution. 69 00:07:02.960 --> 00:07:06.000 This only begins the catalog of interventions. 70 00:07:06.000 --> 00:07:07.520 In economic affairs, we now have 71 00:07:07.520 --> 00:07:09.480 a conservative administration calling 72 00:07:09.480 --> 00:07:39.480 for a Vast Expansion of Unemployment Benefits, New Restrictions on the Use of Cash, Food Stamps for Foreigners, Stepped-up Federal Spending and Control of Public Schools, More Foreign Aid, and More Federal Reserve Money and Credit to Make it All Possible. We can look forward to another round of international bailouts, possibly even of Japan where, as has been pointed out today, banks are holding a trillion dollars in bad debts and officials are burning up the phone lines to 73 00:07:39.480 --> 00:07:46.120 PC. Also Scott Trask mentioned to me that it's already in the Spanish language press 74 00:07:46.120 --> 00:07:53.280 that the US is going to be bailing out Argentina. They've already made that decision. And we 75 00:07:53.280 --> 00:07:57.360 shouldn't forget the billions headed towards Afghanistan to fund a massive rebuilding of 76 00:07:57.360 --> 00:08:03.560 what the US has just destroyed. No one should believe the Wall Street Journal that the dawn 77 00:08:03.560 --> 00:08:08.780 has arrived because the government believes itself to be more powerful than anyone or 78 00:08:08.780 --> 00:08:11.340 or anything on earth. 79 00:08:11.340 --> 00:08:14.020 Noah's Jefferson said the opposite is true. 80 00:08:14.020 --> 00:08:16.820 The more latitude the government has at home and abroad, 81 00:08:16.820 --> 00:08:21.180 the more we ought to be concerned for the future of freedom. 82 00:08:21.180 --> 00:08:23.380 Interestingly, Bartley pens a chilling sentence 83 00:08:23.380 --> 00:08:26.220 that would appear to indicate some knowledge of this. 84 00:08:26.220 --> 00:08:27.620 Listen to his choice of language. 85 00:08:27.620 --> 00:08:30.020 Quote, a new era cannot be consolidated 86 00:08:30.020 --> 00:08:32.540 in the foreign arena alone. 87 00:08:32.540 --> 00:08:35.460 In the new year, Mr. Bush will have to make the point 88 00:08:35.460 --> 00:08:45.460 But the serious minds who can so ably run a war are also the best minds to run an economy. 89 00:08:45.460 --> 00:08:52.460 Nurture better education, make environmental trade-offs and save a faltering social security system. 90 00:08:52.460 --> 00:08:56.460 Of course, he favors central planning by Republicans as opposed to Democrats. 91 00:08:56.460 --> 00:09:03.960 But from the point of view of the free society, it doesn't matter whose calling card the state is carrying. 92 00:09:03.960 --> 00:09:08.200 that free enterprise is capable of funding a huge military empire 93 00:09:08.200 --> 00:09:12.440 creates something of a problem for those of us who advocate freedom. 94 00:09:12.440 --> 00:09:15.440 For we know that the more wealth society produces, 95 00:09:15.440 --> 00:09:18.800 the more governments try to steal it. 96 00:09:18.800 --> 00:09:22.960 This is why it's morally and intellectually incumbent on believers in free enterprise 97 00:09:22.960 --> 00:09:28.280 to take the lead in warning against expansions of government of every sort. 98 00:09:28.280 --> 00:09:31.560 One may argue, of course, that to the extent the U.S. military 99 00:09:31.560 --> 00:09:34.600 insists in keeping peace and stability in the world. 100 00:09:34.600 --> 00:09:37.480 This is good for free markets and prosperity. 101 00:09:38.840 --> 00:09:40.800 But is this what the Pentagon does? 102 00:09:41.960 --> 00:09:44.080 The terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center 103 00:09:44.080 --> 00:09:47.120 were striking out at wealth and those who produce it. 104 00:09:47.120 --> 00:09:48.960 Just as many bureaucrats in Washington 105 00:09:48.960 --> 00:09:51.760 strike out at market productivity on a daily basis. 106 00:09:52.680 --> 00:09:54.960 The damage done on September 11th was dramatic 107 00:09:54.960 --> 00:09:57.160 and compressed in one instant. 108 00:09:57.160 --> 00:09:59.580 The damage done by Washington bureaucrats 109 00:09:59.580 --> 00:10:04.460 is spread out over years and decades and less visible to the eye. 110 00:10:04.460 --> 00:10:10.300 But both forms of violence constitute the use of coercion against peaceful people. 111 00:10:10.300 --> 00:10:15.260 So by hating and attacking the market economy, the terrorists share a profession in common 112 00:10:15.260 --> 00:10:19.660 with the political class in this country, though the latter is, of course, in good standing 113 00:10:19.660 --> 00:10:20.660 with the law. 114 00:10:20.660 --> 00:10:23.860 Indeed, it makes and enforces the law. 115 00:10:23.860 --> 00:10:27.980 Moreover, there's more than enough evidence, including the statements of the terrorists 116 00:10:27.980 --> 00:10:50.020 I don't believe that US foreign policy ought to change because terrorists say so. I believe 117 00:10:50.020 --> 00:10:54.380 it should change because it is the right thing to do. 118 00:10:54.380 --> 00:10:59.660 The U.S. government somehow managed to do more than simply provide terrorists with motivation. 119 00:10:59.660 --> 00:11:03.340 With policies dating back decades, it made it very difficult for Americans to protect 120 00:11:03.340 --> 00:11:10.460 themselves, for, by example, preventing privately-owned airliners from arming themselves against hijackers 121 00:11:10.460 --> 00:11:15.060 and leading us to believe that a military budget larger than that of every developed 122 00:11:15.060 --> 00:11:21.180 nation in the world combined might actually be all the protection we would need. 123 00:11:21.180 --> 00:11:26.220 A government at war always uses the occasion to expand its power over the economic and 124 00:11:26.220 --> 00:11:33.060 social lives of its citizens. To be sure, some of its excuses are quite plausible. Everyone 125 00:11:33.060 --> 00:11:39.320 favors justice for those involved in killing the innocent. But unleashing the dogs of war 126 00:11:39.320 --> 00:11:45.500 leads to unpredictable consequences. Even after adding to Afghanistan's miserable lot 127 00:11:45.500 --> 00:11:50.780 and killing some 4,000 civilians who had no part in September 11th. 128 00:11:50.780 --> 00:11:54.540 The U.S. still hasn't caught Osama bin Laden. 129 00:11:54.540 --> 00:11:58.620 Perhaps there were better ways than war to pursue justice, but there was certainly no 130 00:11:58.620 --> 00:12:03.600 better way to increase the grip of the central state over America, which is what the government 131 00:12:03.600 --> 00:12:06.900 actually aims at. 132 00:12:06.900 --> 00:12:09.100 That we have always known. 133 00:12:09.100 --> 00:12:13.460 The events of recent months have reminded us again of why it is so urgent to join the 134 00:12:13.460 --> 00:12:25.460 And the intellectual battle in defense of the free society, particularly in the field of economics, and for the sake of our personal well-being and that of society as a whole. 135 00:12:25.460 --> 00:12:35.460 If there is a new faith in government today, it is not a faith that government can completely manage society as Tracks from the 1930s claimed. 136 00:12:35.460 --> 00:12:43.760 Instead, it is a faith that government can pulverize its enemies with ease, and to that degree, that faith is not entirely misplaced. 137 00:12:43.760 --> 00:12:52.260 The human mind has always been impressed by the ability of power to accomplish spectacular acts of destruction. 138 00:12:52.260 --> 00:12:57.060 Yet the Fed has proven itself powerless as a tool of macroeconomic stimulus. 139 00:12:57.060 --> 00:13:02.660 Its impotence has even startled the Fed's own economists. 140 00:13:02.660 --> 00:13:09.660 Think of it, we live in times when the government cannot point to a single one of its programs and call it a success. 141 00:13:09.660 --> 00:13:18.660 We're faced with several huge physical crises in the future involving retirement benefits, rising debt and the overvaluation of stocks. 142 00:13:18.660 --> 00:13:26.660 Because politicians destroy the gold standard, we have a currency that is fundamentally unsound and unchecked by any limits on the central bank. 143 00:13:26.660 --> 00:13:30.660 We have collapsing public schools, public transit, public services of all sorts, 144 00:13:30.660 --> 00:13:36.660 and other sorts, which no amount of cash infusion is going to fix. 145 00:13:36.660 --> 00:13:39.660 Yet there are positive signs that have emerged recently. 146 00:13:39.660 --> 00:13:42.660 I would name the shredding of the Kyoto Treaty 147 00:13:42.660 --> 00:13:46.660 and the hampering of environmentalism as a political movement. 148 00:13:46.660 --> 00:13:51.660 The inability of the left liberals to enact more gun laws. 149 00:13:51.660 --> 00:13:55.660 The sucker punch that 9-11 gave to the multicultural movement, 150 00:13:55.660 --> 00:13:57.660 which claims that there is something inferior 151 00:13:57.660 --> 00:14:01.660 is inherently awful about the Western mind. 152 00:14:01.660 --> 00:14:04.660 The relentless march of the homeschooling movement, 153 00:14:04.660 --> 00:14:06.660 the well-documented trend among students 154 00:14:06.660 --> 00:14:09.660 to reject the left-wing prattle of their professors, 155 00:14:09.660 --> 00:14:13.660 the rise of a new bourgeois cultural sensibility, 156 00:14:13.660 --> 00:14:16.660 and the continued growth of a diverse internet 157 00:14:16.660 --> 00:14:19.660 as an alternative source of news. 158 00:14:19.660 --> 00:14:21.660 The realization that the government, 159 00:14:21.660 --> 00:14:23.660 despite the Department of Homeland Defense, 160 00:14:23.660 --> 00:14:29.900 cannot protect us. It's probably a good thing too. It can only increase the use 161 00:14:29.900 --> 00:14:34.700 of market means of providing the security that we all seek. These things 162 00:14:34.700 --> 00:14:38.980 are not enough to bring about a new dawn of course, but we will also be helped by 163 00:14:38.980 --> 00:14:44.580 one thing we can be 100% sure of. The state will continue to get egg on its 164 00:14:44.580 --> 00:14:49.940 face whenever it intervenes in terms of spectacular scandal and spectacular 165 00:14:49.940 --> 00:14:55.060 Failure. Before talking about what we must do, however, let me explain what I mean by 166 00:14:55.060 --> 00:15:02.180 Don. For all of us, it is the free society, one in which we are secure in our property 167 00:15:02.180 --> 00:15:06.820 and our privacy from a grasping government, and when our families and community lives 168 00:15:06.820 --> 00:15:12.180 are permitted to flourish in absence of the belligerence of state officials, when the 169 00:15:12.180 --> 00:15:16.980 U.S. government no longer believes itself the master of the country and the world, but rather 170 00:15:16.980 --> 00:15:20.980 begins to observe the Constitution's limits on its power. 171 00:15:22.300 --> 00:15:24.780 That dawn will require first an ideological change 172 00:15:24.780 --> 00:15:27.120 in public opinion where people's latent distrust 173 00:15:27.120 --> 00:15:29.220 of government is hardened into a hardcore 174 00:15:29.220 --> 00:15:30.700 love of liberty itself. 175 00:15:31.700 --> 00:15:34.300 This change must begin in the world of ideas, 176 00:15:34.300 --> 00:15:37.100 the world to which the Mises Institute is dedicated. 177 00:15:38.680 --> 00:15:40.660 Through it all, the Institute's intellectual work 178 00:15:40.660 --> 00:15:43.900 proceeds apace and with astounding results. 179 00:15:43.900 --> 00:15:45.860 Our teaching and resident fellow programs 180 00:15:45.860 --> 00:15:51.940 prepare the cadre that any revolution needs. Our journals overflow with outstanding scientific 181 00:15:51.940 --> 00:15:57.540 and historical scholarship. All of this, which you helped make possible, is laying a foundation 182 00:15:57.540 --> 00:16:03.300 for the future, just as Rothbard and Mises did. However, that doesn't mean that good 183 00:16:03.300 --> 00:16:09.260 scholarship in the Austrian tradition goes unnoticed today. The IMF, for example, just 184 00:16:09.260 --> 00:16:13.460 released a working paper that does a credible job presenting the Austrian theory of the 185 00:16:13.460 --> 00:16:15.460 and the business cycle. 186 00:16:15.460 --> 00:16:20.460 If you think about this, it's astounding for a theory that was supposedly killed off in the 1930s 187 00:16:20.460 --> 00:16:23.460 to be emerging into discussion today. 188 00:16:23.460 --> 00:16:27.460 But it is happening and at far more places than the IMF. 189 00:16:27.460 --> 00:16:30.460 This is the power of ideas at work. 190 00:16:30.460 --> 00:16:35.460 Recently, Gene Callahan mentioned that there were so many articles appearing in the popular press 191 00:16:35.460 --> 00:16:40.460 that discussed Mises that you can't swing a dead cat without hitting one. 192 00:16:40.460 --> 00:16:43.060 that would have been unthinkable 20 years ago. 193 00:16:44.620 --> 00:16:46.460 Every summer we bring in hundreds of brilliant 194 00:16:46.460 --> 00:16:49.260 and dedicated students, leaders on their campuses 195 00:16:49.260 --> 00:16:52.940 to receive systematic instruction in economics, 196 00:16:52.940 --> 00:16:55.600 history, ethics, law, social theory. 197 00:16:56.500 --> 00:16:58.100 They leave telling us that their time here 198 00:16:58.100 --> 00:17:00.460 has had a greater impact on their education 199 00:17:00.460 --> 00:17:03.380 than anything at their colleges and universities. 200 00:17:03.380 --> 00:17:06.100 Dozens of dissertations and books have been completed 201 00:17:06.100 --> 00:17:09.640 based on ideas sparked at these conferences. 202 00:17:09.640 --> 00:17:13.600 We have hundreds of young professors, teachers, researchers and writers doing the hard work 203 00:17:13.600 --> 00:17:19.800 of liberty. Our daily editorials reach tens of thousands of the world's smartest students, 204 00:17:19.800 --> 00:17:25.520 educators and business professionals. The intellectual movement backing our ideas has 205 00:17:25.520 --> 00:17:30.520 become nothing short of a well-oiled international machine, spreading truth and good sense at 206 00:17:30.520 --> 00:17:36.000 all levels of academia, society and culture. I submit to you that this trend should make 207 00:17:36.000 --> 00:17:42.320 make us more bullish on liberty despite any political or financial crisis. 208 00:17:42.320 --> 00:17:48.400 Time is ripe for the Austrians to be heard. Only the Austrian School has coherently explained 209 00:17:48.400 --> 00:17:54.140 what is happening right now in Argentina and Japan. Only the Austrian School has provided 210 00:17:54.140 --> 00:17:59.080 a full account of what has brought us to the present economic downturn in America and why 211 00:17:59.080 --> 00:18:05.840 welfare and warfare and inflation only make things worse. Only the Austrian School has 212 00:18:05.840 --> 00:18:10.500 has offered a consistent vision of a radical alternative, one that is capable of attracting 213 00:18:10.500 --> 00:18:16.940 young minds and appealing to society's cultural and intellectual leaders. 214 00:18:16.940 --> 00:18:22.340 Our greatest patron in this battle is the free economy itself, which daily astonishes 215 00:18:22.340 --> 00:18:28.640 us with its ability to provide, innovate and expand in the midst of so many attacks. 216 00:18:28.640 --> 00:18:34.340 The creative power of commerce dumb-founds those who continue to fortell its death. 217 00:18:34.340 --> 00:18:39.980 The state may pave, but the flowers of enterprise break up the concrete. 218 00:18:39.980 --> 00:18:44.740 And by commerce and enterprise, what I really mean is human action. 219 00:18:44.740 --> 00:18:48.900 The choices of individuals to embrace their own self-interest, and that of their families 220 00:18:48.900 --> 00:18:56.260 and communities, rather than to live for the political aims of the omnipotent state. 221 00:18:56.260 --> 00:19:00.420 For hundreds of years, and more so now than ever, the market has outrun the ability of 222 00:19:00.420 --> 00:19:05.620 of Interventionist Governments to Make it Conform to some Predetermined Plan. 223 00:19:05.620 --> 00:19:10.140 Despite the boom and bust of dot-coms, thanks to the Fed, the internet continues to grow 224 00:19:10.140 --> 00:19:17.780 as a source of commercial strength, as an alternative also source to news and of analysis, 225 00:19:17.780 --> 00:19:21.780 not cleared with DC in advance. 226 00:19:21.780 --> 00:19:26.540 With the aid of human motivation and innovation, human action in the marketplace, aided by 227 00:19:26.540 --> 00:19:33.180 by those institutions that sustain it in society will see our way out of the mire. 228 00:19:33.180 --> 00:19:37.160 We must be aware, of course, that those of us who champion a consistent vision of a free 229 00:19:37.160 --> 00:19:43.080 society without apology or compromise are going to come under fire. 230 00:19:43.080 --> 00:19:47.180 These criticisms can be brutal, but they're no different in character from what they've 231 00:19:47.180 --> 00:19:48.900 always been. 232 00:19:48.900 --> 00:19:53.620 The fundamental tactic is to question our motives and disparage our cause as only another 233 00:19:53.620 --> 00:19:55.840 special interest. 234 00:19:55.840 --> 00:19:58.880 But liberty is not the demand of a pressure group. 235 00:19:58.880 --> 00:20:05.400 It is a plea for the good of the entire society, and that makes it unique. 236 00:20:05.400 --> 00:20:09.000 Ours is not a mass movement, of course, and it need not be. 237 00:20:09.000 --> 00:20:13.040 Throughout history, the true friends of freedom, the ones who believe in it as a matter of 238 00:20:13.040 --> 00:20:18.160 hardcore principle, have always been few, and we've been reminded of this in recent 239 00:20:18.160 --> 00:20:19.800 days. 240 00:20:19.800 --> 00:20:24.880 How much more important than to stress and restress our continuing themes, liberty for 241 00:20:24.880 --> 00:20:32.380 For everyone, state privilege for no one. This is the social framework of a market economy. 242 00:20:32.380 --> 00:20:36.880 This is a message that no faction within the ruling class wants to hear. No matter how 243 00:20:36.880 --> 00:20:42.120 divided the factions are among themselves, they form a united front against the libertarian 244 00:20:42.120 --> 00:20:49.040 idea. That's why to sign up with the cause of liberty is to take a principled step. It 245 00:20:49.040 --> 00:20:53.800 means rejecting the dominant strain of politics, that the state ought to be used to promote 246 00:20:53.800 --> 00:21:16.800 The Cause of Liberty rejects all this, not because we have a special interest, but because we stick by the most unpopular claim of all, that society ought to be permitted to organize itself so that it benefits everyone in the long run. 247 00:21:16.800 --> 00:21:24.800 There is only one system that does so, and that is the competitive market economy operating under the natural order of liberty. 248 00:21:24.800 --> 00:21:29.800 We must never, even now, underestimate the power of ideas. 249 00:21:29.800 --> 00:21:39.800 The state, even with its attacks on freedom and peace, is ultimately no match for the truths we love and defend with all the energy we have. 250 00:21:39.800 --> 00:21:44.800 Our tradition of thought is deeply rooted in European and American history. 251 00:21:44.800 --> 00:21:50.800 It flourishes today among students, faculty and professionals all over the world. 252 00:21:50.800 --> 00:22:04.800 Those who seek to stamp it out through intimidation are no match for a body of ideas that has withstood every crisis that has befallen it for centuries, survived and flourished as new young minds joined its cause. 253 00:22:04.800 --> 00:22:13.800 One of the blessings of prosperity is that it permits serious scholarship and teaching, in addition to art and music and all the humane studies, to flourish. 254 00:22:13.800 --> 00:22:19.800 In this way, through the intellectual means, civilization perpetuates itself. 255 00:22:19.800 --> 00:22:25.800 There will always be crises, financial, economic, social and political. 256 00:22:25.800 --> 00:22:29.800 But there will also be great opportunities for change. 257 00:22:29.800 --> 00:22:35.800 If we adhere to the spirit as well as the ideas of freedom, then there will indeed be a new dawn. 258 00:22:35.800 --> 00:22:42.800 As Mises said, quote, ideas and only ideas can light the darkness. 259 00:22:42.800 --> 00:22:47.800 We have the ideas, and they will light our way to victory. Thank you. 260 00:22:47.800 --> 00:23:15.800 Do you want any questions or is it time for dancing? Christy? Jeff, the music director? 261 00:23:15.800 --> 00:23:22.800 Let's head out.