disadvantage of their competitors. .. >> he fortunately was able to hire legal representation and fight against it. that little innovation was

protected. all of those egg breakers lost their job. you know, they had to wander off into the countryside and die. [laughter] whatever happens to unemployed egg breakers. i suspect they got other jobs and did thanks that added more value, but that was a case in which there was going to be little cost imposed on all of us, every omelet would cost just a tiny bit more. benefits would be concentrated orphan a group with a lobby in washington, d.c.. we were fortunate, in this case, there was another concentrated interest. the manufacturer of the machine who found out about it, and he was able to raise hell and get that resended. we don't always lose those, but as a general rule, in a situation where you can impose small cost and large number of people aggregating the resulting benefits to small number of people, you get rent seeking behavior and transfers of income

or exfoliation. it's one of teaming power, that is to say putting restrictions on these exercises of power. i'll talk about that in the next presentation. it's not all doom and gloom, and i should warn you sometimes when we talk to our friends. who are public choice economists, it's really depressing because they give you every reason why the state will continue to expand forever. every incentive seems to be in favor of the expansion of state power increasing budgets, more spending, and so on, and yet, it's not always turned out like that, and they have been very, very important periods when the state retrenched itself, and the people struggle for freedom, expand the area, free and voluntary activity. the next presentation will talk primarily on the historical process by which people were able to impose some kind of

limit on the exercise of state power. i'll leave you with a passage from one of my favorite sociologist. when hilt leer came, he left the country. there were some very insightful people who had a very strong idea of what was coming and let the country saying we cannot live under this, and then he spend many years on the great work, and a gigantic volume came out in german, and his son translates an excerpt and published it for freedom and

domination arguing all of us, without exception, carry inherited poisen within us in the most varied and unexpected places and diverse forms defining perception. all of us collectively and individually are accessories to the great sin of all time, this real original sin, a her red tear fault to be erased with great difficulty and slowly by insight into pathology, by will to recover, and by the active remorse of all. it's our responsibility to try to think what it is to live as free persons, not to be dominated by other people, not to be bossed around, the idea that, in fact, the passport doesn't give you your freedom. this is an institution of control over you. free people don't need to have passports to be able to travel. the state doesn't grant you these things. the state has an important role

in protecting exercise of our liberty, but as the signers of the declaration of independence put it, to secure the rights, governments are instituted among men. that is come to be understood by most people as to give us these rights, to grant us these rights, to create these rights, but certainly not what the american founders had in mind. we have our rights as free human beings. we may crawl on government to secure the rights, but increasingly, government has told us that we are, indeed, their own creation that without them, we would not be possible. that brings us back to the awful statement from the president of the united states, you didn't build that, somebody else did that. that is part of that pathology that we have to overcome. we have a little bit of time now for some discussion. i hope i may have touched a couple buttons thinking about the origins of the state and predatory behavior so thank you.

[applause] if anybody wants to pose the question about social order, even without the state, i'd be happy to entertain that. [laughter] yes, sir? >> hi, i'm john. >> be close to it. >> okay. in your lecture, basically, you presented the theology of the state as a form of someone intervening or imposing something in represent seeking. what if -- have you acknowledged the possibility of a state originated through the interactions of people that eventually create a surplus and recognize the necessity of protecting each other and continue to create a state? is there any sort of different origin for the different kind of states? >> everyone understand that? i'll repeat it then. >> yeah. >> correct me if i get it wrong.

the question is the story i told about the emergence of the states we experience today is that they originate in some kind of active conquest. they are traceable back to the time. are there or could one imagine states that originate through a kind of spontaneous order or through voluntary deliberate acts for securing, if you will, benefits for protections of our lives and liberties and so on, is that fair? >> yeah. >> absolutely. the connection i make is between states and government or state power and governance. all human interaction requires the governance for rules. we can have rules that are spontaneously derived or they emerge without deliberate patterns. a lot of those govern our lives.

think of how pathways emerge in jungles. someone walked that way the first time, another person followed, and then there's a pathway created, people follow it, and they can organize their behavior. there's lots of rules that can emerge spontaneously. we see them all over the world. for instance, the principle of first come, first serve. that emerges spontaneously. people figure that out pretty easily, or one thing that you can study all over the world is sit down two children, give them a cake, and ask them to divide it. they all figure it out quickly. one cuts and the other chooses; right? that seems to be something we all settle on pretty well. it's not so culture specific. states are not merely sets of rules. they are organizations, however. right?

so the firm is an institution, but general motors is an organization. they have to emerge in some way through some deliberate act at some point. there are a lot of institutions of governance that emerge in deliberate acts that are not predatory. condo associations, business corporations, all kinds of ways we organize our lives, but typically, those do not claim a monopoly on those legitimate use of force in a given territory. that's a defining characteristic of a state. i'll talk this afternoon about the emergence of municipal government in europe which essentially has that form. these are voluntary social contracts, people come together and come up with rules to govern them and their behavior, and they invite people to move in on so and flourish. that principle of voluntary governance is in a way a competition with the state principles. we live with both at the same

time. absolutely possible, historically well-documented. that's where we should be looking for the the source of the civilization to those kinds of organizations, not to those that were founded in acts of conquests. in all contemporary states around the world origin nairt in those acts of conquest, but what we need to do, in effect, is tame them and make them behave more like civil society institutions, voluntary institutions of governance. >> thank you. >> yes, sir? >> i've done a lot of discussion with people on creating more voluntary societies and stateless solutions, and what i can't get past in my own head is let's say that we did form more voluntary society. on one side, we have the peaceful libertarian nerds who are happy to be peaceful and on the other side, there's people with big guns who want to take what the peaceful libertarian

nerds have. in a stateless environment, what is to stop the peaceful libertarian nerds from being conquered with the guys with bigger guns? if the answer is an army raised by the peaceful libertarians, what is to stop that army or mercenary group from doing the same thing? >> that's not actually what i was getting at, but something different. a great deal of institutions of law enforcement for example today are not institutions of the state so even the theory of sovereignty does not describe what we live in the united states of america. let's take a very simple example, and that is who is it that captures fugitives? people who jumped bail. people think the police. they don't. they don't capture that many of them. that's not the primary job or responsibility. it's bail bondsmen and bounty hunters. these have a bad reputation

because of trashy television shows. [laughter] the fact is that private bounty hunters, they are private persons, not agents of the state. they don't like violence. violence is costly, dangerous to them, and it's not dplam rows or romantic. they are paid to bring back a person by the bail bondsman. in the case if you're charged, you're released on bail, you don't have the money to put it up, go to the bail bondsman. they are not an agent of the state, not at officer of the court, but a private person. that person, in effect, loans you the money, posts bond, but they want your signature here, you're liable for it, and i want your mom to sign on it also or whatever people around you, these act as assureds so then you'll come to court when the date comes by, but then you

don't. what happens then? bail bondsman is out the money. that's forfeit if you don't show up. he has to hire someone to find you. that's a private person also. the advantage is if that person goes and hurts you, that person is a private person, he is subject to your action against him for having harmed you. he has to bring you back all in one piece, healthy, alive to the court. this is not an incentive that the police have by the by the w. they have little incentive to do that, but the bon toy hunter, if you hurts you, he bears liability for that, and if he doesn't bring you back, he doesn't get money. when do they capture people? four o'clock in the morning when the person is groggy and goes outside for a smoke. they don't come in guns blazing.

they don't like violence. they like to resolve the problem, get the money without it. the consequences of the system is the majority of fugitives from justice are brought back by effectively the voluntary system. it's not part of the state. the excellent enforcement mechanism doesn't correspond to the theory of sovereignty that we're taught, that everyone learns in high school and so on about the state. we have lots and lots of social ordering mechanisms that don't rely on the use of violence and force. gossip, an obvious one. everyone, we get angry about gossip, but it's an extremely important social institution telling us about the behavior of other people. it sends us little clues. this person is not trustworthy and so on. credit bureaus, we could have the government out there collecting every bad debt. they don't. i learned this through painful experience when a lot of money was owed to me. the government won't collect it for me. [laughter] who knew? i thought i just, like, i won,

where's the money? no, no, now i have to go and collect it. you have to hire a debt collector to go and get the money owed to you. well, one of the ways we deal with this is through credit bureaus. people share information. bob doesn't pay his debt. bob has a bunch of money. other people are not going to loan bob money anymore; right? that's an extremely effective mechanism much better than debtor prisons or debtor police or debtor bureaucracy. no violence, minimal intrusiveness, and yet it helps people to coordinate their behavior. there's lots and lots of ways in which we can govern our behavior without referring to force and violence, but people think the reason you get people to behave better is by pointing a gun at them. that's the only thing that works. well, that works in some cases,

but there's a lot of other institutions free society can avail itself of. that's what i have in mind with voluntary organizations, social ordering, and less reliance on force and violence and the police. last thing i'll mention. i was in a debate a time ago on these questions, and i did research, and i asked around, and i wanted to find out how many people were killed in any given year by private security guards. how many people are killed by police? who are uniformed agents of the state. the only data that i could find that was reliable, and first off, seems virtually no one in the united states is killedded by a private security guard. they don't have incentive to do that. if you misbehave in a mall, they don't club you down. [laughter] they ask you to leave because you're disrupting it. you don't get beaten down. how many people are killed by the police?

well, the department of justice did a very interesting study, and it was police officers murdered by felons and felons justifiably killed by the police. on average, there was 450 per year felons justifiably killed by the police. wow, that's interesting. then i found in the footnotes, what is the definition? anyone kill by police is defined as a felon. [laughter] in any killing by police, that's a justified homicide. right? i said, oh, i get it. this was so embarrassing that the department of justice did not release it until subsequent years. it told us was that anyone police kill in this country is a justified homicide by definition because they were killed by the police. that can't be right. i would much rather be stopped

by a private security in the mall than any uniformed policeman in this country. yes, sir? >> thank you. i was hoping you could make comments on voter identification standards. >> on voter i dentification? >> voter identification standards, if you could comment on that. >> interesting point that the same people who insist we have to show the id every time we get on to a train or airplane, resisted when it comes to the exercise of an act of citizenship which is to say voting. i don't like the idea of a national id card at all. i think that's very, very dangerous. i do think insisting that people show some proof that they are qualified voters in a jurisdiction is perfectly reasonable, and i don't have a problem with that. i think that's a reasonable requirement. if you're going to show up to

vote, you should be able to demonstrate that you're qualified to be a voter, that is to say a citizen, and that you are a resident of that jurisdiction qualified to vote for mayor or representative in congress or senator or governor, whatever it may be. i do find it ironic that we are forced to carry id for every other purpose, but the same people who are eager to do that resist the idea of being asked for id to cast a vote. that seemses to me something's wrong with that. yes, sir? >> you began this morning talking about makers and takers, and the most interesting slide i saw this morning was capital invested per employee and wages and ect., and, however, the idea of exfoliation and taking or really expropuating money from

the capital base with exfoliation. eventually, you know, we are broke like you said because, i mean, if you don't have capital, the wages won't go up and the continued progress can't go up. my question is i don't know how he reached the opinion that we were not broke. [laughter] >> the reference, of course, to professor steve landberg's comment. i think we were disagreeing a little bit on what it meant to be broke. i don't think we're broke. i think the government's broke. there is a distinction there. the problem is that the government has its hand in your wallet, and he has the opportunity to access all of your wealth. if you look at it from the perspective of being broke, we have resources to travel and eat and do things we want to do. we're not broke in that sense, but what i meant is the budgetary imbalance, that is to

say the difference between what the state has a statutory -- not necessarily a constitution, but a statutory obligation to pay in terms of future benefits for medicare, social security, and a wide range of other things, and the expected tax revenue is staggering, it's at least $80 trillion present value for united states, and probably substantially higher. various people recalculating it now with obamacare and so on to try to figure out the total budgetary imbalance. in that sense, the state is broke. now, they can deal with it in a couple of different ways. one is they can take a lot more wealth. the consequence is a lot less wealth is produced in the future to take. there's a very serious feedback mechanism there. the other thing they can do is default on those expected obligations, and that can take several forms. they could default on the

official government debt, and i don't think that is unthinkable. many countries have done that, and i think the united states might, in fact, do that in the future, simply default on the official government debt, to say all the bonds outstanding. the other form of default is simply not paying what they promised to pay. they may, in fact, jigger the numbers, raise eligibility, you have to be 75 to qualify for social security, and so on and so forth. finally, another form of default is inflation; right? you can inflight the currency and diminish the value of the obligation in terms, set in nominal terms, and you inflate away the value. that's another way of getting wealth. it's a cruel one, and it falls on those who are not able to shield themselves from the effect of inflation, so typically poor people, net

savers, elderly people, and so on tend to be really hit very hard by that. that's what i meant by "being broke," and it's not to say there's nothing they can do. something will be done about it, but it will be a combination of more taking of the wealth, possible default on official debt, and then simply going back on promises made to people on the basis of which they have made decisions about their lives which is to say the contemporary welfare state is built on a gigantic lie. it was known for a long time these obligations could not be met, and that seems to me, fundamentally unjust. yes, sir? >> well, i know we should be kept to one question, but i just have a quick one and a second more significant one. the first one being about, you know, you showed the slides through your book in the review, and how was that perceived overseas?

>> in persian or other languages? >> any comments. >> the reviews were positive. i don't read persian, by my friend translated it for me and it was glowing talking about wealth creation and virtuous behavior. i was happy about that. my approach, by the way, on this question is i would like to help people in iron to achieve -- iran to achieve a free society. i think that that's much more possible with this kind of a initiative from civil society organizations and discussion on publishing in persian and engaging people rather than cruise missiles or threats of war, which i think are likely to entrench the worst elements of the regime there and not to lead them towards more freedom so i'm very frightennedly mill tar --

military rattling of swords, and i would much rather engage people in a different way intellectually to help them achieve more freedom, and then it's come out in a number of other languages as well. i was in finland, and we had robust, enjoyable debates, and the finished edition was a big success. chinese, arabic, turkish, romanian, hungarian, ect., ect., ect., and then -- >> the more significant question. you touched on the basis of the state and all of that throughout history, and so i'm wondering if i could just get a couple historical examples as well as some outlook to the future on privatized court and polycentric law. >> emergence of legal systems in western europe fairly well understood was inherently

polycentric meaning a multitude of different jurisdictions that overlapped or penetrated each other, even at the time of blackstone and his commentaries, he articulates a number of different court systems functioning in great britain; right? courts of admiral law and so on and so forth. there was a process of consolidation, but the legal code, what we call the common law, emerged from a multitude of different legal systems. for example, think about the british monetary system before they went metric. it was a lot of different monetary systems that grew together. anyone old enough to have been in britain and be really confused when you try to make change, remember, my mother said it was the most confusing thing she'd ever encountered is so many shillings, crowns, and pents, and nothing adds up in proper multiples of each other,

and at the time, the english were well-known for being honest and took a hand full of coins and asked how much does it cost. all right, one of those, two of these, and they worked it out. [laughter] the metric system, think about inches, feet, hands; right? pounds, all of these different things, and none of them add up to anything that makes any sense, and some way i don't know how many gills are in a pint anymore. they grew over time. frankly, i like it, even though i don't understand it, i love the british imperial system of measures. legal systems are a bit like that also. only later did people come and try to impose rational understanding and they grow over time from the interaction of lots of legal systems. the best book that i would recommend on this theme by a

brilliant professor of law at harvard law school, hared berman and it's called "law and revolution: the formation of the western legal tradition," and it looks at all of the different systems and sources of law that interpenetrated each other within europe that gave us the laws that we have today, and i'll give one example of one that persists which is was the lex mercator law. it's not the product of any single legal system of any state. there's no state that enforces it as such, but you will find that all over the world this emerges from the mercantile courts in europe, business and tradersment to do business. they want quick justice. they don't want to be in court for 40 years or an antitrust

suit. they say i contracted for so much cloth for this amount of money and the cloths not of the quality. they have a legal case. we want a decision and go home. that produced an efficient legal system that still functions, and that did not emerge from any state. look at the united states of america today. uniform commercial code. this is passed by legislatures, but created by private law bodieses, american legal institute and others, who look at contract law and say what happens in contract law. what new contracts have people been writing? they codify it. that's what the codification process does, but it wasn't that the codifiers created it. they went out and said what is happening in the law? namely, what are all the people making contracts are doing. lenone, an italian legal theorist put it neatly saying, you make law when you make contracts. you are not actually creating

the law. subsequent to that, legislatures pass it as a codification. this is the universal code for north dakota or new jersey, what have you. they didn't write it. they didn't create it. it's created by people in the market economy. there's all kinds of legal systems today all around us that are not the products of the importion of state power or force. what we need to do is open our eyes to be able to see the amazing world of spoon tape yows order -- spontaneous order all around us. it's just everywhere. it's not a question like the earlier question suggested that somehow the institutions of the state could be diminished or gotten rid of, and then trd be a fantasy world to discuss how that works. we actually already live in a world substantially structured by institutions that were not the product of the state, and most of the legal institutions

that govern our lives fall into that category. the law itself is not a product of the state. it fundamentally a product of people voluntarily exchanging and interacting. we don't have to do science first experiments. just open our eyes to see the real world we live in right now. yes, sir? >> thank you. thank you very much. i'm paul davidson from norway. i hope there are no fins here, but we do not accept that view that you went to finland and not norway. >> actually, i was in oslow before i went to finlands. [laughter] a big fan of oslow, although [speaking in nor weigan] >> that sounds good. >> that was what i said, i can't speak norweigan.

[laughter] >> last year, i was in south sudan for the independence of that country, and the relationship between norway and i would say the most, like, the donor community and south sudan has been pretty much decided by focusing on the development aid and not so much on business development and those things that create economic development. my question is how can you create sustainable economic growth in a failed state where you do not have the characteristics of what weber describes in his definition? is a country like somalia, is it always doomed to fail and becoming dependent on international donor community and countries like norway, or are there any prospects for development? thank you. >> well, that's a great

question. sometimes when you look at failed states, you can ask why they failed, and foreign aid is one of the reasons why somalia failed. there's several good books on this. i recommend michael morin's book, and i think it's called "the road to hell," and he looks in the way in which foreign aid was a major cause of what we call state failure catastrophe. the cf bar, the dictator in somalia, received a great deal of aid, which he was unable to use to provide resources to no maddic goat herders and then massacre their goats so they were then dependent on the aid delivered by the international aid community. now he had had big concentrations of people. he conscripted them to invade ethiopia. this is one of the ways in which smoal ya, not a wealthy country

to begin with, really began to collapse. had the aid not been available, he wouldn't have been able to do that. this is one of the reasons for the horror and the nightmare of somalia. we could then look also at what happened in other countries in northern somalia, not an attractive place to live, but it is a lot better. the astonishing violence was largely what were called the technicals. that's a funny term, "technicals," and that's what the gangs are called. they are a pickup truck with a 50 caliber gun on the back and terrorize neighborhoods extracting resources from people. that was technical assistance to foreign aid delivery. we paid for that. we bought those trucks and mounted the .50 caliber machine guns on them, and then when you give a young guy a .50 caliber

machine gun on a truck, he becomes an important person. we effectively armed what turned out to be these horrific, horrific gangs. when the united states intervened, you may remember black hawk down, and so on, the u.s. intervened, it was a disaster. it was a disaster in the only from the perspective of american soldiers, but the people there as well. the reason was local stable e quill lib yum cannot emerge when you fear outside power with enormous fire power like the united states, nato, or other powers that can come in and disrupt any time they want. people don't make local binding agreements and create institutions of mutual trust, mutual respect, and so on. northern somalia, again, i'm not romancing this and go there tomorrow, but it's not as bad. it's better than southern somalia.

why? no foreign troops. that was the key. so local leaders, war lords, tribal leaders, elders were able to get together and say, look, let's work out some system that we're not constantly fighting each other. those held because you didn't have the united states army or other foreign militaries intervening and disrupting them. those people were lucky. they said don't come here. the u.s. stayed out as did the other powers. people in the south were unlucky. they were unlucky enough to receive all of our assistance which disrupted local institutions that were able to generate more order, more legality, and many peace. our aid has contributed substantially to the creation of failed states. a couple of other very good books, excellent book documenting over and over what

happened with that, and georgia is an economist from ghana, excellent, a number of books in english, what happened with the aid industry and how it's been so destructive in damaging, especially in africa. i think the best way to avoid the problems, frankly, is to stop the aid. that's it. stop it. then allow trade. get rid of the trade barriers that we impose on those countries. there's an element to the trade initiative that president clinton and then president bush did initiate, allow people to sell their stuff to us. they can produce all kinds of valuable things. let them do that. reduce foreign aid to zero. i think that will begin the process of healing countries that have been deeply, grievancely wounded by our foreign aid. yes, sir?

>> this is a historical question. you used the broad steps about various from greeings. >> sorry? again, please. >> you use a lot of steps about various -- [inaudible] steps, what step -- originally -- [inaudible] >> an element of what? sorry. >> government.

it is corrupt -- >> can i read it. i apologize it. is your question written down? did you write down your question? could you bring it to me? may i see the question? i apologize. okay. okay. the ancient greeks. commonwealths include natural order, natural society, a newly concept. >> okay. >> elements of government. >> of government. okay. we will discuss it further later to be able to grasp. this is an important question. the greek term has given us the

term "political", but we don't ice it in quite the same way that the greeks use the term "polis." this is a problem in political history to see a term, a word that origin nates -- originates in one lang and goes to another. they were a city state, communities of persons that were self-governing, by which i mean, they were not governed by foreign groups, does not mean they were democracies in our sense of the term. multitude of different political systems within them, but the greek polis was considered to be the only proper way for a human being to live according to aristotle for example. why i admire aristotle is going beyond his political science.

he thought you could not have a polis, a political body larger, more extensive than a voice could reach. it's possible to have much more expensive political bodies, and not only as empires, but also as law governed institutions, subject to constitutions, and so on. i'd like to discuss this with you further later on to get the core of it, but the notion that greek institutions of democracy are the modern political system are deeply flawed. there's a historical discontinuity, the end of disclassicallization, and later they read the texts and begin to take the vocabulary for that context and apply it to really a different set of institutions and practices.

that's led to a little bit of historical confusion so somehow our political institutions were intimately rooted in greek ones when in effect there's a substantial discontinue newty. let's talk about that again later as well. yes, sir, wrapping up here, just a few more minutes. >> my question is in regards to the narrative you presented today. does that continue into the future? in other words, are we approaching some ending point approaching a more and more minimal state and therefore we're in a battle against the state, or do you see us on a longer run tan gent towards an ultimate stateless society at some point in the future? >> i'm deeply suspicious of all philosophies of history, that is to say all the views that somehow history is aiming. there's someplace it has to be, some end of history. i don't believe that. i think francis should have put an end to that notion by having incorrectly claimed history

ended some years ago it didn't and kept going on. [laughter] >> to be fair to him, he didn't mean things wouldn't happen but meant the final, political form of human community was achieved and no challenges would emerge to it. at the time, i thought it was interesting thought, but ridiculous. of course they there's all challenges and there's nothing we can't anticipate today, the rise of radical religious ideologies is a good example of that. it was a surprise to him evidently these things were still out there. what we find is that the majority waxes and weans. you have good periods and bad periods. you see the retreat of civilization and the growth of monsterrous institutions, and

sometimes they are beaten back. there's a constant battle between the principles of liberty and principles of uncontrolled power. i do not believe for a moment that the triumph of liberty is inevitable, but i also don't think that it's -- its defeat is inevitable either. i think it depends on what we do to a very substantial degree, but i'm deeply suspicious of all philosophies that deposit someplace we're headed to. imagine that you're walking down a hallway backwards. that's how we should conceive of the human progress into the future; right? we can see what we already have been past through history, but the stuff we're going to encounter in the future, we're blind. i think that's a better image of the historical progress. yes? >> i wanted to circle back to the discussion of administrative rule making and the federal

register, and, for example, i wanted to talk about the fda rat hair list, the amount of maggots that are in pizza sauce and delicious stuff like that. i wanted to know what are your thoughts on this list and do you think it should be publicized in television commercials so the american public knows, like, the quality and the educatedness of public administrators that are making these rules? >> right. well, that's a case in which you have government institutions that have taken responsibility, food and drug administration notably, for allegedly guaranteeing the safety, purity of food, but you face a real problem there, and that is that there's always cost on the margin of incremental judgment of safety, secure, or cleanliness or whatever it may be. if you have a command and

control regulatory system, you have to articulate standards like that; right? if you went down to unpleasant to think about it, but how many spider hairs you can have in something, at some point, the cost of eliminating the last spider hair is so great, greater than all value that could have been realized in whatever product you were trying to produce. it's not worth it at that point so all regulatory bodies -- >> find the rest of this online at c-span.org. we're going to take you live now as c-span's coverage of the young americas foundation student conference continues. this is the groups 34th annual meeting bringing together more than 300 students from 37 states to hear from speakers on the conservative movement, and tonight's keynote speaker coming up soon, author peter schweitzer with the his newest book called

"throw them all out. " >> we have information online as well. if you want to learn more about us, go to the website at yaf.org. young america's foundation, yaf.org. i'm pleased to introduce the featured speaker tonight. not that long ago, peter was where you were sitting. well, that depends -- before i was born, but not that long ago. [laughter] he's where you were sitting tonight, and he was inspired by young america's foundation and wanted to make a difference and he started doing that, and he wanted to do so by studying and by researching things that made a difference. believe it or not, he actually, most famous for now, he got president obama in a liberal senate to pass a bill. isn't that amazing? [cheers and applause] his last book "throw them all out" was a new york times best seller, and it went through and

somehowed everyone in washington, both sides of the aisle, and how they used congressional insider trading, insider information they learned from in their hearings, and they'd know because they were passing the law what was going to happen and things that affected the market in wall street, and they made decisions to invest in corporations or not based on laws they were passing. peter went and exposed it, and guess what? congress passed a supposedly to stop it. i think peter gets into whether or not the law is effective, but it's amazing someone started here, produced legislation. a lot of people write books, but no many write books that make a difference. our guest tonight did. please help me welcome him. [applause] [cheers and applause] >> thank you. [applause] thank you very much. everybody having follow-up this week? [cheers and applause] yeah, good. glad to hear that.

well, as you have been sitting here learning from a lot of incredible people, incredible leaders and thinkers, i've been watching tv. i've been watching the olympics. there's something strange about watching the olympics even during this political season when we face a national election. you think i'd be watching cable news, but i've been watching the olympics, watching the swimming, the gymnastics, the soccers the basketball. the other night, an american won the gold medal in judo. she stood up on the podium, that's right, stood on the podium, and it was an amazing display because she stood up on the podium, and they started playing "the national anthem," and she was utterly reduced to tears, and you could see the relief that was inside of her. as i watched that, i thought what is it about the olympics that captured my imagination, the imagination of so many other people who watched it?

i think it's because it's one of the few areas left in life where you can just display grit, determination, hard work, and you will be applauded for your excellence. think about that for a minute. when they go and stand on the podium to receive a gold medal, there's nobody there saying they don't deserve it or they need to share half of it with someone else. [applause] there's no one saying that they had an unfair advantage because they were, you know, created with certain physical skills or capabilities. it's a celebration, and the fact that someone has worked hard and is the best in the world is something that celebrated, not something that is scorned, and i wondered if i watched her win, and i watchedded so many other athletes win, what's going to happen when they go to the white house? you know, is the president going to say to them, you didn't earn that? [laughter] i certainly hope not.

i certainly don't think so, but what i'd like to talk to you about tonight learning about policy and learning about ideas about how washington works. you probably discussed the notion of the gross national product, the tax rates in this country. i'm going to talk to you tonight about what i think is the biggest struggle that you will face over the next 20 years because i believe that your generation, and i don't say this to exaggerate one single bit, but that your generation is going to determine whether the united states as we know it is sustained or whether we drift off into something else and just another ordinary country. i'm going it ask you to think about it in terms of what they have on the training center out in colorado for our olympic athletes because you see over the end try way where the athletes go, work, and train, there's a quotation from henry david thoreau which reads "you

cannot dream yourself into a character, but you must hammer and forge yourself into one." anyone who wants it tell you that excellence, winning new ideas, saving your country, preserving traditional values is going to be easy is lying to you. it's going to be worthwhile, every bit as worthwhile as it is for the athlete that stands on the podium at the olympics, and what i'd like to talk to you tonight bit what that struggle is. the struggle i'll contend to you today is a struggle of whether you're going to choose to worry about the spirit or you're going to worry about the material. what do i mean by that? i think if you look through american history, you'll see that every 80 years or so the american people have had a choice to make. are they going to strive for and fight for freedom, or are they going to live by material comforts and choose that option?

each time in the past, in those 80 year spans, the american people have chose p to fight, to choose the spirit over the material and the comforts. well, the last battle was 80 years ago, and now the battle is brewing is the one that your generation is going to face. i want you to take time now to just think a little bit about this battle that oftentimes we fail to see. now, the greatest stories and the greatest decisions, i think, in american history have been when americans have chosen principle and the ideas that have american values over the material comforts. i would begin with the american war for independence. you've all studied that in your history books, aware of the founding fathers and the sacrifices made. what oftentimes is ignored though, is those who lived in colonial america, who chose not to fight for independence, what

was their rationale or the reason for not doing so? some was a commitment to the monarchy, but a lot of it had to do with the fact that they didn't want to lose their comforts. they didn't want to -- they were fearful of losing their material possessions, and, indeed, many of the founding fathers who chose to fight for independence, who chose to fight for the value of freedom and the american spirit did lose a lot materially. in the war for independence, it was the success of those who chose to fight for the spirit over the material that created and forged the american nation. move forward approximately another 80 years, and the american civil war. there were those in the north who believed that the preservation of the union, that the issues related to slavery and other issues were worth fighting for, but there were those who did not think they were fighting for, and, again,

they chose the material comfort over the commitment to american principles and values, the value of union, of the american nation, the value of individualism, and the value of freedom, and, again, those who fought for those values lost materially by doing so. move forward another 80 years approximately to the world war ii generation. that was the generation that fought through the depression, stormed normandy, and that won world war ii. again, there were those who said that we shouldn't fight that fight. it was not of our concern. some of those did it out of principle, but many of them did so because they didn't want to sacrifice maybe their sons or sacrifice materially. they were unconcerned about the principles upon which the american founding was based. move forward now another 80 years from world war ii and where are we? we're in the present day.

i'm going to ask yourself, i'm going have you ask yourselves are you willing to choose the spirit of freedom over material comfort? are you prepared to do so? are you preparedded to make the sacrifice? i ask this questions a lot of times to students. why are you committed to the free enterprise system? imagine for a minute it's never happened, never will, but just imagine for a minute that someone created an economic system that was not based on free markets, but that actually created more prosperity. would you embrace it? would you give up your freedom and individualism so that you could have greater prosperity? sadly, a lot of people would say yes. this is the choice that your generation is going to face, and i will tell you that a lot of people my age and older, unfortunately, don't think that

you guys are up to it. they say you are selfish, materialistic, say you don't care, and that row are ignorant of american history. are they right? are they right? i would say no. i would say no. i would say absolutely no. [applause] now, you know, there was a book that came out a few years ago by tom brokah called "the greatest generation," and brokaw's argument was this was the greatest generation in history because they fought and sacrificed in world war ii. now, i've been fortunate to know many people from that generation, and one of those that i knew very well who became a mentor in a sense to me was a gentleman named case per weinberger. he served in world war ii in the

pacific under general douglas mcarthur, and then he was secretary of defense under president ronald reagan. i would talk to cap a lot of times about what was going on in the world, the circumstances of his youth, and about half a does p years ago, i -- dozen years ago, i asked him about what was going on with the american military, to go back to the time as you may remember and be aware, the wars in iraq and afghanistan were very hot. there were a lot of americans dying. there were a lot of major battles. there were some people who were, in a sense, losing their nerve saying, you know, we may not be up to this. we better pull back. i remember asking cap, i said, how would you, having been the secretary of defense, having served in this generation of world war ii, how would you compare america's soldiers to those of the greatest generation? are they as good? you know what cap told me?

he said, no, peter, they are not as good. they are better. you know why they are better? he said we were drafted. these americans volunteered. [applause] they chose to go there. [applause] i would say to you tonight, that's your generation. the soldiers that are overseas doing this are your generation. they are not my generation. you need to take pride and recognize and reject all of the nay sayers who are saying that you are not up to the task, and that you don't embrace the american spirit because i know you do, and i know you can, and i know you will make an enormous difference in the challenges that we face in the future. now, in washington, d.c., here, both political parties, president of the united states right,