Well, my talk today is entitled, Is There Hope for Liberty in Our Lifetime?
And it's certainly tempting to think that there is.
As I discussed in the first part of my book, libertarianism, not all that long ago,
used to be something that was really just known to a tiny handful of people
who were scattered all across the country.
I think I've heard, you know, Walter Block say that
several decades ago, if you were in the libertarian movement,
you knew everybody else was in the libertarian movement, or at least it felt that way.
And this was even true to a considerable extent when I first became a libertarian about 15
years ago.
You know, I only heard about libertarianism because I happened to know somebody who saw
that I was interested in political ideas, conservative ones in my case at the time,
and suggested that I subscribe to the Freeman Magazine published by the Foundation for Economic
Education.
And probably some of the older people in this room were introduced to libertarian ideas
in much the same way.
But most people didn't know anyone who could tell them to subscribe to the Freeman and
so they didn't hear about libertarianism, they didn't read about it in magazines that
they read, libertarian books weren't on the New York Times bestseller list, they weren't
hearing about it on TV or anything. But now, of course, everything's changed. You meet
people who call themselves libertarians everywhere and some of the people don't know what that
It's remarkable that they even know the word libertarian, but what's really remarkable is how many of them really do know what that means.
I've been going around the past year and giving lectures at various law schools across the country.
I've been amazed that law students come up to me and they start telling me about Murray Rothbard.
They tell me they read lewrockwell.com every day.
and they tell me they're reading about Austrian economics from books available from the Mises Institute
that they're reading online for free because of the Mises Institute.
Even when I was in law school less than a decade ago, this was unfathomable.
There weren't law students around like this, like there are now.
There are two big factors that have contributed to this and they both kind of build on each other.
One is the internet and the other, of course, is Ron Paul.
When Ron Paul ran for president, of course, the mainstream media almost completely ignored him,
but you had this hardcore of fans on the internet who kind of put the word out, got people interested,
and eventually they were able to raise enough money online to kind of launch him to mainstream media attention,
and then he was able to give his message from a better platform, reaching more people.
And then in turn when Ron Paul sent people back to the internet to learn more about these
ideas he was espousing related to liberty and Austrian economics and specifically he
sent them to the Mises Institute which had been espousing these ideas, particularly the
most important ideas related to war and the Federal Reserve as no other institution had
been doing and of course they had this wonderful online library that's unlike anything that
that anybody else had out there.
And now that this is happening,
you're hearing about libertarianism
in places you wouldn't have expected to.
You're hearing the names Mises and Hayek
in the mainstream media.
The people who are referring to them
might not understand what Mises and Hayek
actually have to say, but they at least know the names
and it demonstrates that our ideas
are getting into the culture
in a way that they never did before.
Again, to anyone who's been around this movement for more than a few years, this is all just
astonishing. This is something I couldn't have imagined, certainly. Even five years
ago, I don't think I would have thought we'd be anywhere close to where we are now.
So when you look at this explosion of growth that we've had as a movement, when you look
at some of the anti-government sentiment that seems to be out there, again, it's certainly
tempting to think that we have a relatively good shot at getting closer to a libertarian
Society here in the United States and our lifetimes.
But there's a quote from Ayn Rand
that I think is relevant here.
It's a quote that Jeff Rigenbach sometimes brings up
in his Libertarian Tradition podcasts,
which you should subscribe to if you don't already
because they're excellent.
The quote from Rand is, it's earlier than you think.
Meaning, of course, that even though it seems like
our ideas have gained a lot of ground,
even though it seems like it should be really obvious
to everyone that they should cast off, the statism that's oppressing them, it really,
we're not that close after all. There's a whole lot more work that we need to do before
we're going to be close to that point, if we ever get there. So the question is, how
will we get from here to there? What kinds of things can we do to get from here to there
faster? Well, first I want to consider a couple things that some people advocate to advance
and Finance Liberty that I don't think will work, and then I'll talk about what I think will work.
Some people think that electoral politics is the way to go. I don't think so. There's
one way in which electoral politics certainly can advance our cause, as an educational platform.
Murray Rothbard favored the foundation of the Libertarian Party because he thought most
people are busy living their lives and they're not thinking about political ideas most of
of the Time, except every four years when there's a presidential election, people start
thinking about it again. So this is a way that we can put our ideas out there when that
opportunity arises. And you know, the Libertarian Party has been doing that with varying degrees
of consistency and success since it's been formed. And of course, Ron Paul did essentially
the same thing in 2008. That's fine. What's not fine for advancing liberty is trying to
to run candidates for Congress or for the presidency with the idea that you're actually
going to win the office. Because you're not going to win any elections with a libertarian
message, not with a real libertarian message, because most people aren't libertarians.
You can point to Ron Paul winning a seat in Congress, but Ron Paul is the exception to
a great many rules. As Lew Rockwell says, there's only one Ron Paul. The reality is
The overwhelming majority of people in America, in every state, in every city in America,
are not libertarians. They're not even close to being libertarians. They're not going to
be close to being libertarians anytime soon. It's just reality. Not most of the people,
not half the people, not a quarter of the people. David Kirby and David Bowes at the
Cato Institute have done some studies where they've looked at polling data and concluded
that 14% of voters are libertarian. If that was true, that would be very encouraging.
Unfortunately, that number is way, way too high. If you look at the questions they asked,
they just kind of gauged people's attitudes towards government and the market and kind
of added that up to some people being libertarians. But there is nothing in those studies, in
those polls, that would give you any clue whatsoever of where those people stood on
the most important issues, some of the most important issues, such as war, the police
State, the Federal Reserve, the people counted as libertarians in that poll could have easily
supported all those things and I don't doubt that most of them do support most of those
things. And so if you took a realistic poll and you defined libertarian the way that most
people in the libertarian movement would define it, you'd find that the actual percentage
in the general public is very, very low.
Well what about the Tea Party? You might think there's cause for hope there because after
After all, it sounds like they're saying, even if they're not perfect libertarians,
it sounds like they're saying some of the right things and they seem to have a decent
us versus them attitude toward Washington, which seems healthy.
And without question, and of course there are some big names in the libertarian movement
who have thought this, who have tried to latch on to the Tea Party movement, tried to fund
it and its candidates, thinking that it might finally be a chance to get smaller government,
Without question, there are some true libertarians in the Tea Party movement, and I'm sure that
some of those people are able to use the Tea Party movement to influence others who might
be new to political ideas, who might be kind of on the borderline in the direction of libertarianism.
I started out as conservative and I came around, so I'm sure they can bring some people around
too. And I know there are little cells of the Tea Party, given the way the Tea Party
is organized, it's decentralized. There are little cells of it that are hardcore libertarian.
But if you look at the numbers, you realize that if liberty is going to be achieved in
America, it's not these people who are going to bring it about. Consider some figures from
an April 2010 CBS New York Times poll that was taken of people who identify as Tea Party
It asked tea partiers to identify what political figures they admired most.
This wasn't particularly rigged or anything.
They could say anybody they want.
They could say none of the above.
They could say other.
Who was number one for the tea partiers among the people they admire most in politics?
If you guessed Ron Paul, I appreciate your optimism, your good feelings towards your
It's your fellow man, you know, thinking the best of people and all, but you're way off.
It's Newt Gingrich, who, of course, is known for favoring the death penalty for drug dealers,
favoring war with Iran, praising the New Deal.
Number two on their list, by the way, when I talk about politicians, I'm not saying we
should vote against these people or vote for that people.
This is just to give you an idea, you know, to make an inference about the people's ideas.
That's all.
Number two on their list, Newt Gingrich, who's number one. Number two on their list, Sarah
Palin, make of this what you will. Number three was a tie between Mitt Romney, the progenitor
of Obamacare, and that noted supporter of smaller government and humble foreign policy,
George W. Bush Then at number four, we have another tie.
This one is between George H.W. Bush who gave us those low flow toilets that we enjoy today
among many other wonderful things, Mike Huckabee who as far as I've noticed has never favored
liberty with respect to anything and then John McCain and then finally we have Ron Paul.
So add up all those people who admire George Bush, admire Sarah Palin, what planet could you be from and think that they're worthy of any manner of admiration?
Well anyway, so add up all those people who admire those figures and then compare that to the number who admire Ron Paul, which was by the way 3%.
That's 3% of all tea partiers, not the general public, tea partiers.
And then you get a sense, you start to get a sense of how likely that movement is to advance liberty.
These figures I gave are a little old. They were from a year ago. So you might be tempted
to think that the Tea Party has gotten a little more radical since then. After all, government
has only gotten bigger. They've had more time to absorb the ideas of Austrian economics
and so forth. So maybe they've started coming around. Maybe they're more radically opposed
to the government now. I'm afraid not. Back in September, Pew Research took a poll of
of Tea Party Supporters, and they found that 47% of tea partiers said they're angry with
the federal government. This should seem kind of strange, right, because, I mean, one, the
media is always telling us how angry the tea partiers are, and if you look at the books
that are out there about the tea party, they have titles like Boiling Mad and Mad as Hell.
Well, if they're not angry with the federal government, what are they angry at? I don't
know, but, and if they were, if they're really anti-government, then you would think they'd
they'd be really angry with the federal government because they have a lot to be angry about.
But back in September 2010, 47%. But now, you might think they're angrier now because
after all, government has only gotten bigger, new wars and so forth, and of course they
elected all these Tea Party guys to Congress and government hasn't started shrinking yet.
You know, all these Tea Party guys, almost all of them voted to renew the Patriot Act,
No debate, no changes. They all just went for it. So you think, well, they'd be really
mad, right, because these guys betrayed us, and they'd be really angry with the federal
government. Unfortunately, you'd be once again too optimistic. A Pew poll taken last month
found that only 28% of Tea Partiers now are angry with the federal government. And think
about that. That's just after two months of a Republican House of Representatives. Imagine
And how not angry with the federal government most of these people would be if you also
had a Republican Senate and a Republican White House. I think you'd find they would be led
by the same talk radio hosts who led many of them to the Tea Party right back to where
they were during all those years when George W. Bush, who most of them like, was president.
By the way, all of this is to say nothing, of course, of the troubling anti-immigrant,
and the virulently anti-Islam pro-war views that all of them espouse right alongside their limited government talk.
And if you're interested, by the way, here are the top three, this poll was just taken last month,
the top three 2012 presidential picks of Tea Partiers from a Pew poll.
Number one, Mitt Romney. Number two, Mike Huckabee. Number three, Newt Gingrich.
In fairness, though, that was a month ago. If they took it now, maybe the Tea Partiers would put Donald Trump in there instead.
So, that might not characterize their views now.
So, I don't think it's an especially encouraging sign that the Tea Party movement came along
and adopted some of the Ron Paul movement's rhetoric and strategies.
And I think the people who are trying to fund that movement, who think that backing that
movement is going to advance liberty, I think it's a waste.
Not necessarily for libertarians who are trying to work with them and influence them, but
for actually trying to fund this as a movement that's gonna elect people who are gonna make
our lives better.
And of course, there's still other reasons to think that Americans aren't going to elect
libertarians anytime soon.
I mean, think about the American public and what they've supported, and think about especially
the early 20th century, all the stuff that Americans went along with.
I mean, first you had World War I, so they got behind that, and they got behind conscription
Prohibition to send their sons off to be killed for this senseless war. You had the Fed then,
but maybe you can't blame people for supporting that. Then, of course, you had more than a
decade of alcohol prohibition that people tolerated for that long. Then, of course,
you had the New Deal, which people voted for again and again. Then, of course, during World
War II, Americans tolerated the government rounding up Japanese American citizens, putting
them into concentration camps. Then you had Americans, of course, going along with all
and all manner of wartime economic controls and thinking that was fine.
And that, that was in the early 20th century.
Think about how much closer the country was back then to whatever libertarian roots it
might have.
Those people who supported all that stuff in the early 20th century, they weren't raised
going to federally controlled government schools.
And those people were much more loyal to other institutions besides the state, such as, you
You know, the churches, such as fraternal organizations.
And so if those people could be so easily manipulated
into supporting unprecedented fascism in America,
how much more likely do you think Americans today
are to vote for less government?
Consider also that over the decades ahead,
more and more libertarians, or excuse me, not libertarians,
more and more people will be receiving checks
from the government through social security
and through government employment.
Do you think those people are going to suddenly want to get rid of the federal government?
Do you think they're going to roll it back? Of course they're not. Of course they're not.
I don't say all of this to be negative or to depress you. The point is simply that trying
to win elections isn't going to work, now or anytime soon, because most people aren't
libertarian and aren't about to be. As Iran said, it's earlier than you think.
Some people argue that since libertarianism can't win through the electoral process, we
should go to the federal courts and get libertarianism that way. After all, that's what the left
wing does, right? I mean, when the people won't go for what they want, they go to the
federal courts and try to get the federal, try to get them to force people to accept
what they won't vote for. With these libertarians, the idea is we need to get government to start
reading Congress's powers into the Constitution, like under the Congress cause, more narrowly
and start reading the protections for liberty more broadly.
This camp has had big wins recently, it's true.
They had big wins with the District of Columbia
versus Heller and McDonald versus Chicago gun cases
where the Supreme Court recognizes the second amendment,
protects an individual right to bear arms
and then it applies against the states.
And so these legal activists think with some justification
that their strategy's a good one.
And of course, it is a great and heroic thing
that they went and they did this. There can't be any doubt whatsoever that people in D.C.,
here in Chicago, other cities that had stringent gun control laws are now better off. They
enjoy a right that they couldn't before. But their big victory for liberty is not likely
to last very long in the long run. After all, the Supreme Court said in those decisions
that while an absolute ban on guns is unacceptable, reasonable restrictions would be okay. And
And when they tell us what reasonable restrictions means, I think we'll find that the right
that they're willing to recognize is extremely, extremely narrow.
Winning court battles on issues like this helps people in the short term, and again,
that's great. It's heroic. It's saving people from being victims of government crime, but
it does nothing to address the underlying problem of a federal government that's growing
and always grabbing more power for itself. The federal courts are absolutely not ever
are going to help us win that battle.
The federal judges who sit on those courts
are of course selected by the president,
confirmed by a senate, and those guys
are never gonna select or confirm anyone
who won't tell them they can do
absolutely anything they wanna do.
A strategy that relies on the courts
relies on the assumption that the rulers
that Washington chooses for us
are someday just gonna turn benevolent
and give us liberty.
That idea should just seem absurd to any libertarian.
The idea accepts the myth that federal judges, they're really just unbiased arbiters, neutral
arbiters of disputes. Of course they're not. They're political rulers who want to and do
control us. Judges haven't harmed liberty because lawyers haven't made good enough constitutional
arguments in favor of liberty. They've harmed liberty because it's what they're put on the
and the bench to do, so the courts aren't gonna save us.
What will work?
The people who want instant gratification
are not going to be pleased by my answer,
because my answer is the same answer
that Albert J. Knot gave in his classic essay,
Isaiah's Job, and that Leonard Reed gave
in his classic essay, How to Advance Liberty,
both of which you should read.
What we can do now to advance liberty
is first and foremost to work on the one unit of society
that we're actually capable of improving,
which is ourselves.
We learn more about liberty, learn more about history,
learn more about Austrian economics.
And we can learn to improve ourselves in every respect
so that we're more capable of communicating these ideas
that we learn to others and that others would actually see us
as someone who they wanna learn from.
Our purpose shouldn't be to go out
People don't foist our ideas on others who haven't asked for them.
People don't appreciate that and it'll close their minds to us, I think, for the most part.
And that kind of mentality is too close to the mentality that sadists have.
Our job is to go out and remold people into the shape that we think they should be in.
I don't think that's a healthy attitude.
Instead, because we'll make ourselves the best that we can be, people will be drawn
to us.
Because of the character and intellect that we'll cultivate, they'll want to hear what
we have to say. Other people following our example then will want to spread the ideas
to others. And slowly we'll see the ideas seep more and more into the culture. Eventually
we'll see them popping up in unexpected places. We'll hear them coming back to us from the
mouths of people we wouldn't have expected to hear them from, as Nock would predict.
This isn't far-fetched. We have a perfect example of this phenomenon in the real world
today. In fact, this method I advocate, I believe, is responsible for the huge explosion
of interest in liberty that we see. Our perfect example is Ron Paul. Did Ron Paul really ever
seek mass appeal? Did he run national advertisements saying, come check out what I have to say,
or anything of the kind? No. All he did was communicate his ideas clearly and consistently
for Decades, using whatever forum was available to him, while also maintaining an exceptionally
high level of personal integrity that led people to respect him and to pay serious attention
to what he had to say. Then, almost as if by magic, hundreds of thousands of people
were just drawn to him in a way that people in the normal political world couldn't understand,
right, because normal politicians don't naturally attract people. Natural politicians have to,
You know, rather regular politicians have to go out and make all kinds of absurd promises
to get people to come pay attention to them. It's the complete opposite of what normally
goes on in politics. And now look at the people who he's inspired. Look at the people who
have gone out and started spreading the ideas themselves. Look at how the names of Mises
and Hayek turn up all over the place, coming again from people who aren't necessarily libertarians
but who now are aware, at least indirectly, of these ideas.
This is how our ideas advance.
The Mises Institute, of course, also provides an excellent example of this phenomenon at
work.
As far as I know, the Mises Institute never had a plan to go out and convert the masses.
They never were preaching on street corners or anything of the sort.
All the Mises Institute did was build a great institution, build a great website, and people
People just came, people were drawn to it, because the Mises Institute was a light in
a world of darkness. Now, some might say, oh, that's great, okay, more people know
about liberty, great, and they're talking about it. But how do we actually get liberty?
One way we can actually get liberty that's perfectly consistent with this strategy is
by creating institutions that serve as alternatives to government institutions. A great example
of this is the homeschooling movement. People who homeschool their children are freeing
their children from the coercion of government schools. And you'll notice that this came
about just because a bunch of people started doing it. They didn't wait around for liberty-friendly
politicians to be elected. They didn't wait around for liberty-friendly judges to be appointed.
They didn't ask anybody's permission. I know some people will say, well that's fine, there's
little pockets of liberty here and there, but I want a libertarian society. How do we
How do we get that? How do we get rid of the state?
The answer is just that we have to keep doing our never-ending job of self-improvement and
be patient. Someday, we don't know when, the existing Leviathan will collapse just as the
Soviet Union collapsed. Nothing lasts forever, especially not a fascist or socialist regime.
When that collapse comes, however it comes about, we don't know how it will, if we've
done our job in spreading our ideas, there will be a natural aristocracy of libertarian
and leaders in place who are ready to help rebuild society on a better foundation.
This could be many years from now and I think it will be after my lifetime. Maybe it won't
happen at all, but that's just reality. There's nothing to be upset about. There are lots
of good things that might happen in the future after we're all gone that we can think of
that will probably happen that we won't enjoy because we haven't been born in this particular
time period, think of all the technological innovations that we know will happen but will
happen after our lifetime, you know, interplanetary travel, human life spans extended to hundreds
of years, the holodeck from Star Trek and of course flying cars, all these things we
think will eventually happen but we won't get to enjoy them because it will be too long
from now.
Well, you sit around all day being bummed out about that, no, of course not, you're
You're glad you live now when you have all this stuff, iPhones and whatever, that you
do have, and you're glad that you don't live in some previous time when things would have
been a lot worse. Well, it shouldn't be any different for liberty. There's no reason why
we should expect progress in this area to be faster or easier than progress in any other
area of human endeavor. Getting a whole society to change its mind about some of its most
fundamental beliefs is really difficult. There's no reason to think it wouldn't be, especially
Even all the world's governments who have all the guns and most of the money are working
really hard against you.
You know, you might say, oh, it's not fair.
Other people get to see their political ideologies enacted, but that's just reality.
There's no quick fix.
Libertarianism isn't a political philosophy for people with high time preference.
It's high time, really, it's high time preference that leads people to think, we need to get
results in Washington now.
That leaves libertarians astray. It's what makes people latch on to politicians who don't
really share our values. It's what makes people pursue these campaigns for quasi-libertarian
things that would actually move us in the wrong direction, like privatizing social security
and school vouchers. It's high time preference that makes people think we should focus our
efforts on the federal courts, because after all, then you just get a federal judge to
say we should have liberty, and boom, instant liberty for the whole country if you get the
Supreme Court to do it. But that can't work. It can't possibly work, because even if you
If you could get some judges to do that, which you couldn't, society wouldn't be ready for
it. People would not understand the ideas. The pillars wouldn't be in place to underpin
it. This isn't to say that we shouldn't be involved with short-term practical political
projects. If there's a good chance of protecting somebody's liberty by going to court, fine.
There's an anti-war movement that could stand in the way of a war. Join it. View these things
for what they are. Those things are like stopping a particular crime from happening. It's not
a, it doesn't address the underlying root problem of crime, right? It's like, you know,
when the government does a big drug bust and they get, you know, a thousand kilos of cocaine
or whatever they get, you know, a huge quantity of cocaine, and they think, wow, this is a
great victory in the war on drugs. We're stopping drugs now. Is anyone not, is it, are any less
drugs really going to be taken as a result of that? Does that really address the drug
problem, if you want to call it that? No, of course not. It doesn't address the drug
problem at all. They just stopped this one little thing. And so what we need to do is
keep our eyes focused on the big problem, the long-term problem, and we can't ever compromise
our principles if we do pursue those short-term things, because someone has to keep those
ideas alive and growing and pure. And if we don't do it, no one will, and the libertarian
movement that we've built so far could be lost. Now, if you have an urgent need for
for more liberty in your personal life, if that's your complaint, right, that you don't
have enough liberty, there's lots of ways you can go out and get it. And you can reduce
your tax burden, you can find your ways around regulation, right? I mean, you can be like
Jeffrey Tucker and hack your shower so that you can get the showers the government doesn't
want you to take. You can hold onto gold instead of Federal Reserve notes. And you can do what
a lot of people are doing and move to a part of the world where they'll give you more of
whatever kind of freedom is more important to you. And by the way, as people move with
With their feet like that, I think it's going to happen more and more as travel becomes
easier, governments will have to compete for citizens and as they do, they're going to
have to make themselves less burdensome and they'll do it without us having to actually
dirty our hands with politics. They'll do it because we've made people want more liberty.
Anyway, regardless of what happens with the rest of society, we should all be glad that
we're living in a time and place that's allowed us to discover libertarianism in Austrian
and Economics. Unlike most people who have ever lived, we can see things clearly that
they couldn't. Unlike most people, we can see the state for what it is. Unlike most
people, we can see what's going on in the economy and understand what's going on. Unlike
most people, we have the truth. In many respects, the truth has already set us free. So, let's
keep learning, let's keep improving ourselves, let's keep communicating our ideas to others,
Let's create more liberty for ourselves without the politicians' help, and let's take joy
in all of that.
And even if we don't get as much liberty as we might like in our lifetimes, we'll have
enjoyed ourselves doing all of that, and we'll have known, we'll have given our time and
our efforts and our lives to a worthwhile cause.
Thank you very much.