Thank you very much. It's a marvelous introduction. It's super. I don't know if I can live up to it.
I think this convention is a great convention. I mean, it's really unusual. I'm not just saying it because it's another convention I attended because
And two unique things about it, one for Libertarian Party conventions.
One is, today is the first time, today and tonight, I heard a Libertarian Party official at any convention call for more members.
That's fantastic. That's an unusual situation.
You might think it's puzzling why it's unusual. That's an interesting question. Why indeed.
Actually, welcoming and calling for new membership. That's a great spirit in itself.
There are too many parties, and I'm not going to mention their names in order to protect the guilty.
There are many state parties which don't want to grow in membership.
If we have enough members, we have 20 members, why do we need more?
Well, it's strange attitude.
And the second great thing about the Michigan Convention here is that the first convention I remember is since the 1970s.
I've attended every national convention since 1975.
And there are many state conventions, not every one, but many.
The first convention since the 70s, which focuses on ideas, ideas of liberty and how you apply it to the real world, the first time, a very unusual situation, so I applaud that, it's just great to talk about ideas. What else did they talk about? I don't know.
So I hope this sparks a trend of talking about ideas at the Libertarian Party conventions.
What's the purpose of the Libertarian Party? Should our purpose be to get more votes? Should
it be to win elections? Should it be to spread ideas? I never understand the dichotomy here,
I always figure all of the above is my answer. That's the whole point. We grow in membership,
advance the ideas, get more votes, and eventually get elected and mull back the Leviathan state.
That, I figure, is the whole point of the exercise here. So I can never understand why
there should be any kind of split in these aims. It seems to me that the ultimate purpose
of course of the Libertarian Party, the Libertarian Party is the political action arm of the Libertarian
Movement, and it's the arm which flies libertarianism to politics and electoral politics, and the
idea is eventually to roll back the state, and this is our method of doing it.
It seems to me that the basic strategy we should employ is to, and this again as a question
always comes up, what sort of strategy, seems to me the basic strategy is to uphold, keep
the idea of the loss of our ultimate goal, ultimate principle, and try to achieve them
and try to get toward it as fast as possible. This would seem to be almost banal, but it
seems to be controversial in the movement. There are two, Marx has worked this out, Marx
has a very good strategy, strategic theorist. As a matter of fact, before they started collapsing
about a few years ago, they spent most of their time arguing about strategy, not about
The Marxists identified two basic erroneous strategies, and I would endorse this, one is what they call opportunism, which I think is often rampant in the movement.
And what happens there, I've seen this happen in many libertarian organizations because I've been around the movement for about, Jesus Christ, about 43 years that I've been a libertarian. Good God.
At any rate, what happens is, your goal is to advance the ideas of liberty, that's the objective, okay, and you want to do it as rapidly as possible and as effectively as possible.
And so you try to get, build an organization which will accomplish that, and what begins to happen, sometimes very quickly and other times after a long period of time,
The end of time begins to have a subtle, or sometimes sudden, shift of emphasis.
The means become the end.
The objective, which had been advancing liberty, now becomes keeping the organization going,
keeping the payrolls going.
Then you change the output in order to maximize your input, so to speak.
So the ends and means are transposed.
My friend Woody Harper used to say, one of my early mentors in the movement,
That is when an organization takes on the dimensions of a racket.
You claim you're advancing freedom, instead of that you're simply building your own salaries.
So that's one problem that keeps popping up, only internal vigilance, and realizing
the problem I think can stop it.
The other problem is certainly the opposite, the opposite problem, which is Marx is called
sectarianism.
In other words, only saying, okay, we want, only talking about the ultimate goal and never
I think the best, most extreme example of that is the old, fairly lovable socialist party called the Socialist Labor Party.
I don't know if anybody here has heard of it. For good reason, nobody's ever heard of it.
At any rate, the Socialist Labor Party has been in existence since about 1890 or so.
They've gotten no place, and their strategic outlook is simply to publish one pamphlet.
The one pamphlet has different headlines. They keep up to date. Their outreach program is to change the title.
In other words, they'll say, are you worried about nuclear war, pollution, unemployment, whatever the situation is?
Then they reprint the same pamphlet, and the answer is socialism.
Scrap capitalism onto socialism. That's it. It's the pamphlet.
So it hasn't been very effective. It doesn't really grab. It's not a grabber.
There are a lot of libertarians that tend to have the same emphasis. Okay, smash the state, that's it. Without any kind of intervening analysis.
So what I think is the correct strategy, so to speak. I think the correct strategy is to hold the ultimate goal objective, always keep it in mind, and then offer what the Marxists call transition programs.
So the transition program to a taxless United States is abolishing income tax. It's a good solid transition program. Go for that.
I've been willing to live with that for a few years before pressing on.
So the transition program, however, has a couple of criteria, important criteria for the transition program.
1. It should be consistent with the objective, with the goal. I think it's very important.
This is what liberals mean when they say the means should not contradict the ends. I think
it's clumsily worded, but basically it's that you advance a transition program and shouldn't
undercut the ultimate objective. So you don't, for example, if you want to abolish the income
tax, you don't say, we should have a huge sales tax. But the first one will usually
have it and you have both. You wind up with both. Our objective is not to help the state
The Heartland, of course, the libertarianism, as we all know, was a stunning mayoralty race in 1973.
Fran Youngstein got 9,000 votes or something, which was great for that time.
And so, buoyed up by this resurgence, they decided to run for governor next year, Jerry Tuccioli ran for governor.
They signed on a soft-core program, because they really thought they were going to either win or at least get a lot of votes.
You have to appeal to the public.
In 1974, Tuccioli's radical program was to cut taxes, cut state taxes, which was a big deal.
Both the Republicans and Democrats said the same thing.
So we were stuck with a situation where Republicans and Democrats were both saying we should cut taxes.
Taxes were too big.
The Radical Crazy New Party also says the same thing. What's the point of voting for the Radical Crazy New Party if they don't offer any alternatives?
So naturally, there's a big flop-a-roo with lots of hysteria coming out of it.
And she left the party shortly thereafter, a disillusioned broken man.
And the New York Party has been declining ever since. Every year it gets less fewer votes.
At any rate, there's no point in selling out in that manner because you don't offer an alternative.
There's no point in pulling for a 2% income tax cut, things like that.
There were many great things about the Clark campaign in 1980, but the content was not one of them.
The content was, Clark offered the big centerpiece of a Clark campaign, which is very well funded,
and a lot of TV ads, which we haven't had since, the centerpiece of a Clark campaign was a 30% income tax cut.
Tax Cut. Unfortunately, Reagan was saying the same thing. He was also offering a 30%
income tax cut. The question is, if a Republican has a good chance to win over the 30% cut,
and a libertarian with a crazy new party also says we're in favor of a 30% cut, who is the
average anti-tax person going to vote for? And the answer is obvious. Ain't us. So that's
the sort of thing. We have to offer a clear cut radical alternative to the existing system
to give people a reason to vote for, to break their habits of a lifetime and vote for some
The Libertarian Party has what I consider a great platform that was built up over many
years.
I'm one of the architects of it.
I've been on the platform committee for many years.
And we built it up specifically to take the principles, which are great principles, and apply them to political issues.
To make the connection, to just say your favorite freedom is not enough.
It's great, it's fine, but it's only the first step.
Okay, you guys are in favor of freedom, how do you apply it?
Okay, he will apply it.
Bing, bing, bing.
Well, this upset a lot of people, including many libertarians, and it's a constant call for either getting rid of the platform, which is almost impossible to do because
The way the bylaws are structured, once the thing is frozen on the platform, it's almost impossible to get rid of it.
The other proposal, which unfortunately carries, is to have a program, which is a short platform, which essentially is an end run around it, to appeal to the average person because the platform is considered too radical.
So what you have, you're beginning to get something like a 2% income tax cut. You're beginning to get to the point where who cares anymore.
The Democrats and Republicans vote for the Democrats and Republicans.
I don't know, this guy's a little bit better for them.
Yet with us, they say, well, you have a hundred positions.
I disagree violently with one of them. Therefore, I won't vote for you.
Why do they do that?
Why do they have to agree with every damn one of the planks until they vote for us?
I still don't understand this.
Maybe cycle babble has a place after all. I can't explain this.
Jean Burns was a sometime candidate for president. I think he was just a great candidate. Unfortunately, things happen and he never continued to be nominated to the nomination.
He has a great, I think a great concept. By the way, he's one of the greatest speakers I've ever heard, bar in any party.
Anyway, his concept was a freedom train concept, which I think is terrific. He said this, of course, much better than I do. He's a radio talk show host and he has a great voice.
He said basically, look, if you don't agree, we have a freedom train. We're going on the way to freedom.
I invite you to get on the train. If you don't like what we do, you know, after we go 80% of the way or 60% or 90%, you're free to jump off or get off at any time.
But join us in the meantime. I think it's a great metaphor and I think it's terrific.
I'm sorry I didn't continue the nomination.
Anyway, so I think that sort of thing might be a good answer to this.
Nobody wants you to agree 100% on the thing. It would be great if you did, but we don't require it as a condition for voting for us.
I think to get to another point here about the case for the free market and the case for liberty and the case against statism, I think it's very important to do two things.
One, to refute the intellectual content. It was to show that statism doesn't work. That's great. I'm against it. I'm all for it. I do it most of the time.
Most of the time. But there's something else which I think is also important, mainly to show it's not just intellectual error.
This is where I agree with the public choice people. It's not just intellectual error. People aren't that dumb.
A lot of people benefit from this stuff. We have to expose the fact that they are ripping us off.
And one of the advantages of this is it gets people hung on a collar, as they should do, as they should.
In other words, if you say, well, the foreign price support program is a beautiful example of this,
If it doesn't work, it's irrational, etc., etc., it's all true, it hurts the consumer.
People will say, yeah, okay, and they sort of walk off. They don't really care that much.
It's like my students, or anybody else's students in the classroom.
If you say, they're ripping us off, these are a bunch of thieves, they're looting our pocket.
Then they start, you know, they pay attention, they're interested.
It rouses them from their usual torpor.
So the moral argument is actually an extremely important one, and even from utilitarian grounds.
For example, think the farm price support program. Farm price support program is, quote, irrational, unquote.
It's the old way of looking at it. The taxpayer pays the farmer. The taxpayer is fleeced.
The government pays the farmer to produce less or sometimes not to produce at all.
and then prices go, supply goes down, prices go up, the cheese or whatever, there's a store
and then some warehouse and many years, in addition to all that, the Department of Agriculture
is also paying farmers to produce more, increase their productivity, to irrigate, in the old
days to electrify, to increase fertilizer, so it seems totally crazy, why is the government
paying people, the farmers, one to produce more and two to produce less?
That's irrational from the point of view of the consumer, from the point of view of the economic system.
It's not irrational, however, from the point of view of two groups.
One, the big farmers get paid to produce more and to produce less. That's great. They love it.
Two, the Department of Agriculture increases bureaucracy tenfold to run these programs.
So we have a cozy coalition between the Department of Agriculture and the large farmers.
They are ripping us off.
I think this sets this thing in a historical point better than simply a logical critique of a program, in addition to that.
This brings me to my question of outreach, which of course is always on every libertarian's lips.
And actually I'm in favor of everybody voting for us, without exception.
Another question, who do you target? I mean, we don't have unlimited resources. Which issues do you concentrate on? Which groups do you try to get in?
And I think the basic thing is you try to concentrate on people who are, in some way, are outraged at government, some aspect of government action.
It's an anti-government coalition, I think we're trying to build.
In other words, it's not a coalition with Dan Rather, not that I hate Dan Rather, it's not a coalition, the idea is not to convert Dan Rather.
I think it's a hopeless task, although anybody who wants to do it is free of course to do it.
Or to convert the establishment, or to convert the Reagan administration or the Bush administration, I think it's a terribly mistaken kind of strategy.
The idea is to convert people who already hate the government for one reason or another.
This puts us in a very different kind of focus, a very different kind of footing.
It also means we're probably going to be less respectable.
Interest and respectability, this is not the kind of program to push.
For example, one of the outrageous things happening right now is the sell-out of President Bush on gun control.
And President Bush, a lifetime member of the National Rifle Association, allegedly opposed to gun control,
This is a crunch comment, which means anything at all. Suddenly somebody uses a gun to shoot somebody. Bingo.
Yeah, yeah, we have to restrict imports of guns and all the rest of it.
So this is a powerful program for the people out in the boonies.
I admit it's not a good program for urban America.
New York City, if you argue against gun control, you're a minority of one, two, or three, or whatever it is.
So what? This is correct. You have a large number of people out there in the non-urban areas who hate the guts of gun control.
and we'll get their votes in support.
When you push to make the philosophical case, you can't be in favor of gun control and also be in favor of any other aspect of private property rights and freedom and all the rest of it.
So that's just one aspect of policy which might be unpopular, but it's very important to push.
And when you get the votes in support of financial support, even if a lot of people are very interested in the topic,
There are other aspects of this. I've already alluded to some of it in today's panel. This afternoon's panel. The whole drug program, here's a beautiful example of tying in the war against drugs, of tying in civil liberties, personal freedom on one hand and private property on the other.
Personal Freedom on one hand and Private Property Rights and Economic Freedom on the other.
Because both of them are going down the tubes as a result of the totally insane war against
drugs which is not going to win, hasn't won, not going to win, it's hopeless.
And result is of course to get the government in every aspect of our life.
It's very much like Prohibition in the 1920s, it's outlawing liquor and then shooting everybody
The way of mobilizing the resources of the whole government at every level to seek out
liquor, pry it out, kill anybody who has a still and all the rest of it.
And it means also, of course, that it doesn't outlaw liquor, it simply drives it underground
and gets it lower quality.
Of course, there's no quality control in the black market when a thing is prohibited, so
you get people dying from methyl-acrylamide, methyl-acrylamide, the poison kind of alcohol,
things like that.
In addition to not succeeding in the drug front, as a matter of fact the drug
Addiction Problems has increased in proportion to the amount of resources the government has put into fighting it.
In addition to all that, of course, they're using it in order to terrorize everybody's financial records, everybody's bank account.
You can't use cash. You gotta want cash. That means you're a drug dealer. Why else would you use cash?
Why else would you use the beloved government banks?
So this is a move towards, a method of moving towards exchange control and trying to outlaw cash and all the rest of it.
and National Arrest of it.
And people on the wrong pole would meet media people and so forth.
And government officials even admit this. They admit it doesn't work.
They still, of course, have to be publicly committed to the Civil War.
Eventually, it's got to crack.
What proportion of the world's national product will have to invest in the drug fight
until the whole thing is seen as hopeless?
I mean, 50% after the DMP going into the drug war, whatever it is,
those things are ridiculous.
Okay, so we can be on the forefront on the drug question, which we haven't been, if we've done that.
We could keep accelerating this.
There's an example, by the way, to get more toward economic questions.
As an example of what I mean by uniting with the public, part of the public that hates the establishment and hates the government.
I happened to live in California the glorious summer of 1978 when Proposition 13 was passed and it was a magnificent thing to see because everybody was against it, everybody hated it, it was a terrible thing, it would destroy the state government, there won't be any police anymore if you passed this, big tax cut, property tax cut, there won't be any schools, there won't be any firemen, those roads will decay, and none of it worked. And everybody, the whole big business, big unions, big government, our beloved
The teachers unions, the whole group weighed in, the press, the media, the TV, everybody attacked. Irresponsible.
How can these people be so irresponsible in favor of cutting the property tax decision by two-thirds? A terrible thing.
And as the thing built, as the hysteria mounted, the polls began to record that the population was getting more and more support. It was a beautiful thing.
And at the end, it's per swept a victory, but no establishment support whatsoever, two or three economists, and that was about it.
And it was a glorious thing to see, and if it could happen then it could happen somewhere another time too.
Of course that was the heyday of anti-government sentiment in the United States so far, which was the late 70s, before the Reagan administration came in and co-opted the whole movement.
But it can happen again, because I think one of the glorious things about what's happening since President Bush got in with the eight years of the Reagan miasma being lifted at long last and the sort of narcosis or whatever of the Reagan smile and the head-shaking and all the rest of this.
People begin to see reality once more. And what happened? Bush is hardly in office. And suddenly what happened? There's the SNL crisis, which I'm going to talk about a little bit later.
Secretary of Treasury Brady comes out with a brilliant idea. The way to save the SNL and pay off the depositors is to tax the bank deposits.
Small tax, only $0.25 for every $100. What is it? Public won't care.
By the way, here's the problem with the public choice people. They would say, well, the public won't care.
The small amount of costs are spread over many people, teeny amounts.
It was magnificent, it was a wonderful thing.
One of the greatest things that has happened in American politics in my memory, namely a firestorm of hatred.
It rose up and in three hours the whole proposition was dead.
In three or four hours it was great because it was advanced to 10 o'clock in the morning one day, whatever it was.
And by three o'clock, so let's crossfire whatever it is on and say, it's dead, it's finished.
I mean, Bumpercraft, Republican, the main here, but it's finished.
We're taking idiotic, stop. It's dead. It's out.
So I said, what a magnificent sight. It's just beautiful.
It reminded me, of course, in the early 80s, even on the high day of the honeymoon,
they try to put a withholding tax member on interest and dividends. That was killed also.
This is a great reversion of that.
The second step, which happened shortly thereafter, was the Congressional Pay-Raises Scam, one of the beautiful things in American politics, not organized by a libertarian party, but caught us by surprise, and they have this whole thing rigged so they have a so-called bipartisan commission of beloved people.
I use the term beloved, by the way, for many of us, by people who are beloved by all right-thinking people.
New York Times, CBS, Washington Post.
And one of the most beloved people in 20th century America was Lloyd Cutler,
who was the chairman of the bipartisan commission.
And Cutler, in his wisdom as a long-time lobbyist of the public trough, of course,
came to the conclusion that we need a 50% pay raise for congressmen and for top bureaucrats with judges and everything else.
and everything else. Desperately need it, otherwise we'll lose these great people!
We'll lose them! Pay them now!
It wasn't a grabber.
And the thing is, there was a revolution against the pay raise,
it was organized by a radio talk show host, a heroic group,
The TV is sort of locked up. You watch TV, you watch Donahue and all these other creeps.
And the radio talk show house, whoever, sort of semi-libertarian or whatever,
they rose up as one man, practically, and had this whole network across the country,
sending tea bags to the congressmen protesting as it's rotten.
How dare they? See, the point is, it's a moral indignation again.
How dare these SOBs vote themselves a pay increase at our expense?
Very simple and very effective.
In the 19th century, anytime Congress would vote itself a pay rate, even a hundred dollars a year, they were thrown out in a nice election, just like that.
How dare these people do that? Okay, so the same spirit rose up. It's not dead in America.
And tea bags were sent to all these people, and even the White Sulphur Springs, Greenbrier, whatever,
and there were kind of Congressmen, the National Committee, whatever it meant, and they'd conclave, and all of a sudden they're dead using tea bags and tickets.
And it worked. It worked. That's the great thing about it. Because the one thing about Congress, we complain a lot about Congress, of course, and one thing about them, they have to come up for re-election pretty often. So they're sensitive to public protests, the pressure. That's the point. It's not the idea of begging these people. Put pressure on them. Look, you so-and-so, if you vote against me for the pay raise, you're out. You're finished. And so it worked. We beat it. And it's just a great thing. It's magnificent. Despite all the establishment, despite all the hokey arguments,
These are heartening signs that things are breaking loose again in the United States as they were before the Reagan administration.
Okay, let's get to the SNL bailout. I think that's a very interesting example of a situation
where only a radical approach works. Only a radical approach is consistent. There's a gradual
approach which is taken by almost all think tanks. We heard about free market think tanks
today. Almost all the free market think tanks say, well, of course we have to bail out the
depositors. It's a government guarantee. You have to bail them out. And then you try to
and how to reform them. Other forums are pretty picky even to begin with. I don't want to talk about that right at this moment. I want to talk about the bailout.
Nobody knows how much the bailout is going to be. I mean, the estimate keeps rising at about $20 billion every month or so.
It started last year about $20 billion, it's now up to about $120 or $200 or whatever. Who knows?
Because the thing is, the SNLs, a third of them are officially insolvent, and the rest of them are philosophically insolvent.
When does the reality catch up with philosophy? It can happen any time.
I think it's about $8 billion a month being withdrawn by shrewd people.
Let's get out of this stuff. It seems to be collapsing around us. Let's get out and go into other things, money market funds or whatever.
This is going to accelerate as the collapse accelerates. It could easily happen.
So, the government guarantee is very interesting because the government, this is part of the running debate and libertarian party for many years over public debt.
Those of us who are radicals are in favor of puniating the debts. The answer is, gee, it's a contract. Who made the contract?
Contract is made by a government with people who want to live off tax loot for the next 20 years.
I don't consider that a valid libertarian contract. It's sort of like a mafia contract. You and you get together, we shoot that guy over there.
So, interestingly enough, the question of how the SNLs will be bailed out, everybody except maybe Mises Institute and one or two other groups are in favor of the bailout.
Then the question is, how do you arrange the bailout? Well, you can establish and say, well, half of it will be paid by taxpayers.
It won't be a tax, though, of course, like the saving, like the other tax and deposit was not a tax. That was supposed to be a fee.
This is one of the ways. President Bush fulfills his pledge of no new taxes. You don't call it a tax. Tax is a bad word. Nobody likes taxes anymore.
So you use the word fee. In this case it would be an insurance premium. You raise the insurance premium on the other banks to pay off the unsound banks, which of course pushes up various marginal banks into unsoundness, you understand.
That's one way. Half the bailout funds are supposed to come from there. The other half will come from borrowing.
Well, how do you... $50 billion is the estimate. It would be a lot more than that, I can assure you, before the thing is over.
The other question is, how do you meet the Graham-Rudman limits on deficits?
We're supposed to be moving down towards zero on the budget deficit question.
When you do it by very simple advice, you just don't include it on the budget. It's an off-budget item.
One great way to balance the budget is to not include spending in the budget. I wish I could do that.
So I won't budget that.
We create a phony new outfit called the Resolution Finance Corporation, something like that.
They flood the bonds, and that wouldn't be officially part of the government, so it doesn't really count.
One interesting thing is the third method, which they don't mention, the way they could really pay off the deposit seems very simple.
The most important tip, which is really the foundation of Fed power, is to just print money and pay the people with it. Print the currency and give it to them.
Why don't they do that? Why don't they print two hundred billion dollars, and give it to the depositors, and write the whole thing off.
They could do it. There's no law against it. They've got the unlimited power to counterfeit.
Which is the Fed.
The reason they don't do it is kind of interesting. Because if they do it, it would be super-hooper-duper inflationary.
Fractional Reserve Banking
1. It would relieve the taxpayers of $200 billion or more of new taxes or new inflation, or however they're going to hug or bugger this.
2. Our beloved depositors and savings and loan people will learn a valuable and instructive lesson.
Namely, never trust the government again.
It's very similar to the foreign debt question.
If there's foreign debt piling up in Brazil and Argentina and other places,
what to do about it? Well, don't write it off.
Which means the Brazilian taxpayers don't have to be fleeced some more,
the American taxpayers don't have to be fleeced some more,
and the banks will finally engage in some honest accounting,
which means they'll go under.
So this is a radical one. It's a cleansing kind of thing.
The thing is that honesty applied to American politics for the first time in a long, long time.
We had the same opportunity, by the way, to get rid of unsound banking during 1933 and the Great Depression.
The banks were going under. They were collapsing as we spoke.
But we had two alternatives then. One is to allow them to go bust and that's it.
We go back to the hard gold currency, forget about paper money and fractional reserve banking.
The other route was taken, of course, by Roosevelt, and would have been taken by Hoover, which was, of course, to save the banks, go on to a paper-fiat standard, and all the rest of it, guarantee deposits, and all the rest of it.
Now, some of my close friends are in favor of eliminating the FDIC government insurance and substituting private insurance, privately financed deposit insurance.
Well, I'm not against it. I mean, it's like an entrepreneurial point. If you want to set up a private deposit insurance corporation, you're free to do it.
The Ohio and Maryland private deposit insurance firms a few years ago.
One bank was a crooked bank and that went under and immediately all the other banks,
people got scared and the bank run occurred.
The bank run, by the way, is a beautiful, magnificent institution, so it spreads like that.
And once it spreads, nothing can be done about it.
I think that's an instructive lesson because the banking system is the only industry in the United States that I know of which rests only on public confidence.
You know, they always talk about confidence. We can't tell the public that SNLs are collapsing because it would ruin the confidence of the public.
You don't see that applied in any place. Nobody talks about the importance of confidence in the computer industry or confidence in the TV industry.
They've got TVs to sell. They've got computers, which are good. I mean, work.
Confidence rests on the soundness of the product, not on flim flam and smoke and mirrors, which
it does in the fractional reserve banking system.
That's why confidence is all important, because they ain't got the money there, folks.
They ain't got the money.
There's a dispute among my friends about whether the public thinks that their money is there
on the banks.
I mean, take a poll, I think they all think it's there, and even my students every year
for a semester of brainwashing still really believe it's there.
So they think the money is there, they don't think it's going to be loaned out somewhere
and it ain't there.
So anyway, that's, I think, again, an instructive lesson which should be learned.
To me, the idea of insuring the fractional reserve banking system, insuring the SNLs,
is very much like insuring the Titanic after it hit the iceberg.
No percentage of people.
You're free to do it in the free market to do it, but there ain't much percentage in
it.
Okay, so by the way, free enterprise, it seems to me, I'm getting kind of irritated at the idea that if you're a small firm, if you own a restaurant or whatever, you're allowed to go under. If you're a big business, if you're a continental Illinois bank, or if you're a Lockheed or Chrysler or the SNL on the street, you can't be allowed to go under. You're bailed out automatically by the government. It seems to me that free enterprise means freedom to choose
and also therefore means freedom to lose, for the big guys as well as the small ones.
Okay, I think if I haven't succeeded in alienating everybody yet,
I might as well give a couple, two more points on the current policies and current issues.
One is a thing which irritates me a lot.
I don't see much opposition to it, either in the libertarian movement or free market economists.
I'm not saying it's not there, I just don't see it.
It might be there bubbling underground and I haven't seen it yet.
Anyway, we've had in the last few years a veritable reign of terror on Wall Street.
Many of us have our least favorite politician. It's very difficult.
I think about my least favorite politician is very difficult to decide among a rich tapestry of choices.
If you're focused on this guy, yeah, yeah, he's the least favorite.
If you're focused on somebody else, yeah, he's the one.
My particular favorite is Rudolf Giuliani, the heroic Savonarola of Wall Street, the scourge of Wall Street, and Giuliani, as you probably know, is probably going to be the mayor of New York soon, and his big thing is using the power of the state apparatus, including all praise I have for illegal means, and certainly all the libertarian means, to what? To combat the evils on Wall Street. What are the evils on Wall Street?
Insider trading, which is tied on up in certain means. If you hear, if you talk over a martini and say, gee, I know, gee, Jim, I know that so and so XYZ Corporation is going to merge with ABC Corporation, you're arrested. It's illegal. Somebody's spying on you. Ah, it's inside trading evil. Lock them up.
And the idea that it's somehow an unfair advantage if you know something more than the other guy and therefore profit from it, that's what free enterprise is.
It's knowing something more than the other guy and being an entrepreneur and profiting from it, whether it's the stock market or business in general.
This is a direct assault on free markets, on free enterprise, on private property and all the rest of it.
It's a victimless crime, just as much as prostitution and drugs, it's a victimless crime.
also helps the economy by siphoning control and ownership of assets of corporations to
the most efficient people, those who know more than the other clucks.
And for this they are persecuted, the two permanent investment bankers are dragged out
of their offices in manacles and chains by Giuliani's thugs, and what does the public
say about it?
I mean usually I'm optimistic about the public, but not in this sort of situation, they don't
It's too good for them. There's a billion dollar fine and five years in jail and prohibiting
forever freeing of security again. Too good for them. They should lock them up and throw
away the key. This seems to be the modal argument, the modal opinion of the man on the street.
And if you talk about civil liberties or property rights of Wall Street people, it seems, ah,
they're rich. Who cares about their rights? I think it's extremely important for us to
to me, one of the most interesting aspects of this was the New York Times headline, the New York Times always tries to be very objective in their headlines and their reporting
but this time they weren't very objective, even by New York Times standards, the big headline was something like this, I wish I could remember the exact quote
on the financial page, which is even more neutral than the other parts of it, was something like this
Income so big that even Wall Street can't stomach, that was the headline.
Income referred to Michael Milken, indicted for a billion dollars fine, 550 years in jail, whatever the penalties are,
for the crime of inside trading, plus takeover bids and a little aperture against him a little bit.
And the comments about Milken's $550 million a year income,
Three people in particular at the New York Times quoted as attacking this bitterly.
It's too much, it's monstrous, and so on and so on.
One was, of course, our old buddy, John account of Galbraith.
So you can expect that from Galbraith, alright.
Galbraith was made minions by attacking everybody else's affluence.
This is contribution to social life.
The other was with Donald J. Trump, who was on the nerve, saying,
You couldn't be happy on less money than that.
What gold? What chutzpah?
And third, another old buddy who practically runs the country, David Rockefeller, who says,
if somebody can make that much money, it shows there's a serious imbalance in our financial system.
So what are we looking at here? We're looking at a situation I think basically we're really looking at.
The old corporate elite, which was inefficient, which has been shafting the stockholders for a long time, suddenly finds a system whereby people like Milking can finance, take over bids, and get the corporation out from under inefficient elites and under new and better owners.
And so they'll pay the stockholders more money. That's really what it's all about. People like Rockefeller almost the embodiment of the old-fashioned corporate elite.
So, there's another factor here, too, which Mises pointed out years ago, namely, very rich people tend to be in favor of progressive income tax. You wouldn't think of that.
But very rich people essentially live off inheritance, off inherited wealth. They don't want new upstarts coming up with labor income, which is what Milken's income was, of course. It was percentage commission of income he got for the firm.
So you have a war between the old-fashioned inherited wealth and people coming up on the outside, fast on the outside, doing better things.
Actually, the whole milk and point was made possible by the Williams Act, the Farias-Williams Act in 1967, when the corporate elites were being hit by takeover bids so that people could get stockholders together and offer them higher money in the morning than getting an hour per share.
It was outlawed by the Williams Act, and the Williams Act cracked down on takeover of business
and ordered, as soon as you amass 5% of any corporate stock, you have to go public, you have to announce it,
announce your intention to have an eventual takeover and wait a certain number, a certain time period to do it.
This of course meant opportunities for arbitrage and the rest of it.
And what Milken did was tremendous financial innovators to get around, by takeover, by leverage bias,
around and so-called jump bonds to get around this prohibition. The Williams Act was passed
by the beloved Senator Williams, who was then beloved, not now. The so-called education
senator was always filling a congressional record with the pleas for more government
money and education. We got caught on the Ampscam affair, got tossed under the Hussgau,
The bankers who were floating low yield bonds didn't like the fact that Milton was competing with them very successfully.
So you have these various interests trying to crush that competition and using the government to do it and using phony moral arguments to try to do it, and apparently fairly successfully at this point.
So, my final example here, a current issue which I think almost everybody is wrong on, which I think libertarians should sail into,
Is the Alaska oil spill. I'm sure you're all familiar with it. I couldn't see anything on TV. TV news are getting the point. All you get is medical news. And what's the point of getting something of the Alaskan oil spill?
I mean, I'm now intimately familiar with every study and report that's been done on cancer and heart disease and plenty of other obscure diseases now, just from watching the regular news program.
At any rate, here you have the oil spill. Who's blamed for the oil spill? Exxon.
Excuse me, Exxon is precisely the apple of people we should feel sorry for.
Exxon loses ten million gallons of oil, which is approximately five million dollars,
plus the money they have to pay, and I think correctly so,
the people, the lost apple of the oil spill, the fishermen, and all the rest of it.
So Exxon are the losers, allegedly, from allegedly drunken sea captain.
and yet Exxon is being boycotted, constantly attacked, etc., etc.
And if you look at the arm, what we're suffering from is essentially environmentalist infection here
because if you look at the environmentalist propaganda here, what they're saying is
they're not really talking about the fishermen, they're talking about the otters,
they're talking about the water. In fact, the water is no longer blue,
it's now white or whatever, it's now black or brown because of the oil.
So in other words, the rights of, but it used to be the rights of a stale daughter become a greater than the rights of human beings, or the rights of a caribou, or whatever, now it's the rights of the water.
The right of the natural right of the water remain pristine. It seems to be totally idiotic.
That's the sort of, that's the language in which this is camped. Exxon are not the liberally bumpy oil. They're the ones who are lost from it.
The last big problem was the Amoco-Cadiz tanker off the coast of France in about 1979, I don't think there was any big fuss made about it at all, it was much bigger, about 60 million gallons, nobody complained, there was nothing big on television about it, they paid, I think Amoco paid about $100,000.
They paid, I think Amoco paid about $500 million for unliability. That was it. There was no big thing. Nobody boycotted Amoco and all the rest of it.
I think this is an example of the way in which environmentalism has spread in the last intervening decade.
And I think what we have with the oil pipeline, which they're trying of course to shut down,
The big argument against it was, for many years, which held up the development, the fact that the caribou migratory patterns would be disturbed.
I mean, the caribou's got lots of land up there in Alaska. There's tons of, you know, huge amount of land. There's lots of land to walk around in.
But the idea, the projection was the caribou would be disturbed by the pipeline.
Well, they built the pipeline. It turns out the caribou loved it, because it's nice and warm.
And they literally stubble up to the pipeline with a nice warmth.
So, we have a group of people which have not been explored enough, I think, an environmentalist movement, essentially an anti-human movement, a movement which wants to roll back the Industrial Revolution, wants to go back to the primitive period when man and nature were allegedly in balance, which means of course wiping out about 95% of the human race, and elevating the alleged rights of animals, insects, fish, water, mountains, everything except fish.
and People. Those of us who take this position are called speciesists, I prefer to call humanists, human beings being the prime priority here. I've been writing some anti-environmentalist articles in Liberty Magazine and the last couple of weeks ago the August chairman of the August New Jersey Libertarian Party called up the head of the Center for Libertarian Studies and demanded that he fire me as the
of the Journal of Libertarian Studies for daring to attack environmentalism.
So my friend who's the head of the center said it seems to be a lot easier for him to fire himself a subscriber.
That means forcing him to subscribe to the journal.
So that sort of stuff, I think, has to be tackled because where socialism, as I mentioned this afternoon, has collapsed.
I mean, it's imploded, it's collapsed.
Nobody is a socialist anymore, but we have a rise in various other forms of interventionism,
in particular environmentalism, other egalitarianism, other measures, hatred of the rich and things like that, which still persist.
So there's lots of work for us to do, but I think the climate, the political climate has gotten a lot better.
With the retirement of Reagan to the ranch in Santa Barbara,
What's your opinion of government experimentation on the American public without the American public knowing it?
I was mentioning at the table here during dinner that the American public was injected with a AIDS virus, and we're all carrying the AIDS virus around with us, and it was a government experimentation back then, and how we all got this AIDS virus within us.
How we all got this AIDS virus within our bodies was back in 1962 when the government
was giving all these free polio injections that they had the AIDS virus within this injection
of the polio. So we're all carrying the AIDS virus. The only problem is that they're not
sure how the AIDS virus spread to where it's out of control today.
I never heard of that. I don't know anything about that.
it sounds far out. Yeah, it sounds far out. I can see any evidence of that effect. My favorite
story about the government medicine was the swine flu caper, if anybody remembers that.
I mean, that was documented. During the Ford administration, I believe, Ford was desperately
anxious to get re-elected, but didn't look as if he was going to. He discovered the great
Swine Flu Menace, and it's just that everybody got injected with this virus. There's no authentic
cases of swine flu that had been recorded, and they were desperately trying to find somebody
with swine flu so they could justify the program. They finally found some guy, I think in northern
Michigan or Minnesota or something, it turned out however he was a pig farmer, he actually
got it from swine. That didn't count. So they never really found anybody. In the meantime
I kept injecting people with this stuff, and people were getting paralyzed from it and dying from it at a fairly hefty rate.
And my favorite story, being a New Yorker at the time, being steeped in New York politics and social life,
the head of the top mafia family in New York, the sainted Carlo Gambino, I believe, was pretty old then.
His assistant, his top assistant, assisted him. Godfather, you must go get the swine flu virus injection.
And he finally did. He tottered it off and got it and died the next day.
And his helpful assistant was Carmine Galante, a secret member of the other competing family, then took over as head of the mafia.
That was one great story. And the other, not really a story, was that I was telling this,
I was talking to my class in American Economic History about the current situation at the time.
And at that point Nelson Rockefeller was the Vice President.
And that morning, I think, President Ford showed the greatness and the safety of the virus, the shot, got himself injected.
One of my students popped up and said, well, if Ford dies tomorrow morning,
and Rockefeller becomes President, that would vindicate a conspiracy analysis.
Back some years ago there was a hundred intel programs by government spying on the roots in the country.
Do you have any comments about any current government monitoring of various political groups, saved libertarians?
The LP was spied upon in the early founding a couple of years. It was really kind of crazy, about five people in the party, and one of them must have been a government agent, because Ford had a great detail about it. This guy said it, and that guy said it.
I think in a particularly scary period, one of the first libertarian meetings in the current period was in 1969.
I was putting out a libertarian forum at the time in New York.
My friend Joe Peaton was the publisher.
He said, we seem to be getting a lot of people here, let's have a supper club.
Go to a Chinese restaurant and have supper club.
We thought we'd get about 20 people.
I guess a report, someone so spoke, they said such and such in the comments. I mean, imagine the peculiarity of this thing, this coming little movement. We were, I mean, we're a mighty movement compared to what we were in 1969. You know, twenty people giving papers, and the cops were there. You know, they were spying on us and reporting it, and the taxpayers were paying for this crap. So I don't know what's going on now, but I do know that was going on then. And it was, oh, I can tell a story at length on that. But anyway, that was the Nixon administration. Nixon was going bananas.
How, from a federal preventionist foreign policy standpoint, as an historian who has spawned, would people say Americans would never have won the Revolutionary War if they were not a part of the French?
I was wondering if you'd ever addressed a free market alternative to saving the environment when you were talking last you mentioned the environment possibly as not being the important issue but of course in bottom analysis it still is important to a lot of people so I was just wondering...
I do have some friends who are libertarian environmentalists.
They have all sorts of ingenious plans, if you want to save the turtle or whatever it is.
I don't care about saving these things.
If you care about saving the species sub-28 of the turtle, you buy the damn thing and preserve it.
You have a breeding range and you preserve it.
Some environmentalist groups are doing that.
They buy a plot of land and they save species.
Okay, I'm sitting out against it.
I wouldn't contribute a lot of money to it, but that's different strokes for different folks.
Other things like pollution is an important question, but there you have to prove it.
You have to sort of show the pollution going on, what the effect is, before you can start using the power of the government upon them.
And a lot of the stuff seems to be very vague, you know, somebody's doing something.
I mean, it's like the rainforest in Brazil. I mean, somehow poor Brazilians get in the neck.
Everybody else can develop and chop down a forest.
Well, I've noticed there was a number of organizations that have shown that they can save the environment at a profit.
Yeah.
Like whale watching.
Yeah, yeah, sure.
You know, there's Rainforest in Central America where they're taking people through and charging them to go through.
Great. There's nothing wrong with that at all.
Sure.
The best example of that is my late Anthony Fisher, the founder of about two dozen free market institutes.
And he invested in the turtle breeding grounds somewhere in the Caribbean.
The thing apparently about turtles, and I'm not a natural scientist, I'm working on shaky ground.
I'm not a turtle maven. But anyway, the turtles apparently...
There's a high death rate for turtles. They're spawned on the beach.
The Libertarian Party and the Libertarian Movement seems to, in terms of the
Q. Membership, funding, the vote seems to have been basically a plateau in this decade.
Do you think there will be any significant growth in the next 10 or 20 years, and what
do you think they will take for that to happen?
A. If you look at the Libertarian Party, it was founded in 1971, it grew phenomenally
until 1980, at almost an exponential rate, and then bingo, we're hit.
I don't think it's an accident that it was growing at the same time as anti-government
In general, anti-tax sentiment, anti-inflation sentiment, anti-watergate, the whole watergate thing came in, the presidency, Vietnam, also Vietnam War, it all came in about the same time in the mid-70s.
So you had a tremendous revulsion against government.
Well, what happens in the 1980s, Henry Ronald Reagan, he had the honeyed voice and the head-shaking and all the rest of it.
So Reagan, using libertarian rhetoric and doing exactly the opposite, fooled a large number of people.
And so that's, so yeah, that killed eight years.
And I think we did great by being on a plateau. I'm surprised we didn't collapse altogether.
Now that Reagan, I really place a great emphasis on Reagan.
I don't think it would be a replicable phenomenon. I think I couldn't find anybody who was like that, who was a beloved actor, who knows all the tricks of the trade and all that sort of stuff.
Given that, I don't see that the state would be beloved again. He restored, he realized what happened to the presidency, he realized the magnificence of the fact that Nixon was really impeached.
I mean, before Watergate, the talk of impeachment, which of course was straight constitutional advice, was unthinkable.
You couldn't talk about impeachment, or not if you talked about impeachment.
When Nixon came in, he was impeached. In fact, when he resigned before they could actually kick him out.
But he was impeached. It was a great thing, a great step forward in American history.
Finally an impeachment of the president.
So, with Carter, first when Carter got out, I was afraid the cardigan sweater would sweep people off their feet,
I think that that didn't happen. He sank without a trace. And when Reagan comes in, it reestablishes the love of the people of the president, the sovereignty of the president, and all sorts of stuff.
So I think with Reagan out of the picture, it's not going to happen. I mean, Bush has a high approval rating, but I don't think it means much, because he isn't beloved in the same way.
It's not magic, whatever it is, because I don't understand it, because I'm not caught up by it. But he hasn't got it.
I think we're now going to be back to a normal political scene with people rising up in hatred of the government.
My prognosis is great.
I think there were a few of us who were surprised, to say the least, at your advocacy of Ron Paul for our party candidate in the last election.
I wonder if you have any thoughts about it, if you intend to get involved in the 92 campaign, if you have anybody in mind?
I've always involved every campaign. I haven't got anybody in mind particularly now. I think a candidate should be a credible candidate, should be somebody who the American public can identify with as a political leader, somebody who might be conceivable as a president.
See, that's my problem with nominating people who are obviously not president.
There's no word as president, I'll be like, it's like, I'll be like, the Pope, somebody who's a credible people candidate.
So I think we should put up somebody who the American public would look at as a possible credible candidate.
Like Dick Jacobs, the out-debated, what's the regal, you know, that sort of stuff.
Somebody who can out-debate the establishment.
If a monk will knock the socks off of Bush, it should be clear.
So, I mean, that sort of thing. Two, I think, is you should have somebody who can raise money.
If you need money for a presidential campaign. And Ron didn't have the ability to do that.
So, I think that, and somebody who's pure libertarian, not going to waffle or sell out, which I think is also true.
I think there were mistakes in his campaign, but, I mean, that's, you know, that should be corrected.
But for the future presidential nominee. Yeah?
What do you think the Hans Hoppe philosophical proof on property rights is going to have on the intellectual movement of libertarians?
He's establishing a value-free, without establishing an ethical system, he's establishing a value-free libertarian ethic, hardcore, totally hardcore ethic, and he does it by taking an Aristotelian version of communism, which is prominent in Germany, extrapolating into economics and politics, so I think it's great, I mean I think it will have a lot of influence, I think it already has, so of course most of the people who originally reviewed it didn't understand it, and that's inevitable.
Yeah, back there lady, back there in the wall.
care of my own health, my children's health, and the industry that we have in the environment.
So I would urge you to maybe reconsider your creation of environmentalists and start bringing them into the fold.
basically starts what they start off by saying that before people arrived everything was great, there was a balance of nature, everything was, the environment was a little balanced, the species were balanced, and then man comes along and screws everything up, man is linear instead of being this beautiful circle, and man changes the environment, dominates it, it's a terrible thing, that seems to be the basic philosophical environmentalist position, for a long time now, it's the stuff I've read, so that you know, if you take a moderate position,
How do you explain the continuing popularity of Paul Johnson in certain intellectual circles?
I think there's some merit in modern times, a certain amount of merit. He adopts the Austrian Great Depression.
It's a peculiar merit. But I think, basically, Paul Johnson is part of the international, really Anglo-American neocon movement, neoconservative movement.
I'm not a big fan of the neoconservative movement. I think they're endangered, both to old-fashioned conservatism and to libertarians.
Neocons are statists and they're basically, the position they take, they're very smart, they have a lot of media influence, the Wall Street Journal, Irving Kristol and so forth, and Jack Kemp, and basically their position is they want a more efficient welfare state.
They want a welfare state after pre-McGovern, pre-1967.
In favor of the New Deal, in favor of the Fair Deal, they love Hubert Humphrey and all that stuff, and they only stop with McGovern and post-McGovern.
That's not good enough for me. I'm against the New Deal from the very beginning, even the Progressive Movement, much less the Deal.
They're collectivists, they believe in American position of collective might all over the world, pushing everybody around for the base for world democracy or whatever.
And I think it's a very dangerous movement, and the English seem to be into this quite a bit.
The English right wing is now almost all neocons, except for a few maverick types.
So, and they have a huge amount of influence, much more than their numbers, even more than that.
We have somebody who mentioned that libertarians are more influential than their numbers.
Neocons are even more so, almost the influential, and very few actual people in it.
But they have believers of power, they're very smart, they have mostly their ex-Marxists or ex-Tchotskyites,
One of the biggest news stories of this past week was the conviction of Oliver Noyce.
I personally don't think you should absolve them. I'm sick of the order stuff.
When the prosecutor, John Kecker, raised the Hitler point, I think he was making a good point.
He was making the point that that was the icon of defense. He was just carrying out orders. He wasn't doing anything.
He wasn't a rogue elephant, a rogue cowboy, whatever you want to call it.
I think you have to apply the same sort of standards in the United States.
I have to say that I've obeyed orders that are not good enough.
You can resign, despite Rothbard's law. Some people can't resign.
the freedom to get out of government. So that's my position, essentially anti-North and anti-Reagan.
By the way, North patriotic Hocum, he'd stand on his head for the president and all that sort of stuff.
You notice when Bush came to shove and his neck was on the line, he didn't stand on his head for anything.
He was subpoenaing Reagan, right, and trying to expose these so-called secret documents.
So I don't see his nobility there either.
What do you think about libertarians selling the idea of libertarianism, making it more powerful?
What I mean is like, instead of saying abolish the IRS or abolish the income tax, talk about the benefits of the income.
I thought you were going to say privatize the IRS. I got scared for a minute.
Oh, we don't want an efficient IRS. No, we don't.
What I'm saying is a lot of times you hear a wrong call or whatever, right on the TV they want to abolish this.
The question is, instead of doing that, maybe explain the benefits that would come with getting rid of money?
on the viability of privatizing the judicial system?
The political ______ about the radio and TV channels or something.
You get somebody who's an expert on the TV industry and you can judge it.
It's picked by both sides and therefore it would be selling your services on the market.
And I think it's great. It's happening more and more.
It's not just a theoretical point.
Many of these things, by the way, are not just arcane points.
They're happening all the time.
It's just where we don't get too brain-clogged to see it.
By the way, there's a great book coming out by Bruce Benson this summer.
The title, it keeps seeing different titles.
Law and Justice.
And what it is, he's an economist at Florida State, what it is is a whole massive compendium
of how private law, private courts, and private enforcement has been successful in primitive
Indian tribes and pre-modern Europe and all the rest of it, a whole bunch of cases of
that sort.
It's a great book.
So that's a look for it.
Anyway, he has an article in Southern Economic Journal, this current issue on law and merchant,
how to develop a private merchant course and then take it over and scoot up out of the
I ran once said that one does not go above one's house dusting it if one's house is on fire. How do you see America's house smoldering, on fire, if it hasn't already burned to the ground?
The way Albert J. Knox put it, it's the struggle between state power and social power.
By social power, we meant voluntary arrangements, market arrangements, voluntary scientific
development, civilization and all that.
And social and state power forces the state looting it, interfering with it, repressing
it.
It's a contest between the two things.
I think we're fairly in good shape and there's some bad things and some good things.
Back there.
Do you see the current balance of trade deficit and do you think there's anything to be said for protectionism?
Probably you've got to hold the $200 billion worth of dollars somewhere.
And what it is, of course, foreigners hold it. Foreign investors are investing in dollars.
Which means the dollar is much more higher value than it would be without it, which means they're financing cheap imports.
It's great. It's one of the last. It's terrific.
There's nothing wrong with deficits. It's just like worrying about the deficit between Dearborn and Southfield or whatever.
If there was a balance, if there was a customs barrier between Dearborn and Southfield, between Las Vegas and Los Angeles or whatever,
There will be people griping about the deficit. There will be some sort of deficit. One or the other. There will be more dollars crossing the border this way than that way.
And people will gripe about it. My God, we have to have tariffs, we have to have government intervention. It's all nonsense. There's no problem with the deficit.
And the only reason people think there's a problem is because the word deficit is the same as the government budget and the balance of trade.
The fact that the word is the same means nothing. It's two totally different things. There's nothing to worry about.
Unfortunately, statistics, a collection of statistics often creates problems on themselves.
This is a beautiful example of it.
That's it. Yeah.
Everybody seems to be running around tonight asking the solution to their own pet problem.
It's all asked of mine.
And that is, you as an economist, I think, must understand how freedom movement around the country
The English network of roads in the 18th century was all private, and turnpikes, toll roads, you can see that, this is where I'll have a private collection of tolls that the government, and then streets are going to be run in all sorts of ways, all sorts of ways in which the street companies collect income.
So Broadway becomes a private firm?
You know, on the, on the, on your car, you buy a sticker which gives you the right to drive in certain, let's say in the rush hour period, you pay a market clearing price for the sticker, this eliminates congestion and rush hour. Beautiful way of doing it.
In New York City, there's two, first of all, they, of course, they don't have much, either they have zero fees or very low parking fees, they have big congestion.
And then the mayor says, we've got to ban all private cars from New York from Manhattan.
There's a typical government in action, easy to subsidize something, you're prohibiting it.
There's no kind of concept, maybe you let the market do it, you know, have a market of private and competing private and enterprise,
and let them work out the pricing arrangement. It's the only rational way to do it anyway.
It's only because we've been locked in a situation for several centuries of government rows that we can't conceive of how it would work.
It's very much as if, for some kind of customary, historical reasons,
The government is the sole monopoly producer of shoes.
Everything else is free, but the government produces all the shoes.
And if I came up and said, I think we should have a privately competitive shoe or shoe industry,
and you could easily say, hey, that's a terrible thing.
You want people to go one shod, and who would produce shoes?
How many would they be? How many firms would it be?
Who the hell knows? Let the market rip and let the market decide.
That's the way to do it.
Two more questions.
Okay.
I'm sorry, I don't have a question, but I'd like to remind everyone that there's something that they can do to advance their libertarian philosophy, and that's to get ahold of their Republican representatives and let them know how they feel about this gun control legislation, because all of your rights hinge on your ability to prepare firearms.
Talking about politicians, I'm confused about Dana Broderbacher, I thought he was a libertarian once, he just got elected, he's talking about Olly North, he made a real pro-Olly North government the other day.
And then he shifted over as soon as the job in the Reagan speech campaign team opened up.
So that's, I mean, I don't know what, I mean, who the hell would be?
People change their minds, people defect from the Communist Party, people change a lot, and even he changed.
The problem is to call him a libertarian in some sense.
That's where I balk, you know, the guy's now a Reaganite.
So that's the tradition.
And look at his voting record, it's Reaganite.
speech record and the rest of it. So that's it. It happens from time to time. Too bad, but it doesn't happen.
Thank you, Murray.