WEBVTT NOTE The Misesian Vision 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:17.500 He's the editor of a number of books including The Gold Standard Perspectives in the Austrian School, The Free Market Reader, The Irrepressible Rothbard, the author of two books, Speaking of Liberty, and The Left, The Right, and The State, Geron Soil, and The Bookstore. 2 00:00:17.500 --> 00:00:29.500 He is a frequent guest on Judge Andrew Napolitano's Freedom Watch with the Judge on Fox.com, and it's a website you may have heard of, LewRockwell.com. 3 00:00:29.500 --> 00:00:36.140 He is a living libertarian legend, the chairman and CEO of the Mises Institute, Lew Rockwell. 4 00:00:36.140 --> 00:00:40.140 Thank you, Douglas. 5 00:00:43.140 --> 00:00:51.140 Oh, thank you. 6 00:00:55.140 --> 00:01:00.140 I want to mention how lucky the Mises Institute is to have Doug French as our new president, 7 00:01:00.140 --> 00:01:06.660 not only because of his vast financial experience, which the Institute has already greatly benefited from, 8 00:01:06.660 --> 00:01:14.820 but even of more importance to us, he was Murray Rothbard's student at UNLV, where he received his master's in economics under Murray. 9 00:01:14.820 --> 00:01:19.260 So very, very lucky to have Doug. 10 00:01:19.260 --> 00:01:24.500 Despite what it says on our schedule, for which I apologize, I'm going to talk about a different topic. 11 00:01:24.500 --> 00:01:28.140 I'm going to talk about the Misesian vision. 12 00:01:28.140 --> 00:01:36.640 I'm finding it ever more difficult to describe to people the kind of world that the Mises Institute would like to see. 13 00:01:36.640 --> 00:01:46.140 With the type of political order that Mises, in the entire classical liberal tradition, believed would be most beneficial for mankind. 14 00:01:46.140 --> 00:01:53.140 It would appear that the more liberty we lose, the less people are able to imagine how liberty might work. 15 00:01:53.140 --> 00:01:56.540 It's a fascinating thing to behold. 16 00:01:56.540 --> 00:02:00.540 People can no longer imagine a world in which we could be secure 17 00:02:00.540 --> 00:02:04.540 without massive invasions of our privacy at every step 18 00:02:04.540 --> 00:02:08.540 and even being strip-searched before boarding airplanes, 19 00:02:08.540 --> 00:02:12.540 even though private institutions manage much greater security 20 00:02:12.540 --> 00:02:16.540 without any invasion of human rights. 21 00:02:16.540 --> 00:02:20.540 People can no longer remember how a true free market and medical care would work 22 00:02:20.540 --> 00:02:24.540 even though all the problems of the current system were created by 23 00:02:24.540 --> 00:02:31.140 Government Interventions in the first place. People imagine that we need 700 military bases 24 00:02:31.140 --> 00:02:37.580 around the world and endless wars in the Middle East for security, even though, say, safe 25 00:02:37.580 --> 00:02:44.700 Switzerland doesn't. People think it is insane to think of life without central banks, even 26 00:02:44.700 --> 00:02:51.140 though these are modern inventions that have destroyed currency after currency. Even meddlesome 27 00:02:51.140 --> 00:02:55.940 Some agencies like the Consumer Product Safety Commission or the Federal Trade Commission 28 00:02:55.940 --> 00:03:01.560 strike people as absolutely essential even though it is not they who catch thieves and 29 00:03:01.560 --> 00:03:04.820 frauds but private institutions. 30 00:03:04.820 --> 00:03:10.860 The idea of privatizing roads or water supplies seems outlandish even though we have a long 31 00:03:10.860 --> 00:03:13.800 history of both. 32 00:03:13.800 --> 00:03:19.320 People even wonder how anyone could be educated in the absence of the public schools as if 33 00:03:19.320 --> 00:03:30.320 If markets themselves didn't create, in America, the world's most literate society in the 18th and 19th centuries, this list could go on and on. 34 00:03:30.320 --> 00:03:42.320 But the problem is that the capacity to imagine freedom, the very source of life for civilization and humanity itself, is being eroded in our society and culture. 35 00:03:42.320 --> 00:03:47.820 The less freedom we have, the less people are able to imagine what freedom feels like, 36 00:03:47.820 --> 00:03:52.820 and therefore the less they are willing to fight for its restoration. 37 00:03:52.820 --> 00:03:56.320 This has profoundly affected the political culture. 38 00:03:56.320 --> 00:04:00.320 We've lived through regime after regime at least since the 1930s, 39 00:04:00.320 --> 00:04:04.320 in which the word freedom has been a rhetorical principle only, 40 00:04:04.320 --> 00:04:08.320 as each new regime has taken ever more of our freedom. 41 00:04:08.320 --> 00:04:13.320 Now we have a president who doesn't even bother to pay lip service to the idea of freedom. 42 00:04:13.320 --> 00:04:18.320 In fact, I don't think the idea has occurred to Obama at all. 43 00:04:18.320 --> 00:04:29.320 If the idea of freedom has occurred to him, he must have rejected it as dangerous, or unfair, or unequal, or irresponsible, or something along those lines. 44 00:04:29.320 --> 00:04:37.320 To him and to many Americans, the goal of government is to be an extension of the personal values of those in charge. 45 00:04:37.320 --> 00:04:42.320 I saw a speech in which Obama was making a pitch for national service. 46 00:04:42.320 --> 00:04:53.320 The ghastly idea that government should steal two years of every young person's life for slave labor and to inculcate obedience to the Leviathan. 47 00:04:53.320 --> 00:05:00.320 Though, of course, no concerns for setting back a young person's career and personal life. 48 00:05:01.320 --> 00:05:10.320 How did Obama justify his support of this idea? He said, when he was a young man, he learned important values from his period of community service. 49 00:05:11.320 --> 00:05:18.320 It helped form him and shape him. It helped him understand the troubles of others and think outside his own narrow experience. 50 00:05:19.320 --> 00:05:22.320 Well, I'm happy for him. 51 00:05:23.320 --> 00:05:35.240 But he chose this path voluntarily. It's a gigantic leap to go from personal experience 52 00:05:35.240 --> 00:05:41.320 to forcing a vicious national plan on the entire country. His presumption here is really 53 00:05:41.320 --> 00:05:48.600 taken from the playbook of the totalitarian state. The father leader will guide his children's 54 00:05:48.600 --> 00:06:13.600 To me this comment illustrates one of two things. It could show that Obama is a potential dictator in the mold of Stalin, Hitler and Mao. For the presumptions that he puts on exhibit here are just as frightening as any imagined by the world's worst tyrants. 55 00:06:13.600 --> 00:06:25.600 Or, more plausibly, it may be an illustration of Hannah Arendt's view that totalitarianism can be merely an application of the principle of the banality of evil. 56 00:06:25.600 --> 00:06:33.600 With this phrase, Arendt meant to draw attention to how people misunderstand the origins and nature of evil regimes. 57 00:06:33.600 --> 00:06:41.400 Evil regimes, she said, are not always the products of fanatics, paranoids, and sociopaths, 58 00:06:41.400 --> 00:06:47.160 though, of course, power breeds fanaticism, paranoia, and sociopathology. 59 00:06:47.160 --> 00:06:53.720 Instead, the total state can be built by ordinary people who accept a wrong premise concerning 60 00:06:53.720 --> 00:06:57.040 the role of the state in society. 61 00:06:57.040 --> 00:07:03.560 If the role of the state is to ferret out evil thoughts and bad ideas, it must necessarily 62 00:07:03.560 --> 00:07:10.840 become totalitarian. If the goal of the state is that all citizens must come to hold the same values 63 00:07:10.840 --> 00:07:17.720 as the great leader, whether economic, moral or cultural, the state must necessarily become 64 00:07:17.720 --> 00:07:23.880 totalitarian. If the leaders believe that scarce resources must be channeled in a direction that 65 00:07:23.880 --> 00:07:29.640 producers and consumers would not choose on their own, the result must necessarily be 66 00:07:29.640 --> 00:07:36.240 Central Planning. On the face of it, many people today do not necessarily reject these 67 00:07:36.240 --> 00:07:43.760 premises. No longer is the idea of a state-planned society seen as frightening. What scares people 68 00:07:43.760 --> 00:07:51.760 more today is the prospect of a society without a plan, which is to say, a society of freedom. 69 00:07:51.760 --> 00:07:56.440 But here is the key difference between authority and everyday life, such as that exercised 70 00:07:56.440 --> 00:08:03.640 by a parent or a teacher or a pastor or a boss and the power of the state. 71 00:08:03.640 --> 00:08:08.920 The state's edicts are always and everywhere enforced at the point of a gun. 72 00:08:08.920 --> 00:08:13.160 It is interesting how little we think about this reality. 73 00:08:13.160 --> 00:08:18.720 One virtually never hears that truth stated so plainly in a college classroom, for example. 74 00:08:18.720 --> 00:08:21.640 But it is the core reality. 75 00:08:21.640 --> 00:08:26.340 Everything done by the state is ultimately done by means of aggression, which is to say 76 00:08:26.340 --> 00:08:41.340 The total state is really nothing but the continued extension of these status means throughout every nook and cranny of economic and social life. 77 00:08:41.340 --> 00:08:51.340 Thus does the paranoia, megalomania, and fanaticism of the rulers become deadly dangerous to every single person. 78 00:08:51.340 --> 00:08:58.820 It begins in a seemingly small error, a banality, but with the state, what begins in banality 79 00:08:58.820 --> 00:08:59.820 ends in bloodshed. 80 00:08:59.820 --> 00:09:05.580 Let me give another example of the banality of evil. 81 00:09:05.580 --> 00:09:10.740 Several decades ago, some crackpots had the idea that mankind's use of fossil fuels had 82 00:09:10.740 --> 00:09:15.860 a warming effect on the weather. 83 00:09:15.860 --> 00:09:19.020 Environmentalists were pretty fired up by the idea. 84 00:09:19.020 --> 00:09:25.660 So are many politicians. Economists were largely tongue-tied, because they had long ago conceded 85 00:09:25.660 --> 00:09:31.740 the idea that there are some public goods that the market can't handle. Surely the 86 00:09:31.740 --> 00:09:39.180 weather is one of those. Enough years go by, and what do we have? Politicians from all 87 00:09:39.180 --> 00:09:45.220 over the world, every last one of them a huckster of some variety, only pretending to represent 88 00:09:45.220 --> 00:09:51.020 and his Nation, gathering in a posh resort in Europe to tax the world and planet's weather 89 00:09:51.020 --> 00:09:56.420 down to precise temperatures half a century from now. 90 00:09:56.420 --> 00:10:12.420 In the entire history of mankind, there has not been a more preposterous spectacle. 91 00:10:12.420 --> 00:10:17.580 I don't know if it counts as tragedy or farce that the meeting on global warming came to 92 00:10:17.580 --> 00:10:22.580 an end with politicians rushing home to deal with snowstorms and record-low temperatures. 93 00:10:22.580 --> 00:10:30.820 I draw attention to this absurdity to make a more general point. What seems to have escaped 94 00:10:30.820 --> 00:10:37.340 the current generation is the notion that was once called freedom. Let me be clear about 95 00:10:37.340 --> 00:10:42.960 Not what I mean by freedom. I mean a social or political condition in which people exercise 96 00:10:42.960 --> 00:10:48.620 their own choices concerning what they do with their lives and property. People are 97 00:10:48.620 --> 00:10:55.100 permitted to trade and exchange goods and services without impediment or violent interference. 98 00:10:55.100 --> 00:11:00.340 They can associate or not associate with anyone of their own choosing. They can arrange their 99 00:11:00.340 --> 00:11:07.340 for their own lives and businesses. They can build, move, innovate, save, invest, consume 100 00:11:07.780 --> 00:11:14.780 on terms that they themselves decide to find. What will be the results? We can't predict 101 00:11:14.780 --> 00:11:18.660 them any more than I can know what everyone in this room will have for breakfast tomorrow 102 00:11:18.660 --> 00:11:25.460 morning or what time you will wake up. Human choices work that way. There are as many patterns 103 00:11:25.460 --> 00:11:41.460 The only real question we should ask is whether the results will be orderly, that is consistent with peace and prosperity, or chaotic, and thereby at war with human flourishing. 104 00:11:41.460 --> 00:11:54.460 The great burden borne by the classical liberal tradition, stretching from medieval times to our own, is to make believable the otherwise improbable claim that liberty is the mother, not the daughter, 105 00:11:54.460 --> 00:11:57.460 not the daughter of orderliness. 106 00:11:57.460 --> 00:12:03.460 To be sure, that generation of Americans that seceded from British rule in the late 18th century 107 00:12:03.460 --> 00:12:07.460 took the imperative of liberty as a given. 108 00:12:07.460 --> 00:12:11.460 They had benefited from centuries of intellectual work by true liberals 109 00:12:11.460 --> 00:12:14.460 who had demonstrated that government does nothing for society 110 00:12:14.460 --> 00:12:18.460 but divide and loot people in big and small ways. 111 00:12:18.460 --> 00:12:22.460 They had come to believe that the best way to rule a society 112 00:12:22.460 --> 00:12:43.460 Today this social order sounds like chaos. Not anything we dare try lest we be overrun with terrorists and drug fiends amidst massive social, economic and cultural collapse. 113 00:12:43.460 --> 00:12:48.900 To me, this is very interesting. It is the cultural condition that comes about in the 114 00:12:48.900 --> 00:12:55.660 absence of experience with freedom. More precisely, it comes about when people have no notion 115 00:12:55.660 --> 00:13:01.300 of the relationship between cause and effect in human affairs. One might think it would 116 00:13:01.300 --> 00:13:06.940 be enough for most people to log on to the World Wide Web, browse any major social networking 117 00:13:06.940 --> 00:13:13.340 site or search engine, and gain direct experience with the results of human freedom. 118 00:13:13.340 --> 00:13:19.620 No government agency created Facebook. No government agency manages its day-to-day operations. 119 00:13:19.620 --> 00:13:26.220 It is the same with Google. Nor did a bureaucratic agency create the miracle of the iPhone or 120 00:13:26.220 --> 00:13:33.220 the utopian cornucopia of products available at the Wal-Mart down the street. 121 00:13:33.340 --> 00:13:40.340 Meanwhile, look at what the state gives us. The Department of Motor Vehicles. 122 00:13:40.340 --> 00:14:09.340 The Post Office, spying on our emails, listening in on our phone calls, full body scans at the airport, restrictions on water use, the court system, wars, taxes, inflation, business regulation, public schools, social security, the CIA, and another 10,000 failed programs and bureaucracies, the reputation of which is no good no matter who you talk to. 123 00:14:09.340 --> 00:14:18.340 Now, some might say, oh sure, the free market gives us the dessert, but the government gives us the vegetables that keep us healthy. 124 00:14:18.340 --> 00:14:31.340 That view does not account for the horrific reality that more than a hundred million people were slaughtered by the state in the twentieth century alone, not counting its wars. 125 00:14:31.340 --> 00:14:34.340 This is only the most visible cost. 126 00:14:34.340 --> 00:14:41.260 As Frederic Bastiat emphasized, the enormity of the costs of the state can only be discovered 127 00:14:41.260 --> 00:14:49.060 in considering its unseen costs. The inventions not brought to market, the businesses not 128 00:14:49.060 --> 00:14:55.260 opened, the people whose lives were cut short so that they could not enjoy their full potential, 129 00:14:55.260 --> 00:15:01.200 the wealth not used for productive purposes but rather taxed away, the capital accumulation 130 00:15:01.200 --> 00:15:05.580 and through savings not undertaken because the currency was destroyed or the interest 131 00:15:05.580 --> 00:15:12.680 rate held near zero among an infinitely expandable list of unknowns. 132 00:15:12.680 --> 00:15:19.120 To understand these costs requires intellectual sophistication. To understand the more basic 133 00:15:19.120 --> 00:15:25.120 and immediate point that markets work and the state does not needs less sophistication, 134 00:15:25.120 --> 00:15:30.080 but it still requires some degree of understanding of cause and effect. 135 00:15:30.080 --> 00:15:36.320 If we lack this understanding, we go through life accepting whatever exists as a given. 136 00:15:36.320 --> 00:15:41.160 If there is wealth, there is wealth and there's nothing else to know. 137 00:15:41.160 --> 00:15:48.760 If there is poverty, there is poverty and we can know no more about it. 138 00:15:48.760 --> 00:15:53.520 Was to address this deep ignorance that the discipline of economics was born in Spain 139 00:15:53.520 --> 00:15:58.800 and Italy, the homes of the first industrial revolutions in the 14th and 15th centuries, 140 00:15:58.800 --> 00:16:03.520 came to the heights of scientific exposition in the 16th century to be 141 00:16:03.520 --> 00:16:08.520 expanded and elaborated upon in the 18th century in England and in Germany, in 142 00:16:08.520 --> 00:16:12.600 France in the 19th century, finally achieving its fullest presentation in 143 00:16:12.600 --> 00:16:19.520 Austria and America in the late 19th and 20th centuries. And what did economics 144 00:16:19.520 --> 00:16:25.720 contribute to human sciences? What was the value that it added? It 145 00:16:25.720 --> 00:16:31.320 It demonstrated the orderliness of the material world through a careful look at the operation 146 00:16:31.320 --> 00:16:36.920 of the price system and the forces at work that organize the production and distribution 147 00:16:36.920 --> 00:16:39.480 of scarce goods. 148 00:16:39.480 --> 00:16:43.660 Its main lesson was taught again and again for centuries. 149 00:16:43.660 --> 00:16:48.720 Government cannot improve on the results of human action achieved through voluntary trade 150 00:16:48.720 --> 00:16:51.080 and association. 151 00:16:51.080 --> 00:16:53.280 This was its contribution. 152 00:16:53.280 --> 00:16:55.340 This was its argument. 153 00:16:55.340 --> 00:17:03.340 This was its warning to every would-be social planner, your dreams of domination must be curtailed. 154 00:17:03.340 --> 00:17:08.340 In effect, this was a message of freedom, one that inspired revolution after revolution. 155 00:17:08.340 --> 00:17:16.340 Each of us stemmed from the conviction that humankind would be better off in the absence of rule than in its tyrannical presence. 156 00:17:16.340 --> 00:17:20.340 But consider what had to come before the real revolutions. 157 00:17:20.340 --> 00:17:24.340 There had to be intellectual work that prepared the field of battle. 158 00:17:24.340 --> 00:17:32.340 is a chronic struggle that lasted centuries and continues to this day between the nation-state and the market economy. 159 00:17:32.340 --> 00:17:43.340 Make no mistake, it is in this battle's outcome that is the most serious obstacle to the establishment and the preservation of freedom. 160 00:17:43.340 --> 00:17:51.340 The political order in which we live is but an extension of the capacities of our collective cultural imaginations. 161 00:17:51.340 --> 00:17:56.580 Once we stop imagining freedom, it can vanish, and people won't even recognize that it is 162 00:17:56.580 --> 00:18:04.180 gone. Once it is gone, people can imagine that they can, or should, get it back. 163 00:18:04.180 --> 00:18:09.020 I'm reminded of the experience of an economist associated with the Mises Institute who was 164 00:18:09.020 --> 00:18:15.040 invited to Kazakhstan after the fall of the Soviet Union. He was in part to advise them 165 00:18:15.040 --> 00:18:21.760 on a Transition to Free Markets. He talked to important officials about privatization, 166 00:18:21.760 --> 00:18:27.960 stock markets, monetary reform. He suggested no regulation on business startups. The officials 167 00:18:27.960 --> 00:18:32.940 were fascinated. They had become convinced of the general case for free enterprise, if 168 00:18:32.940 --> 00:18:39.220 only because they understood that under socialism, officials were poor. And yet an objection 169 00:18:39.220 --> 00:18:44.760 was raised. If people are permitted to open businesses and factories anywhere, then we 170 00:18:44.760 --> 00:18:53.460 When we close state-run factories, how can the state properly plan where people live? 171 00:18:53.460 --> 00:18:57.480 After all, people might be tempted to move to places where there are good-paying jobs 172 00:18:57.480 --> 00:19:01.960 and away from places where there are no jobs. 173 00:19:01.960 --> 00:19:06.680 Kahnem has listened to this point and kept waiting for the objection. 174 00:19:06.680 --> 00:19:10.760 He nodded his head that this is precisely what people will do. 175 00:19:10.760 --> 00:19:13.360 After some time, the government officials became more explicit. 176 00:19:13.360 --> 00:19:19.360 It said that they cannot simply step aside and let people move anywhere they want to move. 177 00:19:19.360 --> 00:19:22.360 This would mean losing track of the population. 178 00:19:22.360 --> 00:19:27.360 It could cause overpopulation in some areas and desolation in others. 179 00:19:27.360 --> 00:19:30.360 If the statement went along with the idea of free movement, 180 00:19:30.360 --> 00:19:37.360 it might as well shut down completely for it would be effectively relinquishing any control over the people. 181 00:19:37.360 --> 00:19:40.360 And so in the end the officials rejected the idea. 182 00:19:40.360 --> 00:19:46.440 The entire economic reform movement foundered on the fear of letting people move, a freedom 183 00:19:46.440 --> 00:19:50.780 that most everyone in the United States takes for granted and which hardly ever gives rise 184 00:19:50.780 --> 00:19:53.240 to objection. 185 00:19:53.240 --> 00:19:58.440 Now we can laugh about this, but consider the problem from the point of view of the 186 00:19:58.440 --> 00:19:59.720 state. 187 00:19:59.720 --> 00:20:06.100 The whole reason people, state officials are in office is to control, they are there to 188 00:20:06.100 --> 00:20:08.660 to manage society. 189 00:20:08.660 --> 00:20:14.060 What they really and truly fear is that by relinquishing controls of people's movements, 190 00:20:14.060 --> 00:20:17.780 they were effectively turning over the whole of society to what they would have described 191 00:20:17.780 --> 00:20:21.020 as the wiles of the mob. 192 00:20:21.020 --> 00:20:24.980 All order might be lost, all security gone. 193 00:20:24.980 --> 00:20:27.580 People would make terrible mistakes with their lives. 194 00:20:27.580 --> 00:20:32.100 They would blame the government for failing to control them, and then what happens? 195 00:20:32.100 --> 00:20:35.620 The regime loses power. 196 00:20:35.620 --> 00:20:41.140 In the end, this is what it always comes down to for the state, the preservation of its 197 00:20:41.140 --> 00:20:47.240 own power. Everything it does, it does to secure its power and to forestall the diminution 198 00:20:47.240 --> 00:20:53.820 of its power. I submit to you, everything else you hear, in the end, is a cover for 199 00:20:53.820 --> 00:21:01.820 that fundamental motive. And yet, this power requires the cooperation of the popular culture. 200 00:21:01.820 --> 00:21:07.340 The rationales for power must convince the citizens. This is why the state must be alert 201 00:21:07.340 --> 00:21:13.460 to the status of public opinion. This is also why the state must also encourage fear among 202 00:21:13.460 --> 00:21:19.260 the population for what life would be like in the absence of the state. 203 00:21:19.260 --> 00:21:22.740 The political philosopher who did more than anyone else to make this possible was not 204 00:21:22.740 --> 00:21:31.100 Marx nor Keynes nor Strauss nor Rousseau, as awful as they were. It was the 17th century 205 00:21:31.100 --> 00:21:36.580 philosopher Thomas Hobbes who laid out a compelling vision for the nightmare of what life is like 206 00:21:36.580 --> 00:21:43.040 in the absence of the state. He describes such life as solitary, poor, nasty, brutish 207 00:21:43.040 --> 00:21:51.040 and short. The natural society, he wrote, is a society of conflict, of strife, a place 208 00:21:51.040 --> 00:21:57.480 in which no one is safe. He was writing during the English Civil War and his message seemed 209 00:21:57.480 --> 00:22:05.480 was unbelievable, but of course the conflicts in his time were not the result of natural society but over the control of Leviathan itself. 210 00:22:05.480 --> 00:22:16.480 So his theory of causation was skewed by circumstance, akin to watching a shipwreck and concluding that the natural and universal state of man is drowning. 211 00:22:16.480 --> 00:22:22.480 And yet today Hobbesianism is the common element of both left and right. 212 00:22:22.480 --> 00:22:29.000 To be sure, the fears are different, summing from different sets of political values. 213 00:22:29.000 --> 00:22:36.680 The left warns us that if we don't have Leviathan, our front yards will be flooded by rising oceans. 214 00:22:36.680 --> 00:22:43.640 Big business moguls will rob us blind, the poor will starve, the masses will be ignorant, 215 00:22:43.640 --> 00:22:50.240 and everything we buy will blow up and kill us. 216 00:22:50.240 --> 00:22:57.160 The right warns that in the absence of Leviathan, society will collapse in cesspools of immorality 217 00:22:57.160 --> 00:23:03.360 lorded over by swirly terrorists preaching a heretical religion. 218 00:23:03.360 --> 00:23:07.960 The goal of both left and right is that we make our political choices based on these 219 00:23:07.960 --> 00:23:13.320 fears. It doesn't matter so much which package of fear you choose. What matters is that you 220 00:23:13.320 --> 00:23:20.440 to support a state that purports to keep your nightmare from becoming a reality. 221 00:23:20.440 --> 00:23:26.400 Is there an alternative to fear? Here is where matters become a bit more difficult. 222 00:23:26.400 --> 00:23:32.400 We must again begin to imagine that freedom itself could work. In order to do this, we 223 00:23:32.400 --> 00:23:38.320 must learn economics. We must come to understand history better. We must study the sciences 224 00:23:38.320 --> 00:24:02.120 What they knew is the great secret of the ages. Society contains within itself the capacity 225 00:24:02.120 --> 00:24:07.160 for self-management, and there is nothing that government can do to improve on the results 226 00:24:07.160 --> 00:24:16.340 of the Voluntary Association, Exchange, Creativity and Choices of Every Member of the Human Family. 227 00:24:16.340 --> 00:24:22.120 If you know this lesson, if you believe this lesson, you are part of the great liberal 228 00:24:22.120 --> 00:24:29.560 tradition. You are also a threat to the regime, not only the one we live under currently, 229 00:24:29.560 --> 00:24:36.320 but every regime all over the world, in every time, in every place. The greatest guarantor 230 00:24:36.320 --> 00:24:46.320 The power of liberty is an entire population that is a relentless and daily threat to the regime precisely because they embrace this dream of liberty. 231 00:24:48.320 --> 00:24:51.320 The best and only place to start is with yourself. 232 00:24:52.320 --> 00:24:56.320 This is the only person that you can really control in the end. 233 00:24:57.320 --> 00:25:05.320 And by believing in freedom yourself, you might have made the biggest contribution to civilization you could possibly make. 234 00:25:06.320 --> 00:25:10.560 After that, never miss an opportunity to tell the truth. 235 00:25:10.560 --> 00:25:16.960 Sometimes thinking the unthinkable, saying the unsayable, teaching the unteachable 236 00:25:16.960 --> 00:25:22.560 is what makes the difference between bondage and sweet liberty. 237 00:25:22.560 --> 00:25:25.680 The title of this talk is The Misesian Vision. 238 00:25:25.680 --> 00:25:29.680 This was the vision of Ludwig von Mises and Murray and Rothbard. 239 00:25:29.680 --> 00:25:32.240 It is the vision of the Mises Institute. 240 00:25:32.240 --> 00:25:39.040 It is the vision of every dissident intellectual who dared to stand up to despotism in every age. 241 00:25:39.040 --> 00:25:45.360 I challenge you to enter into this struggle of history and make sure that your days on this earth 242 00:25:45.360 --> 00:25:53.040 count for something truly important. It is this struggle that defines our contribution to this world. 243 00:25:53.040 --> 00:25:59.200 Freedom is the greatest gift that you can give yourself and give all of humanity.